The Garden of the Villa Mollini Page 13

  Not that many people from our school went to the auditions. They thought it was going to be too hard, and anything that seems hard to them, they let it go. But it wasn’t difficult. You had five minutes to look at the script and then you had to read out a speech from near the end of the film, where they ask Julie why she started the fires, and she tells them. She tells them what she feels about communities like this one. She despises them. She thinks they’ve been hypnotised and corrupted. She thinks greed is all they understand.

  It was quite a long, angry speech. When it came to my turn to read it, I pretended I was saying it all to my brothers and that they didn’t understand a word of it and the more confused they looked, the more angrily the words came out. When I ended it, I knew I’d made an impression on the person who had asked me to read it. He was staring at me in amazement and then he said would I be able to come down to London in July for a second audition, which would be in front of a camera.

  In the letter that came this morning, they told me that over two hundred girls had been seen for the part of Julie and that now there are just six of us. And us six will go to London – not all together, but each of us on a different day – and we will all pretend to be Julie, the arsonist, and other real actors will pretend to be her Mum and Dad and everyone and they’ll decide at the end of all that who they’re going to cast.

  When I think about this now, I realise that although I’ve longed to get away from this town and longed to be the owner of the bungalow under the viaduct, I’ve never before longed for anything I could actually have, now. Getting away and living in that little house were all way-into-the-future kinds of things, but this, this part in the film is waiting for someone now, this year, now, and I’ve got a one-in-six chance of getting it and I want to get it so badly that it’s been impossible, since this morning, to concentrate on lessons or eat a shitty school dinner because what I could feel all the time was my heart beating.

  The only time I could feel calmer about it was on my walk with Whisper. What I told myself then was that I have had years of ‘acting experience’ at home and probably those other five girls have had none and what you see and hear of them is all there is. But me, I’ve been saving my breath. Saving it up for now.

  When we walked back, by the time we got to the viaduct, I’d made myself believe – and I’m going to stick to this – that I am definitely the right person for this part and that the TV people are intelligent enough to recognise this and to offer it to me. And when I get it, that’s going to be something.

  But I still, to be on the safe side, looked for a long time at the bungalow under the viaduct and told myself that if you know how and where to look for them, there are loads of different ways you can be happy. Being an actress is one. Having a nice home in a place where there’s silence is another. You just have to work at it all, slowly and carefully, like Dad made that fire catch on Dartmoor in the rain, one stick at a time.

  The New People

  MILLICENT GRAVES IS leaving.

  Today, with her friend and companion, Alison Prout, she has been for her last walk to the village and back. She has sat for a while on a wooden seat under the war memorial. The ice-cream van, playing four bars of a tune she thought was called ‘The Happy Wanderer’, drew up by the war memorial and obscured her view of the village green, the pub, the bank and the co-op. A few kids queued up at the van’s window. Millicent Graves, who had heard on Radio 4 that some ice-cream men were also drug traders, stared at the children. They were pale and obese. Millicent Graves imagined that inside their skulls was confusion and darkness.

  Upstairs now Alison Prout is packing clothes. The clothes are Millicent’s. There are hats and furs, unworn for thirty years but preserved in boxes with mothballs and tissue paper. There is a black lace ballgown and a black velvet ‘theatre dress’. There are white kid gloves and oyster-coloured stockings. Millicent can remember the feel of these ancient clothes against her skin. She has told Alison to pack them all – even the black lace gown and a hat with ostrich plumes – because she wants to believe that in her new life there will be the time and the climate for a little eccentricity. She can see herself in the old feathered hat, perfect for keeping the hot sun off her head. She might, she has decided, go shopping in it and enjoy watching the shopkeepers’ faces as out from its ridiculous shade comes her order for half a kilo of parmesan. Or it might become a gardening hat, in which case it will be the nuns who spy her on the other side of their wall – a small but striking figure in her new landscape, going round with the watering can, placing cool stones on the clematis root. Alison Prout has had a bitter argument with Millicent on the subject of the clothes, certain as she is that Millicent’s motive for taking them is detestable vanity. Millicent was, long ago, beautiful. Now, she is, simply, old. But the clothes, the foolish, expensive clothes, are a reminder – another among many reminders – of her power. And that power, Alison admits to herself as she folds and sorts her friend’s possessions, is not yet completely spent.

