Love Fifteen (20 page)
From the kitchen Tlda brought a tray which she nearly dropped when she saw him. Now almost deaf, she hadn't heard him arrive.
“Where in the world did thee spring from?” she said, then to Rose: “I did think ee'd gone for a sawljur, to fight on the front in France.”
“Well, Gran, I have in a way, at the Battle of Agincourt.”
He kissed her, holding his breath against the smell of age and death that always hung about her.
She held him at arm's length.” That case, you better go out and take off your clothes in the garden, not to bring they lice in th'ouse.”
“It was only in a film.”
“We told you, mother,” Rose said, “several times we told you he was coming home for a day or two.”
“I didn't yer. Thee'awl be wanting a cup too,” she said and made her slow way back to fetch one.
Rose offered him a cigarette and they all lit up. He wished the baby could be there then he could have got the four generations in a three-shot, closing in on Eugene's brown head at his sister's pale breast.
For the rest of his stay he bragged about his new life, dropping names and technical terms he himself hadn't known a few weeks before.
They laughed at his imitations of Olivier and Robert Newton. It struck him as odd that it was he who was now being the sophisticated Londoner, which had till now always been Kay's role. She still gave tinkling laughs and pinched her vowels like Vivien Leigh but that fell rather flat beside his first hand stories of her famous husband. Once or twice he found her gazing into space.
Another job followed as go-fer, on a romance with plenty of Grieg concerto. He soon learned that this was no way to climb the slippery pole of big-screen success but would at least earn him a living while he waited to be called up. A few weeks later, at his Elstree lodging, he received a note with his home postmark, in Fred's writing.
“Trust you're well and fighting fit.
Your mother's asked me to let you know that your sister was evidently more affected by the baby's birth than we had thought. A day or two ago she was only just saved from throwing herself off the Clifton bridge. A passer-by got suspicious of her behaviour, as she kept approaching the metal railing and drawing back. Then she crossed to the other side and was trying to clamber up when he vaulted the barrier, ran forward and pulled her away. No bones broken but we're all in a state of chassis here and, though I know they'll probably finish off the war for us, I can't help wishing those damn Yanks had never come to use our island as a stepping-stone to Europe. I enclose a cutting from the
Evening World
reporting the incident, so some busybody must have phoned. How they got that unflattering snap of your sister is a mystery but our old Salvation Army neighbours at Villa Borghese are not above suspicion .after that business when I had to testify that they were dealing in stolen goods.”
In spring he was called up and had to read about
âHenry V's
triumphant opening. His two weeks' embarkation leave was a chance to see how Kay was coping. Well, it seemed. Rose thought it was silly not to tell Theo where he was being sent. Fred explained that there was still a war on and all troop movements were top secret. The second front was launched from further along the coast and thousands were being evacuated, Rose said she was sick of hearing about the brave Cockneys and their blessed blitz doodle-bugs, as though the rest of the country hadn't suffered too.
Theo looked up Inky, now going steady with the same plain member of Margo's entourage. Theo wanted to say that beauties always had beasts in attendance but held his tongue because it was clear Inky didn't see it that way. The boyhood friends took her to eat in Carwardine's restaurant and, as he hoped, she brought Margo along. It was the first time Theo had seen her since the day she fell in the street and the first time he'd heard her speak since the episode of the half-price ticket. He could see she was impressed by his work in films and by his having got so close to the stars.
This morning, before catching the train to Bristol, I reread a few of Hazel's old letters, ending with this one welcoming me back after my years in the US.
24th November 1963
Dear Theo,
Wonderful news that you're coming home! As you see, we've moved back near the city centre after so many years in Rosemount your old family home. It was good for Eugene while he was a boy, with the large garden and swing. But now he's at the main university building, a central flat will be handier and anyway I never did feel at home in suburbia. It was good of your dad to let us have the place after your mother died and Fred went into the twilight home but not really my style. So, when you arrive in a month or so, you'll find us not so far away from Brandon Hill and Charlotte Street. Nor for that matter from Fred's place near Blackboy Hill.
Your feelings at returning home are bound to be mixed. I know you thought you'd never be coming back except as a conquering hero. And perhaps you see yourself as having failed. A serious mistake, believe me. From an English viewpoint, that's not how it looks at all. And you too should try to see your Hollywood experience as a rebuke to that whole horrible side of American capitalism. It's their loss. Obviously those philistines wouldn't welcome you with open arms, wouldn't ever recognise your brilliant potential. How could they, when your whole thinking is critical of their most fundamental assumptions? Remember the day we met and saw
âMister Smith Goes to Washington
'? Such wonderful technique and talent devoted to such a well-meaning but banal ideology! Twenty-odd years later, that propaganda machine is still mangling its most gifted members in the interest of archaic ideas â or ideals, as they say here in your hometown. To the rest of the world, Hollywood now looks obsolete. Its wasteful cars, tight-gusseted and corseted women, its Disney world-view, those grotesque religions. The paranoid fear of anyone who doesn't kowtow to the mighty dollar.
