by Adam Thorpe
Grope for Jesus, Milly murmurs to herself. George picks up the Indian gong and whacks it just once but it’s enough. It makes her nigh jump out of her skin. He chortles, showing his gums which are wolverine to say the least. She blinks so quickly it turns him into the picture Uncle Stan took her to with the mummy in it which’d made her scream but instead of screaming she stays blank and turns away and fiddles with the candlesticks. Oh. The mummy’s coming towards her. Its hot breath is on her neck. It’s only an actor dressed up in about twenty yards of lint, said her Uncle Stan. Don’t be frit. The hot breath turns into a cold hand. It somehow gets between her detachable collar and the nape. Aye, the cold hand says, we ken it all, squit. Here they are. Don’t slip up or Georgie-Peorgie’ll make ye cry, aye. Then the cold hand leaves. The candlestick by now is on the very edge of the mantel. It’s good to know some traditions continue. Here they are indeed. She somehow gets to where she’s supposed to go, halfway up at the back, next to the picture of Mr Trevelyan, waiting to wait on. She’s so far from any light source it’s hard to make her out, but she’s there, she’s there. She’ll always be there. Her afterburn has never decayed, even when the place was empty in the mid-fifties and she looked out of taped-up windows or when the ground floor became a dental surgery in ’59 with plywood partitions blurring the bedrock. Patients as they were sinking into their own nonsense of gas saw her with a huge soup-ladle leaning over them and tried to bob up again and did to well dones and a free tissue but couldn’t remember. She’d tune in for a second between the Cripps-approved easy chair and The Five Stages Of Dental Rot wall poster and those of a nervous disposition in the days of low-speed drills squealed and everyone looked at them. A dentist with all five stages on the cobbler’s-children principle blistered his lips on his Player’s Special when she walked towards him down the corridor with a steam iron as he was closing up very much alone. O chaser of shadows, fleeter after dreams! You think I’m joking? Hey, the landlady went white when I enquired after the resident domestic on my last trip over. Tenants had left because of less, what with the lethal electrics, the impossibility of escape in a fire, the diseased carpets, the deaf Pole’s TV at night, don’t mention the blasted ghost if you please my dear it might dent my nice little earner, it might upset the boys from the Friends of Rachman Society, they might want to have a little word, if you get my drift.
OK, OK, you don’t believe me. Christ, Uncle Ken’s still going for the Bore of the Year, Belgravia Section. Fast forward the soup course until he’s stopped. In out, in out, in out, napkin whipped up to mouth and back, in out, in out, heads jerking and the soup gone down in five seconds flat, not a drop spilled, the conversational drone a witter like bats or Japs. Stop. Play. I’ve played this scene a thousand times. I transferred it onto video for edited highlights, my own personal use, but you’re gonna see it once. I know it by heart, I know every word before it comes, it must have been really irritating for Zelda watching it with me, like it must be really irritating watching The Graduate with Dr Lazenby who knows the songs by heart and has a voice like a weasel on heat. I could score every chink of silver spoon on bone china and the slippings of silk against silk and the discreet burps and the pad pad squeak pad pad of George with his bottle into something that’d have Cage turning in his grave like an organ-grinder’s organ. But you’re gonna see it once, once only. Unique print. Nothing happens in this world MORE THAN ONCE. It’s called entropy. It’s called there goes the echo. It’s called decay and rot and fade. It’s called wiping and shredding. It’s called pulling down the studio to build a parking lot. The fickleness of life and love. So listen and look. You won’t get another chance like they didn’t get another chance. Meat course. Where to goodness is the draught coming from? says Mrs Trevelyan. That’s Bosey passing her with the rifle mike but we can’t tell her that because even if I shouted in her ear I’d be goldfishing – it’s like there’s an inch of gallery glass between us and them and it’s enough, we’re silent but we raise a chill. Where indeed do draughts arise? ponders Mr Trevelyan. He fingers the long stem of his crystal goblet. George fills it so discreetly it’s like being served by bad breath. Where indeed do they arise? he asks again. That’s the kind of useless question that he can wheel in front of his own thoughts because his own thoughts are about as viewable as a multiple pile-up on a freeway right at this moment. They concern Ruthie. Ruthie sniggered when he unbuttoned his combinations facing her instead of slipping behind the hanging plush as per usual. Confounded cheek. Their firkytoodle was dashed dismal. He stroked her diddly-pout with the flat of his foot as he always did and she sniggered again. It put him off. The walking on moss to the rivulet’s edge went quite awry and he withdrew his foot and rose