Mourning Raga

‘She’s the American star they brought over to play Marianne in this film Chloe’s making. I told you. Everybody thought they’d fight like tigresses, and they fell into each other’s arms on first sight, and have been as thick as thieves ever since. That’s how it comes that Chloe’s willing to lend me to help out Dorette over the kid. She wants us to drive down to Bath and hear all about it, and get fixed up about dates and everything. I suppose we could do that much, anyhow, couldn’t we?’

‘Today? Now?’

She nodded. The scintillation of desire, fever-white, was still in her eyes. You don’t get offered India on a salver every day. ‘We can still say no, if we want to.’ But she didn’t want to, and neither did he. Not if this was on the level. They eyed each other thoughtfully, still chary of believing in such luck.

‘There has to be a catch in it,’ said Dominic firmly.

She didn’t argue; she knew her mother even better than he did, and it was a reasonable assumption that they would trip over a string or two sooner or later. ‘It would have to be a big one to tip the scale much, wouldn’t it?’ she said honestly.

Dominic got up and hoisted the suitcase on which he had been sitting. The coy lock held, ready for any journey. ‘You’d better call her back, hadn’t you,’ he said, rather as if it had been his idea all along, ‘and tell her we’re coming.’

Some youthful genius from down in the boutique belt, who hatched outrageous ideas on the side and sold them in much the same way as he did outrageous clothes, had come up with the improbable inspiration of making a big musical out of Sense and Sensibility, and with his usual luck had found suckers all round him ready to buy the notion that Jane was with it. He had besides – and it was his chief asset – a gift for concocting elegantly dry, agreeable and piquant music, so witty that it turned the most banal lyrics into epigrams, and it was an even bet that the film he had conned his less well-read contemporaries into making would turn out to be not merely a box-office bonanza, but also a surprisingly good film. They had gone the whole hog on casting it. Most of the money in the venture was American, and the producers had insisted on getting Dorette Lester to play Marianne, the ‘sensibility’ half of the two sisters. The English director, with equal certainty, had declared that no one but Chloe Bliss would do for Eleanor. Chloe’s daughter might have cocked a quizzical eyebrow at the idea of her mother standing for ‘sense’, but it was what she could suggest before the cameras that mattered, not what she really was, and before the cameras or an audience there was nothing Chloe could not be, from an electrifying Ariel in The Tempest to an awe-inspiring grande dame in Wilde. Musicals were something new for her, but she took to the form like a duck to water. She sang the outrageously clever songs of the boy genius, half-pop, half-avant-garde, with such conviction that even the composer was startled. He had never taken them all that seriously himself. What he did was juggle the notes and words around a little, and the money came rolling in. He had never ceased to find it funny, but was a little unnerved when he found it could also be moving.

One of those ladies hired to play the youthful Dashwood sisters was turned forty, and the other was thirty-six, and there were plenty of genuine teen-age actresses to be found, what with half the pop singers taking to the boards or the screen or both as to the manner born; yet nobody seemed to find the casting at all strange. Only a year ago Chloe Bliss had added a superlative Peter Pan to her repertoire. And as for Dorette Lester, one of her most passionate admirers had once said that she couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance, couldn’t really do very much in the acting line, and didn’t have to; just looking at her was enough. But if she had to act, it had better be in some such part as the hypersensitive and emotional Marianne Dashwood, where over-acting, controlled by an intelligent director, wouldn’t show.

Dorette had been married in her early twenties, before she became a star. Tossa told Dominic all about it, or as much as she herself had gleaned from Chloe’s thumbnail sketch, on the way down to Somerset in the Mini.

‘The way I see it, she can’t have been much then, and apparently he was rich, and must have been no end of a catch. A couple of years later, and she probably wouldn’t have looked at him. He was a graduate from the University of the Punjab; doing post-graduate work in research physics and chemistry over in the States. Anyhow, she married him. And they had this little girl. And then things clicked into place, the way they do at the wrong moment, and she made a hit and grew into a star. And I suppose she got very busy and involved with her job, and he was just as busy with his, and maybe they were too far apart ever to make a go of it. Anyhow, they didn’t. She divorced him years ago, and gave herself wholly to her career. And he went back to India, and presumably devoted himself to his.’

‘And the little girl,’ said Dominic, after a pause for reflection, and in a tone of some wonder, ‘is now about to be shipped off after him?’

‘That’s the way it looks.’ And she added doubtfully: ‘Maybe just for a visit?’ Dominic said nothing to that; he didn’t think so, either. ‘Well, it seems she’s getting married again. Dorette, I mean. Maybe he doesn’t react too well to the idea of a ready-made daughter nearly fourteen years old.’

‘Or maybe she thinks he won’t. I don’t suppose she’s ever asked him. Or asked the kid what she thinks about it.’ A possible catch was beginning to appear, and he couldn’t help wondering what they were getting themselves into. Still, if the case was as he was beginning to suppose, it could be argued that the little girl would be better off with her father. Or hadn’t he wanted her, either? He seemed to have let her go without too much of a fight, and put the width of the world between them.

‘Still,’ said Tossa, mind-reading beside him, ‘we shall have to go on and take a look at the whole set-up now, I’ve committed us to that. We can always back out if we don’t like the look of it.’

She looked at Dominic warily along her shoulder; there was something in the acute care he was suddenly giving to his driving, and the look of almost painful detachment on his face, that told her he had found himself abruptly reminded how delicate might be the ground on which they were treading. For Tossa also was the child of an egocentric actress, and her early years also had been bedevilled by her mother’s remarriages and haunted by her mother’s wit, charm and success, which left her seedling only shady ground in which to grow. He needn’t have worried, Tossa was very well able, by this time, to make good her right to a place in the sun. The amiable conflict between mother and daughter was fought on equal terms these days, and as long as Dominic was on her side Tossa had the secure feeling that she was winning. Still, all experience remains there in the memory to be drawn upon at need.

‘When you come to think of it,’ said Tossa practically, ‘I might be just the right person for this job. If the kid is going to be flown off to her father in any case, it might as well be with somebody who’s been in much the same boat, and knows the language.’ And somebody else, she thought, but did not say, who’s never had parent trouble in his life, and doesn’t know how lucky he is, but manages to rub off some of the luck on to other people even without realising it.

‘It might, at that,’ agreed Dominic, cheered. ‘Anyhow, let’s go and see.’

By which time they were close to the turn that led to the Somerset studio, and the issue was as good as decided.

The Misses Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood sat side by side on a flimsy, gilded, Empire sofa like twin