Darling Sweetheart (25 page)

The stark décor persisted into her bedroom. She closed the Venetian blinds, turned on a small bedside lamp, propped herself up on her pillows and poured a substantial glass of wine. She gulped it down then poured another. She wanted a cigarette but knew there were none in the house. She noticed that a metal-framed photograph lay face-down on the bedside table. She lifted it into her lap. She remembered Jimmy putting it flat because he said it creeped him out while they were having sex. A sudden surge of shame washed through her at the thought of having sex with Jimmy Lockhart.

In the photograph, her father was crouched in front of a rubber-tyred wheel, which she knew to be that of an aeroplane. She knew this because there she was beside him, not quite six years old, her little face creased by a self-conscious smile. Her hair was short and she wore dungarees; more a boy, at that age, than a girl. Her father had one arm over her shoulders and she was holding Froggy.

Mr Crombie had puffed as he had knelt to take the photograph. Her father had barked instructions; he had only just
landed at Whin Abbey and had said he wanted to record an important occasion. He had made his last film, he had announced; now he’d be staying home for good.

Lying on her bed eighteen years later, Annalise thought how everyone keeps a diamond lodged in their hearts, a shiny, indestructible shard made from their happiest childhood memories, compressed together by the grinding forces of adulthood. With the passing of time, scattered moments are squeezed together to form a perfect prism, through which all subsequent joy is viewed and inevitably found wanting. Her own happiest years had begun when this photograph was taken and had lasted just as long as her father had kept his word.

She thought back to her next clear memory of that time – him driving her to school in one of his fancy cars. Until then, at her mother’s insistence, she had always walked the four miles there and back. All the other parents and children had stared at him. He had never been to her school before and, whilst everyone for miles around obviously knew that a film star owned the abbey, practically no one had ever actually met him. Her teacher, Mrs O’Kane, had nodded and smiled at everything he’d said, as if he was the boss of her, the boss of the school, the boss of everything in the world. As if by magic, Katie Brennan and Hannah Cowen had stopped hitting her at breaktime, although they had still called her a bitch and a whore. Every day after that, her father had asked her whether the other children had been nice to her. She’d always said that they had.

Froggy had been as pleased as Annalise to have Darling Sweetheart stay at home. Together, they had watched TV in her playroom. She had lots of tapes, but their favourite thing had been Zig and Zag, a pair of puppets on Irish television. They had a real person who looked after them called Ray, and they had been cheeky to him and Darling Sweetheart had made Froggy get very excited at that and shout funny things at the screen.

Once, he had spent days climbing ladders around the old ballroom. He had hung a huge glitterball from the ceiling – goodness knows where he’d bought it – and had set up a music stereo and coloured lights, the lot. It had been their own private disco, and the two of them had danced, night after night, to Soft Cell, to Strauss, to Sly and the Family Stone, but most of all, to Ella Fitzgerald, as she sang ‘Call Me Darling, Call Me Sweetheart, Call Me Dear’… twirling around the room, laughing, singing along, just happy to be together.

But best of all had been the plays, up in the library. He had started off by reading her bedtime stories there, a solemn ritual that had involved pulling two armchairs together; he had sat in one, she and Froggy in the other. Then, she had watched as he became lots of different people. Her favourite stories were from
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
and Doctor Seuss. He had read her
The Hobbit
and after that she had made him read all of
Lord of the Rings
which he had complained would be way too hard for her, but she and Froggy had loved Gollum so much, it was worth all the boring bits about dead kings and elves for the bits where Gollum made an appearance. Froggy had said Gollum was the coolest person who had ever lived. Then, one day, Darling Sweetheart had said it was time to try something else; he had showed her a book called
The Tempest
and had said they were going to learn Act I, Scene 2. At first, she had understood nothing, but patiently, he had explained every line. Then, he’d read Prospero and Ariel whilst, slowly at first, she’d tried to be Miranda. To make it more fun, he’d made Froggy be Caliban, ‘You taught me language and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse! The red plague rid you for learning me your language!’ She’d kept corpsing – that was the word, he’d told her, for laughing when you shouldn’t. One morning, the house had woken to a shriek from Mrs Crombie when she’d arrived up to clean. During the night, Darling Sweetheart had hauled every potted plant in from the walled garden and a huge fallen tree branch from one of the
fields and had dumped the whole lot in the black-and-white tiled hallway. ‘David, you lunatic, what on earth are you doing?’ her mother had shouted, standing on the stone steps in her nightdress. ‘Why, isn’t it obvious, you silly woman? I’m building Prospero’s island!’

