The Sea Change (19 page)

‘. . . worked to get the apartment straight for you – ever since ten this morning. Will you say something nice to her about it?’

I remembered then that in a moment we would not be alone together, and had to use some of my precious warmth to say: ‘Of course I will.’ But I had the warmth – and at least I
could say it.

3

ALBERTA

New York

My dear Uncle Vin,

I am answering your letter at once, because I feel you are worried, and also because I find the nature of your anxiety distressing – this last, I do promise you, not on my account. You
have so often said to me that a great deal of gossip goes on in the theatre, and that if people took less notice of it they would be much happier. I have now spent a week here alone with him
– Mrs Joyce arrived this evening – and I don’t think anyone could have been kinder, more considerate, or more interesting – in fact the things you say sound incredible.
Apart from his charming behaviour to me, you seem to have left out the fact that he is married, and from the trouble that he took today it is clear that he is devoted to Mrs Joyce. He spent hours
– while I was tidying up this flat in which we are all to stay – buying her favourite flowers, and champagne, and a box of something called Marrons Glacés (chestnuts in sugar)
which she fell upon when she arrived, and said were her favourite sweets. He went to meet her himself, and when they came back, they both looked happy and as though they’d achieved something.
I would also like to point out to you, Uncle Vin, that he is sixty-one, and could therefore quite easily be my father, and if it wasn’t for Papa I wish he was. I hope it is clear that I like
and respect him very much, and that is why I hate your believing those horrible idle rumours about him. As for me, you know I have never been in love in my life, and cannot easily imagine what that
would be like, but at least I do know that the kind of vulgar intrigue which you imply has nothing to do with love, and cannot start at all unless both people are disposed towards it. When Papa
said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you are thoroughly aware that you are doing it,’ I think I understood him. How could I – even supposing it crossed his
mind which I am certain it never would – how
could
I encourage him to make poor Mrs Joyce unhappy when she is ill, and has already had so much unhappiness? If I did, it would not be
what Papa meant at
all
, and what good could come out of such idiotic irresponsibility? I am sorry to employ this vehemence, but I do feel so angry and sad that people like him should be
subjected to such gossip, and although I know that this is nearly always so of remarkable people, the gap between theory and my experience of it is a very large one. So please, Uncle Vin, if you
hear anything more of this kind, say that you know better from first-hand evidence.

Now I’ve read this to see if I’ve said what I meant, and realize that I haven’t once thanked you for worrying about me, which I know you have done with the best reasons. Please
don’t worry Papa with any of this, though. I’m writing this in bed: the others have gone out to dinner, including Jimmy Sullivan, who had to wait to get all their luggage through the
Customs, and didn’t arrive here until half past eight. They asked me if I wanted to go with them, and I said no, because I thought Mrs Joyce would like to have dinner alone with him, but then
in the end Jimmy went too so it wouldn’t have made any difference. This is a beautiful flat and I have a room with so many cupboards that my clothes get lost in them. Mrs Joyce has two
enormous
trunks full of clothes, apart from suitcases. She is very glamorous, in an interesting way – you feel she really
is
– not that she can sometimes manage to be. I
am going to help her unpack tomorrow. Finally, to put your mind thoroughly at rest, I may as well tell you that I am not alone in this room, but am sharing it with an unusually gloomy little
monkey. He somehow came up in the lift with Jimmy by mistake, and he glares at me all the time in a moping sort of way. I’ve given him some grapes, and he ate them as though they were wasting
his time, and spitting the pips out over his left shoulder, and now he’s bored to death and is sitting in a kind of hunched up elegant heap – although Jimmy said all he needed was
company, which clearly I’m not managing to be. He shows one quite simply that material comfort is
not enough
, which is interesting, because it’s much harder to see about people.
Mrs Joyce wanted to let him out, and she did – in the sitting room. He broke a lamp, upset three vases of flowers, tore some curtains and made four messes; he did all this frightfully quickly
and then ran up the curtains and it took ages to catch him, and even Mrs Joyce said that perhaps he was better off in his cage. It’s a pity monkeys can’t read, because they look as
though they can, much more than a lot of people who actually do. Oh well. Much love, darling Uncle Vin – and please don’t worry about me – and I promise I’ll tell you if I
have any difficulties or get ill or
anything.

