by Patrick Gale
‘He wants to try you out as a composer,’ Rosa said with satisfaction.
‘A composer?’
‘That’s what you do now isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but what does he want with my music? A wedding march? A requiem mass?’
‘Here’s his number, Eli.’ Rosa would not even acknowledge his artistic qualms. ‘Take it. You’ve a wife and child to support now. Offers like this don’t grow on trees.’
Edward made the call. He did not wait for Sally’s return from work so he could ask her advice. He rang. He committed himself. Half an hour of music was required that could be chopped and edited later. An introduction and finale. A march. A waltz. A polka. And some ‘horse music and train music’ as Jerry Liebermann put it. The film was an adaptation of Anna Karenina, to be called Desire and to star a young actress called Myra Toye. Edward and Sally had seen her in a few films already, and, in his opinion, she was more suited to modelling bathing costumes than personifying complex adulterous passion.
‘Very romantic. Very Russian,’ Jerry enthused. ‘We’ve got all the best boys on it. Rosa tells me you write plinky plonky music. Stravinsky stuff. We won’t be needing that here. One note of that and you’re out. Except maybe in the train bit. Give us a really blistering chord for the death. No, Teddy – I can call you Teddy, can’t I?’
‘Well, actually –’
‘Great. Teddy? We need Tchaikovsky really, only the real thing’s been used to death already. Maybe throw in a touch of Rachmaninoff. Now don’t say no. You can do it blindfold. And don’t pretend you don’t need the money, ‘cause I saw the state of your suit and I bet it’s your best and only. Am I right?’
When Sally came home for lunch that afternoon, she paused just inside the front door, surprised at the delicious harmonies and soaring melodies flooding from Edward’s fingers. When he told her the news she laughed and kissed him, happy as he had seemed on hearing of the baby. The money Jerry offered, it was true, was spectacular compared to anything either of them had ever dreamed of earning. She recalled the flirtatious little man with his bizarre accent – half cockney, half German – his sombre, painfully respectful teenage son – ‘Shake hands with the lady, Heini. Show her you’re a gentleman’ – his chauffeur, cigars and pinkie ring.
Edward watched her joy and welcomed the sense that two swift telephone calls had corrupted him utterly. Here was the absolute change he needed. Here was the outward show of rot he deserved. No tortured chords for the sister-smotherer but a slow professional suicide by sweetness and facility, candied harmonies, corrupt, forgettable pastiche. All day, all week, undemanding, flashy melodies poured from his pen at a speed he would never have believed possible. He pilfered shamelessly from Russian symphonies, opera and ballet scores. He borrowed whole chord progressions, changed two notes to disguise a stolen eight-bar theme.
Rosa Holzer and Jerry Liebermann had snatched his soul as Miriam’s due. Playing through a gaudy ballroom waltz, to which Sally was already humming along on the landing, he knew himself reborn: Edward Pepper, the Fleapit Faust.
18
With the progression of her pregnancy, Sally felt herself increasingly a stranger among familiar faces. She had heard, times beyond numbering, how the gestation of her child was a woman’s most beautiful time. Now that she knew the truth first-hand, she spat upon the saying.
On her bad days, which were many, she was a seething, distended bag of hormones. She cried easily, over mere trifles. Her hair was greasy. Spots appeared on her forehead. She developed a craving for raw celery, a vegetable she had always avoided, even when cooked. She would devour whole heads of it at one furtive go, jealously munching over the kitchen sink, gums sore with the stuffs lingering stringiness, tongue bathed in a green, mineral spittle. She had back-ache, an inside-out belly button and the unpredictable wind of an incontinent ninety-year-old. The scientist in her regarded these developments with a certain horrified fascination but knew that only the perverse would call her beautiful.
