I shove the card in a kitchen drawer and then I call the London Film School, wondering if it’s too late and if anybody will be there. Somebody answers – a woman with a lilting Welsh accent – and I realize I have no idea what I’m going to say.
‘I’m a friend of Mac Bartley-Thomas’s,’ I say; the wavering croak in my voice not only due to the vestiges of my cold. ‘He’s in hospital and I’m trying to trace his son. I believe Mac might lecture with you – is there anyone there who might be able to help me?’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she says. ‘We didn’t know he was in hospital. Yes, he does lecture with us occasionally, although he’s not due with us again until February. I’m not sure we can help. All we have is Mac’s contact details, address and so forth. I don’t know anything about a son. Well, perhaps you could ask Stewart Whittaker – he’s the closest to Mac here, but he’s in New York at the moment, I’m afraid. Hang on …’ There’s a slight rustling sound, as though she has to go off-camera and blow her nose. ‘I have his email address if you’d like it?’
‘Yes, please,’ I say breathlessly. ‘Yes, I’d love his email. Thank you.’
She recites it to me and I note it down and as I end the conversation my brain is scrolling through its roll-call of people I have ever met. Stewart Whittaker … I’ve met him, haven’t I? He’s the man who Mac and I ran into that time, in Soho. I’m pretty sure of it. A little scared of doing so, I go to the laptop and compose an email to him, saying I’m a friend of Mac’s and does he know the whereabouts of Mac’s son. As I sign off I wonder if Mac ever told this Stewart about me – properly. Will he recognize the name Arden Hall and think, Oh, her?
I go upstairs to have a shower and then put on what I call my Notting Hill outfit, as it’s very similar to what Julia Roberts wore when she went to Hugh Grant’s friends’ house for the birthday dinner in Notting Hill: dark blue jeans, kimono-type satin blouse and low ankle boots. It’s a bit fancy for the hospital but perfect for the bar later; and when has that ever stopped me, anyway? Clothes are my armour and my disguise and my freedom.
James is at Ward 10 again tonight, looking all stiff in his suit, but he smiles as though he is pleased to see me.
‘You weren’t here this weekend.’
‘No, I had a bad cold. Check out the red nose and the lingering air of Lemsip.’ He gives that brief, wry smile again, but his grey eyes look amused. ‘I’m all right now, though. Which day did you come?’ I ask him.
‘Both days. Saturday and Sunday.’
‘Oh, right.’ I wonder if he’d wondered where I was. He can’t have much of a social life, I think, if he’s propping up Ward 10 on a Saturday night, not that I can talk. I spend all my Saturday nights gawping at the telly then drifting upstairs at 10 p.m. with a book I’ve usually read before and might manage two pages of.
‘It’s nice to see you back.’
‘Thanks.’
He makes no mention of my dressy outfit, although Mac looks like he may appreciate it. There’s an unhurried smile from him as I approach the bed. He is almost sitting up tonight, the upper half of his body shored on about four pillows. His eyes are shining and his cheeks have good colour in them. Has his condition improved since I was last here?
‘Oh, you’re looking bright and breezy,’ I say, as I sit down in my usual chair, half-expecting him to just say, ‘Hello, Arden,’ and start chatting, but of course he doesn’t. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make it at the weekend.’
‘A good day today,’ says Fran, passing the bottom of his bed. ‘Chipper, our Mac has been, haven’t you, Mac?’
Mac smiles and nods a little, as though he’s taking the piss, which I hope he is.
‘Any talking?’ I ask her.
‘No, sorry,’ says Fran.
‘You’re far too quiet these days,’ I say to Mac cheekily, remembering what James said about him. ‘I miss you going on and on and on about films.’ I do. I miss our discussions; I really want to talk movies with him. I’d talk anything with him, to be honest. I would just really love him to speak to me.
‘So, how was work today?’ James asks me, flipping up the back of his suit jacket and taking his own seat at the other side of the bed. Fran has decided to stop and take Mac’s temperature, top him up with water. She clucks around him like a starchy hen. ‘That’s if you were there, after your cold?’
