by Adam Thorpe
Don’t think you’ll make a bloody fool of me, Trevelyan.
He whips out the tie from the end of the gas-pipe, or strictly speaking the beginning of the next section of the gas-pipe with no gas in it, and tosses it on to Barstow’s head. Barstow’s been sick, by the way. I wasn’t going to mention it because you try cutting between the great John Barrymore in the performance of a lifetime and Barstow being sick on the floor but I guess I have to or you might think we’re beginning to feel comfortable in this cute little snuggy-hole. OK, there are gusts through the window, but these gusts are English and Bosey’s started to sneeze from the lousy little grate and its cheap coal. See how we’re suffering for our art and you. Thank you, old chap, whispers Barstow. I’ve just stopped you topping yourselves and probably taking the whole house with you, come to that. That was Lightfoot, by the way. I say, I thought it was only distressed lovers who formed suicide pacts. That was also Lightfoot, plus sneer. I have to slip in here how Lightfoot is known to Agatha via Amy. You don’t know Amy but Amy is Lightfoot’s second cousin and Agatha’s best friend. Amy is very nice. In fact, she’s extremely attractive in the broadest sense of the word and laughs a lot at my jokes, which my great-aunt doesn’t. That’s unfair. I’m guessing my great-aunt would not have done whereas at least Amy has the advantage of hearing them even though she’s fairly deaf and you have to shout a lot, but at ninety-something I don’t suppose I’ll even have ears to hear with. Lightfoot doesn’t know his second cousin awfully well but on each occasion he’s enjoyed her company, the cad. He’s met Agatha twice, once actually at Hamilton Lodge where he addressed Giles as Giles and was quite nice to him even on the croquet lawn but that only makes the whole thing worse. He more than enjoyed Agatha’s company, he was actually stricken by it, which makes the whole thing even worser. You’d think that he’d try to suck up to her brother, would you not, but he doesn’t. He’s not schizoid he’s just complicated. Or maybe he’s simple. He never liked Giles Trevelyan and it really subliminally irritates him, I think, to see a dim echo of Agatha Trevelyan’s features and amazing grey eyes in the silly little prawn. Anyway, he and Giles do not get on. Lightfoot beat Trevelyan fairly badly with a togy a couple of months before the first meeting with Agatha last year, I think I’m right in saying. This is quite apart from the previous unofficial infringements of my grandfather’s personal space which started from the very first day four years back when little Giles was suspended by various slightly less junior chaps including Lightfoot over the central well of the house where at some date in the previous century a new boy’s green suspenders had failed to hold out and had consigned their contents to the fairly unappealing career of a spook in the dim-lit basement three floors below. And Giles suffers from vertigo, like his grandson. I can safely say that so far, in a pretty uneventful life, those were the worst five minutes of it. Too bad they didn’t stay that way.
Sorry, I thought I’d better fill you in. Don’t fall for Hubert, for God’s sake.
Giles’s hiccups are really taking off his dignity. He is about to raise his finger and rout soundly this charge of sexual misconduct and attempted suicide when he finds his finger already in place. That’s a great start. I have to hicform you, Lighthic—
Hubert. Call me Hubert.
What?
Family friend, old chap.
This takes my grandfather completely off guard. His finger is lowered. Barstow’s searching for his collar-stud in a kind of discreet manner, still on his knees. I hope for his sake it’s not in the puddle of vomit. You wouldn’t believe the smell in here, actually. I wish they’d just get on with it so we can get the hell out of here, guv. My grandfather’s momentarily stricken with the thought that Hubert Lightfoot might end up as his brother-in-law. I know the feeling. C’mon, just get a bloody move on. I need to expectorate. The gas has really affected my sinuses for some reason. Sylvia actually looks green. Apart from anything else, guys of this age smell pretty disagreeable anyway, like my neighbour’s tom-cat or whatever. It brings it all back.
Porter, eh?
