Sylvia Sinclair
The Star
We’re in Italy now, even if the mountains all look the same.
Far off in the distance, though, I can see a beautiful powder-pink church and I don’t think they have so many of those in Switzerland.
Crazy, that you can hop over a mountain here and find yourself in a different country, whereas I didn’t leave the state of Montana ’til I was sixteen, then ran like hell and never looked back.
I feel like I’ve just clicked my ruby slippers together.
Except I’m not going home – unless I count her as home now, which maybe I do.
The snow rushes around my skis. I don’t have to pretend to ski like a baby deer on skates now. Oh, and it’s so nice to wear trousers that actually fit, you know, rather than cutting off circulation to a girl’s …
Catherine looks across at me and grins. I wink back.
The voice on the other end of the line that day. She sounded so … lost. Course I knew she wasn’t his secretary: I’d already spoken to his secretary.
‘Do you want to meet, honey?’ I asked her. ‘I think there are a few home truths you might want to hear. Call me if you want to talk.’
And you know what? She did. She came to my dressing room at the Almeida.
I thought at first she was exactly like she had sounded on the phone: a stuck-up, dull, none-too-bright little princess.
Later I came to realise that was just the mask she had created to hide her true self from the world.
That she was smart and cute and droll and even secretly a little rebel.
Some gardener that she nearly ran off with at school.
After that, we called each other several times a week, when her husband was away.
Sometimes she had to travel to London to ‘visit a women’s clinic’.
Funny how the length of her treatment coincided almost perfectly with the entire run of The Cherry Orchard!
We realised that both of us were being lied to by the same man. I’d already done my homework. Knew he had other women besides me. Knew I was the latest plaything, that he’d throw me over soon as I hit forty.
I make a nice wide turn, snow sparkling up like powder from a puff and feel the lovely, lovely weight of the gold shift on my back. You know what this weight feels like? It feels like power. It feels like freedom.
Look, maybe I wish we could have done it without the killing.
But we couldn’t. I’ve known some takers and some users in my time and Narracott was one of the worst. He’d taken from Catherine until he used up all she had.
He had it in him to destroy a woman. Maybe even to kill.
Her: that day on the mountain. Me: that night in the bath if he could have got away with it.
I could feel it, that he half wanted to.
I can make myself feel better about the Bruno fella, too.
He was half ready to go as it was. You know, he looked almost peaceful, after I’d done it.
We played our parts beautifully. Her invisibility like a magic cloak.
My razzle-dazzle a bright painted mask. Together …
lethal (and delicious) as absinthe and rye in a Sazerac.
It took a few slips on his part. A map of the Swiss Alps left out at home.
Both of us began to pay attention. Yours truly getting him drunk (said Sazeracs and martinis and the rest with a nice little finishing dash of benzos which I find highly effective in loosening any lover’s tongue), him telling me tales of derring-do, of the fortune he was going to find in the mountains that would more than replace the one he’d already gobbled up (his wife’s).
Even telling me the name of the hotel, even half-inviting me, before he realised that was a terrible idea.
It’s astonishing, really. The number of powerful, supposedly smart, men who have followed their peckers to their doom.
Catherine knew her husband was a phoney.
When he told his tales about his wartime heroics they’d change every time.
She knew the limp was a hoax. Stuff he shouted in his sleep.
Stuff he’d say to me when he was deep into his third drink: ‘I’m never going to heaven, my sweet, so we might as well have a good time down here.
’ We’ll never know the whole story but anyone with a cache of Nazi gold hidden in the mountains is probably not someone who deserves a medal for heroics.
When I think of my little brother, brave boy, gone to his end in the South Pacific. No grave, no medal, no nothing. Just a sense of duty. And Tony, pretending to be a hero … the thought of it makes me sick even now. Looked at that way, it might even have been a righteous execution.
Together we put together most of a pretty little puzzle.
And then we made a plan. The doc that called Narracott and told him he should take his wife away for a trip?
That was me. Didn’t take all those voice classes at The Actors Studio in New York for nothing!
What a schmuck! For her part, Catherine was a beautiful little schemer.
She threw away her sleeping pills and replaced them with paracetamol so she could play dead to the world and sneak out after her husband on his night-time adventuring.
She threw away the low blood pressure stuff too, so she could stand up and faint straight away on ‘finding out’ he was dead.
And she was the one who came up with the whole bit about the earring, blocking it all out like a piece of stagecraft!
I slipped it into her hand when she helped me to my feet that day on the slopes.
Oh, I did love seeing Tony’s face … he knew there was no way the thing could have been found in their hotel bed, as we’d never had a rendezvous there, but he couldn’t argue the point without exposing our other sordid little trysts.
You could say Catherine played director, the finest I’ve had.
And you know what? I think my performance here has been my best to date.
The meatiest role I’ve had in years. When would they ever have let me play a nun, without having to bring sex into it?
That was a clever touch of Catherine’s. She’s the sort of girl who has always been good at doing her homework.
And boy did she do her homework on that place.
She learned that it was a holy site, visited by many different orders of nuns.
Much better than trying to disguise ourselves as, for example, hotel staff: where there’d be one particular uniform.
That was bold. Even for me. But then I was taught the fear of God by a foster mother who I see now had nothing of God in her.
Once you learn that, it’s difficult to shake off.
She made a great little acting student, too. Thing is, she’d been acting for most of her adult life anyway. Fact is she’d gone so method on the role of Good Little Wife it took a while even for her to rediscover the real woman underneath it all.
That woman was more my type than the husband, really.
I’ve always been an equal opportunities kind of girl.
All the very best ones are: Marlene, Garbo, Tallulah B, Kathy Hepburn and the rest. But that ain’t box office, baby, so we created our little ‘sewing circle’.
Now I’m done with Hollywood before it’s done with me.
I don’t need its patronage – and patronisation; the measly slim pickings handed out for women over a certain age.
I’m ready to leave behind the loneliness, the pretence.
In Tinsel Town I’m pretty well dried up.
In the rest of the world, I have half my life ahead of me.
Still. Don’t think we won’t suffer for it. We will. But we’re only five years on from the biggest mass slaughter this world has ever known, when far, far better men were killed for far less. Gives a girl a little perspective.