The Twilight Hour (27 page)

She took both his hands in hers: ‘Mr Colman – my deepest sympathy.' He still just stood there. She released him and settled herself on the Knole sofa and looked round. ‘They didn't make too much mess then, the police.'

Stanley looked grim. He said: ‘Could you rustle up some coffee, Dinah?'

I assumed he felt he had to hear the gruesome details, but when I returned, they were sitting there in glum silence. ‘There isn't any milk.' I set the coffee tray on the nest of tables. Beatrice Lomas rose to her feet. ‘I have some. I'll fetch it – won't take a moment.'

I looked at Stan. ‘Are you all right? What did she say?'

‘A man called.'

The neighbour glided back into the room holding a dainty jug. She placed it on the table and returned to the sofa, where she sat with her knees slightly apart.

‘This man who called –' Stan could hardly get the words out. He'd been more like his usual self in the train, but the reality of the flat had knocked the stuffing out of him.

‘Miss Grey's – I'm sorry, Mrs Colman, but I always thought of her in that film role, you know – her Romanian friend perhaps?'

Stanley flinched. ‘He came here?'

Beatrice Lomas sipped her coffee. Her hands flashed with huge rings, topaz, amethyst and an emerald. ‘It was some days before … she passed away. After her visitor had gone, Mrs Colman – Gwendolen – asked me to give her a reading – the cards, you know,' she added, seeing Stan's puzzlement. ‘I believe she will have told you I'm a clairvoyant. She said she was thinking of going back to acting. I read the tarot for her. She didn't like what she saw.'

‘Why? What did they say?' I cried. Alan would have scoffed at the very idea of fortune telling, and of course I didn't believe in it either, but it would be spine-chillingly horrible if this ridiculous woman had foreseen poor Gwendolen's death.

‘That isn't how the tarot works,' she said repressively. ‘Dark strangers – a journey – that's a very ignorant idea of what to expect. I'm not some vulgar Gypsy Petulengro on the pier, you know. But it was a disturbing spread.' Her accent was more Bromley than Romany. ‘After that I didn't see her again until … well …'

Stan hung his head. He seemed more and more dejected. ‘I know she missed that life,' he muttered. ‘At first she said she wanted to get away from it all, but then … she sort of languished without it.' He sighed, a sigh so deep it was more of a shudder. ‘I was hoping to start something here. Brighton's full of stars – I thought we'd meet a few important people in the industry – I thought if I got the Brighton studios going again, it'd all be hunky-dory. And now – without Gwendolen … what am I going to do?' He buried his head in his hands.

‘I know you're devastated, Mr Colman. But she wasn't destined to act again. Let's step downstairs to my flat. The aura here, the atmosphere – it's upsetting. Things will be clearer in a neutral environment. We'll have a reading. You'll find it helpful.'

Stan followed her like a lamb. They seemed to have forgotten about me. My indignation didn't last long, though, because this – I suddenly saw it, with a stomach lurch of nervous excitement – was an extraordinary opportunity. I had the run of the flat. Before all this happened I'd never have dreamt of snooping about and prying into other people's possessions. Now I had no scruples. I looked round the room. The framed poster on the wall had ‘Gwendolen Grey' and
House of Shadows
drifting in spectral smoke across a murky night sky. In the foreground a lake glimmered darkly, and a wraith-like woman fled towards a wood; a sliver of moon hung high up and cast its ghostly light on the house in the distance.

There was a modern oak bureau in the space by the window. I pulled down the flap, excited and apprehensive. I riffled through the pigeonholes, but they contained nothing but unused envelopes and a ball of string. I had no idea what I was looking for. In any case, Stanley, or possibly the murderer, would have removed anything suspicious. And of course the police must have searched the place too. Anyway, what was there that
could
be suspicious? But this was too good a chance to miss, I had to carry on. There just might be something. A letter from Radu, perhaps, something incriminating. But there was nothing of interest in the desk drawers either, apart from a foolscap envelope containing newspaper cuttings about Titus Mavor's death and Colin's trial; it wasn't surprising Gwendolen should have kept them. Whatever Gwendolen's relationship to Titus, she must have been interested – even she, who seemed so little interested in anything. But it reminded me of the way the newspapers had linked the two murders. Suffocation was the link; and the fact that the two victims had once been lovers.