Hey, Lightfoot’s picking up the bottle. He holds it to the light. There’s some liquid in there, if you remember. If you don’t, tant pis, or Aunt’s in the smallest room if you want to add to your Amusing Subtitles collection (Les Beaux Drops, 1935, 15 mins, director unknown, only print thought to be in Japan along with Frank Tuttle’s Puritan Passions, 1923, alongside some great lost Goyas probably).
I say, what damned consideration, you’ve left me some. Barstow’s got his mouth open to tell him that it’s not porter actually but something else, only his knuckles are being rolled against the floorboards by his pal’s foot and he squeaks instead. Actually, adds Hubert, that bratchet Vermin told me you were up to something. He seemed stupendously sore about it. Why’s it warm, heh? Been trying to mull porter, have you?
Giles nods his head. Um, one does in the right circles, Hubert.
He also smiles and makes a steeple of his fingers. Barstow groans. If he was in a war film he’d be the podgy little sergeant with round spectacles and permanently open sweat-glands who gets mown down at the climax despite having done all he could to avoid action. He is in a war film, actually. I mean, these are just the preliminaries, hey, your eyeballs are getting themselves burnished on THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER MADE ABOUT THE GREAT WAR and Barstow’s down for the battle scenes. Or one of them. He’s down for the most disastrous and bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, actually, which is fairly bad luck on him, given the fact that he’s not exactly Gregory Peck or Rod Steiger or Steve McQueen or whoever. If you told him that fact right now he’d blink at you and probably laugh or throw his lead soldier at your head if you were a pal of his because I think the very last image of himself as a grown man that he’d ever slip into the magic lantern show would be of Gerald Barstow in a real battle because he is probably the worst OTC cadet in Randle history and he is morally opposed to all forms of bloodshed. But life springs crazy surprises, dunnit? I mean, whoever around our family Bisto table ever considered I would be a movie-making genius, for God’s sake? No one except me. And I was incredibly wrong. Until recently.
You’re black-rotten drunk, Trevelyan. I could have you gated for the rest of term.
Wow, big deal. The Randle grounds are quite big enough for two chaps to be imprisoned in for a few months, you may be thinking over your Alka Seltzer if there’s any left. What you haven’t considered is THE SHAME. Gated chaps have a big yellow G sewn on to their foreheads or somewhere equally visible. They also get about fifty of the best as a kind of soupçon. Their parents are informed by letter. It’s suggested that all pocket money be suspended. It’s also suggested that all contact, written or otherwise, be suspended. With the corollary that of course if the fellow falls mortally ill the parents will be immediately informed and vice versa. These people have hearts, for God’s sake. And it has to be pointed out that there is nothing honourable about being gated, even among the chaps, because it’s generally for middling misdemeanours like drinking porter in the study or attempting to gas yourself or maybe both at the same time. I guess it’s like having herpes with I HAVE HERPES hung round your neck or positioned next to your begging cap. You wouldn’t get much money that way, at any rate.
That’s why Barstow groans again. Hey, he can’t wait to leave this hell-hole. As soon as he leaves he’s going to become a writer of amazing theological treatises musing behind a fragrant screen of flowering wisteria and stay that way until his state funeral. He can even see the plump maid come out onto the loggia and replenish his teacup. Loggia, because he reckons it might be in Italy – he reads a lot of Browning and Ruskin and there’s a framed Fra Angelico next to my elbow here. I know it’s a Fra Angelico because it says so at the bottom where the scissors have cut it out from some magazine. The colours aren’t too bad for 1913. I think I might have known it was a Fra Angelico but I could have got him muddled with Fra Lippo Lippi, to be honest. I’d really like to say to Barstow that things might not work ou
t quite like that but now wouldn’t be the time. He looks extremely pasty again. Cor blimey luvaduck. Hubert Lightfoot’s leaning towards the chaps still with this giant urine sample in his right hand. He smells of games pitches and some mentholy stuff you put on enormous but weary muscles and has a stupid little blue ribbon thing on his lapel which means he’s a Captain of House. If he couldn’t spell Thucydides one wouldn’t mind, but he can. Tighten on his face, Gordon. It’s got to fill the whole screen. Great stuff, great performance.
