Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I remember our first year and all the comings and goings, and Hannah, in love with a boy in Magdalene, coming in at two to wake me up, sit on my bed, and declaim, “Claude, I’m in love!” for the first of many times in her life. Being in love justified everything, even betraying a friend or waking her up in the small hours; certainly it justified handing in essays late, not going to lectures because you had to sleep in, not showing up in “hall” for mealtimes because you were cooking up baked beans on a gas-ring in some boy’s room or living off beer and peanuts at the pub on Magdalene Street. It justified lying about where you had been, and with whom, turning down one date to go with another, newer love, simply not showing up at all; it justified everything. It was the great achievement of life: love, true love, experienced to the heights and depths. Everything we read and saw in films echoed this belief: it was as if we were being initiated into a new cult, acolytes with a purity of vision and a remorseless drive to achieve it.

  Looking back, I doubt that any of the young men involved felt similarly, glorifying their sex-drive with such romantic feelings. Maybe some did—we were all reading the same books, after all. How many of us actually indulged in real penetrative sex, our holy grail after reading Lawrence, I don’t know. Contraception was still hard to get, abortion was still illegal, the stories of girls who “had to” go to London for it, to back-street abortionists, terrified us, and may well have terrified the boys who “had to” pay for it, or get married as the only other option. We kissed, long and passionately, sometimes for hours. We necked, or smooched, or petted, or felt each other up. I remember hard lumps in trousers and groans from boys whose hands roamed over our black-sweatered breasts, and only sometimes, amazing us with their daring and ingenuity, felt their way inside our bras. I remember a great deal of frustration on both sides, but a great deal of goodwill too—we were all more or less in the same boat, desperate, ignorant, scared, burning with lust and calling it true love. At the Arts Cinema, where the films changed twice weekly, we lived on a diet of passionate sex, with Fellini’s, Antonioni’s, and Godard’s latest films. In everything we read and saw, this was the crux of the matter; it was what life was all about.

  Then, after Cambridge, there was our year in London: was it here that I lost her? Freedom, independence, swinging London, the King’s Road, all the new music and parties every night: that was what the late sixties were famous for, the version that is so easy to adopt: and yes, we were there, at the heart of it all, Hannah and I. But what were we doing? I was taking the Tube each day to teach in a school in Ealing. She was doing a secretarial course, the one thing she had sworn she would never do, because she wanted to work in publishing and that was then, for women, the only way in. We shared a two-room flat above a shop that sold paperback books and magazines but never seemed to be open; it may have been a front for something, or not—we never discovered. It was on the wrong end of the King’s Road, in Fulham rather than fashionable Chelsea, and it was cheap. There was brown linoleum on most of the floors, as there was in the shop downstairs, and the bath was in the kitchen, with a lid to it that could double as a worktop or, coffin-like, hide the person in the bathtub if someone visited unexpectedly. From the back window you could see Battersea power station with smoke drifting up from its chimneys; from the front, the traffic that churned past towards Portsmouth and the west. There was a little park opposite, with a few benches, and shabby trees only tall enough to give a little shade in summer, and tangles of elder, old-man’s beard, and sticky-willy that grew up against the fence.

  We were there for the year that followed our graduation from college. I had just met Bud the wandering American and heard about cool California, where independent filmmaking was taking off and the films of revolution and protest were being made. One young man—Bud—told me, come to California, the other—Alexandre, in Paris—wrote urgent postcards to say, in fierce black art-school handwriting, that the revolution was happening, and why was I not there? The beach was there under the paving stones, the future was ours, the old orders, whichever continent you looked at, it seemed, were going to crumble. Meanwhile I was trying to teach history to a bunch of teenagers who only wanted to talk about the Beatles.

  It’s like having had several lives running concurrently. I was in love—I’m sure I was—with the young man studying law in Paris; I was also slouching up the King’s Road with my hand in the back pocket of the ragged jeans of the tall, tanned, bearded American who taught me to say cool, far out, and call people “man” whatever gender they were. I was trying to teach English history to girls in blue uniforms who were interested in nothing except John, Paul, George, and Ringo; and I was dreaming of being a film director, of making the ultimate avant-garde movie. I had signed a lease here in London with Hannah, and I was making plans to go to America with Bud, and make films. I stood each morning on the platform of Fulham Broadway tube station waiting for my train, and imagined Los Angeles, the Hollywood hills. My mind, like a tethered kite, was tugging me elsewhere. In my spare time I got the Tube across London to Hampstead to go to the Everyman and see films: Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Resnais, Eisenstein, Bergman, sometimes going straight from one to another. I watched Cassavetes’s Shadows at least five times. I’d stumble out late at night and get the Northern line home, exhausted but on fire with what I had seen. Hannah herself was doing her tedious daytime shorthand and typing course and at night going to parties in Chelsea to meet people in publishing, and presumably dating Philip, as we didn’t call it then. We’d arrived in London to make films (me) and to publish books (her) and here we were, the most brilliant girls of our generation, living in penury and spending our days doing work that bored us. We had trained ourselves, during the long years of school, and even the hectic flurry of Cambridge, to wait for the prize, to work for it if we had to. This, sixties London, was supposed to have been that prize. And it eluded us still.

  On a Saturday morning I stood at the kitchen window watching the columns of smoke rising from the power station and mixing with a pattern of cloud and plane trails in the summer sky. She sat at the kitchen table. We had found a shop nearby that sold croissants, and these, with coffee, were our Saturday treat. We lit up Gauloises after the croissants; we were still pretending to be Parisian intellectuals.

  I said I had something to tell her. I don’t even remember how I said this; but she sat upright suddenly and said, “You’re not!”

  “Not what?”

  “Pregnant.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You’re not getting married.”

  “No. I’ve got a chance of a job in LA. Los Angeles. With someone Bud knows. It’s in film, Hannah, it’s an amazing opportunity.”

  She put down her coffee mug, threw back her hair, reached for a cigarette, and lit it with a little gold lighter I hadn’t seen before. She didn’t speak for what seemed like a long time. Then, “Oh, Claude.” There it was again, the disappointment; I had failed her.

  “But what about this? London? Our life?”

  I said, and I’m ashamed of it now, “Well, we knew it wouldn’t go on forever, didn’t we?” As if the plans of women are always to be this easily interrupted by the slightest proposition from a man.

  “We’ve only been here a year. Less than a year.”

  “I didn’t expect this, Han. I hadn’t planned it.”

  “But some stupid American only has to breathe a suggestion about a possible job in film in your ear, and you rush off, just like that? It can’t be a real job. You haven’t any experience, after all. He’s just a lost soul, anyone can see that, all this beatnik stuff is just put on, I can’t think how you can fall for it. He just wants to get you into bed. Or are you there already?”

  “It could have been you, and you’d take a chance like this, I know you would. I know it’s the right thing.”

  She gave me a level stare, and blew a smoke ring. “I know what I want, and it’s here, in London. I’m not
going anywhere. I’ve got an interview at Macmillan, in publicity. Anyway, I thought you were thinking of making experimental films, where everything had to be discussed and democratic before anyone did anything. Or is that over now?”

  “You never said! About Macmillan.”

  “I know, I was going to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “When I’ve got the job. The interview’s on Monday.”

  “That’s wonderful! Great news. I’m sure you’ll get it, they’ll love you.”

  She did not congratulate me in return until a few days later, when she brought home a bottle of cheap Italian fizzy wine and we drank it, still too warm, out of tumblers, toasting each other in the bathroom-cum-kitchen while pasta boiled over on the stove.

  “Well, here’s to California, anyway.”

  I thought she had forgiven me, that she understood. But that was the year, it’s clear to me now, that she agreed to marry Philip, who was setting up his own small press in East Anglia, and leave the great job in publicity to someone else. I was in America by then, waiting tables in San Francisco, not making films after all.

  “Oh, Hannah, it’s been great, you know it has. But we were bound to move on, weren’t we?”

  “Of course!” She lit a cigarette, waved her wineglass around. “No stopping us. We’re the future! Plutôt la vie! Isn’t that what they’ve been writing on the walls in France?”

