The Queen of New Beginnings (30 page)

“Have you never done that?”

“Excuse the mix of metaphors, but I have at least let the sheets cool down before switching horses mid-race.”

“Then I would suggest you’ve never lost your head. Or your heart.”

“Is that what you did with Bruce?”

She nodded. “And he with me. Nothing on this earth could have stopped us from doing what we did.” For the first time in their conversation, she lowered her eyes from his. For a moment she seemed lost in thought. It was as if the light had gone from her face. But then their waiter reappeared with their food and the smile and bewitching gaze were once more firmly reinstated.

When they were alone again, she said, “Now it’s time for you to tell me how you came to write
The Queen of New Beginnings
.”

“I met Alice,” he said simply.

“Alice,” she repeated. “How is she?”

“All grown up,” was all he could think to say.

“Married?”

He shook his head.

“Where is she living? In London? Is that where you met?”

He shook his head again.

“She lives about five miles away from Cuckoo House. But for a time she did live in London.”

“Her father was devastated when she didn’t reply to any of his letters. He wanted so very much to repair the damage he had done.”

“She was hurt by his apparent selfishness. She was left to cope with so much, not least the aftermath of a stepmother who committed suicide. She was only eighteen.”

Isabel put down her knife and fork and took a sip of her wine. Clayton felt the full force of her penetrating blue gaze. “You sound protective of Alice,” she said. “Are you involved with her?”

“I…I was.” It was the first time he had admitted this to anyone.

“Recently?”

“Why do you think that?”

She shrugged and ran her fingers up and down the stem of her wine glass. “It makes sense. If you’d met her a long time ago you would have written
The Queen of New Beginnings
then. What does Alice think of it?”

He hesitated. He could so easily lie his head off. He could say that Alice had given it her full backing, that she thought it was a perfect portrayal of her family and her life. But there was something about the situation, about sitting here with Isabel—no longer was she a character from a page of dialogue he’d written; she was very much the real deal—that compelled him to speak the truth.

“Before I answer your question,” he said, “can I ask you what you thought about the way your character came across? Was there anything you disagreed with? Did I get anything wrong?”

She smiled. “Are you asking if I was shocked by witnessing my behaviour?”

“No. I want to know if you think it was a faithful enactment of the events. These things are important to me.”

“I can only speak for the little that I took part in, but yes, I’d say you got it dead right. Which means you could only have done that with Alice’s help.”

“But you’re not angry with what I did? You don’t feel a libel suit coming on?”

“Relax. I didn’t write to you with anything like that in mind. Of course, if you’d upset me over the way you’d portrayed Bruce, I would be coming after you for sure. But tell me about Alice.”

He took a mental deep breath. “I wrote it all without Alice’s knowledge or permission after she had shared her story with me. She’d never told it to anyone else before and she had no idea what I was up to until I was more than halfway through it. When she discovered what I was doing, she was furious.” He explained in more detail how once he’d started writing he just couldn’t stop. Despite the inevitable consequences.

“Heavens,” Isabel said quietly. “You’re a bit of a bastard beneath that engagingly winsome exterior, aren’t you?”

“No argument there.”

“Does she hate me very much?”

Clayton pushed his empty plate to one side and took a moment to consider Isabel’s question. “I’m not sure. But she never said as much, so I’d be inclined to think she doesn’t.”

“I’d like to meet her. Do you think she would agree?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. We haven’t spoken since Christmas. I have no idea what’s currently passing through her mind. Although I would guess that if it’s anything to do with me, it’s not good.”

“Good Lord, what is it with that family and Christmas? Does it always have to be so dramatic for them?”

“Perhaps it’s the fault of those who come into their orbit and cock things up for them?”

“Is that what you think I did?”

“Well, you didn’t exactly help, did you? Sleeping with Bruce and then running off with him was hardly the best way to bring about family accord, was it? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not making out my crime was any less serious. I flagrantly stole from Alice just as you stole from Julia.”

“Does love not get a mention? Don’t you think that love sometimes justifies our actions?”

“You can gloss it up that way if you like; if it makes you feel better, but I know what I did was out of self-interest. I deliberately stole from Alice for my own reward. Was sleeping with Bruce an act of altruism? Or were you driven by your own needs?”

“You can play dirty, can’t you?”

“I’m sorry, but there really doesn’t seem any point in shirking the truth. I did that long enough with the woman with whom I was previously involved.”

