The previous summer he had dropped out of filming Hammer’s To Love a Vampire, the follow-up in the Sheridan Le Fanu ‘Karnstein’ saga (even though the part of occultist schoolmaster Giles Barton had been written for him) because Helen had become gravely ill, yet again.
“No more milk train,” he’d said.
When she’d been rushed to hospital that last time and he’d been telephoned by Joyce at the studios, he was shocked how tired she looked when he arrived at her bedside. It was immediately clear this was not just a case of a few check-ups, as he’d deluded himself into thinking. He’d held her hand tightly and said to her he wasn’t on call the next day and he’d bring in a picnic lunch. She smiled and said that’d be lovely. But when he’d arrived with the wicker hamper, like some character from a drawing-room farce, the nurses had told him he was not to be admitted under any circumstances. The doctors said his wife had had a serious relapse and her heart and lungs were terribly weak. He heard very little after that.
He succeeded by sheer persistence in persuading the specialists to let her home. Nobody precisely said that these coming days were her last, but their acquiescence made it obvious. Cushing shook their hands and thanked them profusely. The Polish doctor long ago had said he feared there were no miracles, and this was clearly what he meant, he knew that now. And he knew his wife would need constant medical assistance for the short, precious time she had left.
He arranged day and night care, and rang his agent to cancel his role in the Mummy picture they’d started shooting. He was not irreplaceable. Other people in this life were.
Now he remembered the crew sending flowers to the funeral.
As families do, of course.
He remembered, too, sitting at her bedside, tears streaming down his face. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done things of which I have been entirely ashamed, foolish things… Yet through it all, you have been perfect. You forgave…”
“I told you so many times, my love,” Helen had said. “I never wanted you to feel I possessed you. That was our bargain, remember? What I know doesn’t hurt me, so why on earth should it hurt you? It’s unimportant. Those things simply didn’t happen. You hear?” She’d wiped his cheeks with a corner of the bed sheet. “Not a person in the world could have done for me what you have done… But I’m tired, my darling… I can’t talk now…”
In the bedroom now, all alone, he took the crucifix Helen wore from the jewellery box in front of the vanity mirror where she would put on her make-up every morning.
He placed it deep in the hip pocket of the Edwardian tweed suit made for him by Hatchard’s, the outfitter in the High Street. It was where he bought most of his traditional clothes: caps, cravats, gloves. They knew what he liked there and never let him down. People didn’t let him down, that was the remarkable thing in life. He remembered wearing this, his own suit, when filming I, Monster with Chris Lee. Now he faced another Jekyll and Hyde, another beast hiding under the mask of normality. A clash with evil in which he could only, as ever, feign expertise. Fake it. But at least with the right tools. And in a costume that felt proper for the fight.
Downstairs, the scripts and letters he had trodden over to get in still lay on the mat inside the front door. He picked them up. Clutched them to his chest. They felt full and heavy. Full of words and ideas and powerful emotions, and his chest empty.
“What if I fail?”
She was as clear in his ear as she’d ever been in life.
You shall not fail, my darling… With faith, you cannot fail…
“What faith?”
He faced the closed door to the living room.
Your faith that Goodness is stronger than Evil. It’s what you believe, isn’t it? You always have.
“I know. But is that enough?”
You know it will be. It must be.
He turned the handle and pushed the door ajar.
The room was in darkness as he walked through it. He placed the scripts and cards on the bureau, adding to the pile. He looked at one envelope and held it between his thumb and forefinger. He recognised the handwriting. It was a friend.
So many friends. And yet…
Darling, never fear… You are the one good thing in a dark world… and I am with you…
“Helen…”
How could he be downhearted when countless individuals led their entire lives without finding a love even a fraction as powerful as the one he had found?
He picked up her photograph and pressed it to his lips.
