“That's nice,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. Surely I would have heard, if she was developing something new? But if she were lying, or exaggerating—I was afraid to wonder what that said about her.
“The Beeb are very confident,” she said. She sounded like a film school graduate. Everybody worth their salt knows the BBC shows blanket enthusiasm about everything. They hate rejecting people, preferring to break them down, SS-style, in the rewrite stage. “They're giving it its own channel,” she said: she meant a dedicated digital channel, like Channel 4 gave Green Lanes before their advertising revenue allowed them to webcast it for free.
Funnily enough, I didn't want to talk about the ratings or her casting problems, or scriptroom politics. Not after all we had been through together: the arguments, the crises, the successes we had shared. (Jerome Jones—for six years running he won us Best Male at the National Soap Awards; during her time at the studio, Rachel picked up an unprecedented three Baftas.) And what about our intimacies? Our rows? Our silences?
She was putting walls of words around herself: barricades of meeja-speak. To keep out the past. I beat against her defenses. “So, you've no plans for that novel you were going to write?”
“No.”
“Any news about that company you were going to set up?”
“No.”
“What about those short films you were going to do?”
I didn't mean to launch an attack on her. It just happened. “I remember what you used to say about elderly viewers,” I said. “Do you?”
Of course she remembered.
Just then, Frank reappeared. “Here we go!” he cheered, plucking a bottle of Crianza from the rack on the dresser.
Rachel beamed at him.
I wasn't ready for that.
I looked away.
* * *
Their house was nicer than I'd expected. Something about Frank—so prissy, so precise, so practical—had led me to imagine doilies and dried flowers and horseshoes above the door. Actually, most everything was salvage, there wasn't too much of it, and with every room painted white, the effect was homely, contented, stylish—I liked it.
“Who did the decorating?” I asked Rachel the next day, meaning to pay her a compliment.
“Frank,” she said, which showed me how much I knew. “Frank does everything.”
He certainly did.
I thought, since they were working so hard on the house, that I'd show willing and do a spot of mowing for them. But Frank got in there before me: “It won't take ten minutes,” he announced.
I felt like cooking. “I thought we might go out tonight,” Frank said.
“Want a cup of tea?” I said. But it was Frank who made it.
Like most passive-aggressives, Frank was happiest when he was helping people.
“You just put your feet up,” he'd say to Rachel, of an evening.
“Just relax.
“Are you comfortable there?”
It pleased him to bear burdens. Give him the chance, he'd suck you dry. Drained of motivation, stripped of healthy self-discipline, you were left feeling progressively more helpless.
“I'll do the washing up,” I said.
Without a word, he stacked the dishwasher.
“I'll do the pans, then.”
He ran water in and left them to soak.
But in the end it was up to me, wasn't it? If I wanted something to do, why was I sprawled on my ass in front of the TV, waiting for Frank's permission?
I got up.
“Oh, relax,” said Rachel. In his company, she was quite as bad as he was.
I fancied a walk.
“Ooh!” Frank seemed very keen. “A walk is just what I need.”
I fancied it now.
“It won't take me long to get ready,” he said.
Half an hour. He couldn't find his boots. Would he need a raincoat? He couldn't decide.
An hour. Now, where were his keys? Should he make a flask of tea? Where was his wallet?—oh, it was in his other jacket. How much daylight was there left?
One and a half hours. He discovered a hole in his boot. But he had others upstairs. There was a lot of cloud to the East. Maybe there was just time for a little toddle down to the pub. Did Rachel want to come... ?
I did what I should have done in the first place—I gave up on him.
I went out.
And, of course, it was cold, it was dark.
And, yes, it was raining.
As I walked, I wondered, not for the first time, what the hell I was doing here. Frank felt that my visit was doing me good; that I needed this distraction, now that I was dropped from Green Lanes. Rachel's attitude, though—I couldn't figure it. I worried at it constantly, unable to resist the notion that their contentment was not without its exploitable flaws.
