Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Agnieszka. Yes, I have.’

  ‘She’s something, isn’t she?’ he said. This might have been intended as nothing more than a comment on her appearance (which was pleasant enough, but not – I’d have said – remarkable), but might have been taken to imply that he had an interest in her. The latter, it seemed to me, was intended.

  ‘She seems a nice young woman,’ I said.

  ‘She is. She is indeed,’ said Sam, gravely, as though we were discussing someone who merited our profoundest respect. Then he added, as his parting shot: ‘Good workers, the Poles. Never let you down.’

  By the time Aileen had finished talking to Eleanor, Sam had been back on the roof for a quarter of an hour. He seemed such a nice boy, she commented. It was remarkable how suddenly he’d come out of himself. ‘He really likes you, I think,’ she said.

  13

  The family convened for Cerys’s show, for which the venue was a school hall in north London. The hall had an under-air of sweat and there was as little legroom between the rows of hard plastic seats as you get on a budget airline. And I had Sean sitting next to me. Arriving at the last minute, he at once informed me, with a cheerful grin and a brisk rub of the hands, that he’d had a bugger of a day. Having imparted this information, he scanned the audience. ‘Well, Broadway it isn’t. But nearly a full house. That’s good,’ he commented, nodding, as if bestowing his approval on the achievement a team of amateurs whose performance had gratifyingly exceeded his modest expectations. I too inspected the audience, in search of Sam. A glimpse of the back of a young man’s head – short-haired, dark – made me catch my breath; the young man turned; I half-covered my eyes; and I saw through my fingers a face that looked no more like Sam’s than Sam’s resembled mine. Meanwhile, Sean was giving closer scrutiny to the row in front of us; a woman with bird’s-nest hair and huge faux-Celtic earrings seemed to have a notebook on her lap, which meant she might be a critic. ‘Could be the big break. You never know. You never know,’ he repeated, as if countering an expression of doubt from me, while at the same time sharing my supposed scepticism. ‘OK, OK, here we go. Prepare to be dazzled,’ he murmured as the lights went down, rubbing his hands together again.

  The set was in place for the first scene: along the edge the stage, in front of a curtain of black gauze, half a dozen small tables had been placed, each equipped with a pair of chairs; to one side there was a counter, with an assortment of liquor bottles and glasses on it. A young man in a white shirt and red braces, his hair thickly oiled and centrally parted, appeared behind the bar, which was approached from the opposite direction by a stout middle-aged gent, in pin-stripes and spats. The stout chap – the banker Elisha J. Whitney – took a tumbler of whisky to a table; two other customers entered, were served, took seats; then entered Billy Crocker, impersonated by Simon Derbyshire, Cerys’s boyfriend.

  He started nervously: his voice was too quiet, and his accent was like nothing ever heard in New York. An imperfectly audible exchange between Billy and Mr Whitney ensued, but moments later things improved with the arrival of Reno Sweeney, a broad-shouldered, long-legged and large-breasted young woman in a sky-blue satin dress, who crossed the stage with the air of someone who knew that from this moment onward she would be the main focus of attention. Her hair was a black bob in the style of Louise Brooks; her lips were glossy and scarlet; the teeth were of an American-quality whiteness. Up to this point I’d had been tense; I’d been unable to rid myself of the feeling that Sam was somewhere in the hall, watching me. Now my attention was more fully engaged, and the tension weakened. Sean was checking the cast list: ‘Katie Lanner,’ he whispered in my ear. Katie Lanner started singing, and it was as if the show’s volume control had been turned up by fifty per cent; and she wasn’t merely loud – the voice was true as well. The first few lines were aimed at Billy/Simon, who looked as though he’d been cornered by a powerfully alluring axe-woman. As soon as she’d sung ‘I get a kick out of you’ in his direction once, Reno/Katie disregarded him and sang for the audience instead, as if doing a cabaret turn. It was very accomplished, despite some nasty noises from the band; when she finished there was applause, which she did not acknowledge.

