by Adam Thorpe
Charming picture, says my grandfather.
She looks up and because he’s waving his hand around like a traffic policeman she hasn’t the foggiest what he’s on about. And then he doesn’t help the situation by saying C’est un banquet charmant au sein de la nature, Où chacun a sa place et trouve sa pâture. Her mouth is now right open. That wasn’t Henrik in his Rimbaud phase by the way it’s off a postcard Nurse Ginger-Whiskers Hallam purchased in 1903 of a bird charmer in the Tuileries Gardens at Giles’s insistence when the Trevelyans were travelling continentally for a month and it did not matter one jot that this guy in a big walrus moustache and greasy cape and soiled trousers too small for him had a pocketful of crumbs, Giles reckoned he was the tops – especially with the bird muck all over his shoulders like a hard frost as Uncle Ken pointed out and this pigeon on his hat like Sir Lancelot as William pointed out, a little forward for his sailor suit as always. It’s French, my grandfather’s saying. Then he blushes, because he was about to say it’s a French postcard of a bird-charmer. But if you dumbos didn’t know this already that sentence in 1914 or at any date from around 1880 is lethally loaded because a French postcard in 1914 means one with a girl in a corset up to but not incl. her nipples licking a baguette or lowering her buttocks onto the Eiffel Tower or unlacing her otherwise completely unclothed mistress’s leather boot while this jerk in an oiled walrus holds out some lilies with the edge of the backcloth showing behind the tin tub with the discarded frilly knickers arranged tastefully upon it. So my grandfather brakes in a cloud of flint-chips and manages to say St Francis and the birds instead. He steps over and picks up the picture and the bamboo frame comes apart. He holds the bottom piece of the frame to stop the glass falling out and pretends that it’s not an incredibly cheap and shoddy frame coming apart in his hands but looks at it with his heart beating very hard as if it’s Piero della Francesca and sees his own face in the glass and what a stupendously silly fool he looks.
Frightfully charming, he says.
This is about the crappiest dialogue I have ever seen in any film but stick with it, this is how it was, I’d have preferred the line leading pretty soon to me to have been instigated during something you could have spliced unedited into The Rainbow or whatever but hey, sorry, this is the truth, truth mumbles and sends the fly on the wall off to sleep unless the fly on the wall realises that every movement reveals us. My grandfather’s wondering how he’s going to get this collapsing icon back onto the little bedside ex-milking stool intact, it’s like he’s come in here and smashed up her toys or something, her presence next to him is a very complicated thing, she’s a blur next to him but it’s a very complicated blur involving downy golden hairs on forearms and precious cheapjack articles and the sound of breathing and the hint of armpits under a cotton print dress with tiny red roses all over it and these dark locks coming out of their pins and surprisingly dirty fingernails and as he’s trying to pretend not to be pressing the bottom piece of bamboo back into the glass and the backing and the little tacks in each corner he gets this very clear image of her whole life from birth to now, she’s drowning inside his head, he’s slotted his coin into the peep-show, flap flap flap. There’s a baby and a little girl and a bigger little girl and then a little big girl and then right now where there’s kind of a girl and a woman at the same time with her little bedside treasures and her feminine articles and a rag doll not really wanting to look over the cream bed-cover and finally this fellow in white flannels next to the bed and it’s him and the penny drops and it’s dark again, it’s that gust, Clifford’s going great guns with the thunder-sheet the other end of the lawn, tell him to cool it, it’s not the Second Coming yet, just because he lost a Pall Mall hotel last night. Giles looks up and the light wavers on again and he wonders how anyone could survive these draughts. He feels quietly moved by his viewing of The Maidservant’s Life but of course he doesn’t wipe away a tear, it’s like a very submerged sob that never makes it past Jules Verne level. As a matter of fact he’s getting irritated by this picture, it’s like he wants to hold her life in his hands but his hands are full, he gives up and rests it on its back on the stool because if he tried to place it upright it would probably collapse.
Dennis Price plays this guy called Jack Yates of the City Imperial Volunteers with a damaged dick and a brandy problem in that Amiens Cathedral scene, by the way. Just in case you’re thinking of pissing off out of here. And the drizzle’s getting worse, it’s kind of sleety now. Stick in the warm for a few more hours, pour yourself a Buck’s Fizz or an Essex Fuzz or whatever. Go for it.
