My stomach was really beginning to hurt now and Mrs P remained AWOL. This was ridiculous. I couldn’t be expected to hang about all night. There was a Gene Tierney double-bill on television later that I’d been looking forward to for ages. I decided I would teach Mrs P a lesson by cooking my own meal.
The larder presented some difficulties initially. The fish needed gutting, the meat cutting, the vegetables peeling, slicing, sautéing. But then I chanced on some beans in a jar, and thinking that one could not go wrong with beans, put them in a pot with a cupful of rice. I waited until some steam began to brew over the water, then drained it and put it on a plate and took my meal into the dining room. It was quite edible if you ate it quickly enough between swallows of wine, and I was rather proud of myself. I dined alone, watched over by the sombrely ticking clock and a moth that fluttered atmospherically against the shade of the lamp by the long mahogany table. Afterwards I made myself a gimlet and returned to the drawing room and the by-now-restored chaise longue.
The first half of the double-bill was the negligible Heaven Can Wait, in which Tierney has only a small part as Don Ameche’s saintly wife; but it was followed by Otto Preminger’s magnificent Whirlpool, in which her curious combination of magnetism and vacuity, so suited to Hollywood’s purposes that she might have been constructed in some Burbank lot, was exploited to its fullest: drawing in the viewer as at the same time she retreated from the plot, fading and fading until, Siren-like, she had pulled you right into the picture just at the moment that she disappeared from it; so you found yourself alone in the space where she should have been, in the shadows and spiderweb of Preminger’s cruel machine.
I watched a lot of old movies, and from the first time I saw her, Gene Tierney was my favourite star of that era of true stars. Although she’s largely forgotten now, in her time she was regarded as the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen. But her beauty took the form of a smouldering, purely feminine darkness, without the reassuring masculinity of a Bacall or the frivolity of a Hayworth, and it seemed to terrify the movie-makers; they would cast her resolutely against type, as a dullard housewife or a good-natured ninny or a cartoonish Arabian princess, roles devised to restrict and minimize the awesome power of her face, emphasizing instead her natural and deep-rooted uncertainty. Critics and industry, even as they fell in love with her, insisted unanimously that she couldn’t act. (Of Whirlpool, for instance, in which she plays a kleptomaniac taken advantage of by an unscrupulous psychoanalyst, one reviewer said: ‘it is sometimes difficult to tell from Miss Tierney’s playing whether she is or is not under hypnosis’.) Preminger was the only director who seemed to understand her and what she meant to those who saw her; in his and her best film, Laura, she spends most of her time dead, appearing on screen in the form of a painting and in the flashback testimony of the suspects for her murder.
I’d seen both films before, though, and drained by the exertion of making dinner I dozed off. As I did so I experienced the curious sensation, not for the first time in recent months, that in some inexplicable way the film was watching me; I slept tormented by bad dreams, in which vampiric images of women enticed me, withholding focus and changing at the last minute into hideous monsters that grinned toothlessly and made meaningful gestures at a vast chimney lined with empty bottles. I woke to the sound of voices at the door and a new, more crippling pain in my stomach. The voices belonged to my sister and the Thing and had distinctly romantic undertones, but I found myself unable to get up and intervene. ‘Cease,’ I cried weakly, but my voice cracked and my head swam and I lay there powerless in a pool of sweat. In the corner the muted television showed pictures of people in some kind of makeshift campsite — thousands and thousands of people, weeping and lamenting. Then, in one of those moments of extreme clarity that nausea brings, I perceived that my cocktail glass had been removed from the table. Mrs P was back! With the last of my strength, I pulled on the bell-rope and its clang echoed distantly around me as I passed out of consciousness.
When I came to again — parched, pain rampaging through my intestines — I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs P’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was effectively through her negligence that I had been forced to poison myself), and one gormless and oblivious, face, which belonged to Frank. Biting her lip and putting a hand on my shoulder, Bel asked if I were all right.
‘Beans!’ I gasped.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I think he has eaten many kidney beans,’ Mrs P shuddered. ‘Many kidney beans not cooked.’
‘Beans!’ I cried again deliriously.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ Bel said. ‘Charles, listen carefully, did you soak the beans before you cooked them?’
‘Of course I didn’t soak them,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘What do you think?’ Bel said to Mrs P. Mrs P threw her hands in the air and turned away, speaking agitatedly in Bosnian, or whatever it was.
‘They did seem rather crunchy,’ I recalled.
Frank gave me a wink. ‘On the batter, eh? Hair of the dog’s what you want.’
‘What?’ I said, then ‘Oh,’ as he produced a hip flask. The thought of putting my lips where his had been repulsed me but I would have done anything to rid myself of this mortal agony, so I steeled myself and swallowed a mouthful of very cheap whiskey — and it worked, in that soon I was copiously throwing up into a silver champagne bucket. After that I felt a little better, better enough to request a moment in private with Bel.
‘Charles,’ she said, sitting beside me and stroking my brow, ‘when are you going to learn to stop being such an idiot?’
‘Never mind that for the moment,’ I snapped. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on.’
‘Well, we came home and found you rolling around the floor, so we —’
‘Not that, damn it, Bel — that Frank, what is he doing back here?’
Bel drew back. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘I mean, I’ve never laid eyes on him before today, and already he’s spending the night? Just because Mother isn’t here doesn’t mean the house can be turned into a, a bordello, you know.’
She flushed a deep scarlet. ‘How dare you,’ she said coldly.
‘I’m only thinking of you,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to stop you doing something you might regret. One of us has to keep a level head, after all.’
‘My head is perfectly level, I assure you.’
‘Well, is it, though,’ I said.
Bel stood up. ‘What do you mean, “is it, though?”’
‘I mean, you’re not in good form. You said it yourself, Bel. You’re feeling bereaved. You’re ticked off because you’re not with your pals in college any more. You’ve been like this all summer. It’s perfectly understandable. But there comes a point where someone has to step in and take charge. Because the fact is that bereaved or extremely sad people often reach out for support to the wrong places. Their heads are clouded, you see, so they make these ferociously bad decisions —’
Bel’s teeth ground audibly. ‘Charles, how dare you say what you just said and then presume to think you know how I feel. God, if anything’s pushing me to make bad decisions and do something I’ll regret, it’s —’
‘I’m simply thinking of your welfare. Can’t you just sit down and listen for a moment?’ I winced and pressed my hand to my side as a flame of pain shot up from my gut. ‘I mean, who is this Frank? That’s what we have to ask ourselves. What does he want with us?’