The Price of Fame Read online

  Morton thought, as he often had, that it could not be easy for a boy to live with two women, in a household without a man. Morton did his best to fill the breach, but had never fooled himself that it was enough.

  Alison led the way into the living room and he went to warm his back before the fire.

  ‘If Richard’s kicked his football through the kitchen window again, it isn’t the end of the world,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘I wish that were all it were,’ Alison replied.

  Morton’s smile faded to a thoughtful frown as he listened to what they had to tell him.

  ‘Richard is behaving as though he hates me,’ Alison summed up.

  ‘There’s no other way to describe it,’ Emma endorsed.

  ‘It is certainly worrying – but aren’t you two being a bit melodramatic?’ Morton said.

  ‘That can sometimes be said about Alison,’ Emma retorted. ‘But never about me. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, Max. Richard has been so cold to her this week, it’s a wonder, when he passes her the jug of water at the supper table, that it doesn’t turn to ice.’

  Morton headed for the door. ‘Maybe I’ll have more success than you did in discovering what this is all about.’

  He returned no wiser. But an interesting detail had emerged. ‘On the evening Richard went missing, Alison, he visited your step-cousins.’

  Alison shot out of her fireside chair, such was her fury. ‘Then we need look no further! Those despicable Plantaine twins have finally turned my son against me.’

  Morton waited for her to calm down. ‘I agree that they are a pair of arch-schemers,’ he said with distaste. ‘It’s no secret in show business that conniving has got them where they are.’

  ‘Where exactly are they?’ asked Emma. The theatre-world gossip she heard Alison and Morton discussing invariably failed to register with her. ‘Didn’t Lucy Plantaine get married recently?’

  Alison nodded, her lips curled with contempt. ‘Charles Bligh has made an honest woman of her. Though his wife divorced him long ago, it took Lucy – who was the cause – years to hook him. But now she is married to an impresario, she’ll be a permanent star, and her twin will get Bligh Productions’ plum directing jobs – though neither of them has an ounce of talent.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say Luke Plantaine has no talent,’ declared Morton, who was fair even to those whom he abhorred.

  Nor, in honesty, would Alison say that. But the mere mention of the Plantaine twins was inflammatory to her. They had done their best to make her miserable when the three of them were still youngsters working with the family repertory company, and in later years had tried to capitalise on Alison’s success to promote their own careers. She had not let them use her and they had become her bitter enemies, but ingratiated themselves with Richard when he was still a little boy.

  ‘The mere fact that Richard likes the twins and I loathe them has caused trouble between him and me!’ she exploded to Emma and Morton. ‘But you two are well aware that I’ve always attributed evil motives to their befriending my son.’

  She grows more beautiful with the years, Morton thought. And anger enhances her beauty. The flush staining her cheeks emphasised her sculptured features, and her eyes had darkened with feeling to the colour of her blue-black hair. For Morton, there had never been any other woman, though many had lain in his arms.

  Alison toyed wretchedly with the milky pearls at her throat, which Morton had given her for Christmas. He had given Emma the expensive-but-sensible brown cardigan she had on. His gifts epitomised how he saw them – and were Emma’s yearly reminder of something she knew too well.

  ‘Stop playing with your necklace, you’ll break it,’ Emma said to Alison.

  ‘I am more concerned with my already broken heart. And the twins are to blame for it.’

  ‘That’s pure supposition,’ said Morton. ‘And I doubt that even they could manage to turn a boy against his mother in the space of an evening.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Emma, ‘they told him that Alison really is his mother. That she’s been lying to him all his life.’

  A silence followed.

  ‘They have no way of knowing that,’ Morton said.

  ‘But that wouldn’t stop them from saying it,’ Alison answered. Then she laughed harshly. ‘Which would fit in with your idea of God and His ways, wouldn’t it, Emma? Though I would not have expected Him to employ a couple of devil’s disciples to wreak His vengeance!’

