by Adam Thorpe
Everyone was in general agreement that the house was ‘troubled’. Troubled! What a marvellous word, an old worn penny still circulating in this God-forsaken place, and tendering nothing beyond it.
Thursday, 16 September
Breakfast near enough to another area sales manager for him to engage me in enthusiastic talk. He was in frozen foods and had an earring. I said Bejam made me think of mortuaries and he looked ever so surprised. Lonely, I think. He calls it ‘chilled food’, which is worse.
Interview in the Telegraph as if dictated by a tipsy secretary while I was out. Under the sub-heading Authentic Bard: The Man Who Came in from the Globe, I am referred to as ‘the infamous director who sports a piratical eye-patch and believes in humours, vital spirits, and actors learning lifeless hand gestures by rote – because that, he firmly believes, is how it was done in Shakespeare’s time. While admittedly different, even strange, his efforts haven’t enchanted everyone: tourists, for instance, are staying away in droves, and that’s got the Arts Council very worried indeed.’ Headless chicken sort of journalism, but it still has such a debilitating effect. What will happen when I’m not around to reply?
A Damascus moment followed from this, however: while over at the house, still irritated, suddenly saw it as a sort of brain, balancing the more muscular practicals up in Eilrig Lodge. A fine reference library, dorms, intimate performance space on the usual lines, lectures on Elizabethan acting from renowned specialists, seasonal courses on rhetoric, wit, rhythm, the science of gesture, theatrical decorum, court manners and so forth, lovely garden and good meals, retreat weeks for harassed actors, with cornettos and crumhorns (or even the odd Jacobean masque) on the tended lawn. The Eilrig Foundation’s a charity and we could say it’s for ‘young people’ with our hand on our hearts. The local authority will fight it but who cares about them? I’ll phone Barry about it tomorrow. Pull out the plug and sluice away the junk, everything to do with that past. What an unhappy place.
Found an old cigarette card on the stairs: Betty Nuthall, Wimbledon star of around 1930! Must have been mine, once. Didn’t notice it yesterday. She’s playing around the baseline with bobbed hair, sexy white stockings, loose blouse; a neat hedge and glimpse of mock-Tudor beyond, but no leaves on the trees. As if someone had propped it on the top step, just for me.
All the wallpaper’s the same except some dribbly stuff in the ‘morning-room’. Scared by a bat floundering in front of my face for a moment in Mother’s room.
Friday, 17 September
Interview over the phone for Kaleidoscope. Interviewer ‘A man in all the world’s new fashion planted/That hath a mint of phrases in his brain’, but without Don Adriano’s panache. He kept saying I was turning the clock back and why? I said I’m not turning the clock back, I’m taking it off the wall and mending it. He drawled the word ‘musical’ as if he meant the noun, not the adjective, and quoted my enemies who claim my theories are built on inhibitions and I said that’s absolutely right, early acting is built on control and inhibition as early instruments are built from seasoned wood. It only encourages me to write my book as a sense of mission, like Tyndale’s Bible. Finished with my favourite: ‘As M. Clemenceau said, passing a pretty girl at the age of seventy – Oh, to be sixty again!’ He laughed, aged I should think thirty.
Barry thinks my ideas feasible in terms of the conditions of the will but it means putting the Social Services appointment off until late next week. He said he’d ‘sort it’, anyway. I hope they don’t smell a rat. Their disturbed youngsters can find somewhere else to disturb, surely. I suppose I’m flying in the teeth of Aunt Rachael’s post-mortem intentions but draw succour from the thought that a Historical Performance Research Centre (working title) would go so completely against Uncle E’s desires. Like sitting on his face, to use a yobbish expression.
Am I mad? No, just ripe for mad exploits.
Organised a handyman to clear the garden, but he didn’t turn up. Gorgeous, sad time of year, this, hazy with bonfire smoke: leaves falling, conkers bulging from their gourds like blind eyes staring up at blue sloes, red hawthorn and beechmast and scudding swift skies. Rather cold today. Stripped elderberry bushes and ate the berries raw as I did sixty years ago. Crab-apples on same old gnarled tree at lane’s corner. Walked through the beechwood at bottom of garden and on into the field: stubble freshly burned and one of the tumuli badly scorched. Lots of equally cindered crows above it, still with bad throats shouting ‘hodge-podge’, as of yore.
