Running to Paradise (19 page)

‘
But how did you come to meet Barny Elliott?’

Aunty
Phyll poured us both another cup of tea, and lit a cigarette. ‘It was after he got back from China. Some friend of his had told him about Sophia’s birth. He never seems to have been in any doubt that the baby was his, and he tried to see Char, who of course would have nothing to do with him. Then Perdita Grant suggested he came to see me. She said I might be able to help.’

‘
And you liked him?’

‘
Yes,’ she said simply, ‘I liked him; we both did. I remember him coming so well. I was weeding the big border by the terrace; it was one of those lovely autumn afternoons one can get sometimes in November, and suddenly there was this tall, heavy-looking young man standing beside me. He was wearing one of those broad-brimmed felt hats men used to wear in those days, and he looked so pale and sad. “Are you by any chance Cousin Phyll?” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve been told you might help; it’s about Char, you see.”

‘
“You’re Barny Elliott,” I said, “you’ve your daughter’s eyes.”

‘
“Have I really?” he said. “How nice.”

‘
Well, in the end, he stayed three days. I was nervous about what Ronnie might say when he got back from the City and found the young man, but the dear simply took it in his stride. He was like that, my Ronnie. On the surface so conventional, but inside a romantic in the real sense. His advice to Barny was to run off with Char. “Abduct the girl,” he said. “It’s the only way with women like that. Then get her working; it doesn’t matter what damn fool cause she takes up, but get her working; keep her busy in bed and out of it and she’s yours.” It was good advice up to a point, but we all knew really he’d lost Char by leaving her in that idiotic way so soon after they’d met.

‘
“Why did you do it?” I asked him.

‘
“Because I’m a self-destructive idiot,” he said, “and needed the money. I was frightened, too, of marriage, I suppose.” What could one say?

‘
The last evening he spent with us he cried with his head in my lap: it’s a horrible thing to see a man cry. The next morning he caught the early train to town with Ronnie, and I never saw him again. He was killed a year or so later in an air crash, but I expect you know that.’

‘
Do you think if he hadn’t bolted to China like that, he and Char might have made a go of it?’

‘
Yes,’ said Aunty Phyll, firmly, ‘I do. Of course, it would have been a marriage full of fireworks, but it would have been a marriage. He was the man for her, no doubt of it, but she chose to play safe, d’you see. Barny would have treated her as a grown-up and she didn’t want that, she felt safer as a child. And look where it got her; nearly forty years married to that bore George.’

We
were silent, listening to the raucous, canned laughter emanating from the lodgers’ TV. Suddenly the noise ceased, to be followed shortly by thunderous footsteps on the stairs, the slam of the front door, then blessed silence.

‘
You loved Char very much, didn’t you?’ Aunty Phyll said. ‘In spite of everything.’

Carefully,
I collected the tea things together and stacked them neatly on the tray, then swept the crumbs up with my handkerchief.

‘
Never mind that now, dear; you did, didn’t you? Most men did, you know, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

I
nodded, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I loved her.’

And
that was that.

12

For several days after my visit to Aunty Phyll’s I felt overcome with a sense of my own inadequacy. Was that really what people thought — Sophia too — that I was in love with the ghost of my mother-in-law? The last time I’d heard those words were from Beth, just before she walked out: ‘You’re in love with my bloody mother,’ she’d said. ‘You’re just as mad as she is.’

I
decided I was becoming morbidly obsessed with the past and needed a holiday. Sophia was in Geneva, involved in yet another conference, so as I had some leave due to me, I accepted a long-standing invitation from friends in New York. Returning ten days later having drunk more, talked more, met more people and visited more galleries and theatres than I had in years, I felt ready to tackle once again what seemed to be fast turning into some kind of personal odyssey; for I was slowly beginning to realise that whilst disinterring Char’s past, I was also, albeit rather painfully, clearing some of the accumulated rubbish and clutter from my own.

While
I’d been away Sophia had ferreted out the address of Natasha Marcolini, Pa’s second wife; she who ran off with the Italian gardener. She was, apparently, still alive and living in Gloucestershire. ‘Bed-ridden,’ Sophia said, ‘but on the ball. Her husband’s fifteen years her junior and still runs the market garden.’

I
told Sophia of Aunty Phyll’s meeting with Barny Elliott, but she merely said, as she had done after reading her mother’s diary, that she didn’t as yet know what her reaction to the knowledge of the real relationship between her parents might be. She would, she said, let me know when she did. ‘It was a long time ago and on the face of it, of little importance to anyone, but oddly enough I think it might have for me,’ was the only comment she made on the subject.

Natasha
Marcolini turned out to be a rather bacchanalian figure; a lady, perhaps, from a picture by Rubens. She greeted me from the depths of an enormous double bed covered in dogs. The famous hair, now dyed orange, was pinned into a sort of untidy cushion on top of her head, her body still voluptuous, beneath the slightly grubby flannelette nightdress and pink bed jacket she was wearing.

