That Gallagher Girl (11 page)

‘The photographs . . .?' she prompted now.

‘Were mildly pornographic. The redtops loved the fact that an actress who had appeared in classical productions penned by such literary giants as Chekhov and Ibsen, and who had wound up married to Ireland's answer to Picasso, began her career posing for a lads' magazine.'

‘Just how graphic were the pictures?'

‘Page three stuff, mostly – tits and ass, you know? The kind of pictures loads of pretty teenage girls get suckered into doing in return for the promise of fame and fortune, and very little hard cash. But my sister made me look ridiculous, and I couldn't forgive her for that.'

‘And the other sister?'

‘She didn't actually borrow money – she borrowed a painting of Hugo's that she'd admired. I warned her it wasn't hers to sell, but she went ahead and did it anyway. It fetched five hundred thousand at Sotheby's last year.' Ophelia gave a mirthless laugh. ‘It would have fetched twice that, before the recession.'

They were playing ball, now. ‘Is money important to you, Ophelia?' Keeley asked.

‘Yes. Money is important to anyone who didn't have enough of it, growing up. I worked hard for any money I ever made, and it makes me mad to think that people like my sisters profiteer on the back of my success.'

Keeley was seeing a different side now to the woman who romped with her dog and who baked cakes and scattered corn for her hens. She liked it.

‘So when you hit upon the idea of writing a children's book, just who were you writing it for? Your unborn baby?'

‘No,' said Ophelia. ‘I hit on the idea for the book before I even knew I was pregnant. I wrote it . . . I hope you won't think I'm being precious, Keeley, if I tell you that I wrote it for my inner child – for the little girl who wore her sisters' hand-me-downs and who was constantly being told she was a bad girl and who had her hair hacked off when she was five because she had nits. I wrote it for Tracey.'

‘Tracey?'

‘Tracey was my name before I became an actress. There was already a Tracey Spence in British Actors' Equity, so it seemed an ideal opportunity to change my name to the one belonging to my favourite Shakespeare heroine.' Ophelia smiled, a little sadly. ‘I used to read Ophelia's speeches out loud to myself at night, to try and drown out the noise of my parents rowing in the kitchen downstairs.'

Yes! Keeley fucking
loved
it! Already in her mind's eye she saw the strap line for her ‘Epiphany' piece: some pertinent quote from
Hamlet, ‘
More matter with less art,' or something. Maybe she'd ask the photographer to set up a shot of Ophelia floating on her back in the lake, mirroring the image made famous by Millais, of the drowned tragic heroine. But just as she was about to ask the actress if she'd be up for it, there came the sound of a crash outside in the hallway, and she heard a man's voice boom, ‘How many times have I told you not to leave that dog lying there in the hall? It's fucking Stygian without the lights on! Even a blind man could trip over a black Labrador in the dark.'

Keeley and Ophelia exchanged looks.

‘My husband,' said Ophelia with remarkable equanimity. ‘I have to say, I had hoped he wouldn't be joining us.'

‘No worries,' said Keeley. ‘This interview is with you, not your husband. I'm turning off my tape recorder now.' And Keeley did just that.

Then the door to the sitting room opened and Hugo Gallagher lunged through. Recovering himself, he placed a hand on the door jamb, and fixed Ophelia with a basilisk look. A lesser woman might have quailed, but Ophelia rose to her feet gracefully, and said, with steel in her voice, ‘Hugo, this is Keeley Considine. She's interviewing me for the
Sunday Insignia
.'

Hugo turned the beam of his attention on Keeley. ‘The
Insignia
, is it? The
Sunday-
fucking-
Insignia
? Ha! What a load of wankers! What a shower of shits!'

‘Nice to meet you, Mr Gallagher,' said Keeley. ‘We actually met once before, at an exhibition opening of yours in the Demeter Gallery in Dublin, many years ago.'

‘Did I ride you?'

‘No. But you rode my colleague, Stephanie.'

Hugo gave Keeley a narrow-eyed look of assessment, and then he smiled the smile that had made hundreds of women go weak at the knees, fall at his feet and beg him to take them to bed – just as Keeley's colleague Stephanie had done. Even in his cups, even at fifty-something, Hugo Gallagher was a fiendishly attractive man.

