Authors: Harriet Evans
‘Mum …’ I say weakly. ‘No one’s supposed to know where I’m staying … You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Yes. Well, I forgot, didn’t I.’ Mum gives a little laugh. ‘I remember now. Don’t worry though, dear. Who’s going to see it?’
‘No, Mum,’ I tell her. ‘I’m serious. Someone’s after me.’ She cocks her head on one side, looking at me. ‘You shouldn’t have given this interview.’
‘Someone’s after you?’
‘It’s probably nothing, but – that’s why I’ve got all these people all the time.’
She laughs again. ‘Silly Mums. But …’ I’m blinking, wondering how serious it is, and she suddenly says sharply, ‘Oh, really, Sophie. It’s not like you’re … Barack Obama. Who’s going to read the
Shamley – Charlton Lacey – Ambleside Gazette
?’
Steve Jobs looks hurt.
‘Anyone who has a specific Google alert looking for me,’ I say, trying not to shout. ‘Everything’s online now, even some crappy local newspaper.’
‘Hey,’ Steve Jobs says, but Mum holds out her hand.
‘Shh, please, Steve. Look, Sophie. I’ve got a life as well, you know. It’s about me too, you know. They wanted to know about me.’
I breathe out heavily, and just stare at her. I don’t know what to say. I am a horrible person.
‘Who’s this?’ I look up at the voice in the doorway. It’s Angie. She says to Steve Jobs, ‘Sir, can I help you?’
Steve Jobs looks utterly confused.
Mum says crossly, ‘This is my friend Steve. Do you mind?’ She looks annoyed, whether at me, at Angie, or at her interview I don’t know.
I turn to Angie. ‘It’s fine, honestly. Let’s go.’ I look back at Mum, but she’s looking at the photo of herself in the paper. ‘Mum, please don’t do that again. I’ll call you.’
She doesn’t answer. I don’t know if it’s because she’s cross with me, or because she’s absorbed in the photo of herself. But she turns back to the newspaper as I leave. One coral nail traces her grey-inked face on the paper.
I climb into the car. It’s raining again, a thick, heavy, silent sort of rain. I stare out of the window, trying not to cry, as we drive through the outskirts of Shamley. It’s grim here. No one could miss it. No one could want to stay here, or belong here. I sniff and shake myself. We go past Dad’s first garage, where I used to sit on the stool by the entrance, reading comics and eating sweets with him, when I was really small, and people would walk past and smile. That Chris Sykes with his new garage and his sweet little girl, he must be worth a go, they’d think. He called me his lucky mascot. Maybe he lied to Mum, maybe he’s here. I crane my neck to see him, but there’s no sign, and we carry on. The a Co-op, a charity shop, the bus stop the cool girls used to hang out at, and there’s –
‘Oh, my God.’ Angie jumps and Jimmy swerves, just a little, at the harshness of my voice.
‘Sophie? What do you see?’
‘What’s wrong, love?’
I jab my finger against the wet, steamed glass. ‘Donna. It’s Donna! Jimmy, can you pull over? Donna, my best friend from school, she’s over there—’
Angie says, ‘Sophie, we need to clear this if you’re going to get out.’
Jimmy pulls over. The rain is even heavier now. ‘Donna!’ I wind down the window and call her name. ‘Donna!’
A woman pauses at the entrance to the Co-op and turns around. My wet fingers fumble to open the door. She stares at me. It’s definitely Donna. She looks totally different, her semi-Afro hair scraped up into a messy ponytail, her face drawn and uneasy.
I yell again, my heart beating so fast. ‘Donna, it’s me! Sophie!’
An old man stares at me from the bus shelter. Donna glances at me from under her umbrella, her face immobile, then at the car. The automatic doors of the Co-op suddenly glide open as a clock somewhere starts to chime, and she turns and walks through the doors, not looking back.
There’s a silence in the car.
‘Maybe it wasn’t her,’ Jimmy says gently, after a few seconds.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Probably. Let’s just get out of here.’
We drive through the deserted streets, running grey-black with walls of rain, and soon we’re out on the main road again, and it might never have happened. I rub my eyes.
‘Miss Leigh,’ says Angie from the front of the car. ‘I’m talking to Gavin as soon as we get back. We can’t have you staying in the hotel if it’s been published in a newspaper. That’s a specific risk to your security. We’ll have to move you.’
‘Oh, Angie.’ I lean between the seats. ‘Seriously? Come on, it’d be easy enough to find out where I am if you wanted to. It’s only my mother spouting off in some local newspaper. It’s only just come out today, anyway.’