  She was trying to be cool about it, and at that awkward moment I loved her for it. It was only later that I knew how much it had cost her.

  Are you really going to live in America?

  You know they are all morons, don’t you?

  But Claudia, what about Alexandre? You won’t be able to flit across the ocean to see him …

  If you think you can trust Bud, you need your head examined.

  I’ve heard that there aren’t any women filmmakers over there, anyway.

  All these remarks came out during the next couple of months, and were met by me with sulky silence. Her effort at being existentialist hadn’t lasted. She was miserable and angry, and I knew it. Yet for once—and it did feel like the first time I had confronted her with wanting something different—I did not give in.

  I remember her coming in late, when we first moved into the flat, our first really independent home. I remember her flinging back her hair and dumping bags of food on the table and pulling out a wine bottle. I remember her exuberance, her delight. I remember taking a series photographs of her that first summer with the old Leica I had at that time: Hannah with her hair in a towel after washing it, Hannah leaning against the grimy windowsill, the chimney pots of south London behind her.

  Where I am now, in her house, I have to get up quickly, take a shower, and towel myself hard so that the tears that are already beginning to spill can be sluiced away and dried, so that I can go down and face her anxious family.

  15.

  I left her for a mirage. That is at least what it looked like shortly afterwards, when I had made the kind of leap into the void that you can only do when you are young and have no idea what you are taking on. The dream job turned out not to have existed—she was right about that—and Bud’s friend’s movie was not going to be made. Bud himself had disappeared back to Ibiza, which was the place to be at, with a woman called Miriam, and I found myself lost and adrift in Los Angeles, that most transient and inhospitable of cities. It was a few months before I realized that nobody in the movie business was going to employ a young English woman, ignorant of most things except European films and seventeenth-century history, except for activities to do with sex. Then, I hitched a truck ride north to San Francisco, where I got a job waiting tables in a café down by the waterfront that served oysters and crab and whatever had come in on the latest boat.

  I remember looking out across the gray water where the seals swam, pushing up their heads from time to time like old whiskered men coming up for air. I cracked open crab claws and oyster shells and my hands were raw and red and I was waiting for a green card and being paid under the table. I recognized this as the immigrant experience; there were many of us, European, Australian, Chinese, Mexican, skirting round the edges of legality at this place flung up against the endlessly shifting walls of the Pacific. I was far, very far from home; and yet, as I wrote to Hannah, it seemed easy in a way, you just did the same thing every day, and strolled home uphill to a tiny apartment shared with a Korean coworker, and got up again and went to work.

  I missed Hannah, and I missed Alexandre. I missed my family. On bad days, or if a customer was short-tempered or rude, I missed England and our flat in London and my friends there, in a blur of tears. But I had cast my lot, made my move: I was here, and would do whatever it took to stay, as immigrants all around me did and could, however they were feeling.

  Making films seemed very remote at this time, but it was still there, the dream that enabled me to get up every day and go to my job. I wanted movement, not the stasis of photography. I wanted to be behind the camera, not write scripts. I saw my material all around me. A girl in a long stained apron—myself—shucking oysters. Hanging up her apron to carry them to a table. The great cargo ships straining at their moorings as the wind came in across the water, all the way from Asia. The grayness and the salt, the way paint peeled, the tarry ropes that tugged at bollards, the high swooping movements of gulls. Seals’ heads in the bay, like swimming dogs. The look of things in movement; the weight of meaning in places, in objects, in people as they moved around. The gait of one person, hobbling across concrete: an old man, a fisherman’s cap pushed back on his head. The way buildings disappeared and reemerged, through fog. I was training myself to look, without really knowing it; while my hands worked, my eyes noticed and my brain stored what it needed.

  I borrowed money, bought a secondhand camera. It was a year, two years before I decided to apply for film school. I arrived at UCLA on the unlikely strength of an interview—it was my “eye” they liked, apparently—and some grainy film of the San Francisco waterfront and my café there. Once again, as at my Cambridge interview, it was not what I thought I knew, but something apparently invisible to me, that had worked. My “eye.” The way I saw things. Something so intangible, so personal, as instinctive as the way I walk, or speak; or maybe they had also liked my English accent, my Cambridge degree.

