Engleby (5 page)

I told Stellings this and he started calling me ‘Groucho’. I liked this better than the nickname I had had at school.

Something else looked briefly promising. This was called ‘Theory’ and it was just coming in. The point about Theory was that it didn’t matter if you read
Jane Eyre
or a fridge installation manual: what you were doing was studying how you studied them, and the important thing now was not the (anyway unquantifiable) ‘value’ of the original work but the effectiveness of the theory.
Vanity Fair
or Biggles was the guinea pig; the vaccine being tested was the -ism. Some of the theories came from the study of linguistics, which was partly based on neuroscience, and for a moment the poor English dons, so fed up with being looked down on by their scientific colleagues, could boast that they too had a ‘real’ subject with truths that could be tested in a lab.

The linguistics side of it hasn’t been fruitful yet because the people writing about the basis of language don’t seem to be able to write.

Other theories are coming in, but they’re based on Marxism or psychoanalysis and other doctrines which haven’t cut the mustard in their own world and now look as though they’re just trying their luck on defenceless Eng Lit – like soldiers cashiered from the regiment turning up as teachers at a struggling private school.

So for Gerald Stanley and the rest it looks like it’s back to
Jane Eyre
.

You can see why, personally, I prefer to take my neuroscience straight, with options in genetics and pathology.

More to the point, however, than my academic work is this: an unexpected but very good thing has happened.

Two

I’d better explain. It’s October, the beginning of my final year. I left off this story all of a sudden because I had to do some work for exams. They didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but that doesn’t matter.

This does matter, though.

In the summer vacation, I worked in my father’s old paper mill for four weeks to make money. The work was boring (I pushed a rubber-wheeled wagon round the factory floor), but it wasn’t hard. At some time the union had agreed that in return for deferring a pay rise, the workforce would have a ten-minute break each hour – excluding lunch and tea and the official tea breaks of fifteen minutes and the five-minute two-hourly toilet breaks. You could roll all the minutes up, if you liked, and leave an hour early. As a casual, I wasn’t officially in the union, but I followed their rules and got paid in cash in a crinkly grey envelope on Friday afternoon.

Jennifer was going to Ireland to make a film with some people from Trinity. The director was called Stewart Forres and there were maybe thirty or so people, cast and crew and a few hangers-on, girlfriends, boyfriends, going to a large old country house near Tipperary.

There wasn’t room for everyone in the main house, so some people put up tents in the grounds and some took rooms in the local village. I found one above the butcher’s shop. The proprietor was called Michael Clohessy and we joked about having the same Christian name. His wife called me ‘little Michael’ and cooked breakfast of black pudding and bacon and sausage and soda bread. The rent was five pounds a week, and after Mrs Clohessy’s breakfast I didn’t have to eat again till the evening, when there’d be dinner on the lawn after the day’s filming was over.

‘You’ll not be wanting rain on your fillum, will you?’ said Mrs Clohessy every day as I left for the set. ‘Let’s hope you’re lucky again.’

The odd thing is that we were. ‘Tip’, as they called the local town, has one of the highest annual rainfalls of any town in Europe, you half expect it to have gondolas, but we never saw a drop.

Day after day the sun shone. The lawn of the old country house began to look bare and brown. The owners worked in horse-breeding and they had stables with thoroughbreds, but they hadn’t had much luck at the market or the races and they took in guests whenever they could. They were pleased to be full up, but after a week they said they wanted a day off, so we’d have to do dinner for ourselves.

In the morning I hitchhiked to Tip, where I found an off-licence. I’d noticed that the drinks stores were running down and I bought a dozen bottles of cider, some seven-pint tins of beer and half a dozen glass carafes of wine with sealed metal tops. The Clohessys’ rent was so small that I still had plenty of cash left from the paper mill. I bought a tray of cut-price chicken pieces from a supermarket and the ingredients for a barbecue sauce. I’d done a lot of cooking as a child because I got hungry waiting for my parents to come home. I had to feed Julie as well as myself and she was quite fussy about the way I did it.

