Our Time of Day

by Kika Markham

  (‘You are more real than my sculpture. (I love you)’)

  It was a message full of promise but she had misgivings. What would it be like to be with him now the film was over? They had never done anything ‘normal’ together. The entire relationship had taken place on locations, sets or in hotels. She had never even made a cup of tea for him, would he expect her to cook for him and entertain his guests?

  She arrived in Antibes early in the evening. The rented villa looked unfriendly and chic. Clipped hedges arranged themselves around patterns of gravel and the grass was over-watered and looked too green under the dusty fat trees. You could smell and hear the sea but that was all. The hedges had been planted to stop one looking any further. Although his greeting was warm, it seemed he too was unsure of what to do.

  He was shocked at her appearance. Perhaps he remembered an image of her in the final scene off the film: pale, black-ringed eyes, dying of tuberculosis. Now she was very tanned and fatter.

  As he was working with another writer on his next film script La nuit américaine (Day for Night), she didn’t want to be in the way – so, avoiding various interesting-looking people in the villa, she went and sat on the balcony and tried to read.

  She was studying Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks and in particular the chapter ‘On The Question of Dialectics’.

  It was required reading for anyone who was serious about Marxism, which she was:

  The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their “self-movement”, in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the “struggle” of opposites…

  Underneath she had written a quote from Hegel which was now unreadable, smudged by tears which plopped from her chin to her hand and from her hand to the page. Self-pity in all its self-movement and spontaneous development. How horrible.

  She had tried to get him to take an interest in Trotskyism. It proved very disappointing. In her limited vocabulary her ideas sounded over-simplified. He remained unconvinced although respectful. He had a strong suspicion of ‘organized’ politics.

  She closed the book and went downstairs. Drinks were on the terrace. Dinner was served. Who cooked the food? There must have been a discreet housekeeper whom she never saw. She couldn’t get a grip on herself.

  In the morning he told her that he had offered her father a part in the next film. She thought of trying to explain this to her therapist:

  ‘No – don’t you see, he didn’t want me – he wanted my father.’

  Her father had played a small role as a fortune teller, playing a scene with her, in Les deux Anglaises, looking at her palm reproachfully… ‘You are going to have several unhappy affairs – there is much confusion here…’

  ‘He loves fathers,’ Suzanne had told her. ‘His own family was such a mess that he thinks everyone else’s is wonderful.’ So there it was. She had been replaced by her father. He had fallen in love with him.

  Who was writing which script?

  She left the next morning. He offered to drive her to the airport. He had tried to give her a farewell present. He owned some beautiful old watches but she was too proud and refused to accept one, although later she regretted this. In the end she chose his yellow towel bathrobe: the only scruffy thing he had and it comforted her. He promised to write and hoped she wouldn’t be too sad. He was kind and civilised.

  She longed to say something devastating that would stay lodged in his memory forever. Suddenly he touched her knee. She was wearing an old black and white mini-skirt. He liked short skirts.

  For a moment she thought it might be a sign that he wanted to begin it all over again. Or was he relieved that she was leaving? There was no knowing.

  So they continued, he stroking her knee, thoughtfully, the other hand on the steering wheel, approaching Nice in the soft grey dawn of the Mediterranean.

  I thought the film was brilliant. It had never occurred to me that a film by Truffaut would not be successful and would be so misunderstood for its observations about love and there was no one I could talk to about it and my sense of rejection. What made it doubly painful was that it broke up my relationship with Malcolm, which I had never wanted to happen.

  Meanwhile, Corin was in Paris filming Sérail, directed by Eduardo de Gregorio, with Leslie Caron and Bulle Ogier; I think he was having a romance with a French woman and we didn’t meet.

