The Unlit Fire

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Andra Lee is a promising young actress and her film career seems guaranteed. But her fiancé, determined that their future together lies in South Africa, has other plans. She is prepared to comply until a vivid nightmare shatters her resolve. And as she sails towards South Africa, thinking only of the world she is leaving behind, the disturbing figure of her dreams comes into her life.

Release date: March 27, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

FLACK SANKEY, older of the famous Sankey Brothers—theatrical and film agents—was a man who prided himself that his large nose was designed for smelling out trouble.

He smelt it this morning. He positively sniffed the air as he walked into Andra Lee’s flat. Rose Penham, secretary to Andra Lee, met him in the long low-ceilinged room of Miss Lee’s beautiful penthouse which overlooked Hyde Park, and noted the expression on Flack’s face. It was a big heavy face with two blue chins and heavily-lidded eyes and that distressing nose which never seemed to distress him. Poor old Flack was no thing of beauty, Rose thought, and, at forty, weighed eighteen stone. He breathed noisily. He reminded her of a porpoise—the way he swam doggedly through crowds, getting ahead of anyone else. Yet she liked him. Everybody liked Flack. He had a certain benevolence and charm which outweighed his lack of physical attraction. He even had a petite blonde wife who adored him. But London knew that Andra was the real love of his life, and his star client. Jay, Flack’s wife, knew it too, but did not begrudge him Andra’s friendship. She loved Andra too. And Rose, like all those who served Miss Lee, was her devoted slave.

Rose Penham, tall, thin, middle-aged, with silver-wings over both ears and a lot of nervous energy, eyed Flack with gloom. She knew exactly what was the matter with him. The same thing was the matter with her this morning; with everybody employed by Andra.

They were afraid she was about to ruin her life.

Flack came to the point bluntly. In his rich guttural Jewish voice which held all the sorrows and indignation of his persecuted race, he said:

“Ach! what a catastrophe! The girl is off her head.”

“We’ll all be off our heads if you don’t keep calm, Flack,” said Rose in her brittle, rather ill-tempered voice. She gave the impression that she was a sour woman, but she was really very kind and immensely efficient. She had done much to protect Andra Lee from the troubles and problems that beset a film star. Rose was Andra’s bodyguard. It was she who answered the telephone and locked the doors to keep out unwanted photographers, reporters and fortune-hunters, or those who merely came whining, to beg for help.

Andra Lee was a new and sensational success. In her last film, Poor Little Rich Girl, she had captured the hearts of Britain’s film-going public. Now Hollywood was rolling handsome offers to her across the Atlantic.

Andra was a success as an actress, not merely as a body, although beautiful she certainly was. But she appealed to a public with intellect, as well as to the masses. Flack, himself, who never paid fulsome compliments had declared after that film that Andra was the Ingrid Bergman of the future.

“Ach!” Flack repeated his anguished exclamation and held up podgy hands. On the little finger of the left hand there flashed a diamond. It seemed incongruous worn with linen slacks, blue shirt and no tie. It was a hot day in June. The warmest summer since 1947. London sweltered. But up here in the penthouse it was delicious with a special air cooling system. Striped blinds sheltered Andra’s roof garden which was brilliant with flowers. A wicker chaise-longue piled with scarlet cushions, was there to tempt even a man like Flack, who liked to work eighteen hours out of twenty-four.

“Where is she?” he asked Miss Penham.

“Just had a shower and will be coming out to speak to you.”

Flack began to walk up and down the lounge. It was dimmed by the half-closed slats of the Venetian blinds on this roasting morning. Moodily he looked at everything and thought to himself for the hundredth time since he had received Andra’s letter, late last night, that it was tragic—even criminal—that a girl should write the word Finis to a brilliant career that had only just begun. With a stroke of her pen, he thought, she was signing a death warrant for herself as an actress, as well as for him as her agent.

Only twenty-four hours ago, Flack had offered her a contract big enough to make the head of any twenty-two-year old girl swim. Even while he had prepared that contract, Flack had regretted the fact that he had not signed her up before; tied her down; the little fool. But they had waited to see how the world would receive Poor Little Rich Girl. Poor little rich girl, indeed, he thought furiously. She could hardly make a fortune out of one film and she was chucking away all her splendid chances to build one up for herself in the future.

