Ancient Light Part 2

The hired house was cavernous and bone-white, like an enormous skull, hollowed out and bleached, with all sorts of pa.s.sages and cubbyholes and winding stairways throughout which our voices reverberated, joining and clas.h.i.+ng in a headache-inducing blare. The weather was strange-it was one of those hectic days that come sometimes in October, when it seems that out of sheer mischievousness the year has reversed itself temporarily and turned back to springtime. The tawny sunlight was hard and without warmth, and a stiff, muscular breeze was barrelling its way up the river and churning the water to mud-brown waves.

Dawn Devonport was the last to arrive, naturally, being the starriest star among us. Her limousine, one of those special sleek black s.h.i.+ny jobs, probably armour-plated, with tinted, opaque windows and a menacing grille, wallowed heavily on its reinforced suspension as it drew up to the door. The driver, spruce in dove-grey and a cap with a s.h.i.+ny peak, hopped out in that burly yet balletic way they do and whisked open the rear door and the lady extricated herself from the deep back seat with practised deftness, affording the merest glimpse of the underside of one long, honey-hued leg. A couple of dozen of her fans had been waiting to greet her, huddled on the pavement in the cutting wind-how did they know where to come to, or am I being naive?-and now they broke into a ragged round of applause that sounded to my ear more derisive than adoring. As she made her way between them, she seemed not to walk but waft, borne along in the bubble of her inviolable beauty.

Her real name is Stubbs, or Scrubbs, something unsuitably blunt like that, so it is no wonder that she should have hurried to change it-but why, oh, why Devonport? She is known in the trade, inevitably, as the Casting Couch, though I am surprised these youngsters today should know of such a thing, which surely went out with the Metros, the Goldwyns and the Mayers. She truly is a captivating creature. The only flaw in her loveliness that I can detect is a faint, a very faint, greyish down all over her skin that under the camera seems the tremulous bloom of a peach but that in real life makes her look as grimy as a street-urchin. I hasten to say that I find this hint of the slums exciting in a way that I cannot account for, and were I younger-well, were I younger I should imagine myself capable of all sorts of things and probably end up making a great fool of myself. She came into our midst, where we waited for her in the large and draughty hallway of the house, to a chorus of clearings of male throats-we must have sounded like a colony of bullfrogs at the steamy height of the mating season-and glided at once at a seahorse's slight, forwards-leaning incline straight to Toby Taggart, our director, and laid two fingers of one hand on his wrist and did that famous wisp of a smile, glancing blurredly off to the side, and spoke rapidly a breathless word or two meant for him alone to hear.

You will be surprised to learn that she is a slight person, far slighter, certainly, than she appears on the screen, where she looms in huge brightness with all the magnificence and majesty of Diana of the Three Roads herself. She is impossibly thin, as they all have to be these days-"Oh, but I don't eat," she told me, with a tinkly laugh, when we broke for lunch and I gallantly offered to fetch her a sandwich-especially on the inner sides of her upper arms, I notice, which are positively concave, with sinews unpleasantly on display under the pallid skin that makes me think, I am sorry to say, of a plucked chicken. It is hard to tell what the rest of her is like, I mean in real life, for of course there is little of her that has not been bared already to public view, particularly in her earliest roles when she was eager to show the jaded mammoths who run her world just what stuff she was made of, but on the big screen all flesh becomes blanded over and made to seem as suave and densely resistant as plastic. She has something of the flapper about her, an impression which I am sure she fosters deliberately. She favours little pointed, high-sided shoes that b.u.t.ton up the front, and old-fas.h.i.+oned stockings with seams, and diaphanous, tunic-like dresses inside which her lithe and seemingly weightless body moves, as though independent of any restraint, to its own sinuous, nervy rhythm. Have you noticed that you do not see her hands in close-up? They are another flaw, although I like them, also. They are large, too large certainly for their delicate wrists, and strongly veined, with big-knuckled, spatulate fingers.

For all the worked-at fragility of the image she presents to her public she has a certain mannish way to her that again is to my liking. She smokes-yes, did you not know?-with burly application, thrusting her face forwards and sideways and dragging on the f.a.g with her lips stuck out, which makes her look as plebeian as any gaffer or grip. She sits with her elbows planted on her knees and holds things, a tea mug, a rolled-up script, in a tight, two-handed grasp, those big knuckles taut and s.h.i.+ny and more like knuckle-dusters than knuckles. Her voice, too, in certain registers, is huskier surely than it should be. I wonder if there is something particular to the movie life that coa.r.s.ens actresses and hardens their sensibilities, as too much exercising over-develops their muscles. Perhaps that is what makes them so disturbingly attractive to most of the male half of the audience, and probably to half of the female half as well, that impression they give of being a third gender, overmastering and impregnable.

But that face, ah, that face. I cannot describe it, which is to say I refuse to describe it. Who does not know it, anyway, its every plane and shade and pore? What young man's fevered dreams has it not gazed out of, or into, grave and grey-eyed, sweetly sad, omnivorously erotic? There is a delicate sprinkle of freckles to either side of the bridge of her nose; they are russet, old gold, dark chocolate; for the screen she hides them under extra-thick applications of slap, but should not, for they are terribly affecting, as we actors say, in their delicate appeal. She is poised and thoroughly self-possessed, as you would imagine, yet I detect, deep down in her, at the very base of her being, a beat of primordial terror, a quivering along the nerves so rapid and faint it hardly registers, the vibration of that fear that everyone in our trade is p.r.o.ne to-and everyone outside it, too, for all I know-the simple, blank, insupportable fear of being found out.

I liked her from the moment when shambling Toby Taggart took her by the elbow-talk about a contrast!-and steered her to where I was loitering, studiedly inspecting my fingernails, and introduced her to me, her superannuated leading man. As she approached I did not miss the faint frown, half dismay and half appalled amus.e.m.e.nt, that puckered the flawless patch of pale skin between her eyebrows when she beheld me, nor the infinitesimal grim squaring of the shoulders that she could not keep herself from doing. I was not offended. The script calls for some strenuous grapplings between her and me, which cannot be an appetising prospect for one so lovely, so delicate, so flagrantly young. I do not recall what I said, or stammered, when Toby had introduced us; she, I think, complained of the cold. Toby, mishearing her, surely, gave a big, slow, desperate-seeming laugh, a noise like that of a heavy item of furniture being trundled across an uncarpeted wooden floor. We were all by now in a state of faint hysteria.

