An Evening of Long Goodbyes (5 page)

Which is how the house came to be under my care, and whatever Bel said, I had to work hard to keep its inscrutable momentum, to tie the disparate elements together in some semblance of order – Mrs P’s wandering mind, Bel’s pathological insistence on controlling every aspect of her life, the eccentricities or criminal tendencies of whoever she was seeing at the time, and the house itself, the centuries of stonework and timber, that had its own whims and bad moods to be coaxed through. It was I who kept it all ticking over, who stayed in all day just to centre things a little, give them a bit of focus; it was a tough job and no one thanked me for it. I couldn’t be expected to get things right all the time, either; that is, what happened afterwards wasn’t entirely my fault, whatever they tell you.

I rose early the next morning, in spite of all the excitement the night before. The vet was coming to look at the peacocks, which had developed an infestation of some kind, and I had to let him into the garage. The peacocks were my responsibility. Father had looked after them when he was alive – he was the only one who actually liked them and they had been somewhat neglected since. I had had a peacock-flap built into the door of the garage where they lived, so they could come and go as they pleased, and other than embarrassing visits from the vet we didn’t have much to do with each other most of the time. I felt a little guilty about this, but really it was their own fault: they were the most unrewarding creatures, bone-stupid and filthy, with little sense of loyalty or gratitude, and they got infestations at the drop of a hat if they weren’t paid constant attention.

The vet examined each bird and doused them with some sort of powder; then as usual he started getting cross about their living conditions and exhorting me to change their sawdust more frequently to avoid future infections, etc. ‘And
feed
them, Mr Hythloday, they’re
animals
, they need to eat every day, not just when you remember –’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said; it was a little early for exhortations and frankly I think we were all secretly hoping that they would die off quickly and we would be rid of them; I can’t think of any other reason that I should have been left: in charge of them, apart from the practical one that the garage was the only area of the house to which Mrs P did not have a key. Even Mother found the peacocks a little over the top, and Bel reserved a special loathing for them – all her Drama friends had turned Marxist in their Sophister year at Trinity and they gave her a fearful time about them.

The reason Mrs P didn’t have a key was that the peacocks shared the garage with what was probably the most beloved of Father’s
objets
: a 1930 Mercedes, a pristine, bottle-green Grand Prix racer. It had been a gift from the German ambassador, who lived nearby; Father had developed a special hypoallergenic balm for his daughter, who suffered terrible eczema. He’d never driven the car – in fact, none of us was quite sure whether it could actually be driven – but he’d cleaned it obsessively every Sunday afternoon, buffing vigorously with chamois and beeswax for hours on end. When he was finished, he would stand arms folded at the garage door, watching the light spill over the metal as behind him the sun sank below the trees; and these liminal moments, reflecting on the stationary Mercedes, were among the few times when you could say with any degree of certainty that my father looked genuinely happy.

After the vet had gone I wandered into the kitchen, where Mrs P was scooping scrambled eggs on to two plates of soda bread and smoked salmon.

‘He’s still here, then,’ I said.

‘Yes, Master Charles, you must hide from your sister, she is very very busy.’

‘Busy, what’s she busy about?’

‘I don’t know, she get up early too, say where is my scrambled eggs please, I must prepare –’

‘Prepare for what?’

‘I don’t know, Master Charles, but she is very – how you say – stress?’

‘Just a second, Mrs P – who owns those pants?’

‘Pants, Master Charles? I see no pants.’

‘There, poking out of that basket.’ How could she not see them? They were the most enormous underpants I had ever seen.

‘Oh, yes, I see, those pants.’

‘They’re not Frank’s, are they?’ I didn’t like the idea of Frank’s delicates mixing it with mine.

Mrs P rubbed her chin slowly. ‘No, Master Charles, they are a… a present.’

‘A present?’

‘Yes, Master Charles,’ she nodded, ‘a present for you, I buy.’

Surely this wasn’t more penance for last night! Couldn’t she just let it go? This was the sort of thing I meant earlier, about her seeming distracted; these pants, furthermore, could quite comfortably have fitted three or four Charleses in them. ‘That’s a very touching gesture, Mrs P, but really, I don’t expect you to buy me presents. Anyhow, I already have plenty of underpants.’

‘Oh yes, Master Charles, but it’s in shop, is special offer, I think only, ah, is bargain for Master Charles, but then I see, is too big –’

‘Yes, well, not to worry, you can bring ’em back later, or something.’

‘Later, Master Charles, I bring them back to the shop.’

‘That sounds like the best plan, all right.’ I found myself speaking to thin air as she bustled away with the tray. ‘I mean, thanks anyway.’

Whatever they were doing, Bel and Frank kept a low profile for much of the morning, and in keeping with the terms of the pact I refrained from investigating. Passing by her door at one point, however, I couldn’t help but overhear Frank talking about a countess. I wondered what Frank was doing knocking about with countesses, and whether it was anyone I knew, and without meaning to eavesdrop, I lingered there momentarily. But the conversation soon turned to appearing in court, which seemed more in his line, so I continued on my way.

As a matter of fact, I was feeling unusually purposeful after my early start. I passed a fruitful hour at the piano working on the bridge for a song I was composing, entitled ‘I’m Sticking to You’.

You may say that we’re all through:

I’ll tell you that I understand;

You can cry, and say goodbye,

But as you leave I’ll take your hand–

For I know that you need to be free,

But I can’t let go so easily,

A girl like you’s a damn hard thing to leave,

So
…

I’m sticking to you

Like gum on your shoe,

Like a cheap tattoo, like the Chinese flu,

Or a nasty cough

You just can’t shake off
–

Oh darling, I’m sticking to you
.

