Page 9 of The Love Letter
Only James, her darling grandfather, had remained calm; a quiet presence exuding reason and support when all those around her seemed to be screaming at the tops of their voices.
Zoe had always been James’s special girl. As a child, she’d had no idea that the kind, elderly man with the rich, deep voice, who refused to be addressed as ‘Grandpa’ because he said it made him feel old, was one of the most lauded classical actors in the country. She had grown up in a comfortable house in Blackheath with her mother and older brother, Marcus. Her parents had already divorced by the time she was three and she had rarely seen her father, Charles, who had moved to LA. And so it was James who had become the father figure in her world. His rambling country home – Haycroft House in Dorset – with its orchard and cosy attic bedrooms, had been the setting for her most pleasurable childhood memories.
In semi-retirement, only popping off stateside occasionally to appear in a cameo film role, which ‘brought home the bacon’ as he put it, her grandfather had always been there for her. Especially after Zoe’s mother had been killed suddenly in a road accident only a few yards from their house. Zoe had been ten, her brother Marcus fourteen. All she remembered of the funeral was clinging on to him and seeing his face set, jaw clenched, silent tears running down his cheeks as they listened to the vicar say the prayers. The service had been tense and bleak. She’d been forced to wear a stiff black dress, the lace irritating her neck.
Charles had returned from LA and tried to comfort a son and daughter he hardly knew, but it had been James who had wiped away her tears and hugged her as she wept long into the night. James had tried to comfort Marcus too, but he had closed up and refused to discuss it. The grief Marcus had felt for the loss of his mother had been locked away deep inside him.
While her father had swept her up to live in LA with him, Marcus had been left at boarding school in England. It was as if she had not only lost her mother, but her brother too . . . her whole life all at once.
When she’d arrived in the dry, prickly heat at her father’s hacienda-style house in Bel Air, Zoe had discovered she had an ‘Auntie Debbie’. Auntie Debbie apparently lived with Daddy and even slept in the same bed as he did. Auntie Debbie was very blonde, voluptuous and not happy to have ten-year-old Zoe arrive in her life.
She’d been sent to school in Beverly Hills and had hated every moment of it. She’d rarely seen her father, who was too busy carving a niche for himself as a movie director. Instead, she’d endured Debbie’s idea of child-rearing: TV dinners and wall-to-wall cartoons. She’d missed the changing seasons of England desperately and hated the harsh heat and loud accents of LA. She’d written long letters to her grandfather, begging him to come and fetch her so that she could live at her beloved Haycroft House with him, trying to convince him that she could look after herself. And that, really, she would be no trouble, if he’d only let her come back home.
Six months after Zoe had arrived in LA, a taxi had appeared on the drive. Out of it had stepped James, wearing a dapper Panama hat and a broad smile. Zoe still remembered the feeling of overwhelming joy as she ran down the drive and threw herself into his arms. Her protector had heeded her call and had arrived to rescue her. With Auntie Debbie banished to sulk by the pool, Zoe had poured out her woes into her grandfather’s ears. Subsequently, he had called his son and told him of Zoe’s misery. Charles – who had been filming in Mexico at the time – had agreed to let James take her back to England.
On the long flight home, she’d sat happily next to James, her small hand clutched in his big one. She had leant on his firm, capable shoulder, knowing that she wanted to be wherever he was.
The cosy, weekly boarding school in Dorset had been a happy experience. James had always been glad to welcome Zoe’s friends, either in London or at Haycroft House. It was only when she watched their parents’ wide-eyed wonderment as they came to collect their children and shook hands with the great Sir James Harrison that she started to realise just how famous a man her grandfather was. As she grew older, James began to pass on to her his love for Shakespeare, Ibsen and Wilde. The two of them would regularly take in a play at the Barbican, the National Theatre or the Old Vic. They’d stay the night at James’s grand London house in Welbeck Street, then spend Sundays in front of the fire going through the text of the play.
By the time Zoe was seventeen, she knew she wanted to become an actress. James sent off for all the prospectuses from drama schools and they pored over each, weighing up their pros and cons, until it was decided that Zoe should go to a good university and take an English degree first, then apply for drama school when she was twenty-one.
