by Dai Smith
As we grew older, we moved apart. Or rather, I moved in directions that were outward to other people and different things. Academic. Sporting. Sexual. Ambitions. Marcus remained his own centre of interest. He sat no formal examinations and left school at sixteen. He worked at the Royal, if you could call helping Freddie to move reels and Maisie to do the book-keeping any kind of work. We spoke briefly and amicably if we met in the street but the world no longer held any official sway over him and he turned his back on it. In no sense did he seem sad or even melancholy but the aura of retreat was almost palpable. When I moved completely away to live elsewhere after university the letters from home would, from time to time, drop the news of this one’s death or that one’s illness. And so I would learn how no one knew of Thelma and William’s deaths, the one quickly after the other, until after their funerals had taken place, and how, within a decade after that, the Royal finally closed its doors.
I had, of course, long before that, cross-questioned my mother further about Maisie’s “accident”, and the whereabouts of Marcus’s father. Once I had dared to ask him directly. He had waved the issue away with a “Best not to ask, dear boy. Absent, d’you see. Present and accounted for and all that. But decidedly in absentia, so I’m loco, but not quite ‘in parentis’. Quite.” When my mother considered me old enough I was told what I’d guessed, that Marcus was a war baby, one of many, some born out of wedlock. We were all war babies. My mother’s story was a cracked record by now. His father had been one of the American troops who’d been billeted in the town and the Valley prior to D-Day in the early summer of 1944. My mother, who went to them, remembered him in dances as tall and willowy with a pronounced accent, southern she thought, and that he was an officer. A loo-tennant. He’d met Maisie in the Royal over a simple exchange of money for tickets that quickly became something else. Maisie, my mother confirmed, was indeed beautiful and not shy of local admirers. Americans, especially ones over six foot tall, were something else again. Maisie persuaded Thelma to take over in the Box Office some nights, and she and the American would go upstairs to the balcony. She told my mother his favourite film was the best release of 1944, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, and how they’d sit in the dark to see murderous Barbara Stanwyck’s white blonde hair shine whilst Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, her seduced patsy, and Edward G. Robinson’s insurance investigator, Keyes, wisecracked to Raymond Chandler’s dialogue. Her American would, after four viewings, lip synch with them to its desperate end. When embarkation time came nearer Maisie spent more time with him by day. He said he’d come back for her. That when the war ended they’d go away to America. He didn’t come back from Omaha beach. Missing presumed dead. Maisie was pregnant with his child but hadn’t known it when sometime after the Normandy landings a letter came from one of his fellow officers to tell her the news. It was then that she suffered a cataleptic fit, brought on by hysterical, uncontrollable grief. Marcus was born at the beginning of April 1945, just as the war ended.
Then one letter from home told me that my mother had unexpectedly come across Maisie Robinson in the town, and that she’d said her brother Freddie had died that autumn. There was no further news of Marcus. Nor more of Maisie until one day, more than forty years after we’d first met, I had a letter from Marcus himself. I had recently returned from the solicitor’s practice I had long run, and my own mother was long dead by then – her funeral the last occasion I had reluctantly returned home – so he had no way of directly knowing my home address and must have counted on a squirrelled-away nugget of information – from his mother via mine? – to reach me. The letter was scarcely more than a note. It addressed me in first name terms but was more formal than friendly. Maisie had been ill for a while, and had died the previous month. He had been considering matters and wished to see me to convey his thoughts. I was to go to see him. There was a “please” appended to the statement, but it was more a politely phrased imperative than a request. You might say it was peremptory. I replied just as curtly to say it would be a few weeks before I could possibly go down, certainly not before early May. A further note, by return, said “Good, the 8th of May then. At 2 p.m., in Bryn Villa.”
* * * * *
Bryn Villa, like the town, had not taken the passing of time well. It still commanded a view, but where there had been commerce and bustle below its hill there were now shops whose windows were plywood, building site gaps, like randomly missing teeth, dereliction as calling cards and decay: cracked windowpanes, peeling paintwork, chipped masonry and a mockery of shoe shops and estate agents. Where the Royal had been was a Hold All Sell Cheap Mart, stuffed with plastic household goods and gimcrack ornaments for every model home. I winced. And Bryn Villa itself seemed both reduced in size and dingier than I remembered. I knocked loudly, more than once, and from behind the etched glass door, further down the passageway I heard the splutter of coughing and the shuffle of feet until both stopped and Marcus opened the door.
I half-expected to see the hallstand in its customary place. The ARP warning. The wardens’ helmets and coats. The aspidistra. But there was no room for them. All that had changed. Down the hall and stretching as far as the eye could see on either side of the wall and up to the ceiling on wooden planked shelving which sagged in places under the accumulated weight were – books. Hardback books. Paperback books. Books with torn covers and no covers. Books on their side. Books stacked on top of each other. Books overspilling onto the floor and into corners. Outsize books and pocket size books. They crept up the stairs, and under the low wattage light bulbs could be seen as both shelved and floor clutter on the upstairs landing. I sensed, more than immediately saw, that they would be everywhere now, in every room, up and down, in every corner and every cupboard, on every chair and table, in boxes and suitcases, in the attic and in the coal cellar. Marcus’s mind had filled the house with itself manifested as a material thing.
