‘My daughter’s doing Russian coursework now at school,’ I told him. ‘Would you like to see her textbook?’
I held it out to show him. He had turned from the freezer to sip his water. He glanced over his shoulder and shook his head.
‘But it’s about Russia,’ I said, puzzled.
‘Lies,’ he said.
I blinked. I gave a little laugh before I realised he wasn’t joking.
‘No honestly,’ I said. ‘It’s history.’
‘Lies,’ he repeated, compressing his lips, shoving his head back inside the fridge.
Wow, I thought. Bloody hell.
Wait till I tell Michael he’s been barking up the wrong tree all these years, I thought; that he’s been wasting his time on Mesopotamia et cetera. Lies! I put the book back in the pile of Georgia’s coursework on the dresser.
I felt quite winded.
On the evening of my overnight business trip to Moscow, Mr Petrossian had booked a table at a giant marble-clad sushi restaurant. I’d arrived early and was shown to a balcony table from where I could take in the sheer girth of the chandeliers shining light on the men at dinner all around me. The table nearest was occupied by two heavies growling stuff at each other when they weren’t growling into their mobiles; opposite them, ignored by them, sat two teenagers in thick make-up, immobile as captive princesses, and completely silent.
I never lied about it but I did stay silent. Secrets aren’t the same as lies. It’s not something I’m proud of. I told the girls someone got me in the face during a doubles match when they asked about my wavy nose. So it’s not true I never lied; I have lied!
Of course, it was another time, the Seventies. An earlier stratum of history altogether. And he was plausible, my dad.
I’d had enough. My knee had started to throb and I realised I ought to rest it.
‘I have fixed it,’ said the man triumphantly, closing the freezer door.
He glanced at his watch and scribbled something on his timesheet. I watched him as he started to pack his tools away.
‘Well done,’ I said.
I felt weirdly wiped out.
I knew I ought to ask him what it was that had gone wrong in the first place. I hadn’t forgotten about Michael’s file of domestic notes; for some reason though, I’d temporarily lost confidence in it. It can’t be that useful, I thought, otherwise we’d have got everything sorted ages ago. What if it’s not the condenser coils or the evaporator fan next time round? What if it’s a different part of the freezer altogether? And even if, thanks to the notes, we do find out what’s gone wrong, that won’t alter the fact that it’s gone wrong again.
I still did ask him though, and I carefully wrote down what he said and dated it. After all, Michael hadn’t once let me down in all the time I’d known him and I had no reason to doubt his way of going about things now. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to foul up his scrupulously recorded dossier.
Voice Over
MATTHEW SPERLING
A: Hi, I’m Marlie Prince, and I played the character of Shawna in Forever a Stranger.
B: And this is Baxter Fields, I was producer on Forever a Stranger, and can I just say how glad I am to see this anniversary edition being released now. It took a long time to make it possible, but really I’m incredibly proud and glad of the work we did to make the movie happen, all those years ago. It was a magical few months that we all worked on it together, and not least because I think I’m right in saying that it was a first film for a lot of us, and that’s the case for you, isn’t it, Marlie?
A: It is. I was so young, just seeing me on the opening credits there!
B: And that was actually sort of old-fashioned already when we did it, to have opening credits with the actors appearing in stills. But that was just one part of the whole look that Dieter wanted it to have, and he was very clear on things like that. An amazing capacity for attention to detail he had. And . . . well, there’s nothing happening on screen really now, we can just see that wonderful landscape being established . . . so maybe we can talk a bit more about what it was like to work under this amazing director, especially as a young actress, Marlie?
A: Oh, amazing, yes . . .
B: And you’d mainly done modelling before this, am I right? . . . Well, I guess that’s a —
A: Sorry, I’m just seeing Robin there, and it’s still a shock to see him, you know? Still a shock. He was such a, well, such a beautiful man, and when I say that I don’t mean at all in a feminine way, and yet there really was a terrific delicacy to him, which I think this movie brings out. And maybe after this it got lost a little, you know, he did a lot of movies which didn’t bring out that side of him, and I think maybe in a sad way that side of him actually died out. It was never . . . nourished. Yes, I was a model before this, but really just a catalogue model, and I was just a girl, I’d never imagined this whole glamorous, you know, world.
B: And is it true, just for, uhh, getting the record straight, it’s often said but is it true that Robin scouted you at the mall?
A: He scouted me at the mall, yes. But I already had an agent who was putting my name around, so in a funny way when Robin went back to the studio and said, I’ve got this great girl, they already had me on file.
B: That’s so funny.
A: Isn’t it funny? I guess that’s the kind of town it was back then, it was a lot smaller, so I guess if there was a beautiful girl then probably you would know about her, she’d be on the books in some way already.
B: And Robin, of course, can’t be with us today for this commentary, I’ve spoken to him and he regrets that —
A: You spoke to him?
