Facing the Light Read Free

wonder. Vaguely, Rilla thought about whether it would be worth turning the flat upside down to find them. Probably not. Half the photograph was white roses, spilling off the bed and almost out of the frame, like an avalanche. David, the director, had spent such ages piling them up, arranging the fur rug over her feet, and making sure she was leaning back against the bedlinen at just the right angle. I should take it away, she thought. It’s ridiculous to keep it there as a reminder. Maybe I could cover it up completely with a scarf or something.
    She stared at herself and sighed. She smiled. That was a mistake. Could all these wrinkles and dark circles and general sagginess of neck and chin have sprung up overnight? I’m only forty-eight, she thought. Sod’s Law, that was what it was. There was Gwen, two years older and all milk and roses with never more than a spot of powder and a dab of lipstick on special occasions. No bloody justice in the world. She could hear her mother’s voice saying, as she always did,
Fairness has nothing to do with it, Cyrilla darling. Your sister is one person and you are another and you are both precious to me
. Leonora was the only person in the whole world allowed to use the really too silly name she’d saddled her younger daughter with at birth. Her sister only had to contend with Gwendolen. It wasn’t brilliant, but at least people had heard of it. When Rilla first went to school, everyone asked, is Cyrilla a family name? But they could barely suppress their laughter whenever it was spoken, so shevery quickly shortened it, and short was how it had mostly stayed.
    Of course, if her father had lived, he might have tried hard to suggest something more sensible, but Rilla was willing to bet that her mother would have carried the day as she usually did. Peter Simmonds, Rilla’s father, had died in a car accident six months before she was born. Rilla knew it was quite irrational, but she’d always felt faintly guilty, as though she herself were to blame somehow. Both she and Gwen grew up with stories about the relationship that had existed between their parents. By all accounts, this love was like something out of a fairytale: transcendent, immutable and deeper by far than the rather ordinary passions experienced by other people. Certainly it took Leonora some years to recover from her husband’s death. Rilla thought she recalled the house being quiet, and her mother in black weeping at the breakfast table, but didn’t know whether the silence and sadness in her head were truly memories or only stories that had been told to her later by Leonora and which she was imagining. Photographs of her father, a tall, rather military-looking man with reddish hair and an unsmiling gaze, were there in albums which were hardly ever looked at these days.
    â€˜What for do you look so sour, beloved Rilla?’ came Ivan’s lazy tones, husky partly from last night’s cigarettes but mostly from well-rehearsed affectation.
    â€˜Nothing,’ said Rilla, ‘only it’s going to take a hell of a lot of slap to reconstruct something resembling my face.’ She kept her voice light, so that Ivan shouldn’t know her true feelings. She had no intention of trying to explain the fear in her heart at the prospect of the days ahead.
    â€˜You are beautiful, my darling,’ said Ivan. ‘You have a twilight beauty.’
    â€˜And you are full of shit,’ said Rilla, laughing, applying rather more foundation than Monsieur (or possiblyMadame) Lancôme would have recommended to her cheeks and forehead, and making sure to blend in thoroughly around the neck and chin line.
    That was one thing you could say about working (or in Rilla’s case most often
not
working) in the movies and the theatre. It did teach you all about the possibilities, the magic, the transforming power of make-up. Everyone was busy constructing selves that they thought might appeal