The Colonel's Daughter Read online

  ‘I’ve tried.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To love other people. Other men, I mean.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The feelings don’t seem to last. Or perhaps I’ve just been unlucky.’

  ‘Yes. You deserve someone.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone, Marcus. This is what I’ve at last understood. I have the children and the craft shops and one or two men friends to go out with, and now I have the novel . . .’

  ‘I miss you, Anna.’

  She rested her chin on folded hands and looked at him. Mighty is a perfect word, she thought. To me, he has always seemed mighty. And when he left me, every room, every place I went to was full of empty space. Only recently had I got used to it, decided finally to stop trying to fill it up. And now there he is again, his enormous shadow, darker, nearer than the darkness.

  ‘You see, I’m not a poet any more.’

  ‘Yes, you are, Marcus. I read your new volume . . .’

  ‘No I’m not. I won’t write anything more of value.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m floundering, Anna. I don’t know what I expect of myself any more, as a poet or as a man. Susan’s destroying me.’

  ‘Oh rot! Susan was exactly the woman you dreamed of.’

  ‘And now I have dreams of you.’

  Anna sighed and let Marcus hear the sigh. She got up and walked the few yards to the river and watched it shine at her feet. For the first time that day, the breeze made her shiver.

  *

  Light came early. Anna woke astonished and afraid. Marcus lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, his right arm resting down the length of her body.

  A noise had woken her, she knew, yet there was nothing: only the sleeper’s breath next to her and the birds tuning up, like a tiny hidden orchestra, for their full-throated day. Then she heard them: two shots, then a third and a fourth. Marcus turned over, opened his eyes and looked at her. She was sitting up and staring blankly at the open window. The thin curtains moved on a sunless morning.

  ‘Anna . . .’

  The strong hand on her arm wanted to tug her gently down, but she resisted its pressure, stayed still, chin against her knees.

  ‘Someone’s shooting.’

  ‘Come back to sleep.’

  ‘No, I can’t. Why would someone be shooting?’

  ‘The whole world’s shooting!’

  ‘I must go and see.’

  Marcus lay still and watched Anna get up. As she pulled on a faded, familiar gown, both had the same thought: it was always like this, Anna getting up first, Marcus in bed half asleep, yet often watching Anna.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I have to see.’

  The morning air was chilly. It was sunless, Anna realised, only because the sun had not yet risen. A mist squatted above the river; the landscape was flattened and obscured in dull white. Anna stared. The dawn has extraordinary purpose, she thought, everything contained, everything shrouded by the light but emerging minute by minute into brightness and shape, so that while I stand still it all changes. She began to walk along the river. The ground under her sandals was damp and the leather soon became slippery. Nothing moved. The familiar breeze had almost died in the darkness, the willow leaves hung limp and wet. Anna stopped, rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Where are you?’

  She waited, peering into the mist. The mist was yellowing, sunlight slowly climbing. A dog barked, far off.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Senseless question. Where are you? Where are you? Anna walked on. The surface of the water, so near her slippery feet, was absolutely smooth. The sun was climbing fast now and the mist was tumbling, separating, making way for colour and contour. Where are you! The three words came echoing down the years. Anna closed her eyes. They came and shot the ducks, she told herself calmly. That’s all. Men came with guns and had a duck shoot and the mallard are gone. When I come down here with my scraps, I won’t find them. But that’s all. The river flows on. Everything else is just as it was yesterday and the day before and the day before that. I am still Anna. Birds don’t matter. I have a book to write. And the sun’s coming up . . .

  She was weeping. Clutching her arms inside the sleeves of the faded gown, she walks from room to room in the empty flat. Where are you! London dawn at the grimed net curtains . . . fruit still in the bowl from which, as he finally went, he stole an orange . . . nothing changes and yet everything . . . his smell still on her body . . . And where am I? Snivelling round the debris of you in all the familiar rooms, touching surfaces you touched, taking an orange from the bowl . . . Where am I? Weeping. The ducks don’t matter. Do they? Keeping hold on what is, on what exists after the shot has echoed and gone, this is all that’s important, yes, keeping hold on what I have forced myself to become, with all the sanding and polishing of my heart’s hardness, keeping hold of my life alone that nothing – surely not the wounds of one night’s loving? – can destroy. So just let me wipe my face on the same washed-out corner of a sleeve. And forget. A stranger carries the dead mallard home, dead smeared heads, bound together with twine. But the sun comes up on the same stretch of river where, only yesterday, they had life . . .

