Whitstable (11 page)

“Not for me.”

“Not for everybody, that’s for sure. Some people find it repulsive. Some can’t even bear the idea and run a mile. But to gourmets, those who appreciate the good things in life, well… they’re a little taste of Heaven.” Gledhill’s eye was steady again. Unblinking. “Acquired taste, of course…”

“If you say so.”

“Don’t knock it ‘til you try it. As they say.”

“Something eaten whilst it is still alive, simply in order to give a person pleasure? I find that rather… obscene.”

“In a way. In another way, it’s the peak of civilized behaviour. The stuff of banquets and kings. Of aristocracy and riches and palaces. The supreme indulgence. The Romans introduced them here two thousand years ago. Long ago as the time of Christ. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Perhaps.”

“Lot of algae and low in salinity, the Thames Estuary. Knew a thing or two, those Romans.” He tossed away the empty shell into a bucket half-full of them, shortly to add to the ‘cultch’ bed upon which the ‘spat’ of the next generation would settle. “Besides. If we humans don’t live for pleasure, what do we live for?”

Cushing thought for a moment.

“Love?” he suggested. But really it was nothing like a question, to his mind.

Gledhill gave a snort, as if it were a bad joke, and wiped his hands in the grubby towel.

“Anything else I can do for you, sir? Or will that be all?”

“Actually there is one thing.” Cushing was careful to maintain a matter-of-fact air. “I’m going to a matinee at the Oxford Picture House this afternoon. I rather thought you might like to join me.”

Gledhill did not look away. “I don’t like going to the cinema as a rule. Not in the daytime.”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the dark?” Cushing’s wit fell upon deaf ears. “I’m sure you can make an exception.”

“I’m busy.”

“I think not. Your working day is evidently over.”

“I didn’t say I was working, I said I was busy.”

“Oh. That’s a shame.” Cushing feigned disappointment. “It really is a shame. Because I’ve been to see your ex-wife and son, you see. Yes. Sue and I had a most edifying chat, and I thought you might be interested in what she had to say. It was quite—what can I say? Quite—special. I’m being dreadfully presumptuous. I shall go alone.” He placed the wrapped Dover sole deep in his shopping basket and walked away a few steps before turning back, as if the next thing he said was a mere afterthought. “I believe the main feature commences at half past two. I do so hate missing the start of a picture, don’t you? You can’t really enjoy a story unless you see it from the beginning, right through to the bitter end. Don’t you find?”

Gledhill was still staring at him. A few foolishly courageous seagulls descended in a flurry on the ‘stalker’ in front of him and took stabs at it, one trying to skewer some fish offal in rolled-up newspaper. Gledhill stamped his feet and clapped his hands, yelling sharply and waving his arms to scare them off. “Go!
Go!
Bloody pests!” Behind him, another fisherman directed a high-powered hose to wash down the flag stones. The gulls took to the skies.

Cushing tapped his shopping basket before walking away.

“Thank you for this. I shall enjoy it.”

***

Fetching coal to build the fire for that coming evening, he remembered entering the same way from the garden, closing the door with his foot, finding Helen hunched on the divan looking like a frightened child. “I thought you’d left me.” “I’m not going anywhere,” he’d reassured her. She’d closed her eyes. He’d wrapped a blanket round her and made a fire, as he did now on his knees before the grate. He screwed up sheets of old newspaper in makeshift balls and laid a criss-cross pattern of kindling on top of them.

Maisie Olive had brought tea and said, “She’ll be all right, sir.”

He’d been smoking a cigarette. “Thank you, yes. She’ll be all right.”

At nine o’clock the night nurse helped Helen to bed. The last thing she said, clutching his hand, was, “Goodnight, Peter. God bless you.”

At three o’clock some instinct he could not explain woke him, and he found her skin cold and clammy to his touch. He switched on the light and the electric blanket and went down to make tea. Her pupils were small dots. He fluffed up pillows and prised them behind her. When he returned with the tea, the night nurse was there saying her breathing was painful and then what breathing there was, painful or not, stopped.

The nurse looked at him and shook her head.

