Fallout (39 page)

What about Kurtz’s accusation you’re ‘reactionary’?

You’re not English. Where are your parents?

Are you Jewish? Did your father change his name?

Does fame appeal to you?

Is ‘madness’ in your work a political preoccupation, or personal?

‘Do you think the real world is as nightmarish as the one you depict in your play?’

‘Sometimes it is,’ said Luke. ‘Yes.’

When Nina had left his flat, the day he went back, he searched for clues of her. He went around carefully like a dog checking for any piece left behind. There were ghosts – the smell of her on the pillow, the sheets, a gold cigarette packet crumpled and dropped into the bin. Split-second relief from her absence. He pressed his face into the place on the bed where her body had been as if he could climb back into her. She had sent the key to his agent and a note saying ‘Thank you’, which made him angry for being so fatuous. He would rather no note at all. He wasn’t angry with her, it was just the instinct to fight back against the pain, and nobody to fight with. He had felt the hit, the rush, the heat, the taste, the oblivion of being inside her. The wound she left didn’t close. He forgot why he should want it to.

And still he had nothing to write. The limited world was in intolerable focus. All his life there had been so many other lives within him he had taken them for granted, even held them back. Now, when he looked, there was a void. He did not write. He could not conceive of writing. She had hollowed him out.

Then, in September, his mother died.

He knew it when he heard the doctor’s voice as he answered the phone. The hospital only ever called in a crisis.

He put down the telephone thinking coolly,
This is what it feels like to hear news like that. It’s all right. It doesn’t hurt
. But then, over hours, it began to.

He drove to Seston. Death mixed the elemental and the base unflinchingly. Even for a poor woman like his mother, who had almost nothing, the authorities must be notified, forms filled in, in triplicate, coffin paid for; the details of her death examined and dismissed. He welcomed it all; it kept him from self-recrimination and being with his father. He had let his anger with Tomasz lie unexamined until it had iced over. His mother’s death made it hot again. Tomasz cried, and railed, or else just stared, as if contemplating his myopic soul. Observing him, Luke choked on harsh judgement.

He could not stay at the house. He went to Seston’s best hotel – grey net curtains and mauve-flowered valences on the beds – and on the second evening he called Paul.

‘Paul, it’s Luke.’

‘Hello.’

‘I’m in Seston.’

‘Where?’

‘
Bloody hell! Seston!
’

He had never shouted at Paul before, he could feel his shock down the line in the pause that followed.

‘Sorry,’ said Paul finally, in what Luke thought of as his
ay-up
voice, dry – impossible to be angry with.

‘My mother died on Saturday,’ said Luke. ‘Heart attack. Two hundred and fifty volts going through her every week can’t have helped.’

A brief silence. Then Paul said, ‘Shall I come up there?’

Luke nodded, forgetting Paul couldn’t see him.

‘Luke?’

‘Sorry. Yes. Thanks.’

‘Just me. Leigh and I split up.’

‘Someone told me.’

‘Someone would. See you tomorrow, then?’

‘I’m staying at The Pines.’

‘It’s seriously called that?’ said Paul.

They laughed, didn’t say anything more, and Luke put the phone down.

‘He’s just
sitting
. . .’ Luke ran out of words to condemn his father’s inertia.

He and Paul were driving to the asylum. Luke needed to go through his mother’s room and hadn’t been able to alone.

‘He lacks moral courage,’ he said.

‘Hark at you,’ said Paul.

‘He does. That and a spine.’

‘Think of him like an animal, or someone you don’t know,’ said Paul. ‘That’s what I used to do with my granddad when he peed himself.’

‘Compassionate.’

‘That’s me.’

‘You were how old?’

‘Fifteen, about. He’s dead now.’

‘It’s quite funny, though – I used to think of my mother as a zoo animal when I was a kid. When she got out of hand.’

‘What kind?’

‘One of the nice ones, a tiger – or something just jumpy and a bit mad, like a gazelle or a monkey.’

‘Is that it?’ Paul pointed ahead, through the windscreen, as they reached the brow of the hill and the hospital, roofs first, revealed itself to them.

‘Yes,’ said Luke.

They approached. He turned the Triumph between the high gates and up the drive towards the dark-red turreted asylum. Gun-metal rainclouds were banked up behind it and a weak sun glinted on the slates.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Paul.

