The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  A few days later they moved out: Terry to begin an extended period of sleeping on friends’ floors, Sarah (who had not yet found a teaching job) to stay in the spare room of a much-disliked aunt in Crouch End. But Terry’s anger had subsided, by now. He was able to see that the incident had, if not quite a funny side, then at least a certain ironic dimension which he would come to relish more and more over the ensuing years. And he kept in touch with Sarah, and kept taking her out for drinks and meals, and occasionally asked her to tell him the story again, just so that he could be clear in his mind about how the disaster had happened.

  ‘It was a dream, Terry. I must have dreamed that I’d done it.’

  ‘But how is that possible? Nobody has dreams like that.’

  ‘They do. I do. It’s been happening all my life.’

  And even now, looking back on that day, Sarah found it impossible to distinguish the dream from the reality: the transition from one to the other remained perfectly seamless. Each was characterized by the same elements: the frail afternoon sunlight, dimming and brightening on the surface of her desk as the clouds went by; the sound of trains rattling past every few minutes; and beyond the railway line, on the fringes of the cemetery, the sea of treetops undulating in the breeze. It was mid-November. The flat was ghostly quiet, and had been for the last two days, ever since Terry’s departure for Italy. Since then she had spoken to no one, apart from Terry himself when he had phoned from Milan that morning, full of stories about the famous director he had been sent out to interview, and wanting to know if the proofs of the Henry Logan speech had arrived yet. Yes, said Sarah, they came in today’s post. And Terry had said, Good: because there’s something I want you to change.

  Frame was by now, in this last year of its existence, an austere, rather intimidating-looking publication with a small but influential academic and general readership. Articles tended to be long, sparsely illustrated and freighted with heavy footnotes. Normally its editorial board would never have contemplated running anything as thin or anecdotal as the text of an after-dinner speech given by Henry Logan; but this infamous British mogul and ex-producer had recently announced his retirement from the film business and simultaneously – for reasons best known to himself – come to the rescue of the magazine during its latest near-fatal financial crisis. Now that he was their benefactor and majority shareholder, there was no question, unfortunately, of not publishing the food-spattered manuscript he had proudly dropped on to the desk of the editor-in-chief one Monday morning. Fragments from a Life in Movies was his inspired title, and the appearance of these pages had immediately set in train an orgy of buck-passing, as successive members of staff frantically ducked the awesome responsibility of subbing them into some kind of shape. The job finally devolved upon Terry, as the newest and lowliest employee. He recognized at once that there was nothing much to be done about the substance of the speech, which comprised the expected mixture of trivial reminiscence and insufferable self-congratulation. None the less he did his best to set aside the personal animosity he had conceived towards Logan’s son during their brief meeting, and applied himself to what seemed, in this case, to be the most useful editorial task: the provision of footnotes, to add something more in the way of biographical colour and to make the many specific British cultural references more explicable to the magazine’s international readership.

  With a newcomer’s diligence, Terry spent at least a week working on these footnotes, and was still agonizing over which were necessary and which superfluous when a call came from the magazine, to say that a staff journalist had fallen ill. Terry was going to have to deputize for him, and this involved the pleasant responsibility of flying out to Milan, to prepare a location report on the shooting of a prestigious Anglo-Italian co-production. Before departing, he had submitted a more or less final version of his annotated manuscript which still, however, left him with some nagging uncertainties. And it was to resolve one of these that he phoned Sarah from Italy that morning and asked her if the proofs had arrived.

  ‘Now, listen carefully,’ he said, ‘because those will have to go back in the post this evening, first class. So first of all you’ve got to read them through for typos. And then – are you listening? – and then I want you to take out the third footnote.’ He enunciated these words as clearly as possible, as the international line crackled and spat. ‘Footnote number three. Delete it. We don’t need it. It’s fussy and it doesn’t add anything.’

  ‘OK,’ said Sarah. ‘That’s easy. I can do that, no problem.’

