Glittering Fortunes (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

‘I’
M
TO
PLAY
the mother
?’ Susanna belted into her cell phone. Despite the thousands of miles between them, she saw her agent shrink like a weed in the heat. She could picture Jennifer in her polished LA downtown office, coffee steaming, leather squishy, surrounded by works of art that Susanna herself had paid for. ‘Are you
kidding
me?’

‘This is a great role,’ Jennifer encouraged. ‘You know we’ve been trying to find a way in with Howard Brice for years. This is it. They want
you
, darling.’

‘And I wanted the part of Janey. Who’s that going to, then—an embryo?’

Jennifer named an upcoming actress whose flawless sixteen-year-old dolly face Susanna had seen plastered across the weekend glossies. Her cheeks flared.

‘And just how old am I supposed to be?’

‘We’d need to age you...slightly.’

‘Oh, well that does sound appealing! For God’s sake, Jennifer.’

‘This is an opportunity to showcase your considerable talents,’ her agent put forward, with just the right marriage of clout and caution. A decade of working with Hollywood’s biggest diva had taught her that persuasion was an art above all others. ‘Those frothy parts never did you justice, Susanna—now let’s show the world what you’re really capable of. The role of Linda is a complex, colourful one.’

Susanna couldn’t imagine how playing the insipid cookie-baking parent with a total of seventeen lines could possibly be either of those things.

‘The name alone makes me think of an eighties perm.’

‘If perms are eighties then chick-flicks are nineties.’ Jennifer paused to let that one sink in. ‘What have I always said? Play
up
the age slide, not down. Young plays old gets an Award; old plays young gets laughed out of the building. You and I both know the industry has a challenging view of you right now, and this way we’re preempting criticism. Isn’t it time you sunk your teeth into something meatier?’

Cato thundered in from the bathroom. His zipper was undone and his face was like fury. Talk about sinking her teeth into a prime cut. No sooner had they arrived back at the hotel and she had put Thorn to bed, reading him his night-time story and waiting until he drifted to sleep, than Cato had ordered her back to the suite and ravaged her like a madman, flipping her wordlessly over the mattress and pounding the life out of her. He had demanded the Lord Cato routine more brutally than ever, insisting with a hectic desperation that she repeat his title again and again, so many times that the words lost all meaning. Susanna had glimpsed him over her shoulder, rutting grimly, shaped like a trident with his arms flexed and raised, biceps swollen like apples beneath a picnic blanket. He had resembled a Viking, naked and sweat-bathed.

On any other occasion she would have been pleased at this renewal of interest, but not today. He was behaving like a nutter. He’d barely spoken since she collected him from the barge.

Jennifer’s question all of a sudden made her feel bloated.

‘Fine,’ she forced out. ‘I’ll meet them.’

‘Good girl—you won’t regret it.’

‘That’s for me to decide.’

She clicked off the call. Was this what her career had come to, wearing a wrinkle mask and having a head full of talcum powder? Next they would be wedging her into a fat suit, or giving her prosthetic warts. Perhaps she could be famed for it, the chameleon that suffered for her art, pursuing without vanity those characters lesser actresses shied away from, afraid to encounter the raw bones of their craft...

‘I have news.’

That was meant to be Susanna’s line, yet it came from Cato.

‘So do I,’ she responded, omitting the finer points of the conversation as she enjoyed instead the simple pleasure of the director’s name coming out of her mouth. ‘Howard Brice wants me for his new movie. Jennifer and I are meeting in LA two weeks from now. This is my renaissance. I’m heading straight back to the top!’

She inspected her reflection in the mirror for crows’ feet.

‘Well?’ she insisted. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

He didn’t respond. Susanna straightened, peevish as a meerkat.

‘Cato?’

‘I’ve more pressing matters on my mind,’ he said ominously.

Dutifully she remembered the ravaged patient in his hospital bed and arranged her features into an expression of concern. The skin on her face was terribly taut: if she hadn’t been hauled from the peat pulp at the operative moment she might not have been left with the complexion of an overstretched balloon.

‘Of course you have, darling.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘But you said yourself Barnaby was on his last legs...’