“That would be Stacey Cook, wouldn’t it? If you don’t mind me saying, and if the tabloids are to be believed, that could not have been a happy relationship. What made you stay together for as long as you did? It strikes me that it was a very obvious mismatch.”

“Habit. That and a reluctance to change the status quo. Stupidly I’d thought it was better to have someone in my life rather than no one.” It was another thing he’d admitted aloud for the first time. Not even Glen had shoe-horned that admission out of him.

“And what if you had met Alice while you were still with Stacey? Would habit have stopped you from falling in love with her?”

“Who said anything about me falling in love with Alice?”

“Are you saying she meant nothing to you? That she was nothing but a handy shag whilst you sneakily robbed her of her life story?”

“No!” His voice rang out so loudly a couple at a nearby table turned and stared. “Certainly not,” he denied more quietly.

Isabel’s face broke into a slow smile. “I didn’t think so. You cared about her, didn’t you? Otherwise, you couldn’t possibly have written what you did, not with so much sensitivity, especially when it came to her character.”

“And your point?”

“Oh, I’d have thought that was blindingly apparent. I’m just trying to say that nothing we do is as simple as it first appears. My running off with a man eighteen years older than me wasn’t a mindless fling. As unbelievable as it sounds, it was love at first sight. And mutual love at that. Bruce and I were crazy about each other.”

“How long did you stay together?” This was something Clayton had been curious about for some time. Even more so now that he’d met Isabel. “We were together right up until he died.”

“How did he die?”

“Pancreatic failure. There’d been no warning signs. Nothing. I woke up one morning and he was dead in the bed next to me.”

“Did you marry?”

She shook her head.

“We never felt the need to do so. He really was the love of my life, you know.”

“Yet you later married someone else?”

She looked him dead in the eye. “And divorced him fifteen months after we married. It was a disaster, a ghastly mistake and something I should never have done. A bit like the mistake Bruce made with Julia. I was lonely; I thought I could replace Bruce.” Her gaze softened. “How wrong could I have been? Bruce was irreplaceable. He was a genuine one off. I still miss him.”

“So does Alice,” Clayton said. “She cried when she found out that he’d persisted in trying to find her.” Clayton went on to explain about George telling Alice all that she’d known.

“George!” Isabel interrupted him. “Is she still alive?”

“Alive and very much kicking. I swear that woman’s indestructible.”

Their waiter reappeared to take away their plates and to offer them the dessert menu. They both declined. “Just coffee, please,” Isabel said.

“The same for me,” Clayton added. “And the bill.”

While they were waiting for their coffee to arrive, Clayton asked Isabel if she had ever heard from Rufus in the intervening years.

“No, we never spoke again. But then I never expected to.”

“What did you see in him?”

“A handsome, clever and charming man. Plus he was head over heels in love with me. What young woman would turn that down? I knew it would never last, though, that I would soon tire of being charmed by him. That was why I was so surprised when he suddenly announced our engagement in front of everyone. He’d previously dropped a few hints about us getting married before but I’d never said yes. I thought I’d made it clear to him that I believed we were far too young to consider such a thing.”

“By leaving him for Bruce you couldn’t have squashed his enormous ego more effectively.”

“That wasn’t ever my intention. I’m not a cruel woman.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I did feel guilty about what we’d done, but when Bruce told me just what kind of a man Rufus was, I felt I’d had a lucky escape. As did Alice.”

“What about Julia? She wasn’t so lucky, was she?”

“Bruce told me that Julia had tried to kill herself before. It was a recurring threat of hers.”

“Really?” This was news to Clayton. Most probably it would be news to Alice as well.

“Oh yes. He came home late one night and found her unconscious in bed. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, not enough to kill her, but enough to make a point. Another time she locked herself in the bathroom and taunted Bruce by saying she was going to kill herself exactly the same way his first wife had. Even though he knew it was impossible for her to go through with what she was threatening because he’d had the electrics changed after Barbara’s death, he broke the door down to ensure she couldn’t harm herself in some other way.”

“Why didn’t Alice or anyone else know about these suicide attempts?”

“She did it when the children were away at school. Bruce used to hate leaving her on her own. She blamed all her unhappiness on him. It was a nightmare for the poor man.”

“Being so unstable couldn’t have been too much of a picnic for Julia. She only stuck it the way she did because she needed the security of his money to raise her children in the way she wanted.”

“Exactly right.”

Their coffee arrived, and after a moment’s distraction of offering each other milk and sugar, Isabel said, “What about Alice? Was there ever any communication between her and Rufus? Or his sister?”

“Nothing. Not a word from either of them. Although there’s every chance that could change now if either of them saw the programme and they choose to write to me as you did. I doubt they’ll view things in quite the same open-minded way that you have.”

“If you’d really been worried about that you would never have gone ahead with the programme.”

That’s what you think, Clayton thought with a stab of guilt. If Alice’s heartfelt request for him to delete his script hadn’t stopped him, the thought of any potential reprisals from a jumped-up twerp like Rufus certainly wasn’t going to stop him.

“I meant what I said earlier,” Isabel said. “I really would like to get in touch with Alice. Will you give me her address or perhaps her telephone number?”

When he hesitated—who was he to give out Alice’s address?—Isabel backed him into a corner from which there was no escape. “Better still,” she said, “why don’t you pass on my number to Alice?” She let loose one of her dazzling, white-toothed smiles. “At least then you’ll have the perfect excuse to get in touch with her yourself.”

“How do you know I want to?”

“Because it’s written all over your face, you silly man.” The dazzling smile so effectively tightened its hold on him, Clayton felt helplessly lassoed to his chair.

Ronnetta swung open the doors of her drinks cabinet and started to mix Alice a cocktail. She rattled tops off bottles and swished and stirred, at the same time swinging her hips in time with Matt Monro singing “From Russia With Love” on the CD player. “This,” she said, “will cheer you up better than anything else I know.”

“But will it render me a total wreck head in the morning?”

“Who cares about tomorrow? Let’s get through today first, shall we?” There. All done.” She turned around and handed Alice a tumbler of green liquid.

Alice took it doubtfully. “And the key ingredient would be?”

“Crème de menthe. With a dash of pernod, ouzo, rum, amaretto, limoncello and a hotly guarded secret ingredient.”

It sounded as mad a way as any to use up an excess of duty free holiday booze.

“Here’s mud in your eye!” Ronnetta said. Alice took a cautious sip and willed her liver to forgive her. As the liquid made contact with her taste buds, it was all she could do to stop herself from shuddering.

“What do you think?” Ronnetta asked, when she was sitting in the armchair alongside Alice. “I invented it myself. I call it the Last Resort.”

“It’s very sweet,” Alice murmured as an intense but not unpleasant sensation began to take hold of her throat.

“Another few sips and you’ll get beyond that. Now then, what’s the latest on George?”

Alice had just arrived home after her day spent at the hospital when Ronnetta had knocked on her door. She had taken one look at her and ordered her to come round for a drink and a bite to eat. “You look worn out, Alice,” she’d said. “What you need is someone to pamper you.”

Alice risked another sip of her drink and brought Ronnetta up to date on the news that George had had another stroke in the night. What little strength and mobility she had gained since the first stroke had gone again. The only upside was that she hadn’t lost what limited speech she’d been managing previously.

“I’m so sorry,” Ronnetta said when Alice finished explaining. “You’ve become very close to the old girl since she’s been ill, haven’t you?”

“I’m all she has.”

“Well, I’m sure she appreciates everything that you’re doing.”

“I’m doing nothing but spend time with her.”

“Never underestimate how much good that does. Just having you there must be an enormous comfort to her.”

“Oh but, Ronnetta, if you’d seen her today…I’m worried there isn’t any fight left in her, that she’ll simply give up. The nurses are wonderful, but for someone like George being helpless is so dehumanising.” At the memory of how defeated and wretched poor George had looked today, Alice felt tears prick at the back of her eyes. To chase the memory away, she took a large mouthful of Ronnetta’s Last Resort. Then another. She held the glass up to the light. “How extraordinary,” she said. “You were right about this stuff: it does get better.”

“As if I’d lie to you. And talking of lying, have you heard anything from that dreadful man?”

“Clayton?”

“Well, of course, Clayton. Who else would I mean? Unless you have a secret army of dreadful men who regularly lie to you. Or perhaps you were thinking of that atrocious stepbrother of yours. What was his name again?”

“Rufus.”

It had come as no surprise to Alice that, three weeks ago, when she had been watching
The Queen of New Beginnings
with George at the hospital, Ronnetta and Bob had been at home watching it as well. The pair of them had inundated her with questions the next day. Ronnetta had wanted to know just how true the programme had been and after Alice had admitted that Clayton had done an excellent job of being faithful to what she had told him, Ronnetta had thrown her arms around Alice and hugged her tightly. “You poor thing!” she had cried. “You poor, poor thing! What a dreadful life you’ve had!” No matter how vociferously Alice had denied that this had been the case, Ronnetta hadn’t let it go. Her eyes shiny with tears, she’d said, “You’ve never really had anyone there for you, have you?” From then on, it was as if Ronnetta had assumed the role of surrogate mother to Alice.

