House of Silence (3 page)

‘No, frustrated! I’m a better actor than
people realise. But I can’t get anyone to take me seriously. I’m
famous as Rae Holbrook’s son, as the inspiration for TDH. She’s
Frankenstein and I’m her monster.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s a lot
of baggage to carry into an audition.’

‘But I thought children of the famous got
breaks because of their connections?’

‘We do. We get the breaks and we have
impressive address books, but few of us make it big. People will
talk to me at parties. TDH is an ice-breaker because everyone has
read at least one of the books - Rae’s been writing them for twenty
years. There’s now a generation of readers introducing them to
their own children. But the thinking goes like this: TDH occupies a
place in the popular mind as an archetypal boy hero. White,
middle-class, rather old-fashioned. The product of a middle-aged
mind struggling to get to grips with the gross materialism of the
‘80s and coming up with a boy hero who’s a refugee from the pages
of John Buchan. Curiously dated, but also timeless. When the first
book was published people described it as “an instant classic” and
they were right. It was. Now when people meet me, they compare me
with
their
idea of TDH. Whether I disappoint - and surely I
must! - isn’t really the point. Casting directors decide that I’m
so associated with TDH, no-one is going to believe me as Henry V or
Heathcliff, because I’m TDH! It’s easier, safer, to cast someone
else.’

‘But - well, forgive me if this sounds a bit
harsh—’

‘No, go on. Put the boot in.’ He grinned. ‘I
love it when you’re mean to me.’

‘Maybe you don’t get those parts because you
just aren’t right for them.’

‘Good point. Do you know what one of my
tutors said at drama school? She said I had a face more suited to
radio.’

‘What a bitch!’

‘Not really. Just a hard-nosed professional.
And as it happens, I like doing radio. I can be tall, dark and
handsome on radio. My voice is flexible and versatile and I’m a
good mimic. I can do any accent you care to name if you give me
half an hour with a demo tape - Russian, Iranian, Cumbrian... The
last one’s the hardest, by the way. Voice-overs and radio pay the
bills, so I can’t complain. But the problem is, my voice doesn’t
really go with my cheeky face, does it? Or the seven-stone weakling
physique.’

‘Oh, come off it! Just because you’re not
tall—’

‘You should have seen me before I joined the
gym. They used to call me Tom Thumb. The thing about the casting
game is, you never know why you don’t get parts. My agent used to
call and say, “Sorry, Alfie love. No dice. They saw the part as
older.” Or younger. Or taller. Or Asian. Or any of the things I’m
not, that TDH is not. Now she just sends me for TDH parts.’

‘What are they exactly?’

‘Young Oxbridge dons, toffs in Agatha
Christie, chick-flick eye candy, assorted younger sons and
ne’er-do-well nephews. I am perennially puerile. My earning
capacity depends on my continuing ability to play overgrown
schoolboys and I’m thirty next year. God forbid I should ever lose
my hair! The work would dry up altogether.’

‘I can see it must be very frustrating for
you.’

‘Humiliating, frankly. Oh, Rae will see I’m
all right for cash. Or my sister Vivien will - she holds the purse
strings. But I really would prefer to be independent. Of all of
them.’ Scowling, Alfie lifted his glass and swallowed a mouthful of
wine. ‘I suppose I could always earn a crust on the after-dinner
speaker circuit, talking about what it was like growing up as a
childhood icon.’

‘What
was
it like?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t remember! I was too busy
trying to be a normal boy. But I’m sure I could improvise something
over the port. Anyway,’ he said, pushing his empty soup plate
aside, ‘I was raised by my father. I didn’t even know all the TDH
stuff was going on.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. I didn’t have to contend with being
a Living Legend until they made the documentary. I was
eighteen.’

‘So your parents had divorced?’

‘Yes, a few years after I was born. Rae
wasn’t the maternal type and she was pushing fifty. So I went to
live with my father. Then I was packed off to boarding school and
just saw my family in the holidays.’

‘So you’re saying your mother created a boy
hero and based him on a child she didn’t actually know?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. My
dear mother’s a fraud. Being an impostor is one of the few things
we have in common. TDH’s childhood was supposed to be based on
mine, his character based on mine. But when Rae Holbrook wrote
those books, I wasn’t actually around.’