  In a week’s time, Millicent and Alison, who have lived together in the cottage for nineteen years, will have left it for ever and The New People will have moved in.

  It is a summer afternoon and the light on the garden is beguiling, Alison thinks, as she passes and re-passes the small bedroom window, carrying Millicent’s things. Millicent is downstairs, dusting the weasel. She has promised Alison that she will ‘make a start on the books’. There are more than two thousand of these. When The New People first arrived to look round the cottage they appeared genuinely afraid at the sight of them. They’d imagined thick walls, perhaps, but not this extra insulation of literature. Then, as Millicent led them on into the sitting room and they noticed the stuffed weasel under its glass cloche, their fear palpably increased, as if the long-dead animal was going to dart at their ankle veins. And yet they didn’t retreat. They knew the weasel would be leaving with the women; their glances said, ‘We can take down all these book shelves’. As they left, they muttered, ‘We shall be instructing the agents . . .’

  After they’d gone, Alison had started to cry. ‘They’ll change it all,’ she sobbed, ‘I always imagined people like us would buy it.’ Millicent reprimanded her. ‘Change is good,’ she said fiercely, ‘and anyway, dear, there are no more people like us.’

  But later that evening, Millicent found that she too was looking at the shape and detail of rooms and wondering how they would be altered. After supper, she’d gone out into the garden and stared at the summer night and thought, they will never see it as I see it, those New People, because even if their hands don’t change it, their minds will. ‘We’ve got ghosts now!’ she announced to Alison as she went in. ‘Ghosts who come before instead of after.’

  Now, polishing the weasel, Millicent senses that the ghosts are with her in the sitting room. She turns round. ‘What we don’t understand,’ they say, ‘is why you’re going.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Millicent.

  Then she notices that Alison has crept down from sorting the old clothes and is sitting in an armchair, saying nothing.

  ‘Is it a long story?’

  ‘No,’ says Millicent. ‘I’m going because I’ve been replaced. I look around, in very many places where I once was and now I not only do not see myself there, I see no one who ever resembled me. It’s as if I have been obliterated. And I can’t, at the age of sixty-nine, accept my obliteration, so I am simply going somewhere where I shall be visible again, at least to myself.’

  The New People look utterly perplexed. They want to say, ‘We knew you literary folk were a bit mad, a bit touched, but we thought you tried to make sense to ordinary people. We thought this was common courtesy.’

  ‘No,’ snaps Millicent, reading their minds, ‘it is not common courtesy, yet what I am saying is tediously simple.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid we don’t understand it.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t . . .’ Millicent mumbles.

  ‘What you still haven’t
told us,’ say The New People, trying to drag the conversation onto a solid foundation, ‘is where you’re actually going.’

  Millicent looks at Alison. Alison turns her face towards the window and the afternoon sun shines on her hair, which is still reddish and only dulled a little with grey.

  ‘Umbria,’ says Millicent.

  ‘Sorry?’ say The New People.

  ‘Yes. The house we’re buying is by a convent wall. It belonged to the nuns for centuries. It was a place where important guests were put. Now, we shall be the “guests”.’

  At this point, The New People get up. They say they have to leave. They say they have a great friend who’s mad on Italian food and who is starting a local Foodie Society. ‘Tonight,’ they laugh, ‘is the inaugural nosebag!’

  Millicent turns away from them and goes back to her polishing. When she looks round again, she finds they’ve gone.

  ‘They’ve gone!’ she calls to Alison, who is after all upstairs and not sitting silently in a chair.

  ‘What, Millie? Who’ve gone?’

  ‘Those people,’ says Millicent, ‘those ghosts. For the time being.’

  At supper in the kitchen, Alison says: ‘I think I’m going to try not to think about The New People, and if I was you, I’d try not to think about them either.’

