Authors: Christianna Brand
S
HE HAD DRIVEN DOWN
that evening to Wren’s Hill in Hertfordshire. They had a rather chichi little cinema club down there, which specialised in rare out-of-date films; and they were showing, for just that one Saturday, one of the rarest of them all—Sari Morne in
The Spanish Steps.
A fair enough evening when she had started out; not till she was tearing along the country roads in her lovely new Halcyon had the storm begun to threaten, the clouds hanging dark and low, blotting out the light of an autumn evening, the air very heavy and still. If it broke before the doors opened, she thought, there would be few others turning out from their comfortable telly-sets for the pleasure of seeing, perhaps for the last time, this the last film—the first and the last film—ever to be made by Sari Morne. Sari Morne the bright star, flashing overnight into instant fame. Sari Morne, falling star, vanishing as unpredictably, never to be seen again. Or only in occasional revivals such as this, of a picture now four years old—four years old and yet unforgotten by the masses who had created for themselves an image, only to lose it the next moment behind a veil of obscurity, never explained away.
Even to herself—never quite explained away. Of course at the end, things had been—difficult. And then she’d been out of the scene for a bit, certainly. But even so... Just no more offers, that was all. Options with the studio not taken up, money paid over as per (not very generous) contract—but no work required. She had badgered Ethelbert about it, he still worked for the company; but Etho just shrugged and said that after all, darling, she
had
left them rather flat, hadn’t she?—all those scenes to be cooked in afterwards, with stand-ins in huge hats—just fortunate that the film had been set in sunny Italy and they could get away with wide straw brims. ‘You were so naughty, Sari, rushing off with your princeling all the time, knowing you were needed....’
But she knew it had been nothing to do with Aldo really; Aldo was now long gone. She’d behaved badly to the company, but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t grown up since then; she wouldn’t behave badly again. So—? Not much talent, perhaps; she was prepared to grant them that. But a beauty incomparable, a ‘differentness’, a persuasiveness, a charm—she knew it herself, could not fail to know, though she accepted it without vanity, simply a fact: a warmth and a humour and a charm, all the notices had said it—and the beauty.
Beautiful, all the critics had said—and something so much more than beautiful.
Vi Feather, sitting behind her grating, scooping in the money—for there had been quite a little crowd drifting into the Wren’s Hill cinema after all—had recognised her immediately. ‘Well, I never! It’s you!’
‘Good heavens, Vi, what on earth are you doing here?’
The small, pinched, raddled face, the greedy red-tipped claws, all a-sparkle with chippy little pretence-diamond rings, automatically closed down on the pound notes as she chattered, slapping down tickets, shoving back the change beneath her grille of metal bars. ‘I chucked it, dear, soon after you—left. Glamour they think it is, but there’s not much glamour, not reely, not in dressing: running from one to the other, except where it’s the star and you don’t often get a chance of that—keeping all that stuff in your mind, Continuity always after you.’ A hand passed into Sari’s range of vision, plonking down a note and Vi flicked back the ticket fastidiously, lest the brown skin touch her own. (‘I can’t be doing with these Paks, their nails so pale at the ends of their fingers!) Well, so I got a chance of this job so I came down here; pays all right and I do a bit of cleaning as well, if you want to know,’ said Vi, daring Sari to think less of her for it. ‘And then Dad died so I thought I better move in with Mum, save rent and all; Camden Town, we are—’
‘You come all the way down from London?’
‘Well, jobs are hard to get, I thought I better hang on. And it’s handy, Intertown bus almost from door to door. And you? Not working at all, dear?’
‘No, I gave it up too.’
‘Studio wouldn’t put up with it, I suppose?’ said Vi shrewdly. ‘Well, you did lead them a dance. I’ll never forget them last days for all the retakes, having to squeeze the stand-in into your dresses, Wardrobe going mad for hats to hide her face. Wonderful they got away with it, reely; but of course it creaks if you’re in the know. D’j’ever see any of the others nowadays? That redheaded feller, did your dresses?—if you could call him a feller,’ said Vi, lowering her voice. ‘Queer as a coot, I always thought, meself. Carrying on with Angelico, him that played your lead. World star he is these days, Angelico.’
‘Yes, he is and you’ll find yourself in big trouble if you go round talking scandal like that about him; you could ruin him. He married into some huge, titled family so I should just watch it if I were you.’