‘
So you are my little Char’s son-in-law,’ she said. Her voice, heavily accented in spite of a lifetime spent in England, was husky and seductive. ‘Sit down and tell me what you want to know.’ Then turning to the tall, gloomy young man who, having answered my rather timid summons at the front door, had silently conducted me upstairs to her bedroom, she shrieked: ‘Take those damned dogs out of here, they smell, and bring Mr Horton some tea.’ The young man’s expression didn’t change, but he suddenly let out a series of yodelling noises, in the manner of a huntsman calling in his hounds, to which the pack, much to my relief, instantly responded and surged, puffing, panting, tails wagging, off the bed and out of the room. The door closed behind them and Natasha smiled invitingly. One could see how gorgeous she must once have been. ‘Now, tell me,’ she said.

So
I told her, as best I could, what it was I had been trying to do, also a little about Char’s final years: the breakdowns; the collapse of her marriage to George.

‘
He was no good for her, that George, not strong enough. I knew from the first, and told her so, but she wouldn’t listen. Did you know I was with her when she met both her second and third husbands?’

I
shook my head. ‘George I know well, of course, but Char rarely spoke of Beth’s father. She did keep some of his letters, though. He sounds rather fun.’

‘
He was beautiful,’ Natasha said simply, ‘but fun? No, I think not.’ Outside the window someone was trying to start up a tractor; from another part of the house came the beat of rock music. There was a tap on the door and the young man reappeared carrying a tea tray. The tea pot was of heavily ornamented silver, the cracked sugar basin fine Chelsea, and instead of cups there were two mugs decorated with scenes from the life of Winnie the Pooh. The young man placed the tray on the rather spindly table by the bed, removing as he did so, several misty photographs in silver frames, which he carefully placed on the crowded dressing table. Natasha didn’t thank him and waited until he had once again left the room before she spoke. Had they had a row, I wondered, and who was he, anyway?

‘
Now Guy — I can call you Guy, can’t I? There’s a bottle of vodka and two glasses in the jerry cupboard. It will help us to endure Igor Ivanovitch’s tea.’ I obediently poured us each a small vodka. She sipped hers and smiled. ‘Aah, that is better. Now, where do you want me to begin?’

‘
Anywhere,’ I said. ‘Perhaps when you first met Char.’

‘
That is easy. I first met Char in the summer of 1926. She looked like a little brown bird, I remember. Her hair was short and fuzzy in those days and her figure like a boy. But then she would smile at you and throw back her head, so, and you could soon understand what the men saw in her. My Dick, her father, he had that smile too. It was formidable. Poor Algy, he adored her so it was quite ridiculous. We dined together, the four of us, at the Savoy, just after Dick and I were married. Dick was so nervous. He thought, you see, that Char and I would not get on. “To have a step-mother three years younger than herself, and she’s always been difficult,” he said. But it was like your Stanley and Livingstone; we looked at one another and clicked. “Ma’s such a bore,” Char would say. “Always going on about things; you’re much better,” and we would scream with laughter. The young can be very cruel.’

‘
What went wrong,’ I asked, ‘between her and Algy?’

‘
The sex ran out,’ she said simply. ‘Algy was a very attractive young man, but not so good as a lover. Once the babies started coming, he didn’t understand that because she’d had such a bad time, Char needed gentleness, imagination, understanding.

‘
“It’s just the same every night,” she would say. “He cleans his teeth, brushes his hair, puts his loose change on the dressing table, then climbs into bed in his nice, clean, striped flannel pyjamas, blows his nose and starts. I can’t stand it any more, and it hurts.” I tried to get Dick to make Algy understand, but, of course, he couldn’t; it was impossible for a man such as Dick to see such things. Well, naturally, soon Algy began to look elsewhere. He was never short of girlfriends, there were strings of them: his Dianas, and Daphnes, and Mollies. He would ask Char quite formally if she minded whether he took one away for the weekend. You know Char; she told him to do whatever he damned well liked, but the hurt was there all the same. But she simply could not understand that if she wanted to keep Algy, she must sleep with him, and gradually she lost him.’

‘
And Barny Elliott?’

‘
He was very important to her, I think. He woke her up, she said. But what was the good of that? The Prince rides up to the enchanted castle, wakes the Sleeping Beauty in her bower, and then rides off into the sunset without her. Dick and I were away for six months in ‘33, travelling around the world, so we never met him; we only got back in time to pick up the pieces.’ She smiled suddenly and gulped her vodka. Fleetingly I wondered if it was doing her any harm, but at four p.m. on a warm afternoon, it had already succeeded in making me fairly light-headed, so I, too, took another sip myself.

‘
Little Sophia, such a funny, grown-up, guilty sort of child. Are you in touch with her? She never married I believe.’

‘
Actually, I see quite a lot of her,’ I said. ‘Did you know she’s something pretty high up in NBZ?’ Natasha shook her head not, it seemed, all that impressed with this piece of information.

