Camellia (54 page)

'What went wrong in your life?'

He spun round, surprised by such a penetrating question so early in the day. Kate was sitting up in bed hugging her knees, her black hair tousled, her violet eyes bleary.

'What makes you ask that?' he said, immediately on the defensive. He picked up his pants from a chair and hastily put them on.

'I know you were very drunk last night, but I felt your suppressed anger and disappointment,' she said, raising one eyebrow. 'Why don't you tell me about it?'

For the first time ever he couldn't think of a quick retort. Her questioning eyes reminded him of his mother. He wondered if he'd screwed her and whether it had been a disaster.

'We didn't make love.' She smiled as if she'd tuned into his thoughts. 'I showed you where the bathroom was and the next thing I knew you were in my bed fast asleep. Now, Nick, I'm not a rich woman looking for a young plaything, I brought you home with me because I guessed you had nowhere else to go. If you don't want to talk to me you can take your clothes and leave now, but if you would like to stay, as a friend, I expect honesty.'

At first he told her just enough so she'd let him stay. Her home reminded him of his mother's taste – the soft pastel colours, the dainty china and flowers – and it felt soothing. Despite his first impressions, Kate wasn't wealthy: it was an ordinary semi-detached house, decorated and furnished with care, and she earned her living doing accountancy from home. She later told him that her ex-husband had given her the house as a divorce settlement.

After that first night she put him in her spare bedroom, a tiny yellow and white room that made him think of a nursery. She sent him back to Chelsea with only enough money for the return fare to pick up his belongings, and made him sign on at the Labour Exchange. He went along with it because he had no choice, but for the first day or two he spent a great deal of time considering stealing something from her and making off.

But Kate was wise to him: she gave him odd jobs to do around the house, leaving her office door open while she worked, and she had a knack of appearing with a cup of tea at crucial moments. As the days passed and his head cleared from the drugs which had been so much part of his life, he began to realise just how low he had sunk and how fortunate he was that he'd met Kate.

It was a long time since he'd had regular meals and Kate was a good cook. She made him help prepare the food and wash up, and in the evenings they watched the television together, listened to music or talked. She was restful company, interested in him, but not nosey, concerned about him, yet not overbearing. It was like a convalescence. Slowly he began to tell Kate about himself. The bitterness came out first: he put all the blame for his downfall onto other people and Kate listened and commiserated. Then he found himself moving back to tell her about his childhood, his older brother and sister, how his parents restored Oaklands, and the happy times until his mother died. Kate's gentle questions were like a key turning in a long-locked door.

He had never told anyone, not even Belinda how he hated his father for not bringing him home from school in time to see his mother before she died, but he told Kate. He told her how empty Oaklands had seemed in the long summer holidays, and described how he had made a conscious effort to do badly at school to get some sort of response from his father.

Finally he told her about Belinda, and what they'd had together. For the first time he was able to see that he alone was responsible for everything.

'Nick,' she said, fixing him with those lovely compassionate eyes, 'you haven't lost everything. You've just been flipped back to the start line. You are still young and handsome, you still have that talent which got you that television series. You have a father who loves you. You are healthy and strong. Now that's more than enough to start out again.'

'But my name is mud,' he said and to his shame he began to cry. 'I've hurt so many people. How can I start again?'

She put her arms around him and drew him to her big breasts as if he were a small boy. 'By looking deep into yourself and understanding why you did those things. It's my belief your mother's death is at the root of it all,' she said, gently caressing his neck. 'I suspect you locked your anger and sorrow inside you at the time. But these feelings can't stay shut away forever, and when they do finally rise to the surface we don't always recognise what they are.

'You felt powerful once you'd got your first good acting job. Maybe you were testing Belinda to make sure she loved you enough to stay forever, no matter how awful you were to her.'

'But I didn't want her then, I wanted to be free,' he sniffed.

'Did you?' She lifted his head between her two hands and looked right into his eyes. 'Then why did you blot out everything with drugs? Wasn't it because without them you felt exactly as you did after your mother died, alone and frightened? You have to learn to be a man now, Nick, to take responsibility for your own life.'