  ‘Yes, but make sure you do it properly,’ Terry said. ‘You’ll have to renumber all the footnotes. Make sure they correspond.’

  ‘Terry, I’ll do it. Don’t worry.’

  He had hung up then, apparently reassured, muttering something about an impending lunch appointment with Marcello Mastroianni.

  Sarah waited until early in the afternoon, when she had finished her shopping and the light would be better on the sitting-room desk. After making herself a cup of coffee, she took the sheets of paper from their envelope and arranged them neatly in front of her. Terry’s footnotes were on a separate sheet; the third one would have to be deleted and the others renumbered, but she set them aside for the time being, and decided to look first of all at the main body of the text (five pages in all), reading it through carefully for sense and printing errors. This took twenty minutes or so. Then she went back to a sentence near the beginning. ‘Who’d have thought,’ Logan had written, ‘that, only last year, I would have become managing director of a substantial new country club and leisure centre situated just a stone’s throw from those self-same studios – in Teddington, no less?’ After the word ‘Teddington’ came a small superscript ‘3’, directing the reader to a simple explanatory footnote on the separate sheet, which read: ‘A placid, respectable Thameside suburb of London, just south of Richmond.’ This was the footnote Terry wanted deleting. She couldn’t see why, at this late stage, but it was his decision, after all. So she crossed out the little ‘3’ in the text, left a clear mark for the printer in the margin, and set about changing all the numbers which followed it: ‘4’ became ‘3’, ‘5’ became ‘4’, and so on. She left the footnotes themselves untouched at this stage. It was easy, mechanical work, and the flat was so quiet as she went about it that she could hear the scrape of her biro on the page, and each delicate slurp of coffee seemed like a shattering intrusion upon the silence.

  She had just changed the final ‘16’ to ‘15’ when there was a noise from the hallway: something coming through the letterbox. It was late, but not impossibly late, for the second post. She went to look and found that there was a single letter lying on the floor. It was in a plain white envelope, bore a first-class stamp, and was addressed to her in what she immediately recognized as Robert’s handwriting. Shaking, she tore it open with her forefinger and stood in the hallway reading it.

  She had heard nothing from Robert since the day they had parted; the day she had left him sitting on the clifftop, his cheeks bruised and swollen from some bizarre, unspecified accident in his bedroom during the small hours. He had not followed her back into the house, and an hour later Sarah’s parents had arrived to take her and her possessions away from Ashdown for good.

  Since then, nothing.

  Two letters addressed to Robert at Ashdown had gone unanswered. Then, six or seven weeks after the end of term, Sarah phoned the house, and some man whose voice she had never heard before told her that Robert had gone, more than a month ago. She phoned his parents and was told that he was on holiday, in Europe somewhere, Interrailing. The next time, they gave her an unlikely-sounding address, a town whose name meant nothing to her, some 200 miles from London. There was no telephone number. She wrote but he never answered. Terry wrote; and his letters, too, were ignored. Sarah gave up. Robert had said that he didn’t want her friendship, for the moment at least. It seemed that he had meant it. There was only so much effort she was prepared to make.

  And now,
this letter.

  It gave no address, and there was only one sheet of paper, which seemed to have been scribbled over hurriedly. Clearly she was not going to learn much in the way of news.

  It said:

  Dear Sarah,

  Ashdown was bad. A bad idea. I only stayed a week or so. Too many phantoms.

  Then I went home for a while. Arguments with my father (we never got on), and lots of days in bed. Not much fun, so I tried a bit of travelling. Not much fun either.

  This was hopeless, Sarah thought. Worse than hopeless. But the next paragraph looked longer, at least.

  Did I ever tell you about a dream I had when I was a child? I suppose I must have done – I told you everything, at some time or another. It was about being on a road, a very hot and dusty road, with a woman in a nurse’s uniform pointing into the distance, towards a building which I could tell was a hospital. She was standing in front of a sign written in a foreign language.