  The curtain of black gauze went up, disclosing the foredeck of the SS American, evoked by means of two curving metal staircases that rose to a balcony onto which two portholed doors opened; a large red and black funnel in the background, and a lifebelt hanging between the doors, did the job of telling us that we were on board a ship. ‘Every expense spared,’ Sean remarked. Moments later, Hope Harcourt – Cerys – was strolling across the balcony, and the idea of Sam’s presence disappeared entirely. She looked lovely: her outfit – pale blue halter-neck top and wide-legged white satin trousers – suited her figure, and the hair she’d been given – blonde, crimped into tight little waves – enhanced the shape and the guilelessness of her face. Billy/Simon, convincingly smitten, sang ‘Easy to Love’ with a sincerity that more than compensated for the deficiencies of technique, and Cerys was winningly hesitant as the recipient of his advances. She was just as good in a scene that perhaps required more pretence, in which, having failed to rouse any passion in her fiancé, Evelyn (a tall and very thin boy with a forelock as floppy as a wet face-flannel), she presented to us a face that was aghast at the feebleness of his virility. The boldness of her self-confidence was surprising, and rather touching.

  With Billy/Simon she sang ‘It’s De-Lovely’, and although not every note was hit with perfect accuracy, they transmitted a reciprocal attraction that seemed to beguile those who didn’t know that this was not entirely a simulation as much as it beguiled those of us who did. Brief applause followed them, but then Reno/Katie was back and again the voltage increased. When she sang ‘Anything Goes’, every word would have been audible in the back row. The performance was big, with more than an element of showing off about it, but the panache and precision were impressive, and when the entire cast started dancing it was impossible to resist the idea that they were moving around her like satellites, that everyone on the stage knew that this production had only one star. The choreography was too ambitious for some of the participants, notably one of the sailors, who dropped his mop before almost felling another crew member.

  The hapless sailor was the first topic of conversation during the interval. Sean reckoned that you shouldn’t put yourself forward for this kind of gig if you couldn’t tell your left foot from your right; Eleanor felt sorry for the boy, as did Aileen. ‘But wasn’t Cerys wonderful?’ said Aileen. Eleanor had to confess that she hadn’t expected her daughter to be quite so good; she was very proud of her, she said, with a glance at Gerry, inviting him to say the same. ‘Could be the start of something. You never know,’ said Sean. There was general praise for the foppish Evelyn. Shortly before the bell started to ring for the second half, Katie/Reno was at last mentioned. ‘Bit too brassy for my liking,’ remarked Gerry. ‘But hot, no?’ suggested Sean. His father tilted his eyebrows and pursed his lips, as if to say that this was a matter of opinion and he was inclined to disagree, but Eleanor thought she was pretty, and had great gusto. ‘Best gusto I’ve seen for months,’ said Sean. We returned to our seats. Preoccupied with the possibility that Sam might at any moment appear in the foyer, I’d barely spoken.

  Reno/Katie delivered ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’ with redoubled zest, as if she intended the song – or her singing of it – to lodge itself in the heads of every one of us for weeks thereafter. Stalked by a spotlight, she strutted across the edge of the stage, arms aloft, whipping up the crowd. She was comely, but her self-conviction had now become off-putting. Unwilling to be coerced any longer into watching her, I looked away, and then something immensely strange happened. The spotlight, losing track of Reno/Katie for an instant, passed across the head of the young woman who was playing the role of the Angel Charity, and as the beam of light traversed her face she turned her head towards the audience and averted her eyes so that, for no more than a second, they were directed strai
ght at me. And in that second I had the sensation – the thrilling sensation, I have to admit – of being looked at by Sarah.

  Why suddenly I should have seen Sarah, I don’t know. This young woman was approximately of Sarah’s build and colouring, but before this moment I hadn’t been struck by any resemblance, and when, afterwards, I looked at her more closely, I noted a vague similarity in the jaw and in the set of the eyes, but nothing else. Perhaps there was something about her eyes in that instant, when she squinted out of the light, or some other evanescent aspect of her expression; or perhaps there was something in the angle at which she tilted her head, or the way her lips opened; or in the quality of the light, in the colours that flared up as the beam passed over her; perhaps it was something in the pattern of shadows that detonated a memory – whatever the cause might have been, the effect was so acute it was as though I’d fleetingly been somewhere else, and while my eyes were seeing this unknown young woman my brain was reacting to Sarah looking at me. The sharpness of the hallucination was such that it seemed that it could only be the resurrection of a specific incident; I tried to work out what that incident might have been, but within seconds there was almost nothing to work from – I was back in the theatre, fully conscious of what was around me, and the sensation had gone, like a photo that had been developing when the darkroom door was opened, and now had vanished.