She passed swiftly through a phase – inspired by her reading of Dr Pertwee – of encouraging Edward to make love to her despite her condition. Now she colluded in his squeamishness. She saw his boyish shock when she undressed her scary hugeness. Where once his love had encompassed her from scalp to toenail, now it shrunk to three small circles, shone discretely on to her face and hands, as though the rest of her were temporarily absent. Leaving the house for the studios – which he had to do increasingly, for all Jerry Liebermann’s initial promises – Edward bent carefully to kiss her lips, hands in his pockets or tucked behind his back, like a boy playing bob-the-apple. It made her feel like an old-fashioned doll, her face made of china and the rest, if one stripped away the clothes and cotton wig, a sausage of faded pink cloth, lumpily stuffed, not intended for even a loved one’s scrutiny.
Reluctantly, she relinquished her work for Dr Richards. There was a possibility he might still have a job for her when the baby was old enough to be left with someone, but he was too busy to do without help for long. Besides, they were not yet sure enough of Edward’s new earning power to even think of hiring a nanny or a nurse. She became fearful of riding the motorbike and allowed her fears to be worked upon by her mother’s reiterated suggestion that women on both sides of the family were prone to miscarriages and going into labour prematurely. She stayed in. Appalled at her extravagance with Edward’s new money, she approached a shop in Rexbridge which made deliveries.
Needless to say, her mother and father had been thrilled at the news. They came over a few times, when one of her mother’s admirers of either sex could be prevailed upon to act as chauffeur. She was making the most of being under strict doctor’s orders to take things easy for a while. They smiled at Sally with a kind of unconditional, subtly cannibalistic pleasure, making her feel less an intelligent woman, more a side of beef. In her ever more substantial presence, her mother abandoned the role of queen bee for that of mother hen and clucked, actually clucked, around Sally with cushions, magazines and cups of tea. Her father merely sat, but his tired old face, which for so long had seemed set like an unsuccessful milk shape, in a permanent expression of depressive apprehension, was now unnaturally creased up into a no less fixed proud smile. Whenever she swayed up out of her chair, he raised his hands in an Italianate gesture of admiration towards her bulging midriff, as if surprised afresh at this biological wonder. It irritated Sally beyond measure that, after years of striving, with slide rule, exam paper and stethoscope, to add their approval to Dr Pertwee’s, she should find their highest, most heartfelt accolade ultimately bestowed on something she could have done a decade ago, without a single qualification; something as passive as lying on her back under an appropriate man at an appropriate time. She kept their visits to a minimum by pretending Edward was working from home far more than he was, and needed peace.
The truth was that he was often having to spend the night away, in cramped studio digs. Smaller, swifter projects than the Anna Karenina film were also being pushed his way.
She pestered him for details of the famous people he encountered, genuinely fascinated, but he dismissed her curiosity. As her own life was diminished however, she found it hard to suppress the impulse to live vicariously through his. She had been unable to hide her delight at the newly tuneful music he was writing. She saw too late that her pleasure goaded him, betraying as it did the wifely insincerity of her support for the ‘serious’ work she had heard previously. His melodies entered her brain and she found herself singing them even as she strove to make no remarks in their favour. He kept her questions at bay, wounding her as he was wounded, and so her curiosity quickened into a lively envy that burned in her gut whenever he left her side to enter his life elsewhere.
With the speed of a fairy’s swishing wand on a soap poster, he became a busy man, Sally, a housewife. This, too, was a galling source of pleasure to her parents. Not only were they impressed at Edward’s new connection with the glamorous world of cinema in a way they had never
been by the mere fact of his being a composer and pianist, but her mother’s every comment implied that Sally was now in her rightful place. Her mother had worked all these years only from necessity, it seemed, never gaining one ounce of pleasure from the independence granted her. She managed somehow to imply that Sally’s transformation from white-coated medic to heavily expectant Hausfrau was a step up woman’s evolutionary ladder, like the acquisition of a second car, a washing machine or a son at a fee-paying school.
