The Queen of New Beginnings (28 page)

A month after being admitted to hospital, George defied the experts and regained a limited amount of movement and the ability to speak. Now that she could swallow again, she no longer had the nasogastric tube fitted and had even put on a little weight.

As encouraging as it was that George could now talk, her speech wasn’t at all easy to understand. More often than not, her words came out as fast as machine gunfire and made little or no sense. It frustrated her immensely when yet again Alice failed to grasp what she was saying. The speech therapist explained to Alice that for George everything she said made perfect sense inside her head and so it was only natural that she would be upset with anyone else’s apparent inability to understand her. George had never been one to suffer fools gladly so it was no wonder she lost her temper when Alice had to apologize for the nth time that she had no idea what George was talking about.

There were times when Alice didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she was having her ears verbally boxed as invariably the words George hurled at her weren’t the right ones. Accused of being a jabbling wardrobe or a cucumber in chapamas was never going to hit its target in the way George thought it would.

Even so, it was a comfort to have more of the old George back. It was a comfort also when George would reach for Alice’s hand and gently squeeze it. There was little strength in her grip, but that didn’t matter; it was the fact that she was able to reach out that mattered.

Most days George would greet Alice’s arrival at her bedside with the same question: how were Percy and the girls? Alice’s answer was always the same: they were fine; she was going to Well House twice a day to feed, clean and generally remonstrate with Percy. Denied access to Well House—Alice had locked it up for the sake of security—Percy’s behaviour had grown worse. Like a surly, sulky teenager who had been denied access to his Xbox, he either completely ignored Alice or subjected her legs to an assault of vicious pecking. There was no reasoning with him. He didn’t listen to a word she said when she tried to placate him by saying his mistress would soon be home, that he wasn’t to worry. Why would he believe what she told him when in all honesty, Alice didn’t believe it herself?

Today, when Alice took her usual seat by the side of her bed, George was in a particularly agitated mood. “Slow down,” Alice said after George had bombarded her with a breathtaking stream of incoherency.

George ignored her and let loose with a furious look and another torrent of incoherency. Her tone and frantic demeanour suggested that she had just explained that there wasn’t a moment to lose, the world was about to end and Alice hadn’t understood the simplest of instructions on how to save mankind.

“Start again,” Alice said patiently. “I didn’t hear you properly.”

The furious look was exchanged for an equally familiar expression, the one that said, Don’t-you-dare-patronize-me! “The teapot,” George said. When Alice failed to make the appropriate response, George raised her voice. “The teapot!
There!
” With great effort, she lifted her right hand and pointed vaguely towards her bedside locker. There was no teapot, only a plastic cup, a jug of water and a newspaper.

“You want a drink?” Alice asked.

George’s eyes glinted.

“OK, you don’t want a drink. You want me to read the newspaper to you, is that it?”

As if an unbearable weight had been lifted finally from her shoulders, George’s whole body visibly relaxed.

But Alice’s body did the opposite when she saw what it was that George had been so keen for her to read.

It was his big night and Clayton wasn’t handling it well. With ten minutes to go until
The Queen of New Beginnings
started, Glen was schmoozing a new client on the phone in the room next door, leaving Clayton to sweat out his apprehension alone.

He had the television switched on with the sound turned down and with the remote control clamped on his hot, damp hand, he was like an actor with first-night nerves waiting in the wings to go on stage. He had always been nervous for what was the equivalent of an opening night performance for him. Before the pilot of
Joking Aside
had gone out, he had been so nervous he had actually thrown up. It didn’t matter that he and Bazza had already watched a recording of the programme and knew that it more than hit its mark. What filled him with stomach-heaving, bowel-loosening, sick terror was knowing that a real audience would be watching and judging his work. He had never told anyone that he got so worked up in these situations, not even Bazza. He had always brazened it out. Or hidden himself in the toilet until the worst of his anxiety had passed.

He checked his watch.

Six minutes to go.

Was he too old to watch his programme whilst hiding behind the sofa as he had as a child with
Doctor Who?
Without fail, it had been the Cybermen that had frightened him rigid. Something about those sinister featureless faces and the way their arms and legs moved. All credit to Russell T. Davies for resurrecting the show to such great effect, but those new Cybermen weren’t a patch on the originals. They were too slick. A bit too camp, if he was honest. No real scare factor.

Four minutes to go.

Would Glen, the most unthinking agent in the universe, ever get off the phone?

It was worse than waiting to be taken to the gallows.

Not that he had ever waited to be taken to the gallows, but hyperbole had its place in situations like this.

