by Fay Weldon
‘You mean like Castaway?’ I ask. I know film people. Everything relates back to celluloid.
‘How did you guess?’ He looks surprised. He’s not all that bright. Or perhaps I’m just too bright for everyone’s comfort. For all his gliding to and fro on his great new black macho electronic camera with its built-in Citroën-type suspension – ‘This camera cost £250,000,’ he snaps, if anyone so much as touches the great shiny thing – I can’t take Tony seriously. He has quite an ordinary, pleasant, everyday face. He’s thirty-nine, and has a lot of wiry black hair. Andreas’s hair is fair and fine. ‘I love you!’ Tony Schuster yells, for all the world to hear. ‘Run off with me, do!’
I think his loving me so publicly annoys Andreas, but he doesn’t show it. Tony’s one of the top cameramen around: they can be temperamental. It’s as well for a Director to hold his fire, unless it’s something that really matters – a smooth fifty-second track in for example – not like love, or desire, which everyone knows is just some kind of by-product of all the creative energy floating around a set.
‘I love you’ is a great turn-off for the female committed elsewhere. GUP.
Sometimes I do agree to have a drink with Tony, when it’s a wrap for the day, and we all stagger back to the bar of the Hesperia. Except for Andreas, who’s staying at the Helsinki Inter-Continental. When I heard C.C. was coming to join her husband and hold his hand through the whole month of Helsinki shooting, I put them in a different hotel (I do location accommodation, inter alia) from the rest of us. I thought I couldn’t bear their happiness too near me. We’d be going off to Rome presently, anyway, and C.C. wouldn’t be following us there. She’d be going, not back to little Phoebe, but to Hollywood for some rubbishy block-busting new series, which Andreas despised. He had the Art, she made the money.
‘It’s so clichéd I can’t bear it,’ Tony would moan.
‘The PA in love with the Director! You’re worth more than that.’
More than being in love with Andreas? How could such a thing be possible?
Tony’s wife had just left him, taking the children. He’d been away from home just once too often. When she wanted him where was he? Up the Himalayas filming Snowy Waste or under the Atlantic with Sonar Soundings or in the Philippines with Lolly a Go-Go. When he didn’t turn down Lenin in Love because he couldn’t miss an opportunity of working with Andreas Anders, the Great Director, Sara waited for him to say ‘yes’ to the call from his agent, and he did, of course, having said he’d say no, and at that point she packed. The wives do.
‘You love films more than me,’ she said. And so Tony did. Now he thought he was in love with me. I knew what was going on. His wife had left, he was sad and worried; love on the set’s a great diversion. On the whole, you last as long as the project does; not a moment longer. Sometimes it sticks – look at Andreas and C.C.; me and Andreas – but mostly it’s all, as I say, just surplus energy taking sexual/romantic form. I know so much, and so little too. GUP!
‘You have no pattern for a happy married life,’ laments my mother. ‘All my fault.’
‘I don’t want to be married,’ I say. If I was married how could I follow Andreas round the world? But I don’t tell her that. His favourite PA! I’m good at my job: by God, I’m good at it. He won’t find fault with me.
‘Without you!’ he once said (that was Love in a Hot Climate: we were in a really ritzy room at the Meriden in Lisbon: C.C. was off in Sydney and Andreas thought she was having an affair with the male lead), ‘Without you, Jude, I wouldn’t be half the director I am!’ A real working partnership we have, Andreas and me, oh, yes! His fingers running through my hair when there’s nothing else to do, and hotel rooms in strange cities can be lonely; you need your friends around.
Before I left for Helsinki my mother said something strange. ‘Your father ran off with a girl from Finland,’ she said. ‘Our au pair. Just make sure you come back.’ Now my mother never said anything at all about my father if she could help it. And my sister Chris and I seldom asked. Questions about our dad upset her. And it doesn’t do to upset a woman who is a golf coach by profession. She gets put off her stroke, and if she loses her job, how will any of you live? Our house went with the job. On the edge of the golf course. Thwack, thwee, muted shouts – to me the sound of childhood.
