Yet you didn’t ask to share a cell with someone else?
GHENT
No, there were plenty worse than Rimmer! Really hard men, twisted men who would attempt any kind of malice just for its own sake. The malice itself would be satisfaction enough for them without any other gain from it. Men just determined to prove they were living up to being criminals. No, once I’d found I could put up with Rimmer, then that was enough for me.
DOCTOR (awkwardly)
Look, there are some things I have to say. As your friend. Adjusting other than physically may be a lot more difficult than you think. Everyone you know has been developing, changing in all sorts of directions while you’ve been (pause) not standing still, exactly, but centred, limited, if you know what I mean. . . .
GHENT says nothing, looks serious.
DOCTOR
. . . .You mustn’t misunderstand or take offence. But many things you took for granted are no longer (pause) relevant, or relevant only in a special way. . . .
Again DOCTOR is anxious that GHENT shall understand.
DOCTOR
The most obvious example of what I mean is. . . .Well, look, you’ve been living constantly in the company of an old lag of sixty. Surely you can see it’s going to take some adjusting, living with Gwen again?
4. INTERIOR. KITCHEN/LIVING AREA. DAY
GWEN picks up a tray with coffee things on it, walks from kitchen through door to living area, across living area, and out through doors on to terrace.
5. EXTERIOR. TERRACE. DAY
On the terrace GHENT and DOCTOR sit at a table in the open air. They have clearly just finished lunch.
Enter GWEN from living area. She pours and distributes coffee for the three of them throughout the following.
GHENT
I had an official letter from the college this morning. Do you know, they’re allowing the years I was inside to count towards increments in my salary? So I won’t be worse off financially.
DOCTOR (wryly)
Apart from the eight years’ salary you lost, of course — no chance of the college doing anything about that, is there?
GHENT (laughs)
No, the Senate could never be that generous, much as they sympathised with what I stood for. (pause) I can never really say thank you for the way you’ve looked after things for me. . .
DOCTOR
You of all people don’t have to.
GHENT
I don’t know how you managed. . . .
GWEN
I don’t know how we managed sometimes, either.
DOCTOR
When do the college want you to start again?
GHENT
Not this term, anyway. They suggest the beginning of the new academic year, October.
GHENT grimaces on tasting coffee, helps himself to lots of sugar.
DOCTOR (slightly amused)
You take sugar now!
GHENT
Yes. Everything had sugar in it, so I took it willy-nilly. Now I can’t do without it! That’s an example of the corrupting influence of prison if you like!
GWEN helps herself to sugar, sits down.
GWEN (almost smugly)
A question of taste. (pause) There are a great many letters. . . .
GHENT
From?
GWEN
People. Do you want to answer them all?
GHENT
How many are there?
GWEN
Dozens. . . .perhaps a hundred.
GHENT
Yes, let’s try to answer them all.
DOCTOR
You’re already becoming a Grand Old Man!
GHENT
Well, it’s better than becoming a dirty old man, I suppose. If that’s the choice! Is that the choice?
DOCTOR
Who knows?
GHENT
Which do you want, Gwen?
GWEN does not answer: is distinctly cool. She moves off terrace under cover of clearing away plates and so on. DOCTOR notices awkwardness.
DOCTOR
Ghent, you must have dreamed of the view from here across the valley.
GHENT
Not so much dreamed of it as held it fixed in my mind’s eye. I could call up every detail at every season. . . .trouble is that now the real thing seems a poor copy of what I had in my mind! Places take on a different significance as one’s centres of interest change. Think how many different things London has meant to us! It was college and Bart’s for you, for me it was my first job. D’you remember warning me each Friday not to hit the kids that day as Friday night was bath night and their Mums would see the marks?
DOCTOR laughs.
GHENT
Then London became the centre of oppression, the place that stood for all we were fighting against. (pause) It was still that at first after the trial, but curiously enough London later became chiefly the place where the Prison Commissioners had their offices. And now London once again seems. . . .
Enter GWEN with HIND and CHRISTINA.
HIND (apologetically but firmly)
I intended to ring you later in the week, to give you time to settle in, but something’s come up which we ought to discuss this afternoon, I think.
GHENT
Oh?
DOCTOR rises, tactfully begins to leave, greeting CHRISTINA as an old friend: they and GWEN go into living area and towards kitchen.
HIND
I understand you’ve agreed to record a television interview in the morning?
GHENT
Yes.
HIND
What are you going to say?
GHENT (carefully casual)
I haven’t thought that much about it. (pause) I shall just be myself, as they say.
HIND
But which self? The one that went in, or the one that came out?
GHENT
Who knows?
HIND
We were hoping you would.
GHENT
We?
HIND
The Language Association. (pause) The Party’s been a lot less active since you were sentenced. Or didn’t they keep you in touch? (pause) Most of the nationalist effort comes from the Language Association now. . .
GHENT
The Language Association! A lot of steamy old ladies of both sexes!
HIND
In your day, perhaps. Now most of the members are young. And very active. The old women are in the Party! (pause) If you’re looking for them.
