by Bella Pollen
‘You do give me everything … everything I want.’
‘What if I wanted to give you more.’
‘What “more” are we talking about here?’ Jay asked.
‘I don’t know. A child?’ As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was almost paralysed with shock. Couldn’t believe I’d said it. Didn’t even know where it had come from.
He was quiet. ‘You couldn’t give me a child,’ he said eventually.
‘Am I that selfish?’ My laugh sounded false.
He didn’t reply.
‘Because you don’t want one?’
‘Because I can’t have one.’
I automatically thought, low-sperm count, weak swimmers. I thought adoption, baby from China, love in a Petri dish …
‘I won’t have children, Maggie. I can’t.’
There was something in the way he said it which made my whole body go still.
‘You never told me.’
He rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you go round telling someone on a first date. “Hey, shall we go to dinner, and by the way I’ve had a vasectomy.”’
‘It’s not funny.’
‘No’, he said. ‘It’s not funny. Why is this an issue all of a sudden? You told me you didn’t want children.’
‘I don’t.’ Jay had asked me once. I’d said no and he’d said good. I hadn’t realized the question had an invisible ‘ever’ attached to it.
‘What is this really about then, Maggie?’
I couldn’t explain, wasn’t sure myself. Maybe subconsciously I’d just used the one thing against Jay I knew he couldn’t come back from. You can’t extort commitment out of somebody, it’s not a tangible thing to be handed over or promised.
‘Look at me, Maggie.’ He spread out his hands and they trembled a little. ‘This isn’t from drink, or because I’m an old fuck, there are things I have seen that will never leave me. Try to understand. What have I got to offer a child? What have I got to offer anyone?’
I didn’t answer. In my head, the moment just crystallized into how differently we thought about the future.
‘You’re idealistic now, you’ll be less idealistic in twenty years. Look around you, Maggie. The world isn’t a particularly nice place. Love doesn’t conquer everything.’
‘I know, you told me, love doesn’t make the world go round, Pepsi does.’
‘Hate,’ he said, ‘rage, grief, greed, war – those are the things that make the world go around. Love just makes it all a little less painful.’ His voice was harsh and I felt numb.
‘Can we Scotch tape this?’
‘I don’t know.’ I was crying.
‘Don’t give up on me, Maggie,’ he breathed into my damp hair and kissed me. ‘Please, please don’t give up on me,’ but all I understood was that he’d given up on himself.
* * *
The oldest possession in my loft is an egg. When the stainless-steel boys delivered my fridge, the egg was already in it. For a long time it was the only thing in my fridge – save a few cans of SpaghettiOs for which I have a weakness (cold and preferably out of the tin). After a while there seemed no way of ridding myself of the egg without the risk of it breaking and the stench would have been apocalyptic. So for safety, I drew a face on it with a red felt marker and left it there. That was three years ago.
Staring into the fridge, standing on the bare boards of my kitchen I was struck by the spartan decor of my loft. It didn’t look minimalist, it looked studenty, but after I had slept for a couple of hours at least it felt more like home. I opened one of the spaghetti cans and organized the videos from England in sequence in front of the television.
On Newsline you get the first edit. Initially you present the material as you want. If that doesn’t wash, it becomes a question of give and take – more specifically they take and you try as hard as possible not to give. If you mess up totally Alan can and will put someone else onto it but this doesn’t happen all that often. One of the great things about Alan is that once he hands out an assignment, he generally doesn’t interfere in the creative process until you screen the finished product for him. Alan likes to be sure of coming to the material fresh and remaining objective enough to gauge whether the final story is solid in terms of content, whether it makes for compelling viewing, and more crucially whether it is a ‘Newsline’ story.
Usually I get as much footage as I can then try to find a route through the material after. I know that the end result is a puzzle to which you have the key as long as you are prepared to worry and jiggle the pieces enough. Working for Newsline I learnt to edit in my head as I went along, but in order to do this you need to keep a clear view of what you want to say. And that was my problem. I no longer knew what that was.