‘Yes, I was there. It was quiet, fairly dull, a bit croaky, in places. How about you?’
‘Not too bad, I sold a house on Brompton Road.’
‘Oh, great. That’s good.’
‘Yeah, nice people, too. The buyers, I mean. The sellers are arses.’
‘I see.’ I’m finding James’s polite manner with the occasional swear word chucked in quite amusing.
‘No thrills at Coppers since I last saw you, then?’
‘Thrills are always thin on the ground at Coppers, to be honest. At least in my office …’
‘What is it you do there again?’
‘Locations,’ I say, ‘you know, arranging to go and trash people’s houses with equipment and muddy trainers – that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, we’re quite similar, then,’ he nods, ‘dealing in property. You’re a wanker too.’
I laugh. ‘Why, thank you very much!’
His grey eyes are dancing. ‘Oh, while I think of it,’ he says, and he pulls his phone from his inside pocket and clicks something on it. ‘I won’t be able to come to the hospital this Saturday. I’ve got to go to an expo and I’m not sure I’ll be back in time.’ I notice he does a contemplative little frown sometimes, just a subtle knit of his brows. He’s doing it now. I contemplate this is a lot of superfluous information and wonder why on earth he is telling me. Perhaps he fears I won’t turn up at the weekend again, either, and wants to make sure someone is on shift, for Mac.
‘Is it on how to fleece people?’
He knows I am joking. ‘Yes, absolutely.’ He grins, giving a short laugh.
I decide to be superfluous too, why not? ‘I probably won’t be here on Saturday either. It will depend what time I get back.’
‘Oh, where are you going?’
‘To visit my mother in a nursing home in Walsall.’
‘Ah. My expo’s in Birmingham. Twenty minutes from Walsall on the M6,’ muses James. ‘Do you want a lift up there?’
I am taken aback. ‘Why? Oh no, I don’t expect so!’ I say primly but far too loudly, with a touch of the wartime harridan; next I’ll be wielding a broom and a head full of curlers and seeing rapscallions off my doorstep.
‘Oh, OK!’ Now he looks surprised, like it wouldn’t be at all odd for us to drive up to the Midlands together, just like that. I’ve been planning to take the train, as I always do. Do I really want to sit in a car for two and a half hours with someone I barely know?
‘Plastics,’ says a raspy voice from the bed.
‘What?’ I say. Fran has moved off down the ward now and I turn to Mac who is sitting up on his pillows and staring at me. ‘What?’ I start to laugh. I pull my chair closer to him and I laugh and laugh. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself,’ I tease. ‘Is that it?’ My cheeks are probably now rosy too. The silk of my jacket rustles as my shoulders vibrate. I haven’t laughed like this for a long time.
‘Plastics?’ parrots James, bemused.
‘Plastics is a famous bit in The Graduate. Have you seen it?’ I ask James.
‘No. Never seen that one.’
‘That’s a shame. And well, you haven’t lived, quite frankly. You should watch it tonight; it might be on Netflix or something. Ben – that is, Dustin Hoffman – is saying he wants his life to be different and his future to be something brilliant and the advice he’s given by a well-meaning neighbour of his parents is “plastics”.’ James looks like he doesn’t get it. ‘It’s all in the context,’ I say, grinning at Mac. I am excited; I am talking too fast. ‘Ben has just graduated, he’s listless, terrified of the future and of ending up like his parents – “plastics” i
s the last thing he’d ever want to get into. The line is also indicative of the age, how plastic everything was. All that disgusting sixties consumerism. Isn’t that right, Mac?’
Mac nods, just a little, and smiles. I’m almost feeling like my old self – the good part. I have to resist the urge to tell him that I am filled with everything about our time together, that my body and brain are swirling with images from the movie and the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack and Ben and Elaine on the bus and the knocking on the church window and the everything of us. But I can’t, can I? With James here? And maybe it’s for the best. Who wants a gushing nostalgic fool at their bedside anyway?
We sit for a while. Me full of Mac and The Graduate, James full of a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and a can of Coke he got from the vending machine in the corridor. He’s a noisy slurper but it doesn’t offend me.
