My Life in Black and White (24 page)

“I thought waiting tables was your livelihood?” Trinity asked ever so politely.

“I’m an actress! I’m the star of the film, remember?” she continued undeterred. “I’m going to sue you big time!”

“I didn’t touch you,” I said calmly. That stopped her in her tracks. Her eyes grew wide and she practically choked.

“You slapped me.”

“I didn’t lay a hand on you.”

“Don’t try denying it, Clara. I have a room full of witnesses,” she stated and grinned like she had me.

“I didn’t see anything,” Trinity said.

“Not a bloody thing,” Billy the cabbie tossed in.

Saffron shook her head.

“Me neither,” Niall said and moved to my side.

“Huh! I’d expect as much from you lot,” she went on. “But Dean and Freddie saw too.”

“You’re not in America anymore. The English don’t sue over every slight to our character,” Frederick said smoothly. “And besides, I didn’t see Clara touch you.”

“But, Freddie, I’m your star.” She spoke with genuine panic in her voice. “You said so, you discovered me yourself.”

He looked embarrassed. “I may have over-exaggerated that. You’re a beautiful blonde with an ugly personality. And after everything I’ve heard and seen tonight, I have one word for you: recast.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“I may like redheads in gold gowns, but I don’t appreciate being played, and you played me for a fool,” he said flatly. “And to top it off, I don’t admire cruelty, and you, my dear, are a first-class bitch.”

Her whole face was red; indeed, so was her décolletage. That left her one man standing. My husband.

“Dean?” she pleaded.

He shook his head. “Clara didn’t slap you, Amber. You must have fallen asleep in the sun and got a slight burn. It will be gone by morning.”

“Sunburn! This is fucking England! That does it. I’m leaving now, even if I have to walk back to London.” She stormed upstairs.

“I will call her a cab,” Frederick said. “There’s a lovely inn in the town, not more than a few miles away. It will do for the night.”

“Don’t bother, mate,” Billy piped up. “I’ll take her.” He nodded to us all and walked out the door.

“I think it’s high time we turned in for the night,” I said, exhausted yet oddly satisfied.

Trinity came with me and we walked down the hallway, past Amber’s door, where we could hear the muffled sounds of her packing, cursing and otherwise harrumphing about.

“You did good,” she said to me when we reached my door.

“Remember what you said about my being Alicia Steele’s femme fatal Frankenstein?”

“Yes, sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. It was true,” I said. “And I want to hang on to a bit of her.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” she said, touching my arm. “Every one of us gets trampled by life at one point or another. Sometimes more than once. You’re just as tough and just as beautiful as any screen heroine, you just never realized it.”

“Maybe anti-heroine is more like it?” I said and smiled. “But as much as I tried to be her, the real me shone through loud and clear.”

“How do you mean?”

I thought of Larry’s injuries, the door clunking Niall, Frederick’s ludicrous behaviour by the pool, the accidental slap and every other misplaced and misunderstood moment from the past week and said, “I’m just a screwball comedy in film noir clothing.”

She grinned and hugged me before heading to her room. I went inside and leaned against the door to shut it, only it wouldn’t budge, so I put my whole weight against it when I saw a hand creeping in. I screamed. It was Niall.

“My God, why didn’t you knock?” I said. “You shouldn’t creep around in a place like this. It’s scary enough.”

“Sorry, Clara,” he said. “I did knock. Damn door is so thick you obviously didn’t hear me.”

“Well, what do you want?” I asked, feeling very exposed in the thin satin dress so close to that giant four-poster bed. Why did he have to look so irresistible?

“I came to apologize. I shouldn’t have kissed you. Especially not in front of a crowd. I was quite out of line. I’m sorry.”

I flicked my hair over my shoulder and back again. “I accept,” I said and felt myself step closer to him despite my best instincts. “Only next time do it in private.” And I brought my lips to his.

W
hen I woke up, it was mid-morning on December 10. Niall was still sound asleep as I tiptoed to where his jacket was folded over the back of a chair. As I searched his pockets for his smart phone, I felt nothing but trepidation. I needed to know one thing. One vital thing. I found the phone and went to the browser and typed in my grandmother’s name. There it was—an IMDb entry for
He Gave No Answer
, which gave her date of birth and date of death. “Everything okay?” Niall asked, his eyes half closed.

“Sorry I woke you,” I said. “I needed to check a date.”

“Did you find it?”

I nodded and turned away. I had my answer. Alicia Steele, Alice, my grandmother, had died on this day in 1952. I hadn’t changed a thing. The tears were about to tumble down my cheek and it wasn’t something I wanted to share; tears required explanation, and I needed to reflect on the information in private, at least for now. Niall lit a cigarette and shoved his grandfather’s case back into the pocket of his trench coat. He took a puff, then held it out for me. I frowned at it.

