All I know is that Sarah has lain in her husband’s family vault since February 1967.
For some reason I still cannot explain, I have never been to Argentina.
My memory leaves me with an impression. An outline without detail, a fragment without form. The image fades leaving a reminiscence of absence. A disturbing sense of being out of time. It’s just an impression, but the impression remains.
Tell me, Charlotte, what have we been doing in this book all these years?
Until my twenties I used to be called Charley. By my parents, my friends, my sister. I was Charley.
Sometimes, you just have to reach out your hand: mine rests on a nineteen-year old girl’s. Bent over her desk, Charley is sticking articles and photographs into a scrapbook, conscientiously captioning them.
There I am, in a tweed dress, below-the-knee or very short. There I am, lying on the boot of a car, or hidden by flowers, or standing next to my father in a double-breasted suit, or with a group of actors. I’m laughing, humming a tune. A man is stroking my hair or putting his arm around my waist.
There’s Sarah too, in a ‘New Look’ dress and silk gloves, looking hesitant at an award ceremony.
Sarah and her photographer friend, Roland. Sarah, so happy.
I close the photo album. I’ll leave you now, Charley, it seems as if my name left with Sarah.
And I can never again hold a young girl in my arms lost in the wilds of Argentina.
What is our book? A search for the right form. A few words, a few images. And one or two secrets.
The secret of the piece of paper the colonel holds in his right hand as he kneels on the grass, his left hand clutching his face.
The secret of Sarah’s death.
The secret of who knows. It’s a bit like a Persian tale: it takes a lifetime to write and a hundred to read. And only one to forget. But no, it takes two lives to write. And if we lack innocence, let me write these pages that a child can read.
One night I woke up screaming. I saw Sarah’s death in a dream. And my scream became lost in time, until today, until these words which I never wanted.
Sarah and I had developed a taste for a certain type of freedom. We liked being outsiders.
After Fontainebleau, we returned to Stanmore and our house: Westwood. The garden gave onto the ‘green belt’. The thatched roof gave it an old-fashioned feel. Westwood had a fairytale charm and a soul.
Sarah started at the French Lycée. She would disappear every morning into the London Underground on her way to South Kensington. On a secret adventure.
Sarah stayed with the French, while I went back to uniform and discipline. It was painful, this return to barracks.
Mathematics resisted my every attempt to grasp them. I discovered that numbers literally stopped me in my tracks. I had terrible turns at school, like fainting fits. I’d fall over. Was it because I didn’t understand? Was it some logical terror?
The school and my father were consulted. I was dispensed from maths lessons. And that is how a part of the world remains a mystery to me ever since, paralysing and fascinating me in equal measure.
Stop the world. I want to get off. Everyone can keep going but I have to stop.
What do you think if I stay where I am for hours and days and weeks on end. The outside world barred. All dialogue shot. Your words are snares, you know that very well… Nausea without definition. All illusions gone.
We create our universe in the attic. Our own world: a big sitting-room, two bedrooms. Sarah and I bring up armchairs and books. This is our poetic horizon.
On Sunday afternoons we invite people over. My mother, who has always loved balls, parties, dressing up, enthusiastically encourages us. ‘Charlotte and Sarah’s parties’ become a thing locally.
Our friends sit quietly on chairs, on the floor: we drink orange juice, listen to records, sing and dance, rock’n’roll and slows.
Listening and singing. The 45s fall on the spindle of the record-player.
Sarah and I often speak French, our secret language. Everything seems innocent. It is an open-ended, happy time. Our golden age.
The music fills us, lulls us into a gentle reverie, and in a sense, speaks for us as well.
The atmosphere in Stanmore’s parish hall at the start of that summer was hard to believe. The room was packed. I remember the sound of rustling, of laughter.
Sarah and I were in raincoats and fishnets. We wore berets. We sang Luis Mariano, our versions. It was so French…
Afterwards people came up to me. They seemed surprised: ‘Charlotte, we didn’t know you had it in you!’
I started to see. To understand a certain way of looking at people that wins them over. Holds them, challenges them. The look that disappears when you leave the stage.
I was fourteen and I’ve never forgotten that unsettling, thrilling feeling.
And then you felt people were staring at your face, your grey eyes, heavy-lidded and distant, your body, your smile, your grace.
Years later, when my father and I started talking, he said in all earnestness, ‘If I had to start over, I’d be an actor.’
In Stanmore, he played the lead in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Deep Blue Sea. Liberated from the army, from its uniforms and traditions, he metamorphosed into a clumsy, eccentric leading man. I was amazed to see him walk out on stage, suddenly so free. This is the English spirit: they admire eccentricity. The joy has got to express itself somehow.
I saw my mother dancing in fishnet stockings in front of the whole town, including her daughters and her husband, and she was happy.
After a concert in Stanmore, an agent sought out Sarah and me and offered us an audition at a club in Piccadilly.
We made plans for this expedition, which had to be kept secret. What would our parents think of us sneaking up to London like that?
We hid our berets and raincoats in our satchels. Then one afternoon we rushed off after school. A mad scramble on the Underground, then through the streets of Piccadilly… I can still feel our feverish elation.
We sang in front of three gloomy men who didn’t say a thing. Melancholy hung in the air. I can still see the look in their eyes as they watched us across the empty tables.
Then the Underground swallowed us up again: we didn’t say a word until we got home. The colonel was waiting for us on the steps. He stared at Sarah and me in silence, as if he knew. And that was the end of my career as a cabaret singer.
Even childhood with its vague and happy memories, the songs, the beaches, the waiting; neatly folded hands; laughter; lost images; the going away and coming back – all this can make a book too.
Aren’t you writing any more?