And why?

Flack padded up and down the lounge, chewing off the end of a cigar. He really did look like a porpoise or a seal, Miss Penham thought, bending that oily black head of his as he surged forward. She sighed. She pitied him. She pitied herself, too. It looked like the end for her, after the happiest year of her life. It was hard work, being confidential secretary to a film star, but Rose enjoyed it. She did so love Andra Lee. She was such a darling. So simple, so kind, so unlike a film star, really. She had the shyness and reticence of a Garbo. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps she would have become another Greta Garbo if she had gone on with her career. In her private life Andra tried to avoid too many bright lights, glittering suppers and hectic parties. She hadn’t even wanted this expensive flat. It was Flack who made her come here. Andra had shied at moving into such a palatial home. She had been quite happy, so she said, in her little two-roomed flat in Chelsea. But Flack had talked her into moving after the rapturous reception the critics and the public gave her film. He intended to make her the great Andra Lee. She had only to put herself in his hands.

The trouble was, thought Rose Penham, that Andra in her quiet way was extraordinarily stubborn; not at all easy to control. Flack was here this morning to try and make her change her mind but Rose knew that he was wasting his time. Nothing would make Andra change it.

“Ach!” for the third time Flack almost shouted the exclamation, then sat down on a low satin-covered divan and grabbed a photograph which stood on the glass-topped table beside him. He stared at it while he puffed at his cigar, his breathing growing more and more noisy.

“You!” he said to the photograph, “you are responsible for this. If I could but assassinate you in my thoughts, you would lie at my feet—a fearful corpse. A corpse, do you hear?”

“Really, Mr. Sankey,” protested Miss Penham.

Flack glowered at her.

“Do you not agree with me that it is better that he should be a corpse and Andra should continue her fine flight upward to stardom?”

“Yes, I think it’s a pity, Mr. Sankey, but Miss Lee happens to be in love.”

“Ach! In love with what? With this tailor’s dummy—this hulk of handsome boyish smug stupidity? Or is it she is in love with love?”

“Oh, I think Mr. Goodwin is quite fascinating,” said Rose Penham. “And she adores him—truly she does. She writes to him every day. Every day. And she has so often told me she would rather be just any housewife living with her husband than Andra Lee who has the world at her feet.”

Flack’s small black eyes disappeared into the white folds of his eyelids. He set Trevor Goodwin’s photograph down on to the table with a crash that threatened to smash it and which made Miss Penham jump. He growled:

“I tell you it is a terrible, a fantastic, a gargantuan mistake on her part. Mr. Goodwin is an ordinary young man with a handsome face. There are thousands more in the world. She need not ruin herself, and all of us, just because she wants to go out to Cape Town and marry this one. If she waits she will find more men to choose from and possibly a better one. Most certainly. Who is Trevor Goodwin? Who is he?”

Miss Penham gave a somewhat hollow laugh.

“Just the man whom Andra Lee fancies, that’s all.”

“I don’t believe that she does,” said Flack. “She has talked to me of this Trevor but I do not think he can be the love of her life. He is just a man to whom she engaged herself when she was twenty. And because she is a nice girl with nice ideas, she thinks that she must keep her promise.”

“Keeping one’s promise is really quite a good idea,” remarked Rose dryly. “I used to be engaged once—oh, a million years ago, when I was a young girl—and my charming fiancé broke his promise to me. I’ve never cared for anybody since. I wouldn’t like that to happen to Miss Lee’s boy-friend, though he means nothing to me.”

Flack puffed cigar smoke somewhat vindictively in the direction of Miss Penham.

“So Andra does not mind turning me into a nervous wreck and herself into an imbecile who surrenders her fortune and slides into a marriage which will make her nothing but a nonentity. In Cape Town she will become one of a million other wives with little to offer the world and to whom the world offers nothing in return.”

“Oh, dear, Mr. Sankey, you have worked yourself up this morning,” said Miss Penham shaking her head.

Flack spread his hands out in a gesture that was meant to be appealing. In Miss Penham’s rich imagination, it was the porpoise begging for a fish.

“Can you not reason with her? Make her see sense. Send for her parents, her lawyer, her bank manager—anybody to whom she might listen.”

