And so he brokered her first deal, while warning her against the meretriciousness of the movie business; when her mother moved out to Hollywood to chaperone her, he stayed in New York and set up the Belle-Tier Corporation to manage her earnings. She lived within the parameters he set – she drove a small car, made her own clothes – and everything was dandy, until she eloped with Cassini and her mother flew home in disgust to New York and found that her husband had been having an affair with her best friend, whom she had charged with ‘taking care of him’ while she was away. The best friend was the daughter of a railway tycoon and had a fortune of her own: in her, Howard Tierney Sr saw at last a way out of his debts. In fact, this relationship had been going on for some time; in fact, the reason he’d sent his young family on that fated holiday across America in the first place was so that he could spend the summer alone in New York with her; and now, fresh from denouncing his daughter to the press, he announced he was divorcing Gene’s mother and marrying her best friend.
It would be an understatement to say that Gene was disillusioned to find her father had feet of clay. But there was more to come: because when she demanded a new deal with the studio, so that her salary went straight to her and not to the company her father had set up, he sued her for fifty thousand dollars for breach of contract; and when she won the suit, and for the first time saw a statement of her savings at the Belle-Tier Corporation – of all the money she had earned in Hollywood and obediently sent on to her father, who had administered it with such draconian rigour – it came to zero, nought, nothing: there was nothing in the account.
She only saw him two more times. Once, she was under sedation and didn’t recognize him. The other time he came to her house and said, as he left, ‘Well, Gene, I suppose we both got what we wanted.’
Hence, surely, the succession of millionaires, the trade-off of her beauty for the security of knowing that no matter how else they betrayed her, she would never have to see them diminished like that: she would never have to see them dismiss the maid, or sell the crystal piece by piece, or carry a gun in case the worst came to the worst; no matter what else happened, there would always be security, there would always be enough to pay her hospital bills, her daughter’s hospital bills.
One would have a strong case for arguing that it was the men in her life – the lovers, the father, the directors, producers, critics – who destroyed it. And yet when you looked at the broad sweep they appeared more as agents, collectively, of a darker, wider force of ruin that pursued her. It was as if her epic beauty somehow angered the gods, and drew down a suitably Promethean punishment; and the girl behind the beauty, the nice girl from Connecticut who at the end would wonder whether, if her life had been a movie, she would have been cast to play her part – found she had wandered off the lot into a Greek tragedy.
Sitting amid the uniforms in the cavernous warehouse, I tried not to think about this. I tried to concentrate on the good things: the Oscar nomination for
Leave Her to Heaven
, in which out of nowhere she gives a performance of jealousy and insanity and anomie that is quite chilling; the premiere of
The Razor’s Edge
in New York City, the first big premiere after World War Two, when she’d walked a red carpet in a black tulle dress in front of thousands of fans…
But I couldn’t help but hear echoes of another life: in Gene’s mother Belle, in the Belle-Tier Corporation her father had sucked dry, in
A Bell for Adano, Belle Starr
, whose heroine’s name she’d chosen for an alias when she eloped with Cassini to Las Vegas; and I wondered if she’d ever, in the midst of those dreams and hallucinations, thought of the girl who would come fifty years later, who would also sit in a hospital ward and wonder who she was… And in the end I decided it might be kinder to forget: to let her disappear back into the twilight of late-night broadcasts, of dusty stills in the back of dusty junk shops patronized by lonely men with too much time on their hands. I put my notes in a shoebox and stowed it under the davenport in my room.
I asked Frank one time if he could remember how
The Cherry Orchard
had ended. After some deliberation he said that as far as he could recall, they all just leave.
‘They all just
leave
?’
‘Yeah, s’far as I remember.’
‘What kind of ending is that?’
‘Dunno, Charlie. Must have been the only one he could think of.’
The Amaurot Players never reconvened. The papers had never been signed and the lavender-suited PA had taken Harry aside after the funeral and told him that Telsinor were pulling out of the deal. No one was pointing fingers or making judgements, she said; still, the company had a responsibility to listen to its shareholders, and in the shareholders’ eyes these recent events were simply not in the spirit of youth and change and communication that Telsinor represented.
