The Grass Memorial Read online

  The Curfew’s manager, Rupert, came up to her. She liked him, he reminded her of Jamie, and she slipped her arm wantonly around his waist.

  ‘What can I do for you, young man?’

  ‘Ask not what you can do for me, darling – your friend’s outside.’

  ‘Friend? What friend? I don’t have any.’

  ‘Your friend Gordon.’

  She squinted into Rupert’s face. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Anticipating your reaction I kept him in the holding bay till I’d spoken to you.’

  ‘But he was only here on Thursday.’

  ‘I know. What can you have said to encourage him?’

  Stella went out into the corridor. Gordon stood some yards away, facing in the opposite direction, briefcase in hand, his other hand in his pocket. If he had change to jingle, he was jingling it. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Gordon?’

  ‘Oh – Stella!’ She could tell from his startled expression the sort of thoughts that had been in his head. ‘I hope you don’t mind – after the last time – I had to see you again.’

  ‘Not a good idea, Gordon.’

  The first cut, but the blade was so fine and quick he scarcely noticed it. ‘I realise you’ll want to be with other people tonight, but perhaps, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very well.’ They were still standing six yards apart but now he came up to her, opening his briefcase as he did so like a door-todoor salesman preparing to make a pitch. One of the strapping young female stage hands came bouncing down the corridor, carrying a bottled beer, and ricocheted off him so that he staggered.

  ‘Oops, easy!’ said the stage hand. ‘Nice one, Stella.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Here.’ Gordon handed Stella an envelope. ‘I really only came to give you this.’

  She looked at it without taking it. ‘What is it?’

  ‘All the things I’m not good at saying.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Oh, but there is. Last time—’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘I can’t.’ His face was incandescent. ‘It was so different. You were so different.’

  No, I wasn’t, she thought, but I am now.

  ‘You’re right, Gordon,’ she said. ‘Everything’s changed. I don’t want to see you any more.’ The brutal simplicity of the words was so childlike she half-wanted to expound, explain, wrap the whole thing up in a few platitudes, just for the sake of how it sounded and how he would remember it. But she managed not to.

  He looked worse than stricken – wiped out. So pale that she feared he might be about to faint.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘What were you doing then?’

  It was said without aggression – he hadn’t a mean bone in his body – and she understood him perfectly.

  ‘Saying goodbye.’

  As the words formed in her mouth she knew they were true, and that he recognised their truth.

  ‘At least,’ he said, proffering the note, ‘take this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To remember me by if nothing else?’

  ‘I shall remember you, Gordon.’ Until I forget.

  She left him standing there, note in hand, went back into the green room and closed the door behind her. The seethe of smiles and bodies and the babel of euphoria in a blur of cigarette smoke was bizarre – could all this be going on as before when she’d just ripped a man’s heart open?

  ‘Poor old Gordon,’ said Rupert, wrapping her fingers round a glass. ‘Who’d be a stage door Johnnie?’

  ‘Piss off, Rupert.’

  He laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.‘Never underestimate the recuperative powers of the male ego. He’ll be re-jigging the whole episode to his own advantage as we speak.’

  She flashed him a hot, vexed look in acknowledgement of the sympathy. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself lady.’

  He left her, to be replaced in short order by Teresa.

  ‘Well! A triumph, I think.’

  ‘It was all right.’

  ‘All right?’ said Teresa. ‘All right? They were orgasmic out there.’ She tipped her head quizzically. ‘You know, Stella, you are allowed to be pleased.’

  ‘You what?’ Stella thrust her head forward, eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  ‘It’s okay to be chuffed. Pleased with yourself. You blew them away. You played a blinder.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with me.’

  Teresa laughed uproariously. ‘Spare me the false modesty, Stella, it doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘That’s right, it doesn’t. And neither does associating myself with self-regarding, self-referential, meretricious crap.’

  ‘I beg—’

  ‘Which is why I don’t intend to do so for one second longer.’