‘
Ah,’ and her leopard eyes searched my face, ‘you sleep with her — no?’

I
felt myself blush. ‘As a matter of fact, I do, but it’s in no way connected with—’

‘
Of course not.’ Her voice was soothing; pandering to a child. ‘She is beautiful?’

‘
Not beautiful exactly, but she has a quality, a sparkle; a sort of hint of wickedness mixed with goodness, hard to explain. We met at Char’s funeral. I hadn’t seen her in years. Perhaps it was me who had changed, but she seemed different to the way I remembered her.’

‘
Free from the guilt, perhaps. I wonder.’ She took a gulp of vodka and looked at me with eyes half closed. ‘No, you are not quite as I imagined, young man, not quite; there is something...something missing.’

I
looked at her blankly. ‘But I wasn’t aware. Sophia, has she—?’

Natasha
shrieked with laughter and then started to cough. ‘For many years after I left her father,’ she said when she had recovered, ‘Char and I would write each other a Christmas letter. We had no secrets, you know, she and I. We told each other everything. It was in her last letter, I think that she wrote of dear Guy, her oh-so-perfect son-in-law, and I thought, lucky Char to have such a one.’

‘
When did the letters stop?’ I asked, hoping to get her off the subject.

‘
In the 1970s. I wrote as usual and she never replied. After that there seemed no point in going on. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty years and probably never would again.’

For
a moment we contemplated the inexorable passing of time. She gestured to me to refill our glasses. I obeyed, knowing I should have to spend the night in a local pub. I couldn’t drive back to London in my present state.

‘
Did you know,’ Natasha said once we had settled down again, ‘Char became physically paralysed for a time, after the break-up of her marriage? We had her at Amberley and for weeks she lay in a darkened room. Of course, in those days there was little they could do for such cases but wait and hope things might get better. It was a trying time for all of us. Con insisted on coming to stay — Dick was always putty in that woman’s hands — and drove away all the servants. And the specialists we had from town said that Char might never recover. But they were wrong and she came out of it at last. I remember the moment so well: I was sitting beside her one morning as she lay in bed, her eyes wide open, simply staring up at the ceiling, reading to her from the newspaper. I would do this each day for a little while; the specialist had said it might help her to return to life. On this particular morning I was reading about Barbara Hutton collapsing from starvation and being taken into a nursing home, when Char suddenly said in her normal voice: “Stop reading that balls, Nat, I think I can hear the cuckoo.” We listened and so it was, a cuckoo, I mean; the first of summer, and the tears poured down my face.

‘
It was after that Dick and I took her to India with us. On the way home we stopped off at Colombo, and that’s when she met her second husband.’

‘
He was an actor, wasn’t he? My ex-wife, Beth, had an old photo of him as Sidney Carton, she—’

‘
We were dining out in Colombo,’ Natasha, well into her story, ignored my interruption. ‘Dick had many business acquaintances there — tea you know,’ I nodded. ‘Char was bored and sat smoking and twiddling her rings in the way she did when she was bored. Suddenly a little eternity ring she had, it was emerald and so pretty, shot off her finger and landed at the feet of a young man sitting two or three tables away from ours. He was with a party of noisy theatricals and was very handsome in an obvious sort of way: tall, good figure, black wavy hair, brown skin, you know the type, I’m sure.’ I nodded sagely. ‘Well, of course, he picked up the ring and brought it over to our table. He and Char looked at one another and pouf! That was it. He asked her to dance and off she went with him. Dick was furious and kept on about ill-mannered pansies, but there was nothing we could do. Later they disappeared to some nightclub or other and Dick and I went back to the ship without Char.

‘
Then about six o’clock the next morning there was a tap on my cabin door. I crept out of my bunk hoping not to wake Dick and there was Char looking quite radiant.

‘
“Nat, I’m in love. Dave and I have spent the night together.”

‘ “Darling, how nice,” I said. What else could one say, but my heart sank when she told me he was travelling back to England with us. The young man’s name was David Brent and he was the juvenile lead in an English theatrical touring company called the Gemini Players. They’d been touring the Far East for the previous two years and Colombo was their final booking before going home. The man who ran the company had apparently let them down and all any of them had left was their fare back to England.

‘
I think Char must have lent the boy some money — she had a big allowance from Algy in those days. Anyway, he was able to transfer from second to first class on the boat, which annoyed the other Geminis who had to slum it somewhere down in the hold. Of course, Char insisted Dave sat at our table for meals, which we found a little tiresome. “If that young dago tells me how his Hamlet went down in Timbuktu, or paws my daughter over the soup just once more, I swear I’ll wrap that damned silk scarf he wears round his neck and strangle him,” Dick said. Luckily, we did not see much of them on the voyage apart from meals. They spent most of their time in Char’s cabin, or playing ping pong; Dave was very good at that, I remember.

‘
“Nat, I feel cleansed,” Char told me. “We fuck and fuck and it just gets better all the time.”