The Mistress of Alderley (7 page)

“Would you like me to carry the…bottle up to the Dower House? It's not far.”

She stood astride her bike and brushed aside his offer with a shake of the head. “Your mother's away for the weekend, I hear.”

“That's right.”

“Off with Marius for a dirty—no. Can't really be a dirty weekend when they have one every week, can it?”

“I don't see why they can't have a dirty weekend anywhere they want to. Actually it's Cardiff.”

“Not my idea of a place to have a sexy rendezvous, but what would I know? I've hardly left the village in the last twenty years.” A grievance seemed to take hold of her not very clear brain, and she brandished her bottle in his face. “Reduced to buying cheap plonk because the coffers are so low. Next thing will be, Jack will want me to go out cleaning.”

“I'm sure that won't happen.” Nobody would employ you, Alexander thought.

“I wouldn't bank on it. What we need is a nice steep interest-rate rise, so that our money makes something for us, what there is of it.”

“I expect there'd be inflation too, so it wouldn't help in the long run.”

“Bloody economist too, are you?” She bent forward to look him in the face, her bulging eyes fearsomely red. “If you're so bloody smart about money, you should give your mother some advice.”

“I think she gets more advice than she can stomach.”

“Jack, you mean? He has her interests at heart, at least. She gets advice given her because she needs it. Any woman who's a mistress not a wife does need it. Tell her to get something on paper, that's what Jack says.”

“I'll tell her but—”

“Otherwise what will happen? Marius is a high-powered businessman. Life of tremendous stress, eh? So one day he drops down dead, and then where is she? Nowhere.”

“I think Marius has—”

“No good thinking. Tell him she wants to see it, that's what your mother should do. Otherwise she'll have no money, no roof over her head, and a career that's dead in the water because she hasn't done any acting for yonks. She'd be a beggar. I don't give a damn, but Jack does. Tell her to get something definite in writing! Otherwise tea and sympathy is all she'll have, and not a great deal of the latter.”

She hitched herself on to the saddle and rode off, turning at the next corner in the direction of the Dower House. Alexander walked on slowly, expecting to hear another crash, but Meta seemed to have negotiated the last part of her journey successfully. Over the rest of the mile-long walk home he pondered what Meta had said. He felt that, granted it had come from a drunken old harridan with a vicious streak to her, it had not been bad advice at all. Alexander did not hate Marius, but neither did he love him in the way Caroline had convinced herself both her children did. His mother was also sure she was something more than just one in a long line of Marius's mistresses. Without a doubt, words had been uttered that had convinced her that he had done, or would do, something that would give her special status a financial basis. OK then, let it be something not so lavish as to seriously damage his wife's or his children's position, but something generous and concrete. Something on paper. With witnesses. Even better, cash or title deeds in advance.

Stella, when he talked it over with her later that day, was in agreement, but she said the matter of talking to their mother about it would have to be his duty.

“You're the elder, and you're the one who's thought it through. Anyway, Mum is convinced you are the really serious one in the family.”

“I suppose it's just a matter of finding the right time,” said Alexander dubiously.

After he had talked with Stella, or tried to, he was rather doubtful whether any time would have been right. When Caroline had settled back after her Cardiff trip he put Meta's points to her, and she clearly found the suggestion distasteful.

“Oh, darling, how sordid!” she said, wrinkling up her face. “Like those awful film stars and tycoons who arrange the terms of their divorce before they even get married. You've got to trust each other if you love each other.”

“Marius is a tycoon, so probably he wouldn't object. Meta says Jack is worried about this.”

“Is
that
why he goes on and on about my acting, and how I should keep it up?”

“Probably. Remember, you're not even Marius's partner, which would probably give you some rights. He's living with his wife. It surely wouldn't do any harm to be sure Marius has actually done for you in his will what he promised to do.”

