The Daughter of Lady Macbeth

by Ajay Close

  ‘I mean you and me. Us.’

  A few seconds before I might have told him, but asking the question had changed the answer. I was his cradle-snatcher, his Mrs Robinson, his rich-bitch bored wife. He was my Oedipus, my Benjamin Braddock, my toyboy, my Tithonus. But what were we?

  ‘A good time,’ I said, ‘in a dull world.’

  A possibility occurred to me – a fantastical possibility, but just then I couldn’t think of a more plausible alternative. I turned to look at him.

  Something snuffed at the crown of my head.

  Kit sprang back and fell off the table.

  The lurcher barked.

  ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know you were there!’ It was Becca from the bar, a hand spread across her chest in shock. Behind her embarrassment, I could see her looking forward to the story she would tell when she went back inside.

  Kit had retreated a couple of metres from the table. She asked him for a light. She was one of those unlucky fat girls whose surplus weight doesn’t translate into a cleavage, which ruled her out as a former girlfriend. I wondered if she was a friend of Nikki’s. Or an enemy, which could prove just as dangerous. I was sitting up by then, trying to look unconcerned. The lurcher planted his front paws on the bench beneath me and raised his shameless-soulful eyes in entreaty. I opened my hands – ‘No crisps’ – and the dog lifted his grizzled muzzle to nudge at my breast.

  ‘Mungo!’ His mistress laughed. ‘Not on a first date!’

  The dog went over to try his luck with Kit.

  Becca assumed that sociable smoker’s pose, hip cocked, one arm folded across her midriff. ‘He used to do that to Lindsey when she was expecting Kyle. He knew before she did. Mum says they can smell it.’

  Perhaps it really was a guileless remark, but I wasn’t about to give her the benefit of the doubt. She looked away, flustered by my stare. Rebuffed by Kit, the lurcher was making a circuit of the beer garden, sniffing and cocking his leg. She ground out her cigarette and clicked her tongue to call him to heel.

  ‘Sorry if I…’ She let the sentence hang unfinished. ‘I, eh… I didn’t see anything.’

  For a long time after she was gone neither of us spoke. A lorry clanked over the bridge. My left nipple, the one nudged by the dog, throbbed as if from a human touch.

  ‘We should go back in,’ I said, ‘you’ll be missed.’

  He walked up to the table, reaching through my open coat to place the flat of his hand against my belly. I closed my eyes. As a young woman I had been wary of young men, their spunked-up noise and violence. It was Frankie who taught me to see the vulnerability underneath. They all yearned for something. A football team, a cause, a woman, a child.

  ‘You got what you came for, then,’ he said.

  ‘You came too, as I recall.’

  The eyes he turned on me were dark-rimmed in the pallor of his face, a look I’d seen in Ruth’s children just before they cried. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

  I massaged my neck, which had started to ache. ‘When I knew what to do.’

  His look hardened. ‘What’s to know?’ He took his hand away. ‘Congratulations, Mrs MacKewon.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ I said.

  I saw the eager light flare in his eyes, and as quickly go out. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I just know.’

  The leakage from the bar grew louder. The customers were singing along to a tune I almost recognised.

  He rolled himself another cigarette. ‘You’ll be off, then,’ he said, ‘back to Glasgow.’

  I couldn’t deny it. What were we? Married to other people.

  ‘We don’t have to lose touch,’ I said.

  ‘No? What do you have in mind: a quickie in your lunch hour in the back of the Subaru?’

  It was exactly the sort of thing he would have said before, only now there was a bitter edge to the innuendo.

  ‘Course, you won’t be working, with a baby.’ He lit the roll-up and exhaled, narrowing his eyes as the breeze blew the smoke back against his face.

  A cloud covered the moon, leaving the glowing end of his cigarette the only source of light.

  ‘I should have got him to slip Nikki one while he was at it.’

  I stared into the darkness. ‘What d’you mean?’

  He dropped the cigarette, crushing it underfoot. ‘What d’you think I mean?’ I had never heard cruelty in his voice before. ‘I fire blanks. Billions of the fuckers. Every one a dud.’

