The House of Sleep (34 page)

Of course, there has been tragedy in my family, as well as good luck. I well remember the terrible night in August 1959, when my brother Jack was staying at my house and received a police telephone call to say that his three young children had gone missing. His beloved son Jimmy – the eldest of three brothers – was subsequently found to have been abducted and murdered by a brutal sex fiend.
⁸
I have always admired the enormous strength of character Jack showed in rising above this calamity and establishing for himself a successful career as politician and statesman; never once forfeiting his integrity in that sometimes corrupting arena. (As an example of his uncompromising standards, I recall him whispering warmly to me once – of one senior politician who shall for his own modesty’s sake remain nameless – ‘There are only three people I trust in public life: he is one of them’.)
⁹

I think you will probably appreciate, by now, that I come from a close-knit family, and that the traditional family values of loyalty and mutual support have always been very important to me. Although I am separated from my first (American) wife, I keep in close contact with our son Bruce, who is now a successful producer in Hollywood. The woman who instilled these values in us, and whom we all still remember with enormous fondness, was my dear mother: a woman of terrific warmth and vitality, who lived her life in a golden haze of laughter.
Indeed, she died as she had lived – laughing: in this case, at a joke told by a comedian on the television (I wish I could remember his name), about a housewife describing her new television set to a next-door neighbour: ‘It’s an eighteen-inch console,’ she was supposed to have said. ‘Well,’ replied the neighbour, ‘I should think that eighteen inches would console anybody’;
¹⁰
whereupon my mother erupted into laughter, choked on a pork scratching and was dead within the half hour.

I have spoken of my family; but I should also speak of my friends. One of the things I love most about this crazy, magical business is the extraordinary diversity of talented people who gather together under its benign umbrella, and who have blessed me, over the years, with their friendship and affection. This realization was brought home to me only two weeks ago, when a select group of conspirators – including, I am happy to say, many of tonight’s illustrious guests – put their heads together to organize a surprise party in my honour at London’s National Portrait Gallery. What a distinguished roll-call it was! After being welcomed at the door by my old and dear friend Jeffrey Archer,
¹¹
who should I espy first of all – contemplating, with an amused but sceptical frown, a new portrait of himself in oils – but that doughty man of letters Kingsley Amis.
¹²
We had a fair old chat about matters cultural and political (his reminiscences about a recent encounter with Larry Olivier were, I have to say, brief but tantalizing
¹³
), but I had to break away all too soon in order to renew my acquaintance with the delightful Dame Vera Lynn.
¹⁴
Finally, I had an enthralling conversation with someone
whom I have long admired, and whose film work has never, in my opinion, received the recognition it deserves – that great tunesmith and family entertainer, Cliff Richard.
¹⁵

All in all, then, a memorable evening – but one in many ways typical of what I have come to expect from this mad, wonderful business called the movies.

∗

Terry and Sarah kept in touch for about a year after they had moved out of the flat. Their restaurant meals dwindled into drinks, which in turn dwindled into telephone calls. She sensed a growing coldness in him. Some months after being fired from
Frame
he managed to find work on a TV listings magazine, where one of his jobs was to write short, eye-catching résumés of the week’s films. He was allowed an indiscriminate fifteen words per film, whether it was
Smokey and the Bandit
or
La Règle du Jeu.
Demeaning work, Sarah would have thought, but she couldn’t help noticing, the last few times she saw him, that he seemed to be applying himself to it with ever more single-mindedness, and ever more manic energy. His eyes, which had always been hooded with the dead weight of his fourteen hours’ nightly sleep, were soon red-rimmed and staring. He admitted that he didn’t need nearly so much sleep any more. He admitted that his interest in Salvatore Ortese,
Latrine Duty
and the whole subject of ‘lost’ films was beginning to dwindle. His visionary, elusive, Edenic dreams were becoming less and less frequent: once a week, then once a month, if that. He no longer saw any point in spending half of his life asleep. He sat up most nights, until dawn sometimes, watching
films on television or video. What sort of films? Sarah would ask; and Terry would shrug his shoulders and say, It doesn’t really matter.