  Truffaut and my father stayed in touch, his parting gift being to cast Dad as the doctor in La nuit américaine in which he shone with wonderful humour, kindness and beauty. It was as if both he and David Mercer wanted to hold on to my father – David had written a wonderful role for Dad in And Did Those Feet after he and I broke up. My father’s charismatic beauty affected some of my partners. After his death, Corin wrote about him, ‘I loved him very much as a fine courageous man… physically the most beautiful and handsome man I ever saw.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On My Own

  I rented a room in Glebe Place, Chelsea. I was getting a lot of work but I felt out of place. Every time a plane went over, I wondered if it was going to, or coming from, Paris. I had trouble crossing roads and panic attacks. I went back to my analyst.

  Dennis Potter wanted to meet me; he had writer’s block and wanted to discuss a new idea about acting versus prostitution – over a dinner. He had seen me in a commercial for Cornetto, and thought, as a committed socialist and serious actress, I should not have allowed myself to become sexualized for money. I did have doubts myself at the time, but we sold a lot of papers in the pubs on the strength of my being recognised as the ‘Cornetto girl’. I went along to meet him at The Regent Palace Hotel and we had a very long, mostly friendly argument for the whole meal, about acting and prostitution. ‘How much would I compromise my principles if I got a large fee?’ He put it all in the play, everything I said, without taking any notes, and told me that I would play the actress and the prostitute – although it would involve doing a nude scene, which I wasn’t keen on. But as he believed ‘actresses were prostitutes in disguise,’ he thought I would agree in the end. And of course I did because it was a wonderful play, although I suffered doing the nude scene and had to suck a Cadbury’s Flake. The play was called Double Dare and was produced by Ken Trodd for the BBC. I think it’s one of Potter’s best.

  I had started going out with Clive Merrison, and now, thanks to him, I stopped looking up at planes and started to be able to cross roads again. He came with me to France as I made another French movie, this time with Jacques Rivette, called Noroît, a film with Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont, two great actresses.

  Les deux Anglaises opened in London to cool reviews, which was a shock. Nevertheless, I was photographed by Lord Snowdon along with other promising young British actresses for The Sunday Times. I had breakfast at Kensington Palace with my friend Francis Wyndham, the writer, and Snowdon before we did the shoot. Possibly the only time a Trotskyist got to sit in a royal kitchen… but these were interludes in my life of ever-increasing political activism.

  There were quite a few actors in the party by now, and we were engaged in a campaign to change the rules of Equity so it could be a trade union instead of an association. There was fierce opposition to this as many actors thought we shouldn’t be political as entertainers. Corin led the way, inspiring many young actors with his brilliant speeches in theatres where we had our meetings, and using the example of the actors suffering under apartheid in South Africa: banned, unable to work and often in prison. We became a trade union and Corin helped negotiate a minimum wage for actors for the first time. Simon Callow described those days:

  [Corin] suggested that I might like to come to a meeting of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP), offering, almost en passant, a concise and dazzlingly lucid analysis of the terminal contradictions of capitalism. He was charm itself – steely charm, but charm nonetheless. Some sense of self-preservation kept me out of the Party, but in somewhat cowardl
y fashion I made regular financial contributions to it, which ensured that whenever I met Corin I would receive one of his brilliant, slightly lopsided, smiles.

  The next few years brought a much-touted Battle for the Soul of Equity, in which the great casting director in the sky had secured the dream team of, on the Left, Corin Redgrave, lean, dangerous, incorruptible, and, on the Right, the actor Marius Goring, white-haired, patrician, softly spoken, clubbable, slightly sinister. The battle raged, Equity meetings were a monthly Armageddon, and then Margaret Thatcher pulled the plug on it all by abolishing the closed shop, after which Equity was finished as a political force. Corin threw himself ever more into the WRP, which was plagued by paranoia and a sense that its moment in history had passed. But he worked superhuman hours to advance the cause, down at the docks at 6.00 a.m. to sell the paper, across the country to address a meeting, on the phone at 2.00 a.m. to forge links with foreign comrades. And all the while he was making a living, or trying to, plying the family trade … [I]t was only when his father died in 1985 that he was able to come into his own as an actor, which he did almost immediately, evincing a strength, a warmth and a power that had not hitherto been his to command. It took the world a little while to wake up to the fact that a great actor had arrived, but when it did there seemed to be no holding him back.