Long pause.
GHENT
I knew your father. In the Party. (pause) I always thought you’d go far.
HIND (smiles)
I always hoped to go too far. . . .
GHENT
Look, I’m not going to be told what to say or not say by the Language Association or anyone else!
Long pause. HIND gets up, stares out at view.
HIND
Of course, you never learnt our language, did you?
GHENT looks viciously at him. HIND goes over his excuses for him, almost to himself.
HIND
You were one of the millions culturally deprived by the English. One can have only one mother tongue, of necessity, one imbibes it with one’s mother milk, as our proverb has it. And your mother tongue was English.
GHENT
No one could hate England and what the English have done to our country more than I do! No one!
HIND
But your wife’s mother tongue was certainly not English. . .
Again GHENT looks at him viciously. Pause.
HIND
And how did you fill in the long prison days?
GHENT
The only thing they’d let you have notebooks or paper for was study. Approved study. . . .
HIND
And our language was not ‘approved’ study!
GHENT
I had to write to stay sane between one slopping out and the next. But no, my own writing was not allowed: nothing could be writt
en on their paper about your own life, prison conditions, other prisoners, methods of committing crime, and lots of other things, all lumped together as the same offence. So I told them what to use their official paper for, and what to do with their approved courses of study, and I began to write despite them, but in my head! And because it was easier to remember, to keep, for the first time since my early twenties I wrote poetry, long poems I could thunder through my head like a tape recording, but variable and changeable, I could improve the poem at any point on playback. And I was able to put in my own life, prison conditions, methods of committing every crime I heard about, all on purpose, all the things they would not let me write down on their bloody paper! And there they all are still, up here, lying ready for. . . .(pause) It was the only thing that kept me sane.
HIND (unmoved)
Why don’t you just talk about the poems in this television interview, then?
6. INTERIOR. LIVING AREA. EVENING
Subdued light. Television set (black and white) on. A group watching GHENT in an interview pre-recorded in this same room.
GHENT in MCU on set. He has no idea of television presentation of himself; he appears bombastic, ham, overacting, far larger than life.
GHENT (on screen, declaiming)
“Night and the thundering heat on me
Proclaim the emptiness made for one,
Spuming the grafting hand in the dark
And the jets that spume to the aching void
While the tower of need goes emptied, full. . . .”
HIND and CHRISTINA sit watching.
CHRISTINA (quietly, to HIND)
Is that what I think it’s about?
HIND
I’m afraid so.
CHRISTINA
Why can’t his generation be straight about sex? Instead of wrapping it up in verbiage like this?
HIND
Ask him!
GHENT (answering question)
Tape recorder! As though I could ever forget them! They’re here, (taps forehead) here! Branded forever on the quivering flesh of my brain by the whitehot iron of necessity! (pause — for effect) Why, I remember, when I was a tiny boy, a child in God’s sight, not even a pimply youth, going to school, an English school where they forced those of us who spoke the mother tongue of our country. . . .
Reaction shot: HIND.
GHENT
. . . .to wear a placard reading FOREIGNER — yes, this in Britain, Great Britain as those gentlemen in London call it — they called me FOREIGNER who had never set foot outside my native land, who had. . . .
Reaction shot: CHRISTINA.
GHENT
. . . .been brought up on the words of Stahl and Beline, who had drunk at the shrine of St. Erling. Who did they think they were? What did they think they were doing to me? To us? Gentlemen, I wonder!
It is apparent by now that GHENT is either drunk again or overcome with emotional hysteria.
Embarrassed reaction shots now cover DOCTOR, SACSEN, and GWEN, besides HIND and CHRISTINA.
INTERVIEWER (voice over only)
The situation you found in your childhood still largely exists. What do you see as the next step?
Pause.
GHENT (flannelling)
The next step is obvious. . . .
Reaction shots of HIND in particular during the following:
GHENT
. . .Clearly, my act of defiance and the vicious reaction of the establishment represent only a beginning, they formed the vital spark from which has flamed the movement and reaction which have (pause) followed. The next step is clear: there must not be just one martyr, but two, and then three, and then ten, and then fifty, and then five hundred, and then five thousand, until our whole nation is seen to be so united, so opposed to the whole vicious idea of empire, of one nation dominating another, that a true conflict arises, an actual confrontation of a mass of people with another. . . .mass of people. . . .
Contempt on HIND’s face.
GHENT
. . .this is not only inevitable
and . . .conclusive . . . .but will be seen to be
inevitable and conclusive!
This nonsense is proclaimed with hammy conviction: CHRISTINA, DOCTOR, and GWEN register varying degrees of unconviction.
INTERVIEWER (voice over only)
Can we turn now to your actual experience in prison — What did it mean to be a perfectly law-abiding citizen, a university lecturer with an increasing reputation as a specialist in medieval English literature, an eminently safe career — then this career, this security, you gave up, abandoned, virtually overnight, to become what some saw as a criminal and others as a nationalist hero. Simply, what did it mean to you, a man used to comfort, to the unhampered use of extensive libraries, to have to endure the privations of a prison designed in Victorian times for the accommodation of only a third of the prisoners it does now?
Pause on GHENT (screen) as he gropes for answer.
GHENT (at length, insincerely)
You had to. . .float. (pause) Float. (pause) If you didn’t float, then it got on top of you very quickly. (pause) Otherwise you’d blow up. (pause) You understand?
Patently the unseen interviewer does not: GHENT sees this, but tries to conceal that he has seen it.
GHENT
I can’t put it any better, you had to float. . .you had to float. . .
Suddenly, and almost simultaneously, the image on the screen is switched off, and the lights in the room are switched on.
GHENT stands at the door, by the TV set, in a position to have done both: his presence has not been realised until now: the five others in the room look at him.
GHENT
That isn’t me! They haven’t got me there!
(pause) Have they?
7. INTERIOR. NEWSPAPER OFFICE. DAY
Start tight on badly-reproduced, ten-year-old newsprint photograph of GHENT.
NEWS EDITOR (vo)
Did you know he read his own obituary notice at one point?
Pull back to see NEWS EDITOR in his office. He is briefing the JOURNALIST who has a cuttings file before him through which he has clearly just been reading.
FX off: newspaper editorial processes in large room.
NEWS EDITOR
Must be a select little club, the few people who’ve done that.
JOURNALIST
This must have been shortly after the explosion?
NEWS EDITOR
Yes. Get on to him about it. Ask him how he felt, reading of his own death. Great angle, if he’ll talk.
JOURNALIST
But how did they come to think he was dead? There’s nothing in the file about it.
NEWS EDITOR
There wouldn’t be. The thing was that they knew at least two of them had done the job, and there was so much blood and guts and bits and pieces lying around everywhere that it looked like two of them had to have made the mess. But this Stannis who was with Ghent was an enormous man, twenty stone and tall with it. And the bloody thing must have gone off as he was clutching it to his stomach or something, because there was one godawful scene. I was on the night desk when Tony Druce came through with the story, and he sounded shattered — and you know how hard Tony is.
JOURNALIST (nods)
Where the hell was Ghent?
NEWS EDITOR
That’s the question you should use all your journalist’s cunning up to which to lead. (He smiles smugly at the pedantic inversion) No one knows. Did he chicken out? Did he go for a leak? There are lots of stories, of course. You’ll hear them. There’s bound to be a pub near this converted farmhouse he has. It should be no hardship to put in a bit of market research there, between drinks. You’ll hear the locals’ versions then.
JOURNALIST
Did you see him on the box last night?
NEWS EDITOR
Some of it.
JOURNALIST
What did you make of the poetry bit?
NEWS EDITOR
Curi
ous. But not for our readers. Irrelevant to the paper. It sounded a load of crap, anyway.
JOURNALIST (hesitantly)
I thought it was quite revealing, the way it confirmed a pattern in his life. I came across a quote by Nietzsche the other day. . . .
NEWS EDITOR (horrified at the intellectualism)
Nietzsche!
JOURNALIST
He said “Every man of character has a typical experience which recurs over and over again”. It seems to fit Ghent very well, as far as I can judge. His ‘typical experience’ has been an emotional conflict which has always been resolved by an act of violence.
NEWS EDITOR
You’re reading a lot into those crappy poems. And I’ll bet you a fiver you don’t get Nietzsche past the subs.
JOURNALIST
The point is that if there is a pattern, then it’s going to be repeated. . . . .
NEWS EDITOR
Ah. . .so what’s he going to blow up next?
JOURNALIST (nods)
Where was he when he read his own obit?
NEWS EDITOR
No one knows. On the run, somewhere. The story was in some local nationalist paper first, but it didn’t say where.
JOURNALIST (casting around)
I wonder if he was with his wife. . . .
NEWS EDITOR
The wife. . . .(searches for sheet of paper in file tray) There’s some dirt on her dug up by a stringer locally. (pause) Yes, here. The marriage had nearly broken down at the time he went inside. It seems to have been given a longer lease of life quite artificially as a result.
JOURNALIST
Any children?
NEWS EDITOR
No. The stringer says she didn’t go short of it while he was a guest of Her Majesty.
JOURNALIST (slightly disturbed)
Ah. Look, I want a definite line on this story.
NEWS EDITOR
The paper’s line is very clear and simple: we’re opposed to all forms of nationalism within Britain, whether it’s the Welsh, the Scots, the Cornish or the Herne Bay Freedom Movement. This is Great Britain, greater than the sum of its parts, diverse as they may be. And anyway, two out of the last four Prime Ministers have been Scots, the Welsh had Lloyd George — What more do they want? So you dig as much dirt as you can, right? Your methods are your methods, I don’t want to know anything but the dirt. Right?
JOURNALIST
Right.
JOURNALIST gets up to go.
NEWS EDITOR
And for crissake keep bloody Nietzsche out of your copy!
8. INTERIOR. KITCHEN DAY
Well Done God! Page 21