‘Not only will you study the classic texts at university, which will give your performances depth, but you will also be older and ready to suck up all the information on offer at drama school by the time you get there. Besides, a degree gives you something to fall back on.’
‘You think I’ll fail as an actress?’ Zoe had been horrified.
‘No, my darling, of course not. You’re my granddaughter for a start,’ he’d chuckled. ‘But you’re so damned lovely-looking that unless you’ve got a bloody degree, they won’t take you seriously.’
They’d agreed between them that Zoe – if her A-level results were as good as expected – should apply to Oxford to study English.
And then she’d fallen in love. Right in the middle of her A levels.
Four months later, she was pregnant and devastated. Her carefully mapped-out future was in tatters.
Uncertain and terrified of her grandfather’s reaction, Zoe had blurted it out over supper one night. James had paled a little, but had nodded calmly and asked her what she wanted to do about it. Zoe had burst into tears. The situation was so dreadful, so complex, that she could not even tell her beloved grandfather the whole truth.
All through that awful week when Charles had arrived in London with Debbie in tow, shouting at Zoe, calling her an idiot and demanding to know who the father was, James had been there, giving her strength and the courage to take the decision to have her baby. And he had never once asked who the father might be. Nor questioned the trip up to London that had left Zoe drained and ghostly white when he’d picked her up from Salisbury railway station and she’d fallen sobbing into his arms.
If it hadn’t been for his love, support and his complete faith in her ability to make the right decision, Zoe knew she would not have made it through.
At Jamie’s birth, Zoe had watched James’s faded blue eyes fill with tears as he’d seen his great-grandson for the first time. The labour had been early and so swift that there had been no time for Zoe to make the half-hour journey from Haycroft House to the nearest hospital. So Jamie had been born on his great-grandfather’s old four-poster bed, with the local midwife in charge. Zoe had lain there, panting with exhaustion and elation, as her tiny, squalling son was lifted into James’s arms.
‘Welcome to the world, little man,’ he’d whispered, then kissed him gently on his forehead.
In that moment, she’d decided to name her baby boy after him.
Whether the bond had formed then, or in the following few weeks as grandfather and granddaughter took it in turns to get up at night and comfort a colicky, tearful baby, Zoe didn’t know. James had been both a father and a friend to her son. Young boy and old man had spent many hours together, James somehow galvanising the energy to play with Jamie. Zoe would arrive home and find them out in the orchard, James throwing the football for Jamie to kick. He’d take him off on nature hunts through the winding lanes of the Dorset countryside, teaching his great-grandson about the flowers that grew in the hedgerows and in their gorgeous country garden. Peonies, lavender and salvia jostled for space in the wide beds. And in mid-July, the smell of James’s favourite roses wafted through her bedroom window.
It had been a beautiful, tranquil time, Zoe simply content to be with her little son and her grandfather. Her own father was at the height of his fame, having just won an Oscar, and she rarely heard from him. She did her best not to mind, but still, just yesterday at the airport, when he’d hugged her and said he missed her, the invisible parental thread had tugged at her heart.
He’s getting old too. . . she thought as she negotiated the roundabout at the end of the motorway and headed for central London.
When Jamie was three, it had been James who had gently convinced her to apply for drama school. ‘If you win a place, we can all live in Welbeck Street,’ he’d said. ‘Jamie should be starting nursery a couple of mornings a week soon. It’s good for a child to socialise.’
‘I’m sure I won’t get in anyway,’ she had muttered, as she’d finally agreed to try for a place at RADA, only a short bicycle ride from Welbeck Street.
Yet shehadgot in, and with the support of a young French au pair, who collected Jamie from his nursery at noon and cooked lunch for both him and James, Zoe had completed her three-year course.
Her grandfather had then corralled his theatrical agent, plus a raft of casting director friends, to attend her graduation performance – ‘My darling, the world is built on nepotism, whether you’re an actor or a butcher!’ And by the time she left, she had an agent and her very first small part in a television drama. By then, Jamie was at school, and Zoe’s career as an actress had subsequently blossomed. Although to her disappointment, it was the screen, rather than the stage – her first love – that formed her employment.
