Darling Sweetheart (19 page)

‘Well HELLO! The newspapers say you are! The internet says you are! And my daddy says it’s all over town about you and Emerson!’

‘Look, you have no right to call me a–’

‘What? A lyin’, sneakin’, man-stealin’
bitch?’

‘Holly, you’re completely out of–’

‘Annalise, who is this?’ Emerson walked up, as if from nowhere. Annalise jumped – distracted by Spader, she hadn’t noticed his approach. None of his bodyguards was as around, the usual harbingers of his proximity. No Frost, no Talbot, no fawning runners; even in costume, there was something odd about seeing him alone like this.

‘Who is this?’ he enquired again, ‘and why is she callin’ you a bitch?’

If Annalise was surprised, then Spader nearly shat herself. Her expression went into spasm, before exploding into a smile that ate her face.

‘Harry, this is Holly Spader. Holly, Harry Emerson.’

‘Oh hi!’ Spader leapt four inches off the ground, clapping her hands together. ‘Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi! I’m a HUGE fan of your work!’

‘Yeah, but who
are
you?’

Spader babbled, ‘I have a part in your movie that I’m so much looking forward to and my father is Brandon Spader, Deputy Vice President of Corporate Development at Universal!’

Emerson looked unimpressed. ‘Never hearda him. So why is Annalise a bitch?’

‘I… uhh…. I… ahh…’ Spader’s smile stretched even wider and her eyes flickered desperately. Annalise allowed her to squirm for a few seconds but then, fearing the woman might rupture her cheeks, intervened.

‘Holly was telling me about a scene from a film and sort of acting it out a bit – about a posse of rappers, was it, Holly?’

‘Rappers…’ Spader mouthed.

‘I hate rap,’ Emerson said flatly.

‘I play Irene Arnald,’ Spader spoke through clenched teeth.

‘What?’

‘It’s her part,’ Annalise soothed, ‘she’s the innkeeper’s daughter who betrays us on the way to Montaillou.’

‘Oh.’ He scowled at Spader as if she had betrayed him in real life then turned his shoulder to her, to show that she was now surplus to requirements. ‘Annalise, can we talk?’

Still showing her molars, Spader backed away. ‘Yeah. Right. See you guys around. Real nice meeting you, H.E… real nice…’

Emerson did not deign to look at her. He waited several beats before continuing.

‘Can I come in?’

‘It’s hot and stuffy in that old trailer, let’s get some air.’

They strolled up a grassy ramp onto the keep wall. In their costumes, they looked like they belonged.

I don’t remember hirin’ that woman,’ he glared after Spader as she scuttled through the keep arch, ‘musta been the castin’ director, it’s a small part.’

‘I barely know her myself.’ Annalise smiled wanly.

‘I see you’re checkin’ your publicity.’

Only then did she realise that she still held Loach’s press clippings. ‘Oh… just a letter from my agent.’

‘I betcha he’s got loadsa offers!’

‘Apparently there’s a few things in the air all right.’

‘Don’t agree to anythin’ until you’ve finished this movie.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you should only do big pictures from now on. I’d like you to come to dinner tonight.’

‘Since I’m staying in your home, I’m sure I can manage that.’

‘No, we’re goin’ out.’

‘Oh? Where?’

‘I dunno; some restaurant. Can you do me a favour? Will you wear that classy brown number you wore the other evenin’?’

‘Uhh… you mean the Nichols dress? It’s still in my apartment.’

‘I had Frost move your stuff.’

‘You’ve moved all my things up to your place?’

‘Yup.’

‘I… er… gosh, I don’t know what to say. But look, I’ll be fine in this dress. I want to wear Roselaine’s clothes all the time from now on. This restaurant, it isn’t in a town, is it? I can’t go anywhere where there’s lots of people or cars.’

‘I told them to pick somewhere quiet. But d’ya gotta wear that costume? It’s, like, dirty and torn.’

‘It’s starting to work for me, Harry – I’m getting closer to Roselaine and I don’t want to stop. But tell you what, I’ll pop into wardrobe – they have other outfits for her. There’s actually a beautifully embroidered dress for one of the flashback sequences – I’ll try that, okay?’

‘Uh, okay… I guess.’ He rummaged in his tunic and produced a mobile phone. ‘I’ll get Levine to take us home.’

