‘Not much,’ I had to admit, although there was something – an empty house in Muswell Hill with its bedrooms full of memories.
‘Absolutely ghastly. I’ve got to go, of course. Can’t get out of it. So you’ll have to come with me.’
‘I couldn’t.’ I didn’t want to be given treats, like Natasha, to take my mind off the truth of the situation.
‘You must.’ For once Cris sounded like a commanding officer. ‘As the representative of the accounts department. Keep some sort of check on my expenses.’
The Small Screen Festival was all that Cris had expected. Nice was full of flags, posters, parties and television executives from all over the world doing deals in restaurants and on the beach with bored blondes at their elbows. Girls in bikinis, peering through square helmets in the shape of television sets, processed down the Promenade des Anglais together with the local firemen and police bands and floats depicting scenes from the Great Soaps of All Time. Cris and I saw one show, a Belgo-Argentinian co-production of a musical in which Donna Quixote was an ex-Miss Argentina and Sancha Panza a fat Flemish comedienne. After it, and before the VIP champagne supper in the Negresco that followed, Cris said, ‘Let’s flee to the hills.’
He deferred to me elaborately as the Controller of his Privy Purse and asked if we could afford the Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence, provided he promised not to waste any more of the company’s time watching television. I agreed and we spent the next few days eating on the terrace as the white doves circled round us, drinking pink wine by the Léger mural. I went to bed early and slept late, sinking quickly into the blank oblivion in which people are said to take refuge from disasters such as the death of those they love. I can’t say I began to recover, but there were moments when I sat in the sunshine, listening to the doves and smelling the wood smoke and the lavender, and almost forgot to be unhappy.
On our last evening, as we sat outside the Café de la Place drinking coffee and watching the old men play boules, Cris said, ‘We all change in time. We all become somebody different.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In a while, perhaps only a short while, you’ll be a different Philip Progmire. Not the one who was married to Bethany. Another one altogether. Made up of quite different experiences.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Oh, not that you’ll lose those years when you were married. They’ll be there always. But it’ll be as though they happened to someone else.’
A little flock of girls passed, chattering, with bare arms and sweaters round their shoulders because it was chilly after dark. Boys with rackets played against the old town wall. Their tennis balls vanished into the darkness and then bounced back under the street lights.
‘Do you want to talk about it? Your marriage, I mean?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
‘Are you sure it’s over? Is she with someone else?’
‘Let’s change the subject. If you don’t mind.’
So I never told Cris about Dunster and Beth, not even years later, when he first mentioned War Crimes, and gave me the scripts and told me who had written them. Dunster was something I didn’t want to mention, like a shameful disease, until, in the end, I had to.
On the plane back to London, Cris passed me his copy of The Times. ‘Another bit of bad news for you,’ he said. ‘Hairdressers won the Golden Comedy Goblet at Nice.’
THE QUESTION
Chapter Twelve
A few weeks after I opened in The Seagull with the Muswell Hill Mummers (the notice in the Advertiser was rather like one of Trigorin’s own: ‘An agreeable and competent performance but not a patch on Jonathan Pryce’), I got a telephone call while I was trying to put the best possible face on the year’s drop in advertising revenue.
‘Perry Gryce here. As I think you know, I’m produce-directing Crimes. Could we have the smallest possible natter?’
‘What about?’
‘The powers that be,’ said Peregrine Gryce mysteriously, ‘think we ought to meet and talk. I’m in the Malibu Club and I thought it might interest you to buy us both lunch.’
‘I don’t know. It’ll take me about an hour and a half to get to Soho.’
‘Of course. You’re in the Isle of Dogs, aren’t you? I always avoid the place myself. But I think you ought to come. Seems Lord God Almighty suggested we should meet.’
‘Really ...?’ I must have sounded dubious.
‘Don’t worry, luv,’ he reasoned with me. ‘There’s nothing born again about Perry. I was talking about the chairman of the Board.’