“Why not?” I said and shrugged. I put the cigarette to my lips and inhaled deeply, only to have the smoke retaliate and come back out of my mouth in a fit of coughing. Niall rushed into the washroom for
a glass of water, and I threw the offending cigarette out the window. Smoking like Lauren Bacall was truly a thing of the past.

“I think I just quit,” I managed to say.

“I think it quit you,” he teased.

Then we heard a high-pitched noise off in the distance.

“What’s that sound?”

Niall opened the window. He looked concerned. The sound grew louder and louder, and there was no mistaking its source. “Police siren,” I said. “More than one.”

We stood and watched as two police cars tore up the drive to the front of the castle.

“Better get dressed,” he said.

But they were too fast. We heard a kafuffle downstairs, followed by loud steps beating a pathway to our door.

“Police.”

I had no choice but to slip into that gold gown once again. When I opened the door, two uniformed officers looking none too happy were there to greet me.

“Clara Bishop?”

I nodded.

“You’re under arrest for assault.”

Niall gave me his trench coat for warmth, and they led me down the staircase and out the front door. As I was being stuffed into the back of the police car, I saw Frederick wailing at another officer as he too was being forced into a car.

“I can’t believe this is happening again! Don’t you people have anything better to do?”

Everyone else, Saffron, Dean, Trinity and Niall, were asked to come in for questioning. No doubt as witnesses. I sighed. Amber wasn’t going away quietly.

“And that, Sergeant Hooper, is that.” I took a sip of water and waited. Hooper stared at me
.

“I told you it would be tough to believe. But everything I said was the truth.” I couldn’t blame him if he didn’t buy my story
.

He scowled. “So you admit to slapping Miss Ward across the face, then?”

“I do,” I said. “But she deserved it.”

He shifted around on his chair. He had amassed quite a pile of yellow foolscap pages, and he shuffled them like a deck of cards
.

“How do you account for all this? It’s bloody impossible,” he said. I nodded. “I agree. Impossible. So what are you going to do?” I asked. “That sure is a lot of paperwork.”

He clasped the lot of it in his hands
.

“And it’s been a long interview,” I added
.

He took up the pile of papers and in one swift motion ripped them in half. I flinched at the sound. He then scrunched the two halves up and tossed them in the wastebasket. Then he pulled up a new piece of paper and scribbled furiously
.

“Sign this,” he instructed me and showed me a single paragraph that stated I had slipped and fallen into Amber, accidentally striking her across the face. Given my history of such clumsy mishaps, it was really quite reasonable, far more so than the truth. “None of your friends will corroborate Miss Ward’s side of things. You and Frederick Marshall seem to be victims of her bitter temper.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said, shocked by the sudden turn of events
.

“You’re free to go, Clara.” Hooper stood up and opened the door. I followed him, pausing at the doorway
.

“Thank you,” I said and kissed him on his cheek. He blushed
.

“You’re very welcome,” he said and smiled. “I would hate to see you
taken in by the likes of her. You got to be careful of her type. You know what they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’”

“That’s right,” I agreed and walked out the door
.

Niall was waiting outside the police station for me. I still had his trench coat over my shoulders as we walked towards Billy and his cab. It was dark, and there was thick fog again.

“I’m sick to death of this fog and mist all the time. I can’t wait to be back in sunny California,” I said with a sigh.

“You plan on leaving soon?” he asked. I detected the disappointment in his voice.

“I have to go home sometime,” I said.

We were silent for a bit, and then Niall grinned and said, “You’re not going to tell me that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, are you? I know how you love those film noirs.”

I smiled and shook my head. “No, Niall. For one thing, I like you more than as a friend. And for another,
Casablanca
isn’t a film noir.”

He stopped and chewed on this as I raced to the cab. Billy held the door open and I jumped in. Then Niall climbed in beside me and we kissed.

I
grinned all the way through the streets of London, taking in all its colours from the back of the taxi. A city never looked so vibrant. The sun had at last made an appearance, so that every shop window, bus stop and park bench, even the sidewalks, appeared to twinkle. Trinity’s flat was bright and airy like it had been when I first arrived. My tiny room looked happy and full of light. The closet was as I’d left it, overflowing, and the typewriter sat looking forlorn on the tiny desk, the same blank sheet of paper drawing me in. Part of me was afraid to go near it. As much as I admired the land of film noir, I was in no hurry to make it a permanent relationship. I wasn’t sure where the magic began and where it ended, the clothes on my back, or the suitcase, or the unfinished screenplay—the thing Alice started that I was supposed to finish. But one thing was missing—the train case. Though I wished that the matching set of luggage had stayed together and intact, it made sense that the case had vanished, destroyed in the car accident.

“Clara, let’s go to the pub,” Trinity called out from the living room. “We told Niall and Frederick four o’clock and it’s nearly that now. I can’t keep my producer waiting.”

“I’m coming,” I said and took another glance at the time-worn machine.
A Woman Scorned
was one scene from The
End
and I still couldn’t finish it.