Now, up on her feet and clattering around in her drinks cabinet again, she seemed intent on pitching Alice headlong into Last Resort oblivion with a refill. But Alice was beyond caring. She felt happily light-headed. Better than she’d felt in days. If not weeks. It was as if the cares of the world had been lifted from her shoulders. “You know, I’ve always thought of myself as having been lucky,” she said when Ronnetta placed her replenished glass on the table in front of her.

“Lucky?” repeated Ronnetta with a dubious expression. “How do you work that out? Your mother died when you were a kiddie, your stepbrother played you like a cheap violin, your stepmother was a basket case and topped herself, and your dad—”

Alice put up a hand to cut Ronnetta short. “No need to catalogue events, Ronnetta; I was there, remember?”

“So how come you reckon you’ve been lucky? Oh, and let’s not forget what that rogue Clayton Miller did to you. You call that lucky?”

Alice laughed. “Ronnetta, give it a break, will you? If anyone should be keeping score, it’s me. And I did enough of that before, when I refused to have anything more to do with my father. Trust me, score keeping isn’t the answer.”

“You try telling Bob that. He’s got a list of scalps he wants on your behalf.”

Alice laughed. “Where is Bob, by the way?”

“He’s helping a mate over in Matlock with some DIY work. You see, that’s the kind of man he is—always willing to give up his free time to help people. Honest too. You wouldn’t get any wily business from him. Unlike some people I could mention.”

Smiling, Alice said, “You’re never going to forgive me for making the mistake of choosing Clayton over Bob, are you?”

Ronnetta waved a hand around in the air, causing her bangles to rattle and slide on her arm. “He was attractive enough, I’ll grant you, but he was a bit dull. No real pizzazz to him. You could do so much better.”

Alice thought about Clayton and whether or not he had pizzazz. Maybe not all-singing and all-dancing pizzazz, it had to be said, but he’d had something. A sort of understated, enigmatic quality. She had liked that about him. She had liked his sense of humour, too, and that he’d never taken himself too seriously. He’d also been impulsive and again she had liked that. Time spent with him had never been boring, that was for sure. She thought of the first time they met and how she had fooled him with Katya. That had been fun. The look on his face had been priceless when she’d been so mercilessly rude to him.

She sighed, suddenly overcome with a very real sense of regret. If only she hadn’t been so quick to tell him about growing up at Cuckoo House. Who knew how things might have worked out for them if she hadn’t presented him with such an obvious temptation?

“You’ve got a strange faraway look in your eyes,” Ronnetta said.

“It’s this cocktail of yours,” Alice replied. “It would give anyone a strange faraway look.” She downed another mouthful, thinking with wry amusement that she was in danger of acquiring a taste for it. Not only that, in her happily mellowed state, she was in danger of losing her animosity towards Clayton. It pained her to admit it, even to herself, but she missed him. Many a time when she had been at the hospital with George she had experienced the urge to talk to him, to find out how he was, to share with him her concerns for George.

Before last night, when poor George had taken a dramatic turn for the worse, she had been annoyingly vocal in her opinion that Alice should get in touch with Clayton to congratulate him on his programme. Having made the mistake of confessing to George that she had been surprised and pleased by what he had written, and even that she might have judged him too hastily and too harshly—given her own propensity to hide things from people—George had urged her to get in touch with Clayton. George also wanted him to know how delighted she was with the way she had been portrayed, and that she had been especially pleased with the actress who had been cast in the role. “Just don’t start boasting to all and sundry about your moment of fame,” Alice had begged her. “Do that and I’ll tell people you’re ga-ga and they mustn’t believe a word you say.”

George had replied with just one word. “Cruel.”

Alice’s fear that suddenly everyone would know that the programme was about her had not proved to be the case. Either no one in the area had watched it or they simply hadn’t made the connection.

• • •

Hours later, Alice stumbled home. Acutely aware that she needed to take preventative measures to ward off a stinker of a hangover, she filled the kettle for some coffee. While she waited for it to boil, she drank a glass of water. And another. That was when she noticed that the red light on her answer phone was winking. She pressed the play button and heard a voice that had the effect of instantly sobering her up.