“Not just promised: what he has made quite clear to me he
has
done. I wouldn't
think
of asking, Alex. He'd probably think I was planning to bump him off.”

“He can't believe in your love for him if he imagined that.”

Caroline sighed.

“
Joke,
darling. I'll put my mind to it some day, if it worries you. But you can't expect me to think of it with Olivia's first night in five days' time.”

Or, probably, after it, Alexander felt sure.

Guy Fleetwood came down with his father on the following Friday, the day before the first night of
Forza.
He was a good-looking boy, taller than Marius, with a nice manner. He would be a wow at St. Andrew's, Caroline thought, where he was to study computer science. She had noticed other times he'd been down that if Marius suggested he do something, he jumped to and did it, and that if he disagreed with his father about anything, he did so tentatively, almost apologetically. Caroline conjectured that his upbringing had been a great deal more traditional that her own brood's. Stella capitalized on this.

“Anyone feel like tennis?” she would say.

“Guy would like a game, wouldn't you, Guy?” Marius would reply, as if his son were a ten-year-old. And Guy would tear himself away from Alexander's little computer room (where Guy could lord it, rather, by virtue of his greater sophistication and the superior equipment he was used to at home) and go out and bash a ball around on the tennis court, which Caroline had brought back from its overgrown state when she had taken over Alderley. Caroline didn't know that he made little attempt to be agreeable during the game.

Marius was to take Guy to York station on Monday morning early for the train to Edinburgh, and then continue on back to his workaday life in London. Meanwhile, there was the opera premiere to prepare for. Caroline knew better than to ring Olivia on Saturday to wish her well. The day of a first performance, one had to have entirely to oneself—either alone, or losing oneself in a crowd, for example, of shoppers. Caroline wouldn't put it past Olivia to go and watch Leeds United that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, she phoned a florist in Leeds and had roses delivered to her daughter's dressing room. Then she found that anything she settled down to didn't serve its purpose, and when she jettisoned it for something else, that turned out to be equally useless at calming her nerves. “It's worse than if it were
my
first night,” she said to Marius. She cooked a risotto followed by T-bone steaks for their early dinner. Marius and the children ate heartily, but she had to force her meal down. Then she dressed, and Marius put on his swankiest suit. They kissed the children good-bye, said, “Cross your fingers for Olivia,” and drove off.

“Right,” said Guy, as they stood at the sitting-room window watching the Mercedes go down the drive. “Where does your mother keep her car keys? We're going to hit the town.”

 

“I don't suppose you're looking forward to this evening,” said Caroline, as Marius's Mercedes glided past Wakefield.

“On the contrary, I'm looking forward to it immensely.”

“Not much fun if you're cloth-eared, sitting through even half an hour or an hour of opera.”

“I'm cloth-eared but I'm not tone deaf. You know that. And I shall enjoy the curtain calls immensely. I know my connection with the new star is tenuous, but I shall bask in your maternal pride, and get high on the cheers for your sake.”

“Let's hope there
are
cheers. All sorts of things can go wrong—with the voice, the production, the
feel
of the whole event.”

“The feel is going to be one of enormous expectation. That can't be bad. And I pay Olivia the compliment of saying that she knows her own voice, and how to take care of it. If she needed to cancel, she'd cancel, but we know she isn't doing that.”

Caroline had had a call from Colm just before dinner to say that Olivia was brimming with confidence and lively anticipation, though she didn't want to talk to anyone. Caroline had been awfully touched that he'd thought to ring.

“You'll have a lot of time to kill,” she said. “What will you do?”

“Oh, maybe a film. Or there's something on in the Playhouse Courtyard Theatre that I could sample. I've never much cared for the pubs in the center of Leeds, but things open up all the time there, or change managers. Don't worry about me. If there's nothing on I want to see I'll booze. I'll try anything except an Irish-theme pub.”

“It would have been better if we hadn't eaten early, then you could have had a good meal.”