***
Square and temple-like, it had gone the way of all flesh. Now mostly a bingo hall, The Oxford in Oxford Street was a piece of faded gentrification, a mere memory of past glory, a vision of empire slowly turning to decay, a senile relative barely cared for and shamefully unloved. All those things. He remembered being told, at some official council function or other, that the original cinema opened in 1912, long before talkies, even before he was born. Rebuilt in 1936 in Art Deco style by a local architect, the regenerated Oxford’s first film show was Jack Hulbert in Jack of All Trades. Extraordinary to contemplate, looking at it now.
He trod out a cigarette on the pavement.
Behind glass, Ingrid Pitt’s fearsome, fanged countenance loomed over a tombstone. Beautiful temptress or bloodthirsty monster? She’s the new horror from Hammer! He noticed his own name amongst the other co-stars, George Cole and Kate O’Mara. Inevitably it brought back the letters of condolence he’d received from both of them. And the strangers who had done so, too. He thought it peculiar, yet immensely touching, that those who’d never even met his wife or himself personally would feel moved to make such a gesture. The foibles of the human heart were infinite, it seemed, at times. But that notion did more to give him a chill of apprehension than stiffen his nerves.
Inside, the carpet tiles were disastrously faded and the disinterested girl at the ticket booth barely old enough to be out of school. He did not need to say “upstairs” as he used to, because the seats in the stalls had been removed for bingo tables. Upstairs were the only seats left. With a clunk the ticket poked out and he took it.
“Excuse me for asking. Are you Peter Cushing’s father?”
“No, my dear. I’m his grandfather.”
In what used to be the circle the house lights were up and he had no difficulty finding his way to a middle seat, halfway back. As yet he was the only one there. He took off his scarf and whipped the dust off it before sitting. It was more threadbare than when he’d come last, but he couldn’t blame the owners. Trade was dwindling. The goggle box in the corner was sucking audiences away from cinemas: not that he should complain—there was a time, at the height of his success in that medium, when people joked that a television set was nothing so much as “Peter Cushing with knobs”. But now people were becoming inert and frighteningly passive, like the drones predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which so horrified when he starred as Winston Smith in the BBC production in the fifties that it caused a storm of outrage. Questions were raised in Parliament, no less: the remarkable power of drama to jolt and shock from complacency. Some outrage was necessary, he also considered, when picture palaces like this, almost jokily resplendent in Egyptian Dynastic glamour, were becoming as decrepit as castle ruins.
He thought again of Orwell’s masterpiece and wonderful Helen standing just off camera, her radiant smile giving him a boost of confidence to overcome his chronic nerves. What had been the play’s theme? Love. And what was the ghastly phrase of the dictatorship? Love crime. Two words that were anathema in juxtaposition. Except, perhaps, in a court of law. Indeed, he wondered if this was his own ‘Room 101’ in which he had to face the very thing he feared most: love, not as something sacred, but as something unspeakably profane.
His stomach curdled—as it often did of late—and he tried to shift his musings elsewhere. To Wally the projectionist, who once proudly showed him his domain, with its two 1930s projectors that used so much oil that, when it came out the other end, he’d use it in
his car.
Cushing took his coat from the seat next to him and folded it over the one in front. He was hoping the vacant seat would be occupied. Eventually, if not sooner. For now he had best try to endure the sticky smell of popcorn and Kia-Ora embedded in the surroundings.
He put on his white cotton glove and lit a cigarette. Before he’d finished it Russ Conway’s ‘Donkey Serenade’ faded and the house lights went down.
Without the pre-amble of advertisements, often the case in a matinee, sickly green lettering was cast over the rippling curtains as they creaked begrudgingly open. Mis-timed as ever.
An American International/Hammer Films Production.
Ah yes.
Jimmy ringing him in a panic saying AIP were getting cold feet because they’d cast an unknown in the lead, and a Polish girl at that. They’d already had to defend their decision to the Ministry of Labour, for God’s sake: now the Americans had said they’d feel more secure with a “traditional Hammer cast”. And so he’d stepped into the breach at the last minute to save Hammer’s bacon. He could hardly believe that only a year ago he was filming it all on Stage Two and at Moor Park golf course, with Helen waiting for him at home, alive, when they called it a wrap.
He squinted as colour flecked the dark air and dust motes.
