Curtain Call Read online

  That was it – the foreboding – it was lunch with her mother, today. Worse, lunch with her mother on her birthday. How old was she now? Nina calculated it at fifty-nine, though that was certainly not an age Mrs Land would admit to. Her company didn’t count as an ordeal, exactly, though it did demand on Nina’s part a careful management of irritations brewed over a lifetime’s exposure to her mother’s brittle vanity and pettish grievances. Having the example of such a mother had made her determined not to be remotely like her, and the vigilance it entailed was faintly exhausting. Whenever she explained this to friends she realised how undaughterly she must sound. Her mother’s life had not been an easy one, both through her own failings of character and the operations of fate, and Nina knew she ought to feel sorry for her instead of harping on her tiresomeness. The result of these guilty ruminations would be a birthday gift whose extravagance her mother would unsuspectingly take as her due.

  She crushed her cigarette on the saucer and climbed dripping out of the tub. The heat of the bathwater had steamed up the mirror, presenting an irresistible tabula rasa. With her finger she traced a dainty pair of initials, NL + SW, and encircled them with a heart. ‘Silly,’ she snickered after a moment, and wiped it clear. She stared at her reflection, warily amused by her towel-turbaned head: it reminded her of the genie she had played in panto at the Eastbourne Hippodrome. Below it her face glowed pink. She had turned thirty-two in April, supposedly in the prime of her acting life, yet she knew how precarious was the ground beneath her. A string of bad notices, an unsympathetic director or a stone-cold flop could disable you, to say nothing of that pack of younger, brighter, hungrier actresses snapping at your behind, taking your work. That was the trouble – you were always worrying about the one at your back.

  She had just descended to the hall when a door behind her moaned on its hinges and Mrs Keeffe sidled into view. She was a mousy-haired widow of uncertain age whose slight stoop made it look as if she were trying to peer up her interlocutor’s nose. Nina occasionally wondered what she wore under her never-changing floral-patterned housecoat, though felt it would be no hardship at all to remain ignorant on the subject. Her landlady treated Nina with a mixture of disapproval and respect, the former born of an older generation’s understanding of the word ‘actress’, the latter encouraged by a vague perception of her lodger’s glamorous life: Mrs Keeffe had once seen her being dropped off outside the house in a Rolls-Royce.

  ‘Didn’t hear you come in last night,’ she said, addressing a point some distance over Nina’s shoulder.

  ‘Ah – we had a late one,’ Nina replied.

  Mrs Keeffe gave her head a little shake. ‘Well, I hope someone brought you to the door. ’Snot safe for a lady’ – she gave Nina a lightning once-over – ‘out on her own in the West End.’

  ‘Whatever d’you mean?’

  ‘You don’t read the paper?’ Her mouth formed into a perfect ‘O’ of prim dismay. ‘Been another murder – girl found outside a hotel.’

  Another murder? Nina was not aware there had been a first. ‘And the police think it’s the same . . .?’

  ‘Oh yes. Same man. Strangles ’em,’ she added with a ghoulish twinkle.

  ‘How awful,’ said Nina. She had walked home alone last night. ‘A friend dropped me off anyway – in his car.’

  ‘You don’t wanna know what he does to them . . .’ continued her landlady.

  ‘No, I’m sure I don’t, Mrs Keeffe,’ she said, opening the front door and turning to offer a little wave. ‘If anyone calls, I’m out all day. Goodbye.’

  By the time Nina reached the restaurant in Maiden Lane her mood was on another downswing of agitation. Her mistake had been the bookshop on the way. She had already bought her mother’s birthday present on Regent Street – a vertiginously priced bottle of Patou’s Joy – and, with a few minutes to spare, had popped into Foyle’s for a browse. She had chosen a couple of books – Elizabeth Craig’s Bubble and Squeak for her mother; South Riding by Winifred Holtby for herself – and was taking her little chit to the payment desk when she spotted it in the shop’s selection of new books. It was a compendium of reviews by James Erskine, theatre critic of the Chronicle, and carried the ominously punning title Withering Slights. She plucked the top one from the little stack and, with a hollowing sensation in her chest, riffled through the index. And there she was, unarguably, Land, Nina, 91–2 – a reprinted review of her first-ever starring role, in a play called Fire in the Hole. Her eye sought out the paragraph she had read in the paper four years ago:

