Last Act of All Read online

  Neville, however, had been hell-bent on her coming, and for the moment at least, what little Neville wanted, little Neville would get. Neville was her current meal ticket, and Lilian had her stomach set on some pretty fancy gourmet banquets in the future.

  She wasn’t at all sure where the relationship was headed, on screen or off, but for the moment the press attention was doing her nothing but good. She’d string along, and if he did divorce his wife — well, marrying him would surely be good for an extended run in ‘Bradman’, and he was as attractive a man to play serial monogamy with as any other. Better than most, in fact: in lots of ways, they were two of a kind, with strong appetites and few illusions, products of the same tough upward struggle. They played by the same selfish rules though Neville seemed to prefer a nice layer of cosy self-deception between him and the naked truth which was always her own bottom line.

  She sighed, and prepared to swing her long, expensively-stockinged legs out of the car. He hadn’t said anything, and she had picked up only the sketchiest indication about the way Neville wanted her to play this scene; she would have to busk it. His wife’s reaction was Someone Else’s Problem.

  *

  The hall was dark, despite the tall lamp on the chest at one side, which Helena always left burning in this shadowy part of the house. Neville and Lilian were laughing and talking as they came in, with Chris behind them. She moved to the chest to set down her handbag, and consequently appeared, as it were, spot lit.

  Helena had believed herself prepared, and the newspaper photographs had not lied about the good looks or the glamour. What they had entirely failed to transmit was the resemblance.

  Like a clever caricature of me, Helena thought wildly, with just that mild exaggeration of everything: the hair a more metallic shade of blonde; the features coarser; the complexion more highly-coloured; the eyes a more strident shade of blue. She was taller, of course, but the likeness was there, in the curve of the cheek, perhaps, or the line of the eyes. She felt the superstitious dread of the doppelgänger, as she descended the last few steps.

  Then Neville, too, stepped into the pool of light, ready to take Lilian’s coat, and Helena had to suppress a gasp. His hair, thick and straight, had always been worn combed back from the temples, but for Harry it was, as now, brushed forward to fall across his brow. His tweed jacket was of a pattern Neville would once have dismissed as crude.

  A blessed sense of unreality descended. From somewhere a long way off, she saw herself walk across the hall to greet them, all serene confidence.

  There was admiration in Chris’s eyes, and for once she allowed him to kiss her without forcing him to arm’s length.

  She did not go to kiss Neville, and he made no move towards her. He did not take his eyes of his companion as he said, ‘Lilian, sweetie, you’ve heard all about Helena.’

  Helena smiled, saving nothing, experiencing only a mild curiosity as to how the other protagonist would react.

  Reaction was too strong a word for Lilian’s behaviour, suggesting that another person’s attitude had impinged on her consciousness. Lilian operated like an emotional tramcar along the grooves of her own needs and desires.

  She surged forward gracefully, a tidal wave of fur and expensive scent, putting out both hands to Helena and kissing the air four inches above her right ear.

  ‘Darling, what fun to meet you at last! And what a wickedly amusing house! Neville’s told me all about it, and you simply must show me every last horror.’

  Astonishment almost overcame Helena’s sense of detachment, but catching Neville’s eyes upon her, dead as glass, she found a professional social smile.

  ‘Have you had a reasonable journey? Do come in to the fire. Or would you prefer to go upstairs first?’

  ‘Oh, a fire, and tea — is tea by any remote chance on the schedule? Oh, angel! I’ve been dreaming of a cup of tea all the way down, haven’t I, Neville darling?’

  She drifted past Helena into the drawing-room, slim as a wand in her cream suede suit, her head set like some exotic flower on her long neck, then collapsed gracefully into a chair, stretching uninhibitedly, cat-like, in the warmth. Helena could almost fancy she heard the rumble of a purr in her lazy, low-voiced laughter.

  *

  The extraordinary thing was, Helena found that she could not entirely dislike the woman. There was something almost refreshing in her frank enjoyment of her creature comforts and the naked egotism of her conversation.

