She groped for her watch on the bedside table. It was early morning, too early for apologies or for Ben at all. “Go away,” she croaked.
“It’s Roy. Can I have a word?”
She stumbled to the door and blinked at him. “I just wanted to say that if you don’t feel up to it, I’ll drive.” He glanced toward the room where Ben was sleeping and winked at her. “It gets pretty cramped in the back of the van. You might be better off going by train.”
She wondered how much he knew: enough for her to kiss his cheek. “Thanks, Roy,” she said, and he tiptoed away blushing.
As soon as she was dressed and had packed her overnight bag, she settled the bills at Reception and made for the station.
The rainy London streets were dazzling as tinfoil. Drying trees turned piebald in Hyde Park. Molly felt bouncy and free as she reached Ben’s office. She blew a kiss to the calendar girl as she sat at her desk. “You’re welcome to him,” she called, and set about the budget for the northern expedition. The less that still had to be done when he returned, the better.
She had almost finished when her phone rang. “Mr. Gould would like to see you,” his secretary said.
She shared a lift to the ninth floor with the head of Religious Programs, a balding, compassionate-looking man with a pop singer’s smile. Jake Gould’s secretary sent her straight into Gould’s office, a spacious, sparsely furnished room that smelled of sunlit leather chairs and tinny air conditioning. He sat forward as she came in, stretching his arms sphinxlike across the desk and displaying his gold cuff links. “Miss Wolfe.”
“That’s me.”
He frowned, though she hadn’t meant to be facetious. “I understand that all is not well between you and Ben Eccles.”
“It depends what you mean,” she said cautiously.
“I mean, as an example, a program underbudgeted by several thousand pounds. I mean leaving him and his crew to find their own way back this morning.”
So Ben had beaten her to it, by phone, of course. “The budget was based on information he gave me,” she said as calmly as she could. “And I had good reasons for coming back by train. For one thing, I was too tired to drive.”
“Do sit down if you feel the need.” He gazed at her while she did. “Are you finding the responsibilities of the job more than you bargained for?”
“Not the job, no. Just fending off Ben Eccles.”
“Of course one hears tales about him, mainly in the press.” His gaze grew keener. “One wonders who might have been gossiping, and why.”
“I don’t know why, but as to who, I should think it could be any woman who has ever been alone with him.”
Gould was unwrapping a cigar. The crackling of cellophane rasped Molly’s nerves. At last he looked at her again, as he shook out the match. “Well,” he said between puffs, “no doubt you know that Martin Wallace wants you. Frankly, on your present showing I don’t know what to tell him.”
“I won’t work with Ben Eccles.”
He applied another match and blew out smoke that seemed for a while to be endless. “How do you feel about working with Wallace?”
“I’d like to. Very much.”
“Much as you felt about working with Eccles, I suppose? How can I be sure you won’t let Wallace down?” Abruptly he ground the cigar into rags in the ashtray. “Well, it’s his responsibility. You’re clearly no more use to Eccles. But I give you fair warning,” he said, standing up to terminate the interview, “I shall be monitoring your performance.”
The next Molly knew she was at the lifts, knuckling the call button until her skin started to flake. At the fifth floor she shoved the doors aside and strode blindly down the corridor to Ben’s office. She hoped he was there and by God she would tear him to pieces. But the office was empty now that Martin and Leon were emerging.
Her rage drained away. She felt weightless as a dream of flying, and yet on the edge of something: one step and she might fall, not fly, fall and never wake. “Gould says we can work together,” she said.
“That’s great, Molly. I’m really pleased. Leon’s been telling me how good you are when you’re given the chance.”
“Pubs are open. I propose a toast,” Leon said, and Molly thought that a drink might be just what was needed to get rid of this vague apprehension that wouldn’t quite go away. Feelings like that were no use to her, they never had been. If she had dreamed of Martin, it must have been years ago.
6
IT TOOK all day to film the Heathrow introduction, since Martin seemed to think on film. After the last shot of the morning—of Martin descending by escalator into the international crowd—he said, “That’s enough of me, too much, probably. Let’s eat.”
He and the crew ended up in the airport snack bar. Planes turned ponderously beyond the double glazing and rose silent as clouds into the sky. “Maybe I shouldn’t appear in the film at all,” Martin said.
Terry Mace sat forward and his motorcycle jacket creaked. He was assistant to the cameraman. “What did you want to put yourself in for, anyway?” he said.
“Well, I’m in there whether or not you see me. I figured appearing in it would be taking responsibility for it, saying it’s my view of things. Maybe I’m too visible already.”
“What, because you were in Private Eye? Don’t let those buggers get to you. They’re just out to get MTV because a couple of the backers sued them years ago.”
“I guess they let me off relatively lightly.” But he sounded as if he wished he knew what he’d done to deserve their attack. (“News from Empty Vee: Leon ‘Call me Lane, love’ Bardin, winner of the Worst Program Title by a Gay Producer Award, is importing Martin ‘Instant Controversy’ Wallace, a film director with an international reputation for bothering needy old ladies and policemen doing their duty. What is the relationship between Lane Bardin and Marty the Menace? We think we should be told… .”) “Back home we have the National Enquirer,” Martin said.
