Engleby (6 page)

Jennifer didn’t seem to be enjoying any of this, but when Stewart asked if she wanted a break she made as if it was a test of her integrity not to complain.

Hannah suggested Jennifer should be naked under her dress because the pulling off the underwear was too much like a ‘male fantasy’, so it was agreed she shouldn’t wear anything.

Then the lights weren’t working so Stewart decided to start again using available light only and Hannah told him that’s what he should have been doing all along anyway, and that made an even tenser feeling on the set.

Everything seemed to go wrong that morning. Hannah said she didn’t think Jennifer should be naked if Alex wasn’t because that would exploit the woman, but the trouble with having Alex naked was that he was always excited and that was exploitative, according to Hannah, because no one was meant to be enjoying this. Alex said that if he wasn’t excited then there could be no rape and no point made, and presumably a rapist did enjoy it anyway, that was the point: he was sick.

Hannah told him not to give her any of that Method shit, but Stewart persuaded Hannah that Alex’s point was reasonable, but by this time Hannah had said so many disparaging things about Alex that he couldn’t get excited any more. So then we couldn’t film him naked because it was obvious that he couldn’t rape someone, so we were back to having just Jennifer naked beneath her dress when he lifted it up. Stewart said it didn’t matter in the long run if Alex was excited or not because these shots would be cut in the edit anyway.

Then Jennifer began to cry because . . . I don’t know why Jennifer cried.

Perhaps it was because she felt Alex didn’t desire her any more – even though it was only his character that was meant to desire her character, and even though he was a rapist and if you were a woman you wouldn’t want him to want you in that way.

She seemed really upset, though, and she couldn’t stop crying for about twenty minutes. Hannah told Alex he was a pig, and other things. Geoff the lighting man had been told to leave the set with his lights and the only person in the wood who seemed calm was the DoP, Nick. He had a pair of purple crushed velvet trousers.

I don’t remember how it got resolved. I know there was a tender scene when Hannah’s character came over from the big house to comfort the Jennifer character. Hannah said she should herself be naked for this, but Stewart would have none of it.

Then he and Hannah had another row about who was in charge and it was clear that Hannah knew more about acting, but it was Stewart’s film, and it was Nick’s camera.

Personally, I found it an interesting morning, but for fear of seeming voyeuristic and because I was only a stand-in for Tom, I never let my eyes leave Jennifer’s face.

The shoot took three weeks in all. Towards the end, the evenings started to draw in. There was some rain at night. People seemed tired. I heard Jennifer say she really wanted a hot bath, though I’m sure there was hot water in the main house, where she had a room. Perhaps she was thinking of her parents’ house in Lymington, or of a particular bathroom.

Stewart kept going well. He said he’d had inquiries from an ‘independent distributor’ and from the Student Film Council, who had partly funded the operation.

A week before the end, Steve discovered that Hannah had switched her affections to Nick, the DoP. Steve was angry. Hannah told him he was immature. He said he was sorry to get heavy about it, but he thought she’d been dishonest. She said he was possessive and she couldn’t stand that. So he took his guitar and left in the night, like a thief, and it seemed to be his fault for not being cool about things.

I missed the music. Nick looked pleased but surprised, the new man in possession who has not sought greatness but had it thrust upon him. He was careful not to seem possessive, but Hannah was always lighting a cigarette then putting it in his mouth or listening with intense respect when he talked to Stewart about a shot. These break-ups often happen in September, I think. The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

We had a party on the last night and Stewart told us all we’d be invited to the screening room at Film Soc to see a rough cut in due course. The party was a good one. Everybody seemed to be back at their best and all the differences were forgotten. I made some chocolate cakes with about an ounce of hash in them and bought a whole lot more cider from Tip. The people who owned the house seemed sorry to see us go and they made a big casserole of beef that they’d bought from Clohessy’s, and rice with apple and raisins and red peppers for the vegetarians.