Shaking hands always gives me the s.h.i.+vers, the unwarranted clammy intimacy of it and that awful sense of having something pumped out of one, plus the impossibility of knowing just when to disengage and take back one's poor, shrinking paw; Dawn Devonport must have had lessons, however, and that veinous hand of hers had hardly touched mine before it was briskly withdrawn-no, not briskly, but in a swiftly sliding caress that slowed for a quarter of a second just as it was letting go, as trapeze artists let go of each other's fingertips in that languorous and seemingly wistful way when they part in mid-air. She gave me, too, the same sideways-glancing smile that she had given Toby, and stepped back, and a moment later we were all trooping into a high-ceilinged, many-windowed room on the ground floor, stumbling behind the star, the star of stars, like a chain gang in our invisible shackles and treading on each other's heels.

The room was entirely done in white, even the floorboards had been gone over with a daubing of what looked like pipe-clay, and there was nothing in it except a couple of dozen cheap-looking, hoop-backed wooden chairs ranged against the four walls, leaving a large bare s.p.a.ce in the middle that had a worryingly punitive look to it, as if it were there that the dunces among us, the ones who forgot their lines or tripped over the props, would be made to stand, singled out in our confusion and shame. Three tall, rattly sash windows looked out on the river. Toby Taggart, thinking to put us at our ease, waved a broad square hand and told us we could sit wherever we wished, and as we b.u.mped into each other, all heading in a herd for what looked like the most inconspicuous corner, something that had been there when we were milling outside in the hall, some hint of magical possibilities that we had all felt for a moment, was suddenly gone, and it was dispiritingly as if we were at the end and not the beginning of this fantastical dream-venture. How fragile is this absurd trade in which I have spent my life pretending to be other people, above all pretending not to be myself.

To start off, Toby said that he would call on the scriptwriter to fill us in on the background to our tale, as he put it. Our tale: so typical of Toby in his poshest mode-you do know his mother was Lady Somebody Somebody, I forget the name, very grand? What a contrast to his actor father, Taggart the Tearaway, which was the yellow press's delighted label for this larger-than-life, best-loved and worst actor of his generation. As you see, I have been making it my business to gather what facts I can about the princ.i.p.als in whose hothouse company I shall be working in these coming weeks and months.

Toby's mention of the writer set us all to craning like, well, like cranes, for most of us had not realised he was among us. We quickly isolated him, the mysterious Mr. Jaybee, lurking alone in a corner and, after we had all fixed on him, looking as alarmed as Miss m.u.f.fet on her tuffet when the spider came along. In fact, as I discovered, I had misheard again, and he is not Jaybee but JB, for this is how Axel Vander's biographer is known to those who have any claim to intimacy with him. Yes, the perpetrator of our script is the same one who wrote the life-story, a thing I had not been aware of until now. He is a somewhat s.h.i.+fty and self-effacing fellow of about my vintage; I had the impression he is ill at ease at finding himself here-probably he considers himself many cuts above mere screenwork. So this is the chap who writes like Walter Pater in a delirium! He hummed and hawed for a bit, while Toby waited on him with a smile of pained benevolence, and at last somehow the teller of our tale got going. He had very little to share with us that was not in the script, but rehea.r.s.ed a long rigmarole of how he had embarked on his biography of Axel Vander after a fortuitous encounter in Antwerp-birthplace of the real, the ur-Vander, as you will recall if you have been paying attention-with the scholar who claimed to have unmasked the old fraud, the fake Vander, that is. This part itself makes quite a tale. The scholar, an emeritus professor of Post-Punk Studies from the University of Nebraska by the name of Fargo DeWinter-"No, sir, you are right, the fair town of Fargo ain't in Nebraska, as so many folk seem to think"-through diligence and application had found and brought to light a number of anti-Semitic articles written by Vander during the war for the collaborationist paper Vlaamsche Gazet. DeWinter confessed to being more amused than shocked by the enormities that Vander was said to have got away with, not merely foul writings in a now defunct newspaper but, if we are to believe it, the murder, or mercy-killing, which no doubt is what the scoundrel himself would have claimed it was, of an ailing and inconvenient spouse. The latter piece of mischief had remained hidden until JB put Billie Stryker on to Vander's noisome scent and the whole truth came out-not, as JB observed with his sickly smile, that the truth is ever whole or, if it is, that it is likely to come out. These revelations were made too late to harm the egregious Vander, who by then was late himself, but they as good as destroyed his posthumous reputation.

We worked until midday. I felt giddy and there was a buzzing in my head. The white surfaces everywhere, and the gale outside that made the windows boom in their frames, and the river surging and the cold sunlight glittering on the roiling water, all gave me the sense of taking part in a nautical romp, a piece of amateur theatricals, say, put on aboard a sailing s.h.i.+p, with the crew for cast, the tars got up in sh.o.r.e rig and the cabin boy in flounces. Sandwiches and bottled water had been provided in an upstairs room. I took my paper plate and paper cup into the haven of the bay of one of the big windows and let the light of outdoors bathe my jangled nerves. The higher elevation here afforded a broader, more steeply angled view of the river, and despite the dizziness I kept my gaze fixed on this precipitous waterscape and away from the others milling about the trestle table at my back, where the makes.h.i.+ft lunch was laid out. It will seem absurd, but I always feel shy among a crowd of actors, especially at the start of a production, shy and vaguely menaced, I am not sure how or by what. A cast of actors is in some way more unruly than any other gathering, impatiently awaiting something, a command, a direction, that will give them purpose, will show them their marks, and make them calm. This tendency of mine to hold aloof is I suspect the reason for my reputation as an egoist-an egoist, among actors!-and a cause, in my years of success, for resentment against me. But I was always just as uncertain as the rest of them, gabbling over my lines in my head and s.h.i.+vering from stage-fright. I wonder people could not see that, if not the audience then at least my fellow players, the more perceptive among them.

The question recurred: Why was I there? How was it I had landed this plum part without applying for it, without even an audition? Had I felt one or two of the younger ones among the cast smirking in my direction with a mixture of resentment and mockery? Another reason to turn my back on the lot of them. But, Lord, I did feel the weight of my years. I always suffered worse stage-fright offstage than on.

I sensed her presence before I glanced to my right to find her standing beside me, facing out, as I was, also with a paper cup clutched in her cupped hands. All women for me have an aura but the Dawn Devonports, scarce as they are, fairly flare. The Invention of the Past, in its movie version, has a dozen characters, but really there are only two parts worth speaking of, me as Vander and she as his Cora, and already, as is the way of these things-she is probably no more immune than I am to the envy of others-a bond of sorts had begun to forge itself between us, and we found ourselves quite easy together there, or as easy as two actors standing in each other's light could hope to be.

I have known many leading ladies but I had never been thus close up to a real film star before, and I had the odd impression of Dawn Devonport as a scaled-down replica of her public self, expertly fas.h.i.+oned and perfectly animate yet lacking some essential spark-duller, slightly dowdier, or just human, I suppose, just ordinarily human-and I did not know if I should feel disappointed, I mean disenchanted. I cannot remember any more of what we talked about on this second encounter than I can of what was said when we were introduced in the hall downstairs. There was something about her, about the combination in her of frailty and faint mannishness, that was a sharp reminder of my daughter. I do not believe I have seen a single film in which Dawn Devonport stars, but it does not matter: her face, with that teasing pout, those depthless, dawn-grey eyes, was as familiar as the face of the moon, and as distant, too. So how, standing there under that tall, light-filled window, would I not be reminded of my lost girl?

