Free The Final Curtain by Priscilla Masters Page B

bland and derivative of American imports, cattle rustling, a lost lamb, a cow that calved.’ She humphed, ‘With a lot of mooing and groaning. Even a murder. Some poor cowhand was found at the bottom of the well.’ Suddenly she looked vague, her forehead struggling to frown. ‘I think …’ She attempted to retrieve her story with a smile. ‘There were so many episodes – one a week every week for twelve years. Along the way I’ve had five husbands.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘Not all of them very satisfactory. I’d had two by the time I was twenty-one. My first husband was a lot older than me. He was my screen Daddy on Butterfield.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘It almost felt incestuous but Gerald was one of the loves of my life. I adored him. Unfortunately he died in a road accident in the States, on the Santa Monica highway. He’d been working on a film out there. I’d been due to join him.’ Her finger massaged the area between her eyebrows as though searching for a frown line and failing to find it. ‘The movie never happened. I did try the movies later on but I could never settle in the States. Anyway …’
    She waved her hands around, crossed her legs and pulled a frown, then continued. ‘By the time I was eighteen I’d made enough money and Gerald was wealthy anyway. After Butterfield folded – we shot the last few episodes late in nineteen seventy-one – I didn’t really need to earn any more so I had little to do except get married and divorced and make the odd “B” movie. At nineteen I was basically redundant and watched my celebrity fade. A light, first bright, dimming quick.’ Showing a tinge of cynicism she looked straight at Joanna. ‘Let me tell you how it is, Inspector,’ she said, holding up an index finger. ‘This is how it happens. At first newspapers, magazines, interviews, opening supermarkets, meeting royalty, cutting ribbons. They were happy days.’ She spoke quickly. ‘Everyone wanted a little piece of me. And then, poof.’ She exploded her hands. ‘Suddenly, no one did any more.’ She gave a wry smile and looked both bleak and cynical. ‘At twenty I was history. You see, I committed the unforgivable sin, Inspector.’ She turned her head to encompass Korpanski too. ‘Sergeant, I got older. From being the darling of the universe I was thrown out like an old sock with a hole in the toe. You see, no one wanted me to grow up. Ever. My adoring fans couldn’t forgive my ageing. They didn’t want to know the adult me but preserve my memory in aspic as that sweet little girl.’ Again she looked straight at Joanna. ‘The only way to keep a little girl a little girl is for that little girl to never grow up. In other words, to die young. Then she remains the child. For ever Timony Shore or Lily Butterfield. Take your pick. Beautiful, sweet little child.’ The cynicism in her voice was as toxic as mustard gas.
    She paused again, then looked directly at Joanna and then at Mike, as though to satisfy herself that they were listening. ‘You have to understand how big and famous I was. There was hardly any family TV in those days, not a great deal of choice, so practically everyone in the UK was tuned into
Butterfield Farm
on a Saturday evening.’ She tossed her head. ‘I was mobbed everywhere. It was celebrity culture in the early sixties. It brought its pains and gains.’ Her face twisted. ‘At one point I was threatened – stalked – by a fan who tried to gouge my eyes out as I came out of the studio one evening. I was almost fourteen at the time.’ Her finger touched a tiny scar at the edge of her right eyebrow which Joanna would not have noticed unless she had drawn her attention to it in this abstract way. ‘After Gerald died I married husband number two, Sol Brannigan, who was as tough as they make