“Just don’t let that shit put you off making the kind of film you make.” Terry brushed his long hair out of his eyes and stared defiantly at a woman who had turned to frown at him.
“Well, Terry, maybe you’re surer than I am what kind of film that is.”
“Right, maybe I am. I think your best film was The Unamericans, fantastically powerful. You ought to show up our police the way you did yours. About fucking .time someone did.”
Martin was smiling at his vehemence. “Aren’t your police pretty reasonable overall?”
“What? Tell Lenny Bennett’s mother that after the pigs got him in a cell and killed him.”
Molly spoke for the first time. “Well, that’s one version,” she said.
“Right, there’s the official version and the truth. No prize for guessing which one MTV broadcast. He died just up the road from them and they didn’t even go to investigate.” She had been trying to calm Terry down but had only infuriated him. “What do you think the pigs were going to do to a black militant who’d been criticizing them, after they got him in by planting explosives on him? Bake him a cake? I’ve seen the inside of one of those fucking cells. They could have worked on him all night, nobody would have heard him scream.”
The cameraman, Andy Butterworth, spoke low. “Watch your language, lad, or they’ll have you back inside.”
“I bet they’d love to. Didn’t even charge me in the end, just wanted to shut me up.”
Mace had been kept overnight in a cell for chanting slogans in front of the police station and buttonholing everyone who passed. “You should investigate them,” he told Martin. “You’ve got the power to make people look.”
“If you feel so strongly about it,” Wallace suggested, “maybe you should tell people yourself.”
“Think I haven’t been? Do I look as if I sit on my arse doing nothing?” He pointed to the badges on his jacket: Troops Out of Northern Ireland. Free Iran. “I’ve been playing a policeman in a street play about Lenny Bennett. We’d do it in front of the station if there
was room. Make the bastards think Lenny had come back to haunt them.” He seemed about to say something but changed his mind. “You’ve got the power to take it into people’s homes,” he said fiercely. “Things won’t change unless they know.”
Martin had finished his lunch and looked restless. “Come on, lad,” Andy said. “Finish your milk and let’s get going. Time enough to tell folk how to make films when you’ve made a few yourself.”
After they had filmed a few impressions of Heathrow, Martin wandered for an hour or so before saying abruptly, “That’s it for today.” He was silent on the drive back. As Molly steered the van into Connaught Street for the car park under MTV she thought he seemed to be gazing at something inside himself.
His office was on the fourth floor, down the corridor from Leon’s. Its personality was mostly Molly’s: a calendar of English landscapes, an old percolator she had managed to fix, the binoculars she took whenever she drove into the countryside. He leafed through the reviews of The Spin she had brought him to read, but he was obviously ill at ease. He kept rumpling his already untidy hair, pinching the skin between his thick eyebrows.
“I’m sorry about today,” she said.
His deep blue eyes widened. “Why should you be sorry?”
“I should be making sure you aren’t put off your work.”
“Christ, I can fight my own battles.” That brought him back to himself. “I didn’t mean that. You’ve been a tremendous help. I only meant I should be able to handle Terry. He reminds me of the Baptists. The university was overrun with them.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about my student days.”
“I don’t mind, if you feel like talking.”
“Snapping me out of it comes with the job?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, it’s fine with me,” he said, smiling suddenly. “How about dinner? Do you like Indian food? I haven’t had any since the last time I was here.”
“I’ll take you to the Standard.” She was startled by how pleased she felt that he had asked her out. “We can walk there,” she said.
The night was growing colder. A few stars glittered like ice above the lamps on Bayswater Road. “So tell me about your student days,” Molly said as they crossed a side street.
He took her arm. “My baptism of fire. All the time I was at college the Baptists were trying to get evolution taken off the syllabus. Evilution, they called it. I guess it’s pretty funny,” he admitted as she laughed, “but they could get to you if you weren’t careful. For instance, they’d say God created all the fossils to test everyone’s faith in the Bible. You’d find yourself arguing back that maybe the world was created just a moment ago, our memories and all, because how can anyone prove different? There’s a born-again millionaire in Texas who’s offering fifty thousand dollars to anyone who can prove evolution to him. A few years around that kind of thinking can loosen your grip on reality, believe me.”
In the Standard Molly ordered for both of them. “I was just thinking,” Martin said as the waiter marched away, “the last time I met any of the Baptists was after I’d made The Unamericans. This girl came up to me on the street in Chapel Hill. Right there in front of some people she said I should have dedicated it to Satan instead of to Larry.” He was staring at the table. “You asked me once about Larry.”
“I didn’t know you then.”
“So ask me now.”
Something had made him need to talk. She squeezed his hand. “Tell me whatever you like.”
He was silent for a while. “I really think he was jealous of me,” he said at last, uncomfortably. “He was two years older, you see, and I think he’d had time to get used to being king of the hill. I don’t mean he ever took it out on me. Maybe it would have helped if he had. No, he looked after me all the time. Really,” he said, taking a deep breath, “all he wanted was to make our father proud of him.”
