Remember Me... (39 page)

‘Fixed yourself up, then?' said Tim, who had affected to regard Joe as a ‘randy sod' since his over-lengthy call on the stripper and her subsequent tokens of affection to him.

‘Yes . . . a friend from university. Well, and since, actually. He's a writer, was, is, in the music business now, I can't quite fathom how he—'

‘For God's sake, Joe, stop making excuses. The cat's away!'

Joe blushed even though he was innocent or perhaps because the innocence only papered over the disloyal desires for Madeleine.

‘The problem with this movie is,' said Tim, ‘how do we end this without giving it the full camp welly and if we give it the full camp welly how do we get to show it? How do we get it past Ross?'

Joe could weary of Tim talking like that about Nijinsky and Diaghilev, whose friendship, then brutal parting and Nijinsky's tragedy were, he knew, as moving for Tim as they had become for himself. But Tim had seen service in Malaya, and as he often said ‘developed a First-Class Bullshit Detector', which meant that this heroic dancer, whose mental extremes of sensibility were awesome, and his lover, the great impresario of ballet, whose taste and patronage was on a level with that of the Medici, had to be discussed in barrack-room terms. When Joe hinted at that, he was given what Tim relished to dish out: an Al bollocking.

Yet they got on well, helped by Tim's cheerful admission that he ‘couldn't write his way out of a paper bag'. Nevertheless, he added, he knew what worked. Joe's script had been several times rewritten. It was limited in the amount of dialogue permitted in a docudrama, but nonetheless it was a ‘talkie', Joe's first.

Joe did not always make common cause with the total loyalty Tim demanded. When Ross McCulloch had come to see the first rough cut, Joe had been thrown by the man's dismissal of what he thought was a key scene; Nijinsky in his dressing room, naked (his back to camera of course) after the rift with Diaghilev, his master, his father figure (unfortunately Joe used that term: McCulloch was not impressed by psychoanalysis), and his clearly implied lover. Nijinsky was attempting to put together a sequence of what appeared bizarre steps as excerpts from his notebooks were spoken, interspersed with a rhythmic grunting and chanting. Tim had shot it in slow motion and put some bars from Stravinsky under it. Joe thought it expressed and encapsulated everything about genius struggling against madness to express originality all but out of reach. Ross said it was ‘camp rubbish' and should be cut out completely. After the dust settled, Tim, to Joe's dismay, agreed with him.

Perhaps as a consequence, when Ross argued against a basic premise of the film, which was that you could intercut documentary techniques with dramatic scenes, that you could have a Nijinsky portrayed by real photographs and also a Nijinsky played by a young dancer, and Tim hit the roof, Joe said he could see some strength in Ross's point of view. When Ross had left the cutting room, after having surrendered on the issue, Tim said,

‘You nearly blew it!'

‘He has a point. As he said, a documentary is a documentary.'

‘He always has a point. But that was a typical Ross establishment knee-jerk against what's new. And it was you he was attacking, you pillock. You wrote the dramatic bits. And not too bad, some of them.'

‘But he still . . .'

‘Bollocks!'

That was the end of it. Later Tim said,

‘At least you're no dummy.'

And late that afternoon he said,

‘Why don't you and Alison bugger off and have a drink. You've been ogling each other all afternoon. We'll finish this sequence.'

Alison was the young assistant editor, dark-haired, cream-complexioned, quick-eyed, rather like Rachel, Joe had thought from the start. She looked across at her boss, Gerald, the film editor, for his permission. Gerald nodded.

‘He says the most terrible things,' said Alison when they were safely on the street. ‘Ogling each other!'

‘He's good, though. He knows his stuff. Ross thinks he's our best director.'

Joe had almost an hour to kill. He looked up and down the narrow busy scruffy sexy Soho street still sweating from the slowly setting sun. There was about this place a poison that made him nervous even as it exuded an erotic energy. Up and down the street there were tables uneasy on the dirty narrow pavements but clustered with drinkers determined to suck in the last of the afternoon heat.

‘Quite continental, isn't it?' said Alison.

‘Would you like a drink, then?' Joe asked. ‘Just one. If you want to,
that is. I've got to stay around for a while. You might need to go home. It's . . . I . . .'