  ‘I’m afraid—’

  ‘Be afraid,’ said Stella, flying now, with the whole room listening.

  ‘Be very afraid, my darling. Because as of now you’re on your own.’

  They all gaped at her. It was very heaven.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Teresa.

  ‘I mean I’m going.’ She put down her glass and scanned their faces, giving the performance of her life. ‘Read my lips. Going.’

  ‘You can’t!’ said Faith in a high, breathy, girlish voice.

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘But for heaven’s sake, why?’ This was Mimi, in the tone of someone who genuinely could not fathom it out. What planet did these women live on?

  ‘Because we no longer see eye to eye,’ she said. ‘And there are more of you, so I’m getting out.’

  Teresa snorted. ‘That’s so unreasonable.’

  Stella opened the door. ‘Goodbye, good luck, God rot you.’

  ‘But what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not aware that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘And us?’ Helen came over and squared up to her. ‘There are legal and financial implications, what about us?’

  ‘Umm, let’s see . . .’ Stella smiled, the embodiment of sweet reason. ‘You could try fucking yourselves.’

  She closed the door with a clean, dry snap, heard the brief lull followed by the hubbub and then the door reopening. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t even return to her dressing room. Stuff would be returned to her and if it wasn’t she’d replace it. More important now to make the exit of a lifetime. Someone was calling her name, someone else said, ‘Let her go, she’ll get over it,’ and a third ran behind her and caught at her arm, but she shook the hand off and kept moving.

  When she reached the main door of the Curfew it was pouring with rain. Not a regular autumnal English drizzle but a cloudburst of operatic proportions, coming down in such volume and with such intensity that it exploded back up from the ground in a hissing microstorm. A heavy bead curtain of water rattled down in thick liquid strands from the cornice above the door. The pavement was covered in a sheet of water and the gutter was a black torrent, bearing a spinning flotsam of rubbish. The traffic up on the main drag was scarcely moving, the massed headlights blurred and seemed to melt under the onslaught of the rain. Some cars had simply given up and pulled over.

  Stella paused, but only for a second. Hesitation might not be fatal, but neither was it in keeping with her headlong mood. She stepped out into the downpour.

  Within seconds she was soaked, her skin numb and her hair directing a secondary rivulet down her neck. It was perfect. She whooped and threw up her arms as she ran with long splashing strides through the maelstrom towards the main road, drunk with abandonment and reckless with freedom.

  The Rolls must have been the only car travelling at more than ten miles an hour, and in the bus lane at that. It slewed round violently to avoid her, sending up a leaping fan of spray that slapped down on her a split second later. She saw the driver’s furious face, teeth bared, and heard the massive bass heartbeat of music turned up
full on the stereo. She didn’t move a muscle, but stood there, drenched and vengeful as, with the other traffic patiently circumnavigating them, he got out and slammed the door.

  ‘Madam,’ he said in a thin, Scots snarl, approaching until his streaming face was six inches from hers, ‘enlighten me. Are you mad, or am I?’

  The woman was crazy, he hadn’t the slightest doubt of it. On something, or several things, undernourished, poorly dressed, not even a handbag, eyes starting out of her head, apparently laughing in his face as she shouted back at him: ‘What sort of question is that?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She put her cold lips to his ear. ‘If I was mad, how would I know?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ He forced the question through gritted teeth. All around them in the dull roar of the rain was a clamour of conflicting horns like an orchestra tuning up. In reply she lifted her arms high in the air and danced round on the spot, knees going up and down like pistons, feet splashing, a wild female Fagin.

  ‘I’ve got to move the car!’ he bellowed, losing patience.

  She yelled something back and before he could stop her had run to the passenger door and let herself in.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked, turning on the engine and wrenching the wheel round.

  She covered her face with her hands – long thin hands on which the bones stood out, but strong-looking. She seemed to be shaking – with laughter? Tears? Rage? Sickness? The car surged ahead, the arcing tyres sending up more water, and she jolted forward like a rag doll.