  She called Neville ‘darling’, ordered him to light her cigarettes, and blew him kisses when she went to change for dinner. On the other hand, there was none of the emotional or sexual tension between them which would have made the evening hideous with embarrassment. It even crossed Helena’s mind that this was meant to demonstrate that there was nothing between them after all.

  Almost she might have believed it. But Neville’s eyes never met her own, and his behaviour seemed cold, yet excitable, as if he were waiting, with ill-restrained impatience, for the next act of the social drama to begin.

  Chris, too, was ill at ease. He seemed to be out of patience with Neville’s more boisterous exchanges.

  Helena could, very nearly, derive sardonic amusement from it, shielded by the detachment that had fallen about her like a protective cloak. In this surrealistic situation, she had discovered that playing the role of a mother meeting her son’s girlfriend for the first time meshed perfectly with Lilian’s performance.

  But Neville’s eyes, still and watchful as a snake’s, chilled any laughter, and despite Lilian’s artlessly selfish prattle, the evening limped slowly and awkwardly away.

  At last the clock chimed eleven, and Lilian rose, stretching luxuriously in her tactile pink cashmere, and patting a yawn that showed neat white teeth.

  ‘Definitely my bedtime, darlings,’ she proclaimed. ‘I simply love my bed, Helena, and I can’t wait to get below that puffy comforter — such heaven! Wherever did you find it?’

  Helena knew better than to reply, Lilian by now being engaged in blowing streams of tiny kisses to the men. ‘I’ll show you up,’ she offered, seizing the opportunity to get herself out of the room. ‘Lock up, will you, Neville, when you’re ready to go to bed.’

  He had hardly directed a look or a word to her all evening; now he stared at her silently. He had been drinking steadily; his face was flushed and his eyes glittering.

  It was Chris who got to his feet. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘Does that earn me a good-night kiss?’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Chris,’ she said, closing the door before he could move.

  Lilian yawned again, much less delicately, as they crossed the hall. ‘Don’t you think Chris is gorgeous? He always looks as if he might beat you up, if you didn’t do exactly what he wanted. It gives me the most delicious shivers up my spine when he calls me a stupid cow on the set.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t find that sort of thing appealing,’ Helena said flatly. She felt exhausted by her efforts to sustain this ludicrous, artificial atmosphere, and, like the anaesthetic wearing off after a tooth extraction, the comfortable feeling that all this was happening to someone else was beginning to disappear.

  Lilian did not pursue the conversation; she withdrew to the yellow bedroom, leaving Helena, her body suddenly leaden, to drag herself through her bedtime routine.

  This couldn’t go on; she must talk to Neville. But she felt sickening uncertainty as to his reaction, and as a roar of inebriated laughter rose from below she shivered. She had learned the painful folly of arguing with Neville when he was even slightly drunk.

  Her courage failed her. He would be no more convinced by a pretence of sleep tonight than he had been other nights, but if she were in bed with her eyes shut and the bedside lamp at her side switched off, it should not provoke an outburst. Unless, of course, that were part of a plan over which she had no control.

  *

  It was after midnight when she heard the loud good-nights on the landing, and Neville came in. He sat he
avily on the bed to take off his shoes, and opened drawers and cupboards noisily as he undressed for his shower, but he did not speak. When the rushing of water told her he was safely in their bathroom, she risked sitting up to stretch her cramped limbs, before lying back in the same position on down pillows that felt like concrete. In the silence that fell when the shower was turned off, she found her hands clenching in tension.

  After the bathroom door opened again, she could hear no sound, though she strained her ears for any stir of movement. Perhaps he was standing, staring at her: by a huge-effort of will, she stopped her eyelids flying open to look. But she lay still, and heard at last the bare footsteps rustle on the soft pile of the carpet, moving as slowly as a big cat stalking its prey, round to her side of the bed.

  Still she did not move, and barely breathed, until without warning his hand, hard as bare bone, gripped her chin.

  In one movement, she jerked upright, her eyes blazing. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, her voice automatically lowered, but savage in its intensity.