* * *
Dinner was waiting for me when I got back. Lots of opportunity here for Frank to wring his hands at the amount of time I was taking in the shower, the imminent ruination of the roast and so on: all nonsense. Dinner, then—and some pregnant looks. But acknowledging that I had lost my temper wasn't going to do any of us any good, and nobody said anything.
In the bathroom, as I got ready for bed, I pummeled my cheek, held my face in warm water, rubbed and pummeled it again: but the prickle of the evening's cold was rooted deep in the bone, and for several days after, I could feel ants tunneling beneath the skin.
* * *
Every morning, Frank drove Rachel into Cambridge. She rented an office in town—not much more, she said, than a desk, a laptop, a good copier. “It's good to get out of the house. It breaks up the day.”
Sometimes they met for lunch. Most evenings, he drove her home; or she would pick up a taxi and arrive around three P.M. She no longer had a car of her own. It seemed an extraordinary sacrifice for her to make—one of Britain's foremost writers for TV, reliant now upon Frank or the national rail system to carry her from studio to location to business meeting. Only—of course—that was not her routine now.
On those afternoons that she came home early, I made the most of my time with her. I tried to tease out the threads of her life, to get her talking about her Third Age soap, even. But she was always tired, and glad to be done with it for the day. Besides, she had the evening meal to prepare. Not “dinner,” mind you. Not plain and simple “food.” Always “The Evening Meal,” capitalized studio-style. Red meat, in the main. Roast vegetables, always. Gravy. Heavy pudding.
At least she let me help. It felt good, to be sharing simple, domestic tasks with her. It felt intimate, though it probably wasn't. It felt like the beginnings of a rapprochement; but after all, maybe it was just safe territory, a place where our differences had no room to express themselves.
“If you peel, I can do the gravy.”
Hardly a meeting of minds.
“Can you do us a favor?”
“Yes?”
She was up to her elbows in the dishe water.
“Can you push the hair out of my face?”
I brushed it behind her ear. There was a lot of grey in it.
“Thanks.”
I stood away. Her face was lit by greenish sunlight reflected off the dish water. There were lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked inexpressibly sad. I wanted to hold her.
* * *
Mornings were the worst. After a night's spooning with Frank, she woke infected with him, leaping out of their bedroom and bouncing about the house like a bumptious squirrel while Frank threw out tendernesses in a ghastly, Disneyesque falsetto, all soft “s'es” and “w's” for “r's.”
“The-tea-an-the-toasht?”
They were like Chip and Dale.
“Hooh, the-tea-an-the-toasht!"
* * *
They kissed constantly. Frank's tongue was prodigious—a pit-bull reaming the marrow from a bone.
* * *
Maybe it was purely psychosomatic, maybe the dirty weather—warm, febrile storms drifting in off the A
tlantic—but my face began to hurt again, and viciously at night. The only relief I found was to absent myself around nine P.M. If we stayed up talking any later, my eyelids started twitching and a curious, generalized toothache set in that kept me tossing and turning all night.
Even then, I couldn't sleep more than four or five hours before I was awoken by a fierce burning round the corners of my mouth.
I'd wake up at about five AM, and traipse down to the kitchen. It was a nice house to be in: just the right balance of cleanliness and clutter to feel comfortable. I liked it at night: reading, or watching the soaps, or knocking back coffee, or dialing in on the living-room laptop to CNN or Guardian On-line—everywhere you sat, the rooms lit you like a film star.
Moving softly so as not to disturb anyone—this was best of all. The truth was, I felt most comfortable as an interloper. It gave me an illusion of control.
I got to watching Green Lanes again, and it came home to me—without any rancor or bitterness—what an extraordinary show it was, that I had left.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: every soap writer worth their salt has dreamed that impossible dream at one time or another. The dream is as old as theater itself: imagine a drama that preserves Aristotelian unities of time and place by the simple expedient of never pausing, never ending—never, ever, going off the air.
Rachel was the first to turn it into reality.
