by Melvyn Bragg
‘Joseph! A Cumbrian au pair! Who could possibly resist?’
‘Sometimes . . .’ Joe stood up and mocked a threatening strangulation.
The stripper was in bed when Joe knocked at the hotel-room door and she had to repeat ‘Come in’ twice before he could summon the nerve to enter. When he did he was confronted by the sort of bedroom he associated with swish rooms in well-heeled films, more an unwalled apartment than a bedroom, the chaise longue, the dressing table as strewn with make-up as was the floor with clothes, mainly, it seemed to Joe at the briefest glance, specialist underwear, the open door to a large bathroom and, dominating the room, a four-poster bed and in the bed, head peeping over lilac sheets like a dormouse, ‘Madeleine’.
‘Over here,’ she said in what sounded to Joe like a sultry and suggestive whisper and sent him into a confusion of responses. ‘Sit on the bed,’ she commanded, and a white listless arm fringed with blood-red nails patted the spot. He sat.
‘I phoned,’ he said. ‘Four times.’
‘The phone’s too far away.’ He looked down. It was at his feet. He nodded.
‘They’re waiting for you on the set,’ he said.
‘They can wait.’ She twisted in the bed, revealing a breast he had seen before, and leaned down to the floor to pick up the Du Maurier cigarettes. She held out the box for Joe. ‘Take two,’ she said, in her unforgiving Yorkshire accent. ‘Light mine.’ She held out the lighter. ‘I always think that’s dead romantic.’
He did as he was bid. Marjorie Partington was her real name, fresh up from Barnsley, spotted by Tim Radley the documentary and feature films maker who was completing a movie, Soho by Night. Joe was making an arts process film about his working methods and he had been roped in to help in the setting up of a couple of sequences: including Madeleine the stripper whom Tim liked as much for her Yorkshire accent as for her amazingly proportioned and, as Joe had seen in the rehearsal, unusually supple body.
She tried and failed to blow a smoke ring.
‘We’re both from the North,’ she said, ‘so I can be honest with you.’ She tried again and failed again and Joe could see that it annoyed her. Now she was propped up against the pillows, the sheet clutched over her breasts, her face completely revealed as fully made-up. ‘I didn’t run off to London to show my parts to a lot of dirty old men in macs.’ She tossed her head; it was a well-rehearsed gesture and the thick blonde mane bounced back without hesitation. ‘I’m not knocking the money,’ she said. ‘Money’s good. But it’s not me, Joe, not running between dirty little clubs watching dirty little men play with themselves. I want a career.’
Joe nodded and swallowed cigarette smoke and coughed until his eyes watered.
‘You need something for that,’ she said.
It was a little like a ventriloquist act, Joe thought. This beautiful woman, the blonde hair thickly waved, luxuriant, the features haughty, sexy, proud, but the voice straight from traditional Northern music-hall comedy.
‘I know I speak common,’ she said. ‘You’re thinking that, aren’t you? But that can be worked on. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t speak common yourself once upon a not very long time ago, my friend.’
‘I did,’ said Joe eagerly, in his new middle-media-class tones.
‘Well, if you can get over it we all can, can’t we, Joe?’
‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘I want a film making about me,’ she said. ‘Not just the stooge part in some dirty-minded director’s little titivation. I can sing, me, and I can dance. That’s what I came here for. And when I saw you, Joe, yesterday, at what they called the rehearsal which was a free show to me, I thought – he’ll do it; he’ll make a film on me. Watch this.’
She hesitated for a moment and then said,
‘Christ! Don’t worry. You won’t see anything you didn’t see yesterday and you paid nothing then neither.’
She was magnificent! She sang ‘Walking Back to Happiness’. The Northern accent was whipped off and replaced by an accurately mimicked Southern American soul drawl. And how she moved! Joe had seen the new women in the pop groups on television and Madeleine moved better than any of them, even though the lack of a dress might be an influence on his opinion. She gyrated like a stripper and strutted like a rocker. Though there was no band, her strong big rhythmic voice drove through the room.
