Power of a Woman (9 page)

“No, not that I know of. However, Ma’s indicated to me a few times that she thinks he’s…sort of—”

Cutting himself off, Miles hesitated, and then, dropping his voice an octave, he finished in a stage whisper, “Plotting against her.”

“Ah, I see.” There was a dramatic pause. Then, holding Miles with his eyes, Derek intoned, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

“I suppose there’s truth in that. Shakespeare Power of a Woman / 91

always got it right, didn’t he? And you should know, you’ve been in enough of his dramas.”

A thoughtful look crossed the actor’s expressive face, and he was silent for a moment or two, and then he asked quietly, “Do you believe he’s plotting, Miles?”

“I…I just don’t know.”

“I
know
your mother. She doesn’t imagine things, she’s far too pragmatic for that. Therefore, if she thinks he is, then he is. Although, to be truthful, I’m damned if I know the reason he would do such a thing. After all, the business will be his one day.”

“Maybe he’s in a hurry.”

“I can’t imagine the reason.”

“Neither can I, Gramps.”

Derek sighed. “Ambition. Greed. The lust for power. It’s toppled many a throne, caused murder and mayhem on a grand scale. We’ve only got to look at the Plantagenets and the Tudors to understand that.” He shook his head, and a sad, rather regretful expression settled on his handsome face.

“Nigel always was something of a mystery to me, Miles, I must admit. I never really understood him when he was a child. Nor did I understand his ac-tions when he was a teenager. But then, that’s another story altogether, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. I didn’t understand all that mess either.”

Derek stared off into space for a moment, lost in memories of the past, before saying eventually, 92 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

“How is Nigel’s marriage? Is that all right? No problems with Tamara?”

“None as far as I know, and she’s a smashing girl.

He’s bloody lucky to have her and those two great kids.”

“Ah, but does
he
know it, Miles?”

Miles shrugged, lifted his hands in a helpless gesture.

Derek averted his head, looked into the fire, lost in thought again.

After a moment Miles said, “Getting back to Gideon, I’ve been wondering if he’s upset about Margot. But then, why would he be, when
he
broke it off with her?”

“Could he possibly have regrets?” Derek suggested, turning to face Miles, looking directly at him.

“Maybe. But it wasn’t very good between them in the end. I think she was getting on his nerves. Margot always was something of a social butterfly, and you know Gideon’s not very keen on partying. He’s too serious, too dedicated to work.” Miles exhaled heavily. “Oh, God, I don’t know…and who knows what Gideon really thinks or feels? It beats me.”

“Have you tried talking to him?”

Miles threw back his head and guffawed. “Oh, come on, Gramps, of course I have! And he bit my head off the last time I did.”

“Perhaps he’s just going through one of those phases all young men go through—at some time Power of a Woman / 93

or other,” Derek said, thinking out loud. “Trying to find himself, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But more than likely, it’s woman trouble.” A brow lifted knowingly. “That’s usually what’s ailing men when they appear troubled and despairing but without any real reason to be so afflicted.”

“I suppose you’re right, Derek.”

A split second later, Chloe appeared in the archway of the great hall. “Coo-ee, coo-ee,” she called, waving frantically, trying to gain their attention. “It’s almost three-thirty and lunch is ready! Mom would like you to come to the dining room.
Now
, she says.”

“Her wish is our command, my darling.” Derek put down his glass and rose.

So did Miles.

Together the two men went to join her, and the three of them slowly made their way to the dining room.

I
T WAS A FESTIVE LUNCH.

Everyone talked a lot and laughed and exclaimed about the good things offered to them, since by now they were all extremely hungry.

Cappi and her two helpers had prepared a truly memorable Thanksgiving lunch. There were all manner of delicious and succulent things to eat with the large, plump turkey—sweet potatoes with a marshmallow topping, mashed potatoes as well as potatoes roasted in the oven, and parsnips, red cabbage, cranberries, a thick, fragrant-smelling gravy, and, of course, Stevie’s famous, mouthwater-ing sage-and-onion bread stuffing.