Every aurate woman I have loved in my life, and I use the word loved in its widest sense, has left her impression on me, as the old G.o.ds of creation are said to have left their thumbprints on the temples of the men that they fas.h.i.+oned out of mud and turned into us. Just so do I retain a particular trace of each one of my women-for I think of them all as mine still-stamped indelibly on the underside of my memory. I will glimpse in the street a head of wheat-coloured hair retreating among the hurrying crowd, or a slender hand lifted and waving farewell in a certain way; I will hear a phrase of laughter from the far side of a hotel lobby, or just a word spoken with a recognised, warm inflection, and on the instant this or that she will be there, vividly, fleetingly, and my heart like an old dog will scramble up and give a wistful woof. It is not that all the attributes of all these women are lost to me save one, only the one that remains most strongly is most characteristic: is, it would seem, an essence. Mrs. Gray, though, despite the years that have elapsed since I last saw her, has stayed with me in her entirety, or as much of an entirety as one may have of a creature not oneself. Somehow I have gathered up all the disparate parts of her, as it is said we shall do with our own remains at the Last Trump, and a.s.sembled them into a working model sufficiently complete and life-like for memory's purposes. It is for this reason that I do not see her in the street, do not find her summoned up in the turn of a stranger's head, or hear her voice from the midst of an indifferent crowd: being so amply present to me, she does not need to send out fragmentary signals. Or perhaps, in her case, my memory works in a special way. Perhaps it is not memory at all that thinks it holds her fast inside me, but some other faculty altogether.

Even in those days themselves she was not always my she. When I was in their house and the family was there she was Mr. Gray's wife, or Billy's mother, or, worse, Kitty's. If I called for Billy and had to come in and sit down at the kitchen table to wait for him-he really was a tardy soul-Mrs. Gray would let her not quite focused gaze slide over me, smiling in a remote fas.h.i.+on, and take up some vague ch.o.r.e as though the sight of me had reminded her of it. She moved more slowly than usual at those times, with an unwonted, telltale dreaminess that the others, had they really been others and not her family, would surely have taken suspicious note of. She would pick up something, anything, a teacup, a dishcloth, a b.u.t.ter-smeared knife, and look at it as if it had presented itself to her of its own volition, demanding her attention. After a moment, though, she would set the object down again, with an intensified air of abstractedness. I can see her there at the kitchen table, the thing put back where it had been yet not quite relinquished, her hand still resting lightly on it as if to retain the exact feel of it, the exact texture, while with the fingers of her other hand she twisted and twisted that unruly spring of hair behind her ear.

And I, what did I do on those occasions, how did I comport myself? I know it will seem fanciful, or just plain tendentious, when I say I believe that it was in those fraught intervals in the Grays' kitchen that, without knowing it, I took my first, groping steps out on to the boards; nothing like an early clandestine love to teach one the rudiments of the actor's trade. I knew what was required of me, knew the part I had to play. It was imperative above all to appear innocent to the point of idiocy. With what skill, therefore, did I adopt the protective cover of doltish adolescence and exaggerate the natural awkwardness of a fifteen-year-old, stumbling and mumbling, pretending not to know where to look or what to do with my hands, trotting out inappropriate observations and knocking over the salt cellar or slopping the milk in the milk jug. I even managed, when addressed directly, to make myself blush, not guiltily, of course, but as if out of an agony of shyness. How proud I was of the polish of my performance. Though I am sure I over-acted wildly, I believe neither Billy nor his father noticed that I was acting at all. Kitty, as usual, was the one who worried me, for every so often, in the midst of one of my little pantomimes, I would catch her eyeing me with what seemed a knowing and sardonic glint.

Mrs. Gray for all her worked-at air of hazy detachment was, I have no doubt, permanently on tenterhooks, fearful that sooner or later I was bound to go too far and take a pratfall and send us both sprawling in the disarray of our perfidy at the feet of her astonished loved ones. And I, I am ashamed to say, teased her heartlessly. It amused me to let the mask drop now and then, just for a second. I would wink at her sultrily when I judged the others were not looking, or in pa.s.sing would softly b.u.mp against some part of her as if by accident. I found endearingly erotic the way in which if, say, I touched her leg under the breakfast table she would try to cover up her start of fright, reminding me of the fl.u.s.tered, helpless attempts at modesty she used to make in our earliest days together when I would bundle her into the back seat of the station wagon and claw at her clothes in my haste to get at this or that high or hollow of her bared flesh as it shrank from me and at the same time enticed me onwards. What a pressure she must have been under at those times, in her own kitchen, what a panic-fright she must have felt. And how callous I was, how careless, to put her through such trials. Yet there was a side to her, the wanton side, that cannot but have thrilled, however fearfully, to these prods that I so cavalierly gave to the blandly domestic surface of her day.

I am thinking of the occasion of Kitty's party. How did I come to be there, who invited me? Not Kitty herself, I know, nor Billy, and certainly not Mrs. Gray. Curious, these holes one encounters when one presses over-insistently upon the moth-eaten fabric of the past. Anyway, for whatever reason, I was there. The little monster was celebrating her birthday, I do not remember which one-she always seemed ageless to me. It was an occasion of wild misrule. The guests were all girls, a score of undersized hoydens who romped unchecked in a pack through the house, elbowing each other and grabbing at each other's clothes and screaming. One of them, a whey-faced creature, neckless and fat, displayed an alarmingly adhesive interest in me, and kept popping up at my elbow with a congested, insinuating smile; Kitty must have been talking about me. There were party games all of which ended in violent scuffles, with hair pulled and blows exchanged. Billy and I, whom Mrs. Gray, before taking refuge in the kitchen, had charged with keeping order, waded into these melees shouting and slapping, like a bo'sun and his mate struggling to quell a riot among a gang of drunken sailors on sh.o.r.e leave in a dockside tavern of an unlicensed Sat.u.r.day night.