Initially there was some talk of looking for funding elsewhere, but it quickly petered out. Nobody’s heart was in it any more. Soon everyone went their separate ways. Harry made some sort of a statement claiming that the theatre was an élitist art form and that the Internet was the only medium capable of expressing truly revolutionary ideas; he got a job writing copy for the Snickers website, and to my knowledge
The Rusting Tractor
was never produced.
Mirela seemed to have taken the crash especially hard. For weeks afterwards she barricaded herself in her room; she would not speak to Harry, and the engagement was quietly forgotten. She left the house shortly afterwards. For where I did not know: Mrs P would not speak about her. I never saw her again, at least not in the flesh.
It was only a short while after that Vuk and Zoran’s application for asylum was turned down. The former Yugoslavia, in the eyes of the Irish government, was no longer sufficiently dangerous to merit their staying on here; the next thing we knew they were heading back to Croatia with Mrs P. It all seemed very sudden. The truth of it, though, was that the citizenship issue was only an excuse. Mrs P had been pining to go back home since the day she arrived, and the ‘recent events’ had only bolstered her resolve.
‘To her it doesn’t matter there is nothing left there,’ Vuk said to me. ‘Always she is thinking only of my father, who was lost, and she does not want to live away from.’
‘What about Mirela?’ I said. ‘Is she going too?’
‘Ay, Mirela,’ he sighed. ‘Maybe she is right. Maybe it is better to stay here, to forget. But Mama is determined.’ He tapped his head and grinned. ‘We go with her, make sure she doesn’t go too crazy.’
I knew Mother must be lonely in the house on her own. I had been nagging her to get in someone new, but she didn’t listen. In fact, I was never sure how aware of my visits she was. She confined herself to one or two rooms these days, leaving the rest of the house to the great draughts that roamed through it. I would find her sitting by a cold hearth, with a glass in her hand and cinders all over the floor. We would talk, or rather I would listen as she talked: about the old days, invariably – Trinity College, the Hunt Ball, Father and her star turns in this or that production. Sometimes I would try to get her to talk about Bel, but whether real or put on, I could not pierce this cloudy nostalgia. Once only, when I asked her straight out about the night of the school play, did it seem that the cobwebs fell away. She paused, ran her finger around the rim of her sherry glass, and then said: ‘A true actress, Charles, never lets herself be seen. Every time she walks on stage, she creates herself anew, using what’s around her; and when she walks off she divests herself of it just so –’ lifting her arms and shrugging off an imaginary gown. ‘Her life is merely a peg on which to hang it. But Bel, you see, Bel…’ She paused once more, and smiled sadly. ‘Bel always insisted life skip to her tune. She never would learn the value of compromise. So like her father in that way, making things harder than they already were…’
The fingers ran around the glass: then, abruptly, she brightened. ‘But in the
old
days, Charles, how jolly it was. Now, of course, it’s all little people and their rules. But then… but then, when the house was full of life, when the grooms would bring round the brougham, and the maids would present in their frocks, and curtsey at the knee, and the valet and the chauffeur and the cook, and every room bustling with life…’
‘No, Mother,’ I contradicted gently. ‘That wasn’t here. We never had all those people working for us in Amaurot.’
‘I don’t mean us, Charles,’ she said irritably. ‘I mean in the old days. The last century, before we ever arrived. Now we’re starting a new century, of course,’ she added with disdain, and her eyes glazed over as she poured herself more sherry, absently tilting the bottle up and up till the drink trembled right at the rim of the glass. ‘But how jolly it must have been, how jolly…’ shaking her head and smiling fondly and not noticing as I raised the latch and let myself out into the gusty hall.
I couldn’t get out to her as often as I should have liked, and I did worry about her. I rang the Cedars once, to inquire about the possibility of having her return there, just for a short while; but there had been some sort of trouble with the last cheque, so I let the matter drop.
Thus I passed my new life. My work hours meant that I rarely had to speak to people, and the quiet order of it suited me; it was like swimming underwater, through the ruins of some drowned city.
And then one night I got a call.
