The Cilla Rose Affair (8 page)

“There are a number of things your grandmother never forgave me for,” Evan began. “The first was marrying your mother.”

Anthony didn’t say anything. Behind them, a late train rattled across Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo. They walked along the Embankment, the dark Thames beside them reflecting the lights of the city, its dank depths smelling of boat fuel and commerce.

“She also never forgave me for being an actor, and for taking your mother away to Canada—for having Ian in Toronto instead of in London—the list goes on and on.”

“There must have been something you did right.”

“Yes—the three years I spent back here in the mid-sixties. But then, of course, I made the mistake of renting a flat in Hampstead.”

“What’s the matter with Hampstead?”

“Nothing at all. But it was too far away from Mitcham to suit your grandmother. And on the wrong side of the river. In fact, about the only thing I managed to do right in all that time was conspire to produce you.”

Anthony looked away. He’d lived in London for three years. His father had been here for almost as long, yet their visits with one another had been infrequent, their conversations strained.

No one thing had been the cause of the distance between them. Rather, it was an accumulation of feelings: an uncertain hesitancy on his father’s part, a sullen stubbornness on Anthony’s.

He’d been performing for as long as he could remember. He’d been a juggler. A clown. A gypsy rover in a roaming band of summer storytellers, with a bright-paint caravan and horses and a grant from the Canada Council.

An actor.

It had been a journey of validation, notably marked by his father’s absences.

It hurt.

“I was impressed by your performance this evening, by the way.”

“I didn’t know you were there. I’d have got you a ticket.”

“No need, Anthony,” his father said, gently.

Anthony swallowed.

“My performance aside,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

His father prised the lid off a styrofoam cup full of tea he’d bought earlier at Charing Cross. “I’m trying to track down an actor, Anthony. Potter Maynard. Does the name ring a bell?”

Anthony thought. “I met him once, didn’t I? In L.A.?”

“You’ve got a good memory.”

“It more or less comes with the territory,” Evan’s middle son said. “Why are you looking for him?”

“Something to do with something else from a long time ago. Do you remember the night I went out to that pirate radio station? You must have been three…four years old.”

“I was three,” Anthony said. “I remember. There was a gale warning and mum didn’t want you to go. She thought you’d be washed overboard.”

“Indeed. That was the night I met Simon Darrow. Ian used to listen to him on the radio.” He stopped, and tossed the lid, and a plastic stir-stik, into an overflowing litter bin.

“You came home with a book.”

“
Muirhead’s Short Blue Guide to London
. That’s right. God, Anthony, your memory.” He shook his head in disbelief.

“You gave the book to me. I used to pretend I was reading it.” He thought. “It sank, didn’t it? The ship?”

“It did,” his father confirmed.

They had walked together as far as Waterloo Bridge.

“One of the people we think might have had something to do with the ship’s sinking is Simon’s wife—Potter Maynard’s sister. We’re trying to establish a connection to Simon in 1966, and I was hoping Potter might be able to provide us with some answers.”

“He’s not listed anywhere? Equity, the British Theatre Association? The Arts Council?”

“Nowhere that I’ve looked. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know if he’s still in the business.”

His son didn’t say anything.

Evan paused. “I wouldn’t normally ask you to get involved, Anthony, but we’ve run up against a complete dead end with this one. Would you mind?”

Saturday, 24 August 1991

Anthony walked across Adelaide Road and up the Bridge Approach. On the blue-walled overpass he stopped, and clambered onto a concrete planter filled with crumbling earth and shrubbery, and stood and watched as the trains rattled beneath him, clattering down to Euston.

Long ago there had been many weekend walks like this: his mother and father, and Ian, and Anthony, in his push-chair. There had been this bridge, and Anthony remembered his older brother, eight years old, pleading: “Lift me up—I want to see.”

And after Ian had had his look, Anthony would say, very seriously: “I want to see, too.” He had taken life very seriously when he was three. People used to say to his mother: he’s got a terribly grown up little face, hasn’t he?

His father would swing him up onto his shoulders, and there Anthony would perch, the king of all of Primrose Hill, watching the trains.

