The Woman Next Door Read online

  ‘Yes, I know they’re bringing it back, but I’ve already died, remember?’ Stella had said when her agent called her out of the blue.

  ‘If I understand it correctly,’ Bethany had said, ‘they want your old character, Cassandra, to be . . . well hang on, I’ll read you part of the email. What it says is, the presence of Cassandra in the revival series was inspired by the meaning of the character’s name. She is not just the woman who died in the final weeks of the last series, but a prophet who has passed over and weaves her way through the lives of the characters, providing narrative links and flashbacks, and extracting revenge on characters whom she believes have done her wrong in the past. We will see many old scores settled here, and Stella’s interpretation of Cassandra will obviously be the key to the character’s authenticity. Gareth Stokes is directing,’ Bethany continued, ‘and he’s insisting you’re the only person who can carry it off.’

  ‘It sounds abysmal; he probably thinks I’m the only person fool enough to take it on,’ Stella had replied. ‘I’d heard he’d gone a bit feral with the supernatural recently. Give me twenty-four hours to think about it.’

  She had put the phone down and gone next door to ask Polly what she thought. Their friendship goes back years to when they met on the set of a crime series for which Polly had written several episodes.

  Polly had hooted with laughter. ‘Bloody Gareth,’ she’d said, getting a bottle of gin out of the fridge. ‘Bloody Gareth. But of course you must do it. Honestly, Stella, it’ll only work if it’s you because all the old fans will be so thrilled to see you they’ll be prepared to suspend their disbelief.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be some sort of compliment?’ Stella had asked.

  ‘Well – yes of course. They loved Cassandra because of what you made of her. I bet Gareth had them write Cassandra back in and if you don’t agree they’ll have to drop that strand of the narrative. Go on, do it.’

  ‘I’ve already retired, twice.’

  ‘Third time lucky then! Go on, one last fling. Cheers!’

  So here she is now, a blanket around her shoulders in the early morning light, waiting for bloody Gareth. It’s not as though they’re not looking after her properly – but this is not natural territory for the elderly. Younger members of the cast and crew nip back and forth across the rocks, agile as mountain goats, carrying clipboards or clapper boards, light meters and cameras, mikes and mufflers. But at eighty there is nothing like rough terrain, segmented with gashes where white water boils up with spray, to make one feel one’s age and potential instability.

  Stella sighs. ‘Polly, where are you now?’ she murmurs, but she knows where Polly is because she got a text from her yesterday, with a picture of her sitting on a wall in Edinburgh, the castle in the background. As Polly doesn’t know anyone in Edinburgh, Stella would like to know who took that photograph, because even at her age, she can tell a selfie from a snap taken by someone else; someone who has managed to capture Polly with the smile usually reserved for her oldest friends.

  Stella shivers and pulls the blanket around her. One of the young goats . . . oh dear, whatever is her name? . . . is heading towards her with a large mug in her hand, and something else.

  ‘Oh! Tim Tams, six of them, darling, thank you. Don’t tell Gareth you brought me so many, he’ll sack you for blowing the budget.’

  ‘He’s not that bad,’ says the young woman. ‘He told me to buy in a lot as they’re your favourites.’

  They turn together to look at Gareth, who waves and mimes chomping on a biscuit. ‘Not long now, Stella, couple of minutes,’ he calls to her.

  ‘Bloody Gareth,’ she says, waving back, ‘that means quarter of an hour at least, don’t you think . . . um . . .’

  ‘Trixie,’ the girl supplies.

  ‘Of course, sorry, dear . . . Trixie. My memory’s getting worse.’

  ‘Why does everyone call him Bloody Gareth?’ Trixie asks. ‘They say it all the time as though it’s his name.’

  ‘It’s sort of become his name,’ Stella explains, ‘largely because he messes us all about so much, keeps everyone waiting, changes his mind a million times, does lots of unnecessary takes. He’s good but bloody annoying.’

  Trixie is looking at her, Stella realises, with the sort of affectionate bewilderment with which young people observe the elderly, as though they are a completely different species.

  ‘Well he thinks the world of you,’ Trixie says. ‘He was telling me that you were in Neighbours for a while.’

  ‘I was indeed. But that’s a very long time ago.’

  ‘Did you actually meet Kylie Minogue?’

  ‘Of course, we worked together for several months, and lovely Jason too. So sweet, both of them, they weren’t famous then. Jason was especially good in the part where he murdered that young girl . . .’

  ‘Was there a murder in Neighbours?’ Trixie asks in surprise. ‘I never knew that. I thought his character, Scott – wasn’t it? – I thought he was a really sweet sort of . . .’

