‘Tell you though, I’ve seen a fair few who’ve spent a bit too long staring at that.’ He jabs a finger at Nostalgia. ‘It’ll make a cowran, tim’rous beastie of anyone. No much freedom in that.’
I smile in delight. I feel oddly grateful to the barman but have no idea why. ‘You like Robert Burns then?’
‘I just know a few.’
‘You want another?’
‘I wouldn’t say no.’
He doesn’t. He pours us two more doubles. Fixes me with a gimlet eye. ‘Why’d you stop making films?’
‘Ah, you’ve recognised me.’
‘C’mon. The whole town knows you’re coming. No many folk turn up here with a limo and a bodyguard.’
He points with his chin. I turn and smile at Akira, sitting quietly at a table. ‘No. I suppose not.’
‘What happened to the films?’
‘That’s why I’m back. I’m making another one.’
‘Really? An old man like you?’
I laugh loudly and point at the mirror. ‘Nostalgia, my friend. Who can resist?’
And soon a fraying.
The little voice saying we must go now, go now nags for a while longer but is eventually silenced.
Fraying, Duke, it sounds just like freeing.
I tell the barman about The Bruce. He’s intrigued, clearly a man who also likes his myths to be muddied.
I even offer him a part. The old retainer, who brings Bruce some wine as he stands alone, looking down from the ramparts the night he took Edinburgh Castle. Frank Stone can only agree, what does it matter to that hack anyway? What matters is that it matters to me. It’s so rare to meet someone I can talk to, about Bruce, about Burns, who can reel off lines. We’re laughing like a couple of old pals and maybe we were pals, Duke, at primary school, why the hell not?
‘There was a group of us that used to go about together.’
‘Proper wee toerags, so we were!’
‘Down the Esha cliffs, remember?’
‘That circle of big boulders down on the shore. Like a den. Or a castle. Didn’t we used to call it Esha Castle?’
Maybe the barman was also with us that autumn day, Duke, when we cycled out the Albannach Road and went fishing from the rocks, the mackerel coming in on the tide and we were in them, in them, five, ten, a dozen . . . heading here afterwards, the three of us, did we really come in here, The Clachan, showing off our catch to our fathers, who toasted our skills, as The Breda Boys were toasted a few years later, remember, the barman also here the night of that farewell party, listening to the old man’s speech, watching you serenade poor embarrassed Anna . . .
‘Some night, some night.’
‘Half the town was here.’
‘Sinky fell in the harbour on his way back home. Poke of chips and he didn’t see the mooring rope.’
‘Sinky by name.’
Soon we are telling others these stories, who appear as if from nowhere, filling up The Clachan, office and shop workers on their lunch break, delight in their eyes as they meet and greet old Johnny Jackson, Goretex-clad tourists clutching Lonely Planets like bibles, sipping their first malt.
And over there, the old man, that tatty fedora, shouting in old Donny’s ear, you in the corner with Anna and yes, we’re going to be making films, in London, and no, I can’t believe it either.
Yet I am outside it all, watching myself, completely present yet a thousand miles distant from everyone, who ask occasional, shy questions when the barman and I are momentarily silent, scrabbling for the next detail in memory’s murk. Even Akira is persuaded to have a drink.
‘Just one, Johnny.’
Again he makes me think of Leonid, something in the tone or something I am forcing, a way back to another occasion in The Clachan, Leo’s sombre words of condolence at the old man’s wake.
‘Your brother, eh?’ the barman is saying.
‘Still gets me,’ I say. ‘Right here.’ I’m thumping my hand on my chest, my heart. ‘Right here.’
‘A lot of shocked people. You don’t expect that kind of thing. But he was loved, you should know that.’
‘I do, I do.’ And do you, Duke? Do you see the light in this stranger’s eyes as he raves on and on and on . . . ?
I come across myself again.
It is silent.
I am sitting on the same bar tool and staring in the mirror. Nostalgia scrolls across my forehead.
I realise the barman and everyone else has gone. I feel a strange kind of slackening. I dread these moments of lucidity and turn uncertainly to Akira, who is sitting beside me. There is nothing in his eyes to suggest I might have caused a scene, or said or done something to empty the pub.