With the cider I took some Mandrax I’d been saving. Stewart did the thing with the Tibetan candles again and we all held hands – and this time I was in the circle, two away from Jennifer, and the light flickered up into her face.

And that was the really good thing that happened. I thought it would carry on, this communal feeling when the new term began in October.

We’re now in the third week of it and final exams are still a long way away, next summer, but somehow people already seem preoccupied. I’ve been to Film Soc a couple of times, but not many of the Irish people have been there: Nick (without Hannah, who was in
Uncle Vanya
at the ADC), Amit and Holly are the only ones who’ve looked in so far. Stewart’s working with Dave on the edit. Apparently the rushes are promising.

But it’s already cold outside, the leaves are wet on the pavements and it seems a long way from Tipperary.

I have a new room this year, in Clock Court. It’s got its own pantry with a gas ring so I don’t bother to go to the dining hall any more. There’s no shower, but there’s a bathroom I share with only five other people and few of them seem to use it. So I work the bath over with a cloth and some Vim from a saucer that the bedmaker replenishes, rinse off, fill up and listen to
The Archers
on my small transistor radio. There’s a Northern Ireland barmaid called Norah who takes up too much story time, but I like the old man, Walter Somebody. He reminds me of the old men in the almshouse in the street where I was brought up. ‘Heh, heh, me old beauty, me old darlin’,’ he says. Or something like that. I don’t listen
that
carefully.

I’ve changed my routines a bit. For a start, I’ve almost given up drugs. This is partly due to the fact that my supplier has disappeared. I used to buy pills from a man in the Kestrel called Alan Greening. He had an executive metal briefcase that looked as though it might hold the secret plans of a Ukrainian nuclear reactor. All it had in fact were bottles of pills. He’s been in and out of various hospitals and he’s signed on with three different GPs. He has a pharmaceutical directory and he looks up the drug he wants, then describes the symptoms it’s prescribed for. He goes to different chemists to have them made up and no one checks up on the others. Tricyclics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, benzodiazepines, all sorts of stuff – they make an awful rattle in his bag and most of them don’t do anything at all for you. There’s one called Nardil, an MAOI, that you have to take for weeks for any effect and if you eat cheese or Marmite or broad-bean pods it can give you a brain haemorrhage. Where’s the fun in that? But Tuinal, Nembutal, Amytal, I quite like them; and Quaaludes go well with gin. It all depends. I’ve tried almost all the sleeping pills, even the banned ones, and they don’t even make me feel tired. On the other hand, I’m susceptible to a patent hay-fever cure you can buy over the counter at Boots, which goes to show.

The only thing I wouldn’t do is amphetamines – or LSD. They synthesised that stuff in a lab twenty-five years ago when they were trying to induce human madness in guinea pigs. Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane? If you’d even glanced at neuroscience in Nat Sci Part One, then, believe me, you wouldn’t go near those things.

The point is, I don’t need any of this stuff any more. (Apart from marijuana and alcohol, but they don’t really count, and anyway, I don’t need them, they’re just a habit, like cigarettes or going to the cinema.)

I don’t need drugs because I can deal with reality as it is. Reality is no problem for me. Poor old Eliot thought humans couldn’t stand too much of it. But I can stand as much of it as you care to throw at me. As much as D.H. Lawrence anyway. I should have pointed that out to Dr Gerald Stanley in my original interview. (He looks at me sadly when I pass him in the cloister nowadays – though I greet him cordially enough. ‘Ah, Dr Stanley, I presume. How’s Jane Eyre? Married yet?’)

I do keep some connection with Literature. I write poetry of my own in my room in Clock Court. With the proceeds of two of Glynn Powers’s tennis balls I bought a record player and some records – Mahler mostly, and some Bruckner, Sibelius and Beethoven. I first heard Mahler’s Fifth in the opening sequence of the film of
Death in Venice
, which came out in my first year. I liked it, but they shouldn’t have changed von Aschenbach into a musician. To show how dry and intellectual he was as a writer (so his passion for the boy is all the more unruly), all they had to do was have the hotel manager pick up a couple of his books and wince at the titles. But to create that dry impression with a composer meant they had to have flashbacks to Germany with him arguing embarrassingly with a colleague about Art and Life, as though Visconti had yielded these scenes to Ken Russell, or worse. Why do film-makers make life so hard for themselves by assuming that the original writer has got it all wrong?

