Semi-Detached (41 page)

‘Ha ha
ha. Go on, darling. Let him have a look. If you find any money in there, let me
know, my friend.’

Over
three months I never found anything compromising of any kind in any woman’s
handbag but I spent hours trying to persuade heavily perfumed, twittering
ladies to open the wretched things.

As the
evening concluded and the ballroom emptied, the guests swept out to argue over
taxis, new guests arrived to enjoy the ‘007’ disco on the seventh floor and
sometimes single ladies walked in. Brett enjoyed his duty to keep ‘tom’ out of
the hotel. ‘Where do you think you’re going, darling?’ he would ask salaciously
If unaccompanied, they were invited to leave the premises. He was
indiscriminate. To Brett, any woman, even of a matronly demeanour, was bound to
be on the game.

‘No, I
think you’re making some mistake.’

‘No, I
tell you what. You’re making the mistake. Whores are not allowed in here.’

The
investment banker (something of which Brett, so it seemed, had never heard)
stormed off, promising retribution. Brett was uncowed by ‘the cow’. After all,
in the early hours of one morning, just before Christmas, a manager escorted a
well-spoken and expensively dressed woman to the door. She swung around in the
entrance. ‘Will you get your hands off me,’ she snapped. He let her go. She
addressed the lobby in a carrying voice. ‘There’s nobody in this place that
could afford me, anyway,’ and exited to a round of applause.

Our
world was bounded entirely by the reception area: the white shining marble
vestibule floor, with the porters’ desk to the right, the entrance to the
basement cocktail bar just by it, the jeweller’s shop to the left that nobody
ever looked at, let alone went into, and, behind us, the lower seating area.
Opposite the reception desks, two staircases ran down to the hateful back
entrance.

Brett’s
uncle usually stuck me down behind the lift shaft after midnight. Six hours,
standing guard over nothing. Few used this entrance during the day, and after
midnight almost nobody did. Originally, we had been allowed to sit down, but
late one night, following a gruelling workout at the 007 nightclub, the boss,
Mr West Junior himself, came down into the lobby and found his men lounging
about reading. He was incensed. This was not the alert, twenty-four-hour
bomb-proofing he had undertaken to provide. An order from above came down via
Roy and Brett’s uncle: ‘No sitting, no lounging, no reading, ever!’

Do you
ever feel that life is too short? I spent half my entire existence standing in
that grim space. The muzak was switched off at 1.30 a.m. precisely It came on
again at seven, sounding, suddenly, as blaring as a colliery band. The rest of
the time I was left in silence. I recited poetry, I wrestled with
half-remembered philosophical problems, I followed the geometric pattern on the
carpet, round and round, up and down through imaginary mazes, along imaginary
paths until I knew it better than its designer, while the seconds crashed past
like waves on a beach.

I used
to ration myself. After I could stand it no longer, I would sneak a look at my
watch. I was always disappointed. Disconcertingly, the last ten years have
passed more quickly than one of those shifts.

But I
knew I would escape eventually It was an interlude. All I wanted was the money.
In a few weeks I would be off back to Cambridge to fill up the time before I
started proper work. There was a chance I might direct some more plays back
there. It wasn’t real professional work, but it would tide me over. Apart from
Brett, all the other operatives were, like me, just putting in a bit of duty a
couple of tours.

Ken had
been a journalist on the
Scottish Daily Express,
which had recently been
shut down. It wasn’t bad, was it? Eighty quid a shift was a lot more than he
got for writing up court cases in Glasgow Come the summer he was going to be
off. He was even hot-bunking with a friend in Bermondsey They shared .a
bed-sit. He worked the night shift. His mate worked the day He got into the bed
that his mate had just got out of. They were thinking of sharing shoes. That
way they could save even more. He already had a few thousand, plus his redundancy
money stashed away He was just waiting for the summer and then he was going to
go camping in the South of France, and then he was going to find himself a
proper job.

After
Christmas, I left. I got another session as a bodyguard in the spring. But I never
did handbag checking again.