  Stella looks at Trixie in confusion as the girl continues, then she cuts across her. ‘You’re right, Trixie, of course you are. Silly me, I got it mixed up with something else Jason was in.’ But she can’t for the life of her remember what production that was. She flushes with embarrassment, she’s done this quite a bit recently, muddled things, people, names. Sometimes she thinks she’s actually making up things that have never happened. And she overhears herself talking like the stereotype of an old actress in a soap which, of course, is just what she is at this moment, but normally she doesn’t talk like this, the little rhetorical flourishes, slightly unnatural intonations. Is she becoming one of those tedious old theatrical pains in the bum, boring everyone with their memories, big noting themselves with name- dropping and grand gestures? That’s not who she is, nor what she wants to be. She wants to be herself: Stella, the old woman who lives in the house with the blue front door, Joyce and Mac on one side, Polly on the other. Stella, eaten up with arthritis, reading three or four books a week, making her way slowly down to the Italian deli in Wray Avenue for her shopping, and usually in bed by nine o’clock. Here she is an old trouper, drinks in the pub at the end of the day, joking with the make-up artist, returning calmly to take after take, and speculating with June, who’s in charge of wardrobe, about who among the younger actors is sleeping with whom. But this other persona keeps creeping up on her: Stella – ageing star of stage and screen with all the stereotypical and pretentious baggage. I’m living a double life, she tells herself; what I need is to go home and lie down for a long time in a darkened room.

  ‘So were you . . . like, really famous or something?’

  ‘Famous or something . . . mmm . . . well how about we go for moderately well known,’ Stella says. ‘You know, one of those actors you see in small roles in lots of things but they’re never important enough for you to actually remember their names.’

  Trixie gives her a long look. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘probably my mum would’ve seen you, or my nan.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Gareth says we might have to wind up at nine ’cos there’s some sort of problem, and if it doesn’t get sorted we can all have the rest of the day off,’ Trixie says.

  Stella rolls her eyes. ‘Does he indeed? Well that’s a nice thought but I wouldn’t start making plans, Trixie, don’t ring your boyfriend or anything yet. We’ll probably still be here into the afternoon if Bloody Gareth runs true to form.’

  *

  Edinburgh

  The morning after the fire alarm Polly had eaten breakfast in her room while going through her presentation for the umpteenth time. She was not new to conferences and had, in the past, been a confident speaker. Back then, when she was young and very full of herself, she could fly through any sort of presentation by the seat of her pants and still make an impression. She’d been writing for television then, and at
one time – for a very short time – she had been considered the wild child of the industry, for her gritty, often bloodthirsty dramas set in the back streets of Kings Cross, or harsh, remote locations in the outback. But in her forties she’d begun to feel she had had enough of the dark side.

  ‘I can’t face shedding any more blood or planning any more murders,’ she’d told Stella at the wrap party for a short and particularly brutal series set during the gold rush. ‘I want to do something nice, a love story maybe, a mild family soap perhaps.’

  ‘But you’re so good at it, darl,’ Stella had said, ‘you’ve got a reputation for blood and guts.’

  ‘Well that’s just it,’ Polly had said. ‘I don’t think I want that sort of reputation. I’m a bit over being controversial and having to defend my penchant for brutality. I think I’ll take some time off.’

  The wild child period had been great financially, and she had headed for Europe, managing to pick up bits of work along the way. In Paris for three months she’d rented a cramped, rather damp room off the Boulevard St Michel, and fallen for the charms of Shakespeare and Company. There she discovered new writers and classics in both English and French, titles and authors she’d never heard of, and she would lose herself for hours among the packed shelves before finding a spot in the nearby café to dunk croissants in huge bowls of coffee, and read about everything but crime and violence. She learned a lot in those weeks, especially about the women who lived on the Left Bank in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. There were writers and artists, political activists, dancers, singers and musicians, and it was the minor characters that enthralled her. A new world of possibilities opened up for her. While she knew then that she would probably still have to make her living by writing for television, her new passion was to read and learn more about the lives of some of those women and to write about them.

  Back in Australia two years later she had met up again with Stella on the set of Neighbours. By then she had completed a year’s diploma in life-writing and had started to write a short biography of a barely known dancer. A stint on Neighbours helped to restore the bank balance, and when the biography was published, first in England and later in France, it was a surprising success. Two years later she followed it with another on a group of women who had formed an erotic writing club in Montmartre in the early thirties. It had been the end of television and the end of big money, but there were other, more lasting and satisfying rewards, and she began to teach some writing classes to top up her income.

  When Stella had first decided to retire, almost twenty years ago, she had given up the lease on her apartment in Melbourne and moved back to her own house in Fremantle, and it was this that had brought Polly back on a visit to the west coast for the first time in many years. She had arrived there as a teenager in the early sixties with her parents and her older brother, Alistair. The whole family had been shocked by the long and relentlessly hot Perth summers. Fortunately, within a few months, their father, an engineer, landed a job in New South Wales, and the family had crossed the Nullarbor in a Kombi, and settled in Newcastle. Neither Polly nor Alistair held any affection for the west, and only returned if or when required for work reasons. But when Polly flew over to visit Stella for a long weekend, she discovered a different place from the one she remembered. That weekend she had fallen in love with Fremantle and stayed on for two weeks, leaving with a sense of regret and a longing to return to the port city, to the forests of the southwest and the sharp new sophistication of the growing capital. She started talking casually about perhaps moving west. Just over a year later Stella called to tell her that the house next door to her own was for sale, and Polly had booked a flight and made the fastest decision of her life. The house was an old limestone cottage, a neglected duplicate of Stella’s, and three months later she was winding up her Melbourne life. It was 1996, she was forty-five and felt closer to her true self, the self she wanted to be, than ever before.