My grandmother’s wiping some glitter off her nose, she probably couldn’t care less about this picture or not now at any rate, now it’s just part of her general sadness and she feels the bed bounce and it’s him, he’s sat beside her, tweaking his flannels up like no one under sixty does these days. I’m leaning right forward in my seat now. Like I used to lean forward in the Enfield Ritz and sometimes slip off and crack my tooth on the ashtray especially if it was that bit in Great Expectations Des used to remind me about after Mither had flicked the light out and the clothes on my chair were doing their Son of Werewolf routine and the hairs on my back were proving they existed. I hope I don’t crack my tooth on my knees because there’s no ashtray in front of me, only a sheep-fleece rug with attached thistles from my uncle in Melbourne who’s trying to find Will There’s A Way on video and keeps writing to me about this. I’m not going to disappoint him, he’s nearly ninety, it might finish him off, it gives him a purpose in life outside of his scuba-diving and bungee-jumping and stuff.
Hey, they’re not very close in fact. I would say there’s easily two feet between them. He’s gone as near the end of the bed as he can get without having a drypoint of the cast-iron rods on his thighs and she’s nearly on the bolster.
Basically they’re staying very still for a moment.
It’s like you wouldn’t know the camera was working except that the light’s unstable, the candles are jittery, this draught through the crack in the window is making the celluloid work for its living.
Dennis Price. And, hey, Alec Guinness. Yup. Alec Guinness as Parkes. Actually I have the whole Ealing stock company scattered through the rest of this movie. Parkes is Giles’s batman. Wot a character, cor lumme, patter like there’s no tomorrer which there probably ain’t, drives Giles up the bleedin’ wall. He gets blown up fairly swiftly but it’s the young Alec Guinness, he’s not that fantastic at nineteen. He has this great running gag wiping his little spectacles on his sleeve every two minutes but his Cockney accent’s hopeless. After the shell lands on his head or wherever Giles finds these spectacles unscathed in the general pulp and sends them back to Mrs Parkes the dear old mum (Margaret Rutherford) but, wait for it, he wipes them carefully first.
It’s still just the light moving, and probably their internal organs.
The first movie was a cave-painting, by the way. It said so in this article in Time magazine I picked up at my heart specialist’s last week. How the bisons and wild antelopes and mammoths and so forth were painted onto irregular rock so when the tallow-lamp arrived out of the pitch-black they all shifted around, the shadows jittered and swayed, it was a very early use of the Starlight enhancement to Quantel’s Mirage Digital Video Effect, it was basically a shade modifier, this is the kind of junk Dr Laysemendtoend comes up with and no one giggles. But if I were to add that excuse me you’re talking steaming shite, there is no correlation between DVEs and the kind of magic my but I’m not sure your ancestors were into, these people were continually profound, they drew animals like no person could draw animals now because we’re full of steaming shite and watch DVEs instead of how a bison’s hip-joint ripples, they allowed the animals to come into them and let them out through their finger-tips onto the rock like I’ve let my grandparents come into me and out through my fingers onto the rock and now they’re both just sitting there moving but not moving in the candlelight, the whole fucking class’d be on a hysterics l
oop-tape.
I guess you’re moving but not moving in the dawn light or maybe ten o’clock light by now of the new millennium. I wish sometimes I could move but not move in the dawn light of about twenty thousand years ago minimum. I have this very strong urge sometimes to be prehistoric because being post-historic you don’t have the wind and animals and leaves of grass blowing through your mind, you just have an incredible amount of gunk and junk, it’s like being a waste tip where the only beautiful thing is the wheel of gulls and they’re laughing.
I feel very Walt Whitman sometimes, as a matter of fact. I really feel like cleaning meself art, guv. Fade the gulls to faint, for God’s sake.
I don’t want to know the void though, I was never into this void thing of Zelda’s, I’m a really unZen person actually. Basically I think I’m a Great Prairie person. If I could get my head emptied of everything except rolling silvery grassland to the open sky I’d be right there, I do believe. I know you’ll be tittering to hear Ricky Thornby of all people talk like this but hey, everyone has their secret, their quirk, their personal planet. OK, they’re moving again.