He got down. He was taller than Evan now, by a good three inches.

He continued his journey through Chalk Farm Village, stopping at Mr. Dhaliwal’s shop on Regent’s Park Road for a chilled orange Fanta, then crossed the road and entered the park.

Anthony’s mother, reminiscing, had once told him she used to push him up this hill on a daily basis. Anthony wondered how she’d ever managed it; the path was steep, and there were very few trees along the way to provide shade from the beating summer sun or shelter from the winter rain. The reward for such perseverance, however, was great: the view from the top was insurmountable.

Anthony stood for a moment, observing the magnificent vista of distant spires and towers and scaffolds, breathing the crisp air, savouring the brisk, cooling breeze. Below him, a small child was rolling down the face of the hill, his delighted laughter catching the stray strands of wind.

He remembered hill-rolling. He remembered wall-walking, too—childhood preoccupations in a country where childhood was still an imaginative indulgence. Somehow, in the process of moving back to America, all those years ago, that magic had vanished.

He’d been quite unprepared, at the age of four and a half, for the culture shock of Southern California—for the large cars and the miles of concrete and the sprawling suburbs. For not terribly well-behaved children with loud American voices.

He’d been something of a curiosity to them, with his earnestly polite English demeanour.

He’d been singularly unhappy there.

He was happy now—a kind of happiness, anyway—an unfinished emotion, like a work of stained glass, its glittering pieces cut and wrapped and soldered into an exquisite pattern—all of the pieces but one, in the very centre, in the very heart.

He’d been walking a few days earlier through Hyde Park. It had been cooler then, a hazy, grey afternoon; the mist had hung in the trees, and the grass was that brilliant green you don’t find anywhere except in England. He’d wandered down from Marble Arch, skirting the curious and the obsessed at Speakers’ Corner, and the clutter of deckchairs. There were teams of American footballers and joggers, and further down, at the Serpentine, a regatta with rowers and loudspeakers and prizes.

He’d trudged along Rotten Row, and just before he’d turned south to leave the park, he’d caught up with a family. There were five of them—mother in a skirt and comfortable shoes, father in shirtsleeves, a girl and a boy on small, two-wheeled bikes, and a little boy, very blond, being made to walk as far as the gates, while his mother wheeled the push-chair.

A tiny pique of delight had suddenly taken hold of the woman. “Come on,” she’d said, tossing her head, laughing. “I’ll race you.”

“Now there’s a treat for the eyes,” the father had remarked, as the two older children pedalled furiously in the direction of Coalbrookdale Gate. “Mummy running.”

At that single instance, a pang of something had shot through Anthony’s heart, so swiftly and so deeply, he barely had time to catch himself. He’d stopped, and, aching and angry, had rubbed away the sudden tears with the heel of his hand.

Why now?
he’d wondered.
Why now?

Something, somewhere, had been lost, denied. Something he’d once had, but only in the very deepest recesses of his memory—a faint blur, like a photograph taken at the wrong exposure.

Old wounds.

Places you thought had healed a long time ago, edges knitted together like those soft spots at the tops of babies’ heads.

He drained the contents of the soda tin and, taking studied aim, consigned it to a nearby wire basket filled with similar remains.

For years he’d blamed his father for not crossing the vast, unclaimed territory that stretched between them, that rugged desert that was filled with treacherous chasms and cold, exposed ridges, unresolved anger and lost feelings.

They could meet on their common ground—acting—and they could hold civilized conversations that never once deteriorated into the kind of animosity that often plagued children of other broken marriages.

But loving one another was too frightening a thought, and the threat of it caused him to push away, hard.

He’d almost said no to his father’s request.
Do your own footwork—look in your computers. It’s nothing to do with me
.

He gazed down at the panorama of London spread before him, and then stood up, fingering the slip of paper in his trousers pocket upon which his father’s telephone number was written, along with the name of the tiny alternative theatre in Wimbledon Potter Maynard had last been known to inhabit.

