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.
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.
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?