“Why should you sit through your daughter's triumph with a rumbling tummy? Anyway, you know me: if I feel like it I can eat a second dinner without any problem.”

“I just hope we don't meet Rick.”

“Well, I hope we do. I'd like to cast my eye over Olivia's father. I could ask him for a rendition of ‘On the Street Where You Live.'”

“Oh God! You're quite capable of doing that. And Rick is quite capable of obliging.”

When they got to Leeds they drove to the concrete monstrosity of a car park in Woodhouse Lane, then walked down through the dank horror and sinister emptiness of the underpass, finally making it via Merrion Street to the Grand Theatre. They had no sooner entered the semicircular corridor around the stalls than they saw Rick. Caroline knew in her bones that he had been watching for them.

“Caroline! Darling! And is this your new rich bloke?”

“Marius, this is Rick.”

Rick held out his hand, and Marius took his, his sparkling eyes aglow with curiosity.

“So glad to meet you at last,” said Rick. “I've heard a lot about you. Funnily enough I've always got on well with Caroline's blokes, though she never returns the compliment with my chicks.”

“Rick, you sound as if you got stuck in a groove round about 1964,” said Caroline.

“Perhaps I did, darling. Not a bad era to get stuck in. But let's not spar. This isn't our night at all. It's that wonderful phenomenon we produced between us.”

Caroline had to repress the urge to say “ugh.”

“I hear you were in
My Fair Lady
when it first came over,” said Marius.

“Well, not
quite
the first cast,” said Rick, because Caroline knew the truth. “I suppose Caroline's told you how much she suffered from ‘On the Street Where You Live,' has she? She used to tell everyone at the time. Well, let me tell you, it's a
bloody
difficult song to get right. I've done quite a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan since, and it's shown me how very much the American musicals took from them, at least until Sondheim. For example, when I used to launch myself into the song in question, which we won't name…”

Caroline drifted away. She knew that Rick, having proclaimed they were there for Olivia's sake, would from then on talk entirely and exclusively about himself. Anyway, Marius would be less likely to call for a reprise of that ghastly song if she wasn't there to get embarrassed. She stood in the crowd at the bar, was recognized by the barman, and got served at once. She got a gin and tonic for herself and a whiskey and soda for Marius. She put it in his hand as she passed him and Rick.

“There's a whole treasury of forgotten English musicals, if we could only find a style to do them in,” she could hear Rick saying. Caroline shuddered as she contemplated the thought of endless revivals of
Lilac Time
and
Bless the Bride
starring her onetime husband. She went and stood alone in a dark niche, to listen to the excited anticipation of the audience.

“Excuse me, but aren't you Caroline Fawley?” came a voice at her elbow. It belonged to a pleasant, rather faded middle-aged woman. “I did so love you in
At the Kitchen Sink.
Nobody makes sitcoms like that these days.”

Caroline purred. This was more like it.

“No, they don't,” she said. “I sometimes wonder what has happened to the art of comedy.”

*  *  *

Guy nosed the car around the streets of Leeds, looking for a parking place he wouldn't have to pay for. It was just seven o'clock, early enough for there still to be one or two left. Under Alexander's directions he kept well away from the Grand Theatre, where a capacity audience would have bagged all the places, and eventually found one behind the law courts.

“Now—what time do we have to meet up, so we're back before them?” he asked, turning to the two Fawleys. “When will this opera end?”

Alexander shrugged.

“It's quite long. But they put the time of ending up in the foyer at the Grand Theatre.”

“Right. And they're going to a party afterwards. We'll be on the safe side and allow half an hour from the time of finishing, and meet back here then. OK?”

They both nodded. Guy strode off purposefully, though he knew of Leeds only what he had learned by driving round it. Alexander and Stella drifted off down to the Headrow, then she went in the direction of the cinemas and he, with no particular purpose in mind, found himself going toward the station.