In her letters to Dr Pertwee, Sally tried at first to maintain a cheerful front. She laughed at herself, blustered away her doubts and suspicions with a gabbling, newsy tone. This cracked, in time, shortly after one of Edward’s longer absences, and she began to fire off shorter letters, biliously truthful about the frustration she was feeling. In her letters back from Corry, Dr Pertwee judiciously held back from discussing any cracks that were appearing in the love’s young dream but urged her not to waste her time, not to vegetate. Sally could hardly clean the house more than she did: with so little furniture, attic to basement housework was the labour of less than a day, and every stick of woodwork already shone with fragrant polish. She filled her other days with books. She began to work her way through the mildewed gardening encyclopedia Edward had unearthed beneath some seed boxes in the cellar storeroom. Breathing its sickly-sweet scent, she acquainted herself with every plant in the garden, and memorised the elegant Latin name for each, the way she had familiarised herself with muscles, bones and arteries as a medical student. Choysia ternata. Iris foetidissima. Lilium Candidium. She drove the names into her head by making an effort to ‘greet’ plants with their full names as she walked in the garden after breakfast. She cultivated a taste for novels, too, something she had always regarded as a waste of time but which now, with hours of leisure heavy on her conscience, she passionately understood. Slumped on the sofa, a cushion behind her aching back and a rug about her for warmth, she devoured whatever the library van had to offer – Mary Webb, Stella Gibbons, Rumer Godden, Ngaio Marsh, snobbish but oddly addictive Angela Thirkell. She read more from compulsion than pleasure, tossing one book aside and beginning another with barely a pause to digest what she had just finished. She swept dispassionately through other women’s courtships, marriages, adulteries and trials of strength, pausing to smile only at the rare mentions of pregnancy, as from one sufferer to her fellow.
When Edward did work from home, she kept out of his way. Resisting the temptation to sit in the hall and listen, for fear of angering him, she borrowed the car to drive cautiously to market or to her parents, pottered in the garden as best the baby would allow or simply stayed in bed with a book. Despite her mother’s gift of needles and wool, she declined to learn to knit; some principles, she assured Dr Pertwee, remained sacred.
Whether he worked from home or the studios, Edward seemed to be always one step from exhaustion these days. His face began to crease from strain – a little trench appearing on either side of his mouth and a frown between his brows. He fell into a deep sleep often before he had kissed her goodnight, sometimes even before she had come to bed herself. Restless and uncomfortable with her size, she sat up beside his slow-breathing body, reading, stopping occasionally to stare at him. She loved his face when it slept. It acquired an openness, an expression of calm trust it no longer wore in waking hours. Usually he lay there still and silent, but sometimes a dream disturbed the pool of his slumbers and he would twitch and mutter like a hound hunting in its sleep. Once, lost to her in a nightmare, he even wept. He made no sound beyond twitching the bedclothes, but when she turned to him in the moonlight she watched in appalled fascination as three tears welled up, distinct as those in a Disney cartoon, and ran in quick succession down his bony cheek.
19
As Edward stressed in vain in the face of Sally’s shopgirl curiosity, the studios were anything but glamorous. The initial thrill had lasted a week, maybe two, then he discovered they were actually a factory, perhaps shabbier and more ramshackle than most. Avenues of Nissen huts, cavernous sound stages and ad hoc mobile dressing rooms were linked overhead by a sparse canopy of telephone wires, stout, rusting pipes and haphazard swags of electric cable. The kitsch pomposity of the porter’s lodge – a thatched, Tudorbethan affair designed to summon up the same sense of anticipation as a grand entry to a stately home – raised expectations that were entirely false, for one passed swiftly into a labyrinth of unloved industrial buildings without ever arriving at anything one could truly call a front or main entrance. There was not even a façade. The country house theme was taken up just once elsewhere, in the commissariat. The seventeen-forties’ elegance of this oak-panelled dining room was as bogus as any ballroom or boudoir concocted in the scenery docks around it, its phoneyness heightened by the knowledge that, barely a decade before, it had been an indoor swimming pool where starlets disported for the entertainment of press and producers.
Musical soundtracks were recorded in a room like a cinema with all the seats taken out. The players – a ragged orchestra of hard-boiled professionals one suspected could play anything from Bach to Berlin with studied lack of discrimination – were ranged out across the floor. Edward conducted them from a podium while the relevant scene was projected on to a big screen behind them. They watched his baton, he watched the movie and, in a sound-proof cabin below the screen, a team of sound technicians recorded the noises he drew from them.