  It wasn’t a lie any man I knew would tell.

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I wanted to shag you. You weren’t complaining.’

  The moon came out from behind its cloud.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll do you a deal. You let me keep that ten grand you lent me, and I’ll make sure Frankie doesn’t get to hear about our afternoon in bed—’

  I had been so sure Kit was the father.

  ‘You get your brains shagged out and go home to play happy families, Frankie gets his son and heir, Nikki and I get a free shot at the Miracle. Sounds fair to me.’

  I was about to say I didn’t care about the money (it was only going to sit in my savings account earning 0.25 per cent interest). But then he would have had to find another way of getting back at me.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to find out like this.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Glad to be of service.’ He stuck out his hand like a salesman clinching a deal.

  ‘Stop it.’

  He looked at the hand I refused to shake, shrugged and went back through the garden to the bar.

  I sat listening to the river. For a while I thought I was going to cry. I would never get to untie that strip of leather from his wrist, never feel again the surprising softness of his skin. Ahead of me stretched all the years when I would look back on us. If I remembered him at ninety, he would not be more irretrievably gone than he was then.

  Champagne

  Lilias paused just inside the restaurant, taking a long, conspicuous look around. Her eyelids were frosted silver, her white-gold hair sparkled with its thousand lights. She was wearing the rabbit-fur tippet she insisted was winter mountain hare, over her floor-length, lapis blue coat. She might as well have carried a sign, I am an actress.

  I reminded myself that being an actress was not a capital offence.

  ‘You are clever, darling, to have found this place.’

  A waiter approached us and nodded at the far side of the room. I watched her lips purse at not being shown personally to our table.

  She sat down, draping the fur over the back of her chair. ‘Well, this is a treat.’

  We smiled at each other.

  ‘You’re looking rather… ’

  ‘Yes?’ I said, too eager.

  ‘Peelie-wallie,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps it’s just that colour on you.’

  I glanced down at my green empire-line dress. ‘So. What have you been doing with yourself?’

  ‘Oh you know, the usual.’

  ‘Shopping, socialising, breaking hearts?’

  She gave me a narrow look. ‘Reading a couple of scripts actually.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’ I was burning to share my news, but I wanted her to guess.

  ‘Actually there is something. A one-woman show by a new writer, an Irishman. Very talented.’ She smiled, lowering her lashes, showing the frosted silver. ‘It’s called Dinner with the Contessa. The part’s a wee bit old for me, but I’m sure,’ another smile, ‘Dermot can be persuaded. It’ll be quite exciting, holding the audience for ninety minutes all by myself.’

  She hadn’t done anything longer than a five-minute take in years. ‘What sort of run?’ I asked.

  ‘An eleven-week tour.’

  I shrugged. ‘If your consultant’s OK with it.’

  ‘You mean my agent.’

  ‘I mean you’re recovering from cancer.’

  She seemed to shrink before my eyes. I had shot her down in her moment of triumph, but if I wasn’t going t
o point out the potential hazards of this venture, who was?

  The waiter arrived with a bottle of water and hovered until it was clear we weren’t yet ready to order.

  ‘This is a treat,’ she said again.

  ‘We can still go somewhere else.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling.’ She ran her eye down the menu. The waiter had left a taint of perspiration in his wake. The calendula on our table had been placed over a ghostly stain that laundering had failed to remove from the cloth. As soon as I saw it, I knew she had noticed.

  ‘There’s chicken and chorizo stew. You could leave the chorizo. I’m going to have the lamb.’ I smiled at her surprise. ‘I’m a carnivore these days.’

  ‘Darling! When did this happen?’