  ‘What a very complicated construction that is, Alison,’ says Millicent, helping herself to the raspberries she picked a few moments ago in the dusk.

  ‘Particularly tomorrow evening,’ says Alison.

  ‘Why particularly tomorrow evening?’

  ‘While I’m out.’

  ‘Out? Where are you going?’

  ‘To say goodbye to Diana.’

  ‘I see,’ says Millicent. ‘Well, it is going to be extremely difficult not to think about them, because they will be here.’

  ‘They’re only here in your mind, Millie.’

  ‘I mean, they will actually be here. They’re bringing a builder.’

  ‘Tomorrow evening?’

  ‘Yes. They’re driving down from London.’

  ‘Oh. Then I won’t go out.’

  ‘That would be considerate.’

  ‘On the other hand, I promised Diana . . .’

  ‘I marvel that you feel an emotional goodbye to be necessary.’

  ‘Not “emotional”.’

  ‘In fact, why not, when we get to Italy, just send a postcard?’

  ‘As if we were on holiday, I suppose you mean.’

  Millicent sniffs. Another thing she hopes of her future life is that Alison, fifty next year, will have no more love affairs. She’s never expressed this hope, except in her recent poetry, which, as once-praising, now-contemptuous critics have noted, is all about betrayal. She hadn’t realised that betrayal was so unfashionable a subject nor indeed that her poems were ‘all about’ it. Perhaps, she decides capriciously, she will ask The New People about these things and watch their moons of faces closely to see whether or not they understand the words.

  They arrive at seven. Alison has promised to be back by seven-thirty. On entering the cottage, they say, God, they’re sorry, but since their last visit someone has told them that she, Millicent Graves, is quite a famous poetess and it’s awful to say they’d never heard of her.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ says Millicent. ‘Then why did you say you thought literary people were mad?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ they say.

  ‘You said you knew that literary folk were a bit touched . . .’

  ‘We said that?’

  ‘Or did I imagine it?’

  ‘You imagined it. You must have done.’

  They introduce the builder. He doesn’t look, to Millicent Graves, like a builder, but more like a town councillor, wearing a brown suit and brogues. ‘Perhaps you’re a New Builder?’ she asks. The man frowns and tugs out a pipe. He says he’s been in the construction business half a lifetime. ‘I think,’ says Millicent, as she pictures Alison arriving at Diana’s house and being greeted with a kiss, ‘that everything’s become very different and confusing.’

  She leads them in. As they reach the sitting room, and the builder starts to look up at the bowed ceiling beams and to prod the springy, flaking plaster of the walls, Millicent finds she can’t remember the name of The New People and wonders in fact whether she’s ever known it.

  ‘Oh, Prue and Simon,’ they tell her.

  Yes, she wants to say, but the surname? What was that? Something like Haydock-Park, wasn’t it, or is that a Grand Prix circuit or a racecourse? She asks the New Builder his name. ‘Jack Silverstone,’ he announces impatiently.

  ‘Lord!’ exclaims Millicent. ‘Everybody’s careering about.’

  The New People glance at each other. We must obliterate every trace of her, says this fearful look. And Jack Silverstone nods, as if in reassurance: It can all be changed. You won’t know it’s the same house. It’s going to cost a bit, that’s all.

  ‘Where do you want to start?’ asks Millicent.

  ‘Oh . . .’ says Prue.

  ‘Well . . .’ says Simon.

  ‘Upstairs,’ says Jack Silverstone.

  So now, as Millicent gets out the sherry bottle from Alison’s tidy kitchen cupboard, they’re up above her head in the bathroom. Conversations, in timber-framed houses, escape as easily as heat through the floors and Millicent can hear Prue say to Jack Silverstone: ‘This is the one drawback, Jack.’ And it appears that Prue wants two bathrooms. Though they will only use the cottage at weekends, she feels, ‘It simply isn’t viable with one.’

  ‘What about downstairs?’ asks Jack Silverstone.