‘You’re not listening.’

She went to him, spreading her fingers across his shoulders. He was tense as scaffolding. It surprised her that he should care so much for an uncle whom just this morning he had been ridiculing, but that was the way with Cato—so much of it was for show. With her he let his guard fall, let her see what he was truly feeling. Susanna loved to uncover these new depths; she savoured opening them and fingering what was inside, like a delicately wrapped box of jewellery.

‘I’m listening now,’ she told him, resting her chin in the nook of his collar. They would celebrate Howard Brice once the deal was in the bag, and until then she would concentrate on being the perfect fiancée-to-be: supportive, sensitive, altogether wifely. She wondered what Lord Cato would say if she asked him to return the gesture; if she asked him to address her as Lady Susanna during the explosions of her orgasm? If he were to embrace the idea in role-play then he might start getting used to it in real life, like some kind of subliminal sex messaging.

‘I need to find out,’ he stated darkly.

‘Of course—we’ll call the hospital.’

She went for the phone but he stopped her.

His face was ashen. ‘Not about that.’

‘About what, then?’

There was a horribly loaded pause.

‘Brace yourself, Mole.’

* * *

‘I
T
WAS
THE
first thing he took.’ Charlie had his hands in his pockets. The moon peered in at them enquiringly. ‘I was four and he was nine. This would have pre-dated Barnaby’s leaving, and back then my father and Cato were inseparable.

‘On that day—it was a Friday in winter—Richmond took him hunting. Cato was shown how to fire a gun. We kept an arsenal of the things in the old barn, you’ve seen the racks, row upon row of sleek black barrels; I doubt they were legal. I heard the shots from across the estate, booming claps that ricocheted off trees and hurtled the birds to the sky. My mother was shut in her bedroom. Nobody else was around.

‘They came back to Usherwood and blazed through the hall in their tweeds, Cato a copy of our father in his riding cap and sturdy boots. I was at the top of the stairs, peering through the banisters. Even the way Cato talked was the same, and the really weird thing would be when he spoke out against our father, those rare times when he would side with me over some lightweight dispute, and the intonation would be self-scolding, my father telling my father off, so that between them they had me caught in a whirlpool of concentric circles, a Lomax within a Lomax within a Lomax.

‘I had my dog with me, a spaniel with a brown and white coat, and a whiskery nose. The week before he’d slipped in a ditch and broken his leg. We’d called out the vet and Peter had been fitted with a splint. He had a limp but he was getting better.

‘My father disappeared into his study. Cato was searching for something to do. Over the years he’d been known to break things, hide things, kick things, all on purpose and all for sport. He craved provocation. He craved reaction. He yearned to bait, and, if necessary, to hurt. Now he looked up at me, wearing the expression I’ve come to know: a thirst for entertainment, a bloodlust borne of boredom.

‘Before I could stop him—and in those days I couldn’t have with all the warning in the world, because he was twice the size of me—Cato grabbed Peter by the scruff and dragged him down the stairs.
Want me to show you something?
The dog’s bad leg went thumping behind him like an afterthought.
Want me to show you what I learned today?
You can learn it
,
too
,
old bean.
I’ll teach you.

‘When I started yelling, Cato clamped his hand over my mouth and told me to stop, or he’d fetch the cane from the cellar and beat me with it till I was black and blue. He never did this, though he threatened it a lot.

‘Those were the only times I loathed Usherwood. It was too big to be found. Things went unnoticed. There were too many hiding places. Nobody heard and nobody saw.

‘Outside, the sky was frozen with drizzle. The lawns were grey, the air like lead. I raced after him but my legs couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t dressed for the weather and it was bitterly cold. Cato was making for the barn; Peter tugged roughly after him. What got me was the way the animal squeaked in pain each time his bad leg caught, but in between would go to wag his tail—it was pathetic, really, that innate trust that there was nothing to fear from these boys who were his playmates. Only there was.

‘When I saw the barn approaching I felt convinced that Cato would back out. He had to. He was a bully, but he wasn’t a killer.

