Veil of Darkness (31 page)

His future now lies in cardboard boxes.

But this is only half of his grievance.

Whilst once Bernie meant nothing to him, just one of the many apertures into which he could dip his wick, since their reunion his emotions have led him into far deeper waters. He soon had reason to thank Kirsty for forcing him to retract; his admiration for Bernie’s talents moved some part of him, spiritually and sexually, which had lain dormant before. He enjoyed making love to a prodigy. He adored her status as superstar. He relished the life of comfort and the company of admiring intellectual people, the chattering classes with whom he had previously had no entrée, his father’s family having rather more of an industrial bent.

Dominic also loved his status as partner and escort of a
cause célèbre.

Bernie’s added fascination is that she shows no signs of being a phenomenon. Far from it.

Take the TV show last Friday.

Rory accompanied Bernie who was nervous. Dominic stayed home alone, drank far too much brandy and watched.

It was more than ghastly.

It was diabolical.

‘The little lady from Ireland who has stunned the snooty literary world. At the age of nineteen, ladies and gentlemen, no scholarly bluestocking, no stuttering oddball, but our very own Scouse, BERNADETTE KAVANAGH.’

And if this wasn’t excruciating enough, coming from the poof with the saccharine smile and the hair striped like a badger’s, the audience looked like a coachload released from some rest home for the occasion. Why oh why had Bernie insisted? She was beginning to believe her own hype. She thought she was invincible. She even believed the suave Rory Coburn was enamoured by her charms.

But she ought to be able to do better than this.

Quite out of character, Bernie performed with a goggle-eyed stupefaction, which was painful for all to see. Bearing in mind the loud and lack-lustre performances of her three fellow contestants, if she’d been herself she could have survived, shone even. When the host started on the questions Dominic closed his eyes and let his head fall into his hands. The questions were full of smutty innuendo—something that Bernie had never mastered; she never understood the simplest of jokes and detested slapstick. So she took all the jokes at face value and tried to answer the questions seriously, which added to the audience hysteria and made her the jibe of the host’s worst taunts.

Everybody but Bernie could see that the out-of-focus picture was an elephant’s
bum. Yes, this was the level of the quiz: guess the subject of a distorted picture. It became so obvious it was embarrassing. And even when the full picture emerged Bernie couldn’t identify it. All she kept saying was two ships’ funnels and the audience fell about in their chairs.

Dominic flinched as he watched her performance, as she fiddled with her hair, bit her nails, laughed in the wrong places and failed to get the host’s name right.

And as for poor Bernie, she was aware she was doing, not just badly, but catastrophically. How come she handled all that press stuff with such aplomb, it was a cinch, a piece of cake, demanding not much more than smiling and agreeing with everything anyone said. But now…

Hell.

Rory would be waiting for her in the hospitality suite, and oh, he would be so disappointed. How was she going to explain this pitiful performance? And just when she reckoned she had snared him. He has already organized a small advance payment into her account, and she and he are off to have dinner after this fiasco is over, at a floating restaurant on the river.

Why should she have to put up with this public mortification while Kirsty and Avril sit back and wait for their fair shares? Her financial advisers might well be right. Why should she share the advance three ways when she was being made a spectacle of, in public, in front of millions?

And here comes the only serious question, one for each of the guests, involving their individual careers.

‘What authors have made the greatest impression on me in my life?’ Bernie was reduced to repeating this unanswerable question. She couldn’t think of one author apart from Shakespeare and that would sound naff. Everyone’s eyes were telling her this was a kindergarten question, and yet she sat there silently with her mouth half open, willing a sensible name to come out.

‘I’m not a great reader,’ she said lamely.

And everyone looked at her askance.

‘Well, I haven’t had time,’ said Bernie. ‘I’ve had to work. You know?’

Where was the power and the presence that she sensed had been guiding her earlier? And she hoped the cameras were being kind and not following her hand as it inched downwards towards her knee to give it a hopeless scratch.

‘You were quite dreadful,’ Rory tells her unhelpfully as she falls back into the hospitality suite gasping with shame and relief. ‘What happened to you in there? Are you feeling unwell?’

