Darling Sweetheart (29 page)

‘But why live in London, if you had those sorts of connections?’

Sylvia indicated the restaurant and, by extension, the rest of the city with a flick of her wineglass. ‘The best heart hospital in the world is only a few streets away: St Bartholomew’s? Honestly, the number of times I’ve died in the past twenty years and somehow they always bring me back…’

‘Sylvia!’

A male American voice sounded over Annalise’s shoulder. Kevin Spacey leaned across the table and kissed Sylvia on the cheek. He was wearing a brown cord jacket with a black shirt. Behind him was a stocky, older man with glasses. This man nodded at Sylvia but did not kiss her. Spacey smiled at Annalise then he and his companion moved on to a corner table. Annalise gawped.

‘Okay, okay! I believe you!’

Sylvia smiled. ‘In our game, timing is everything…’

‘Who’s he with? Looks sort of familiar…’

‘Him? Oh, that’s David Mamet…’

She woke under bright, fluorescent light. She felt hot, sweaty and deaf. She yawned; her hearing returned with a painful pop and her head flooded with the whine of jet engines. An angelic little girl, her hair arrayed in ringlets, peered at her over the seat in front. Annalise forced a smile. The little girl stuck her tongue out and dropped out of sight. Annalise pressed the overhead button and ordered a brandy and Coke with lots of ice. As the plane began its descent, the pilot said it was half-past six and blustery in Dublin. The brandy made her want another, but the fasten-seatbelts sign pinged and the cabin crew stopped serving.

The taxi driver from the rank at Dublin airport was foreign. He knew how to get to Kildare but not Kilnarush. Annalise said she would direct him and settled into the back seat, grateful that he was the sullen, silent type. Through the rain and the early evening light, she could see that things had changed a lot since her last visit. Warehouses and apartment blocks reared haphazardly, where once there had been fields. All the way to Kildare, the road was lined with brash new developments. Ireland, she thought, had finally become just like everywhere else, only not as tidy, as if some careless power had littered the landscape with monstrous flat-pack furniture.

Once away from the motorway, the minor road to Kilnarush
still wound past trees and farmland, but the village itself had not escaped the plague of so-called development; swollen with magnolia-painted housing estates, it had more than tripled in size. The Market Square was a mess of cars, grime and rain. She felt no attachment or nostalgia; the Kilnarush that she remembered had been colonised by commuters. She guided the driver out the back road towards Whin Abbey, through bland new suburbs. The mill where Katie Brennan and Hannah Cowen had attacked her was gone, replaced by a row of tatty townhouses. She wondered what had become of her two tormentors and decided that the worst punishment she could wish upon them was that they still lived in a place like this, married and overweight, with broods of fat, ugly children.

The gate lodge was just a shell now, with its windows, doors and roof removed. It looked far too small for anyone to have ever lived in it; she thought about the Crombies and felt sad. She asked the driver to wait and stepped out into the blackening cold.

Metal fencing blocked the driveway. It bore signs that said: ‘CONSTRUCTION SITE – DANGER – NO ENTRY; HELMETS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES’. A huge billboard had been erected beside the lodge, topped with purple flags that smacked soggily against the sky. A giant golfer swung his club; behind him, the picture showed a manicured mansion. ‘COMING SPRING 2009: WYNNE ABBEY GOLF RESORT & SPA.’ It was already summer 2009, she thought; the developers had probably run out of money. She pulled her raincoat about her. The driver watched from the car as she squeezed through a gap in the fence.

The driveway was a mess of churned-up mud; elongated puddles filled the tracks made by diggers. A few of these were parked like sleeping dinosaurs beside a row of concrete boxes – the inevitable housing development, but unfinished. Most of the driveway trees had been felled and a cluster of Portakabins occupied
what had once been the lawn. The whin bushes had been ruthlessly cleared, but even in the wet and the dark, she remembered their wild vanilla smell. She sploshed through the puddles, as if hypnotised. Off to her left, the walled garden was also gone – not a brick remained, certainly no trace of her mother’s temple, only a lumpy patch in the ground, crisscrossed by tyre tracks. Where the driveway ended, a vast confection of scaffolding and plastic sheeting shuddered in the wind. It suddenly occurred to her that she might be too late, for it was impossible to tell whether the original building remained underneath or whether it had been completely demolished like the garden, with some new horror waiting to be born. Then, she made out the porch. The front door had been removed but, picking her way through poles and planks, she came out of the rain and found herself standing on the original black-and-white tiles of the hallway.