  She’ll go to pieces in a minute, Morton thought, seeing her fingers move from the pearls to her apricot wool dress and begin plucking edgily at a pleat. It was like watching a performance, but her emotions were real, not controllable as they were when she was acting a part onstage.

  ‘We must stop conjecturing,’ he declared firmly, ‘and stick to the facts. Adolescence is a tricky time and Richard is going through it at present. I can remember myself having moods I couldn’t account for, or rationalise, when I was his age. OK. So an adolescent boy takes off for a few hours without leaving a note saying where he’s gone, and is in a funny mood when he gets back. What is so odd about that?’

  ‘The way he is still behaving,’ said Alison. ‘As if I’ve done something terrible to him.’

  ‘Which you have,’ Emma told her.

  ‘And a lot of help you are!’ Morton flung at her. Emma ignored him and addressed Alison. ‘Career or not, with the benefit of hindsight, would you still agree to the cover-up you agreed to sixteen years ago?’

  ‘No,’ said Alison unhesitatingly. She gave Emma a wan smile. ‘When I was younger, I believed that everything would come right in the end.’

  ‘You mean you thought, because you were Alison Plantaine, you had a charmed life,’ Emma replied. ‘But you know, now, that nobody has – not even you. That people have to pay for the things they do. I never agreed with the cover-up, and I told Max so, though I had no choice but to go along with it. One lie always leads to another – and look where we are now.’

  Emma turned to Morton. ‘Perhaps you remember me saying to you when we first learned Alison was pregnant that I would never allow anything to be done that harmed the child? But I wasn’t thinking far enough ahead, Max. There’s no way any of us can protect Richard from the shock of discovering who he really is. If he’s found out by accident – or had it put in his mind by the twins – that’s even worse than his hearing it from Alison’s lips.’

  Morton poked the fire to hide his agitation. Was Emma trying to make him the scapegoat for how she now felt? Outwardly, she was the only one of them who seemed calm, and was now standing with her hands in her cardigan pockets, eyeing him with rebuke. Her tiny, birdlike appearance made her seem a meek little person, he thought. But when necessary, she was anything but!

  ‘Thank you, Emma,’ he said brusquely, ‘for telling us what we can now see for ourselves. But might I add that in a crisis people do what is expedient for the immediate problem. Speaking for myself, at the time you are harking back to I was concerned only for Alison. There was no Richard. And—’

  Morton broke off in mid-sentence when the boy entered the room.

  ‘If I’m interrupting a private conversation, I’ll come back later,’ Richard said, hovering in the doorway.

  Alison made up her mind. ‘No. Come in and sit down, darling. What we are discussing concerns you.’ She was aware that her voice sounded choked and that tears were stinging her eyes. But her own feelings were unimportant. What mattered was setting things right with her son. For her son.

  Richard did not sit down, but went to stand beside Emma, as though he sought her support. And it struck Alison that, in effect, he had been doing that all his life. Though Alison was his mother, she was someone he did not wholly trust. Emma, who was always there for him, spelled reliability – and Alison, flitting back and forth between him and her career, the opposite. After the war she had undertaken a lengthy provincial tour, and Richard had never been sure when she would next manage to get home to see him.

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p; But there was something else that probably accounted for his distrust, she thought now: the way, when he asked her questions about the past – as children do – she fended him off and was guarded with him, lest she let slip a loose end in the web of lies that shrouded his origins.

  Alison steeled herself to unravel that web. She knew that Emma and Morton were aware, without her telling them, of what she was about to do. It could not be done without causing pain to her son.

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asked him.

  His reply did not bode well. ‘Unfortunately I do.’

  ‘Then I hope you’ll try to understand all that I am going to say to you. And forgive me, if you can.’

  Richard brought from the inside pocket of his blazer the photograph he had found in the attic, and propped it up on the mantelpiece. ‘Has it got something to do with this?’

  Alison exchanged a glance with Emma. Richard’s birth certificate was safely locked away, but she had overlooked other clues to his true identity that were here in the house. The ways of God – or Destiny – were more simple than one supposed.

