Darling Sweetheart (21 page)

‘Sayin’ “yes” would help ya there.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think of the goodwill that would exist between us if you were my fiancée.’

‘Are you saying that there wouldn’t be goodwill if I said no?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘Jesus, what
are
you saying?’

‘Look, I’m Sayin’ that if this movie is a hit, then you will be a star. And the better the chemistry between us, the more chance there is of that happenin’. You understand that much, huh?’ She nodded. ‘Okay. I really think we got somethin’ here; an opportunity to create somethin’ big.’ His eyes went misty, bang on cue. He lifted the ring from the table and held it out to her again. ‘Don’tcha feel a sorta connection?’

She felt a connection all right, but it was inside her brain, and it was twisting apart. She struggled, almost for breath, and instinctively realised, as all women do when cornered, that her only hope of escape was to act. So she took the box, closed it and cupped it with both hands as if it were a baby bird. She raised her eyes to him, filled with all the humility she could muster.

‘Harry, you’ve overwhelmed me.’ She allowed her voice to crack slightly. ‘Never in a million years did I think something like this would happen.’

He looked pleased. ‘So that’s a yes!’

‘ I want us to wait.’

His face fell. ‘It’s a no!’

‘Did I say no?’

‘I dunno, did you say no?’

‘No.’

‘So it’s a yes?’

‘No.’

‘Goddamn!’ He slapped the table.

‘Listen! I think we should wait until we’ve finished filming. Then perhaps we could have this moment again.’ She set the box down.

‘ You’re stringin’ me along! You’ll keep me waitin’ and hopin’ then when we’re done you’ll just say no!’

‘I promise I won’t do that.’

‘So why not just say yes?’

‘Because I can’t spend the next two months being Annalise Palatine, the actress who’s about to marry Harry Emerson. I need to be someone else for a while.’

Slowly, he relaxed back into his chair and smiled a small, conspiratorial smile.

‘Ah. Your part.’

She felt dizzy. The table seemed far away. ‘ I need to be someone else,’ she repeated.

‘You wanna concentrate on the movie – I like that, very professional. Okay, you gotta deal.’ He scooped up the ring-box and slipped it into his jacket pocket. ‘Better save this bad boy for when we need it. Hey, ya know somethin’? You’re such a standup girl, I’m gonna tell my lawyers to raise you to two per cent on our pre-nup. That’s how good I feel about this whole thing.’

She stared down-river, to where the sun had died. ‘Tell your
lawyers I don’t want anything at all.’

His smile grew. ‘You’re a very special person, Annalise Palatine.’

‘Oh, you have no idea…’

Fanshawe held a telescope to his eye. The view showed a loch running the length of a broad, scenic glen. A grim-looking mansion stood at the far end, but it was quite obviously a special effect, a matte painting with fake mist rising around it.

‘Ah-ha!’ he exclaimed. ‘Our destination is at hand! The lair of Aleister Crowley, whom some call the Great Beast!’

Squeezed beside his master in the basket of the hot-air balloon, Grovel moaned, looked heavenward and made the sign of the cross on his corpulent chest. An aerial shot showed the balloon – an eccentric, ancient-looking contraption, all ropes, pulleys and patches – as it drifted along against the mountains. ‘Prepare to drop anchor,’ Fanshawe reprised, and Grovel produced an iron grappling hook tied to a rope, ‘on my mark: three… two… one… mark!’ Grovel tossed the hook out of the basket.

The scene cut to a peaceful track by the loch, where a rough-looking Highland type sat atop a haycart hauled by a worn-out mare. There came a grating scrape of metal against stone and the Highlander awoke from his semi-slumber to look for the source of the noise. Suddenly, the rear of his cart lifted, violently tossing him and his hay to the ground. He looked on in disbeliefas his cart and horse were dragged along, suspended from a rope attached to an enormous balloon. The Highlander chased his whinnying horse and disintegrating cart, cursing furiously. He pulled a sword and jumped up and down, slashing at the rope until he managed to sever it. As the balloon drifted off down the loch, he shook his weapon, roaring incoherent Scottish-isms.