‘My job is to protect you, Miss Leigh,’ Angie says. ‘I’m not doing that if I don’t warn you about stuff like this. We’ll have to get you some options, that’s what we need,’ and she turns and speaks, softly and fluently, into the phone. I sit back, watching the town I grew up in recede into countryside again.
The next day I’m doing exterior shots in a rare break from the rain. It’s that stage in the shooting schedule when you seem to have been shooting for months and be no nearer completion. In a couple of weeks we are supposed to be moving on to Leavesden, to film the more technical and bluescreen scenes.
When I get back to the hotel Sara’s waiting in the bar, holding her BlackBerry aloft. As I raise a hand at Nicola, the hotel manager, and a couple of guys from the crew, she bustles towards me. On her face is a curious mixture of excitement and something else, I don’t know what it is. Fear?
‘She wants to meet you,’ she says. ‘She’s changed her mind. I – I don’t understand it.’
‘Who?’ I say stupidly, fiddling with the kirby grips in my hair, pulling them out and into my coat pocket. Sara hands me the BlackBerry.
‘I don’t understand it,’ she says again. It’s an email addressed to me, sent to my account. I read it aloud, and as I get to the end a big grin is sliced across my face.
Dear Miss Leigh,
Most unusually, I have received a phone message from Eve Noel. She would like to meet with you. She apologises for not replying to your previous requests but she has been prevented from doing so by circumstances beyond her control. She has been trying to contact you herself but has not found it possible to reach you. She has considered your proposal and would be interested in discussing the part of Anne Hathaway. To that end she would like you to visit her for tea next Monday. The address is Heartsake House, Charlton Lacey, Gloucestershire. She requests you arrive at 4.30.
I cannot emphasise how unusual this is.
Yours
Melanie Hexham
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY Tony Lees-Miller comes with me. Jimmy drives us. Mike, Angie’s afternoon stand-in, is there too of course.
I’m nervous like I haven’t been since I was auditioning for
South Street People
. Three failed auditions beforehand (an Ovaltine ad, a British period film about the Raj, and an ITV drama about runaway prostitutes which I was pretty glad not to get, if I’m honest) meant Mum and I were both extremely tense, as she drove me to London. Mum managed to make it clear that
everything
– all the money she’d spent on classes and private tuition and clothes and the rest of it – boiled down to this moment, that if I didn’t get the part, it would be a big deal. I chewed half my cuticle off, I was so nervous, and it spotted my new Oasis dress with red dots of blood: we had to stop at a Little Chef and sponge it off. Maybe the drama took my mind off the other drama, because I knew as I was acting that I was nailing it. I was in London, at last, out of Shamley, and I was good, too. I could start to see what Mum had been pushing for all those years.
I feel this drive is similarly important. They talk about ‘Act Three’ in scripts – the point at which everything has changed and you can’t go back to the way things were. I feel like we’re getting to Act Three. We’re going to see Eve Noel. I’m nervous, but I’m also uneasy, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what to expect.
We’re crawling through Charlton Lacey, a beautiful Cotswold village dozing in the rare afternoon sun. There’s a thin river, almost a stream, cutting along the edge of the last crop of buildings, and an overgrown field, with a dilapidated old building standing in the middle of it, the remains of a garden sloping down to the river.
‘Village doctor used to live there, back in the day,’ Jimmy says. ‘Shame, it’s a beautiful house. Been boarded up for years.’
The river runs through lush, low fields, a golden bridge arching over it, incongruous in the middle of nowhere. It winds near us, then away again, a grey-blue ribbon through the land. We drive a mile or so longer in silence, until the car swings round a corner and up a narrow path.
‘This is it,’ says Jimmy. Tony and I peer ahead. The drive is only about 20 metres long, but it’s impossible to see what’s at the end. There are yew trees on either side, so thick and black and unkempt the car almost gets stuck pushing through them.
It occurs to me that we are the first visitors for a while.
‘Do you want to get out here, sir?’ Jimmy says.
‘Maybe, maybe,’ Tony says. ‘Thanks, Jimmy. Wait here.’
Mike opens his door but I stop him. ‘It’s fine, Mike. I’ll call you when we get inside.’ He frowns but sits back again.
Jimmy hands Tony a bouquet wrapped in paper, and we walk up the drive. It must have had gravel on it once, but it’s dry and mealy now, thronged with chick weed.