Lugubrious Douglas Wilmer’s Baron von Hartog closes the book on his family history. He watches from a high window in the ruined tower of Karnstein castle as an apparition floats around the fog-swathed graveyard below. A phantasm in billowing shroud-cloth, the Evil not yet in human form…
The words of the actor in voice-over blended with the words Cushing recalled dimly from the script.
How the creature, driven by its wretched passion, takes a form by which to attract its victims…
How, compelled by their lust, they court their prey…
“Driven by their inhuman thirst—for blood…”
Cushing shifted in his seat. Why were cinema seats so desperately uncomfortable?
The camera tracks in towards a drunk who has staggered out of a tavern and stands urinating against a wall. His stupid face opens in a lascivious grin. Back inside the tavern, his scream chills the air and everyone freezes in horror—the way Hammer does best. The serving wench runs to the door and opens it to find the drunk with twin punctures in his neck. Lifeless, he falls…
Peter Cushing looked at his watch. Tricky to see in the dark. The merest glint of glass. Hopeless. Hearing the screech of a sword drawn from its scabbard, he lifted his eyes back to the screen.
Douglas Wilmer waits in the chapel for the apparition to return to its grave. As his eyes widen, the camera pans to a diaphanous shroud more like a sexy Carnaby Street nightgown than anything from the nineteenth century, and the naked, voluptuous figure beneath it. The camera rises to the face of a beautiful blonde. She steps closer and wraps her arms around the frightened, mesmerised Baron. When her cleavage presses against the crucifix hanging round his neck she recoils sharply, her lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Close up: bloody fangs bared in a lustrous, female mouth. With a single swipe of his sword he decapitates her. Moments later, her severed head lies bloody on the castle flag stones at his feet. The lush music of Harry Robinson, as romantic as it is eerie, wells up over the title sequence proper…
Still the seat beside Cushing remained empty. He lit a second cigarette. By now he was wondering if he would be sitting through the film alone. Perhaps his attempt to entice the creature hadn’t been as clever as he’d thought.
The pastiche Strauss made him cringe every time. He’d never been impressed by the tatty ballroom scene at the General’s house. The Hammers were always done cheaply—the ingenuity and commitment of cast and crew papering over inadequate budgets—but now they were starting to look cheap. It worried and saddened him. Like seeing a fond acquaintance down on their uppers. Byronic Jon Finch looked heroic enough, he had to admit. He didn’t look bad himself as a matter of fact, in that scarlet tunic and medals…
Peter Cushing as the General looks on, presiding over his party. He kisses the hand of the delightful Madeline Smith, bidding her and her father, George Cole, goodbye. Or rather: “Auf wiedersehn.”
Until we meet again. Obviously. The audience knows he will appear later in the picture. He’s one of the stars, after all.
He watched Dawn Addams as the Countess introduce her daughter Mircalla, played with languid hunger by Ingrid Pitt—plucked from her brief appearance in Where Eagles Dare after Shirley Eaton (from Goldfinger) was deemed too old, even though they were actually the same age. Perhaps Eaton, he thought, simply hadn’t given Jimmy Carreras what he wanted, as Ingrid with her European eroticism undoubtedly had. Poor Ingrid, who’d spent time with her family in a concentration camp—(“concentration camp: that’s true horror”)—and for whom he’d organized a cake and champagne on the anniversary of her father’s birth: Helen had wheeled it onto the set and Ingrid had blown out the candles with tears in her eyes.
Peter Cushing asks the Countess if she would like to join in the waltz. “Enchanted,” comes her reply.
“The invitation to the dance.” A voice in reality: one he recognised all too well.
Without turning his head, he saw the usherette’s torch hovering at the end of his row of seats. A silhouette moved closer, given a flickering penumbra by the fidgeting and then departing beam. The donkey jacket seemed almost to be bristly on the shoulders, like the pelt of some large animal, especially with the long, flesh-coloured hair running over its collar.