‘Ooh, you look dressed up!’ says Fran, later, after we have said our goodbyes to Mac and are making our way to the door. ‘You two going anywhere nice after this?’
I am horrified. Does she mean together? And James always looks dressed up; he wears a suit every time he comes to the ward!
‘Well, I don’t know what James is doing tonight,’ I say carefully, ‘possibly watching The Graduate …’ I look at him and smile. ‘But I’m meeting a friend and going to a new bar in the West End.’
‘Oh, which one?’ asks James. He really is a very strange man sometimes.
‘Gatsby’s.’
‘Oh, yes. Used to be The Chapel,’ he muses. ‘It’s supposed to be pretty good.’
‘Sounds like he wants to come,’ says Fran, looking all excited and happy, like she’s in a bloody romcom. And she actually winks at me. Oh, bloody hell. She’s the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof, finding me a find, catching me a catch, when I don’t bloody want one.
James shrugs again, like he is not denying it. Really? He wants to come out with me and Becky and Dominic and the mystery man who needs checking out – although I’m not sure why Becky is trusting my judgement. She must know it to be supremely off.
‘Do you want to come?’ I ask, in the manner of a huffy child having to invite the class bully to her birthday party.
‘OK,’ he says.
‘Right, OK. Bye then, Fran,’ I say through clenched teeth. Thanks a lot.
Talk about awkward. Despite what Becky said about needing me, I’m not sure if she wants me here after all. She’s in a foliaged corner with the ‘prospect’. They are talking and laughing; she is flinging her head back and showing all her teeth, knocking back the vodkas. I haven’t seen her like this for a long time, but at least she looks happy, I think. I check out her date from a distance. All I can gather is that he’s wearing a pair of red velvet slippers with no socks and likes to put his hand on her shoulder, while laughing, but she can probably clock that for herself. Dominic’s off doing his own thing, too – he’s at the bar chatting up a waitress and using his broken leg as a flirting aid, which seems to be playing its part well; the waitress is currently scribbling something on it with a black marker pen.
And I appear to be stuck with James.
‘All right?’ he says, a bottle of Beck’s in his hand.
‘All right,’ I reply, stirring a passionfruit and chilli mojito dispassionately with a straw.
Gatsby’s is packed. Monday really is the new Friday. I’m already wincing at the high-decibel laughter, shrieks and over-loud music. I wish I wasn’t here; I wish I was home in bed, or still in the hospital with Mac, under dimmed amber light. It is an amazing venue, though, any fool can see that. It has been accurately and exuberantly done up like an original 1920s speakeasy: there’s a jungle of tropical plants performing botanical theatrics in every corner; printed tropical-plant wallpaper, so you’re not sure where plant ends and wall starts; studded leather bucket chairs and a marble floor; lazily flicking ceiling fans; cloisonné lamps suspended over tables in cosy corner booths; American jazz; cocktails in tin cups; and a New York style bar. New York … I wonder if Stewart Whittaker has seen my email.
It’s all colour and light and up-for-it boys and girls – lots and lots of girls, all done up to the nines, tens and elevens. Becky looks almost subdued in comparison, in her pale aqua stretchy dress – these girls are in a riot of colour, each trying to outshine the next. And James seems to be getting a lot of attention from them. They are glancing at his salt-and-pepper handsomeness, then looking away. Flicking their hair in the direction of his smart-suited oblivion. Grinning at their friends, then risking another look. Even Becky’s eyes expanded to dinner plates when we met her outside and as she scuttled me to the bar, while James kindly took coats to the cloakroom, she hissed, ‘Where the bloody hell did you get him from? He’s gorgeous!’
‘It’s nothing like that!’ I said.
‘Who is he, then?’
‘A friend, an estate agent.’
‘Are you moving? Where do you meet friends like that?’ She quickly ordered two vodka and tonics at the bar – doubles, despite my protestations – and I knew I would have to tell her.
‘I met him in the hospital.’
‘The hospital? Which hospital?’ She was already sipping noisily through her straw, mining it through the rim-high crushed ice in her vodka and tonic.
‘St Katherine’s. I’ve been visiting someone. Someone we saw the night we went to see Dominic.’