A long, low house sits at the end of the thicket of yew. It must have been whitewashed once, but the surface is grubby, mildewed with years of neglect. There is ivy everywhere, creeping up the side of the house, curling into a lead window, around a chimney pot. There’s a smell of something too – oil? Gas? I peer through the window, but I can’t see anything at all. Then I realise I’m looking at cardboard boxes piled high, blocking out the light from the outside. Beside the front door, it says
Heartsake House
, or at least I think it was supposed to. The black pointed letters are decaying, swinging on red rusted nails, and the ‘t’ and ‘u’ are missing.
Tony stands up very straight and holds out the bouquet, like a child being inspected. He rings the plastic bell that just clings to the wall with one bent wire. I look down.
‘Why did you bring her those?’ I say sharply.
He glances down. ‘White roses? They’re her favourite flowers. She’s famous for it.’
I feel slightly dizzy. A sweet, strange taste comes into the back of my mouth as I stare at the flowers, peering out from the paper. I know this is a mistake, I just don’t know why.
There’s no sound inside the house or out, only the whispering of the breeze in the yew. I wonder if we should press the bell again. But if we don’t, we could just go … back away from this dark, unhappy place.
I don’t know Tony, I realise. I stare at the mildewy wall, then at the white roses. It’s white roses, I tell myself. It’s got nothing to do with you. Everyone likes them. It’s a coincidence.
‘Perhaps we—’ I begin, and then I intake my breath. There’s a soft, soft rustling sound, scratching, and something scrabbling at the other side of the door.
‘Miss Noel?’ Tony says clearly. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Noel? It’s Tony Lees-Miller. From the studio. We agreed—’
The door opens, very slowly. A piece of ivy, caught in the hinge, springs out towards us and I jump, then look ahead.
A woman is standing there. She is rail thin, her skin papery, but she is beautiful. Her eyes are dark, black as night, but vacant, clouded with some sort of film. She smells musty, or perhaps it’s the house behind her.
She shakes her head at the two of us, blankly, her hands clutching onto the door. ‘Good afternoon. How may I help you?’
‘We were looking for Eve Noel,’ says Tony politely. ‘We were told she lived here.’
He holds out the white roses and she looks down, then breathes in sharply, a terrified little hiss.
‘She’s not here.’ She shakes her head. ‘Go away.’
‘Miss Noel,’ I say. She turns to me, her eyes huge.
‘Go away. They shouldn’t have sent you. I’m Rose. Eve’s been dead for fifty years.’
For a brief second the film clears and the liquid black eyes flash silvery fire, and she stares right at me, and it’s her, I could swear it is. Then the cloud descends again and she turns. I catch a glimpse inside, of boxes stacked high against the walls and a black-and-white cat running down a corridor behind her, and then the door is closed in our faces.
a huge bite of the apple
April 1961
‘LUCILLE HERE WAS just saying it’s in the bag for you, honey.’ Dilly smiled up at me and pinned the last section of hem into place.
I smiled politely. ‘That’s wonderful.’
‘Aren’t you excited?’ Lucille, the seamstress beside her, asked curiously.
‘I’m tired,’ I said truthfully. ‘I’m honestly thrilled just to be nominated. It’s a wonderful year for the movies.’
‘Well,’ said Dilly, my dresser, her mouth full of pins, kneeling beside Lucille. ‘If you want my opinion, it’ll be incredible if you don’t win. Just incredible. That movie, I don’t know what it is about that movie but it’s … special.’ She clasped her hands together, pushing her large bosoms up between her elbows as she did. ‘Oh, my. I’ve seen it seven times. Seven times, and I still cry like a baby at that ending. My husband won’t let me go no more. When are they gonna show it on the TV, Miss Noel? I read it someplace, they’ll be showing movies on TV soon.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I couldn’t help but smile at her dreamy expression, the thrill in her voice.
‘“
You’ll be fine, Rose
,”’ Dilly recited, looking up to the ceiling, her voice tremulous. ‘“
You’re always fine. Just think of me occasionally, will ya?
”
‘Oh, my,’ said Lucille, her curly hair bobbing around her face. ‘“
My thoughts are yours already, Peter darling,
”’ she told Dilly, gazing at her intensely. ‘“
You know that. I’ll never love anyone else. Never.
”’
Lucille sniffed, and they turned to face me as if expecting applause. I clapped feebly, a couple of times. It didn’t hurt me to hear them any more. Every woman in America, it seemed, had seen that film by then, every woman wanted to recite those lines to me.