The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

  ‘Hey, Aidan! I’m your number one fan!’

  Who was it thought he was sexy? Oh yes, Belinda Redknapp. Christ! Takes all sorts.

  Re-set by the north wall. Get the exterior sequence done by lunch. Knock off the piece to camera, send Aidan back to his hotel or is it club? Buckle down to the cutaways. The fun starts when the presenter leaves. A bit of real directing.

  ‘So I’ve got my added word, Henry. Still okay?’

  Jesus, one word. Why’s he so excited over one fucking word? Who am I fooling? He knows and I know that this one word is symbolic, it stands for authorship. Aidan Massey has spoken. In the beginning was the word, and the word was sexy.

  Rowan retouches the star’s nose and brow, and he walks the talk.

  ‘Here on the north side of Westminster Abbey you see an empty niche. There used to be a statue here, of the Virgin Mary. In May 1645 a mason called Stevens was paid by a committee of MPs to hack it out and smash it to fragments. Images, the iconoclasts believed, do the work of the devil. Give us too many sexy images to incite our lust, and we’re on the fast track to hell.’

  Henry circles the cropped grass with Ray to locate a camera position for the mute wide cover shot. Aidan crouches over the monitor as Mo runs him a playback of the take. The abbey towers over them all, living history as they say, even though it’s made of stone. The earth beneath my feet is living history, thinks Henry. Who else has stood where I’m standing, through the long centuries?

  Raised voices round the camera. The star is throwing a hissy fit. He’s calling for Ray.

  ‘I want the camera moved! I want another angle!’

  He’s telling Pete to give him more light, he’s snapping at the make-up girl to fix his hair all over again. The crew look to Henry, hesitating, unsure who to obey.

  Henry joins Aidan.

  ‘What’s the problem, Aidan? It’s looking great.’

  ‘It’s looking like shit, Henry. Wake the fuck up and do your job! You’re supposed to be the director. Let’s see some fucking directing.’

  Henry turns red. All this in front of the crew.

  ‘Maybe we should have a quiet word.’

  ‘Losing light,’ says Ray.

  ‘It’s not rocket science,’ says Aidan. ‘Camera here, me here, a simple track, then lose me on the tilt up. End on abbey towers against the sky.’

  ‘One big beast of a stop pull,’ says Ray.

  ‘Okay, Aidan,’ says Henry. ‘This is my job.’

  ‘So why aren’t you doing it?’

  ‘I am doing it.’

  ‘Then you don’t know your job.’

  Henry struggles to control himself.

  ‘You think you could do it better, Aidan?’

  ‘Damn fucking right I do!’

  Christina steps in.

  ‘We’ve not got much time,’ she says, touching Aidan’s arm. ‘Why doesn’t Aidan go back to the bus, have a coffee, Rowan can take a look at his hair, while Henry sets up the shot?’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Aidan. ‘At least there’s someone here who gets it. That’s all I ask.’

  He stomps off to the bus. Henry draws a deep breath.

  ‘Set up to do the last take again, Ray.’ He avoids Christina’s eyes, ashamed to have lost authority before her. ‘Thanks, Christina.’

  She whispers to him.

  ‘You know what it was? The camera angle made him look short.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  She lowers her voice still further to add, ‘You could do his job better than him, too.’

  He smiles at that. He glances up and catches her sweet mischievous look and feels his burden grow lighter.

  So is this what we do it all for? A woman’s smile. A woman’s admiration. Ugly little Picasso painting his models into his bed. All the arts a form of seduction. We shine, we shine, cheating the flowers to open their petals to our little suns. Even the married men. Most of all the married men.

  How much is enough? When are we supposed to be satisfied? Monogamy just a social arrangement, introduced to protect property rights, subsequently elevated into a secular religion. As a result of which I feel guilty at taking comfort from Christina’s smile.

  The digger starts up again, clawing through tarmac to the soil beneath, which is living history.

