Darling Sweetheart (46 page)

‘But how can he stand in front of my very eyes and not say, “Hello, Annalise, it’s me”?’

‘Because he was afraid. He was shit-scared that you’d punch him in the gob and just walk away.’

‘I might yet.’

‘I guess that’s your prerogative.’

‘I was right to be suspicious of you.’

‘I texted him or phoned him to keep him posted, but he was so worried, he followed us. He kept saying that he was gonna show himself at the right moment, but it never seemed to be the right moment. He got really freaked out when we hunted down Evelyn – he didn’t know what to do about that. Then on the train – I guess that was just a father, checking up on his daughter.
I should have told you then; I was so fed up, I nearly did.’

‘Well, now that you and I have this wonderful new spirit of openness between us, perhaps you can answer what I asked you this morning – how did you get mixed up in this?’

He smiled slightly. ‘That Fanshawe and Grovel movie set in Scotland? The scene with the balloon? That’s me, danglin’ off the rope.’

‘Got a thing about rope, haven’t you?’

‘I always leave enough to hang myself with.’

‘Your message about me not marrying Emerson – that was from him, wasn’t it?’

‘He thinks it’d be a disaster.’

‘Unlike his marital record which is, of course, exemplary.’

‘When he saw the headlines, he threw a wobbler.’

‘So did I. But you lied about being in his films. That’s why Miller recognised you.’

‘I didn’t lie about the circus! That’s where his stunt guys recruited me – I was in two of your father’s films and I was signed up for the last. But, as it turned out, he had other plans…’

‘So why did he pick you?’

Proctor shrugged. ‘Because we became friends? Because I was young and impressionable and faking a big movie-star’s death seemed like a really mental thing to do?’

‘When Evelyn said about you being a helper – that’s when I started to guess. Your eyes give you away. You try too hard when you’re lying.’

‘So, unlike you when you’re pretending to be a crazy person, I’m not entirely convincing?’

She pushed off from the rock, back towards the cove. ‘As the first part of your penance, you can fetch me a towel down from the house. A big one, please.’

‘Leon Miller said they found human flesh with the wreckage of the plane. Not much, but some.’

Proctor and her father exchanged a look. Pointedly, she forked a piece of the tasty lemon chicken that Proctor had cooked and held it up to a candle, as if for inspection. The perfection of the setting – dinner on the verandah, the pink and purple sunset – was as much of a counterpoint to the underlying atmosphere as it was possible to imagine. It was like sitting in heaven, only with a pair of sneaky old devils for company. Still, they had enjoyed a convivial meal, the wine flowing, trading anecdotes as film people do. Her father’s were highly amusing – when he dropped famous names, he also acted them out, mimicking voices, expressions, turns of phrase. She’d laughed out loud several times. After her swim, she’d asked for some clothes, and he had showed her upstairs in the house, where two whole rooms were stuffed with costumes of all types, hung on wardrobe rails. There was everything from uniforms to suits to gaudy holiday-wear, like a miniature wardrobe department, as well as entire suitcases of make-up, face-paint and false eyebrows, moustaches, beards and wigs. All the disguises, she thought, that an accomplished old faker would need. The clothes were of course masculine, but she managed to pick out a simple navy shirt and a pair of baggy white shorts. As she fixed her hair in the bathroom, she checked that her upper buttons seemed casually undone – revealing a bit, but not too much. Over dinner, she caught Ben flicking his eyes away from her several times and, better still, her father had caught him too. Come into my cabin – no one need ever know. She mopped her lump of chicken about her plate then chewed it.

‘I’m just curious to know how you did that.’ She licked her lips. ‘I mean, most people who stage their own deaths leave their clothes lying on a beach. Or were the fragments not human? What did you do, pack the plane with pre-cooked chickens?’

‘Err… no,’ her father was embarrassed, ‘not exactly.’

She let her fork drop. ‘There was someone on board? Who?’

‘Well, uhhh… you can buy pretty much anything in Palermo,
if you have the cash.’

‘You’re joking!’ Her father and Ben exchanged another look, now with the air of naughty schoolboys. ‘Hey!’ She wagged her fork for emphasis. ‘If you two want forgiveness, no more lying by omission!’

‘An indigent…’ Proctor began, playing with his food.

‘A tramp,’ her father offered.