‘But the more I protested, the more he pushed. If I had walked away, he might have got bored. No audience, no point. But Cato enjoyed my cries. He mocked my pleas. He had embarked on a path unsure of its destination: my reaction would dictate the outcome. I didn’t know this then. All I knew was fear, and utter, utter helplessness. I was unable to reason with him because he could not be reasoned with. None of this could be articulated. I didn’t have the words; I just kept saying,
please
, over and over again. Useless. Because the more I begged, the better the game became. Some days I wonder if my life with my brother hasn’t been one big wind-up—that everything that’s happened to us isn’t simply a childish prank that somehow got out of control, and one day a curtain will get lifted and there it all is, how it should be, nothing lost and nothing sacrificed.

‘The gunshot chilled me. I’ll never forget it. Cato must have misfired because there was a thin, burbling moan before a second was released. Even then it couldn’t have been true: I had to see for myself. When I peered round the door, Peter’s fur was soaking red. The gun hung from Cato’s arm. I screamed.

‘Mother came across the lawn in her nightdress and knelt to comfort me—
What’s happened
, she kept asking;
tell me what’s happened
?

‘
I
didn’t want to see him suffer
, Cato pledged when he came out of the barn, forlorn, traumatised, making like his sacrifice of Peter was humane: he’d been putting the animal out of its misery. Our uncle had shown us to do this, with a baby gull he had found on the beach one day, knotted in seaweed.
You should never leave a creature in pain if you can help it
, he’d said—all Cato was doing was following instruction. Mother dashed to comfort him, kissed him and told him not to worry.

‘I remember Cato saying:
I
thought it was the right thing.

‘To this day I don’t know if my brother has ever done the right thing.’

He stopped. Olivia realised she’d been holding her breath.

‘Don’t you see?’ Charlie finished. ‘I’m not like them. I never have been and I never will be. I’m not a Lomax. I’m not.’

She stood, closing the gap between them. His dark eyes met hers. She reached to touch his face. It was hot, and coarse with stubble.

‘What am I going to do?’

The glare of his scrutiny burned. Her whole body came alive, electric, and she was submerged by a feeling so massive and new that all she could say was: ‘This.’

Slowly she raised her mouth to his. She felt his forehead brush against hers, the spill of his hair, soft and scented like pinecones, before the phone rang.

It was Decca. His uncle’s struggle was over.

* * *

S
USANNA
CLUTCHED
THE
dresser. The floor sprang and bloated like a dish of blancmange.

‘This can’t be true,’ she rasped, chilled with horror. ‘It can’t!’

‘It is,’ Cato confirmed grimly.

‘But it has to be Charles,’ she cried, her voice sliding up several octaves, ‘it has to be! He’s the younger one, this affair didn’t begin until—’

‘We don’t know when it began.’

‘But you were the first-born.’ It was as if someone had just been sick all down her. ‘Beatrice and Richmond conceived you—they were delighted when you arrived, Barnaby said as much! They struggled for a second baby after that, meanwhile she got in deeper with this farmhand of hers—it’s obvious Charles is the love child!’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes! Cato, you can’t possibly imagine...?’ It was heinous, monstrous, a joke.

‘We have to be sure.’

‘We are sure!’ Any alternative was criminal. Susanna simply could not entertain it. Cato was Lord of the Manor, with his impeccable British manners and thousand—acre bastion and ancestry solid as a mahogany closet. What was he without the Lomax pedigree—the son of a farmer and a factory worker’s daughter?

It was unthinkable!

‘I’m not surprised,’ she warbled, clutching at possibilities, her words spilling out without thought or consideration, ‘not surprised at all. The minute I met Charles I knew he wasn’t half the man you are. He’s not cut out for our way of life; it’s plain to see he hasn’t got a shred of refinement in him. If Barnaby had been given five more seconds, he’d have confirmed it clear as day.’ She laughed wildly. ‘
Obviously
Charles is the impostor—oh, it makes such sense now, doesn’t it, darling, him sloshing through puddles and getting filthy with those horrible dogs. He’s not
like
you!’

Cato was pacing back and forth. ‘Slow down, Mole, we must think about this.’