Emerson laughed out loud – dramatic, slapstick stunts had
been one of the hallmarks of the Fanshawe and Grovel films. Annalise was torn between the discomfort of watching her father with other people present and the wonder she used to feel as a child from seeing him be two different people at once. Of course, now that she was in the business too, she recognised all the tricks – clever editing, shooting over a double’s shoulder, lots of big close-ups. Although the characters were pure cartoonish pork and the humour so dated, she could not help but admire his skill. Up on the screen, he
was
the idiotic Fanshawe; he
was
the drooling Grovel.

Emerson had returned from the restaurant to Château Saint-Christophe in ebullient form. Tired and embarrassed, Annalise had tried to slink off to her room, but he had detained her, summonsing Frost and all the bodyguards into the colonnade, where someone – presumably Talbot – had set up a projector, a screen, loudspeakers and a row of chairs. At that point, she had nearly bolted, thinking that he wanted to show some of the daily rushes from
The Perfect Heresy
. She had not yet seen herself as Roselaine and did not want to. But instead, the disc turned out to be from a boxed set of her father’s comedies; Emerson had picked one of the last her father had made:
Fanshawe, Grovel and the Number of the Beast
. Reluctantly, she had joined the strange little audience in the balmy night air. She suspected that this was Emerson’s way of welcoming her into his household, establishing her status by connecting her in everyone’s mind to her once-famous father. But he also seemed a genuine fan. Americans, she mused, still found Benny Hill and Monty Python funny, so why not Fanshawe and Grovel?

However she noticed that Frost, like her, did not laugh. Instead, the woman threw her the occasional filthy look. The bodyguards chuckled, both at the film and their boss’s childish reaction to it. Talbot served drinks, even to the bodyguards. Emerson was really kicking back tonight, she thought; like Elvis, lounging with his goons – the Memphis Mafia, taking care of
business. Everyone present knew much more about her host and would-be husband than she did.

Up on the screen, Fanshawe studied the frayed end of the anchor rope as if it were a new species of plant.

‘I’m afraid,’ he began to tie it around his servant’s waist, ‘that these blasted Scots have yet to learn some good old English manners. But since you are French, I can hardly expect you to understand that, so be a good chap and stop this infernal contraption, would you?’ He pushed Grovel out of the basket. Emerson started choking again.

Grovel screamed as he fell. The ground rushed up to meet him, but he stopped just short of it and gasped as the tension of the rope squeezed his flabby waist. He flailed and scrabbled, but then the balloon dragged him across a pasture, at the far side of which was a flock of grazing sheep. Grovel’s eyes widened. He was hauled through the sheep, him roaring, the animals bleating. He hit a dry-stone wall, smashing it asunder. As the balloon pulled him clear of the dust, it could be seen that he was holding a ram.

‘Sale bête!’
he cried, and dropped it. It landed in the loch with a splash.
‘Non! Non! Non!’
A wide shot of the glen showed the balloon sink towards the surface, trailing Grovel by the rope. He impacted in a jet of spray.

‘Goddamn,’ Emerson laughed, ‘whoever that guy is, he’s one helluva stuntman. I mean,’ he elaborated, ‘these days, a lotta stunts are just shot against a green screen, but this is real stunt-work. They really
are
draggin’ that guy through the water on a hundred-foot rope… and look, watch this next bit…’

A formal group enjoyed a picnic on the front lawn of the forbidding mansion. Still clinging to the rope, Grovel emerged from the water and, howling and spluttering, swung towards them. He smashed into the table, sending food, utensils, servants and diners in all directions. The rope caught in a nearby tree, bringing the balloon to a sudden halt against the mansion’s roof.
Fanshawe steadied himself in the basket then pointedly looked away from the confusion, polishing his fingernails against the lapel of his tweed jacket. Some thirty feet below, the prostrate diners stared up in disbelief. Fanshawe did not acknowledge them, rather looked airily about as if waiting for something. Groaning, Grovel picked himself up. He was soaked through and caked with dirt and food.

‘My lords and ladies,’ he bowed unsteadily at the open-mouthed guests, ‘may I ’ave ze pleasure of announcing my master, ze Viscount Dingwall and Fourth Duke of Jellicoe, ze right ’onourable Rodney Geddes Fanshawe!’ As Fanshawe bowed from the waist, the balloon above his head caught fire. Glowing scraps of debris ignited the mansion roof. Wide-eyed, Grovel tried to lift an arm in warning but collapsed in a heap. Emerson practically fell off his chair with laughter; Annalise was glad it was dark and no one could see how moist her eyes were. She muttered something about needing the bathroom and ran up to the tower and threw herself into bed.