When you grow up with absolutes, there are good guys and bad guys. There is the pure and simple truth and a self-righteousness that goes with believing you’re with the angels on every issue, but let’s face it, the truth is rarely pure and it’s never simple.
I rewound the tapes over and over again, looking at the faces of the Bancrofts, Lady Roxmere, heard my own indictments, cold, repressed, snobbish, remembered Rory’s retorts, shy, scared, lonely.
I paused on Montague. ‘Some say inheriting a large house is a cruel burden, but I say if you’ve got a family that’s been in possession of a house for a very long time you want to keep the bloody thing going. I mean that’s what primogeniture is all about. It is the duty of the eldest son to keep the place intact.’
‘Bevan was my father’s private war,’ Rory had told me. ‘The elms were his casualties. He’s spent the last twenty-five years planting trees. My father has earned the right to his land.’
I freeze-framed on the Earl of Bevan himself. ‘We are dinosaurs. We have clung to tradition even though it has driven us to bankruptcy but of course the knowledge that we are passing on a huge burden to our eldest child is less attractive than it used to be.’
My confusion meant that I had no idea where to start or end. The set of moral values with which I used to define right and wrong, fairness and decency, had been skewed. I had lost my ground rules, and with no ground rules I didn’t feel safe enough to tell a story, and with no story, there would be no film. I finally pinpointed why this was such a scary admission – the implication being that if I’d got this project so wrong I had to question so many other judgements. I wondered about past programs I’d made, how passionately I’d felt about issues, how fairly I’d manoeuvred edits, manipulated questioning or back-to-backed two nonconsecutive incidents to make a point. The film-maker can be as guilty of planting evidence as any bent cop. It’s no fun shining a torch in your own eyes and, as I watched the tapes, I wondered how many people had been burnt by the flare of my unswerving certainty.
* * *
Dawn broke over the city, two, three, four times. Sun glinted off the fire escapes outside the window. The sewing machines whirred beneath my floor. When I ventured out to the deli to pick up some food I noticed that someone had painted a row of watermelons on the inside of the elevator. Everything was as it used to be yet nothing felt the same and time continued to run on and out.
On the fifth day, I made the mistake of picking up the phone without screening the call. Alan was on the other end. I bargained with him for a little more time. He knew, because I’d told him, exactly what story I had on tape and he thought what I was going to produce would be worth it, but I heard the warning in his voice. Not long after my stay of execution was granted I got into a crying fit and couldn’t get out. When it was over, I thought that by rights, I should feel purged. Rory was a bug I caught in England, a particularly virulent one. Now I was rid of it. But it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, never had I felt such a failure, both as a journalist and as a human being.
daniel
Rory’s in a blue funk and I reckon if ever there was a time for a Dionysiac moment this would be it. If it were me, exampli gratia, I would be wallowing like a hippo in a river of
alcohol by now but, as we’ve seen, Rory’s made of sterner stuff. He does not succumb. Instead, curiously, he takes to cushion scattering with a vengeance, stripping bare the mews house in a burst of feverish energy. Even the moose head comes off the wall and gets chucked into the back of the car along with the rhino bin and Bevan’s other artefacts of the past. When Rory delivers them home he gives no explanation for their return and Alistair does not ask for one.
Upstairs in the nursery he dumps everything on the floor. He has every intention of leaving them there without a backward glance, but he does give a backward glance and some bird charts stacked in the corner catch his eye. There are three of them, old and warped. Seabirds, Birds of Prey, Marsh Dwellers. When we were children we were given two pounds a chart to memorize them. Rory moves aside a stack of cardboard boxes and squats down.
‘Greater Black-backed Gull, Gannet, Kittiwake,’ he closes his eyes and whispers. ‘Arctic Skewer, Herring Gull, Little Tern.’ He opens his eyes and sits down on the floor staring numbly at the posters. ‘Latin name for wren?’ he can hear Alistair asking. ‘Troglodytes, Troglodytes, Troglodytes,’ he hears my reply. You see, I want to point out to him – all the snippets of other people you absorb as a child will, one day, absorb you.
