Daniel Martin (36 page)

In the script I had solved this inertia by violence, the rape of a village girl by two of the band; then Robin’s rage and self-rage, the first expressed in a summary move to hang the two men, the second by forgiving them, the acceptance of his own ultimate responsibility, as the leader and will of the enterprise.

And now, in London that morning, under the influence of the last twenty-four hours, and of that at least partial confession of Caro of what I had in mind a confession I hadn’t really intended, had half come out with to placate her, half to make it a little more difficult to renege, I began to see the kind of trap I was in. A potentially further retreat, with no guarantee that I could return from it as I had made my Robin Hood (convenient man of action, puppet, hireling… a high-scrupled brigand—at least I read Byron with more understanding afterwards) return.

One note I wrote that morning ran: A character who must be seen in flight, like a bird that has forgotten how to stop migrating. Then: What makes him stop?

The irony is that all artists, at least in the process of creation, are much more ‘divine’ than any first cause one might arrive at, theologically or scientifically, on the evidence. They are not of course genetically, environmentally or technically free; imprisoned inside whatever gifts they have, whatever past and present experience; nonetheless, even that limited freedom is far greater, because of the immense forest constituted by the imagined, because of the permission Western society grants them to roam in it, than any other form of human being, except perhaps the mystic and the madman, can attain. That is the one reality, and it is largely unconnected with the reception the public accords the eventual product of the retreat.

But the distinction between the craftsman and the true artist is precisely between knowing what one can do and not knowing which is why one occupation is safe, and the other always incipiently dangerous. I had only to glance back over my work to know which category I belonged to in the overwhelming bulk of it: it reeked of safety, mainly because it had been written out of what I (and my studio masters) knew the world wanted to hear, and less and less out of my whole knowledge of reality, both personal and public. My most damaging substitute retreat had been from the awareness of that. That was the horror of landing that drove the bird endlessly on: the risk of the real ground.

The wilderness, whose worst temptation is not to return. If I had a preferred line in the modern novel, it was the one that began with Henry James and descended through Virginia Woolf to Nabokov; all, in their different guises, of the confraternity, the secret society, who have known, and known exile from, la bonne vaux. We all like to think such personal preference reflects a general criterion, but of course it also, always, stems partly from personal failing betrays what we lack, what we long for from and in our lack. I made one other note that morning.

If a life is largely made of retreats from reality, its relation must be of retreats from the imagined.

A number of far more mundane things seemed in any case determined not to make Dan’s literal retreat to his own South Devon combe easy. There was the inquest and the funeral to follow; a feeling he should not walk out on Caro during her last days at the flat they had, that evening of the breakfast psychoanalysis, talked a good deal more, and far more affectionately. On the flat itself they both havered; and finally elected to postpone a decision for a while. Dan hoped her side of the havering represented a tacit recognition that the affaire with Barney must end one day.

Finally there was David Malevich, who had put the Kitchener hang-rope round the writer’s neck; and now proceeded to tighten it. Dan had telephoned New York the day after he got back from Oxford, only to find, from the producer’s secretary, that she had been about to ring him. Her boss was out of town, but flying to London in a few days’ time, and urgently wanted a meeting. That ‘urgently’ jabbed Dan’s conscience. Between domestic and family things, he tried to get back to his last. The premonition he had had that night in Oxford turned out to be not quite illusory. There was at least a trickle of badly needed new ideas; and if he still half wished he had never taken the film on, some of its technical problems began to seem more interesting than tiresome. Being in England again helped; the wretched old protagonist had always seemed doubly unreal in California.

Malevich was a long way from the stock satirical notion, some crass bespectacled toad surrounded by telephones, tits and cigar-smoke of the American producer. He did not even look the part, being tall, slim and dauntingly fit and young-looking, despite his near-baldness, for his fifty-five years. He had once reputedly allowed a dispute with an actor he wanted over an extra twenty thousand dollars to be settled by a tennis match; and beaten his much younger opponent three sets to love. One version of the story has it that at the end of the game he went up to the net and offered the money back on condition it was spent on tennis lessons. But I doubt that. He was hot on budget-paring. He neither smoked nor drank, and dressed as soberly as a New England businessman. He would have passed very well as a successful corporation lawyer or a Wall Street banker, both professions he was suited for not merely physically and sartorially.

This was the third script Dan had done for him and he knew Malevich listened intelligently and kept his personal whims well under control when they disagreed; and also would not tolerate his directors improvising on final drafts which had gained him the sobriquet ‘Genghiz Khan’ with at least one of them. Dan was unkind about him to Jane, since it was he who had once held forth about Levi-Strauss’s ideas… and not really tryingly at all. He was literate for his trade, even though he tended to use its jargon when talking business. Beneath the showbiz acumen and the skill at packaging, there lay a romantic idealist, almost a dreamer. He had come to the cinema after a successful spell as a Broadway impresario; and he had managed to remain his own man in a world where almost any independence is taken as a vicious personal affront.