  *

  Marcus held Anna. They stood by his car. It was still morning, yet they sensed the tiredness in each other, as if neither had slept at all.

  ‘I’ll be going then, old thing. Sorry I was such a miserable bugger. Selfish of me to disturb you with my little problems.’

  ‘Oh, you weren’t disturbing me.’

  ‘Yes, I was. Typical of me: Marcus Ridley’s Lament for Things as They Are.’

  ‘I don’t mind. And last night –’

  ‘Lovely, Anna. Perhaps I’ll stop dreaming about you now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He kissed her cheek and got quickly into the car.

  ‘Good luck with the novel.’

  ‘Oh yes. Thank you, Marcus.’

  ‘I’ll picture you working by your river.’

  ‘Come and see the children, Marcus. Please come and see the children.’

  ‘Yes. Alright. No promises. Are you going to work on the book today?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I can. Not today.’

  ‘Poor Anna. I’ve tired you. Never mind. There’s always tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, Marcus,’ and very gently she reached out and touched his face, ‘there’s always tomorrow.’

  My Love Affair With James I

  Exercise 4, Week 4 of the Eric Neasdale ‘Make Money by Writing’ course: Describe with honesty and, if possible, humour, a recent major event in your life.

  William Nichols – or ‘Will’, as I think of him – is an actor I’d never actually met. It’s odd I’d never met him because a) he’s filthily famous and b) his pic is on the same page as mine in Spotlight. Actually, my pic is above his as I’m fractionally superior to him alphabetwise, but our page goes: Stephen Nias (me), William Nichols (Will), Bob Nickolls (spelt with a k and two l’s and pullulating with his resemblance to Alain Delon), and Ken Nightingale (the less said the better; cast as the eternal traffic warden; should never have had his pic in ‘Leading’).

  You may think the question of the Spotlight pics is a bit of a waffle (this writing course is tediously keen on the word relevance), but I don’t think it is. You see, my pic was actually taken in ’79 (hair darker, bags minimal, you know . . .) and in it I look so absolutely dead right for the part of the Duke of Buckingham that I was offered it sight unseen, or virtually. I did have lunch with the producer, Alfie Morton, before contracts went out, but Alfie likes to lunch at The Rasputin, an utterly excruciating Russian restaurant he thinks is de riguer for the famous, and luckily the bloody Rasputin is so dark – and I mean pitch – that you honestly can’t tell whether the cav in your blinis is red or black. So you see, in those conditions I could still make thirty-five; Alfie stares at me like an icon over our red-glassed candle and his only worry is, is my voic
e, which viewers hear almost nightly extolling the nutrient virtues of a catfood called Tiggo, too domesticated a tool for the cadences of the haughty duke? He decides no, and he’s right. The reason I got the Tiggo VO is that my voice is – and I say this without vanity – my greatest asset as an actor. I’m not a deep person; I know my failings. Life’s a bit of a game to me, a bit of a tap-dance. But my voice is redolent with depth. It’s as if it was engendered in one of those grottes the green Michelin guides keep encouraging you to visit. It reverbs. It has texture. I’d be dead on for Son et Lumière. I’m wasted on frigging catfood – but that’s television for you, and my bank manager isn’t complaining. So I have no difficulty convincing Alfie Morton that he and old ‘Eyelids’ Mordecai, our illustrious director, have made the right choice.

  By the time we get to coffee, Alfie’s making his ‘Welcome Aboard’ speech and I know I’ve got the duke. I actually begin to rattle with excitement: a four-month shoot, one month of which will be in Greece. And Will Nichols playing King James. With Will’s name on the picture, it’s certainly going to get coverage. It’s a major movie alright: Jon Markworthy on script, Billy Nettlefold on cameras, the Morton/Mordecai clout with distributors, Will in his first screen role for over two years, and me. After lunch with Alfie (I put my shades on the minute we get anywhere near natural light) I brisk along to Dougie, my agent, and to my utter amazement he produces a bottle of Taylor’s port from a filing cabinet marked ‘Clients SS’. I’m much too surprised by the Taylor’s gesture to ask Dougie what ‘SS’ stands for.

