The Angel Tree (44 page)

‘Can I come to you now, please? I don’t want to go down there with them. If I say sorry and that I believe in God, will they let me?’

For once, there was silence in her head. No one answered and a single tear rolled down her cheek.

‘I’m sorry, Mummy, so sorry. I didn’t mean it, really.’

And what about Ava? You abandoned your daughter . . . Who can forgive you for that?

The voices were back again. ‘Please!
Please!
’ she begged them. She knocked back the pills in her palm and was about to tip out more when there was another noise . . . a bell
chiming, as if at the gates of hell.

The chimes reverberated around her head. ‘Stop! Stop! Please stop!’ The noise was vaguely familiar, and gradually she realised it wasn’t hell beckoning her in but the bell at
the front gates. Somehow, she managed to walk into the hall, then sank to her knees.

‘Go away, go away! Please!’ she screamed.

‘Cheska, it’s me. Uncle David!’

Cheska looked up at the video screen. David? It couldn’t be him. He lived in England. It was the voices again. They were trying to trick her.

‘Cheska, please, let me in!’

She stood up and peered at his face on the screen, just to make sure. Older, heavier, with grey hair receding at the temples, but still with the same twinkling eyes.

‘Okay, okay.’ Cheska walked unsteadily down the hall to switch the alarm system off, then pressed the buzzer to let David in through the gates.

David did his best to hide his shock when Cheska opened the front door. Her hair was lank and greasy, her eyes glassy, with large black smudges beneath them. Her pupils darted from side to side,
giving her the appearance of a hunted animal. In the centre of her forehead was a huge black bruise. A dirty sweatshirt hung from her thin shoulders and her once shapely legs looked like two
sticks. She was swaying in front of him, as though she was drunk.

‘Cheska, how lovely to see you.’ He leant forward to kiss her and smelt an unwashed odour.

‘Oh, David, David, I—’ Her blue eyes looked up at him in anguish, then she burst into tears and sank to the floor once more.

He watched as she sat there, rocking herself backwards and forwards, and knelt down to comfort her, but she screamed when he tried to touch her. Then he noticed the pill bottle clutched in her
fist.

‘That’s it, I’m calling a doctor.’

She looked up at him. ‘No! I . . . I’ll be fine, really.’

‘Cheska, look at you. You’re not fine at all.’ He wrenched the bottle from her grasp and looked at the label. ‘How many of these have you taken?’

‘Only three or four.’

‘Do you absolutely swear?’

‘I swear, David.’

‘Right. Let’s get you up off the floor.’ He swiftly pocketed the pill bottle then helped her to her feet. She managed to make it into the sitting room, collapsing onto the sofa
and holding out her arms to him.

‘Please, come and hold me. Uncle David, just hold me.’

David did as she asked, and she buried her face in his lap. She lay there silently for a while, then stared up at him, studying his face. She lifted a hand and traced his eyes, nose and
mouth.

‘Are you real?’

He chuckled. ‘Well, I should hope so! Why do you ask that?’

‘Oh, because I’ve imagined so many things over the past few days. People, places . . .’ A smile suddenly lit up her face. ‘If you
are
real, then I’m so
glad you’re here.’

With that, Cheska closed her eyes and promptly fell asleep.

After a while, David gently moved Cheska’s head onto the sofa and left her to sleep. He went into the kitchen, noting the filthy surfaces littered with used glasses and
cups. Taking the bottle of pills from his pocket, he flushed the contents down the waste-disposal unit. He had little doubt what Cheska had been about to do, and thanked the fates that he’d
decided to stop as he drove past her house on his way to stay with an old actor friend further up the hill.

He’d been working in Hollywood on and off over the past few years and had called in on Cheska occasionally for a drink, believing that, in spite of her abandonment of Ava, it was important
to maintain some form of contact. But he had always found her company difficult to endure. There had normally been a man hanging around somewhere in the house and he doubted he’d had more
than a few minutes alone with her over all his visits. He was aware that this was almost certainly done on purpose; no one in Hollywood knew that Cheska had a child and he was sure the last thing
she wanted was him talking about Ava. She’d known he wouldn’t in front of strangers.