On the other hand, my dear fellows.
Giles brightens immediately. Profile shot of Fra Trevelyan’s brightening face against the Fra Angelico. The Fra Angelico is of the Magi bringing myrrh and stuff which is a nicely subtle link because Lightfoot’s other hand is famous. It’s the left one, it’s held out while its partner twitches the togy and it gets heaped up with ices and shillings and French postcards and whatever other sucks happen to be available until the togy in the right hand stops twitching. My grandfather once tried to tell my great-aunt about this little incy-wincy flaw in Hubert’s character but she ran off over the lawn and lost her straw hat to a trailing honeysuckle tendril under the gazebo. Ho hum. Love blinds, as little Josef’s devoted mother never said. Don’t I know it.
Hubert’s still leaning over with one eyebrow slightly raised. It has to be said that he’s in a long and glorious tradition of Randle extortionists, it’s not an idiosyncracy, Stalin was Ivan the Terrible and all that. The camera crane’s just gone right through his face but it wasn’t meant to be an augury. Hell, not everything can be an augury, even in 1913. I mean, I’ve seen amateur cine films of Pearl Harbour, guys on the decks sunning themselves and stuff in fuzzy colour, and you think every time they look up at the sky it’s a portent. Everybody got up as normal in Hiroshima that August morning, to quote the first line of my very first movie, shot in the streets and parks of Enfield with a Super-8. I’ve lost the print. It was kinda like The Bicycle Thieves without the bicycle. As my grandfather isn’t saying anything but is still trying to deal with his hiccups Lightfoot comes in with an offer.
The rest of the porter and ten Woodies, he says.
He rolls the urine sample around a bit. Seriously, he doesn’t realise. Basically the porter went so fast through my grandfather it’s still pretty well porter, if a bit tangier. Barstow closes his eyes and slumps against the wall under the window. He takes off his spectacles. He would like to say don’t drink that, Lightfoot, it’s Trevelyan’s piss, but he can’t. Neither can my grandfather. He wishes he had in fact left some porter instead of drinking it all and replacing it with an inferior version because he doesn’t fancy being gated and flogged and stuff and ten Woodies is pathetically small, so maybe this is why he’s not saying anything. Instead he lets the air out of his cheeks and nods with very wide eyes. The liquor is just beginning to clear from his head which is unfortunate, because the iceberg is about ten feet away.
I’ll deal with the porter now, says the bottle. The smokes by tomorrow. Plus a shilling for my trouble.
The reason the bottle says it, is because Hubert’s mouth is so close to the opening. It’s how the BBC used to do aliens from outer space before they got technical. That shilling sting-in-the-butt is classic Lightfoot. Giles nods again and leans out to touch the iceberg. Lightfoot has the bottle to his lips and is tipping it back. Sylvia actually has her face in her hands, looking out through her fingers. Gordon’s got shake. Bosey’s got a lip mike very close to Lightfoot’s starchy little sticking-up collar to pick up on the gurgle and swallow, but we can always dub my bath going out later if the collar makes contact. The urine sample certainly makes contact with the inside of Hubert’s mouth because after a very small pause it comes straight out again and all over Barstow the other side of the room, which shows how fucking small the room is. Can we wrap up now? That’s what Sylvia’s expression is saying to me. Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to hang around for the reaction shot. If you’re thinking it’s just disgust you’re wrong. It’s disgust and humiliation, because a gentleman knows when he’s made a right dickhead of himself. That’s why my grandfather got away with the whole porter episode and Hubert didn’t get his myrrh and stuff. It’s all down there in the diary. Exit Hubert until the world-renowned trench scene with it all bottled up, if you don’t mind the expression. Let’s go get some fresh air, let’s leave my grandfather laughing and Barstow sniggering. A great victory over the forces of evil. But they’ll come back, they’ll come back. They always do, like migraine dots. I hope yours aren’t obscuring the dawn.