Luke spent two hours carefully boxing up his mother’s things. He couldn’t easily throw them out but there was no place for them. He found the cardigan with the daisies she had worn the day they went to the National Gallery. He didn’t know what to do with her hairbrush. All the postcards he had sent were arranged in groups, views of churches, town halls and parks from every place he’d ever worked. There were more than two hundred and fifty, in both French and English. Some only had one line, others closely written, all over and around the edges, tiny biro words right up to the corners of the stamp.

‘Do you mind?’ said Paul, gesturing them.

‘Go ahead,’ said Luke.

So Paul sat on the floor and looked at the cards, front and back, reading, trying to decipher the French, while Luke went through the room doggedly, stacking her books, almost not breathing.

‘Good they let her keep them,’ said Paul.

Luke shot him a look, defensive.

‘They’re nice.’

Paul nodded. ‘I know,’ he said, but the hospital terrified him.

It was worse than any horror film he had ever seen, and smelled as bad as it looked. When they arrived he had heard screaming from somewhere – he wasn’t sure if Luke had even noticed. He tried hard to see it from his perspective –
a second home, childhood games in the corridors, homework
– forcing himself past immediate appearances to the relationships and the everyday life of the place, but he was appalled to his soul by it. This dead woman’s sanctuary and his friend’s beginning was Victorian bedlam directed by Roman Polanski. Luke seemed to think he had known a mother’s love like other children, but any normality he had was learned. Paul thought of the reasoned framework of his own childhood, the well-meant oppression he had pushed against to grow into a man, and was immeasurably grateful for it.

Hélène’s body was in the morgue and the asylum’s chapel booked for her burial.

‘We have to change it,’ said Luke. His voice was expressionless with his excess feeling. ‘I want her to be buried at St Saviour’s. The Catholic church in town. I think it’s better. Free. More free, I mean. For her. To be out. Better.’

‘Yes, we’ll sort that out,’ said Paul. ‘What?’

He asked, because Luke, who had been so busy, had stopped. Paul thought he might be going to cry. He didn’t want to stay to find out.

‘I’ll leave you alone,’ he said, halfway to the door.

‘I think I must be much more stupid than I appear to be,’ said Luke. ‘Deluded. Naïve, or something.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m still surprised she died here. I think I meant to come and get her one day. Why do we carry on believing like that?’

‘In what?’

‘This nonsense fairytale of salvation.’

Paul thought about it, and had no useful answer to give him.

‘We must like it,’ he said at last.

‘I don’t,’ said Luke, without turning. ‘I don’t like it. It’s better to believe in nothing.’

Luke, Tomasz and Paul were at the service and graveside at St Saviour’s, along with hospital staff, some retired, who had visited Hélène over the years, sixteen people in all.

‘Nice funeral,’ said Paul out of the side of his mouth to Luke as they stood in church.

Seeing Luke crossing himself before the altar had been another jolt, another piece in his jigsaw.

‘Not a pauper’s grave,’ said Luke.

‘No,’ said Paul, knowing what he meant exactly. ‘Out with a bang, man. Jumpin’.’

Luke and he had bought a black suit for his father. Getting him into it on the morning of the funeral his frailty and stubbornness were extreme, much worse than the Christmas before. It was a grotesque enough experience to be funny now that Paul was there. After the funeral they had thick brown tea and bridge rolls in the nearby pub. The landlord was familiar with the funeral set. The nurses were driven by kindness to say nice things about Hélène. Luke was reluctant to hear them. Even knowing their words were only platitudes and politeness, it was too painful.

‘She was so proud of you, your mum.’

He hated the formal exposure of his unreconciled grief, the sorrow spilling out, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands trying to force it back.

‘It’s like a crucifixion,’ he said to Paul. ‘You’re being flayed, and people stand about and talk to you about it.’

‘Funerals are good in the end. It always works out,’ said Paul, comfortably.

Behind the bar the landlord watched the small, disparate crowd and the dark-haired young man, obviously the only family member, crying as if he were surrounded by friends.

‘Very sentimental these Catholics, as a rule,’ he murmured to the barmaid filling the teapots. ‘Not like us. The foreign ones are the worst for it.’

The last thing they did before leaving Seston was buy food for Tomasz, and some more vodka. Luke had no compassion left for him.

‘With any luck, he’ll drink himself to death quite soon,’ he said.

His father was a worse cripple than his mother had ever been, and she had had the dignity to fight.