He stood before me, larger in all ways, from his baggy pullover and loosely belted trousers to his head on which his halo of hair seemed to have slipped to his face and inverted itself as a beard. As before, he was not straightforwardly fat although his whole body was somehow now all one thing. It was more that he seemed swollen, about to burst before he grew, perhaps, even bigger. He ignored the hand I held out and instead turned with that familiar fluidity of his, almost pirouetting off his right leg, to clasp me on the shoulder, guide me inwards and mutter, “Dear boy. Pleasure, dear boy. Pleasure.”
We walked down the towering funnel of books to the back kitchen where he scooped volumes off William’s old chair and flung himself onto the divan, scattering half-opened books to the floor as he did. There was no cooking aroma now. On the table, amongst the books, were cans, opened and unopened, of baked beans, tinned fruit, processed meats and half-cut loaves of bread. He saw my glance and gave me one of his beatific smiles. “No time, dear boy. No time. One does what one can. I could make you tea? Though the milk may be a little off. Imparts a pleasant tartness I find. Will you? Or perhaps not?” I said I was fine and how was he? He didn’t answer the question but just said he had a story to tell me. One, he thought, only I might understand. Or believe.
“My name,” he said, “is Marcus Robinson. As you know, Gareth. Yet, as you may have surmised, dear boy, it is not. Or not exactly. Which is to say my given name is Marcus, after my father it appears, whereas my assumed name – rather too Swiss Family or Lemon Barley wouldn’t you say – of Robinson, derives from placement rather than conception. I’m sure you follow. Around the time we parted – you to stay, me to go, so to speak, or vice versa, eh? – Maisie decided to lay before me the evidence of that which I had, silently, hitherto half-guessed and of which I did not enquire. When I say ‘evidence’, I mean only her memories because there were no letters, diaries, keepsakes whatsoever. Other than the U.S. Army kitbag which I had inherited with, as you’ll recall, its cornucopia of books, the start of my lifelong obsession I suppose, or should I say pre-life, I wonder? I had, of course, noticed that mos
t of the books were inscribed with ‘Marcus James Ambrose’ and some with ‘M.J.A., the Third’ which makes me the 4th, wouldn’t you say? After some signatures was the place name ‘Miledgeveille, Ga.’ and others had ‘Georgia State College’, and dates of course, from the late 1930s to 1944, the year, as Maisie told me, he was killed. She wrote to the Army later and had letters sent on to what she believed to be his parents. No replies ever. Letters returned unopened. She had me by then. She gave up. Understandable, I feel. There were no photographs either. Maisie said she’d begged him, just as a keepsake until he returned, but he’d said it was bad luck, and besides, unnecessary when their images of each other were so bright. Romantic stuff, dear boy.”
He paused and took in some air through a mouth far too small for his face.
“They never found a body they could identify. Missing Presumed Dead, and all that. She had, as you saw, all of you saw, gone into shock. She had not known she was pregnant. She came out of it apparently when I arrived. Lovely for her, eh? Though she was no longer lovely herself, of course. Except in the dim light of her box, eh? I think I started to speak in this particular, shall we say, absurdly refined manner, because she willed me to be a gentleman. I know that makes no sense but it was what happened, and I acquired my precocious vocabulary from the books. I was, you see, not meant to be a child. I was, shall we say, a substitute. I was, shall we say, him.”
He paused, again, and looked hard at me with an intensity which lacked all his usual, informal geniality.
“Let me go further, dear boy. I was a receptacle. I was a simulacrum. I was a mirror. I was a recording device. I was meant to stop time ticking. And I did. She insisted, you know, that I watch all those American films with you. She loved the thought of that, of the two of us, up there on the balcony, in the dark, absorbing all that, that American-ness, and those accents you loved and I professed to hate. I grew, shall we agree, more exaggeratedly not American. But she knew better, and so, despite myself, did I. Listen.”
And then he stood up and as if a button had been pushed he began, verbatim, to spout reams and reams of disconnected dialogue and monologue in which, with startling precision, his voice moved up and down a register of tone and was pitch perfect across a galaxy of actors. He was Bogart, a low tremolo made sinister by an almost indefinable lisp, duelling with Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains – who loved him the more? – and, seamlessly, he was hurt and bewildered yet stubborn and defiant Gary Cooper in High Noon in a bespoke Western accent of hesitant, drawling authenticity. One-liners, challenges and whole, packaged speeches came from within him, and all without a let-up. This was not memory, it was a transubstantiation of Marcus James Ambrose the Third. He managed the manly gurgle of Clark Gable, never quite crossing the line into falsetto, in It Happened One Night and his bereft and bereaved John Wayne, Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or in The Searchers as the implacable Ethan in quest of the hopeless cause of a reunited family was more than imitation, it was a homage to what that great, befuddled personification of American power and pity had managed to stumble through in a lifetime of acting parts that were more real than he was himself. And how had Wayne done that? Marcus showed me by misplacing the emphasis on every proper noun and end-lining, which he now repeated. The Duke had needed to plonk his furrow-browed recall of the words so woodenly in order to get to the end of them. And, by so doing, he no longer acted them. They acted him out.