At one particularly boisterous pa.s.sage of these revels I, too, retreated into the kitchen, tousled and unnerved. Kitty's fat friend, called Marge, if I recall-she probably grew up a sylph and broke men's hearts with the arching of an eyebrow-tried to follow me, but I gave her a Gorgon's transfixing glare and she hung back dolefully and let me shut the kitchen door in her face. I had not come in search of Mrs. Gray but there she was, in her ap.r.o.n, with her sleeves rolled and her arms floury, bending to lift a tray of fairy cakes from the oven. Fairy cakes! I was creeping up on her, intent on embracing her about the hips, when, still bending, she turned her head and saw me. I began to say something, but she was looking beyond me now, to the door through which I had just entered, and her face had taken on an expression of alarm and warning. Billy had come in unheard behind me. At once I straightened and let my hands fall to my sides, unsure, though, that I had been quick enough, and that he had not seen me there, advancing at a crouch, ape arms outspread and fingers hooked, towards his mother's tautly proffered hindquarters. But luckily Billy was not an observant boy, and he swept us both with an indifferent glance and went to the table and took up a slice of plum-cake and began to stuff it into his mouth with slovenly dispatch. All the same, how my heart wobbled from the gleeful terror of such a close thing.

Mrs. Gray, making herself ignore me, came and set the tray of cakes on the table and stood back, pus.h.i.+ng out her lower lip and sending a quick puff of breath upwards to blow a stray fall of hair from her forehead. Billy was still chewing cake, mumbling complaints of his sister and her riotous friends. His mother bade him absently not to speak with his mouth full-she was still admiring the cakes, each in its fluted paper cup and snug in its own shallow compartment in the tray and smelling warmly of vanilla-but he paid her no heed. Then she lifted a hand and laid it on his shoulder. This gesture, too, was absent-minded, but for that reason all the more shocking, to me. I was outraged, outraged to see the two of them together there, she with her hand resting so lightly on his shoulder, in the midst of all that homeliness, that shared, familiar world, while I stood by as if forgotten. Whatever liberties Mrs. Gray might grant me, I would never be as near to her as Billy was at that moment, as he always had been and always would be, at every moment. I could only get into her from the outside, but he, he had sprung from a seed and grown inside her, and even after he had shouldered his brute way out of her he was still flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are the things I thought, exactly, but I had the gist of them, and suddenly, in that moment, I was sorely pained. There was no one and nothing that would not make me jealous; jealousy crouched inside me like a bristling, green-eyed cat, ready to spring at the slightest provocation, real or, more often, imagined.

She had Billy take up the remaining slices of plum-cake on its plate and a big bottle of lemonade and, bearing an imbricated array of banana sandwiches on a wooden tray, went after him out of the kitchen. Was there a swing door? Yes, there was: she stopped and held it ajar with her knee and cast back at me a grimful sort of glance that had in it both reproof and pardon, inviting me wordlessly to follow her. I gave her a sulky scowl and turned aside, and heard the spring make its comical, rubbery sound-boing-g-g!-as she let go the door and it swung shut, releasing as it did so a final creak and then a heavy after-sigh.

Left alone, I lingered moodily by the table, glaring at the tin tray of cooling fairy cakes. All was still. Even the hoydens had gone quiet, temporarily silenced, it must be, by banana sandwiches and gla.s.ses of lemon pop. Winter sunlight-no, no, it was summer, for heaven's sake keep up!-summer sunlight, calm, and heavy as honey, was s.h.i.+ning in the window beside the fridge, which was silent, too. Mrs. Gray had left a kettle of water on the stove, grumbling to itself over a low flame. It was one of those conical-shaped whistling kettles that were so popular then and that one hardly ever sees nowadays, when everyone has given in to the electric kettle. The whistle was not on it, though, and from the stubby spout a broad slow column of steam was rising, dense with the sunlight in it and lazily undulant, and curling on itself in an elegant scroll at its topmost reach. When I made to approach the stove something of my own dense aura must have gone before me and this charmed cobra of steam leaned delicately away, as if in vague alarm; I paused, and it righted itself, and when I moved again it moved, too, as before. So we stood wavering there, this friendly wraith and I, held in tremulous equilibrium by the heavy air of summer, and all unexpectedly and for no reason I could think of, a slow burst of happiness enveloped me, a happiness without weight or object, like the simple sunlight itself in the window.

When I did return to the party, however, this bright and blissful glow was clouded on the instant by the unexpected arrival of Mr. Gray. He had left his a.s.sistant in charge of the shop-a Miss Flus.h.i.+ng; I shall get round to her presently, if I have the heart for it-and had come home bringing Kitty's birthday present. Tall, thin, angular, he stood in the kitchen amidst a pool of little girls, like one of those poles that stick up crookedly out of the lagoon at Venice. He had a remarkably small and disproportionate head, which gave one the illusion that one was always farther off from him than was in fact the case. He wore a bedraggled, pale-brown linen jacket and brown corduroy bags and suede shoes scuffed about the toecaps. The bow-ties that he favoured were an affectation even in those archaic days, and represented the only mark of colour or character that I could discern in the otherwise washed-out aspect that he presented to the world. Spurning what must have been a shopful of styles and makes of frame, he chose to wear cheap, steel-rimmed spectacles, which he would remove slowly, holding them delicately at one hinge between a thumb and two fingers, as if they were pince-nez, and closing his eyes he would slowly ma.s.sage with the first two fingers and thumb of his other hand the knotted flesh at the bridge of his nose, sighing the while to himself. Mr. Gray's soft sighs sounded at once imprecatory and resigned, like the prayers offered up by a minister who has long ago given in to religious doubts. He had about him permanently an air of troubled inadequacy, seeming incompetent to deal with the practicalities of everyday life. This dim distressfulness had the effect of rallying ministrators around him. People always seemed to be pressing forwards anxiously to aid him, to smooth his way, to make straight his path, to lift an invisible burden from his sloping shoulders. Even Kitty and her friends as they gathered about him now had a hushed and helping aspect. Mrs. Gray, too, was solicitous, as she handed to him over the heads of the children his after-work half-inch of whiskey in a cut-gla.s.s tumbler, perhaps the very tumbler that I used to drink from with Billy, upstairs, and from which afterwards I would guiltily wipe my fingerprints with a less than clean hankie. How tired was the smile of thanks he gave to her, how weary seemed the hand with which he put the drink down on the table behind him, untasted.

And maybe, indeed, he was ill. Do I not recall hushed talk of doctors and hospitals after the Grays' flight from our midst? At the time, sunk in bitter sorrow, I thought it must be just the town as usual spinning a story to cover over for decency's sake a scandal the initial revelation of which had delighted so many. But maybe I was wrong, maybe all along he was suffering from some chronic ailment that was brought to crisis by the discovery of what his wife and I had been up to. That is an unsettling thought, or should be, anyway.