There was barely enough light to see by. All the decorative wood – doors, panels and skirting-boards – had been stripped away, but the big sandstone staircase still squatted in all its might. Slowly, she climbed it. Halfway up, she stopped and looked back. Her mother lay dead at the foot of the stairs, arms and legs twisted, her purple cloak wrapped around her. Against the black-and-white tiles, it was as if someone had tried to complete a giant crossword puzzle, using a woman’s body and a bucket of blood.

The coroner had not been able to say whether she’d tripped on the stairs or thrown herself off the gallery. ‘Domestic accident’, the death certificate had read. After Sylvia had taken Annalise back to London, she had never returned to Whin Abbey. Occasionally, she had tried to ring, but on the rare occasions when her mother had answered she had been cranky and dismissive. Eventually, the number had been cut off, and, after that, so had her mother’s life. Annalise had started shooting her second television series when the news reached her. She
had not collapsed, she had not cried – for that’s not how things had been between her and her mother.

Gabriella Ferrer’s distant family – a female cousin and a nonagenarian uncle – had flown her body to London, and Annalise and Sylvia had attended the funeral in St Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell, with its marble pillars and white alabaster cherubs. Then she had cried, but mostly she had thought how annoyed her mother would have been at ending up in a church – she would have much preferred her crazy temple in the walled garden. Sylvia was sterling, charming the relatives, deflecting their questions, giving Annalise nothing more to do than mumble the odd hello. After the cremation at the East London cemetery, she had taken Annalise in a taxi straight to the American bar at the Savoy Hotel, where they had necked a legion of gin martinis.

A pigeon exploded from the gallery and flew across the recesses of the wrecked hallway; Annalise blinked – her mother was not lying dead at the foot of the stairs, but that’s where they had found her. Almost reluctantly, she climbed the remaining steps then tiptoed along the upstairs corridor. The library door was gone, as were all the panels and shelving. The room looked naked, ready to submit to whatever depredation the builders had in mind. Indeed, there was no way to tell that it had ever been a library. She went to the far corner and stamped her foot until she found the loose floorboard and then knelt down. She used her fingernails to lift it.

And there he was, grey with dust, staring up at her with those mad eyes.

‘Well look who it is!’ Froggy snapped. ‘What’s your problem this time?’

The arguments started almost immediately, in the taxi back to the airport. She dusted him off as best she could and sat him on her knee.

‘Why are you bothering me?’ she demanded.

‘Err… seems like
you’re
the one who’s bothering
me.’

‘I heard your voice in Harry’s castle in France. And you were in my bathroom in Greenwich. What was that all about?’

‘That must have been your conscience, overcome with guilt at the way you’ve treated me.’

‘Froggy, you’re a soft toy.’

In a very loud voice, he squawked at the driver. ‘Hey mister! Turn this shit-heap around, so as Keira feckin’ Knightley here can put me back where I belong! What use is a shitty soft toy to a famous feckin’ actress, huh?’

The driver stared in his rear-view mirror.

‘Don’t listen to my frog!’ Annalise counter-commanded. ‘Keep going!’ The car lurched as the driver returned his eyes to the road, but his posture had tensed. ‘You shut up!’ she admonished. ‘I’ll do the talking, okay?’

‘Ha! Good one!’

‘Look,’ she moaned, ‘my life is turning to shit right now, but there must be a reason why you’re back inside my head.’

‘There is a reason – it’s because you’re mad, just like your mother before you.’

‘Right!’ she shrieked. ‘I don’t have to take that kind of crap from you! Hey!’ she ordered the driver. ‘The frog is right! Turn the car around! Take me back to Whin Abbey and you,’ she roared at Froggy, ‘can rot there for the rest of your fucking life!’

The driver turned all right, but only to swerve off the road, where he promptly killed the engine, ripped the keys from the ignition, jumped out and ran away along the hard shoulder.

‘How long does polyester take to rot?’ Froggy mused. ‘Because I don’t think I’m particularly biodegradable. Still, an eternity in stifling darkness is better than listening to you moaning about your problems.’