It was tricky getting all this stuff to a point where I could hitch a lift back, but the man in the supermarket lent me a trolley. Everyone was off filming in a wood in the furthest part of the estate and there was no one around except a small girl called Jude, who had straight brown hair wrapped in something I think might be called a snood. She wasn’t needed that day and had been told by Stewart to get a meal together. She was sulking about this; she said he’d picked on her because she was a woman and that he’d never have told a man to cook. I gave her a Glynn Powers roll-up and said I could look after the dinner.

At five, I put up a trestle on the gravel by the kitchen garden and laid out the drink with some paper cups I’d got from the village. I stuck the chicken under a marinade in a huge pan I found in the kitchen. With old bricks and bits of stone I picked up near the bonfire site I built a base for a barbecue with a good draught running under it, laid some wire netting over it, then gathered armfuls of wood from the parched grounds. By seven I had orange-grey embers, and by eight I was ready to offer marinated grilled chicken with barbecue sauce, baked potatoes and salad to thirty people.

I tried to pass it off as Jude’s work, but actually nobody seemed to care who’d cooked it; no one even asked who’d bought it or got it to the house. A guy called Andy said, ‘Great sauce, man.’ Maybe he thought I was a caterer.

I noticed that Jennifer enjoyed it too. I’d bought apple pies and cheese from the village to have afterwards. She laughed when some apple squeezed from the piece of pie she was holding and dropped into her lap.

Jennifer was playing one of the main parts in the film, as it happened. Stewart Forres gave a talk before the camera rolled. He had a thin brown beard and Christ-like hair parted in the middle. He said, ‘You’ve all seen the script that Dave and I have developed. We started with this heavy concept – an acid
Twelfth Night
, if you will – but we’ve finished with something more unstructured. Most of the dialogue is going to be improvised, so you’ll be work-shopping some of your scenes with me or Dave first. We’re going to light some Tibetan candles now and sit in a ring. This is a good-luck ceremony. I’d like you to respect it.’

It looked really good with all the candles and everyone gathered round. The light from the flames shone up on their faces: Kathy and Dave and Amit from King’s, and Hannah and Holly from Newnham, and Hannah’s boyfriend Steve, and Stewart, of course, and Jennifer, who was sitting next to him, and all the others and the ones who did the lights and the sound and the runners and so on. I hadn’t seen the script myself, but there was a feeling of relaxation and people seemed happy to go wherever it took them. The night was warm and someone had a guitar. Sitting there, they looked like Jesus and his disciples. They gave me a feeling I’d seldom had before, like sometimes when I’d watch Julie and one of her friends from school when she was five or six. I used to sit on the other side of the room and just observe them playing.

Most nights in Ireland were similar, but the night I cooked the chicken was the best. After I’d cleared up the plates and stuff, some of the people went off to their tents or their rooms, but most of us, about twenty, stayed round the fire.

Steve had a steel-string guitar, and he began to strum it gently, sitting with his legs crossed, pausing to suck on a joint and pass it on. He then began to pick at the strings instead of strumming. He didn’t make a big thing of it; he played quietly, so if you wanted to listen you could, but it didn’t matter if you carried on talking. In fact everyone did stop what they were doing, and edged into the circle, looking over to where Steve sat. They held their paper cups and cigarettes and waited in the darkness.

The notes picked by Steve’s right hand began to form a melody. He played a Bob Dylan song, ‘Girl From the North Country’, which is like ‘scarborough Fair’, but somehow full of concern. He wants a girl he once loved to be all right. He’s worried that she’s cold. ‘Please see she has a coat so warm/To keep her from the howlin’ winds.’ (He’s already spoken of the snow and ice, where ‘the winds hit heavy on the borderline’.) I used to wonder if this was the border of Canada and America, maybe near the Great Lakes, but now I don’t think it matters. It could be any North Country. He isn’t worried for his own loss or his own feelings – only for the girl he loved. He wants her still to have her hair long, and to be warm. I don’t know why this is so sad.