I feel awfully like a smoke, says my grandfather.
He’s turned his head a few degrees towards my grandmother at least and somehow the Woodbine’s got into his hand. My grandmother nods. It’s kind of a dutiful nod, like he’s just asked for some more cocoa. There’s a lot of rustling of clothing, I think the mike must be badly positioned or maybe clothing in those days was noisier.
Do you? asks my grandfather.
She turns her face and looks at him square on with her mouth open so he can see the little glistening cave of it and then at the fag then back at him and shakes her head. It’s amazing that her eyes meet his for more than it takes for me to sip my duty-free Laphroaig once and replace it on my Shad tea-chest if you think about it, because up to now she’s never actually more than kind of glanced off of his eyeballs when stair-passing or wielding her majolica crumb-brush on the tea-table in front of his knees. I hope you like this shot of my grandfather’s eyes which are blue-green not kind of mud-green like mine and of course Willo’s. That’s the last time you’ll see them in extreme close up until 1917 when they’ll be encircled by a gas mask and blinking with some very heavy scuba-diving breathing going on but I’m not trailing that now, there’s no time. My grandmother’s raven eyes drop to his breast-pocket and she says I didn’t mean to hit him sir in such a quiet voice it makes my grandfather lean towards her and the bed has to be rushed to hospital.
Sorry?
I didn’t mean to hit him, Master Giles.
Who?
Master William, sir.
Hey, if you have a fruppenny bit for five frows and don’t lean over the string and get free of the balls through my grandfaver’s mouf you could win a lead duck, they were collectors’ items down the Portobello Road in my heyday, roll up’n ’ave a go guv, he’s not going to be like that for long, he’s going to taste the Cologne water and the candle wax and the armpit-sweat etc. on the inside of his cheeks and snap it shut like right now. See? Too late. He thinks he might have sat on the stain. He stands up and sure enough he did. He didn’t look, it happens sometimes, the seat of his white flannels has picked up the cat’s afterbirth, he’s twisting round to look and Milly has stood also and is doing things with her hands in the air and she says I’ll wash them straight off, I’ll bleach them straight off, sir. He looks at her now and starts to snort, no, laugh. This is crazy – he starts to laugh. He’s got this big slime patch on his white seat and his fingers are crooked in front of his mouth like he’s trying to catch his laugh or something and my grandmother’s holding her hands out like she’s going to take his trousers right now for God’s sake and I don’t know where to look, I’m blushing, I’m embarrassed at these people like I used to be embarrassed at my parents when they came to School Open Day and my mother’s high heels kept catching in the holes in the lino and my father’d wear his sharp suit and try to comb his hair in the staff-room bottle-glass and say cor lummy every time Miss Bellerby rippled past. I survived though, my scars are barely picked at now, the school was authentic Jacobean with huge oak trees and beams with real woodworm so they demolished it and put up a whizzo H Block in pre-stained concrete with extremely large rectangles of glass that gives a great view of pre-stained concrete with extremely large rectangles of glass that gives a great view of your tiny face trying to find your tiny face which leaks in 1953 and the saplings didn’t make it, they got some disease – but there’s lots of ground cover at the foot of the security fences so the Miss Bellerby Memorial Fund for the Advancement of Natural History Studies has something to go on, she’d have been quietly proud if she’d not got giddy while examining a buck’s-horn plantain somewhere about an inch too close to the edge of Wales and seventy-five feet too far from the shingle six weeks before her retirement, I was surprisingly sad, when I told my dad in the Home he said cor lummy and I practically fainted, it’s the one and only sane response he’s made to date since the stroke.
It’s OK. My grandfather’s stopped laughing. Just like that, like I’ve yelled CAT and we’re to do it again, like a passionate kiss can end just like that when you yell CAT and the guy turns his face and you’d think he’d just been biting a sour apple or something.