  ‘We don’t like that,’ says Oliver.

  Milly hurries across to the building site to negotiate another pause.

  ‘We’ve lost light,’ says Ray, tapping his light-meter. ‘We can’t do it.’

  ‘We’re doing it,’ says Henry.

  ‘It’ll look like shit.’

  ‘Just shoot it, Ray. I don’t have to use it. We’ve got the other takes in the can.’

  Most likely I’ll run the sound over rostrum shots, seventeenthcentury engravings of the abbey, whatever I can scrape together. The cutting room the arena of second chances. Mistakes excised, poor decisions corrected, new order imposed.

  If I could re-edit my life, what would I do? Not this.

  34

  On her return from Wales Laura retreated to her childhood room at home and refused to come out for three days. Her mother left trays of food outside her door which she picked at in the small hours of the night. Also at night she locked herself in the bathroom and ran the shower endlessly, washing and washing her rejected body.

  She came out at last, pale, ashamed and angry, not wanting her family’s clumsy concern.

  ‘Darling,’ her mother said, ‘we’ve been so worried about you. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  ‘What can I get for you, darling? What would make you happy?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Laura felt the unfairness of her sullen and brutish manner but she couldn’t help herself. She hated to see the pity in her mother’s eyes. Her father, utterly out of his depth, hurt her with every well-meaning word.

  ‘The man’s a shit. That’s all there is to it. Just as well you found out in time.’

  The only one of them she found bearable was her sister Diana. Laura’s undisguised misery returned Diana to the days when she had to pick her little sister up out of the dirt of the playground, and with the same brisk practicality she set about brushing her down after this new tumble.

  ‘Honestly, Laura, trust you to get yourself into such a mess. It’s all your own fault, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do know.’

  ‘I told Roddy all about it.’ Roddy was Diana’s fiancé. ‘Roddy has a cousin who actually got left at the altar, can you believe. She was so ashamed she went off to Tanzania to work in a school for the blind.’

  ‘Maybe I should go to Tanzania.’

  Diana helped in another way. She called everyone they knew and told them of Laura’s humiliation. This had the great merit that Laura didn’t have to tell anyone herself, and need not fear any innocent but out-of-date enquiries after the late Nick.

  His name was studiously avoided in her presence. For the first few days, when she was still expecting him to phone, she used the formula: ‘Has anyone called for me?’ Then when she realized there would be no call she began to look out for the post. ‘Any post for me?’ But there was none.

  How was it possible for him not to want to be in touch with her? She couldn’t understand it at all. For all her silence, for all her avoidance of his name, he was in her mind and in her heart every minute of every day. The first wave of grief had passed. She no longer lay on her bed sobbing and wanting to die. But the smallest reminder of him still had the power to render her motionless with pain.

  He lay in wait for her everywhere. He besieged her. He booby-trapped her. On Thursdays there he was, raising his glass, saying ‘Happy Thursday’. She couldn’t hear the sound of running water without flinching. The smell of French cigarettes, songs from old musicals, her dog-eared copy of Middlemarch – again and again her fragile equilibrium was rocked by some chance encounter with her lost happiness. She did her best to avoid her memories, b
ut they were legion. His reach encompassed so much of her world: parties, pubs, darkened rooms; rivers, railways, empty roads; green hills and blue sky; Cambridge, London, New York. Words too were treacherous, words she could hardly escape like there and stay. Sometimes she caught herself uttering low groaning sounds like an animal in pain, and she would search back to find the trigger: a station concourse, a glass of wine, even her own face. She no longer looked in mirrors. She wanted to be faceless.

  The songs were the worst of all. Any love song hurt her, because she had identified with all of them when she had been in love. When? She was still in love. Nothing had changed for her. He was the one who had changed.

  For my darling I love you

  And I always will.

  Only he hadn’t. Why not? What had she done wrong?

  Her college friend Katie came down to Sussex for a few days, but it wasn’t a success.