Kitty's birthday gift was a microscope-she was supposed to have a scientific bent-yet another cost-price item, I spitefully surmise, from Gray's the Optician. A sumptuous instrument it was, though, matt-black and solid where it stood on its single, semi-circular foot, the barrel silky and cold to the touch, the little winding-nut so smooth in action, the lens so small yet giving on to so magnified a version of the world. I coveted it, of course. I was particularly taken by the box it came in, and in which it would live when not in use. It was made of pale polished wood hardly heavier than balsa, dove-tailed at the corners-what a tiny blade such fine work must have called for!-and had a lid, with a thumbnail-shaped notch in it, that slid open lengthways along two waxed grooves in the sides. It was fitted within with a wonderfully delicate set of tiny trestles, carved from wafer-thin plywood, on which the instrument lay snugly on its back, like a doted-on black baby asleep in its custom-made crib. Kitty was delighted, and with a beadily possessive light in her eye took it off into a corner to gloat over it, while her friends, suddenly forgotten, stood about in leporine uncertainty.

Now I was torn between envying Kitty and keeping a jealous watch on Mrs. Gray as she attended to her husband, home wan and weary from the day's breadwinning. His arrival had affected the atmosphere, the wild party spirit had drained from the air, and the guests, sobered and subdued and disregarded still by their undersized hostess, were getting ready in their bedraggled way to go home. Mr. Gray, folding his long frame as if it were a delicate piece of geometrical equipment, a calipers, say, or a big wooden compa.s.s, sat down in the old armchair beside the stove. This chair, his chair, covered with a worn, pilled fabric that resembled mouse-fur, seemed wearier even than its occupant, sagging badly in the seat as it was and leaning drunkenly at one corner where a castor was missing. Mrs. Gray brought the whiskey gla.s.s from the table and once again pressed it on her husband, more tenderly this time, and again he thanked her with his invalid's dolorous smile. Then she stood back, her hands clasped under her bosom, and contemplated him with a worriedly helpless air. This was how it always seemed to be between them, he at the end of some vital resource that only the greatest effort would replenish, and she anxiously eager to aid him but at a loss to know how.

Where is Billy? I have lost track of Billy. How-I ask it again-how did he not see what was going on between his mother and me? How did they all not see? Yet the answer is simple. They saw what they expected to see and did not see what they did not expect. Anyway, why do I exclaim so? I am sure that I for my part was no more perspicacious than they were. That kind of myopia is endemic.

The att.i.tude that Mr. Gray displayed towards me was curious-that is to say, it was strange, for certainly it betrayed no trace of interest. His eye would fall on me, would roll over me, rather, like an oiled ball-bearing, registering nothing, or so I believed. He never seemed quite to recognise me. Perhaps, with his poor eyesight, he imagined it was a different person he was seeing each time I appeared in the house, a succession of Billy's friends all inexplicably similar in appearance. Or perhaps he was afraid I was someone he was supposed to know perfectly well, a family relation, a cousin of the children's, say, who came on frequent visits and whose exact ident.i.ty he was at this late stage too embarra.s.sed to enquire into. For all I know he may have thought I was a second son, Billy's brother, whom he had unaccountably forgotten about and now must accept without comment. I do not think I was singled out particularly for his lack of attention. As far as I could see he looked upon the world in general with the same slightly puzzled, slightly worried, fogged-over gaze, his bow-tie askew and his long, bony, twig-like fingers moving over the surface of things in feeble, fruitless interrogation.

We had an a.s.signation that evening, the evening of Kitty's party, Mrs. Gray and I. a.s.signation: that is a word I like, suggestive as it is of the velvet cloak and tricorn hat, the fluttering fan, the bosom heaving under tautened satin; I fear our circ.u.mspect outings had little of such flash and dash. How did she manage to slip away, with so many ch.o.r.es to be done in the aftermath of the party?-in those days women cleared up and washed the dishes without expectation of help or thought of protest. In fact, it galls me that I do not know how she managed any of our desperate liaison, or how she got away with it for as long as she did. Our luck held remarkably, given the dangers we ran. I was not the only one who tweaked the love G.o.d's nose. Mrs. Gray herself took foolhardy risks. As it happened, that was the very evening we ventured together for a stroll on the boardworks. It was her idea. I had been expecting, indeed warmly antic.i.p.ating, that we would do on this occasion what we always did when we managed to be alone together, but when she arrived at our meeting place on the road above the hazel wood she had me get into the station wagon and drove off at once, and would not answer when I asked where we were going. I asked again, more plaintively, more whiningly, and still getting no response I lapsed into a sulk. I should confess that sulking was my chief weapon against her, nasty little tyke that I was, and I employed it with the skill and niceness of judgement that only a boy as heartless as I would have been capable of. She would resist me for as long as she was able, as I fumed in silence with my arms clamped across my chest and my chin jammed on my collar-bone and my lower lip stuck out a good inch, but always it was she who gave in, in the end. This time she held out until, rattling along by the river, we had pa.s.sed the entrance to the tennis club. "You're so selfish," she burst out then, but laughing, as if it were an undeserved compliment. "Honest to G.o.d, you have no idea."

At this of course I became at once indignant. How could she say such a thing of me, who for her sake risked the ire of Church, State and my mother? Did I not treat her as the sovereign of my heart, did I not indulge her every whim? So wrought was I that anger and self-righteousness formed a hot lump in my throat, and even if I had been willing to I would not have been able to speak.

It was June, midsummer, the time of endless evenings and white nights. Who can imagine what it was like to be a boy and loved in such of the world's weather? What I was still too young to recognise, or acknowledge, was that even at its glorious height the year was already poised to wane. Had I given time and time's vanis.h.i.+ngs their due it would perhaps have accounted for the p.r.i.c.k of indefinite sorrow in my heart. But I was young, and there was no end in sight, no end to anything, and the sadness of summer was no more than a faint bloom, of a delicate cobweb shade, on the cheek of love's ripe and gleaming apple.

"Let's go for a walk," Mrs. Gray said.

Well, why not? The simplest, the most innocent thing in the world, you would think. But consider. Our little town was a panopticon patrolled by warders whose vigilance never flagged. True, there should not have been much to remark in the sight of a respectably married woman strolling along the quayside in the broad light of a summer evening in the company of a boy who was her son's best friend-not much, that is, for an observer of an averagely unspeculative and unsuspicious disposition, but the town and everyone in it had an unregenerately filthy mind that never ceased computing, and by putting one and one together was always sure to come up with an illicit two, clasped and panting in each other's guilty arms.

That outwardly blameless promenade along the boardworks-the local name for this construction-const.i.tuted, I believe, the most audacious and rashest risk we ever took, aside from the final risk, had we but known it as such, that led precipitately to our ruin. We had come to the harbour, and Mrs. Gray parked the station wagon on the clinkered verge beside the railway line-the railway ran along the boardworks, a single track, a thing for which our town was noted, and is to this day, for all I know-and we got out, I sulking still and Mrs. Gray humming to herself in a pretence of not noticing my surly glare. With one hand she reached quickly behind and plucked the seat of her dress free at the back in that way that every time she did it provoked in me an inward gasp of agonised desire. The air over the sea was still, and the water, high and motionless, had a thin floating of oil from the moored coal-boats, that gave it the look of a sheet of red-hot steel suddenly gone cool, aswirl with iridescent shades of silver-pink and emerald and a lovely lucent brittle blue, s.h.i.+mmery as the sheen on a peac.o.c.k feather. We were not by any means the only promenaders. There were quite a few couples out, ambling dreamily arm in arm in the late soft glow of the evening's immemorial sunlight. Perhaps, after all, no one so much as noticed us, or paid us the slightest heed. A guilty heart sees glancing eyes and knowing grins on every side.

