In the Still of the Night

Annie had got out of her car and walked to the gate, stood there, staring, her heart plummeting. The house was empty.

Nobody could live in a house that looked like that. It had deteriorated since she last saw it, the windows dusty, thickly cobwebbed, the garden a wilderness of scrubby bushes and trees and weeds, choked with nettles and rough grass among which the daffodils shone, golden as sunlight, dozens of them in clumps, their frilly trumpets blaring at the blue spring sky.

Nobody had lived here for ages, you could feel it. It was a house abandoned, forgotten, except by jackdaws nesting on the battlements who cawed angrily at her appearance, making her jump. The Gothic tower rose against the blue spring sky, shutters banged in the wind beside the high, arched windows.

She had peered through the dirty glass into the drawing-room. The room hadn’t changed an inch; the hearth where they had built up great fires of logs had been swept clean, although a sprinkling of soot had fallen since then and was sprayed across the shabby old carpet, the furniture was all covered in sheets, everything was tidy, so someone had been here, to clean the place, but there was an air of desolation.

The house was haunted, by memories, by ghosts, and a multitude of spiders. Spiders spun great grey swags of webs from every corner, sunlight glinted on the delicate fibres of a web across the window, they had swung silk ladders from light-fittings and picture rails. Flies which had somehow got into the house had bred there and buzzed hopelessly against the window, trying to escape into the light. There was an earwigs’ nest on the windowsill, and wood lice, which an actress from Lancashire she knew called parson’s pigs, clicked along the floorboards in their grey, primeval armour, like tiny armadillos.

She had gone back to look at the drawing-room, had closed her eyes and seen it as it had been all those wintry days when they drew the curtains to shut out the world, turning the room into their own private universe, lit a fire in that cold hearth and lay in front of it, naked, making love.

‘I’ll love you for the rest of our lives,’ he had whispered, his cheek against her warm breast, and she had echoed what he said.

‘I’ll love you forever.’

Three months later he had walked out of her house, out of her life.

But she hadn’t stopped loving him or thinking about him. All those years, while she was building her career, working in TV or on the stage, she had tried to forget Johnny, but she couldn’t. No other man she met had ever matched up to her memory of him.

Well, at least she had more confidence now, she controlled her own life instead of letting her mother do it, not that Trudie could, any more. Trudie couldn’t even look after herself. Annie increasingly found herself taking on the role of adult to her mother’s child.

She knew that getting this part had helped her grow up a lot. The series was set around the City of London police force; her character was an detective inspector in CID for which she was grateful, as it meant she did not have to wear a serge police uniform, which would have been hell under the lights. Actors who had to wear them were always complaining.

Slightly built, her breasts still small, although her hips had a more rounded curve now, Annie knew she looked younger than her actual age. The bone structure she’d inherited from her mother made her face striking rather than pretty; she was lucky it was so expressive, reflecting every thought, every emotion for the camera to pick up. She found it easy to act on the small screen – the less you did, the better. She just let a thought fill her head, and it would show on her face without her trying.

Her skin had cleared up, she no longer had a tendency to eczema, and she had cut her long blonde hair. These days she wore it very short and straight, the part she played demanded that. Women police officers generally did wear their hair short, for good reasons, Harriet had explained when she asked Annie to have hers cut. Long hair was too easy to pull, if you were attacked, for one thing, and for another, short hair was a police tradition, and easier to keep tidy. Looking neat and capable also disguised the fact that you were a woman, and, in a male-dominated world, that helped.

Annie still saw herself as plain, for all the attention she got, but she’d discovered with surprise that a lot of other actors were just a

s shy and uncertain. Acting was one way of dealing with shyness. You hid inside the shell of someone else. When she was in a part, she could feel beautiful, brilliant, exciting, and make her audience see her that way.

When she took off her make-up, her real self-image took over again and her confidence crumbled. Her slow but steady rise in her profession hadn’t made any difference to the underlying uncertainty about herself.

She looked into her eyes and saw the nervous glitter in them; she was always keyed-up before she started work, afraid that this time the magic wouldn’t work, she would fail, make a fool of herself.

‘CID card, put it in your inside jacket pocket,’ said the girl who looked after props. ‘Handbag, check the contents with me?’

Annie pulled herself together to go through the neat black handbag item by item while they were ticked off to make sure continuity was preserved for that day’s filming.

She had to open the bag in the first scene; the contents would be visible and there was always an eagle-eyed viewer who would spot any discrepancy.

‘Valentine’s card,’ Props said and Annie’s head jerked up, her face turned white.

‘What?’ She looked at the stiff white envelope in the bag then, not touching it, suddenly sick. Oh, my God. How had he got it in there?

Then she heard the giggles and realised. She took a deep breath, forced a smile, reached for the card, willing her hand not to shake, opened the envelope and read the scrawled words.

‘Love from all of us!’

In the mirror, she saw them all crowding into the doorway, grinning at her and looking a little sheepish: all the technical people, cameramen, electricians, sound-men, Frank Goodwin towering behind them.

‘A day early,’ Frank said, ‘But you won’t be working with us tomorrow, and we wanted to give it to you, not send it.’

‘Thanks, guys! It’s gorgeous,’ she said, putting a hand to her lips and blowing them a kiss.

‘That’s enough fun and games from you lot, get back to work,’ Harriet said, but she was grinning too. She had been in on the joke.

Annie relaxed again but she was trembling faintly now, a thin film of perspiration on her forehead.