  ‘He’s just a bastard, Laura. You’re not the first one he’s treated like this. He’s just an arrogant selfish bastard, and you’re a million times better off without him.’

  This wasn’t what Laura wanted to hear.

  ‘You’re totally wrong. You don’t know him at all. That just shows you don’t have one single clue about him.’

  ‘Well, I know how he’s treated you.’

  ‘He’s done nothing wrong to me.’

  ‘Laura! How can you say that! He dumped you.’

  ‘So? Has it ever occurred to you that he might have had his reasons?’

  ‘What reasons? Why would any normal guy want to dump someone like you?’

  ‘Nick is entirely normal, Katie. And perceptive, and considerate, and thoughtful, and as a matter of fact he’s probably the person I’d go to first if I wanted advice on anything important. I respect him. So if he thinks it’s best for us to be apart I’m willing to accept he has his reasons.’

  ‘Oh, sure! Like he wants to fuck around.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I just can’t bear to see you so unhappy, okay? I want you to forget him and move on.’

  ‘I will. I just need time.’

  ‘He’s not worth it, Laura.’

  ‘Stop saying that! If he’s not worth it, what kind of a fool does that make me?’

  A big fool. A jumbo-sized fool. The kind of fool who deserved to be dumped. So Laura’s thoughts went round in circles, and contained tight within every circle was the conviction that it had all been her fault.

  She brooded on this endlessly. She was convinced that if she could locate what she’d done wrong then there was a chance of putting it right. Then he would come back to her.

  She was not pretty enough. People called her pretty, but all you had to do was look more closely and all the defects jumped out at you. Her lips were too thin. She had a gap between two of her top teeth. Her breasts were too small. She had freckles on her back.

  She was not sexy enough. She wasn’t quite sure what it was some women did in bed that made them sexy, but she suspected it was nothing to do with positions or techniques. It was all about taking the lead sexually, making moves unasked. Laura was no prude, she was willing to try anything. The hard part was taking the lead. Her shyness lay in her fear that she would get it wrong; that her advance would be unwanted, or worse still, ridiculous. So she always waited to be told what to do. Maybe just being available for sex was not in itself sexy.

  She was not clever enough. She had failed to hold his interest. Nick was so much cleverer than her, she had known it from the start, it had been one of his great attractions for her. Laura was not indulging in false modesty here. She knew she was clever in her own way. She was a good learner, she could fulfil a brief, she was efficient at passing exams. But she was not original. Left to herself she had no ideas other than those she had been taught. Nick was full of ideas. It would never have occurred to her to contrast the classical myth of Arcadia with the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden. She was clever enough to appreciate the originality of Nick’s mind, but not clever enough to match it. So he had become bored with her.

  She was not independent enough. She had invested herself so completely in her love affair that she had hardly existed apart from Nick. This had made him feel cramped. She had been a weight round his neck, a drag, her very presence in his life had made demands on him, so of course he had had to cut free of her. She had become a pathetic needy person who no one could love.

  So Laura went round and round in her circles of self-blame, suffering intensely with regret at her past self. But through all the obsessional punishment she kept one part of her past unblemished. Nick remained in her memory the only perfect man she had ever met, or would ever meet. They had not parted through any fault in him. By assigning all the fault to herself she left open a door to a future in which they could be reunited. All she had to do was grow older and wiser, until at last she was worthy of him.

  When after several weeks of suffering Laura reached this conclusion, she did something she had never done before. She wrote a letter to the future. The letter was to Nick, and it was to be put aside until they met again, and became lovers again. This would be many years in the future, two or three or even four. Over these years she would change a great deal. When she had fallen in love with Nick she had been a girl. In that future time when she would give him the letter to read, she would be a woman.

