Ancient Images (11 page)

    "I'll bring it," he said, and swung his legs off the bed, penis wagging.

    She dabbed at her eyes with the duvet and wrapped it around herself. When Roger came back with the bottle he was draped in a black robe edged with gold thread. He insisted on her wearing it, and tramped bare-buttocked to the bathroom for a terrycloth robe for himself. Sandy poured the wine, and they touched glasses. "Here's to beginnings," she said.

    "And many episodes."

    "With lots of action."

    "Leading to climaxes."

    "You needn't worry on that score. You made up for the rest of the day at the very least."

    "Shit, you mean it wasn't only your cats being killed?"

    "Shall we say it's been a varied kind of a day? I've been given time off work whether or not I want it. So I started out to look for Graham's film, and met some people who made me wonder if I should. They write a magazine. I'll show you."

    She glanced through it before passing it to him. Trantom's misspelled editorial was addressed to "all the psychos and sickos like us." An article by John the Maniac described weeks of wandering around seedy video libraries in search of under-the-counter horrors. Andrew Minihin's page concluded, "They're only special effects, and if you can't tell the difference you must be sick in the head, so fuck off to a nuthouse and let the rest of us enjoy them." Sandy refilled the glasses while Roger scanned the pages. "Somehow I doubt Graham would have had much time for them," she said.

    "I remember now, they presented him with a copy of their organ, gave him one of their organs as you might say. He thought the joke was on him. He was kind of relieved they weren't any help, because he would have felt obliged to invite them to his premiere. Imagine having to introduce these guys to royalty."

    "It isn't how squalid it is I mind so much as how meaningless."

    "Sure, the cinema disappearing up itself, or reverting to a kind of magic show. If you have to spend your time reminding yourself it's fake and that's the point, what
is
the point? Maybe it's a rite of passage for people who never grow up. But when audiences have had enough of being shocked they generally want something more subtle, and you might be helping to revive that by finding Graham's movie."

    "I suppose so."

    "Listen, don't let me bore you. Maybe you're thinking I'm like those guys, living in the movies because I'm scared of real life."

    "Why should I think that? Using your talent is part of real life, and you're using yours to make people see what you see, make them look again."

    He smiled rather wistfully at her. "The best I can hope for is that we're both right. Movies are somewhere I could go and let my feelings out for a couple of hours, once I was old enough that my folks had to accept I could go out by myself. I guess I got into the habit of suppressing how I felt in case it made them anxious. I should tell you they had their reasons. I had a sister who died of meningitis when I was three years old and she was six."

    "Poor little thing. Do you remember her?"

    "Sometimes I dream I see her face, but I don't remember it really. The one memory I have is of her coming into my room and standing at the end of the bed with the light from the doorway behind her. She looked as if she was drawn in light, turning into light, you know? My folks tell me that must have been her saying goodbye the night they had to take her to the hospital."

    Sandy licked a stray tear from his cheek. A hint of after-shave underlay the salty taste. "I wouldn't say you were afraid of reality."

    "Maybe just of getting involved in case I lose someone else." Then he grinned. "That's Hollywood bullshit, don't you think? It doesn't work that way unless you've seen too many movies and let them do your thinking for you. Deep down most of us need someone. I do."

    "It's mutual," Sandy said, feeling as if his former awkwardness had been transferred to her.

    "I hope you don't just mean that the way Charles Dickens did."

    "Nothing so literary. I mean what I feel."

    "You feel good. I'd say we've something more to celebrate, but we've killed the wine."

    "I can think of a better way to celebrate."

    This time it was unhurried and inventive, and taught them more about each other. Afterward they lay exhausted in each other's arms, and soon they were asleep. Whenever Sandy awoke, his closeness was a renewed surprise and a sleepy pleasure. Once she awoke convinced he had a dog which they'd forgotten to let in, and was halfway to the door until she realized her error. She was missing the cats, she told herself, but snuggling under the duvet with Roger was such a compensation that she slept again almost immediately.