‘So TDH is just a figment of her
imagination?’

‘Precisely! And if, by common consent, I am
TDH, what does that make
me
? A figment of a figment... More
water?’

‘Thanks.’ She watched as he refilled her
glass. ‘It’s quite a story.’

‘No happy ending, I’m afraid.’

‘Your mother sounds extraordinary. I’d be
really interested to meet her.’

Alfie shook his head and intoned solemnly,
‘Over my dead body.’

Gwen

Alfie appeared to have inherited his mother’s talent
for words. One of his many verbal flights of fancy was
The Short
Life and Lamentable Death of Tom Dickon Harry
, a theme he’d
return to often and with relish. He’d pleaded with Rae to kill off
her creation and when she’d refused, he’d devised his own story -
several in fact - in which TDH met a variety of gruesome ends.
There was to be no ambiguous tumbling over the Reichenbach Falls
for TDH, no possibility of a comeback. Alfie murdered his
alter
ego
in cold blood, sending him to a watery grave, tossing him
into an erupting volcano, blowing him to bits with a bomb. Alfie’s
disposal of TDH was vengeful and very final. I don’t doubt it was
also therapeutic.

He was right. He
was
a much better
actor than anyone gave him credit for. But he knew how good he was
and that knowledge contributed to his bitterness. He didn’t want
fame. In a way he already had that. Minor celebrity status anyway.
What he wanted was recognition. He wanted his talent to be
recognised and he wanted to be appreciated for
himself
. He
hated being thought of as someone’s son, or worse - an ageing Peter
Pan, frozen in time, forever on the cusp between boyhood and
adolescence. He used to say, if only his mother had allowed Tom
Dickon Harry to grow up with the books, his life would have been
more bearable.

TDH was Alfie’s shadow, attached to him and
a version of him, but a distorted one. The only way he could be rid
of that shadow was to stay out of the limelight, keep a low profile
- things an actor would find hard to do, even if they didn’t
constitute professional suicide.

On that first evening together we sat
talking in the restaurant until it seemed too late for Alfie to
think about returning to London. He insisted on paying for dinner,
claiming the pittance he was paid was probably more than the
pittance I was paid. He insisted too on waiting with me for a taxi.
There was something oddly appealing about the way he coupled
courteous behaviour with scurrilous talk.

‘You could stay, you know. I really don’t
mind.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of imposing.’

‘It wouldn’t be an imposition. I mean... no
strings. You could have the sofa. I wasn’t assuming that you’d want
- I meant, I didn’t—’ As I ground to an embarrassed halt he leaned
forward and kissed me.

‘My return to town should not be read as a
reluctance to consummate our relationship. And if you were to put
your hand down my trousers
now
, you’d perceive the truth of
that.’ He kissed me again. ‘Another time. There will be another
time, won’t there? I’ve got to be on the set at 9.00am tomorrow -
costumed, made-up, coiffed and looking fresh as a daisy. Make-up
will have to use industrial-strength concealer on the bags under my
eyes.’

‘So stay over.’

‘No. I like to sleep in my own bed. Not
necessarily alone, you understand. Will you be on the set
tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the day after?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll be around for a while, I hope?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Alfie stepped out into the road suddenly and
hailed a passing taxi. It slewed to a halt and he opened the door
for me. I kissed him on the cheek and climbed in. By the time I’d
given the driver my address and looked round to wave goodbye, Alfie
was gone. As the taxi drove away we overtook him, his hands in his
pockets, his head bowed. Pale-faced, pale-haired under the
street-lights, he looked slight and insubstantial, like a
ghost.

I didn’t see much of Alfie in the next few
weeks. We were sometimes on set together, but his filming schedule
was punishing and my hours were long, so there wasn’t much time or
energy left over for socialising. We had a tacit agreement that the
friendship that
might
become a relationship was on hold
until we could give it our full attention. At least, I think that’s
what was going on. We flirted, touched, kissed in snatched moments
of privacy, but Alfie put no pressure on me to go up to London with
him and he never accepted my invitation to stay over in Brighton,
even though it was pretty clear I was no longer offering him the
sofa.

