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  Contents

  Winston Graham

  Dedication

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Winston Graham

  After the Act

  Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

  Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

  Dedication

  For Andrew

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  The day after I met her I flew back to London. I’d promised Harriet to be home for the Friday evening.

  Harriet and I had just moved into this new flat in Spanish Place, and when I got home I found she had invited four of our friends to dinner—more, I suspect, to show off the flat than for the sheer pleasure of their company, though perhaps Tim Dickinson was a special case.

  The main room, where we did all our living, was big and high and square with two tall windows. We had pulled out the tiled grate, put in by someone in the twenties, and built a wide brick one. In front of the fireplace were two emerald-green velvet settees at right angles about an Angola rug. Behind one settee was a carved African chest which served as a drinks table, and between the windows was the long dining table—a marble slab on cast-iron legs.

  In the ordinary way Harriet was too uninterested in food herself to concentrate on the cooking of it, but given an occasion she could do well, and we ate well tonight. I was trying hard not to think of last night and the girl.

  I’m not a promiscuous man, and in the seven years of marriage to Harriet I had hardly so much as glanced elsewhere. Of course we had had our ups and downs, and there had always been Harriet’s health; but I had been working hard, one aim only in view, on the whole content. Certainly I had had no straying fancies in Paris.

  But sometimes you don’t have to look, or even be receptive; the lightning strikes and—God help you—there it is.

  The guests at dinner—not unwelcome by me because they shock-absorbed the first evening home—were Ralph Diary, my agent, prospering with me after—at least, so far as I rated—eight years in the wilderness, a Jew, prematurely bald, lisping, quietly on the mark; Tim Dickinson, an old friend of Harriet’s, tall and wiry, a solicitor, comfortably off and well connected, who had lost a leg in the war and a wife in the courts but no urbanity with either; Mary Arlett, the blonde who had acted in two of my earlier plays; and Isabel Chokra, the dress and stage designer, married to the naval attaché at the Thai Embassy.

  They asked about Paris, and that way I could talk and think of almost the same thing. I told them it was settled Paul Charisse would produce; he was hoping to get Marie Paladini and Jules Leblanc in the leads. Apart from that, everything waited on Kluseman’s translation, which should be through in a week or so.

  I did not mention the cocktail party Charisse had given last night at the Hotel Meurice. It could hardly have been more trite, the way I met her and the setting, but triteness is only life repeating itself: one shies away from the familiar patterns only to find that the new designs minister to the same end.

  People and cigarette smoke, Lanvin and Givenchy and the bubbles of champagne in a room of gilt ceilings and Empire furniture. Paul Charisse was the son of a newspaper magnate and his approach to the theatre, while strictly professional, was not limited in finance. Nor was he limited to the theatrical groups. Jules Leblanc, who was almost certain for the play, was a square, short-legged, cynical man, and as if to entertain me he carried on a gentle running commentary on the guests which was audible only to me and to the yawning sixteen-year-old beauty at his side.

  ‘There’s the Duc de Beloff. The eyeglass he’s wearing is to disguise the glass eye he says he lost in the war; actually it was poked out by Mme. Job. Mme. Job, she’s over there, looks like a wolf-hound; she was never pretty, but such lecherous vitality. Job is that Toulouse-Lautrec figure—vastly rich from motor cars; has a yacht at Cannes that he never uses and won’t lend. D’you recognise the late war-minister, Capriot; he’s going downhill quickly with Parkinson’s disease; they say he nearly got rid of Indo-China three years early by nodding too often. And there’s Lord Antar, he acquired that nose before penicillin was discovered.…’

  In a far corner of the room, with fingers as gouty as Frederick of Prussia’s, a middle-aged woman in a chiffon frock was playing discreet melodies on a grand piano. It all seemed a long way from my cramped study in Glebe Avenue, Southfields, where fifteen months ago all this had begun. (It’s a surprise I have not yet had time to get over: the flowering into theatrical glamour of the painfully conceived idea, the drably arduous execution.)

  The girl was not far from the piano when I first saw her, and the woman was playing a selection from South Pacific, her fingers skidding apologetically. The girl was talking to a haggard man with charcoal-grey hair, and after a minute their conversation lapsed and she looked right across the room at me.

