Not Without You (37 page)

I sank into an armchair. Gilbert stayed standing, pacing up and down. I saw him look at his reflection in the dark window.

‘You’ll stay here, then,’ he said flatly. ‘You must be tired.’

‘I—’ I didn’t know what I was. I didn’t want to be alone, I knew that. But to be with other people seemed unbearable, too. To smile and make chit-chat, be congratulated and admired, this farce, this stupid farce. I shivered, I was very cold. ‘Maybe I’ll come for a little while.’

‘Eve.’ Gilbert came over towards me. He crouched on his haunches, his hands on either side of the chair, so I was trapped. He smiled, one black brow raised. He was so alive, so virile, so bursting with confidence and vigour. ‘Eve, you need to consider your future now, dear.’

‘You’ve considered it for me,’ I said, fighting to get the words out.

He leaned forward so our faces were almost touching. I could smell stale cigarettes and whisky on his breath. One stray eyebrow hair curled out onto his shiny, tanned, porous forehead. It was grey, the others were black. ‘I’m doing what’s best. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been tired. Things are … hard.’

‘Mmm.’ He grunted, and adjusted his position so he was kneeling. ‘I’m worried about you. The studio is, too. Your friends, your family. We know you’re not yourself at the moment. So you need someone to take care of it for you.’

I tried to keep my breathing steady. I faced him down, staring into his black eyes. ‘Take care of what? Of me?’

His lips twitched. ‘Of it all, the whole damn thing. Now, my dear. You’ve had your time in the sun, but now you’re going to be a mother. I can provide everything we need. You don’t need to act any more. You don’t like the studio, do you?’ I shook my head. He was right. Maybe he was right. ‘So you don’t go there. You stay at home and bring up our son.’ He said softly, ‘It’s my time now. Got that?’

Victoria came bustling back into the room. ‘Nice glass of milk and I found you some cookies, here we are, Miss Eve—’

He flung one arm out behind him. ‘Go away, please, Victoria.’ His voice was calm, cold. ‘Leave us be. Mrs Travers isn’t feeling well. Go.’

‘Victoria—’ I called out.

‘Shut up. Just go,’ Gilbert said again, more loudly.

And Victoria bowed her head so I couldn’t catch her eye. She turned slowly and left, shutting the door behind us, and I knew then that help was gone. Gilbert put his hands on my neck, gripping me firmly, so my head wobbled above his wrists, as if totally separate from my body. ‘You are sick. Your mind is confused. You’ve done some things that I’ve never asked you about. And I won’t. But you have to understand, my wife must be like Caesar’s: above reproach. My dear, I think it’s best if you remove yourself a little. You’re – well, you’re a danger to yourself.’

Then he took one of the white roses that stood in a vase on the sideboard beside us. He pulled it across my chest, so the thorns caught on my skin, snagging and tearing, beading blood. I pushed his hand away, and he gripped my fingers around the stem of the rose, so the scent caught my nose, as the thorns pressed into the pads of my fingers, and I screamed.

‘No!’ I said, pushing away from him. He wrapped his fingers around my neck again, his grip like iron, and I knew I couldn’t break free.

‘Oh, you are. You’re mad,’ he said, hissing at me. ‘Well, let’s be polite and call it unstable, darling, everyone knows it.’

‘I’m not,’ I said, struggling to breathe. ‘Just – I can’t see things clearly. I want to—’ His hands tightened around my throat and I cried out. ‘Stop it, Gilbert! Please … please stop.’

‘I won’t hurt you, Eve,’ Gilbert said. He loosened his hands, slid them onto my shoulders, shook me slightly, chuckling as if it was all a joke. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, dear. I only want to help you. We’re seeing a doctor on Monday, you and I. And he’ll help you.’

‘I don’t need a doctor,’ I said. But I knew I did. I knew I needed rescuing in some way, just not by Gilbert.

‘Well, I think you do.’ Gilbert looked down at his nails. ‘The studio does. Your friends do. People are starting to talk. He’s a very good doctor. You’ll start to see everything clearly again, afterwards.’

‘I’m not going to a doctor,’ I said, sitting upright and struggling out of my chair. ‘I want my life back, I can decide what I—’

He pushed me back dismissively, as if I were a cardboard cut-out, and I fell heavily into the low-sprung seat with a howl of weary, impotent rage.

