She tries again outside my suite, her half-hearted see you at dinner a question she can’t understand why she’s even bothering to ask. When she leaves, I tell Akira we need to organise one more excursion. Just he and I. There can be no security phalanx to deaden the moment.
‘Come and get me at eight.’
‘Eight it is, Johnny. I’ll sort it out.’
I pour a drink and draw the curtains. I am in no mood for reflections. I turn off all the lights except the two reading lamps at either end of the coffee table. Thin, chrome and boomerang-shaped, they lean insistently towards me, super-focused spots leaching very little light into the surrounds. I will try and resist the obvious parallel about only ever seeing what’s directly in front of me . . .
How much is momentous in a life? Who justifies, truly, the conceit of an autobiography? I’m embarrassed for all who read my polished little nuggets of nothingness. Like a confused mole, I squint at their meaning, all so neat and so layered, stripped of messiness, the literary equivalent of a Club Sandwich, so much appeal but always so disappointing.
Yet now I actually want a Club Sandwich. What does this tell you, Duke? There is significance here, yes?
Room service answers the phone immediately, as if they have been waiting for my call. I expect an instant pitter-patter of hurrying feet, the rattle of a trolley in the corridor. It takes only slightly longer for the soft rapping on the door. I shout a terse come in, come through . . . Only when the waiter is standing opposite me on the other side of the table do I look up.
I do not expect Lewis. My heart gives an inadvertent thump. Even in the near dark I can see the blush on his big forehead. It is hard to imagine anything vindictive of this man. ‘Put it down,’ I say.
He clatters the bottle and sandwich platter down so hard on the table I expect the glass top to smash.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
‘Didn’t know you did room service. Jack of all trades, you. Bit below your rank, eh?’
‘I was coming up this way anyway.’
‘Grab yourself a glass and sit down.’
‘We’re not really supposed to.’
‘Bollocks to that. It’s all about the guests, son. First rule of hospitality.’
He hesitates for a few moments then crosses to the cabinet on the other side of the room, returning with a tumbler. He sits down on the very edge of the sofa directly opposite, as if ready to bolt.
‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you,’ I say. He shuffles on the seat and glances towards the door. I pour two whiskies and hand him one. When he takes it, I raise my own in the air. ‘To the Shinigami.’
I know that he is now definitely blushing.
‘Sorry, sorry. Bit egotistical to toast myself. Here’s to you. How’s that documentary of yours coming along?’
‘Is that how—’
‘“I’m making a documentary.” You told me. In the bar. You wrote the same thing in one of your emails.’
He slams the glass down on the table and stands up. ‘I should be going. I don’t want to—’
‘Sit down, for crying out loud! No-one’s going to come bursting in. You think this is a Frank Stone movie?’ I top up my drink and watch him sit back down. ‘I’m guessing that it’s about me.’
He looks down at his glass.
‘Helluva dramatic though. The whole Shinigami thing.’
‘Maybe so.’
In that moment, I know what I’m going to suggest. Yet I’m not sure where it’s coming from or if I actually want to. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you the big centrepiece scene. It’ll make the whole thing hang together. You’ve spent so much time fretting about me that it’s the least I can do.’
‘I’m not following you.’
‘Let’s hope no-one else does. When are you off shift?’
‘Nine.’
‘Have you got a car?’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Lewis, son, I’m fenced off. I peer out at the world from a compound. You’ve done your research, I’ve been like that for a long time. There was this rainy morning, see, I wandered into a byre.’
He rubs his beard and looks troubled. No psychotic temperament after all, it seems. He’s likely wondering about mine, if I’m always this spontaneous. I’m not, I’m a man of tiresome habit, I have to sleep facing north, the open ends of my pillows must face the centre of the bed . . .
‘Then you can tell me what you want, eh?’ I add.
As soon as Lewis leaves I call Akira’s room and tell him to take the evening off. I have three hours to change my mind. The Club Sandwich winks. I take one bland bite and leave the rest. Can I really be such a cynic, Duke, if I feel that sandwiches have let me down more than people over the years?
