Our Time of Day

by Kika Markham

‘How many are there?’ asked Corin.

  ‘Twenty,’ said Arden.

  ‘Righto,’ Corin was unfazed.

  They sat on the grass and Corin heard every one of them till the dusk came and it was supper time.

  ‘Do you remember that time?’ I asked Arden, who is now twenty-nine. ‘Yes, very well,’ he replied. ‘I felt I could ask him anything and he would never be shocked or angry. He was always very comforting.’

  Here’s an extract from a diary that Corin kept for me as he found himself looking after the boys on holiday in Italy without me when I got a job unexpectedly. I should explain that when we went on holiday Corin and I pretended to be a couple of rich North Americans who were always trying to buy up castles or villas. They were called Ethel and Hiram.

  Corin’s diary for Kika

  Sunday, 19 August 1987

  Lunigiana, Italy

  A week ago, so ‘Tim’ (our landlord) told us at Castagneto (Aston Villa), an awesome thunderstorm crashed over the Lunigiana valleys, and since then the air has been sweeter and cooler. Certainly the night air in Campocontro is cool. My bedroom window is open. It is 5.15 a.m. and I’m waiting for the dawn.

  A mad (or ghostly?) huntsman has been blazing away with his shotgun all night long in our valley. He seems to be particularly active now, letting off a cartridge every thirty seconds or so. Our neighbour’s dog sounds very like Kika’s imitation of a dog. He is also an insomniac, and barks every half an hour through the night.

  Campocontro scores 9 out of 10 for the friendliness of its inhabitants, who all smiled and returned our ‘buonasera’ with a very passable show of warmth: 10 out of 10 for picturesqueness: but for tranquility I’m afraid, it is doubtful if it can even score 1 out of 10. Hiram, of course, snored peacefully through every explosion, at least until 4.45 a.m.

  But, of course, he had four glasses of wine at La Galeta last night from the very large carafe on his table, and was about to have six more, when he remembered that he had two boys to drive home, not to speak of Ethel and himself. Ethel, on the other hand, I’m sorry to say, despite bunging her ears full of wax and placing a sleeping mask over her eyes, did not sleep a wink, what with the dog and the mad huntsman. She is not too keen on the bats either, which flit to and fro outside her bedroom window.

  La Galeta was just like old times, very friendly barman and sweet waitress. The boys had ravioli con ragu and lamb. After supper we played three games of table-top football. The blue player has a distinct advantage because the table slopes so that the ball rolls into the red goal mouth. Harvey beat the combined team of Arden and Corin, two games to one, though Arden did manage some spectacular saves. He is the Bruce Grobbelaar of pin table football, saving the almost impossible shots, and letting in the easy ones.

  6.00 a.m.

  Dawn at last. And a chorus of birds, singing so rarely (Walter Scott) and sweetly. And the church bell in Amola, our nearest village. And the cockerels. And still the mad huntsman blazes away, and now I think he’s been joined by his brother in the next valley. I wish I had a tape recorder – no city dweller could imagine how NOISY the countryside can be at this hour of day. Balham is silent by comparison.

  7.20 a.m.

  The sun has risen above the tree tops. Sunshine is streaming into my bedroom window. A beautiful second awakening. Harvey is a wonderful companion. Very funny and observant, and a great help at reading road signs.

  Day 1 (Sunday) – On the beach at San Terenzo

  Arden spends all morning in the water, swimming, diving, and splashing about in the dinghy. Before we set off he said ‘I’m starting to miss Mummy.’ San Terenzo is very, very crowded. But the sea is lovely, just the right temperature. Lunch at Great Feelings which is very nice, despite its name. Then back on the beach until 2.30. We’re very short of cash now, only 24,000 lire to last the rest of the day, and I’m trying to figure out how we are going to telephone you (and V) and have dinner.