SARAH

4

JIMMY

L
OOKING
back, at the end of it, on that first week, I realize that we didn’t come to what seemed a crazy decision at
any one point of it. I say we, because I’m not even sure now who had the idea, I only know that neither of us would have dreamed of it at the beginning of the week. I didn’t have a
chance to talk to Emmanuel until the morning after we arrived, because the evening was devoted to Lillian, and somehow everything goes wrong if we talk theatre in front of her, and she’d been
so excited at meeting Emmanuel that I’d been afraid of her having another attack – I still was – all evening. She was really lit up – not with drink – pure gaiety, and
he was responding. He seemed much better than he was in London: less tired and edgy – serene somehow. I guessed he’d been writing, but I didn’t ask, and then when she did, he said
yes, and I knew he was lying – so it wasn’t that. But at least he seemed to be over Gloria, and I’d been afraid we’d have the dregs of her with us for weeks. The new girl
– she really is the new girl personified – seems to have done her job well. He doesn’t seem to have broken any dates, got drunk, or trodden on anybody’s toes; he’s
managed to make the apartment
and
the ship on time, and I haven’t seen him so smooth with Lillian for years.

I left them after dinner; they wanted to go home, and I wanted to walk the streets a bit and show myself the town. It was too late to go to a theatre, and I walked around looking for a movie,
and wondering why, whenever I come back here, I always feel like this. I mean, I know the feeling so well, you wouldn’t think I’d have it any more. It’s all right in England: I
tell myself I’m travelling – I’m a foreigner, and I don’t even have to tell myself that in France: but here, I look forward to coming back, and then have a kind of
resentment that it isn’t my home: I feel it ought to be – it’s just that most of the ingredients are missing. Twice a year they send a letter from the home where I wasn’t
born: they ask for news I don’t want to give, and give a whole lot of news I don’t want. I had a drink on the way back to the apartment and tried not to feel resentful about not being
able to spend the evening with Emmanuel, which would have made everything OK. What was it Annie had said in London? The Father Figure, and I was so nuts about him, transferred, I think she said
– she was showing off her Freud – that I’d never have a satisfactory affair with a woman. I don’t suppose I shall; it seems to me a dreary, interim arrangement. I’d
rather lay a woman and never see her again, or be in love with her. I had another Scotch, and started trying to imagine the kind of girl I could be in love with. Slender, but not too tall, with
beautiful hair and a low voice – gentle and ready to trust me; someone to whom I could show the world in exchange for her showing me herself. I looked round the bar and imagined myself
waiting for her to walk into it: in a sense, I suppose, I
was
waiting for her – and then I thought of the number they’d written into Emmanuel’s musical: ‘Fate Made a
Date with You and Me’ which they’d scored now to merge into the big first act finale number – a waltz: ‘The Time and the Place and the Loved One’. Emmanuel had said it
was very good and looked like being a hit number. Well, she hadn’t turned up, my girl, whoever she was; no sense in looking for her (after all, most of the time I didn’t need anyone
else in my life), but one thing I knew, and that was she only had to walk into the bar – any bar where I was, and I’d know it was she. It was a little like finding the perfect actress
for a part, which perhaps Emmanuel and I would be doing together tomorrow . . .

The first thing we did when we got shot of the apartment was to go to the drugstore we always went to when we wanted to think aloud together with no chance of being interrupted. There was
nothing unusual about it except that we always went to it. We got coffee and I bought a pack of Luckies, and we sat and looked at each other. Then he said: ‘Well, Jimmy, it’s just as
difficult as we thought. Neither of the ones we wanted is available. There are about six whom various people want to star in something – I’ve seen four of them and they’re no
good: two to go. And of course they’ve put us through a lot of the routine stuff – agents who want to give a girl the impression they’re working for her – or want her to
have the experience of an audition.’

‘Have you tried Alex?’

Emmanuel smiled. ‘I didn’t have to try. He was round at George’s office like a flash with what he described as his greatest discovery in years.’

‘Was she?’

‘Her appearance was memorable. There turned out to be only two small snags. She hadn’t one word of English, and she’d done no acting in any language whatever.’

‘She must have been some eyeful.’

Emmanuel said impassively: ‘It was extremely difficult to look at her for long.’

‘What does Mick say?’