We sat out there for hours and drank cider and wine and smoked more and listened to Steve’s guitar. Then Holly played a little, but she wasn’t such a good singer as Steve and she gave him the guitar back and he ended with a song called ‘Fire and Rain’. As he was singing, I noticed Jennifer get up and stretch in the night and she walked right past me and laid a hand on my shoulder as she passed and said, ‘Thanks for the dinner.’

I let myself in through the Clohessys’ kitchen and went quietly up the stairs and pushed my window open and wondered if I could still hear any music, just faintly on a breeze. It was a very still night, though.

The boy in charge of the camera was called Nick, and they called him the DoP, which means director of photography, or chief cameraman. ‘Ask the DoP,’ Stewart said ten times a day. I think it was Nick’s camera. It was quite large and could be mounted on a tripod, though for some shots Stewart used to put it under his arm and insist on walking around with it himself to give what he called a ‘New Wave texture’ (which is that thing where you feel seasick). Nick never seemed that keen on Stewart holding the camera and looked relieved to get it back on its tripod.

The other main female part was played by Hannah, who’d done a lot of stage plays earlier in the year, including
Hedda Gabler
, I think. She was confident and difficult to deal with; she often said things were ‘getting too heavy’ and she’d stop for a cigarette and Stewart had to be very gentle with her. Steve, her boyfriend, watched carefully.

There are lots of ways you can make yourself useful on a film set if you’re good with your hands and if you’re patient. When the sound man wants to go for a smoke, you can do the job for him. You put on the headphones and say, ‘Just hold it there, everyone, there’s a plane going over.’ It’s not that difficult.

I can also use a saw and a chisel and make things and paint them if I have to – not that Stewart required much extra scenery, what with it being a pastoral thing set mostly in the woods, except for the bits inside the ‘castle’, which was the house itself. If nothing else, there was always someone who’d like a cup of tea.

A few nights after the chicken evening, there was a shortage of dope and I had to go back to the Clohessys’ and dip into the stash I had in my sponge bag. I had a brought a hell of a lot over on the ferry from Fishguard. Glynn Powers had told me, just before the end of term, ‘Mike, you’ve been my best customer. I wonder if you’d like to do a bit of work for me. It’s like I can’t really handle it all.’ He opened his locker and showed me these spherical lumps of hash the size of tennis balls. He had half a dozen and I took a couple off him to dispose of and split the profit.

When I got back to the garden, I chopped some up into five-pound deals but sold it for a pound a go, credit accepted.

‘Hey, man,’ said Andy, ‘Mike the cook’s turned into Mike the pusher.’

The next morning, Stewart was serious when he called everyone together. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re having a closed set this morning. Just Geoff on lights, Tom on sound, DoP of course, me, and the actors – Alex, Jennifer and Hannah. No one else at all. Is that understood?’

‘What’s a closed set?’ I heard Steve ask Hannah.

‘It means Jenny has to take her clothes off.’

‘Tom’s not back from Tip,’ said Dave. ‘You know he and Bob went last night? He rang in to say he’s got a migraine. He gets them.’

They needed someone to do the sound because they couldn’t delay the scene. It was on the schedule for today and, who knows, it might rain tomorrow. I told Stewart I could do it.

‘You happy with the machine – the cans and everything?’

I told him I’d done it before, which I had, when Tom was off one morning. Tom’s heart wasn’t really in sound; he wanted to act.

Stewart nodded. ‘Everyone cool?’ He looked at Jennifer and Alex and Hannah. Alex looked terrified. Jennifer seemed close to tears.

It was a rape scene of course, but it was feminist in the way Stewart filmed it so you were meant to share the rage of the woman character, played by Jennifer.

There were a lot of planes going over towards Dublin, so we had to keep redoing the bit where Alex’s character pulled Jennifer to the ground and lifted up her dress. There was a problem with her underwear. It was difficult for Alex to rip it off without tearing it, and they didn’t have enough spare pairs. Also, it took too long to get it off and it looked as though the camera was sort of dwelling on it.