Proctor frowned at him. ‘There’s a hospital,’ he gave up on his meal and lifted his wine, ‘where, if you have the right contacts… look, the guy had no family and he’d been dead for twenty-four hours. They’d already taken most of his organs for transplant. So in exchange for a generous, umm, donation, they let us have the rest of him.’

‘You complete fucking ghouls!’ She was, nonetheless, fascinated.

Proctor sighed. ‘I packed the plane with enough ammonium nitrate – agricultural fertilizer, to you and me – and high-octane fuel drums to take out a small town. I’ve watched the special effects guys do it many times. The main thing is to get the detonator right. I flew the plane, and your father followed me in a fast boat.’

‘With a corpse for a passenger?’

‘I had to double back quite a few times so as your father could keep up, but once I thought I was inside Tunisian airspace, I dropped a life-raft and baled out after it. Three minutes later, and boom. I think I might have used too much explosive, actually.’

‘You’re telling me,’ her father giggled, ‘I was ten miles away, and I saw the fireball in broad bloody daylight! But we knew the Tunisian authorities would be less than thorough – it was my plane, so obviously they assumed it was me on board. I just wish I could have seen Leon Miller’s face. That greedy old bloodsucker, making me do yet another of his wretched films! He badgered me and badgered me, would never take no for an answer,
so I thought, Fuck you, Leon, now for a stunt that isn’t in the script!’

Annalise remembered the night in the Goddards’ living room, the weight of the grief, how it had buckled her at the knees, how her chest had felt chopped with a meat cleaver… how Geoffrey Goddard had stood before the fireplace, uselessly stroking his beard, whilst Monica cried her semi-secret tears. And she remembered how long it had taken for the grief to become even a little bit bearable, how her stricken love for him had become part of her identity, pushing everyone else away, like a cuckoo in the nest of her heart. But most of all, she remembered a little girl who just loved her daddy.

Wordlessly, she set her fork down and took herself off to bed. Subdued, the two men sat on, glumly staring at the soft toy that had been tossed into a nearby chair.

The following morning, she found him downstairs, in a room at the back of the house. She thought she was the first to wake and had creaked down the wooden staircase. The main lounge was spacious, with heavy ceiling beams and two sets of patio doors giving out onto a verandah. She stood for a moment, wondering what to do with herself, when she heard a tapping noise from under the stairs. A short passage there led into a windowless room filled with computers, wires and screens; a sort of hi-tech hideaway. Her father sat in a swivel-chair, tapping on a keyboard. The stone walls were almost bare, apart from a huge, blown-up photograph mounted directly above her father’s head. In the dim light, she had to step closer to see it properly, but it showed a disgustingly fat, near-naked man, wearing what looked like a nappy. He held on to the lattice of a window, peering out from a darkened room but not at the camera, which he seemed unaware of. It was, she realised, a paparazzi shot. Grey hair was plastered on his head, which was small in proportion to the rest of his swollen body. He looked like an overgrown baby in a cage
– helpless, almost pitiful. Her father swung round.

‘Ah!’ He gave her a Blofeld voice and pretended to stroke a pussycat. ‘Welcome to my lair, Mr Bond. But I fear you are much too late to stop me from taking over the world!’ When she didn’t laugh, he followed her eyes to the picture. ‘Recognise him?’

‘Oliver Reed?’

‘Close, but no banana.’

‘It’s not you in a fat suit, is it?’

‘No, but you’re not entirely wrong. A few more years making Leon’s stupid films, and that’s how I’d have ended up.’

‘Who is it?’

‘That,’ he turned to admire the image, ‘was the greatest actor of his generation; some say, the greatest ever. Yet look at the state of him.’

‘It’s not…?’

‘Brando. Yes it is.’

‘Where was it taken?’

‘At the window of a hotel in the west of Ireland, where he was staying to make some silly thing that fell through.’

‘He looks awful!’

‘He looked even worse before he died. You may be beautiful now, my girl, but just wait until your breasts start to sag and the backs of your legs turn to cottage cheese.’

‘That’s how see your daughter? Tits and ass?’ He gave a slight smile, but a genuine one, she detected, not fake.

‘You know, your great-grandmother was an actress, back in the silent era.’

‘Evelyn told me; she showed me her photograph. You should have dropped in and said hello while you were snooping on us – she told me quite a lot of things.’