That night, with him wearing an old curtain for a cloak and Annalise in one of her mother’s dresses, they had staged Act I, Scene 2 of
The Tempest
as a command performance for her mother and the Crombies, the three had sat on dining chairs in the plant-filled hallway. Annalise never forgot the deliciousness of that first formal applause; how her mother had stood at the end and presented her with a bouquet of white roses as she, Froggy and Darling Sweetheart took their bows.

But then, other times, he had got into moods and had locked himself in a bathroom or hidden in the creepo chapel. It had always been her and Froggy who had persuaded him to come out again. Banging on the door and shouting, ‘David, I hope you rot in there you bloody great child’ did not work. When her mother had done that, he had shouted rude things back, then she had run and cried on her bed. So Annalise had learned to wait patiently outside wherever her father was hiding, with Froggy on her knee, until eventually he had opened up, crawled out to her and put his big head in her little lap and said, ‘I’m sorry, poppet, I’m just a rotten bastard.’ And she had stroked his hair and said, ‘Rubbish, how can you be a rotten bastard when you are my Darling Sweetheart?’

‘Why do you call me that?’ he asked her one summer, as they lay together on the lawn, amongst the whins with their yellow buds; buds that made the air smell as if heaven had descended to earth in the form of wild vanilla. ‘Why do you call me Darling Sweetheart? Ever since you could talk, you’ve called me that; one minute it was Da Da Da then, all of a sudden, I was Darling Sweetheart. Is it because of that Ella Fitzgerald song?’

‘It’s just my name for you.’

He laughed. ‘The best part I ever played, eh? Devised and written by a little girl…’

When she woke, she felt like she’d been crucified. She could barely move her arms and her neck hurt like hell. She had fallen asleep spreadeagled on the duvet wearing Roselaine’s dress. White-wine pain flashed behind her eyes – the bottle was empty on the floor. Groaning, she rolled onto her side and saw that the framed photograph had fallen to the floor, too. The glass was cracked down the middle; she felt like weeping. She no more felt like going to Shepperton to meet Emerson than travelling to the moon. She rummaged through her bedside drawer, where, thank all the deities that mankind ever invented, she found a curled-up tray of Anadin with two tablets left. Gagging, she swallowed them dry, staggered to the bathroom, turned on the shower and fell into it.

She stood under the spray for a long time, letting the hot water massage the pain in her head and neck. When she finally stepped out, the bathroom had steamed up. She wrapped herself in a towel then rubbed the misted mirror to see just how awful she looked.

Froggy peeped over her shoulder. He said, ‘Hey, bug-face – it’s time.’

She screamed and dropped her towel. Diving to pick it up, she clipped her head against the edge of the sink. She howled with pain and staggered from the bathroom in a roll of steam.

‘Ow, ow, owww…’ she groaned and sat heavily at the top of the stairs. Small tears of agony came. She wiped them away and looked around; as the bathroom cleared of vapour, it was obviously empty. There was nothing she could possibly have mistaken for… Rubbing her head, she went muttering to her bedroom, where she tugged on her grungiest jeans and a black poloneck then rummaged around her bedside drawer some more
until she found her spare credit card. As if laying out a body, she spread Roselaine’s dress on her bed. She found a pair of boots and another red raincoat and thundered down the stairs to the front door. The instant she opened it, someone started shouting, ‘Miss Palatine! Miss Palatine!’

She thought it might be another hallucination, but a very real-looking Bernstein stood at the bottom of her steps. With one girder-like arm, he was blocking a young man in a cheap suit from climbing towards her. The young man yelled again, ‘Miss Palatine! What do you have to say about Jimmy Lockhart?’

She froze, unsure whether to continue outside or to retreat. An older man wearing an anorak lifted a very big camera and pointed it at her. Bernstein pushed this man, knocking him off balance.

‘No pictures!’ he growled.

‘This is a free country and we’re standing on public property!’ the photographer protested. The younger man tried to dodge around the bodyguard.