‘What time is it?’ I ask him. My voice begins some distance away and slowly works its way back to me.
‘Two thirty.’
‘There’s an old joke in there . . . the Chinese dentist?’
Akira just stares.
I point at the mirror. ‘I think I want that.’
Akira shrugs.
‘Serious, I like it.’
My gaze moves to a new barman, who places a tray of glasses on the bar and gives me a double take.
‘You’re that famous film director,’ he states.
‘I am.’
He’s wearing a black T-shirt that says I Eat Lions in bold white letters. Even drunk I don’t believe him.
For I am, as you know, Duke, perceptive.
It is written in the frown lines like the skeleton of a bird’s wing that I see reflected back at me.
‘How much?’ I ask the barman.
He looks back at me. Frowns. He seems barely eighteen. ‘For what?’
‘The mirror.’
‘Eh? Well, I don’t think it’s for sale.’ He smiles nervously, the flush swift-rising from neck to cheeks.
‘Five hundred quid and a hundred for you.’
Akira gets off the stool and takes out his wallet. He counts out five hundred pounds and puts the money on the tray. Then he walks behind the bar and hands the barman two fifty-pound notes.
‘You can’t . . . It’s not mine. What’ll I say?’ He defin-itely doesn’t look like someone who eats lions.
Akira has already lifted the mirror off its hooks. Then he pauses and laughs. In the empty space where the mirror used to be is a faded poster of a naked redhead. Patty Mullen, the poster tells us in block letters. Penthouse Pet of the Month, August 1986. She has an immense eighties perm and high-hipped white panties. One hand is demurely covering a large breast.
‘I apologise for my behaviour, son,’ I say, sliding carefully off the bar stool. ‘Sometimes I feel a right tit.’
Eight
When Anna moved into St. Stephen’s Garden, I moved to Kilburn. A room in Leo’s flat on Albert Road, where old Irish matrons stood in their doorways like frosted sentries. A two-ring hob and barely a ray of natural light, the overground train rattling on the other side of the scrubby back gardens.
The old man headed to Soho.
He spent most of his time there anyway. Not among the Bohemian wannabes but the Poles and Jews, French and Italians, exiles who crafted a new place while holding firmly to the old culture brought with them. Soho was somewhere to play up that identity, almost to professionalise it.
Thus entered the Gregarious Gael, propped at the bar of The Coach and Horses or the French pub on Dean Street, telling the old Clachan stories and those of more recent vintage, lurid tales of showbiz London and no names but can ye no guess, a rap of the cane and a doff of the fedora, hugs for the Greek proprietors of his favourite cafes. An effortless maker of his own myth, he might have lived in that tiny flat across from the Prince Edward Theatre his whole life.
Yet as the Rank films rolled he became antsy, nothing to do but set up a few marquee Breda Boys bookings now and then. Soho’s delusions rubbed off; he wanted to be a player and The Aga Khan’s money meant he could buy a way in. I called him the Angle Grinder, always chasing the connections. As the financial bo
y wonder, most negotiations deferred to me. I made some savvy property deals in Pimlico in the early sixties, all off the back of the old man’s contacts.
More than anything, he saw it as somehow preordained that he become the proprietor of an exclusive nightclub. I bought us into Delilah’s, a second-division hostess club off Berwick Street haunted by chancy politicians and fading call girls. He became its public face, his ego placated until it could be fully indulged with a something that would be his alone, The Cannonball Club.
I saw him less and less, Duke and Anna more often.
She came south at a good time. Journalism was opening up for women, no longer the lone voice of Marjory Proops. Yet the horizons remained limited: fashion, society gossip.
It didn’t irritate her, to begin with, how her talent as a writer was so much less attractive to The Mirror than what she offered as the fiancée of Duke Jackson, Film Star. They wanted the razzle-dazzled country girl in the big city. Through the Looking Glass, her weekly column, was styled accordingly, full of uncontroversial showbiz tittle-tattle, playful hints of scandal.