  With only 24,000 lire in our pockets, it’s clear that CR is going to have to cook dinner. So off to Licciana Nardi, where no shops are open. On to Crespiano. We devise a very complicated, scabrous game, which goes like this: the first person to see an open shop will never be a bumhole for the rest of his life. The other two will not automatically be condemned to everlasting bumholishness, they will merely remain potential bumholes. This gives everyone hope, and we all look eagerly for an open shop, and find one, simultaneously, in Cuspiano. We spend 15,400 lire. 2,300 lire on the phone call. 1,000 lire on games. Not bad.

  The meal, back home, is rather good, and makes me quite ambitious to cook more. Only it is marred by an awful accident, so heartrending I cannot bring myself to write about it.

  [I never found out what it was; KM]

  We manage to get Arden to bed, then C and Harvey talk for half an hour about (a) missing Kika, (b) the problems of life, and (c) the pros and cons of optimism and pessimism.

  Whenever we got the chance, Corin and I arranged to go to our little Montparnasse studio flat that we rented in Paris through Suzanne Schiffman. Rue Boulard runs at right angles to Rue Daguerre and along the tip of Montparnasse Cemetery, where celebrities like Gainsbourg, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Beckett are buried. Our flat, no. 17 Rue Boulard, was above a Vietnamese hairdresser and next door to the famous restaurant – Au Vin des Rues. An establishment run by a terrifying and jovial patron with a black handlebar moustache. His food was not for wimps. His speciality was all kinds of meat, and the helpings were enormous; trotters, tripe, steak, venison. He kept a roving watch on all his customers and eyed you with great disfavour if you were having difficulty finishing your meal. Jehane and I were caught trying to tip our food into my handbag, so we could never go back.

  Opposite was a café where we often had breakfast. A bittersweet experience because although we’d been coming there for a good four years, the barman or owner never greeted us, or worse, even remembered us. And despite ingratiating ourselves to a humiliating extreme, we never got a smile out of him. More galling was the fact that we saw him laughing and joking with other customers. Did he hate us because we were English? Or did he just not give a damn and had a short-term memory problem? We fantasised about how we could make him acknowledge us but it never happened.

  The flat was one room with a bedroom and bathroom off it. We had a table by the windows overlooking the street, and a leather armchair and a tiny fridge for paté, melon and wine. When we got off the Metro (line 4) at Denfert-Rochereau and walked through the market, passing the stalls of crabs and lobsters, strawberries, melons, and wine, I would stop at the florists to buy a bunch of spring flowers and Corin would pick up a bottle of wine – oh happy, happy days! (Though at the time I was always yearning for the ‘perfect’ flat with a garden.)

  The flat represented the most extravagant, impossible, but wonderful dream that we had denied ourselves during our most puritanical days in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. It was there that we found some extra valuable time for each other and the boys, who loved to come despite the cramped conditions. We could resume the long-running stories of our childhoods, something we were always fascinated by; our different backgrounds. We made unrealistic plans for the future and reassessed the old wounds we had inflicted on one another. One way of doing this was to write a story about some minor incident from the other’s point of view, exposing a deadly (and we thought witty) insight into one another. It was a way of getting revenge while laughing about it. Here are two such stories.

  Haddock à l’Anglaise

  by Kika Markham

  The café they had chosen was closed for Sunday, so they found a rather traditional American Left Bank sort of place.

  They were shown to their seats by an elegant but tiny head waiter. She chose coquilles Saint-Jacques à la Normande and he ordered haddock à l’Anglaise.

  ‘But darling, why choose that in Paris?’

  He weakened and changed his order to saumon avec pommes purée. They forgot that he had changed his order and brought him the hadd
ock anyway. The house wine was particularly good and his wife, most uncharacteristically, could not fault it. He was a little preoccupied. Thinking about Monday’s rehearsal and whether to invite the leading actress to lunch and allow a little more ‘adventure’ into the proceedings. His wife was attempting to ask the waiter something in very bad French and he tactfully explained the right phrasing. Poor love, she certainly needs those classes but I must be careful not to parade my knowledge too readily. She gets very defensive, he thought.

  He was just giving an extremely good example of perfect syntactical French when suddenly the room went dark and he couldn’t breathe. He was choking horribly and tears poured into his eyes. She was looking at him quizzically.

  ‘Do you want a slap on the back?’

