The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (31 page)

She looks at her watch. Just past twelve.

I have a husband. I have children. I have things to do. Phone Diana to find out when she’s coming down, confirm the baby-sitter for Glyndebourne, make something for the children to eat tomorrow, is Carrie friends with Naomi again? Are my babies happy? Am I doing enough? I’ll do anything for them, there are no limits, I’ll sacrifice anything, just ask me.

Billy appears as she crosses the hall back to the library.

‘Anything on that matter we spoke about?’

‘Nothing so far, Billy. Sorry. I have been asking around.’

‘Good. Good. Seven years, you know.’

‘What’s seven years?’

‘My father knew this Doll for seven years. I can’t find it in myself to blame him. After all, seven years of happiness. That’s something, isn’t it?’

He shuffles back into his room, waving one hand in the air as he goes.

Laura packs up her boxes in the library, switches out the lights, closes the door after her. As she turns to face the high galleried hall she is caught unawares by a shiver of sensation that begins in her legs and floods her stomach and chest and makes her face burn. Before she has time to qualify or judge it she knows it for what it is: a rush of joy.

36

The hush of the classroom as twenty eleven-year-olds scratch away at their desks. Alan Strachan finds himself thinking about Liz Dickinson and wondering if she has a boyfriend. Just because she’s a single mother doesn’t mean there isn’t some other man about the house. Though if there was surely he’d share the duties of the school run and ease the burden on the granny. But then again she’s attractive, no denying it. Not pretty, too real for such a girly word, but there’s something there in her face that makes you want to, oh, get closer, nuzzle up. Must be her eyes, or the lines round her eyes. What is that look in her eyes? There’s a word for it, or several words. Resigned. Acceptant. Unjudging. Yes, that’s part of it. You look at her and you feel she’d understand.

Who am I kidding? Understand, sure, we all know what that means. Not hard to tell where that one’s going. But who else am I to turn to in my dreams? The erotic current does not flow strong in the staff room. Not unless you include the Australian gap-year students, all of eighteen years old, and if you include them then why not the girls in Year Eight, one or two of whom are so achingly gorgeous it doesn’t do to let the eyes linger too long or you wake up turned into a paedophile. Thirteen years old! Jesus! Why has nature played this trick on us? The physical peak of perfection and not to be touched. Ring them round with the electric fence of our longing and our shame, then plaster every billboard on every street with images of women made to look younger, longer-legged, thinner. The corporate logo of Planet Desire a pubescent thirteen-year-old girl, the perfect icon of the hunger that can never be satisfied, so stuff yourself with beer and chocolate and anaesthetize all lusts.

But I’d rather have Liz Dickinson any day.

Thank God, the bell for break.

‘Chloe, stay behind a moment. About your composition.’

‘But sir! It’s break time.’

‘Won’t take a second.’

Now she hates me. Can’t be helped. She’ll have to forgo the pleasure of torturing Alice Dickinson for a few minutes.

‘Actually it isn’t about your composition. I just said that so no one would know.’

It seems I have her attention. Big blue eyes, wavy blonde hair, perfect skin, evil heart.

‘It’s about Alice.’

The eyes close inside. The shutter is down. She’s going to give nothing away for free. That’s fine with me, babe. I have the jump on you in this little encounter. I’ve had time to make a plan.

‘I thought you might be able to help me. But I have to ask you to keep this between ourselves. For Alice’s sake. Will you promise?’

A slow cagey nod. She’s getting it now, this isn’t a court of law and she isn’t the defendant. So who is she?

‘Someone’s bullying Alice. I don’t know who, she won’t tell me. But it’s making her very unhappy. You’ve probably noticed how quiet she is these days.’

Another slow nod.

‘I’m not asking you to tell me who it is. That would be telling tales. But I’ve noticed you’re the one the others look up to in class. I thought maybe you could have a word with whoever’s responsible. I expect they’re just doing it for a joke. You could make them see it’s not a joke. You could even tell them it could get them expelled.’

‘Expelled!’

‘Oh, yes. We take bullying very seriously. That’s why I was hoping you could help me sort it out quietly. Do you think you can?’

She twists her lips, chews her lower lip. Wrinkles that perfectly smooth brow.

‘I suppose I could try.’

‘I shouldn’t really admit this, but I think they’ll pay more attention to you than to me.’

She likes that. The presumption of power, always an acceptable compliment.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘Our secret.’ Hand out for her to shake. Physical contact, almost as binding these days as a blood oath. There, her slender hand in mine. ‘If anyone asks, say I’ve been banging on about full stops and commas. Really boring, and not fair in break time.’

That gets an actual smile. Conspiracy in place. Off she goes, pink as an assassin, charged up with secret explosives. Poisonous little tart. Let’s hope it works. It would be good to have an actual improvement to report to Liz after school.

So it’s Liz now, is it?

37

Alone that early evening in the production office on the Goldhawk Road Henry pours himself an industrial-strength gin and tonic and runs through the tapes of the day’s work. Nothing that can’t wait but the trains will be crowded and he feels the need to be alone. Also Nick Crocker will be at home having dinner with Laura and it takes more reserves of energy than he’s got to be sociable with a stranger, particularly one who is no stranger to his wife. So do some work, see what’s there, mark up some takes for Dylan, revise the schedule for the next day’s shoot, which is Monday.

The offending piece to camera returns to life on the office screen. He sees at once that the camera is too high and the angle too wide, at least at the start of the take. He tries to remember if that was his doing or Ray’s, and if it was his, why? Aidan Massey enters frame in the middle distance looking strikingly like a monkey. Henry runs the take three times for the sheer pleasure of it while he downs his gin, and begins to feel the tensions of the day melt away.

