Liberty Silk (45 page)

As she crept from the room, she missed Lisa’s dreamy smile, and her murmured response: ‘Sleep tight, my beautiful, beautiful girl . . .’

The next day, Lisa departed for France. Cat took a picture of her standing on the steps up to the aeroplane, laughing, flamboyantly blowing a goodbye kiss. Cat wore her chiffon frock, the filigree earrings, and – because she’d been chasing rainbows to photograph for her publishers earlier – her walking boots. The camera she used to snap Lisa was – for old times’ sake – the Box Brownie that her aunt had sent her for her fourteenth birthday.

ANY TIME SHE
visited her parents in Connemara, Cat made a point of touring the rest of the country randomly on her motorbike, seeking out material for photographs. Since she had never been north of the border, she decided to follow the coastline around the wild beauty of the Inishowen peninsula, and then along the Foyle estuary to the troubled city of Londonderry.

There her camera granted her access to the brave new world of the Bogside, a neighbourhood not much bigger than a football pitch, which had just proclaimed itself a free state and a no-go area for the police.

‘Are you from the paper, love?’ A middle-aged woman dandling a baby on her hip was standing outside one of the mean little terraced houses, eyeing her camera.

‘I’ve had a few pictures published, yeah.’

‘You’re very young-looking to be such a big gun.’

‘I’m twenty-six.’

‘Twenty-six? No way! Sure, that’s the age I am.’

Cat tried not to look shocked. The woman looked at least twenty years older; worn out. She was wearing a miniskirt and plastic sandals, and her legs were bare and mottled with cold. She took a deep suck on the butt she was smoking, then tossed it into the gutter.

‘Would ye ever take a photograph? Of me and the new babby? He’s never had his picture taken before.’

‘I’d be glad to. Is it your first baby?’

The woman gave a bark of laughter that turned into a paroxysm of coughing. ‘I’ve a clatter of them. Five, and another on the way. Will this picture get in the paper?’

‘If it’s any good.’ Cat removed the lens cap from her Leica. ‘Would you mind if it did?’

‘Why would I mind? Sure everyone wants to get their picture in the paper. Put my name in, too. It’s Valerie McDevitt.’

Cat felt like kicking herself. For this woman, having her picture published would constitute an honour, even though her she was malnourished and ragged and missing some teeth. It would be her fifteen minutes of fame.

She checked the light reading on her meter while Valerie readied herself for her portrait.

‘Here, babby,’ she said, tickling the baby under its arms. ‘Don’t be afraid of the camera. Give it a big smile.’

The child laughed – its grubby face gleeful suddenly – and Cat laughed too, because the only alternative was to cry, and she had learned that you couldn’t focus through tears.

She took a couple of dozen shots, and had just rehoused her camera when an almighty banging and clattering arose. Further along the street, a group of women had come out of their houses and were pounding bin-lids on the pavements and shouting slogans in what was clearly a rallying cry.

‘Take the wean, Jacinta!’ shouted Valerie, thrusting the baby into the arms of a passing child. ‘The fuckin’ peelers are tryin’ it on again!’

A photo opportunity! As Valerie hurtled down the street, Cat segued directly into Mohammed Ali mode – dancing sideways on the balls of her feet, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, moving to the rhythm of the clicking of her camera and the atavistic tattoo of metal on concrete – until she ran out of film.

Reluctantly she stowed the camera back in its bag and retreated across the border of the tiny new Republic of Bogside without saying goodbye. She’d almost be afraid to say goodbye, for Valerie now had the appearance of a woman possessed by some tribal buzz as she yelled abuse at the police and beat a bin-lid with the heel of her hand. Cat had just started off in the direction of her Kawasaki when she became aware that she was being observed by somebody on the other side of the street.

It was a man – a damn handsome man – and he was photographing her. Pissed, Cat gave him the V-sign. He put the lens cap back on his camera, and, smiling, gave her one right back.

It was Nick Ryder.

In the fuggy bar of the City Hotel, where the international press corps was billeted, Cat chain-smoked her way through half a dozen Marlboros. She’d been badly shaken by the rage that had erupted in the Bogside. For an hour or so she fulminated about the Brits and their bullying tactics, and when she calmed down, Nick said: ‘You’re way more complex than I imagined from our first inauspicious meeting. I took you for a bimbo.’

