28 August
Writing this on the porch, & it may end suddenly because they find me. Everything is over & this might be the last time I write in you, Book.
I’ve made an M mark on my hand with a biro. I have drawn over it several times a day. It’s bigger every day.
I hate myself, I hate myself.
M for Madeleine, moron, mistake, maybes.
When I get to school I can use the compass to scratch it in properly. So it’s a scar I can look at every time & say, “That’s for making such a mistake.”
Everything is ruined.
Tony has gone mad, I think he has a disease of the brain. Ben was rude to him but Tony actually grabbed his arm and hit him & Ben is almost bigger than him now. (He has been lifting weights at school. Told me this the other evening at the beach hut. Said it was cos he has been pushed around in the past by bigger people & doesn’t want to any more.)
Ben took some whisky. Whisky is disgusting, I have drunk it before, one of the girls at school smuggled some in a Body Shop bottle. Ben came up to the sitting room in the night while everyone was asleep & had a whole large tumbler size. He got really drunk and was sick on the porch. Tony heard some noise, came upstairs & found him. I think that Tony was horrible to him actually. He woke us all up by shouting at him. Said he was weak and a disgrace & had to learn to be a man not a boy. All that sort of rubbish T has never gone in for. Althea shouted at Tony, Tony yelled at her, he called her a horrible name. Cord yelled at them both, Ben just stood there arms folded, swaying, v. pale, looking miserable. Smelling of sick (unpleasant). But Tony really was furious with him. Face is very red these days. Eyes bloodshot. Vein ticks in his jaw. I’m really not in love with him now. Ben said he was just trying it out & wouldn’t apologise. He said Tony had never asked him how he was after he ran away and didn’t care about anyone else but himself.
Then he pointed at his dad & said, “I can’t wait till I don’t have to pretend any more.”
Tony said, “What the hell do you mean?” & he screwed up his eyes.
Ben said, “You know what I mean, Tony.”
Tony touched his face with one hand, like he was shielding his eyes from Ben.
Althea said, “Darling, stop it. Stop it,” but I didn’t know who she was talking to.
Tony started yelling, saying how he’d had enough of it all. That there weren’t to be any more visitors this summer, no more people coming round, that it was his house, he couldn’t stand the way she made a fool of him . . .
Cord, Ben and I cleared out early the next day, took a picnic up on the downs. Althea went up to London to audition for a play. That evening when the three of us were in the beach hut Ben said he couldn’t sleep at night & that’s why he went upstairs. He told me he hates sleeping alone & has nightmares, doesn’t mind school for that reason alone, that he is sharing a room with 2 other chaps. (So I am the reason he has nightmares, because if I didn’t stay with them perhaps he could be sharing with Cord. He was OK when she was around.)
The other reason I am leaving early and I am marking myself like this is to me much worse and it is that 2). Cord has found us out. She left me & Ben having our cigarettes in the beach hut (strangely there was no punishment for Ben as if Tony knows he went too far) & then must have waited behind because after a few minutes she burst in.
I was enjoying it this time as I do more and more and I think about him touching me and kissing me more and more and sometimes the days are v. long waiting for night-time here with him. That night changed everything about him. I saw him as a different person for the first time. Not the boy I used to play with. I wanted him to kiss me, we both did. I wanted to push against him and feel how close we could get, and to touch him and his skin.
He had his hand up my skirt, I let him put one finger inside me. (It was OK. I am keen on the kissing / holding, not so much into the finger bit.)
She didn’t burst in actually that is too dramatic. She opened the door & we were ½ sitting / lying on the daybed. I saw her first. Over his shoulder. I saw her expression & I won’t forget it for ages. Like she was confused. Like she couldn’t work out what was going on. 2 little lines between her eyebrows. She said, “What are you two doing?”
I laughed. If I regret one thing for the rest of my life, it’ll be laughing at her. But I was scared at her face and how she looked at me. I said, “It’s nothing.”
“Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?”
I said no, but Ben at the said time said YES, really loudly. (I feel we should have talked about that bit before.)
