Not Without You (22 page)

‘You know what?’ I say to Patrick. ‘I think I’m going to go. I’m not feeling great.’

‘I’ll take you home,’ he says immediately.

I shake my head, numbly. He puts his arm around me.

‘Jesus, Sophie, you’re really cold.’ He’s right. It’s a humid night. I lean against him, just for a moment.

‘You’re warm,’ I say.

‘I’m always warm. Growing up I was the warmest part of the house when there was a storm and the wind blew the spray into ice off the sea. My dogs used to come sleep on me in the winter. Listen, Sophie, I think you should go home. Maybe you need to rest. Let me get your car. I’ll drive you.’

‘No, it’s fine.’ I gesture to the valet guy to collect the jeep. ‘This is crazy. I haven’t even got here yet. I haven’t been inside.’

‘I’ll tell George you’re sick, you don’t want to risk the shooting schedule. Hey, you sure you don’t want me to take you home?’ Patrick’s voice is soft in my ear. Part of me wishes I could say yes. I’m so used to being this me that I don’t think I remember what it was like to be half of a whole. I’ve never known what it was to feel that way.

Now is not the time. I stand away from him, embarrassed now, wishing I was gone already, hoping I don’t burst into tears. ‘I’m fine, honestly, Patrick. Thank you. It’ll make a bigger thing of it if we leave together.’

‘OK then. If you’re sure,’ he says.

‘I’ll be so fine. I’ll get into bed, watch TV and get some sleep.’ The valet appears with the Cherokee and I look round, and at the same time I see George again, watching us both, his wolfish smile still plastered on his sick, stupid face. Impotent rage bubbles up inside me. He’s talking to Steve, the host, now, one of his old buddies. He looks up and sees me and smirks, and something in both their expressions makes my blood run cold. That tape of me … why the fuck did I let him film me. Maybe everyone’s seen it. I have been so stupid. I clear my throat, trying to push the thoughts out of my mind. ‘Go enjoy the party. I’ll see you next week for the first run-through, OK?’

‘Sure. And Sophie?’

‘Yes?’ I take the keys and give the valet a tip, my fingers fumbling with my purse.

‘Maybe we could do that coffee again. Or have a drink. Or something.’ Patrick takes my hand again and holds it. Just holds it like we’re going to walk off somewhere together. His warm fingers squeeze mine. ‘Anyway, I’ll stop because you want to go. Just take care of yourself, Sophie, and I’ll see you soon. Call me if you need anything, won’t you.’

I nod, though I’m sure I won’t. He watches me drive off. I know him. I know him so well and I’ve only met him three times, for a total of, what? Ninety minutes? Then I remember – of course, he’s one of the most famous people on the planet. I tend to forget that. I know him because I’ve seen him on-screen a bunch of times, besides the fact that he’s on the front of every magazine. That’s why, nothing more. It’s been a long day and I need to go home.

THERE’S NO ONE at the house tonight. Deena’s left, Tina’s gone, Carmen sleeps in the guest cottage by the gate and she’s out at her cousin’s wedding. There’s the security guy who covers for Denis whose name I can never remember but who has a moustache, but he wouldn’t pay any attention anyway. Is his name Moustache? The thought of locking the doors and screaming as loudly as I can is so enticing as I drive home, sitting up straight, trying not to cry.

It’s monotonous, this route, one barred entrance after another off a dusty road. There’s this gate I always like to see as it means I’m nearly at the top of the hill. It’s tacky, pearlescent white wrought iron, and it always makes me think of the Pearly Gates. I accelerate past it towards my home. Someone has been having a paper trail, or a wedding: there’s confetti, little scraps of white, strewn all over the road beneath the house. I turn into my own drive, itching to rip the gold sandals, which are pinching, off my feet, to change my clothes and do whatever I want. Cry, then eat too much, probably. I wonder what ice-cream there is in the freezer.

The gate is open, and that’s strange … I drive up, wondering why. A light is on, at the top of the driveway by Deena’s room, and there’s something odd about it, but I can’t work out what. Where’s Moustache? Maybe the new guys are here already? I pull up and get out.

There’s no one around. And it is really almost dark now, and the light’s disappeared. I wonder where it was coming from. Suddenly something flashes at me again, and it’s moving – it’s a torch, or something, inside my house. Someone is inside.