It was an odd sort of courtship - and
courtship
is what it felt like, not just because he was in
Regency get-up most of the time we spent together. Alfie’s verbal
seduction of me left me in no doubt that his mind and feelings were
engaged, even if for the moment his body wasn’t. I had a sense of
his attention being lavished on me and I watched him to see if he
treated everyone in this way. He didn’t. He was friendly, funny,
respectful to the director and experienced members of the cast and
crew, but with me he was more open, somehow vulnerable. I can’t
think of a better word to describe it. I just had a sense of Alfie
being
himself
with me. Except that he wasn’t really. It was
so obviously a performance for my benefit: entertaining, endearing,
apparently sincere but also self-consciously charming. The
contradictions were what made him so intriguing. And so
infuriating.

When I look back now, it seems to me that
the best and most convincing performance I ever saw Alfie give was
off-camera. As himself.

It was the performance of a lifetime.

Gwen

It probably sounds as if I was a pushover, besotted
from the outset. Maybe I was. I was certainly pretending, to myself
and to Alfie, that I
wasn’t
.

When I said I didn’t have much experience
with men, I wasn’t referring to a lack of interest in them, nor to
an unprepossessing appearance. (I gather I’m attractive to men.
Slim, but not skinny, with shiny, straight, dark hair, as featured
in shampoo commercials.) My meagre love life was a result of
caution on my part and cowardice on men’s. They found me
challenging. I just wasn’t “girly”. I didn’t wear make-up. I didn’t
wear fashionable clothes, preferring vintage and second-hand
clothing. I didn’t wear heels. Not a feminist statement, or even a
fashion statement. If you’re 5’ 9” and single, you’d have to be
supermodel-confident to think you could wear heels and still have a
good chance of pulling.

To make matters worse, I was intelligent and
articulate. Not exactly self-confident, but I was at least capable.
A “coper”. With a family like mine you learn to cope at an early
age. You accept that sometimes you are effectively the head of the
household, or at least the most responsible member. I earned my own
living and I was pursuing a career. I wasn’t killing time until I
could bury myself alive with babies and soft furnishings. But nor
was I a girl-about-town, clubbing, drinking, sexually adventurous.
I liked sewing, reading, tending my houseplants, pottering about in
flea markets and Oxfam shops. I enjoyed old black and white movies
and I listened to Radio 4. On the basis of all this, more than one
ex-boyfriend had described me as “seriously weird”.

The reasons for my eccentricity are not hard
to fathom. I’d seen, in gruesome detail, where partying got you:
drunk, diseased and dead. No wonder then if I chose to err on the
side of caution. From my “weird” point of view, Alfie had a lot
going for him. He drank very little. As far as I could tell, he
didn’t do drugs. He seemed thoroughly heterosexual despite
numerous, sometimes pressing invitations to widen his sexual
horizons. But he wasn’t a womaniser. An incorrigible flirt maybe,
but older women were more often favoured than young. The more
senior the
grande dame
, the more likely she was to receive
his attentions. I observed him at a party meeting Dame Judi Dench
for the first time. When she moved on to the next group of guests,
he turned back to me looking slightly dazed. He looked down at the
hand she’d shaken and claimed he wouldn’t wash for a week. Was the
reverence real? I think so, but you could never tell with
Alfie.

He wasn’t the slightest bit threatening, to
me or anyone, nor did he seem to feel threatened by me. If
anything, I think he found my foibles amusing. We were a couple of
oddities. By the time we finally slept together - both stone cold
sober - we were already friends. We felt safe with each other. I
think we both realised that even if the sex was a disaster, we
would try again because we liked each other.

But sex wasn’t a disaster. Far from it.
Alfie was as kind, attentive and funny in bed as out of it and, I
have to say, he looked a good deal better with his kit off than on.
I told him so and he said, ‘Damn. I’ve always suspected that. I
look taller naked, don’t I?’ For some reason he did. His was a
slender, wiry frame, more muscle than flesh, thanks to his
assiduous working out at the gym. Naked, he put me in mind of one
of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings, where you’re aware of the body
as a machine, how it’s put together, how all the different bits
work. When I was an art student we had to do a lot of drawing in
our foundation year. Even though textiles were my first love, I
enjoyed the challenge of figure drawing, trying to convey the body
beneath the clothes, the structure that supported them. Although
you couldn’t see much of the body in my sketches, I wanted the
viewer to have a sense it was there.