‘Brilliant? My my, praise indeed.’
‘Take it or leave it, only the dim or criminally jealous would think otherwise.’
‘I think I’ll take it then.’
Straight talking that was not as straight as it seemed was a simple idiom for Petula to slip into, one this audience had sufficient experience of to know they were dealing with no ordinary fraud, allowing Petula to continue. ‘But where the dickens did you shoot the thing? I live in Yorkshire but what was going on with the moors? I’ve never seen them look so… red, red for heaven’s sake! Four episodes and not a drop of rain, it was bloody a desert! I half expected to see Clint Eastwood ride over a hill!’
‘Independent Week-e-n-d Television,’ snorted Eager, killing each word, ‘somehow took it into their heads that Malta would be a cheaper place to shoot than Kirkby, hence the farce you refer to. Mind you, back to your first point, given the inauspicious circumstances…’
‘We really did shine,’ said Astley finishing his sentence, ‘yes, for a cut price pile of poo, the worst “Withering Shites” in living memory, we were brilliant. I’m just amazed that anyone stayed watching long enough to notice. Still, if it hadn’t been for those three weeks in Valletta we would have never met, would we Don?’ He brushed a thick lock of hair away from his eyes, ‘and life would be very different. This man was my hero, my role model you know.’
‘Wasn’t he to us all?’ exclaimed Margy Middleton, a more homely version of her anorexic sister, Esther, who added slightly less sarcastically: ‘Yes, it was almost a national duty to find this man attractive, once upon a time.’
‘How I remember,’ gushed Petula, leaning forward and showing her bosom in a way that even the gay couple found beguiling, ‘they say you should never meet your heroes in the flesh, that they always disappoint; I’m pleased to say that I’m not finding that to be the case, not at all…’
‘You dear, dear woman, here, join us, please,’ Eager offered his chair. ‘Who do we have the pleasure of talking to?’
‘Petula, Petula Montague.’
‘Donald Eager at your service, Margy, Esther and Max, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.’
Petula’s laugh followed falsity’s highest calling, not a note too low or true. She was afraid that at any minute she would be revealed as a piece off a different board, mixed into this set by mistake, and that she must keep trying and not relax for a second.
‘Please have my chair.’
‘Too kind.’
‘Anything for a beautiful lady.’
Petula took her place at the fold-up table, the autograph hunters forgotten for the moment, another bottle of wine quickly opened as she sprinkled flattery far and wide lest anyone feel excluded by her rapid entry into the upper echelons of British acting.
‘What I would like to know, love to know in fact, is how you all do it,’ she said looking at the Middleton sisters while still addressing Eager and Astley, ‘the way you become the characters you play. Is there any hope for the rest of us or do we mere mortals have to rely on make-up and method acting to scale the same heights as you natural players?’ Petula frowned for emphasis as she had noticed Astley to do in his promotional posters. Providing her new friends were the object of her effusions they would believe every word, stray off course and praise anyone else in the same terms and they would think she was talking delusional nonsense; the trick was to shut out the rest of the world and its standards of credulity. All that existed was here.
‘The short answer is that we are a nest of geniuses and the rest are a shower of jobbing hacks,’ laughed Margy Middleton, the two bottles of wine she had drunk before the show combining with the one she had sunk since to induce a certain unsteadiness, ‘they can’t bleeding act, they just copy, is what they do.’
‘So you don’t waste time with anything dull like researching characters? Is that all nonsense?’
Margy held onto her mouthful of Muscadet with difficulty and pulled a face suggesting that the answer to the question, were she capable of answering it, would be not if she could helpit.
‘I find,’ said Eager, his sentences inclined to begin as neat summaries, ‘that as with life, moving forward with what I can best characterise as vague hope will offer you far greater freedom than the results of predictive analysis. Specificity and research, as you intimate, are the preserve of the second-rate. No harm in that of course, there’s room for us all.’
‘I read this theory.’