He had dutifully written to tell her that her mother had woken up from the coma soon after Cheska had left England, and had tried to keep her informed of Greta’s progress over the years.
But every time he’d seen her, Cheska had been singularly uninterested in talking about Greta. When David brought the subject up, it was a one-way conversation, with him offering short
platitudes such as ‘Your mother sends her love’ – which was a lie, anyway, as Greta didn’t even remember Cheska.

Whenever he visited he’d always leave her house feeling horribly depressed, as it was obvious Cheska’s past in England no longer existed for her. As it didn’t exist for Greta.
It saddened and frustrated him, but his mother always said, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ and, eventually, that was what he’d done.

David washed up a cup and made himself some tea, going over the situation in his mind. He had little or no idea what had driven Cheska to attempt suicide. He’d presumed that everything was
going wonderfully for her.

He’d been in Hollywood for the past month shooting a cameo part in a big movie. Filming had ended yesterday and he was on his way home to England. Temporarily, at least. After attending
his mother’s eighty-fifth birthday party, he was going on a long-delayed ‘gap year’, as the teenagers these days called it. He was sixty-one years old, and his career – both
here in the USA and in England – had reached the point where he felt he could take time off and return if he wished. He’d earned it, and knew if he didn’t do it now, he might be
too frail in the future to attempt it.

And, finally, he wasn’t alone.

He smiled at the thought of her: her petite but shapely figure and her dark hair, swept up in a chignon, her brown eyes shining with warmth and intelligence. He’d liked her the first time
he’d met her. It had been at a dinner party given by an old friend from his Oxford days. As a single man, he was usually seated next to a spare female on these occasions, most of whom left
him cold. But Victoria, or Tor, as she liked to be called, was different. He had thought originally that she was in her mid-forties – though he found out later she was over fifty – and
she had told him her husband had died ten years earlier and she had never felt the need to remarry. She was an Oxford don, specialising in ancient Chinese history, and her husband had been a
classical scholar. Tor had spent her life closeted in the world of academia.

David had driven home thinking that such a cultured, well-read woman would have little or no interest in a light entertainer like him. Granted, he too had received an excellent formal education,
but he’d lived in a very different world ever since.

However, a week after their first meeting, he received a note from her inviting him to Oxford for a recital he’d expressed interest in. He’d booked into a local hotel, wondering how
he’d mix with Tor’s intellectual friends. And he’d had a very enjoyable evening.

Later that night, over a quiet supper, Tor had chided him for his modesty. ‘You entertain people, David. It’s a great gift, far greater than writing a thesis on Confucius. Making
people laugh and feel happy for a few seconds is a wonderful talent. Apart from that, you were at Oxford once, too. And this evening you held your own perfectly well with my friends.’

They had begun to see each other regularly and, eventually, he’d asked her if she’d like to go away with him for a weekend. He had taken her to Marchmont, where LJ had warmed to her
instantly. Although, mused David, given his mother’s thinly disguised frustration at his enduring devotion to Greta – ‘For goodness’ sakes, darling, she doesn’t even
remember who you are!’ was her constant mantra – he was hardly surprised at her relief that at last he had a ‘lady-friend’, as she’d delicately put it.

‘Ma, she really
is
a friend,’ he’d insisted that first weekend.

Throughout the next few months David began to rediscover himself; his love for music and the arts, walking hand in hand down a country lane after a large Sunday lunch, books they’d both
read which were discussed over a bottle of wine late into the night. He felt, above all, that he’d found a woman who appreciated and enjoyed his company as much as he enjoyed hers.

Then Tor announced that she’d decided to take a year’s sabbatical from Oxford, visiting some of the distant places she’d taught and written endlessly about but never seen. She
had asked him playfully if he wanted to go with her. And even though he’d laughed at the time, when he mulled the idea over, he’d started to think that perhaps it was exactly what he
needed. Her eyes had been full of joy and disbelief when he’d said he wanted to join her.

‘But what about your career? And Greta?’