Country feels empty off the roads, these days. Just the odd machine doing something agricultural, and distant high-powered noises. Stood on the charred left tumulus for a bit. The shallow depression around it presumably all that remains of Uncle E’s trench.
After supper, took a moonlit walk to the house. Pungent sludge of windfalls in the orchard on the lane made me feel sick. House like a great black cliff against the moonlit sky. Thought I could hear more bats so stopped myself going in. No whiffs of wild garlic on the lawn or anywhere else. Defied my own silly fears just by walking about in the garden with my back to the mournful old face. Bloodshot eyeball watching me through a tear in the lino, of course.
Writing this in bed. Obscurely excited. It must be the project, or the fact that I dared myself and won.
Saturday, 18 September
A good breezy walk over the open downs, at least seven miles. Touched when a bent old man in front of the shop said, ‘Hello, Hugh boy.’ Identified himself as Jimmy Herring, the pimply clerk in the Post Office who’d save me first-day stamps – and suddenly quite obvious under the wrinkles and creases, as if all that he needed was a good airing. A few threads of belonging, though I never felt I belonged. Some good times here, mostly when Mother came back on leave. The memoir makes her oddly remote: when I think of her these days she’s almost stiflingly close, as if my head is buried in her skirts. Starch and woodsmoke and sweaty legs. I think when I was forty I still felt betrayed by her leaving us so abruptly.
Lunch anyway at Pottinger’s Mill aka the Mill House Restaurant, pricey-posh. Strolled there by the old muddy path now officially entitled ‘The River Walk’, with stone or metal sculptures covered in graffiti called things like Isopod 2 next to fogged-up display boards of herons, otters, obscure waterfly, etc. Didn’t see any, of course, and therefore felt let down.
Ate desultory poulet basquaise quite possibly on the same spot Mother saved Ted Dart in asthma attack by holding him like Jesus but no identifying points – huge picture window where door was, false walls, hired bric-à-brac, not even a case of ‘thereabouts’. Weedy yard now full of white gravel and smart cars. Recognised by discreetly cultivated couples, but by staring back at them I clearly wasn’t Hugh Arkwright, despite the eye-patch. Not all ship’s cooks with peg-legs and parrots are Long John Silver.
Sunday, 19 September
Sudden momentary conviction on the loo that I should forget the research centre idea and simply hand over the house as agreed. When I told Barry about sluicing away the junk, he went on about me being entitled to the ‘chattels’ – but I insisted I didn’t want to start burrowing. If there’s a chest of doubloons up there then let Oxfam have it, or whoever. Certainly the terms of the lease mean the place has to be empty. Feel pushed about by this damn will – presumably not Aunt Rachael’s aim. Just that I shouldn’t have the house, only the responsibility of handing it over to the Good Cause. Can’t say it’s vindictive, exactly.
Anyway, let the Good Cause be Shakespeare. The English poetic drama. Nothing finer, in the end.
The revolution’s intelligence HQ.
Nuncle will be writhing in his grave. Or wherever in the wildwood his ashes landed on that gusty wet morning. I think he really did believe it would leap over the fence and smother us all under its melancholy boughs, smother our silly chatter and din, the moment his burnt offering touched the mould – and it hasn’t spread an inch, just grown scruffier at the edges. Rather an attractive notion, Britain as one great greenwood, when I think about it! Oh dear. Morr
is asking me once why I loathed my uncle so and me saying I might tell one day – on my deathbed. I told Dr Wolff, but that was different.
Missed church service, wandered about around the graveyard looking for Aunt Joy’s stone and two more ancients on a bench greeted me as if I’d been away a week. They’ve usurped names belonging to rough lads from my past, big crop-headed bullies who’ve just stayed here, growing older and older until the choice not to not leave has gone and soon they’ll be part of the wind.
Good roast for lunch. Friendly couple run this place: Jessica and Roger Marlow. Told me she was a fringe actress, once. Lovely throaty laugh.
Passing posh country residence that used to be a tatty farm off the Fogbourne Road, I saw a youngish man in the garden peeing into an immaculately clipped privet. He had a three-piece suit and tie on. Swing on the lawn but no sign of kids on this lovely day. All packed off to school, leaving him free to piss with abandon into his privet.