‘Miss Palatine! Paul Ruddock from the
Daily Star!
Do you have any comment on waaauuggh–’ he choked as Bernstein seized him by the throat.

‘Hey!’ the photographer cried. ‘That’s assault! Let him go!’

‘Miss Palatine,’ Bernstein spoke calmly over his shoulder, as if none of this was actually happening, ‘would you mind stepping into the vehicle, please? H.E. is expecting you at the studio.’

‘That’s assault!’ the photographer repeated, levelling his equipment again. Without releasing the reporter, Bernstein yanked the camera away from the photographer’s face and whacked it off Annalise’s garden wall, separating the lens from the body.

‘You bloody bastard!’ the photographer shrieked.

‘I told you, no pictures. Miss Palatine,’ he repeated, ‘would you mind stepping into the vehicle, please?’

‘But I was going to take the train,’ she mumbled.

Jimmy Lockhart, Miss!’ the reporter rasped, his face purple. ‘I just want a comment!’

She pulled her front door shut. ‘Jimmy Lockhart has nothing to do with me.’ She ran across the street and jumped into Bernstein’s black people-carrier. The bodyguard let the reporter go and followed her, ignoring the photographer who fumed and waved his fist; completely unruffled, he climbed aboard and drove off.

‘What on earth was that all about?’

‘H.E. said no pictures, Miss.’

‘But that reporter was shouting about Jimmy Lockhart – what did they want?’

‘I don’t know who that is, Miss.’

‘Jimmy Lockhart was my… oh, never mind. Have you been parked out there all night?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘Why?’

‘Orders from H.E.’

‘Holy… Christ…’ she moaned and touched the tender lump on her head. Bernstein listened to the robot lady sat-nav as he sped down Maze Hill. He seemed a lot less human than Levine. She realised she was shaking. Images of Bristol filled her mind; that awful tableau, flooding back in vivid technicolour. Had the newspapers caught up with Jimmy? Her rush of guilt returned. She should have phoned the police, but Levine had dragged her away from the hotel so quickly… that was no excuse, and she knew it. They have telephones in France. She was afraid that Jimmy’s dirt might spatter her if his filthy little secret got out, and it was hypocritical to pretend otherwise. As the car entered Greenwich village, she summoned her nerve, tapped Bernstein on the shoulder and asked him to stop outside a newsagent’s. She ran in and scanned the morning papers, arrayed across the shelves. Two carried front-page photos of her and Emerson, snapped the day before in Saint-Christophe, when he’d deliberately
opened the window of the jeep. He was grinning like a monkey; she looked frightened. She bought these editions and returned to the car. She leafed through them, but there was nothing about Jimmy. As they crossed south London, she felt confused and dreadfully hungover. And her head really hurt where she’d banged it.

The familiar sight of Shepperton’s grey, warehouse-like sound stages had a momentarily reassuring effect. Over the past six years, she had worked there often and the guard at the gatehouse even greeted her by name. ‘H’ Stage was Shepperton’s biggest; when they stepped inside, it seemed to stretch forever. Bernstein took a phone from his pocket, said, ‘Package delivered’ and strolled off into the shadows.

Dozens of crew milled around the sets. The film was using a few genuine interiors but many had had to be built from scratch. The one nearest to her recreated the inside of a manor house – the one that Roselaine was visiting at the time of her capture. She had filmed the outdoor action scenes for this sequence before Emerson arrived in France, so she inspected this with interest. Next, she wandered over to the dining hall of an inn: all rough wooden tables, a convincing stone-flagged floor, hefty pillars to support a non-existent roof and smoke-blackened walls that ended abruptly fifteen feet above the ground in banks of lights and scaffolding.

‘You ain’t seen the best bit.’

She jumped. Emerson had spoken very close to her ear; she swung around and there he stood, wearing tailored trousers, elevator shoes (she guessed from his height) and a white shirt. He was perfectly polished; his hair styled to look as if it hadn’t been styled, his skin burnished. If he’d gone shopping that morning, she thought, it must have been in the hotel beauty parlour. Behind his shoulder, Frost looked utterly cosmopolitan in a scarlet suit with heels; Levine, as ever, was black from head to toe.
Frost did not greet her, but Levine smiled and nodded. Emerson pecked her cheek. ‘So how was home?’