December 1938, London
Of course it was lovely. Fairy lights were twisted around the skinny poplars flashing pink and green, pink and green, and stalls selling roasted chestnuts wafted out their delicious fatty smell. And the children zipping around clutching candy floss on sticks, or sitting on their fathers’ shoulders, bobbing along to the brass band, and the air crisp and chill so that every in-breath felt cleansing. Bettina would love it, she’d soak everything up, attempting to find unique ways of describing things, maybe jotting them down in her ledger so that she might later slot her profound observations into the book she’d been writing for the last hundred years. But Bettina was at home shovelling cake into her face while preparing for a Christmas party so that people they didn’t give a fuck about could come and eat their food, drink their booze and marvel at the picture-perfect house and the picture-perfect family.
He had a go on the coconut shy, winning a catapult for little Monty. Tabby pouted, and so he knocked down some tin cans after nine attempts with a crooked BB rifle, winning her a cheap ragdoll. He gave them both some loose change and sent them off to the penny arcade. He sat at a stall which sold dank ale and mulled cider, his hat pulled over his eyes.
Last week he’d suggested in a roundabout way that Bettina was a bad mother.
No.
Last week he had plainly stated that Bettina was a bad mother.
His exact words: ‘You’re a terrible mother; you should be ashamed of yourself.’
Because she’d forgotten to order that train set for Monty’s Christmas present. And why had she forgotten? Because she’d spent the day getting drunk with Tuna.
‘How dare you?’ she’d whispered, before running up to her bedroom.
He sat on his stool, swilling his drink around in its glass, his mouth fixed into a moody slit. Thinking of all the horrible things she’d said to him over the years. ‘No wonder Étienne left you – I’m surprised he didn’t do it sooner … oh, wait – he did!’ There was one. He’d cried about that. And the time she’d called his films ‘perfectly moronic’. He went up to her room with a speech prepared in his head – ‘So you can dish it out but you can’t take it. Same old Bettina! You’ve implied that I’m a sub-par father, but you women are always so precious about your maternity. Et cetera, et cetera’ – to find her crying on her bed. And Bettina so seldom cried. He immediately apologised (sincerely) and she forgave him, or at least pretended to.
A man two stools over was looking at him.
‘Eh,’ he said, coming over. ‘Weren’t you the Mortician?’
Bart winced and nodded.
‘Well, well,’ said the man. ‘Not every day a man finds himself sitting next to a Hollywood actor.’ Ac-toorr. ‘My old lady reckons you’re the bee’s knees.’
‘Thank you. Your wife has impeccable taste.’ The standard response.
‘Haven’t seen you in anything lately. There was that one, wasn’t there, with the bride of Frankenstein.’
‘That wasn’t me.’
‘Oh. Well. Let’s get an autograph then. For the wife? If you would so oblige.’
Bart took a pen from his breast pocket. ‘Of course.’
The man was in his twenties. He had two missing teeth at the front, a perfectly round bald patch in his moustache, and clear blue eyes. Fuckable. ‘Here,’ he said, taking a book from a Woolworths shopping bag – A Christmas Carol, by Dickens. ‘I bought her this for a Christmas present. If you sign it, that’s two presents in one.’ He nudged Bart. ‘Which means two lays for me.’
Bart laughed, as was required. ‘Well, it’s customary for the author to sign their own book, but seeing as this one’s been dead almost seventy years … What’s her name?’
‘Rosemary. Rose.’
He wrote: ‘To Rose, have a wonderful and spooky Christmas, your friend Bartholomew Dawes’, adding devil horns over the ‘B’.
‘She’ll love this,’ the man said. ‘Thanking you kindly.’ He took the stool next to Bart. ‘So what’s Lillian White like then?’
Oh God. He knew where this was going: What was it like kissing her? Did you feel her arse? Lovely arse on her. I bet she’d do it soon as look at you.
‘Lillian White is a delightful human being. Look’ – he downed his pint and wiped his mouth – ‘I’ve got to go and retrieve my children. Have a lovely Christmas.’
‘You too, mate.’
Bart shoved back his stool and walked away, burping into the back of his hand, hat pulled so low over his eyes he could see only half the world, sliced in two.
The last time this band had played at one of her Christmas parties, there’d been a black man playing the trombone, but he’d now been replaced by a white man. According to their pianist, the black man – Jonty, his name was – had been beaten to within an inch of his life in the streets of Norwich because he’d apparently smiled at a white woman, and was to this day still lying in hospital with his body encased in casts. Bettina asked the pianist if she might write a cheque to help cover some of the poor trombonist’s medical bills, and as she did so, Bart walked past, grinning sarcastically at her while stretching an arm around and patting himself on the back.