  When I got home, I took my trousers off and examined my legs. My bathroom’s all mirrors, so I shot little glances at them from every angle. They’re okay. I’m five eleven. But they’re not the exquisite legs the Duke displays in that picture of him in the Portrait Gallery. Those legs look as if they begin at his armpits, and my thighs seem positively neanderthal by comparison. But then I remembered that Will Nichols is a short man – sturdy and stubby – so that compared to his legs, I thought mine would have a touch of the gazelle about them. Heaven knows why I was so worried about legs. There were far more excruciating things to worry about, had I known it at the time (as the lion said to the unicorn), but I was all breezy innocence and excitement! I got out a pair of ancient bermudas and stuffed them out with a couple of cushions to make them look like hose. Protruding from these, my legs looked plain ridiculous. It’s at times like these, with cushions puffing out my bum, that I’m thankful I live alone. At least, after everything that happened, I haven’t lost my sense of humour!

  *

  Reading this, I see that there are two exclamation marks in my last para. The writing course says ‘use these sparingly’. May have to cross them out in my rewrite. And the joke about the unicorn: ‘Avoid doubtful and distasteful humour’ says the bloody course. Never mind. I’ll leave it in for now.

  *

  There was one fact which, from the start of this film, I found slightly odd, but which no one else remarked on: namely, Will Nichols, about to play the most Scottish king since Macbeth, was Welsh. I’d long ago seen Will Nichols grapple with a Scots accent in one of those thunderous war movies that are all about detonating bridges over the Rhine, and he’d done dismally. His voice has what I’d call gusto, but it’s unmistakable Welsh gusto. He can do a passable English baronet, but not (well, I don’t think he can) a Scots king. I felt like saying to Morton: you might as well cast an American, love, and have done with it. But by the time I was offered Buckingham (the juiciest film part I’ve ever had) Will Nichols’s name was on the project and there it would stick. Over the Taylor’s, Dougie told me that at least Will was off the booze.

  I’ll tell you what I knew about Will at that time. (You’ll know most of it already. His life is pretty well public knowledge.) He’d crawled onto a stage bent double from his deprived childhood in a Welsh mine, straightened up enough to do a memorable Hamlet aged twenty, married a then star of the English stage called Myrtle Bridehead, years his senior and opposite whom he played a rather chunky Romeo. (Myrtle Bridehead as Juliet, nudging thirty-seven, was one of the finest embarrassments of my protected youth.) He’d then been whisked off to America. In Hollywood, he began to make a string of romantic movies and by the age of thirty he was a flash name and a millionaire. He should have died then. Or am I being unfair? He’s done one or two respectable things since then – he’s now forty-seven, looks older – but his fame has bred on itself, rather than on additions to itself, if you get my drift. He dumped Myrtle the minute LA swam into vision through the smog and only played a bit-part at her suicide two months later. Rumour has it that since Myrtle, the last scales of Welsh conformism have fallen from his eyes and that from that time he has tangled off-screen only with men and boys. His most faithful companion of recent years has been the whisky bottle. His Welsh lungs have begun to sound as if they’re filling up with coal. Despite all this, he’s still a bankable star.

  As to me (virtually unknown Steve Nias), I tried to prepare myself meticulously for Buckingham, and I don’t just mean staring at my legs. Jon Markworthy’s script suggested a relationship between Buckingham and King James which, if it wasn’t a love affair in the understood sense, was as least as passionate as one. Now I loathe ambiguity. So I spent hours in Chelsea Public Library trying to decide for myself precisely what the nature of this friendship was – and failing. History itself is ambiguous on the subject, as I might have guessed. So all I had to go on were Markworthy’s scenes. In one of these, I am summoned in the middle of the night from the bed of my wife, Katherine, to the bedchamber of the king. I arrive breathless, and no wonder. The king stammers on about his role as ‘nurturer of peace in this land’. I, wearing a night robe (that turned out to resemble and to be as heavy as a forty foot drape) start to mutter ominously about the need to take England to war. A verbal scuffle ensues. The King starts to weep. I hold him and he kisses me. Lorks! In the run-up to my first meeting with Will Nichols, I phoned Dougie and asked for a meeting with Markworthy and Eyelids re the persistent ambiguity of this and other scenes. Dougie simply laughed and told me to stop jittering.