  ‘Downstairs?’

  ‘The little room next to the kitchen.’

  ‘Her study? Convert that into a second bathroom?’

  ‘Why not? Got no use for a study, have you?’

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘Good God, no. Don’t plan to bring work here. Need a phone, that’s all.’

  They start to clatter towards the stairs. Now they’ll come down and go into the study, where nothing has ever been disturbed but only moved about gently to accommodate the hoover, and start a conversation about piping.

  Millicent leaves the sherry unpoured and marches quickly to the desk where all the unfashionable words on the subject of dereliction have been set down and picks up the telephone. By the time The New People have opened her door and exclaimed with barely concealed annoyance at finding her there, she has dialled Diana’s number and has begun to wonder whereabouts in Diana’s very beautiful house Alison may be standing or sitting or even lying down, because although it is now 7.25 by the silent study clock, Millicent is certain that Alison is still there and that unless summoned immediately she will come home very late, long after The New People have gone, leaving Millicent alone with the darkness and the ghosts.

  The telephone rings and isn’t answered. The New People have retreated to the kitchen where impatiently in their minds they are tearing Millicent’s old cupboards off the walls.

  ‘So tell us why you’re going. Won’t you?’ say The New People, sipping sherry.

  ‘Well,’ says Millicent, ‘I’ll tell you a story, if you like.’

  ‘A story?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s this. Men have never been particularly important to me, but one man was and that was my father. He was a scientist. All his early work was in immunology. But then he became very interested in behaviours, animal behaviour and then human behaviours. And from this time, our family life was quite changed, because he started bringing to his laboratory and then into the house all kinds of strangers. They would mostly be very unhappy people and their unhappiness and noise made it impossible for us to live as we’d once lived and everything we valued – silence, for instance, and little jokes that only we as a family understood – had disappeared for ever. And then my youngest sister, Christina, whom I loved very very much, committed suicide. So you see. Sometimes one has to act.’

  Three faces, turned in expectation towards Millicent, turn away
.

  ‘Dreadful story,’ mumbles Prue.

  ‘Can we have a look at the study now?’ says Jack Silverstone.

  ‘Yes,’ says Millicent. ‘My study in Italy overlooks the nuns’ vegetable garden. They told me they hoe in silence, but I expect from time to time one might hear them murmuring, don’t you think?’

  They don’t know how to reply. In the study, they whisper. They’ve understood now how their plans can be overheard.

  Millicent pours herself more sherry and notices that, as she predicted, Alison is not home and that the sun has gone down behind the laurels.

  The New People emerge, beaming. Clearly, they have decided where the lavatory can go and where the bath. Millicent fills their glasses. ‘The convent is, of course, crumbling,’ she tells them, ‘that’s why the nuns have been forced to sell off the guest house – to try to repair the fabric. The Church in Italy used to hold people in their blood. Prayer was food. But it isn’t like that any more. It’s in decay, and all over the place there are empty churches and the old plaster saints have been replaced by plastic things.’

  ‘There’s a lot of shoddy muck about,’ says Jack Silverstone, ‘take my trade . . .’

  ‘One imagines that perhaps certain African or South American Indian tribes are held to certain ways and certain places in their blood, but I think no one else is, do you? Certainly not in this country, unless it’s an individual held to another individual by love. What do you think?’

  ‘Well,’ says Prue.

  ‘Time,’ says Simon.

  ‘Time?’ says Millicent.

  ‘Yes. If you’re in something like Commodities, as I am, you don’t have the time for any other commitments.’

  ‘And as for the Church,’ says Jack Silverstone, ‘all that ever was was bloodthirsty.’

  At this moment, Millicent hears the sound of Alison’s car. It’s eight thirty-five. The New People get up and thank Millicent for the sherry and tell her they’ve seen everything they needed to see.

  Alison looks white. Her straight, small mouth is set into an even straighter, smaller line. Millicent decides to ignore – at least for the time being – the set of Alison’s mouth and tells her friend with a smile: ‘They’re called the Haydock-Parks!’