Kate was right about so many things. She knew nothing about the drug scene – the wildness of the sixties had passed her by – but she knew all about people's frailties.

Nick got a job as a barman in a pub in Barnes and Kate introduced him to a retired drama teacher who coached him for a couple of hours each afternoon. Every week they studied
The Stage
together and decided which auditions Nick should go to.

Seven months later in November that year, Nick finally came home to tell Kate he had a part in a television play about the army.

'It's only very small,' he said, throwing his arms around her and bouncing her up and down in her kitchen. 'I'm just one of the squaddies, not the hero, and I'll have to get my hair cut short. But it's a start, isn't it?'

'A whole new beginning,' she smiled. 'I'm so very proud of you, Nick. Now get on the phone and tell your Dad and make him proud too.'

Nick gave up the struggle to sleep and sat up to light a cigarette. He wondered how Kate was, the last time he heard from her she was getting married again and moving to Suffolk. If she had still been living out at Chiswick he could have gone to visit her tomorrow before going home. He could bet she'd have had some suggestions about finding Mel.

There was only Sir Miles Hamilton left to see now. Would such an old man be able to remember anything about an event twenty years earlier?

An elderly man with stooped shoulders and wire-rimmed spectacles answered the door at Sir Miles's house in Holland Park.

'Do come in,' he said and ushered Nick across a wide hall with a polished wooden floor and into a library at the back of the house. 'Sir Miles will be with you in a few minutes, Mr Osbourne.'

The library was warm and impressive. A large coal fire crackled away in the hearth and the entire wall space right up to the ceiling was filled with books. Nick was too nervous to sit down in one of the winged armchairs by the fire so he stayed standing, quickly running his eyes over the books to try and get an insight into the taste of the man whose name was so often in
The Stage.

There were the inevitable leather-bound classics, collections of poetry and legal books, but more interesting to Nick's mind was the enormous number of paperback thrillers. Somehow he had never imagined anyone with a title reading such books, let alone displaying them openly.

Nick braced himself at the sound of approaching feet, but as the door opened he was thrown. The black-and-white press photographs he had seen in the past hadn't prepared him for such a big or striking man.

Sir Miles wore a dark blue smoking jacket over grey flannel trousers, and a lighter blue cravat tucked into an open-necked shirt. He had several chins, a fat stomach and a somewhat bulbous red nose. Nick knew he was over eighty but he looked closer to sixty-five.

'Thank you for seeing me, sir,' Nick said holding out his hand.

Sir Miles gripped it firmly. 'I must confess to being a trifle intrigued by your phone call,' he said in a deep, almost growl. His eyes were almost hidden by folds of skin, showing only the dark pupils. 'You said it was a delicate matter.'

'Yes it is, sir. I'm still not quite sure how I should approach it.'

'It's quite private here.' Sir Miles motioned for Nick to sit down and took the other armchair himself. 'So fire away.'

If he knew Sir Miles better, Nick might have remarked how like W. C. Fields he looked. Instead he took out Sir Miles's letter to Bonny and handed it to him. 'This is the reason I wanted to talk to you, sir,' he said. 'This and some other letters from other men, including my father, were found by Camellia Norton on her mother's death.'

'Bonny's dead?' To Nick's surprise Sir Miles chuckled. 'What a relief for mankind.'

Nick had to smile. He liked irreverent people.

Sir Miles merely glanced at the letter, then tossed it back to Nick. 'Such a silly, empty-headed woman,' he said. 'Goodness only knows why Norton married her. She managed to charm my wife, but I never had any time for her.'

The old man's attitude was so indifferent that Nick felt his visit would prove to be a waste of time. But just in case he might get a little more background, he quickly launched into a brief explanation as to how he came by the letter.

'My father, Magnus, would have preferred to see you himself, but he isn't well enough,' he finished off.

'So you are Magnus Osbourne's son,' Sir Miles looked hard at him and frowned. 'I haven't seen him in years. We didn't know each other well, as I expect he's told you, but we ran into each other occasionally at social functions. A good man I believe.'