* * *
The gloom is a cindery deepening as Lewis pulls out of the back gates of the hotel. We’re in an ancient, rattling Land Rover, as cold as the Arctic air outside. I sit in the passenger seat. Lewis is apologising, fiddling with the fan, trying to clear the condensation from the windscreen. He drives carefully until it clears, revealing the CinemaScope view that I’ve always been such a sucker for.
So let’s indulge the thrill, Duke! When I see a shop on the edge of Inveran, I ask Lewis to stop.
The door gives a merry tinkle as I enter. The teenager behind the till looks startled, as if I am the first customer she’s had all day. I feel her eyes on me as I wander the shelves, staring at tins and packets I might never have seen before. I buy a half-bottle of Old Inveran and open it in the car, a caving in to nostalgia that I regret with the first swig. Perhaps it is the screwing up of my face that makes Lewis decline the offer. Do you remember, Duke, this was our first shared bottle? A Friday night in the byre, all day Saturday with my head in the toilet. I will persevere . . .
On the promenade the flags dance in a rising wind, a heavy swell bringing the waves high enough for the crests to be illuminated by the orange streetlights. We follow the lights eastwards and, where the promenade continues round to the marina, take a left, steeply climbing Shore Road.
Once more I pass the entrance to the cemetery. Then we turn into a series of tight corners, headlamps making psychedelic greens of the flashing verge. A few minutes later we reach the top of the hill. The road flattens out as it continues west, across the Moor of the Parting we cannot see, the landscape different from the other side of Inveran, a geological watershed crossed. The Land Rover is buffeted by a wind that meets no resistance, slowly easing as we begin to drop steeply down, the void of the Sound of Skerray soon appearing to our right.
I had forgotten how close the sea is to the single track. I see the glint of shingle and a confusion of waves, now and then an arc of spray lifting gently across the road, the way a tugboat bowser might welcome a big ship back into harbour, as if the Sound has put on a welcome home, JJ.
It is full dark now. Lewis slows. He will know, undoubtedly, that the cottage is just ahead. He turns into the side-track and stops, the headlights illuminating a closed gate at the top of the slope.
‘Not a bad scene for your movie, eh?’
It is impossible to tell if I am drunk. It is likely, yet not certain. It might only be the wind making me stumble as I step carefully up the slick, rutted track. Yet I manage to follow the headlight beams through the same rusted gate of sixty years ago, the darker shape of the gable end looming closer.
When I reach the yard, I need the torch that Lewis handed me from the glove compartment. Instead, I stand in the dark, letting my vision adjust. My eyes are streaming, Duke, but not tears. Then a troubling thump of my slow-failing heart. As if here I may finally fall and not rise.
You’d like that, yes?
There is no life in the cottage. In the absence of people it has become like every other empty home in the Highlands, a place of abject melancholy, heavy with the presence of ghosts known all too well.
Inevitably, it is now a holiday cottage. Akira found it on a website.
I peer in the kitchen window and switc
h on the torch, revealing a white table and four different coloured plastic chairs. The kitchen has been knocked through to the front room, the floor now covered in a zigzag patterned carpet. Above the fireplace is a print of Lunch atop a Skyscraper.
I feel both a tender longing for something long gone and disbelief that I could ever have been here at all.
I switch off the torch. I force down another mouthful of old Inveran as I stare into the dark cottage, waiting for the illumination of some cobwebbed memory, the fire to flicker on polished flagstones, two boys messing about at the table, one mussing the hair of the other, the parents smiling and indulging but only momentarily, the light-heartedness cut off swiftly by my father’s bark, as if it is too embarrassing, too revealing of affection, perhaps, for us all to enjoy ourselves . . .
