Hester's Story (2 page)

Driving away. That’s what’s stayed in my mind for nearly fifty years. Turning round in the taxi and looking out of the little window at the back and seeing
Grand-mère
standing on the pavement getting smaller and smaller. The lime trees starting to put out new leaves. Everything blurred because of the tears that keep on falling and falling in spite of my best efforts to be brave. My father sitting beside me, staring straight ahead, his mouth pressed into a line. Stiff. Cold. Not crying a single tear. Everything I’d ever known getting further and further away. Disappearing. Yes. I remember that. I remember leaving home.

19 December 1986

I will not cry, Hester thought. But the phone call had ended only moments ago and she still felt anguished, stiff with pain. She’d been drawn back, too, to thinking about the distant past, which only made things worse. She told herself: I will answer this young woman’s questions about the Wychwood Festival, my childhood and my past life as a ballet dancer and I will not on any account cry. She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in and out slowly, collecting herself in the way she’d learned to do before any performance. Find something – anything – in front of you, she told herself, and fix your gaze on it and you’ll keep steady however many times you spin around. The old trick might work for interviews as well as it once did for pirouettes.

‘This is the Wychwood Festival’s tenth year,’ she said. ‘Quite an important anniversary, really, and we’ve got a fascinating ballet premiering here in a few weeks … on the sixth of January. It’s called
Sarabande
and the music is by my old friend, Edmund Norland. It’s being put on by the Carradine Company. There’s a competition every year to see who’s going to choreograph the ballet and Hugo Carradine is a worthy winner. I’m sure it will be an enormous success.’

‘There’s a rumour,’ said the interviewer, whose
name Hester had forgotten (Jenny? Julia? Jean? Something beginning with J. Never mind) ‘that Silver McConnell’s going to be in it. Is that right? I thought she was going to dance in Paris or Berlin …’

Hester suddenly remembered her name as she was flicking through her notebook.
Jemima
. ‘I believe she’s going to Paris, but it’s a Festival tradition to have only ten performances up here at the Arcadia Theatre, so she can fit this in before she leaves. The company arrives on December 27th. It
is
quite an intensive rehearsal period, but everyone seems to enjoy the challenge.’

She forced her lips into a smile. Oh, please, please, she thought, let her stop. Let her close her notebook and leave. Please let there be no more questions.

‘I should think that rather cuts into your Christmas celebrations, doesn’t it?’

‘We don’t celebrate Christmas at Wychwood,’ said Hester, and realised her mistake even as the words were leaving her mouth. If she didn’t move on immediately, Jemima would ask why not, and then … Hester couldn’t talk about it. Not now and not ever. She found that she was speaking rather more quickly than she normally did, to block any further discussion of Christmas or anything to do with the festivities surrounding it.

‘Has George shown you round the Arcadia?’ she asked. ‘You’ve met Ruby and George Stott, haven’t you? They’re such an important part of the Wychwood family. Ruby used to be my dresser, you know, while I was still dancing. I don’t know how the Festival would function without them.’

‘May I ask you something else, Miss Fielding?’ Jemima smiled at Hester, gathering her bag on to her lap as she spoke. Thank God, Hester thought, she’s
going. She’s getting her bag ready. Not long now and then I can be alone again to think. I need to think.

‘Yes, of course. Please do.’

‘I was wondering … I hope you’ll forgive me asking, only it’s something every one of my readers will be longing to know. Can you say something about why you’ve never married?’

Hester saw red. It wasn’t, she realised with alarm, a figure of speech but something that was literally true. The whole room swam in front of her eyes, as though it had suddenly been flooded with scarlet light.

‘Go,’ she said, barely able to get the words out at first and then letting them fly from her mouth with an anger she did nothing to disguise. ‘Go at once, please. I have never, not through the whole of my career, answered a question like that and I don’t propose to start now. This interview is over.’

By the end of this outburst, Hester found she was standing up and pointing at the door. She had a sense of Jemima hurriedly stuffing her notebook into her handbag and backing out of the room, bent nearly double under the blast of Hester’s fury.

As soon as she’d gone, Hester sank into the chair and covered her face with her hands. Oh God, here they come. The tears. If I start crying now, she thought, how will I ever be able to stop?