Suffocation; to suffocate someone you had to be strong, Alan said. It wasn't as easy as it sounded. Unless you drugged them first – and that wasn't necessarily easy either. Titus had been drugged, but Bannister had never explained how Colin had managed to dose him with chloroform.

I moved on to the bookshelf. Gwendolen hadn't had many books. I don't think she was ever much of a reader. Some copies of
Reader's Digest
and some romances – Ethel M Dell and Baroness Orczy's
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. And an old notebook with a marbled card cover, rubbed away at the edges. I opened it and began to read the childish copperplate handwriting.

May 7, 1940

I shall write about things as they happen. But first he said I should write about childhood. Writers always write about childhood, he said. But that was so long ago.

My first memory. A seashell curled on the sand, indecent flesh-coloured, hard and shiny, like my private place, only spiky. He liked it when I said that. You're a true surrealist, he said.

We lived up and down the south coast, moving from furnished rooms to furnished rooms, all different, all the same. The landladies made Mamma cry. We always lived in the back streets, never had a view of the sea. We walked to the beach, down hilly streets, along cliffs, or followed the curve of a promenade as it made a long tongue round the bay. A hurdy-gurdy played. Donkeys plodded along the sands.

There were children playing on the beach, but I was always on my own.

Mamma wore pink and red voile, a pattern of flowers, and her red Japanese parasol, under cloudy skies. ‘If we could only go back to the Riviera. Shan't we one day, Freddy?' But Papa in his armchair screened himself behind a copy of the
Racing Times
and didn't reply.

We moved again. ‘Furnished rooms! Can we never have a place of our own?' ‘Don't be so bloody middle class, Matilda. Who wants to be tied down? Where's your spirit of adventure?'

Papa had fought in the war. He coughed all the time. ‘Wished I'd copped it in the trenches instead of dying by inches with this bloody gassed lung.' ‘Oh, don't say that, Freddy!'

It frightened me too.

At first I liked Gordon. ‘You're a free spirit, ain't you, Gwenny. Come and sit on Gordon's knee.'

I didn't want to do what Gordon wanted, but he made me in the end and when Mamma found out, she blamed me. ‘It wasn't his fault, you led him on, you wretched child, you
disgusting
little trollop–'

I met Gordon on the turn of the stairs. He muttered something and fumbled some notes into my hand. I ran away. I took the train. The King had just died.

My room in Chelsea had no furniture, but it had yellow walls, I was living in a daffodil. I rolled up in an eiderdown the girl in the next room gave me and slept on the floor. It was more important to have some clothes. In my red dress with a skirt like a peasant and a black velvet choker I walked about in the King's Road and hoped I'd meet some artists. Quite soon I did, they wanted to paint me.

I was walking on air, living on air. Literally. Hardly anything to eat, but I had an air about me, someone said … putting on airs.

One evening I was swept up with a crowd and into a party in a seedy part of Camden Town. It seemed strange to me that there should be a town in the middle of London, which itself was a town, London Town.

He was there – in his blue overalls and white shirt and a red and white spotted scarf round his neck. And the red curls, like an angel, around his fresh, rosy, cherub's face. He was drunk, he was shouting a poem through cupped hands across the roar of the party until he saw me and made a path of silence between us like the parting of the Red Sea. We walked towards each other along the corridor of silence and the party ebbed away on either side. ‘You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. Where have you come from? I have to paint you.'

When he saw my body and the ugly puckered scar, he said how beautiful it was, he liked the imperfection. What is flawless is never truly beautiful, he said.

He helped organise the Surrealist exhibition in London. Famous French artists and writers came specially. His own paintings would also be shown. The English Surrealists were small minnows beside the continental whales; it was their big moment.

The most famous of the foreigners gave a talk: Salvador Dalí. He had a curling moustache and very black eyes. He dressed in a deep sea diver's suit to give his lecture. He stomped onto the platform, but then something happened. He began to struggle with the helmet. Something was wrong. Titus and one of the Frenchmen rushed forward and wrenched off the helmet. There was no air inside and he'd nearly suffocated.