  He couldn’t nod, let alone speak. Coughs wrenched him. His lungs weren’t getting any air. He waggled his fingers feebly.

  ‘Does that mean no?’

  Again that curiously detached little smile and a small pucker of worried frown but then she started to eat again. He wiped the tears from his cheeks, still unable to breathe or speak. She probably wouldn’t be able to call for an ambulance with her French. He was going to die in Paris in a minicab with her sympathetically watching him vomit into a plastic bag.

  He heard himself wheezing, as if far away, and the room began to come back into focus. No one was running to the table or even looking concerned, except his wife.

  ‘Oh darling, that was awful,’ she said, ‘I wanted to slap your back but you seemed to say “No”.’

  ‘I couldn’t breathe,’ he said. ‘Was it a bone?’

  ‘I don’t know what it was. Something stuck. My mouth was too full.’

  ‘I was really frightened. I had visions of… well…’

  She didn’t finish.

  ‘Yes, so did I for a moment,’ he said, ‘but fortunately the choking subsided and I realised I was going to live.’

  She hesitated and he knew she was wrestling with herself.

  ‘Don’t whatever you do, say: “It was a pity you chose the haddock”.’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘We’ll just say it was an unfortunate mistake.’

  He sighed. Had he got anything in common with this mongrel woman? God knows how their marriage had lasted so long. She was looking at him, radiantly sorrowful, hiding a smirk behind her napkin.

  ‘Truly darling, I’m not trying to score points. We’ve had such a lovely holiday and the last thing I want is that this incident becomes…’ she paused, blushing, and he couldn’t help being touched in spite of himself, ‘…becomes a bone of contention between us. Whoops. Sorry.’

  Only Choking

  by Corin Redgrave

  ‘I don’t see why,’ she said, ‘Why is it worse for William?’

  ‘Because William didn’t choose to leave his children.’

  William and William’s misery had been their topic of conversation for the past hour. Subjects like these, the problems of their married friends, helped to disguise their own. But sometimes, as now, they helped to expose the fundamental fault lines of their own relationship.

  ‘I don’t think you understand the problem,’ he was saying, ‘It’s not your fault, it’s no lack of sympathy on your part. You can’t understand it because you haven’t experienced it. I have, you see.’

  ‘That’s the South African argument.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Before Mandela. When a white racist from South Africa couldn’t convince one of the natural justice of apartheid, he’d end up saying you couldn’t understand it because you hadn’t been there.’

  ‘Excusez-moi!’ she signalled to a waiter, ‘Je veux change.’

  Her vocabulary was small and her grammar, non-existent, but her accent was so convincing and she spoke so confidently that she managed to make herself understood. For her husband it was maddening, this ease with which she managed to communicate in mangled French. Whereas he who had been educated to speak fluently, with flawless grammar, must struggle to make himself understood.

  And even then would end up being served with what he hadn’t ordered.

  ‘Do you mind if I correct you?’ he asked warily, evenly, ‘I wouldn’t normally…’

  ‘Oh yes you would, you love correcting me.’

  ‘No, not as a rule. Only I thought, as you’re taking French lessons, it might be helpful.’

  ‘Most helpful,’ she said, gritting her teeth, ‘What did I get wrong?’

  ‘Changer. It’s an infinitive.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No, you said, ‘Je veux change,’ which is meaningless.’

  ‘He seemed to understand.’

  ‘Of course. He understood your intention.’

  Silence. Her husband sighed, feeling misunderstood. And then, embarrassed by the silence, began to speak of William again. His publisher. Poor misunderstood William who hadn’t chosen to leave his children.

  She let him talk. He had a nice melodious voice, not too loud. She used to tell him that his voice was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him. And newspaper interviewers, even if they could find nothing else particularly flattering to say about him, would always remark on his voice, and how he managed to talk for minutes on end in unbroken sentences of perfect syntax.

