The Skull Beneath The Skin

'But that isn't relevant. It was all a mistake. Tolly knows that. Everyone knows it. I suppose Ivo told you. That's typical of his malice and disloyalty. Can't you see that he's sick? He's dying! And he's eaten up with jealousy. He always has been. Jealousy and malice.'

Cordelia wondered whether she could have asked the question more tactfully, whether it had been wise to ask it at all. Ivo hadn't asked her not to betray their conversation but presumably he had hoped for discretion. And the weekend promised to be difficult enough without setting two of the guests at each other's throats. Direct lying had never been easy for her. She said cautiously:

'No one has been disloyal. Obviously I did some tactful research before I arrived here. These things do get talked about. I have a friend in the theatre.' Well that was true enough anyway even if poor Bevis was more often out than in. But Clarissa was uninterested in putative theatrical friends.

'I'd like to know what right Ivo has to criticize me. Do you realize how many careers he's ruined by his cruelty? Yes, cruelty! I've seen actors – actors mind you – in tears after one of his reviews. If he could have resisted the impulse to be clever he might have been one of the great British critics. He could have been a second Agate or a Tynan. And what is he now? Dying on his feet. He's no right to come here looking as he does. It's like having a death's head at table. It's indecent.'

It was interesting, thought Cordelia, the way in which death had replaced sex as the great unmentionable, to be denied in prospect, endured in a decent privacy, preferably behind the drawn curtains of a hospital bed, and followed by discreet, embarrassed, uncomforted mourning. There was this to be said about the Convent of the Holy Child; the views of the Sisters on death had been explicit, firmly held and not altogether reassuring; but at least they hadn't regarded it as in poor taste. She said:

'Those first messages, the ones that came when you were playing Lady Macbeth, the ones you threw away. Were they the same as the later ones, typed on white paper?'

'Yes, I suppose so. It was a long time ago.'

'But you can't have forgotten?'

'They must have been the same, mustn't they? What does it matter? I don't want to talk about it now.'

'It's the only chance we may get. I haven't been able to see you alone today and tomorrow isn't going to be any easier.'

Clarissa was on her feet now, pacing between the dressing-table and the bed.

'It wasn't my fault. I didn't kill her. She wasn't properly cared for. If she had been she wouldn't have had the accident. What's the point of having a child – a bastard too – if you don't look after it?'

'But wasn't Tolly at work, looking after you?'

'The hospital had no right to phone like that, upsetting people. They must have known that it was a theatre that they were calling, that West End curtains rise at eight, that we'd be in the middle of a performance. She couldn't have done anything if I had let her go. The child was unconscious, she wouldn't have known her. It's sentimental and morbid, this sitting by the bedside waiting for people to die. What good does it do? And I had three changes in the Third Act. Kalenski designed the banquet costume himself; barbaric jewellery, a crown set with great dollops of red stones like blood, a skirt so stiff I could hardly move. He meant me to be weighed down, to walk stiffly like an over-encumbered child. "Think of yourself as a seventeenth-century princess," he said, "wonderingly loaded with inappropriate majesty." Those were his words, and he made me keep moving my hands down the sides of the skirt as if I couldn't believe that I was actually wearing so much richness. And of course it made a marvellous contrast with the plain cream shift in the sleep-walking scene. It wasn't a nightgown, they used to sleep naked apparently. I used it to wipe my hands. Kalenski said, "Hands, darling, hands, hands, that's what this part is all about." It was a new interpretation, of course, I wasn't the usual kind of Lady Macbeth, tall, domineering, ruthless; I played her like a sex-kitten but a kitten with hidden claws.'.

It was, thought Cordelia, a novel interpretation of the part, but surely not altogether consonant with the text. But perhaps Kalenski, like other Shakespearean directors whose names came to mind, didn't let that bother him. She said:

'But was it true to the text?'

'Oh, my dear, who cares about the text? I don't mean that exactly, but Shakespeare's like the Bible, you can make it mean anything, that's why directors love him.'

'Tell me about the child.'

'Macduff's son? Desmond Willoughby played him, an intolerable child. A vulgar Cockney accent. You can't find a child actor now who knows how to speak English. Too old for the part too. Thank God I never had to appear with him.'

One biblical text came into Cordelia's mind, brutally explicit in its meaning, but she didn't speak it aloud:

Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Clarissa turned and looked at her. Something in Cordelia's face must have pierced even her egotism. She cried:

'I'm not paying you to judge me! What are you looking like that for?'

'I'm not judging you. I want to help. But you have to be honest with me.'

'I am being honest, as honest as I know how. When I first saw you, that day at Nettie Fortescue's, I knew I could trust you, that you were someone I could talk to. It's degrading to be so afraid. George doesn't understand, how could he? He's never been afraid of anything in his life. He thinks I'm neurotic to care. He only went to see you because I made him.'

'Why didn't you come yourself?'

^CI thought you might be more likely to accept the job if he asked you. And I don't enjoy asking people for favours. Besides, I had a fitting for one of my costumes.'

'There wasn't any question of a favour. I needed the job. I probably would have taken almost anything if it wasn't illegal and didn't disgust me.'

'Yes, George said that your office was pretty squalid. Well, pathetic rather than squalid. But you aren't. There's nothing squalid or pathetic about you. I couldn't have put up with the usual kind of female private eye.'

Cordelia said gently:

'What is it that you're really afraid of?'

Clarissa turned on Cordelia, her softly gleaming, cleansed, un-coloured face looking for the first time, in its nakedness, vulnerable to age and grief, and gave a sad, rather rueful smile. Then she lifted her hands in an eloquent gesture of despair.

'Oh, don't you know? I thought George had told you. Death. That's what I'm afraid of. Just death. Stupid isn't it? I always have been: even when I was a young child. I don't remember when it began, but I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin. Nothing traumatic happened to start it off. They didn't force me to look at my Nanny, dead in her coffin, nothing like that. And I was at school when Mummy died and it didn't mean anything. It isn't the death of other people. It isn't the fact of death. It's my death I'm afraid of. Not all the time. Not every moment. Sometimes I can go for weeks without thinking about it. And then it comes, usually at night, the dread and the horror and the knowledge that the fear is real. I mean, no one can say "Don't worry it may never happen." They can't say "It's all your imagination, darling, it doesn't really exist." I can't really describe the fear, what it's like, how terrible it is. It comes in a rhythm, wave after wave of panic sweeping over me, a kind of pain. It must be like giving birth, except that I'm not delivering life, it's death I have between my thighs. Sometimes I hold up my hand, like this, and look at it and think: Here it is, part of me. I can feel it with my other hand, and move it and warm it and smell it and paint its nails. And one day it will hang white and cold and unfeeling and useless and so shall I be all those things. And then it will rot. And I shall rot. I can't even drink to forget. Other people do. It's how they get through their lives. But drink makes me ill. It isn't fair that I should have this terror and not be able to drink! Now I've told you, and you can explain that I'm stupid and morbid and a coward. You can despise me.'