A Part You Could Do Something With

There was a curious mixture of rivalry and camaraderie in the air. All the women present, waiting in the local Leisure Centre, wanted the same thing, and they were in competition with each other, but of course, only one of them could be chosen to play Meredith Morello in the planned TV costume drama. It was a relatively minor role, the older sister of the central character, the 1930s femme fatale Adelaide Morello (who, ultimately, was not found guilty of murder and did not end up on the gallows, but it was the general consensus that she still was guilty. At any rate, of manslaughter. After all, Lizzie Borden was acquitted, too!) As folk said, it was the kind of part you could do something with. 

     Yet there was fellow-feeling, too. They had all, or nearly all, been through drama school and found it both the fulfilment of their dreams and a series of ridiculous exercises, and had waited at table, and cleaned hotel rooms, and, if they were lucky, done voiceovers for commercials for cleaning fluid or soup for cats. Some of them had had previous success – Rhiannon Edgar recognised Laura Marsden, who’d been the doctor’s daughter in that medical soap that finished last year, and Suzanne Cooper, who had actually played Ophelia on stage, though admittedly in Wolverhampton and not Stratford, not that there was anything wrong with Wolverhampton.

     “Do you ever wonder what half the things they do in Leisure Centres actually are?” the woman sitting next to Rhiannon asked. Rhiannon had an aisle seat, which she was quite grateful for, so there was only someone on one side.

     “I – suppose so,” Rhiannon said, glad that the other woman had broken the ice and made conversation. She was an attractive woman, though with an understated attractiveness that would not rule her out of playing Meredith. Even though there were pictures of Meredith, though not, of course, as many as there were of Adelaide, nobody could quite make up their mind as to whether it was unfair to call her a Plain Jane or not. She certainly didn’t have Adelaide’s flamboyant beauty, but an air of having something about her. Those big, thoughtful eyes, with a solemn look but a hint of humour, that demure white lace collar. It was odd, really, how often the word “something” turned up when trying to persuade yourself that a minor role was every bit as important as a minor one. Rhiannon was sure she had seen her neighbour somewhere before, but that wasn’t so surprising. She may have seen her, fleetingly, on stage or screen, or just at another audition.

     “I mean, Lord help us, what’s Chairobics, or Kettlercise – the mind boggles.”

     “I can’t say I’ve ever tried either of them,” Rhiannon said, thinking that she wasn’t quite old enough for the former, much as she felt it some days, and the latter sounded too much like hard work. But she did have a rough idea what they were. 

     “Just as long as they’re not a part of the audition!”

     “I doubt that,” Rhiannon laughed.

      “To tell you the truth, I don’t like what they’re doing with it. But I didn’t expect anything else.”

     “Well, I expect they’re sticking more or less to the facts,” Rhiannon said, having hurriedly done an internet search and borrowed her mother’s stash of true crime books to do some research when the possibility of the part arose. Somehow, the story had never become as celebrated as others, but that was no bad thing. To put it somewhat distastefully, the stories of Edith Thompson and Ruth Ellis and the like had been done to death. This was something new.

     “More or less,” the other woman said, enigmatically.

     The Morello sisters were still both unmarried, but apparently it was generally agreed that Adelaide would either make a brilliant match or be a perpetual wild bachelor girl, and that Meredith might well end up as a spinster. They were the daughters of Dr David Morello, who owed his exotic surname to a great grandfather who came from Italy, but was now as respectable a natural inhabitant of the still relatively new leafy suburbs of Surrey as you could imagine. Both women still lived at home in their comfortable redbrick house with Dr Morello and his wife Edith. There were photographs of him, too, and they bore out what was known of him. He was a strict father, and quite traditional in his ways, but by no means oppressive. Both his daughters had been well educated, and both of them had careers. Meredith was a teacher, and generally well-liked and respected by her pupils and colleagues, and Adelaide was – well, the version the family preferred was a “businesswoman”. She ran a dress-shop, or a boutique, as they preferred to call it, with her old school friend Martha. Both of them liked to design clothes too, and they skirted a fine line – the word skirt being appropriate. Their clothes were not the kind that respectable middle-aged matrons, or maidens, come to that, would choose to wear, but they managed to avoid being too risqué. Well, at least most of the time. Dr and Mrs Morello, in truth, weren’t so happy about the dress shop, but they tolerated it, said that it wouldn’t be long before Adelaide, with her vivid good looks and winning ways found a nice husband, and at least they knew where she was. 

     “But it wasn’t a particularly successful shop, you know,” Rhiannon’s neighbour said. “They’re presenting it that way in the series, I know, possibly hoping it might attract viewers who still watch all the repeats of The House of Eliot.” She spoke the name of the popular 90s series with a slightly puzzled, slightly condescending air.