‘We could go up there,' she said, and pointed to a less crowded nest of tables at some distance. ‘I'll have a dry white wine, please.'

As soon as they sat down, she offered him a cigarette, taking charge.

She told him that the sequence cut out by Ross was the best in the film. She told him that when he was not there, Tim made encouraging references to him. She told him she had loved his film on Brassens and especially the parts where he had imitated Renoir. Was it Renoir? She herself wanted to make films like Truffaut.

He did not quite understand how this came about but having clutched tight the secrecy of his novel writing, he told her he was on the final lap of the third draft of a novel set in Cumberland, in a place like the town in which he had been brought up. He told her about Faulkner and Bellow, whom he was reading just now, and Evelyn Waugh, and how odd it was to like Evelyn Waugh's novels so much when he hated his ideas and his personality so strongly. He told her he could not believe he had written a film for Tim Radley who was always mentioned in the same breath as the best new directors and playwrights and photographers. He told her he could not decide whether photography was a real art or not but when he had put that to Tim he had been informed he was just a literary snob, antediluvian, typically English, without any visual sense and so bloody arrogant he probably did not know how a film camera worked. He didn't. They had another drink.

When she left she gave him a warm kiss on the cheek which he thought only happened between theatre people. When he watched her walk away he realised he was studying the slim shapeliness, the twitch of the disturbing mini-skirted bottom, the length of exposed leg, the independent stride, the sexy freedom about her. He had drunk three bottles of beer on an empty stomach and his head was muzzy but pleasantly, welcomingly so, he thought, as he made his way to meet James at the rendezvous pub. The summer streets were mostly inhabited by young people, some extravagantly dressed in the new peacock fashions, all of them free and sexy, he guiltily admitted to himself, all of them with the world as their oyster. He too could go
anywhere, he thought, on this evening, take any turn, go in any pub, he too was unconfined. Those few minutes following the absorbing appreciative conversation with Alison left him filled with a kind of helium of the moment.

‘I find this pub rather noisy,' said James in the solemn, well-educated voice which was even more than usually at odds with his keen modern look. It was his clothes, Joe concluded; something very up to date about the clothes.

‘I thought you might like the Buckingham Club,' said James, as they squeezed out and popped onto the pavement. ‘It's gay but quite safe and I think it will interest you. Most of these clubs are dirty little fire-traps. The Buckingham thinks it's rather upper, but pretentious is a better description, though not at all kinky. I think you ought to be made aware of it.'

Joe thought that it could have been mistaken for a rather run-down drawing room in one of those classy but cash-strapped town houses into which he had sometimes landed on his broadcasting quests. There were thickly textured armchairs and sofas, battered as if for extra style, Eastern rugs, well-stocked bookshelves along the panelled walls, real paintings, soft and flattering sidelights, little oak tables for drinks, ashtrays, newspapers and a clientele which, on the whole, looked as if it had been quite acceptably barred from the better London clubs, a couple of which Joe had also been invited to. The bar was a little item in a corner, as if an afterthought.

Joe's wary gaze was first attracted to a rich velvet plum-coloured jacket leaning heavily against the bar and containing a writer well known for his dashing bad-taste depictions of the lusts and intrigues of the upper classes.

‘He's always drunk,' said James. ‘If you talk to him you'll never get away. He loves the young working class, especially clever ones. Quite amusing but can be a bit of a barnacle.'

James steered him to a faded purple sofa in a particularly poorly lit part of the room.

‘Busy but not at its buzziest,' James said. ‘Yet not altogether disappointing.'

He signalled several times and at last a young man dressed in black trousers and a white shirt and even in the heat a tie, sauntered across.

‘Two beers,' said James. ‘Lager. One with lime.'

The young man sighed, put a small saucer of olives on the little round table and drifted away in the general direction of the bar. James addressed the situation.

‘The first thing to grasp, though it may soon change from what we read, is that what is quite often happening here is still a criminal offence. Sodomites, as some of our judges like to call them, us, are sent to jail if discovered
in delicto
, usually in a public lavatory, and they trump up charges all the time, but in a club like this we're safe. The criminality only adds an extra frisson of dangerous excitement. Ah! I'd rather hoped he'd come in. That man, rather short, in the pin-striped, three-piece suit, is a QC, an utter shit and a hypocrite, a collector's item.'