  *

  I can’t leave lorks in. But this one word conveys precisely what I felt every time I read this scene. One of the commandments of the Eric Neasdale Writing Course is ‘avoid ejaculations where possible.’ Lorks is an undoubted ejaculation. Oh well. Perhaps something else will come to me in the middle of the night, as they say. N.B. I must take this piece of work seriously. I would seriously like to become a writer. But writing about ‘real events’ seems to have its little problems.

  *

  Before I plunge in to the main thrust of my story (this last is a shitty sentence and must go), I think I ought to say a word or two about my life – as it was before I met Will Nichols, and as it is becoming again.

  I came to acting from dancing. The love of dance hasn’t entirely left me and I sometimes do little dance routines on the flat roof of my Fulham top-floor flat, among my plants. I grow cucumbers on this roof in the summer and shrubs and herbs and roses all the year round, in big tubs and old baths and sinks. I never grow tomatoes because I’m allergic to them. This allergy makes some dinners problematical: you find tomato in almost everything from daube to douglère, from Bolognese to braised oxtail, and the unsightly neck rashes I then have to endure are one of the penances of an otherwise quietly agreeable and civilised life.

  I live alone, as I said, but I’m seldom actually lonely. I lived with someone called David for a year and with someone called Donovan for about nine months. Otherwise, I’ve always lived alone since I left school and home. My mother is an elderly person and safely put away in a home for elderly persons near Swindon. My father, who disapproved of me and all my works till his dying day, mercifully reached his dying day in 1976, and since then I’ve felt guilty about nothing and fairly positive about most things.

  The money I make from Tiggo and other VOs I do for ITV have brought me a high standard of living, even though I don’t
get as much acting work as I’d like. Between you and me, I’m not that fantastic an actor. I’ve got my following because, as you’ve guessed from the Buckingham thing, I’m still fairly morbidly handsome. Sexually, I’m what they call alert and I honestly don’t have any difficulty in that département. My West Indian cleaner, Mrs Baali (I call her Pearl Barley. That’s the kind of joke that’s typical me) is allowed to tease me about my boyfriends, but I keep them low profile. ‘Sex = love’ is pure romanticism, pure bunkum, in my view. Jon Markworthy at least understood this in his famous script, if nothing else. I’m a very meticulous person, day to day. I like clean things. Lately, I’ve been a slut, though. I’ve had weekends when I didn’t wash or shave or go out or wash up. Pearl Barley’s been dying to comment. She’s like a huge, wobbling brown fruit, my Pearl Barley, and comment on my sluttishness has been on the brink of bursting out of her for several weeks, I can tell. But she hasn’t cracked yet. She’s a loyal woman. I’m not all that loyal myself, but I value it in others.

  Well, that’s me. Enough said. On to the main thrust, as they say: my love affair.

  I was forty-one the day I met Will Nichols for the first time face to face. An odd coincidence that this project should kick off on my birthday, 6 May. In fact, it had kicked off months before of course, but old Eyelids actually sat down with his lead actors on 6 May in what appeared to be the boardroom of his Wardour Street offices, flanked by Markworthy and Morton and Nettlefold and legions of PAs, and over a rather troppo minceur lunch of smoked salmon mould he began to talk about ‘my great new royal baby, King James I’.

  ‘Eyelids’ Mordecai is seventy-eight years old. My allergy to tomatoes (uncomfortable enough, God knows) is but a shade compared to the ghostly army of allergies haunting Mordecai. Mordecai rightly belongs in a Swiss sanitorium, muffled to the neck in polyanimide, breathing cloudless air. Here, he would die calmly, snow would settle on his globally famous eyelids and that would be that. As it is, his quaking body is carried on and off aeroplanes, wheeled around scorching Spanish locations in the modern equivalent of a Bath chair. Some days, even his voice has a quake to it and his brain has patches of blank, like sunspots, and all his instructions fall out of his drooling mouth in slow motion, like elephants’ feet. It makes you wonder, when you consider what Mordecai earns per annum, about the film business.