REEL CHANGE. WE’RE getting there. Hey, cross me ’art guv, there really are some classic scenes coming up, stick with it, unfold your legs, you’ll get varicose veins, relax. The People’s Committee found me guilty, by the way. Vice-Principled Vyshinsky said I was generally upsetting a lot of people, it wasn’t just this thing about Jane Russell’s brassière. He mentioned the paper bag over my head and that comment (in my movie history class two years back for God’s sake) about Norma Talmadge being the most beautiful woman ever to have appeared on the silver screen. Norma Talmadge was the most beautiful woman ever to have appeared on the silver screen or even the golden screen for that matter, I replied. Our Dean’s crew-cut kind of quivered all over like it had been electrocuted or was maybe recalling how once it had had something to toss and shake in a summer breeze or in the back of a Chevrolet Bel-Air Convertible doing one hundred and five up the ocean freeway and she fixed me with one of her dirty looks. You also said, she growled, that the beauty of the silent movie stars has never been surpassed. Too right I did, I replied, you can’t have a goddess with a drawl or, just in case you think I’m being anti-American or something crazy like that, clipped vowels like this. There was a general sigh, like I’d confessed to chain-sawing twenty-five nuns over a period of several hours. My imitation of Celia Johnson was a wash-out. Vyshinsky stirred behind his purple waistcoat, the one that gives me migraine and I’ve told him so on several occasions but it’s made no difference, he goes on wearing it day in day out, it smells and has Persian cat hair on its lapels which is maybe why I sneeze whenever he comes too close. Your job is on the wire and the wire is kinda shaky, Rick. I object to the use of my Christian name, I retorted. Uh, don’t you mean your first name, some prick from the literature faculty of the University (HCDVA is affiliated or infibulated or whatever – hey, didn’t you know?) pointed out helpfully. No, I replied, my first name is Archibald (lies, lies). My second name is Richard but I am not about to say hey, I object to the use of my second name. The prick droned on about imperialist discourses and other but he never said what other it was just other and I frowned imperially but Vyshinsky waved his hand and said we’ll leave it for now, Hal. I said hey, I haven’t finished, I object to the use of the name by which my dear mother used to refer to me, I mean can you imagine Vyshinsky yelling Comrade, you have been found guilty by hot flat-iron of dismembering the Soviet state, wrecking the economy, subverting the military-industrial complex, reintroducing the capitalist system, murdering Comrade Secretary Kirov and plotting the murder of Comrade Lenin so I reckon your wire is kinda shaky, Nik.
He didn’t like that. He and the others really didn’t like that. Apparently Sue G. Yass (I am not fabricating, she teaches Getting In Touch with Your Vocal Chords or something over in the drama section) had a grandfather who laughed at a joke about Stalin’s dick in a bread queue in 1936 and knew all about it and didn’t take kindly to, etc. She got really emotional. I said Hey, you haven’t told me what happened to him. What the hell do you think happened to him? she said, in her best Cincinnati Latvian. I presume he ended up in front of a tribunal, Miss Yass, I replied, in my best Trevor Howardian. Vice-Principal Vyshitski’s fist makes mincemeat of the crap pile of papers he’s shoved in front of him to make it look like he can read. Do I need to go on? Basically I have been severely reprimanded, Rick. Rick has lost whatever microscopic chance he had of a boost to his boost or being put in charge of the Canteen Check Committee when Buster G. de C
arrion retires (I am not joking, that name is for serious, he’s a nice guy actually when he’s not picking his nose). Hey, it might have gone to my head. As my daughter used to tell me I don’t need to grow up, I’m better off in the pre-operational stage, I don’t need to ask why it is that I fail when I do, I just do. What hurts is that they’ll touch my pension. My pension is decided by the College Pension Committee if I live that long because I’m not using the elevator whatever and my shared cupboard is three floors up. Hey, I found myself in front of Sue G. Yass in the canteen queue today. She was fairly hostel. I nearly got a plate for her and could have been up in front of the tribunal again for gentlemanly behaviour, it was really close – I so wanted to ask her if the joke about Stalin’s dick was a good