Shalimar the Clown (48 page)

The event that would shatter the cocoon of the lie in which she lived took place some months later, in November 1974, when there was a notorious, bloody murder on Lower Belgrave Street, in the house at number 46. An English aristocrat named Lord Lucan, estranged and living apart from his wife Veronica, entered the family home in the evening of November 7 wearing a hood, and, in the basement kitchen, murdered his children’s nanny, Mrs. Sandra Rivett, probably mistaking her, in the dark, for his wife. He went upstairs and in spite of the presence in the house of his three young children assaulted Lady Lucan violently, forcing three gloved fingers down her throat, then trying to strangle her, gouge out her eyes and bludgeon her on the head. She was a tiny woman, but she grabbed his testicles and squeezed, and when he crumpled in pain she escaped. She ran down the street and burst into the Plumber’s Arms crying murder. Lord Lucan escaped, abandoning his car in the port town of Newhaven, and was never found. He left behind several notes to friends, many of them financial in content, and several large gambling debts.

John Bingham, “Lucky” Lucan, was the seventh earl. The third earl of Lucan had acquired his own bad reputation 120 years earlier. During the Crimean War, the third earl was the man responsible for ordering the catastrophic charge of the Light Brigade. This was during the battle of Balaclava. Curiously enough, the woollen hood worn by his murderous great-great-grandson was of the type known as a balaclava.

On the morning after these events a police officer rang the Rhodes household’s doorbell and asked if anyone had heard anything unusual the previous night. India had been asleep, and Peggy Rhodes said she had heard nothing. When the story broke in the evening papers, and everyone knew about Lady Lucan’s run to safety, India wondered how Peggy could have failed to notice something, considering that it was an unseasonably warm evening and their sitting-room windows had been opened wide; and, after all, the Plumber’s Arms was right across the street. Later the police returned to ask Peggy if, as a fellow member of the high-roller Clermont Club, she had known Lord Lucan. “No,” she said, “I knew him by sight, but he wasn’t particularly a friend.” India had heard her mother speak more than once about her “chums,” Aspinall, Elwes and Lucky, yet now she was lying to the police, why was that. She afterwards learned that her mother wasn’t the only liar in the story. One widely held view was that the upper class had closed ranks to protect one of their own behind an aristocratic version of
omertà,
the Sicilian code of silence. But India heard Peggy sobbing hard at night.
John, oh John.
She drew no conclusions. She was only seven years old. A few days later the police issued a statement criticizing Lucan’s set for being unhelpful to the inquiry and pointing out that withholding information in a murder case was a criminal offense, even if the withholders were millionaires and aristocrats. But India had forgotten all about Lucky Lucan by then, because two days after the murder Peggy Rhodes had come to her in her bedroom at night, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping, and said, “There are things I must tell you, yes, yes. Hum! Ha! Things you ought to know.”

You have a daddy.
One month after the Grey Rat, in the grip of an unexplained emotion, gave her father a name, Maximilian Ophuls was standing at the door of the house in Lower Belgrave Street holding flowers and a stupid doll. “I don’t play with dolls,” India told him solemnly, revealing much about Peggy’s attitude to parenting and taste in children’s toys. “I like bows and arrows and slingshots and excaliburs and guns.” Max looked back at her straight-faced and thrust the doll into her hands. “Here,” he said. “Use her for target practice. It’s no fun if you don’t have a target.” Then he picked her up and hugged her hard and she fell in love with him, just like everybody else. He sat her beside him in the back of a large silver car and told the driver to take them as fast as possible to a posh restaurant by the river. He was sixty-four years old and knew the words to the song, send me a postcard, drop me a line. Will you still need me, will you still feed me. “You’re a very old daddy, aren’t you,” she asked him over ice cream. “Are you going to die soon?” He shook his head very seriously. “No, my plan is never to die,” he said. “You will one day,” she argued. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe when I’m two hundred and sixty-four and too blind to see it coming. But until then, pah! I snap my fingers at Death, I thumb my nose at him, and then I bite my thumb.”

She giggled. “So do I,” she said, but she couldn’t snap her fingers. “Anyway,” she added, “I want to die when I’m two hundred and sixty-four as well.”

