OK, so it’s not exactly what I’d call my dream job. No one says ‘when I grow up I want to write about dead people’, but let’s face it, some of the most fascinating people that ever lived are now dead, and some of the most boring are still alive, and I know which I’d rather write about.
It’s Friday night and in lieu of going out, I’m at my desk putting the finishing touches to my first obituary. It’s taken a bit longer than I thought, as I got sucked into the vortex that is Google. One minute I was researching Monty Williamson’s plays and the next I was googling ‘signs of sepsis’ because I had an itchy rash on my elbow, or ‘can dogs eat apples’ because Arthur stole the apple core out of my wastepaper basket when I wasn’t looking.
Anyway, it’s almost finished. I press the recording on my iPhone from our interview a few days ago and his widow’s voice fills my bedroom . . .
‘Please, call me Cricket.’
‘Like the sport?’
‘Like the insect,’ she laughs. ‘It’s Catherine really, but it was my nickname as a child and it’s stuck. My husband always said I was chirpy.’
Cricket lives in the kind of house you imagine to be the home of a playwright. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases bursting with so many books they’re wedged into every available nook and cranny, walls lined with photographs and framed theatre posters, ornaments and artefacts from far-flung travels; a tribal mask, painted wall plates, exotic-looking rugs. It has that slightly chaotic feel of someone who lived an unscripted life.
Our interview was along similar lines.
‘Please – sit down, make yourself comfortable,’ she said, after I followed her through into the living room where we were to conduct our interview.
I looked around for a chair, but all the furniture appeared to be draped in paint-splattered sheets.
‘There’s a sofa underneath that one.’
‘You’re decorating?’ It suddenly dawned on me as I noticed the set of ladders and various pots of paint dotted around. ‘I thought when you said painting, you were doing oil or watercolours.’
‘Heavens, no.’ She laughed cheerfully. ‘The house needed a good lick of paint, so I thought no time like the present.’
I don’t know what I was more surprised by. The fact that a woman in her eighties was up a ladder with a roller, or that she was in such remarkably good spirits considering her husband had just died.
‘I always wanted this room to be yellow, but Monty would never hear of it – which do you prefer?’ She gestured to two paint samples on the wall. ‘The one on the left is Bumblebee and to the right is Tuscan Sun.’
‘Hmm . . . I think I prefer Bumblebee.’
She looked pleased. ‘Great minds think alike. Who wouldn’t want to sit in a room painted such a fabulous name?’ she grinned, before disappearing into the kitchen to make tea and bring biscuits: ‘Delicious chocolaty ones that are terribly bad for us.’
I liked Cricket from the get-go. She was sharp and irreverent, and as our interview got underway she brought out old photograph albums and regaled me with stories of scandal and intrigue from the fascinating career of her husband, sprinkling the names of stars of the stage and screen like fairy dust through our conversation. But she was also incredibly honest. Once the curtain came down, life wasn’t all glitz and glamour. Critical reviews. Financial hardships. Cancer. His suffering towards the end, and her relief and guilt at his death. The stuff real life was made of. The stuff that doesn’t make the photo album.
‘I met Monty when I’d given up on the notion of falling in love again. It was quite unexpected. I was about to turn fifty and assumed any recklessness was behind me. Marriage and children had evaded me . . . or had I, in fact, evaded them?’ She smiled, a flicker of mischief in her eyes, and it struck me that I was far more interested in Cricket than I was her famous late husband.
‘How did you both meet?’
‘I was an actress in those days – not a very good one, I might add – and I’d had my fill of passionate love affairs and doomed romances. I’d been engaged several times; once I even bought the wedding dress, a hideous netted thing I seem to remember . . .’ She shuddered, her mind casting back. ‘Fortunately the groom saved me from having to wear the damned thing by confessing he was already married a few days before the ceremony. And to think it caused such a ruckus at the time.’
She laughed heartily.
‘But that’s one of the good things about getting older: often the most terrible of things turn into the most amusing through the lens of time.’
My mind flicked to my own broken engagement. Would I really be laughing at that in decades to come?
‘After that I decided I was done. Love didn’t suit me. I would get myself a cat and take up the viola—’
‘Why the viola?’
‘Why not?’
I smiled. ‘Why not’ seemed like a good philosophy for life.
‘I was quite happy. But then some months later I auditioned for a play and met Monty and everything fell away. Which was lucky in some ways, as I later discovered I was terribly allergic to cats and couldn’t hold a note. More tea?’
So we drank more tea and, as the weak February sunshine gave way to dusk, Cricket told me that although they were together for over thirty years, they didn’t get married until they were in their seventies. ‘And only then because his health was failing and Monty wanted to avoid all that tax nonsense. We married in New York. No fuss. Just the two of us. I remember thinking, to anyone watching us on the steps of City Hall, we must look like a couple of old dears, me with my grey hair and Monty with his walker, but I felt eighteen again. You know, despite everything I was dippy about him . . .’
She trailed off, transported back to the steps of City Hall.
‘Have you ever felt dippy about someone, Nell?’
I faltered for a moment as the spotlight turned to me.
‘Yes,’ I nodded.
‘And?’
‘And he wasn’t dippy about me.’
Her eyes met mine. ‘My dear girl.’
She said it with such kindness it almost made me cry. I’d been bottling it up and putting on a brave face, being flippant and trying to make light of things, because it was the only way I could cope with what happened. Because I feared that if I started talking about it, I might just fall apart. But thankfully she didn’t ask for details, and I didn’t have to give any, except to say I’d recently broken up with my fiancé in America and moved back to London to start over.
‘And I’m forty-something.’
‘So? I’m eighty-something.’
I smiled, despite myself.
‘Don’t worry about getting older, worry about becoming dull.’
Somehow I couldn’t imagine Cricket ever being dull.
‘The only problem with getting older is you lose your friends and loved ones,’ she continued. ‘They die off all around you, one by one. Losing Monty has been very hard, but I lived a large part of my life before we met. When we did get together he was a workaholic and often away. I grew used to him not being here . . . But losing my girlfriends has in many ways been much harder . . .’
She stood up and plucked a photograph from a collection on a side table. It was of four women, all sitting in deckchairs and smiling. The one with dark hair was obviously Cricket when she was much younger.
‘They were my sisterhood.’ She gazed upon them for a moment, then pointed each of them out. ‘This is Una. She was my best friend. We used to share digs together in London and would speak every day, sometimes several times a day. Veronica I met when we were in a play together . . . we used to go to a matinee every Wednesday. And Cissy worked at the local library where Monty often liked to go and write. At first I was horribly jealous, you know. I thought he might take a shine to her. She was ever so pretty.’ She smiled. ‘But then we became the best of friends. She was forever giving me books she’d read and loved . . .’ She trailed off, remembering. ‘They were always here for me. I miss them all terribly.’
Listening to her talking, I realized that in a funny kind of way we had something in common. I knew how she felt. My friends hadn’t died, they’d just got married and had babies, but I missed them too.
‘But let’s not be gloomy.’ She shook herself, and replaced the photograph. ‘I’m sure I’ve taken up quite enough of your time.’
‘Not at all,’ I protested, but it was late. I thanked Cricket for the interview and as we said goodbye, she called after me.
‘By the way, it was my friend Una who told me never to join the Blue Rinse Brigade.’ She waved cheerfully. ‘She said they might kill you.’
I’m grateful for: