by Tot Taylor
‘Darling!’ Iona’s voice became louder.
Though Daly and Nightly might sometimes have doubted the reality of what they’d created at Trewin – the two-syllable assonance worryingly containing another – ‘ruin’ (something the superstitious Iona and Monika would have noted immediately) they weren’t about to lose sleep over it. If John Nightly had given it more than a moment’s thought, he may have concluded that he’d replaced one dysfunctional family – his Cambridge birth group – with another, his music group, a quintet as dysfunctional and depersonalised as families come, only to end up as part of a third: the ‘family’ at Trewin, the white farm. The house on the hill. The asylum. Literally ‘funny farm’, as some locals no doubt referred to it. If John had thought about stuff like that, difficult stuff, with possible indications of little progress regarding his personal situation, he would’ve gotten very depressed indeed. Regressively depressed. The old codger would’ve slunk off to his room at the end of the long corridor and put on one of his all-time favourite masterpieces; a Rachmaninov piano concerto performed by Horowitz, Howard Hanson, the White Album (the chosen side would depend on the blackness of his mood), Prokofiev, Fauré, Ravel, Poulenc, Sibelius, Delius, Todd Rundgren, the Who – they all fitted the bill. John would have turned the volume up loud: real loud, distorted and crazy – blow-out loud! Deafening to most ears, and… Well, it would have been completely, completely…
‘Darling… can you please turn it down! I hate to ask… You know I do, but…’
Iona was trying to speak on the telephone. The regular mid-afternoon update from her agent. In the boxroom next door, John had this thumping rhythm turned up so damned loud. Even Lee had retreated to the relative safety of the balcony.
Tomorrow was the big day. The day they were due to start sessions proper for Pitfall. Track-laying should have begun a week before, but the edit had been changed yet again by the director, which meant that the composer was having to reorganise and rearrange once more, for the hundredth time it seemed, all of the music he’d prepared ‘to picture’ so far.
An arduous job, having to add half a second of suspense when a shot lingered too long on an abandoned farmhouse or interrupting a theme just when it had got going because of the need to speed up the action – which for purely musical reasons, John Nightly hated doing. At yesterday’s production meeting, Myra had made it clear that it could all well change again. That it was, at the end of the day ‘all up to the director’, she said; and after that, ‘the money people’.
Since lunchtime, John had been working on a meticulously timed and quite harrowing sequence where the young female lead, played by newcomer Teri-Ann Christie, is taunted by a farm labourer – Bruno John in his first role – having to hide from him by submerging herself in a stinking mud pond. The boy had done a commendable job, heightening the tension in Karmov’s close-ups without being overly musical or too dramatic.
John was now on his second task: smoothing over queasy edits in the next scene, in which Bruno and Teri-Ann were driving at speed along Old Bond Street while being pursued by Teri-Ann’s guardian, the character-actor John Sanderson, trying his best to keep up with them in a delivery van. The action occurred at a point in the story where it dawned on Teri-Ann that Bruno may not in fact be the person he claimed to be. Since the timing of this dawning had been left visually unmarked by the director, for post-production reasons, it was up to the composer to construct a clear narrative. But, after having heard and watched each scene at least a couple of hundred times, as Iona and Lee had over the past few days, well… there was a limit.
‘You know I hate asking you, darling, but…’
‘I know, I know, darling… and it’s no problem at all… I told you… I know it’s ridiculous… horrible… literally horrible for you… for anyone… to have to listen to this rubbish – or, well, anything, come to that – this many times.’ John furiously rubbed his tired old eyes. ‘No different from torture…’
He adjusted the sync on the Steinbeck while at the same time winding the volume up one more notch.
‘It’s not “horrible” darling – that’s not what I mean,’ replied Iona as she prepared for another day-long tanning session on the balcony. ‘Or torture!’ she shouted from the bedroom. ‘Your music – something that came from you, came out of my own very sweet darling – could never be… “horrible”. “Horrible” is not the word I mean today.’
‘Well… I’m sorry, anyway,’ the composer replied, ‘really I am.’ John looked up, missing his soundman. ‘Lee? You ready? We can do a bit more now, I think.’
‘Ready for anythin’, man.’
Lee took a final puff before he carefully balanced his joint on the iron balcony rail and wandered back into the room.
May 1968 seemed like a golden time. A blessed time. Everything was looser now. People really seemed to be flowing, reaching out for something, following their own path. It sounds idealistic in terms of the complex man-made terror society now finds itself engulfed in, but that’s how it appeared to John Nightly as he gazed out over the rusty balcony at Her Majesty’s sea-pink roses and forced himself to watch the scene play out on the editing machine just one more time.
‘John, why we have to have so many radios all over the house?’
‘It’s not a “house”, darling.’
The boy turned back into the room, squinting in the yellow sunlight.
‘Don’t be funny with it, John. Why do we have so many? How many we have? Maybe one hundred…’
John and Lee both laughed out loud.
‘It’s so ’e can hear all ’is ’its, innit, John? So he can count his cash, man,’ countered Lee as he lit a regular smoke and managed to sneak a glimpse at Iona, loosely wrapped in her bikini, a see-through cheesecloth skirt and John’s kimono. The girl beamed at the soundman’s obvious delight.
‘You are surely right, Lee… that is the reason we have it!’ Iona laughed along with them both.
John closed the balcony window and automatically nodded his agreement, without taking the slightest notice of what was being said.
Iona leaned back against the living-room door. She forgot herself, and let the robe fall away, in the process showing off very nearly all of her exquisite and heavily insured body. Lee could hardly help himself as he proceeded to stare full-on at this unexpected and quite magnificent display. It was worth the embarrassment of Iona seeing him drool to catch a glimpse for a few seconds. He looked hard, imprinting the image into his visual deep-storage. Iona pulled on the sash of the kimono, literally pulling herself together as she held out three very small Japanese transistors.
‘Can’t we… des-troy some of these? You know half of this things is not functioning.’
John turned around again, his head still stuck in the complexities of the dramatic scene.
‘We can’t “des-troy” them, no.’ He looked back to check on his cue point. ‘We can “chuck-them-out”, if you want. It’s… the Daleks that “des-troy” things.’
Lee sniggered nervously at the ridiculousness of it. John continued.
‘It’s the batteries that don’t work – or function… not the actual radios themselves, y’see.’
‘So can we do that?’
‘What?’
‘Put the new batteries?’
As usual, John found himself trying to concentrate on at least three important things at once.
‘Of course we can change… or… put the batteries, darling… You just go down to the shop and buy new ones. Surely you’re as capable of doing that as anyone else?’
‘John!’
‘Or is that something I have to do personally for you?’
Whoa! Whoa… Dear God Almighty! At once an eerie silence fell upon the place. An acreage of uncertainty appearing from nowhere, as the four walls of the tiny brick-shaped room expanded and a swathe, a whole swampland of lush white Axminster rolled out before the players, the silken fibres glistening as if after a heavy snowfall. A vast runway of the stuff;
a shimmering, white cultivation stretching out into infinity. There was a quaking. Vibrations – bad ones – echoed around the chamber; an impenetrable, cubed void suddenly existing between king and queen, genius and muse. As if a giant iceberg, an opaque drystone bloc, had been dropped from a great height. The overwhelming feeling inside the penthouse being one of detachment, disenchantment, estrangement, unknowing-ness, un-love. For an event had just occurred between the two protagonists that had never occurred before.
‘John!’
Only a few short months ago it would have been inconceivable for John Nightly to speak to his one and only inspiration like this. This sarcastic, disengaged manner. A shock, for as far as the awakened Lee was concerned – as far as everyone was concerned – John worshipped his muse. A worship that was reciprocated, frame by frame, moment for moment, completely and utterly in sync; locked, immoveable. And importantly, Iona was the prize; of that there could be no doubt. Her boyfriend’s every gesture and response being polite and affectionate, understanding, allowing – reverential even.
In company sometimes, Iona would coquettishly ask John for confirmation of his affection – ‘Darling… you do still love me, don’t you?’ – a routine usually played out at the dinner table in front of close friends and attentive would-be suitors. Without fail John’s response would be, ‘Darling, as I have always said… the thing is… I don’t… love you as such… in the sense that… it’s gone much, much further than that, I’m afraid!’ as he looked around the table for approval. ‘I worship you, you know I do. You know that…’ Comedically timed and resulting in cheers all round.
Today the question was not coquettish and the declaration did doing nothing to satisfy Iona. ‘But I don’t want you to worship me, John. Don’t you understand, my sweet thing? I want you to love me…’ was the girl’s all-too-confused and, of course, to John, ungrateful response.
‘But… but… this is what I mean – oh God…’ The boy switched to his most charming and beguiling self as he attempted an explanation. ‘Surely “worshipping” is better than… loving ? It’s bigger… deeper, for a start. Much deeper… and more intense, more… valuable in a way. Better all round, surely?’
He really was a complete pillock.
‘I think you do not understand, John,’ his lover replied. ‘I don’t want worshipping! It’s loving I want. What I mean… loving.’ The girl’s face turned pink. ‘I definitely want loving!’ She slapped her hands on the table. ‘What is this worshipping? Something to do with God… or… Tutankhamen!’ Iona clasped her hands to her head in exasperation. ‘But not woman… this is definitely not for man and woman!’
The tension between John Nightly and his muse had existed since February, when, at a fashion event for Quorum, John had been paying attention just long enough to catch the light of a smile between the object of that misunderstood worship and Mr Antony Spring, a being John Nightly believed to be no more than an acquaintance of his wife. The look that passed between Mr Spring and Iona, little more than a slightly-too-familiar acknowledgement, signalled to John Nightly that things were somehow not quite level anymore; at least not as completely, perfectly, level as John had understood them to be.
John and Iona’s thing, their unique, all-encompassing, taken-for-granted partnership, would never be the same again, after this one fleeting frame. For the first time ever in the relationship, the boy fancied, not too seriously at first, then suspected, quite seriously – the pain of suspicion hitting him like a death in the family – that something was going on and was ongoing. The exchange of absolute understanding John witnessed between his personal property and a third party seemed far too intimate and knowing to actually be any good.
The smile that passed was a smile that should only have been possible between intimates – lovers; between Iona and John. It wasn’t a smile between friends, because it wasn’t friendly. But here it was, this upsetter of a thing, being flashed around the Revolution Club in front of Justin, Monika, Connie and Alice, Lucy and the others. What John Nightly recognised in that fugitive exchange made him feel firstly incredibly uncomfortable and unsettled, and then very, very frightened.
The truth was that Iona had been regularly escorted by the Cork Street art dealer while John had been away touring. John was aware of it, and hadn’t given it a second thought, but now it seemed possible, plausible, then probable, that some extra-curricular activity had taken place.
The boy decided not to challenge Iona that night, believing there to be a possibility that he had made a mistake and that everything would be the right way round again the next day. But each time the phone rang over the next few days it was Tony. Getting straight through to Iona – because John, like his mother before him, refused to have anything to do with the telephone himself, both of them declaring themselves ‘allergic’ – and if the young woman wasn’t there a too-stuttery message would be left concerning some new exhibition or other that Mr Spring wondered if the newlyweds might be interested in seeing.
Someone like Tony Spring, an established man-about-town sort of man, was the only kind of suitor who could possibly upstage John Nightly (excepting another pop star or actor – and then it would have to be someone of a similar or higher stature than the boy himself). Although, as John always reasoned, Iona must have had enough opportunities with actors, photographers and racing drivers as well as the ‘physically perfect’ male models she spent her working days with way before John himself came along. Tony Spring certainly had what it took to be a worrying competitor. One of the Daily Telegraph’s Men to Watch at just twenty-three, he too was a Cambridge man, former King’s chorister and rowing blue, with the looks, grooming and easy charm to complement his well-ordered intellect and social standing.
It would have been too naive, and far-fetched, for John Nightly to imagine Iona sitting at home with her knitting during the long weeks he spent away from her. They did speak by telephone every night – sometimes several times; often backed up by further calls during the day – but John still found it difficult to believe that the girl, innocent as a peach, open as a spring bulb, would ever betray him.
Eight weeks after that shook up May afternoon, on the warmest night of the year, couched in a booth at the Beachcomber, too many whiskeys and too many spliffs having passed between them, an emotionally fragile evening ended with both Iona and John in convulsive tears. Tears which opened up a seam that continued to appear without warning over the coming months. Snuggled up to her boyfriend, arms tight around his waist as if she were trying to prevent him from falling halfway down a mountain (which she was), clutching his thin fingers as if her life depended on it, Iona confessed that she and the man to watch had become lovers; although, like a hoary old typescript, the episode was now of course all played out – ‘Over and done for’, as she announced. The only thing Iona knew for certain right now – the thing that mattered to her more than anything in the world, in her life, and all that would ever matter, she insisted and implored – was the person she was holding on to as if her sanity depended on it (which it did); the unique bond that existed between them, and the importance of getting back to where they once had been.
In the ensuing drawn-out decades, preoccupied with that constant flashing back, and in a permanent state of limbo, Iona made it impossible for anyone travelling with her, particularly her new but old, conventionally minded husband/companion, to ‘move on’ in any way whatsoever.
While Iona mourned her loss there was also, if she were honest, some strange comfort in it. Going over what had occurred, again and again, in terms of real life, the thought of getting back ran like an underground stream, a slipstream or leat, alongside the practical reality of her married routine, and her routine marriage, full of all the regular conventions and commitments, social and seasonal, family-orientated and festive.
Deluded and alienated and so very, very sorry, the abandoned Iona proceeded along an ever-narrowing pathway that transformed her mortal taste, as a cotton-wool John Nightly began to appea
r in the blackened windows of her Cornish estate house. His image stamped like a footprint in the snow, blanketing the sandstone rocks and shingle banks separating her own fragile state of mind from the ocean, making them slippery and treacherous and hidden from view until the sun came out to melt the snow and they reappeared to reflect the light of hope rather than hopelessness. Getting back. Iona was most certainly honest about that bit. In all her life nothing ever mattered to her as much as John Nightly, and getting back to and with him. Over the next thirty years, a midlife in which an incandescently bright future turned into a cascading nothingness, a kind of perpetual shock and solitude, Iona Sandstrand would think about no individual and no presence – or absence – as often as her once-betrayed boy genius. Her spirit wind, her forever ‘bright starre’.
John’s sapphire eyes caught the light in the thread of the twill silk scarves that Iona hand wove as samples to be sent to Pakistan for mass-production. His lantern skull strobed in and out of the spokes of the old water wheel that struggled to produce just enough energy to run the small loom she’d installed in the outhouse, the lo-tech centre of her burgeoning retail empire. On her morning drives Iona even saw John’s bimbo smile in the radial field pattern surrounding her property; and during her therapeutic afternoon strolls in the whorls and lobes of the wood anemones along the rocks and blasted trees that protected her expensive face from the unrelenting sea wind.
But the Nightly face Iona imagined was a young face, Face of Faces circa ’67/’68. A face of promise and enlightenment, still possessed of all its natural flow; a face of clarity and intelligence, before the river was tapped. An image captured in one of the Polaroids Iona took of John walking in Regent’s Park with their golden labrador, Sable, chasing around like a madman as he tried to stop the young pup terrorising the Queen’s squirrels. The photograph, faded in reality but not in memory, was still pinned inside the wardrobe that held all of her most treasured possessions – clothes mainly, and jewellery from her father, her brothers and sisters, and of course her new husband. Maybe it was a photograph of John on the balcony at Queen Square watering his plants. An activity she’d had plenty of opportunity to capture, since it occupied almost one full hour of each waking day.