  It was, nonetheless, with a certain trepidation that I called him to ask him to play the Duke of Windsor in my production of Snoo Wilson’s play HRH. Snoo’s Duke was a skittish silly ass with a penchant for music hall. Would this newly formidable actor want to let his hair down? “Corin,” I said, taking a deep breath, “do you by any chance play the ukulele?” “Simon,” he replied, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to be asked to.”

  As a child, it appeared, he had been obsessed by George Formby, and knew his entire repertory. Then he said: “I do have a suggestion.” My heart sank: what Marxist perspective did he want to introduce? “I’ve always wanted to play the bagpipes on stage, too. Could we work that in?” I said that we could, and we did, and the rehearsal period was as entertaining a time as I’ve had. Corin proved himself to be a superb light comedian, and sometimes rehearsals had to stop while we laughed till we cried.

  In 1973 we were working on an ambitious project, ‘The Road to Workers’ Power’, a dramatised history of early trade unionism. Five directors would each take a team of actors with them into different parts of England and, with the help of the local community, would assemble a cast to enact a part of their history. I was allotted Jarrow, with Steve Clark-Hall, and the story of William Jobling, the last man in the North East to be gibbeted. Corin was in Manchester, doing the Chartist Movement – he must have been playing his renowned Octavius Caesar for the RSC at the time, commuting from Stratford. Roy Battersby was in Wales – Taff Vale – and Roger Smith was in London – The First International and Marx.

  In-between rehearsals and recruiting people to take part, we would be selling the paper in the early mornings. I would be at the great Swan Hunter shipyards at 6.00 a.m. as the men poured through the gates. I would sell one paper to every twentieth man, and sometimes they spoke kindly to me and invited me in to the huge canteen for breakfast, where hundreds of men sat at tables like a scene from Dickens. I loved the breakfasts, black pudding and bubble and squeak, and would have many a cheerful discussion on life and socialism with the men sitting opposite me. They never seemed surprised that a young actress was holding forth to them in their break. I don’t know where my confidence came from. After a month, all the teams gathered for a meeting and rehearsal with their different casts, the size of which had expanded beyond our dreams. It was my absolute joy and pride that our Jarrow team had persuaded the local brass band from the colliery to take part, and when they started to play to the assembled hall they were greeted with cheers and tears. We took this collection of plays with actors, miners, railway workers and young people, down to the Empire Pool in Wembley – it was packed out and a resounding success.

  It was a unique experience. Nobody ever attempted such an event either before or since, except Danny Boyle, with his inspiring opening to the 2012 Olympics. It made me wonder if he had been in the audience that night at Wembley as a teenager.

  There was a dark cloud though. I had persuaded Clive to join the party and it didn’t suit him. He was a practical man, and a beautiful and stunning actor. Without him I would now be on the street as he persuaded me to put down money on a small house in Balham. But the harsh and unreasonable demands of the party defeated us – sometimes we only met on sales. We had to spend too much time without each other and we started to argue. We had a deep fondness for one another, so there was no blame on either side, and one day Clive moved out. So I was alone again when, early one December morning at 5.30 a.m., I was woken by a loud knocking.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Billingsgate

  It was Christmas, bazaars were looming. Very crossly and sleepily, I staggered to the door and opened it to Corin, standing there with one of his half-smiles. I didn’t see him much these days as he was now on the Central Committee and a full-time organiser.

  ‘I was wondering if you felt like doing Billingsgate this morning.’

  ‘No.’ This was unlike me, but I was barely awake and the very thought of the smell of the fish was making me want to throw up. ‘No one told me. It was supposed to be tomorrow, not today, and it isn’t my turn to go.’