Detractors say it was simply a matter of time before the dream was realized. That shows like Big Brother showed the way—were, in their way, more radical. That it was only ever a question of waiting for the technology to get good enough. But that sells Rachel short. Dramatic, credible twenty-four hour drama is more than a matter of scale: it functions according to a completely different set of dramatic rules—rules no one ever had to figure out, until Rachel threw down the gauntlet with Green Lanes.
Colin and Jolene's kids have just discovered that their parents are swingers. It's being played for laughs at the moment, but you can see disaster looming as those impressionable angels prepare for their first term at Haringay High, with all its attendant temptations.
Grahame from the garage is questioning his sexuality. Again.
Sarah Lassiter the nurse and her husband Robert have left for the country hoping that this will give their broken-hearted little foster-daughter A Fresh Start.
With Sarah gone from the hospital, Green Lanes is trying out a fresh bevy of night-shift hopefuls. A hospital auxiliary. A disgraced policeman (Clinging Barely To His Badge). An office cleaner with A Dysfunctional And Abusive Marriage. A loner cartoonist.
A loner cartoonist? A definite and dreadful no-no, that one. The scriptwriters should know better than to have allowed it through. Angst-of-creation self indulgence. Dreadful. The punters would flee from it in droves.
Jerome Jones's resignation from Haringay High (he's off—twinkly-eyed cad that he is—to the Roedeanesque “Greatham School for Ladies") has given games teacher Yasmine Grant and love-lorn trades union rep Leonard Rushby “A Second Chance At Happiness.” They're Drinking Coffee now; they're digesting their Romantic Candle-Lit Dinner. Robert's lips give their trademark Wry Smirk. Yasmine buries her head in his chest. Robert cups her breast....
I could feel it, still. I could feel it in my hand. Her breast. Her body. Vagaries of plot had driven Yasmine against Jerome—against me—very often. Suspiciously often. You didn't have to be particularly insightful to spot the murky workings of Rachel's conscience. Yasmine was Rachel's way of keeping me sweet.
It was manipulative of her, but flattering nonetheless. To have Yasmine under me.... The late-night episodes....
I turned off the TV. The urge to masturbate was strong and dreadful.
* * *
Rachel felt uneasy with my early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine. She thought I was avoiding her—that she had done something to offend me.
“Morning!” Rachel greeted me, stumbling down to the kitchen in her cream silk robe. It was meant for a much younger woman, but she wore it well: all wild hair and pale as a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
I went to the back door and pulled on my boots.
“Where're you off to?”
“Thought I'd wander round the wood and back,” I said.
“Have you had breakfast?”
“I had some cereal.”
“Oh,” she said, in a small voice. “Okay.” She picked up a smile, and dropped it. “Have a nice time.”
* * *
More often, Rachel came downstairs to find me already gone. In the hour before dawn, the fresh dampness of everything was intoxicating: a tequila slammer for the lungs.
There were some nearby woods, and a sunken roadway through the center of them, and an old grouse shoot full of dizzying, maze-like paths. Rachel lent me her mountain bike—I don't think she'd ever used it—and I had hours of fun toppling off the thing. One day, after a strong wind had brought down every crab-apple in the county, I tried riding along the sunken road. The apples under my wheels were as hard and smooth and slippery as ball bearings. I clobbered myself bloody all morning and came home grinning like a madman.
But come November, rain made the paths so muddy, even my infantile appetite for filth was satisfied, and I searched out gentler pastimes.
To the east lay an old Second World War aerodrome. Long stretches of broken concrete lay concealed behind shoulder-high grass. It was nothing to speak of in the light of day, but the sheer monotony and scale of it, in the blue hour before dawn, suggested an ancient burial complex.
“Would you like to go there with me?” I asked Rachel once, as I did up my boots.
“Oh, another time perhaps—I'm exhausted.”
“I can't believe you've never been there.”
She shrugged.
Well, I didn't know what to say after that.
“I'd better get on with the Evening Meal,” she sighed, and levered herself off the sofa.