*

Edmund had phoned her only minutes before her interview with Jemima was supposed to begin.

‘Wychwood House,’ she had said, picking up the phone as soon as it began to ring. Why was it that people always rang you at a time when you couldn’t possibly talk? Hester never gave her name out, just in case the caller turned out to be some sort of a nuisance.

‘Hester?’

‘Edmund! How lovely to hear from you! What a surprise …’

In the second between hearing Edmund’s voice and speaking herself, before she had time to adjust what she was saying, Hester knew that bad news was coming. Edmund never phoned. He hated the idea of speaking without being able to see the person at the other end. Telephones were, in his opinion, for emergencies only. She imagined a warning vibration on the line, and the moment between dreading and actually knowing spun itself out, stretched and lengthened for second after second, as though the whole world were slowing to near-stillness. But the words came at last, and as soon as she heard them, Hester wished she’d never answered the phone, never admitted that, yes, she was there and ready to hear whatever was coming.

‘Hester, darling, I’m sorry,’ said Edmund. ‘I’m in Vienna. I’ve just spoken to Virginia. She phoned me from New York. I knew I had to tell you at once. It’s Adam.’

‘Something’s happened to him?’ Part of her wanted to say
what business is that of mine? Adam Lennister has been nothing to me for over thirty years … why should I care what’s happened to him?
but Edmund, as he always seemed to do, guessed what was in her mind.

‘I know you haven’t been in touch and so forth, but still. I do feel you must know. You might have seen it in the papers tomorrow anyway, and I couldn’t bear the thought of you happening on it, just like that. He’s dead, Hester. Adam died yesterday from a heart attack. He didn’t suffer any pain, apparently. He was working. In the library of the New York house, because they’re always over there for Thanksgiving
and Christmas, aren’t they? I’m
so
sorry, darling Hester. So sorry …’

‘Yes,’ said Hester. What else could she say? She felt as though all the words she used to know had flown out of her head. Edmund sounded on the verge of tears himself. It reminded Hester of how upset he’d been on the one occasion when they’d really quarrelled. She found that she was clutching the receiver so hard that her wrist and her fingers hurt. Breathing had suddenly become almost impossible, a matter for the utmost concentration. I must say something to Edmund, she thought. He was Adam’s best friend.

‘Edmund, I don’t know what to say. I’m so, I’m so …’ she managed to stammer, after an effort to move her mouth into the right shape. ‘You must be very sad. Would you like to come up here?’

‘I’d have adored that, Hester, but I’ve got to stay here for a couple of days … they’re doing one of my symphonies and I can’t miss it … and then of course there’s the funeral. I have to go to that. But I’ll come straight to Wychwood afterwards. Is that all right? I could get there on the second of January. How does that sound?’

‘Oh, Edmund, do come as soon as you possibly can. I can’t talk now, because I’ve got some wretched journalist coming to interview me about this year’s Festival.’ She laughed, but with no mirth in the sound. ‘It’s the last thing I feel like doing now.’

‘I’ll be there soon, Hester. Will you be all right? I’ll be thinking of you.’

‘I’ll be fine. The show must go on, right? I’ll see you soon. Goodbye.’

Is this me, uttering such clichés, Hester wondered.
The show must go on
. I don’t care, she thought. This cliché is particularly comforting and also true. She
believed it. What would become of her if the show
didn’t
go on was too dreadful to think about.

The funeral. Virginia would be seeing to it now. Death made a horrifying amount of work. There were so many arrangements, so much to see to – perhaps, she reflected, precisely in order to occupy people who otherwise would want to do nothing but crawl under their blankets and howl and howl like wounded animals.

She tried to recall Adam as he used to be, long ago in the days when he was her lover, but so many images flickered through her mind that a kind of nausea washed over her. Other pictures came and went but the one she kept returning to was that of his dead body. All she could bring to mind was closed eyes and pale skin and white limbs stiff under a cold sheet – not the man whose body she used to know as well as she knew her own.