It was one of those bitter, sleety winter nights, so desperately cold that in the warehouse even the uniforms seemed to shiver on their rails and yearn to clap their hands together, if they’d had hands. I had gone into the village on my eight o’clock break in search of coffee to warm myself up. There was nothing visibly out of the ordinary when I got back. Rosco was working at the far end; the pile of cardboard boxes was just where I had left it. And yet the air seemed somehow
heightened
; hyperreal, as if the focus wheel had been turned and a new clarity been added. I waited a moment there at the door, looking over the cold hall, then realized that a phone was ringing.
With a tight feeling in my chest, I tracked the sound: past the foreman’s cabin, past the shuttered doors, down the aisle of nurses’ uniforms till I came to my writing desk, and lifted a pile of order forms to find Bel’s phone.
I had kept it more as a souvenir than anything else, a souvenir or a pet. Droyd had showed me how it worked, how to unlock it and keep it fed; but I never used it, other than to wonder at its little green display, and hardly anyone ever called me. Yet here it was singing away. I picked it up and pressed a button; and a voice said, ‘Charles?’
The entire warehouse, the entire world, the particles in the air seemed to freeze and hang motionless in suspension.
‘Hello?’ the voice said.
‘Yes, yes, I’m here,’ hurriedly.
‘I was hoping you’d pick up,’ the voice said.
I sank on to the chair.
‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’
My heart was racing, that was why. I wiped a frost of sweat from my forehead, and said, with some effort, ‘Is this you?’
‘Of course it’s me, don’t you recognize me?’
‘No, I – damn it,’ the damn phone was so
small
, it kept losing itself in my hand, ‘damn it, we all thought you were –’
‘I suppose that was the idea.’
‘That was the…?’ rising again, caught in a bewildering mixture of emotions that ranged from relief to gratitude to apoplexy: ‘we’ve been so
worried
– not even worried, we’ve been – I mean of all the wretched, selfish…’
There was a silence at the other end. For one terrorized instant I thought I’d scared her off. Then the voice said: ‘I know. I’m sorry. But I didn’t think you’d think – I mean I thought you’d work it out.’
‘Work what out?’
‘The name.’
‘The name?’
The name, she repeated, the name, come on, Charles: and slowly it stole across me. Jessica Kiddon: Jess Kiddon: Just Kidding.
‘MacGillycuddy,’ I breathed.
‘Maybe I should have gone with Tempora Mores,’ Bel mused.
Just kidding: it was one of his conceits, I’d have recognized it a mile off; and once I did I couldn’t believe I hadn’t guessed before. I should have known he’d be in this up to his neck; I should have known that banishing him from our lives was like asking a genie to kindly get back in its bottle, or trying to shoo a charging bull with a big red rag. Before she said another word, several unexplained phenomena suddenly became clear. The dinner invitation that hadn’t arrived; the mysterious school-friend who wasn’t in the yearbook; the chopping noise I had heard that night, clearing a path through the trees for the car, to the same cliffs MacGillycuddy had been so determined I fall off instead of exploding myself. There was no masterclass in Yalta; there was no Jessica Kiddon. Bel had lifted the entire idea from me and my abortive flight to Chile – which, given the uncomplimentary things she’d said about it at the time, I thought was pretty rich.
In fact her plan, as she explained it to me that night, was significantly more detailed than mine. It had to be, she said; she hadn’t had any money of her own, and the only way to fund her escape had been to create this new persona, the respectable girl who could persuade Mother to part with the necessary sum. Furthermore, familiarizing us all with the fictitious Jessica (I thought here of our flirtatious conversation after the greyhound race, and blushed) would lend her both time and a means of muddying the waters after her initial departure. The idea was to travel to Russia in her own name, under cover of the Chekhov trip: as far as we were concerned, Jessica would be with her and everything would appear above board. It was only when she was over there that the phoney papers, passport, etc. that MacGillycuddy had arranged would come into play. The way she had set it up, she would then have a six-month window (the length of the spurious class) in which she could merge into Jessica – Jessica, who had no roots, no background, could disappear quite easily and never be traced – and let Bel Hythloday simply melt away, without any of the mess or pain or logistical headaches of an actual faked death, a drowning or an explosion or a car crash.