‘Shut up,’ Gilbert said. ‘Shut the hell up. Now I’m going to change my shirt, and I’m going out tonight, and you know, Eve, dear? I’m going to be the most popular person in the room, for once,
for once
, and you won’t be there. Who knows what my reward will be?’ He looked down at me with an ugly expression. ‘Not a pregnant bag of bones with a lopsided hairline who’s like a feral cat in heat. You’re disgusting, my darling. Only a blind man would want you now, do you realise that? And one more thing.’ He snapped off his cufflinks, started unbuttoning his shirt, as he walked towards the door. ‘I’m afraid there’s bad news about that fag Conrad Joyce. Another of your fag friends, got himself into trouble.’

My blood ran cold. I rubbed my bruised neck and then said, quietly, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Moss told me as we arrived this evening. He shot himself. Last night.’

I breathed in, gasping for air, as if I’d just jumped into an icy sea. ‘Conrad? He’s dead?’

‘Oh, he’s dead all right.’ Gilbert gave a little whistle. ‘Shot clean through the head. He left a note, but it’s the saddest thing, it’s gone missing. Something about how he couldn’t stand being a queer any longer and it was the best thing for him.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Well, I agree. I’m sure you don’t, but then you love fags, you filthy whore. You’re my wife full-time now, no more Eve Noel the star, so perhaps now you’ll realise what decorous behaviour is and isn’t.’ His hand was on the door. He was drumming his fingers on the brass fingerplate, leaving smears. I would have to wipe those smears off. ‘Goodnight, dear,’ he said, his voice like honey. ‘Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow. Everything will be different, tomorrow.’

SUMMER HAS FINALLY come, almost too late, to the waterlogged, lush fields around us. Suddenly it is beautifully warm, and we bask like cats in the unaccustomed heat. Since Tony arrived on set two weeks ago, the shoot has been transformed. Things are on time; people know what they should be doing. T.T. still stands around looking confused and pulling his hair out, but now it feels like part of the creative process rather than something costing us all thousands of dollars. I honestly believe Tony had a hand in that as well. And here in this green, lush valley, it feels like there really is nowhere lovelier.

In a short space of time Tony has turned the film around. We have a sense of purpose and I think we might just pull this off. I might be good. I don’t think I ever realised it till now. We live in a bubble, I haven’t seen the news or read a magazine in ages. I get up, go to work, say my lines, come home. I haven’t weighed myself in days, or got undressed and stared, despairingly, at my fat arse, for weeks. I haven’t ‘accidentally’ logged onto some site to see what a few teenage girls are saying about me, or checked out TMZ to make sure another schmuck is taking up the paparazzi’s attention. I think Sara thinks I’ve gone mad.

As for the white roses and everything – it’s like another world. The LAPD don’t seem to be any closer to finding out who it was. Every time I ask them, or Sara does, for an update they give a ‘we’re following several different lines of inquiry’ brush-off which Sara has to read out to me with a straight face. Anyway, I feel safe here. I’ve persuaded Angie’s boss Gavin to let me stay on in the Oak. She agrees with me – it’s no big secret we’re here, and there’s security in the hotel twenty-four/seven.

To be honest I don’t think about it too much at the moment. We are working hard, there’s no time for delays now. I’m in the zone: I understand the production, what’s missing, what needs fixing. I know what the budget is, where we’re overspending. I know when T.T. needs hand-holding and when the light’s not right or how to cheer up a pissed-off cameraman. I can see the schedule in my head, what’s missing, what’s on track. I grew up with a dad who felt more at home with the challenge of starting a business than the challenge of family life. Maybe I’m my father’s daughter, not my mother’s. Instead of fixating on the bad stuff and what might happen, I’m just getting on with it. And at the end of every day I fall into bed completely knackered, but happy.

A week or so after our strange trip to see Eve, I’m sitting outside on a warm, starry night watching the second AD round up everyone for the next shot. It’s a night shoot, at an old timbered cottage a few miles away that’s standing in for Shakespeare’s house. Annie the modern heroine has just landed back in the past and met the Bard for the first time. He’s sitting in the garden, musing, and she surprises him. He jumps and breaks the quill he’s holding, which makes him furious, and then he stares at her and thinks she’s a spirit from another dimension because of her appearance.

It’s a bit chilly, and I’m wrapped in a big cardigan. Alec and Paula are standing next to the monitors, talking intently. I watch Alec, admiring his legs in his Shakespearian costume. He totally pulls it off, because there should be something ridiculous about a man in a leather blouson shirt and knickerbocker-style breeches having an intense discussion with a woman in jeans but he looks … right, somehow. He’s always totally at ease, wherever he is.

