Trio

by Geraldine Wooller

  ‘What about Albie, then? What’s he doing here? Maybe he’s got something he can help you with.’

  He waved away the thought. ‘He was scouting for young actors at the academy, I think. He’ll be on a plane by now. I’m going to bed.’

  She sat for a time, feeling tired herself, not wanting to get up. The parks he spoke of she could see, where large young people pushed past you, well-fleshed and white-toothed, somewhat vacant Australian girls and boys scantily dressed, in a wide, spacious country, claiming all of it as their personal space, only at the last minute moving an arm or a shoulder backward or forward to avoid collision. These same people of course, in another setting, say a café, will serve you with a smiling good nature that wouldn’t have registered any harm done. Which just goes to prove, she thought, the old premise that one can only take offence if there is an intention to offend. Still, if someone felt offended by something, then the perpetrator had to accept this responsibility.

  But again, these were inner ramblings, her own, unrelated to Mickey, who had put down his empty glass and bade her goodnight in his usual softly-spoken way, brushing vaguely again at his eye.

  It was likely that what he said was true. There was not enough to bounce off here. The city of her childhood had devoured itself in greed and a show of progress. No history remained to draw upon, and a lack of history impedes your memory of the way life used to be, with other people and earlier preoccupations, real obstacles. Life was almost too easy here yet the population complained that they didn’t have enough money, enough time, enough consideration from the government. What, as an example, had the army barracks looked like – the place where she had worked, a young school-leaver, as a minor functionary? Or the elegant pink, spiffy little art deco office building that used to be an insurance office near the Victorian pub, in those halcyon days, when they went and drank beer on a Friday after work. What of all the other good-looking 1920s office buildings, the beautiful city hotel with its white, first-floor verandahs, the chequered arcade, the fabled movie theatre (marble staircases, chandeliers, a domed ceiling of gold stars on blue that actually slid open – could they do that in 1947? – to reveal the genuine article)? Where were the coffee bars, the dance studios that gave the city its life all those years ago? All buried in memory, though she still tried zealously to guard it. In creating and constantly recreating new buildings – angular grey steel and glass – the city had become antiseptic, ugly and gleaming, like any other new city, with none of the soft edges of lived-in dirt; it had no soul. It was a city that belonged to commerce, to the present only, one that thrived during the day and died from lack of human interchange at night.

  Without warning she felt drained, as though she had been running for miles. She tidied her cup and saucer away and went to bed.

  16

  London, 1986

  It wasn’t as if she was seeking him out. They were bound to come across each other somewhere: in a theatre, looking at a billboard, or just walking along Shaftesbury Avenue. As it happened they came upon each other on a bleak day in the following November, the most sorrowful month in England. People were trying to get into gear for Christmas and hating it; Oxford Street dense with the city’s population pushing and scowling as if it were in the grip of a revolution. The air was bitingly cold. Where Celia came from, November was a lavender-purple month: jacaranda trees bloomed, tall agapanthus came up as if by papal decree out of their wide-leafed low-lying shrubs and plumbago ran riot all of a sudden, spilling over fences, generally taking over like a crazed despot. It was the month of her birthday and these vibrant colours took hold of the city and suburbs.

  They met by chance – one of the things that happens in London – near Swan and Edgar, across the road from Piccadilly Circus. He was on his way to Tottenham Court Road.

  ‘Whatever for?’ said Celia.

  ‘To slake my drouth. Come, join me,’ he answered.

  ‘Oh Mickey, give it away,’ said Celia. ‘Look at you.’ His teeth were turning brown, his eyes were pouched and the skin on his face like sandpaper. He was a shambling wreck, but seemed quite chipper, a fairly usual state of mind for him, when she considered it.

  ‘Sure you’re hounding me to heaven itself,’ he said, becoming Irish and skittish, referring to poetry. She couldn’t resist his voice, or his plight, whatever it might be, and broke into step with him. As always when they had walked anywhere together they became philosophical; the perennial questions came up.

  ‘How can I do it, Mickey?’