Along with the turkey, Cappi had baked a Virginia ham and roasted a batch of quail, much to Derek’s amusement. He knew that these had been made in order to tempt him; after years of complaining to Stevie about her Thanksgiving turkeys, she had apparently taken the hint. And

96 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

yet hadn’t he always explained to her that English turkeys were not as good as those to be found in America, an important point, since over the years most of her Thanksgiving meals had been served in London. He had been partially teasing her; she had taken his words to heart.

“A little of everything,” he told Cappi, who was hovering around the sideboard, where the turkey, ham, and quail were arrayed on large platters, alongside all the accompanying vegetables. “And only dark meat, please, if you’re giving me turkey.”

“And what about vegetables, Sir Derek?”

“Mashed potatoes would be lovely, and stuffing and gravy, but that’s it, thanks, Cappi. Must watch the waistline, you know.”

Miles moved slowly around the table, pouring the red Bordeaux, a Château Gruaud-Larose, his favorite Saint-Julien. It had been bottled in 1989, a good year, and he commented on this to Miles, who nodded and smiled. “Chosen specially for you,”

Miles told him with a conspiratorial wink.

Chloe followed on her brother’s heels, filling their water glasses; Blair passed around the basket of homemade breads and Stevie offered cranberry sauce. Then at last they were all served, and they settled down to eat.

Derek ate slowly, savoring his food, saying a word or two occasionally. Mostly he listened, and observed everyone.

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He was very content to be here today, enjoying this respite from his work, enjoying being with his family. Part of his family, at any rate. He could not help wishing Gideon were here, and Nigel and Tamara with their two children, and then they would have been complete. A true family all together under one roof for once.

This was his second family; long ago there had been his daddy and his mam, his brothers, Owen and David, and sister, Gwyneth. The family of his blood, whom he had loved so much when he was growing up in Ystradyfodwg, that little parish that was the Rhondda.
The Rhondda
…how he loved the sound of it, loved rolling the name around on his tongue. The place of his heart…where all his hopes and dreams had been born…another of the great industrial valleys of South Wales, where coal mining was the main industry.

The pit. The dreaded pit. The giver of wealth, the taker of life.

His daddy had worked in the pit all his life, from being a young boy until the day he died. Claimed by the pit. It was an explosion in the belly of the earth that took so many of their men and ravaged the town. His daddy had died with the others when the walls of the mine had collapsed and water had flooded the shafts.

His brother Owen had not been on the same shift as their daddy that day, and so, thankfully, he had been spared. Spared to become the breadwinner for them all.

98 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

It was because of his elder brother that
he
had been spared. Owen, and Gwyneth too, had seen something special in him when he was a boy.

Eventually they had come to calling it “the gift,” and as it turned out, it was just that, something deep within himself that he could draw on and that would eventually take him to great heights as an actor, although he had not known it then. Nor had he or they known at that time exactly what this gift was, not really. They could not define it. But, very simply, his brother and sister had discerned something in him that made him different, lifted him high above the mediocrity of the crowd.

In a sense, it was a mixture of things: his talent for acting, his genius for mimicry, his boy’s soprano voice that everyone said was so beautiful—this would go, they all knew that—but they recognized these attributes in him and rejoiced. Owen, in particular, appreciated his aptitude for learning and was convinced that this alone was his great chance. That rare chance to escape the fate of most boys of his age in South Wales in the 1940s: Working in the mines underground.

“He’s not going down the pit; I won’t let him,”

Owen was forever announcing to Gwyneth; his sister, mother, and brother, David, would agree that he was too good to be wasted “down there.”

Owen was awed by his renditions of poetry; he had a natural talent for reciting reams of it, all learned by heart and committed to memory; equally, Owen was awed by his overwhelming

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ambition, his consuming desire to act. To be an actor, that was his goal.

He wanted to walk out on a stage and become someone else. Yes,
to act
, of all things, and he a poor boy from the Welsh valleys. Yet they had a rare respect for the language in those once-glorious valleys where the bright hillsides had been spoiled, seamed as they were with mine shafts, the tops of the lovely green hills scarred by pit heads.