I can hear him now. ‘Well, when will you know, Paula?’

Paula sighs sharply. ‘I have no idea. Ask T.T. Ask Tony. There’s no one available.’

They’re talking about old Anne, the part they were hoping Eve Noel would play. They’ve been on the phone to agents again all day, seeing who’s available. They want it to be a Name and they’ve had no luck so far.

Alec is cross. I can hear the thin reedy tone his voice gets when he’s peeved floating across to me in the chill night air. ‘It’s getting bloody ridiculous, Paula darling. I can’t react off Doug.’

‘You’re going to have to, I’m afraid.’ Paula is extremely calm. ‘We’ll know later this morning.’ She looks tiredly at her watch; it’s nearly two a.m.

‘What happened with Eve Noel?’ Bill Claremont asks, looking through his director’s viewfinder at me, then at Alec. ‘Thought we were going to try her.’

‘Didn’t you hear?’ Alec shoots me a look. ‘Tony and Sophie went to see her, but some old bag answered the door and said she was dead.’

‘That’s not quite right.’ I raise my voice so they can hear me from where I’m sitting on the ground. ‘I think it was her. I’m just not sure. And she wasn’t … an old bag.’

‘That’s not much help to us, is it, dearest.’ Alec is sarcastic. ‘Anyway, if she is dead, when did she die? Wouldn’t it have been on the news? She was a huge star.’

Bill steps behind a camera. ‘Not necessarily. The story I always heard was she had a breakdown and came back to England. Don’t know if it’s true but it was fifty years ago, you know. That’s a long time. People forget about you. They watch your films on bank holidays but they don’t wonder where you are.’

‘But that’s extraordinary, when you think about it,’ Alec says. ‘She just – what? Vanished? Hid herself away? What on earth happened to her to make her do that?’ He turns to me, almost accusatory. ‘You were always obsessed with her. Isn’t there some biography or something?’

‘
Eve Noel and the Myth of Hollywood
,’ I say. ‘I’ve read it more than any other book I’ve ever read.’

‘So you’ve read it more than
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Big deal.’ Alec doubles up with hilarity. ‘Ah, sometimes I make myself laugh so much it hurts.’

I ignore him. ‘It only goes up to 1961. After Conrad Joyce killed himself she went away for a few months, no one knows where. The biographer interviewed this driver at the studio who says he took her for a drive some time in June but he wouldn’t tell him where he dropped her. It’s weird. What happened to her afterwards, no one knows.’

‘Didn’t she have any family?’ Alec asks, interested despite himself.

‘Her parents were dead by then, within a couple of months of each other. She wasn’t close to them, they were cold fishes. She had a sister … but she died. Drowned when she was eight and Eve was six. Her roommate at drama school says she blamed herself.’

Paula is peering into the camera next to her chair. ‘Well, she was an actress. It’s easy to make yourself invisible, if you want to walk down the street and don’t want to be noticed.’

‘How extraordinary. I
always
want to be noticed,’ Alec says.

‘I know what you mean,’ I tell Paula, ignoring Alec. ‘You don’t have to have twenty photographers waiting outside some bar for you. But you have to be clever about it. If you adjust the way you walk, don’t act suspicious, keep yourself to yourself – people don’t see you.’

‘Exactly,’ says Paula. ‘I’m telling you, no one goes looking for you unless you want people to know you’re hiding.’

I pull awkwardly on the long sleeves of my granny cardigan. ‘What I don’t understand is that she told her agent she’d see us. She sent her an email. Why would she do that if she was just going to deny all knowledge of us and say she was someone called Rose when we turn up at the door?’ I don’t like talking about it; the memory is still unsettling, upsetting. Those blank, sad eyes. Whoever that woman was, she needed help.

‘Rose?’ Paula says. ‘You never said that.’

‘Yeah.’ I pull the cardigan round me tightly. ‘
A Girl Named Rose
– weird, eh?’

‘I love that movie,’ Paula sighs.

‘But that doesn’t prove anything, either way,’ Alec says. ‘If she was Eve, she might say she was called Rose, if she’s off her rocker. And she might say she was Rose if she was trying to be Eve. It’s the part she’s best known for. Everyone knows that film.’

‘There’s something that doesn’t make sense.’ I shake my head. ‘If it is her, why did she tell her agent she’d see us and then freak out when we turn up? What’s she been doing all these years? By herself, in that creepy house.’