As the taxi crawled through Limehouse and we sat staring at the backs of lorries along the Commercial Road. I couldn’t stifle a feeling of excitement at the thought of entering what I’d been led to believe was the very heart of show business. At last we turned into Soho and drove down past the Boy’s boutique and the peep-shows, past the arcade where displaced children from the North spent their days playing computer games and their nights in doorways, and the multi-language newspaper shop, to the discreet entrance of the Malibu Club.
The bar was filled with men swathed in linen, lying back in armchairs giving interviews. The little lights of recording machines glowed on the coffee tables in front of them. Opposite them eager girls held notebooks to make sure no word of wisdom was lost. As I passed. I caught snatches of deliberately quiet, self-controlled dialogue. ‘So we had a deal with Paramount but when we talked story they didn’t see the project in quite our terms, so we went –’ I am ashamed to say that all this excited me, voices from a world of professional drama I had always yearned for. Through what I found to be rather beautiful waitresses in bow-ties and black trousers, a hand waved at me, a wrist enclosed by a heavy gold chain. At the zinc counter, lit by a blue neon strip and perched on a high chromium-legged stool, so that he looked like a gnome seen by moonlight, sat Peregrine Gryce, producer of War Crimes, with a bottle of champagne nestling in an ice-bucket beside him.
‘Philip, hi!’ he beamed at me. ‘Welcome to the great big world outside the accounts department.’
A drink at the bar gave me chance to inspect the Gryce outfit. His jacket was also made of floppy linen, but the trousers had a sort of buttercup-coloured tartan pattern, while his striped cotton shirt was set off by a deep-blue waistcoat decorated with white flowers He was a lean, lantern-jawed man with cropped grey hair and small, gold-framed spectacles.
‘I suppose,’ he said, when we sat down to lunch, ‘it’s all a bit of a treat to you, being invited out by the creative side.’
‘It’s something that’s always interested me,’ I admitted.
‘Has it really, Philip?’ Peregrine Gryce sounded supremely uninterested in my career as he studied the menu. ‘You don’t mind the Philip, do you? As it seems we’ve got to work together?’
‘Have we?’
‘Well. In a manner of speaking. Caviar blinis. You could hide them away somewhere, couldn’t you, in the budget?’
‘No’ – I thought it was about time to assert the authority of the accounts department – ‘I don’t think I could.’
‘My, you are strict! All right, then. It’ll have to be the warm monkfish salad and the grilled breast of duck with saffron rice and lentils. And Philip ...’
‘Yes?’
‘Could I give you a bit of advice? If you really want to go into production give that dreadful, grey accountant s suit away to some hard-up Member of Parliament. A bottle of Ngatarawa Sauvignon? Can Megapolis rise to that, do you think?’
When I had written off the New Zealand white, Peregrine spoke on the subject which seemed to interest him most.
‘I have a creative job and so I need to dress creatively. Every morning I open the wardrobe and what am I searching for?’
‘Clothes?’
‘I am searching for myself. I am trying to create some sort of distinctive harmony. Also I want to send Perry out into the great wicked world feeling confident, well loved and full of that particular joy in liv
ing which comes from a really expensive cashmere cardigan.’
‘What was it exactly you wanted to meet and talk about?’ I didn’t know how long I could sustain this discussion of the dressiness of Peregrine Gryce.
‘Of course, a few years ago, I was an absolute sucker for mid-eighties monochrome chic,’ he went on remorselessly. ‘It was all unstructured suits, everything from the same place, if you understand me. I suppose there was a certain purity about it. But now I feel free. I’ve taken off. I mix and match. I shop around. I’ll go for separates: Cerruti, Armani or Issey Miyake.’ His voice sank to a confidential whisper. ‘You might not believe this, but I got the waistcoat, Philip, from an Oxfam shop in Godalming!’
‘All right,’ I promised. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘The shirt is Romeo Gigli.’ Now he obviously felt on safer ground.
‘I’ll take your word for it. But how can I help you over War Crimes?’
‘I don’t know, Philip. I don’t know, luv, honestly. Just at the moment, it seems to me, we’re in deep trouble.’ His confidence, in spite of his clothes, seemed to have drained away. I looked at him and he seemed even smaller, a shrunken elderly man dressed in a way that was far too young for him.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and why is that?’