The club, dimly lit, and in deepest, darkest Soho, was nasty. The carpet was worn, and it smelled of stale spirits and cigarette smoke, and the front door, downstairs, was guarded by a large, evil-looking man in a shiny dinner jacket. It was the stuff of Rank and British Gaumont,
Mona Lisa
and
Minder
.

“Potter,” Evan said, extending his hand. “It’s been years.”

“Good Lord.” Emerging from his booth, Potter Maynard ignored the hand, and instead embraced the entire man. “I wouldn’t have recognized you. Evan bloody Harris. What have you done with your hair?”

Evan considered his most visible feature. “It is a bit on the fiery side, isn’t it?”

“A bit.” Potter looked around, borrowed a chair from an adjacent table, and dragged both back to his booth. “When I knew you in California, you were dark.”

“I invested in a supply of black hair dye, Potter. The powers at large didn’t think that a red-headed hero would wash with the American viewing public. You’re somewhat grey in that area yourself.”

“Also bottled,” the actor replied, confidentially. “Imparts the ambience of notability and great distinction, don’t you think? Do join us.”

Potter’s table was furnished with a dingy cloth and a flickering candle inside a cheap ruby glass, and two women—neither of whom seemed remotely interested in the company of their host.

“Ladies,” Potter said. “I give you Evan Harris, distinguished actor, old friend.”

“Delighted,” one of the women replied, not sounding very delighted at all, and Evan sat down. One of the legs belonging to his chair was missing its bottom half-inch; he planted his foot on the floor, to correct the wobble.

On a too-small stage at the front of the room, a stripper who looked as though she would rather have been hoovering her floors was going through the motions, accompanied by a solitary saxophonist on a stool.

“Wine…?” Potter inquired, giving a bottle of dubious vintage a poke across the table.

“No,” said Evan. “Thank you.”

“We’re celebrating the demise of the alternative to alternative theatre,” Potter said, topping up his own glass. “We opened—and closed—in record time.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Evan said.

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Potter answered, philosophically. “It was positively atrocious. I haven’t witnessed anything quite so ghastly since my old amateur dramatic society decided to mount a musical adaptation of Norman Simpson’s
Resounding Tinkle
.”

One of the women snickered, and her not-delighted companion decided to seek solace in a cigarette. Her disposable lighter was being stubborn. Evan had no matches; he proffered the candle instead, and it was accepted with indifference.

The snickering woman, whose hair had no doubt begun the evening fashionably, took a compact mirror out of her handbag and checked her teeth, drawing the corner of her lower lip down with the tip of her little finger.

Behind them, the exotic dancer had finished taking everything off, and was collecting her wardrobe from the floor of the stage. She might have been picking up after her children.

Potter appeared to be about to topple into an abyss of alcoholic retrospection, and Evan wasn’t certain he was up to it.

“Why don’t we go for a walk, Potter? Get some fresh air into our lungs.”

“All right,” the actor replied, brightening. He threw a small wad of money onto the table. “Ladies—I take your leave.”

Both women seemed distinctly unconcerned.

Potter Maynard was tall and balding. What hair he had left was thin and long and, as he had already pointed out, quite grey. He reminded Evan, as they emerged at the unfashionable end of Oxford Street, close to Tottenham Court Road, of the Hanging Judge from the golden age of the Hollywood westerns
. The man should be wearing a black frock coat and string tie
, he thought
, not a baggy green corduroy jacket and the wrinkled trousers from a long abandoned suit
.

“We were divorced in 1970,” Evan said. “End of television series, end of marriage, end of California.”

“And the boys…?”

“Gwennie had custody.”

Potter digested this bit of history, then changed the subject.

“However did you find me, old chap? I’m not, as you might have gathered, quite a traveller on the beaten path of life these days.”

“My son,” Evan smiled. “Remember Anthony?”

“Clever little thing. Inordinately fond of the skateboard, as I recall. Whatever became of him?”

“He decided to pursue a career in the theatre, Potter. He’s playing in the West End.”

“You don’t say.” Potter Maynard was genuinely pleased. “I’m so glad. Do pass on my heartiest congratulations. He was dressed up as Batman, the last I saw of him. Batman on wheels, cascading down the road in front of your house in that god-forsaken Canyon.”