  ‘Do what, darlin’?’

  ‘Live my life in a better way.’

  ‘A hard nut to crack.’ A frown came with it. ‘Never mind the living, what about the loving? I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs,’ and he went down on one knee in the middle of Regent Street, facing her.

  ‘And with my childhood’s faith,’ she finished.

  What a pair of incompetents we are, Celia was inwardly shaking her head, as she trotted along, heels too high, to his lurching gait and listened while he talked. Even half-pickled he made her smile, taking her to ideas not yet put into use.

  ‘You’re thinking that you have to do something that serves your best interests by way of a calling, is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘More or less. Searching for a career, rather than a job. I’m tired of finding work, learning to do it well and pretending that it’s the best thing that could have happened to me.’

  He looked at her. Keenly, you could say.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said.

  ‘Been sick, got a bad cold in a storm about a year ago. I’m better now.’ They walked on.

  ‘Celia love, you don’t want a career, you want to write good poetry and have it acknowledged; that’s called being an artist, practising an art. If it was a career you were after you’d have taken up accountancy or economics, or the law!’

  They both laughed. ‘What you want to do, it doesn’t get you a lot of money but it might get you a modest recognition, right?’

  ‘Yes, right. Though if one became good enough at it … but I’m a long way from there. I’ll probably continue being grateful just winning even some small success. For meagre rewards. But it would be something on my own account – not hitching my wagon to someone else’s production.’ She told him however about some small triumph she’d had, writing accompanying lines for a theatrical enterprise, something akin to ballet but with words needed. He gave a pleased little murmur of appreciation.

  They knew they were soon going to talk about Marcia – what they both wanted to do.

  ‘I figured out what it was,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, the meaning of the universe?’

  ‘No, no, that’s easy by comparison. How you succumbed to my charms one night, and on another denied me to Albie.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I did apologise for that. Not that it helps much.’

  ‘You dealt me a crushing blow, bejasus, it’s true. A blushing crow. But look, Cele. I understand it all now. Tout comprendre and so forth. You loved Marcia, I loved you both, Marcia loved me for a brief while, and I think she probably loves you profoundly and purely and simply. But you’re such a complicated woman.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Is that your considered response?’ They walked on. ‘At any rate, the question is not how to live, but where to live and with whom!’

  She nodded, and he, then she following suit, looked up at the thick grey clouds, he thinking how much it was like a Dublin sky and she thinking of the Battle of Britain and how people were afraid to look up for years, whenever they heard aircraft approaching.

  ‘Life is not all success or all failure, Celia. It’s not winging your way through heaven or descending into icy misery. There’s such a thing as a steady, even contentment, with just a few little things going wrong along the way, that turn out to be unimportant.’

  She looked at him, in surprise. Was he talking about Marcia?

  ‘So they tell me, anyway,’ he said.


  He persuaded her to take a little jaunt to Croydon where he wanted to collect a debt from an old chum. They took the Tube then a bus to a suburb she wasn’t familiar with. The first place they visited was The Fox and Hounds where they spent an hour before seeking out Mickey’s friend in order to get the money owing to him. They were directed to an area within five minutes’ walking distance of the pub, which in Celia’s experience always meant at least seventeen minutes. The uniform bungalows were lined up in all their pebble-walled ugliness.

  ‘Tell me Celia: can any passion occur here?’ asked Mickey, sniffing the air around them. ‘Are there possibilities at all behind these dank grey edifices? Surely only a person of pygmy heart could have designed such dwellings.’

  They stumbled around the streets looking for a name that didn’t appear on any of the street signs and a number that didn’t exist. Mickey was forced to admit that they were possibly in the wrong suburb.

  ‘Surely we’re on a fool’s errand, Celia.’

  A soft, penetrating rain started to soak into them. She steered him towards the warm Underground where they sat in steamy reverie, towards home, wherever home was for him these days. Outings tended to finish like this. She wanted to say something old-fashioned like: Be of good heart. But she was worried and invited him to her little flat in Notting Hill Gate the following evening, where she intended to cook him a good meal.