But in
the early eighties I had gone back to the same hotel for a big television
awards ceremony I was wearing a dinner jacket and was in an overexcited state. ‘I
used to work here as a security guard,’ I giggled, and the other members- of
Not
The Nine O’Clock News
who were with me laughed in astonishment. ‘Yes, yes,
and Douglas too.’ How they roared. We pushed through the revolving doors. The
lobby was still bathed in the unearthly glittering white of dozens of pin-sharp
spots. There was the jeweller’s shop. The head porter’s eyes flickered over me,
but paid me no more attention than he did to the hundreds of other punters that
he guessed wouldn’t be worth that much in tips. But I let the others go on
ahead a bit. The table was still there. And behind it, so was Ken.

‘Hey,
Ken.’

‘Griff,
how you doing?’

We
greeted each other as veterans. I couldn’t help myself.

I
asked, ‘I’m just surprised to find you still here.’

‘Oh
yes. Yeah, well. Not for much longer,’ Ken said. ‘You know, it’s good bread,
and you get used to it after a while.’

19. Pigs May Act

It is Sunday, 20 February 2005.
The temperature has fallen overnight to zero. My daughter has just celebrated
her eighteenth birthday. It’s her last day of half term, so it’s her choice,
and she wants to eat sushi for lunch. I have grumbled halfway into Soho and
all the way back about the sensation-less gastronomic experience of eating raw
fish in a snowstorm.

Still
hankering after nursery food, I take ‘her’ dog to the park for its run (and
mine of course). As I pull up, I notice a man in a track suit leaning against
the people carrier in front of me. It is John Chapman. As a returning old-boy
director he made me wear a gold nappy and a pleated wing cloak as the Governor
of Malta in his Marlowe production at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1974. Well,
well. He is still in a state of resuscitation after his own health experience,
and I have to remove my glasses before he is able to recognize who it is
gesticulating at him through the windscreen. We pause in the chill Regent’s
Park air and talk about his TV work at Granada, our children’s gap years and
the perils of running, which we both do now we’re getting old, and would never
have done at all when we were young enough to enjoy it.

Later,
half-way around the park, I nearly knock over a woman trying to stop her
Labrador puppy eating a discarded sandwich. This is Hero. When I first moved to
London, I lived in her house (where I now realize she must still live, since it
is just across the way). We can’t do much more than note that our dogs are
related by a mutual interest in my ex-Cambridge girlfriend Charlotte’s dog,
Molly, because Jacob, the puppy, won’t leave the picnic alone and because I don’t
like to stop for anything once I have got running, I jog on past the zoo,
feeling bemused by my village connections in a city of ten million. It seems
incredible that I can so casually bump into, greet or knock flying friends I
had first made thirty years before. Had I kept on running I could have gone
into Primrose Hill. I might have met Nick Hytner. I might pass John Makinson. I
would see Jon Canter in a few days when I went to Suffolk. The night before I
had talked to Clive Anderson. I still get daily text messages from Rory
McGrath. All this jelly was setting in 1975.

It was
a year of behaving badly As I laboured in Park Lane pretending to be a
bodyguard, Charlotte got a lowly job at Sotheby’s, clerking in the Islamic Art
and Antiquities department, and I busied myself ruining her life.

Twelve-hour
shifts doing nothing at my bomb-checking work left little time to do nothing at
home. My surroundings rather discouraged loafing, anyway Hero had inherited a
Nash Regency villa in Park Village East. It overlooked a big, sooty wall behind
which mainline trains from Euston Station clunked up and down in a massive
culvert, but inside Cassandra, Hero, Charlotte, Penelope and me — the grubby
and frankly untrained interloper, tolerated and indulged like Jacob the
Labrador puppy — padded about, drinking Earl Grey tea, eating wilted greens and
listening to hearty soups plopping on the stove. Nick Hytner tells me I visited
Cambridge one weekend, threw my hands in the air, and snorted, ‘They spent all
last week sewing a chair!’ It was
Friends
as written by Jane Austen.