  Within months of the move she found contract work teaching a life-writing class for three hours a week at a local university. One year later she couldn’t imagine how she had ever sat down every day to create stories in which people were bashed to death, had their teeth pulled out with pliers or their fingers chopped off by villains, nor how she had coped with the volatile environment of television. She had opted for simplicity and a slower pace and she loved it. More books followed and she was developing a significant profile. But she never regained the brash self-confidence of her youth. She had chosen a fluid discipline with complex roots, a fertile battleground for would-be experts, and one that was increasingly popular and contentious, and she frequently felt like a fraud. Now, each time she delivers a lecture, a talk, or occupies a seat on a panel at a writers’ festival, she has to psych herself up for the performance in ways she never needed to do in the past.

  And so, that morning in Edinburgh, as she had taken the lift to the ground floor, she was focused solely on her keynote and the fact that by eleven-thirty it would be over and she could relax.

  ‘Ah, Polly – I wondered if I might run into you again,’ a voice called as she crossed the hotel lobby. ‘I assume you’re heading for the university? Let’s walk together.’

  Polly’s stomach sank. He . . . this man, he was perfectly nice but she wished he would go away.

  ‘The thing is,’ she’d said, looking straight at him, ‘I am anxious about my keynote. I need to keep my head focused on it so I’m not really in the mood to talk.’

  ‘Me too,’ he had said. ‘Pre-performance anxiety. Should we walk in silence?’

  ‘Can the silence be relied on?’

  ‘Women usually accuse me of too much of it.’

  She took a deep breath; there seemed to be no escape. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s give it a go.’

  And together they passed through the revolving doors out into the brilliant sunlight of a bitterly cold morning, their feet crunching across the snowy pavement, and not a word passed between them until they reached the point at which their paths diverged.

  Leo paused. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re a smash hit.’

  Polly smiled and managed a small laugh. ‘You too.’

  He nodded towards a café across the road. ‘Would you like to have lunch over there later?’

  It was her need to stay focused, to concentrate without distraction, that had made her decline the brandy last night, and stay in hiding this morning. But he seemed genuine, he could cope with silence, and apparently he shared her professional anxiety. She suspected he also had a sense of humour.

  ‘Twelve-thirty?’

  He nodded. ‘Perfect, see you then.’ And he was gone, striding briskly away across the snowy campus.

  Now, three days later as she puts the last of her clothes into her suitcase and walks around the room checking that she’s leaving nothing behind, she realises that she’s quite disappointed that this is the last time she’ll see him. By chance they are booked on the same flight to London so are sharing a taxi to the airport. Yesterday she had texted Stella a photograph Leo had taken of her sitting on a low wall with the castle in the background. Great conference, fabulous city, pleasant company, she had written. Leaving here tomorrow for Paris, then to Bali. Since that first walk in the snow they had not only eaten lunch but also taken a tour of the castle, eaten two dinners and breakfasts and sat up late in the bar talking.

  ‘Are you going straight home from Heathrow?’ he had asked her last night.

  Polly shook her head. ‘No, I’m going to Paris, I’ve some research to do there, then on to Bali for a holiday on the way home.’

  ‘Pity,’ he’d said. ‘I thought I might persuade you to stay on in London for a while. I’ve so enjoyed your company.’

  ‘Me too,’ she’d said, ‘but I have commitments in Paris.’ This was not really true; she was her own boss and committed only to getting into some document archives, and doing what she called
her ‘street level’ research – quietly walking the streets where the women she’s writing about had lived. It’s something she must do alone, imagining herself living there among them in the twenties, in a small boarding house or apartment, choosing croissants in the bakery, walking to visit friends on wintry days, or in spring sunshine. Ordering coffee for breakfast, or buying flowers from the street stall. She could postpone it for a couple of days but her head is in the right place for all this now, she’s hungry for it and knows how much she will regret it if she lets anything get in the way. Too often in the past she has put aside her work, her consuming passions, to fit in with someone else’s plans, and the someone else has always been a man who seemed different, interesting, who seemed to offer a deeper connection. Keep your safe distance, she reminds herself. But as she lugs her case down to reception she can’t help wishing that they’d had a little more time in which she could have got to know him better.

  Three hours later, in the chaos of Heathrow, their ways finally part, she to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar, Leo for the underground to Paddington and his nearby flat.