In the old days he and Bazza had watched their work together. No matter where they were or what they were doing, they would set aside that particular evening when the show went out to watch it together. As soon as Clayton had discreetly dealt with his PST—Pre-Show Tension—he would then be glued to the sofa with Bazza, the two of then analysing every line of dialogue they had written. Had they really got the timing of each joke right? Had the actor really nailed it?

Presumably Stacey now kept Bazza company on the sofa when he had something new to watch. Or maybe he didn’t bother watching his work. Perhaps he was so cocksure of himself these days he had only to glance casually with one eye at the studio recording and pat himself on the back.

Lately Clayton had almost begun to feel sorry for the Golden Couple. Their collective halo had definitely lost its shine and their TV appearances had more or less dried up. Rumour had it that Stacey had tried to get on
Loose Women
and had been turned down. As Glen said, how out of favour would you have to be not to get on that programme? The shots the paparazzi now snapped of them were less than kind. Only yesterday there had been a very unflattering series of pictures in a newspaper depicting a furious-looking Stacey emerging from a restaurant with Bazza; she appeared to be giving him hell over something. Clayton hadn’t ever seen Bazza with such a hang-dog expression on his face before. Last week one newspaper had suggested that Stacey had had a boob job and showed what they claimed were before and after shots. With the advantage of having been her long-term partner, Clayton had to admit that her breasts did indeed look suspiciously larger. He doubted their size was attributable merely to being jacked up by a substantially padded bra.

Two minutes to go.

Come on Glen! Shift yourself! I can’t face this alone.

It was an unavoidable thought—although being the coward he was, he had done his utmost to try and avoid it—but he wondered whether Alice was right now, this very minute, settled in front of her television at Dragonfly Cottage. Perhaps she was there with a hotshot lawyer by her side ready to take him to the cleaners. He had covered himself, though. He had changed all the names. He had changed the location. He had done everything to cover his back. He had done everything except the one thing Alice had asked of him.

The voice of Captain Sensible kept muttering ad nauseam that it might have been a good idea for Clayton to share his guilty secret with Glen. As his agent, Glen should have been made aware that there was a potential glitch on the horizon. He had a right to know just how near the wind Clayton was sailing. Wrecking careers. Wrecking lives. By Jiminy, it was an impressive trick if you could pull it off.

But Captain Sensible wasn’t having it all his own way. He now had to contend with the voice of Signor Ego. Signor Ego stubbornly maintained that he needed this success to be back in the game. And at any cost. So what if he was accused of stealing somebody’s life story? So what if he had trampled on the feelings of a person who had shown him nothing but friendship and kindness?
And trust
, Captain Sensible piped up.
Let’s not forget that.

Clayton squeezed his eyes shut. Just how much rope did a man need to hang himself by?

• • •

For most of the evening they had had the television room to themselves. They had briefly had the company of an elderly man with an oxygen tank at his side but he had been taken away by a nurse halfway through the programme. Perhaps it had all been too much for him. There had also been a woman in a nearby chair who had fallen asleep during the last thirty minutes. Alice had been seized with the urge to jolt her awake and say, “Don’t you want to know how it ends?” The woman was snoring loudly now, oblivious to the credits rolling.

After the briefest of exchanges, both Alice and George kept their gaze on the screen. When Clayton’s name passed before their eyes they again turned and looked at each other. But Alice couldn’t speak. Her throat was tight and her eyes had filled with tears. From her wheelchair, George reached out to her and patted her arm. With great effort, she said, “I was right. He did care about you.” The clarity of George’s words, each one of them precisely and slowly enunciated, made Alice’s heart clench.

Still unable to speak, she shook her head, then very gently laid it against George’s shoulder. She needed to feel close to someone. She felt bereft, as if she had lost her parents all over again. Whilst it was true the actors hadn’t looked anything like her parents, the way they spoke was uncannily reminiscent, especially Bill Nighy, who had played her father. She knew all too well that an actor is only as good as the lines that have been written for him, and it pained Alice that Clayton had so perfectly captured her father. How had he done that, and to such an incredible and insightful depth? All he’d had to go on was what she had told him. Surely she hadn’t described her father to that extent?

In contrast, her mother had come across as a far more unknown quantity. Was that Clayton’s interpretation? Or was that how Alice had depicted her mother to him? Maybe so. After all, her mother had died when she was still quite young and before her death she had been far more occupied with her work and her husband than with Alice. Not that Alice was criticising her for that; it was just the way she had been. It hadn’t been in Dr. Barbara Barrett’s DNA to be any other kind of a mother. Just as it had always been in Alice’s DNA to be as close to her father as she had been. So it was only natural, after Barbara had died, that the special bond that already existed between Alice and her father would be strengthened yet further.