  Richard was studying the photograph. ‘I look exactly like him, don’t I, Mother? And since I found his picture, a lot of thoughts have whirled around my mind – including the hopeful one that Auntie Emma might possibly be my real mother, since your father was her uncle.’

  Alison could not have been more brutally affected had Richard slapped her face.

  Morton stubbed out his cigar. ‘If you realised what a hurtful thing you have just said, you would not have said it, Richard.’

  ‘Yes, I would, Uncle! But I’m still waiting for my worst fear to be confirmed.’

  ‘There seems to be an unpleasant streak in you I hadn’t detected,’ Morton answered.

  ‘I wonder where it comes from,’ said Richard, eyeing Alison.

  ‘Hold your tongue!’ Morton thundered.

  Richard gave him a sullen glance and moved closer to Emma.

  ‘Do me a favour, will you, dear?’ she appealed to him. ‘Listen with an open mind to what your mother is going to tell you.’

  But Alison knew that his mind and heart had already closed against her. That he would strip the tenderness from the story of her brief interlude with a young German intellectual that had resulted in his being born.

  While she told it, Alison’s voice sounded false to her own ears.

  And to Richard’s. ‘Tell me another!’ was his strident reaction. Having German blood in his veins was unthinkable – like hearing that he was the son of a murderer. ‘If you decided to invent a father for me, why did you have to make him a Hun? And don’t bother telling me any tales about why you pretended you adopted me!’

  ‘The decision your mother made about that was very hard for her,’ Emma said quietly.

  Morton, too, came to Alison’s rescue. ‘And you may as well know, Richard, that it was I who advised her to take the course she did.’

  Richard gave him a thoughtful glance. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘You are old enough to know,’ Morton went on, ‘the social stigma attached to an unmarried mother. Women who are a good deal less in the public eye than yours has always been would not have such a thing known about them. She was already a star, and the slur on her name would most certainly have damaged her career.’

  This was the worst thing Morton could have said.

  When, thought Richard, did her career not come before me? But Uncle Maxwell was no better than she was! He had advised her and she had done as he said. The honorary uncle whom Richard had always idolised had turned out to have feet of clay. Auntie Emma was the only one left to trust.

  Alison was, with difficulty, holding herself together. ‘Is there anything you would like to ask me?’ she said to Richard. She could not bear to see the hurt in his eyes.

  ‘Only who my father really was.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, darling. If I had a picture of him, I’d show it to you, but I didn’t think of asking him for one. It’s probable that he wouldn’t have had one to give to me – he wasn’t the kind to bother about snapshots. All I want you to believe, Richard, is that we loved each other very much.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he come to England and marry you?’

  ‘He was engaged in anti-Nazi propaganda. It was just before Hitler came to power, and he couldn’t leave Germany at such a time.’

  ‘If you’d said he was Jewish, I might have swallowed it,’ said Richard with contempt. ‘But the other Germans were on Hitler’s side, weren’t they? Or they wouldn’t have let the Nazis do what they did to the Jews.’

  ‘There were some decent Germans, Richard, as I found out when I was in Berlin. Your father was one of them. He was a good man.’

  Richard gave Alison the cliche-reply that, so soon after the war and the holocaust, was still the British belief: ‘The only good German is a dead one.’

  Alison’s lover had died for his ideals. He had, with other young intellectuals incarcerated by Hitler, hanged himself in his cell on the night history would record as The Burning of the Books. The smoke raised by that literary funeral-pyre had signalled for Richard Lindemann that barbarism reigned in the country he loved.

  This was one of the things Alison had intended to tell her son. She had wanted to tell Richard, too, of the terrible uncertainty she had suffered, not knowing if his father was alive or dead. The suicide was not confirmed until after the war, when she had steeled herself to go to Berlin.

  In the interim, she had lived for her child and her work. She was a passionate woman, and had not remained physically faithful to her son’s father. But there was no love in the occasional sexual encounters she allowed herself. It was as though all the love she had to give to a man had been spent during those three weeks in Germany, in 1932.