  It is difficult to judge whether at this age Miss Land’s horse-faced looks are going to turn to beauty, or else settle into something gaunt and hard. There is no doubt she can act, though she tends to be elusive in the emotional passages: does true feeling rage beneath that cold exterior or is she merely benumbed? She is glamorous but ungainly, does not know how to walk, and has not acquired enough sense to avoid showing her plain legs. Yet there is a quality – a disconcerting sultriness – that draws your eyes to this coltish creature and prevents you from noticing others. If I sound hesitant, it is only because I write this with my fingers crossed.

  She could recall it, almost word for word, and the outrage that followed. Ungainly? Plain legs? Horse-faced? His words of praise offered no balm to his strictures, keen as paper cuts. Yet back then there was comfort at least in knowing that the review, however mortifying for a day, would be forgotten by the next, when Erskine would have someone else pinned beneath his critical microscope. Now the thing had been resurrected for all to read, ambered forever between hard covers. At the time she had written in furious complaint to the Chronicle, explaining to the editor that she did know how to walk, and what credentials did their ‘esteemed critic’ possess to judge whether etc., etc. Thank God common sense had prevailed: she had torn the letter into pieces. Admitting the hurt would be to hand victory to the swine. But it did hurt – it rankled.

  Across the room she spotted her, ensconced at a banquette. Nobody ensconced herself quite so comfortably as her mother. She was talking to the maître d’ in a simpering manner that Nina knew of old; it involved a good deal of giggling and tapping of the man’s forearm. As she approached the table she felt herself to be interrupting something, though her mother greeted her with a small squeal of delight that seemed half genuine and half display for the diners nearest to them.

  ‘Darling!’ she cried, as Nina leaned through a cloud of Floris to kiss her powdered cheek. The maître d’, with a courtier’s air of ingratiation, bowed to her and stepped away.

  ‘Hullo, Mother – happy birthday,’ she said, amused by her mother’s false surprise at her proffering gifts. What – for me? she seemed to say. Annabel Land carried the slightly tense demeanour of a one-time English rose who had not yet accepted the fade of her bloom, and probably never would. In fact (Nina had to admit) she looked good for her age, with a clear-eyed gaze, a hard, high bust and only the smallest wrinkles at her eyes and mouth. She maintained an astonishing confidence in her own attractiveness: that her twenty-odd years’ seniority to the maître d’ might be an obstacle to flirtation would never have occurred to her. She expected men to take her at her own estimation, which was high. She hardly glanced at the Elizabeth Craig cookbook, seeming to sense the richer prey awaiting in the Dickins & Jones box.

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’ cooed Mrs Land, eagerly clawing at the sleek package and prising out the bottle of Joy. Having dabbed a little of the perfume on her wrist, she plunged into an ecstacy of inhalation. Nina, watching, raised her just-filled glass without comment. Her mother, not content with this silent toast, picked up her own glass. ‘Happy birthday to me!’

  Nina gave an involuntary laugh: the line was so very characteristic of her. Mrs Land, an only child born to doting parents, had been raised on an inviolable idea of her own deserts; producing children of her own had never encroached on that principle. As a girl Nina had not been encouraged in a similar indulgence of her will, though when she was fiv
e she had wanted to be an admiral in the British Navy. She had imagined that, as reward for her valour on the high seas, the King would set her up in one of the grand mansions on Piccadilly, or Park Lane – the sort they were knocking down nowadays.

  Interpreting her daughter’s laugh as simple affirmation, Mrs Land handed over the tasselled menu. ‘I’m going to have the lobster mousse, then the grouse,’ she declared brightly. ‘They do game so nicely here.’

  Nina sensed her mother’s cheeriness might not be entirely due to the birthday fuss. ‘How’s Felicity?’ she asked, wondering if her older sister was pregnant again.

  ‘Fine, fine. John’s doing awf’ly well at the Treasury.’