  He loomed above her, his eyes almost as dark as the navy of his bathrobe. ‘So you are just indifferent, not actually clinically dead. I did wonder.’

  ‘What do you want, Neville?’ She shrank back, at bay against the headboard.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Just a little reaction, to show you care, perhaps? Just some sign that somewhere, under all that perfect self-control, there actually is a flesh-and-blood human being. Why didn’t you fight for me, Helena? Why didn’t you scratch the bitch’s eyes out?’

  He was almost shouting as he bent closer, and outrage gave her courage. ‘Neville, you’re drunk. I’m not going to talk to you now. We can discuss it in the morning — if you can tolerate the sound of anything other than an Alka-Seltzer fizzing in the glass.’

  The emotion went out of his face, leaving it expressionless, and his voice was flat as he said, ‘No, Helena. No, I don’t think we will.’

  Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, his mouth curved in Harry’s malevolent, mocking smile. ‘Come on, darling, give us a good-night kiss. It’s every wife’s duty to kiss her husband good-night.’

  He bent over, the smell of whisky raw on his breath, and tipped her face urgently to his, bruising her lips with a hard, unloving kiss. ‘“Good-night, good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow,”’ he said. ‘Sleep well, won’t you, my pet?’ and he was laughing as he walked to the door of the bedroom and went out, leaving it open behind him. She heard his footsteps cross the landing, his tap on the door –‘Lilian?’ — and a gurgle of laughter from the other side.

  She threw herself out of bed to slam the door against their mingled voices and stood, leaning against it, shuddering and scrubbing her mouth with her hand, like a child. She need no longer imagine there was any humiliation too gross for him to commit upon her. The metamorphosis was complete: Neville was gone, swallowed up by the monster he had created.

  Indeed, in her first wild unreason, it seemed that Lilian, too, was a mutation; that Helena and the Neville she had once loved had no more substance than wraiths, adrift forever in the limbo of things past.

  *

  She did not know how long she had huddled, cramped against the door into a tight, agonized ball of suffering, but the sound of footsteps brought her to instant awareness.

  The tap on the door, when it came, was gentle, even tentative, but still she fumbled for the awkward old key, persuading it to turn in the lock.

  She succeeded, but the handle was not tried. Instead, Chris’s voice spoke softly but urgently through the thick panels. ‘Helena – Helena—’

  ‘Go away,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘If this is all part of the plot, I can only say that you disgust me. For god’s sake, leave me alone.’ She heard what sounded like a sigh, but he said nothing and the footsteps retreated. In a sudden frenzy, she rushed to the wall of cupboards, flinging open doors, dragging out suitcases and filling them, almost at random, with all that they would hold.

  It was seven o’clock when at last she crept out to ferry her cases down to the garage. She was on her way by ten past seven, leaving no note, and driving through the sleeping village as if all the devils in hell were at her heels.

  *

  Sandra Daley, sifting listlessly at the uncleared breakfast table on Tuesday morning, did not jump to answer the phone when it rang. It was more than a week since she had last scurried eagerly to pick up the phone.

  Now her voice was flat as she said, ‘Hello?’ indifferently.

  ‘And what sort of greeting is that?’

  A shockwave seemed to course down her spine as she recognized the teasing, familiar, dark-brown voice.

  ‘Enough to make a fellow think you didn’t want to speak to him!’

  ‘N–Neville!’ she stammered. She struggled to sound cool, sophisticated, in control. ‘I – I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.’

  ‘Now, how can you say that?’ His voice was caressing. ‘Not expecting to hear from me, when we haven’t had a chance to talk for ten days? I’ve been thinking of nothing but how to make time to call you, but I haven’t had a moment alone when I didn’t know Jack would be at your end with his hand out, ready to pick up the phone.’

  ‘Oh, Neville!’ Her eyes filled, and she didn’t care any longer that he would hear the tears in her voice. ‘What was I to think? Never a word from you, and all those pictures in the papers—’

  ‘Oh, my sweet, I forget what a precious innocent you are! Look, the world I live in — it’s different. Lilian’s part of my job, and my public life — well, that belongs to my public, and to a large extent, I’m their slave. They have to get what they want, or that’s the end of the track for me.