‘Stop there, theory is the revenge of the second-rate against the talented, do not speak to me of it again!’
Petula nodded sagely, it was not hard to see why Eager had earned his moniker, ‘the Professor’.
‘Absolutely,’ said Astley, not to be outdone by the master. ‘Overdetermination takes the air out of a role. I please my audience because they please me, and there’s something internal to that relationship, a dynamic if you will that provides me with what I’m looking for in a part. Trying to put it together from the outside doesn’t work, you need to begin in the middle and from the inside for authentic results.’
‘And not overlook the political context,’ chipped in Esther.
‘Which in itself is no more than saying anything goes,’ concluded Eager.
‘Ahh yes, a natural selection of accidents, that’s what I believe in,’ said Petula disingenuously, confident that it did not really matter if she understood what the others were saying as it was a conversation that asked no more of her than she grasp its general drift. ‘In fact, I deliberately leave my calendar blank, I hate being hemmed in by plans or detail of any kind,’ she lied, glad that the children were still too young to contradict her.
‘Plans, God! I think I’m going to miss my train!’ exclaimed Esther whitening at the thought, ‘I’ve an early one to catch. I’m meant to be selling the paper in Ilford tonight… I promised Kaspar I would as we’ve no evening performance. There’s a strike on, they’re relying on me.’
‘Bollocks to Ilford and bollocks to the paper,’ said Astley, taking her cup from her and filling it again with cheap rosé. ‘I feel like getting properly stewed after that ghastly farce of a play! Who’s with me?’
‘Oh yes!’ said Petula clapping her hands, sure that Mingus and Regan would find plenty to do amidst the props and costumes. ‘I could do with getting a bit tight myself!’
‘Where did you get that gorgeous outfit made up?’ asked Margy, spilling some of her wine over Petula’s blouse.
‘Shatby, nowhere special. It’s in Yorkshire.’
‘Shatby, that’s funny, we were talking about that place the other day… what for… oh god, what are we doing there again?’
‘Come on Margy, the booze is ruining that memory of yours, you’ll be fluffing your lines next. Yes, about that other Heathcliff, the intense force of nature that is Ned Wrath,’ opined Eager. ‘Brilliant man of course, but heavy, heavy-going, not the sort of chap you’d want to get stuck in a lift with. Anyway, he’s what we’re doing there.’
‘Really?’
‘Afraid so, we once had to speak at an event together and all he could do was tell me that America was a terrible place for “the black man”, which was quite useless information in my case as any fool could see I wasn’t black…’
‘Oh really!’
‘Yes, he’s moved from save-the-hedgehog to save-the-world. And he’s not even all that young, must be thirty or over, terrible time to get into all that self-righteous crap.’
‘I don’t trust these single issue politicians,’ sniffed Esther. ‘Lovely man, heart in the right place and all but the only way we’re going to rid the world of injustice is class-based politics.’ Petula eyed Esther with amused disinterest, she really was no threat to her at all if she carried on like this all the time. ‘If we start thinking of ourselves as separate from each other then we’re playing the bosses’ game, letting them divide and rule, and the revolution can just as well be put off forever.’ Esther winced as if the very thought had the
power to turn her insides. With her neat and delicately proportioned face, primed with emotion carelessly redirected from one place to another, Petula did not much fancy Esther’s chances in any upcoming revolution, decadent late-capitalism seeming just about the right thing for her.
‘No I don’t see it,’ Margy was saying. ‘Why can’t we be both women and Marxists, Red Indians, Hedgehogs or whatever. You know, you have your reality and I have mine, and yours can be whatever you want it to be, so long as you don’t tell me what I’ve got to be in mine.’
‘You can’t be a woman and a hedgehog,’ said Eager dryly, ‘though exploitation is verily egalitarian in its application, I do agree.’
‘But there are female hedgehogs, Don.’
‘But they’re not Marxists, dear.’
Petula would not let them stray too far from the hook. ‘What is your connection with Wrath, do you all know him or something? And why Shatby?’