He had had one or two disasters, and a high failure rate (including one of Dan’s two previous efforts) in terms of projects he had never managed to push beyond script stage; but over the years his guesses as to what new trends—or returns to old ones—would bring audiences in had proved a good deal more perspicacious than most of those of the big studios. He once took a script he had touted round all the majors without success and did a co-production deal behind the Iron Curtain; it was not a world-buster, but it grossed considerably more than the costly white elephant one of his Hollywood refusers had wasted a fat part of their annual budget on. A year or two later Malevich had somehow got hold of a copy of their internal cost-and-return breakdown (not the sort of figures that ever see the public light of day) and promptly had it bound up with a copy of his own balance-sheet, then sent it to the studio head concerned along with a brochure about retirement homes in some remote corner of Florida. He retained an engaging venom for anyone who had ever turned him down without good reason.

Dan, not having done cast-of-thousands work since his attempt at the genre in the days with Nell, had laughed when first presented with the Kitchener idea. But the producer had argued in his usual dry, obstinate way, his theory being that despite Vietnam there was a considerable latent nostalgia in the States for imperialism, and especially when someone else could be seen to be doing the imperializing, then there was the war stuff, the other famous historical figures who could be pulled in by the hair of their armpits, the political intrigue, the exotic locations. He had read Kitchener up; and what Dan knew about the old man at that stage could have been written on the top of a matchbox. He made the error of ceding a little ground: he might just be interested if the folly of imperialism could be shown, and there was the nice irony of that famous finger recruiting for the world war imperialism had finally caused. Malevich treated this obvious idea as a stroke of genius—precisely why he had come to Dan, he wanted a sound script before he started assembling the rest of the package. Dan didn’t fall for that, and still played coy.

But then there was a letter assuring him there was no shortage of development finance; percentage, if he wanted it that way; the golden was added to the vanity carrot. It took another lunch. But by then Dan had done a first research himself and decided that Kitchener was an odd enough character (there were a number of interesting pre-echoes of T. E. Lawrence, as Malevich had already pointed out) to give him a foothold. He knew the weird and Dombey-like mixture of acute shyness and determined megalomania could be turned into an agreeably complex part for any actor worth his salt (just as this same mixture helped him guess why Malevich, a Jugoslav Jew in his origins, had developed this unlikely interest in the man who invented the concentration camp). Even the lack of any visible sex life in Kitchener, either straight or bent, had potentiality.

The old man himself had never really been Dan’s problem, in fact; it was simply the mass of material that had to be included, all the places and events, all the Gordons, Bothas, Curzons, Churchills and the rest who had to be marched on. Something had to give, either proper dramatic development or historical facts, and the juggling Dan was reduced to had been what irritated him most. He had settled (rather as a drowning man clings to a lifebelt) for one small formal trick. He wanted to catch Kitchener somewhere in mid-career and at some central focus geographically; and then sally from that point in flashback and flash-forward to the rest of his life. Many years before, when he was living with Andrea, he had been to Egypt. She had had a touch of pleurisy one winter, was off work, both depressed and depressing; almost as soon as she was fit to travel Dan took her off for a cruise down the Nile. They had stayed on a few days at Aswan, and fallen for one of the islands in the river there: Kitchener’s Island. Dan had no very clear memory of it, beyond its exotic trees and liquid green peace against the surrounding desert, the feluccas drifting by, but that seemed a good calm launching-pad for all the sorties into the blood-and-thunder the other countries, other times.

I knew David well enough, when he duly turned up in London and we were sitting opposite each other at the Connaught, not to pretend that everything was going fine. He listened to my problems; agreed with one or two things I thought could be dropped, baulked at another, the row with the Khedive, which I knew would cost me time and David money, at least he’d like to see it on paper. Having won that point, he went on to praise the idea of using Kitchener’s Island as a kind of hub for the spokes of the rest. I described the place as best I could; its advantages for the story.

‘I like it, Dan. We won’t beat it.’

‘A similar island won’t be too hard to find. It’s getting that desert background.’

He eyed me, nodding his head. ‘Maybe we should think again?’

‘I’d hate to do that. There must be somewhere.’

He sipped his apple-juice, then suddenly gave me a little smile. I should have remembered he was also a first-class card-player.

‘Alternatively you could ask what the hell a busy man like me’s doing here.’

‘I thought you’d told me.’ He had said he was going on to Rome about another project.