  Love, attraction, the sexual spark, however you like to label it, does not depend so much on visual perception as on a sort of innate recognition. Even now, talking to my wife and our friends over the dinner table and after a lapse of only twenty-four hours, I couldn’t remember exactly what this girl looked like. Nor did her looks, pleasing though they were, begin to explain. Th
ey never do. As a writer I was annoyed that the emotion of headlong flight towards another person should be incapable of analysis. If one couldn’t separate out one’s own feelings—especially when in the grip of a fairly powerful impulse—it was a poor recommend for the created characters of the stage. (But did the created characters spring from an entirely different source—a sort of psycho-cerebral germ well removed from one’s heart and viscera? Did Shakespeare ever remotely understand himself as well as he understood Hamlet?)

  Tim Dickinson had asked me something; and for a second or two I watched Harriet helping herself to the champagne.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘ Charisse has done two of Anouilh’s plays. Pièces noires. That’s why I think I’ve been lucky to get him. Though I don’t pretend to see the resemblance that some people say they see between …’

  ‘Well, my dear Morris, I wouldn’t myself. Anouilh, forgive me, is the master of that genre. But there’s a sort of over-all similarity, a comic savagery, a feeling that despair and dread have got you by the throat, and that the feeling is outrageously funny.’

  Tim Dickinson, the amateur, had of course far more theories than the rest of us put together. Tim in fact was the sort of informed dilettante I sometimes liked and more often disliked. He had studied psychiatry before going into law, and for the last three years of the war—after he lost his leg—had worked in an army hospital. Isabel Chokra, whom I had known longer than any of the others, took him up on my likeness to Anouilh, which she didn’t see, and my mind slipped away again.

  I can’t remember even now exactly how we met, with what degree of interest the move was made, whether she came to meet me, but when I spoke to her we were some way from the piano. I asked her in French if I could get her more champagne, and she said thank you the waiter is bringing me some. But I am British, you know. Close to, she was less frail, her lips fuller, she was younger than I’d thought. The smile was wide, gracious, unreserved, with a suggestion of appetite; a tip of tongue moved to moisten her lips.

  ‘Enjoying the party?’

  ‘Very much. You’re Morris Scott, aren’t you?’ A strange lilting lovely voice, moving up and down the sexual registers. ‘It’s your play, isn’t it, which is a great success in London—the success of the season?’

  ‘It’s running. What is your name? No one has introduced us.’

  ‘I’m Alexandra Wilshere. A secretary. Why should anyone? It’s only chance that I’m here.’

  The waiter came and we took fresh glasses. From being just another party at which one stood, glass in hand, with aching insteps and slight heartburn, trying to hear and to be heard and waiting till it would be polite to leave, the evening took a new turn. I was thirty-two and was not used to parties that took a new turn.

  Champagne, if that was the cause, was not having the same effect on me tonight; Harriet had bought three bottles, and it unlocked other people’s conversation, not mine. I looked across the table at my wife.

  Thirty-nine years old. Tall and rather lanky, with fine bones in an intelligent face which had never quite got to be beautiful and which now was gradually becoming mannish as maturity and ill-health left their mark. Dressed tonight in a tailored cream silk shirt and black velvet Pucci pants, which was the sort of wear she was always most at home in, Harriet, my constant companion, encourager, counsellor, stimulator and supporter for seven years of marriage and endeavour.

  She was talking about me. She had always been pretty susceptible to alcohol, but these last two years the susceptibility had become a complaint. A solitary drink sometimes would go to her head like a half bottle of whisky, it was bound up in some way with fatigue and her general metabolism.

  ‘… essential thing,’ she was saying, ‘ is not to become self-conscious about his work. As I see it, Morris is a natural. Technique with him is something instinctive; it’s either there or it isn’t—a part of the organ-organic growth of the dramatic thought. What I don’t want is that he should be praised and criticised and analysed almost out of existence the way Fry was. I wish he could go away somewhere, out—out of reach of all the clever criticism, the assessments, the c-comparisons.…’

  Good sense—she seldom talked anything else—but it set off old stirrings of irritation. When she got like this she would talk of me while I was there as if I weren’t there; as if I was some race-horse that has just won the two thousand guineas and mustn’t on any account be put off his feed for the Derby. Maybe it was not unnatural in her case to sound proprietorial; but any psychologist—even Tim—should have been able to point out her error.

  And last night there was this young woman of twenty-two. In the middle we’d been interrupted: Paul Charisse had wanted me to meet one of the great French comedians; then Jules Leblanc came up beside me again with his witty, scabrous commentary.