“Script trouble. It usually is.’
‘Who’s your writer?’ I asked, as innocently as possible.
‘A person who wears a tweed jacket with leather patches.’ Contempt seemed to cheer Peregrine up. ‘He must think they’re coming back in.’
‘How did you find him?’
‘Unnerving.’
‘No. I mean, how did you come to be working with him?’
‘Oh, that. Well, Dick Dunster sent us this idea, written out, in handwriting. Of course we didn’t read it. I mean, who reads handwriting nowadays? I don’t believe they teach it in schools any more, do they? Anyway, then he called round. At my office. Streetwise Productions. We’re just next door to the Malibu, so convenient. And he made a terrible fuss, shouted at everyone. Shouted at me. Explained the idea, war criminals of all nations, and demanded an immediate answer. Well, really to get rid of him, I said I’d try it on a few people. He said, ‘All right. I give you two weeks and then I sell it to the highest bidder.’ I didn’t believe he had any bidders, but at least he went. Well, then. About ten days later I was having lunch with your director of programmes.’
Gary Penrose, by dint of keeping his head down, had risen soundlessly in Megapolis. He continued, despite his eminence, to avoid trouble and drive a Toyota.
‘Gary said to me, “Perry,” he said, “we need a newsworthy public affairs programme for late-night viewing to improve our image and our ratings.” He asked if I could come up with something. To be honest with you, my mind was a complete blank. I looked round the room. This very room, as it happens. There was some exhibition of old photographs round the walls. All war scenes, you know. Faces smeared with camouflage paint under helmets, rows of corpses, a child crying in a burnt-out village. What’s his name? The guy who does these things? All black and white and grainy I hadn’t noticed them when we sat down to lunch, but then I said, off the top of my head, “We’ve developed six really brilliant eps on war crimes.” A few days later Gary rang me up to say he’s happened to mention it to your chairman, who was particularly keen on the idea.’
‘I know.’ I said. ‘Cris wants to do it.’
‘And for some reason he wants you to join me as associate producer. He thinks you’d welcome a chance to get out of accounts.’ I was grateful to Cris for the suggestion, but could I stand any sort of working association with Dunster? I wanted to find out more.
‘You said you were in trouble. What sort of trouble exactly?’
‘This Dunster’s got a final story which he regards as his great scoop. So far as I can gather, he’s only told me this. Mind you. I haven’t seen a word on paper. It’s about some British bad behaviour in Italy. You know, up in the mountains. Peasant town perched over precipices, place crawling with partisans and Italian fascists. Runaway prisoners of war, brave British SAS dropped by parachute, and the wicked Germans. It could be a fun location.’
‘All right.’ I said in my best down-to-earth accountant’s voice, ‘what do you need me for?’
‘Your artistic in-put of course. Goes without saying. The expensively dressed gnome opposite me smiled mockingly.
‘Balls. What do you really want?’
‘Dick Dunster has got all these bright and shocking ideas of what the Brits in the mountains got up to, but he won’t tell us his sources. And your chairman is dead keen that we check extremely carefully on this one. It’s obviously a bit of a minefield, politically speaking.’
‘It probably is.’
‘But, as I say, Dunster refuses to tell us where he got the story from. He’s quite cagey about what it is, too. At the moment I’ve only got the vaguest idea. And he said if we don’t do the one about the Brits in the Apennines, we can’t do the series.’
‘I suppose that would be your bad luck.’
I looked round the room. At some of the tables the interviews were continuing and the red lights of tape-recorders glowed by the side plates. On the walls fashion photographs were now being exhibited. Models, standing with their legs apart and facing a high wind, had ousted men in combat gear and crying children. War was something we didn’t want to think about too often or brood about for long. But we were being led back on a surprise trip to a long-forgotten battlefield by a man who seemed prepared to tell us nothing at all about what we might expect to find when we got there.
