you should such dishonour undergo,
While I sit lazy by.
Maureen:
It would become me
As well as it does you: and I should do it
With much more ease; for my good will is to it—
She stopped at that point and rolled her eyes, because the last line didn’t fit. They both laughed as Richard procured his own chair and placed it close to hers. “What brings you here to my dressing room, Ferdinand?” asked Maureen, wondering at the power of prayer.
Richard:
Admired Miranda!
Indeed the top of admiration! Worth
What’s dearest to the world! Full many a lady
I have eyed with best regard and many a time
The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage
Brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues
Have I liked several women; never any
With so fun soul, but some defect in her
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she ow’d
And put it to the foil: but you, O you,
So perfect and so peerless, are created
Of every creature’s best!
Richard delivered his lines without slip or omission, and Maureen was thus landed, with barely a resisting wriggle on the hook. Now she knew where she had obtained the vision for her prayer: Richard had attended several of her performances and the theatre was quite intimate, so it was difficult to miss him. She turned back to her mirror, and they talked while she scoured off her makeup, revealing the flawless complexion of a natural redhead who avoids sunshine and fresh air. She looked very young and vulnerable without it, and as she glanced at his reflection she caught an expression she recognised, that of the besotted and lustful male. Her scouring complete, and before her courage failed her, she turned around, stood up and kissed him gently on the lips to advise him of her intentions, which, as she well knew, were also his.
Because her husband was away at a conference, she took him to her bed that very night and they enjoyed a year of insane passion before her spouse, who was obviously somewhat slow on the uptake, became suspicious. Neither Maureen nor Richard was very good at keeping things uncomplicated, and they were absolutely obsessed with each other. He begged her to run away with him, a lad of twenty still to make his fortune, and with remarkable speed the illusion of a future together was dispelled by grim reality, which, as we know, has no sense of the romantic. Maureen was fond of her husband, and particularly of the lifestyle he provided, which enabled her to live in luxury, work when she wished, and not have to count her small change.
When Maureen ended the relationship, Richard was certain he would have to kill himself. He chose the ideal place to jump into the Thames, and stood there night after night, trying to get up the courage to carry out his dramatic statement.
In the end, sanity reasserted itself, aided by a harrowing dream. In this dream, he observed himself lying on a slab in a nineteenth-century morgue, with water dripping over his white corpse. The persistent drop drop drop of the water dislodged a huge chunk of his face which slid off the bones1 even as Maureen bent over him, mourning his death. She screamed and ran out, vomiting in the street.
1 The dream may have been inspired by Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, which Richard had been reading at the time. It is perhaps fortunate that his relationship with Maureen ended when it did, before Richard was inspired to tip her husband into the Thames.
On waking, Richard realised Maureen was not going to turn up at the morgue sobbing hysterically over his beautiful corpse. If he was found, he was likely to be water-logged, disgusting, and probably smelly. Or fish would have nibbled his nose. No, this was not going to be a heart-wrenchingly tragic final act, it would be farcical.
He let the curtain fall on his personal melodrama, but he always had a slight penchant for red hair and voluptuous figures. He never saw her again, so his memories remained unsullied by reality. To see her grown middle-aged and fat, with the tideline of grey growing at the roots of hennaed tresses, would have been too much to bear.
* * *
Richard’s thoughts turned to Lisette. His ex-wife and Eliza’s mother. She was beautiful and feisty. He had loved her passionately, of course; he didn’t know any other way to do it. Their relationship had been fraught with partings and reconciliations right from the beginning, usually as a consequence of his bad behaviour. We all know the strangely compelling nature of Make Up Sex, and their relationship was full of it. He’d always started out, after each rift, with the best of intentions, but in the end it seemed that she had just burned out. Love had changed, not even to hatred but to a kind of exhausted resignation. They loved each other even when it was all over, but they could never be friends, except as a performance, for the sake of the children. He loved her still, but she had remarried, someone as far from the performing arts as she could manage, someone safe and unexciting.
* * *
The third love, which was less a grand passion and more like real love, was Linda. She was an artist and sculptor whom he met when she was twenty-eight and he was thirty-six. He was quite successful as an actor by that stage, but he enjoyed teaching. Fate, that unashamed Romantic, arranged it all: Richard would be plying his trade in the vicinity of the studio in which Linda was teaching artists to paint scenery for the theatre, and he would see her and pursue her. Actually she saw him first but he took the bait nicely. Her hair was indeed red, though closer to auburn. She had a well-proportioned hourglass figure, slender in build, but the way she walked was definitely voluptuous.
For a year they had a love affair which was both torrid and tender. He taught her everything Maureen had taught him; she taught him a few things of her own. She told him about her ex-husband’s affair with a monosynaptic twenty-year-old beautician. He told her about his marriage, his children, even his indiscretions, and she had a few of her own to relate. There are always secrets in any relationship, but theirs was surprisingly open and honest.
Linda, aside from her obvious attributes, was talented, highly intelligent, well read, and had a fine sense of humour, so they also talked and laughed. Richard was completely stripped of all pretence, of anything remotely inauthentic, in her presence. There is, after all, no real need for an actor to keep on acting when he removes the greasepaint.
She painted his portrait and sculpted his head, his hands and any other bits of him which took her fancy. Linda felt it was bad for Eliza to see her father entertaining women and having to meet them at the breakfast table, so although she sometimes insisted on taking Eliza with them on family outings, Eliza rarely saw her otherwise. She appeared, on the surface, to have no impact on Eliza’s life, however Richard mellowed under her influence.
Their affair ended when Richard left for Australia for a year, and lo! she refused to abandon a well-paid and exciting job offer to go with him. So they had a fight to justify parting and enable blaming, each of the other, which numbed the pain with anger.
When he returned to England he