I expect if your husband ran off with the Finnish au pair you wouldn’t want to dwell on it much. This was the first I’d heard of it. Chris and I had tried to trace our father, when she was twenty-one and I was eighteen, but we never got very far. I can’t say we tried hard. Who wants to be in touch with a father who doesn’t want to be in touch with you? Apart from the fun of the thing, I suppose. Sister Chris had been oddly worried about my going to Helsinki.
‘You and your lifestyle!’ she said, when I rang the Nurses’ Home to say I was off to work on Lenin in Love. She’d just been made Night Sister of Men’s Orthopaedic. Quite a cheerful ward, she said. At least they mostly got better. ‘Can’t you ever stay in one place, Jude. You’ll get AIDS if you don’t watch out. You film-people!’ Chris had my lifestyle all wrong. I was astonishingly sedate. There’d only ever been Andreas Anders, apart from a few forgettables. It was pathetic, really. But somehow men seem to know if your emotions are occupied elsewhere. You send out ‘I belong to someone bigger than you’ signals, just as much if you’re wretchedly involved as if you’re happily married.
My mother and sister were right to worry, as it happened. Because a strange thing did happen to me in Helsinki. I was walking with Tony in the Rural Life Museum one Sunday and explaining why I wouldn’t go to bed with him, and what was wrong with his psyche. He was looking quite wretched and pale, as men will in such circumstances. The Museum is in fact an open-air park devoted to the artefacts of Finland’s past. We were admiring an elegant wooden church boat which could hold a hundred people – entire villages would row themselves to church in these boats if they so chose – when my attention was caught by one of those familiar groups of people, complete with cameras and sound equipment. This lot were clustered round and filming one of the enormous orange toadstools with yellow spots they have in these parts. Proper traditional pixie toadstools. Hallucinogenic, they say.
And the sound man put down his gear – he was taking white sound, I presumed: a toadstool hardly makes much noise, even in its growing, which can be pretty rapid – and walked over to me. He wasn’t young. Sixty or so, I suppose. Quite heavy round his middle: pleasant looking: intelligent: glasses.
‘Hello,’ he said, in English.
‘Hello,’ I said, and I thought where have I seen that face before? And then I realised, why! whenever I look in the mirror, or when I look at Chris: that’s where I’ve seen it. More the latter, because both Chris and he were overweight. It looked worse on her. He was really quite attractive.
‘You’re with the English film crew, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘I saw you in the Square yesterday. It had to be you. Jude Iscarry.’
‘Or Judas Iscariot or Jude the Obscure,’ I said, playing for time, because my heart was pounding. ‘Take your pick!’
‘Your mother said you’d gone into films,’ he said. ‘Chip off the old block.’
‘You’re my father,’ I said.
‘’Fraid so,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know she was in touch with you,’ I said. It was all I could say. Tony just stood and looked on. Moments in a person’s life!
‘I passed by five years back,’ my father said, ‘but she advised me strongly to keep away, so I did. Though I’d have liked to have stayed. Quite a powerful stroke, your mother.’
‘She’s had to develop it,’ I said.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘But she always was independent, wanted to be father and mother too.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ I said.
Tony left us and he, my father, whose name was Saul Iscarry, took me out to lunch. We had pancakes, caviar and sour cream, washed down by tots of vodka. The best food in the world. The Finns have the highest he
art disease rate in the world. So Chris had assured me, before I set off for Helsinki.
My father had eventually married his Vieno, my mother’s au pair, and actually gone to the Moscow Film School, and now he was one of the best sound men in the world (he said) and had Finnish nationality, but lived in Leningrad. Vieno was a doctor, they had three children, and what with visa problems and general business and so forth there hadn’t been much point in keeping in touch, let alone the time. (Roubles are just one of those currencies that make it difficult for a father to support his abandoned children.) But he’d thought of Chris and me a lot.
Big deal, I thought, but said nothing. What was the point?
Now we were in touch, he said, we must keep in touch. He was glad I was in films. The best life in the world, he said, if you had the temperament. But why was I only a PA? Why wasn’t I a producer, at the very least? Ah. Well. He said he’d like to see Chris. How was she? Just fine, I said. She’d have to come over and see him some time, since visas for him were so complicated. If you ask me visas are as complicated as you care to make them, but I didn’t say that either.
I said Chris would be over to see him next Easter. That gave her six months to lose three stone. She should be able to do that. A girl likes to be at her best when she meets up with her old dad.