  ‘A few weeks ago. I got sick of macaroni cheese.’ But I didn’t want to talk about my diet, I had something more important to say. ‘Ma, I thought this lunch could be a new start for us—’

  She assumed a pleasantly quizzical expression.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said back in the summer, about you not being a good mother. I realised when I got home you were trying to open things up between us, and I just shut the conversation down…’

  I stared at her suddenly sparkling eyes, the flush in her cheeks, the slight jut of her chin to correct her overbite. She stood up, waving at someone on the far side of the high counter that separated the tables from the kitchen. Turning, I saw a tall, heavily built, handsome man whose silver quiff and billowing white shirt were pitched somewhere between camp and piratical machismo. I had never seen him before, but I knew he was an actor. He would have played Antony to her Cleopatra, or Sky Masterson to her Sister Sarah, and was now supplementing his income frying tapas. He cut a path through the tables with such energy that our fellow lunchers paused their forks to watch.

  They kissed cheeks – once, twice, thrice, four times – laughing and exclaiming, pulling back to take a proper look. She teased him about going grey. He pulled a face: wasn’t it awful? Oh no, it suited him. Very distingué. But look at her! Not changed a bit: she had to have a portrait up in the attic! He turned his attention to me. I was afraid he was trying to flirt, but when I met his eye it was pity I read there, mixed with a sort of superstitious thrill. He touched me on the shoulder, as people will bring their hand to a kettle to check if it’s still hot. ‘And this was…?’ Lilias nodded, a rapid, dismissive nod, almost a warning, and all at once he was boisterous again, pulling out a chair and shouting for wine, clasping Lilias’s hand and mine with the sort of spontaneous exhibitionism I had dreaded all my life.

  It turned out to be Benedick he’d played to her Beatrice, how many years ago? Oh, too many. In Manchester. And they hadn’t met since. Apart from that time… Anyway. It was wonderful to see her.

  His name was Xavier and he was French by birth, though you wouldn’t have known it from his Lancashire accent. On the back of his success in Much Ado, he’d done a couple of seasons at Stratford and a Hampton revival off Broadway. After that he’d returned to France and been a mainstay of some interminable serial which was death to the soul but allowed him long liquid lunches with the week’s guest actress. Here Lilias shot him a reproachful look and he mugged like a naughty schoolboy. I wondered if they’d ever tasted each other’s sweat, or just teased the cast with their simulated foreplay. Twenty years of brunettes, he sighed. The casting director had a thing about them. In the end, boredom and too many long-lens shots in Paris Match had pushed him into a crise. De conscience? she wondered. De foie, he said.

  He was out of the business now, an old dog learning new tricks. She might remember he’d always loved to cook. Oh how could she forget! Those omelettes whipped up on the coal fire in his digs – fit for the Gods! The boeuf bourgignon he made for the cast party! But behind this gush I could see her mind working, weighing his status as a failed actor against the admiration he had to offer and his possible future as an entrepreneurial success. It was tough, he said, realising he’d spent forty years on the wrong path. Cooking was so much more creative. Or at least – with a gallant nod at her – more so than the fist he’d made of acting. Oh no: she’d never forgotten the way he’d played Benedick as a sort of South Ken Peter Cook – or was Peter Cook actually from Kensington? She knew what he meant about cooking, though. She had once eaten a baccala con carciofi at a little place in Chichester that was like standing by a driftwood fire on a stormy night under the spray of crashing breakers.

  Xavier was watching me again. I could feel the burn of his eyes (rogueish for Lilias, doggy for me) searching my face for something that wasn’t there.

  ‘What do you do when you’re being creative, Freya?’

  I was on the verge of replying I don’t, but what law decreed I had to spend my life as Lilias’s other?

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.

  When I saw the tenderness bloom in his gaze I thought of Frankie.

  ‘Darling!’ Lilias exclaimed.

  Xavier beckoned a waiter. ‘Bugger the verdejo, we need a bottle of champagne,’ his arm froze in mid-air, ‘unless you’re not drinking?’

  ‘A glass won’t do any harm.’

  ‘Darling,’ Lilias said again, ‘that’s marvellous.’

  The words rang hollow. She was a better actress than this. She wanted me to see she wasn’t pleased. Over forty-odd years, I had learned to anticipate Lilias’s rebuffs, but every once in a while she got past my defences and I was a child again, blinking back the hurt.

