John’s old red wooden fire-engine stood on top of one of the cupboards. The dolls’ house stood on the table by the window, where he and Adrian had played for long hours with their Meccano.
He gazed blankly out of the window. A rabbit had joined the starlings on the lawn. What would become of the old place if he gave up? Fall into ruin? Wrenched from its purposes and turned into an institution?
Laura had visited Pippet Hall only twice. Once with the film team, before there was anything between them, to play the Sex Symbol in the Georgian House episode. Once last autumn for a weekend, just before they separated for good, following the party at Claridge’s.
As Teresa complained, he had managed to defer that inevitable parting for a month or two, but only because work on ‘Frankenstein’ had continued for longer than anticipated. The break had been final. He could not bear to see her again, to speak impersonally to her. He had dived back to work, she had gone on to play a more interesting role; he had watched her on television recently, as an injured wife in a Play of the Week. Damned good she was.
And when they had parted, nine months ago, she’d been damned good then. Nothing to complain about.
Delays and hesitations inseparable from creativity occurred. Some incidents had to be re-shot. Some of the scenes involving the CSO process had not worked as well as expected. A model had to be re-made. ‘World Dream Design Centre’, the episode they filmed in Hollywood and Los Angeles, had its troubles. Ash fell ill. August turned into September. Definite boundaries became blurred. An electricians’ strike further delayed progress.
But by the first week of October, all thirteen episodes of ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’ were completed to the satisfaction not only of the British but of the German, American, and Australian interests involved in the production. Everywhere, quiet and sometimes noisy confidence grew that something special had been created.
After a grand farewell party at Claridge’s, attended by all the crowned heads of television, and some from the arts world, Squire drove with Laura in her car, back to her flat.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I realize for the first time that we’re all a stunning success.’
‘Wait till you read the reviews…’
The flat was tiny without being cosy. It occupied part of a house on the run-down fringes of Canonbury. Laura’s husband, Peter, was away on a photographic assignment, she knew not where. He had left a scrawled note without saying.
They bought pitas on the way to the flat, stopping at a kebab house in Essex Road. They ate standing in her narrow kitchen as they said good-bye.
Both of them trembled. Laura leaned against the breakfast bar, unable to touch him. Both of them dropped pieces of lettuce, tomato, and meat, in their anguish at facing this final moment.
The mansion, once moderately grand, designed for a prosperous middle class with servants, had been divided into several flats. It was always full of mysterious young people, designated of course as ‘students’, whenever Squire was there. Bicycles blocked the hall passage. Laura’s flat was decorated with her husband’s photographs, framed in metal. Generally shots of streets, taken from ingenious angles no one else would have thought of. Never a shot of Laura in the nude, or even dressed. Silly bugger.
The furniture looked cheap but was expensive, Laura said; it was too low to get out of easily. Laura and Peter quarrelled all the while, she said, excusing a general neglect.
When he went to pee in the toilet, his eyes came level with a packet of sanitary towels lying on the window sill. The sight of them moved and obscurely hurt him: though on this evening of parting everything brought him close to tears. He thought of her vulnerability. Didn’t vulnerable and vulva derive from the same Latin root? She would have taken care to keep her Tampax out of sight a few months earlier. They were both of them going down the drain — like the Tampaxes, eventually — and he had to remember that she, at twenty-six, felt acutely that youth was passing.
He returned to the kitchen and his half-eaten pita.
‘I’ve really fucked things up for you, my love. It’s as well I’m disappearing at last.’
‘You haven’t fucked anything up. I was just a mess till you came along. Your dear steadiness — you have been that way all your life, I can tell. I didn’t need an older man, I needed you.’
‘It goes too deep for me to say. I was muffled for so long. With you — no guard possible, no guard needed…’
‘We’ve had something so worthwhile together. In that sense, I don’t mind parting, though I’ll hate myself for saying it when you’ve gone…I’ll never forget you, Tom. You’ve changed me, given me so much, so many things…’
‘Nothing — nothing compared with what you’ve given me. With you I’ve been aware of the whole world again. You’ve made me whole again…’ A piece of mutton fell to the floor. He kicked it in the direction of the sink.
‘You’re such a dear, dear person.’ She reached out and touched his neck. He clutched her wrist, still brown from the summer they had had.
‘Don’t be hurt. Grow. Continue. My love and gratitude will always be with you, for whatever that’s worth. Laura, dear Laura…’ He spoke indistinctly, munching the bread.
‘We’ve had such travels together, gone so far.’
‘I’ll never forget what a weight you were when you fell asleep on me on the plane back from LA.’
‘And try not to forget how many miles it is to the River Bug.’ Her lip trembled as she said it.
‘Perhaps one day we’ll meet in that little romantic Polish village whose name we remember so well.’
‘You mean Molly Naggy?’
‘I think it was Lolowsky Molehold.’
‘Anyhow, we’ll recognize it by all the dead horses.’ She started to laugh and cry a little.
He put an arm round her waist. ‘You’re rotten at geography, incredible at everything else.’
‘You’ll always be my lovely man.’ She rubbed her face against his jacket. ‘My standard. Let me give you a last cup of coffee. Instant. And there will always be “Frankenstein”… Something worthwhile we did together.’
‘And your lovely photograph in the book. I’ll send you a copy before it’s published. Lasciviously inscribed.’
‘To hell with Peter. Bring it round in person.
‘I’ll see about that. No, no coffee — I’d better go, my love.’
‘My love.’ Her beautiful gaze engaging his.
‘Oh, dearest Laura…’ They clung tightly to each other for the last time.
It was autumn. He felt the chill as he blundered down the garden path, the chill a younger man would not have noticed. He thought, as he went blindly into the street, ‘From now on, there’s only autumn. Then winter. Fifty next birthday. Old age. I was lucky to have a Laura in my life, bloody lucky. Just that short while — not so short, either…
‘Well, somehow I’ve done what I said I would, at last. Now I must go back and make amends. The great renunciation…I hope it counts for something…
‘Oh, Laura…’
He unlocked the secret compartment in the nursery cupboard. Only a few treasures there these days. A little framed pencil sketch his father had made of him when he was a child of four, just after Adrian was born. Not very good, when considered dispassionately. A school magazine dating from only a few years back, in which was his son John’s article, then considered both daring and amusing, on why the monarchy should be abolished. A couple of letters from Laura — notes, really. He smelt the envelopes, but enclosure in the cupboard had made them fusty. Two letters dating from last winter from Tess, and a rough copy of his response.