Monday, 20 September
Organised another handyman-gardener, one John Wall (of the unpleasant Wall clan, though he said there was only his mother). ‘Hello, Mr Arkwright,’ he said, as if he knew me from somewhere. He has a limp and is pasty-faced and looks as if he’s about to snigger all the time, but I think it’s shyness. He likes to use weed-killer and wants a big sit-up mower to tackle the lawn but I put him right on the last two counts. He’s about forty but could be a barely-pubic fifteen (especially his voice, poor thing), and I guess he’s gay but has never been allowed to realise it and so remains with Mum accumulating hang-ups. We found cobwebbed tools in the main shed but I don’t know if he’ll use them. I said if he wants to hire a motor-mower that’s up to him, but I have no car. All I want is the garden to be de-jungled so that I can see things more clearly. These people are always in love with technology, anything that smokes and makes a big noise.
I stood in the attic for a while. Vaguely recognisable bits and bobs, like lines from long-ago reps. Some African souvenirs dumped by Father on his ignominious return: masks, stools, skins of snake and crocodile and the big leopard pelt he spent weeks tanning, an awful job. Something terribly creepy about old animal skins, too bestial by half and completely dead and vanquished but still grinning.
Beyond the decades’ broken furnishings spotted one of the big bamboo-ribbed trunks we’d had in Bamakum. Locked. I think it was there not long after Mother left us. The dust was awful every time I lifted something and my ankle-bones are bruised. Nothing induces me to ‘sort it’, and anyway it would take weeks. No leaks in the joists and no bats, only mice which I don’t mind. So the roofs intact. Perhaps what we need is a big pyre.
A pint literally to lay the dust in the Never Fear and to take soundings on John Wall. A man in braces said he’d heard I was to get John a big sit-up mower and something called a bush-cutter. ‘Oh dear,’ I replied. A hairy man with as high a voice as Wall said that the trouble with John boy is that he thinks he’s Damon Hill and then Braces made a jerky movement with the flat of his hand on the bar, growling. Everyone laughed: the jerkiness was the limp and the growl a racing car. Thirty years ago it would have been Graham, not Damon. With another cripple to rag.
Told Jessica Marlow I would stay an extra week. The villa’s free all autumn.
Tuesday, 21 September
Sitting on a bench in the square, studying the pond’s ducks. A disturbing day, as they say.
Popped into the village stores this morning and Marjorie Hobbs was behind the counter. Actually she’s now a Rose, married one of them a generation back and come through to widowhood without my seeing. Same pleasing pre-war smells of wax polish and dry goods, and still all basically dog chews, woven name-tapes, metal hairgrips and mopheads, plus the usual tinned groceries and some feeble-looking greens. Fluorescent bits and bobs for kids but otherwise no concessions to progress. Remembered how I used to fancy Marjorie’s mother when I was pimpled and now the little daughter in ribbons is a fat fifty-odd. An old bird hunched up in a basket chair by the door leading off to the living quarters but I didn’t make the connection. Marjorie said she had seen me pass the window and how was I doing?
‘It’s Mr Arnold, Ma,’ she called. I mumbled Arkwright but saw that Gracie was responding so went over to her and shook her hand, all soft folds of skin yet bony like a little bird’s. She has the same twinkles for eyes, but everything else has gone as it was based on a sort of yeasty plumpness, leaning her full chest on the counter and smelling of split peas and tea as she strained to hear my blushing thruppenny orders.
Of course I’ve seen her since, but how many times have I been back in the last fifty years? A handful, and not at all since 1974.
Gracie genuinely pleased to see me – I am still the little boy. We somehow got on to Mother. She liked Mother, called her ‘handsome’ and ‘a proper lady’. This doesn’t mean posh, it means charm and treating the shopkeeper as a person. No mention of Uncle E. Then she leaned forward, whispering. I didn’t catch it at first: her false teeth loose, my ears going. Something about walking. My mother liked walking and was deaf? Was staying where?
‘I saw your dear mother walk, the day of her death.’
‘What?’
‘I did. I saw her walk. The same day.’
I nodded as if she’d told me the price of bacon was up. My hand was gripped in hers.
‘How did she look?’ Daft question, but Gracie replied, ‘Famous.’ Serves me right.
