Whitstable (7 page)

This man who makes horrible, sadistic films about cruelty and sex and torture…

Someone who’s never had any children of his own, they tell me…
Someone who
adores
other peoples’ children…

This old man and this innocent little boy…

Liquid surging up his gullet, he gagged and stumbled from the room to the little lavatory under the stairs, pressing his handkerchief to his mouth, but gagging nonetheless.

***

After he had vomited on and off for half an hour he half-sat, half-lay in the dark, drained and pathetic, too weak to move. What was the point of moving? He was clean here. He was untouched, though his fingers tingled from the bleach he had thrown liberally down the pan and the acid of it almost made him retch all over again. At least here, huddled on the cold linoleum, he could imagine the Domestos coursing through his veins, ridding him of the foul accusation that had contaminated his home. Here he could bury himself away from vile possibilities, horrid dangers, unspeakable acts and, yes, responsibility to others. What did others
want
of him anyway? He despaired.

What did his
conscience
want of him? To go to the police—with what? The fantasy of a backward child? A child with a vivid imagination, or psychiatric problems, or both? And what would that do but cause trouble, of the most horrifying nature, not least for himself?
An old man talking to a young boy
, he’d been accused of being by the boyfriend. The insinuation turned his stomach anew. What was wrong with that? How dare people misinterpret—but misinterpret they would: they
wanted
to misinterpret, that was the vile thing. Then again, what if he
himself
was misinterpreting? He could see it now, in a flash-forward, a dissolve: “Famous actor unhinged by grief.” If he stepped forward and spoke up,
he’d
be just as likely the one arrested. Sent to prison. Shamed. His picture all over the newspapers. If he was pathetic now, how much
more
pathetic would he be behind bars, or even in the witness box? But what churned in his belly more than all of that was the terrible thought that his failure to act would suit the true offender down to the ground. The creature would be free to continue his cynical, sordid depredations to his heart’s content. And that poor boy…

God…

He shut his eyes. He felt like the terrified Fordyce, the bank manager he played in
Cash on Demand
. Mopping perspiration from his brow. Prissy, emasculated, threatened. Affronted by the taunts of his nemesis. Goaded. His psychological flaws exposed. But that didn’t help. What could he
do
? He wanted, wanted so desperately for someone to tell him. But who was there?

Aching and chilled, he clawed himself to his feet, clambered to the kitchen, poured himself lukewarm water from the tap, and drank. He needed Helen, his bedrock. Now more than ever.

He realised he felt so weak and ineffectual, not just now, but always. He remembered the spectacle of breaking down in tears in front of Laurence Olivier, thinking then, as he thought now: Am I strong enough? Am I strong enough for this?

Yes you are, Helen had reassured him
. If you want to be. You’re worth ten of them, Peter. You’re strong enough for anything…

Back then, she’d nursed him through a nervous breakdown that had lasted a good six months. Dear Heaven, is that something this odious man could use against him now? His doctor’s records of psychological unbalance? He felt the terrifying possibility like another blow to his physical being. The awful likelihood of the dim past regurgitated, raked over in mere spite and venom. It would bring with it dark clouds, as it had done then.

Six months of misery it had been, for him and for Helen too, without a doubt. God only knew how she’d endured it, but she had. And he had endured it too, thanks to her, and her alone. How could it be, he’d wondered, that he, the husband, was supposed to protect her, and there she was, sacrificing everything completely selflessly so that he, this worthless actor, of all things, could pull through?

Then he could hear her voice again, even clearer this time:

Peter, you are completely unaware of your own value. I expect that’s why I love you, and so do so many of your friends and colleagues. Can you not see? You must think more of yourself, darling, as we do. You do not need the backbiting and jealousy of the court of King Olivier. Your heart is not suited to it, and I know your enormous talent will out… You just need the right opportunity to come along, and it will… You must believe that too…

Once again he remembered her love and sweetness and once again he felt devastated. He teetered to the living room and collapsed in a chair.