And on the drive back to London, heading south in the afternoon light that set gold into the air and patterns over the ordinary road, they talked about nothing but theatre; risky, comforting, blessed theatre – until Luke asked Paul, ‘Do you know where Leigh is? Is she all right?’

‘She’s in America,’ said Paul, ‘last I heard.’

Bayswater. Moscow Road. There were two people kissing in the street below his flat as he got out of the car, and someone playing a piano in another house by an open window. It was the theme from
The Sting
, tripping, stop-starting. Luke got his case from the boot. The two people kissing and whispering to one other; the piano playing the same ragtime phrase over and over; the sunlight moving leaf shapes on the paving slabs. He let himself in and went upstairs.

His desk stood against the bare wall opposite the bed. The notebooks were as they had been. Pencils in the jar. The typewriter, with its sagging ribbon, red and black. He put down his case and sat at the desk. He picked up a pencil and wrote.

Funerals are good, in the end.

Afterwards – New York – 1975

New York was not Luke’s city and this was not his life. He sat in a chair facing the view through the window of the small, top-floor apartment at his hotel.

In an hour’s time, the curtain would go up on
Diversion
at the Morosco Theater, a shabby, thousand-seat old dame, squashed into her place along W45th, the brightly lit triangular billboard jutting out over the street fighting for precedence.

Luke Last’s Diversion, original West End cast
.

When the London run finished there had been more than a year’s break while the actors took other jobs if they were offered them and the deals were done with the New York managers. Then the Broadway transfer. A second chance. A rebirth. A new city, a new stage.

Luke let Ben deal with Lou Farthing over it and had nothing to do with Tony at all. Rehearsals in the rented studio in Midtown had been intimate, just the cast and Malcolm and Luke, working in safe anonymity. But now there was a gathering of power. A number of L. M. Farthing Productions as well as Lou, and Tony Moore, were all there in the city. The generals come to witness the foot-soldiers’ unarmed foray into the line of New York fire. Tonight at half past seven the curtain would reveal them, ready or not.

He should get to the theatre.

He was dressed; black tie and a dinner jacket that was clean but crumpled because it had felt unlucky to unpack it before now. He should have hung it up in the bathroom. He should have called down to the lobby for someone to collect it. It was fine, he had matching socks.

It had been an idyll of sorts. Or if not that, at least a taste of the life
Diversion
had once promised to him in the long solitude of writing. In New York he had seen it rehearsed and played all the way through for the first time. He changed small things here and there with Malcolm’s blessing, to put his mark on it.

Then, that morning at the dress –

‘Thought you should know, love,’ Malcolm said, ‘Tony arrived in town last night. Bit sticky? He’s staying at the Taft, apparently.’

‘Nina?’

Luke had only been able to say the name on its own. He had no other words to go with it, still.

‘I imagine she’s with him.’

At the opening of his first play in Oxford she had held his hand.

He looked at his watch. Six. He should go to the theatre.

The telephone did not ring. He had been getting telegrams and calls all week from London but now there was silence. He got up and went over to it.

‘Good evening, sir,’ said the receptionist, sing-song, a trace of Brooklyn. ‘May I help you?’

‘Do you have a number for the Taft Hotel?’

‘Certainly, sir, would you like me to connect you?’

Nina and Tony were staying on the fifteenth floor of the Taft with Chrissie and Alexander. Alexander was rehearsing for a comedy soon to open at the Astor. Accustomed to his screen career, it was his first stage appearance since the RSC in his twenties and he was frightened, which made him drink more. Chrissie drank along with him and often without. Their nanny and the two-year-old Natasha were left behind in London. Chrissie and Nina travelled in taxis and got out only to shop or go to restaurants, terrified of muggers and drug-dealers, blacks and pimps – all of New York that wasn’t sheltered by money or the theatre. It seemed a lawless place. Nina was six months’ pregnant and felt particularly vulnerable. Everything seemed dirty to her, she washed a great deal and covered herself with scent.

Now Chrissie and Alexander were arguing in the suite next door – muffled growls and screeches, furniture going over – and Nina was looking out at the skyscrapers. Tony was on the bed with a Martini, feet up and crossed at the ankle, jittery from the speed he had taken earlier and irritation at Nina’s mood.

‘Look, come with me to the bloody play if you want, darling, or don’t,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t be less interested.’