‘You were great!’ he said. ‘You really were.’
She was flushed.
‘Really? You really mean it? Really?’
‘Really. You were fantastic.’
‘Do you think you can do something with me?’
‘Yes. Or somebody can. Yes.’
‘Why not you, Joe?’ She walked towards him, as tall as he was, glowing, a slight sheen of sweat. ‘I’d like it to be you.’
‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask.’ Ross McCulloch? ‘You deserve it.’
Why were his words choking in his throat? He stood up. She was all but on him.
‘You won’t let me down, will you, Joe?’ Her eyes were blue and wide now and, he could tell, faking it, but that made no matter. ‘I’ve been let down too many times in my life.’
Somehow from the thicket of his throat came words which, unscrambled, indicated that he would not dream of letting her down. She breathed very deeply, contentedly, her breasts rising and falling with satisfaction.
She looked over her shoulder at the bed.
‘We could celebrate,’ she said, ‘our new partnership.’
‘I’m married,’ Joe said. ‘I’m married.’
Marjorie smiled.
‘I respect you for that, Joe.’ She reached down and held him hard. ‘But you can’t deny an interest in the matter.’
‘I’m married,’ he said, gasping a little. ‘Shall I wait outside?’
‘While I put my clothes on?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think I’m going to like you, Joe, you daft bugger.’
It took him some time to disentangle that encounter. When he told Tim Radley how astounding ‘Madeleine’ was as a singer and a dancer the great man replied, ‘We wondered what took you so long.’ When he tried ways to honour his promise and get a film made about her, ways failed him and he broke his promise and felt bad. She haunted him. When he remembered what had happened he could not believe he had behaved like that but he knew that there was no other way he could have behaved and yet there was the undeniable fact of the erection.
A few months later, Tim Radley embarked on a project to do a dramatised documentary commissioned by Ross McCulloch on the life of Nijinsky and asked Joe if he thought he could write it. ‘Ross told me that he’d heard you read some of your own stuff and it’s quite promising, he said. He suggested I give you a chance.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
He counted James as an old friend even though they had met only at Oxford. Joe was sparing in his use of ‘friend’ and considered it linked with length of time. But Oxford had been a new beginning and undeniably brought new friends, and James, surprising, Buddha-like, thoughtful, affectionate, James, like David, had become one.
‘If you’ve nothing better to do we could meet for a drink,’ James said.
‘That would be great.’
‘There’s a pub in the street next to you, in Wardour Street.’ He gave the name. ‘I could be there by eight.’
‘Thanks. Good. Yes.’ When Joe put down the phone he realised that he was relieved. Natasha and their daughter had gone to Brittany that morning for their summer holiday. At the last minute Joe had been delayed because of the difficulties in the editing of the Nijinsky programme. It would be at least three days before he could join them and he had rung James, seeking help to fill in the unexpected prospect of an evening in London without Natasha. He would be finished in the sweaty little basement cutting room in Soho well before eight but strolling the streets in anticipation of seeing an old friend was a far better prospect than lugging himself back to an early night in the empty house in Kew.
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‘Fixed yourself up, then?’ said Tim, who had affected to regard Joe as a ‘randy sod’ since his over-lengthy call on the stripper and her subsequent tokens of affection to him.
‘Yes . . . a friend from university. Well, and since, actually. He’s a writer, was, is, in the music business now, I can’t quite fathom how he—’
‘For God’s sake, Joe, stop making excuses. The cat’s away!’
Joe blushed even though he was innocent or perhaps because the innocence only papered over the disloyal desires for Madeleine.
‘The problem with this movie is,’ said Tim, ‘how do we end this without giving it the full camp welly and if we give it the full camp welly how do we get to show it? How do we get it past Ross?’
Joe could weary of Tim talking like that about Nijinsky and Diaghilev, whose friendship, then brutal parting and Nijinsky’s tragedy were, he knew, as moving for Tim as they had become for himself. But Tim had seen service in Malaya, and as he often said ‘developed a First-Class Bullshit Detector’, which meant that this heroic dancer, whose mental extremes of sensibility were awesome, and his lover, the great impresario of ballet, whose taste and patronage was on a level with that of the Medici, had to be discussed in barrack-room terms. When Joe hinted at that, he was given what Tim relished to dish out: an Al bollocking.