Through the doorway to the hall he could see the pile of unread scripts and it reminded him of the single day of shooting at Elstree, just over a month earlier, on
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
, the eleventh of January, the day he’d had the phone call to tell him Helen had been rushed to Kent and Canterbury Hospital. His scenes had been hurriedly rescheduled but Helen had died of emphysema at home on the Thursday. There was no question of him returning to the production. The already-filmed scenes with Valerie Leon were scrapped and the role written for him, that of the Egyptologist Professor Fuchs, given to Andrew Keir. Quatermass replacing Van Helsing. The curse of an ancient civilisation: it seemed like ancient history now.

Yet clear as a bell was his memory of wandering out alone, all, all alone onto the deserted beach just after Helen had breathed her last from those accursed lungs of hers, the seagulls reeling and swooping and cackling, the gale force wind hard in his face, the waves that crashed on the shingle sounding to him like a ghastly knell, the thoughtless pulse of the planet. And he’d sung
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
. He thought he’d gone a little mad that night.

Up above the world so high

Like a diamond in the sky…

He’d then found himself, unaware of the passage of intervening time, back at 3 Seaway Cottages, running up and down the stairs repetitively, endlessly, far beyond the point of exhaustion. To an impartial observer this might have given the appearance of madness too, but was anything but. In those moments he’d known exactly what he was doing. He’d ran up, ran down, ran up again and so on in the vain hope of inducing a heart attack so that he might be reunited with her. He may have cursed God too, a little, that night under the stars. God didn’t approve of taking one’s own life, but damn God. He’d wanted to be with Helen and that was all he cared about. Then, racing up and down, up and down, he stopped dead as he realised the cruelty of it all. That, if he did commit suicide, he might find himself in purgatory, or in limbo, and separated from Helen forever. The crushing realisation had hit him that
that
Hell would be even more unbearable than this, and he crumbled finally, spent.

Helpless, he’d found himself sitting on the stairs gasping for air, wheezing as she had wheezed, his lungs filling like bellows as he wept.

When the blazing sun is gone,

When there’s nothing he shines upon,

Then you show your little light,

Twinkle, twinkle, through the night…

But God, as they say, moves in mysterious ways. And soon afterwards he had found the letter. Heard her voice as he’d read it:

“My Dear Beloved. My life has been the happiest one imaginable… Remember we will meet again when the time is right. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever. But promise me you will not pine… or, most of all, do not be hasty to leave this world…”

He had shivered then at the terrible thought that he might have, stupidly, done something so contrary to her wishes. Helen wanted him to go on, and he would go on. He would do what she wanted. He would do anything for her.

Do not be hasty to leave this world…

That’s what she’d said to him. But the truth is, he thought, I didn’t have the courage then, and I don’t have it now.

Dear Peter, of course you do. Dying isn’t hard. Living without the love of your life is hard. That’s the hardest thing of all.

But now I am feeling more lost than ever… the child, the boy…

You care. That is your greatest strength. People feel it. They see it on the screen.

But this isn’t the screen. This is life.

You will know what to do. You make the right choices, Peter. Just believe in yourself. As I do, my darling. Always…

He remembered, as if being in the audience watching a scene on stage in a drawing-room play, his father telling him, without any note of malice or cruelty, as if it were a statement of fact like the earth revolving round the sun, that he, Peter, was forty and a failure.

Even the memory of the hurt made him take a quick, sharp breath. But he remembered also the way Helen had stood up to the old man and given him a piece of her mind. His father had never been talked to like that, and certainly not by a woman. The fellow hardly knew what had hit him. And afterwards, when the two of them were alone, what had she said to him?

You have to believe in yourself, Peter… Believe in yourself and your abilities and not be brought down by those lesser mortals who for some reason of their own want you not to succeed. God gave you an amazing gift, darling, and God wants it to soar, and so do I. Have faith in your talent. That’s all you need, Peter… Faith, and love…

The stink of bleach burned in his nostrils. It clung to the air and he knew he would not be able to rid the house of it for days. Perversely, he inhaled it deeply, as an act of defiance, determined to breathe in his own house, undaunted.