‘I’m flying to Cairo first. Tomorrow.’

‘You don’t mean…’

‘Want to come along?’

‘Shoot in Egypt?’

He grinned. ‘The Israelis do it. All the time.’

‘Well exactly—isn’t there a slight political problem?’

‘Jews with guns and Jews with dollars are two different things.’ He made a gesture of giving away. ‘You have your island. The way their Washington embassy are talking… anything.’

‘And you don’t mind…?’

He shrugged. ‘So I’m barred a couple of bridge-games.’

‘That’s marvellous, David.’

‘I hear the light’s something.’

‘As good as California. Better. No smog.’

‘They even have some kind of setup down at Aswan. Studios, technicians. If we need them. Extras a dime a hundred. Per week. Camels for free.’ He began to eat again, but couldn’t resist prodding his fork at me. ‘You still don’t know a good producer when you see one.’

‘And the Cairo scenes? Suakin?’

‘Could you make it tomorrow?’

I explained about Anthony.

‘That’s too bad.’ He thought a moment. ‘This is what I’d like, Dan. Soon as you can, you get yourself out there, it’ll make a nice trip. I’m flying straight back from Rome to New York, but I’ll have my office give you who to meet and what to see. They’ll fix everything there. They want us in that badly.’ One of his eyelids twitched. ‘Daughters, wives… you name it.’

‘I think you’re confusing Arabs with Eskimos.’

‘Not the gentlemen I’ve been talking to.’

‘I’m delighted.’

‘So let’s enjoy it.’ He decided he didn’t want any more of his steak, and leant back. ‘When’s Jenny McNeil through?’

‘Three or four weeks. If they don’t run over.’

‘Take her. I hear she’s earned it.’ He saw me hesitate. ‘No?’

‘I’m behind as it is, David. I’m not sure I shouldn’t scrub it. I have been there. Enough for what I need.’

‘And you know what I do to writers who don’t deliver on time.’

‘My point.’

We were smiling. He looked down, then up at me, more serious. ‘I want this to be really something, Dan. Screw the date. If you need a couple of weeks more… ‘ he opened his hands. ‘What’s two weeks?’

‘Let me sit on it.’

‘Just tell the London office. They’ll fix the visas, all that junk.’

‘Fine.’

He folded his arms. ‘Now let’s talk directors. Guess who I had lunch with last week.’

But in the taxi home Dan decided firmly that he must not go. It wasn’t necessary; just a perquisite of the profession; the eventual director’s and location manager’s job, not his. He was also more behind than David had realized, nowhere near even half finished, and with less than half the contract time to run. In addition it seemed one more running away from all those lives he had just re-entered: a resort to that most pernicious and enduring ‘privilege’ of the film world, the supposed freedom to be above all normal considerations of duty, routine, economy, self-discipline. He didn’t even tell Caro, when he saw her the next morning and she asked how the meeting had gone.

A day later he was in Oxford again, to attend the inquest. He went straight to the court where it was held, as his train cut the timing rather thin. Jane and Rosamund were there, and Andrew, who had driven over that morning; Nell had stayed behind to look after his son and heir, still ill with the mumps. There were two or three ranks of other people, one or two obvious reporters, what Dan presumed were a sprinkling of university friends and colleagues, though perhaps mainly just the unemployed curious. The medical and post-mortem details were gone into, the nurse who had last attended Anthony gave her evidence, the ward sister on duty that night; then Jane was put gently through it. Yes, she had been surprised, it had been against all his religious beliefs. He had never discussed doing such a thing. She could not recall ever having discussed the matter in general with him. There was no family or financial problem that might have caused him distress. He had been kept fully informed of the prognosis, he was well aware that he had little time left… and so on. She was very composed, level-voiced, and especially when the elderly coroner asked her if she knew of any special reason why he had chosen to ‘terminate his life’ on that particular evening.

‘Of none at all.’ She went on, ‘He had seen an old friend, my sister’s former husband, whom he had particularly asked to visit him. I know he was very much looking forward to this and so far as I could tell, both from my husband and Mr Martin afterwards, he greatly enjoyed it.’

‘You were not present yourself at this meeting?’

‘My husband asked if in the circumstances he could be selfish and have Mr Martin to himself. They were very close friends here as students, at the same college, and they hadn’t seen each other for many years.’

He did not press the point, but Dan saw him write something down; and had an abrupt and nasty intuition that he was not going to get off so lightly. It was soon put to the test, when he took Jane’s place.

‘May I ask why you had not seen the deceased for so many years?’

‘There was considerable bitterness at the time I was divorced by Mrs Mallory’s sister. I was very largely to blame for that. I’m prepared to explain why, if you think it’s relevant.’