Facing the Light (2 page)

‘Well …' Gwen hesitated. In the end, she murmured, ‘The colours are rather strong, aren't they? And all those patterns look a bit fussy to me. Over the top. Don't look so crestfallen, Rilla! You did ask. And it's not me who is going to be bathing here, is it?'

‘No, right,' Rilla said. ‘I saw what you had done in your ensuite bathroom. Peachy pink as far as the eye can see; peach basin, peach bath and peach His and Hers towels folded neatly on the heated towel rail.'

‘There's no need to be nasty,' said Gwen.

Rilla had bitten back the ‘Fuck you, too,' which came into her head and quickly led the way out so that her sister's delicate tastes should no longer be affronted. To this day she could remember how Gwen's words had made her feel in the wrong, exposed as someone altogether too noisy who called attention to herself. Disapproved of.

So why did she keep visiting? Why did she not distance herself from the whole damn thing? Love, as usual, was the answer. Twined in among all the other feelings that filled her whenever she thought of her family, entangled in everything, bound in so strongly that to try to cut it out would destroy her utterly, was the love she felt for her mother and her sister. She couldn't help it. All that nonsense about blood being thicker than water was, it appeared, no more than the truth. It was as though
Leonora and Gwen were parts of herself, parts that she found difficult and irritating most of the time, but still pieces of the fabric. Also, there were things she remembered from her childhood which still shone, after everything, and you didn't throw such memories away in a hurry. You kept hold of them as a kind of talisman to guard against the others, the things you couldn't bear to think about.

Rilla sat up and squeezed a spongeful of water on to her shoulder. They love me too, she thought, even though they disapprove of me, Gwen and Mother. Even if I'm not quite the sort of person they'd mix with if I wasn't their blood relative, they, too, probably need me in their lives. She wondered whether or not Gwen still recalled an earlier bathroom incident from when they were little. Rilla hadn't forgotten. She'd taken her felt-tipped pens one day and drawn all over the white walls. It wasn't an accident. She could remember thinking: the walls will be prettier with fishes all over them, and she'd gone and taken the felt-tips out of the nursery and brought them into the bathroom and spread them out on the side, by the sink, and then she'd set about making lovely fish outlines and colouring them in carefully with her best shades of turquoise, purple and orange. They looked beautiful. How happy Mummy would be when she saw them swimming there, across the wall! Rilla was only seven and she couldn't reach very high up even if she stood on the chair, but there were lots and lots of fishes and she'd added some seaweed too, otherwise it wouldn't be the proper sea. When she'd finished she called Gwen to come and have a look. Gwen went white all over. The colour left her face, then came back again, all red and blushing, as though she were ashamed.

‘She'll be angry, Rilla. You've spoiled the whole wall.'

‘No, I haven't,' Rilla laughed. ‘I've made it pretty. Look at the fishes! Don't you like it?'

‘It's horrible and I'm going to tell Mummy. You're going to be in
such
trouble. Wait and see.'

Rilla got out of the bath and found one of the enormous soft towels that covered her from head to toe. She smiled. I
was
in trouble too, she thought. No supper that night, and then no visit to the circus, and watching out of the window as Gwen went off with Mother in the car to see the clowns and the elephants. How I wept and sobbed and begged, but Mother was quite unmoved.
You have to learn, Rilla dear
, she'd said.
Before you go galumphing into things and being naughty because you haven't thought properly
. Even after all this time, the injustice rankled. So often, things she'd done to please Leonora were somehow misunderstood. Rilla wondered sometimes whether her highly decorated bathroom was a way, after all these years, of getting her own back at everyone who thought her childish fishes and seaweed did nothing but spoil a nice clean wall.

‘Galumphing' was the word which really hurt, the one that got under the skin and stayed there for more than forty years. Galumphing, which came trailing implications of bigness and weight and excessive clumsiness. Rilla made her way into the bedroom. Ivan was awake, humming tunelessly as he looked at the paper. She had to get ready. She wanted to be at Willow Court as early as possible and definitely before dinner.

