by Tim Pears
Locals, despite the infrequency of Agatha’s expeditions, had grown used to her unpredictable manoeuvres: they knew that a beep on the horn probably meant she was about to park, that a jet of windscreen-washing water spraying backwards over the roof heralded an abrupt lurch into St Hilda’s Road where the church was. So they kept their amused distance. Strangers, on the other hand, had to dig deep into Sunday-morning sluggish reflexes as, in front of them, a driverless Morris Minor came to an emergency stop for no reason at all, entirely without warning.
And yet, watched over by angels – perhaps because she was always and only ever driving between church and cinema – her car’s bumper was not once dented, her blue polished paintwork never scratched.
When Agatha stopped driving to church people heaved a collective sigh of relief. They assumed she had accepted the inevitable frailty of her years. It never occurred to anyone that she’d forgotten where it was she kept her car; and then that she had a car at all.
In fact Agatha was as physically fit as ever. She had taken a daily spoonful of cider vinegar for years, to ward off arthritis and nostalgia, the twin curses of old age, which it did; only to give her another, which was to make her more crabby than ever.
When Agatha shouted out to the queue in the foyer that today’s film not only had sound but it appeared to be in colour, too, they took no notice. Nor when she interrupted a screening with an unexpected interval and proceeded to clip people’s tickets for the second time. Nor on the occasion she asked whether anyone had seen the piano player, and, come to that, where was the damn piano? When her projectionist arrived for work one day to be told, ‘You can’t come in here without a ticket,’ even he took no notice because he’d had plenty of time to become accustomed to her rudeness. She’d been threatening every evening for a year or more to sack him if he couldn’t get the film in focus and shouting at him to turn the volume up, even when people were coming out to complain that it was so loud their ears were hurting. So he’d learned to ignore her.
Harold and Zoe, though, were shocked by her decline: it was clear that not only her senses but her faculties too were disintegrating all at once. Zoe was unable to conduct a coherent conversation with her grandmother because she got tripped up on a word, the wrong one, and repeated it fixedly as if the movie had got stuck in a projector in her mind.
‘Just like your Great-aunt Georgina, my sister, you are,’ she told Zoe. ‘You’ve got her spoons.’
‘Her what, grandma?’
‘Her spoons,’ Agatha repeated, emphatic but frowning. She pointed at her own eyes. ‘Just like hers, the same green spoons.’
Or else she spoke sentences whose parts came out in the wrong order, as if the reels had got mixed up in their cans.
‘It’s a popular ice-creams in the tray,’ she said, when Zoe volunteered to be an usherette. ‘Make sure you put lots of film tonight.’
It turned out that the projectionist, while hardly realizing he’d been doing it, had been covering up Agatha’s forgetfulness for a long time – putting up the posters, ringing the local newspapers with the programme details, and ordering the popcorn. Finally, Agatha forgot herself: a few days after Harold and Zoe’s return she looked in the mirror and failed to recognize the old woman staring back at her, because the passing of the last fifty years had slipped her mind.
Zoe made her a cup of tea and Harold suggested as kindly as he could that she might consider retirement.
‘What did you say?’ she asked, staring at the wall a couple of feet to his left.
Harold repeated himself.
‘WHAT DID YOU SAY, WILLIAM?’ Agatha shouted. He knew that was the name of one of her cousins, long dead, and assumed her poor sight and memory had combined to confuse her because of a family resemblance. He didn’t realize how much of a resemblance; he didn’t realize that she’d inadvertently revealed, for the one and only time, the identity of his father. So he said softly:
‘It’s all right, mother.’
‘WHAT DID YOU SAY, WILL?’ she yelled at him.
After a lifetime of severe self-control Agatha Freeman was coming apart at the seams, unwinding, unravelling. That night Harold and Zoe heard noises downstairs and descended from the flat above the cinema, and found Agatha in the auditorium shouting: ‘BRING UP THE LIGHTS! WHERE AM I? WHERE AM I?’
She told Harold to go back to the farm and only calmed down when Zoe took her hand and led her back upstairs.
‘Where are we going, Dorothy?’ Agatha asked.
‘We’re going to follow the yellow brick road, Grandma,’ Zoe told her.
‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘Oh, good. I am glad.’
Agatha’s funeral was small and quiet, attended by those members of the family who’d not taken her rudeness personally, plus a cluster of film buffs grateful to her for introducing them to the French New Wave. They seemed at ease inside the church during the service taken by the vicar (a little older but still giggly) but when they stood outside around the grave with their sunglasses and pale skin they looked as much frightened as mournful. James wanted to take a photograph of their shoes, which all had holes in them, but he was too timid to remove the camera from inside his buttoned-up overcoat. He decided he preferred weddings to funerals. One of the film buffs threw a flower onto Agatha’s coffin in the grave.
‘The Sixties are over, man,’ he confided in his nearest companion.
Zoe overheard him and gave him a scornful look. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she told him.
James carried his camera with him everywhere, although the first photographs he took with the roll of film Edna bought were so disappointing that for a long time he didn’t ask her to get any more. He was content just to look through the lens, to get used to the world reduced to separated rectangles. For a while he was overwhelmed by the infinity of possibilities: there was no fixed, ideal framing for any subject; whenever he clicked the shutter (which he did even though there was no film in the camera) was an arbitrary choice. He found it difficult to keep the camera still; rather he moved it around, tracking the world before him – which itself was rarely still – as if he were holding a ciné camera.
The rest of the family asked him what he was doing. ‘I’m practising,’ he whispered.
They left him alone to practise, fed up with having to bend closer to hear what he was saying, especially since he didn’t look at them when he whispered, he looked at the ground, so they couldn’t even lip-read. The garrulous child, the gregarious boy, had withdrawn.
James spent whole days exploring the house through his viewfinder. Furniture didn’t move, and in the guest rooms, unoccupied for months on end, it seemed that time had stopped, and he was able to arrest the wavering movement of his roving eye. The closer he moved in, the easier it was, quietly approaching a vase on a window sill, a pillow, the panel of a door. The more he reduced the world, the more paradoxical depth he discovered, the more elements of texture, colour and light, of surfaces on different planes, of line. Sometimes he was unnerved by the fragility of things: he wondered how it all held together. Then he’d hear the gong for supper resonate from far below, or Alice’s voice rend the silence of a room: ‘There you are, James! Come on, it’s time to go to the cinema.’
It took him a moment to remember how to form words. He blinked. ‘You go on. I’m busy,’ he murmured.
He looked out at the world, at little corners of the world, through his lens. It felt like looking out of a bubble; he was protected behind his camera. He was safe. He discovered that it was possible to get through the rest of the time in another kind of bubble. When he finally returned to school in the autumn he sat in the middle of the class and the teachers, unable to hear what he was saying, left him alone there. During the games periods – from which he was exempt – he inspected the quiet classroom, clicking his empty camera at aged ink stains and old graffiti scored in the wooden desks.
At home he sat silent at mealtimes but no one complained. James discovered that if you didn’t demand anything f
rom other people they demanded nothing of you; if you didn’t speak they rarely addressed you.
‘I’m just going off to practise,’ he whispered, lurching away from the supper table: he got rid of the walking sticks but was left with the rolling gait of a seaman on dry land.
‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ Charles boomed after him, chuckling, and James heard his father lead the others in a tuneless rendition of that childhood song as he climbed the stairs.
‘Weigh hey and up she rises
Weigh hey and up she rises
Weigh hey and up she rises
earli in the morning.’
James rose away from them.
‘Put him in the scuppers with the hosepipe on ’im
Put him in the scuppers with the hosepipe on ’im
Put him in the scuppers with the hosepipe on ’im
earli in the morning.’
The surgeon had been right: James could walk perfectly well. But he didn’t venture far. He rarely went to the cinema with Alice and Laura, despite its being an opportunity to see Zoe.
‘Someone’s got to help Harold through college,’ Zoe told him when she came to Sunday lunch, and so instead of going back to school herself she took over the running of the cinema. ‘It’s a home of my own, James,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough of travelling for a while. And once I’m established, I’ll be able to fund my own travels.’
The old projectionist retired and Zoe hired a man she’d met on the road to Marrakesh, but otherwise she did everything herself. She put the popcorn to one side and restocked the sweets counter with flapjacks, hazelnut bars and chocolate brownies from a wholefood co-operative on Factory Road. She found Agatha’s mint-condition blue Morris Minor in the garage: those antique cars were just coming back into fashion, so Zoe took lessons, passed her test and drove it round town herself, almost as dangerously as her grandmother once had.
Every time she parked it in the garage, though, she thought it was a waste of space when she could leave it in the street for free. I could use this for something else, she thought, but it hadn’t yet occurred to her what.
She took out a bank loan and replaced the once comfortable but now decrepit cinema seats with new, smaller ones that cramped tall men but allowed an extra row to be fitted at the back of the auditorium. ‘I’ve got a plan to get the place going,’ she told Charles another Sunday.
What Zoe did next was to inspect the programme, which consisted – as it had for years – of one film (plus supporting short) shown four times a day for one week. Then she walked outside and stood in front of the cinema, and watched the pedestrians walking along Lambert Street for a few minutes, before returning inside and ordering by phone every film distributor’s catalogue.
What Zoe Freeman did before her time was to discern different audiences within the provincial town for different kinds of films, and to show old ones alongside the new: she organized mini-seasons reviving the Ealing comedies, Bible epics, science-fiction fantasies, a whole delirious night of the Marx Brothers, Shakespeare on film, and cinematic versions of whatever else was on the school syllabus, as well as Disney cartoons during half-term.
She initiated late-night screenings: on Fridays of pornographic films she was at first too young to legally watch, never mind order, herself (using her father’s name on official forms) and on Saturdays of Sixties landmarks like Zabriskie Point and Easy Rider, Woodstock and Valley of the Dolls, at which hippies and Hell’s Angels warily shared flapjacks and marijuana. The film buffs – who came to everything and whom Zoe teased, telling them the only films she needn’t show were horror movies, since they were so like vampires themselves – rubbed shoulders with pensioners on Mondays, schoolchildren on Wednesdays and housewives on Thursday afternoons, squeezing their handkerchiefs while watching Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Zoe greeted them all, listened to their suggestions and complaints, and worked sixteen hours a day, until she was as well known in the town as her grandmother had been.
James missed that little revolution: he had his hands full with his still photography. He finally summoned up courage and took the huge step of putting film in the camera. He shot a number of rolls of film that Edna delivered to and collected from Boots when she went to the Wednesday market. He didn’t want to show them to anyone else but he wasn’t forceful enough to withstand Simon’s, Alice’s and Laura’s demands to see them: James had been walking around clicking that stupid camera for over a year, when he looked at them it was invariably with one eye closed and the other hidden by the camera (as if their poor brother wasn’t crippled but blind, and it wasn’t a camera but a miraculous new medical aid). The truth was they possessed normal human vanity and expected to see snapshots of themselves; they were disappointed and perplexed by the close-ups of bedposts, chair covers and a corner of the drawing-room carpet.
Simon turned them on their sides and upside down sympathetically. ‘After all that,’ he commiserated with James, ‘there’s something wrong with the bloody camera. I suppose the guarantee’s run out by now?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the camera,’ James whispered. ‘That’s what I meant to take. They’re called still-life details.’
‘But they’re so boring,’ Simon frowned. ‘There’s nothing in them.’
Alice for her part looked at her brother pitifully. ‘You’re strange,’ she told him; and then she remembered something she ought to have done earlier, and ran off.
‘I think they’re very interesting, James,’ Laura said, but he could tell she was making an effort for his sake.
James looked at his photographs on his own. He studied them through a magnifying glass. He was as baffled as Simon, but for the opposite reason: there was too much in them. He realized he’d been overambitious. It crossed his mind that he’d be better off aiming to achieve the simplicity of X-rays.
‘Of course,’ he whispered to himself. ‘That’s it. Black and white.’
James asked Charles for some extra pocket money, Stanley converted one of the unused guest bathrooms into a darkroom, while Robert, in return for a 20 per cent commission, in cash, volunteered to procure all the equipment James needed direct from the warehouse at half-price.
‘That’s really good of you, Robert,’ James responded in a surprised whisper.
‘Yeh, well, I’ve got contacts,’ Robert confided. ‘Used notes, mind,’ he added.
James spent hours in the darkroom. At first he was daunted by the discovery that the printing of photographs was a demanding art form in itself, especially with no teacher, but he soon found that actually there was nowhere he’d rather be than in the infrared, womb-like isolation of the darkroom with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and he had to spur himself on to take enough photos to develop in the first place. After a while, though – and perhaps in contrast to the hermetic cell of the darkroom – he ventured outdoors with his camera and explored the garden with the same detailed scrutiny as he had the house: he spent some weeks on a systematic project to photograph the petals of Alfred’s roses, at various times of day and in successive stages of bloom and decay; then he selected one of the beech trees he’d once taught Alice and Laura to climb and took a sequence of pictures, taking a step backwards for each one, from a macro-close-up of the bark to a full-length study.
When he got to the end of a roll James trotted, swaying, into the house and up the stairs to the darkroom. He put the film, a take-up spool and canister and a pair of scissors into a changing-bag, and stuck his hands into the elasticated sleeves. He closed his eyes and saw images of what his fingers felt, and enjoyed the skill of a technician that he was acquiring.
What he loved most of all, like any budding photographer, was the emergence of an image on white paper in the developing tray, a moment of magic that never failed to excite him.
Some things change, and other things stay the same for ever. And then you realize they’ve changed too and you hadn’t even noticed.
Simon had sat and failed most of his O-levels and
promptly left school, on his father’s advice, to embark upon an apprenticeship of business around the various departments of the company. Simon was becoming a self-confident and popular young man. He and James had swapped places: the boy battling with his worthlessness in the sad blue light of the television had made a deal with life, while the friendly child who’d preferred running to walking and couldn’t stop talking had retreated into an infrared room.
Robert, meanwhile, came out of puberty even grimmer than he’d entered it. His voice when he used it was harsh, he stopped growing taller but his body took on the dimensions of a man, with wide shoulders and a powerful chest, and he slipped in and out of the back door at random: he would pass unseen among them, the only evidence of his presence a vaguely delinquent aroma of oil and sweat.
At weekends he went on shooting expeditions with Stanley, in identical flat cap and jacket, having graduated to a .22 rifle. Robert was like the son Stanley didn’t have, they had the natural closeness of a silent master and his protégé. But even if they’d been by nature loquacious their relationship couldn’t be spelled out, it had to remain unspoken, informal, because Robert, after all, was the son of the man-in-charge.
The one school activity that Robert took part in with any regularity was an extra-curricular one: on his thirteenth birthday, without telling anyone, he joined the boxing club run by the biology teacher in the school gym on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Robert loved it at once: the sounds, the smells, the sweat, the pain, as twenty boys walloped punch bags, shadow-boxed, performed punishing callisthenics and hit a thick pad held by Mr Bowman.
On that very first evening, after Robert had felt waves of nausea from doing press-ups, sit-ups and jump-presses, Mr Bowman handed him a skipping-rope and said: ‘Now skip for five minutes, lad.’