Familiar Rooms in Darkness (6 page)

‘Oh, well.' She shrugged, about to rise.

Adam put out a hand and held her arm. He leaned forward and drew her to him, and kissed her for a gentle, brief and dizzying moment. Her response was too warm for him to handle. He drew away.

‘That was just by way of compensation. To me, I mean. For not–' He stopped.

‘Taking advantage of me?' Her voice was wry.

He nodded. ‘I had hoped to elevate you to pedestal status and leave you there.'

‘Oh God.' From where he lay, Adam could see the swell and curve of one delectable breast, the nipple stiffened. If she didn't go now –

She stood up and pulled her robe together.

‘Don't be cross,' said Adam, studying her face.

Bella ran a hand through her cropped, soft hair, shook her head, and left the room.

Adam lay awake for a long time, reflecting on the odd occurrence, trying to derive some consolation from the knowledge that at least he had done the right thing.

*

Next morning, Adam awoke at six to the steady cheeping of the alarm on his mobile phone. He dressed and went downstairs quietly. The household still slept. The front door had been locked by some process which Adam couldn't fathom, so he went through to the kitchen. Pausing to leave a note on the table for Briony, thanking her and explaining that he had to leave early, he walked through the scullery to the back door. The large metal key was still in the lock. He turned it, and stepped out into the chilly dawn. He made his way to the front of the house and crossed the gravel driveway to where his car stood. The engine coughed a couple of times before starting, and he glanced up at the house, hoping he hadn't woken anyone. But no one appeared. He put the car in gear, and headed back to London.

Three weeks later, Adam was sitting with a photographer in the lobby of a West End hotel. They were there to interview an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author who had kept them waiting for over half an hour. Adam picked up a copy of
Hello!
from a nearby table and flicked through it. Bella was featured twice in
Diary of the Week
– once, attending the premiere of yet another lottery-funded British no-hoper movie, and then at the opening of some Sloaney friend's new jewellery shop. You could see why photographers loved her. He stared intently at both pictures of her. In one she was laughing with two other girls, and in the other she was talking to an actor called Bruce Redmond, saying something in his ear. He was smiling. It looked very intimate.

Adam folded the magazine and showed the page to Dan, his photographer. ‘Bella Day. What d'you think?'

Dan considered the pictures. ‘Yeah. Wouldn't kick her out of bed, that's for sure.'

Adam closed the magazine and sighed.

When he got back to his flat that afternoon, Adam played back his messages. The third was from Bella. After the night at Gandercleugh, he had hardly expected to hear from her again.

‘Adam, this is Bella Day. You didn't say whether or not
you had my mother's number.' There followed Cecile's phone number, and nothing more. That was the content of the message.

He sat down and went back, for the thousandth time, over the conversation they had had in his bedroom at Gandercleugh. Not really a conversation, more a fragment of one, mere words, two people not quite making sense to one another. Leaving the fact of Megan aside, his response to her availability had been instinctively truthful. She was insecure, flaky, and she had come on to him purely out of boredom. How many other men did she offer herself to on first acquaintance? Dozens, probably. A strange girl. You would think someone as beautiful as that would have a stronger sense of self-regard. He could wish the incident had never happened, given that he wanted to be able to talk to her easily and equably about what it was like being Harry Day's daughter. Then again, it had possessed a bizarre eroticism which he found difficult to put from his mind.

That evening he and Megan lay on the sofa after supper, Adam flicking through television channels, his shoes off, feet on the coffee table.

‘I still don't know what to wear to Jo's wedding,' said Megan idly.

‘When is that again?'

‘In two weeks – July the first.'

‘I may be in France that weekend.'

‘Oh, Adam! You've known about it for ages. I've accepted for both of us.'

‘Sorry about that. But she's your friend.'

Megan said nothing for a moment. She had wanted very much to attend this wedding with Adam. At an old schoolfriend's wedding, being part of a couple had a special importance. It was all very well being a single thirtysomething on the London scene, but when the chips were down, in the old church setting and at the reception afterwards, she'd look very much like remaindered goods if she had to show up on her own.

