Clouds among the Stars

‘All I ask is that you don’t let them back in.’

‘I’m going to give my press conference at The Green Dragon. The landlord’s thrilled to have the free publicity. My agent’ll be pleased too.’

‘Have you understood what’s happening? Pa’s about to be sent to prison for the rest of his life and all you can think about is promoting your career.’

‘Not really?’ Bron looked quite anxious. ‘That would be awful.’

‘That’s an understatement!’

‘I must say I’m surprised. I consider myself a good judge of character.’ I wondered on what grounds he made this entirely unsubstantiated boast. But as, despite everything, I loved my brother I did not contradict him. ‘I mean, actually smashing a man’s skull. I know Pa’s always hated Basil but it’s taking rivalry a bit far.’

‘Of course he didn’t do it!’

‘Oh. No. That is, if he didn’t, why’s he been arrested?’

‘I’ve explained all that.’ I had, at length, as soon as the press had gone. The trouble was, Bron was full of Manhattans, and black coffee can only do so much. ‘Of course he didn’t do it. And we’ve got to go on telling everyone that, however bad things look. What’ll the police think if even his own family doesn’t believe he’s innocent?’

‘Righto.’ Bron nodded solemnly, his fair hair flopping elegantly over one eye. ‘I’m with you there, Harriet. Pa didn’t do it. I’m prepared to stand up in court and testify to that.’ He was silent for a moment and I knew he was seeing himself as a character in a courtroom drama.

‘What on earth is that?’ I stared with distaste at a swan fashioned from white carnations, sitting on the piano. Its beak was made of orange chrysanthemums and turned up, like a duck’s. Until that moment I had been too agitated to register that the drawing room resembled a cemetery. There were vases of lilies and roses on every table.

‘Oh, people keep sending Ma flowers. She’s very annoyed. They’re all the wrong colours.’

The telephone rang. I went into the hall to answer it.

‘Hello. This is the Daily Champion. I take it you are a member of the family? Can I have your first reactions to the arrest of Waldo Byng?’

I put the receiver back on its rest as a violent surge of misery made me almost too weak to stand. The telephone rang again immediately. I felt cornered by it as if it were a wild, snarling animal. I held my breath and lifted the receiver cautiously.

‘Hello, hello? This is the Examiner –’

After that, though our number was ex-directory, everyone in the world seemed to know it and be bent on seeking our opinions, so I unplugged all the telephones. The front doorbell rang incessantly. I was deputed to answer it, which I did by calling through the letter box. Usually it was a reporter and he was asked politely to go away. I was afraid if I allowed myself to be rude I would lose all self-control.

Occasionally it was a neighbour, wondering if they might do anything to help. A perceptible curiosity unpleasantly mixed with relish was channelled like a bad smell through the slot between us. We had never been popular locally. I think people were torn between pride in having a famous actor living in their neighbourhood and umbrage that my parents had nothing to do with them. No slight was intended. It simply never occurred to my parents that the residents of The Avenue might be in any way interesting. According to Bron, who fraternised down at The Green Dragon, they were enthralled if my mother appeared in a different hat, but she never noticed if they were sporting a new pram complete with twins. I expect it seemed that ours was a gay and privileged life. Faces familiar from the stage and screen came constantly to our house. Parties went on until the early hours of the morning and there was much laughter to be heard over the garden wall.

Now our neighbours had some kind of reparation for the years of neglect. I thanked everyone and said I would be certain to call upon them if there was anything they could do. After a while I got thoroughly sick of this so I fetched a stepladder, put a wedge of paper between the bell and the clapper and tried to ignore the urgent knockings and flappings of the letter box. In the drawing room Bron was reading Ophelia’s copy of Harpers and Queen and playing The Rite of Spring at full volume, which made my head, already pounding, want to burst. I turned it down a little.

‘What? Sorry?’ Bron looked up at me enquiringly. ‘Couldn’t stand that bloody row going on.’

‘I wish I knew where Portia was. If she’s seen the newspapers or television she must be frantic with worry.’ I dithered. ‘Perhaps I ought to plug one of the telephones back in.’

My mother thought television sets too hideous to be seen so ours was shut away in the small room where the fuel for the boiler was stored. Cordelia, who spent much of her time sitting in the coal-hole, greatly to the detriment of her clothes, had come running upstairs the minute the reporters had been got rid of, to say that Sir Basil’s death was on the nine o’clock news. Bron and I had gone down to watch. I did not want to, in the least, but a confused sense of loyalty seemed to require that I should know what was being said about Pa behind his back.

As we crowded in, slithering about on pieces of nutty slack, there was an interview with someone who had seen Pa being driven away from the Phoebus Theatre in handcuffs. The newsreader said, in what sounded to me like a sneer, that the police were refusing to confirm that Waldo Byng had been arrested on a charge of murder. A résumé of Basil’s career, with accompanying stills, had lasted nearly ten minutes. There followed fulsome tributes to Basil from people with tremulous voices and tear-filled eyes and an interview with the producer of King Lear, saying what an absolute disaster his sudden departure would be for theatre in this country.