Becky stared at me. I could see her brain whirring under her choppy blue quiff. ‘St Katherine’s? Who?’ The brain kept whirring. She bit at the top of her straw and frowned. ‘The night we saw Dominic … Hang on …? Don’t tell me that man who looked like Mac Bartley-Thomas was him!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh my God! You went back in to get your phone. What? Were you checking it was him …? Arden! Bloody hell! What on earth’s been going on?’
‘He was in a car accident,’ I said, sipping at my own drink, and hating how meek I sounded. How ashamed, although the only part I was ashamed about was not telling her. ‘I’ve been visiting him. James has, too – he’s Mac’s neighbour.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Becky. She waggled her straw and inhaled from her glass. ‘Blimey. So Mac lives in London? Bloody hell. Wow, Arden. This is pretty huge.’ And pretty huge that I hadn’t told her … ‘You really loved him.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Is he OK? How long has he been there? And what does he say about you turning up in his life again?’
‘Not a lot! He can’t speak, you know, because of his injuries. He’s in quite a bad way, really.’ I won’t tell her about the whole List thing. The movie references. How I’ve been reliving mine and Mac’s affair. ‘He’s been in hospital for a couple of weeks. Brain injury.’
‘Wow,’ she said again. She shook her glass, hoovered once more through a stack of crunchy ice with her straw. ‘You’re such a dark horse.’ She looked cross, then thoughtful. ‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘What a thing. I wonder where this is going to go.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s like something out of the movies you used to watch with him. Him turning up like that. Some kind of serendipity.’
‘John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale,’ I said, almost flippantly, referring to the movie of the same name. But I am so sad Mac and I met each other again so late, and under such circumstances, and sorry Becky was the last to know.
‘Er, yeah. What do you think will happen?’ She excavated the last of her vodka, leaving the pole of her straw standing in its siphoned arctic nest.
‘I have absolutely no idea. I don’t even know if he’s going to be all right.’
‘And the gorgeous James?’
Two hands suddenly appeared on Becky’s shoulders and she jumped two foot in the air, a splatter of crushed ice jerking over the rim of the glass and landing on her dress. She whipped her head round and then grinned.
‘Simon!’
‘Hi, Becky.’
‘How’re you doing?’
‘Great!’
‘Simon, this is Arden; Arden
, Simon.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Simon, but it was clear he only had eyes for Becky, what I could see of them behind his Clark Kent glasses. They twinkled at her above a huge hipster beard and below twitching, bushy eyebrows. ‘Would you like another drink?’ And Becky and her contender turned to the bar and James returned from the cloakroom and took up his place as Much-Admired Older Man.
‘I meant what I said about that lift,’ he says to me now, as a girl in an emerald-green dress smiles furtively at him then looks away. I wonder how he can be so unaware of it all.
‘Thank you,’ I reply. ‘It’s very kind of you. I’ll have a think about it.’ I wish he hadn’t brought it up again. I don’t want to think about it at all. I just want to go on the train, get my visit to Marilyn over and done with and come home again. ‘Thank you.’
James is on his second beer. He closes his eyes each time he sips from it. I still have the same drink. ‘Can I ask you something?’ he says.
‘Sure.’ A woman in a black lace headdress and plum lipstick is taking her place in a dusky corner, behind a microphone. I will welcome a relief to the thudding music which seems to pump right through me.
‘Are some of your clothes inspired by characters in movies?’
A slow smile dawns on my face. No one has ever asked me this before; not even Becky. ‘Why would you ask that?’ I enquire, all innocent.
‘Well, the check coat and beret combo,’ says James. ‘It’s very Bonnie and Clyde. Then the shaggy coat the other evening – I could only think of Kate Hudson in Almost Famous. And, well, forgive me if I’m wrong, but do I sense a hint of Julia Roberts in Notting Hill tonight?’
I laugh. I pat at my hair which is in a plaited chignon thing, the curls restrained – similar to Julia’s when she goes to that birthday dinner and causes utter chaos. ‘Rumbled,’ I say. ‘I’m impressed. And quite amazed.’
You, Me and The Movies Page 14