He paused while the waiter brought a bottle of wine and struggled with the cork. “You have to understand my father,” he said. “Maybe you know there are Southerners who are still fighting the Civil War. Sabers on the wall and all that. Really what they’re doing is preserving the old ways. You look around and see why they might want to. There aren’t many gentlemen left—you couldn’t call me one.”
“Who couldn’t? I would.”
“You wouldn’t if you were a Southern lady.” He smiled wryly and touched her face, a gesture that seemed so intimate she felt dizzy. “What am I saying? I don’t mean you aren’t a lady, not at all. But our Southern ladies wouldn’t think much of a guy who got them into a pub brawl.” He put his fingers on her lips when she made to protest. “Want to hear a bad joke? Your people wanted me to call my series ‘A Yank in England.’ That would really have improved my father’s opinion of me.”
Before she knew what to do about the glimpse of his pain, he said quickly, ‘ ‘The trouble was he needed us to be like him. He taught Southern history at the University of North Carolina, and so he wanted us at least to go to college and know more than him about something. Well, Larry knew more about cars than anyone else I know. He was fixing them before he was old enough to drive them, he was planning to open his own repair shop just before he went to Vietnam, but none of that was any good to my father. And neither was I.”
He stared into the distance while the waiter unloaded a trolleyful of food. “He thought I was. I mean, I read all the books in the house and went to college. Then friends of mine started refusing to go to Vietnam and I went with them on peace marches. The Baptists went round wearing stars and stripes in their lapels and saying we should be proud to fight God’s war against communism. I filmed the police at a march and they smashed my camera. Some of that footage is in my film.”
His eyes clouded over, and he gave a short sour laugh. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what made me committed— getting my camera smashed, not my friends dying in Vietnam at all.”
“I expect it was both.”
“Maybe. Anyway, my father heard about the marches and ordered me home, and we had the argument that must, have been happening all over America just then, me saying I might die for my country but wouldn’t kill for it, him saying he’d go himself if he was younger, I was the first coward in the family, he was glad his father was dead and couldn’t see how I’d grown up, other stuff you don’t want to hear. It wasn’t as though I’d even got my papers. I really think he would have backed off if I’d said I might think of enlisting. So eventually we finished yelling at each other and I started upstairs to my room, and Larry was telling my father he’d talk to me when my father said, ‘Whatever gave you the idea he’d listen to a goddamned dumb mechanic when he won’t even listen to me?’ That was the last time they ever spoke to each other. The next day Larry volunteered.”
Belatedly he realized he was eating. “This is very good,” he said, but Molly doubted he was tasting it; she was beyond tasting much herself. “He wrote to me and my mother a couple of times,” Martin went on. “He was never much good at writing—used to say that was one thing his hands weren’t good for. He said he was glad he’d gone instead of me, he could look after things out there while I got on with learning, there were enough of us dying. He wanted me to promise my mother I wouldn’t go, and her to make me promise. A rocket killed him in the jungle near someplace I never could pronounce.”
He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and then at his eyes. “I was home for the funeral when my draft card came. As soon as the funeral was over, I skipped to Canada and spent two years making my film.” He dug his fork into a piece of meat so hard that the tines screeched on the plate. “As if making it could wipe out what I’d done.”
“I don’t see why you should feel guilty.”
“Don’t you? I must have expressed myself badly, then.” Or had he left something out? He was withdrawing behind his smile. “This is wonderful,” he said. “Let’s eat.”
She felt as if she’d missed a poi
nt somewhere, but he encouraged her to talk about herself, and she told him about her childhood near Plymouth, about the smugglers’ coves and the inns with secret passages; Winston the bulldog who sat in the middle of the village street and would move just enough for a car to pass; about the summer day she’d lain on Dartmoor and watched the clouds until she had felt the world turning and the night she’d seen sailing ships in the moonlight (but that must have been a dream). And then she was on the edge of telling him about her dreams, but she held back. “Were your parents pleased you dedicated this last film to them?” she said.
“My mother was. My father, I guess not, if she even told him. I don’t hear from him. I know from her he’s pretty ill by now, his heart and too much booze. Something else I can take the credit for.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Molly said, but she felt she wasn’t reaching his pain. She wished she could confide more of herself to him, reach him that way, but all she could think of to share were her dreams.
After the meal he walked her home. Queensway was crowded as a bazaar, Bayswater Road was almost deserted except for a turbaned cyclist and a few cars. A stone eagle on a pedestal guarded a private square, a crow like a tatter of the night flew into the park. As they turned the corner by the estate agent’s, she made up her mind not to invite him in for coffee; she would be too conscious of not being able to tell him about the dreams she used to have. She had forgotten how much it meant to her.
“Thanks a lot, Molly,” he said when they reached her gate. “I had a fine time. You’re good company. I’m lucky to know you.” He smiled and turned away quickly, up the hill toward Kensington and his flat, which MTV was paying for. She bolted the gate behind her, feeling oddly disappointed, and was at her, door when suddenly she wanted to call him back. Instead she strode furiously in to discover who was in her flat.
Incarnate Page 5