  ‘I know, but you’re so famously good at it, and there’s no one else. Would you like a coffee?’

  He offered me a paper cup of lukewarm coffee he’d had in the car.

  There were two fundraising events in the WRP: the Young Socialists’ summer and Christmas bazaars. I was elected on to the bazaar committee because of my contacts with the entertainments industry. Also I was very good at asking for money, which was rather shame-making. (At one point I even remember finding myself in the office of Harold Evans, the then editor of The Sunday Times, asking for a donation for the paper.) I both hated and loved helping to run these events. The organisation involved was ghastly, but I was terribly good at selling designer clothes on the ‘boutique’ stall, deriving huge satisfaction from seeing difficult customers go off with a dress that they really liked.

  One of the worst jobs, that we all dreaded, was collecting produce from the big markets: Covent Garden for flowers, fruit and veg, or Billingsgate for fish. You had to get there around 5.30–6.00 a.m. and make yourself known to the stall owners, who, depending on their politics, would either send you packing or tell you to come back after the rush. We had to compete with the nuns who were brilliant at begging with charm and authority. If they had got there first you didn’t stand a chance. But sometimes we were lucky and got a crate of melons or grapes, and bit by bit we would fill the van with potatoes, cabbages, strawberries – whatever they hadn’t been able to sell. I always had to look decent, however early it was; we weren’t beggars, asking for charity, but political activists fighting Thatcher, unemployment and racism. Sometimes this was met with a dismissive wave of the hand and a glare – other times a warm coat on the shoulder and a cup of tea. There were Greek and Chinese exporters who could be very generous and I could always tell by the produce that was still there at 7.30 a.m. whether it had been a good morning for them or not.

  We were still on the doorstep. I was weakening. ‘Look, we’ll race round together and it’ll be fun.’

  In the end I went of course. It was very difficult to stand your ground against Corin if he really wanted you to do something. He went round the big fish stalls collecting dabs, whiting, catfish and many fish I didn’t recognise. I did the shellfish, shrimps, cockles, kippers.

  Two hours of fish hell in the freezing cold with numb hands from carrying the ice packs and boxes of fish. Both the car and I stank to high heaven. I don’t remember what we said on the way back. But I always think that morning was the beginning. Nothing of special significance and yet, as I washed the smell of Billingsgate off my hands in the kitchen sink, I felt
as if I’d been on a rather interesting sort of holiday. the kind that you don’t want to go home from.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Proposal

  It was a sparkling morning in early spring 1976, and the grass was wet with melted frost. The college grounds were rather beautiful, if somewhat neglected. A thrush was singing loudly. Corin was standing, half-leaning, on one side of the gate, and I was on the other. We were enjoying a smoking break in the middle of a lecture at the College of Marxist Education in Derbyshire. The lecture was on The Doctrine of Being from Volume 38 of Lenin’s philosophical works on Hegel, and required fierce concentration.

  Corin was wearing an old check bomber jacket. He looked good in it. We smoked silently, battling against the habitual fatigue that settled on everyone in the WRP.

  Skilfully aiming a cigarette butt into a clump of bushes, Corin said suddenly, ‘I’ve fallen in love with you. Would you like to get married one day?’

  A very long pause followed, during which the thrush kept up his singing unaware of the frisson by the gate. Then I replied primly, ‘I think you’ve left it too late Corin, you should have said something before.’ I was aware that my heart was beating very fast and despite my pomposity and coolness, I felt very alive.

  We returned to the lecture without another word. We had never even kissed, but in writing this I remember we had kissed in a 1970 episode of the television series Happy Ever After – as characters – and had got married in a little church. Corin wore a black jacket and pinstriped trousers and I was in a white trouser suit with flares, my hair frothing down my back in curls (it was the Seventies). Far smarter than our actual wedding, in 1985 at Wandsworth Town Hall.