‘Oh, Mrs Dawes, what a charitable offer! Our Jonty’ll be over the moon.’
But it was all ruined now.
She signed the cheque, paying a pound more than she’d originally intended – it was Bart’s money.
The nanny was chasing Monty around with a pair of socks in her hand and Doris was repositioning some of the decorations on the huge Christmas tree after a handyman had let his ladder fall into it. Bart stood slouched next to the grandmother clock, reading a book of poetry, which was hilarious – he hated poetry – so she could only assume he was hoping to impress someone.
The doorbell chimed. Bart caught Monty by his lapels and called Tabby over. ‘Come here and stand next to your brother and smile at the guests like perfect little angels.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Bettina. ‘Do what you like, Tabby. He’s just being a meanie.’
He raised a brow. ‘Oh? I thought that was what you wanted?’
She drained her champagne and stood up, ignoring him. She had indeed planned on setting up both her children near the front door to smile at guests, until Bart pointed out what a farce this was. So she’d let her children run wild until bedtime, and if Monty hid under the buffet table eating out of the sugar pot or if Tabby insisted on showing off her sub-par ballet to adults too polite to decline the offer, she’d laugh it off, her pearls and teeth glittering under the chandeliers, everything glittering, her eyes full of benign permission, oh, everything jolly and glittering, because she was carefree and unconstrained by the rigid codes of polite society!
He came over and wrapped his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry. I know you hate it when I point out your inconsistencies. If it makes you feel any better, I am a much worse human being than you.’
‘It does make me feel better,’ she said, ‘and you are.’
He kissed her on the forehead. ‘Let’s behave ourselves tonight.’
She smiled and returned the kiss, aiming for his cheek but bumping his nose. ‘If I can’t be thin any more,’ she said, wiping away the lipstick, ‘then I’ll damn well be a charming and accomplished mother and wife. Allow me this.’
‘I will, darling. Oh, look – here they come.’ He wrapped an arm around her waist and smiled a dazzling smile. He really was a wonderful actor.
Tuna was dressed conservatively. For Tuna. She had on a cream floor-length dress belted at the waist, with bright red curly-toed Aladdin slippers. A decorative Christmas angel was perched amongst her frizzy explosion of hair – it peeked out, its little china face full of chubby malevolence. She was thin again. Ribs and cheekbones thin. She attributed it to the divorce, telling Bettina over the telephone that she’d only eaten apples and thin wedges of cheddar for six months: seriously, darling, nothing but apples and tiny little slices of mature cheddar; I’m not exaggerating, I could stomach nothing else – oh wait, I lie, I did once have a tiny canapé at a charity ball.
But there were rumours. Tuna was currently ‘seeing’ a writer who was known to smoke opium on a regular basis. Maybe she’d cultivated the habit for herself? Bettina didn’t believe a word of it – heartbroken women got thin all the time. Just as pampered, idle women got fat.
Tonight Tuna had brought along a tall Yorkshireman whose eyes were too close together – the supposed opium-guzzler. He apparently wrote literature too honest to be published.
She found them out in the garden, smoking hashish and discussing the situation in Germany. ‘It’s all just bluster,’ Tuna was saying. ‘Men with huge egos trying to see who can piss the farthest out of their tiny little cocks. Oh, hello, Betts. Lovely party.’
‘Don’t lie, you’re finding it boring.’
Tuna snatched a hand to her breast as if mortally wounded. ‘Such assumptions you make about me! I am not the woman of excess you think me to be, not any more.’ She nudged the writer. ‘Tell her, Nicholas.’
‘She is not the woman of excess you think her to be, not any more.’
‘Where’s Bart?’ said Tuna.
Bart was chatting to a gorgeous man called Ted who ran the picture house in Bethnal Green. Bettina had noted Bart’s hand on his shoulder – relaxed and chummy, the fingers touching his neck. ‘He’s making a damn fool of himself with the—’
The patio doors swung open and Bart came out. ‘Oh, there you are,’ he said, seeing Bettina. ‘Why make this big fuss about throwing a Christmas party if you’re just going to sneak away?’
‘I’ve been out here for literally one minute. Sir.’
‘Oh, don’t start. I’m not some authoritarian – why do you always have to make me look like—’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m sorry. I just fucking hate parties.’ He felt his breast pocket for his cigarettes. ‘Oh, blast it, I’ve left them in – Tuna, can I have one of—’ He noticed the joint in Nicholas’s hand. ‘Is that a – are you smoking a – Tuna, could you please tell him not to do that here?’
‘You might try telling him yourself,’ said Tuna. ‘He’s got ears.’
‘Sorry,’ said Nicholas. ‘I’ll put it out.’
