Daniel Martin (17 page)

‘Oh well if…’

I stood and shut it; and received a frozen grimace, meant to represent gratitude, from the lady and two or three covertly disapproving examinations from my male fellow-passengers. I had committed the cardinal sin not of shutting the window, but of opening my mouth. No other caste in the world who are so certain that public decency and good breeding is silence; or who by carrying it to such lengths create such an impression of tribal homogeneity… I was wearing clothes bought in California, a polo-necked jumper and sports jacket, not a suit and tie, and perhaps they read something alien in me a danger, someone to be taught the English way. I didn’t really disapprove of it; I noted it, like an anthropologist, and understood it, as an Englishman. Being forced to share a confined space with people to whom you have not been introduced was an activity dense with risk: one might be held to ransom and forced to give some item of information about oneself. Perhaps it was just a matter of accent: a terror of revealing, in even the smallest phrase, one’s class, or some dissonance between voice and clothes, opinion and vowel-sound.

It disturbed me far more than usual, that absolutely normal English silence. It seemed not relaxed at all, but almost explosive, a silence like a scream; perhaps because it seemed so characteristic of my own past and of the family I was re-entering. I had analysed ‘so this fear of exposure, this onanistic fondling of privacy, long before; once used it successfully in a play; but its persistence baffled me. It went marching on through the youth and the sexual revolutions: through the permissive society, swinging London and all the rest, Hide, hide, hide, hide. Of course it was nothing, in that train: simply six middleclass people wanting to be left alone. But its private transference to a personal world, its murderous use as a killer of tolerance and trust, as agapicide, had principally ruined my marriage. We had used our silences like sabres, in the end.

Dan and Nell decided, perhaps in reaction to the other ménage’s philo-progenitiveness, not to have children for at least a year. There were or so they argued economic reasons. He had to see how his dramatic firstborn would be received, had to prove he could follow it. They both wanted to move to London. Nell needn’t have worked, but of the two sisters she was at that time much closer to the then unformulated ideas of Women’s Liberation. Of course it was partly pretending: we both had private income, indeed together just about enough not to have needed to work at all. If we had money troubles, then as later, it was because we were born squanderers: Dan in reaction to his upbringing, Nell in conformity with hers. Neither of us ever showed anything but a very intermittent skill at economizing.

The Empty Church, the play that attempted to exorcise my father’s ghost from my life, came on. It received fair to good reviews, benefiting a little from the charity traditionally extended to new names. It had rather a slow start at the box-office, but then picked up. Dan had his first real publicity. I suppose he ought to have seen a red light then: Nell was far more emotional, manic-depressive about it, than he was. She took the praise at face value and the criticism (most of it justified, if one’s going to copy Ibsen one has no business with melodramatic tricks) as a personal affront almost as if what was under attack was her choice in marrying the playwright. She was stupidly rude one evening at a party, they had just moved to London, to the New Statesman drama critic. He hadn’t even given the play a bad review, merely spelt out some reservations. That spawned their first serious row, when they got home. It didn’t last long, she cried and they made love. Dan even had to stop her writing a letter of apology the next day. At the time he put it down to over-identification. In reality it was a first declaration of career jealousy.

What had finally brought them to London was not only the modest success of the play, but the quite unexpected arrival of a film-script offer. Dan had supposed it was a reward for the talent for realistic dialogue revealed in the theatre; a better agent might have warned him he was simply being snatched up on the cheap. The story, based on a rotten novel about a wartime romance, was not worth reading, let alone filming. But he was very green, he thought he saw new angles, he knew he could improve the dialogue, and the money, though next to nothing by future standards, tempted. He was also having problems with his next play. I can’t pretend that he hesitated, and Nell was for it. The well-known and profoundly ungifted British producer who had bought the book flattered him in the manner of his kind and they both happily swallowed that as well. At one point they seemed to be seeing a new film every evening and tearing its script to bits afterwards or trying to pick up lessons from it. Dan read the moviemaking classics and had the usual love-affaire with the professional jargon all that bastard attempt to direct on paper which every decent scenarist in the history of the business has always run a mile from.

Nell found herself a job soon afterwards. One of her college friends had already got some minor editorial position with the same publishers who were to re-enter my life later in the form of Caro’s rejected beau. They were short of a reader and Nell was successfully recommended. The pay was criminally poor, barely covered the money she spent on clothes, and nothing serious was sent her way. But she was allowed to work largely at home and she and Dan were still dewy-eyed enough to think that that compensated for the exploitation and the drudgery. They took turns at the same typewriter. All this was in a tiny mews flat they had found near the Brompton Road, before it had achieved its current chic and crippling prices.

It was a happy enough winter. Jane had Rosamund, without problems, and Dan and Nell became the baby’s godparents. They still saw quite a lot of Anthony and Jane, either at Wytham or when they came down to London. Dan had by then realized that no amount of dialogue improvement could hide the basic silliness of the story, but the first draft he sent in met with more approval than it deserved.

It was a typical British film production: a bad idea in the first place, done on the cheap from top to bottom, and based on the legitimate assumption that the great British cinema-going public had no taste and the illegitimate one that only water divided the United Kingdom from the United States. In the novel the hero had been English, but ‘American interest’ had killed that from the start not that it would have made any difference to the two hours of rubbish that eventually hit the odeons.

It took some years for Dan to realize that the total failure in England to develop a decent commercial movie industry, let alone something better than a constipated trickle of serious filmmakers, is at least partly due to our unerring flair for backing bad directors or to the corollary notion that some semi-illiterate cameraman or ingratiating phony must know more about reproducing life than anyone else. He should have learnt from that first director, who had merely managed to fawn his way into the grand conspiracy of mediocrity that has dominated the home industry for the last twenty-five years.