Yet they got on well, helped by Tim’s cheerful admission that he ‘couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag’. Nevertheless, he added, he knew what worked. Joe’s script had been several times rewritten. It was limited in the amount of dialogue permitted in a docudrama, but nonetheless it was a ‘talkie’, Joe’s first.
Joe did not always make common cause with the total loyalty Tim demanded. When Ross McCulloch had come to see the first rough cut, Joe had been thrown by the man’s dismissal of what he thought was a key scene; Nijinsky in his dressing room, naked (his back to camera of course) after the rift with Diaghilev, his master, his father figure (unfortunately Joe used that term: McCulloch was not impressed by psychoanalysis), and his clearly implied lover. Nijinsky was attempting to put together a sequence of what appeared bizarre steps as excerpts from his notebooks were spoken, interspersed with a rhythmic grunting and chanting. Tim had shot it in slow motion and put some bars from Stravinsky under it. Joe thought it expressed and encapsulated everything about genius struggling against madness to express originality all but out of reach. Ross said it was ‘camp rubbish’ and should be cut out completely. After the dust settled, Tim, to Joe’s dismay, agreed with him.
Perhaps as a consequence, when Ross argued against a basic premise of the film, which was that you could intercut documentary techniques with dramatic scenes, that you could have a Nijinsky portrayed by real photographs and also a Nijinsky played by a young dancer, and Tim hit the roof, Joe said he could see some strength in Ross’s point of view. When Ross had left the cutting room, after having surrendered on the issue, Tim said,
‘You nearly blew it!’
‘He has a point. As he said, a documentary is a documentary.’
‘He always has a point. But that was a typical Ross establishment knee-jerk against what’s new. And it was you he was attacking, you pillock. You wrote the dramatic bits. And not too bad, some of them.’
‘But he still . . .’
‘Bollocks!’
That was the end of it. Later Tim said,
‘At least you’re no dummy.’
And late that afternoon he said,
‘Why don’t you and Alison bugger off and have a drink. You’ve been ogling each other all afternoon. We’ll finish this sequence.’
Alison was the young assistant editor, dark-haired, cream-complexioned, quick-eyed, rather like Rachel, Joe had thought from the start. She looked across at her boss, Gerald, the film editor, for his permission. Gerald nodded.
‘He says the most terrible things,’ said Alison when they were safely on the street. ‘Ogling each other!’
‘He’s good, though. He knows his stuff. Ross thinks he’s our best director.’
Joe had almost an hour to kill. He looked up and down the narrow busy scruffy sexy Soho street still sweating from the slowly setting sun. There was about this place a poison that made him nervous even as it exuded an erotic energy. Up and down the street there were tables uneasy on the dirty narrow pavements but clustered with drinkers determined to suck in the last of the afternoon heat.
‘Quite continental, isn’t it?’ said Alison.
‘Would you like a drink, then?’ Joe asked. ‘Just one. If you want to, that is. I’ve got to stay around for a while. You might need to go home. It’s . . . I . . .’
‘We could go up there,’ she said, and pointed to a less crowded nest of tables at some distance. ‘I’ll have a dry white wine, please.’
As soon as they sat down, she offered him a cigarette, taking charge.
She told him that the sequence cut out by Ross was the best in the film. She told him that when he was not there, Tim made encouraging references to him. She told him she had loved his film on Brassens and especially the parts where he had imitated Renoir. Was it Renoir? She herself wanted to make films like Truffaut.