Sitting in front of her dressing-table, Rilla peered into the triple mirror and saw far too many reflected images of her lover, lying already fully dressed on the bed behind her. She couldn't decide which was more depressing – looking at him, or contemplating the wreck that she'd suddenly turned into. Back in the bathroom, it was easy to pretend that she was still the creamy-skinned, gorgeous creature in the photograph that mocked her from behind the massed bottles of perfume. More fool me, she thought, keeping a movie still from more than twenty
years ago. I must be a masochist. That hair, rippling over a pillow trimmed with lace, and those perfect shoulders in the satin nightie … no wonder the monster, or whatever it was in
Night Creatures
, was tempted. The rings she was wearing in the photograph were still around somewhere, ornate silver set with moonstones and opals. She'd been allowed to keep them, for a wonder. Vaguely, Rilla thought about whether it would be worth turning the flat upside down to find them. Probably not. Half the photograph was white roses, spilling off the bed and almost out of the frame, like an avalanche. David, the director, had spent such ages piling them up, arranging the fur rug over her feet, and making sure she was leaning back against the bedlinen at just the right angle. I should take it away, she thought. It's ridiculous to keep it there as a reminder. Maybe I could cover it up completely with a scarf or something.

She stared at herself and sighed. She smiled. That was a mistake. Could all these wrinkles and dark circles and general sagginess of neck and chin have sprung up overnight? I'm only forty-eight, she thought. Sod's Law, that was what it was. There was Gwen, two years older and all milk and roses with never more than a spot of powder and a dab of lipstick on special occasions. No bloody justice in the world. She could hear her mother's voice saying, as she always did,
Fairness has nothing to do with it, Cyrilla darling. Your sister is one person and you are another and you are both precious to me
. Leonora was the only person in the whole world allowed to use the really too silly name she'd saddled her younger daughter with at birth. Her sister only had to contend with Gwendolen. It wasn't brilliant, but at least people had heard of it. When Rilla first went to school, everyone asked, is Cyrilla a family name? But they could barely suppress their laughter whenever it was spoken, so she
very quickly shortened it, and short was how it had mostly stayed.

Of course, if her father had lived, he might have tried hard to suggest something more sensible, but Rilla was willing to bet that her mother would have carried the day as she usually did. Peter Simmonds, Rilla's father, had died in a car accident six months before she was born. Rilla knew it was quite irrational, but she'd always felt faintly guilty, as though she herself were to blame somehow. Both she and Gwen grew up with stories about the relationship that had existed between their parents. By all accounts, this love was like something out of a fairytale: transcendent, immutable and deeper by far than the rather ordinary passions experienced by other people. Certainly it took Leonora some years to recover from her husband's death. Rilla thought she recalled the house being quiet, and her mother in black weeping at the breakfast table, but didn't know whether the silence and sadness in her head were truly memories or only stories that had been told to her later by Leonora and which she was imagining. Photographs of her father, a tall, rather military-looking man with reddish hair and an unsmiling gaze, were there in albums which were hardly ever looked at these days.

‘What for do you look so sour, beloved Rilla?' came Ivan's lazy tones, husky partly from last night's cigarettes but mostly from well-rehearsed affectation.

‘Nothing,' said Rilla, ‘only it's going to take a hell of a lot of slap to reconstruct something resembling my face.' She kept her voice light, so that Ivan shouldn't know her true feelings. She had no intention of trying to explain the fear in her heart at the prospect of the days ahead.

‘You are beautiful, my darling,' said Ivan. ‘You have a twilight beauty.'

‘And you are full of shit,' said Rilla, laughing, applying rather more foundation than Monsieur (or possibly
Madame) Lancôme would have recommended to her cheeks and forehead, and making sure to blend in thoroughly around the neck and chin line.

That was one thing you could say about working (or in Rilla's case most often
not
working) in the movies and the theatre. It did teach you all about the possibilities, the magic, the transforming power of make-up. Everyone was busy constructing selves that they thought might appeal to others. Ivan, for instance, had a really rather remarkable resemblance to a vampire and played it for all it was worth. He was foreign, he was tall and skinny, he had lots of teeth and very pale skin and eyes he himself described as ‘hypnotic'. He went in for Hammer Horror decor in his flat, which Rilla tried to avoid as much as she possibly could by managing to contrive that they always ended up here. She smiled again at her own reflection in the mirror. Her house was not exactly Ideal Home, but even if it was as flamboyant as Ivan's, it was also cosy and there was nothing remotely Gothic about it.