Would I enter the house if my mother smiled? Pull her to me and breathe her scent? Would I shake my father’s hand, finally, an acknowledgement and an exorcism? There is no room for such possibilities with you there, Duke. I watch our mum and dad follow your gaze to the window, such disdain in your eyes and such disappointment in theirs. Even my young self can’t look at me, rushing over to the box bed to bury his face, as if he suddenly sees what he must become.
Is he not proud of the Blue Plaque of the Breda Boys achievements? When I go back to the gable end and shine the torch up it is not there. I eventually find it at the front of the cottage, lying on top of a picnic table, two stars of a lesser firmament staring up at all the others. I carry the plaque back round to the kitchen and prop it against the window for you all to read.
I sense you behind me now, Duke.
Yet by the time I turn and swing the torch back and fore across the yard you’ve vanished. I move the torch back to the byre then quickly point it down at the ground, the glittery rain pouring through the beam like tracer fire in an old war movie. I am waiting for my courage.
When it comes, I’ll lift the torch back to the byre. I’ll let the beam follow its outline, along the sagging roof, down to the door tied shut with blue twine that will take an age for me to untie.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I open the door. It creaks, of course. I hold my breath as I look up, but all I see in the emptiness below the cross-beam is dust drifting through torchlight.
I sit down on an old packing crate. I don’t know how long I sit there. I point the torch at the ground and click the beam on and off, on and off, watching the same bits of muddy straw appear and vanish. I don’t know why I feel so disappointed. When the door opens again I swing the torch up and see Lewis. He stands in the doorway like an invitation, rain tracing in behind him.
‘I know. Helluva night for sitting in—’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Isn’t that obvious?’
‘Not this barn. Inveran. Why the hell did you come back here?’
His sudden anger is startling. I wait for something to explain it but his face instantly softens.
‘I’ll take you back.’ He turns away quickly and I rush to speak before he steps out into the rain.
‘I don’t want to go back. Not yet,’ I add.
He hesitates for a few moments before again facing me. ‘There’s always my place. If you fancy it?’
Fourteen
Anna, Erin and I returned to London in June 1967. We didn’t talk about what would happen when we got there, though the question seemed to hang in the air for the whole journey. On the concourse outside Euston I finally acknowledged it. I asked Anna if she wanted me to go back with them to Notting Hill.
She did, but would never have asked. I ended up staying several nights. Then I returned to Kilburn but visited every day. Soon, I began to stay over, ‘It’s too late to go home now, Johnny’, eventually moving in full-time a few months later. ‘I mean, you’re round here so often anyway.’ It was a reluctant neediness. She wanted me there; just there, an exact arm’s length away.
So we filled a life with domestic intimacies, indistinguishable from husband and wife until that ever-loaded goodnight before we went to our separate rooms. Then that, too, became normal.
Yet all was just shifting shapes.
Her need to have me around was balanced by a melancholy detachment. She existed elsewhere, a place of an emerging Duke fetish; a little shrine in the corner of the living room, framed photographs and a candle lit every morning. And the birds, the birds, pictures found in junk shops and bought from catalogues. She filled the house with them, always one in her eyeline.
These were intense days. Still the door-stopping press, though less as time passed. Even when they slunk off altogether, Anna refused to leave the house. It was me who took Erin on walks and did the shopping, longer and longer trips to delay my return to those epic silences. Yet both times I said I would move out she insisted there was no need with such anxiety in her eyes, apologising for being so distant and ‘Give me time, Johnny, give me some space.’
It struck me as the most accidental, even apologetic, of relationships.
I never asked again if I should leave. In time, her answer might have been different. By then I always expected, during one of our frequent, disorientating skirmishes, those seared-in moments of her sad fury and Erin’s tears, that she would scream at me to get out. Yet she never did.
That’s how it breaks, little bro.
Duke was ever-present. A smile in the photograph as Anna lit her candles, a ghost sprawled between us as we sat at either end of the sofa in the heavy evenings, matching us drink for drink.
I made his film and told no-one.