A loud roar behind me, and I scream as a car swings up the drive and pulls over, fast. Red and blue flashes stripe along the whitewashed walls. I turn around, confused. It’s the police. ‘Miss Leigh?’ someone says, flashing a badge. His face is hidden by his cap. ‘We had a report of something—’

The light’s still flickering on and off inside, and I stare at it, mesmerised, and then all of a sudden there’s a loud scream, and a cracking sound, and someone from the road below shouts something, I can’t hear it fully, but there’s another cracking sound, and the cop pulls me to the ground.

The flashing light stops moving, and there’s a figure framed in the front door of my house. It’s the substitute security guard, Moustache. Manny? Manuel? I stare up at him from my position flat on the ground. My knees are grazed.

‘Miss Leigh …’ he says. ‘Thank God you’re OK. I’m so sorry, Miss Leigh …’

‘Who’s in there?’ I ask, standing up and brushing myself off. I wince; my knee hurts.

‘No one, but – someone was. Someone was there.’

He’s shaking his head.

I push past him and run into the house, limping, a cop following behind me.

Someone has been there all right. The furniture’s pushed over and slashed with something sharp. Pictures ripped, legs broken off chairs, like a poltergeist or the Incredible Hulk has swept through the room. Cups and plates and little stupid knick-knacks like the china bull I got in Barcelona when I was filming
Jack and Jenny
, smashed to bits. I go from room to room, in silence, my hand over my mouth. My study, my stupid office that I was so proud of, is almost the worst: the film posters pulled off the walls, cabinets and shelves broken, glass lying like sparkling snow an inch deep on the floor. The Eve Noel framed pictures have been particularly viciously treated: the frames are smashed and the photos have been torn out and ripped into pieces. Paper is scattered over everything. The window is open, and I realise that what I thought was confetti is, in fact, the new version of
My Second-Best Bed
on my desk, torn into tiny pieces and thrown out onto the road.

I turn away, unable to look. I don’t know what to do. The Moustache is behind me, wringing his hands. ‘I was asleep – I don’t know what happened, like someone drugged me. I didn’t hear it, Miss Leigh, I’m so sorry …’

I walk towards the bedroom, but a female cop, who’s already gone around ahead of me, puts her hand on my arm.

‘Don’t go in there.’

‘Why?’

She says flatly, with no empathy, ‘You just don’t want to.’

I push past her into my room, my beautiful room … It is trashed, like the rest of the house, but worse. Someone’s written all over the walls:

My silk nightgown, white with lace trim, has been slashed to ribbons, and laid carefully out on the bed. There’s something else there, too. There must be about two hundred, three hundred white long-stemmed roses in there. Scattered over the bed, jammed into the drawers, inside the closet, trampled underfoot.

another beautiful blue day

Hollywood, April 1959

THERE WERE NO seasons in Los Angeles. Sure, it was colder in winter, and warmer in summer, but only by a few degrees. Some people – Gilbert, for example – loved the idea that we were cheating our English blood, living here amongst oranges and jasmine all year round.

I didn’t. At first, the novelty stayed with me – it was delicious to wake up with sunshine pouring through the window, and to know it was November and that, were I still in London, I would probably have chilblains and a leaking hot water bottle. It had been worse back home in Gloucestershire, where the cold, biting wind whistled through the valleys and hills, slipping into my room at night, so that often I would wake and find icicles on the inside of the windows.

The first winter after Rose died I was seven. From my bedroom window you could quite clearly see the river, frozen into a thick sheet of grey. At night, it was as though the wind got caught inside the hollow trunk of the rotten willow tree beside the river and it would wail, literally weep.

Some nights, when I couldn’t sleep and thought I heard her calling me, I’d carefully pile my books up and stand on them, leaning on the high sill cut into the ancient brick of the house. I can still feel the cold stone wall against the fronts of my thighs. I’d stare at the tree, drooping branches trapped by the ice, my chin heavy in my hands, my elbows aching from the pressure of hanging on with my small, frozen body. Sometimes I was sure I saw her, peering through a tear-shaped gap in the empty trunk, her thin face pale in the moonlight that bounced off the frozen milky water. I never moved, nor waved to her, though I desperately wanted my sister back, and for the longest time I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that she was outside, calling to me, that she wanted to come back inside. I would replace the pile of books carefully on the dark carved mahogany bookcase that Mother said I was lucky to have in my room, and climb back into bed, shivering even more, and I’d imagine her long arms tight around me, keeping me warm just as she used to when I couldn’t sleep and she’d crawl into bed with me. But not any more.