I can
write all this with confidence because in 2005, after months of prevarication,
it was time to open the last undisturbed research artefact of my past — a
leather case I bought for a quid in an Oxfam shop in the Kite and into which I had
shoved the residue of my life from the mid-seventies. I must have lugged it
away when Charlotte finally kicked me out of her bedroom. The ‘time capsule’
was filled with genuine detritus — little tubs of powder paint, gum arabic and
a squeegee for making screen prints. (I had designed my own posters. I had
forgotten that I attempted to manufacture them too.) There was student
flotsam: a bicycle bell (ah, how sweet) and one of those flat spanners for
getting at wheels. There were two bow ties, one black, one white —postcards of
Monets, still dotted with the Blu-Tack that had stuck them up behind my desk,
and bank statements monitoring a permanent, fungoidly multiplying overdraft in
increments of four pounds or ‘two pounds and three pence only’. There was even
a curled whitish card congratulating me on my degree, from my college.

There
were also, however, running-orders scribbled on the backs of envelopes, a
collection of hand-written sketches and two bundles of letters. The biggest was
a sheaf of thirty-one rejections from theatres across Britain, brusquely
setting me straight. There was no work available for me as a director,
assistant or unpaid help, at all, ever, anywhere.

The
second bundle was smaller. First, a note from Margaret Windham, the president
of the Marlowe Society She told me I had little chance of directing the society’s
main production in Cambridge, but Commander Blackwood was meditating on
employing me to do the Footlights. The others were all from Charlotte. They
invited me to step gradually through the break-up of our relationship as if
scripted by Charlie Kaufman for
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
They
went backwards. On the top was a poignant farewell, charged with all the
awakening honesty that the end of a relationship engenders. At the bottom was
an account of the joy of mixing paint for Hero’s front room, the horrors of a
mutual friend’s motorbike which had dripped oil on a patio step, the dinner I
had missed with her activist cousins and a paragraph begging me to ring — everything
I wanted to run away from, in fact.

She was
tied to her unrewarding new job, living ‘with a canary with sinusitis’, but
trying to find a flat for us to live in and informing me about dinner parties
with distant relatives who were angling to inherit her father’s silver
heirlooms. Mostly they were letters of heart-rending apology. She was sorry
about her ‘bates’, guilty about her clinging, worried about her obvious
frustration, about my lack of communication and her jealousy of my
independence. They were only written because, despite Margaret Windham’s note,
I had prevailed with the Marlowe Society They agreed to pay me two hundred
pounds to direct at the Arts Theatre in the spring and the Footlights in the
summer. Like a selfish junkie, leaving his girlfriend to go cold turkey, I had
gone back to the party in Cambridge.

Shortly
after Christmas my first call was to the white house in the Madingley Road
rented by Peter Bennett-Jones and Nick Hytner. As I poured myself a drink I
felt the first pangs of uneasiness. These people were as busy as I had been a
year before. They rushed in and out of their house between feverish
assignations and snatched academic work. Having talked briefly about our plans
I was left to feel … what? Free? How was I going to deal with this sense of
displacement? I was just beginning to feel that maybe this wasn’t really my
world any more when Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath arrived to borrow Nick
Hytner’s car.

It was
rare to have a car as an undergraduate. I think it was actually illegal.
McGrath couldn’t drive, so Mulville was going to get him to Ely, and I
suggested I tag along. I was relieved. This was the sort of time-wasting I
respected. Perhaps I could have a look at McGrath too.

Rory
tells me I had met him before he arrived at the house in the Madingley Road,
but I didn’t remember this. I knew who he was. He was at the same college. He
had been for two years by then. Some time in his first term he started stalking
me. I would look up from shuffling along to some self-important meeting to see
an Afro hairdo peering at me from behind a pillar. He was always staring at me
and eventually came to see me.

‘I knew
you were something to do with Footlights, so I wanted some advice.’