Ancient Images (2 page)

    "You can owe me one," she said, and sat beside him on the bench, "since you can't wait to tell me what you've tracked down."

    "Guess."

    "All the scenes Orson Welles shot that were cut after the sneak preview."

    "Ah, if only. I begin to doubt we'll see those in my lifetime. Maybe my heaven's going to be the complete
Ambersons,
double-billed with
Greed
on the biggest screen my brain can cope with." He blinked rapidly at the park, nannies wheeling prams, pigeons nodding to crumbs on the paths. "I know you've indulged me already, but would you mind if we were to go inside now? I feel in need of a roof over my head."

    They dodged across Marble Arch, where the black flock of taxis wheeled away into Edgware Road and Oxford Street and Park Lane, and almost lost each other in the crowd before they reached the pub. Though he was mopping his forehead with one of his oversized handkerchiefs, Graham chose a table furthest from the door. Sandy perched on a seat wedged into the corner and stretched out her long legs, drawing admiring glances from several businessmen munching rolls. "You haven't found the film your American friend was sure was lost forever," she said.

    "
Tower
of
Fear.
I have indeed, and I wanted you and him to be the first to know. In fact I was wondering if you'd both care for a preview this evening."

    "Was there ever one?"

    "Not even in the States, though my copy came from a bank vault over there, from a collector who seemed to prefer watching his investment grow to watching the films themselves, bless him. Mind you, I've my suspicions that one of my informants had a copy salted away too." He sat back as if he'd just finished an excellent meal, and raised his gin and tonic. "May all my quests be as successful, and my next prize not take two years to hunt down."

    "Was it worth two years?"

    "My
dear,"
he chided her, knowing she was teasing him. "A feature film with Karloff and Lugosi that no one living will admit to having seen? It would have had to be several times worse than the worst of the junk that's made these days to disappoint me, but let me tell you this: I watched half an hour of it before bedtime, and I had to make myself put out the light."

    "What, just because of- was-"

    "An old film? An old master, I'd say Giles Spence was, and it's tragic that it was the last film he directed. He knows how to make you look over your shoulder, I promise you, and I think you'd be professionally impressed by the editing. I'd love to watch the film with someone who appreciates it."

    "Doesn't Toby?"

    "He's sweet, but you know how he is for living in the present. I hope he won't feel outnumbered if Roger joins us, the American you mentioned. You met him at my last entertainment, you'll recall."

    "We exchanged a few words."

    "Oh, wary, wary. I wouldn't dare to arrange a match for the hermit of Muswell Hill," Graham said, pretending to shrink back in case she hit him. "Seriously, shall you be able to come tonight?"

    He sounded so anxious that she took pity on him. "I'll look after you."

    He glanced behind him, presumably for Toby, but there was no sign of Toby among the crowd silhouetted against the dazzle from outside. Above the bar the one o'clock news had been interrupted by commercials. Aproned women with sheaves in their hands danced through a field of wheat to the strains of Vaughan Williams, and a maternal voice murmured "Staff o' Life-simply English" as the words appeared on the screen. Now here was the news footage Sandy had edited, the line of constables blocking a road into Surrey, the wandering convoy which the media had christened Enoch's Army fuming at the roadblock, the leader burying his fingers in his beard which was massive as his head while a policeman gestured him and his followers onward to yet another county, children staring out of vehicles at children jeering "Hippies" at them from a school at the edge of the road. "Scapegoats, you mean," Graham muttered.

    "I hope people can see that's what they are."

    "All you can do is try and show the truth," Graham said, and jumped as someone loomed at him out of the crowd.

    It was only Toby. He stroked Graham's head in passing, and leaned against the wall beside Sandy, wriggling his broad shoulders to work out tension. In his plump face, made paler by the bristling shock of ginger hair, his blue eyes were wide with frustration. "Thank you, Dionysos, for this oasis in the jungle," he said, elevating his glass.

    "Trouble with the natives?" Graham suggested.