and dressed and chucked a shilling on the rumpled coverlet and left her with a slam of the door. Beastly confounded cheek. Harlot. Painted harpy. Mistress Much Too Quickly. I am asking a straightforward question, repeats Mrs Trevelyan. There’s no need, Arthur, to dress it up. Is the girl ill? Uncle Kenneth lifts his head from his fork. He reads jerkily from the crib card Julie’s holding up, or seems to. She maintained, that she had little appetite, but would, join us eventually. Ah, says Mrs T, thank you for telling me. I would have done, says Uncle Kenneth, but I have only just remembered. Mrs Trevelyan eyes him, superciliously of course. The leaks of fluid at the corners of her eyes glint in the candlelight. She is allergic to dust and smoke and stuff and the fireplace now and again puffs its fumes into the room and outside London’s rapping its foggy knuckles on the window-pane to coin a phrase and her eyes are leaking. Uncle Kenneth feels very nervous and she picks this up. He’s run out of drone. He’s thrashed Pragmatism and hasn’t the energy to think anything new about the Irish situation. I won’t argue with you, says Mr Trevelyan. He says this like he’s decided it long ago and is skipping a few lines to save time – you know what I mean. Uncle Kenneth swallows his meat and it’s noisy. It’s because his oesophagus is restricted by nerves. Where is that confounded girl he’s thinking behind his jolly but really hammy grin. He knows where she is. She’s walking up and down in her bedroom rehearsing her lines. He can’t bear it. Mrs Trevelyan sighs and fiddles with a potato. Underdone, she says, inform Dorothy the potatoes are underdone. This is because the potato does not fall apart the instant it’s touched. They are quite agreeable, her disagreeable husband announces. Mr and Mrs Trevelyan turn their heads towards Uncle Kenneth as George stirs discreetly in the background. I like them any old way, shouts Uncle Kenneth. He didn’t mean to shout. Mrs Trevelyan’s eyelids twitch as the sound waves smash into them. Now here’s a subject, thinks Uncle Ken. His knife lifts in Rhetorical Gesture 3. Perhaps we shall be like the Emerson-Palmers, says Mrs Trevelyan as Uncle Ken’s mouth opens, who partake of their meals quite separately, they say. Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean, contributes Mr Trevelyan in a knowing sort of tone which could quite easily be susceptible to a sexual interpretation. Holy shit, this goes on EVERY EVENING. Can you imagine? Mrs Trevelyan smiles sardonically. OK, maybe not sardonically, maybe it’s just the candlelight on her allergy reaction, but to Milly the maid in the shadows it doesn’t look terribly friendly. Mr Trevelyan looks up and catches this look and blinks and frowns because this look of his wife’s seems to turn his forehead into a fish-tank full of his brightly-coloured thoughts in murky water. Amazing how he can see this the length of a table you can measure in yards in this sort of dimness but they are used to it, their eyes haven’t been ruined by neon and floodlights, they can open their pupils right up and read by one candle without getting a migraine. Those were the days. Day for night, night for day. We don’t know what night is. Night never comes to Houston. It is one eternal blaze and wink wink wink of cop cars. It gives me a headache just popping out for a Kentucky at three a.m. That’s what you do when you’re single. You eat Kentuckies and there’s no one to lick your fingers for you. Aw, shucks. Shuddup, will ya?
Agatha is not pacing up and down in her room. She’s sitting very still by the window and listening
to the wind in the wych-elms or whatever those very large trees are outside her window – hey, I reckon they’re wych-elms because the first time I visited in ’88 they were very ill and white and now they’re dead and down. She’s trying to work up some Sylvia Pankhurst spunk in herself, but her tummy is liquid. This is only about the third time in her life she hasn’t descended the moment the gong sounded. The first two were owing to illness. She’s staring out the window and wondering why life tends to be either intolerably dull and miserable or intolerably blissful. In the sigh of the wind through the wych-elms she hears the sea and it’s taking her away from this place. She doesn’t know where to exactly but vaguely through the sea-mist she sees an island and this island has a handsome ship-wrecked sailor on it who turns out to be a relative of Captain Cook and so widely read he can read to her every night under the stupendous stars without a book in his hand. They have a heap of children and together they work out the Perfect Society. And the time comes for them to return but Agatha won’t project that far ahead, she has an intimation that the vessel that finds them carries their destruction in some way. Maybe all the sailors have the plague or something. Maybe on board there’s a pretty daughter of the captain seeking a handsome gentleman to elope with. She’d better be going down. Golly, they must almost be through the main course. O Lord, give me strength and spirit to do right this evening. To do the right thing by Thee.