But I wasn’t in the room, no one yelled CAT. Hey, all twenty-four people crammed into that room could have yelled CAT and my grandfather wouldn’t have heard them, he’s really in his own world now, his eyes are burning because the laughter made them leak a bit and now you’ve got this great candle-flame specular in each one just over the retina which my grandmother even notices but it’s hard for us, they’re not in extreme close-up now, the crew missed that one. Instead they’re tightening in on the hands. My grandfather’s hands are closing around my grandmother’s hands and my grandmother’s hands are sitting inside my grandfather’s hands like a baby rabbit. Like that time the late Fawholt gravedigger came out from behind some geranium pots and gave him something soft to hold that rippled and then just trembled while his heart leapt around and Nurse Ginger-Sideburns Hallam brushed hairs from his sailor suit lapels and got tense in 1905 or something.
Don’t hurt me, says my grandmother.
Ladas Cream Baking-Powder thinks my grandfather because there’s a Ladas Cream Baking-Powder tin full of hairpins or maybe insects just beyond the maid’s head, on the window-sill there, and right now his eyes are kind of skirting her face because her face is looking surprisingly distressed.
Why should I want to hurt you, Milly?
You’re hurting me hands, she says.
He realises he is but it’s nerves, her hands haven’t got the pliability of a baby rabbit, they’re quite bony. Sorry, he says. He relaxes his grip a jot but the baby rabbit doesn’t try to escape. This is very complex. She may not be trying to remove her hands because she’s too frightened to resist or because no one’s held them for about nine months since Sis and then her Ma held them at Worksop station and it’s quite nice having your hands cupped. Or maybe there’s something sexual here, just maybe, but I have to tread on tiptoe through this area because there are a lot of people in white coats and round spectacles just waiting for me to slip up and say hey, come on over and see my Japanese nose flutes or whatever.
Or maybe it’s all those things at once. Maybe if you were to take a deep emotion sample the tube’d be full of different soils and industrial poisons and some bits of bone and pottery and you’d be in the lab a long time sifting it. He lets her hands go. He steps back. Her hands weren’t the same as Amy’s were on that slope, the maid’s hands are bonier. He feels incredibly nervous now, he doesn’t feel he’s achieved anything, the fag’s between his lips, it must have got there when the lens was sampling the light on my grandmother’s neck. I’ve spilt my fucking Laphroaig, leave it, let the fleece get happy. Now there’s a low angle on his shoes, they’re involved with this apron on the floor, this big white apron either Sylvia remembered too late or we just didn’t pick
up before – it’s the one my grandmother untied and tugged off her shoulders and hurled away before bursting into sobs about ten minutes ago when she was on her own. He lifts his feet up and out like he’s in liquid mud again. He actually picks the apron off the floor and holds it in front of him.
I say, ah, what do you mean you hit my bro? he says.
He’s looking at the apron as he’s saying this, it’s as if he’s asking the apron why it hit William, this must be what Robert means by automatism and the cause following the effect and making the objects look as if they want to be there, it’s completely illogical. Ladas Cream Baking-Powder also runs through his brain, there’s a pink stain on the apron, his cigarette’s moving up and down because he wants to chew his bottom lip but it’s tricky with a fag in the way. My grandmother’s also looking at the white apron. She has her mouth open like she’s about to whistle and make it lift its head and prick its ears or something, she’s seen this three times at the local lousy music-hall, it was grand the first time, not so grand the second, totally pathetic the third. This reminds me of a great exercise I did with Peter as in Brook the day before I got blinded for several seconds by tear-gas outside the US Embassy, that was quite a week, life’s been downhill ever since, we got this grey cloth and pretended it was a very sick person who had to be carried off this mountain in Tibet, we carried it down across the lino of this big low room for the whole morning, the worst bit was crossing the stream in full spate from the melting snows by the fire extinguisher, it was a very rocky mountain with extremely thin air, Peter was sitting like a Buddha on his rug, he didn’t help at all – this very sick person was heavy and delicate and definitely groaned when I lost my footing on some terminal moraine, I think he survived though, we all had some strong tea and Peter thanked us and hugged me. I forgot to switch the camera on. It’d have looked very naff, I told myself, weeping afterwards. It’d have looked so incredibly naff. Maybe I didn’t say naff in those days. Maybe I said something else like it just wouldn’t have swung or its soul would’ve been out for lunch and then about twelve hours later I had gas in my eyes, maybe it’s a family tradition, I was weeping some more by this upside-down coach with everybody screaming and I’d lost my bandanna, it was crazy, a crazy way-out week, man.