Dalí said he had to paint me. Titus was jealous – of Dalí, not of me. He wanted Dalí to be interested in him, in his painting, his painting of me if he wanted, but not in me myself. Dalí's wife didn't like it either.

He painted me anyway. The painting was very strange.

And then things went wrong. But I can't write about that.

I don't know why I thought I should write a diary. Nothing happens to me any more.

Something
has
happened now. I found her! She says I'm depressed, she's going to take me out of myself, she said. She said I must pull myself together. It's time I got a job. Firm but kind, she said. She'll look after me now.

I should never have guessed Gwendolen could write so poetically. Well, it was a bit fey. Such crushed pathos – was that the shrinking creature sheltering within the brittle shell of the Gwendolen I'd known?

I left the drawing room and opened the doors off the hall until I found the main bedroom. I pushed open the door, but this
did
seem an invasion of privacy, for after all it had been Stanley's bedroom too.

The room reminded me of Ormiston Court. The brocade curtains were pulled back, letting the cruel light in off the sea to expose the gilt and tapestry chairs, the pink satin counterpane, the kidney-shaped dressing table with triple looking glass and the built-in wardrobe.

I stood by the dressing table and picked up a heavy silver hand mirror. I touched the matching hairbrush with its elaborate raised pattern. There was a dusty fluff of black hairs caught in the bristles: Gwendolen's. I put it down hurriedly, with a shiver. There were trinket boxes and a cut-glass scent bottle with a round, crochet-covered pump, looking more like a slightly obscene medical accessory than an aid to beauty.

I looked in all the drawers, but I didn't find anything except clothes and make-up. It was ridiculous, when I thought about it, to expect to find anything important, and even if I did, I might not recognise it.

I pushed open the sliding wardrobe door for no other reason, really, than to inspect Gwendolen's wonderful clothes. The rail was stuffed with garments, crammed in so tightly I had difficulty pulling them apart. Her leopardskin coat was crushed against a blue-grey evening dress. I remembered that dress; it was the one Gwendolen had shown me. Next to it red taffeta was bursting to free itself from the packed rows of black astrakhan and pale mink, flowery dresses, garnet red tweed, bottle green wool. I inspected the textures and feel of the silks, the alpaca, the broadcloth and cashmere, and looked at the labels. A stiff black coat was by Dior. There was a lovely blue tweed suit by Hardy Amies, a
feuille morte
silk Jacques Fath cocktail dress, and the black-and-white cotton she'd worn on our day into the country. This was far more intimate, somehow, than letters would have been. The dresses were dead things, the husk, the shed skin of Gwendolen. Their presence, her absence, brought home to me she was really dead.

And how clothes stored memories! I stroked the blue-grey gown, pulled it forward, remembering Gwendolen's discomfort when Dr Carstairs had recognised her at the dance. I could see her now, in my memory, sliding away from him, trying to avoid recognition.

The blue-grey taffeta made a slight creaking sound. I pulled it right out and held it against myself, as I'd done in Gwendolen's other bedroom. It felt different now. Something had happened to the lining. It stuck right out. It must have come loose. I unzipped the bodice. I'd read about the canvas and buckram lining that shaped the New Look dresses – there'd been a disapproving article in
Picture Post
, suggesting that the new fashions were very
old
-fashioned – as if a dress could drive women back to the home.

But this – as the inner surface of the bodice was revealed I could see there really was something wrong. There was something inside the lining. I pulled at the intricate stitching. There was a crackling sound.

‘What the hell are you doing?'

Stanley stood in the doorway, a look of horror on his face. ‘Stop it!' He stepped forward as though to prevent me physically.

‘There's something inside it, Stan – that crackling, it isn't the lining …'

‘You'll hurt it,' he said piteously, as though it were Gwendolen herself I was tearing apart.

‘Please – wait a minute, Stan. I'm doing my best. Let me just get it out.'

This made him angrier. ‘Stop it! Stop it, Dinah!' he cried. He grabbed hold of my arm, but I wrestled away. He gave up and collapsed onto the bed, his head in his hands.