  ‘Uncle Maxwell was with me in Berlin. He met your father,’ she told Richard.

  ‘Very briefly,’ Morton said.

  He’d lie through his teeth for my mother! Richard thought. Then he remembered Alison once referring to their having been in Berlin together, and recalled the German theatre programme he had found in the trunk – and not strewn carelessly with the other old programmes: carefully preserved.

  ‘Why didn’t you stay there with him, if this man you say was my father wasn’t able to leave?’ he cross-examined Alison.

  Morton replied for her. ‘She was committed to appear in a play for me, Richard. Your mother has always been loyal to me.’

  As you are to her, thought Richard, so you’re helping her tell me this cock-and-bull story! ‘Does this mythical German dad of mine have any relatives?’ he enquired sarcastically.

  Morton put an arm around Alison. ‘If you don’t change your tune, Richard, I shall have something very severe to say to you.’

  The poor kid is like a hurt animal, lashing out in all directions, Emma thought. Couldn’t Max see that? No! He was too besotted with Alison to see anything or anyone but her. If we were all together on a sinking ship, with only one lifebelt, Max would want Alison to have it, Emma reflected irrationally – feeling as if she were on that sinking ship at present. The close family unit they had been since Richard’s birth had suddenly divided into two camps – or so it felt. Max’s defence of Alison was as aggressive as was Richard’s reaction to what he had been told.

  ‘I’m still waiting to hear if I’ve got any fairytale relations,’ Richard prodded them, in the same sarcastic tone. ‘Or did my Uncle Hansel and Auntie Gretel get lost in the Black Forest?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, your German grandfather was an eminent surgeon,’ Alison said.

  ‘Did he get the Iron Cross for using Jews as guinea-pigs in the concentration camps?’ said Richard snidely.

  ‘That’s quite enough of that,’ Morton answered. And added, ‘Your mother never met him. But I did – when I went to Berlin, after we heard that your father had disappeared. Herr Doktor Lindemann was one of the people I called on.’

  ‘We understand that he died of pneumonia, during the war,’ Al
ison said.

  ‘And we know of no other relatives of your father’s,’ said Morton.

  To the boy, the way they dispensed the information between them was as though they had rehearsed it.

  ‘How very convenient for you,’ he said. ‘It means there is nobody I can check up with, doesn’t it? Disappearances and pneumonia my eye! Where did you get the name Lindemann from? A German telephone directory? For some reason, you don’t want me ever to know who my father was. Maybe he’s married and you’re scared I’ll go and see him and cause a scandal for him and my mother – the one they avoided when I was born. I don’t believe a word you two have said!’ he blazed to Alison and Morton.

  Then he fled from the room and, as always, it was Emma who went to calm him down.

  Chapter Four

  On the morning after their emotional scene, Alison rose early to breakfast with her son before he went to school.

  ‘You look beautiful even when you’ve just got up, Mother,’ he said when she joined him and Emma at the kitchen table.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ said Alison, who had tossed and turned all night.

  ‘It wasn’t a compliment. Just an observation.’

  Emma laughed, to ease the strain. ‘It’s a long time since you saw your mother at this hour, isn’t it, Richard?’ For Alison to rise at seven was unprecedented.

  ‘And I appreciate the peace-gesture,’ said Richard, reaching for the toast.

  ‘I’m thankful you are speaking to me this morning,’ Alison told him.

  Richard gave her a smile, but there was no warmth in it. ‘There’s no point in my not doing, as we have to go on living together. Now may we please talk about something else?’

  Emma hastened to do so. ‘You haven’t told me yet if there was anything special in the letter you got from Janet yesterday, Richard.’

  ‘She sounded fed up, Auntie. Could we invite her here for a weekend, soon?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Alison and Emma in unison. Emma’s niece was dear to them both.

  ‘It will be a break for her to get away from her parents for a couple of days,’ Richard opined.