‘Oh, just a curio the agent we all share, the great Tim Tinwood, has got us into, should be quite interesting actually…’
‘Of course it’ll be “quite” interesting Don, it’ll be a bloody honour and a cute gig to be associated with.’
‘But he’ll be there Max, picking holes in our intonation, diction and God-knows-what-else. He’s a bloody fusspot, look at the way he tore apart that documentary Ken Russell made on him, a work of hagiography if ever there was one. He’s a perfectionist who considers human life too messy, and us as part of that mess. I’m certainly not looking forward to having to recite him to his face.’
‘Still. Have you ever read his Pig-Man, Dog-Woman? A masterpiece, it’s the volume I’ll be reading from, a hugely underrated piece of work.’
‘I don’t think underration is a problem Wrath’s oeuvre suffers from.’
The conversation was pinging along in the direction Petula wanted, this was the way she liked it, speed was the highest value, to move through experience as quickly as possible, attempting to understand the why of what she was doing a dreadful brake on momentum. She had brought the horses to water, now they were drinking her bait.
‘Don is being picky, I think Wrath is every bit the seer the press portray him to be,’ said Astley, ‘it’s just that we’re uncomfortable admitting such a man walks amongst us in this iconoclastic age. I must admit, of course, all the stuff about his plough and penis can be a bit much but one can see what he’s trying to do…’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ smiled Petula coyly, ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit of his plough.’
Astley slapped his thigh and laughed uproariously, ‘I’m not above a bit of smut myself, however given Wrath’s views on the love that dare not speak its name, I doubt whether he will be up for a plough-share with me any time soon, he’s quite old-fashioned like that I hear.’
‘Yes, a bloody puritan in some ways,’ chuckled Eager, ‘I understand that he even thinks playing with yourself is a sin, a waste of good sperm and not at all what the earth goddess thinks we should be doing with our willie winkies.’
‘God knows what else there is to do in Shatby! The pictures I’ve seen of the place look absolutely ghastly!’
‘Hold on there…’
‘No my good lady, I won’t hear a word said in defence of the place, I was in digs, back in ’38, playing Iago, my then wife Desdemona and the bloke I was sleeping with Othello, and the landlady would wake us with full nudity, a bucket of oats and a cup of freezing weasel pee, which in Shatby is known as “the full Yorkshire” for breakfast! No, a dreadful place. Let it fall under the same bombs as Slough! I will die defiling its name!’
‘I couldn’t agree more, you wouldn’t catch me even buying petrol there and that’s my point, you don’t have to stay in bloody Shatby!’ Petula protested. ‘My farm is a decent distance from town, round the corner but not too close if you know what I mean, so no need for you to be holed up in some miserable seaside B&B… there’s plenty of room at mine. Cosy. Nothing spectacular I warn you.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Of course, it’s nothing much to speak of, but you’d be my guests, I insist.’
‘What a marvellous suggestion. How generous of you.’
‘No, we couldn’t put you to the trouble,’ interrupted Astley firmly, ‘I mean, we hardly know you, though it’s very nice of you to offer. You’re simply being too generous and you’d regret it later when you found that you didn’t like us.’
Petula could not tell whether he was being cautious or polite. Still, it was too late to retreat now, best give it all she had.
‘Fiddlesticks, what trouble? I insist you come as my guests. I insist. I’m not much one for entertaining so you’d be left alone, but I think you’ll adore what you find. There’s nothing so melancholic as an empty space and I have far too many bedrooms in exactly that state. They need filling by bright creative people.’
Reagan watched her mother work the actors from under a large hat she had been playing with, Mingus talking away quietly at his reflection as he posed with a plastic axe, the two children revelling in their invisibility.
‘So it’s settled? You’ll all come.’
‘A farm,’ hiccuped Margy, her flushed cheeks resembling those on the figurehead of a whaling vessel, ‘I don’t think I’ve even been to one since I was a land-girl. Do you have chickens? I like an egg at breakfast. Double yolkers we used to have.’