‘Yes,’ he kept his expression blank, ‘Evelyn, yes… anyway, Maude Fealy was one of the great beauties of her day. When she looked like you do now, she was idolised by millions. Here
she is…’ and he summoned up a website on one screen, with several black-and-white pictures. Annalise wanted to study them, because it was like seeing a former version of herself, but she resisted the temptation to snatch the keyboard from him. ‘Hugely popular stage actress,’ he continued, ‘and a big friend of Cecil B. DeMille’s, she was in most of his films. But do you know how she ended her career?’

‘How?’

‘By crawling around Women’s Institutes in the 1950s, alone and unmarried, her looks long gone, acting out silly vignettes for anyone who would pay her a lousy appearance fee. You know, I met her once, not long before she died. After I got my first television part, in 1971 – way before you were born. I’d always been curious to meet her, so I bought a ticket and went to see her in some hospital in the Valley, near San Fernando. She was ninety, can you believe that?’ He searched her eyes, as if looking for something. ‘Nearly twenty years older than I am now. Very frail, of course, but still perfectly coherent. I introduced myself, told her all about her son, Lewis – my father. She’d been to England before, of course, but not since she had become famous – not since Queen Victoria died! Then, I told her about my acting, thinking how proud she would be. Following in your footsteps, granny! And do you know what she said? She just curled her lip and said, “Actors never give up acting; it gives them up.”’ He gestured at the bloated Brando. ‘And there’s the proof.’

‘Is that why you ran away?’

‘Partly.’

‘But why didn’t you just give up acting? Why not come home and look after your family instead?’

His voice turned tetchy. ‘Either you haven’t been listening or else you haven’t understood. It sucks everything from you and leaves you as a husk! But you can never stop, never make a dignified exit! Look at me now, still crawling round the edges, doing
stupid extra work! I didn’t want you to follow in my footsteps, Annalise; I didn’t want Sylvia to tutor you; I think she took those classes at Broken Cross just to spite me!’

‘I owe Sylvia everything.’

‘She might have taught you how to act, but did she teach you anything about life?’

‘More than my parents ever did.’

‘It’s a fucked-up world, Annalise! Half of it is starving to death, yet even second-rate actors like Harry Emerson are worshipped like gods. What does it say about the human condition, when we shower so much money and admiration on a bunch of vain, insecure people whose only talent is pretending to be what they are not?’

‘Funny you should say that; Harry reminds me of you – quite a bit, as it happens.’

His eyes widened with indignation. ‘I am nothing like that little shit Harry Emerson!’

‘Completely self-centred? Check. Treat people like rubbish? Check. Manipulate every situation in your own favour? Check.’

Huffily, he swivelled away from her and summoned up Google. ‘I expected you to be angry when I brought you here, not gratuitously insulting!’

‘You didn’t bring me here – I found you out, remember?’ He ignored her. ‘But as it happens, Emerson told me something very personal about you.’ He couldn’t ignore that. He swivelled towards her again.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He said that you were his inspiration – you were the reason he got into acting. He’s a big fan of all your movies.’

His face tried to hide it, but she could tell that he was pleased. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. Now, who do I have to screw to get breakfast around here?’

He winced. ‘Follow your nose. It will lead you to a thing
called a kitchen, which we try to keep intercourse-free, for reasons of hygiene.’

Sniffing coffee, she found Proctor making three cups from a machine.

‘Hiya – sleep okay?’

‘Eventually, yes.’

‘I usually take a morning walk,’ he nodded in the direction of her father’s computer room, ‘because head-the-ball won’t come out of there until lunch.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Why, he’s watching the world of course, from his pinnacle on high. And when he gets bored of that, he plays Second Life – you know, that virtual world where everyone has big boobies, especially the men?’ He pointed out the window at the satellite dish. ‘That baby gets high-speed broadband and about five hundred television channels. Every hermit should have one.’

Already, the air was heating up. On Proctor’s advice, she had taken a straw panama from her father’s wardrobe and a pair of walking shoes, which she made fit by wearing two pairs of thick socks. She was glad she had listened, because the terrain was mercilessly rough – sharp, prickly bushes and razor-like grasses sprouted from cracks in the weathered chaos of the limestone. Wild goats sauntered nonchalantly out of their way, peering at them with superior curiosity. After an hour, by which time she was sweating steadily, they stopped at a high spot where they could admire the coastline in both directions. The view was mythic; she would not have been surprised to see fauns chasing nymphs along the clifftops or wooden galleys row past out to sea. They sat on a rock – Proctor obviously knew it. He handed her a pair of binoculars and pointed inland. It took her a moment, but she eventually located a twisty road, with white boxes moving along it.