B: Just very briefly, a very brief, uhh, talk —
A: Amazing. It must be ten years that I didn’t speak to him.
B: Well, uhh, as I say, very briefly we spoke about, you know, this release, which he’s very excited about.
A: Robin’s excited?
B: Maybe excited isn’t . . . He’s certainly aware that this release is happening . . .
A: Okay. We should tell them about the movie anyway, Baxter. Look, it’s this sequence, what’s this shot again? You all spent so long on it?
B: The smash-zoom. This is, I guess, a thing for the real enthusiasts, and I remember that Dieter and I spent almost a whole afternoon getting this shot right, with Paul Baker, our wonderful cinematographer, who sadly died. So it’s, well, it’s gone now, it’s a very fleeting effect, can we go back? Can we…? No? Well, okay, you can’t see it now, but it’s where the camera zooms out, from the focus on their two hands, the lovers’ hands, resting next to each other on the gate, it zooms out from there to a position behind their two backs, with all of the valley in front of them in focus, and at the same time it tracks left, to move the shot towards Robin in the centre of the frame, and Shawna is there on the edge. Which is pretty, you know, prophetic in terms of the movie. And that all sounds sort of technical, but the whole thing takes, it must be less than ten seconds, and we shot that forty or fifty times to get it right, and now I believe they teach that moment in film schools —
A: No way!
B: Yes, well, I don’t know, someone sent me a book, it was a whole book about Dieter and his movies, and in it there was a whole two pages about this one shot —
A: No way.
B: It’s lovely to think, isn’t it? It was just something we worked out one afternoon, when we were all kids, and now there’s kids in college writing term papers about it.
A: I’d love to read those papers.
B: Yeah, certainly, as I say, there’s this one book on Dieter at least . . . And I remember you were wonderfully patient with us, while we made you stand by that gate with your hand there for hours, repeating this shot, and doing the lighting, and always having to clear the valleys in the background. And those picnickers showed up . . .
&nbs
p; A: I don’t remember that. Really I was just so grateful for the opportunity to be in the movie, I wasn’t going to ask Dieter to hurry it up! Later, I would have.
B: I know you would! Well, I worked with you on The Mighty Challenge, uhh what is it, ten, twelve years later, and I was amazed how much more confident you’d become.
A: Well, by that stage, you know, I was a mother, and I’d been married to Robin, and I wasn’t going to take crap any more really, pardon my French.
B: Well, you know, we’re now up to a pretty advanced point in the courtship between Robin’s character David, and your character Shawna, and it’s sometimes said that the way we cut it, the story moves along too quickly, whereby, you know, they meet and then they seem to be a regular couple so quickly —
A: But Robin was a very seductive man!
B: He was that, yes. And I think we made a decision, as a team, I remember there was an ice skating sequence that we shot and then cut out, because we thought to establish them as, not just lovers, but really a couple, we thought we could do that rather . . . by a sort of short-hand, I suppose, and within the grammar of the montage people would gather that more time had passed than we had really shown. And I think that works pretty well.
A: But what’s the season here? I can never remember.
B: That’s another funny thing, you know, to prepare for doing this commentary I went to the IMDb and I read what people say about this movie, and there’s a long list of the continuity errors we made, and the season . . . Finally the weather was so unpredictable, and the schedule for location work was so tight, we figured we had to fudge the question a little. So it’s sort of spring into early summer? But there were a very small number of re-shoots —
A: I don’t remember re-shoots —
B: No, you weren’t there, I think you were working on your next project already. We did a small number of re-shoots later that year with a double, so sometimes, I don’t even remember which shots they are, but sometimes when it’s your back or your hand, it’s actually someone else’s hand.
A: Oh, that’s so weird. I hope she was pretty.
B: You know, I don’t remember, I’m sure . . . But the thing was, the re-shoots mean that you really shouldn’t pay too much attention to the state of the leaves on the trees, or the length of the grass, even though these people on the IMDb database have a long list of every time we made a mistake . . . Now, where are we? This shot looks like it was done in a studio but this is actually a real house we borrowed, do you remember that house?
A: Uhh, not so much . . .
B: This is another celebrated shot, anyway, because this whole scene is done in one long take, and it’s almost four minutes long —
A: That was a real challenge.
B: And you were wonderful in it, and Robin too. You see he’s making an omelette here while you two deliver the dialogue, and he’s just got so much to think about, because we used a dolly for this, even though the kitchen is not enormous by any means, so Robin had to think about his lines, and his performance, and hitting his marks, and all the while he’s actually making a real omelette from scratch —
A: Hey! You remember what he said?
B: He said . . . well, why don’t you tell it?