James was silent for a while, looking the place over. Joe wanted to be a Chandler hero, quietly casing the joint, but it was all he could do to stay calm. As he began to decode the movements around the room, the questing of some, the posing of others, the soft voices and softer laughter, the soft strokings of the arm, the occasional kiss on the cheek, the intimate play over the lighting of a cigarette, he felt a rather erotic mixture of fascination and unease, alarm and attraction, a sort of breathlessness, and an unmistakable stirring of excitement.

‘Oh, Lord, Rupert's coming our way. I'll head him off. I'll be about ten minutes. When he finds out you're straight he'll start boring you with his list of every queer in history from Socrates to Joe Orton. He also claims Shakespeare.'

Before Joe could respond, James was up, arm extended for a firm handclasp with a very tall, stooping, etiolated but elegant figure whose white hair was styled in the fashion of a junior public schoolboy.

Joe felt uncomfortably isolated and drank his beer too quickly. The young waiter glided over with a new glass and pointed at a small group of young men across the room. One of them waved, his hand dangling from his wrist, the cigarette dangling from his hand. Joe raised his glass
and as he sipped he saw that the dangling waver was on his way towards him. His stomach clenched tightly. The excessively thin young man, a handsome yellow and white striped shirt open at the neck revealing a cross on a chain, flared trousers, long hair, was revealed as a follower of the latest foppish fashion. For the first time in his life, Joe was aware of the limitations of his sports jacket, grey flannels, checked shirt and tweed tie. The young man smiled warmly and sat down opposite Joe with proprietorial slyness.

‘Joe Richardson,' he said. ‘Fancy seeing you here.'

Joe paused and then it was as if a film in his head reeled backwards at the speed of thought.

‘Paul,' he said. ‘It's Paul!'

‘It's Alexander now,' Paul said. ‘Sir,' he nodded over his shoulder to where the tall white-haired man was talking at the bar with James, ‘over there with your friend, I'm with him and he wants Alexander so Alexander he gets.'

Joe felt winded with the inrush of memories, a fierce jet of nostalgia. Paul in the gang of them together as children in the town, the adventures, the dramas, they flickered through his mind and with an almost dizzying intensity. Paul! Here!

‘I've just been writing about Wigton,' Joe said. ‘In a way. Those times. Our gang. Our lot. I thought
Our Lot
might be the title, at one time.'

‘The old gang.' Alexander offered a cigarette, a Passing Cloud: Joe took one over-eagerly as if both to show and to confirm solidarity. ‘Alan, Malcolm . . . Writing about Wigton, are you? I could give you Wigton, Joe.
The Lower Depths.
I couldn't wait to get out.' He offered a light from a slim gold lighter. ‘Your Uncle Colin did me a favour.'

‘He used to take you on his motorbike.'

‘You could say that. I got money out of him at the end,' said Alexander. ‘I made him pay: a no-squeal fee! He's terrified of your dad, you know. Absolutely terrified, he is.'

Joe parked all that: he could not cope, and besides, here was Paul-Alexander bringing, with evidence of Wigton, part of a past that Joe had been attempting to marinate in fiction, bringing a world which could so easily seem sealed off from his London life but the seal was broken as
one of the actors in his past rose up in the Buckingham Club to drug him more strongly than the alcohol.

Alexander needed no encouragement. Gossip was his second trade. Joe was beguiled by his accent. It was still Northern, much more so than Joe's whose pronunciation had begun an inevitable journey south at Oxford, but softened, more like a woman's, Joe thought, one of the older women of the town, that was it, who talked in a stream of lilting heavily spiced sentences, almost a chant.

‘Who's your friend, then?' Alexander asked after a heavy exchange on the darker incidents in the recent history of the home town. Joe explained. ‘I've seen him here before. But you're straight, aren't you? Christ! Aren't you just! You're even blushing in the dark. I read something about you, I saw that television you did on the Northern painters. It made me feel very proud, Joe, to know you.'