‘You are happy now,' he said. ‘You are remembering last night.'

‘Don't flatter yourself, sweetie,' Rilla said sharply, and instantly regretted it. He wasn't the best lover in the world, but he was better than nothing. ‘I'm sorry, Ivan. It's just that I'm a bundle of nerves about going back to my mother's house. I can't help it.'

‘You smile,' Ivan continued, ‘while I am weeping. What will I do without you? How will I bear it? How will I live?'

‘Oh, do grow up, darling, honestly! It's only a few days. There's no need to be melodramatic about it.'

‘You do not love me. You could not speak so if you had love in your heart.'

She couldn't deny it. She didn't love him, of course she didn't, but it was quite sharp of him to have spotted it. Rilla thought she put on a reasonable show of affection
and certainly she was always wholehearted about the sex, but her heart, well, that was foreign territory, and had been out of bounds for years. It was sometimes hard to square the way she was now with how she'd been in the days of Hugh Kenworthy, her first love. Months would go by and Hugh would simply never enter her mind, but when she
did
turn her thoughts to that time (sixteen years old, feeling everything so passionately that it seemed as though her skin were missing) she experienced something like a flood washing through her, a mixture of that old desire that made it hard for her to catch her breath. Rilla pulled her thoughts round to the present.

‘It's nothing to do with love,' she explained patiently. ‘I've told you all about it. Mother's seventy-fifth birthday party is strictly a family affair, otherwise of course I'd take you. You know that.'

Rilla outlined her mouth with a colour called Sepia Rose, and added lipgloss, believing that one couldn't glitter and shine too much. She had no time at all for matte and beige and the whole less-is-more philosophy. Cream cakes, red wine and prawn Bhutans with extra naans were what she craved. She hadn't been quite truthful about the family affair. Partners, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends were all invited, but Rilla never for a moment considered taking Ivan. She knew exactly how her mother would react to him. She'd be oh so polite, and smile the smile that made the Mona Lisa look positively open by comparison and say something like,
Welcome to Willow Court, Mr Posnikov
, but her greenish eyes would take in the slightly grubby fingernails, and her nostrils would dilate almost imperceptibly and her eyes would strip away all the pretences and discover who knew what awful truths about poor old Ivan. What would be made entirely clear to him, without so much as a word being spoken, was the feeling that he was not, in Leonora's phrase,
one of us
.

‘Do get up, Ivan, please,' said Rilla. ‘I have to decide what to take. I really want to get to Willow Court as soon as I can.'

She began to throw garments from the wardrobe on to the bed. Why was almost everything she owned either silky or satiny or feathered or beaded or somehow like a costume from a show? Whenever she visited Willow Court, she felt the need to find a disguise, a costume which wouldn't instantly make Leonora wrinkle her mouth. Why couldn't she manage neat skirts and crisp blouses? She would probably spill something on them if she did wear them.

‘I choose for you!' Ivan declared. ‘I know what you need. I am dress designer, no?'

‘Okay,' said Rilla. ‘Imagine you're dressing me for a three-act play set in a country house. French windows, drinks on the terrace. You know the sort of thing.'

She moved to the chair by the window and sighed. ‘You can't possibly do any worse than I did.'

With surprising care, Ivan picked up one garment at a time and laid most of them aside with the merest hint of a despairing sigh. Finally he said, ‘I think this will be enough, no?'

Rilla looked through what he'd chosen and saw that yes, indeed, the green chiffon might do nicely for a summer party, that the claret-coloured gypsy skirt could conceivably pass muster with the white linen blouse, that the black trousers and several silk jersey T-shirts might not be too hideous for morning strolls in the garden. Ivan added a couple of rather fine scarves (‘Georgina von Etzdorf …' he breathed reverently as he laid them gently on the pillow) and then turned to choose a necklace from the ones looped over a corner of her dressing-table mirror.