We had put our coats on and were about to open the door when the typewriter keys began to click. I stopped cold and looked at Trinity. She heard it too.

“What is that?”

We tiptoed to the room, but this time the door was wide open, and we didn’t have to get too close to see what was going on. There on top of the typewriter was a ginger cat. It walked back and forth along the top, its paws punching a different key each time.

“I can’t believe it!” I burst out laughing. “Whose cat is that?”

“It’s Clifford. He lives downstairs. That’s the cat I borrow to kill mice when I need to. He’s a great mouser.”

I sighed. That explained the mysterious typewriting and the dead mouse. “Maybe he can finish the script,” I joked. My cell rang. It was a Los Angeles area code but it wasn’t Marjorie’s number. I was anxious to talk to her and had called a couple of times since leaving the police station but hadn’t been able to reach her.

“Hello,” I said. The woman at the other end of the line was professional, concise and spoke with all the warmth of an iceberg.

“Your mother had a heart attack. We’ve admitted her, but her condition isn’t stable.”

When the plane landed at LAX, the air was the colour of toast. The drive to the hospital seemed to take forever. I’d called the nursing station from the baggage carousel, and Marjorie’s condition had improved; she was considered stable, but she was quite weak. Weak enough that they wouldn’t let me speak to her. I rarely took cabs in Los Angeles, and the driver apparently thought I was a tourist. Eventually, we wound our way through the traffic on La Cienega and into the vast complex that is Cedar Sinai Hospital. I raced down the corridors like you see on television, the robin’s egg blue suitcase banging and knocking into me the whole way.

“Where is Marjorie Bishop?” I asked, out of breath. The nurse looked me up and down.

“Are you her daughter?”

I wanted to ask who else I’d be but just nodded. She picked up a file and walked around the nurse’s station and down the hall. I followed. She looked at the suitcase.

“Been away for a long time?”

“It feels that way.”

“Did you go far?”

I smiled at this. I wanted to say all the way to 1952 but instead said simply, “London, England.”

“That is far.” Then we reached Marjorie’s room. The nurse opened the door for me and I walked in cautiously. She was lying on the bed fast asleep. Everywhere were tubes—up her nose, coming out of her arm; she looked very, very ill.

“I’ve never seen her sick before,” I said to no one in particular. But the nurse nodded politely.

“I’ll leave you alone with her. She’ll wake up soon.”

I sat on the edge of the bed as carefully as I could and held her hand. “Mom?” There was no reaction. “Marjorie?” I said softly. Slowly her eyes opened. They were rimmed with red. She looked at me, and a weak smile drew the corners of her mouth up.

“Clara,” she said faintly. “You’re back.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m back. I came as soon as I heard. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine. Just had a little trouble with my heart,” she explained.

I felt the tears come to my eyes. She looked at me and shook her head. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. I’ll be fine.”

I swallowed hard. She was studying me. Then I remembered. “How do you like my hair?” I asked and tossed my hair so the curls tumbled down. She brought her chin up higher and gave me the once-over.
For a moment, I thought she was going to cry. “Do you hate it?”

The weak smile came back. “You look very pretty. Like your grandmother.”

I was taken aback. “That pretty?” I asked. Marjorie nodded.

I watched her eyes roam over my outfit. “You’re wearing her dresses?” she asked.

“I haven’t stopped since I left,” I explained. “I guess they’ve grown on me.”

The door opened and my mother smiled, a little stronger this time. I turned and in walked my father. I stood and hugged him. He held me and kissed the top of my head.

“I didn’t know you were here,” I said.

“He’s been here every day,” Marjorie said with as much slyness as she could muster.

My father ran his fingers through his white waves of hair and smiled. “You were away and, well, we were married once.”

“Oh God, don’t explain to me!” I said, feeling badly. “I’m glad you’re here.”

For the next few hours the three of us stayed together. It was almost like a family. He teased her. She teased him. And I sat there wondering what had gotten into them. At one point I must have yawned, perhaps more than once, because my father stood to leave.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said and put his arm around me.

“But I don’t want to go,” I said.

“You need to rest. I will pick you up in the morning.”

“Don’t worry, I’m fine,” my mother reassured me.

We walked down the corridor together and out to the car park. The haze had lifted as usual and the sky was white hot. I squinted and dug for my sunglasses in my handbag. I’d never been so happy to see the California sun. It was a contentment that I wasn’t going to mess with.

“Don’t take me to the apartment,” I said. “I want to go to mom’s house.”

My father turned the ignition key. “That’s a good idea,” he said and kissed my cheek. “Tidy it up for her.”

We chatted about Marjorie’s health and when she could possibly come home. And then my trip came up and that topic took us all the way to Camrose Drive. Of course, I had to leave out the bits about the enchanted suitcase full of magical clothes, the screenplay that belonged to my grandmother and being thrown into a living, breathing black and white film noir. So mainly I told him about Trinity getting a big break and which bars made the best sidecars. I also neglected to mention Niall.