“Hello Alice. I’m not sure which one of us will feel more awkward about this, although right now I reckon I might be out in front, but that might be presumptuous on my part as I’m pretty sure you’ll still be furious with me. And for the record, I don’t blame you for being angry. Anyway…um…oh, hell I’ve lost my thread. OK, right, yes, got it. Look, the thing is, you might not want to talk to me, but something’s come up and if you could bear to return my call, I’ve got something important to tell you. And just in case you haven’t got—”

The answer phone cut him off at this point. Alice could see there was another message waiting for her attention. She pressed play again. Once more Clayton’s voice filled the kitchen.

“Sorry,” he said, “I’m rambling on. Nerves. Well, fear actually. Maybe even terror. Not that I’m saying you’re scary, Alice. Well, you were when you were Katya. Oh, hell, I’m off again. Look, here’s my number, just in case you threw it away.”

After he’d repeated the number for her, he said good-bye and the kitchen went quiet. There were no more messages.

The kettle clicked off in the silence. Alice made a cup of coffee and then made a decision. It was time to bring back an old friend.

• • •

The ringing of his mobile roused Clayton from a deep sleep in which he’d been dreaming he was working on the checkout in a supermarket. But the machine for reading the bar codes had gone wrong and people in the queue were getting restless. A big ugly guy had started pelting him with his shopping—eggs, tomatoes, rolls of toilet paper. Others had joined in. It was a full-scale mob attack. The manager had then appeared. Dressed in riot gear, he carried a transparent shield and a baton. He said it was always like this on a Monday night. Disorientated, his eyes barely open, Clayton fumbled for the phone in the dark.

“Hello,” he said groggily. He almost expected it to be the supermarket manager.

“Hello, mister.”

“Hello,” he repeated, trying to shake himself awake. He switched on the bedside lamp. He blinked at the brightness and when he was able to focus he checked to see what time it was: it was five minutes past midnight. “Who is this?” is demanded. If it was some call centre in India hoping to sell him something or inform him that he or a member of his family had won the chance to go on a holiday of a lifetime they were in for a nasty shock.

“Don’t tell me your memory is as bad as your manners.”

OK, so not a call centre. A wrong number. And from someone who wasn’t English. “Whoever you are,” he said, “try concentrating on what you’re doing and dial correctly next time.”

“Hey mister, you the big idiot! Not me. I dial very carefully. I always do things carefully. Not like you. You the most careless man I know.”

He sat up. His brain suddenly made itself half useful.
Katya?
“Hey,” he said, “you can’t just ring up and hurl abuse at me like you used to.”

“No? Well, we see about that. I no lose my touch.”

“That much is clear. How have you been?”

“You really interested? You really want to know? Or you just being polite?”

“I think you established a long time ago that politeness is not one of my strong suits. So tell me, how have you been?”

“I’ve…I’ve been better.”

He was pushing his luck, but if he didn’t say it, he knew he’d regret it. “I’ve missed you,” he said.

The line went quiet.

“Are you there?”

Still nothing.

“Alice?” he said, concern making him dispense with playing along with Katya. He could hear something faint and muffled in his ear. “Alice?” he repeated. “Are you all right?”

“No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m crying, you horrible, insensitive man!”

“Oh, Alice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did, that it upset you so much.”

“Who said it was anything to do with you? This may come as a surprise to you but the world doesn’t resolve around Clayton Miller all of the time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And stop saying you’re sorry.”

“Sorry. Oh, hell, I can’t stop saying it now.”

From the other end of the line came the sound of Alice blowing her nose. “I’ve missed you,” he said again when she’d finished.

“I’ve missed you, too,” she said so softly he very nearly didn’t hear her. “Especially recently since—”

Clayton waited for her to continue. When the silence had gone on for longer than he could take, he said, as gently as he could, “Since when, Alice?”

“Since George had a stroke.”

Shocked, it was now his turn to fall quiet.

“It happened several months ago,” Alice went on. “She’s been in hospital ever since. Then last night she had a second stroke. I…I don’t think she’s going to recover from this one.”

“Alice, I’m genuinely sorry. It doesn’t seem possible. Not George. She seemed indestructible.”

There was another pause in the conversation while Alice blew her nose again. Then: “she wanted you to know that she thought you’d done a great job with
The Queen of New Beginnings
.”

“Really?”

“She was very pleased with her screen-self.”

“She was a gift. It took no effort at all to shape her character.”

“You did a wonderful job with my father. I was frightened you might have turned him into a figure of fun. Or worse, a man who had no real feelings for anyone.”