‘You go on. I want to ride back to Saint-Christophe.’

‘You’re kiddin’…’

‘Not at all. Don’t you see, the more I do things the way Roselaine would have, the more it helps.’

There was a distant, throaty scream, and a figure fell off a nearby battlement, sixty feet onto the ground beyond the keep. For a terrible instant, Annalise thought it might be Spader, but then there was another shout and two more figures followed. The second unit, she realised, must be filming stunts.

‘Keep those safe,’ he pointed to the clippings in her hand, ‘they’re the start of somethin’ great.’

She gave him her most modest smile, squeezed his arm and set off towards wardrobe. He lingered and watched a few more staged falls, but although they were quite spectacular, he did so with preoccupied indifference.

Sylvia Jardyce taught drama at Broken Cross. Her classes were extracurricular and attendance meant staying late at school two nights a week, but there were many reasons why this appealed to Annalise. She liked Sylvia; she liked walking down Brompton Road in the dark; she didn’t like going home to the Stockwell bedsit that she’d rented after leaving the Goddards. She had not wanted to return to Ireland, so she’d needed to construct her own life in London. When she’d moved to Stockwell, her father had sent her an angry letter threatening to cut her off, saying that she’d never amount to anything and suggesting that she change her surname to ‘anything except Palatine’. But a week later, he’d paid her school fees for the rest of the year and posted her a cheque for five thousand pounds. She’d returned the cheque and continued on at school, taking a part-time job in a bar to pay for food and tube travel. Sylvia’s classes and the returned cheque had been two-fingered gestures to her father; she fantasised about him watching her first theatrical performance then taking her out to dinner afterwards and having to feast on his words.

She’d had another motive – she’d felt compelled to act, and
not just because she was her father’s daughter. For although they no longer spoke, nor even lived in the same country, her years with Froggy had ingrained the habit of pretending to be someone else. It was a habit she’d found impossible to give up.

Monica Goddard had been very upset by Annalise’s departure from her Kensington home. She had not believed her pretext about wanting to live alone and rightly suspected that something had happened between her and Lucy – but being partially blind to her daughter’s true nature, she had not been able to fathom out what. Lucy had put on a display of haughty nonchalance, however Annalise had caught her giving the occasional covert, worried look. Lucy had known that it was one thing to be slagging her way around the nightclubs of Soho and Notting Hill, but quite another to be dabbling with an old family friend, especially one with David Palatine’s reputation. That would have caused more trouble than even she could handle.

Annalise had also been upset about leaving Kensington, and not just because it had meant trading secure luxury for tawdry uncertainty. She’d agonised that perhaps she had been too hard on Lucy; perhaps her father had deserved all the blame. Lucy hadn’t actually done very much – but it had been what she had not done that had tormented Annalise. Lucy had not leapt up from that lounger; she hadn’t shrieked or subsequently confided. She had behaved as if it had been no big deal for David Palatine to stick his hand down her pants, and the more Annalise had thought about that, the more her mind had filled with sickening images of what might have happened had she not been present on the yacht. Her father kissing Lucy’s breasts in the scalding sun. Lucy laughing, letting him, then leading him like a dog to his so-called stateroom – a cabin twice as big as all the others, equipped with a king-sized bed. For in spite of all the stories; in spite of her mother’s drunken rantings about what her father was really like; in spite of the woman she’d seen at his penthouse, she had never thought of him as a dirty lech before. He had always
been her Darling Sweetheart.

Sylvia was tiny. Even at sixteen, Annalise was two heads taller. It was hard to tell exactly, with her white hair scraped permanently back and her amethyst eyes, but she seemed in her mid-sixties. She had trained, rumour had it, as a child dancer with the Bolshoi. Rumour also had it that her family had defected from the old Soviet Union and that Jardyce was an anglicised surname. True or not, the stories evoked a romantic back-history of winter palaces, communist dictators and Pasternak. Yet, Sylvia seemed as English as marmalade, although with the upper-class accent of one who has learned to speak that way through elocution rather than breeding – every word enunciated, as opposed to half-swallowed.

And she was strict. Two-thirds of the class had dropped out within a month, leaving just Annalise and four others, an attrition rate that, far from vexing Sylvia, had seemed to please her. For, on the evening she had arrived to find only five girls waiting by the assembly hall stage, she had smiled for the first time and had said, ‘Good – now we can begin.’