  I’ve finally worked out the meaning of this dream. What it has been trying to tell me.

  So, here I am. You’ll know where, roughly, because of the postmark, but I wouldn’t try to get back in touch for a while. You wouldn’t find me very good company.

  This is it, Sarah, for the time being. But you will hear from me again one day. I promise you that. And I hope everything goes well for you till then.

  I love you more than ever.

  Robert

  ‘What did the letter say?’ Terry would always ask.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sarah would answer. ‘Hardly anything. It didn’t tell me where he was, or what he was planning to do… nothing.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Well, I think… I can remember taking the letter into the sitting-room, and sitting down somewhere, and trying to read it again. And then half-way through, I started shaking, and I could feel it coming on but I couldn’t do anything about it, and then I must have – collapsed, I suppose.’

  ‘Collapsed? In what way?’

  ‘You know, I’ve noticed that this happens to me sometimes. Like a faint, only I’m still conscious: there’s no power at all in my muscles, and I can’t move until it passes… It happened to me at the party – don’t you remember?’

  ‘You were drunk.’

  ‘We all were. I was no drunker than anybody else. I know what it’s like to be drunk, and this is different. It’s completely exhausting, for one thing. Usually the first thing I want to do afterwards is go to sleep.’

  And this is what she had done, just a few minutes later, lying full-length on the sofa with Robert’s letter crumpled beneath her body. Sarah had fallen asleep that afternoon and started to dream; and like most of the dreams which came to her when she was upset or excited about something, this one was inspired by the events immediately preceding it. She dreamed about her corrections to Terry’s article. She dreamed, fatally, that she had finished them. She even dreamed that she had double-checked them. So that when (a few minutes later? – it was impossible to tell) she awoke blearily, sat up, looked around her, put Robert’s letter to one side and went back to the desk, she did not even so much as glance at the pages before slipping them into the already stamped, already addressed envelope, sealing it, and running out to the postbox on the other side of the street.

  But the footnotes themselves had not been corrected, and had not been renumbered. And this is how it came about that Henry Logan’s after-dinner speech would unwittingly attract at least seven libel suits, have a devastating effect on Terry’s career and eventually go down in journalistic legend as ‘the piece that closed down Frame’.

  Fragments from a Life in Movies

  Producer, film-maker and bon viveur Henry Logan takes a wistful look at the highs and lows of a long career.

  Now that I am easing myself into well-earned retirement, it seems incredible that I should have entered this mad, wonderful business almost fifty years ago, back in 1935 when I was first taken on as a runner at Twickenham Studios. The very first film I worked on was A Fire Has Been Arranged, with that cracking comedy duo, Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen:1 with a madcap pair like that on the set there was, as you can imagine, scarcely a dull moment! Though no ‘classic’, of course, it wasn’t a bad little film, and somewhere down the cast-list you can spot the name of a young actor called Alastair Sim, who would soon progress to great things of his own.2

  Life, I’ve found, has a way of turning full-circle. Who’d have thought that, only last year, I would have become managing director of a substantial new country club and leisure centre situated just a stone’s throw from those self-same studios – in Teddington, no less? This club, the flagship of my chain I might add, has already played host to some distinguished visitors, and boasts among its attractions no fewer than two rather challenging eighteen-hole golf courses.3

  Those studios remain close to my heart in other ways, too, for it was at Twickenham, only a few years ago, that I first met my lovely (fifth) wife Marsha, who was filming there at the time. Now a distinguished actress, of course, Marsha is delightfully candid about her earlier career, and has never made any secret of the fact that she started out in the business by starring, under my own direction, in a series of sex movies.4 What many people don’t know about her, though, is that she is also a deeply religious woman, and a devout Catholic. Among the most prized possessions in our library are several books recommended to her during an audience with Pope Paul VI, who said that they were among the most inspiring and influential works he had ever read.5

  Frankly, I have never seen anything wrong with films which depict the beauty of the sexual act in an open, honest and forthright manner. Nor do I see any contradiction between this and my early reputation as a powerful advocate of family films, which cannot be called into question. In the late 1940s, for example, I attempted to establish an Anglo-American production company for the making of family pictures with world-wide appeal. With a package of excellent books under option, I spent many fruitless months in Hollywood trying to set things up. Perhaps my mistake was in trying to insist upon a particular star – for I had spotted a young, handsome actor, then at the start of his career, by the name of Dean Martin – rather an odd choice of leading man, in retrospect!6 Anyway, it all came to nought.

