Postscripts

by Claire Rayner

  The pub was quiet, its dark brown interior smelling of tobacco and wood smoke, beer and vaguely savoury things, and he was glad there were only two or three groups of people there. He glanced at his watch; almost two-thirty.

  The girl behind the bar looked sourly at him when he asked about food and said, ‘All the hot’s off. Been gone this past half-hour or more. There’s a bit of salad left, and you could have a ploughman’s. Bit late to be serving lunches, by rights, but — ’

  ‘Ploughman’s?’ he said.

  ‘Bread and cheese and pickles,’ she said, clearly scornful of his American ignorance, and rubbed a glass in a bored fashion and put it away. ‘Best we can do. Wouldn’t recommend the salad. It’s mostly been picked over — ’ And she jerked her head at a covered counter beside the bar.

  She was right. A few sad lettuce leaves and curling onion and cucumber rings seemed to be about the limit of its offerings and he sighed and said, ‘Two ploughman’s lunches, then, and — ’ He stopped. What would she drink? What can I give her? he thought then, a little savagely. I’m paying, after all. ‘A couple of beers.’

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, the best you do, I guess.’ And she looked less belligerent and reached for a couple of glasses.

  ‘Halves?’ And she seemed to assume that was what he wanted so he said nothing and watched her as she pulled the beer handles and the dark stuff filled the glasses and topped itself with a high creamy collar. He’d never get to like this stuff, he thought gloomily. Warm and sweet, probably.

  It wasn’t. By the time Miss Hinchelsea appeared at the pub door he was settled at a table beside the log fire with the beer and two respectably full plates of crusty bread, good stilton and celery, together with the biggest pickled onions he’d ever seen; and had sipped his beer. It wasn’t that warm, and had a mellow bitterness he found he liked. It was all a bit like Miss Hinchelsea herself, contradictory, never quite what he’d expected.

  He watched her come towards him through the long room and noticed how well she moved. Long legs and haunches that moved smoothly beneath that hideous old cardigan; he could see her better now for she had her fists thrust into the pockets of the trousers in a way that tightened them over her thighs. And again he felt that frisson of interest.

  She sat down beside him without a word, reached for the plate and began to eat. He watched her; she was indeed hungry, and ate with a sort of controlled fierceness that he found touching. Abner opened his mouth to speak to her, but she caught his eye and looked at him challengingly, and he found his gaze falter, so reached for his own food and began to eat.

  It really was very good indeed; whether it was his hunger or the warmth of the fire in the dark room or the company of the girl beside him he didn’t know, but it seemed to him that all his tastes were sharpened. The bread was crusty and nutty in his mouth; the cheese sharp and yet creamy and the onions wonderfully tart. The beer slid down his throat cheerfully and later, when the girl at the bar brought them coffee and a couple of pieces of apple pie plentifully laced with cloves and cinnamon, that too tasted remarkably good. He gobbled it all with relish, as did his companion and then they sat, one each side of a long settle and stared at the flames.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I needed that.’

  ‘Me too,’ he murmured, a little sleepily. ‘You don’t always notice when you get hungry — ’

  ‘I do,’ she said after another little pause. ‘I needed that.’

  ‘You’re not that broke, are you?’ he said then and turned his head, all trace of sleepiness gone. ‘Is that really the only reason why you said you’d come with me?’

  She made a little grimace. ‘Not entirely. I said I’d come because I was hungry, yes. But also because you’re not a twit. However hungry I got, I wouldn’t spend time with a fool. As for being broke, well, let’s just say I often don’t eat, mainly because I’m too lazy to bother most of the time.’

  ‘Too lazy to bother with what?’

  ‘Shopping. Eating. It seems such a chore. So I just go on till I just have to get something and then I go out. It’s cheaper that way too. I’m not completely on my uppers but I have to be careful. He left bugger all.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Who else?’

  There was another little silence and then he said carefully, ‘You were dependent on him? I mean, you don’t have a job.’