Hester put the phone down and walked to the window. She pressed her forehead against the glass, and looked out at a garden that was nothing but frost-whitened lawn and shrubs, and leafless trees making strange shapes against the grey sky. Dying isn’t the worst thing, she thought, and found that she was trembling. Being buried, that’s worse. The idea of burial, the notion that there he would be, real flesh, real bone, gone and underground forever was, as it always had been, an unbearable thought. Hester took a deep breath. It had been years since Adam was anything to do with her. She’d been sure that she’d left him and all the love she used to feel for him far behind, but now that he was dead she wanted to call his name, cry it out aloud, and found that she couldn’t.

Her hands were icy cold in the warm room. I must call Ruby. I can’t be alone. But I can’t … I can’t tell
her. The journalist is coming any minute now. I must pull myself together.

She was brought out of her confusion by Siggy. An enormous ginger and white tom, with gooseberry coloured eyes, he’d chosen this moment to leave the window sill and jump on to Hester’s writing table, treading delicately over her papers. He settled himself against a small pile of copies of the last Wychwood Newsletter, the one that had gone out to Friends of the Festival a few weeks ago. Hester picked up the top copy and glanced at it, happy to be distracted:

As we move into winter, attention always turns to the upcoming Festival and Friends are eager to know who will present the 1987 ballet. This year’s competition has been won by Hugo Carradine, the 34-year-old founder and choreographer of the Carradine Ballet, who made such a sensation last year with his
Silver Girls
. The projected work for the Festival is called
Sarabande
. Hugo says, ‘It’s based on an ancient Persian fairytale, but we’ve built a series of almost abstract variations round the story. It’ll be sensual and passionate with lavish decor and costumes in the Bakst tradition. We’re very fortunate that Claudia Drake has agreed to dance the principal role of the Princess.’

Wychwood House welcomes the company from 27 December for the customary rehearsal period at the Arcadia, and the first night will take place on 6 January as always and run for ten performances. The Box Office opens on 25 November 1986.

George Stott (Secretary, Friends of the Wychwood Festival and Arcadia Theatre Manager)

‘You’re getting in the way, Siggy,’ Hester said, sweeping her hand gently over his back and putting the
Newsletter down. Her table was under the window so that there would always be something interesting to look at if she tired of whatever she was doing: the monkey-puzzle tree and, criss-crossed by its spiky branches, the roof of the Arcadia Theatre, built in a small dip in the landscape a little way away from the house. Every time she looked at it, she felt proud. It had been her idea, her brainchild, and it was now the home of the annual Wychwood Festival which, over the ten years it had been in existence, had become a highlight of the ballet calendar. The countryside beyond the garden changed colour with changes in the weather, and today it was how Hester liked it best, with the moors almost purple behind the house and disappearing into clouds in the distance. A flurry of sleet almost obscured her view of the tall, intricately patterned wrought-iron gates.

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in.’

Ruby entered with Jemima close behind her.

‘Are you ready, Hester?’ Ruby asked. ‘This is Jemima Entwhistle …’ She paused, and Hester knew that she’d noticed that something was not quite right. Ruby always knew when something was troubling her. ‘Yes thanks, Ruby. I’m quite ready.’

Then she smiled at the young woman who was hovering near a chair. ‘Hello, Jemima, it’s nice to meet you. Please sit down.’

*

Hester’s face was still streaked with tears when Ruby came in with coffee and biscuits. She put the tray down and said ‘I’ve brought a drink for you both … but what’s wrong, Hester? I knew you weren’t looking yourself. Where’s Miss Entwhistle?’

‘I had a call from Edmund,’ Hester said. ‘Just before
you brought her in. He told me that Adam died yesterday. Of a heart attack.’

Ruby knelt down beside Hester and put a hand on her knee. ‘Oh, my dear! My poor Hester. How dreadful! How could you think of giving an interview when you’d just been told something like that? You should have cancelled; Miss Entwhistle would have rescheduled it, I’m sure.’

‘I didn’t want to. I wanted all interviews over with before the company arrives for rehearsals. And I was doing very well. I felt quite proud of myself. She had no idea anything was wrong, but—’

‘What happened?’ Ruby took the chair opposite her and began pouring the coffee. ‘What did she say?’