Anyone who didn’t know would have thought from all this that Basil was dearly loved, but actually he was a cold, proud man with a sharp tongue and generally unpopular. He never went to theatrical parties and rumours abounded that his only hobby outside the theatre was an unhealthy interest in little boys. But he had died a violent death and I had a sick, sad feeling, watching him in a clip from an ancient film, playing Henry V. After that they had shown a recent press release photograph of Pa and Basil together as Gloucester and Lear.

‘It’s not a very good one of Pa,’ Cordelia said critically. ‘His teeth look enormous. He’s baring them as though he’s going to bite Basil’s neck.’

‘I expect that’s why they chose it,’ said Bron. ‘The bags under Basil’s eyes are shocking! I wonder why he didn’t get them fixed? Still, it’s too late now.’

I looked at my watch. I continued to worry about Portia, in the brief intervals when I wasn’t worrying about Pa. ‘Ten o’clock. I suppose she’s gone out to dinner with this new man. But usually she lets me know if she’s staying out all night.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ Bron fished about in the pockets of his jacket. ‘I found this letter on your bedside table earlier.’ The envelope was addressed to me, in Portia’s writing. ‘I thought you’d probably be keen to read it straightaway so I brought it downstairs. Then I went to The Green Dragon and forgot about it. Sorry.’

‘What were you doing in my room?’

Bron looked guilty. ‘I needed a few quid for the pub. I haven’t bought a round for ages.’

I decided to let this pass. Considering the state of things we couldn’t afford to fall out over trivial matters. I tore open the envelope.

Darling Hat, Have come back for some clothes. Dimitri’s asked me to spend a few days at his country house at Oxshott. I think it’s in Devon. It sounds terribly grand. Fifteen bedrooms and simply acres of land. I’ve borrowed your old yellow silk. I hope you don’t mind.

I had bought that particular dress just before meeting Dodge and had worn it only once so it hardly qualified as ‘old’. But it was certainly too frivolous for a dedicated revolutionary, so it would have been niggardly to mind.

Dimitri is incredibly sexy. He practically made love to me in the lift though there was an attendant. He has lots of men working for him – three bodyguards, no less! – and they all seem devoted, which must be a good sign. He only has to raise a finger and they leap to attention. We went to Gerardi’s for lunch and had oysters and champagne in a private room! It made me think of Edward VII and chorus girls. Dimitri says he’s been having an affair with a member of the royal family. He wouldn’t tell me who but apparently she chain-smoked all the time they were between the sheets. Also he had to call her ma’am even in bed. He said this put him off. As an anarchist you will understand this. Tell Ma and Pa that I’m spending a few days with a friend from school. Make up someone suitably respectable, bye for now, Portia.

‘Is Oxshott in Devon?’ I asked Bron, my anxiety increased rather than allayed by this letter.

‘Haven’t the foggiest. Did you say ten o’clock? Long past my din-dins. Do you think Maria-Alba’s recovered enough to cook some grub?’

‘Oh, damn! How awful, I’d forgotten about her.’

I ran downstairs to see if she was all right. She was lying on her bed beneath an eiderdown, reading a cookery book.

‘Così, così,’ she replied in answer to my enquiry. She shut the book and slowly swung her huge legs over the side of the bed. Her lids were swollen and dark, like two black eyes. ‘You need to eat, tesora mia. No, no,’ she went on as I protested that she should rest. ‘Mi farà bene.’

I peeled potatoes and made a salad while Maria-Alba put on partridges to roast. Cordelia came out from the coal-hole and sat at the table doing her French knitting. This is done by winding wool round a cotton reel with four little nails in the top. You hook the wool over the nails and from the hole at the other end of the reel emerges a knitted tail. So far all my efforts to think of something she could make from this had been fruitless. The tail was now four feet long and distinctly grubby from falling into Mark Antony’s bowl and being trodden on, but Cordelia kept doggedly on. She was unusually silent. Maria-Alba made a sauce for the partridges and heaved long, sad sighs. I knew I must pull myself together. I tried to find things to talk about that had nothing to do with murder or prisons but ideas slipped like bars of wet soap from my deliberative grasp before I could put them into words.

‘I’m starving.’ Bron came into the kitchen just as we were loading hot dishes into the dumb waiter. He peered into the lift shaft. ‘It’s a very good sauce.’ He withdrew his head, licking his fingers.

‘Oh, Bron, you pig!’ protested Cordelia.

Bron patted her cheek with his just-licked finger.

‘A lady there was in Antigua

Who said to her spouse, “What a pig you are!”

He answered “My queen!

Is it my manner you mean,

Or do you refer to my figua?”’

Cordelia giggled. Sometimes I got the impression that other people found Bron’s ebullience a little trying, but often, as on this occasion, I was glad of it.

‘Lascia solo.’ Maria-Alba looked up from unmoulding the blackberry bavarois she had made that morning, when the serene skies over Blackheath were untroubled by so much as a single cloud. ‘It is well for you to make joke. When the things go wrong you abandon the boat. When Harriet want you to visit il povero Waldo you are rotten drunk! She have to look only to me for help!’ Bron’s full soft mouth drooped and he looked perfectly angelic. ‘Senta, io sono debole. She need a strong man. You do not think of other than yourself.’ With hands that trembled, Maria-Alba arranged a few whole blackberries round the pale-violet, speckled pudding. ‘You are egoista – selfish like a peeg –’