As the news of her father’s death sank in, she had stopped crying and slipped into a sort of parallel world. All movement slowed down; the voices around her fluctuated in volume and made only partial sense. Geoffrey said something about ‘repatriation’, and the policeman had said that that would probably not be necessary, given there was so little to repatriate. Then, the two officers had departed. Geoffrey must have produced a pipe from somewhere, but she did not notice him doing so, rather became numbly aware of a sweet burning smell, like incense. Monica put an arm around her and, after a long silence, told Lucy to fetch the telephone. She placed the device in Annalise’s lap and said she ought to call her mother, but Annalise couldn’t dial the number, so Monica did it for her. When she heard her mother’s voice, she started crying again, but silently. If everyone in the room seemed distant, then her
mother sounded light years away. Annalise asked whether she should come home and her mother replied, ‘If that’s what you want.’ After an intervention from Monica, it was agreed that Annalise would fly to Dublin the following morning. Monica offered to travel with her, but Annalise just shook her head.

There was no one to meet her at Dublin airport. Monica, anticipating this would happen, had given her money for the hour-long taxi journey to Kilnarush. Annalise asked to be dropped at the abbey gate lodge which, she noticed, was boarded up again and covered with graffiti. Halfway up the driveway, it started to rain. The only sign of life was a smattering of yellow buds across the whins. These now grew everywhere, having erupted out of control, like spiky sponges consuming an island.

The heavy, Gothic façade of the house seemed even more dreary and out-of-place than ever, and the closer she drew to the squat front porch, the more she noticed the panes of broken glass, the tufts of grass lining the gutters, the crooked chimney pots, the decrepit statues in their niches and pattering waterfalls where drainpipes had fallen away. The front door had been irrevocably locked, so she trudged her way around to the kitchen entrance. The cobbles in the back courtyard were slippy with scum and the duck-pond choked with nettles, the ducks long gone. The once-majestic kitchen stank of rotting vegetables. Passing through the house, she noticed sooty outlines against the walls, where major pieces of furniture had stood; their absence, presumably sold, made the corridors echo even more than before.

Following her ears, she found her mother fast asleep on a chaise-longue in the smallest reception room. A clutter of empty bottles occupied the table and floor beside her. Judging by the layers of mess and the portable television banging out its garish game show, her mother spent a lot of time in this room. Annalise turned off the TV, lifted a crumpled throw from an armchair
and spread it over her mother. Even in sleep, her face seemed bitterly disappointed. As Annalise made her way across the black-and-white tiled hallway and up the stone staircase, the house felt like a defunct institution, abandoned by its staff and all but one of its inmates.

Her bedroom was unchanged, apart from the eighteen months of dust. She went straight to the mantelpiece, where she’d left Froggy. She lifted him down, beat the dust off him and sat with him on the bed. She waited. She knew he would ignore her for as long as he could but that, in the end, he would be unable to contain himself.

‘Well, well,’ he eventually rasped, ‘if it isn’t Miss Ambitious Palatine. I really love the way you come running to me when you have no one else to turn to.’

‘He’s gone,’ she whispered.

His harshness softened. ‘Yeah, I know. So it’s just the two of us now…’

She sat up in bed. She thought she was in her old bedroom at home and even felt around her pillow for Froggy, but he wasn’t there. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a shimmer of starlight through the arched windows and remembered – home no longer existed. Instead, she was in a tower in a far-off castle, surrounded by intimidating strangers. Harry Emerson had pretty much ordered her to marry him two days after she’d caught her boyfriend screwing schoolgirls in a hotel bedroom. Not only that, her director wanted to molest her and all this time she was trying hard, oh so hard, to cancel herself out and become a person who had never existed except in a scriptwriter’s mind.

And there was someone whispering outside her bedroom door.

She went rigid, held her breath and listened, but heard nothing more, so thought she’d been mistaken. Silly moo, scaring yourself! Slowly, she eased her head back onto the pillow.

The whispering started again.

One voice – or was it two? Emerson and Frost, it sounded like… but then she thought it might be Emerson and Levine. Now why would they be whispering outside her bedroom door in the dead of night? Was Levine being placed there to guard her again? Or had Emerson creeped up to assert his droit de seigneur? Was he about to burst through the door, throw off his dressing-gown and–