Annalise bumped the back of her head repeatedly off the headrest. ‘I… cannot… believe… I… am… having… this… conversation!’

‘I can! You only come to me when you have no one else to turn to! Now, are you gonna sit here gibbering until that driver calls the cops, or are you gonna get off your arse and sort things out?’

Fumbling and swearing, Annalise unbuttoned her raincoat and stuffed Froggy inside it. About twenty yards down the road, the driver paced around, talking vehemently to himself in what she thought might be Polish, or Romanian. Or maybe Lithuanian – she had no way of knowing.

‘I’m sorry!’ she called out. Headlights roared past in the swirling rain. ‘Please!’ she held her hands up to show they were empty. The driver stopped pacing and looked at her suspiciously. ‘I promise I’ll be quiet! Silent, yes?’ She put a finger to her lips.

‘Bollocks!’ Froggy yelled from beneath her coat.

‘Shut up, you!’ She punched her own stomach. ‘Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!’

The driver said something in Romanian or whatever and backed farther away, making a two-fingered gesture at her, as if to ward off the evil eye.

‘No! Wait! I won’t hurt you! Look!’ She dug in her pocket, extracted a clump of fifty-euro notes and waved them. ‘For you! Yes! For you! Please! Just take me to the airport!’

She got back in the car and sat upright and silent. The driver argued with himself for another minute or so but, eventually, strode over, flopped into his seat and slammed his door.

‘Money!’ he barked.

She gave him a hundred euros. ‘I’ll give you a hundred more
at the airport.’

‘Aeroport two hun-red more!’

‘Yes, yes, okay!’

He drove back to Dublin at very high speed.

Once at the airport, she went straight to a shop and bought a small shoulder bag which she carried to a corner, far from anyone’s earshot. She took Froggy from her coat.

‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ he demanded as she unzipped the bag.

‘If you think you’re sitting with me on a plane then you’re out of your tiny, styrofoam mind!’

‘Who’s outta their mind, exactly?’

‘You nearly got me thrown out of that taxi! And aeroplanes have become very paranoid places in the past few years! If they see me talking to you, they’ll ground the flight and lock me up!’

‘And maybe strip-search you,’ Froggy added, ‘then send you to Guantanamo Bay.’

She stuffed him in the bag.

She thought the guards gave her funny looks as they scanned the bag through security, but they didn’t search it or her. Her head felt feather-light, as if she’d smoked some really powerful dope, although she hadn’t smoked dope since she was sixteen. She ordered three brandies with Coke on the plane. Again, the stewardess gave her a bit of a vibe, but she didn’t care.

It was just before midnight when they landed at Heathrow. She wandered around the terminal until she found a quiet row of seats. She lay with her head on the bag, facing inwards, so that no one would recognise her. Just another passenger, waiting on a flight to God knows where.

‘When you are acting,’ Sylvia instructed her, ‘you are performing a trick; that is all – like a juggler or an acrobat. But unlike a juggler, your trick is not obvious. Indeed, your trick will only work if it is invisible. For you must convince your audience, without a shadow of doubt, that you really are the person you are
pretending to be. You are distorting reality, you are telling a lie. Some actors can just switch it on; others might labour over a part for months. But it’s still just a trick.’

Sylvia rented a rehearsal room in nearby Tavistock Street – it came as news to Annalise that entire buildings existed for this sole purpose. But Sylvia did not want to work in her flat because she said they needed to separate the activities of living and working. So they spent eight hours a day at the rehearsal room, every day except Sunday. Outside that room, Sylvia’s attitude relaxed; inside it, she was a tyrant. There was no question of Annalise going back to school and Sylvia too gave up her night classes at Broken Cross. As weeks became months, they walked across Covent Garden to Tavistock Street at eight-thirty in the morning, where they stayed until four-thirty on the dot. Sylvia allowed only one short break, when Annalise could grab some fresh air and perhaps buy a sandwich – Sylvia lived off coffee and never ate until she settled her elegant little frame into the same booth at Joe Allen every evening at six.

Her tutor went back to the start, repeating every lesson she’d given at Broken Cross. For the first month, nothing but movement, movement, movement, which Annalise really resented… until she felt her body begin to lighten and strengthen; until she felt her sense of balance attune; until she could walk with a new, feline grace and do a cartwheel without drawing breath… until she wore holes in her pair of leather pumps.