‘When we were in France, my dad told me there was this woman my mum knew. I think they were lovers.’
‘OK.’ Kelly folded her arms on the table. ‘This is interesting.’
‘Listen. You were round the flat so much. Did my dad ever say anything about someone called Connie? Constance Holden? She wrote this book.’ I tapped the cover of The Locust Plague.
Kelly looked at it with interest. ‘I’m sorry, Rosie. No. It was so long ago.’ She gazed at me tenderly. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, I’m OK. I mean, I was a bit shocked.’
‘Have you told Joe?’
‘Yeah. Well, not everything. I told him Constance Holden was a writer that my mum knew.’
‘And?’
I shrugged. ‘It wasn’t a big deal.’
She sighed.
‘Anyway. He doesn’t like it when I go on about my mum.’
‘Well, I guess it’s just ’cos none of us know what to say or do, Rosie.’
I looked down at the table. I was sitting with my father again, on that Brittany beach. I closed my eyes, thinking I might cry.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ said Kelly.
‘Oh, god. Yeah,’ I said. I reached out and gave her hand a squeeze, feeling the tectonic plates of our love, shifting once again.
‘Mummy, when are we going?’ said Mol.
I looked away towards the counter, where Zoë was cleaning the coffee machine, her young face set in concentration, the fine spray of acne on her forehead that only seemed to enhance her lovely, youthful beauty. My life felt insubstantial, yet my body was weighted and I was wading deep.
*
After we said our goodbyes, I decided not to go straight home. I left the cafe and sat down on a bench in a nearby park, thinking about the conversation with my father. I thought not of his ominous commentary on Constance Holden, but more of the way he had urged me to think of a language or a skill, as if what I was right now was not enough. I remember you were set for great things! was a refrain I’d often heard. In fact, only one seismic thing had ever happened to me. I hadn’t been enough for my mum to want to stay.
The fact of this had finally caught up with me. It had been gnawing and gnawing at me until I couldn’t find the strength to fight the message that had wrapped itself around my heart for thirty-odd years. And now I didn’t know who I was any more, or what on earth I was supposed to do with myself. I felt no kindness towards myself. I was ashamed at my stasis and ineptitude – because the truth is, everyone has their losses, their shames, their obsessive thoughts, and these people seem to manage it. Somehow they do it – they get on, they make a life for themselves. I hadn’t managed it. I was in thrall to a ghost of a woman, and a boyfriend who seemed to live in his own fantasy, and I hadn’t made anything for myself. I didn’t have a Mol, or a gigantic Instagram following, or a book in my name, or a wife to live with by the sea.
Fuck it, I thought. Fuck it. I got out my phone and typed into the search bar: Deborah Clarke, literary agent.
Self-consciousness in a woman’s life is a plague of locusts.
1982
9
Driving from the airport over the LA freeway in the taxi the film agency had sent, Elise, jet-lagged, longed to leave already. But the lifestyle there! people had said, so she remained by Connie’s side in search of lifestyle. Back in London, Constance had also claimed to be unsure. But looking at her now, in her sunglasses, gazing at the sprawl of LA, turning to Elise every now and then with a grin, Elise wondered quite how unsure Connie really was. They’d had a call from her agent, Deborah, shortly before they left England. Barbara Lowden – the Barbara Lowden, two-times Oscar winner, grande dame not just of this town, but of every cinema screen in the Western world – had said yes to playing Beatrice Jones. Connie and Elise had simply stared at each other agog at the news, before erupting into hoots and whoops and getting incredibly drunk at the pub at four p.m.
Elise had read an article on LA in the hairdresser’s, which had described the city as ‘a place of strange dreams and drinks called Brain On, algae shots and reefer and blood-test diets, bungalow buildings hiding truths behind dark doors.’ Can I live there? she had wondered. She kept thinking of the scene in the novel The Godfather, when Tom Hagen comes to LA to see the head of a movie studio, and witnesses a prepubescent girl tottering from the man’s office like a broken fawn. She thought now of broken fawn legs, of Bette Davis, of Joan Crawford, how long eyelashes masked a starlet’s poverty, and how despite all that, the glamour never faded.
Beyond, beach; yes, sunshine; yes, the sense of opportunity. But up close, Elise just wanted Connie. She wanted peace and calm, and small acts of living. Connie was strong at the moment: flying into LA with her famous novel embedded in both her physical body and her abstract self. Like an amulet, it would protect her in a place like LA, where once she would have felt so pointless. Elise did not have an amulet. She only had Connie.
*
Like all cities, parts of it they drove past looked abhorrent; there was the layer of smog, the air of enslavement, the endless streams of cars. Healtheeeeeeee 4 U! screamed a billboard. The taxi had its radio on: ‘Buy! Buy! BUY!’ it yelled. The advertisement seemed never to stop; the word threatened to overwhelm her. They drove past a huge metal ringed doughnut, erected outside a diner. The doughnut, ingeniously bulbous, easily the height of an average elephant, had rusted on its rotator. Paralysed but very present, it loomed past; Elise tried to take a photo, but the taxi had moved on, the doughnut diminished to a Polo mint. The taxi drove past another giant billboard, perched above the road. All you saw of it was a woman’s face, huge and immaculate, with ravenous eyes, and the words, THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE.
‘Oh my god!’ squealed Connie. Elise winced. She didn’t associate squealing with Connie. ‘It’s her. Can you believe it? It’s Barbara Lowden!’
‘Should we go and see her in it?’ said Elise.
‘We should,’ said Connie. ‘I can’t believe it. She’s – I mean, is there actually anyone more famous?’
‘The Queen. The Pope?’
Connie grinned, readjusting her sunglasses. ‘I bet more people want to sleep with Barbara Lowden.’
Barbara Lowden. Soon, they would meet her. How ridiculous it seemed.
Silvercrest, the studio making Heartlands, had rented a bungalow for Connie. The taxi reached West Hollywood and meandered round silent floral streets, finally stopping at a low-slung building in a Spanish-colonial style, still and quiet, surrounded by jungle-like foliage discreetly tamed, sentinels of cacti adeptly lining the borders, the windows dark and unyielding. It astonished Elise how far away the house in Hampstead felt, which in turn had felt so far away from the tiny flat in Brixton. All the places she had called home, but which never really belonged to her.
‘Are you ready?’ asked Connie.
‘I’m ready,’ she said, although she didn’t know what she was ready for.
Connie rang the doorbell and somewhere deep in the bungalow, they heard a chime. Within a minute, a woman answered, dressed as a maid. Her name, improbably, was Maria. Maria was shy and young, and nothing like Mary O’Reilly back home.