  I could neither find an answer to this question nor pay enough attention to what was happening on stage to follow perfectly the plot. At one point, in the final scene, I leaned towards Sean to ask him what was going on, to which he replied: ‘Search me. Do we care?’ Only when Cerys was singing could I concentrate. Her final number – ‘All Through the Night’, a duet with Billy/Simon – was her best: she’d evidently been saving her voice for the last song, whereas Simon, by now exhausted, could manage only a wobbly croon. At the end of the show the family clapped loudly, led by Sean, who raised his hands above his head to make sure that Cerys could observe the fervour of his congratulations. Cerys, noticing, seemed to blush. Katie Lanner took her acclaim with cool aplomb.

  We waited for Cerys and Simon out in the street. Still not convinced that there was no risk of being ambushed by Sam, I persuaded the family that we should cross to the other side of the street, so as not to clog up the pavement. In the shadow of a plane tree, I checked every face of the departing audience; Sam was not among them.

  Simon and Cerys emerged from the building arm in arm, accompanied by an older man whom Sean, after thirty seconds of doubt, identified as Elisha J. Whitney – evidently his midriff had been heavily padded. He invited the youngsters to accompany him; Cerys declined, with a facsimile of regret, and he said goodbye to her with a kiss for each cheek, and a hand pressed to her back, low down. His name was Nicholas Grainger, Cerys told us, and he was possibly the most conceited pillock she had ever met. He was convinced that he was merely a tad less gifted and handsome than Laurence Olivier, but his brow was Botoxed, his eyes were dull and tiny, and his teeth were substantially ceramic. Furthermore, he was a revolting old sleazebag, whose hands had a habit of inadvertently coming into contact with the backsides of any passing young females. In rehearsal he’d given Katie a playful and encouraging pat on the bum, and been told that if he ever pulled that stunt again she’d kick his bollocks halfway to Dover, which rather took the wind out of his sails. ‘She’s got that X-factor, don’t you think?’ asked Cerys, and so we talked about Katie Lanner, all pretending not to have been overly impressed by her. Too brash, thought Eleanor; too noisy and too obvious, adjudged Gerry. He suspected, too, that Miss Lanner might not be the nicest girl in the world. ‘She’s nice enough,’ said Cerys. Sean wanted to know if Katie had a boyfriend. ‘I mean, you don’t get many of those to the pound,’ he said, cupping his hands to his chest. ‘There’s a waiting list, and a prat like you doesn’t stand a chance of getting on it, believe me,’ Cerys told him, swatting his shoulder. Unperturbed, Sean requested that she should let Ms Lanner know that he was available.

  We went to a bar in Hampstead, where we ordered two bottles of wine, one of which immediately became Gerry’s private property. He didn’t contribute much to the discussion of the show; he seconded the praise that Eleanor and Aileen had for Cerys and some of her cast-mates, but it wasn’t until Sean had taken up the central role in the conversation that Gerry became animated. Sean had much to say about his bugger of a day, which had been made a bugger by the absence of two of his so-called colleagues. One of them was off sick for about the tenth time this year – ‘If this guy sneezes it’s a 999 job.’ The other one, on holiday at the moment, was an OK bloke for a couple of pints after work but a real liability in the office because, at the end of the day, he just didn’t know how the bloody machines work, which is why two different customers had been on the phone to Sean that afternoon, burning his ear off because the OK bloke had given both of them some solid-gold stupid advice. But Sean, rather than dumping the idiot in it, had somehow managed to cover his back for him, while also doing a load of stuff that Mr Sick-Note should have been doing. ‘How can you sell it when you don’t know what it does?’ he appealed to me, as a man who understands the laws of retail.

