The Grass Memorial Read online

  In those days she’d quite simply been the band – its instigator and inspiration, its star, its manager, its roadie and its self-belief On one occasion when their spirits and finances were at an all-time low she’d walked into a supermarket and emerged with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a sack of corn chips. Sitting in a layby off the A1 half an hour later the others reacted with horrified admiration to the revelation that the goods were stolen.

  ‘What if they catch you?’ asked Mimi.

  ‘If they catch me,’ said Stella, ‘I’m buggered.’

  ‘And so will the rest of us be.’

  Stella cast her a sidelong, red-eyed look. ‘Better hope I’m not caught then, eh?’

  You could never get Stella to apologise for anything. If it was the eating of humble pie, crow or just plain shit you were after, you were dealing with the wrong woman. It was Mimi who had the greatest difficulty with this. She was the oldest member of the band by ten years, a curvy crooner who had hovered in the ranks of the almost-theres for just too long and had opportunistically – somewhat desperately – hitched her waggon to Sorority’s uncertain star. While only admitting to forty, Mimi was an old-style trouper, heart of gold and copper-bottomed tonsils, hardworking and philosophical. To her, Sorority represented not so much a new and exciting concept as her best shot at a meal ticket in the shark-infested waters of what she referred to, without irony, as showbiz. She admired Stella’s chutzpah and energy, but was profoundly wary of her excesses. Mimi had learned singing from her mother and professionalism from her father, a saxophonist with a dance band: in her book you turned up, looked good, went through the dots, did your set and cleared off. No temperament, tears or tantrums and certainly no ego. Talent would out, that was what you believed – what you had to believe. When this hadn’t proved to be the case she’d been prepared to throw in her lot with Sorority, but she couldn’t quite come to terms with their leaderene’s modus operandi.

  Faith, on the other hand, lived up to her name. This was due partly to age, partly to temperament. She was in her mid-twenties, not so very much older than the oldest children of Sorority’s audience, a product of public school and Cambridge, tall and patrician with a voice like a tenor sax and the confidence to match. After the departure of one of the founder-members to the cast of a long-running musical, Stella had picked Faith up at a post-production party, vamping it up to ‘Ain’t Misbehavin” round the piano. It was the sort of apparently flighty but actually calculated gesture at which Stella excelled, guaranteed to make a couple of paragraphs in the diary columns because of Faith’s beauty and socio-economic status, and to pull in a fresh audience for the band. Only once did Faith make the mistake of flaunting that status by suggesting that her father, an entrepreneurial baronet, might be persuaded to invest in the band, and had been almost wiped out in the thermo-nuclear blast of Stella’s contempt.

  ‘Don’t go waggling your silver spoon at me, sweetheart. We’ll do this on merit or not at all, okay?’

  ‘Of course, I wasn’t implying—’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  From that moment Faith was ensnared. She adored Stella with a passion that was too hot not to cool down. In her she saw the sine qua non of credibility, a person smart, abrasive, principled and altogether wicked.

  Helen, the fourth member, kept her own counsel, as well she might. Along with a head for figures and a vicarage near Cheltenham she had a perfectly nice husband who occasionally helped out on the technical side. She was a gifted amateur singer who’d obtained an Equity card by sheer hard graft and was not about to rock the boat with open disagreement. It followed as the night the day that Stella did not trust her an inch.

  By the time of the ill-fated performance at the Curfew Sorority also had a manager, Teresa, who had realised a little late in the day that her job was something of a poisoned chalice. She didn’t so much manage as mediate – between Stella and other managements, between Stella and the agency, between Stella and her co-performers. She was sensible enough to know that this mediation was a necessary part of the job, but sufficiently experienced to realise that it should not have been the whole of it. A worm of professional discontent was beginning to uncurl in Teresa’s bosom and was long overdue to turn.

  Stella herself looked on the Curfew performances as a necessary evil. She disliked the slightly smug air of patronage exuded by the audience, the idea that she in some strange way owed them something – when frankly she owed them shit. These smiling punters were just fortunate to have been in the house when Sorority had hit their stride. She’d never pandered to them then and was even less inclined to do so now when the band was an established force on the circuit.

  Unfortunately this was the moment that Teresa decided that some concessions were not only desirable but commercially advisable. Over drinks in the Curfew’s unlovely local she posited this idea.

  ‘I think we should give them a little more of what they want.’

  ‘They want what we’re good at,’ Stella replied, ominously reasonable, not meeting her eye.

  ‘Of course, but they’d like to hear some of their favourites.’

  ‘Stuff that, I’m not Max Bygraves.’

  ‘And thank God for it, but you have written songs which have won a place in the public’s consciousness, in your public’s consciousness—’

  ‘Teresa. Gimme a break.’

  ‘No, I mean it. There are a few numbers which people relate to in a big way—’

  ‘Only a few?’

  Teresa took a deep breath.‘Many, but a few which they remember and which it flatters them to hear.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should be interested in flattering them.’

  ‘Let me put it another—’

  ‘Surely the most flattering thing I can do is to treat them like discriminating adults.’

