I think she knew. I think she knew all along, even before the outward symptoms appeared. But didn’t want to spoil — not before she had to — that Cleopatra summer. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. One Sunday, that September, we drove out, with G— (an actor), to a pub we knew, somewhere in the depths of Warwickshire. A day of sweet, cidery sunshine. G— was in a strangely deferential, vaguely timid mood. If I told you who G— was, you would guess that this was not his usual style. We sat outside. She wore dark glasses and nobody recognised her. I went to get the drinks, and when I emerged, G— was kissing Ruth on the crown of the head. His own dark glasses — these incogniti—pushed up on to his brow, a hand on Ruth’s shoulder, his lips in her hair.
It wasn’t what you think. No, it wasn’t what you think. It was only the thought of the possibility. It could have been them, you see; it could have been Ruth and G— all along, not Ruth and me. Them, not us. I stood there in the doorway with the drinks, like someone standing outside their life, like someone suddenly without a life. You see, it was a solemn, intense, decorous kiss. Like a kiss of farewell, like the kiss of a priest. Like the kiss you give to the small, hard head of a child, conscious of its vulnerability, the brittleness of the skull. And I knew then, by the chill inside me, despite that soft sunshine, by the feeling that my body was like an empty sack, that she was going to die.
And her first role was Girl Number Three.
It was after her father’s death, some fifteen years ago, that I gave up my career (my blooming career as a third-rate academic) to become her “manager.” All sorts of questionable motives might be ascribed to this — and perhaps were at the time. That I wished to be more at my wife’s side — in order, that is, to keep an eye on her. That I wanted to live off her earnings. In any case, it was a bogus job. Other people — agents, theatre and film people— “managed” Ruth. I was no more than a privileged secretary-cum-minder. Since my talents were limited, I sometimes hindered rather than helped proceedings. But I would still maintain that I did it out of a desire to protect her.
He died of a brain tumour. Or so they say. If you ask me, the doctors (naturally, I thought of my great-uncle George) were as baffled as we were. In the last stages he simply lost all power of identity. A mild-natured, obliging man, he slipped towards death with a stony, empty expression on his face, speechless and unhearing, not recognising his own wife or his own daughter and having no idea, so far as you could tell, who he was himself. It was as though the Bob Vaughan we knew dissolved away before some other grim, usurping, unappeasable being. Then he died.
Her mother is still alive. She married again several years ago. But I have lost touch since Ruth’s funeral and the bouts of strained communicativeness that follow a death. Now, of course, in my present woeful circumstances, I am beyond the pale. The fact is, we never got on; and neither were Ruth and her mother always the sweetest of friends. Without ever knowing it for certain, I have always imagined Joan Vaughan as the one who was against Ruth’s preposterous choice of career from the outset, waiting ever afterwards, notwithstanding all the evidence of success, to say, “I told you so.” While Bob was the classic, doting father of an only daughter, happy for his child to do whatever she wished. I picture Ruth as a young girl quarrelling with her mother, and Bob trying, rather ineffectually, to keep the peace.
I should pity Joan, who has lost a husband and a daughter, both before their time. But I don’t. She still harbours, I think, an image of Ruth as someone who might have done something solid and sensible with her life (whatever that may have been) and therefore have still been alive now; instead of this foolishness — see, it didn’t last long — this play-acting. Don’t try to be something you’re not.…
I should want to see Joan now, because only in the mother’s features might I still catch a glimpse, a living vestige, of the daughter. But that’s now how it works.
After her father’s death, Ruth’s acting took on this new dimension, this new depth and range. Everyone noticed it. But there was also — perhaps only I saw it — this new need of protection. This desire on my part to put my arms irremovably around her, as if I were holding her together, to beg for her a special immunity. Be there, always. I don’t know what makes some people exceptional — so that we say the world would be poorer without them. I don’t know why the distribution of love is so unfair. And it’s strange that I say I wished to hold her together, since it was she, after all, who held things together for me, who held my world together. I mean the world that had fallen apart (it did, you see) with my own father’s death.
You see, I protected her so she would protect me.
From Girl Number Three to the Queen of Egypt, from the Blue Moon Club to a palace by the Nile. A reviewer of those last performances wrote (without benefit of hindsight) that she evoked the “defiant incandescence of soon to be extinguished glory.” The formal obituaries referred to them as her “crowning achievement” and the “culmination of her career.” As if she had meant it that way. While the news columns dwelt on the “real-life drama”—“found dead,” “overdose of drugs”—and bandied about, without a trace of irony, it seemed, the phrase “tragic death.”
And no one, out of tact or impercipience, alluded to the simple fact that Cleopatra is a woman who, with serene and regal deliberateness, commits suicide.
“Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.”
I had to play this scene. I understood how hard it is to act. The lines were so awful, so unconvincing. I found myself uttering the hackneyed words “How long does she have?” To which, however, there was a perfectly actual, factual reply. I didn’t want to tell her. If you don’t say it, perhaps it won’t be true. If you don’t think about it, it will go away. But she simply faced me with the same question: “How long do I have?” She didn’t blink. I found I couldn’t lie. “Two or three months.” She came back with a little flurry of brightness — she was an actress, you see: “That much?” Then she gave a look, just like a little girl who’s been punished for getting beyond herself, for having big ideas about herself. I told you so, I told you so.
And there was, after all, this simple, banal explanation. She smoked. She had lung cancer. The common vice and common nemesis of nicotine. The gifted and famous are not exempt, you know. I should have told her to stop (I did), to cut it down. I should have said (but I didn’t know), if you don’t stop, you will die. But, but. The side effect of a certain way of life. Fuel, fire, ash. It might have been drugs, alcohol, screwing around and regular psychoanalysis. It was none of these. None. Just cigarettes. So many packs to learn a part. And the only time, she used to joke, she could do without, was when playing a non-smoking part (e.g., Cleopatra).
And besides, our bodies are ours — aren’t they? To do with as we like. And our lives. Our lives.