He looked down at Helen and saw all pain and suffering gone from her face. She was serene and at peace. The nurse must have seen his stricken features because she extended her arms, then lowered them.

At that moment Cushing had felt nothing, just a supreme hollowness inside. He’d thought, most strangely of all, if this was in a film I wouldn’t be reacting like this at all. I’d be shouting and jumping around and wailing.

“You’d better get dressed now, Mr C,” the night nurse said. He was still sitting in the armchair with the tea tray on his lap and it was daylight.

When the undertakers came, they showed him an impressively shiny catalogue of head stones. Many of them reminded him of the ones made out of polystyrene in the property shop at Bray. He’d been in a few graveyards in his time. Most of them taken apart afterwards to be reconstituted as other sets: barn, ballroom, bedroom. If only life could be dismantled, he thought, remade and reconstructed the way sets were, with a fresh lick of paint, good enough for the camera to be fooled. After looking at the brochure, he’d given the undertaker only one absolute specification for the gravestone: that there be a space left beside Helen’s name for his own.

In that last year her weight had diminished drastically to under six stone, while he himself lost three. It was as if, unconsciously, he’d been keeping pace with her decline, wanting to go with her every step of the way—and beyond, if necessary.

The previous summer he had dropped out of filming Hammer’s
To Love a Vampire
, the follow-up in the Sheridan Le Fanu ‘Karnstein’ saga (even though the part of occultist schoolmaster Giles Barton had been written for him) because Helen had become gravely ill, yet again.

“No more milk train,” he’d said.

When she’d been rushed to hospital that last time and he’d been telephoned by Joyce at the studios, he was shocked how tired she looked when he arrived at her bedside. It was immediately clear this was not just a case of a few check-ups, as he’d deluded himself into thinking. He’d held her hand tightly and said to her he wasn’t on call the next day and he’d bring in a picnic lunch. She smiled and said that’d be lovely. But when he’d arrived with the wicker hamper, like some character from a drawing-room farce, the nurses had told him he was not to be admitted under any circumstances. The doctors said his wife had had a serious relapse and her heart and lungs were terribly weak. He heard very little after that.

He succeeded by sheer persistence in persuading the specialists to let her home. Nobody precisely said that these coming days were her last, but their acquiescence made it obvious. Cushing shook their hands and thanked them profusely. The Polish doctor long ago had said he feared there were no miracles, and this was clearly what he meant, he knew that now. And he knew his wife would need constant medical assistance for the short, precious time she had left.

He arranged day and night care, and rang his agent to cancel his role in the
Mummy
picture they’d started shooting. He was not irreplaceable. Other people in this life were.

Now he remembered the crew sending flowers to the funeral.

As families do, of course.

He remembered, too, sitting at her bedside, tears streaming down his face. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done things of which I have been entirely ashamed, foolish things… Yet through it all, you have been perfect. You forgave…”

“I told you so many times, my love,” Helen had said. “I never wanted you to feel I possessed you. That was our bargain, remember? What I know doesn’t hurt me, so why on earth should it hurt you? It’s unimportant. Those things simply didn’t happen. You hear?” She’d wiped his cheeks with a corner of the bed sheet. “Not a person in the world could have done for me what you have done… But I’m tired, my darling… I can’t talk now…”

In the bedroom now, all alone, he took the crucifix Helen wore from the jewellery box in front of the vanity mirror where she would put on her make-up every morning.

He placed it deep in the hip pocket of the Edwardian tweed suit made for him by Hatchard’s, the outfitter in the High Street. It was where he bought most of his traditional clothes: caps, cravats, gloves. They knew what he liked there and never let him down. People didn’t let him down, that was the remarkable thing in life. He remembered wearing this, his own suit, when filming
I, Monster
with Chris Lee. Now he faced another Jekyll and Hyde, another beast hiding under the mask of normality. A clash with evil in which he could only, as ever, feign expertise. Fake it. But at least with the right tools. And in a costume that felt proper for the fight.

Downstairs, the scripts and letters he had trodden over to get in still lay on the mat inside the front door. He picked them up. Clutched them to his chest. They felt full and heavy. Full of words and ideas and powerful emotions, and his chest empty.