Nina turned from the window, lamplight furring the silhouette of her miniskirt, pregnancy, and glass of champagne.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.

‘You do,’ said Tony, affecting boredom. ‘It’s your lover’s play. You’ll want to congratulate him. We can all sit at separate tables in Sardi’s while we wait for the reviews and toss bons mots at one another. It will be romantic. Very Noël Coward.’

Nina felt her baby kicking. It never failed to give her a frightened jolt that she could not bear to analyse.

The telephone rang. Tony picked it up. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Yes, she’s here, hold on.’ He held out the telephone. ‘
Author-author
– for you.’

Nina did not know what he meant. Luke wouldn’t call her –

‘Hello?’

And his voice, close, in her ear after almost two years.

‘You are here,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to the theatre tonight?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

Tony was watching her. She turned away so as not to see him.

‘I really can’t talk,’ she said.

‘No, of course not. That’s all right. But the thing is, Nina, I just need to know—’

Nina put down the phone.

Tony regarded her, hungrily. ‘What did he want?’

‘I think he wanted to see me.’

‘How rude,’ said Tony. ‘Darling, ring down for a taxi, we should get a move on.
For God’s sake
–
stop screaming in there!
’ he shouted to the wall, and banged his fist on it, but Chrissie and Alexander’s muffled battle continued.

Nina sat on the bed, trembling. She felt terribly sad.

She did not want to cry. Crying never got her anywhere, she always felt better eventually. Better but no different. She sat there, defences broken by the sound of Luke’s voice, like the reminder of a sin. If she cried she would have to do her eye make-up all over again.

‘I wish he hadn’t called,’ she said, in all her loneliness. ‘I just wish he hadn’t.’

‘Yes,’ said Tony, getting up, ‘it was in very poor taste.’

As Luke put down the telephone he found that he was smiling. It was not because he was happy, but because he was thinking that somebody up there didn’t want him ever to see
Diversion
open, in either London or New York. Perhaps it would be revived and tour the provinces in a few years. He might see it then.

He took off his dinner jacket and unknotted the bow tie. He called down to the desk.

‘Could you send some flowers and charge them to my room? Roses. Or something. To the Morosco Theater. Yes. Yes. Thanks.
To Malcolm, Tom, Hannah, Richard, Scot
– one T –
Joan and Henry. Good luck, faith and thanks. Luke
.
Faith
. Yes, that’s it. Fine. What? Two dozen. Thank you.’

He put the phone down, changed into normal clothes and left the hotel.

Times Square in the late afternoon made his own Soho look like a village fete.

In Luke’s first few days in New York he had walked and walked. Everyone loved to tell their street-crime anecdotes, and warn him off, but he wasn’t frightened of cities. He went through the crowds and low-slung cars at traffic lights, dis obeying the
walk-don’t-walk
signs as the unforgiving grid made wind tunnels, carrying dirt from uptown to down, from gutter to doorway to subway, and he absorbed the filth with a foreigner’s appetite. In New York he found for the first time a place with an energy that matched his.

Now, as night slowly came down, beneath the noise-cover of car radios and siren blares, he headed away from 45th Street, downtown. He left the billboards of musicals, high-kicks and top-Cs, big names in lights, and smiled at the quaint sight of Alan Ayckbourn’s name among the others, like finding a Bakewell tart in a stack of donuts. He crossed Times Square, passing the theatres that had been converted to movie-theatres, the movie-theatres that were now porno cinemas and the porn-houses that had been turned into peepshows. Those that weren’t porn were mostly musicals. The cacophony of decay had held a wildlife thrill for the first couple of days. Now it was just visual static. He didn’t glance at the giant Coca-Cola sign flashing above his head.

Focused, he carried on south, down Broadway, block after block. Each step he took felt lighter, each yard that separated him from the Morosco, and from Nina, was a fresh distance, a pleasure.

He realised, with quick and childish delight, that he was looking for something. He was on a pilgrimage that was saving him, inconsequential though it was, from introspection and grief.

Walking fast, he crossed E23rd Street, reached Union Square and turned right, heated by the pace and pleased it was such a simple city to be lost in – no maze of history to negotiate, just one clear refreshing plan. He knew the direction he wanted. He took the streetscape as his reference. He would know it when he found it.

Words of songs went around his head. He resisted singing them openly. He forgot about the play and, realising he had found diversion from
Diversion
, he laughed a little.