The American era's over and done with. It's history, while Europe â particularly England â is buzzing with future. Once you're here again, you'll see that you went off to a periphery and are coming home to an epicentre. Our new films and television plays are intelligent, critical, rebellious and based on reality. Theirs are comic-book dinosaurs.
Kennedy's murder the day before yesterday is being seen across the world as the death of a new kind of zeitgeist, but not by me. If we must read such insanities as portents or symbols, why not as the end of a gangster dynasty? Let's not forget that the head of that family was a Fascist bootlegger and Nazi sympathiser. Old Joe K thought we hadn't a chance against Hitler and advised us to surrender and save the world for capitalism before the Nazis blew us all to buggery. I'm sure all those other sons of his are only waiting to take the throne but their star's not in the ascendant, it's falling, burnt out. Rugged individualism, kill or be killed, is giving way to a new sort of sharing. If we can't have all the world you and I dreamt of, let's at least rescue some flotsam from the wreck and piece together a new homeland. We'd better, before they drop the bomb. We just about survived the Cuban missile insanity, in which the late and much-lamented hero took us to the brink. We just can't trust James Stewart to see us through.
And that ugly villain wasn't reassuring either, though he finally did the right thing, despite his Kremlin bosses. Having to recognise, with great sadness, that the Russian state was only another form of slavery, we must not grow bitter or cynical, as your tone of voice suggests you're about to. Here there's a new eclectic consensus. Eugene was fathered on your sister by an unknown Afro-American father who came here to fight in that just war. He's doing his doctoral thesis on this city's slaving past and uncovering a terrible story. Of course, though there's no detailed history and almost every physical trace of it's gone, his ancestors were kidnapped and taken in chains from their tribal homes to labour in the southern states, to enrich with bananas, chocolate and tobacco the most respected merchant venturers of this faraway city where he was born and has grown up. The terraces and crescents of Georgian Clifton are stained with his people's blood. The raw stuff that made possible our cigarettes and chocolate factories was harvested from their lifelong suffering and tears. The attics in which you and I first made love were the servants' quarters of such a house. Oh, shit, I'm teaching grannie to suck eggs. You've written it so well in your screenplay. Come home and make the film in the right locations. They're still here, mostly, but won't be much longer.
Your biological nephew has just come of age. I'm not sure whether the lack of even an adoptive father has done him any lasting damage. I've never burdened him with the details and it occurs to me this may be the time. Though Geoff was glad at first to have made such a symbolic gesture, he wasn't big enough,
man
enough, to adopt a black bastard in the post-war years when racial prejudice was rampant here. Or perhaps it was more personal and he was ânormal' enough to want his manhood confirmed by siring his own children, which has since happened with his second wife. A man of fine idea(l)s but not the strength to live them, all mouth and no trousers. As well as which, choosing my words with care, he wasn't half the man you were at half his age. A fact I evidently didn't hide well enough. He suspected there'd been someone else but, of course, never knew exactly who. I could conceal your identity alright but not your effect on me and on my character, desires and expectations. When I remember our fond hopes â well, yours mostly â that he'd accept a ménage à trois, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Does all that embarrass you, coming from a fifty-year-old woman? Well, you ignored the difference in our ages when it was far more crucial than it seems now. When we had to end our affair because of Geoff's release, you pretty soon chose someone your own age, or close to it. And, though it hurt me deeply, I couldn't blame you for marrying Margo. She was (and for all I know still is) a great beauty, though her life between leaving school and becoming your wife was far from reassuring. Photographic modelling then was more glamorous than now and the sort she did was perfectly proper. She looked beautiful on those page-three bathing beauty shots, which took her into what your sister would no doubt call the demi-monde, a crowd that hung around that roadhouse out on the A38 to Bridgewater. To her credit, she pulled away just before the shooting-match that led to hubby being locked up. And I dare say Fred helped her elude the law by a few handshakes with the right policemen. So that you could both make that long westward journey at last. You must have seemed glamorous to her, coming home from those freelance jobs in films. And, as you put it in one of your early letters, she opened like a flower to California. So suitable for her, though not for you, despite your lifelong infatuation. Given all this, it couldn't have totally surprised you that she went from small parts in B movies to soft-core modelling and finally the hard stuff. I dare say if you'd got a foothold in films sooner, she'd have stayed with you as long as your success lasted. But beauty like that must be as much a curse as a blessing. I'm trying to write about her with kindness but you see I can't, I sympathise too strongly with the pain she caused you. I can share the bitterness, shock and shame of your inadvertent first sight of her performance in that blue film.
Speaking of which, and of course only between us, did you ever have the old ciné footage developed that you took of us in Villa Borghese and Rosemount? If not, I suppose it's mouldering somewhere in those cans. Is it acetate or nitrate stock that decomposes like that? You told me once but I forget. Not a pretty thought but even less pretty would be the prospect of its being passed around and shown somewhere. I was reading in a life of Cary Grant that he kept his childhood mementoes of this city in a Hollywood vault, his scout-uniform and snapshots of his poor mother before they locked her away in the madhouse. We're all more or less haunted by our pasts, even heroes like him.