‘And I took you for a lech.’

‘It was hard not to ogle you. You were wearing a rather fetching little number, as I recall.’

‘I borrowed it from my flatmate.’

‘She has excellent taste. It suited you.’

‘I don’t enjoy dressing up. I was a tomboy when I was at school.’

‘Where were you at school?’

‘Kylemore Abbey, in Connemara.’

‘I’ve heard of that place. It’s on my list of locations to cover: it’s spectacularly beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I was very lucky to be educated there: it’s where I took my first photographs.’

Nick hooked his elbow over the back of the banquette. ‘Tell me more,’ he said.

Cat shook her head. ‘No. People only want to know about the pillow fights and the best friends in gymslips and the sadistic nuns.’

‘
Were
there pillow fights?’

Cat returned his smile. ‘Of course there were.’

‘Have you any photographs?’

‘You’re some chancer.’ She went to take a sip of her drink, then paused and looked at him over the rim of her glass. ‘If you’re heading west, come with me and I’ll show you around. I know all of Connemara’s secret places.’ She spoke the words in an exaggerated, lilting brogue.

‘I can still hardly believe you’re Irish.’

‘Kylemore is an international school; I have friends from all over the world from there, and all of them speak posh.’

‘So you’re well travelled?’

‘Yep. I’ve read some of your guidebooks, by the way. They’re not bad.’

‘Thanks. After I met you, I got hold of some of your photographs. They’re not bad, either.’

‘Maybe we should collaborate?’

‘That’s not unthinkable.’

‘How long will you stay in Connemara?’

‘As long as it takes.’

Cat gave him a level look. Then her lips curved in a smile as she saw Nick’s eyes go to her mouth.

‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’ he said.

‘Fire ahead.’

‘You went to a convent school?’

‘What of it?’

‘You know what they say about good Catholic girls.’

Cat gave him a look of pure disdain. ‘I’m not a Catholic. And as for “good”, I’m with Mae West on that one.’

‘What did Mae West say?’

‘She said “When I’m good, I’m very, very good. But . . .”’

‘But?’

‘“When I’m bad, I’m better”,’ said Cat.

They headed west, Cat on her motorbike, Nick in his Citroën DS – by which Cat could not but be more than a little impressed.

‘How could you afford such a classy car?’ she asked him.

‘I could never afford it,’ he told her. ‘I won it in a game of poker.’

Having arranged to meet up for something to eat, they stopped off in a hotel just off the Clifden road, a beautiful place which overlooked the Atlantic and was surrounded by acres of woodland.

‘What time are your parents expecting you?’ Nick asked.

‘They aren’t. I guess I’d better phone them and ask them to make up a spare room.’

‘Don’t.’

‘You mean you don’t want a bed to sleep in tonight?’

‘Sure. But not in your parents’ house.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I want to sleep with you, and it would be a very disrespectful thing to do under their roof. I’ve booked us a room here.’

‘What makes you think I want to sleep with you?’

‘Because something tells me you’re dying to find out if, like you, I’m better when I’m bad.’

He was.

Cat and Nick spent a magical week travelling through Connemara with the roof of his convertible down. Basing themselves in the Capital of Connemara (population five hundred and something) they visited Kylemore, where Cat introduced him to the nuns and the goats and showed him the rec room, where a crowd of giggling school girls blushed and fluttered. They motored by the coast along the Sky Road – one of the most beautiful drives in Ireland, and so-called because the road rises to meet the sky. They walked along deserted beaches and boreens, and listened to fiddle music over pints of Guinness in quirky little pubs. They took a curragh out to an island in Bertraghboy Bay and skinny-dipped. And by the end of the week, Nick and Cat had, to her infinite surprise, fallen in love.

Nick had made an appointment to meet a bodhrán maker in the sleepy village of Roundstone, about fifteen miles from Clifden.

‘Drive carefully in that car of yours, Nick,’ Róisín told him. ‘The bog road is riddled with potholes.’

‘Maybe you should take the Kawasaki, instead,’ suggested Cat.

‘No,’ he said, turning on the ignition and making the engine purr. ‘I like the way the women eye me when the soft top’s down.’

‘Get away with you now!’ Róisín scolded him.