But all this is in retrospect. Dan did a second draft, was drawn into the first fringes of the celluloid world—like a foolish shrimp into a sea anemone. Already feelers were out about another script, and he was beginning to see his way through with the new play. Writing that became a great relief after the script, so much so that he insidiously argued himself into believing there was a creative as well as an economic argument for following both professions. Even Nell had a promotion of sorts—to proofreading. She had an unusual feminine ability to be meticulously accurate in punctuation and spelling, something else she did not pass on to Caro. The appallingness of her written English was one of the few things they were able to agree on in later years.

But by this time, the spring of 1952, faint rifts in the lute were already appearing. Dan had to be on hand while they shot the indoor scenes there were very few locations, it was all being done with stock footage and back-projection at Pinewood. Already Nell had begun to complain about the ‘excitement’ of Dan’s life and the ‘dullness’ of hers. He was scrupulous about taking her along to parties and showings and the rest, she even came down once or twice to the studio, but their side-by-side working existence was over. He had taken, even before shooting began, to doing some of the rewrites at the office in Wardour Street. He was given a miserable little cubbyhole there, but he now found it easier to write away from Nell. Perhaps it was partly embarrassment at having, at home, her read what he wrote; but even with the play… she was always hovering over it, wanting to see each scene the moment it came off the typewriter. That began to irritate Dan unfairly, she was trying to cling to the joint existence. As he worked away from home more, so did she; correcting proofs at the publishers, making friends with her fellow-editors. In spite of this, they both started feeling the mews flat was too small. Her first silences germinated there. Increasingly he was late home.

At this stage the blame is almost all Dan’s. The work Nell did was pettifogging and monotonous, especially for a graduate with a better degree than he had managed to get himself. He was doing exactly what he wanted (not the same as he really needed) and she was marking galleys and time. He had also fallen a victim of the glamours and vulgarities of his new world however disparagingly he might talk of it with people like Jane and Anthony.

The commercial cinema is like a hallucinogenic drug: it distorts the vision of all who work in it. What is at stake behind the public scenes is always personal power and prestige, which reduce the industry to a poker-table where every player must, if he is to survive, become some kind of professional cheat, or hustler. Success is always with the twofaced; and one can no more enter the game innocently (though Dan did his best) than a house with BORDELLO in neon lights across its front. That its madams, pimps, whores and bullies masquerade publicly as ‘distinguished’ directors and stars, famous producers and agents, simply shows how much there is to hide.

It cannot be an art, in this form. No art could so invariably prefer the crook to the honest man, the Tartuffe to the plain-speaker, the mediocrity to the genius, accountancy to all aesthetic and moral principle; could install a debased argument from populism, pandering to the lowest common denominator, at its heart. One day history will ask why so few truly adult films were ever made in the two countries with the most opportunities; what fatal reaction it was in the forced marriage between the Jewish and the Anglo-Saxon race-minds that generated so much corrupt shimmer, and so little real substance; and why such a hugely disproportionate amount of the lasting proof that the cinema can be an art, and a very great one, has come from countries outside the English-speaking world.

Dan very soon proved his own failure to ask such questions. He committed his second infidelity to Nell during this first picture. The female lead had been given to a girl whose face and legs were already a familiar standby on the cheaper sections of Fleet Street. She later went to work in America and got a celebrated nickname: the ‘British Open’. She became a course all self-respecting West Coast studs had to have played over at least once. Studio gossip out at Pinewood claimed that she was already being laid even between takes, according to one of the grips by the passé American star who had been brought over to ensure the foreign distribution. Dan first found her synthetic and stupid. But only a producer as gormless and a director as sycophantic as the ones the film had would ever have cast her as the emotion-torn upper-class WAAF officer she was supposed to be playing. Then she grew faintly pathetic, a victim of circumstance, a martyr of the medium. It wasn’t only the stale old sadness of peddled flesh. She did seem to have some occasional notion of how bad she was. She tried desperately to act. That generally made her performance even worse, but she was a trouper, in her fashion. She was also the first woman Dan had met whose reputation was based purely on her sexuality. He began to realize after a week or two that for some reason she preferred his company to that of most other people around the stage. She was getting a fair amount of publicity build-up and Dan had to spend some time doing last-minute rewrites, but when they were both idle they took to chatting together.

He used to tease her a little; innocuously, and she was too dumb to be dry back, but she liked having her pinup image gently mocked. It gave her the illusion that she could see through it.

This type of non-actress always craves the nearest tame intellectual’s reassurance: I know that now and that it isn’t really the wistful modesty the more skilled practitioners can make it seem but just an indispensable adjunct of big tits… like the dress cleft to the sternum or the shirt one size too small. Their motives are no more humane than when Circe asked Ulysses up for a drink or those of Delilah turned barber. Not that Dan’s motives were humane, of course; he was simply, if unconsciously, looking for a personification of all he felt seducing him elsewhere.

She had met Nell, she knew Dan was married; she must also have known that she disturbed him physically. It came to the point when he knew he could have her for the asking. The day before a free day on her schedule, she asked him to ‘drop by’ if he was in town and anywhere near her Curzon Street flat. He had said he must be at the studio. Too bad, she murmured; and her heavily ironic eyes said the rest.

I don’t know what it was: whether mere lust or some perverse need to prove to myself that ‘success’ was the highest moral good instead of ordinary human decency; whether it was Nell’s increasingly frequent sulks and moods; whether it was the fatal memory of that afternoon with Jane, which by then had become a proof that wild selfishness can be got away with… and echo tenderly, poetically, secretly—while Nell could still remain nice, when she chose, to come home to. At the time I blamed the last most: Jane.