By the end of the day he was nuzzling her neck and finding the birds hidden there and she was learning the words to “Alouette” and she was climbing up his shoulders and then somersaulting back and away. When he delivered her back to her mother he looked the Grey Rat in the eye and thanked her, and she knew he had stolen the girl from her, that from now on his daughter would no longer be hers. If I’m his daughter I should have his name, the girl said that night, and Peggy Rhodes didn’t know how to refuse, and India Ophuls was born. What about my mummy, the girl said, tucked up in bed with a night-light sending stars whirling across her ceiling. I want to know about my mummy too. Is she really dead or is she hiding like Daddy was. Peggy Rhodes lost her temper.
That woman is dead to everyone now—all right? mmm?—but she was already, ah, ah, dead to me in life. She left her husband and tried to steal your daddy away and—pah!—had his baby and was ready to abandon it and where would you have been if I hadn’t taken you in. She was going to leave you behind, hmm? hmm?, and go back where she came from and she didn’t want the shame of a baby, didn’t want the shame—d’you see?—of you. Then there were, ah, complications and she, hmph, died.
What did she die of? Where was she going back to?
I won’t answer these questions.
But didn’t she like me really?
It doesn’t matter. She didn’t choose you. I chose you.
But mummy, what was my mummy’s name?
I’m your mummy.
No, mummy, my real mummy, I mean.
I’m your real mummy. Good night.

Then Max disappeared from her life again. “I’m afraid he’s like that, dear,” the Grey Rat told her flatly, “I know he’s your father but you must understand, ahmm, he’s sort of the fly-by-night type,” and when he finally did show up, twice a year, on her birthday and on Christmas morning, there were things he wasn’t saying, things he wouldn’t talk about, and it took her close to a decade to understand the hidden war between the woman she lived with and was growing to hate and the father she barely knew but loved with all her heart, she never understood him until he saved her life. Max never spoke against Peggy, and even when India beseeched him he never betrayed the secrets the Grey Rat did not want revealed, knowing that his ability to see his daughter at all depended on accepting the Grey Rat’s ferocious terms, but for a long time India blamed him for his absences and silences, and her anger with him screwed her up even more than her dislike of the woman she lived with, because he was the lovable one, he was the one she wanted to see every day and laugh at and somersault off and drive with in fast cars and shoot BB pellets into dolls with and embrace and kiss and love. She didn’t understand that the woman she lived with had banished Max again, had denied him all but the most perfunctory access to the increasingly truculent adopted daughter for whom she, Peggy, had such mixed feelings but who represented the bone of contention in her undying quarrel with Max, and who consequently had to be held on to even if her presence was a daily reminder of past shame.

“Yes, your mother is dead,” he told India when she asked him. He had his own reasons for confirming his ex-wife’s untruth. “Yes, it’s just as Margaret said.” Then he said no more.

These were the confusions inside which India Ophuls grew up in the 1970s. She held herself together for a few years, she went hungry for three hundred and sixty-three days of the year and made do with the two days of feasting, but as she neared thirteen she wore the stricken look of a storm-tossed ship heading toward jagged inescapable rocks. When puberty struck, she went dramatically off the rails. There followed a delinquent descent into hell. Hell seemed preferable to the overworld of lying mothers and absent fathers in which she was trapped, and from which, during her ruined adolescence, she consequently tried to escape down all the various self-destructive routes available to her. The downward spiral had been fast, and she had been lucky to survive the smash at the end of it. By the age of fifteen she had been a truant, a liar, a cheat, a dropout, a thief, a teenage runaway, a junkie and even, briefly, a tart plying for trade in the shadow of the giant gas cylinders behind King’s Cross Station. Waking up in her L.A. bedroom to find the woman she loathed looking down at her with eager Olga by her side, she felt her repressed fifteenth year boiling back into her head, like the high tide churning through a breach in a vellard. She fought the memories down but they insisted on rising. She remembered a sweating, febrile room with stains on the walls and a stranger unzipping his pants. She remembered the drugs, the hallucinogens putting reason to sleep and bringing forth monsters, the hard brightness of white powder, the needle’s deadly bliss, the white fedora of the Jamaican pimp. She remembered violence done to her and by her, she remembered retching, and shivering in the heat, and a face in the mirror so pale and blue it made her scream. She remembered slashing her wrists and swallowing pills. She remembered stomach pumps. She remembered a judge’s harsh words for the woman whose name she would never use again,
You have been, madam, an abject failure as a parent,
and she remembered that it had been Max who saved her, Max who swooped down from the sky like an eagle and scooped her out of the gutter, who told the woman she loathed that he would no longer stand silently by, who asked the judge for judgment and prised that woman’s clutching fingers off his child’s wounded arms and spirited his daughter away to be healed, first at a Swiss clinic high up on what she would always think of as the Magic Mountain, and then by sunshine, palm trees and the cobalt blue of the Pacific. She imagined his last conversation with the woman she hated,
You had your chance with her but you’ll never have another one,
she heard him saying, and saw in fancy’s eye the bitter features of the Grey Rat contort like Rumplestiltskin’s into a mask of defeat.