And what of Rufus and his family? Alice gave a little shudder as she thought how cruelly devious and manipulative Rufus had been portrayed as. She pictured the scene when he had taken her to bed on her eighteenth birthday and when her father had stormed in on them. How had her father borne it? Knowing Rufus better than she had, how had he stood by and let Rufus get away with what he had? But how could he have stopped Rufus? He had warned Alice and she had chosen not to believe him.

What were the chances that Rufus and his sister had watched the programme this evening and had seen themselves on their television screens? Oh, yes, Clayton had changed all their names and set the story in North Yorkshire, but there wasn’t a hope in hell that Natasha and Rufus could be deceived into believing this wasn’t a direct account of their time at Cuckoo House. Would they want revenge? She thanked God that she had changed her name all those years ago—plucking the name Shoemaker out of the ether, just as Clayton had accused her of doing—and they wouldn’t be able to track her down. Not easily, anyway.

And what of her feelings for the man who had put her through this?

As with so many things in life, the expectation had been worse than the actual event. There were times during the two-hour-long drama when she had watched herself on the screen and wanted to shout at the silly fool of a girl who was being taken in by Rufus. There were other times when she had cried. The scene when she was sitting in the car with her father, when he was trying to make her see sense, had been so intense she had held her breath. More light-hearted and whimsical had been the mystery trips they had shared together, seeing those moments brought to life so colourfully on the screen had reminded her all over again just how magical they had been to her.

A part of her wanted to thank Clayton for writing what he had. As a permanent record of her father, it was as authentic a record as she could have wanted. Even when he had run off with Isabel, Clayton had not shown her father in a bad light. Clayton could so easily have destroyed him; he could have turned him into a risible caricature, but he hadn’t. On the contrary, he had written the whole thing with extraordinary sensitivity. He hadn’t embellished, twisted, or exaggerated anything; he had simply written the story as faithfully as she had told it to him. As loath as she was to admit it, having read only a small part of his script back on Christmas Day, it was just possible she had misjudged Clayton.

It was the way he had ended the drama, and the inclusion of one character in particular, and the extra dimension it gave the story, that had been the greatest surprise of all. Clayton had written himself into the script. Under the guise of being a novelist suffering from writer’s block, he arrives at Long View to try and cure himself. There he meets a young woman with a story to tell…they fall in love…they part…they get back together…

It made her wonder. Really wonder. Why had Clayton written the ending like that? Was it because, as George had just said, he had genuinely cared about her? Or had it had nothing to do with Clayton? Had he been instructed to tie up all the loose ends in a way that would leave the viewer with a warm rosy glow? Somehow Alice couldn’t imagine Clayton allowing anyone to tell him how to write his script.

Something else that was making her wonder was the hard-to-ignore fact that she was really in no position to judge Clayton as harshly as she had. To condemn him was to condemn herself. For hadn’t she wilfully misled people all her life? Could she really excuse her behaviour on the grounds that she hadn’t hurt anyone in the process of her deception, or gained financially from her half-truths? The word hypocrite resounded in her ears.

She lifted her head from George’s shoulder and looked into her perfectly still face. The old lady was sound asleep.

• • •

Unable to sleep, Clayton lay in bed thinking about Alice. He was thinking about the ending he had written. Watching it play out had been weirdly unnerving. It had brought everything back to him. It had made him remember just how good his time with Alice had been.

What would she have made of it? Would it have been the final straw and had her throwing a very large, heavy object at the screen?

Or was he flattering himself that she had even bothered to watch the programme? What better insult to him than to refuse to watch it?

He turned over and tried to force himself to sleep.

Three hours later he was still trying to sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about Alice. The way she used to smile at him. The way she used to flash her dark eyes at him. The way she used to put a finger to her lip when she was concentrating hard or was unsure about something. The way she used to kiss him. And God help him, the way her body fitted perfectly against his when they were in bed together. He had particularly loved the way that, moments after she had climaxed, she would sigh and then laugh with undisguised pleasure. He had never before known a woman laugh in bed the way she did. Stacey had always treated sex very seriously. Everything had to be done by the book. No, not there, you fool. Here! But with Alice sex had been refreshingly good-humoured and uncomplicated.

Fidgety with restless energy, he lay on his back. He shouldn’t be feeling like this. He should be feeling immensely pleased with himself. He’d got what he wanted: a slot on primetime television and accolades aplenty. So why did it feel so pointless? Why did he feel like shit?

And why did he keep thinking that it wasn’t until you lost something that you realized just how much you valued it?

Once more he turned over and this time buried his face into the pillow. Maybe suffocation was the answer.