  It helped that there was a radical arts collective at UCLA at that time, and that black, revolutionary, third-world, and Cuban films were being taken seriously, that the mainstream—Hollywood—was more or less an object of scorn. Dorothy Arzner was teaching there, having retired from Hollywood. Francis Coppola was a student of hers, about to graduate. George Lucas was at USC, across town. But there were so few women. Women were evidently not expected to be film directors; even Arzner had stopped directing. Women were not generally expected to be anything but coffee-makers or willing “old ladies” to their men. I told some of my contemporaries what I wanted, and discovered not only that it was impossible but that I had the wrong idea, for a start, of what making a film was. Francis, who was working on editing, let me in to the sound room, showed me what he was doing, and eventually took me in hand. Film was a language. Filmmaking was cooperative; forget the idea of the solitary genius behind the camera. Film was unpredictable yet exact; it was organized yet instinctive; it involved everybody, it was a team effort. It was more like being in a beehive, I discovered, than involved in the kind of individual effort I’d imagined. You filled in where you could be useful. You learned to edit, you learned about sound, and how it was added on afterwards; it was about endless learning; you shut up and listened, and there were no shortcuts. You made coffee. You sat up all night listening to men talk, not out of the usual deference, but because of what they already knew and what they were boldly discovering as they went along.

  I wanted to be Antonioni, or Fellini, and then I wanted to be Truffaut. Of course I did, and so did everybody el
se. We’d all had the dream of being the genius auteur. At least in Europe, I protested, there were always Agnès Varda—who was even there for a while in Los Angeles with her filmmaker husband—and Marguerite Duras; great women directors—but one was married to Jacques Demy and the other already a respected novelist.

  In California at that time it hardly seemed to matter; so much was in flux, including filmmaking. I gradually discovered the work of Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, Arzner, and at the margin, Barbara Hammer and Julie Dash. Women were more often allowed to be editors—the people who joined things together, like knitting, like tapestry. There were Dede Allen, whom I met, who later edited Lawrence of Arabia, and Annie Coates. I learned that if you simply did what had to be done next—if you became a useful person, that was, even made the coffee—you would be included. If any of us succeeded, we might include the others in our success. That being considered a wild-eyed narcissist, as some of the people at UCLA seemed to be, would have you dropped from the little gang that formed between five or six of us. We had all grown up on European films, but unlike me, the others were not surprised at the state—nonexistent—of independent filmmaking in America at that time. The thing was to reinvent film; to learn its language; to innovate; to start from exactly where we were.

  I pushed up my hair into a beret like Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim, and they called me Claude, Claudius, or kid. “Hey, Claudius, where are you, take a look at this, what do you think?” I threw myself into it—the long nights’ discussions, the pot-smoking—I was cautious with other drugs—the intoxicating assumption that the whole of society was about to change. There was a boy called Spoon whom I shacked up with for a while. We worked together on a film about someone asleep, a topic about to be taken up by Andy Warhol. We made films using collage, and dolls, and postcards, we scrimped on food to pay for film, we stayed up all night talking. We planned what we would do when we graduated. We learned about editing, and about mixing, those unsung, nearly invisible jobs without which no film can exist. We learned about sound and how it could be faked, reinvented, made to sound “realistic.” As a child, I’d listened to radio every night, as we all did: The Goon Show, ITMA, Uncle Mac, various adventure serials that had me sitting beside the old wireless in the kitchen, shushing my brothers, the three of us a captive audience. I knew that the clatter of horses’ hooves was made by coconut shells clapped together. I knew how to listen for the sinister sound of the wind, the patter of rain. A footstep on a wet street. A dog’s bark, letting me know the hero was about to be discovered in hiding. The wash of waves as the Count of Monte Cristo was taken to his island prison. I’d never thought of it as an education in sound, but of course it was. At school, we’d listened to pop songs on our transistor radios, Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes: I knew the words of songs by heart from all the hit parades of the late fifties.