  ‘Let him sink,’ was Gerry’s advice. ‘If this character can’t hack it, it’s best for all concerned if he goes elsewhere.’ Eleanor, essentially of the same mind as her husband, wanted to know how Sean’s boss saw the situation. Sean had things to say about his boss and his boss’s attitude to Sean; we heard about the boss’s thoughts on the subject of leadership and delegation. Overhearing him, anyone would have thought he was talking about life in a unit of the marines.

  I made more than the usual effort to be affable with Sean, feeling a need to do penance for my vision of Sarah, even though she had come to me uninvited, as it were, rather than being sought. After ten minutes of office philosophy, however, I was struggling to simulate engagement, and I was grateful when Simon at last started talking. Eager to make a favourable impression on the parents, he spoke chiefly at Gerry and Eleanor – this was his introduction to his girlfriend’s parents. Racehorses were his big thing. He intended, he told them, to specialise in equine medicine. The beasts may look similar, he informed us, but each is a distinct character. A week ago he’d met one that had become enamoured of a goat that had wandered into the paddock one day; now the horse wouldn’t go out onto the gallops unless the goat came too.

  This was moderately interesting – more interesting than anything Sean had to say, certainly. The goat-besotted horse got a laugh from Eleanor and Gerry, and from Aileen and me. Cerys smiled, but was looking tired; when she blinked, she blinked slowly. Then, while Simon was talking, I looked at Cerys again, and although she was still smiling there was, in her eyes, an unmistakable indication of boredom, and it seemed to me that she was becoming bored with her new boyfriend rather than with what he was telling us. Simon downed a glass of wine; Sean made some remark about a wildlife programme he’d recently seen, and this set Simon off again. The intelligence of pigs was the subject – they are brighter than dogs, it would appear. Cerys, listening to him, smiled; there was fondness in the smile, merely fondness, and a sense of distance too, as if she were already feeling sorry for the distress she would cause when she rejected him. I wanted to be mistaken. I wanted the youngsters to be happy with each other, for a few months more, at least, and so, when Cerys slid closer to him and, easing a hand under his arm, kissed him on the cheek, I persuaded myself that I’d been mistaken, even though I still saw a shadow in her eyes. And shortly afterwards it did seem possible that I had made an error: not in seeing a shadow, but in deciding what it meant.

  We all walked to the Tube station: Eleanor with Aileen, Gerry with Simon, Cerys and I lagging behind. The director of the show was trying to put together a production of Sunday in the Park with George, which he hoped to be staging in about a year’s time. If it went ahead, there was the chance of a part for her, a small part. ‘I’m not sure about it,’ she said. I asked what she was un
sure about – was it the part? No, she said, she had her doubts about doing another musical. I told her once more that I thought she’d been very good. For a few seconds she didn’t reply, and then she halted, evidently to let the others get ahead of us. ‘You know what I’m thinking?’ she said. ‘I’m thinking that I don’t think I’ve got what it takes. Not really.’

  Again I told her she’d been excellent, that I’d been tremendously impressed, as had Aileen.

  ‘That’s nice of you,’ she said. ‘But it’s such a competitive business. You need something special to stand out. I don’t have anything special. I can carry a tune, I know that,’ she went on, overriding my attempt at an interruption. ‘I can learn the lines. I can do a decent job. But I lack that—’. Raising a hand above her head, she clicked her fingers three or four times.

  ‘I disagree,’ I began. ‘You were—’

  ‘And I’m not beautiful,’ she stated. ‘In this line of work a non-beautiful woman requires something special to succeed. I don’t have it.’

  I told her that she was talented, and very attractive.

  ‘But the crucial thing is,’ she said, hooking my arm and walking on, ‘I’m not totally convinced that I want to have it. I enjoy doing the show. I’ve loved doing it. But doing it every week of your life – I don’t know if that’s me. You need to be driven, and I’m not driven.’

  I suspected that Katie Lanner was having a detrimental effect on morale. ‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ I said.

  ‘Which bit isn’t true?’ she asked.

  The others were waiting for us at the entrance to the Tube station. ‘Both bits,’ I answered. ‘You’re enjoying it, so keep going. Have fun,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh, I’m not giving up,’ she said, with a light laugh, as though I had completely misunderstood. She let go of my arm and gave me a smile, but the shadow was still in her eyes. ‘I’ll keep plugging away,’ she assured me.