Take her then,
she said.

Outside the realm of India’s imagination, however, Max Ophuls went on refusing to criticize his former wife, perhaps because of his feelings of guilt about his old betrayal. Once or twice, in tones of sorrow, he spoke about the power of life’s violent blows and slow agonies to divert a good person from his or her natural path, just as dynamite or erosion can—dramatically or gradually—change the course of a river, and in these speeches he might have been talking about Margaret, but he might also have been describing himself. And his secretiveness was a trait he shared with his ex-wife, they were both citizens of the underworld, they both had things to hide. But at least he understood about underworlds and followed India all the way down into her own private inferno and stayed by her side for months on end, until the dark god released her and let her follow him up into the light, and the Swiss doctors pronounced her well enough to reenter the overworld of ordinary life and he brought her down from the mountain in the back of a new Bentley driven by a new liveried chauffeur, cradling her in his arms as if she were the Ten Commandments, and restored her, if not to ordinary life, then to Los Angeles, at least.

The house on Mulholland Drive was sprawling, with staff quarters, stables, a tennis court, a guest cottage and a pool, and built in the Spanish Mission style, white walled, with barrel-tiled roofs and a bell tower that reminded her of Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
and gave the place an inappropriately ecclesiastical air. She thought of Kim Novak falling from the tower of the San Juan Bautista Mission at the end of the movie and shuddered and refused her father’s offer to take her up to the top of the tower to show her the carillon. For a while, when she first arrived in L.A., she stayed indoors, curled up in chairs and corners, grateful to be alive, but taking her time to make sure she was safe. She preferred to keep her feet on the ground and a roof over her head. The stone floors felt cool beneath her unshod feet and the stained glass in the living-room windows poured colors over her every day. Kim Novak had played an impostor, a woman called Judy, hired to impersonate a woman named Madeleine Elster whose husband had murdered her. There were days when India felt like an impostor too, when she felt as if she’d been hired by Max to impersonate a daughter who had died.

Max’s study was a somber anomaly in this house of color and light: wood paneled, with heavy European couches and mahogany tables, its shelves lined with books printed long ago by Art & Aventure, a Belle Époque movie set of a room designed to echo another long-lost room, his father’s library in Strasbourg: more a memory than a place. He did not allow himself the open sentimentality of hanging his parents’ pictures on the wall. The room itself was their portrait. He spent much of his day in this room, reading and remembering, and allowed his daughter the run of the rest of the big, empty old place. One day, rummaging through the closets in the guesthouse, she found a hatbox containing a short blond wig, a castoff of one of her father’s long-forgotten lovers, and she backed away from it, terrified, as if it were a death sentence. There was something of James Stewart’s slow grace in Max and when the shadows fell across his face in a certain way he scared her. He had to remind her that Jimmy Stewart hadn’t been the murderer in
Vertigo,
he was the good guy. She had been a little crazy in those days too, clean but skittish, but he had waited her out. Which is not to say he was kindly. Kind, yes, in his way, good in a crisis, expecting no thanks for doing what he saw as his duty, but not kindly. When she brought up Kim Novak and the blond wig in the closet he did not restrain his tongue. “Be so good,” he said at the conclusion of an eloquent tirade, “as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that’s what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.”