After a while Rory notices that one of the cardboard boxes he has moved is full of papers from my room. Hesitantly he sticks his hand into this lucky dip of memories. Out come letters, bills, photographs; Rory and me, mouths smeared with orange ice lollies. Another; I am dressed as Robin Hood and he, Maid Marion. A picture of my grandmother, holding the newborn Rory in his christening robe. Her bosom is so massive, he looks like a tiny brooch pinned to it. He unfurls a school photograph. There I am at the back, shockingly good looking even in the midst of spotty puberty, and there is Rory, one row, one year and, as yet, two undropped bollocks away. He crams the photos in his pocket and keeps digging.
I know he will find the map sooner or later and he does. He recognizes my handwriting and looks at the big envelope, undecided, before opening it.
There’s a field at Bevan, to the far left of the farm road, which climbs a hill directly west then drops rather anticlimatically away leaving nothing more dramatic than a horizon of stunted fencing. I have always had a notion to plant a wood there quite from scratch and I thought it would be rather romantic to do this at the beginning of a new century. Everyone has their own idea of a legacy whether it’s a book, a film or a child – it’s not that I’m competitive but trees outlast most of them. ‘The thing I am most proud of.’ This was a silly game Rory and I used to play. Well, the Millennium wood was to have been it for me.
Most people when they design a wood draw it rectangular, but I wanted this one to be more interesting so I drew a shape at random. Bordered naturally on three sides by the paddock, the old orchard and the fox cover, I gave the fourth edge a curvaceous sweep which lent it a whimsical look. The idea was to create a wide ride running through the wood with statues and tree houses along the way, before eventually opening out into two clearings in the centre. The clearings would be planted with all sorts of odd and rare trees, ‘Liquid Amber’ and pear trees for example, both more usually associated with gardens than woods, then evergreens planted behind for a dark backdrop. I thought of putting a bench in the middle where one day mine or Rory’s teenage boys might sit and catch a smoke. Rory turns the map over to cross-reference the tree plan on the other side. I’d chosen things that turn lovely colours; there was a red cedar or two, some sorbus for their berries – and a lot of ash which goes umber in the summer, a dried reddish haze in winter and does well in boggy ground like we have at Bevan.
My plan had been to enlist everyone’s help; get the children up from the village, teach them about plants, give everyone who ever worked at Bevan a tree with their name on it … but look, I’m getting carried away by my own genius. Rory’s not studying the map any more – he’s staring at the floor, more and more anguished, his face all screwed up, then before you know it he’s started crying and I see that the poor bastard is in a lot more trouble than I thought.
maggie
I opened the fridge and stood hopefully in front of it. All that was left was a can of clam chowder, a bottle of red wine with a corkscrew embedded in its top and, of course, the egg. I must throw out the egg. The egg was symbolic – a sign of something rotten in my life. As I heated the chowder I wondered how to achieve its eviction without breaking it. An egg carton seemed logical, but that meant buying more eggs and then what to do with the rest? They’d sit in the freezer for ever and my problem would have multiplied. Eventually I decided to wrap it in an old pair of briefs and put it – well not in the trash can, from where it could be traced back to me by angry neighbours, but somewhere safe, where it would be dealt with swiftly, where there were other competing putrid smells – a hospital for example. So that was the plan. Swaddle the egg in warm clothes and leave it at the hospital. No doubt when it was found dozens of depressed post-partum chickens all over New York would be questioned. Please come forward, you obviously need help, you will receive sympathetic treatment.