Nick wasn't sure that Miles had fully understood him; there was absolutely no reaction to hearing John Norton might not be Camellia's father. But then it was a complicated story, and he was very old.

'I believe you were a guest at the Nortons' wedding,' he said. 'Did you have any reason to doubt John was Camellia's father?'

'None what so ever!' Miles exclaimed. 'I felt a great deal of sympathy for John that he was so besotted with that woman, but I saw him many times right up until a few months before his untimely death and everything he ever said about the child, pointed to her being his flesh and blood.'

'Would you mind telling me what Bonny said in her letter to you?' Nick said warily. 'You used the word "scandal" in your reply, and you sounded angry. I don't wish to pry into your affairs, I'm just trying to build up a picture of what happened back then.'

'It was clap-trap. She made up a ridiculous, vicious story which I have no intention of divulging. But you can take it from me that Magnus is not the girl's father.'

Sir Miles raised his voice as he spoke. It sounded as if Nick had annoyed him, and that those were his final words on the subject. But Nick wasn't about to give up that easily. 'Has Camellia ever called on you, sir?' He hoped he might be able to come back to the letter from a different angle.

'I'm told a girl did come here a couple of years ago. It may have been her. I was abroad at the time.'

'Then you've never met her?'

'I saw her, of course, when she was a small child. But not since.'

'Not since the letter from Bonny?' Nick prompted.

'Certainly not.' His face flushed an even darker red and his voice was full of indignation. 'And after that dreadful business in Chelsea!' He stopped suddenly.

'So you knew about that then?' Nick couldn't help smiling. 'Then you must have known Bonny was dead too?'

'Now look here, young man,' Sir Miles blustered. 'How dare you come into my house and question me? I don't like your tone at all.'

I'm sorry, sir, I didn't mean to be offensive,' Nick said ingratiatingly. 'But you see I'm just trying to piece together a puzzle. While doing so I have found out a great many things, and one thing is perfectly plain: Camellia is a victim of events which started before her birth. Even that business in Chelsea, as you called it, wasn't her fault – and neither was she guilty of any wrong-doing.'

'Rubbish, she was a prostitute.'

Nick smarted, but he was determined to charm something out of this old man at all costs. 'Sir Miles,' he said quietly. 'You are a man of great experience. I'm sure you know as well as I do that not everything in the papers is strictly true. Camellia was a nightclub hostess; she was never a prostitute. Please consider for a moment what Camellia had been through. She lost her father at six, her mother at fifteen and during the years in-between not only did all the old friends of her parents who might have given her life a little more balance jump ship, but she saw a parade of men pass through her home, and all her father's money squandered. She came to London without any friends, family or qualifications. Becoming a nightclub hostess may not have been the smartest thing to do, but then she had no one to guide her. She learned her lesson the hard way.'

'She was a prostitute,' the old man said belligerently.

'She wasn't. I spent an evening two days ago with a policeman who knew everything about the case. She was just a hostess.'

'Same thing,' Sir Miles said stubbornly.

'You know it isn't. I'm sure you've been to clubs often and met hostesses. Are you saying every single one of those was a prostitute?'

'Yes, loose women the lot of them.'

Nick could see black humour in this situation. Sir Miles was sitting there dressed like a playboy, a lifetime of the theatre behind him, yet staunchly pretending he thought all nightclubs were dens of vice.

Sir Miles pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. 'Look at the rest of the evidence against her? She'd hardly recovered from her injuries and her girlfriend dies of a drug overdose. The police found endless pornographic pictures of the girl.'

'Not Camellia,' Nick said firmly. He wanted to comment on what a remarkable memory the man had, but he didn't dare. 'She wasn't even called as a witness when the photographer was on trial.'

Sir Miles snorted and lapsed into silence.

Nick waited for a moment or two before pressing him again. 'Let's put all that business aside now,' he suggested. 'You see it's not really relevant anyway. For two years now Camellia has worked hard for my father. He has become very fond of her and she practically ran the hotel. Look at this picture, sir?' Nick reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph of himself and Camellia taken in Weston-super-Mare.