  ‘Put your bloody seat belt on, woman!’

  She still sat there with her face covered so he reached across, steering the car with one hand, and yanked the strap across her, round her arms, everything, and snapped it into the socket. What in God’s name, he asked himself, am I doing? I didn’t invite her, I don’t want her, she’s patently barking and she’s making a mess on my upholstery.

  ‘Right!’

  He drove another hundred yards and turned off the main road at the next reasonable turning, pulling up under a street lamp, keeping the engine and the heater running. The rain had eased a bit. He got out his cigarettes.

  ‘You okay?’

  She flopped back now, her head on the neckrest, and to his considerable relief he saw that she wore an expression of almost exalted happiness. This was what those poor sods who tried Joan of Arc must have had to put up with, this infuriating confusion. He offered the cigarettes.

  ‘Want one?’

  She felt for the packet, took a cigarette, and placed it between her lips so that it stuck up at a jaunty angle. He lit it and she inhaled deeply and expertly a couple of times before removing it between two fingers, middle and third, that trembled slightly, though whether from cold, emotion, or some drug-related state he couldn’t begin to speculate.

  He lit his own. ‘So where were you going? Where can I drop you off?’

  She shrugged, and the shrug turned into a silent, shoulder-shaking laugh. Mad as a snake.

  ‘We were both of us extremely fortunate not to be killed back there,’ he pointed out.

  He’d deliberately left the remark open-ended. Don’t admit fault, don’t antagonise, keep things even. So he was surprised when she said in a perfectly strong, normal voice: ‘Yes, sorry about that.’

  He allowed a beat before conceding carefully: ‘Six of one, I dare say.’

  She rolled her head and gazed at him, grinning round the cigarette. Alarmingly, considering that she was on the face of it one of the least alluring women he’d ever encountered, he experienced a strong glandular thump in the pit of his stomach. An appeal straight to the vitals.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, allow me to apologise for my part in the incident anyway – for not being the most gentlemanly near-miss you ever had.’ ‘Fine.’ Back in profile. She couldn’t have cared less A long moment passed. The rain was now a gentle patter beyond the warm breath of the car heater.

  ‘You must be frozen,’ he commented. ‘I ought to take you home.’

  ‘Thanks. And I ought to make it up to you.’

  ‘No need, really.’ He laid hold of the handbrake and as he did so felt her hand, cool and damp, over his. When he looked at her it was to meet her eyes again, which flicked back and forth across his face, scanning him.

  ‘Okay, big boy,’ she said, in a voice that seemed to stroke his cock. ‘Fancy the fuck of a lifetime?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘A wall-eyed stallion – vicious – is held solitary in a paddock at the back,

  Not tamed nor saddlebroke, a wilderness horse stripped of all his mares,

  With scars from other horses’ hooves and cougar-claw stripes from a vicious cat attack.

  Crook-footed when he sleeps, he shudders as dreams relive each scar’

  —Elizabeth Read, ‘The Captive’

  Spencer 1931–4

  The first of three incidents that shaped Spencer McColl’s future life took place on his eleventh birthday, on 25 May 1931, in Moose Draw, Wyoming.

  Even though it was spring vacation Mack had given him a day off from the store, so he’d woken up early. It was like something in your head told you when the whole twenty-four hours was yours to do as you liked with, and that something roused you so you wouldn’t go missing any of it.

  Spencer was no momma’s boy, but one of the best things about the early start and the lack of chores was the company of his mother, Caroline. Mack called her ‘Cairlahn’, but she had never lost her English accent and Spencer copied her pronunciation, giving each syllable its full, round value like three chimes of a bell.