* * *
The film industry has a kinked pathology. Profound cynicism meets childlike innocence. I have met people I suspect would strangle their firstborn for the rights to a sure-fire hit. It’s so ludicrous to spend millions making stuff up it can’t be anything but serious. Everybody’s so terrified about someone else killing the box office that they compulsively snap things up. There’s a hoarder’s relief in knowing that if you’re not making it, at least no-one else will be able to.
Seeking the Grail of the killer concept.
It’s a near-religious mindset. The more gripping the story behind the story the better. It turns that tarnished carpenter’s mug into a gem-encrusted goblet. A Man’s a Man ticked all the boxes.
There was no-one better than Fatty Jones to build the buzz. The co-owner of The Cannonball made Peter Ustinov seem monosyllabic. He built the film like a Coltrane solo, taking only a teaser synopsis to studio meetings, along with copies of Don Heelpen’s The Observer profile. He talked up my tragedy and how I had retreated into exile on the edge of the world, where an occult fury of released emotion created this masterpiece, a hallucinatory re-telling of Robert Burns’ life, which turned on how the poet sold his soul to the devil and received Highland Mary as a muse.
Fatty gave Warner Brothers two days to get back to him, three to make an offer on the full-script. When they took four he went straight to MGM – he’d been talking to them on the sly anyway, building that hoarder’s anxiety. MGM agreed to finance the same day. One million dollars, with Breda Pictures sub-contracted as producer. The studio’s one insistence was an A-lister as lead and Robert Redford signed on, hooked by the sentiment of his Scottish roots. Lucky old Leonid got to indulge a little crush when Jane Asher was cast as Mary Campbell.
We went into production at Borehamwood in May 1968. I sent a second unit to Scotland for landscape shots, insisting all other locations were no more than two hours from London. I’d convinced myself I had to get back to Anna every night but was always relieved to leave in the morning.
The most celebrated scene, where Burns and Mary pledge their love, was actually filmed in Oxford with the River Cherwell standing in for the Water of Fail. Midway through take 33, a disconsolate Jane burst into tears, inadvertently giving us the film’s emotional peak. There were other, unidentified grumblings to the press about God in a combat jacket. Yet the moment of imminent breakdown often gave the most potent take. Then God would
call a wrap and hurry back to Notting Hill and a production where there was only ever one opportunity to get it right.
Fatty persuaded me to do one pre-release interview, choosing The Daily Mirror, where Duke had his most indulgent fan base. ‘Good PR, Johnny boy, needs the ooze of sentiment,’ Fatty declared.
I oozed only weirdness. This piqued an interest all its own, less my cryptic answers than the white gloves I was wearing. I had developed a rash, terrified by the mountain of footage I had to corral into a movie, this the downside of torturing Hollywood stars for hundreds of takes. I didn’t explain this, naturally, leaving the interviewer to speculate on a fear of germs like another oddball film-maker, Howard Hughes.
Anna would add to the image, an unintended consequence of my coaxing her back into the world. She started taking Erin to the park. Then I persuaded her to take on a nanny to give her some time to herself. I bought her a camera. She wandered west London and took hundreds of photos she never let me see. I was delighted when she told me she was thinking of writing again.
Her return to journalism was straightforward, Duke’s death still a sentimental dog-whistle. Her weekly column in the Express was called The Party. The editor must have expected a re-boot of the showbiz tittle-tattle of Through the Looking Glass.
Instead, Anna gave him ruthless satire. The sentimentality that had briefly flared in Inveran had vanished. In its place, a hardness emerged, and a growing disdain for me. Both found their flaring in her new column. The Party was a luvvie cringe-fest, characters like ‘Fingers’ Hansen, a priapic young starlet chaser, Larry d’Oliphant, a shrill and drunken queen wracked with sexual guilt, and Hailey Halloran O’Halloran, the manipulative host and bitter old silent film star obsessed with ‘Death’s final cut’.
The Accidental Recluse Page 19