  Dear Nick. I’m writing this not long after you asked me to leave you. I’ll give it to you when you ask me to come back. I know this day will come because there’ll never be anyone for me as wonderful as you. As for you, I wouldn’t be giving you this letter if you hadn’t ended up thinking something similar about me. If you don’t then I’ll never give you this letter, and you won’t be reading it now, so it doesn’t matter.

  I’ve never stopped loving you. I thought for a time that you had stopped loving me. But then I realized that it was impossible for you to just switch off the love I had felt in you. So I decided that somehow you still loved me, even though we had to be apart. That was when I stopped sorrowing and started living, confident that in your own time and in your own way you would come back to me.

  Now you have come back. I want you to know that not one day has gone by in which I haven’t thought of you. The truth is we have never parted. Whatever road I’ve travelled I’ve always known it leads back to you.

  You remember how you said to me that first night, ‘Stay.’ I stayed then. I have stayed ever since. I have never left you, just as I now know you have never left me.

  Here’s the first note you ever wrote me. It says what I feel – until we meet again.

  I love you. Laura.

  September 1978.

  She put the letter in an envelope, along with the strip of photo-booth pictures of Nick, and the red ribbon that had tied up his birthday present to her, and the note he had left in her pigeon-hole that read: ‘Came to see you but you’re not here. If you come to see me I’ll be there.’

  She sealed the envelope and wrote on it: ‘For N.C., one day.’

  35

  In the vaulted library at Edenfield Place, wearing an unflattering cardigan against the chilly air, Laura abandons the attempt to focus her attention on the file box before her. She turns her thoughts to the mystery that is Nick Crocker.

  Why has he come back? To pick up where he left off twenty years ago? To become her lover again? Absurd though it seems, she finds herself thinking this can be his only motive. The monstrous egotism of it makes her gasp. Why should she – married, with children – why should she – except of course that people do it all the time.

  Laura finds she’s angry at him. This pleases her. She prefers anger, an honourable emotion, to the other feelings, feelings she can hardly name, dread and triumph and vindication, and a secret hunger of the heart. Hunger for what?

  Then she recalls the touch of his hand on her arm, in the car by the hotel, and all at once she catches the timidity of the overture, the helplessness, and her anger disperses like mist on the wind.<
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  What we had was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

  Is that true? They were together for ten months, and then it was over. At the age of twenty her life ended. Half a lifetime ago. The memory still has the power to hurt. She still wants to understand. It was cruel, wasn’t it?

  And now, this unwarranted return, this too is cruel. What’s done is done. The lost years can never be given back.

  So if he hadn’t left me, would I still be with him now? Would we have children together? She flinches from the thought as if it stings her, it does sting her, because it erases her babies, Jack, Carrie, and she wants to hold them tight, never let them go.

  And Henry?

  If her love for Nick was unique, never to be repeated, what love has she for Henry? She tries to remember their first meeting and fails. It’s as if she always knew Henry, he was always there, she has only to turn round and smile. Yes, she does remember now, it was in Quaritch’s, where she was working as a lowly assistant. Henry sat across the table from her, walled by cases of antiquarian books, and took notes in a hardback notebook. So like Henry: a man who doesn’t throw away his notes. Greville said to her, ‘Be nice to him, Laura.’ The pretty young assistant assigned to look after the young television researcher. And she was nice to him. She could see that he found her attractive, and she liked that. It was a kind of game. She the secret agent, her mission to charm. The joke was that Henry, duly charmed, never had the power to fulfil Greville’s dream. There never was a television programme featuring – what was it? – Oriel College’s sale of their Shakespeare First Folio, Quaritch’s greatest ever coup. What remained was Henry in love. No, too strong a word for that phase of their relationship. In hope.

  Did I fall in love with Henry?

  Not like the first time. But Nick was long gone. For a year or so there had been Felix, though neither of them really believed they were doing more than marking time. Then there was the Mad Russian, who made her laugh and behaved impossibly badly and proposed to her daily. Some other shorter-lived liaisons, now forgotten. Then Henry.