They had immense respect for the written word, and the spoken, those Celts did. That strangely alien tribe, which, some said, was the lost tribe of Israel.

This love of words was inherited from their ancestors, his ancestors, and he too loved the language, perhaps more than anything else. As a boy he had loved the music and the singing in the chapel on Sundays and the eisteddfods, those wonderful musical festivals where he had excelled whilst his voice had lasted.

His first language, as a boy, had been Welsh, and he still spoke it, loved speaking it. But he had learned that foreign tongue,
English
, when young, had conquered it, made it his own in a most singular way.

Owen and Gwyneth had saved him from going down the pit. He had been forever grateful to them for that, and he had shown his gratitude whenever he could. He was fiercely loyal to them; his brothers and sister meant the world to him. They had, after all, given him this life. Or at least given him the chance to grab this life, make it his 100 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

own, just as he made a stage his own whenever he stepped onto it.

His Welsh family, his blood family. They were fortunately still intact, except for his mamgu, his mam, who had died twenty years ago. She had lived to witness his success, his triumphs, had seen him play Henry IV and Henry V. She had been thrilled by his Hamlet and had applauded his Richard III, had sat there in the theater and watched him mesmerize an audience, hold them spellbound for two and three hours at a stretch. His beloved Welsh family, to which he forever returned, as always rev-eling in his roots, his heritage, dragging this with him wherever he went, like a banner in the wind.

Wait. He was wrong. Surely he was wrong. Not two families in his life, but three. There had been another one long ago, a family of actors, a few young men who had gravitated to each other in the early fifties.

Rich, of course, and Stanley Baker, and himself.

And a handful of other Welshmen who had eventually fallen by the wayside. But all of them of common background, come out of those great green valleys of rugby football and singing, poetry, poverty, and the pits. Working-class boys who became working-class heroes. Especially to each other.

He and Rich and Stanley had been real boyos in those days, treading the boards and boozing it up in the pubs, and wenching hard when they were Power of a Woman / 101

lucky enough to get the chance. Boasting more than doing, as he recalled it now. And the three of them had shared a love of rugby football, playing it, watching it, and cheering on the Welsh team.

Oh, how young they had been and full of power and pride and piss and vinegar. And each of them growing more famous. Heady stuff it had been then, in the London of the fifties.

It was their Welshness, their talent, and their acting that had bonded them together, bound them as a family, and Richard Burton, his beloved Rich, had been their leader. The Welsh chieftain out of the valleys, and ready to lead them on to triumphs beyond their wildest dreams. And he had done so.

Their wonderful Welsh warrior, all fire and brilliance, with his brightly burning genius, immensely powerful as a man, charismatic and compelling, and one of the greatest classical actors of his time. Of all time, in fact, with a voice one critic described as

“memorably beautiful.” And that voice was, in his opinion, the source of Rich’s genius as an actor.

And then Rich had gone and died at the age of fifty-eight, in 1984, and how he had wept for him, just as he and Rich had wept for that other fallen friend, Stanley, when he had died so absurdly young in 1976.
Sir
Stanley Baker by then, honored by all.

And he and Rich had mourned him, and they had shared their rage, their anger that he had died so young and left them so bereaved.

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And it was only a short eight years later that Rich was gone himself, felled by a massive brain hemor-rhage at his home in Switzerland. And that little family of actors was no more. There was only him left.

But he had
this
family. It was they who concerned him now as they all sat around Stevie’s circular table in her dining room at Romany Hall in Kent, Connecticut, so far away from the valleys of South Wales and his youth.

He glanced at Miles, who caught his eye and smiled. Derek smiled back, but immediately he fell inward, thinking about
this
family, these people who had become, over the years, the mainspring of his life.

Miles
. More like a son than a grandson. He had tried to help Stevie raise him after Ralph died so young, at least as much as she would allow. Fiercely independent, she had not wanted any interference with the boys, not from anyone.