‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Did you appear mostly in French magazines?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid I have no portfolio to show you.’
‘What was your modelling name?’
‘Celia McFadden.’
‘McFadden?’ I said, laughing. ‘What possessed you to take a Scottish name?’
‘It was my maiden name,’ she said, sounding surprised.
‘You’re a McFadden, from Martinique?’
‘My great-great-grandfather was a slave on Barbados. He was given the name of his slave master, who may have been his biological father. He escaped, and ended up in Martinique.’
‘Woh. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ Celia said, shrugging. ‘You changed your name, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah. Not officially, just for the radio. It still says McNutt on my passport.’
‘McNutt?’ She smiled.
‘Yes, with two “t”s. So, this,’ I said, changing the subject and stroking the lightning scar, ‘has appeared in public, has it? It wasn’t a problem?’
‘Perhaps it was a small problem. I always had enough work but I’m sure I lost some jobs because of it. But no, I don’t think it ever appeared.’
‘What did they do, cover it with make-up?’
‘No. They shot from the other side.’
‘So all your model shots are from the right?’
‘Mostly. Though they don’t all appear so once they’re printed. You just reverse the neg.’
‘Oh, right. Of course.’
‘Sometimes, when the light or the background meant we had to, they would shoot from my left side and I would hold my arm in a certain way and if there was anything of the scar visible it would be air-brushed out later. It is not a problem.’ She shrugged. ‘Covering things up is easy.’
The latest she ever stayed was ten p.m. I was welcome to stay longer if I wanted, but I never did, and I knew she preferred me to leave first. She would arrive and depart with her hair tightly compressed under a wig – usually blond – and wore large dark glasses and baggy, undistinguished clothes.
In Claridge’s, she’d stripped the bed to its bottom sheet and covered the surface and a dozen extra pillows in red rose petals. The lights mostly stayed on for that one. This was where she finally explained her insane theory about having half died when the lightning struck her.
‘What?’
‘There are two mes. Two of me. In different, parallel worlds.’
‘Hold on. I think I know this theory. Simple idea but the complexities are hideous.’
‘Mine is quite simple.’
‘Yeah, but the real one is confusing to a bonkers degree; according to it there are an infinity of yous. A pleasing prospect, I might add, except there is also, are also… anyway, an infinity of mes, too, and your husband. Husbands. Whatever. See how confusing it is?’
‘Yes, well,’ she said, waving one dismissive hand. ‘But for me it is very simple. I half died then, when the lightning struck me. In that other world I am half dead, too.’
‘But also half alive.’
‘Just as in this one.’
‘So did you fall off this cliff in the other world, or not?’ I asked, deciding to humour this matter-of-fact madness of hers.
‘Yes and no. I did, but I also fell back onto the grass, just as I did here.’
‘So in this world, here, you fell off the cliff too?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet you woke up on the grass.’
‘That part of me did. This part of me did.’
‘So in the other world? What? If you woke up on the grass in this one, she must have not woken up, because she was lying dead at the bottom of the cliff.’
‘No, she woke up too, on the grass.’
‘So who the hell fell off the bleedin cliff?’
‘I did.’
‘You did? But-’
‘Both of I.’
‘I and I? What, now you’re a Rastafarian?’
She laughed. ‘We both fell off the cliff. I remember it happening. I remember seeing myself fall, and the noise the air made, and how my legs made a useless running motion and how I could not scream because the air had been knocked out of my lungs and how the rocks looked as I fell towards them.’
‘So did the lightning kill… half kill you, or was it the fall?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I don’t know. Does it?’
‘Perhaps both did. Or half did.’
‘I think we’ve gone on to quarters by this stage.’
‘Perhaps either would have been enough. All that matters is that it happened.’
‘It would be useless to suggest, I suppose, that this might all really only have happened in your head, the result of having ninety thousand volts zapped through your brain pan and down your body?’
‘But of course it is not useless to suggest it! If that is what you need to believe to make sense of what happened to me by your way of thinking, then of course that is what you must believe.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant.’
‘Yes, I know. But, you see, when it happened, I was there, and you, my dear, were not.’
I let out a long breath. ‘Right. So… so what are the symptoms of you being only half alive in this world… and the other one? You do seem wholly and, I would risk saying, even vibrantly alive in this world, to me. Especially about ten minutes ago. Oh, though there is that thing about the French calling it the little death, of course. Though that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? But back to the symptoms. What makes you feel this?’
‘That I feel it.’
‘Right. No, no, not right. I’m not getting it.’
‘It feels obvious to me. In a way I always knew it. Reading about parallel universes simply made sense of that feeling. I didn’t feel any more certain of what I felt, and it did not really alter what I felt, or what I believed, but it made it more possible for me to explain it to others.’
I laughed. ‘So all we’ve been talking about in the last five minutes is after it became easier to explain?’
‘Yes. Easier. Not easy. Perhaps “less difficult” would be a better formulation.’
‘Right.’
‘I think it might all change on my next birthday,’ she said, nodding seriously.
‘Why?’
‘Because the lightning hit me on the day of my fourteenth birthday, and on my next birthday I will be twenty-eight. You see?’
‘Yes, I do. My God, your aberrant personal belief system is actually contagious. I suppose they all are.’ I sat up in the bed. ‘You mean that on the day of your twenty-eighth birthday, in April next year…’
‘The fifth.’
‘… What?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I die. Perhaps the other one of me dies.’
‘And if the other one dies?’
‘I will become fully alive.’
‘Which will manifest itself…?’
She smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I will decide that I love you.’
I stared into those amber eyes. It seemed to me then that she had the most direct, clearly honest gaze of anybody I had ever met. No humour there just now, no irony. Not even doubt. Puzzlement, perhaps, but no doubt. She really believed all this.
‘There,’ I said, ‘is that big little word that neither of us have spoken until now.’
‘Why should we speak it?’
I wondered what that meant. I might have pursued the matter, but then she shrugged again, and her immaculate breasts moved in just such a way that in this world and surely any other all I could say was, ‘Oh, come here.’
In the Meridien Piccadilly, finding she had a suite with a kitchen attached, she had already been across to Fortnum and Mason and bought the ingredients to make an omelette, flavoured with saffron. She was trying out different types of underwear on that occasion, so that I came, bizarrely, to associate the smell of eggs cooking in olive oil with a basque and stockings.
I laughed as she presented the tray to me in bed.