  ‘I did have. But it died,’ she said, and then lifted her brows at him. ‘I looked after Geoffrey. He was a full-time job. I tried to help with the work as well, of course. The papers — but he was too much for me. Kept it all locked away, wouldn’t let me disturb anything. Kept all his filing systems in his head, damn him. So now it’s driving me mad, sorting it all out.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, it won’t be so bad. When I get straight and the house is sold, and I find a room or something somewhere, that’ll help.’

  ‘Then you’ll eat more often?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it. Shopping and cooking — it’ll still be a problem. God, what a bore! But at least I’ll be able to get out and find something without having to worry about how much it costs.’

  ‘Was it like this for your father too? I thought he was a professor of the University — ’

  ‘Oh, he was, and there was some money from that. And he had an annuity. But that all died with him. Like my job. So, there’s very little. But I can manage.’ And then suddenly she turned and flared at him, ‘Don’t you dare feel sorry for me!’

  ‘Like hell!’ he said. ‘I’d as soon feel sorry for a rattlesnake!’

  ‘Good! Glad you could hear the warning.’ She settled back in her seat, pulling her legs up so that she had her heels tucked beneath her and her arms circled her knees. ‘Keep listening for it.’

  Another silence as the pub slid into emptiness around them with the last people leaving. And he stretched and yawned. ‘Don’t they close soon? I’ve heard about your crazy drinking laws.’

  ‘They’ve changed them. This is one of the places open all day now.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Another beer?’

  She nodded and the same bored barmaid served them. They sat and drank, both staring at the fire and not speaking. Until he stirred himself and said, ‘May I know your name?’

  She slid her eyes sideways. ‘Hinchelsea.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Do you have to be so — ’

  ‘Miriam,’ she said. ‘Miriam Sipporah. As biblical as yours.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Abner. Do you have another name too?’

  He felt his face redden. ‘What if I have?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’d rather not — ’

  ‘Too bad.’ She smiled, and it lifted her whole face so much that it cheered him, and he found himself speaking before he realised he was doing it.

  ‘Shlomo,’ he said. ‘I ask you! Shlomo. When the kids at school found out, they called me shlemiel. What else?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Shlemiel? It means idiot. Fool.’ He stopped then and looked at her sharply. ‘I only just realised. How come you’ve got a Hebrew name?’

  She looked at him levelly. ‘My mother was Jewish,’ she said.

  He was so surprised that he said nothing, just stared, and she burst into laughter. It was the first time he had heard her laugh and it was a pleasant sound; throaty and filled with genuine amusement. ‘Don’t tell me I don’t look it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear that.’

  ‘But you do,’ he said. ‘I should have — it just never occurred to me. That here, in Oxford — and a father who’s a professor — it didn’t seem likely.’ He looked at the cloud of frizzy hair and the wide dark eyes again and nodded. ‘You do look it.’

  ‘I do?’ And there was a note of amused jeering in her voice now. ‘What sort of Jewish do I look? The red headed blue eyed kind you find all over Israel and all over the world come to that Or black like the Ethiopian Jews? Or Chinese like the Sha
nghai Jews? Or — ’

  He threw up both hands in mock surrender. ‘All right, all right! I’m a racist pig who thinks in cliches — ’

  ‘Something like that,’ she said and again smiled at him. It was a real smile, wide and friendly and he could have warmed his hands at it.

  ‘This is better,’ he said, off his guard. ‘It’s good to be so comfortable together.’

  It was as though he’d pulled a shutter down over her. The warmth and the laughter vanished and she sat up, setting her feet firmly on the ground.

  ‘I have to get back,’ she said abruptly. ‘Have you paid? I’ve got the car round the corner in Pusey Street by St Cross. They’ll clamp it if I leave it much longer. You want to come back to do some more work? Or come another day? I could drop you at the station.’

  He stared at her, bewildered again. ‘Can’t you — I mean, do you have to rush back? I want to do some more work, of course I do. And if you worked with your father on this stuff, I’d like to have some guidance from you. But right now, I thought — we seemed to be — I mean, how about showing me the town? I’ve never been to Oxford before. I had a friend who was here, used to write me about it, but I’ve never actually seen it. Show me the colleges.’