I’d still not edited my footage, hadn’t even left the house for the last two days. Now I was definitely losing it. I took a walk. Though night, the cold bite was fading from the air. Winter would soon turn to spring. I headed west along Rivington Street, aware as I always am on returning home how different this place is to any other. People are loud and sharp, the air buzzes with tangible energy. It was after midnight but the streets were packed and lights were blazing. Even the traffic was snarled. When I hit Broadway I saw why. A car had crashed up on the pavement; its door jammed open against the kerb. It had knocked down a trash can and the pavement was decorated with the waste of city. There were the usual disco lights of cops and ambulances and the street was being cordoned off. I detoured into the all-night record store which was deserted save for a few music addicts patrolling the second-hand aisles. In world music I picked out some Cuban tapes I’d been meaning to get for ever. Heading downstairs to checkout, a man was pushing out of the classical section, a bunch of CDs in his arms. Music boomed through the glass door as I held it back for him and I stiffened. I know nothing about classical music, but this I recognized.
Beethoven’s ninth symphony. The music Rory’s grandfather had been playing at such ear-splitting volume that morning at Bevan. I bought it, feeling a little foolish. At home I slipped it out of the case and fast-forwarded to the passage I was looking for. It was a short piece of music, but very powerful. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be written about, but to me it seemed to be about courage, about death, pain and glory. I turned up the volume, played it loud. Opened all the windows and played it louder still until it had chased all the other stuff out of my head. Then everything was clear.
In the morning, I rang a contact of mine and arranged to rent a small editing suite with a technician thrown in. I headed downtown, the film packed tightly into two cardboard boxes. For the first time in a week I felt completely calm – OK so maybe there is no truth, but you’ve got to believe in something.
daniel
Benj’s father dies. Suddenly and unexpectedly. He gets no chance to make his old man amends, no time for the usual last-minute pact with the living before he faces the dead – and a punishment, I believe, richly deserved as was his tumour in the stomach while we’re on the subject of karma. One minute he has indigestion, the next they’re slicing him open and there it is – the big C – nurtured on his internal river of bile, sprouting like watercress in and around every organ in his body. He doesn’t survive the operation.
The effect on Benj is predictable. He disintegrates, regresses, ages, weeps, jumps a generation, celebrates and mourns all with varying degrees of confusion and guilt. At the funeral he stands by his mother in the church wearing a suit which looks like it has been made for a much fatter man. Benj maintains his composure for most of the service then walks unsteadily to the lectern brushing Rory’s fingertips as he passes. As
he stands up there, gazing out over a sea of expectantly mournful faces, I wonder whether he will go off at the deep end, take this opportunity for an exquisitely timed revenge – out his father for the emotional and physical abusing shit of a man that he was. Instead Benj delivers an address so touching, so wry, so fucking true, that it reduces most of the family to tears.
After the service Benj gets drunk and stays that way for a month. Rory makes no attempt to stop him, simply monitoring him closely, occasionally feeding him and when not delegating the job of babysitting him to Alison, sleeping on the sofa himself in Benj’s sitting room. This is all quite good for Rory, leaving him little time for his other favoured pastime – obsessing about Maggie. When he does obsess about her, he still fails to appreciate the simplicity of the situation which is no more complicated than this: Maggie is attached to nothing and nobody while he is attached to everybody and everything. Instead he executes a competent job of convincing himself he’s motivated by nothing more than pique. She had got under his skin in the same way that another driver stealing a parking place from under your nose leaves you with a seething murderous resentment wholly out of proportion with the crime. He is convinced these feelings will, given time, pass – but is not particularly surprised when they don’t.
When Benj comes out of his stupor he makes an announcement. For the first time ever he feels in control. He feels all powerful and will take steps to change his life. He tells Rory that he knows he can achieve anything. Rory is mildly impressed until Benj adds that these accomplishments include the scaling of rooftops and soaring through the air unassisted by wires. ‘Things are about to change,’ Benj says, the frightening gleam of the converted in his eyes. ‘We’re in the dawning of a new era. Someone will have to lead the people and show them the light, that person could be me and I could be well paid for it.’ At which juncture Rory checks him into the Priory clinic and goes back to work.