“I'll help you.” If this was all I could have of her, then I was having it. I wasn't proud. “I can tell you've been working hard,” I said, as she bent myopically over the kitchen counter and leafed through her battered Jane Grigson. “You're all hunched up.”
“I'll be all right,” she said.
“Tell me what we're having and I'll make a start,” I said. “You can grab yourself a bath—help you relax.”
She smiled to herself.
“What?”
“I thought you were going to offer me a back-rub,” she said.
Which gave me something to think about.
She closed the book and put it back on the window sill.
“I can give you a back-rub,” I said. “Do you want one?”
“I'm busy,” she said.
I stood there, useless, angry.
“Can you get the trout out of the fridge for me?”
I fetched and carried a little while and then I went upstairs to read.
I couldn't even find my place.
I thought about Rachel's hair in the morning, spilling in wild coils round her shoulders and over the cream silk robe. I remembered the feel of her hair as I tucked it behind her ear. I thought about her robe. I remembered seeing it hanging up in the bathroom. I let the book fall shut. A thrill went through me. Appalled at myself, I dropped the book on the floor, got up and went into the bathroom.
There it was. I felt clammy. I touched it. The silk was as cold as cream on my fingers. I gathered it up to my face. It smelled of almonds. I don't know how long I stood there.
I went back to my room and sat on the bed with my book and this time I found my place. I read a page, then I read it again, and then I read it a third time.
My left eyelid was flickering again. If I opened my mouth slowly, my jaw popped.
The back door squeaked open. I listened for voices. I heard nothing distinct.
I went back to the bathroom, realized what I was doing, turned on my heel and came out again immediately, slamming the door savagely shut behind me.
A cheery cry from the kitchen—"Is that you?”
I took a deep breath. “Is it dinner time?” Frank said.
* * *
Rachel, after years of studio politics, knew how to keep her cards close to her chest; that was a given. But Frank's behavior was so off-beam, I couldn't figure it at all.
He began crashing us together, almost willing something to happen. He was like a particle physicist, who sends atoms hurtling into each other to find out what they're made of.
For instance, lunchtimes during the week, he took to gathering us in his local pub. He'd carry the drinks over on a tray, nestled in a pile of crisp packets. Honey-roast Ham and Mustard. Country Roast Vegetable and Fish. Whatever. Then one time he didn't show up at all. Which left Rachel and me sipping halves of yeasty real ale in this weird little non-smokers’ free-house neither of us particularly liked, surrounded by twee, anal little hand-written notices which said things like If you have to use your mobile, be prepared to pay the fine! and Today is National Table-Sharing Day.
True, they served great sausages and mash, but even here they made you feel as though you were visiting a slightly malign elderly relative.
Rachel: “De Boers sausages—sounds good.”
Publican: “—.”
Rachel: “Do you know what's in them, then?”
Publican: “Of course.” Sly smile.
Rachel: “I'm sorry, am I missing something here?”
Rachel's mobile rings.
Publican: “Ooh!"—sudden animation—"That's fifty pee for charity!”
Rachel was embarrassed, drinking alone with me. Did she understand what Frank was up to?
I tried to talk to her about it, to clear the air, but all she said was: “Oh, let's get out of here.”
It wasn't far to the parking lot, but it was starting to rain and bitterly cold. “We made their day in there,” I said, thinking of the light in the publican's eyes as he pointed to the charity jar.
But living with Frank had deadened her sense of irony.
She linked arms with me as we entered the parking lot. She was shivering, chilled through. She was wearing her long brown coat—the thin one with the fake-fur collar so realistic that outraged freshmen sometimes threw cigarette butts at it. I put my arms around her. She tucked herself under my chin. Her hair tickled my nose. I bent and dared to kiss the top of her head. She was so cold, she probably didn't even feel it. I ran my hand over her back. Her shoulder-blades were so distinct, so sharp, I could feel them moving under her coat like birds trapped beneath her skin.
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