     “Personally, I always had a soft spot for Tilly,” Rhiannon said.

     “Anyway, some months it didn’t even break even, and her parents had to bail it out.”

     “That’s how it goes with businesses,” Rhiannon said, “My parents had a shop.”

     “Oh – did they really?”

     Still, the fact remained that whether the shop, which they called Ademars, prospered or not, it led to Adelaide meeting Robert Denny, always known as Robbo, who was, ironically, in there to buy a scarf for his girlfriend. Adelaide and Martha, especially Adelaide, placed great import on accessories, but would have preferred they were bought in conjunction with an outfit. Still, men were notoriously useless and judging either women’s tastes or their size, so perhaps just a scarf was safer. 

     “I call her my nut-brown maiden,” Robbo declared, with a fond look on his face. A mouse, then, Adelaide decided. A bit like her big sister Meredith. Although the trouble was that there was still something about Meredith, and she couldn’t quite be condescending about her, and that was irritating. 

     She advised a cherry-red scarf, thinking that if you could help a mouse, you were more likely to help her with soft shades of green or blue, but often neither the mice nor the men knew that. He was suitably grateful.

     “I reckon they’ve made Robbo too much of a pantomime villain, from what I gather,” the woman next to Rhiannon said. “Oh, of course, he wasn’t that high ranking in the brain stakes, but he had a good heart, though he was too easily persuaded.”

     “I don’t know if we – I mean whoever plays Meredith – will have many scenes with Robbo anyway.”

     “Maybe not.” Robbo had already been cast, though it wasn’t officially a matter of public knowledge yet; still, a couple of clicks and you could find out. He was to be played by Christo Marchmayne, who had had a couple of minor parts in hospital dramas and used to be the voice of Trusty Truckers on his local radio station, but was seen as having potential. He was certainly good looking. Rhiannon had been at the same drama school, though they hadn’t known each other well, as he was in his last year when she was in her first. She also knew his real name was Colin Murdoch, and that he had chosen his stage surname thinking of Brideshead Revisited (he probably harboured dreams of yet another remake where he would play Sebastian) but changing the spelling of Marchmain just to avoid any potential issues.  

     “But he was a bit of a charmer – well, frankly a lot of a charmer,” the woman went on. Not that everyone fell under his spell. Funnily enough, Dr Morello did and thought he was a most personable young man when Adelaide began to fetch him home. Apparently (at least if you believed Robbo) he and the nut-brown maiden (her name was Nora, but at this point she was effectively written out of the story) had agreed entirely amiably that they would remain friends. Mrs Morello, who was fond of romantic novels, still maintained a certain cynicism in real life. She thought (it transpired) that Robbo was nice-looking, and had good manners, but there was something shallow about him. And though first impressions might suggest she was a mouse, in her quiet way she was anything but. Still, she knew that Adelaide was of age (and more than of age) and must make her own decisions, or there would be a rift, and having experienced a family rift herself, she knew that was to be avoided, if not at all costs, then certainly at many. Still, she had a way of slightly raising an eyebrow even as she thanked Robbo prettily for the huge bunches of flowers and boxes of chocolates he presented her with. She would have been far happier with a bunch of daffodils and a bar of Fry’s Chocolate Cream. The most she said to Adelaide was, “My dear, pardon me if I speak out of turn, but don’t you think Robert can be just the tiniest bit, well, flashy?”

     Adelaide could sometimes have a hasty temper, but on that occasion she merely smiled and said, “Oh, Mother, you have some strange ideas….” She didn’t quite pat her mother on the head, but she might as well have done. 

     No doubt he thought he would win Mrs Morello over. He was very good at winning people over, and not just the ladies. In his whole life only two people had been wholly impervious to his charms. One was his headmaster, who was a kind and tolerant man and not the cane-wielding parody of an early 20^th century schoolmaster, but who still stood for no nonsense, and had quite taken the wind out of Robbo’s sails when he said, “Denny, I’m not an unreasonable man and know that in the real world at times homework will be handed in late and assignments not finished when they should be. I daresay I wasn’t perfect in that respect myself at your age. But I’d thank you to come straight out and say so and not come up with some ludicrous excuse about them being snatched from your hand by an assailant or your school bag falling over board when you were sailing up the river.” The other was his own mother. Mrs Denny loved him dearly, but let him know in no uncertain terms that she was not deceived by what she called his “lies and puppy dog eyes”. 

     “Sounds like Colin – I mean Christo, is good casting,” Meredith said, “He can turn on the Puppy Dog eyes!”

     Despite all their differences, the sisters were close. They had no particular illusions about each other, but could also be surprisingly generous in their appreciation of the other’s attributes. Meredith willingly acknowledged that Adelaide was the beauty of the family, and had a natural grace to her, and Adelaide was free in her praise of Meredith’s intelligence. 