‘Why might you be in France?'

‘I pitched this idea to the commissioning editor on one of the Sundays – about farmers who've abandoned this country to go and farm in France. I suggested it months ago, and he's only just come round to the idea. So I may be away for a week or so.'

‘Can't you go later? I could take a couple of weeks off, come with you. It would be more like a holiday.'

Adam considered this. ‘I could, I suppose. There's no particular hurry. I'll think about it.'

‘Anyway, I thought you were meant to be getting on with this biography thing?'

Adam sighed. ‘I know. I really should. Actually, Bella Day rang today and left her mother's number. You know, Cecile Patterson, Harry Day's first wife.'

‘Oh, right.' Megan had lost interest, and was watching the television.

Adam wondered why he didn't ring her now. He'd been hanging back on this book, hadn't got in touch with any of the people whose phone numbers he'd taken down at Gandercleugh. His diffidence had something to do with that business with Bella. Well, he'd sorted that out in his mind, so he might as well get on with it.

He got up and went into his room, picked up the piece of paper on which he'd written the number, and rang it.

The voice which answered was light yet husky, very precise. ‘Cecile Patterson.'

Adam introduced himself, and mentioned Bella.

Cecile was warm and expansive. She said she would be delighted to assist Adam, and that he was most welcome to visit any time next week. She began to talk about Harry, unbidden, and went on for a good ten minutes. Adam started to jot down notes, but stopped. He could get it all again when he went to see her. He suspected she was somewhat lonely. She talked in the eager way that lonely people did.

He arranged to visit her at her home in Dulwich the following Wednesday, at two in the afternoon. As he went back through to Megan, Adam wondered whether he would glean from Cecile anything more than the superficial facts of this period of Harry's life. She sounded too civilized, too much at ease with the past, to bring out any hard and bitter truths.

He sat down next to Megan. She half-turned, nestled against him and kissed him, unbuttoning the top of his shirt. ‘Do you want to go to bed?'

‘Let's do it here.'

‘On the sofa? Bed's comfier.'

‘Comfy,' replied Adam, ‘is not what I want.'

‘Cosier.' She slipped her hand beneath the waistband of his trousers.

‘Nor is cosy.'

Undefined thoughts, vaguely connected with Megan's friend's wedding, drifted through Megan's mind as Adam
undressed her. They were to do with the pleasures of being part of a couple, and of patterns taking the shape of stability. Adam's own thoughts dwelt on the sensual pleasure of sexual familiarity, quite different from the erotic charge of first encounters, and tailed off, when his mind became incapable of coherent thought, into the question of how long it took for familiarity to lose its delight and become merely boring.

Cecile lived in a semi-detached house in Dulwich, in a street which she described as a quiet backroad. As though Dulwich contained any other kind, thought Adam, as he got out of the car that afternoon. The early summer air was blank and still, awash with suburban melancholy. He felt its genteel oppression as he walked up the pavement to Cecile's house, through the gate, up a short flight of steps, and pressed the bell.

Cecile answered the door, dressed in loose trousers, a long cardigan with a brightly coloured scarf at the neck, and house slippers. She smiled at Adam. ‘Do come in,' she said. Her voice was husky, languid, with nicely accented vowels. Although she no longer appeared on stage, and very rarely on television, it was a voice which kept her much in demand with producers of a certain kind of Radio Four drama.

She made Adam coffee, and they sat in the front room with a plate of chocolate digestives on the table between them. It was not the kind of room Adam associated with an old person. The floor was of polished wood, the walls white, hung with pictures, and the furnishings a tasteful blend of whites and neutrals. But then Cecile, as he had
realized from glimpses of her at Harry's funeral and memorial service, was not a typical old woman.

‘I don't use this room a great deal. The other one,' she gestured vaguely behind her, ‘is a dreadful clutter. Full of clothes, you know, and my sewing machine and paraphernalia. I do some dressmaking – just for a few clients, friends, really. And myself, of course.'