When the bravura performance stopped after ten minutes I would have been inclined to applaud, to join in the joy of his performance, if it had not been for the tears that had run and stained his face all the time. He sat down abruptly. He did not bother to wipe the tears away. They ran into his greying beard and bedraggled it into wet strands of ashen string. He saw my concern for him etched on my own wrinkled and sagging face, and Marcus smiled. His tone changed again, back to the warm comforting voice that expressed confidence in its own all-seeing knowledge:
“One more speech, I fear, dear boy, to round things off you see. A shortish one, I promise. No two-dollar words in it. Do you remember that one? We thought it good at the time, didn’t we? To puncture the pompous who thought they could teach what they didn’t know, eh?”
I nodded. They were the words the dying Fred MacMurray speaks to Keyes in the final confession and retribution scene of Double Indemnity. I said:
“Walter Neff pleading to Keyes for brevity. And Keyes saying ‘You’re all washed up Walter,’ and Neff says ‘Thanks, Keyes. That was short any way.’”
Marcus gave me one of his grins of wolfish pleasure. I had been taught by one who knew.
“Exactly, dear boy. Wonderful ending, don’t you think? Though not the one James M. Cain put in the 1936 book, did you know? And in that masterwork of noir, Walter is Huff, not Neff and his inamorata, though still Phyllis, is Nirdlinger not Dietrickson. D’you think that last is Viennese Billy Wilder’s jibe at the full-on Kraut, Marlene? No matter. The point is, in the book, Walter and Phyllis, Huff and Nirdlinger, not yet 1944 MacMurray and Stanwyck, get away with their crime. The murder of her husband. The insurance claim. Double indemnity paid for railway accidents. The one they faked. The company man, Keyes, lets them go because it’s better than the bad marketing reputation they will get otherwise from one of their own agents, Huff, being the killer. Beautiful, isn’t it? Greed wins out all the way round. Not quite, of course, since Cain will, moralising even in the maw of the Great Depression, have us infer that our two star-crossed assassins are so psychologically damaged by their evil that they will make a suicide pact, and will go over the side of the cruiser to Mexico, and into the forgiving sea. Mmm. Where’s the life to come there, eh? None.
Yet consider the film, dear boy. Neff has repented his sex-crazed madness. He has killed Phyllis, though it seems at the end she loves him, and, mortally wounded himself, he confesses all to Keyes on recording cylinders via a dictaphone in the early hours of a morning that will never end for him. A different kind of justice for the mid-1940s. And an unforgiving Keyes. And yet, do you remember dear boy…”
And here Marcus rose and swivelled above me on one foot, and out came another voice, the wannabee tipped-trilby smart arse, yet irredeemably small town and suburban, back-of-the-throat voice of Fred MacMurray and the answering, tight-lipped riposte, as warm as a sun-drenched sidewalk and as hard as its paving stone, of Edward G. Robinson. Marcus looked straight into me.
“‘You know why you didn’t figure this one, Keyes? Let me tell you. The guy you were looking for was too close. He was right across the desk from you.”
“Closer than that Walter.”
“I love you too.”’
Marcus slumped back onto his divan. I thought it had all ended, but nothing ever ends with movie dialogue. I should have known that. It echoes. Into so-called real lives. It seeps and it drips and it shapes. Marcus James Ambrose the Third now propped himself up on the reclining arm of his divan. There were no tears left, and the final voice was deep, southern and, in places, slurred into an accent that cared little if it was understood, or not.
“Yus suh, Aaah knocked that pretty lil Welsh girl up as good as Aaah possibley could. Mah folks wuz all daid and Aaah had noah intenshuns of bein’ the laast of mah kind. Double Indemnity, thet silly-ole movie, was mah own ideah. A kinda life-after-daith insurance, yuh see. Aftah all, a daid man is hard to find. Aaah came back, is all. Aaah went, so that I’d be heah to come back. Aaah came back, cos Aaah was heah. And heah Aaa’ve bin evah since. Nevah pre-sume nuthin’ ’bout the daid, not even when they’ve gawn missin’. Ain’t nuthin’ goes missin’ forevah, d’yuh see? Except for sou-uls, a-course, yuh can indeed lose them. It’s jest them ole bahdies of ours, which won’t die. They jest change into somethin’ else, into someone else, into some place else.”
Marcus closed his eyes. I sat and waited, but it was finally over. He said no more. He slept, and yet he was not sleeping. He asked me neither to stay nor to leave. He had finished. I stood and walked back down the p
assageway to the hall and on through to the front door. I stood quite still before I opened it. Back in the kitchen, I heard a man from Georgia talking to himself and to someone else. He sounded animated, in a dialogue, sure of what he was saying in both voices. I opened the door and let myself out into the world which our fathers had left for us to die in.
Who Whom
“A gang of irresponsible hooligans posing as followers of Lenin and Trotsky … had distributed unauthorised tickets to the unemployed, allowing admission at half-price.”
Western Mail, February 1921