While I’m listening to Mahler, I write poetry – in pencil, so I can revise it as I go along. I’ve completed a sonnet sequence (typewritten) and entered it for the university’s poetry medal. If you can picture Mahler’s Fifth, particularly the Adagio that plays over the opening shots of the film – that’s the kind of feeling I’m after. It’s not that easy to put into words because words have too many meanings that clutter everything up. Very blunt instruments, words – because of all those useless but unavoidable connotations. Though if you could find the words to go where Mahler went in that Adagio, I’m not sure you’d like it. A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

Have you ever been lonely?

No, neither have I.

Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own and I’ve never minded about it.

All right. I admit that before I knew Jennifer, I suppose there must have been times when I did mind a little. The times you might mind it are when your own company stops entertaining you. In your normal life that doesn’t happen, because the routines you develop are ones you like – ones that help you through. So you don’t get fed up. Another evening with Mike? Yes, that’s fine. I like Mike. Good old Mike. There’s also Gustav, there’s poetry to write and if it gets bad, stick a coat on and go out for a drink in the Bradford with the transvestite barmaid.

My first summer vacation, I worked for a few weeks in the paper mill to get money, then took a ferry to Le Havre. I thought I’d hitchhike somewhere interesting and do some reading on the way. I took big paperbacks I could tear the pages out of as I went along:
The Wings of the Dove
,
The Magic Mountain
,
Pamela
and
Anna Karenina
. I remember reading
Pamela
on a camping site near Tours and thinking I was glad I was becoming a scientist. I don’t think it’s famous because it’s a good book; I think it’s famous because hardly anyone else was writing novels in the eighteenth century. Posterity didn’t tell Richardson he’d done a fine job; posterity told him he’d done an early job. You wouldn’t want to fly in a Wright Brothers plane now.

There was something in those northern French towns, though, that did make me a bit lonely. I watched the widows with their raisin faces and young mothers with children. Red-faced old men in the cafés; young men absent, working. Those painters like Courbet and Millet, I think they’d seen something too: the peasant in the landscape, grey towns with shutters, churches – the solid-seeming apparatus of life that terrorised a generation of novelists with what Henry James called their ‘puerile dread of the grocer’, but which in reality was so fragile.

Homo erectus
with his flint,
sapiens
with his empty church. Those speciating changes!

And the identical
boucheries
with their blood-smell and queues and the catechism of greeting and farewell that surrounds the purchase. Those cobbled squares and
tricolores
draped from the
hôtels de ville
. The red bulb in the window of the auberge with the typical cooking of the region with its period beams and clanking soup tureens,
potage du jour
with a half-bottle of Saint-Émilion.

The churches, above all. Their emptiness. God has been to Earth – and gone away. That did occasionally make me feel lonely.

The worst thing that can happen when you’re away is that your mind tries too hard to make you feel at home. I remember this happening in a Turkish bus station, in Izmir. (Not much happened between Tours and Izmir, incidentally. Italy and Greece were fine.)

It was night and I was waiting for a bus. There were sodium lights over the grimy tarmac and the glass-sided shelter. There was that wailing Muslim music turned up louder than the cheap speakers wanted, so their tinny shuddering was added to the vibrato of the singer. For every would-be traveller, waiting for the overnight bus to Istanbul, there were two or three hangers-on, men with moustaches and worry beads, smoking cigarettes, approaching the waiting travellers and asking sly, brusque questions with their guttural voices and an aggressive jerk of the head, looking for . . . For what? Money? Sex? Something to pass the time? One came up to me and said something about ‘yellow picture girls’. Was he offering to buy or sell? He plucked at my sleeve till I pushed him away.