I watched her at the parties they threw in Notting Hill. A natural hostess, effortlessly friendly, drawing confidences like blood: an arm around a tear-streaked Diana Dors, fending off Peter Sellers, still burbling his drunken, little boy confidences as she helped him into the back of a cab.
‘These people are children,’ she told me. ‘It’s like being in a kindergarten.’
Duke was the child she couldn’t control.
This was the era of amphetamines and barbiturates. Bennies to start the day, whisky and downers to end it. Before Anna moved south, Duke could hide it for the few days they spent together.
‘I’m worried about him, JJ,’ she said to me. ‘He’s drinking an awful lot. He’s not usually like this.’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I don’t know what’s up with him.’
‘Can you speak to him?’
A squeeze of my arm that went through me like an electric shock. A kiss on the cheek that finished me.
I didn’t talk to Duke. I stopped going to their parties, and then I stopped visiting altogether.
It was a Sunday morning several months later when I went back to Notting Hill. Anna’s smile was genuine, if fleeting. There were new lines on her face, and wariness too, like an expectation of disappointment.
For a moment, I had the strangest feeling, as if time had concertinaed and instead of five months having passed, it had been four years. I saw again Anna’s happiness when she showed off her engagement ring. I felt so sorry for her, for her certainty so quickly vanishing.
There was no sign of Duke. When I asked where he was, she started to cry. Then the outpouring, sitting on the couch with her knees drawn to her chest. I listened with a hot, growing guilt that I had let her endure this alone, convinced, absurdly, that I was responsible for her loneliness.
Duke appeared hours later, dishevelled, still in his Saturday night clothes. ‘Good to see you, little bro.’ He shot me a sheepish grin, fixed himself a Bloody Mary and slumped on the sofa, head bowed like a little boy as Anna viciously castigated him. I should have left, but there was such insistence in their frequent glances. They needed me there. And if each of them were looking for an ally then they were also seeking normality, a respite from their spiralling dysfunction.
I played the role. I visited every couple of weeks, all the while hating Duke’s self-absorption and Anna’s weakness for it.
Yet the emotional abuse they inflicted on each other was so stylised, a psychological equivalent of the objects they surrounded themselves with: the Florence Knoll furniture and the Weegee prints, the zebra skin rug à la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. They needed forgiveness and I let them have it, just enough to briefly convince them that all was the sweetness and light suggested by their public image.
Although that, too, was becoming tarnished. The old man with a hand on Duke’s throat one morning at Pinewood, the other thrusting a newspaper in his face. Don’t you fuck this up! Something had happened in a West End restaurant, a photo in the Express captioned Cracks in the Fairy tale.
It was the latest in a series of incidents which culminated at Ronnie Scott’s, the night I wanted to whisk her away, back to the little croft by the Sound, the two of us at the end of the world.
The Monkey and the Showgirl had wrapped. Another undoubted hit. The champagne and the old man were in full flow.
‘Tenshun. Tenshun,’ my father was rapping his silver-headed cane. ‘The award season is upon us again.’
A great cheer went up, one or two drum rolls on the tables. It was time for The Oxters, the old man’s customary, post-movie prize-giving to cast and crew who had brought honour upon the chimp. Their prize was a twelve-inch plastic replica of Charlie instead of the famous Oscar figure.
‘For artistic licence, for putting the Grouch in Groucho, The Oxter goes to our dear Director, the venerable Mr Douglas Fotheringham.’ The old man rummaged in a plastic bag for a statuette and tossed it across to Fotheringham, who stood up with great dignity and played exaggerated tribute. ‘To all those friends and enemies who have brought me to this career pinnacle . . . and to those I hope never find out!’
This was acknowledgement that the plot of The Monkey and the Showgirl turned on a scene that ripped off the Marx Brothers’ fake mirror scene from Duck Soup, where two Grouchos mimic each other. In our film it was Charlie the Chimp copying everything the drunken villain did while Duke sneaked in the window to rescue the girl.
‘Once again, and his third in a row, The Oxter for simian relations, commonly known as the Doolittle, goes to . . . Leonid Baltacha.’ Leonid raised his glass and, with a loud Na Zdorovie, knocked it back.