‘He’s sympathetic, but he feels I can’t have written a play with a girl who doesn’t exist. He’s beginning to take it as a slight on America that I can’t pick
anyone. He has a new agent on the coast who he says will turn up something if we give him time. The point is this, Jimmy. I like actresses who know their job. I like them professional, at least,
with a pinch of dedication about them. But if we can’t find one of them who would be right – and with Luise and Katie out of it, we look like not finding one, then I like the field
wider open than these people – Mick and George and so on – are prepared to open it. The bunch of models, call girls, and bit-part kids is the wrong kind of wide. I’d rather pick a
girl off the street who looked right, and have you teach her to act.’

‘Yeah, but we’re supposed to open this fall, and I can’t teach anyone what they need to know in three months.’ I thought a minute, and then added: ‘Unless they were
exceptional, of course.’

He looked at me, his heavy eyelids belying the amusement in his eyes. ‘Well, Jimmy – then they’ve got to be exceptional.’

I got up to pay our check. I knew better than to argue with him then.

That was our first conversation about it.

We spent the rest of the morning seeing George’s two girls – the last of the six that he’d got together. We let the first one do the whole scene. She was tall, with what
Emmanuel described as a voraciously wistful expression, but she had a good voice with a lot of colour in it. Then when we got to the bit where she goes around taking the pictures off the walk, he
said: ‘There’s a bird that walks like that – a large bird.’ So it was for me to get her a nice bucket of clean sand and hold her head in it; she was out, thanking me in
anticipation.

Mick was there, and I could feel the whole situation getting on his nerves. Nobody likes to get into real casting trouble, and Mick likes to do everything fast and brilliantly: if personalities
advertised, he’d be the done-overnight, solved-while-you-wait problem man. There was a break after the first girl left, because the second girl hadn’t shown up. The actor who had been
reading for us lit a cigarette, and finally went to sleep on three chairs which he arranged in a row for the purpose. Mick came over to where we were sitting, and did some sales talk on me, and
Emmanuel stared at the top of the proscenium arch where a batten wasn’t properly masked, and except that he wasn’t listening I didn’t know what went on in his mind.

Mick’s parents had been Polish, and I think he still thought in that language. He had a head like a bullet, a crew cut, a merry sly smile and he loved you to agree with him, but it brought
on such bouts of gaiety and energetic appreciation of you that you couldn’t stand it for long. If you didn’t agree with him, he sulked, and his enterprise in that direction was such
that in the end you were responsible for his never having seen Poland which was palpably killing him. But he was a good fixer if he could fix fast, and the set-up that employed him worked on the
principle that almost everything could be decided fast if the right man was taking the decisions. Like almost everyone else in the business, Mick resented Emmanuel’s control over his plays,
and the fact that by sheer weight and merit he could uphold them. Mick knew that experienced and prolific playwrights don’t grow on trees, but just now he was kicking up. Emmanuel, having
borne with it for some time, stopped looking at the corner of the proscenium arch, and speaking under Mick, but distinctly, said: ‘Jimmy, take him away and talk to him, he’s beginning
to take my mind off something else.’

‘Mick?’

‘Sure, sure I’ll talk to you. Let’s go.’

We went to a small room that he used as an office, and he let go. He’d been fifteen years in the business – he’d worked with some difficult people; he named them and there was
hardly anyone left when he was through; but he’d never had trouble like this. He’d read the play – it was just great, but what had got into
Mister
Joyce that he
couldn’t seem to visualize anybody in what was after all a straight lead? What was so out of this world about it that he hadn’t already catered for? Sure, he understood about quality
– if I liked he would agree that Mister Joyce was a genius – the play was a work of genius – I was a genius – so what? Weren’t there, wasn’t there one single
female
genius who could just play one itsy-bitsy part in one goddam play, or must we all kow-tow to genius Joyce as though he’d written the Bible and nothing less than Sarah Bernhardt
would do? Mister Joyce gave him the feeling that we were all wasting time, and whereas it would make him happy – it would make him
delirious
to go on providing Mister Joyce with an
endless succession of beautiful girls to look at day after day if it gave his power complex a kick, there was just one little thing that world genius Joyce was not taking into account, and that was
that his, Mick’s, time
was
money. The stark revelation of this final statement seemed to strike him afresh as he said it, and he had to take in some breath. Then he said there was just
one more thing that he wanted to know. Would I just tell him how we had found somebody in London for the part who didn’t make Mister Joyce sick in his stomach?