    

    

    In the morning he brought her breakfast in bed and then worked at his desk. She showered and hoped he might join her without being asked, but this was one shower scene he was shy of. She used his toothbrush and went out to find him, his hair dangling above the keyboard of his word processor. She held his shoulders and stooped to kiss his forehead. "Such a lot can happen in one day," she said.

    He reached up and stroked her neck. "So what's happening today?"

    "I ought to go on my travels. I shouldn't let Graham down, or my lunch date."

    "I have to work on this book for at least the next couple of days, but maybe I could catch up with you after that if you want company."

    "I'd like that."

    He saved his file and slipped the disk out of the word processor. "If you need to make any calls, go ahead while I take a bath."

    Calling so early in the day proved useful. She arranged two interviews that would lead her across the map from Hatfield without her needing to retrace her route. One was with Denzil Eames, who had written the film and who sounded querulously eager to be interviewed. By the time she'd finished, Roger was out of the bathroom, looking pinkly youthful in his terrycloth robe. She hugged him, but when his hands ran down her skirt and under it she murmured "I really ought to go home and pack. I'm supposed to be in Hatfield for lunch."

    "Sure," he said, his hands springing away.

    "Otherwise I'd stay, I hope you know. And I'd love to have you come after me when you can."

    "Don't count on much of a start," he said, which made her want him so much that she hurried herself away to grab her handbag. At the door she kissed him, lingering even longer for the benefit of whoever she sensed watching. But when she let go of him at last, she could see nobody. How could anyone be thin enough to hide behind the shrubs in daylight? She gave Roger a last hug and ran across the cobblestones to her car.

    As Sandy drove off the motorway near Hatfield she met the autumn. Tips of leaves were yellowing on trees that seemed to wither against the glare of sunlight from moist fields. When she rolled her window down she felt the chill that the buildings of central London had kept at bay. She drew a long breath that tasted of mist and smoke. Whenever she left the city behind, her senses reached out for the countryside, and she realized how habitually she kept them in check.

    She had to do so in order to drive into Hatfield. The outskirts of the town were a maze of traffic circles and of roads whose numbers had been changed. Mechanical diggers flung mud about, a British Aerospace playing field gleamed emptily, prefabricated flats for students at the Polytechnic stood on thick stilts above mud. Sandy found herself driving back and forth between anonymous terraces and fields steeped in mist, and she was beginning to wonder if she'd come to the wrong Hatfield-there were at least two more in the Automobile Association guidebook-when, among the omnipresent signposts to the Polytechnic, she caught sight of one for Old Hatfield. She had to drive twice around the traffic circle before the traffic would let her off.

    The Georgian streets of the old town climbed to St. Ethelreda's church. On Fore Street the car began to labor until Sandy shifted down two gears. She caught sight of the name of the side street she was looking for, nailed to a blaze of sunlight and whitewash, and braked to let two women wheeling baskets heaped with vegetables cross the junction. Halting gave her time to blink away the dazzle of sunlight, but as the car coasted into the side street, she blinked again. For a moment it seemed she had driven into a film. The street was a set along which an actor was striding.

    She'd seen him half a dozen times, but never in color. He had been an innkeeper, a stallholder at a medieval fair, a pirate's first mate who had tired of killing and saved the heroine before dying on a sword himself. She was sure he'd had a tankard in his fist at some point in every film. She stopped the car and waited for him.

    Harry Manners' jowls that used to shake with jollity were veined, she saw; his hair was gray and sparser. None of this lessened him: as he came closer his presence seemed more overwhelming, less contained, now that it was scaled down off the screen. He must be nearly eighty, but his eyes were keen enough. He stopped fifty yards short of the car and peered under his gray caterpillar eyebrows at her, a smile sending ripples through his jowls. "It's you, isn't it?" he boomed, and strode toward her. "My luncheon treat?"