Came a voice from the doorway—that low and singularly sweet voice that could charm the hearts of cinema audiences in their thousands.

“Flack dear, it’s much too hot this morning to get yourself into such a tizzy. Do calm down, and please don’t bother to send for any of these people. My mind is quite definitely made up.”

“But why?” Flack Sankey lumbered on to his feet and perspiring profusely, began to mop his face and neck with a large silk handkerchief. “Why are you doing this, Andra? My darling, you are insane! When I received your note it stunned me. I nearly cut my throat.”

Andra Lee smiled as she moved towards her manager. That smile was full of natural charm. Miss Penham regarded her with dog-like devotion. Flack Sankey looked at her with the tragic realisation that here was a glorious actress for whom the world had waited. He was so genuinely moved to grief by the decision Andra had made, that he would willingly have forfeited his own commission in order to keep her at the top of the ladder.

It had been a rush upwards, he thought—no ordinary climb. Perhaps that was the trouble. Fame had come too quickly to Andra—she hadn’t had time to grasp it or to realise what she was doing by throwing it all up.

“Do sit down, Flack, and relax,” Andra said kindly.

He returned to his yellow satin sofa. Rose retired discreetly. Andra’s Austrian maid came in with the iced coffee which Flack adored. He took a gulp from the tall frosted goblet, then opened his eyes to their fullest in order to examine Andra; as though he wanted to make sure that she was the Andra he knew, rather than a lunatic-stranger.

She looked heavenly, he thought, with deepening gloom, in a white bath robe with a wide sash around the incredibly small waist. Her long reddish hair had been piled up on top of her head with combs. Soft pinkish tendrils, still wet from the shower, clung to her rounded forehead and the nape of the long slender neck. She had that very white skin which goes with auburn hair—pure and unblemished. The oval face had a certain child-like gravity and the long-shaped eyes, darkly grey, with very long lashes, were full of sweetness. There was no voluptuousness in that face, yet a trace of passion in the finely-cut lips. But Andra’s beauty in Flack Sankey’s opinion—and the opinion of many others who were her friends and critics—would improve, like her acting, after she had had one or two love affairs, and suffered.

The expression in those lovely eyes was almost innocent now. Andra, as Flack had said to Rose, was a nice girl, born of nice, ordinary people. The film that had made her name had required her kind of grave, even angelic sweetness. But she still lacked the measure of the deep feeling that a truly great actress needs. The potentialities were there, of course. In the last scene with her lover, they had been so very evident.

Flack groaned and put his hands up to his head, moving it from side to side.

“Oh, my darling! Why, why, must you do this thing?” he cried aloud.

Andra leaned back against the cushions of the chair in which she had seated herself. Between her long slender fingers she held a box of cigarettes and a lighter. She did not open the box. Her eyes had closed. Her face had that shut-in look which Flack recognised. It was the look he had grown to dread during the past year as her manager, for whenever he had wanted her to do something that he had thought good for her and to which she had objected, those shutters came down across that small face and seemed to bar her completely from him. Oh, she was stubborn all right, and amazingly self-contained for one so young. Who was to know what she was thinking? She never seemed able to give of her full self until she was on the stage, participating in the dream world of the film studios.

“Andra, I am your true friend as well as your manager,” Flack began in a voice of real tragedy. “Please, my dear, dear little Andra, speak to me and tell me why you have made this terrible decision? You have the world …”

“At my feet,” broke in Andra, opening her eyes and smiling at him. “I know. I know all the things that you are going to say. I’m sorry only because I’ve disappointed you and let down all those who believe in me.”

“But you are letting down yourself, too,” Flack protested, waving his cigar in the air. “Look at your notices. Look at all this—” he waved a podgy hand around the lounge which was full of expensive flowers, boxes of chocolates still tied up in their cellophane wrappers with gay satin ribbons, and the basket of fan mail which Rose always brought in from the study for Miss Lee to read, quietly, after her bath.

“I tried to explain myself in the letter I sent you, Flack,” Andra sighed.

“It was no explanation. It only gave me your cr-r-r-azy decision to get out of films and go to South Africa to be married.”

“Is it so crazy?”