I said, “Cord, everything’s still the same.”
But she just said, “No, it’s not. You’ve ruined it.” & she turned round & left.
She has not spoken to me for 2 days. Pretends to be asleep when I go to bed. Ignores me when I ask her something at the breakfast table. Pushes past me, jabs me with her elbow just as I pass her, so I bash against the corridor. No one has noticed, I wouldn’t say anything, but I’m not one of them anyway, I have to remember that, for all their kindness to me over the years.
Anyway, I have gone home early. 2 nights ago I came to bed & she had left a note on the pillow: I am taping it in.
Dear Madeleine,
I am writing this to ask you to leave Ben alone and leave the Bosky. I don’t want to be friends with you any more. Daddy told me once that living next door to your father and your aunt Julia in the war was strange because they were so totally different from him and he couldn’t really understand them and he tried but in the end it never worked. I thought it was good we were different, you and me, but now I see it is that you are so different it is bad.
We used to be happy and now we’re not and no one seems to realise it’s you causing it all. I am sorry this happened.
Cordelia Wilde
I lied to Althea and to Tony & said some science prize at school meant I needed to go back a week before term began. Tony wasn’t particularly interested which was awful, but Althea believed me. She was even upset I was leaving. I’m still on the porch writing now, it’s about to rain. The wicker is warm, sagging under my bottom, I can smell the flowers and the dry heat & the metallic feeling rain is on its way. The footstool that catches right where you want on one of the floorboards. The waves below. Crickets. The radio in the background. All dear sounds.
I need to put you away for the summer, Book. Althea is inside now getting ready to drive me to the station. She is a terrible driver. “We’ll see you next August, darling, won’t we? Don’t line up anything else to do, we’ll all miss you if you’re not here.”
That morning as I was in our bedroom looking under the bed Cord came in.
I said, “Here’s this, I made you a present. I’m sorry.” And I handed her a package which is so small.
She didn’t even open it. She threw it on the bed and she said, “We don’t want you here. So don’t come back.”
I think it’s the worst thing anyone’s said to me. Because I loved Cord more than any of them. When I was scared at night she used to get into bed with me and hug me and our toes would touch. She could brush my hair and not pull at the tangles. She knew when I was feeling sad about things, and she would find my hand & squeeze it. When she laughs, she throws her head back and her mouth wide open and she rubs her ribs. She is so definite about everything. I love them all but I truly loved her.
The thing is, I don’t think what me and Ben were doing was wrong. Ben is sad, I have made him happy. Other way round too.
The M gets bigger and clearer with the biro ink going in & under the skin every time I scratch it a bit more.
I wonder if Cord has opened the necklace. I wonder if she will wear it. It is a shell, I found on the beach, and something has eaten a hole away in it and it looks like a heart. I put it on the chain from my necklace Aunt Jules gave me when I was ten. It is gold.
I don’t know where I’ll go. Will they let me back in at school a week before term begins? Think it’ll have to be Dad’s even though he’s
away in Sweden at some conference. I do not know where the key is. I will have to break into my own house. Which is sort of funny when you think about it.
She is coming. No more now. Thank you, Book.
xxxxxxx
Chapter Thirteen
August 1983
Althea knew Tony was cheating on her again when he invited her sister to stay with them for the summer. Other potential guests were thin on the ground these days: Guy and Olivia were in New York while Guy appeared in a cycle of the History Plays. Simon was definitely persona non grata and Bertie was unofficially banned from the Bosky; Tony wouldn’t say why but a kindly fellow actress told Althea that Bertie had left Tony an empty bottle of champagne at the stage door as a belated birthday present with a cryptic note that said, The fizz has rather gone, hasn’t it?
A lot of the others had drifted away; one didn’t see people as regularly as one used to. So if he couldn’t invite Bertie it would be Isla. Once, he had adored Isla, who in past school holidays when the children were young had been an infrequent but much-loved visitor to Twickenham and the Bosky. She was unimpressed by artistic folk, having grown up with her and Althea’s father, an enormously charismatic but rather temperamental painter. She had a way of teasing Tony that he liked, and used to laugh at, once.