Adam nodded, then took out his tape recorder and set it down on the table next to the biscuits. ‘Shall we start?'

‘Of course,' said Cecile. ‘Fire away.'

‘Tell me about the early days with Harry. You first met when you were cast in
Crying Out Loud
at the Royal Court, didn't you?'

‘Oh, we met before that, you know, when I was playing with the Birmingham Rep, and Harry came to see one of the plays – I can't recall what it was. Anyway, the director was Donald Weir, and Harry was a friend of his. Donald was terribly temperamental, and not at all the kind of person one liked working for. But a job was a job in those days… So that was when we first met. Then the following spring I was in
A Taste of Honey
at the Wyndham's, and he came to see me, and I suppose he thought I would be good for the part of Christine in
Crying Out Loud
. So he suggested me to Bill Prior, the director. The last thing in the
world
I expected was that Harry would ask me out. But he did…'

‘Do you remember what you did, the first time you went out together?'

‘Oh, yes. I wanted to see
At the Drop of a Hat
– you know, Flanders and Swann – at the New Lindsey. It was the most wonderful smash. But it was sold out, and
anyway it wasn't really Harry's kind of thing. So we went to a Tennessee Williams play which had just opened,
Camino Real
. Harry loved it and I thought it was dire. I think time has proved me right, and Harry wrong – please, do have the last biscuit. And after that,' she clasped her hands between her knees and smiled brightly at Adam, ‘we began to see one another on a regular basis and… well, we went on from there.'

‘Tell me about your life together after that. You appeared in his next play, didn't you?'

For an hour Adam sat listening as Cecile recounted as much as she could recall of her marriage to Harry. He noticed that she scarcely mentioned Bella and Charlie.

‘And then, you know, we divorced.'

‘Was that a difficult time?'

‘Oh, in some ways. He was not a particularly provident person, you know, Harry, when it came to money, and so on… The children were very young, and things were quite hard, financially. But emotionally difficult? No. We had rather gone our separate ways some time before that.' Cecile stared abstractedly at the back of her hands, and just as Adam was about to ask another question, she went on, ‘Harry really was a bit of a puzzle, you know. He started out as a rather mature person in a lot of ways, but as he got older, he seemed to become more juvenile. Like someone living their life backwards. Maybe it had something to do with the fashions of the times – manners, and so on. When he was a teenager, just after the war, you know, there was no such thing as youth, really. People reached the age of twenty-one and became grown-ups. Men in their early twenties behaved terribly like men in
their forties. They dressed the same, by and large. No such thing as fashion for teenagers or young men in those days. Well, not until teddy boys, all that kind of thing.' She glanced at Adam's cup. ‘Would you like more coffee?'

‘No, thank you.'

‘Harry, when I met him, was a serious grown-up. He was twenty-nine, he was a playwright, he'd published books of poetry… I was only nineteen, of course. At the end of the fifties, the early sixties, society began to change. Things became looser, less well-defined. The younger generation got invented. I think Harry decided he wanted to belong to it. He'd never had much of a youth, you see, between being a schoolboy and being grown-up. Straight into National Service, bang into his first job… He refused point-blank to go to university, you know. That was a sort of rebellion against his father. Anyway, by the time he was thirty-five, or thereabouts, Harry decided to be the young man he'd never had the chance to be. He embraced it all – pop music, flower power, marijuana, modern art, modern fashion. Oh, and how he enjoyed being a celebrity. Back in the fifties, that was the last thing he thought about. When he was writing those early plays, he was utterly dedicated, he wanted to reveal the reality of the kind of life he'd seen. You know, coming from a fairly privileged, middle-class academic background, the life Harry led – the life he forced upon himself, after leaving the army… Well, it was a complete revelation to him. Living amongst working-class people, doing pretty menial work, no money… It was a kind of moral imperative with him to show to the middle-class world he came from exactly what life was like for most
people, hard and basic and not at all genteel. He disliked Coward and Rattigan… though of course that's all become fashionable again now, hasn't it?'