Now, I am sure this is too absurd to have been the case, but on that occasion I recall Mrs. Gray, in her short-sleeved summer dress, wearing a pair of pretty gloves made of a reddish-blue netlike material-I can see it-transparent and brittle, with ruffles at the wrist of a darker, purplish shade, and, more absurd still, a matching hat, small and round and flat as a saucer, set slightly off-centre on the crown of her head. Where do I get such fancies from? All she lacks, in this outlandishly demi-mondaine vision of her, is a parasol to twirl, and a pearl-handled lorgnette to peer through. And why not a bustle, into the bargain? Anyway, there we were, young Marcel in unlikely company with bare-armed Odette, pacing side by side along the boardworks, our heels knocking hollowly on the planking and I silently recalling, with arch compa.s.sion for a former unformed self, how not so long ago I used to lurk under here with my urchin pals when the tide was out and squint through the gaps between the sleepers in hope of seeing up the skirts of girls walking by above us. Although I would not have thought of touching her in the glare of this public place I could feel across the s.p.a.ce between us the thrilling crackle of Mrs. Gray's dismay at her own daring; dismay, but determination, too, to brazen it out. She would not look at anyone we met, and went along as erect and studiedly empty-eyed as a s.h.i.+p's figurehead, her bosom thrust forwards and her head held aloft. I was at a loss as to what she thought she was up to, parading like this before the town, but there was a side to her that was still and always would be a romping girl.

I wonder now if secretly and without fully realising it she, too, yearned to be found out, if that was what this provocative display was for. Perhaps our liaison was all too much for her, as oftentimes it was for me, and she wished to be forced to have done with it. Need I say, such a possibility would not have entered my head at the time. When it came to girls I was as insecure and self-doubting as any average boy, yet that Mrs. Gray should love me I took entirely for granted, as if it were a thing ordained within the natural order of things. Mothers were put on earth to love sons, and although I was not her son Mrs. Gray was a mother, so how would she deny me anything, even the innermost secrets of her flesh? That was how I thought, and the thought dictated all my actions, and inactions. She was simply there, and not for a moment to be doubted.

We stopped by the stern of one of the coal boats to look across to the barrage bank, as it was called, a shapeless hulk of concrete stuck in the middle of the harbour, its original function long forgotten, even to itself, probably. Below the surface, under the slope of the boat's dirty rump, big greyish fish made desultory weavings, and farther down in the shallow brown water I could dimly see crabs at their stealthy, sideways scuttlings among the stones and sunken beer bottles, the tin cans and tyreless pram wheels. Mrs. Gray turned aside. "Come on, we'd better go," she said, sounding weary now and in a gloom suddenly. What had happened that her mood had turned so swiftly? In all of the time we were together I never knew what was going on in her head, not in any real or empathetic way, and hardly bothered to try to find out. She talked about things, of course, all sorts of things, all the time, but mostly I took it that she was talking to herself, telling herself her own wandering, various and disconnected story. This did not bother me. Her ramblings and ruminations and the odd breathless flight of wonderment I regarded as no more than the preliminaries I had to put up with before getting her into the back seat of that pachydermous old station wagon or on to the lumpy mattress on Cotter's littered floor.

When we had got into the car she did not start the engine at once but sat watching through the windscreen the couples still pa.s.sing to and fro in the deepening twilight. I do not see those net gloves now, or that silly hat. Surely I invented them, out of an impulse of frivolity; the Lady Memory has her moments of playfulness. Mrs. Gray sat with her back pressed against the seat, her arms extended and her hands clamped beside each other on the top of the steering wheel. Have I spoken of her arms? They were plump though delicately shaped, with a little whorled notch under each elbow and curving in a nicely swept arc to the wrist, reminding me happily of those Indian clubs we used to exercise with in the school yard on Sat.u.r.day mornings. They were lightly freckled on the backs, and the undersides were fish-scale blue and wonderfully cool and silky to the touch, with delicate striations of violet veins along which I liked to slide the tip of my tongue, following them all the way to where they abruptly sank from sight in the dampish hollow of her elbow, one of the numerous ways I had of making her s.h.i.+ver and twitch and moan for mercy, for she was delightfully ticklish.

I laid an urging hand on her thigh, being eager to depart, but she took no notice. "Isn't it peculiar," she said, in a tone of dreamy wonderment, still gazing through the windscreen, "how permanent people seem? As if they'll always be here, the same ones, walking up and down."

I thought for some reason of that swaying column of steam from the kettle in the kitchen, and of Mr. Gray setting down his untouched gla.s.s of whiskey on the table in his infinitely weary way. Then I wondered if there might still be time and enough left of the long day's light for Mrs. Gray to drive me to Cotter's place and let me lie down on top of her and a.s.suage for a little while my so fierce, tender and inveterate need of her and her inexhaustibly desirable flesh.

DAWN DEVONPORT, I have learned, has also suffered a bereavement, far more recent than mine. A little over a month ago her father died, of an unheralded heart attack, at the age of fifty-something. She told me of this last evening, at the end of the day's filming, as we walked together in the open air behind the studio where we are working this week. She had come out to smoke the fifth of the six cigarettes that she claims are her daily ration-why six, I wonder. She says she does not like to let the cast and crew see her smoking, though obviously I am an exception, being already a stand-in, as I suspect, for the father who so recently absconded from her life. We were both suffering somewhat in the aftermath of a scene of brutal pa.s.sion we had spent the afternoon doing and redoing-nine long takes before Toby Taggart grudgingly consented to be satisfied; did I say film-acting was easy?-and the chill air of late autumn, smelling of smoke and tinged with bronze behind far trees, was a balm for our throbbing brows. To be made to feign love-making before the camera was fraught enough, but to have had to follow the act with a mock blow of my fist between her small, bared and shockingly defenceless b.r.e.a.s.t.s-Axel Vander, at least as JB has written him, is decidedly not a nice man-had left me dry-mouthed and shaking. As we paced the strip of unconvinced gra.s.s under the high, windowless, gunmetal-grey back wall of the studio she spoke of her father in brief rapid bursts, drawing hard on her cigarette and expelling puffs of smoke like cartoon speech-bubbles in which exclamations of sorrow and anger and incredulity had yet to be inscribed. Dad was a taxi driver, a jolly fellow, it seems, never sick a day in his life until his arteries, all clogged up after forty years of forty a day-she looked at the cigarette in her fingers and gave a sour laugh-had shut off the valves one October morning and let the engine cough and die.