“What if I fail?”

She was as clear in his ear as she’d ever been in life.

You shall not fail, my darling… With faith, you cannot fail…

“What faith?”

He faced the closed door to the living room.

Your faith that Goodness is stronger than Evil. It’s what you believe, isn’t it? You always have.

“I know. But is that enough?”

You know it will be. It must be.

He turned the handle and pushed the door ajar.

The room was in darkness as he walked through it. He placed the scripts and cards on the bureau, adding to the pile. He looked at one envelope and held it between his thumb and forefinger. He recognised the handwriting. It was a friend.

So many friends. And yet…

Darling, never fear… You are the one good thing in a dark world… and I am with you…

“Helen…”

How could he be downhearted when countless individuals led their entire lives without finding a love even a fraction as powerful as the one he had found?

He picked up her photograph and pressed it to his lips.

***

Square and temple-like, it had gone the way of all flesh. Now mostly a bingo hall, The Oxford in Oxford Street was a piece of faded gentrification, a mere memory of past glory, a vision of empire slowly turning to decay, a senile relative barely cared for and shamefully unloved. All those things. He remembered being told, at some official council function or other, that the original cinema opened in 1912, long before talkies, even before he was born. Rebuilt in 1936 in Art Deco style by a local architect, the regenerated Oxford’s first film show was Jack Hulbert in
Jack of All Trades
. Extraordinary to contemplate, looking at it now.

He trod out a cigarette on the pavement.

Behind glass, Ingrid Pitt’s fearsome, fanged countenance loomed over a tombstone.
Beautiful temptress or bloodthirsty monster? She’s the new horror from Hammer!
He noticed his own name amongst the other co-stars, George Cole and Kate O’Mara. Inevitably it brought back the letters of condolence he’d received from both of them. And the strangers who had done so, too. He thought it peculiar, yet immensely touching, that those who’d never even met his wife or himself personally would feel moved to make such a gesture. The foibles of the human heart were infinite, it seemed, at times. But that notion did more to give him a chill of apprehension than stiffen his nerves.

Inside, the carpet tiles were disastrously faded and the disinterested girl at the ticket booth barely old enough to be out of school. He did not need to say “upstairs” as he used to, because the seats in the stalls had been removed for bingo tables. Upstairs were the only seats left. With a clunk the ticket poked out and he took it.

“Excuse me for asking. Are you Peter Cushing’s father?”

“No, my dear. I’m his grandfather.”

In what used to be the circle the house lights were up and he had no difficulty finding his way to a middle seat, halfway back. As yet he was the only one there. He took off his scarf and whipped the dust off it before sitting. It was more threadbare than when he’d come last, but he couldn’t blame the owners. Trade was dwindling. The goggle box in the corner was sucking audiences away from cinemas: not that he should complain—there was a time, at the height of his success in that medium, when people joked that a television set was nothing so much as “Peter Cushing with knobs”. But now people were becoming inert and frighteningly passive, like the drones predicted in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, which so horrified when he starred as Winston Smith in the BBC production in the fifties that it caused a storm of outrage. Questions were raised in Parliament, no less: the remarkable power of drama to jolt and shock from complacency. Some outrage was necessary, he also considered, when picture palaces like this, almost jokily resplendent in Egyptian Dynastic glamour, were becoming as decrepit as castle ruins.

He thought again of Orwell’s masterpiece and wonderful Helen standing just off camera, her radiant smile giving him a boost of confidence to overcome his chronic nerves. What had been the play’s theme? Love. And what was the ghastly phrase of the dictatorship?
Love crime
. Two words that were anathema in juxtaposition. Except, perhaps, in a court of law. Indeed, he wondered if this was his own ‘Room 101’ in which he had to face the very thing he feared most: love, not as something sacred, but as something unspeakably profane.

His stomach curdled—as it often did of late—and he tried to shift his musings elsewhere. To Wally the projectionist, who once proudly showed him his domain, with its two 1930s projectors that used so much oil that, when it came out the other end, he’d use it in his car.