  Only lately, she had found she wasn’t listening any more. She preferred to cut off, think her thoughts, and let him talk on, like the water in a babbling brook, forcing its way over stones worn smooth by its flow, through cracks widened by its pressure.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ he asked. He had been talking uninterrupted for some minutes. She had been thinking about his deviousness. How he liked to hold everything apart, couldn’t bear the prospect of monogamy, had to encourage other women that they, but for the grace of God – ‘I was thinking how strange. That your cock had to keep stuffing itself in all those holes. And how odd for so many holes, to have so many cocks stuffed in them.’

  A woman at the next table, plump and with bubbly, frizzy hair, turned and smiled, raising her glass. Silence. He liked such remarks in private, often encouraged her to talk dirty, but froze with embarrassment that they’d been overheard.

  But soon he was talking again. She smiled and nodded, and thought her own thoughts. How nice, she thought, to be like the couple at the next table, who hadn’t said a word for ten minutes, but seemed perfectly happy in one another’s company. German, or perhaps Dutch. They smiled at one another, and twice she had seen the young woman stroking her boyfriend’s knee under the table.

  Suddenly she became aware that her husband was waving at her, and that his face was red, almost purple. His eyes were streaming with tears and he was coughing as if trying to clear his throat.

  ‘Quick darling, eat some bread,’ she said and called for some water. ‘Was it a bone?’

  He had been eating haddock à l’Anglaise, which was maddening of him, in a French restaurant. He kept waving his hand, like a paw, to and fro, as if trying to reassure her. For a split second, she was aware of the power of life or death over him. That would be the perfect murder, wouldn’t it? Or rather manslaughter? Or was it even manslaughter, a crime passionnel, if you simply let your husband die for boring you to death, correcting you till you could scream with frustrated anguish.

  Would it be manslaughter if I let him choke on his fishbone, fall face forward into his haddock à l’Anglaise?

  ‘Better?’ she said, thumping him vigorously, and not without a certain malevolence, bruisingly between the shoulders, ‘Feeling any better now?’

  He was gasping, wiping his eyes.

  ‘Yes, thanks, only you shouldn’t hit someone like that if they’re choking. Read any first aid book. It’s an old wives’ tale that that’s what you should do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Thanks for correcting me!’

  CHAPTER TEN

  1993

  Moving Theatre

  It wasn’t until the Nineties that Corin started to be employed as an
actor again, thanks entirely to Annie Castledine and David Thacker: Rosmersholm and Measure for Measure at the Young Vic. He would remember their support for the rest of his life. The deaths of our fathers and continual worry over money made us fragile. We felt estranged from one another and felt the need to work together again once more, something we had not done since the beginning of our relationship. This led to the formation of the Moving Theatre company in 1993. Our first play was The Flag (adapted by Alex Ferguson from a novel by Robert Shaw), which Corin directed and we were both in. Our friend Donald Sartaine was at the helm and our sons sold programmes after school at the tiny theatre in Bridge Lane, Battersea.

  Our second season was at the Riverside Studios, where Vanessa and Rade Šerbedžija acted memorably in The Liberation of Skopje, a well-known Yugoslavian classic. No one could forget the scene where they were chopping cabbage at a table and were interrupted by a rider on a beautiful white horse – which resided, for performances, on the riverside terrace outside the theatre. Arden, aged nine, joined the company, playing a refugee. Corin directed me in Real Writing, a play by Maureen Lawrence about Akhmatova and her struggle to save her poetry under Stalin. Malcolm Tierney was brilliant in Frisch’s The Fire Raisers, and the programme also included a play by Alex Ferguson about Roger Casement. This ambitious season all but bankrupted us and we remortgaged our house, which I’m still paying for today, but in those days we didn’t look ahead. In 1994 we produced five monologues. Corin adapted Oscar Wilde’s ‘De Profundis’, the letter from Reading Gaol to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. I had written to Tony Kushner asking him if he could write a short piece for me. I had in mind something ten minutes long that he’d possibly had in a drawer. We were friends and had kept in touch for some years, as I’d been in his wonderful play, A Bright Room Called Day, at the Bush Theatre. But the piece he wrote wasn’t short: it was an extraordinary, poetic, hour-long meditation on Afghanistan, loneliness, war and love.