‘As many as you want, chickens and eggs, the whole lot.’
‘You old ham Margy, you were never a land-girl.’
‘I bloody was, how would you know anyway, you fucked off to America with Mummy before the first bombs fell!’
‘I never did! Anyway, Ontario isn’t part of America it was part of the Empire then…’
‘Oh shut up the pair of you, did I ever tell you about the time I snogged Patton in drag?’ guffawed Eager, dropping a turret of ash over Petula’s Hermes handbag.
The adults were drinking more and quickly, to slow down just a little tantamount to stopping completely. Petula was being toasted in wild and extravagant terms and appeared to be soaking it all in. Then, at about the second time Regan heard her mother tell Esther she was beautiful, the thin lady burst into tears.
‘I’m sorry, have I said the wrong thing?’
Margy took Esther’s hand but her sister threw it off and spluttered through her sobs. ‘If I am so beautiful why doesn’t any man want me, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I have children, why can’t I find anyone to have children with?’
Petula shot a look at Eager as if to ask, where did that come from, and accepted the swift refill he provided by way of consolation.
‘Esther’s been through the wars recently, poor girl, lover left her.’ ‘There there Esther, Petula was only meaning to be nice,’ said Margy consolingly; but her sister was not to be consoled.
‘Everywhere I go, knowing no man will take me, only the ugly or old ones. Everyone wondering what’s the matter with her, why can’t she find a man who’ll say those sweet, simple words, “I love you Esther and want you”? Why? Why won’t they come to me, I have so much of myself to give, why?’
Petula felt her face redden like a hot plate, she needed to cheer this morose cow up and do it quickly or else the wonderful esprit de corps she’d established would vanish as immaterially as it had come. But how to do it? Both men were smiling awkwardly and Margy rolling her eyes in a sympathetic loop of the room, yet Esther showed no sign of giving up her mission of misery. ‘Too thin, is anyone too thin to be loved?’
‘No.’
Esther stopped crying as suddenly as she had started, amazed at the identity of her interlocutor. Mingus held a handkerchief up to her which she took at once and dried her eyes.
‘You are a very pretty woman,’ he continued with the utmost seriousness, ‘and there is no reason why you should cry, Mrs Montague was saying the truth. You are very pretty.’
Petula could have swallowed the darling boy whole. Even Eager, who was drinking directly from the bottle, looked ama
zed enough to stop for a moment and express his approval with a: ‘My, my. Who taught you to speak like that my boy?’
‘Mrs Montague, she talks like me too.’
‘Do you really think so?’ asked Esther needily, ‘I mean, that I’m not too thin?’
‘You are just right for a tall lady, just right,’ Mingus insisted, his large eyes focused upon Esther’s trembling lower lip.
‘Just right?’ It was the name and catchphrase of a popular brand of cereal though Esther, who usually missed breakfast, was not to know this.
‘Just right.’
‘Would you like to marry me when you grow up?’
‘I don’t think I would like to get married until I’m much older, when I am I would like to be with someone nice like you… or Mrs Montague.’
‘That’s it, now you must really think that I’ve fed him enough sweeties to start a shop,’ said Petula, providing the cue for startled laughter.
Esther was not to be finished with the prodigy and took his hands ceremoniously. ‘We’re alike you and I, little man, we feel things deeply and say only what we mean. Grownups such as I have much to learn from you my friend.’
‘Yes,’ said Mingus agreeably. ‘Now don’t cry anymore please.’ Which actually made Esther cry again but in what everyone could agree was a good way this time.
‘What a total, total darling. I love him.’
Uncharitably, because of her good start, Petula felt a strain of annoyance with her small saviour, which she knew to be beneath even her prickly competitive sense.
‘He has such an interesting way of speaking. Say something else little man, whatever’s on your adorable mind.’
Nature and Necessity Page 6