‘And now. Best newcomer. It could only be, it will only be, Ms. Lana Roberts.’ The old man reached into his bag as Lana, sitting beside him, squealed and stood up, her epic, Mansfield-esque bust lifting and falling like a cruise ship on a swell (great numbers would also sail in Lana). Then the old man had a sudden fit of coughing. He held up a hand and slowly calmed down, finally able to take a drink of water. After setting the glass down he put a hand on Lana’s shoulder to steady himself. ‘Sorry about that, Lana,’ he said. ‘I’m just feeling a bit chesty.’
The tables exploded. More drum rolls. Fake-affronted, Lana waved her Oxter in the air and blew kisses.
Then Duke, sitting on the other side of Lana, stood up and grabbed her, kissing her hard on the lips. The cheers became louder, and a few wolf whistles, which soon faded into uneasy silence. Duke wouldn’t let her go, Lana struggling and Duke holding on for a few more excruciating moments, the old man now pulling at his arm, before letting her slump down, mouth open in shock. Duke remained standing, wild-eyed and grinning, staring across the table at Anna.
‘That’s how you do it. That’s how you do it in the movies.’
The viciousness was the most disconcerting thing, some unknown slight become a fixation, bursting out.
Very calmly, Anna stood up and walked out. Two days later they announced their wedding date. Only five weeks away and in the middle of November 1962, as if there was a deadline they suddenly had to make.
* * *
‘You’re my best man, little bro.’
Duke shouted this in my ear as we stood at the bar of The Coach and Horses in Soho. A thump on my shoulder and he was gone, back into the noise, the throng and the congratulations. It was the first of several celebratory parties that would mark the run-up to the wedding.
‘Bloody ask first,’ I shouted.
That was the first night I drank, properly drank. Three pints, two whiskies and the pub soon a wurlitzing spin with me in the middle. My brother . . . my best man . . . Flushed faces peering and laughing. Claps on my shoulder and conversations I cannot recall. Then Anna suddenly appeared, somehow resisting the party, a curious look my way and then my nausea quick-rising.
Leo helped me to the toilet. A hand on my back as I bent to the toilet bowl. ‘Let it go, Johnny,’
he said. But when he added, ‘Many loved before,’ I realised he wasn’t referring to my spasming guts.
I haven’t been back to that pub since. It’s probably the haunt of vegans now, polenta eaters.
I didn’t go to The Clachan either. This, the stag party the night before the wedding, would have felt like a wake. Yet I walked past a few times, drawn by something like grief to those shifting shapes on the smoked-glass windows, the relentless bodhrain like my heartbeat made audible.
When the pub door opened, I hurried into the darkness, light and laughter spilling out behind me. Then Duke’s voice. ‘Is zat you, little bro, zat you?’ An echo from tenement to tenement and now quick footsteps behind me. I ducked into a close and when I peered out he was standing under a lamp post at the far end of George Street like the loneliest man in the world.
Many loved before. Yet, Duke, in the slanting rain and soft orange light, looked as if he never had.
‘Find him.’
‘What?’
‘Your brother. Find him.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Seven thirty. He needs to be at the church by eleven. Where the hell were you? You’re his best man, you’re supposed to keep an eye on him. He just disappeared. Christ knows where he is.’
I dressed quickly. Mackintosh and boots. The fizz of rain as I hurried down to the road. I walked parallel to the sea, the choppy waters a corpselike grey and the wind a coldness inside me. Where the road began to angle steeply upwards, I took a muddy path back down to the shore.
The tide was out. I rounded the headland on the flat, no need to scramble over the seaweed rocks. Esha Bay stretched before me, a mile-wide scallop of flat sand. At its western edge the cliffs rose two hundred metres. Among tufts of grass, rock streaked white with their shit, I could just make out nesting fulmars; black, scrutinising shapes, the hardier riding the up-draughts.
We played there as children. In the familiar cluster of sandstone rocks at the foot of the cliffs I saw a round black shape. It took five minutes to reach it. An umbrella. Duke was sheltering behind it, knees pulled to his chest. Despite the noise of the buffeting wind, he knew I was there.
The Accidental Recluse Page 10