she sat daydreaming on the sofa, it never occurred to Katharine Tempest that things might be just a little too good to be true, or that something beyond her control might happen to mar these halcyon days. And if such a thought had crossed her mind she would have dismissed it at once, and with a degree of scorn. For unfortunately, Katharine was afflicted with a character flaw that was almost Hellenic in its proportions. She was crippled by hubris, that defect the Greeks defined as the temerity to tempt the Gods, in essence, an excess of overweening pride and the unwavering conviction of personal invulnerability. Being blindly unaware of this blemish in herself, she had no qualms about anything she did, and so she was also quite confident about the result of the screen test. She would be marvellous and Victor would give her the part in the film.
Victor Mason had told Katharine he intended to start principal photography in April, and this starting date suited Katharine admirably. Her contract with the theatrical producers of Trojan Interlude had an ‘out-of-the-play’ clause, and this came into effect after she had been in the play for one year. The year would be up at the end of March and so she could invoke the clause and leave the production to do the film. The shooting schedule was for twelve weeks, with exteriors to be shot in Yorkshire, interiors at one of the major studios in London. Victor had also told Katharine that he planned to have the footage edited quickly, since he wanted the answer print by September. From this master print he intended to strike two more prints, he had gone on to explain. The film could thus be shown in cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, for one week before the end of the year, thereby making the picture eligible, under the rules, for the Academy Awards of 1956. Although Victor would not be putting the film into general distribution until the spring of 1957, he had confided he did not want to miss a chance at the Oscar nominations.
What if she won an Oscar! This prospect was at once so stunning, so electrifying, so dazzling, Katharine felt momentarily dizzy. And because she had that most unique of all talents, the talent for believing in herself, the idea that she had a chance of winning was not at all beyond the realms of possibility in her mind. But even if she did not win an Oscar, Katharine did not doubt that she would be a star when the picture was released. And her success would not only bring her fame on a grand scale, but money, lots of money, a very special kind of power.
A faint white shadow glanced across Katharine’s face, tinging it with unfamiliar bitterness and dislodging the joy which had previously rested there.
Soon, very soon, she would be able to make her moves, put her final plan into operation, and execute it with the sure knowledge that she would be triumphant. A tiny fluttering sigh escaped Katharine’s lips. It was too late to save her mother, but not too late to save her brother, Ryan. Her dearest Ryan. Lost to her for so long. This desire had been one of the prime motivations behind many of Katharine’s actions for the past few years, and just as she was unremittingly driven to succeed in her career, so too was she driven to rescue Ryan from their father’s domination, from his contaminating influence. Sometimes, when she thought of Ryan, panic moved through Katharine and she quivered with fear for him. Ryan was nearly nineteen, and she often wondered to what degree his soul had been poisoned by that man. Had Ryan inevitably become their father’s creature, partially if not wholly? This idea was so repugnant to her, so unacceptable, and so terrifying, she pushed it away fiercely, denying it with silent vehemence; but her resolution to get her brother away from Chicago and to keep him with her wherever she was living, was reinforced more strongly than ever.
Katharine thought about Ryan, and the daunting expression slowly lifted from her face; her features grew soft, the hardness tempered by love and tenderness. But as always when she contemplated him, other images intruded. Her hands tightened in her lap and she sat staring into space fixedly, without moving, her body as immobile as a statue. Surrounding Ryan like a fateful nimbus was that brooding grotesque house where they had grown up, and where Ryan still lived, that awful mausoleum of a place, that dubious tribute to her father’s wealth and position and his terrible power. She had always loathed that house with its dusky hallways and winding staircases and dolorous rooms stuffed to overflowing with expensive ugly antiques, all manner of bric-a-brac and undistinguished paintings. It was a masterpiece of ostentation, reeking of bad taste, new money and suffocating unhappiness. To Katharine it was also a house of deprivation. Oh, they had had expensive clothes and the best food and cars and servants, for their father was a millionaire many times over. But it was, to Katharine, still a deprived house, for there had been so little genuine love in it. She shuddered involuntarily. She had not set foot in that house for six years, and on the day she had left it she had vowed she would never darken its doors again.
Katharine’s thoughts rushed to her father, and although she consistently obliterated his image in her mind’s eye, today she did not even attempt to extinguish it. She saw him quite vividly, as if he stood before her, Patrick Michael Sean O’Rourke, with his handsome saturnine face and ebony-black hair, eyes as blue as sapphires and as hard as that stone they so closely resembled. He was a dreadful man, and she realized suddenly that she had always understood this, even when she had been a very small child. She had simply not known the words to properly describe him then. Today she had them at the tip of her tongue. He was exigent, rapacious and ruthless, a venal man who had made money his mistress and power his God. The world did not know Patrick Michael Sean O’Rourke as she knew him. He was a monumental anachronism: the charming, laughing, entertaining, silver-tongued Irishman in public, the stern, glowering and dictatorial tyrant in his own home. Katharine hated him. Just as he hated her. Gooseflesh speckled her arms and she pulled her robe closer around her. She recalled, with the most sharp and awful clarity, the day she had first recognized her father’s virulent hatred for her. It had been in August 1947. She had been twelve years old.
On that day, nearly nine years ago, Katharine had been her happiest in many months, this state engendered by her mother’s unexpected presence at lunch. Rosalie O’Rourke was feeling so much better she had decided to join her children at their noonday meal. Katharine had been singularly overjoyed to see her mother looking practically like her old self; and if Rosalie was not brimming with the vitality which had once been such an essential and natural part of her personality, she seemed lighthearted, almost carefree. Her eyes, widely set and a clear tourmaline green, sparkled with laughter, and her abundant red hair, crackling with life, was a burnished bronze helmet above her heart-shaped face, which was free of pain today, and had lost some of its waxen pallor. She was wearing a pale green silk-shantung dress with long sleeves and a full skirt, and its style disguised her thin body, so tragically wasted by illness. A choker of lustrous pearls encircled her neck, and there were matching pearl studs in her ears; her tapering fingers glittered with beautiful rings set with diamonds and emeralds.
Mrs O’Rourke had instructed Annie, the housekeeper, to serve luncheon in the breakfast room, one of the few cheerful spots in the dim and shadowy house, and which Rosalie herself had personally decorated. It had a lovely aura of airy lightness, was brushstroked throughout in a pretty mélange of crisp white and sharp lemon yellow, rafts of these refreshing colours appearing everywhere. It was furnished, in the main, with white wicker furniture, unusual handsome pieces from the Victorian era, and there were colourful prints of exotic birds and rare orchids on the walls and an abundance of tall green plants. Decorated in the same charming manner as Rosalie’s suite of rooms on the second floor, it was refined and gracious, yet without being at all stylized in appearance.
As she had sat gazing adoringly at her mother across the table, Katharine had thought how distinguished and elegant she looked, perfectly groomed and smelling faintly of lilies of the valley as she invariably did. To Katharine her mother was, and always would be, the epitome of beauty and feminine grace, and she idolized her. Katharine, at this moment, was filled with renewed hope for her mother, who seemed to be on the way to recovering from the mysterious illness which had afflicted her for the past two years, an illness no one really discussed, except in whispers.
Since it was a weekday, Patrick O’Rourke had not been present, and in consequence, the tension which generally accompanied their meals was fortunately missing. Ryan had chattered like a magpie, had kept them entertained, and they had laughed