Until then, she had taught nothing but movement, but that night, she had introduced a two-page dialogue scene of an argument between a mother and a daughter. She had played the mother; the five remaining students took turns at the daughter. After Annalise’s third attempt, Sylvia had frowned slightly and pronounced, ‘The emotions are all there – now you must master them, instead of letting them master you.’

For Annalise, it was praise enough to be getting on with. That night, during her tube journey home to Stockwell, she had smiled at her flickering, oddly angled ghost in the darkened window opposite.

For her next class, Sylvia had used the same scene but reversed the roles – now she was the petulant daughter and her students had to play the mother. Annalise had gone first but had been shocked to the core; for the decorous little woman called
Sylvia Jardyce had disappeared, to be replaced by an angry yet vulnerable girl, young in voice and in gaze, yet freakishly old in face. It was as if her teacher had been possessed by the spirit of a bad-tempered child. Annalise was so thrown, she had only been able to stammer out her lines.

‘Not good enough!’ the child-demon had shrieked at the end of the scene. ‘I’m killing you! Now do it again, and this time be a mother – be my mother! Mine!’

Annalise had taken a deep breath and closed her eyes. She’d tried to summon… the surliness… the cynicism… the snarling undertone of jealousy… She’d recalled how every argument she’d ever thrown against her own mother had broken against a raised eyebrow, a curled lip, a tartly delivered insult. She’d tried to think her way into that destitute, drink-addled mind, to feel the frustration, the seething resentment of looks lost and a body that had ballooned… then, a teenager who reminds you of your younger, prettier self, yapping self-indugently in your face; her skin smooth, yours puffy and leaden; her hair luxuriant, yours falling out in clumps… Finally, she’d opened her eyes. She’d barely raised her voice but had met every whinge from Sylvia-daughter with a sneer, dousing her juvenile assault with quietly venomous contempt.

‘That was better.’ For a snap second, Sylvia had been her sophisticated self again. ‘That was much better. I feel sorry for that woman, whoever she is. Now, let’s do it again.’ And she had reverted to child-demon.

Another of the students had dropped out after that session. Her name was Barbara Rudd – when Annalise asked her why, Rudd had answered peevishly, ‘Because after watching you and Jardyce, I realised I can’t act.’ That night on the tube, Annalise had grinned at her flickering ghost all the way home.

Stepping out from Lucy’s shadow at Broken Cross had another consequence – it allowed her to see that her fellow-pupils were not all the witless nonentities that Lucy had made them
out to be. Some were, but there were others with whom she could have perhaps made friends, provided the bullying didn’t start again. But there was no sign of that happening; indeed, for the first time in her life she found herself becoming almost popular, thanks to the uncanny impersonations she could do of all the teachers. She liked being liked, and as the autumn term of 1999 progressed, it obliquely occurred to her that she loved acting because, for the first time in her life, she was winning both attention and approval.

It was hard having no money, but then she’d never had much money, contrary to what everyone assumed. Everyone, that is, except Sylvia, who gave no indication that she knew who David Palatine was, nor that Annalise was his daughter. When her tutor played film clips to illustrate a point, they were golden-age Hollywood: Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Arthur – post-fifties cinema didn’t get a look-in. Annalise, meanwhile, lived off marked-down fruit from the shops near Stockwell tube station. She didn’t mind; all the nourishment she needed came from Sylvia’s classes. She lost weight and her limbs lengthened – she watched herself change, as the final vestiges of puppy fat melted from her face. Such a quirk of timing, that she should now become the adult she had masqueraded as during her year of running wild with Lucy Goddard.

All the clothes that Lucy had picked for her no longer fitted, so she bought more – from Brixton charity shops, not Kensington boutiques. She kept her school uniform clean by washing it in her bedsit sink and wore the blouse with its sleeves rolled up so as no-one would notice that they were too short. She had the hem of her tartan skirt turned down by a Portuguese seamstress who worked above a local newsagent’s. She saved for six weeks just to buy new school shoes. Drugs and perfume were out of the question; she wore cheap, neutral deodorant and didn’t miss narcotics. She gave up smoking and stopped drinking wine, spirits and alcopops, limiting herself to
the very occasional glass of beer, but only when a customer in the pub where she worked insisted on buying her one – she preferred to keep her tips in cash.