Once, long ago. When had that changed? He was less interested in charming Isla, or anyone, for that matter. There was someone new on the scene, not the actresses, not the little singing teacher – for the first time Althea didn’t care who it was. It’d be someone young, pliant, adoring. Someone the opposite of her.
When Althea and Isla were children Isla had liked playing dolls and making houses out of anything she could find in their father’s studio or in the tall, cluttered house. Her dolls lived an intensely rigid, boring existence to Althea, their bedtimes monitored, food dull and solid, constantly being washed with little squares cut from kitchen cloths. She’d never been interested in crabbing on the quayside with the other children, or playing hide-and-seek in the long thin garden that led down to the river, or making things up.
‘Come and imagine there are sprites in the willow tree.’
‘No. Flossie will be wanting her tea soon.’
She had grown into a good aunt, a warm, comforting person, shaped like a cottage loaf, with the same sparkling green eyes as her sister and a dry, sharp wit. She was headmistress of the local girls’ school, lived alone, was utterly unflappable, and Althea found her company these days alternately comforting and discomfiting. Isla knew her little sister. She saw through her, with those beady eyes that took in everything. She rarely called her Dorothy (Althea’s real name, discarded when she went to drama school) any more, except by accident but every time she said Althea, the latter always heard a little note of amusement in her voice. She rose early, when Tony got up late, she didn’t like strong drink, and found theatre talk tedious. Her sister was, Althea knew, probably happiest in the kitchen helping Mrs Gage.
Tony was taking middle age badly. His behaviour had deteriorated. He was drinking more, was obviously bored by people and, most shockingly of all, she’d seen him freeze on stage, a few months ago. It was a worthy state-of-the-nation play on at the National about Thatcher and he’d hated it, but still: Tony never dried. He laughed at the dreaded stage fright that affected others. Always had. But lately he was different. Guys and Dolls, the National’s most successful show to date, was on at the Olivier Theatre next to his own; the roars and screams and whistling were audible in the interval of Mother’s Milk. The stagehands were caught going backstage to watch Guys and Dolls. As you filed through the concrete lobby out into the South Bank night it was easy to spot who’d been watching the glorious life-affirming musical that was the hottest ticket in town and who’d just left an angry, slow-moving play about a decaying mill town, an ageing couple and their two dysfunctional children.
What bothered Althea was that normally Tony wouldn’t have cared. He’d have been glad for the cast of Guys and Dolls, or at least would have pretended to be. But not any more. He hated them, ground his teeth when talk turned to it, smiled thinly when friends asked them if they’d seen it, and once even left the room at a dinner for a retiring director when someone broke into a chorus of ‘The Oldest Established’. ‘Sorry, needed some air, and I do hear that song rather a lot,’ he’d explained when he’d returned ten minutes later, smelling of cigarettes and whisky. ‘I’m awfully sorry, Michael. Do forgive me.’
‘Is Tony all right, darling?’ people had started asking her. ‘Seems rather under the weather lately.’ As if he had a cold, a cold in the head.
And he had started going to the Bosky at weekends again. There were always affairs; she wasn’t stupid enough to pretend there weren’t. She’d come to expect it: a few weeks before the end of every run he’d stroll into the garden or the living room and say, casually, ‘Any objection if I take off to the Bosky for a few days after the run’s over, darling girl? Be good to clear my head.’
‘Of course,’ she’d say, not even raising her head from the magazine or the rose bush or whatever she was doing. ‘Poor darling, you’ve been at it non-stop.’ He never seemed to notice this turn of phrase but it made her feel better. Is it that dark little thing playing Doll Tearsheet? Built like a boy, no hips, no tits, big eyes? Or the stagehand with the nose-ring and the floppy blonde mohican?