one but said anything with no mashed yeast in it please instead as a kind of in-joke because I know she thinks Woody Allen should be strung up but I got zero reaction from her and the counter-lady just carried on talking over her shoulder in Spanish while working the vegetarian’s macaroni with a whaling-spade or something. Then I saw Zelda sitting on her own and dropped my plate on Sue G. Yass’s ankle-bone I think it was, which is probably more painful. She screamed. It was a horrible moment, I thought maybe in some time-slip I had stuck my head inside her body-stocking or something (she wears this lycra skin-cling dance outfit all the time and keeps running her hands up and down her body like she’s lost her wallet which is impossible, you’d see it bulge right out, maybe she’s looking for her vocal chords) and apologised a lot. Everyone was looking at us, there was this terrible silence. I know what Mr Yass Snr Snr felt like now in Stalin-on-Don or wherever it was. Your vocal chords are definitely down there in the right place, I said, I saw them. She said actually she felt very very sorry for me and my immediate family and walked off with her pile of french fries and three really heavy cream puffs. I don’t know how she does it, she must work out like crazy. I kind of nodded ruefully and tried not to look like an unsuspected serial killer so that everyone could get talking again and glanced over to where Zelda had been and she still was. In the kind of lousy films I used to make there’d have been an empty chair instead and I’d have chased after her shadow down endless corridors and into the sewers of Vienna or someplace. But she was still there in this complex masterwork called life. I swallowed and walked over to her with an empty tray and put it down opposite her and she looked up and I felt about sixteen because for about a century our eyes hadn’t met and she has these very grey eyes. I hit Sue G. Yass’s ankle-bone, I said. I dropped my plate by accident, may I sit down? Zelda started sniggling. Her mouth puckered and I thought she was going to cry but instead she sniggled. I guess other people’s misfortunes, etc. I felt this sniggle too but I could sense the security cameras swinging onto me and had to clear my throat and think about operations. This wasn’t difficult because the canteen team all wear surgical gloves which is why I don’t eat much at the canteen quite apart from the macaroni problem and the sesame seeds that get stuck in my bridge. Then I sat down. This is more like Hemingway, I thought. This is going thennishly. Maybe there’ll be a few moreovers. I looked at my tray and realised I had not gotten (sorry, sometimes I like to show off, I like to pretend I’m a chip off the Mayflower instead of a chip on my shoulder) any victuals. I waved my hands around. I guess I forgot to get anything, I said. Where’s the paper bag? said Zelda. I couldn’t believe it. Her grey eyes were looking straight at me and she was being so, well, straight. The canteen started going really echoey. As a matter of fact, it always is echoey, it’s like an aircraft hangar with rubber plants but it got even echoeyer because I realised that Zelda had moved out. Her eyes had red rims around them which meant I guessed she had emoted about it but basically she seemed in very good shape. I smiled ruefully and tried to pick my coffee up because I was looking at her and normally there’s at least a coffee on my tray but I ended up pretending I was doing hand flexions, I did not want Zelda to think I wasn’t mentally Al grade – it’s OK because this is the kind of place people do hand flexions in, there’s a mime and dance module, students are always working out and doing back-flips over my head and stuff, it makes them feel sexy and vigorous and different from their parents who only jog twenty miles a day. I allowed my hand to take a break on my knee while I cleared my throat which I don’t need to do manually, the body’s a great invention. Then I flushed for a few seconds because I’d forgotten the question. It may sound incredible, this, but you have to remember what Zelda does to me even when she’s not about two feet away with her eyes locked onto mine. I swallowed. Then I remembered the question. As long as I kept thenning I was OK. Oh, the bag, the paper bag, I tossed off casually. I wanted to get to the point. The years telescoped. It was as if she had never departed from my personal shores. My dogged loyalty and incredible patience had paid off. I could have hung Todd Lazenby by his green suspenders (have I mentioned his green suspenders already?) and kicked