Last Act of All

by Aline Templeton

  As Helena bloomed in adolescence to something of a beauty, she lived in terror of his icy rages. When she rebelled, taking a scholarship to the drama college which her father, his eyes bulging with rigidly-controlled fury, stigmatized a sink of iniquity, she turned her back on him for ever. She knew now that he was dead; she had not seen him since the day she left home.

  At college she was studious, quiet, and possessed of the real dramatic talent which often lies in violently repressed natures. It appeared to her then incredible that Neville Fielding, with his glamorous looks and wild reputation should look twice at her.

  Initially, though, it had worked surprisingly well. Perhaps he had wanted to prove he could melt the Snow Queen, but it was her helplessly maternal response to the wicked little boy in his character that made her indispensable to him. Neville, sunny side up, was funny and charming, with a demonstrative warmth which did, indeed, melt her heart, and when he behaved badly, absolution from her seemed almost a psychological necessity. She sometimes thought his was a schizophrenic nature, with a black side which intermittently forced its way to the top.

  That, of course, was Harry, though it was only the television series that taught Helena his name.

  It had not, she acknowledged, been easy for Neville. A profile born out of its time, he was Ivor Novello in an age which prefers its heroes short, bald or bespectacled. She had never lacked the early offers which might have led to real success, but faced with the physical brutality his envy engendered she denied her talent and got herself pregnant.

  His career was a progression of small television parts, competently enough performed, but never yielding an income adequate for the standard of living he so desperately desired, as proof of success.

  It was, paradoxically, his failures which brought success in the end. The harsh, disappointed lines about the chiselled mouth, the self-indulgence that pouched the deep-set blue eyes and blurred the classic line of the jaw were perfection for beautiful, wicked Harry Bradman.

  ‘“Badman” Bradman, the villain you love to hate,’ trumpeted the publicity machine. He appeared on Sunday evening television, scheduled against a favourite chat show, and Chris Dyer, producer and director, was a sharp operator. On to the framework of a soap opera, he had grafted an episodic series, relying shrewdly on the Baudelaire principle that evil and ugliness, glamorized, have a powerful attraction.

  ‘He’s Rhett Butler, without the fundamental decency. Or Dorian Gray. Find me Dorian Gray at the precise moment when the face starts to crumble,’ Dyer told his casting manager, and in Neville Fielding, pushing forty, with his aura of fallen-angel seediness, they found him.

  So Harry had rescued him from a thousand petty indignities — the betrayed husband in the last scene, the cigar-smoker in the commercial — and installed him at last on the throne of fame to which he had always pretended.

  Helena was well aware that living the part is an occupational hazard for any actor in a long-term role, and as the series ran and the part became more tailored to Neville’s personality, the division between other and self became, at times, not altogether clear in his mind.

  Initially, he had talked of Harry as an amusing, attractive villain, a clever creation; of late, he had started finding excuses for Harry’s fictional delinquencies, the sort of excuses he was inclined to produce for himself when he was in the wrong.

  Her attitude to his success was ambivalent. Harry was, if not their bread and butter, certainly their jam, and even, as time went on, their caviar. Not only that, but, like most people, a happy, successful Neville was a great deal easier to live with than a morose, frustrated one.

  But Neville’s character had always had warmth; the nastiest thing about Harry was that he was cold, as her father had been cold, and she found herself increasingly anxious about the intrusion of Harry into their everyday life.

  It was certainly Harry who had chosen Radnesfield. Helena recognized immediately his degenerate taste.

  *

  From the taciturn host of the Four Feathers Neville, on his previous visit, had prised a grudging history of the owners of Radnesfield House. The Radleys, who went back to sixteenth-century graves in the churchyard — and, by tradition, well beyond that — were on the way out. An accident with a shotgun to the elder son who had just inherited had incurred a double set of death duties; the younger son, a bachelor in his forties, living alone since the death of his mother two years before, was considered to be presiding over the family’s dying throes.