After they lost touch, Sarah disappeared from Terry’s view, teaching being one of the more anonymous professions. But she continued to see his name in the magazines, and then the newspapers, his byline getting more and more prominent, his articles rising closer and closer to the top of the page. Sometimes she even saw him on television; and though her interest in film theory was never more than casual, she knew enough to realize that he had become one of the leading spokesmen for a form of criticism which jettisoned all the concepts of value that had been held dear, only a few years earlier, even by Terry himself. Beyond that, she had no idea what kind of person he had become, or what kind of life he lived now. Sometimes she liked to believe

REM Sleep

16

believe that I may have known your brother.’

Something seemed to flare in Dr Madison’s eyes for a moment – some hint of circumspection, bordering on alarm – but she subdued it quickly and said: ‘Really? You knew Philip?’

Now it was Terry who looked surprised. ‘No, not Philip: Robert. Your brother Robert.’

‘My brother’s name is Philip. He’s a geneticist. Lives in Bristol.’

This didn’t sound promising. ‘Was he a student here?’ Terry asked.

‘At this university? No. He went to Cambridge.’

‘The guy I’m thinking of,’ said Terry, persisting, ‘was a student here. He was one of my best friends. He looked exactly like you, and he said that he had a twin sister called Cleo who was given up for adoption when he was very small.’

Dr Madison smiled. ‘It’s a nice story,’ she said, ‘but I think you must be imagining it. The resemblance, I mean. I never had a twin brother.’

‘Were you adopted?’

Dr Madison looked at her watch. ‘Terry, I have a seminar to conduct.’

She found him again, early in the evening, sitting out on the terrace with a notepad and pencil on his lap.

‘Another film review?’ she asked, pulling up a chair and sitting alongside him.

‘No: I was just making some notes, actually. Memories, impressions, that sort of thing… I don’t know why.’

‘Where’s the computer, then? Batteries being recharged?’

‘No, I just felt like writing, for a change.’

‘Ah.’ Dr Madison crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, then sat forward in her chair. She seemed to be lacking her usual composure. ‘I lied to you this morning,’ she now said, unexpectedly. ‘I
was
adopted. I was adopted when I was three weeks old. My new parents called me Sally but I always hated the name and years later they told me what my real name had been, so I’ve been using it ever since. And I did have a twin brother, and his name was Robert.’

Terry shook his head in disbelief – not at this story, but at the twists of chance that had now brought the two of them together.

‘I knew it was you,’ he said. ‘I knew it had to be you. It’s been so long, you see, since I’ve taken any notice of faces; been able to recognize people. And last night was the first time that I’d heard your name. But… but anyway – what happened? Have you ever met your real parents? Have you ever met Robert?’

Cleo nodded. ‘Yes. I traced them, eventually. Curiosity got the better of me.’ She appeared, for the time being, to have nothing more to say on this subject. ‘You were good friends, you said?’

‘Yes. Pretty close.’

‘Did you keep in touch with him after leaving university?’

‘I tried writing to him once or twice. But I don’t think he wanted to stay in touch with any of us, for some reason. He just disappeared.’

‘Did anyone know where he went? Did anyone ever wonder?’

‘Yes, I’m sure they did.’

Cleo stared out to sea. Her spectacles were tinted, and the lenses grew darker as the evening sunlight shone full upon them, making the expression in her eyes unguessable. Something about her reticence was starting to make Terry nervous, and a black, nameless suspicion crept up on him.

‘He is – he is still alive, isn’t he?’

After a long pause, she said: ‘No.’

Terry bowed his head. Somehow he had been anticipating this: the news was numbing, rather than revelatory.

‘Oh shit,’ he said; and exhaled deeply. ‘You know, I always thought… I sometimes wondered if he would end up doing that.’

‘Doing what?’ said Cleo, with a sharp edge to her voice.

‘Killing himself.’

‘I didn’t say that that’s what happened.’

‘No – but it is, isn’t it?’ She stared ahead, not answering. ‘Do you know why?’ Still no answer. ‘How?’

‘I think there was a woman,’ she said: so slowly, so effortfully that the words were almost slurred. ‘Some woman he was deeply in love with. As for how…’ She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, then rushed on: ‘He drove his car into a wall one night. A street in South London. No note, no farewells, nothing.’