It seems a long way down, ho yes it does. Her shot-silk dress is viridian. You and I say blueish green but I’m trying to be pretentious, I’m trying to inject some quality into this movie. Zelda used viridian for about a month. It was one of the first things I noticed about her. Isn’t the lawn viridian today? she’d say. Snot green I think, was my rejoinder. No it wasn’t. I never had the pluck. I just nodded and went hmmm and tried to look like Marlon Brando about twenty years ago. It was because she was reading this fat English novel by by by by Byatt, A. S., Mrs, and I said ah, yeah, my pal Jeremy Freeman just missed the rights to that because I phoned him, he was really possessive about Possession chuckle chuckle. I was still trying to make her notice me in those days.
Zelda went through this stage of calling everything stuff like faded periwinkle and saturated moss because she was reading this woman and I couldn’t stand it, it was like living with Mrs Windsor & Newton, she was a walking Dulux sampler or something, she’d stroke my hair and say it’s definitely going frosty flint. I think you mean slug grey, I’d reply in a kind of frosty, flinty way. And at least, honey, it’s not guano white, I’d add colourlessly. OK OK, joke over. Dr Turd Lavatory was reading the same book. I realise this now. I realise that shared reading habits lead straight to the shared bedlamp. She has only one bedlamp. Like me. It makes for very short bouts of reading. This shimmering pigeon’s throat of a sea-green dress laps after Agatha kind of reluctantly down the stairs. I don’t mean the whole shimmering etc. dress, I mean the bit at the back that’s busy cleaning the runner. She crosses her fingers as usual, as she has done for about thirteen years, on the thirteenth step. The pictures go on being pictures, kind of smug and into their own thing to do with cows and churches and never hanging straight, but she’s too nervous to correct them this evening. She turns at the head of the stairs and oh God brushes the loop on the sash window and there it is. The stuffed lemur with the crooked grin. Wrong shot – Gordon you ape, git the lens round. There. Down there. Pull focus. The dining-room door. Wow, big deal, so what’s new, it’s been there for half a century or something. What’s new is the fact that it’s scary, it’s about as enticing as the lid on a coffin. So she leaves her dress alone and holds the banister. She’s very still. There are clinks and clunks coming up from the kitchen and a water-pipe gurgles. She’s not into water-pipes so she doesn’t know it’s a water-pipe exactly but take it from me it is, it’s about an inch under the plaster to her right and why it’s gurgling is to do with air pressure, it’s not someone upstairs it’s someone in the kitchen, one of the servants, it’s a noise Agatha has always known so she’s never thought about it, it just happens, it’s the house musing or clearing its throat like it moans and cackles in the night. Needless to say her heart is beating wildly and if we now have a big close up of her hand Gordon we can see it’s trembling. At the same time she’s thinking how she mustn’t touch her dress before wiping her hand because the banisters are waxy, they haven’t been buffed enough, that’s the new domestic and it’ll spoil the shimmer. Then at the same time as some clerk in her brain is typing this out there’s another one painting in four-foot high letters IT MIGHT GO WRONG, IT MIGHT ALL GO FRIGHTFULLY, DREADFULLY WRONG. Zelda would like this. This is narrative.
Agatha’s foregrounding the narrative for me but she doesn’t like it at all. You know the feeling. It’s the difference between a shaggy pony you go to sleep on and a lean stallion with a very bony spine. Up to about five minutes ago Agatha was enjoying the gallop in a sort of elated way but now she’d rather like to get off. She’s not used to it. She usually spends a lot of her time gently bored on the shaggy pony. But I’m sorry, Ags. Sometimes plot gets hot. Right now it’s very hot. It’s like when Dorothy tests the iron by holding it near her cheek. Agatha touches her cheek. It’s flushed. We’re ready.
But. What would life be without buts? Top-heavy, I guess. OK.