Fred's looking forward to seeing you, of course. It's an excellent sheltered home. I call on him at least once a week and find him being waited on by all those old dears, his fellow inmates, like a bull grazing in a field of cows. Except, of course, that Rose was the only woman he ever really loved and his flirtations with the other residents are mere gallantry. Soon after your mother died, he came round to Charlotte Street one afternoon and made an inappropriate pass at me. An odd experience, you can imagine, as he resembles you a good deal and for some moments it was as though you'd overtaken me in years and we were about to start again with all the advantages of youth being with me for a change. As gently as possible, I let him know that his gesture wasn't welcome. He begged my pardon and suddenly sobbed, saying he couldn't bear life without his beloved Rose. Of course, his memories are mostly of a younger woman, before her dementia. Not that she ever had
much
of a memory, did she? In old age her mind began to play tricks with time, allowing her to relive stretches of her past as part of the montage that became her natural element. You caught that beautifully in her last scene in your script.
There are at least fifteen years left till they let me retire. They and I know only too well that headteachers like me don't grow on trees. I'm still called Mrs. Hampton at school â that's when I'm not âMiss'. Eugene came and gave our mixed-race sixth-form a brilliant talk about our city's past dependence on slavery. He showed them how those âmerchant venturers' who founded your grammar-school were forebears of today's Wall Street sharks and City bankers. I hope you'll do the same about your Hollywood years when you come. Has the present head invited you to take the dais? At least you'd know how to dodge when old Quasi positions his hairy arse among the hammer-beams! I'm hoping, when Gene graduates with the good degree he expects, that he'll get a teaching post at that same school, though he'd prefer the sort of school I taught in and I won't say he's wrong.
We make too much fuss of old age. Life's long enough for most of us and getting longer. Perhaps Kennedy was lucky to be killed young, while such high hopes still clung to him and before life wore away his shine.
Last Sunday afternoon I walked with Eugene from the shell of St. Nicholas across the bombed centre around the gutted towers of Mary-le-Port and St. Peter's, a space they're already covering with insurance offices and other squalid crap. The best you can say of them is that they look temporary and won't last. Here, if there ever was, is an opportunity to do what Wren did after the Great Fire. Or will these bomb-sites, up till now weedy, rubbly car parks, become in time a victim of the gods of commerce, not even beautified by age and sentiment?
I showed your nephew where the Regent stood. He knows little of our relationship, of course, only that we were tutor and pupil. One day I may let him know more. He probably guesses your screenplay is a garbled version of some sort of reality. He can't believe those Hollywood idiots aren't jumping at it. He thinks that opening sequence during the two minutes' silence would be a cinematic gem and laughs like hell at the scenes where I âtook you in' and bought you a milk shake in the cinema café. Of course, if they
had
filmed your screenplay, they'd only have spoilt what has become for me a precious memory. Could you bear to see it taking place in Arkansas or New Jersey, complete with car-chase and schmaltzy music? Such stories belong where they happened. They exist in the detail. Marx was always hot on that. Come home with that script in your hand and you'll find the new sort of producers here will be fighting to film it. And, Eugene agrees with me, you should rewrite the downbeat ending. In spite of all they've been through, let your audience hope for that better world you and I knew so well. It's coming, darling, trust me.
Love,
Hazelâ¦
Such high hopes! Of course her letters can never be seen by anyone else, though there are times when I long to do an Ancient Mariner and read them to some total stranger in a bar or train. All those concerned have either died or moved so far from my orbit that they wouldn't welcome my return anyway, especially not to read such a doomed testament.
Sister Kay's not geographically far away but a nunnery isn't easily approachable and she clearly took the veil to retreat from all that had gone before and from the temptation ever to seek a meeting with her natural son.
Having seen the news of Hazel's passing in the papers and on line, I was pleased when his invitation to the funeral came and readily put aside a day from my idle semi-retirement to bid her a last goodbye.
The most frequent trains to the city now stop at Parkway, the suburban station that's the embryo of a new conurbation beyond Filton where Rose worked for a time at the aircraft factory. But I chose instead to go by one that ended at Temple Meads, the original terminus near the city centre, that lofty Victorian Gothic shed from where I'd made my first journeys to London to work on â
Henry V'.
And where my uncle the porter had tried to carry my suitcase and see me safely on to the train on platform nine.
Hazel's son opted for Cremation, of course, no superstitious clapped-out mumbo-jumbo. Whom did I expect to meet on this sad occasion? She'd been in her eighty-eighth year so most of her friends and relations had preceded her to the ovens or their graves. Even Geoff had gone before and his second wife and children would hardly bother, perhaps didn't even know her. Or
of
her.
Who then? Pupils and staff from her long teaching career might send a delegate, though it was twenty-five years since she retired after a long tenure at the huge Comprehensive she'd turned into a brilliant educational success. I knew nothing of her own biological family, only that she'd had no siblings, just a few distant cousins she seldom saw.