  ‘And Bee?’ Bee was her younger sister, and her mother’s favourite. Mrs Land sighed.

  ‘Still hasn’t settled at the school, poor darling. The headmaster’s a perfect brute, she says. Oh, she asked me whether you could get her a box at the play for a Saturday in October.’

  ‘Quite probably – if she can pay for it.’ Bee (her actual name was Elizabeth) was a teacher, like her mother, and had inherited from her, if not the application, then certainly the sense of entitlement.

  ‘You can’t get a box . . .?’

  ‘Not for free,’ said Nina crisply.

  ‘Well, just two in the stalls, then.’

  As lunch proceeded in its desultory way, she wondered how long it would take her mother to ask how she, Nina, was getting along. Whereas most civilised people she knew regarded conversation as a form of tennis – you put a few questions over the net, then your opponent would lob a few back – Mrs Land was strictly in the business of receiving rather than serving. By the time Nina had finished her fillet of plaice she was low on supplies of chat, and so decided on provocation instead.

  ‘I’m thinking of going up to Liverpool,’ she said. ‘To visit Pa’s grave.’

  Mrs Land tucked in her chin sharply. ‘Why on earth would you do that?’

  ‘Because I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see. They put him in an unmarked grave.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I thought it might be time to have a headstone made.’

  From the disbelieving look on her mother’s face Nina knew she had hit a nerve. Charles Land was for years unmentionable in the family. During a lonely and incompatible marriage to their mother he had worked, amid long absences, as a freelance journalist, a sheet-music salesman and a director of a short-lived railway company. Three years after the birth of his youngest daughter he chucked in everything and cleared off; he was last heard to be on his way to America. He got as far as Liverpool, where instead of taking ship he disappeared into a rackety life of drink and debt. Letters from him arrived intermittently at their home in Westbourne Park (the shabby-genteel side), then petered out, and they were left with only rumours of his whereabouts.

  When, some years ago, Mrs Land received a letter from a vicar in Toxteth telling of her husband’s death – he had been living in a home for vagrants – Nina was surprised by her own grief. She had been six or seven when he left, but she could remember a tall, rather strapping man with a ready laugh (he had been most amused by her naval ambitions) and had nursed a curiosity about him undaunted by her mother’s pursed silences. At some point, maddened by an obscure impulse to see his resting place, Nina had written to the vicar, who had replied in a kindly, reserved manner that Charles Land was buried in a plot at St James’s Cemetery, Toxteth. She had been undecided over what to do about it ever since.

  Mrs Land’s mouth tightened pointedly. ‘I’d say it’s a ridiculous waste of your time and money.’ Seeing Nina’s philosophical shrug, she added, ‘What d’you think you owe to him?’

  ‘Well, my existence, I suppose . . .’

  Her mother’s scowl looked about to set firm when the maître d’ reappeared to clear their plates, and she reverted to flirtatious gaiety. After another perusal of the menu, and another consultation with the waiter, Mrs Land decided she would have the crème brûlée. Nina had a cigarette. By the time coffees were served the good mood had been restored, and the matter of the headstone forgotten. Talk had turned to her mother’s recent dinner invitation from their friend and benefactor Mr Dorsch. He was a German-born businessman who, having settled with his family in Westbourne Park (the fashionable side), had more or less saved the Lands from destitution after their father had scarpered. He had sponsored Nina and her sisters through their time at St Paul’s Girls, an education that would have been beyond their means even if Charles Land had stayed put. It was understood that Mr Dorsch’s patronage sprang from the very high regard in which he and his wife held Mrs Land, whom they had employed as piano teacher-cum-governess to their own children. The wife, Monica, had died three years ago.

  ‘But Mr Dorsch has asked you to dinner before,’ said Nina warily.

  ‘Not since Monica passed away. And Eric was very particular about it being a dinner à deux.’

  ‘I see. And do you have reason to think he may . . .?’

  Her mother’s studied little laugh confirmed it: Mr Dorsch, or Eric as he had become known, was on the market again, and she had put herself at the front of the queue. Nina’s immediate instinct would have been to advise caution – to Mr Dorsch. The thought of that kindly, urbane gentleman linked with her mother for life was a consummation devoutly to be avoided. But of course she betrayed no such misgiving.