Tor knew all about her, of course. She was a big part of his life. Most Sundays for the past seventeen years, Greta had come for lunch at his house in Hampstead or he had visited her –
although, recently, David had guiltily cancelled a few times because he had arranged something with Tor. He was well aware how dependent Greta was on him. She rarely went out, finding crowds
upsetting, had no visitors apart from himself and Leon, who paid the occasional duty call to her, and, even more rarely, LJ and Ava, when they visited him in London. Greta found the thought of
spending even a night away from the sanctuary of her Mayfair apartment untenable. She lived as a virtual recluse.

That moment, when she’d opened her eyes after all those long months in a coma, was one he’d never forget. The joy he’d felt as all his love for her surged to the surface and he
covered her face in kisses, his tears dripping unchecked onto her pale face, had quickly turned to horror when she’d batted him away with her thin arms and asked who on earth he was. Over the
years, he’d begun to accept the way things were and might always be. He’d had little choice, as Greta’s memory stubbornly refused to return.

David did not resent her dependency on him in the slightest; he loved her, after all. But as Greta had never given him a single indication of wanting anything other than his friendship and
support, the situation had remained unresolved all these years.

Meeting Tor had crystallised their relationship further. David had finally begun to realise what his mother had been trying to tell him all along: it was hopeless pining for Greta.

Ma was right. He had to move on.

Once David had reassured Tor he was serious about joining her on her travels, they had begun to plan their route. They’d decided to visit India first and, from there, as Tor was a keen
walker, they would fly up to Lhasa in Tibet before trekking for several weeks in the Himalayas. After that, they planned to travel through China by the Marco Polo route, a journey Tor had dreamed
of making for years.

David poured the dregs of his tea into the sink. When he flew home, he knew he had to speak to Greta and tell her about his forthcoming trip. She was used to him coming to
Hollywood for a few weeks at a time – he’d often asked her if she wanted to come, too, and perhaps visit Cheska – but she had always declined. However, six months was a long time.
He’d have to ask LJ or Ava to visit her during his absence.

And now he was here, by complete chance, facing what he knew was going to be a difficult situation to extricate himself from quickly. He called Tony, his friend, and said something had come up
and he wouldn’t be able to make it today after all.

Putting down the receiver, he couldn’t help but compare Cheska’s current state as a wreck asleep on the sofa to the beautiful woman whose famous face filled television screens,
newspapers and magazines across the world.

Something terrible must have happened recently to bring her to the brink of suicide. He wondered how he could find out what it was. He glanced at the names and numbers written on the pad next to
the telephone in Cheska’s childish looped writing. Bill Brinkley’s was the third number. He was the agent she’d taken on after she’d moved here, having unceremoniously
sacked Leon. Surely he’d know what had happened to her?

He dialled the number and asked to be put through.

‘Bill, it’s David Marchmont. I think we’ve met at a couple of parties here.’

‘Yes, I remember. How’re you doing, David?’

‘I’m very well, thank you.’

‘And what can I do for you? Looking for a new agent? I’d be happy to tender my credentials.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks, Bill.’

‘Okay. So if I can’t represent you, what else can I do for you?’

‘Have you seen Cheska recently? You know she’s my niece.’

‘Really? I didn’t know that. And, as she fired me a couple of months back and made it clear she didn’t want to hear from me again, the answer is no, I haven’t seen
her.’

‘I see. Why did she fire you, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘You don’t know already? I thought it was all over town.’

‘Maybe I know the wrong people, but the news hasn’t crossed my bow-wave before now, no.’

‘Well, it’s certainly not in the public domain yet, so keep it to yourself. They’re gonna announce Gigi’s dramatic end a month or so before the show is aired again in
October. Stir up interest to fever pitch. They’re expecting record ratings when it’s broadcast. So the reason Cheska fired me is that she blamed me for the studio writing her
out.’

‘I see. So who looks after her now?’

‘No idea. Someone said she was going off to Europe to take a break before she decided what to do next.’

‘Right. Do you mind me asking why they didn’t renew her contract? It’ll go no further, I promise you. I am her uncle, after all, and I’m just . . . concerned for
her.’