  Meanwhile Xavier was pressing me for details. How many weeks gone was I? Did I want a boy or a girl this time? On hearing it was my first pregnancy, he became even more solicitous, ordering me the mildest dish on the menu, assuring me it went well with champagne. He approved of me drinking. It wasn’t only nutrients a child absorbed from its mother, but joie de vivre. He had memories, not faces or events of course, but feelings and associations he was sure dated back to the womb. The smile died on his lips, his eyes suddenly furtive. By the time I’d turned to check Lilias’s expression, the waiter was opening our bottle of champagne. She squealed at the pop, making Xavier laugh.

  ‘You’re lucky you can drink.’ She touched my forearm but kept her face angled towards Xavier. ‘When I was carrying you I was so sick. I couldn’t keep anything down. I was getting thinner and thinner. I was afraid you wouldn’t grow. There was a nest in the eaves outside my window. So I used to…’ she gave a breathy laugh, ‘I suppose you’d call it a sort of spell. I used to lie in bed listening to the nestlings calling for food. I’d go down to the kitchen and cut myself a slice of bread, tear the middle into pieces and leave them out on the sill. Then I’d go back to bed and suck on the crusts and imagine I was feeding the baby bird inside me.’

  Xavier regarded her with melting eyes.

  ‘And from that day I started to put on weight?’

  I kept the mockery light, and she pretended not to hear it. ‘We didn’t have scans back then, darling, so I can’t be sure, but I rather think you did. It is a sort of magic, being two people. I hardly knew myself. I was ticklish all over, and smelled of geraniums.’

  Xavier looked suitably enchanted.

  ‘Apart from my feet, which were more like brie de Meaux.’ Her voice became huskier. ‘I’ve always thought the true changelings are pregnant women. Having these feelings you’ve never had before, dreaming someone else’s dreams. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never experienced it. Do you feel it, darling?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It didn’t end with the birth, either. Even after I went back to work it was as if they hadn’t cut the umbilical cord. I’d go through the motions on stage, but you were always at the back of my mind. Poor Xavier, having to convince eight houses a week you were falling in love with this woman who was only half there.’

  ‘Half of you was twice any other woman,’ he said, ‘and I wasn’t really acting.’

  She stretched her hand across the table and he brought it to his lips.

  ‘Get
us, duckie,’ he said in a camp drawl.

  I looked away. The dates were almost right, the genetics not impossible, but the more I saw of him the less likely it seemed. He was not a man to father a child and move on without a backward glance. Even if Lilias had transferred her affections, he would have turned up once a year with his camera and his gift-wrapped doll. The postman would have brought birthday cards with French stamps, and Easter dragées, and a bottle of scent when I passed my exams. I had liked him at first, despite his affectations. Now all I could see was his unsatisfactoriness, like a jigsaw piece the right colour but the wrong shape.

  The food arrived. Xavier had ordered himself a starter portion of risotto to keep us company. Between mouthfuls, they exchanged gossip about old friends. The pretty girls who’d married well, that dancer who was on the game. He began to explain why he’d left acting. The creative satisfaction of cooking was only half the story. He’d had a heart attack not long after his sixtieth birthday.

  ‘…the quack read me the riot act, no more stress. I told him: if you don’t get stage fright, you’re not worth watching. He said in that case the next theatre I played was going to be the operating theatre—’

  Lilias’s glance settled on a part of the restaurant visible over his shoulder.

  ‘I guess once you get to our age, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.’ He could tell he’d lost her. Then he guessed why. ‘Oh God, Lili, I’m a tactless oaf.’

  Her blue eyes turned to ice.

  ‘Is it serious?’ He touched her fingers, which she instantly retracted. I knew she would never forgive him this note of human sympathy, its complete lack of chivalric awe.

  ‘It was cancer,’ I said.

  ‘Darling!’

  What else was I to do? If she was going to freeze him out, at least he would know why.

  He reached across the table to trap her hand beneath his. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Lili.’

  She looked at him with little short of loathing, but he held on.

  ‘She’s been very lucky,’ I said. ‘No chemo, no radiotherapy, no adverse reaction to the drugs.’