Faith and love
were
all he needed. Faith in himself, and the love of Helen, which he knew was immortal. That would be enough to get him through. Even this turmoil. Even this pestilence. He suddenly knew it. He was not weak. He was not pathetic.

With her courage, he could soar.

***

The floor of the interview room was concrete under his feet, the walls whitewashed, the single window set with bars beyond the glass. An old window. A window with tales to tell.
If walls had ears
, the saying goes. Indeed so, he thought. He wondered if it had once been an actual cell and how often names, jibes, scrawls, remarks, obscenities had been eradicated with a new coat of paint. As possible lives had been eradicated, set on this path or that, turned, curtailed, saved, doomed, the guilty punished, the innocent punished come to that.

There was nothing on the table in front of him but his hands, so he stood and paced with them clasped behind his back. They were still dry and cold from the walk. The sea, so often heralded as life-giving, ossified them. Made them into a mummy’s hands. Leather-like.

Old man…

He closed his eyes. Inside his skull images of the scene from the night before ran though his brain. Multiplied. He saw them again and again. Take after take. Wait a minute, in that one he’s quite aggressive. That one, more sympathetic. The clapperboard snapped, making his eyes flicker. Close-up. Take eleven. Man steps from the shadows, his lips open in a horizontal grin… No, take twelve, smiling evilly, the hands rubbing together…

He always wondered how editors remembered every nuance, every glance or inflection: now, only twenty-four hours later, he had difficulty doing the same. Now he had trouble remembering if the man had said anything to incriminate himself—anything actual,
tangible
—or whether his threat and bluster was born out of sheer panic, a bombastic act of frightened self-defence. What did he know for certain? Just that Gledhill had verbally attacked only the person who’d verbally attacked
him
first, in his absence. Was that inhuman, the behaviour of a cornered animal? Or the all-too-human reaction of an innocent man?

You’re losing your
fucking
marbles, old man…

He flinched again at the obscenity scrawled on his memory like graffiti on the wall of a public lavatory. Then saw Gledhill’s face again, at the gap in the door.

An old man and a little boy…

The insidious words’ capacity to appal him was undiminished, sickening him to his core. He took a deep breath and dispelled any misgivings. The man was a liar, and had shown his cards. Hadn’t he?

Aware of a slump he normally only affected when ‘old man acting’ was required, he pushed his shoulders back, stretched his spine, scratched his chin, the bristles rasping there. While there was nothing on the walls to see himself in, in the mirror at home before setting out he’d seen a salt-and-pepper beard emerging, starting to give him a look like ‘Dr Terror’ from Milton’s portmanteau extravaganza, though he knew the particular nastiness in this tale he was living was nothing so comfortably
outré
as ancestral werewolf, voodoo jazz or malignant vine. He wished to goodness it was. He wished he could even be as pragmatic and unflappable as his Inspector Quennell in
The Blood Beast Terror
when luring a gigantic moth to its inevitable flame. But it was all too easy to face monsters with a screenplay in your hand. Even a bad one.

The previous night he had slept in erratic bursts, but not as sporadically as the night before, and did not dream as he had feared he might after his encounter. The framed photograph of Helen had rested on the pillow at his side and the influence of too many third-hand superstitions from bad scripts made him feel it had fended off evil. He’d allowed the thought to comfort him without analysing it too much. Still sorely sleep-deprived, he had awoken at dawn spiky and brittle but strangely purposeful, and had played Berlioz’s ‘Royal Hunt’ from
The Trojans
while he dressed, pausing only to turn it up louder. Twice.

The door opened, the turn of the handle surprisingly sibilant, and a thick-set man entered wearing a brown suit, beige shirt and mustard tie. The shirt had been acquired when he had less of a paunch, and consequently the buttons were under stress and had tugged the ends out above his belt. He ran his index fingers round the rim of his trousers to re-insert them before settling his rump in the chair at the table. His socks and some inches of bare, hairless leg were exposed above slip-ons.