  She stared at him. ‘The dreaming spires bit? I suppose so.’ Another sudden change. She looked approachable again, but the moment of real intimacy that had seemed to grow between them a little while ago had quite vanished. She was polite, no more; and then turned and led the way out of the pub.

  ‘We’d better check the car’s still safely parked,’ she said. ‘And then I’ll walk you around a little. It’s hopeless any other way.’ And she went swiftly along the pavement, her hands in her trouser pockets again, and the old black cardigan swinging behind her. He noticed now that she had a neat round behind and that pleased him. Neat behinds were good to look at, and he might as well get what pleasure he could from her company. Certainly talking to her was an occupation fraught with disappointment. So he watched the muscles move in their rhythmic way and enjoyed it all the way up to Pusey Street.

  The car sat demurely tucked between two much larger ones and since none of the vehicles had been clamped or ticketed and there were plenty of them, she nodded briskly.

  ‘We’ll gamble. Should be all right till a little later. They get tough around the rush hour. So, you want a tour. Right. This is St Cross College. That one over there’s Regent’s Park College. Come on, you can look into the quads as we go by, and I’ll take you into one or two. Oriel, maybe, and Balliol.’

  She took him round the city at a rate that left him breathless, and made even his long legs ache, weaving her way in among the strolling passers-by as deftly as she had manoeuvred her little car, throwing information back at him over her shoulder.

  ‘That’s the Ashmolean — not a bad museum, though for myself I rather like the University one. That’s St John’s College over there, and the other one’s Trinity. If you go down there, Broad Street, you’ll come to the Bodleian — old Bodley — and the Radcliffe Camera’s on the other side of that. We’ll work our way round in a minute — ’

  Her energy seemed unflagging, and she did not shorten her step at all, however breathless he got. He wasn’t used to this much exercise, though clearly she was; most of his time at work was spent hunched over a desk or a camera or an editing set-up. There had been a time when he had considered taking up jogging like everyone else in Manhattan and then had discarded it as mere fashion. Now, as he panted after those swift legs, he wasn’t so sure. It was shaming to be left sweating and red-faced in this manner.

  But as time went on he got his second wind and it got easier, and he could actually stop and stare at some of the things she showed him; great old stone buildings of such solidity they made him feel fragile, and he tried to encompass the dates she gave him for some of them; this place had been largely unchanged, it seemed, for hundreds of years. Some of these buildings could almost have grown out of the ground, they were so much a part of the landscape, and he worked to control his sense of awe. He wouldn’t for the world display to this odd girl his American naïvety in terms of the antiquity of buildings. It was too easy to be overwhelmed by such minor matters, he told himself, and just nodded and asked the most intelligent questions he could, as she rattled on with her guided tour, for all the world like a city employee.

  It was getting dark by the time she had taken him all round the centre of town and at last she stopped on the pavement in the middle of the hurrying home-going shoppers, and said flatly ‘Well, that’s it. Today’s gallop through the dreaming spires.’

  ‘Nothing dreamy about that. I’m aching all over.’ He grinned at her, inviting her to laugh, hoping his admission of frailty would soften her. It didn’t.

  ‘Shall I take you to the station? It’s not much of a walk. Down there, along to the right and then first left. Once you’re over the bridge turn left again and then right. You’ll see the station there.’

  ‘Well, yes. Thank you. I’ll walk. I can come back again?’

  ‘I told you. The stuff’s there if you need it.’

  ‘Even for just a movie?’

  ‘It’s history,’ she said and turned away. ‘Geoff said everyone who needed access was to have it. You need it, you have it. What I think doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘I’ll phone then, and make a time,’ he said and then had to call after her, for she was already walking away from him. ‘Mirian! I’ll call you!’