Eyes fixed on the screen, Cushing felt the weight of Les Gledhill settle in the cinema seat beside him. He detected the strong whiff of carbolic soap and Brut after shave, a multi-pronged attack to cover the daily tang of blood and gutted fish.
Jon Finch is waltzing with the General’s niece, Laura, and Ingrid—Mircalla—is looking over at them. Laura thinks she is eyeing up her boyfriend but he says no, it’s her she’s looking at. A sinister man enters the ballroom dressed in a black top hat and a red lined cloak. His face is unnaturally pale. He whispers to the Countess, who makes her apologies to the General. She has to go. Someone has died.
Peter Cushing as the General tells her, “It’s my pleasure to look after your daughter, if you so wish.”
Sitting beside him in the auditorium, Gledhill’s face was entirely in darkness.
“Don’t tell me you’ll tear down the curtains and let in the light. You’re not exactly as frisky as you were back in the fifties, are you?”
“I thought you didn’t watch my films.”
“Only when there’s nothing better on. They’re okay for a cheap laugh, I suppose. All they’re good for nowadays.” The General says goodbye to the Countess and watches her depart in her coach. Ingrid stares out. The pale, cloaked man on horseback in the woods gives a malevolent grin, showing pointed fangs. “Things have moved on, haven’t you noticed? Blood and gore, all the rest of it. Nobody’s scared of bats and castles and bolts through the neck.” Mircalla fondly places a laurel on the General’s niece’s head. Puts a friendly arm round the young girl’s bare shoulders. “They’re just comedy. Nobody’s afraid of you anymore.”
Cushing chose not to point out that their Frankenstein’s monster never had bolts through its neck. “I believe I still have a small but devoted following.”
“I can see. We can hardly move for your adoring fans.” The man he spoke to knew as well as he did that they were the only people in the audience. “They’re dying, these old films. Everybody knows it. The last gasp. It’s tragic.”
“I think you’ll find this film has been a box office hit. Significantly so, in fact. It’s rejuvenated the company.”
“Really. Look around you.”
“You’ve got to remember it’s already been released for five months. And this is a backwater town. And a matinee.”
“You’re living an illusion, mate.”
“Am I?”
“You need to get a grip on reality, old feller. Before you lose it compl
etely. Choc ice?”
Cushing imagined it was not a serious inquiry.
Peter Cushing’s beautiful niece is sleeping now. Swooning in some kind of ‘wet dream’—if that was the expression. He remembered that this was one of the many scenes that Trevelyan and Audrey Field, who had been campaigning against Hammer for decades, were unhappy about, even with an X certificate. The censor had strongly urged the producers to keep the film “within reasonable grounds”—meaning the combination of blood and nudity, the very thing Carreras was gleeful about now they’d entered the seventies (“The gloves are off! We can show anything!”). In monochrome a hideous creature crawls up the bed. Wolf-like eyes out of blackness become Ingrid Pitt’s—Mircalla’s. To Cushing the girl looks as though she has a bearskin rug crawling over her. Nevertheless, the dream orgasm so worrisome to the BBFC is curtailed with her scream.
“You saw the bitch,” Gledhill said in the gloom. “What did she say? You know she’s a liar.”
“There seem to be an extraordinary number of liars in your life, Mr Gledhill.”
Peter Cushing and an elderly housekeeper run in and calm Laura down. They say it was a nightmare, that’s all. He kisses her forehead and they leave the room. They think of checking on Mircalla, but when they knock there is no answer. They presume she’s sleeping. But the bedroom is empty. Ingrid Pitt is outside under moonlight looking up at the window…
“I thought she seemed perfectly charming,” Cushing said, his eyes not straying from the screen. He pretended that it absorbed his attention. “Another woman with another boy who perhaps doesn’t dream of vampires, like Carl, but of another kind of… creature of the night.”
His companion remained silent. He found it uncommonly difficult to deliver the lines he’d prepared in his head.
“She told me you’d invariably take him off to bed, rather than her. That you’d spend time reading him stories, as a doting father should. Quite rightly. Your, ah, special time you called it, I believe… I wonder what your son might call it?”
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