No one else mentioned her. I wasn’t allowed to ask Mother and Father about her. Mother grew more and more religious, spending most of her time alone cleaning the local church. When, after a year in Hollywood, I wrote to ask if I could visit them during a trip back for the premiere of
Helen of Troy
, my father replied that a visit from me would provide ‘too much disruption’. What could I say? It was only afterwards I realised I didn’t even know where they had buried Rose and I had the thought again, for the first time in a long while, that she wasn’t dead, that it was all a plot.

I had never truly believed she was really gone, you see. She was calling me, calling me for help. She was alone somewhere and afraid. And I was alone in our bed without her because I had left her to die. And so I had become used to being cold and as I grew up and grew further apart from my parents it seemed normal to me, all of it. Only when I went away did I start to wonder what it all meant. And though I loved the Californian sun, I never felt it was real, that it was shining on me.

Up in Casa Benita Gilbert swam before breakfast, and most days, if I wasn’t on set hideously early, we would eat in the sunny breakfast room overlooking the pool, drinking fresh orange juice and staring out at the view. Every morning, I’d remind myself how lucky I was to be able to live in this world. Like an athlete training for a race, I’d exercise the ungrateful muscles of my brain that led me into thinking dark, awful thoughts, rewinding myself to enjoy it.
Today is a great day. Everything is wonderful. You love Gilbert. You act for a living. You have a beautiful home. Why do you think everything is so bad?

For the last few days Gilbert had been in a good mood. The Academy Awards, the previous week, had been a total disaster; the producer had been under dire imprecations of death and unemployment (death being better than unemployment in Hollywood) if the show overran, with the result that number after number was cut, in case proceedings should slow down. The telecast had ended twenty minutes too early, leaving us at home watching a blank screen on our beautiful television set with the walnut case, scratching our heads along with the rest of America before someone at NBC slotted in a rerun of an old football game. I’d been horrified, then mesmerised, that no one seemed to know what was going on. Even in the war, we’d always known what to do, what would happen, and had acted accordingly. But Gilbert had loved it. He’d slapped his thighs, chugging back drink after drink. ‘Those damn fools! Damn bloody fools!’ he’d said, over and over, tears of mirth coursing down his face.

And David Niven had won an Oscar. This pleased Gilbert because David Niven was his kind of actor, the sort who should be rewarded for being a dapper British gentleman, who didn’t forget his obligations to his country, who was unashamedly of a type, rather old-fashioned perhaps, not in the first flush of youth, but all the more comforting for that. Gilbert loathed with a passion the Tony Curtises, the Brandos and the Montgomery Clifts, the young guns in town who showed scant regard for the way old Hollywood worked, who took no care to conceal their bad behaviour; in fact, seemed to revel in it. He had actually said to me once, of James Dean, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ I’d thought he was joking at first, but I should have realised; Gilbert rarely joked about anything.

He had been so pleased at the unspooling of the evening that he’d come to my room that night. We rarely had sex, and I was glad. At first I found him terrifying – he had been my idol. Then disappointing – he was old, and I was young and cruel, heedless of what he’d been through, of what he might be looking for. My fumbling nights with Richard, my ex-boyfriend from Central, squashed together onto the tiny single bed in the Hampstead flat, shushing each other amid giggles, while praying that Clarissa slept soundly next door, had been far more fun, more astonishing, more exciting than those nights I dreaded, then tried to remove myself from mentally. Gilbert was rough; he liked to tear my clothes off, like a hero from the swashbuckling films he used to make. He liked to feel strong, for me to feel defenceless. He never hurt me, not much really, and it never lasted long. Often it was over before I’d even realised he was inside me, and I’d know it wouldn’t happen again for a good few weeks. I’d lie in the vast, curved, wooden bed with the silk sheets slipping away from me like water, watching us in the mirror of the grey French dressing table that a December issue of
Photoplay
breathlessly reported had been flown specially from Paris just for me. And I’d remove myself entirely from the situation. Back to Hampstead, or home again to Gloucestershire. Or the part I was playing at that moment. I was getting better and better at it, pretending to be someone else entirely.