“Madness. Who and what is this man, Trevor? What can he offer you?”

“Very little if it’s only money and position that count in life, Flack.”

“You know that they count. Gone is this old-fashioned nonsense that love comes first. Young people of today realise that bread and cheese and kisses do not work.”

Andra’s grey, lovely eyes now crinkled into laughter.

“I think Trevor can offer me a little more than bread and cheese. I am sure there will be butter and even the odd spot of caviare and the occasional glass of champagne. After all, Trevor is manager of a huge business in Cape Town.”

“But what of you and of your life? You have a great future before you. Glamour, money and fame for the asking. Trevor Goodwin will make of you a housewife whose spare time will be spent drinking in clubs, or playing tennis or golf or bridge.”

“Or having children,” added Andra gently.

“Ach, very well. Have your children and become fat and frumpish.”

“Now you are out of date, Flack. Modern mothers preserve their figures. Even Marlene Dietrich is a grandmother.”

“But she didn’t become one until her name was made and her position secure. Why can you not wait and marry your boy-friend once you have established yourself as Andra Lee? One successful film has put you on the top but it won’t keep you there. You must go on or … you will be like a meteor …” Flack wheezed asthmatically, “which soars into the heavens, then crashes into the earth and is seen no more.”

“Flack, I don’t think I want to be a great star and stay in the firmament as one.”

“Then why did you ever begin? Why did you work so hard for these last two years of your life and reach this pinnacle if it was only to throw it all up?” Flack demanded angrily.

Silence for a moment. Andra bit at her lower lip and then slowly drew a cigarette from the box and flicked on her lighter.

“That’s the way it’s worked out,” she said, “I didn’t anticipate my success. In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d do what I’ve done in so short a space of time. What you don’t realise, Flack, is that I belong to Trevor and that I’ve been waiting for him to send for me. I always intended to go out and marry him as soon as that day arrived.”

“And do you not think he is an egotist? A … a supreme egotist?” flashed the man on the sofa. “To know that you are a star and yet be willing to throw you back into the sea to swim with all the other fish, just in order to run his house in Cape Town and sleep in his bed and bear his children. Is that not abominably selfish?”

Andra rose to her feet.

“You go too far, Flack. Besides, Trevor knows how I feel. He is not demanding anything I do not wish to give.”

Flack too, rose, wiping his wet face and neck. He had lost his temper. He did not care what he said now.

“You object to the mention of the word bed. Is Andra Lee such a Victorian Miss that she cannot allow the world to think of her in the arms of a lover or a husband? Always you shrink from the word sex, yet in your film you managed to convey it so beautifully that every audience that sees your film goes home intoxicated with passion. They have watched you in your moment of surrender and you have given them the thrill they need. The passion is yours but you deny it.”

Andra was pale now and trembling very slightly. She said:

“This is absurd. You and I have never agreed on the subject of sex, Flack. I’m not a fool and I’m not a prude, but I’ve never wanted to be a sex-kitten or any pin-up girl. Sex is not my line. Anyhow the whole thing is ridiculous, because if you analyse it, my decision to go to South Africa and marry my fiancé, cannot be sexless, can it? It means I want a husband.”

Flack stared at her hopelessly, his fat face creasing as though he wanted to cry.

“Oh, my darling, do not let us hate each other. I adore you. I have wept for joy over your notices. There has been nothing greater in my life than you. You can remain the most intellectual actress in the world so far as I am concerned. I know you are innocent and that there has been nobody in your life except this Trevor, but I hoped you would take a lover and learn the meaning of passion, of woman’s fulfilment … not become a housewife and a mother … not yet. Oh, my darling, not yet!”

Andra’s eyes which could be so cool, even stern, softened now. She came up and put her hands on her manager’s shoulders and touched one of his cheeks with her fresh lips.

“Forgive me, Flack. I know I’ve disappointed you. But I’ve got to lead my life as I think it should be led. I gave Trevor a solemn promise before he left me two years ago. I wear his ring. He has been working to make a home for me. I must go to him now.”

“But why can you not do so—get married—but fly back to make your next film?”

“Because that’s the one way to ruin a marriage. You know yourself that in the film world there are endless divorces and separations. I want my marriage to be a suc. . .