  ‘And you do,’ persisted Teresa, ‘you do that. All the time. But let me put it another way—’

  ‘Must you?’

  Teresa closed her eyes briefly. ‘To reprise a few hugely successful songs is to acknowledge that you’re famous, right? It’s like you and they have shared memories. It doesn’t detract from the new material, it enhances it.’

  Stella stirred the ice in her glass with her forefinger. ‘Crap. Sorry but it’s unmitigated crap.’

  This juncture, with the exchange at its most sensitive and potentially explosive, was when Teresa, stung, chose to make her crucial mistake.

  ‘I think you’ll find a couple of the others agree with me.’

  ‘Do they really?’

  Slowly, almost dreamily, Stella placed the back of her hand against her glass and swept it over the edge of the table. It didn’t even break on the carpeted floor but lay in its small puddle of ice and liquor, an empty gesture in every sense, but no less shocking for that.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Teresa reflexively, as though she had done it.

  ‘Think nothing of it.’

  ‘I just believe it’s something we should consider, that’s all.’

  ‘And you’ve already been considering it with the others.’

  ‘Only in the most general way.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Teresa stooped to pick up the glass, shovelling ice cubes with her other hand. ‘There’s no plot or anything.’

  ‘You’re telling me. You’ve lost it.’

  Teresa, again ill-advisedly, treated this as a joke. ‘You may be right! Let me get you another?’ Stella shrugged and Teresa took this as an acceptance and went to the bar. When she returned, Stella had left.

  * * * * *

  Stella walked back to her flat, three miles through the London streets, crossing roads without looking, impervious to blaring horns, shrieking brakes and the imprecations of outraged drivers. It was late November, wet and raw, and she had the wrong shoes on for this sort of undertaking but there was no way she was going to hail a taxi. This was what she’d always told herself would be likely to happen, but now that it was happening her sense of outrage surprised and ov
erwhelmed her.

  At home she stepped out of her pathetic sodden pumps, yanked off her clothes, taking a delight in the snap of fastenings and crack of tearing seams, and got under a shower. She didn’t wash but stood there with the hot water hammering down on her head. When she stepped out and caught sight of herself in the mirror there was something satisfying about her ugliness: the wet ratstails of thin hair, the exaggerated eye make-up snailing down her cheeks, the skeletal jut of her collarbones. Serves you right, you scrawny witch, she thought, you had it coming.

  She’d always known this was the only possible outcome. No one could mind so much, carry so much, make so much of an investment, without eventually being resented. It went with the territory. There had been treachery in the air since the beginning of this tour, but what got to her – what made her blood boil and her spirit writhe – was the mealy-mouthed way in which it had manifested herself. That they should have agreed with Teresa behind her back . . . and what was Teresa doing raising it with them anyway? Sorority was the closest Stella was ever likely to come to having children and now she felt just how much sharper than a serpent’s tooth was a child’s ingratitude. Had Faith, she wondered, gone over to the other side as well? Of course she had. Turn all that bright hero-worship inside out and you found jealousy, soft and rotten . . .

  She scrubbed at her face with a tissue, and applied a towel with the same vigour to her hair. Then she put on her plaid dressing gown and whiskery walking socks, poured herself a glass of bourbon and lay down on her bed to watch the dark descend.

  * * * * *

  All sweet reason, she asked them which numbers they thought would be appropriate. Startled and cautious, they made their suggestions. She slotted them in through the last days’ rehearsals; they watched her warily. She didn’t put a foot wrong. Teresa stayed out of the way.

  The audience reaction at the first performance was ecstatic – warm, wild, adoring. She could see how mutually gratifying the whole thing was. The others said nothing, but they didn’t have to. They thought they’d been proved right, whereas Stella knew she had been.

  Right on cue, Gordon was there at the end of the show. She invited him into the cramped green room with the other guests: Helen’s husband, Faith’s chinless cousin and his fiancée, some gamey old girlfriends of Mimi’s, Teresa, the black-t-shirted stagehands, the obligatory group of gay women.

  Gordon wore a three-piece suit and a striped shirt. He parted his hair a touch too low so that the long side tended to flop – a characteristic, Stella thought, of upper-middle-class men of his generation.

  ‘Absolutely brilliant,’ he said, kissing her on either cheek and pressing freesias into her hand. Their stalks felt thin and stiff like plastic wires. Once, ages ago, she’d said she liked freesias, so that’s what he always got her. She wondered if she now said she was mad about Christmas-flowering cactus whether he’d start bringing her those.

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave them a peremptory sniff before Teresa took them off her to stick in one of the Curfew’s lager glasses.

  ‘You were different tonight,’ declared Gordon, colouring up in a way which she had once thought quite sweet, but more frequently these days found irritating.

  ‘Oh? In what way.’

  ‘A little – softer. Bit less combative. You did one or two of the old songs. When I saw you in Watford you didn’t do that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was that – some sort of policy decision?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Stella felt Mimi arrive, beaming and glowing at her elbow. ‘Gordon, would you like to go?’