  Indeed, when Edward Radley greeted them, he seemed almost faded, as if ancient blood in him were starting to thin. There was a quality of stillness about him, and the long planes of his face were oddly unlined, as though untouched by the events of his forty years. Helena had seen that face before, on figures in East Anglian cathedrals, the knights in medieval brasses; the high, narrow brow with hair receding from the sides, the deep-set eyes, the strongly-marked nose. Beside Neville’s flamboyance, he seemed shadowy, though this was a phenomenon she had noted before, as if earning a living on stage gave actors a larger-than-life-size quality in everyday existence.

  In any case, Neville was, in nursery parlance, getting above himself, greeting each fresh Victorian atrocity with exaggerated ecstasy.

  ‘Helena, look at that absolutely glorious fireplace!’ It was oxblood and black marble, mottled with varicosed grey veins set in a patchwork of rising suns.

  Helena rebelled. ‘Neville, you can’t like it!’ Then, recollecting the silent man at her side, she bit her lip. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Radley.’

  His amusement seemed genuine. ‘I’m relieved you said it, Mrs Fielding. I’ve been feeling as if somehow I’ve been perpetrating a fraud. This place has always seemed to me uniquely hideous.’

  Neville gave his Bradman guffaw. ‘Hideous? But of course it is! That’s why it’s magnificent. Can’t stand all these sickly, chocolate-box places. Just look at the village — no tastefully-restored cottages, no Designers Guild fabrics at the windows and antique, frightfully-understated door furniture. No middle-class architectural watchdog society. Practically no middle-class at all, come to that, thank god. There’s nothing twee about Radnesfield. Give me reality every time.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Helena bleakly, ‘is ugliness considered more “real” than beauty?’

  It was a rhetorical question, but Radley looked at her with interest. ‘People believe that, though, don’t you find? Loving beauty is seen as retreating from life and refusing to face up to things.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Neville, only half-listening as he explored a cupboard, gleaned the impression that his wife’s argument had been refuted. ‘The man who built this house certainly wasn’t interested in namby-pamby considerations like that.’

  ‘I think the pathetic truth is that when my grandfather virtually bankrupted us to build this, he considered it the last word in elegance. Every tasteless embellishment was another step away from the harsh realities of his life.’

  ‘But how sad!’ Helena exclaimed. ‘Don’t you feel a responsibility to love it, in that case?’

  Where another might have laughed at her, he smiled, and considered his reply, like a man unaccustomed to discussing his feelings.

  ‘I was brought up to feel great responsibility towards the place itself, which goes back to the mists of time. There must have been a dozen houses on this site, and probably as many families — though we do have a conceit that Radley and Radnesfield both come from Raed, the Anglo-Saxon word for a council.’

  ‘So you’ve been squires here for centuries?’ Neville put the question eagerly, twirling imaginary moustachios. ‘Droit de seigneur, and all that?’

  While Helena groaned inwardly, the other man looked uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s not something I’ve ever considered, but they’re not at all feudally-minded here. The Radleys have never been socially much above their fellows. We’ve got the Home Farm, of course, but it’s been directly farmed, or managed as it is now, not put out to tenancy. And even b
efore grandfather’s attack of folie de grandeur, we were gentleman farmers, but only just, with the emphasis on the second part of the description.’

  Neville, losing interest as the part of rural squire was denied him, wandered off rudely. Politeness dictated that Helena should linger; anyway, she was beginning to be intrigued by this quiet-spoken man. Where someone more sophisticated might have studied her covertly, he watched her when she spoke with meticulous attention, as if he might be planning to draw her face from memory after she left.

  ‘Would it be very impertinent to ask if you mind selling?’

  ‘Mind?’ He looked quizzically round the room. ‘This? I’d move to the Red House in the village, with enough money left after paying off the mortgages to mend the roof and fix the dry rot. It was my grandmother’s house. She quarrelled with my grandfather — I suspect she was a woman of taste and discrimination — and moved out. It’s perfect Queen Anne, and the relief to my aesthetic sense would be enormous.’

