He loosed his arm, and made for the door. Tallulah made no attempt to stop him. She just said: ‘You should have seen Constantia.’
Constantia? Where had he heard that name? Of course, Lichfield’s wife.
‘She was a wonderful Viola.’
He was too tired for this mooning over dead actresses; she was dead wasn’t she? He had said she was dead, hadn’t he?
‘Wonderful,’ said Tallulah again.
‘Goodnight, Tallulah. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
The old crone didn’t answer. If she was offended by his brusque manner, then so be it. He left her to her complaints and faced the street.
It was late November, and chilly. No balm in the night air, just the smell of tar from a freshly laid road, and grit in the wind.
Galloway pulled his jacket collar up around
the back of his neck, and hurried off to the questionable refuge of Murphy’s Bed and Breakfast.
In the foyer Tallulah turned her back on the cold and dark of the outside world, and shuffled back into the temple of dreams. It smelt so weary now: stale with use and age, like her own body. It was time to let natural processes take their toll; there was no point in letting things run beyond their allotted span. That was as true of buildings as of people. But the Elysium had to die as it had lived, in glory.
Respectfully, she drew back the red curtains that covered the portraits in the corridor that led from foyer to stalls. Barrymore, Irving: great names and great actors. Stained and faded pictures perhaps, but the memories were as sharp and as refreshing as spring water. And in pride of place, the last of the line to be unveiled, a portrait of Constantia Lichfield. A face of transcendent beauty; a bone structure to make an anatomist weep.
She had been far too young for Lichfield of course, and that had been part of the tragedy of it. Lichfield the Svengali, a man twice her age, had been capable of giving his brilliant beauty everything she desired; fame, money, companionship. Everything but the gift she most required: life itself.
She’d died before she was yet twenty, a cancer in the breast. Taken so suddenly it was still difficult to believe she’d gone.
Tears brimmed in Tallulah’s eyes as she remembered that lost and wasted genius. So many parts Constantia would have illuminated had she been spared. Cleopatra, Hedda, Rosalind, Electra. .
But it wasn’t to be. She’d gone, extinguished like a candle in a hurricane, and for those who were left behind life was a slow and joyless march through a cold land. There were mornings now, stirring to another dawn,
when she would turn over and pray to die in her sleep.
The tears were quite blinding her now, she was awash. And oh dear, there was somebody behind her, probably Mr Galloway back for something, and here was she, sobbing fit to burst, behaving like the silly old woman she knew he thought her to be. A young man like him, what did he understand about the pain of the years, the deep ache of irretrievable loss? That wouldn’t come to him for a while yet. Sooner than he thought, but a while nevertheless.
‘Tallie,’ somebody said.
She knew who it was. Richard Walden Lichfield. She turned round and he was standing no more than six feet from her, as fine a figure of a man as ever she remembered him to be. He must be twenty years older than she was, but age didn’t seem to bow him.
She felt ashamed of her tears.
‘Tallie,’ he said kindly, ‘I know it’s a little late, but I felt you’d surely want to say hello.’
‘Hello?’
The tears were clearing, and now she saw Lichfield’s companion, standing a respectful foot or two behind him, partially obscured. The figure stepped out of Lichfield’s shadow and there was a luminous, fine-boned beauty Tallulah recognized as easily as her own reflection. Time broke in pieces, and reason deserted the world. Longed-for faces were suddenly back to fill the empty nights, and offer fresh hope to a life grown weary. Why should she argue with the evidence of her eyes?