‘Oh, well—it’s only what I thought. So who else? Sofy Burnsey? But she had a very small part. Not that small parts would suit her now,’ said Vi Feather, sniggering at her own wit. ‘Pity she’s put on so much weight, I’d hardly have reckernised her—though mind you, it’s done her no harm, she’s always on the telly these days, so I’m told—can’t afford one meself. As a matter of fact she’s—’ But her voice trailed off, suddenly assumed a coy expression. ‘Well,’ I never—it’s my Mr Adam! Adam the Gardener, I call him,’ she confided as, with a murmured greeting, the tall form moved away, ‘because he always wears a flower in his buttonhole. Grows them himself, he says. I passed a comment once and we got into a chat and now and again he’ll take out the flower and present it to me with oh!—ever such a gesture.’ She bridled gruesomely. ‘Well—more than a single flower in our day, wasn’t it, Miss Morne?’
The flowers! The roses, the orchids, the great baskets of scented magnolias! And one day, nestling at the heart of the biggest of all the bouquets—the ring! ‘D’j’ever hear of that Prince of yours nowadays, dear?’
‘No,’ said Sari. ‘That ended.’ And the old, cold fear was chilling her spine, the feeling of being watched. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed for the first time a flicker of something—familiar: of colour, of light, so ephemeral that she could hardly tell what. But something vaguely reminiscent of something—of someone—she knew. She said uneasily: ‘I’ll have to go in now.’
‘When I’ve got rid of all this, I thought I’d go in and see it meself, for old times’ sake. Ah, those were the days, Miss Morne, weren’t they? And best of all for me was the time I worked with
you.
All the excitement in your dressing-room, especially after the Prince began coming: the flowers, the presents and then—that ring! You
would
wear it in the picture. “She’s not to wear it,” Mr Solon says to me—Mr Solon speaking to
me
! It’s the only time he ever did. “It’s too valuable,” he says, “to be knocking around the dressing-rooms.” But you never could be told.’
‘Yes, well, Vi, that’s all forgotten now.’
‘Not by me, it isn’t. What’ve I got these days but me memories?’ She cast a surreptitious eye over the beautiful coat of softest tawny brown leather to match the gleam of hair almost extinguished by the huge black stetson-shaped hat; the fine leather gloves, the expensive handbag, enormous, of fine canvas, hand-painted in a pattern of black and brown. ‘Times are hard for me now, Miss Morne, honest they are.’ She opened her own shabby handbag, scrabbled in its grubby depths for an already well-used paper handkerchief and began, unattractively, to snivel. Ugh! thought Sari; and yet—poor thing! Was she working up to a touch? she wondered. Small hope if she were! One had enough money, lot and lots of money compared with poor Vi, but somehow it all seemed to dribble away. Rufie was such a seducer where spending was concerned: what was the use of temptation, was his favourite quotation, if one didn’t give way to it? And they’d been on a shopping spree and here she was penniless, long before the end of the quarter. ...
Nevertheless, the watcher in the shadows observed, pennies were scraped together in the end: a note handed over with a look of half-contemptuous compassion before the black hat and the high black boots and the beautiful tawny coat disappeared behind the shabby curtain into the auditorium.
The little cinema was quite crowded after all; many who, like herself, had come to see only the feature film, were ploughing about in the dark, trying to find seats. Peering through the gloom she ran full tilt into a man coming the other way, and landed up with her arms around his neck. ‘Oh, I
am
so sorry!’
He restored her to her feet, smiling down at her. ‘Not at all—be my guest!’ The usherette’s torch lit up his face for a moment, and passed on down the aisle.
A fair face, a handsome face, clean shaven, with that look in the light blue eyes that never failed to turn her heart to water. That look of vague melancholy, of being, somehow, a bit—lost. Aldo had had that look and—one or two others; and highly misleading in every case it had turned out to be. But here it was again and here she went again, head over heels in love with that look—that look of easy independence and strength, and vulnerability.
He held her for a moment, as though to reassure himself that she was all right. She repeated: ‘I’m terribly sorry, really I am.’
‘I enjoyed every minute of it,’ he said and let her go—but reluctantly?—and passed on up the aisle. She knew a moment of absurdly bleak despair at the thought that she would never see him again.