  ‘It can’t be as easy as that.’

  He shot Helena a startled glance, like a horse shying, as if afraid of this approach to mental intimacy. His reply seemed at first inconsequential.

  ‘My brother had thought about selling off land for building. Well, I suppose I could do that, and be financially a lot more comfortable. But I don’t need that much money — there’s no one to come after me. If I were to sell to a developer, the village would be swamped by strangers, when it’s hardly changed since I was a child. By some sort of fluke, perhaps precisely because it’s not remotely picturesque, it’s escaped the influx of commuters bed-and-breakfasting during the week and getting up morris-dancing societies at the weekend. Your husband — forgive me — would be wealthy enough to pay for his privacy and satisfy my purist notions that it should stay as it is, unchanged.’

  ‘You like the village as it is?’ Her response held a note of impolite incredulity, and she coloured. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound rude. I’m sure it has charms which are hidden from me. But it did strike me as being a rather unappealing place, as we drove through it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s our fault. Grandfather let a nice little row of Georgian almshouses collapse, and then the council built that very unpleasing housing scheme. The village properties never had a controlling landlord, so they all did their own ghastly thing.

  ‘And of course they were quite delighted when the brewery pulled down the old inn and built a nice new one in the Fifties, with aluminium windows and a sign saying “Gents’ Toilet”. We are not burdened with a middle-class interest in conservation around here.’

  ‘I had noticed. It’s what Neville loves about it, or at least, says he does. But you — you’ve been away from here, surely? Didn’t you find it jarred when you came back?’

  It seemed to be a question he had never asked himself. ‘Well, I was away at school, and then the army, of course, until I — I had to come back. But Radnesfield’s where I belong, they know me, I know them. Our families have lived together for a very long time, and we’ve always adapted to one another’s foibles.’

  ‘Like an old married couple.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ His glance lingered on her for a moment. ‘Though of course, as a bachelor, I couldn’t comment, could I?

  ‘So you really like it?’ She was interested in his response; he was a thoughtful and civilized man, and if he could feel at home here, perhaps she too might find in village life the hidden charms she had flippantly mentioned.

  For the first time, she sensed withdrawal. ‘Like?’ he said vaguely. ‘Oh, I don’t know about like. It’s a funny old place. Seems a pity to mess it about. But I’m keeping you talking far too long. Let’s go and see where your husband has got to.’

  Neville, in the library which boasted French windows inlaid with stained glass, in trying hues of blue and orange, was talking about where his desk would go. Helena left them, and wandered drearily back to the big, old-fashioned kitchen.

  It was at the moment a nightmare, with a floor of cracked flagstones and a stone sink with a rotting wooden draining-board. But here, at least, the deadly hand of the architect had fallen lightly; it was simply a square, undecorated room, surprisingly light thanks to the great window at one end overlooking the big pond at the foot of the shallow rise on which the house was built.

  It was the first pretty view she had seen. The trees, the water — it reminded her of something. Willows, reeds, and ducklings, yes, there had been ducklings. From her bedroom window in the vicarage all those years ago, she had watched ducks on a pond like this, delighting each year in their fluffy clockwork broods.

  She had spent hours there, on the window-seat dreaming of all the glittering prizes — Juliet, Cleopatra, Hedda Gabler; the applause, the acclaim.

  Well, it hadn’t worked out, had it? She felt a sort of dim, detached pity for the little ghost with her long blonde pigtails. How lucky she had never been granted a prophetic glimpse of the future she imagined like a huge box, wrapped in shining silver paper and tied with a great gold bow. She never even suspected, poor innocent, that the box was empty.

  ‘I must have a window-seat here too,’ she thought, and only then recognized her own acceptance of Neville’s decision.

  A tiny quiver of fear touched her. What choice had she left, but to accept it?