‘So,’ Peregrine Gryce said, ‘are you for the job?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll need time to think about it.’
‘I suppose you’re a bit wary of leaving a nice safe desk in accounts. Is that it?’
‘Something like that,’ I told him.
Chapter Thirteen
Although I had been offered a job as associate producer, I took my preferred option and did nothing. That is to say I stayed quiet, kept my head down and got on with my work. Tash came for her weekends and we went to the movies and had lunch at the Indonesian restaurants in Muswell Hill which she liked, and I willingly put up with Deng Deng Goreng and beanshoots for the pleasure of her company. During these visits Tash was in charge, cooking, on the evenings we stayed in, elaborate and rather good meals which she never washed up, employing a process which she called ‘leaving it in to soak’. I asked regularly, trying to drain my voice of all emotion, about her mother, and she would answer automatically. ‘Beth’s all right,’ and pass on to other subjects.
We hardly ever mentioned Dunster, mainly because I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘How’s your step-father?’ I hadn’t seen him since the wedding. Beth had remarried in Camden Town register office and invited most of the old cast of Hamlet. Dunster had written with an extraordinary suggestion. ‘I don’t exactly know whether a best man’s called for in the civil ceremony, but I wouldn’t want anybody else but you, Progmire, old man.’ I read the letter in the kitchen, dropped it into the tidy-bin and arranged to take a trip up the Nile at the time of the ceremony Most of the other passengers found that Egypt had an appalling effect on their stomachs and I sat alone on the deck of a boat which by then bore a striking resemblance to the Mary Celeste. I watched the muddy banks, the villages with their biblical appearance and television aerials, glide past and tried not to remember the punt under the willows, or the icy, rosette-hung bedroom in Blair Cottage.
Not long after my lunch with Peregrine Gryce, I got a telephone call from Major Jaunty Blair. He regretted the way we had ‘drifted apart’ and suggested a meeting: ‘What about a spot of dinner at my club?’ I should have declined the treat. My continued involvement with Beth’s family was like picking at a scab which should have been allowed time to heal I didn’t want to talk about her, hear about her, or be made to remember. All the same I went.
I had expected to find Jaunty half asleep in a leath
er armchair under a painting of the Battle of Inkerman in some dusty retreat for retired officers of the British Army, but I was mistaken. Dandini’s, when I managed to find it tucked away behind Shepherd Market, had a white tie, top hat and silver-knobbed cane over the door, depicted in neon strips that had failed in patches. The doorman was a pale young man in a braided jacket many sizes too large for him, who was leaning against a wall playing, what we used to call at St George’s, pocket billiards. When I asked if Major Blair was in the club he said, ‘There’s only one old guy here yet. You better go and ask him.’ Inside there was a lot of crimson flock wallpaper, stained in patches, pink-shaded lamps, tables round a minute dance floor and a number of dispirited girls in white ties, tails and fishnet tights engaged in low-key gossip. Jaunty was at the bar. When he saw me he drew back his lips and gave a low growl. I was reminded of the dogs at Blair Cottage that used to leap for my groin.
‘God, this place has gone off. Everything’s gone off. Tracy!’ This emerged as a bark at a girl at the far end of the counter who was very slowly polishing glasses. She was blonde with a face, I thought, like that of a very young white mouse. She was suffering from a severe cold and in the intervals of polishing dabbed at her nose with a tiny bundle of pink Kleenex. A closer view of her seemed to calm Beth’s old father a little. ‘Another large G and T for me please, Tracy dear. And one for my guest.’
I said I’d prefer white wine and the girl was delighted to tell us that they didn’t do white wines, not by the glass and it’d have to be a bottle.
‘Oh, come on, Tracy!’ Jaunty’s grin looked savage but it was meant, I suppose, to be ingratiating, ‘I’ve been a member here long enough, haven’t I? And you always used to do it by the glass, didn’t you, for any guest of mine?’
‘Anyway, I’m not Tracy.’ As the girl advanced on us I saw, on the large plastic notice fixed to her lapel, the word, Tina. ‘We haven’t got no Tracy.’
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