  ‘But my private life — our private life — that’s another thing. That’s special; you don’t need me to tell you that. That’s the well of freshness that gives me my inspiration.’

  Lips parted, she listened, letting him seduce her as much by the sound of his voice as by the words he used, and the remembered excitement flooded through her.

  ‘Neville, I don’t know what to say…’

  ‘Just say you’ll meet me — our own special place, three o’clock, Friday?’

  ‘Three o’clock, Friday,’ she repeated obediently. Did she hear him laughing at her confusion as she put the phone down?

  Three o’clock, Friday. It wasn’t over, after all. He hadn’t ditched her. She was his secret inspiration, he had said so, and of course she understood about his public image. It was like royalty, really; he wasn’t free to do what he truly wanted to do, in his heart, but that was all right with her, whatever happened. He had given her back her dream of herself as special, desirable. The wicked, delicious exhilaration fizzed up in her, like champagne.

  *

  London received Helena back with its characteristic indifference, which was balm to her violated sense of privacy.

  Old friends had been both kind and tactful, and contacts yielded a publicity job in one of the larger theatres. It was menial work, but she was self-supporting and still in contact with her old acting world, and its undemanding nature was, for the moment, ideal. She needed time to get to know Helena Fielding, feme sole.

  On Charles Morley’s recommendation, she had refused to speak to Neville except through Henry Stanton, the solicitor he had found for her for whom she felt no personal warmth, but who, having a criminal as well as a divorce practice, was more than a match for Neville, despite his determination to behave as badly as possible. As a result, Helena was able to move into a pleasant garden flat in Highgate just in time for Stephanie’s summer holiday from school.

  Stephanie, despite an attempt at sophisticated acceptance of the realities of modern family life, took it badly. She had hoped to spend the first fortnight at Radnesfield House, with Angel boarded with the Wagstaffs at the Home Farm, but Neville was unhelpful. He and Lilian opened the house up only at weekends, and agreed to her coming without much enthusiasm.

  When she arrived, afterwards, in Lo
ndon it was clear that her poise had been considerably shaken. Stephanie’s veneer of indifference was not proof against seeing another woman in her mother’s place, and neither Neville nor Lilian had done anything to make the child’s awkward position more bearable.

  Neville, after an initial, extravagant fuss over her arrival, had hardly been there, sometimes out in the village (‘Playing squire,’ observed Stephanie acidly), sometimes further afield. Lilian slept late, exercised in the mini-gym, then prepared herself to be taken out in the evening. Stephanie had spent most of the weekend in the stable, the rest in her bedroom.

  Helena did her best to organize a pleasant holiday, with tickets for shows and excursions every day, but the girl was lonely while she was at work, and though Emily Morley came to stay for a week, she clearly had far too much time for brooding. By the end, she was thin and tense, longing to get back to school and desperate to be reunited with Angel, since, apart from a few days when she was visiting the Morleys, she had not seen her pony at all. She had refused to return to Radnesfield House; Helena did not force the issue, and Neville offered no specific invitation. ‘Daddy’s different,’ was all Stephanie would say.

  It was a relief to them both when she returned to Darnley Hall, and an anxious visit midway through September reassured her; Stephanie had regained weight, and seemed happily absorbed in the familiar world of school. In times of stress, children liked what they knew, and temporarily at least her friends had more influence than her family.

  Helena returned to London feeling lighter of heart than she had felt for a very long time. She was very grateful for the bossy determination with which Jennifer Morley had insisted that Stephanie be sent to Darnley Hall.

  She was, however, considerably less delighted at that lady’s next attempt at running her life.

  Chapter Six

  It was one of the warm, still nights of an Indian summer, and since the flat boasted a little walled courtyard, Helena went out to sit in the dwindling rays of the sun, sipping a glass of white wine and admiring the plane tree in a neighbouring garden whose leaves were beginning to show the first streaks of gold. The buzz of the doorbell was an intrusion, but she went light-heartedly enough to open the door, blinking in the darkness inside.