‘Nerves. I was frightened,’ she says childishly, hoping that her vulnerability might redeem her in her agent’s eyes.

But it doesn’t.

‘Any more like that and we’re going to have to make out you’re a recluse,’ says Rory, not laughing. ‘And Clementine rang again this evening to ask if you’ve done any work yet.’

‘I can’t stand much more of this pressure.’ Bernie wipes her brow in a feeble gesture of womanly weakness.

‘Perhaps I should take you back to the flat,’ says Rory unkindly, ‘and let you get on. All these diversions don’t seem to be helping.’

‘I thought you wanted to take me out! It was your idea,’ says Bernie, wondering where the admiration has gone from his hardening eyes. Manipulating Rory is not so straightforward as dealing with Dominic, who has packed his bag and plans to move out of the flat in the morning. He hoped Bernie would beg for forgiveness and plead with him to change his mind, but she has lost interest in her former lover, a young, unworldly student, a drop-out too easily impressed, stale and vastly inferior to someone with the power and charisma of Rory. But perhaps she has read Rory all wrong. Just because he flatters her vanity and uses that publishers’ hyperbole, just because he adores
Magdalene
, just because he sees her as the bestselling author he’s ever had, does not necessarily mean that he confuses the book with the woman.

Perhaps it’s the book he loves, not her.

She remembers the warnings of Candice Love. ‘He flirts with all his authors.’ And, ‘I think he might be gay.’

The rest of the evening does nothing for her battered self-esteem. When they arrive at the restaurant, a haunt for various celebrities, Bernie is chastened to see that his treatment of women is invariably conducted with his own style of effusive elegance. ‘Darling, how gorgeous to see you.’ So artificial and strained. Will Bernie ever be able to understand all this freakish behaviour? She, who comes from Liverpool, where a spade is called a spade and if you look into anyone’s eyes the way Rory looks into hers it’s an invitation to jump straight into bed.

How embarrassing that she imagined Rory Coburn fancied her.

How shameful, how simplistic, to honestly believe he was taking her out with her body in mind.

This is the way the man does his job, these are the manners his women enjoy. No-one in this restaurant, except some nerd with her own ill-breeding, would interpret his attentions so wrongly.

It is blow after blow after blow as Bernie is subtly marginalized by these more sophisticated, cleverer women, just as she was back there in the studio. They end up sharing a table with another party of Rory’s friends, demonstrating to the indignant Bernie that she is not considered sufficiently qualified to entertain the great man through dinner. For his foie gras to go down smoothly he needs not just the best wine in the house, but the most scintillating and intellectual people, while she is rather unsavoury fare.

And she harbours the horrible suspicion that, after he has taken her home, he goes on somewhere else with his friends without inviting her.

The next morning things get even worse.

‘But, my dear, this is quite grotesque.’

Bernie has postponed the meeting with her editor, Clementine Davaine, for too long. Clementine, her brown wig freshly washed and therefore not perfectly settled, insisted on coming today, and now peers down through her thin bifocals in the small office at the back of the flat where the temporary secretary has been working to print out Kirsty’s scrappy amendments. ‘You haven’t understood what I meant at all.’ She sits back and stares at Bernie as if she is an unsettling apparition. ‘We can’t have this—and what has happened to your style, child? Where has all the eloquence gone?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course you know.’ Clementine picks up one piece of rewritten A4 type. ‘Is this a joke? Look at this! Just look at it! I mean, it hardly makes sense any more.’

‘I’ll have another go,’ says Bernie tiredly. What the hell is Kirsty doing landing her in the shit like this? Is her jealousy making her deliberately spiteful?

Clementine removes her spectacles, disturbing the wig as she does so and moving it slightly out of kilter. Her gnarled old hands rest on her lap, clasped together in what looks like defence. ‘No, Bernadette. Let me think for a moment. Unfortunately, you are one of those authors who cannot follow editorial direction. You have tried, I can see that, but all you are likely to do is mess up what was, as it stood, a masterpiece. Perhaps I was wrong to try to make changes, even such minimal ones. But I am going to take this with me and give it to an old friend of mine who might be able to succeed where you failed.’