It turns out that it was Dad, dear old Dad, who lumbered her with the name Dawn Devonport. He dreamed it up for her when she was a ten-year-old hoofer and landed the part of First Fairy in a West End panto. Why she stuck with the name I do not know. An excess of filial devotion, perhaps. The abrupt manner in which the old cabbie sped off while she stood at the kerb, desperately signalling, had left her puzzled and cross, as if before anything else his death had been a dereliction of duty. She, too, it seems, like Lydia and me, feels she has not so much lost as been eluded by a loved one. I could see she has not learned yet how to mourn-but does one ever learn that hard lesson?-and when we stepped away from the set on our way outside and in the sudden gloom beyond the lights she stumbled on one of those malignant fat black cables that turn a studio floor into a snake-pit and she grasped my wrist for support, I felt all along the bones of her strong, mannish hands the tremors of her inner distress.

Speaking of distress, I was tempted to tell her the singular thing that Billie Stryker has told me, which is that Axel Vander, the very he, was in Italy, and not only in Italy but in Liguria, and not only in Liguria but in the vicinity of Portovenere, on or about, as a policeman would say, giving evidence in the witness box, on or about the date of my daughter's death. I do not know what to think about this. Really, I would prefer not to think about it at all.

It is a strange business, movie-making, stranger than I expected it would be, and yet in an odd way familiar, too. Others had warned me of the necessarily disjointed, fragmentary nature of the process, but what surprises me is the effect that this has on my sense of myself. I feel that not only my actor self but my self self is made into a thing of fragments and disjointure, not only in the brief intervals when I am before the camera but even when I have stepped out of my role-my part-and rea.s.sumed my real, my supposedly real, ident.i.ty. Not that I ever imagined myself either a product or a preserver of the unities: I have lived enough and reflected enough to acknowledge the incoherence and manifold nature of what used to be considered the individual self. Any day of the week I leave my house and in the street the very air becomes a forest of bristling blades that slice me imperceptibly into multiple versions of the singularity that indoors I presented myself as being and, indeed, was taken for. This experience before the camera, though, this sense of being not one but many-my name is Legion!-has an added dimension, for the many are not units, but segments, rather. So, being in a film is strange, and at the same time not strange at all; it is an intensification, a diversification, of the known, a concentration upon the ramifying self; and all this is interesting, and confusing, and thrilling and unsettling.

I tried last evening to speak about all this to Dawn Devonport, but she only laughed. She agreed it is disorienting at first-"You lose track of everything"-but a.s.sured me that in time I shall get used to it. I think she did not fully grasp what I meant. As I have said, I feel I know already the otherwhere that I have found myself in, and all that is different is the intensity of the experience, the particularity of it. Dawn Devonport dropped her half-smoked cigarette in the gra.s.s and trod on it with the heel of her sensible black leather shoe-she was in costume as Cora, the nun-like young woman who gives herself to Axel Vander as a Christian martyr would give herself to an old but ravenous lion-and glanced at me sidelong with the shadow of a smile that seemed at once kindly and slyly mocking. "We have to live, you know," she said. "This is not life-my dad could have told you that." What can she have meant? There is a touch of the sibyl to Dawn Devonport. But then, does not every woman, to my enchanted eye, possess something of the prophetess?

She stopped at one point in our pacing and turned and asked if I had told Billie Stryker about my daughter. I said that I had; that, indeed, I had surprised myself by blurting it all out the first day when Billie came to the house and sat with me so taciturnly in my crow's-nest in the attic. She smiled, and gave her head a deprecating shake. "That Toby," she said. I asked her what she meant. We walked on. Her costume was thin and she had only a light cardigan thrown over her shoulders, and I worried that she would be cold, and offered her my jacket, which she declined. It was well known, she said, that Toby's tactic when he was about to work with an actor new to him was to send in Billie Stryker to do a preliminary recce and come back with some choice bit of intimate information, preferably of a shameful or tragic nature, to be studied and stored away carefully and brought out again when and if needed, like an X-ray plate. Billie had a knack, she said, of luring people into confessing things without their being aware of what they were confessing to; it was a knack that Toby Taggart valued highly and made frequent use of. I recalled Marcy Meriwether announcing Billie Stryker the scout, and her hoa.r.s.e laughter coming along the line to me all the way from sunny Carver City, and I felt slow-witted and foolish, not for the first or, I imagine, the last time, in this blended, garishly lit dream that Dawn Devonport and the rest of us are sleepwalking through together. So that is what Billie Stryker is, not so much a scout as a plain snoop. Surprisingly-at least it surprises me-I do not seem to mind that I was duped.