  ‘Of course!’ He was flustered, mortified, all consternation, painful to behold. ‘At once, I do apologise, I thought—’

  ‘No, Gordon.’ She laid her hand on his shoulder. ‘I mean, shall we go? Us, together.’

  ‘Oh!’ So bouleversé was he by this suggestion that he went even redder. ‘Where would you like to – what would you like to do?’

  ‘We’re all going to the Sixth Happiness,’ said Faith, sparkling and eager – disgustingly relieved.

  Gordon gazed wildly at Stella, no longer able to second-guess her. She looked at no one as she picked up her dilapidated leather coat and headed for the door.

  ‘So we won’t be,’ she said.

  She took Gordon to the smarter of the two French café-bars near her flat. He had his car, but they went by cab: she was in charge.

  Over dinner he recovered. He was always better on his own with her. Apparently oblivious now to her uncertain mood he rattled on, accepted her invitation to choose the wine and make suggestions about the menu. Because Stella was a feather in the restaurant’s cap Gordon benefited by association. She drank and smoked steadily, watching him, letting him get on with it. Using him.

  ‘I particularly like that “Return to the Front” one,’ he said enthusiastically, as he tucked into onion soup. ‘I play that in the car all the time.’

  Stella, who had no starter, sat with her elbows on the table, her glass resting against her upper lip. It was odd, even after their long, interrupted association, to think of having such an intimate place in this man’s life – to think of her voice accompanying him as he went to work, to the dentist, home at the end of the day.

  ‘. . . although of course when you did it tonight there were certain key differences. It was interesting to hear how you varied it in a live performance.’

  She made some non-committal sound, agreement, a comment on his perceptiveness, something to keep him going. The wine was slipping easefully through her veins, warming her, getting her head straight.

  Gordon finished his soup, dabbed fussily at his mouth. ‘So how do you feel the tour’s going?’

  ‘Pretty good.’

  ‘I was at Watford and Guildford, as you know. Couldn’t make Brighton, which I regretted.’

  ‘Brighton’s always fun.’

  ‘All those gay men?’ he suggested.

  Sometimes Stella took exception to an implied gay-icon status, sometimes not. Tonight she couldn’t be bothered. She blew smoke over her shoulder.

  ‘Possibly.’

  Gordon leaned forward and chinked his glass against hers. ‘You were especially wonderful this evening though.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  His brow furrowed. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Only you’re usually so fizzy after the performance. You seem . . . a bit flat.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said drily, ‘I’m fizzing away inside.’

  ‘Good!’ He seemed perfectly satisfied with this.‘As long as you’re okay. It’s easy for a mere paying customer like myself to forget how exhausting a tour must be. What have you still got left?’

  ‘Umm . . .’ She paused, stubbing out her cigarette as their foie de veau arrived.‘Glasgow,Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Belfast – about another half a dozen.’

  ‘And then what? A well-deserved rest? A holiday?’

  ‘I haven’t arranged anything.’

  His hands hovered over his knife and fork like those of a conductor readying an orchestra. Stella saw with dismay that his colour had deepened again.

  ‘I wonder if I—’ he began. She shook her head at him. ‘If I – sorry?’

  ‘No, Gordon.’

  ‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’

  ‘I’ve a fair idea of the ballpark.’

  He’d started, so he was going to finish. ‘I was about to ask if you’d allow me to take you away for a relaxing weekend somewhere.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could choose. Expense no object.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, crestfallen. ‘Couldn’t you – indulge me?’

  She shook her head. ‘Take your wife.’

  It was below the belt, but she considered that she was being cruel to be kind. ‘That’s not the point,’ he mumbled miserably. ‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that I don’t want to go away for a weekend with you, but she probably would.�
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  Wounded, Gordon protested: ‘I do take her away . . . of course I do.’

  The ludicrousness of his position suddenly struck Stella – that this adoring, adulterous married man, her casual, ever-ready fuck, should be so anxious to present his credentials as a caring and dutiful husband.

  The laughter was already blooming in her chest as she said: ‘I’m glad to hear that Gordon, I really am—’ And then it burst out of her in a series of wheezy, explosive arpeggios that had the other diners glancing her way and smiling timidly as Gordon sat with downcast eyes, on fire with embarrassment.

  ‘Well, what did you want me to say?’ he asked when her laughter had subsided and they’d broached a second bottle of wine. ‘I don’t understand you sometimes, Stella.’

  He never understood her, she thought. Thank God. The day Gordon understood her would be the day she packed it in.

  She let him pay. When the young waiter, dark of chin and scrubby of hair, came back with the credit-card chit he handed Stella a rose.

  ‘It’s an honour. You’re brilliant.’

  ‘Thank you. You’ve seen the show?’

  ‘Not this time, couldn’t get in. A year ago.’

  ‘We’re at the Curfew in Kilburn for three nights. I’ll leave a ticket on the door for you tomorrow night, if you’re free.’

  ‘Don’t worry!’ He beamed, at ease with her favours. ‘I shall be, even if I have to hand my notice in!’