He did not quite understand how this came about but having clutched tight the secrecy of his novel writing, he told her he was on the final lap of the third draft of a novel set in Cumberland, in a place like the town in which he had been brought up. He told her about Faulkner and Bellow, whom he was reading just now, and Evelyn Waugh, and how odd it was to like Evelyn Waugh’s novels so much when he hated his ideas and his personality so strongly. He told her he could not believe he had written a film for Tim Radley who was always mentioned in the same breath as the best new directors and playwrights and photographers. He told her he could not decide whether photography was a real art or not but when he had put that to Tim he had been informed he was just a literary snob, antediluvian, typically English, without any visual sense and so bloody arrogant he probably did not know how a film camera worked. He didn’t. They had another drink.
When she left she gave him a warm kiss on the cheek which he thought only happened between theatre people. When he watched her walk away he realised he was studying the slim shapeliness, the twitch of the disturbing mini-skirted bottom, the length of exposed leg, the independent stride, the sexy freedom about her. He had drunk three bottles of beer on an empty stomach and his head was muzzy but pleasantly, welcomingly so, he thought, as he made his way to meet James at the rendezvous pub. The summer streets were mostly inhabited by young people, some extravagantly dressed in the new peacock fashions, all of them free and sexy, he guiltily admitted to himself, all of them with the world as their oyster. He too could go anywhere, he thought, on this evening, take any turn, go in any pub, he too was unconfined. Those few minutes following the absorbing appreciative conversation with Alison left him filled with a kind of helium of the moment.
‘I find this pub rather noisy,’ said James in the solemn, well-educated voice which was even more than usually at odds with his keen modern look. It was his clothes, Joe concluded; something very up to date about the clothes.
‘I thought you might like the Buckingham Club,’ said James, as they squeezed out and popped onto the pavement. ‘It’s gay but quite safe and I think it will interest you. Most of these clubs are dirty little fire-traps. The Buckingham thinks it’s rather upper, but pretentious is a better description, though not at all kinky. I think you ought to be made aware of it.’
Joe thought that it could have been mistaken for a rather run-down drawing room in one of those classy but cash-strapped town houses into which he had sometimes landed on his broadcasting quests. There were thickly textured armchairs and sofas, battered as if for extra style, Eastern rugs, well-stocked bookshelves along the panelled walls, real paintings, soft and flattering sidelights, little oak tables for drinks, ashtrays, newspapers and a clientele which, on the whole, looked as if it had been quite acceptably barred from the better London clubs, a couple of which Joe had also
been invited to. The bar was a little item in a corner, as if an afterthought.
Joe’s wary gaze was first attracted to a rich velvet plum-coloured jacket leaning heavily against the bar and containing a writer well known for his dashing bad-taste depictions of the lusts and intrigues of the upper classes.
‘He’s always drunk,’ said James. ‘If you talk to him you’ll never get away. He loves the young working class, especially clever ones. Quite amusing but can be a bit of a barnacle.’
James steered him to a faded purple sofa in a particularly poorly lit part of the room.
‘Busy but not at its buzziest,’ James said. ‘Yet not altogether disappointing.’
He signalled several times and at last a young man dressed in black trousers and a white shirt and even in the heat a tie, sauntered across.
‘Two beers,’ said James. ‘Lager. One with lime.’
The young man sighed, put a small saucer of olives on the little round table and drifted away in the general direction of the bar. James addressed the situation.
‘The first thing to grasp, though it may soon change from what we read, is that what is quite often happening here is still a criminal offence. Sodomites, as some of our judges like to call them, us, are sent to jail if discovered in delicto, usually in a public lavatory, and they trump up charges all the time, but in a club like this we’re safe. The criminality only adds an extra frisson of dangerous excitement. Ah! I’d rather hoped he’d come in. That man, rather short, in the pin-striped, three-piece suit, is a QC, an utter shit and a hypocrite, a collector’s item.’
James was silent for a while, looking the place over. Joe wanted to be a Chandler hero, quietly casing the joint, but it was all he could do to stay calm. As he began to decode the movements around the room, the questing of some, the posing of others, the soft voices and softer laughter, the soft strokings of the arm, the occasional kiss on the cheek, the intimate play over the lighting of a cigarette, he felt a rather erotic mixture of fascination and unease, alarm and attraction, a sort of breathlessness, and an unmistakable stirring of excitement.