    "Not with us at all. Hitler youths on their way to a bierkeller almost shoved me under a bus, and two gnomes in Bermuda shorts sneaked in front of me for the last of the pasta in Old Compton Street. 'Look, Martha, it's like we get at home. Thank the Lord for some honest to God food instead of all this foreign garbage.' They ought to have been thanking the Lord for my concern for international relations."

    "Never mind, love. Sandy'll be joining us tonight, by the way."

    "It'll be a sorry buffet, I warn you-whatever I concoct from the little I managed to save from the locust hordes."

    "The two of you are enough of a feast," Sandy declared, raising her voice to drown out a man at the bar who was telling a joke about gays and AIDS. She thought he might be unaware of the periphery of his audience until he and his cronies stared at Graham and Toby and burst out laughing.

    "I think we may adjourn to our place," Graham said, "lest my mood be spoiled."

    "Just as you like," Toby said, his mouth stiff, blood flaring high on his cheeks. Sandy could tell that he wanted to confront the speaker on Graham's behalf. She ushered her friends past the bar, where the men turned their thick necks toward them. The joker's eyes met hers in the mirror between the inverted bottles. His face was a mask made of beef. When he smirked she said, "You must feel very inadequate."

    "Queers and women's libbers, I can do without the lot of them," he told a crony out of the corner of his mouth.

    "Then you'll have to take yourself in hand," Sandy laughed.

    He understood more quickly than she would have expected, and wheeled bull-like on the stool, lowering his head as if he were stepping into a ring. She didn't even need to imagine him in drag in order to render him absurd. She shook her head reprovingly and urged her friends out of the pub. "You make sure our Graham enjoys his triumph," she told Toby, patting his angry cheeks.

    "We'll enjoy it more for sharing it with you," he said, and took Graham's hand as they crossed over to the park.

    

    

    Sandy lingered outside Metropolitan as they strode rapidly past Speaker's Corner. The man with the raw scalp was still ranting, but only the sound of traffic appeared to emerge from his mouth. A tramp or a tangle of litter stirred behind a bench as Graham and Toby reached the nearest entrance to the car park that extended under the whole of Hyde Park. As Graham stepped out of the sunlight he glanced back sharply, but she didn't think he was looking at her. She was squinting in case she could see what he'd seen when Lezli came out of Metropolitan to find her. "Help," Lezli said.

    At first Sandy thought Lezli was editing an old musical, brushing her green hair behind her ear whenever she stooped to the bench. Astaire was dancing on the moviola screen, and it wasn't until Cagney joined him that she realized this was something new. It was
The
Light
Fantastic,
a television film where the players in an end-of-the-pier show found themselves fading into monochrome and dancing with the best of Hollywood. "Only their rhythm's wrong, and the film's already over budget, and the dancers have gone to America themselves now," Lezli wailed.

    "Any chance of using some other vintage clips?"

    "It took us months to clear these. I did tell the producer he should try, and he used words I didn't know existed. The worst of it is these aren't the clips we thought we'd be using, the ones the dancers were told to match."

    The point of the film was that the ghosts of Cagney and Astaire allowed the dancers to forget their bickering and their failures and realize their ambitions for a night, if only in fantasy, but now it looked as if the encounter turned them into clowns. Sandy examined the outtakes, which proved to be useless. She ran the completed scenes again, and then she hugged Lezli. "Couldn't see for looking," she said, and separated the main routine into three segments. "Now how do we get them all to dance in the same tempo?"

    Lezli peered and brushed her hair back and saw it. "Slow our people down."

    "That's what I thought. Let's see." She watched Lezli run the tape back and forth, trying to match tempi, until the dancers joined the ghosts, not imitating them so much as interpolating syncopated variations in a slight slow motion that seemed magical. The producer of the film came storming in to find Lezli, then clapped his hand over his mouth. "Light
and
fantastic. Thanks, Sandy. I thought we were up cripple creek."

    "Thank Lezli, she's the one who put the idea into words. Soon I'll be coming to her for advice," Sandy said and went to the vending machine for a coffee, feeling even happier than she would have if she'd edited the film herself.