  If ever I’m disheartened by failures such as these, I simply reflect on my humble beginnings and marvel at the enormous distance I have travelled since then. My father owned a small sweet-shop in Market Harborough, and an amusing story attached to it which, although it has been often repeated, I hope I can be forgiven for telling again. One afternoon – in late 1929 or ‘30, I should think – I remember a large Rolls Royce drawing up outside it, and a small boy getting out to buy a ha’porth of liquorice allsorts, which he ate with great enjoyment. ‘One day,’ he told my father, ‘I shall be very rich and famous, but I shall always remember this shop and its lovely sweets.’ Sure enough, thirty years later my father received a summons to Buckingham Palace: for that small boy had been none other than Philip, the future Duke of Edinburgh!7

  Of course, there has been tragedy in my family, as well as good luck. I well remember the terrible night in August 1959, when my brother Jack was staying at my house and received a police telephone call to say that his three young children had gone missing. His beloved son Jimmy – the eldest of three brothers – was subsequently found to have been abducted and murdered by a brutal sex fiend.8 I have always admired the enormous strength of character Jack showed in rising above this calamity and establishing for himself a successful career as politician and statesman; never once forfeiting his integrity in that sometimes corrupting arena. (As an example of his uncompromising standards, I recall him whispering warmly to me once – of one senior politician who shall for his own modesty’s sake remain nameless – ‘There are only three people I trust in public life: he is one of them’.)9

  I think you will probably appreciate, by now, that I come from a close-knit family, and that the traditional family values of loyalty and mutual supp
ort have always been very important to me. Although I am separated from my first (American) wife, I keep in close contact with our son Bruce, who is now a successful producer in Hollywood. The woman who instilled these values in us, and whom we all still remember with enormous fondness, was my dear mother: a woman of terrific warmth and vitality, who lived her life in a golden haze of laughter. Indeed, she died as she had lived – laughing: in this case, at a joke told by a comedian on the television (I wish I could remember his name), about a housewife describing her new television set to a next-door neighbour: ‘It’s an eighteen-inch console,’ she was supposed to have said. ‘Well,’ replied the neighbour, ‘I should think that eighteen inches would console anybody’;10 whereupon my mother erupted into laughter, choked on a pork scratching and was dead within the half hour.

  I have spoken of my family; but I should also speak of my friends. One of the things I love most about this crazy, magical business is the extraordinary diversity of talented people who gather together under its benign umbrella, and who have blessed me, over the years, with their friendship and affection. This realization was brought home to me only two weeks ago, when a select group of conspirators – including, I am happy to say, many of tonight’s illustrious guests – put their heads together to organize a surprise party in my honour at London’s National Portrait Gallery. What a distinguished roll-call it was! After being welcomed at the door by my old and dear friend Jeffrey Archer,11 who should I espy first of all – contemplating, with an amused but sceptical frown, a new portrait of himself in oils – but that doughty man of letters Kingsley Amis.12 We had a fair old chat about matters cultural and political (his reminiscences about a recent encounter with Larry Olivier were, I have to say, brief but tantalizing13), but I had to break away all too soon in order to renew my acquaintance with the delightful Dame Vera Lynn.14 Finally, I had an enthralling conversation with someone whom I have long admired, and whose film work has never, in my opinion, received the recognition it deserves – that great tunesmith and family entertainer, Cliff Richard.15