Oddly enough, Guy, once he was out of sight, slackened his pace and began looking around uncertainly. He was in a big town, new to him, and he needed to get his bearings. Needed, in fact, to read the indications that would tell him the most likely place to find what he wanted. He stopped in a doorway and began to observe the direction taken by most of the young people who passed.

*  *  *

The lights went down in the Grand promptly at seven-fifteen. The orchestra had been tuning up, and periodically phrases had emerged that Caroline recognized.

“I wondered if we should invite your Rick out to a meal afterwards,” Marius whispered to her.

“It will be far too late after the party,” she hissed back.

“Darling, eating late doesn't bother me.”

“
No.
And he's not
my
Rick. He's any and everybody's Rick.”

“I quite liked him. Though he's a bit of a bore.”

“He could bore for England.”

A large bearded man threaded his way through the orchestra, and (because directors abhor the vacuum of an overture) the moment the music started, the curtain went up and a mute scene was played out with Olivia, as Leonora, preparing for bed. Caroline recognized that the set was a permanent one—a shape that dimly suggested a gun—which would be varied with odd props. As the music became more exciting Olivia sat on a bed, having her long hair, actually a wig, combed by her maid. Marius's fingers were tapping on his knee, but when Caroline looked down she saw that the taps bore no relation to the music that was being played.

The opera proper began with Leonora bidding good night to her father, then agonizing in an aria over her decision to run off with her Indian-blooded lover: the aria was a second-sighted vision of herself as
“Me pelegrina ed orfana”
(“wandering alone and fatherless” in the translation), which was to become her fate in the course of the opera. Colm entered as the lover—a handsome figure, large if slightly strained of voice. They agonized together over the approaching elopement, as always in opera for a little too long: when they were interrupted by Leonora's father, Colm as Alvaro threw his pistol to the floor in surrender; it went off, and killed the father. The pair escaped into the night.

Olivia's voice had been large, securely based, dramatic. Already the applause for the first scene was more than warm. Marius turned to Caroline.

“See you at curtain call, or the party afterwards,” he whispered, then made his escape up the central aisle. It was seven-forty.

 

As the interval approached Caroline wished she had someone beside her to share her growing excitement. Olivia had launched into
“La Vergine degli angeli,”
and Caroline thought it was the most beautiful melody she had ever heard. Olivia sang it with the softness of strength: one sensed the solid base to the voice, knew its immense potential power, and yet relished the yearning and the striving toward peace that the soft singing suggested.

Caroline felt a surge of adrenaline. She had registered throughout the scene at the monastery that the audience was getting on to a high: their growing enthusiasm and excitement could not be mistaken by a theater person, and it gripped her. Interval would come as soon as the aria, and Act II, ended, and she wondered whether there would be anything special in the way of first-half applause. An audience in the grip of an exhilaration such as this—and the emergence of a new star
involved
an audience, almost as if they were themselves responsible, and deserved credit for the discovery—needed an outlet, and some particular demonstration might be the result. Caroline felt in her bones that it must come.

And come it did. As the orchestra faded into silence the audience erupted into cheers—not end-of-opera cheers, but provisional cheers, a sort of down payment toward the triumph they felt sure would come. The curtain went up again, with Leonora still at center stage, with the Padre Guardiano some way behind her, and the chorus of monks a shadowy presence at the back. When Olivia had basked in the cheers for long enough she turned and drew the bass to share them with her. Then the curtain went down again, lights went up, and the audience began their invasion of the bars.

People who were in the know knew who Olivia was the daughter of. As Caroline moved into the press of people in the center aisle, those whom she knew and those whom she was sure she had never seen in her life began to shake her hand, pat her on the back, tell her how proud she must feel. Any sense of loneliness vanished. When she gained the corridor around the stalls a young man came up, asked her if she'd ordered an interval drink, and when she said she'd forgotten, thrust his glass of wine into her hand and went back to join the scrum at the bar. “How kind!” she shouted after him.