He’d been there three times this year, and twice taken a little gaggle down – hangers-on from the productions, which he’d at least told her about. The other visits he had supposedly been alone, but that she didn’t believe. She was forty-two and too old for him was what Althea also knew.
The first time he’d taken her to the Bosky, all those years ago, when he had sat her down on that bed and told her the truth about everything, she had given herself to him then, right there. That weekend they had made their vows, the ones that mattered, she always thought, not the ones they said at the registry office a few months later. She had told him, on that day, that she would never try to hold him too tight, that he must do what he wanted. And that the same went for her, too. That they would always come back together in the end. Hadn’t they stuck to this agreement? Hadn’t it worked?
A week after their arrival there was a dramatic storm in which lightning cracked across the night sky and fierce rods of rain lashed the old wooden building. The next morning, as puffed white clouds scudded across the bay driven by a sharp wind from the east, Althea looked up at her husband over breakfast, and saw him, staring at his own reflection in the glint of his knife, smacking gently at the tiny wattle of skin that was beginning to dangle from his neck. He turned his head right and left, unaware that he was being watched, no trace of humour on his expression, utterly and totally focused on himself. She saw him trace the eyebrow with one finger, flare his nostrils, make a tiny moue with his lips – it was almost funny.
Her sister was absorbed in the paper. Althea watched her husband, feeling a cold kind of horror slide over her. Where had he gone, the joyous, fascinating, hugely attractive whirlwind of a man who had overwhelmed her and made her love him? Did he see her? Did he see their children, one virtually estranged from them, the other interested only in her singing? And what about her? Did he wonder about Hartman Hall? About what her dreams were, her hopes for the future? He didn’t seem to care and she thought constantly about him and what he needed. He was petty, too, wanting to be right all the time, and with very little to be right about . . . Other actors of his age and experience founded theatre companies, marched for peace, wrote lyrical letters of protest, attacked governments. Tony sat at breakfast and worried about his jawline.
A fresh breeze through the open window ruffled the hairs on her arms and Althea came to with a start, still watching her husband. She realised her head had been aching for a while.
‘What’s that you’re reading, Althea?’ Isla said, poking the playscript she had rolled in one hand. Althea looked up, trying not to seem irritated.
‘Just a script. It arrive
d yesterday. It’s for a new production. A reworking of . . . something.’
‘For you, darling?’ Tony said, looking up. ‘A play?’
‘TV, or a play. They’re not sure . . .’ She paused, about to speak, then shrugged.
‘How exciting. Let me see.’ He wedged a piece of toast into his mouth and, without asking, took the sheaf out of her hand.
‘Here! Don’t do that,’ Althea said, grabbing it back. From downstairs, the sound of Cord doing her vocal exercises floated up to them, rising a tone at a time. ‘I was reading it. Don’t just snatch it from me.’
‘Sorry, darling.’ He raised his hands, as if guilty. ‘Forgive me.’
‘I didn’t know you were thinking of the stage again, Althea,’ said Isla, dolloping a plum-sized mound of marmalade on her toast and spreading it around with precision. ‘That’s a departure for you. You wouldn’t leave Hartman Hall, would you?’
‘Well,’ Tony said. ‘Hartman’s been wonderful for Althea but it can’t go on for ever, can it?’
Althea heard herself say, ‘You’d like it if it did, wouldn’t you? A slow slide into mediocrity, then totally forgotten? That’d suit you ever so well.’ She stood up, ignoring Isla’s prim pursing of her lips, and prised the script from his pinched fingers. ‘I’m going to finish my coffee outside.’
Outside, with the sun still behind the house and the wind high, it was chilly. Althea pulled the rug over her knees, and sat for a while, staring out at the churning sea. She felt rather sick.
Last week, she’d been told she was to be killed off in Hartman Hall. No one else knew; it was to be kept a huge secret, a big shocker for the last episode of the series to send the ratings back up again for the subsequent, final series. Lady Isabella would be murdered by her brutish new American husband, under mysterious circumstances that would enable him to evade capture before being brought to London for a sensational trial.
The Wildflowers Page 17