  Oh, for years she had given way to keep Neville happy, because she didn’t really care, did she? Or not enough, anyway, to pay the painful cost of any fuss. It kept intact the fiction that, if she did seriously protest, Neville would fall into line. Perhaps, once upon a time, it had been true; she could not remember when she had last put it to the test.

  She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t mind this time. But she knew she must do what he chose, or he would do it without her, and she wasn’t ready to break up her marriage. The bridges were in flames behind her; she had made no provision for any alternative to life as Mrs Neville Fielding.

  But still, the sensation of a snare-wire tightening about her neck was so oppressive that she was raising her hand to loosen the collar of her heavy silk blouse when Neville found her.

  ‘Isn’t it absolutely mind-blowing? Once in a lifetime stuff, I tell you. Now, I’m taking you down the pub for a jar, so you can get a real taste of English rural life without the frills.’

  *

  The pub smelled of stale beer, tobacco, and boiled cabbage, and the half-dozen men gathered round the bar viewed them with unconcealed hostility.

  Neville was in his element. Flashing notes, he bought drinks all round, addressed the silent man behind the bar as ‘landlord’, and with much jocularity ordered pork scratchings for himself and Helena, who shrank into a corner as far as possible from the bar.

  When at last, after an elaborate series of farewells, he tore himself away, she followed him to the car, wordless in her embarrassment and cold with shame.

  ‘There you are — what did I tell you? The genuine article!’ Neville, driving away, was still high after his performance as the Man with the Common Touch.

  ‘Neville, they were laughing at you.’

  ‘What?’ A faint flush crept up his cheeks, and he shot her a resentful glance. ‘Words of wisdom from Helena Fielding, well-known expert on rural psychology and social classes C and D! Since you didn’t condescend to talk to them, you’re hardly qualified to comment.’

  He had not been unaware of the atmosphere, this time or on his previous visit; far from it. He wasn’t looking for simple-hearted, apple-cheeked villagers in a charming country pub; that was a folk-fiction he despised. The petty nastiness so evident in Radnesfield was, in his personal experience, a true reflection of human nature, and he believed himself now to be, like Harry, something of a connoisseur of its less pleasant manifestations.

  Here he had struck a rich and subtle lode, a situation ripe for mischief, ready for exploiting into real-life drama. Harry had always thrived on the open sores of imaginary existence; jaded now, Neville craved the stimulation of flesh-and-blood playthi
ngs. Here was rank soil in which the flowers of evil might flourish.

  He had felt like this before when he abandoned himself to the first stages of an affair. Common sense dictated he should draw back, but he was wantonly deaf to these promptings. There was a glorious exhilaration in being swept along, like going faster and faster down a ski-slope. The suspicion that the only stopping-place was in a crumpled heap right at the bottom didn’t help you resist the temptation to push off at the top. Well — Geronimo!

  His good mood restored, he drove on, humming under his breath.

  They collected Stephanie from a friend’s house on the way home to their Docklands flat. For her sake, they talked normally, but the atmosphere was heavy with unasked questions.

  They were clearing supper, with Stephanie tucked up in her pretty, chintzy bedroom, when Neville said, without preamble, ‘It said something to me, you know, that road, the signpost.’

  She shifted uncomfortably. She too had felt something of the stark attraction he talked about, but feeling it unhealthy, would not indulge the thought.

  ‘Where does the opposite road go to?’ she asked, as if idly.

  In an instant, the clouds descended. He clenched his fists in a pantomime of furious frustration. ‘God, Helena, do you always have to do that? I’m only talking about an important moment of decision — important for all of us — standing literally at a crossroads, and you come out with some crass vapidity about the other road.’

  He glared at her, his face darkly suffused. Once she would have bowed under the onslaught, but experience had taught her that allowing him to lash himself into a rage led to the sort of violence she had no wish to endure again.

  She withdrew her gaze from him, as if he had suddenly ceased to interest her, becoming apparently engrossed in tidying the kitchen.