Why did I do it? Why didn’t I even notice I was doing it?

He’s both amused and alarmed to find his secret self is sabotaging his public actions. He could never use a take like this. Aidan Massey in monkey mode makes the enterprise ridiculous. But anger will find an outlet somewhere. Aidan Massey has come to embody everything that is unjust and futile about Henry’s life. He is the lie, and the lie corrupts everything.

A tap on the door and Christina comes in.

‘I knew you’d still be here.’

She looks uncertain of her welcome. He offers her a smile. She’s welcome.

‘Just taking a look at what we’ve got.’

He spins the tape back.

‘Look at this.’

Still standing, Christina watches the take.

‘See. I told you that’s why he lost it.’

‘I feel like accidentally making a hundred copies and spreading them round the business.’

Christina giggles.

‘He looks like a dwarf.’

‘He is a dwarf.’

‘You were very good with him today, Henry. He behaved outrageously. You kept your cool.’

‘Not really. Thank God he fancies you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s you who calmed him down. You got him off my back. Do you want a drink?’

‘Why not?’

So Christina has a gin and tonic too. There’s more than enough gin and not enough tonic. Henry shares out the proportions as fairly as he can.

‘So do you fancy him?’

‘God, no.’ Christina pulls a face. ‘I think he’s repulsive.’

‘A lot of women do fancy him.’

‘Not me. He gives me the creeps. Plus he’s a total fake.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Henry stretches out on the sofa, feet up on the coffee table, and allows himself to be warmed by Christina’s sympathetic understanding. She’s still too shy to meet his eyes for more than a second, but she’s on the stool in front of him and they’re ripping into Aidan Massey together and that’s enough.

‘You know how he said today he could direct better than you?’

Henry groans.

‘You should have said to him, Fine, you direct. I’ll be the star of the show. Which I happen to have written.’

‘If only.’

‘Actually I’m serious. You’d be great on camera.’

‘I don’t think so.’

This is not Henry’s particular ambition or vanity but he appreciates the vote of support.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing in this job,’ he says after a moment. ‘I love the reading and I love the writing. All the rest, the filming and screening and publicizing and ratings and reviews, I hate all that.’

‘You should be an academic.’

‘I was a teacher for a while.’

‘I bet you were good.’

‘Not really. I couldn’t keep order. No, that’s wrong. I could keep order. I just didn’t want to. I wanted them to want to learn. There were some. It wasn’t all bad.’

‘I wanted to learn,’ says Christina. ‘I still do.’

‘What turned you on to history? Can you remember?’

‘Oh, yes. It was reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
. She was so like me, except that she was history, you know? Daddy took me to Amsterdam to visit the Anne Frank house when I was twelve. After that I started reading everything about the war.’

She calls her father Daddy without even thinking. Henry tries to remember how old she is. Twenty-three?

‘How about you?’ she says.

‘I don’t remember. It was so long ago. I’ve always loved history.’

But he does remember. There was a picture book he had when he was seven or eight, each picture covered two side-by-side pages, each of the same valley. There was a river curving down the valley in the shape of an S, and a little hill and a big hill. In the first picture there was an Iron Age fort on the big hill. In the second picture a Roman town. By the final picture there were trains and gasworks and streets of red-brick houses, but it was still the same valley underneath.

‘Yes, I do. It was a book called
A Valley Grows Up
. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘It must have been out of print for years. I loved that book. The valley goes from the Iron Age to the twentieth century, picture after picture.’

He’s sitting once more in the old green chair by the bay window, his legs curled beneath him, the book open in his lap, experiencing all over again the shock of the past.

‘It hit me one day, reading that book, that history didn’t happen somewhere else. It happened right here. I mean, in the same actual physical space. Like this room we’re in now in Shepherd’s Bush. A real shepherd might have sat under a tree exactly where we’re sitting, only five hundred years ago. He’s here with us now in some form, a ghost or an echo or something. Imagine all the people who’ve occupied this room, this space we’re in now, over thousands of years. Imagine them all existing at once, like a crush at a party. They were here. It’s not make-believe. They were real people, and they were as close to us as I am to you. Closer. People act like history is the study of other worlds, like it’s some dark undiscovered continent, but it’s not. It’s here. Right here.’

He stops, realizing he’s been going on too long. Christina is gazing at him with a little furrow of concentration between her eyes.

‘Anyway, that’s how it started for me.’

‘And it’s still like that for you. Or you couldn’t talk like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like you care.’

‘Like I care. Do I care? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem as much fun as it used to.’

‘That’s terrible, Henry. Don’t say that. Don’t let a creep like Aidan Massey spoil it for you.’

‘Oh, it’s not just Aidan Massey.’

‘So what is it?’

He smiles at her and thinks how pretty she is and wonders that he never noticed it before. She wants so much to understand what he’s feeling. Nothing so seductive as unwavering attention.

‘I hardly know myself, to tell you the truth.’

But I do know. It’s the choice I made when I took my first job in television. My beloved history sold into captivity. A performing bear waddling through its ungainly dance to distract a bored multitude.

‘It’s something to do with growing up,’ he says.

‘Like the valley.’

‘Like the valley.’ As she says it he sees the link for the first time. ‘It’s all there in the title, isn’t it? A valley grows up. That’s the message. History is a journey towards maturity. It’s structurally optimistic. Today is older than yesterday. The present knows more than the past. We travel faster, we have more money, things are getting better, turn to the next picture, the world’s for ever improving. Except one day you wake up and you know it’s not. Then it hits you, maybe we’ve had the best of it. Maybe from now on things get worse. And suddenly history, the glorious glow on the horizon, becomes everything you’ve loved and lost.’