  ‘I suppose he’s still doing his charitable works,’ was all she did say.

  ‘Oh yes. Eric is a great philanthropist,’ replied Mrs Land, with a rather complacent nod. ‘He’s one of those people who only thinks of others.’

  Nina found herself biting back a tart reply as Mrs Land scooped the last of the crème brûlée into her mouth. She lit another cigarette and watched as her mother rearranged her handbag to accommodate her birthday gifts. This involved taking out that day’s Daily Mail, with a below-the-fold headline on which Nina’s eye happened to fall. SECOND TIEPIN MURDER: GIRL FOUND OUTSIDE HOTEL. It was the one Mrs Keeffe had been telling her about this morning. She idly craned her head around to read:

  The body of a young woman was discovered yesterday morning near Russell Square, Holborn. She had been strangled and left in a service yard at the rear of the Imperial Hotel. The pathologist estimated that she had been dead for about six hours. According to a police spokesman, the victim’s tongue had been pierced by a metal pin, a grisly signature that links it to the murder of another young woman in the Haymarket last month. continues page 3.

  Nina felt a sudden panicky acceleration in her heartbeat. It was the reference to the Imperial which had done it. If the girl had been found yesterday morning that meant she had been murdered the same day she and Stephen had been there. And now she thought again of that unpleasant scene in room 408, and the scowling man she had interrupted. Could it possibly be the same? – a sudden clarified memory of the terror-struck girl flashed in her mind’s eye. How had it not registered before?

  ‘Oh God,’ she said in a half-whisper.

  Mrs Land looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing – I’ve just been reading that grisly story – the murdered girl . . .’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it dreadful?!’ cried Mrs Land. ‘They say he stabs a tiepin through their tongues.’

  The note of relish in her mother’s voice was very like her landlady’s that morning. People loved to know ghastly details. And they loved even more to let others know.

  ‘Mother, I’m sorry, I just have to make a telephone call,’ said Nina, rising from the table. She hurried, unseeing, through the dining room and found the phone booth in a side corridor. The air within felt unpleasantly warmed from the chaotic emotions of recent usage. In her diary she found the number of Stephen’s studio at Tite Street, and recited it to the operator. On the fifth ring he picked up, his drawled ‘Hullo’ echoing as though from a deep well.

  ‘Stephen, it’s me. Have you seen the paper today?’

  ‘Um, no. I think the Standard’s ly
ing around.’

  ‘Have a look at it. Please – it’s important.’

  Hearing her troubled tone, Stephen leaned across his sofa and plucked the paper off the floor.

  ‘What’s on the front page?’ she asked him.

  He considered. ‘Some story about a murder . . .’

  ‘Read it out to me.’

  He did so, his voice curious at first, then slowing into realisation as he read down the column: ‘. . . the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square. Hmm.’ He fell silent; she could almost hear his mind working.

  ‘You understand, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Same day.’ A tap on the glass behind made her jump. A man was outside, waiting to use the telephone. Blast. ‘Stephen, there’s something I need to tell you. May I come to the studio?’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘Yes, right now.’

  He looked at his paint spattered hands. He had actually been blazing away, hard at it, but of course he assented, just before the line went dead.

  Half an hour later a cab was depositing her at the foot of Tite Street. She had almost bundled her mother out of the restaurant in her haste (Mrs Land had looked rather put out), waving a distracted goodbye before half sprinting down to the Strand. In the cab she tried to compose herself, but only by degrees did the frantic flutter of her heart subside. She wanted to be able to talk to him about it coolly, rationally.

  His housekeeper let her in with barely a glance. Nina had worried at first that it might look odd, a young woman turning up unannounced in the middle of the afternoon, but then she realised that Stephen would have models and all sorts trooping up and down the stairs here. She was just another in his regular cavalcade of guests.

  His smile when he opened the door did something to reassure her: they would be in this together. He took her coat, and asked if she wanted a drink.

  ‘Thanks, no. I had a couple at Rule’s – to get me through lunch with my mother.’