She might have leant for a while and looked at the waves and even whispered words. Then turned around and gone back to where Vijay was waiting. ‘Okay, now drive me home please.’
Instead she’d stood in her dressing gown, like some batty old crone, seemingly speaking to a tree. The tree had looked down on her. Then she’d come inside, shivering, and got back into bed and sobbed like a punished child.
But it had been kind of George to remember, he was a considerate man. And how else would she have spent this whole day? So some time later she’d got up again, not a sobbing child but a seventy-five-year-old woman, and prepared herself slowly to meet George. She’d put on her face. The cream blouse, the straight black skirt, the little black jacket, the pearls. Her small clutch bag. She’d gone downstairs. It was twelve-thirty. She’d felt a little dizzy and strange, she’d felt a little not herself.
Then Vijay had called anyway, as arranged. He’d said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Robbins.’ She was really ‘Evie’ or ‘Evie White’ or ‘Ms White’, but she’d learnt—in almost fifty years—to accept the frequently conferred title without fuss. And perhaps today it was the right title, and perhaps Vijay meant it (did he remember?) in that way. She’d smiled and confirmed the name of the restaurant. And twenty minutes later she’d followed the maître d’ to the usual corner table, and there was George, rising from his seat as soon as he saw her.
‘Princess, you look lovely as ever.’
She couldn’t act?
‘Princess’—at seventy-five? Only because Jack had always been the prince, or because (and George had better not forget it) she was controlling director of Rainbow Productions?
But this was not one of their business lunches. Polka-dotted silk had flopped from George’s breast pocket as they sat. Two glasses of champagne were instantly poured. ‘Well here’s to him,’ he had said.
Then, with the fish of the day—she couldn’t afterwards remember which fish it was, but she’d definitely wanted fish—more glasses, of white burgundy. George had tasted, squeezed his lips and sagaciously approved. ‘Bony but creamy,’ he’d said.
For a moment she’d thought he’d meant her.
It was not a business lunch, but there was the ongoing issue of the biography, which George was not inclined to abandon. Several months ago she had said, ‘Not on your nelly, George. Tell your literary-agent friend to go away.’ But perhaps in order to work round to it again, or just because of the nature of the day, he had got biographical anyway.
‘So tell me, Evie—all these years and I’ve never really known. How did you and Jack, how did you first really . . .?’
He didn’t know? Such innocence. For over thirty years Jack’s agent? All those lunches with him. Wouldn’t he have got the story anyway, or Jack’s version of it? And now she was going to be put in the position of saying something that conflicted with it? Not on your nelly either, George. Did he think that because a year of her widowhood had respectfully passed, everything might now be up for grabs? He’d be saying next, ‘So tell me, Evie, what happened, what really happened with that magician chap? I forget his name.’
She took a swallow of her wine. She was glad she had already done her sorrow and weeping, but she still might fall back, if needed, on excusing grief. The batty old woman in the garden and the bawling infant had turned into a princess sitting in a Mayfair restaurant, and now she was going to have to play her part, in honourable repayment of George’s kindness, all through what might be a long and challenging lunch. It could hardly be a quick and casual one, given its purpose. And anyway she’d welcomed the means of passing the dreadful hours.
So she had performed her best. And after several glasses of burgundy she couldn’t be sure what she had or hadn’t said.
She had returned in the mellow sunlight of the waning afternoon. Vijay had actually touched his forehead. ‘Have a good evening, Mrs Robbins.’ So the house had entombed her again. Yet there was nowhere, for all the silenced voices, where she would rather be entombed. And the wine had done its work. Now she sat at her dressing table, wondering whether to remove her make-up and half expecting to see in the mirror Jack standing behind her, placing his hands softly on her shoulders.
‘Exhausted, darling? That’s George for you. I know how you feel. I’d take a little nap if I were you.’
But it wasn’t Jack that she saw. It was too brief a glimpse for every detail, but he was in his stage outfit, the last thing she’d seen him in, and she’d recognise those eyes anywhere.
• • •
The show must go on. But must it? Who says? When are you allowed to say the show is over now, there’s no more show any more? And anyway the show was always just what it was, a flickering summer concoction at the end of a pier. Jack had said it had had its day, it was all going out with the tide beneath them. He’d put his arm round her.
And in any case it must finish in September. And even in August, high season, you could feel it, the turning of the year, the shortening evenings, autumn lurking over the horizon. There comes a sad point in any holiday when you start to think: Only so much more of this left now, then back to the real world. But if you’re in show business do you have to care about that? Isn’t life a perpetual holiday? Up there on the stage isn’t it all just a breeze, a doddle, a dream? Or that’s what they all believe. Jack used to say, laughing it off, in interviews,