‘You’ve grown up a fine handsome girl, Jude,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of you,’ and you know, that meant a great deal to me. More than it should have. If anyone was to take the credit for the way I was it should have been my mother. Oh, Great Universal Paradox which runs our lives – that what should please us doesn’t, and what does please us, shouldn’t!
He had to go back to work, my father said. The pixie toadstool called. The crew could not be kept waiting. When could it ever, in any country, in any language in the world? We exchanged addresses. He went.
And I took myself off to the little Greek Orthodox church that’s tucked away behind the Great Square, and there I sat down. I had to be quiet: absorb what had just happened. I didn’t kneel. I’m not very religious. I just sat, and thought, and rested. The unexpected is tiring.
It’s a small, ancient building: a chapel rather than a church. But it blazes with intricate icons and gold leaf and crimson velvet; everything shimmers: there’s no way it can’t: there must be a thousand candles at least stuck all around, lit by the faithful at their own expense. It’s a sensuous, somehow Mediterranean place, stuck here as if by accident in this cold northern land. The air was heavy with incense: that and candle smoke smarted the eyes: or was I crying? And in the ears was the gentle murmur of the faithful, the click click of the telling of beads. Yes, I was crying. But I don’t think from wretchedness. Relief, happiness almost, at something completed. My father: no longer fantasy, just a man.
* * *
And there in front of me, a couple of rows nearer the great glittery altar, was sitting Andreas Anders. He looked round and saw me. I wish he hadn’t. I wanted to just go on sitting there, alone, thinking. But he got up and came to sit next to me. How good-looking he was. His bright eyes glittered in the candlelight.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s not coming to Helsinki after all. Had you heard?’
By ‘she’ he always meant Caroline Christopherson. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’d better give her up altogether, don’t you? Divorce, or something drastic. I can’t stand the strain.’
‘Let’s go outside,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the place for such conversations.’ Nor was it. As I say, I’m not one for religion, but some sort of God was here in this place, albeit in heavy disguise, and didn’t want to hear all this soggy, emotional mish-mash.
So we went out, Andreas and me. And he tucked his arm into mine and said, ‘Shall we go back to the Inter-Continental, just you and me?’ and I pulled my arm away and said, ‘No, I won’t. What a monster you are!’ and heard myself saying it, and knew I meant it, and there I was, out of love with him. Just like that. ‘A monster?’ he asked, hurt and confused. But I didn’t even want to discuss it. It wasn’t worth it. I’d see the Lenin in Love through, of course, because I was a professional, but that was all. The man was an egocentric maniac.
I left him staring after me, his worm turned, and I went back to the Hesperia and found Tony in my bedroom and told him to stop messing about and for heaven’s sake somehow get his wife and children back. If he wanted to get out of the business, let him do it with the proper person.
‘Is this what finding a long lost father can do?’ he asked, as he left. ‘And I had such high hopes…’
And all I could do was suppose it was: that, and simply Finland itself.
In the past Finland has always been conquered or annexed or governed by someone else – this vast flat stretch, on top of the world, of islands and forests – but now it has its own identity, its own pride: it looks not to its previous masters, Sweden and Russia, but to itself. How odd, to identify so with a nation! Perhaps it’s hereditary, in the genes: like ending up in the film business. My dad ran off with a Finn: one mustn’t forget that. Perhaps he somehow felt the same connection, and can be forgiven.
And that’s the strange thing that happened to me in Helsinki, last October, and how my life has changed. And I called this story ‘Falling in Love in Helsinki’, not ‘Out of Love’, because although it’s true I fell out of love with Andreas, out of love with love (which is a real blight), somehow I fell into love with life. Or with God, call it what you will, there in that chapel. Whatever, I found myself sufficiently enamoured of just the sheer dignity of creation to realise I shouldn’t offend it the way I had been doing. I think everything’s going to be all right now. I’ll make out. I might even leave the film business altogether. Not go into a convent, or anything so extreme. But I might try politics. It’s what I’m trained for.
* * *
As for GUP, the Great Universal Paradox, that’s real enough. What I marvel at now is how happy so many of us manage to be, so much of the time, in spite of it.