  Celia was squeezing garlic through the crusher and keeping her eye on the chicken. Their tradition had been that this was her role, Marcia’s had been to sit quietly looking on and chatting intermittently, when not learning her lines, and to clear up afterwards. Mickey’s, with his wellspring of banter, had been to attend to everyone’s glass and fill the spaces with his one-liners. And here they were again, with one-third of them missing.

  He was light on raillery this particular evening as he emerged from the tiny bathroom with the lavatory at the far end of the hallway – where it should be in her opinion – and stood there blinking, like a cat awakened from a nap on its favourite sofa, she thought, or like a dozy man who has just come out of the loo. For the moment his scattering of words had deserted him. Unless he had just discovered something that didn’t please him. But no.

  ‘Hm. I’m not a well man,’ he said.

  She looked up quickly. ‘Are you all right, Mick? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing, pet. Lead me to the bottle opener.’

  Her kitchen was small but well set up; it could have been designed by her, a kind of ship’s galley. There was just room for a sofa, for the onlooker to keep her company while she conducted her implements. She reminded him of a priest at the altar with the bits and pieces to be done: wiping out the chalice with a snowy cloth, and so on. Such clean rites performed by priests you once had faith in. Walking over to the window to look out he said with no preamble whatever: ‘I thought the connection was stronger, I imagined Marcia would want to come back too.’

  She said nothing in reply and removed the last of the cling wrap, leaving an empty cardboard cylinder. He picked it up thoughtfully, squeezed one eye shut and looked, as if through a telescope, like Horatio Nelson and said, ‘Aye, me hearties,’ then put it sideways to his mouth, aping a flautist. She snatched it from him. He was like a schoolboy, his attention meandering from one thing to another, instead of telling her what was the matter with him. This was the thing about Mickey, and why no woman would have followed him to the other end of the earth: all the play-acting and funny voices, either deflecting any serious discussion, or else losing interest in it from one moment to the next. Celia knew she had come back here for her own reasons, yet she felt responsible, in some measure.

  ‘The connection, as you call it, has to be firm, in fact like an electrical current; it doesn’t just course along unaided. I don’t know if you ever told Marcia how important she was to you. People need to know they are cherished. I’m reliably told you’re supposed to work at it.’

  ‘I thought she was working at it,’ he said. But she turned away, exasperated. You couldn’t force him to accept any kind of advice.

  ‘You’ve thrown away so many chances, Mickey – like that workshop in Cornwall. It sounded a modest concern but it would have led on to some contacts and helped you gather some sort of, I don’t know, portfolio of achievement.’

  ‘Ah, achievement!’ he said. ‘Portfolios! I just want to write and direct. You set yourself such high expectations they can only be met with defeat. Cut out your lecturing.’ She looked at him, surprised. Throwing a sentence back at her was not like him. He looked around for a bottle opener and said, more like himself:

  ‘It’s walking the road that’s exciting, not the getting there, Celia. That is the thing.’

  ‘Or the not getting there,’ she answered. But the meal was ready and she set it all out on the table, with a flourish. He raised his glass and they wished each other Bon appetit. And they talked of old times and the current crop of plays. But he ate very little.

  17

  Perth, 1986

  Not long after this, one night around 4 a.m. in Perth, Marcia’s phone rang; it was Mickey, calling reverse charges. She accepted it and he came on the line, sounding sober, but it was hard to know.

  ‘What time is it there?’ he asked. She rested an elbow on a pillow while he told her how things had changed in England. How it was, as she well knew, that they once could register for the dole if they were a member of Actors’ Equity. Since the early 1980s however – in the past few years – actors had to take on re-skilling programmes, or else search for an ordinary job, like the rest of the hoi polloi. Sure wasn’t this a blow to the old ego, and he was ego on a stick, as Celia had once pointed out to him, and he laughed at this.

  ‘I can see it now up there, me old ego, like a head on a stake, something out of Conrad.’ Marcia finally heard by now that he’d had more than a few. The old Mickey would have at this point asked her something about herself.