That was merely a warm-up, however. The double-bill I had fallen asleep during last night had reawoken an idea for a project. I returned to my room and searched amid the clutter under the davenport until I located an old shoebox. Inside, beneath a wasting elastic band, were pages and pages of biography, reviews, snatches of Hollywood gossip, photographs and stills – all of them relating to Gene Tierney, her life and work. I had been assembling these odds and ends for the longest time, without ever quite knowing why. There was something about her that set her apart, that seemed to speak to me. More than any of her contemporaries, her life seemed entwined with the actual, intangible stuff of cinema; every detail had the quality of a fairy tale, or its opposite. The more films I saw, the more cuttings I assembled, the more I felt this vague nagging desire to do something
for
her – to write something or make something or at least to sort these fragments into some kind of sense.

She was seventeen when she was discovered – backstage on a Warner Bros. set, like a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. She was on a guided tour of the studio with her mother, brother and sister: one stop on a grand cross-country vacation they made that summer, driving eight thousand miles from their home in Fairfield, Connecticut to California and back again (the girls brought so many clothes they had to hitch a trailer to their car). Here, on the set of
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
, starring Errol Flynn and Bette Davis, the director stopped shooting to come over to tell Gene she ought to be in pictures. It wasn’t just a line: he sent her for a screen test right away, and the following day Warners offered her a contract.

Her father, when he heard the news, was not enthused. He had stayed in New York that summer to work. Howard Tierney was a powerful insurance agent, though, like everybody’s, his fortunes had dipped in recent years. He didn’t think much of Hollywood, and he thought even less of Warners’ $150-a-week contract. In those days, young ladies of breeding – the Tierneys were society – were expected to finish school, marry a Yale boy and live in Connecticut; any actorly tendencies were to be confined to the ball and the country club. But Gene was his favourite, and he told her that if after making her debut she still wanted to act, he would do everything in his power to help her find a job on the Broadway stage.

He was as good as his word. Every Wednesday, instead of going into the office, he and Gene caught the 8.15 train into the city to meet agents and producers. After bit parts here and there, she finally landed a part in a hit play, and Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of Twentieth Century Fox, flew out to see her. He signed her up immediately. Her father brokered a deal with Fox worth five times what Warners had offered. He formed a company, the Belle-Tier Corporation (Gene’s mother was called Belle), to represent and promote his daughter and to administer her future earnings.

Gene flew to Hollywood in 1939 on the maiden transcontinental flight: somebody gave her a plaque when she got off the plane. She was handed over to the Fox publicity people to be given the starlet build-up: to be photographed at nightclubs, by the pool, on the beach, to be interviewed and profiled while they thought about changing her name and decided what ‘type’ she was – a Penny Singleton, a Deanna Durbin, it was important to look like somebody else. She began work on
The Return of Frank James
, with Henry Fonda; she spent night after night alone in the projection room after the shoot, watching films, trying to teach herself how to act.

I spent the next few hours going through my discontinuous notes, trying to put them in chronological order. Reading over them made me sad; perhaps everyone’s life is sad when you know what will happen next. It seemed to me that in every atom of information – in every snippet of biography, in every publicity still – you could descry the whole trajectory of her life and the forces that would destroy her. Even when you went right back to the beginning, to when everything was full of promise and hope, they were there, like traps waiting to be sprung.

By twelve o’clock I was feeling quite fatigued. I put the notes back in the shoebox, pledging to return to them sooner rather than later, and went to see if Mrs P felt like rustling up some crumpets. On my way I passed Bel’s door again, and happened to pause there, to get my bearings, so to speak – only to find them talking about exactly the same thing as earlier on. Frank was on about his countess again, saying that she was very wealthy, and then stopping and coughing for a while, and then saying that she was easy-going morally and had married a man who wasn’t of noble birth, which seemed a bit rich coming from him. He appeared to have developed a speech impediment overnight; he stumbled over every second word and spoke in a maddening, leaden monotone. Bel got upset and started fretting about how she couldn’t sleep. She kept calling Frank ‘Uncle’, which I took to be some kind of odious pet name. She sounded odd, as if her voice were a borrowed dress that didn’t quite fit right.

‘Yes,’ Frank said. ‘Yes. You are quite right. It is dreadful. My God.’

‘Could you go a bit faster?’ she said.

‘Yes yes you’re quite right it’s –’

‘Stop, Frank, maybe we should go back a bit – how about my dear little child –’

‘All right… you’re not just a niece to me, you’re an angel, you’re – Bel, I can’t understand a word this bollocks is sayin, is he tryin to ride her or what? Cos like if he’s the uncle you wouldn’t think he should be tryin to, like, give her lengths.’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said despairingly.

‘Unless,’ he mumbled to himself, ‘he was one of them uncles that’s just like married to her auntie, I s’pose then it’d be fair enough…’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter Frank, you just have to
read
it – oh, this is hopeless, I’m
never
going to get this right.’

She was teaching him to read, that was what it was!

‘Bel?’

‘What?’

The poor thing sounded quite exhausted and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Perhaps she was realizing that she’d bitten off more than she could chew.

‘I reckon if you were my niece, I’d want to give you lengths.’

There was a moment of outraged silence; I blushed at the door on her behalf.

‘… Give you a ride on the oul train, like…’

Oh, for shame! I was on the point of bursting in and rewarding his discourtesy with the back of my hand when – to my horror – I heard Bel burst into laughter: ‘Oh, you,’ she said, and there was a creaking of bedsprings. Suddenly I felt queasy; I beat a hasty retreat before things took a turn for the tactile.