‘Have a drink, Ms . . .
Sunday Insignia
person,' he said, waving his hand towards the laden butler's tray on the other side of the room.

‘I've had tea, thank you.'

‘Tea? What are you? A journalist or a mouse?'

A journalist. She was a journalist, through and through. No self-respecting hack would turn down an opportunity like this! To be invited to partake of a drink with a major artist – one of Europe's most notorious – was the kind of gig most of her tribe would kill for. Sure, she'd told Ophelia she'd turned off her tape recorder; sure, the interview was now officially over. But the insight she'd get into the way this couple worked would be invaluable if she joined them for a drink. Well – if she joined Hugo for a drink. Ophelia would, presumably, be sticking to tea.

‘I'll have a Jameson, thanks,' she said.

‘My love?' Hugo smiled at Ophelia. ‘Some of your homemade elderflower cordial?'

‘Thank you.'

Hugo ambled across the room and proceeded to fix drinks. The bottle of sparkling water to which he helped himself fizzed all over the butler's tray, and as he flailed around, trying to wrench the cap off, his elbow narrowly missed a decanter of amber liquid.

‘Oh, let me do it!' said Ophelia, raising her eyes to heaven. ‘Sit down, Hugo – and mind that decanter!'

‘It's a hideous decanter,' he retorted, gazing at it as if he had never seen it before. ‘I've been meaning to put it out of its misery for ages. What is such a hideous object doing in my house, anyway? Who let it in?'

‘It was a wedding present.'

‘You mean, we're married?'

‘Very droll, darling.'

‘I have absolutely no recollection of our wedding day,' Hugo told Keeley, unleashing his lethal smile at her before lowering himself on to the piano stool. ‘Any requests? Rachmaninov?'

‘Something a little less rousing, please,' said Ophelia, testily. ‘The baby doesn't like Rachmaninov.'

‘Oh, yes. The baby. What'll I play? Khachaturian? Caitlín used to love that.'

Caitlín. What had happened to little waiflike Caitlín? Keeley wondered. How did the third Mrs Gallagher feel about little, waiflike Caitlín? It was impossible to tell from her expression, since her back was turned, but Keeley sensed a stiffening at the mention of the name. She guessed that maybe – as often happened when a spouse died and the father remarried – there was little love lost between stepmother and stepdaughter.

‘Honestly, Hugo,' scolded Ophelia, rearranging bottles. ‘The water's got everywhere. Excuse me, Keeley, while I fetch a cloth.' Giving Hugo a dirty look, Ophelia left the room, Lulu the Labrador padding at her heels.

‘Caitlín is your daughter, yes?' Keeley asked, watching Hugo as he riffled through a pile of sheet music.

‘As far as I know, Caitlín is my daughter,' he said. ‘It's a wise man, as they say, who knows his own father.'

‘Where is she now?'

‘She should be in London, studying at the Slade. But she's not. She's pissing about on the west coast somewhere.' Hugo raised his eyes from the score he was studying. ‘She could have been a contender, my daughter. She had talent. But instead she's wasting her formative years messing about on boats.'

‘She sails?'

‘Spent every summer of her life at sailing school, far as I know.'

‘Do you sail, Hugo?'

‘No. Hate the water. Caitlín was a waterbaby, like her mother.'

Keeley remembered the harassed-looking woman who had cast anxious looks at her husband at the Demeter Gallery all those years ago. She was dead now, while her husband – to go by appearances – was intent on drinking himself to death. Half-cut at half-past four in the afternoon! He'd be stotious by dinner time.

What kind of a life did Ophelia Gallagher really lead, marooned in the Crooked House with her chickens and her dog and her soak of a husband? Keeley wondered. What class of a life had Caitlín had, growing up here, beside the lake, beneath the sad cypresses? What class of a life would her baby half-sister or half-brother have, once it was born? She found herself wondering if Hugo might not be a more interesting subject for one of her ‘Epiphanies' than his wife, before recollecting that he'd dismissed the staff of the
Sunday Insignia
as a shower of wankers and shits, and would hardly be likely to oblige.

‘You don't have a very high opinion of the press, Hugo, do you?'

He laughed. ‘The
Insignia
art critic trashed my early work. He called it the “maladroit daubs of a fixated amateur”. But that was hardly surprising.'