Bart took Bettina by the arm and led her down the garden to a quiet spot near the rose beds.
Bettina shook her arm away. ‘I haven’t done anything!’
‘Exactly. Those two clowns smoke up out here and you don’t do anything! We’re not twenty any more. We’ve got children sleeping inside the house and—’
‘Hypocrite,’ she said.
‘I am not a hypocrite! Look at the size of our garden’ – he slashed an arm through the air – ‘and they choose to do it right by the doors?’
‘That’s not why you’re a hypocrite,’ she said.
‘Oh? So enlighten me.’
‘I know what you do on Tuesday nights. I know where you go.’
He put his hands on his hips. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Yes, you do. Yes, you bloody do. I know. So here you are, Mr High and Mighty, throwing a tantrum—’
‘I am not throwing a—’
‘Throwing a tantrum because a couple of adults at an adult party choose to partake in some light marijuana use. But oh! How corrupted our children will be by the terrible things happening five brick walls away as they sleep obliviously!’ She stabbed a finger at his chest. ‘And meanwhile, Mr High and Mighty, meanwhile, you’re sneaking off to the woods to—’
‘Don’t you—’
‘I know what you do! I don’t care that you do it. But if you ever got caught, it wouldn’t just be you in the firing line. Imagine little Monty going to school and all the other boys teasing him because they’ve heard his famous daddy got caught with strange men in the woods. “Your daddy’s a faggot! Your daddy’s a faggot!”’
His eyes flashed. Then narrowed. She knew that narrowing – it signified a turning-off of something vital in his control centre – a switch flicked. He chortled to himself, darkly. ‘Oh. Oh. You fat stupid whore. You manipulative cunt.’
‘What? What did you just call me?’
‘You heard me.’ He met her eyes, defiantly. But the defiance was unstable, wavering. It suddenly dropped away, slipped away, was displaced by a guilty, panicked look – she could remember that look from childhood; it was the switch being turned back on again – and he started pacing. ‘What? So you call me a faggot and—’
‘I did not call you a faggot. I said that’s what the other children would say if—’
‘See? You are manipulative! You call me that hateful slur under the pretence of—’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You cannot unsay what you just said to me. Ever.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, how can you—’
‘You cannot unsay it.’
He ran his hands through his hair. The balance of power had tipped and he knew it. He had done and said the worse thing. As usual.
‘Fine, so I shouldn’t have said those things, but—’
‘You cannot unsay it,’ she said, turning and walking back to the party. Victorious.
‘We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas …’
Oh, shut up, Bart thought. Just everyone, shut up.
Most of the guests had departed, but the biggest drunkards seemed unwilling to budge. They stood in a messy circle, their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing in loud, tone-deaf voices. Pink eyes, pink skin – everything pink. Bart grabbed a full whisky bottle and went to the study – blessedly empty – almost falling onto the sofa. He got up and put another log on the fire. Bettina was probably moaning about him to Tuna. Oh, her husband was such a hypocrite! Such a mean, acid-tongued bastard! And a horrible faggot to boot.
No. She had not called him a faggot. Directly. And she was right about the Tuesdays.
But guess what – he was right about something too.
She was manipulative. And fat.
He topped up his whisky, licking the rim to save the droplets dribbling down the glass. He wanted to go to bed. Strip down to his socks and pass out. And never wake up.
Actually, what he really wanted to do was find Ted and fuck him up his tight little arse.
No. That wasn’t true either. He wanted Ted to fuck him. No use pretending it was the other way around.
Tonight he’d read from Étienne’s copy of Rimbaud’s selected poems, remembering that first-ever night in the damp garret – how beautifully Étienne had read them. Licking his thumb to turn the grimy pages, a roll-up cigarette dropping its ash into the crevice of the book. Bart had laid his head on his shoulder and felt the vibrations coming from his chest as he read. Though perhaps he was imbuing this memory with some special significance – maybe, at the time, it hadn’t felt so special. Maybe his bowel had gurgled with held-in farts and he’d wanted badly to brush his teeth. He didn’t trust his memories.
They wrote from time to time, Étienne still addressing him as Fleur du Mal. He’d supposedly put on a lot of weight (‘I am like Oliver Hardy – monstrous!’) and had found work as an interior designer, something he’d fallen into quite accidentally, though it turned out he had an inborn talent (‘You do not have an inborn talent,’ Bart wrote back. ‘I remember that filthy shithole you used to call home.’) Bart could well imagine Étienne designing the homes of Hollywood moguls – they’d hear his French accent and immediately decide that he was a cultured man, an authentic artist. And the scarf around his neck – a bohemian man too! A French bohemian! Here, take all my money and fill my home with bullshit, please!
He was happy for Étienne, he supposed.