the chair away and watched him piss in his pants to no purpose. I could have chloroformed him and laid him down gently in quick-dry cement on my new patio so only his face was showing and practised my golf swing using the nostril that doesn’t tic to anchor my tee nice and firmly absolutely needlessly. I started to think of him as quite a decent guy and probably wrecked now more than I was because he had nothing left – his wife and kids had gone, his dog had recently been put down owing to some kidney malfunction apparently, he didn’t even play golf, his Vietnam experiences would be falling over themselves to come back and haunt him under the skilled direction of Oliver Stone, he was going to have a very tough few years and his hair loss was definitely getting worse. I didn’t say any of this of course, I just sighed and smiled ruefully and watched Zelda sniggle so much her hair came loose and fell across her cheek. I nearly tucked it back but cleared my throat again instead. I was about to say so you’ve moved out only she clapped her hands kind of lightly. I’m sorry, Ricky, she said. That’s OK, I replied. It’s just that I feel happier than I’ve ever felt in my life, she went on. So do I, I smiled. Do you? she said. Her grey eyes were shining, like pebbles just after the tide’s gone out. I nearly said that, but her hand was holding mine, the one I’d left out on the tray doing flexions. I was about to say will you marry me but she said I’m so glad you un-der-stand instead. The instead is mine, by the way. I nodded because I didn’t quite understand what she meant by that but I didn’t care because emotions lie too deep for words and stuff. She squeezed my hand and said how she always knew what gentle candle was burning in my heart. Thank you, I whispered, or maybe gasped. A person may appear a fool and yet not be one, she pointed out. He may only be guarding his wisdom carefully as Zengetsu put it. You could put it like that, I murmured. Congratulations, someone yelled in my ear. Maybe he didn’t really yell it, but after all this murmuring it sounded like a yell. I nearly said thank you but he was taking Zelda’s hand and shaking it. It was Vyshitsky. Thank you, said Zelda. When is it to be? shouted Vyshitsky. He always wears this purple waistcoat instead of a jacket, by the way. He was nearly clubbed to death by the National Guard in Berkeley or someplace about thirty years ago and reckons that gives him the right to wear purple waistcoats and no jacket for the rest of his life. I think I might have mentioned the purple waistcoat already. Too bad. This weekend, yelled Zelda. She was looking at Vyshitface pretty much as she’d been looking at me, with shining grey eyes etc. Vyshitface shouted some more and then squeezed my shoulder as if I was some Alzheimer’s victim on a day’s outing and pissed off with his pepperoni. If I hadn’t sneezed I’d have thrown up. I wiped my nose on my tie and felt really hungry all of a sudden. I guess I’d better get my lunch, I said. Then I added, hey, what’s up this weekend, honey? You’re not thirty are you? I thought you hit that three years ago. Zelda frowned. Oh Jesus, she said. Oh Jesus? I enquired. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, she repeated. It was like my born-again student’s paper on Soviet Cinema, 1918–1945. I gave it a pretty good grade, some things are not worth the damn risk, at least she didn’t go on about Eisenstein directing The Battleship Pote
mkin in between breaking the atom like the others did. No one’s told you then, she said. I thought the way you came over someone had told you and the wisdom come out at last. No one tells me anything, I chuckled. I was hanging on to my knees because they were jerking around a bit. Oh Jeezus, she said again, I’m so sorry, Rick. You mean you haven’t sent me an invitation? I chortled. No, said Zelda. You’re getting married to Todd Lazenby and you haven’t sent me an invitation? I chuckled. Cool it, Rick, said Zelda. OK, maybe it wasn’t a chuckle, maybe I shrieked. But he’s already married, I ventured to point out while my universe was falling past me like that great scene at the end of Quo Vadis? probably. The divorce came through last week, said Zelda. She’s completely cleaned him out and kept the kids, the car and half of the house but he doesn’t care. We’ll manage. We’ve got my room downtown. We’ll manage there until we find something maybe outside in the woodlands, one of those woodlands schemes that are going cheap right now. I want to hear birdsong in the morning. Real birdsong, she added. Oh, is it canned at his house? I chaffed.