He was getting closer. An adolescent thrill took hold. As the buildings dropped in scale so it seemed did he. The young delight of first loves took him over; the records, films, books and album covers of his seeking youth. He knew it must be one of these streets, not far away. He scanned the pavements for familiar signs.

The evening sky glowed French blue against the American skyline. And the city changed, softened into the bohemian, the neighbourhood; messier and yet somehow calmer and more human. He saw roads that nearly took him there, but not quite. He felt as if he were seeking home.

He was about to turn off Lafayette when he saw the Public Theater – known to him, respected from afar for its serious work. It was showing something called
A Chorus Line
. Bowler hats and canes.
Even here
, he thought as he turned off, onto E4th, and walked on.

He was close, he could tell he was. There were brownstones and stoops, cafés and junk shops. A group of musicians were loading a drum kit into a battered VW van, fire escapes zigzagging the buildings behind them and parked cars on either side. Luke stopped in the middle of the street to watch – imagining it in winter – but a yellow cab honked him so he walked on. Washington Square; a flat, green space to break the verticals. And then, on Bleecker Street – he saw something, and he stopped.

A rounded awning on a tall, flat-fronted brownstone over the pavement and, beneath it, two sets of double doors – theatre doors. The name on the awning was the Apple Tree Theater, and the playbills on either side were freshly posted.

The Apple Tree Theater Presents

GONE

By

Leigh Radley, Tracey Hillman and Violet Todd

Starring

Tracey Hillman and Violet Todd

Directed by

Leigh Radley

It was not what he had been looking for but it was what he had found.

He stood and stared at the poster, forgetting everything – his silly mission. He went closer, shuddering at the strange magic. He turned, but Leigh was not there. Just her name. He checked it. Leigh Radley. He decided it was another Leigh Radley. But he knew it wasn’t. He knew it was her.

Directed by Leigh Radley.

Luke stood there, proudly staring at the names on the poster and the locked doors. He went up and rattled them a bit. A thick chain was laced through the handles inside. And so he turned to leave.

Halfway across the street to the theatre, Leigh saw him. He had his back to her, fifty yards away, standing by the doors – she knew it was him at once. As she watched, he turned, and began to walk away.

‘Luke.’ She said his name without thinking. He couldn’t have heard, but he turned round and scanned the street. He saw her.

‘Fuck,’ he said, the sound lost in the space between them, but the word very clear. Fuck.

Yes
, she thought.

He began to come towards her. Just the same. A mess. Too bright to look at straight.

As he reached her, he smiled as if he would gobble her up and held out his arms. She backed away so he changed the movement into putting his hands in his pockets instead.

‘Say something,’ he said.

‘Hello, Luke?’

‘Jesus Christ.’

They were standing in the middle of the street – where she had stopped dead at the sight of him. A car nearly clipped them as it swerved past and they sidestepped onto the kerb.

As they reached the pavement he looked as if he would hug her again.

‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at your opening night?’

‘How do you know? And what’s going on here?’ He jerked his head to the Apple Tree Theater behind.

‘We open in two days,’ she said angrily, knowing she sounded as though she were accusing him of something. She must remember she had the advantage; she had known he was in New York. She’d been avoiding the theatre district for two weeks to be sure that in a city of eight million people she wouldn’t bump into him. But here he was.

‘Two days,’ he said. ‘That’s wonderful.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the play? Are you busy? Can we talk?’

‘You haven’t changed at all,’ she said, like a curse. ‘Why do you say that?’ he said. ‘Everyone changes, don’t they?’

‘Why aren’t you at the Morosco?’

‘Don’t want to be.
Leigh
– your play?’

‘No, Luke.’ She glanced down the road towards the bar she had been going to, the evening he had snatched away. ‘I really have to go.’

‘Really?’ He seemed completely taken aback and innocent.

‘Yes – I’m meeting some people.’

‘
Seriously?
Why? Can’t we . . .’

He looked around, pushing up his shirtsleeves.

‘My hotel is horrible,’ he said. ‘It’s like a Barbra Streisand comedy. Where’s your flat? Are you living on your own?’

Leigh didn’t answer.

She made him nervous, the way she was watching him – judgement and heat.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’d better go. See you.’

And she walked away.

Luke watched her going away from him, as around her all the street lights were illuminated, changing their meeting from afternoon to night. She was lit from above.