    She enjoyed the urgency of editing news footage, but equally she enjoyed helping shape fictions, improving the timing, discovering new meanings through juxtapositions, tuning the pace. She'd learned these skills in Liverpool; she'd spent her first two years out of school working with children at the Blackie, a deconsecrated church with a rainbow in place of a cross, helping them make videos about their own fears. She'd moved to London to attend film school, she'd lived with a fellow student for almost a year and had nursed him through a nervous breakdown before they'd split up. She'd been a member of a collective that had made a film confronting rapists with their victims, and the film had been shown at Edinburgh and Cannes. When a second film that would have let people who had been abused as children confront their seducers had failed to attract finance, Sandy had gone for the job of assistant editor at Metropolitan. Later she'd learned that Graham had put in a good word for her, having seen the collective's film in Edinburgh and admired the editing. He'd introduced himself once she had begun work at the station, and they had taken an immediate liking to each other. He'd steered her toward jobs he'd thought would stretch her talents; he'd supported her when, infrequently, she'd thought a task was too much for her, and had been the first to applaud when she solved it; he'd given her the confidence when she needed it and asked for nothing but her friendship in return. In less than a year she was promoted and managed to land Lezli, with whom she'd worked in the collective, her old job. Now, two years later, she was twenty-eight, and sometimes felt as if she was able to shape her life as deftly as she shaped films.

    She might meet someone she would like to spend it with, but there was no urgency, especially since she didn't want children. It was Graham and her parents who were anxious to see her matched, though Graham was less insistent since she'd met a young architect at one of his private showings. Among the guests wo had assembled to watch Graham's latest treasures, Dietrich's screen test for
The
Blue
Angel,
Walt Disney's menstruation film and a copy of
Double
Indemnity
that began in the death cell-actors from the Old Vic, chairmen of art galleries, columnists and socialites and even minor royalty-the architect had seemed to feel out of place until Sandy had befriended him. He'd invited her out for a drink, and next time for dinner in Hampstead, where he lived. Afterward they'd walked across the heath toward his flat as the wind blundered up from Regent's Park, bearing a mutter of traffic like the sound of a sleeping zoo, and the architect had questioned her about her childhood, whether she had misbehaved at school, how she had been punished and what she had been wearing… She might have played his game if the gleam in his eyes hadn't been so dangerously eager. She'd left him with their only kiss and had walked home to Muswell Hill, reflecting that the encounter had been both funny and sad. Such was life.

    Though she enjoyed Graham's crowded private parties, not least because she knew they meant so much to him, she was flattered to be invited to tonight's small gathering. She must tell him to watch the film Lezli had edited, she thought as the Underground train rocked her homeward. He always watched films she recommended, and that made her feel both special and responsible for him.

    She left the train at Highgate and climbed to the main road. Traffic slow and apparently endless as a parade of baggage in an airport rumbled up from Archway toward the Great North Road. She turned along Muswell Hill Road, where buses were laboring toward Alexandra Park. In five minutes she was at Queen's Wood.

    After the stuffiness of the train and the uproar of the traffic, the small wood felt like the first day of a holiday. Beneath the oaks and beeches the velvety gloom was cool. Holly spiked the shadows among the trunks. Tangles of brambles sprawled across the grass beside the tarmac paths that were cracked by the clenched roots of trees. Sandy strolled along the discursive paths, letting her senses expand until the wood glowed around her.

    Her flat was at the top of a mock-Tudor three-story house that overlooked the wood. She owned half of the top floor. The skylight above the wide stairwell was trying to fit a lozenge of sunlight into her doorframe as she unlocked the door. Bogart came to greet her, arching his back and digging his claws into the hall carpet until she shooed him into the main room, where Bacall was sitting on the windowsill among the cacti, watching a magpie. Both cats raced into the bright compact kitchen as soon as she opened a cupboard to reach for a can of their food. They ate daintily while she finished off last night's lasagna and the remaining glassful of claret, they rubbed themselves against her ankles while she washed up and told them about her day. They followed her into her bedroom and watched her change into a dress she thought elegant enough for visiting Graham, and then they chased her as she ran to where the phone was ringing.