  She cut in: ‘Speaking of Celia, have you seen anything of her? She left here about a year after you went back and I’ve heard practically nothing. A brief postcard.’

  He told her that they had run into each other and had gone on a little trip to Croydon together to collect something. Afterwards she had cooked him a meal. But he hasn’t seen her since. He believed she was trying to find herself, and he found this very amusing.

  There was a pause, and Marcia said: ‘I’ve had my troubles too, Mickey.’

  ‘Have you darlin’? What have they been?’

  She found that she didn’t want to talk about her troubles with him. Even in Perth she had been passed over for parts, had her successes quickly forgotten by a fickle public and worse, the critics. She didn’t want to confide that she was afraid for her life. Though after all what was life if it wasn’t falling down and picking yourself up again, then doing it all over again – as the song went? But to talk like this to Mickey was not what he wanted to hear. She had a point to make if she’d thought he was interested in listening, and it was this: there came a time when you wouldn’t allow your confidence to be worn away by anyone – there was simply no denying that she had had some good fortune in life and a measure of success, and nothing would ever again make her forget it. It is easier as you grow older to reconcile yourself to these things. He and Celia used to accuse her of being secretive and switching off.

  It feels like being snubbed, Celia had once said, laying it on the line.

  But Marcia would rather turn her head the other way than confront; it felt like quarrelling, to her.

  An image of herself as an adolescent doing her A Levels in Hull flashed in front of her, the overcoming of jumping nerves. But as an adult in her chosen career all of that was nothing in the face of lost lines even as the curtain was going up and worse, in the Aldwich, nearly giving way to panic altogether when her fellow actor allowed a pause that even in Pinter was so extended she was certain he had dried up.

  ‘Oh, everything’s all right, really.’ She’d now and then drunk hard w
ith Mickey for a time, but even with too much booze inside her Marcia kept her professionalism intact. Mickey on the other hand had perversely given himself a role to play that was by now passé, kitchen-sink; the hackneyed insecure lad, unable to grow up. Always in a skin that was not quite his own. At times it was the part of an overweening director. She had grown not to even know who she was dealing with.

  He told her now – yes, here he was admitting it – that there had been episodes these past two years when he walked out of the show because he was under-rehearsed, under-prepared, and an understudy had to fill in at the eleventh hour, closer to midnight, in fact. So he decided he was safer doing television work and films, rather than stage work (she wondered if they had been short ads). Short takes, he said, made him less vulnerable because, with the passing of years, his memory could hold out for film. But nothing had come his way for some months.

  ‘I haven’t been able to even face the cameras for the first take, Marcia. It’s as bad as the stage. You know what it’s like.’ Yes, she knew – the raw terror of a first night.

  ‘Of course I know,’ she said, realising that he had absolutely chosen the wrong job in life for himself. ‘I once heard Paul Eddington say on the way to a first night, that he saw some men digging up the road and he thought to himself in distress, that if only he had a straightforward job like that, he’d change it that minute.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mick, raising a laugh that sounded like a bark.

  Without seeing him she could hear the pain mounting, see the shaking hands beating time to his disintegration. But she couldn’t register it openly, since he didn’t. So they pretended it wasn’t happening, rather like British royalty, withholding a brief apology for farting, say, because that would be to acknowledge that it had happened. Someone drowning in unhappiness in Buckingham Palace or in any other palace was without a doubt considered bad form.

  For Marcia, something to be lodged in memory forever was Mickey in his duffel coat swinging out of the theatre, his colour and his feelings high on theatre excitement. They might have a conversation about being friends always. ‘Will you always be my friend?’ was their most frequent question. Unsettling then, that Mickey said one day: not everyone is meant to be a friend for life, there is a season for friendship. ‘It’s a mistake to think that because someone loves you in 1979 they will love you or even want to talk to you in 1986.’ Everything is ephemeral, he reckoned, and she thought he must be right. Look at her and Celia.