This sounds too good to be true. ‘And I won’t have to do any more work on it?’

‘No. In future, my dear, I think I can honestly say that I would rather you kept your hands right off this book.’ And she stuffs the manuscript in an old leather holdall which contains a pair of manly bedroom slippers and a double pack of ultra-soft, rose-coloured Andrex. ‘The sooner we can send edited proofs out to reviewers the better,’ says Clementine, slipping an unlikely padlock around the handles of the old shopping bag and locking the thing with a miniature key. ‘We’ve already wasted too much time. We have paid a fortune for this novel and we really must get things cracking.’

These people think they’re a breed apart. Clementine rises abruptly and leaves while Bernie’s temper flames, fed up of all these insinuations that hers is a stagnant mind. After all, they are parasites every one of them, feeding off authors and artists and bloating themselves like conceited leeches. And the more she frets over the editor’s remarks, sitting alone in the office, the more her wrath is fanned into savagery. Bernadette burns to be loved and admired; this is how this venture had started. Everything was so easy then, back at the Burleston with Candice Love, who thought the sun shone out of her arse. Then along came Dominic to complete her exultation, this London flat and the media attention. She paces the room, silent, sullen and testy.

Bernie is quite alone now, apart from Joyce Parfait the housekeeper who keeps herself to herself and cooks an assortment of fish in the converted garage. She regrets chucking Dom out now—he was stale and fawning but at least he was company. It will be different when she can spend her own money; she can leave this dreary flat and go back to Liverpool. She misses Mammy and Daddy and Fran, who treat her differently on the phone now they know she’s a literary genius. And all her other abandoned friends. But once she’s got money will they accept her?

Her troubles stem from the moment she fooled herself into believing that Rory Coburn was up for it. He, not little Dom, is the sort of man she wants to be seen with—it is his world she longs to be part of; she yearns to be accepted as one of them. Will there always be ‘one of them’ for poor Bernie to aspire to? Does the Queen have ‘one of them’ from whom she is excluded? And every time she achieves an ambition why do the goal posts have to move?

The lonely, dispirited Bernie goes upstairs, showers and throws herself naked on her opulent bed. She picks up her copy of
Magdalene
; she has studied this book, learned paragraphs by heart, memorized the most insignificant characters in case she was ever questioned, what more could she have done? Nobody can come straight out and deny that she is the author of
Magdalene
, not even Clementine, with all her suspicious, witchy looks. But at the end of the day what has it gained her? She will be rich, she will be respected by those who have not met her, but she will never be one of the inner circle.

Throughout her life Bernie has imagined that she is an interesting person.

What is Rory Coburn doing now?

Is he in bed with his butler, Bentley? Or is he, more likely, making love to one of the luvvies he seems to attract with the lift of an eyebrow?

With a reflective smile on her lips Bernie moves her fingers down her perfectly formed naked body, caressing her breasts, her legs, her taut stomach; even her feet are perfect examples of what feet ought to look like. What is the matter with Rory Coburn, and why did he flirt with her in the first place if he finds her so contemptible? He had no right to behave in that manner, assuming she was wise and perceptive. Does he find her ignorance repellent? Is her accent offensive? Are her manners unsatisfactory? Perhaps he considers her vulgar?

How dare he?
How dare he?

She felt this unhappiness when Dominic hurt her. Dear God, please don’t let Rory obsess her. She suspects that she needs him already, that this is the reason for this new desolation. His power to wound would be greater than Dominic’s.

Why should she be used and discarded by a slimy little lecher like Coburn? And how can she get even?

She holds back the tears.

The answer comes to Bernie in one easy flash, like a sudden reflection in the mirror, but she turns round and sees no-one.

For one brief moment she feels sick and reaches for the water jug put ready by Joyce Parfait on her bedside table. Gin might have been more thoughtful. But she lights a fag instead, the other hand unconsciously resting on the unpublished novel.

Malice flows through her veins with the blood.