But the dining-room door looks like it’s closed for the duration of the human species. On the other side of it are her parents and her uncle, we know that. But she can’t imagine this quiet family scene in candlelight without a whole load of stage smoke billowing around knees and sharp white fangs in the dark mouths that turn to greet her. She can hear a rumble of voices the other side of this door under some traffic clip-clopping past the other side of the front door. It’s going echoey. She could hesitate here until hesitation turned into lassitude and lassitude turned into total inertia. The attractiveness of that prospect is awe-inspiring. But the dogs of fate have got her cornered. They’re slavering and chomping at her shot silk. For William’s sake she must outface them. She must throw them meat to deflect their hunger, their frightful rage, their wanton cruelty. She takes the last few stairs with an uncertain tread but at least she makes it to the lozenge chess-tiles and the peculiar cool echoey vault of the hallway. She sighs slightly, poised on the brink. The white enamel finish of the door is the blank sheet of her future, upon which no message is discernible. (Thank you, thank you. But don’t clap between movements.)
Cutaway into the dining-room, please. Right through the wall, through the cutaway wall and up and along and round until we’ve an over-shoulder shot past Mrs Trevelyan’s puffed taffeta of Mr Trevelyan which includes the door behind him. A complicated manœuvre, but one I used to be famed for in my Russell rip-off period. I do think it the most frightful bore, says Mrs Trevelyan. Uncle Kenneth clears his throat, not to speak but basically just to clear his throat. Maybe also to avoid having to say something. I don’t know what the thing that’s a bore is but since it’s one of Mrs Trevelyan’s catch-phrases we needn’t fret too much. It might be breeding Pekinese for a living, it might be the unfortunate exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery which made her giddy, it might be Lily’s problem with the candlesticks – I don’t know and I don’t care and neither should you. We mustn’t get distracted. This is a BIG SCENE. It’d be better if Zelda were here but writing into a void is better than not writing at all and descending into alcoholic dereliction. Did I say writing? Don’t I mean filming? Oi oi – is the purity of my calling sullied already? Can’t I just zip my big mouth for more than two minutes? If not why not? Is it a nervous problem? Am I suffering from logorrhoea as Zelda said Mr Lazenby pig-brain suggested good-humouredly once quite recently before she fell into his outsize trap, before she was pinned struggling on the end of his outsize dick?
Yuk. At least I can spell logorrhoea. Someone who can spell his own condition can’t be too sick. I mean, most of us won’t even have bleedin’ heard of the condition that’ll finally shut us up for good – the one some runtish little clerk�
�ll copy carefully down in some unbelievably depressing room with an adjustable metal shelving system, as if black Quink and a Parker and an adjustable metal shelving system stuffed with the Files of the Dead make up for everything, for Christ’s sake. I thought it was cancer, I remarked. I thought me mum died of cancer. It went on forever, the way he wrote it. Two words, one ending in us and the other in itis. There’s a name for everything, mark. There’s a name for the tightening of Uncle Ken’s red lane and for the running sores under Mrs T’s chin and for Mr Trevelyan’s foot-happy way with Ruthie’s moss and for what’s happening right now to my great-aunt’s guts as she poises on the brink with her hand on the knob. Diarrhoea would be too simple.
She’ll be learning all this soon, y’know. All these sises and ismuses and itises and rrhoeas. And what with it being war there’ll be so many on one body they’re bound to miss a few, it’ll be ever so messy and slapdash, there’ll be conditions overlapping with other conditions and conditions so grave there’ll be nothing left of the original owner and conditions for which medical science must have given a name to but nobody can find it slipping about in the blood as they are so they just invent one and add itis or ismus or rrrhoea on the end and bury them quick, hey ho. But I’m skipping. Agatha has no conception as she stands feeling the slightly slippy brass knob in her hand of WHAT HORRORS ARE TO ENGULF THE WORLD IN LESS THAN TEN MONTHS. Isn’t that crazy? Don’t we all just love that wickit little sense of Dramatic Irony when we see those old old films flickering merrily away, all those innocents bustling nattily along in their bustles and bodices and breeches or playing accordions in the picturesque ghettoes if we’re talking of later, doesn’t it just so excite us, stoodents of mine, think about it, discuss next week, more particly its use in any one o’ Mr Hitchcock’s works, the video library is open till five o’clock, now scram, you’ve got I see here Mr sorry Dr Todd H. Lazenby Jnr on Strategies of Demystification and Disruption in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), containing the doc’s pièce de résistance, his Eisenstein cross-reference, the perambulator bouncing down the steps while everyone gets blown out of their huge lapels, isn’t he amazing, so intelligent and elegant and original, the most obvious movie quote in movie history and Dr Lazenby’s spotted it. Don’t miss this class if you’re a complete jerk.