‘Poor Robert,’ Terry mumbled; then fell into helpless silence. He knew that this conversation, or the memory of it, would stir some feeling in him eventually – some residue of grief, or regret – but for the moment his gaze remained fixed on the horizon, and gave nothing away. When a low sunbeam spilled out from behind a cloud he was dazzled by its reflections upon the water, and fleetingly he had a vision: the wall of some South London cul-de-sac, white and brilliant in the glare of the headlamps from Robert’s car as he drove into it. He wondered if the faintest memory of their friendship might have passed through his mind: some thin reminiscent flicker…

‘When was this?’ Terry said at last.

‘Eight years ago.’

‘And had you known him long, by then?’

‘No. We’d met for the first time, just a few months before.’

‘That must have been extraordinary, though,’ said Terry, trying – for his own benefit as much as Cleo’s – to inject a cheerier note. ‘To meet up with your twin – your other half,
your counterpart – after so many years. You must have been, what, twenty-six, twenty-seven…?’

He tailed off as Lorna came hurrying out on to the terrace with a message for Dr Madison.

‘We’ve got a rather strange girl in reception. I’ve tried talking to her but she says she needs to see you personally.’

‘What does she want to see me about?’

‘She wants to spend the night here. She says she’s been talking in her sleep and she’s worried about it.’

‘Who’s referred her?’

‘I don’t think anyone has. She lives locally and she’s just turned up on spec.’

‘Well, send her away. Nobody gets in here without a referral.’

‘I told her that.’ Lorna paused, then pointed out: ‘We do have a bedroom free, though. Because of that cancellation.’

‘Makes no difference,’ said Dr Madison.

‘Yes, but this girl…’ Lorna persisted, uncertainly. ‘She says that you met her recently and gave her your card and told her that she could come here.’

Cleo remembered, now, the young woman who had sat next to her on the beach, the day she returned from her holiday. In retrospect, giving her that card had been an embarrassing thing to do, and she had assumed that it was probably thrown away immediately. Even now, pleased as she was to hear of the woman’s arrival, she was mildly shocked by her audacity in turning up unannounced.

Lorna said: ‘She asked me to tell you her name, as well.’

‘Her name?’

‘Yes. She was most particular about that.’

Cleo frowned. ‘Well, I can’t imagine why. What is it, anyway?’

∗

‘Language is a traitor, a double agent who slips across borders without warning in the dead of night. It is a heavy snowfall in a foreign country, which hides the shapes and contours of
reality beneath a cloak of nebulous whiteness. It is a crippled dog, never quite able to perform the tricks we ask of it. It is a ginger biscuit, dunked for too long in the tea of our expectations, crumbling and dissolving into nothingness. It is a lost continent.’

Russell Watts looked around at his audience impressively. He seemed to have won their attention. Dr Herriot and Professor Cole sat in armchairs on either side of his bed; Dr Dudden sat on the bed itself, as did Dr Myers, whose idea this informal seminar had been. ‘It’s absurd,’ he had said over dinner, ‘that we have five distinguished practitioners gathered together here, and all we’re doing is playing games with jelly babies and pipe-cleaners.’ He had suggested that they should round off the day by convening in somebody’s room and having a group discussion on a serious work-related topic; at which point Russell Watts had intervened, inviting them all to his room and offering to read them a paper which he was intending to present at a conference of Lacanian analysts in Paris next week. It was entitled:
The Case of Sarah T.: or, an Eye for an ‘I’.

This invitation was accepted by the other four with varying degrees of alacrity, the least enthusiastic – by some margin – being Dr Herriot. There was a certain unwillingness, too, on the part of Professor Cole, who was once again not in the best of tempers. He had phoned his hospital just before dinner, only to be informed that the schizophrenic patient had not merely been discharged, but discharged that very evening; sent back to his council flat in Denmark Hill, where there was no one at all – to the best of the Professor’s knowledge – who would be able to look after him. With this alarming development preying on his mind, he was not predisposed to listen with much sympathy to Russell Watts’s paper. He had, in any case, spent his entire career working for distinguished London teaching hospitals, and was suspicious of this self-styled maverick, with his dubious professional status. These factors, combined with a pragmatic Englishman’s thoroughgoing
scepticism about Lacanian methodology, were enough to bring a battle-hungry glint to the Professor’s eye.