An actress’s face loomed, lower lip trembling with desire, eyes glistening with droplets artfully administered seconds before. Edward would time a crescendo to the invisible beating of her heart, synchronise the peak of a ‘cello’s soaring theme to the second when she held her breath and wiped away a sham tear. The timing had to be perfect, as well as the performance. He came to know every magnified inch of Myra Toye’s face, every inflection of her voice – so well that she began regularly to enter his dreams as he lay beside his wife. On some days they might spend an hour providing the melodic background to mere minutes of her latest film.
‘Background?’ Jerry Liebermann protested, waving a hand at the orchestra, ‘This, Teddy, is the icing on the cake. This can make or break us.’
And often it was true. Edward knew that his music masked lamentable deficiencies in the acting.
‘No. Don’t ask me. I can’t, you silly brute. I simply can’t!’ Miss Toye would jabber, shaking her beautifully gloved hands and covering her face, unable to hide the fact that she had been shooting all day, every day, for weeks, and was so tired she could hardly stand, much less emote on demand. Yet once Edward had counterpointed her words with a haunting, ironic echo of Vronsky’s Theme, played adagio on an unaccompanied oboe d’amore, her drab performance was burnished to a semblance of glory.
A film buff from boyhood, he was fascinated to be gaining an insider’s view of the film-maker’s craft. For all his self-disgust, he could not restrain a certain proud excitement. Yet every week he received fresh evidence that what he had taken for artistry was rank manipulation. He saw now that the men and women whose art he had worshipped were actually artless performers, blessed with a certain voice or physiognomy. Invariably shorter and less glamorous than they appeared on screen. They were recreated in an image worthy of their public’s fond delusions by a small army of gifted technical specialists. These would never be famous – no laudatory retrospective seasons awaited make-up artists and costumiers – yet all would still be working long after implication in a child rape case or a doomed sortie to Hollywood had rendered one of the stars yesterday’s face.
The performers who endured were the grotesque and self-mocking, the buck-toothed and overly tall, content to degrade themselves playing shrewish wives in preposterous hats, alcoholic spies and back-street abortionists with shaking hands and broken reading glasses. Fame, it seemed, always assigned the godlike a shorter contact with the public’s devotion. Edward did not always recognise film stars in the commissariat, so deflated did they seem in the flesh. The men, in particular, seemed less than h
eroic, even downright seedy, when not shot from below with the right lighting. But there were some who were so determined to maintain their screen persona and be always instantly recognisable – spinning manically from a joke with canteen staff, to cadging cigarettes from cameramen, to a touching recollection of the names of wives and children they would never meet – that he could almost smell their time burning out. Occasionally he spotted a former star whose face was still known to him. The lucky ones, who had married well and escaped, were usually seen stepping from a producer’s Daimler, lapped in shielding furs. The commoner, less fortunate, appeared gamely in thankless supporting roles or, sadder still, were found haunting the sound stages, stricken shadows of their former selves, with memories for the names of wives and children intact, bravely hiding the fact that they were there to audition alongside newcomers.
While many of the scene-builders and technicians were cockney, an extraordinary number of the behind-camera staff were former refugees from Germany, Russia and eastern Europe, some Jewish, some political. If one added to that the mongrel background of most of the performers, the upper-middle-class drawing-room scenes the collaborators so meticulously fashioned were small teamwork masterpieces of socio-economic guesswork. Some of the emigrés had merely transferred from one studio to another, hastily translating technical vocabulary as they went along, but many had adapted their skills as well as their unpronounceable names. Tables at the commissariat in lunch breaks could assume the air of smoky academic common rooms. At least two of the men now called upon to direct forgettable froth on celluloid had been prominent theatre directors in their former countries. A lecturer in chemistry from Prague now headed the film processing laboratory, one set designer was a highly qualified Viennese art historian and the dwarfish woman regularly credited as Gowns by Sylvia was rumoured to have held a chair in fine arts somewhere in the Balkans. When the time first came for Edward’s name to appear in a film’s credits – a quota quickie called Angela and the Men – Jerry Liebermann took him on one side.