Reflecting on it now by the pond. The most moving fact is that Mother is still present in the collective memory. Much more important than the fact that it’s all whimsical nonsense. There was no death, for a start. I’d have asked more daft questions but Gracie started to choke on a cough and Marjorie ushered her away into the shadows. One truly wonders if it is less tiring to be a duck than a human.
Wednesday, 22 September
Guardian article by Emma Murphy fine except for a sudden veiled attack on our use of boy-players, as if we’re denting the feminist cause in the name of authenticity. Even the early music brigade would admit that a decent treble beats a decent soprano in terms of limpidity and poignancy. Our boy-players are expert virtuosos after five years at Eilrig; if choir schools do it, so can we. Then they grow up and are as finely honed as any opera-singer.
She also mentioned the new Globe going up, as if I had something to do with it. I had said that if it had been erected anywhere else, I might have done – but where it is will mean block-bookings by Americans and a lot of compromise. Like the RSC not getting the hell out of Stratford, despite all my efforts. I don’t believe in spirit of place. Not a word of this appeared, of course.
Have just read that nasty paragraph again. It’s a little like that chap from the lighting union who went on in the name of his members about our sticking to steady ‘daylight’, whingeing away about our usual absence of effects bar the winched awning and the flaming torch: As if keeping some truculent Sparks happy is more important than honouring Shakespeare.
I wrote a letter after breakfast and then tore it up. Other more pressing tasks. Mainly wandering about the house and imagining its new role. Have removed some of the looser coverings from the windows but the dust is too awful. Let it rest in its gloom until we’re certain.
So here we are.
Spent the rest of the day on the phone to all the people who have to be activated if the new project is to work. Andrew Barnes said that the Lottery is going to reap a windfall for the arts. I said we’ve always been a nation of wasters and spenders: it’ll just mean everywhere will be covered in scaffolding and closed.
Late drink in the Never Fear marred by a big slow man in a smelly flared suit producing little squares of paper on which he wrote apothegms in laborious block capitals. My pockets are now full of them: YOU CAN STAND AND TAKE THE PISS BUT EVERY TIME YOU SHOOT YOU MISS, and so forth. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS TO A WISE MAN HE WILL BE YET WISER AND TO A FOOL IT IS WATER ON COLD STONE. Perhaps he meant to be threatening, but otherwise he never said a word. No sign of our leery coalm
an, thank God.
Thursday, 23 September
Rain, rain, rain. Depressed and strangely exhausted. Suddenly no deadlines, no opening nights. No strung terror that it won’t be ready or any good. Just the fear that without me the enemy will close. What was it Pascal said about each one of us being everything to ourselves, because when we die, the whole dies with us? That is the illusion, anyway.
Dreams about Mother, droll rather than pleasant or sad. She gives me used-up ration-books and there are sirens and she disappears, that sort of thing. I showed her the searchlight this morning (which turned out to be the sun through the curtains), and she was impressed, but I kept looking out for the Junkers over the Humber. She left us six years before all that nonsense.
This comes of reading the childhood memoir, which I finished after lunch. Stops abruptly at the bad news. Seems like another life, another person. But I’m behind the same mask, playing the same story. On looking out a few minutes ago through the streaming blur I saw a chap in cricketing togs sheltering in the bus-stop and assumed, before I could check myself, that it was Herbert E. Standing.
He’s gone, now.
Friday, 24 September
Ten days here and it feels like three, I’ve achieved so little. Have made appointments in London for early next week. Hamlet is sold out for the run: appreciative Japanese tourists who are used to Noh, probably. If only Burbage or someone had preserved it all like the Shogun did at exactly the same time. Alas, we have no equivalent of Zeami’s Kadensho. Seven books on how to achieve the ‘flower’, that mysterious and supreme beauty of performance. My own effort is merely a shoring of scattered fragments with the glue of intelligent surmise. A 5,000-piece puzzle left out in the rain, scattered through the dark woods of neglect.
Today dank but not raining. Showed Barry and Andrew Barnes around the house. John Wall has made cursory inroads into the tangle, but both came in only their prissy city shoes and Andrew wore his long cream gaberdine – which of course got spotted the moment we entered the house, groping about with my little torch. I didn’t prise away any more lino and carpet doping as there are broken windows and it would invite natural and human invaders. Anyway, Andrew and Barry agreed it was only feasible if the place was gutted.