  She didn’t turn round. She just lifted one hand above her head in an absent sort of way, wriggled her fingers, and walked on, and he watched her go and felt oddly bleak. It had been an effortful afternoon, and his calf muscles and heels were aching dully. They’d be screaming blue murder at him tomorrow. But he’d enjoyed it. He’d enjoyed her too. Coming back would be worth while for more than one reason.

  Six

  ‘Listen,’ the fat man said. ‘You’ve picked a good time and a bad time.’ He leaned back in his chair and grinned expansively at Abner, clearly pleased at his gnomic utterance, wanting to be asked what he meant. Irritated by his self importance, Abner refused to ask and just sat and looked at him, waiting.

  He was very aware of the room around him; it was over-furnished to the point of being embarrassing, with heavy leather sofas and armchairs set on deep Chinese rugs, a vast glass coffee table piled with movie magazines and trade papers from every country in the world that published them. The walls were covered with self-consciously modern paintings as well as the ubiquitous movie posters that everyone displayed in offices involved in the industry — only these had been expensively framed. There were a couple of framed gold and platinum records, too, and very large photographs of grinning performers with great sprawling signatures on them. ‘To the Divine Monty’ he could read clearly right over on the other side of the room, scrawled beneath a simpering face so rich in dimples and curls that their owner could have been a lascivious Shirley Temple, except that he was clearly male. ‘The Bestest Agent a guy could have — with gratitude — Jonty Charteris.’ One of last year’s big names, Abner remembered hazily. A singer of banal sentimental ballads that middle-aged women all over the world had adored. He must have made a lot of money out of that one, he thought sourly and stared back at the fat man who was still watching him expectantly.

  After a moment the man sighed and leaned forwards to tap his cigarette ash into the Cadillac hub cap he used as an ashtray. ‘I’ll tell you, Wiseman, there’s money around. Oh, yes, there’s money around.’

  Again he leaned back and stared owlishly at Abner. ‘For some films you just hold out your hands and it comes running in. That’s the good news.’

  Still Abner said nothing.

  ‘The bad news is, the ones that want to spend the money are mostly Arabs. And something tells me that they won’t be so eager to go paying out to make a movie like this one you want to make, you know what I mean? Bad title too,’ he said then with a fine judicious air. Postscripts? What sort of a titl
e is that for a film? Sounds like — like a…’ he sawed the air with one hand, looking for a simile and ended lamely, ‘It don’t sound like a film.’

  ‘Why not? I saw a poster coming in for a movie called K9. What sort of a title is that?’

  ‘A money-making title, my boy, that’s what that is! Anyway, it’s a joke, see — K9 — it means a dog. It’s a buddy movie, only one of the buddies is an alsatian. Great for an agent, that is! Making stars of bloody mutts. But it’s making money, believe me. So who ares what they call it?’

  ‘Precisely. My Postscripts then, is just as good a title — ’

  ‘If it’ll make money.’ The fat man seized on that. ‘But where’s the guarantee? No stars, no glamour, and such a subject! Movies about such subjects — do they make money? People want a bit of uplift now, entertainment, Spielberg stuff — ’

  ‘Spielberg makes Spielberg movies,’ Abner said, as colourlessly as he could, though anger simmered inside him. ‘I make mine.’

  ‘Sure you do, sure you do!’ The other was expansive, warm, sympathetic. ‘Of course you do! I’m just saying, find a better subject, a good title, a star or two and there’s backing for the asking. But this subject, this title — no Arab’s going to give a damn.’

  ‘Are you saying the only available investors in this country are Arabs?’ Abner said. ‘I understood from Joe Kass in LA that you knew the business on this side better than anyone. That you didn’t just agent performers but directors as well and were involved in packaging. That was why I came to see you. I thought you’d know all the sources of funding and — ’

  ‘Of course I do! I was just telling you where there’s easy monies to be found! Sometimes you have to do it the hard way, but why be stubborn if by changing a bit here and there you can have an easy time of it?’

  ‘I’d rather make my own movie, Mr Nagel.’ Abner said. ‘If you’re saying you’re not interested in handling that, then — ’ He made a move to get to his feet and the other waved him down again.