  There were a lot of English people in the area, mostly rich or aristocratic or both, occupying the big spreads and choice fancy houses around Moose Draw, Caroline said they were mainly just money, and was at pains to point out that she herself came from a ‘very ordinary’ family (as if that were far more honourable) from a small town north of somewhere called Oxford. In spite of this Spencer liked to think that in some unspecified way his mother was set apart from the lump of Moose Draw society. She certainly looked and spoke as though she should be: not high and mighty and stuck up, but just the opposite – always polite and elegant and soft-spoken and more fastidious in her person and dress than any storekeeper’s wife had a right to be. Spencer once heard a customer refer to her as a ‘gracious lady’ and he considered this a very apt description. An illustration in the children’s Bible at school depicted the Virgin Mary, pale-skinned and draped in pastel blue, listening with grave attention to the words of the Angel Gabriel and looking the spit of Caroline when serving a difficult customer. Mary was also described in various readings as ‘spotless’ which all seemed to fit.

  Mack was Caroline’s second husband. Though Spencer had been brought up to call him by his name out of deference to the dead, the word might as well have been ‘Pa’ or ‘Dad’ because that’s what it meant for both of them. Mack was tall and sinewy with a melancholy Buster Keatonish face. From the moment he was able to receive such impressions Spencer intuited that Mack adored Caroline in a way that none of his friends’ fathers adored their wives. It was as if the taciturn, hardworking Mack, having inherited this precious legacy from another man, couldn’t believe his luck and was quite stunned by his good fortune and the responsibilities that came with it. Sometimes Spencer caught Mack watching his mother in a manner so painfully raw and unguarded it felt shameful to have noticed at all, like catching a grown man crying.

  As for his real father, Jack Royle, the man who’d plucked the English rose and transplanted her to cowboy country, Spencer knew next to nothing about him. He’d been told of his existence very early on, and shown a photograph which his mother kept beneath an agglomeration of old keys and broken pencils in a tin with a king on the lid. If the photograph was to be believed Jack had been high, wide and handsome, with wavy dark hair, a piratical moustache, and an air of swaggering confidence. All that Caroline would say
about him was that he died in a tragic accident, ‘in the midst of life’ as she put it.

  From all this Spencer had assembled a picture of a dashing adventurer, and a great love story cut down at its fullest flowering. At school he was the only kid with a step-parent, let alone who called that step-parent by his Christian name, and Spencer was in the habit of taking one or two innocent liberties with his family history. He didn’t think of it as telling lies – since he didn’t know the truth that would have been impossible. But he did extemporise imaginatively on the facts. In assorted versions the deceased Jack had been an English earl, a rodeo rider, a racing car driver and a war hero, sometimes a combination of any two. Once the junior teacher, Mrs Horowitz, had come upon him in full flow in a corner of the schoolyard and put a brisk stop to his monologue.

  ‘Now, Spencer, that’ll do, no one wants to hear all that.’

  ‘Oh, but, ma’am, we do!’ chorused Spencer’s audience, both from genuine interest and a well-developed sense of where the more immediate drama might lie. ‘Please, ma’am!’

  Mrs Horowitz was young and pretty, but a disciplinarian nonetheless. When she held up her hands for silence she got it. ‘You want to be running around,’ she declared in the face of the evidence, ‘not sitting listening to stories. That’s for class,’ she added, with a flash of inspiration.

  ‘But, ma’am, it isn’t a story,’ protested Judy Phelan. ‘It’s about Spencer’s folks.’

  ‘I dare say, now off you go.’ Mrs Horowitz placed one firm hand on Judy’s back, and made a shepherding gesture with the other. ‘And, Spencer, will you come with me, please?’

  He followed the teacher into the wooden schoolhouse. The soft pad of their footsteps on the packed earth took on the more official slap and tap of indoors. She closed the door behind them, folded her arms and looked down at him reprovingly.

  ‘Now, Spencer, what was all that about?’

  ‘Like Judy said, ma’am. About my folks.’

  ‘That is certainly what Judy said, but I’m asking you.’

  ‘About my folks . . .’ His voice faded uncertainly.

  Mrs Horowitz raised her eyebrows. ‘I dare say, but we both know it wasn’t true.’