  ‘… mon cher, do you know Pidoux? That is a matter for congratulation. They say he keeps two Senegalese Negresses chained in his flat … and the young Gaston Eux, he is tone deaf, colour blind and impotent, but, as you observe, enjoys his food. At thirty-three he has had to have his Rolls made with extra-wide doors … And Adele Peyson—the woman with the feather and the long throat—allow me to tell you a little story.…’

  As soon as I could I edged back to the girl, but by now there was movement and one or two people were leaving.

  She said: ‘I’m secretary to the Comtesse de la Fayarde. Over there—the dark woman. She’s American. The Count is her fourth husband. I came with them tonight only because we’re on our way back from Longchamp. It’s an easy job. We live at Neuilly most of the time.’

  Information exchanged in short sentences, arbitrarily, like one seeing the other off at a railway station and we might not meet again for six months. (In fact we might not meet again ever.) Mother French, father Scottish; she’d lived most of her life in Edinburgh; it explained that indefinable accent when talking English, being an amalgam of both languages, adding semitones to a voice already set to music.

  With a blue-veined arm the Countess had hitched up her mutation mink and was steering towards us. I said: ‘I shall be in London tomorrow but may be back next week. Have you a telephone number?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gave it me. I did not write it down. Her employer was on us.

  ‘Private?’

  ‘No, but I am usually there.’

  ‘My dear Mr. Scott—it is Mr. Scott?—what a wonderful party. Thank you, thank you.’ I wondered if she thought I had given it. ‘Now we must leave you. Sandra, would you tell the Count …? And such a delightful idea, the music, but I just adore those old tunes.…’ As the girl moved away the Countess put a lot of diamonds, supported by her fingers, on my arm. She looked at me through bloodshot eyes which were barely visible among the mascara and the false eyelashes, like two sea anemones overgrown with weed. ‘They always surprise me, the French, but always.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. The most sophisticated race on earth, Mr. Scott, the most cultured, cultured to the point of decadence; yet almost naïve, almost provincial, if you follow my meaning.…’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘My dear Mr. Scott, who but the French ever laughs at a French farce? But who? And who among us crude Anglo-Saxons would ever have a top-level, but highest top-level, cocktail party and engage a bad pianist, but a really bad pianist, to play these corny old tunes?’

  Alexandra had gone across to a short square-built man with freckled hair and a stance as if he were going to block an escaping enemy.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way,’ I said.

  ‘They bring back memories, of course. I was in Nassau when Oklahoma! first broke.’ The Countess coughed throatily. ‘ Fishing from glass-bottomed boats. Memories … they’re as difficult to deal with as indigestion. You’re too young yet, Mr. Scott. Forsan et haec … what is that old Latin tag?’

  ‘It’s strange,’ said Harriet when our four guests had gone, ‘to hear you whistling that tune. What’s it called? What’s it—what’s it called?’
/>
  ‘ ‘‘Some Enchanted Evening.’’ From South Pacific.’

  ‘That’s right. How does it go? ‘‘You may see a stranger, across a crowded room.’’ You hardly ever whistle.’

  ‘Well, now’s the time to, if ever.’

  ‘I suppose Ralph told you the week’s figures?’

  ‘Not an empty seat. The libraries are renewing their block deals for six months ahead.’

  ‘I went to see him while you were away, to discuss American production. He’s of the opinion we should run it here at least till Christmas; then if it’s still flourishing we might let them put it on in New York separately; if it shows signs of dying here we should wait and take this production over intact.’

  Harriet was combing her hair in front of the mirror, she had long black Indian hair, hair which when plaited was like fine newly tarred rope.

  ‘Why did you bother? I’d already talked to Ralph and Basil about that.’

  ‘I didn’t know. Ralph didn’t say so.’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious we should have discussed it, isn’t it?’

  ‘I assumed you would have told me.’

  When I didn’t answer she said: ‘You could have told me. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  When she had drunk just that bit too much I was always full of a completely unreasonable irritation at everything she said; but tonight, for private reasons, I was patient.

  ‘I can’t tell you everything, my dear. Better to have waited until I came home, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s no harm done.’ She began to bind her hair, the big cornelian glinting. She was not fond of jewellery, and this, apart from our wedding ring, was the only ring she ever wore. ‘Did you do anything more about the translation while you were in Paris?’

  ‘What is there to do?’

  ‘Well, as it comes in you should get someone really intelligent to go over it with you line by line. I know it has got to go into—into—into the French idiom, but I was talking to Kitty on Wednesday and she said Kluseman sometimes takes wildly unnecessary liberties.’