When he had gone, Róisín closed the front door, turned to Cat, and said, ‘It’s time we had a chat. Come into the kitchen and I’ll pour us some tea.’

In the kitchen, Cat sat down at the table, feeling jittery. Róisín’s ‘chats’ were usually anything but chatty.

‘Is it about Nick?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you like him? I’m sorry – maybe he’s outstayed his welcome. I didn’t think we’d be here for more than a few days.’

‘It’s not about Nick,’ said Róisín. ‘He’s a fine fellow – not a bother on him. It’s about your aunt Lisa. I kept the headline from you – I didn’t want to spoil your lovely holiday with your boyfriend.’

‘What headline?’

Róisín went to the dresser and took a newspaper from a drawer. On the front page, Cat read the following words: ‘FORMER FILM STAR DIES.’

She looked at her mother in disbelief. ‘Not Aunt Lisa?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘She had cancer: it was terminal.’

‘She told you this? When?’

‘In a letter. She wrote it in advance and asked her sister-in-law to post it before the news hit the headlines.’

Cat’s hand went automatically to the charm Lisa had given her, which she wore on a chain around her neck. ‘May I see it?’ she asked.

‘Yes. But if you read this letter, Cat, you’re going to learn something about yourself – something that both Lisa and I decided you shouldn’t know until after her death.’

‘What?’

‘Do you want me to show you the letter?’

There was a pause. Then: ‘Yes, I do,’ said Cat.

‘I’d better forewarn you of its contents, so.’

‘Go ahead.’

Róisín set the teapot and the milk jug on the table, and poured. Then she took a deep breath and told Cat the story of how things had transpired from the moment that Lisa had arrived on the doorstep of the house in Clifden, clad in Hollywood casuals and bearing extravagant wartime gifts, to the arrangement that had been set up between the two cousins after Cat’s birth. And all the while Cat kept casting her mind back to the time she’d spent in the cottage overlooking the beach, the three days when she and Lisa had played Scrabble and talked and talked and drunk wine and hot chocolate and watched home movies together, and how any time she’d looked round, Lisa’s eyes had been on her, transfixed. She was silent for many moments. Then: ‘May I see the letter now?’ she asked.

Róisín took it from the envelope and handed it to her, and Cat steeled herself for the tears she knew would come.

Dear Róisín
,

This letter is difficult to write because it will be the last you will ever receive from me. I have asked my sister-in-law Hélène to post it as soon as what is going to happen, happens, because I do not want you to get a shock when the news hits the headlines, as it is sure to. These words will be upsetting for you to read, so be brave.

Some time ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It is of an invasive kind, and has, unfortunately metastasized. It is, therefore, terminal. I may have less than six months left to live. That is why I visited Connemara last spring – I’m sorry for arriving unannounced. It was so good to see you again!

As for my beautiful Cat, I will leave it up to you to tell her of her true parentage, or not. I have sent a package to you for her, containing letters that belonged to her grandmother. If you do not wish her to know that I was her birth mother, you may of course destroy them. But please allow her to keep the enclosed ring: it is a very pretty one that Scotch gave my mother on their engagement.

Also enclosed is a book that Gervaise told me had been sent to the Villa Perdita, addressed to my mother, Jessie. I found it in the library there, and going by the inscription, I thought that it might be a gift to her from my father. Pure speculation, of course, based on little more than the fact that Raguenez in Finistère – which they visited on honeymoon – is known as ‘Little Tahiti’. Still, I love it for the illustrations, which I think may be by him.

Most importantly of all, I have enclosed a certificate of authentication and provenance that pertains to a painting Jessie left me. It is an extremely valuable Picasso that currently hangs on the stairwell in Gervaise Lantier’s house. This document certifies that I am the legal owner of the work, and I want Cat to have it. I have not had the painting shipped over because that could lead to unseemly wrangles between Cat and Ghislaine – Gervaise’s legitimate daughter from a previous marriage. French bureaucracy is always so tangled in red tape. But once Cat has all the relevant papers, it will make things easier.

When she comes to pick it up, she can help herself to anything from my wardrobe that she fancies: there are original pieces by Chanel that belonged to my mother as well as some fantastic couture gowns from my Hollywood years that she could sell. They are all stored in my mother’s room in the Villa Perdita above the Boat House.