1989
Love Amongst the Artists
‘Happy Christmas, my own true love,’ said Lucy to Pierre, on the morning of December 25, 1899. She woke amongst a flurry of white sheets and feather pillows and this was the nearest she would get to seasonal and romantic snow, for the day was mild and they were in the South of France, not Connecticut, which was Lucy’s home, or Paris which was Pierre’s.
Pierre stirred but did not wake. Lucy whispered in his ear again.
‘Happy Christmas, my own true love,’ and this time he murmured a reply.
‘If you and I are to be free souls, Lucy,’ said Pierre with a clarity apparently quite undiminished by slumber, ‘we must put all such religious cant behind us,’ and closed his eyes again and slept on. His arms lay brown and young amongst the sheets and his dark hair was wild and curly on the pillow and she loved him. But she loved Christmas too, and always had.
Morning sun shone in through the little square window and bounced back from the whitewashed walls. She smoothed down her white cambric nightgown and wound her hair back around her head and pinned it up, and climbed down from the high bed, and crossed the bare wooden floor and looked out of the undraped window. She could see across a river valley to vineyards which marched across hills like soldiers going to their death. She put the image from her mind. And if there was a smell of rottenness in the air, as if all the grapes which should have been gathered in the autumn to make wine had been allowed to fall and fester on the ground instead, that was nothing worse than French plumbing. Some things had to be bad, Pierre said, so bad there was nothing left for them to do but get better.
‘Religion is the opiate of the people,’ said Pierre from his pillow. ‘God is a drug fed by the masters to the poor and hungry, so they are content with poverty and hunger. Jesus was never born: heaven does not exist. Blind belief is a thorn in the side of mankind and we will pluck it out.’
In one more week it would be 1900, the dawn of the twentieth century, and into that dawn would strike through
the light of new hope and new liberty, and all the energy of free thought and free love, untrammelled by convention, and Lucy’s soul soared at the thought that Pierre and she were part of it: that he and she were one step ahead of that new dawn. They would be in Paris by New Year’s Eve to be amongst the anarchists; they would gather there together to drink to the future: the passionate brotherhood of the enlightened, and their sisters in that passion.
What a different stroke of midnight it would be from the one she would have envisaged just a few months back: a single glass of wine raised solemnly at the first stroke, in the parlour, in the company of Edwin her husband and Joseph her brother, and then to bed. And each stroke sounding its annual dirge to lost hope and failing passion: its welcome to the triumph of boredom and the death of the soul.
Pierre left the bed and stood beside her. He was naked. Lucy could not become accustomed to it. She had been married to Edwin for fourteen years and had never caught more than a flash of white limb in the bathroom, a movement of bare flesh above her in the bed. Now Pierre unpinned her hair so it flowed around her shoulders.
‘So never name that day again,’ said Pierre, ‘or it will drag you back to the Lord of the Dark Domain,’ and they both laughed. Lord of the Dark Domain was their name for Edwin. Lucy’s husband wrote novels for a living; once every five years or so, to the acclaim of serious critics, he would have published an extremely melancholy book, the text so closely printed that Lucy had no patience with it, but then she was not expected to. Edwin loved Lucy for her folly; she was his child bride, his pretty wife: now he would see how he had misjudged her! Now he would find out: now that another man understood her talent, her intelligence, her quality, her passion.
‘All the same,’ said Lucy, ‘it comes as a shock! No mince pies, no gifts and ribbons and best dresses? Never more?’
‘Never more,’ said Pierre, ‘or you will be dragged back into the Hell of Domesticity, which is the Death of Art.’
Pierre was a composer of fine if difficult song cycles which so few people in the world could understand that when Pierre came to New York from Paris to perform, the concert hall was all but empty, the tour was cancelled and Pierre left penniless and stranded in a strange land. Edwin, as an act of kindness, had offered him work for the summer, teaching Bessie and Bertie the piano. Bessie was twelve and Bertie was ten. They would wake this Christmas morning to a house which lacked a mother. Lucy put that image from her too. Bessie had Edwin’s beetling brows; Bertie aped Edwin’s clipped, dry manner of speech. They were Edwin’s children more than Lucy’s. Pierre saw it. Edwin claimed it. The law acknowledged it: let the law have its way.