    She climbed out and stretched. "How did you know?"

    "I saw you hunting and hoped I was the lucky man." He clasped her hand in both of his. "Your voice was a melody, you are the symphony. I shall entrust myself to you. Ignore me if I cover my eyes occasionally."

    "You aren't fond of cars."

    "I wasn't even when they had to huff and puff to put on fifty miles an hour, especially after what happened to poor Giles Spence. As for how they drive outside town these days, is that what's meant by a white-knuckle ride? You'll excuse me if we don't go far. Will duck pie be to your taste?"

    "Sounds tempting."

    "To the Crooked Billet, then," he cried like several of his roles, and lowered himself into the passenger seat, tugging at his trouser legs that were wide as thirty years ago. 85

    "Back down the hill. Not
too
precipitately, if you'd be so kind."

    As she turned downhill his face looked as though he was trying to suppress the flatulence of panic. As soon as she glanced at him he smiled bravely. "Please ask whatever you came to ask. Take my mind off my cravenness."

    This wasn't the moment to ask what had happened to Giles Spence. "I get the feeling you'd be pleased if I found this film."

    "Pleased for you and for your friend, mourned by many, and for myself. Don't you dare let the scribbler in that excuse for a newspaper deter you. The film has survived worse than him."

    "Have you any idea who bought the copyright?"

    "I don't think any of us had except the producers, and they were both killed in the war. They wouldn't even tell Spence's wife."

    "Did you ever wonder why it was suppressed?"

    "I wonder all the time at a host of things. It keeps me breathing. At the time we thought someone had bought the film who could afford to hold it back until the public was hungry for horrors again, and later we assumed whoever owned the negative had let it deteriorate. You'll appreciate we had other things on our minds, especially during the war."

    "But now you think whoever owns the rights didn't want the film to be shown."

    "So your friend told me he had reason to believe, which angers me. Making the film was enough of a nightmare without its being to no avail. Left at the end here, I should tell you. And now perhaps I'd better concentrate on navigating."

    At the first of the traffic circles she wished he had continued reminiscing. "Next," he gasped, "no, left after here, ah, best go round again." He kept shading his eyes as if he were struggling not to cover them. She found the pub by accident, having strayed back into the confusion of mass- produced terraces. She parked on gravelly soil and gave Harry Manners her arm as he heaved himself out of the car, saying "Thanks, thanks" to her or to whatever powers had kept him safe.

    It was the kind of small old country pub she ordinarily loved, but it didn't seem ideal for interviewing the actor. Most of the drinkers crammed into the bar greeted him by name. "You never said you had a daughter," a woman complained.

    "I've no reason to curse the manufacturers of prophylactics. This young lady's an admirer, if I may presume to say so."

    "You want to revive his yesterdays, do you?" the woman said, one gloved hand flourishing an unlit cigarette in a holder.

    "And to encourage him to go on performing," Sandy said sweetly, and ordered food and a black ale the actor recommended. She followed him out to a table on a lawn beside several henhouses that backed onto a field glowing with misty sunlight. "Forgive me for not introducing you," he said. "I thought you mightn't want to spend the next hour hearing about when she had a singing voice."

    "So long as you don't mind what I said.
Are
you still acting?"

    "Every waking moment and on the stage of my dreams, but you mean professionally. I still tread the boards where I'm invited. A television producer was in touch last week to see if I might accept very little money to appear in a play about the exploitation of pensioners. If we still breed the likes of Giles Spence, I fear they've fled to Hollywood."

    "You obviously admired him."

    "If there were any justice his name would come up whenever people mention English films. You've never seen his
Midsummer
Night's
Dream,
have you? Bought and sup pressed by Hollywood so there was no competition. And his film about Boudicca wasn't preserved properly, so it's decayed beyond repair. That would never have happened if he had still been alive. God help anyone he thought was harming his work."