A: So we did this scene maybe five or six times, and in between each take there was a woman who came and washed up the whisk and the jug and the frying pan, and I don’t know, maybe she even ate the omelettes too. And Robin was just being a sweetie, an absolute darling . . . because, you know, the funny thing is, even though he was this heart-throb and this supposedly famous lover, actually he was one of the least physically well co-ordinated people I ever met! He could hardly place one foot in front of the other. Dieter used to tease him that he walked like a cripple, perhaps I shouldn’t say that word these days . . . But it meant that he found this omelette incredibly challenging, because he never cooked for himself, and he’s also supposed to be drunk in this scene, we’ve come from the bar —
B: I have a story to tell about that bar, but I’ll save it —
A: — and he had this incredible task, of trying to look like someone who’s a comfortable cook, whisking up this omelette without having to think about it, but also to look like he’s drunk, and then to deliver the lines in this scene . . . So by the time he’d made two or three omelettes, Dieter wanted to go again, and Robin was just pouring with sweat, he was concentrating so hard. And we had this joke on set, you know there was this thing Jack Lemmon used to do where before every take he would get himself into the zone by saying out loud, It’s magic time, it’s magic time, it’s magic time, he would say this ten times, and apparently when they did Some Like It Hot, this just drove Tony Curtis insane. But what Robin would do is he would say this, as a sort of joke, but then it became a superstition, because he did it before the final take on that great monologue that comes later in the film, even though we shot it earlier, and he totally nailed it that time, this really involved monologue, so then he started saying it for real, It’s magic time . . . But then with this scene, he’d made this omelette three or four times already, and Dieter asked us to go again, and he said, It’s omelette time, it’s omelette time, it’s omelette time, and he did it just exactly in Jack Lemmon’s voice.
B: And what was the thing he said?
A: That was the thing, he said, It’s omelette time, and we just collapsed laughing.
B: Right, right, because I remember a different line, where he turned to me and for some reason he said it in a British accent, maybe he was doing Gielgud, who he’d just worked with, he turned to me and he said, I don’t even fucking like omelettes, in this British accent.
A: Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s so Robin.
B: He really was the most wonderfully funny man, in those days. Now, where are we . . . It’s in this central movement of the film, in the early stages of this final movement that the theme of love, which was the theme in the opening, where they meet, but here the theme really returns and becomes the main theme. Because, you know, some people think that the disgrace of the David character is the over-riding theme, but I always thought that really the theme was love.
A: And it’s a kind of redemption for the character.
B: Maybe, yeah, it’s, uhh, the redemptive power of love. And that’s where Dieter was so clever, I think, in putting together a script where you can hardly tell between disgrace and redemption . . . because really, when you look past the surface, maybe they’re the same thing really?
A: And that, for me, is very poignant, and very true, and especially in light of what happened to Robin in the, you know, in later years.
B: Yes . . . I don’t know if we want to go —
A: But it’s hard not to mention it, because it’s a part of my life now too . . . I mean after I’d been married to Robin, and we had Jamie, and even though he was the most wonderful father, there was still a real danger about him. He still had dangerous tastes, and that was part of why he was exciting, like David in the film, but also, I suppose, it was his flaw, I wouldn’t say tragic flaw, but clearly it got him in a lot of trouble later on.
B: In those days, of course, we were all a bit more wild. I mean, the Seventies . . . It’s worth pointing out that when we were shooting, Robin was a total professional. And Dieter, who’s a little older than the rest of us, he had his teenage daughters on set a lot of the time, they were thirteen, fifteen, and I don’t think he ever felt there was any risk in that. Robin was a gentleman with them. He was debonair, if anything, always paying them compliments, paying them attention.
A: Of course. It was a different time. It was a very . . . free, very liberated sort of era really. And don’t forget that I was introduced to this world, this world of heated whirlpools and mansions in the hills, and all of these wonderfully charismatic, witty men, surrounded by young girls, and I was just a young girl myself. So in a way it could have been me, that he . . . In
a way it was me, I mean if I’d been a few years younger, I’m sure I still would have found him equally attractive. And clearly the girl that came forward first did find him attractive, I mean she admitted to that much. She wanted to be a model herself, and you don’t go back to the home of this famous so-called lothario, I mean, knowing that he’s married and so much older . . .
B: Yes, really the . . . uhh, the circumstances . . .
A: Well, Baxter, I do want to talk about it, just a little, because really it’s been part of my healing, part of the healing I’ve found in my life, after a period when I had really lost my way, to face up to that aspect of the past. It was in that lost period of my later life that these things, these allegations about Robin came out, with what I still see as a persecution, I mean rounding up old men for things they’re said to have done forty years ago, of course they can’t remember any of it. So it affected my life too. It made me look back at all the past, and for a while I guess there was a time when all I could see in the past was a sort of disgrace, like everything had been tainted by what they said Robin had done to these girls. And the things that were said in the deposition, you know, with the Quaaludes and the merlot, I do recognise that lifestyle . . .
Best British Short Stories 2015 Page 12