‘How so?'

‘He was a fellow Slade graduate, who had had even less success than I did, back in the eighties. He was – is – a mean-minded bollix.'

Keeley knew the critic in question: a man with knock-out halitosis and a bad habit of talking to his female colleagues' tits instead of to their faces.

‘He's changed his opinion now, though,' she reminded Hugo. ‘He rates your work very highly.'

‘Of course he rates it. He'd look like a complete tool if his reviews continued to be out of kilter with everyone else's. It's currently fashionable to rate me.' He leaned forward, and skewered her with a look. ‘Tell me this. If my wife were married not to me, but to some two-bit actor or second-rate Sunday painter, do you think she would have got herself a book deal?'

‘I can't answer that question, since I haven't read the manuscript.'

‘Then let me put it another way. Would you have thought her worthy of one of your in-depth interviews if she was plain Tracey Spence instead of the fragrant Ophelia Gallagher?'

Keeley gave him a level look. ‘No,' she said.

‘I thought as much. And you wonder why I have such a low opinion of the “ladies” and “gentlemen” of the press?' He leaned back, and rested an arm on the lid of the piano. ‘You're a fairly seasoned hack at this stage. How many interviews have you done for the
Insignia
?'

‘I've done one a week for the past year.'

‘Do you enjoy your work?'

Keeley shrugged. ‘I'll 'fess up to feeling tired. Before the
Insignia
, I spent ten years on a paper in New York, and sometimes you learn . . . unsettling . . . stuff about human nature during an interview. It's a little like being a therapist, I guess. People reveal a lot more about themselves than they realise.'

‘And do you take advantage? When people spill a few too many beans?'

‘I like to think I have integrity.'

‘Not a word many people associate with your profession.'

He turned away from her rudely, and resumed his perusal of Khachaturian or Rachmaninov or whatever high-falutin' classical ditties he was into. Keeley felt like telling him to go fuck himself. She was fed up with people curling their lips at her and calling her an unprincipled hack. Not that she'd be a ‘hack' for much longer, she thought, ruefully. She had only three interviews left to file before she'd fulfil her contractual obligations on the
Insignia
. . . and then what?

She had, like thousands of other journalists, toyed with the idea of writing a book. Lots of her colleagues talked about the books they were going to write, but none of them had ever managed to get themselves a publishing deal – unlike lucky Ophelia Gallagher, with the high six-figure advance negotiated for her by superagent Tony ‘The Tiger' Baines. She wondered if Ophelia was aware of just how hard she would have to work in order to earn out her advance.

Keeley knew the reality that lay behind the glittering masque of book launches and press junkets; the sheer slog involved in hauling yourself onto the bestseller lists. She pictured Ophelia touting her children's book around the London Book Fair; or sitting in a booth at the BBC doing interview after interview after interview until she was sick of the sound of her own name (and that of her book); or languishing behind a table in WH Smiths, hoping that more than one person would ask her to sign the title page – and then she realised that she hadn't asked Ophelia who was going to illustrate the book. Presumably, since it was a children's title, the book would be illustrated – and, given the size of her advance, lavishly illustrated at that? Who, she wondered, did the publishers have in mind? Hardly the saturnine Hugo, who was known for his atmospheric abstracts and esoteric symbolism.

‘Who is to illustrate Ophelia's book?' she asked Hugo.

‘Who indeed?' he said, opening the lid of the piano and setting a score upon the music rest. ‘I know who
should
be fucking illustrating it, that's for sure. But Ophelia won't countenance it.'

‘Who?'

‘My daughter, Caitlín, that's who.'

‘What about Caitlín?'

Ophelia was back, bearing a glass cloth printed with a reproduction of a Rousseau painting and a dish of macadamia nuts.

‘I was telling Keeley,' said Hugo, ‘that my daughter Caitlín should be illustrating your children's book, not that buffoon your publishers have landed you with.'

‘Jasper is not a buffoon. He is a highly respected illustrator.'

‘Caitlín could do the job better with her hands tied behind her back.'

‘Very funny, Hugo.' Ophelia set about mopping up the spilled water. ‘Do you know Jasper Douglas' work, Keeley?'