Speaking of dreams, I had one of my wilder ones last night; it has just come back to me this moment. It seems to demand being recounted in all its questionable detail; certain dreams have that quality. This one would require a rhapsode to do it justice. I shall try my best. I was in a house on a riverbank. It was an old house, tall and rickety, with an impossibly steep-pitched roof and crooked chimneys-a sort of gingerbread cottage out of a fairy tale, quaint yet sinister, or sinister because quaint, as is the way in fairy tales. I had been lodging there, on some sort of working holiday, I think, along with a group of other people, family, or friends, or both, although none of them was to be seen, and now we were leaving. I was upstairs, packing, in a small room with a big window open wide and looking out to a view of the river below. The suns.h.i.+ne outside was peculiar, a thin, pervasive, lemony element, like a very fine liquid, and it was impossible to tell from it what time of day it might be, morning, midday or eve. I did know that we were running late-a train or something would be leaving soon-and I was anxious, and clumsy in my haste to fit all my things, of which there were impossibly many, into the two or three hopelessly small suitcases standing open on the narrow bed. There must have been a chronic drought in the region, for the river, which I could see would not be wide or deep even in times of flood, was a shallow bed of sticky, light-grey mud. Busy though I was with the packing I was also on the look-out for something, although I did not know what, and I kept leaning far back, while going on with the packing, to scan the view outside the window. Glancing out now I realised that what I had taken for the trunk of a dead tree lying athwart the riverbed and slimed all over with glistening mud was in fact a living creature, a thing like a crocodile only not quite, or more than, a crocodile; I could see its great jaws moving and its ancient eyelids opening and closing slowly with what seemed a great effort. Probably it had been washed down in a flood that had preceded the drought and become lodged there in that mora.s.s, helpless and dying. Was this the thing I had been watching for? I felt anguish and annoyance in equal measure, anguish for the afflicted creature and annoyance that I would have to deal with it somehow, help to rescue it, or direct that it be put out of its misery. Yet it did not seem to be in pain, or even in much distress; indeed, it seemed quite calm and resigned-indifferent, almost. Maybe it had not been washed up here, maybe it was some mud-dwelling creature which the churnings of the recent flood as it pa.s.sed by had exposed to view and which when the waters came back would sink again into its old, lightless, submerged world. I went down, my feet, in what felt like a deep-sea diver's leaden boots, thumping clumsily on the narrow stairs, and emerged into that strange, aqueous sunlight. At the riverbank I found that the thing had extricated itself from the mud and had turned into a darkly lovely young woman-even in the dream this transformation seemed hackneyed and altogether too easy, a thing that intensified my annoyance and anxious impatience: those suitcases were still not filled and here I was being diverted from my task by a piece of trumpery masquerading as magic. There she was, however, this girl from the deep, seated on a real log on a bank of springy green turf, wearing a haughty and petulant expression, her clasped hands resting on one knee and her s.h.i.+ning, long dark hair falling over her shoulders and down her very straight back. It seemed I should know her or at least know who she was. She was got up elaborately in the style of a gypsy, or a chieftainess of old, all bangles and beads and swathes of heavy, s.h.i.+mmering cloth in dramatic hues of emerald and golden oatmeal and rich burgundy. She was waiting impatiently and in some irritation for me to do something for her, to perform some service the need of which she resented. As happens in dreams, I both knew and did not know the nature of this task, and did not at all like the prospect of performing it, whatever it was. Have I mentioned that in the dream I was very young, hardly more than a lad, though burdened beyond my years with cares and responsibilities, the packing, for instance, left unfinished in that high room the square open window of which I could look up at now, and where the timeless, pallid sunlight was streaming in? The shutters thrown back against the wall on either side were made of what looked like rush matting, a feature I noticed particularly and one that was of an inexplicable significance. I was aware of being in danger of falling in love on the spot, instantly, with this girl, this imperious princess, but I knew that if I did I would be destroyed, or at least put through great pains, and besides, there was so much I had to do, much too much, to allow of so frivolous a surrender. Now the dream began to lose focus and grew hazy, or does so at least in my recollection of it. The location had suddenly moved inside the house, into a cramped room with tiny square windows with deep and shadowed embrasures. Another girl had materialised, the princess's friend, or companion, older than both of us, brisk and businesslike and somehow coercive, whose coercions the princess resisted, and so did I, and who in the end lost patience with us and thrust her fists into the very deep pockets of her very long coat and went off in very high dudgeon. Left alone with the dark-haired beauty, I tried to kiss her, in a perfunctory way-I was still worrying about those half-stuffed suitcases upstairs, agape like the mouths of chicks in a nest and overflowing untidily-but she rebuffed me in a matchingly offhand fas.h.i.+on. Who can she have been, whom did she represent? Dawn Devonport is the obvious candidate, yet I think not. Billie Stryker, oneirically slimmed down and beautified? Hardly. My Lydia, daughter of the desert of old? Hmm. But wait-I know. She was Cora, Axel Vander's girl, of course; not Dawn Devonport's portrayal of her, which if I am honest I consider superficial so far, but as I see her in my imagination, strange and estranged, difficult, proud and lost. The end of the dream, as I retain it, was a wavering, a vaguening, as the enchanting girl-I have called her a princess but only for convenience, for she was certainly a commoner, though of an uncommon kind-departed from me along the barren river's bank, not striding but as if sustained on air, moving away soundlessly and yet at the same time somehow returning to me. This phenomenon continued for some time, this impossible, simultaneous coming and going, departing and returning, until my sleeping mind could bear it all no longer and everything went slack and slowly sank, into the unregistering darkness.

Why, I asked Dawn Devonport-we are still pacing that insulted strip of gra.s.s behind the studio-why does Toby Taggart employ Billie Stryker to nose out the secret weaknesses and sorrows of his players? I knew the answer, of course, so why did I ask? "To have what he thinks will be power over us," she said, and laughed. "He imagines he is Svengali-don't they all?"

It will seem odd, perhaps, but I did not think badly of Toby for this, no more than I did of Billie Stryker. He is a professional, as am I; in other words we are cannibals, the pair of us, and would eat our young for the sake of a scene. I cannot help but like him. He is large and ill-a.s.sembled, built on the lines of a buffalo, with absurdly tiny feet and skinny legs and a broad chest and broader shoulders and a s.h.a.ggy mop of mahogany-coloured curls from under which s.h.i.+ne out those glossy sad brown eyes of his, pleading love and forbearance. His name is Tobias-yes, I asked him-it is a family tradition on his mother's side, from her father the duke back through the centuries to an originary Tobias the Terrible who fought at Hastings and is said to have cradled the mortally wounded King Harold in his armoured arm. This last is the kind of dusty heirloom that Toby loves to bring out proudly from the vault of the family's past for us to admire. He is a sentimentalist and a patriot of the old school and cannot understand my disregard for the deeds of doughty ancestors. I explained to him that I have no ancestors to speak of, only a motley line of petty tradesmen and near-peasants who never swung an axe in battle or comforted a king with an arrow in his eye. I would say that Toby is an anachronism in the movie world if I thought there was anyone in it who is not-look at me, for heaven's sake. How he agonises on the set. Are we all happy in our parts? Is he being true to the spirit of JB's wonderful script? Is the studio's money being well spent? Will audiences understand what we are attempting? There he stands, always to the right and a little behind the cameraman, amid a clutter of wiring and those mysterious long black boxes with reinforced metal corners that are strewn at random about the floor, in his big brown jumper and ragged jeans, nibbling at his nails like a squirrel at a nut, as if he were trying to get at the elusive essence of himself, and worrying, worrying. The crew adore him and are fiercely protective, flexing their biceps and glowering at anyone seeming to offer the slightest slight. There is something saintly about him. No, not saintly, not quite. I know, I know what it is he reminds me of: one of those prelates the Church militant used to produce, muscular but soft, big-hearted, privy to the world's cesspit of sin yet ever undaunted, not for a moment doubting that this chaotic phantasmagoria into which he must sink himself each day will in the end be redeemed and turned into a paradisal vision of light and grace and resplendently cavorting souls.

I can hardly believe it-we are already in the final week of filming. They move so fast, the movies.

HOW PLEASED AND PROUD Mrs. Gray would be if she could see me on the set, her boy made good. She was something of an aficionado-aficionada?-of the cinema, though she called it the pictures. On almost every Friday night the Gray family would get dressed up and proceed, parents in front and the children two paces behind, to the Alhambra Kino, a barn-like converted music-hall that stood on a blind corner halfway along the Main Street. Here they sat four abreast in the one-and-sixpennies, the best seats in the house, to view the latest offerings from Parametro, from Warner-Goldwyn-Fox, from Gauling or Eamont Studios. What shall we say of the lost picture palaces of our youth? The Alhambra, despite the spits on the wooden floor and the fug of f.a.g smoke in the d