     Meredith didn’t quite know what she made of Robbo, at least not at first. She got on well with him, and didn’t have her mother’s distrust and cynicism. He was always friendly and polite to her, and in fact they had some very interesting conversations about books, as they were both keen readers. Adelaide was no stranger to the printed word, but didn’t share their enthusiasm, and said happily, “You’ll be so glad to have a brother in law you can talk books with, Merry!” Meredith liked to say she wished people wouldn’t shorten her name, but the truth was she quite liked being called Merry. All the same, something about that brother in law made her uneasy. He was a likeable young man, she thought, and a good friend, but she reluctantly wondered if her mother might have a point, or at least if they shouldn’t wait a while. Still, she kept her own counsel.

     She was of the opinion that things rarely came out of the blue, and perhaps this hadn’t, not really. One lunchbreak in the staff room at St Griselda’s Girls’ Grammar school, her colleague, Angela Hartford, said, “Meredith – I’ve been mulling this over in my mind so long….”

     “What’s that, then?” asked Meredith, thinking this was rather out of character for Angela who tended to blurt things out.

     “I genuinely hate telling you this. But my brother, Keith, is a very keen tennis player, and he told he saw your sister’s fiancé at the tennis club – well, with another woman.”

     Alarm bells rang but Meredith tried not to hear them. “Oh, really, Angela! She knows he goes to the tennis club – she doesn’t play, and she doesn’t mind in the least. And of course they play mixed doubles at times!”

     Angela sighed. “It wasn’t that. From what I gather, not much in the way of tennis was going on. This might sound like a funny thing to say but – of course it wouldn’t be right if it was a girl who was a bit of a flirt – but that happens. It was Melissa Hope – and she’s a quiet, shy, serious girl, but he was intent on breaking through her shell and – well, it looks like he was succeeding.”

     “Maybe he was just being kind!”

     “Merry – he was doing things that went beyond kind. And you know that Melissa is seriously well-off – or at any rate, likely to be. She’s the only child of the owner of Hope’s Mill and her father isn’t in good health.”

     Meredith decided to confront Robbo. It wasn’t easy to find a time when she could have a word with him without Adelaide being there, but she managed it. She drew a deep breath and said, “Robert,” (somehow this was a time for full names!) “You’ve been seen at the tennis club!”

     Meredith told herself that she was imagining the expression she saw on his face. It was not one of wounded innocence, nor puzzlement, nor yet one of a guilty man caught out, or one prepared to be penitent and persuasive. It was a dark, threatening one. He hurriedly “rearranged his face” as her mother sometimes told the girls to do when they were sulking or pouting, but she had seen it, and it was not her imagination. And his smile was charming – except suddenly it wasn’t so charming any more, when he said, tapping his nose, “Sometimes best to keep that out.”

     Meredith regained her courage. “Don’t you threaten me! So you don’t deny it!”

     “Oh, Meredith, you’re a bright girl. You must know yourself that your sister can be tedious. And she knows I dumped Nora.  These things go in cycles. I’ll tell her nicely. She’ll get over it.”

     Those who knew Meredith well, like her sister and her parents, knew that contrary to what those with only a more superficial acquaintance might think, she did have a temper. It didn’t flare up easily and with a moment’s melodrama, the way Adelaide’s did, but just occasionally, she almost literally saw red – or more like a black-scored purple – and those who witnessed it rarely forgot it. Robbo, however, would forget it, because, overcome with incandescent range she summoned up a strength belied by her slight frame and pushed him. Even in a temper, Meredith was not homicidal, and she probably only meant to wound his dignity and let him register her contempt, but he hit his head on, on of all things, the little companion set in the hearth. And he was bleeding profusely. “Merry,” he gasped, “Get help, you must get help, I have haemophilia …. You know what that is …I couldn’t get married and settle down anyway!”

     She did know what that was (she was interested in the tragedy of the Romanovs) and realised, as a doctor’s daughter, that he was telling the truth. “Daddy!” she cried, instinctively, grown woman that she was, but he was not in the house. 

     Adelaide, however, was. She chose that very moment to come in, and was almost surreally calm. “I know,” she said, in a weird, quiet voice, “I know about it. About Melissa.”

     “He has haemophilia,” Meredith whispered.

     Adelaide was obdurate. She would take the blame, no matter how much Meredith tried to dissuade her. “You have a good, worthwhile career. There are girls for decades ahead who will be grateful to you.”

     “And she did take the blame. I … constantly tell myself I could have done more to stop her …..”

     “Rhiannon Edgar, please!” A clear, female voice called.

     Rhiannon was about to say that she wished to pull out of the audition and have no part in the production. She looked at the seat next to her. It was empty. But there was a little white lace collar on the chair!