When Tilly saw them again, ten minutes later, the poor child was no longer singing. The mother – a brutal woman with crude tattoos and a mobile phone clamped to her ear – was yelling at her, ‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Courtney, you’re getting on my tits!’ She was furious, pulling her along and shouting at her. You knew what happened to children like that when they got home. Behind closed doors. Child cruelty. Snipping off all the little buds so that they could never blossom.
A little black thing among the snow. That was Blake, wasn’t it? Not that the ‘Twinkle,Twinkle’ little girl was black. Quite the opposite, as if she never saw the sun. Crying ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe. It was surprising more children didn’t have rickets. Perhaps they did. Tilly’s grandmother had had rickets, there was a photograph of her as a child, the only photograph of her, taken in a studio in some bleak, flat part of the East Riding. I by the tide of Humber would complain. Her grandmother, three years old if she was a day, had little bowed legs in boots, your heart wept for the past. You can’t change the past, only the future, and the only place you could change the future was in the present. That’s what they said. Tilly didn’t think she’d ever changed anything. Except her mind. Ha, ha. Very droll, Matilda.
Collier had turned out not to be so ‘amusing’, after all. Certainly nothing amusing about hanging around on set (basically, a big aircraft hangar in the middle of nowhere) at six thirty in the morning, freezing your cockles off. The set had been built in the grounds of a stately home belonging to Earl or Duke somebody-or-other. Bizarre, but then the aristocracy were always looking for money these days. ‘Purpose-built set,’ the producers said to her. ‘Cost millions, shows a commitment to longevity.’ Collier used to be on once a week, now it was three times and they were talking about four. Actors like donkeys, turning a wheel.
They’d brought Tilly in to play Vince Collier’s mother because they wanted to make the character ‘more human’, more vulnerable. Tilly had worked before with the actor who played Vince Collier, when he was a teenager, and she kept calling him by his real name – Simon – instead of Vince. Seven takes today just to say goodbye to him on a doorstep. Goodbye, Simon six times, the seventh take she just said Goodbye, dear. ‘Thank fuck,’ she heard the director say (a little too loudly). The name (‘Vince, Vince,’ the director muttered, ‘how hard can it be?’) just kept eluding her. It was in her brain but she couldn’t find it.
Nice boy, Simon. Ran her lines with her all the time, told her not to worry. Gay as a goose. Everyone knew, worst-kept secret in television. You couldn’t say anything because Vince Collier was supposed to be very macho. Simon’s boyfriend, Marcello, was staying with him, rented cottage, nicer than Tilly’s. They’d had Tilly over to dinner, lots of gin and Marcello had cooked a chicken, ‘Sicilian style’. Afterwards they drank some lovely rum that the boys had brought back from holiday on Mauritius and played cribbage. All three of them gloriously tiddly. (She wasn’t a lush like Dame you-know-who.) Lovely old-fashioned evening.
She thought she’d signed up for the duration (‘My pension,’ she murmured happily over her third Twinkle) and then last week they told her that her contract wasn’t being renewed and she was going to die at the end of her run. She had only a few weeks to go. They hadn’t told her how. It was beginning to worry her in some curiously existential way as if Death was going to jump out at her from round a corner, swinging his sickle and shouting, ‘Boo!’ Well, perhaps not boo. She hoped that Death had a little more gravitas than that.
Tilly herself was beginning to feel a lack of commitment to longevity. Some days the old ticker felt like a hard little knot in her chest, other days it was like a soft, fluttering bird trying to escape from its ribbed cage. She suspected that her alter ego, poor old Marjorie Collier, was going to meet a sticky end rather than expire gracefully in her bed. And then! Just as she was coming out of Rayners’ she encountered Death, exactly as she’d feared. Thought she was going to drop dead on the spot but it was just some silly boy in a skull mask. Sneering at her, jumping up and down like a skeleton on strings. Shouldn’t be allowed.
Bluebell Cottage. That was the name of the place she was staying in. A made-up name obviously. Used to be a farm worker’s cottage. Poor peasants, all mud and blood and up at dawn with the beasts in the field. She’d done a Hardy, oh years ago, for the BBC, learned a lot about agricultural labourers in the course of it.
We’ve got you a lovely cottage, they said, usually rented out to holiday-makers. They had cast and crew stashed everywhere – B and Bs, cheap hotels in Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, rental houses, even caravans. They would have been better off just building a Travelodge on set. Tilly would have liked a nice hotel, three-star would have done her. What they didn’t tell her was that she would be sharing the cottage with Saskia. Didn’t tell Saskia either by the look on her face. Not that she had anything against Saskia per se. All skin and bone, far too thin, lived on fresh air and fags – the Dame Phoebe March diet. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she said to Tilly the first time she produced a packet of Silk Cut. ‘I mean I’ll only smoke in my own room, or outside.’
‘Oh, go ahead, dear,’ Tilly said, ‘I’ve been around smokers all my life.’ (It was a miracle she wasn’t dead.) She wouldn’t want to fall out with her. Tilly hated falling out with people. It was funny because Saskia was such a clean girl (obsessively so, obviously had a problem, conducting germ warfare single-handedly) and smoking was such a filthy habit. Ballet dancers were the worst, of course, lighting up like chimneys the second they came out of class. Lungs like lampblack. Tilly used to live with a ballet dancer. That was after Phoebe left the Soho flat (1960 – turned out to be quite a decade for both of them), moving on and up to live with a director in Kensington. Douglas. He had belonged to Tilly first but Phoebe couldn’t abide Tilly having something that she didn’t. Very handsome man. Batted for the other side as well, of course. Nowt so queer as folk, as they said in the north. Phoebe used him up and left him behind after a year or so. Tilly and Douglas had remained fond of each other to the end. His end anyway.
Saskia played Vince Collier’s sidekick, DS Charlotte (‘Charlie’) Lambert. Keep it under your hat but she wasn’t the world’s greatest actress. She only seemed to have two expressions. One was ‘worried’ (with the variation ‘very worried’) and the other was ‘grumpy’. Very limited range, poor girl, although, like a lot of them, she looked good on the telly. Tilly had seen her in a play at the National. She was awful, just awful, but no one seemed to notice. Emperor’s new clothes. (Shades of Dame Phoebe again.)
Now that she had her new specs and could actually see, it was terrifying. Wednesday used to be half-day closing. Her father pulled the shutters down on the shop in the Land of Green Ginger and went off to live his mysterious other life with his fellow Rotarians. He spent a lot of time on the allotment as well, although there were never many vegetables to show for it. No more half-day closing, everything open all the time now, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. And where had all the money gone? You go to sleep living in a prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen? Where had the money gone, and why couldn’t they just get it back?
She had to get out of this God-forsaken place, make her way to the car park. Should you still be driving? an AD had asked her after she’d failed several times to reverse into her allotted parking space in the car park on set and he’d had to take over from her. Ruddy cheek! And anyway parking wasn’t the same as driving. She was still in her seventies, plenty of life left in the old bird yet.