A mile from the cinema—she knew that she was being followed. A mini—the same make and horse-power as Rufie’s or she might never have noticed it. She slowed down and the little black car slowed down, accelerated and it maintained its distance behind her. I’m frightened, she thought, I’m terrified—driving here alone through the black night and the storm, along the small, dark country lanes: and they’re following me again. And a face was illuminated for a moment, dead white in the lightning flash, peering out through the spattered windscreen with the flick-flick-flick of the wipers moving across and across it; and two hands seemed to stretch forward, spread-eagled against the glass, as though only that prevented their reaching out for her. What red glow from some street lamp unobserved, from some passing window, perhaps, curtained red—what red glow had seemed for a moment to turn those grasping hands to crimson, as though they were bathed in blood?
She thrust down her foot on the accelerator and the big car flung itself forward, screeched round a bend in the road, round another, was wrenched into the car park of a wayside pub, lights immediately extinguished. She caught again a glimpse of the white face thrust forward, peering ahead into the darkness; and the little car passed by her, unseeing, rocketing on through the rain. She decided: I’ll let it get well ahead. I’ll go in and have a drink.
The first thought of the man behind the bar as she came in through the door, pulling off her big black hat, thrashing it against her thigh to shake the wet from it, was: My God, what on earth have we got here? His second thought was: But, by God—isn’t she beautiful?
If she was strange, she was deliberately strange; and she could be strange because she knew that she was beautiful. She was—twenty-six, perhaps? Tall, marvellously shaped, with narrow hips and long legs, slender from thigh to ankle, like a boy’s legs. Her hands and feet were narrow and delicately boned, her eyes a deep blue-grey: the face perfectly ovalled, a smooth, golden-y skin, the whole with its shadowed planes beneath the high cheek bones a miracle of moulding. She’s like a cat, he thought, a lovely, smooth golden-y cat, a lioness perhaps—but no, that was far too fierce and strong: a cheetah, more like. But her hair—! ‘My God,’ said the man, before he could stop himself, ‘whatever have you done to your hair?’
She was totally unoffended; only, as ever, a little thrown by a word of criticism, doubtful, insecure. ‘Don’t you like it?’
It had been cut ‘en brosse’, but longer than a man’s crew-cut might be, perhaps two inches high on the crown of her head, brushed upwards all over from above her ears - very thick and close like a tight-fitting wig of soft animal fur, and dyed to a deeply glowing russety red, the colour of dark orange marmalade lit from beneath with gold, with no pretence to any shade that any hair in the world could ever have been. ‘Well, I’m sorry, love,’ he said, abashed by his own outburst. ‘It just comes a bit of a shock at first. But, mind, it suits you.’ And indeed once you got accustomed to it, she was beautiful with it; beautiful.
She peeled off her leather driving gloves, heaved one slender haunch on to a bar stool, balancing with the toe of a high black boot on the brass rail. On this night of drenching rain, no one else in the pub. ‘Give me a brandy, would you?’ she said. ‘A big one. And please have one yourself.’ And she burst out with it. ‘I don’t usually drink anything. But I’m a bit scared. I think I’m being followed.’
‘Followed?’ he said, pausing for a moment, standing at the gantry, one hand on the brandy bottle, looking back at her over his shoulder. ‘Followed—by who?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, but doubtfully.
‘You mean some feller—?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’ He placed the glass in front of her and she splashed a little soda into it, not waiting for him; she sketched a salute and gulped down half the contents, put down the glass on the counter and sat staring into its sparkling depths. It was always easier to tell things to strangers. She said simply: ‘I think they want to kill me.’
Oh, crikey! he thought. Another of these nuts! Her, with her hair like a strangely dyed pussy-cat’s. But the wonderful face! He said more gently than he had intended: ‘I’m sure no one wants to kill you.’
‘That’s what everyone always says,’ she said. ‘But I know that someone does.’
‘Why
should
anyone?’
‘Well, I... Well, I know something, you see. And they’re afraid I’ll tell someone about it. I haven’t the faintest intention of telling anyone, I wouldn’t dream of it. But they can’t know that, can they?’
‘So you do know who you’re being followed by.’
‘I know why. I don’t know exactly who.’
‘Better tell the police then.’
‘I have told them. They just say what you said, which is what everyone always says: “I’m sure no one really wants to kill you.”’