Ted was probably home now. He had a wife. Francine. ‘Nice time at the party?’ she’d say. ‘Yes, it was all right, I suppose,’ he’d say, kicking off his shoes. ‘But the fellow hosting the party was quite clearly trying it on with me.’ Here, the wife would pull a face of abject horror. ‘You mean that chap who does those crummy B-movies? Bartholomew Dawes? A faggot?’
‘Yes, Fran, a raving faggot. I can still feel his hands all over my body. I might take a bath actually.’
Bart left the room, holding one arm out to keep his balance – the world was tilting. He passed Tuna and her plus-one in the hall – they were pressed up against the wall by the telephone, kissing. Bart waved a hand in their direction as if trying to ward off nonsense. He drained his glass, turned it upside down and rested it on the top of the whisky bottle. ‘A little hat for you,’ he said, beginning to climb the stairs. All I want, he thought, gripping the banister, is someone to hold me. Someone to lie in bed next to me and hold me until I fall asleep.
Such a simple little thing.
He almost fell into his bedroom, the glass slipping off the bottle and rolling under the bed. He didn’t need a glass. Love and attention and touch – he needed those things. Not a glass. He sat on the bed and drank from the bottle. He heard a sound next door in Bettina’s bedroom.
Oh, God. Oh, Betts.
What was it in him that made his most vicious thoughts shoot out of his mouth like that? There was something very wrong with him. A darkness of the heart.
He opened her door.
She was on the carpet on all fours, her dress hiked up to her waist, and a man – no, he must be hallucinating – what looked like a man, was on his knees behind her, his pelvis slamming into her large pale arse.
No. Ted? No.
They both saw him at the same time. Ted jumped up, his shiny red stiffy bouncing, and yanked his trousers up. Bettina rolled onto her side and slowly, casually, pulled her dress down. She was smiling.
Ted grabbed his hat and ran from the room, scraping his back on the door frame as he dodged past Bart – then, realising that he’d gone out through the wrong door (into the husband’s bedroom!) he ran back through the doorway, again past Bart, who instinctively lifted his foot out to trip him up. Ted went sprawling and landed on his face. He got up, mumbled, ‘I suppose I deserved that,’ and left through the other door.
Bettina was still on her side like a contented house cat, her stomach spilling to the floor with gravity. ‘Here’s your fat whore,’ she said.
Bart gripped the door handle. ‘Pure spite.’
And she nodded.
He threw his whisky bottle at her – it missed, widely, crashing against the mahogany desk which housed her spare typewriter and notebooks. There was her almost-finished manuscript, in a neat, perfect pile. Almost ten years she’d been working on that – ten years of false starts, rewrites, tense changes, ten years of literary anguish and he’d had to witness it all, pretending that he cared. He went and snatched it up, then ran from the room. He heard her cry out and give chase. He bounded down the stairs, missing the sixth from last step and skidding down on his backside, but keeping the manuscript wedged to his ribs like a rugby ball. He looked over his shoulder – she was halfway down, her hem swishing like tidal foam. He got to his feet and ran for the study, almost crashing into a group of people trying to get their coats on.
He dropped the manuscript into the fire and turned around to see Bettina at the doorway. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes grew fantastically huge – just like when Beadie first saw Reanimated Corpse No. 1. The paper was ablaze, thick smoke curling out. She ran to retrieve it but he blocked the hearth, grabbing a poker and wielding it. Bettina looked at him with such bitterness – oh, such bitterness. ‘Two can play at that game,’ she said. And she turned and ran.
He dropped the poker and gave chase – she was running back up the stairs. She was going to do something. What could she possibly do? He went up the steps two at a time – he could almost touch her ankle. He tripped over, thumping his stomach against the stair edge, winding himself. She was already flinging open his bedroom door. He scrambled to his feet, raced along the corridor, sliding on the Persian rug, and burst into his bedroom.
She was clutching a wooden chest and rushing towards the window. His letters from Étienne. ‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ he screamed.
She unlatched the window and pushed it open just before he reached her. She threw the box out and spun around to face him, her back pressed to the ledge, her face wild. He heard the crash as the box exploded its contents all over the drive outside. He pushed her to the side and looked down – papers were skittering around on the gravel drive, some blowing up into the trees – there, pressed by the wind to a thick branch was a life-size sketch of an erect penis. A man and a woman were gaping up at Bart, their scarves twisting in the wind like ribbons. Fifteen years’ worth of letters, drawings, poems. The only written proof that someone had ever loved him.
Bettina stood with her arms straight down by her sides and her hands bunched up. Her face was drained of all colour save for two perfect little circles of red on her cheekbones.
‘I despise you,’ she said, quite simply.