1982 Janine

by Alasdair Gray

  209 OUR LANDLORD

  I returned later than I intended and was very glad to find Denny sitting in the kitchen chattering cheerfully to the landlord, who was appreciating her company. I had advised her to avoid him because I had feared he could not do that. He was a solemn young fledgling lawyer whom I greatly respected, perhaps because he was rather like me. He dressed in good suits, chose his words carefully and hardly ever smiled. But now he was chuckling. Denny was telling stories about her relations – the ones she disliked – and though the information shocked him he enjoyed being shocked, and kept asking questions. She was exhilarated to find she could entertain a man of his sort. We all had a cup of tea together and when at last I said briskly, “Bedtime, Denny,” he detained me for a moment as I was leaving the kitchen and whispered, “You have a great wee woman there.”

  When I embraced her that night I knew how very lucky I was. That was the happiest day of my life.

  So when Alan introduced me in the refectory to a woman he did not want and who did not want me, why did I follow her to the drama college? Greed. I wanted to discover how much more enjoyment I could have. From the serving hatch Denny saw me talking to Helen, and later that day she said glumly, “I bet you fancy that big woman.”

  I said, “She’s a snooty bitch and I’ll have nothing to do with her, I’ll be working for a group, a team. The experience will be useful. I may even make some money.”

  But when I met the team I abandoned hope of money. They were too disorganised to make any of that.

  I found them in the Athenaeum, whose pillared front and marble entrancehall did not prepare me for the small corridors and dusty rooms I first had to search through. Two women and three men stood on a square of brown linoleum staring with their mouths ajar at the door I had opened. Another man sat on a line of chairs against a wall. One of the women was Helen. She quickly introduced me to the director who said something like this: “It’s terrific that you’ve turned up, er, Jack, Jake, Jock is it? Good good good. We’re all of us absolutely delighted to see you, we’ll be totally dependent on what you’re going to do for us but I’m going to ask you to be angelically patient because you’ve interrupted us in the middle of something important. Would you mind parking your botty on one of those chairs and just … observing us? Soak in the atmosphere. Don’t judge us harshly, we’re at the amorphous stage. Here’s a copy of the script. Don’t take it too seriously. We’ve made a lot of changes that are not marked in, and there’s bound to be more. Later on you and I will have a tête-à-tête and hammer something solid together. Now darlings, back to where you were.”

  210 THE COMPANY

  This speech annoyed me in so many ways that as I walked to one of the chairs against the wall I was imagining walking out of the building, but I sat down and divided my attention between the script on my knee and the continuing rehearsal, which kept quarrelsomely interrupting itself.

  The play was a modern version of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. Apart from the hero, who was a Scottish working-class simpleton, the characters were upper-class English types of the sort who are continually caricaturing themselves on radio and film. The production called itself A Political Pantomime, and had no doubt been written with satirical intent, but I saw nothing funny in it. Only Helen made it worth watching. She played a selfish, sexy, calculating bitch with so much vigour that her lines sounded witty. When not performing she sat hugging her shoulders as if she was cold, and her face above the long elegant neck looking as dreamy and remote as Carole’s; or else she lay flat along four seats with closed eyes, her hair and one arm hanging to the floor. I thought it remarkable that she could put on three different versions of herself – aggressive, thoughtful or utterly abandoned – within three adjacent minutes. The director, who also played the hero, struck me as a silly man and a bad actor. I can still picture him distinctly: effeminately handsome with narrow, pale-blue eyes and well-groomed wavy blond hair. He wore sandals, black slacks and sweater, also an earring and many silver necklaces. But in the fifties men who wanted to look gorgeous never wore jewellery, so I have imposed these on him from a later decade. When not acting he spoke a drawling Oxford accent which became very distinct when he pretended to lose his temper, which was once every five minutes or so. He called people “darling”, or “blossom”, or (when pretending to be angry) “tooty-fruity”, and he waved his arms a lot, so I knew at once he was homosexual. I was wrong. He was the lover of Helen and also of Diana, a less glamorous girl who acted all the other female parts in the play. Diana knew he was also Helen’s lover. Helen was only beginning to suspect he was also Diana’s lover, and Diana was her best friend. This was why Helen was so thoughtful between her performances and did not hear what folk said to her unless they spoke louder than usual. The others present were Roddy and Rory, straightforward manly young actors with no extravagance of dress, speech or manner, and a middle-aged man with the truculent, querulous voice of someone who knows he is insignificant and resents it. He sat in a hunched position and passed remarks that nobody else seemed to hear. I assumed he was a janitor attached to the rehearsal rooms. Wrong again.

  211 THE COMPANY

  As the rehearsal continued the truculent man hunched further and further into himself, then covered his face with his hands and started saying in a monotonous voice, “Oh no … Oh no … Oh no … Oh no … Oh no …” until the director stopped in mid-declamation and said wearily,

  “What is it this time?”

  “Overacting.”

  “You are telling me that I cannot act?”

  “I am telling you that your Glaswegian dialect is the corniest sort of ham.”

  “Tooty-fruity, you are insane!” cried the director in a clear, shrill Oxford-accented, phoney, fury, “I was born and bred in the Calton. My father works in Parkhead forge. Until I was twelve years old I thought that only the monarchy and Hollywood film stars had lavatories in their own houses. And now a schoolteacher from Carntyne tells me I can’t speak the dialect of my own family!”

  212 THE COMPANY

  The querulous man said, “Yes, Brian, I agree that you are, essentially, a dirty wee Glasgow tyke from an even slummier background than my own. You are also quite a good actor. You can act anything except what you essentially are.” The director, with an indefinite expression on his face, walked round the room in a slow circle. We were all watching closely so he must have felt that his present performance was more interesting than the scripted one. When he got back where he had started he said mildly, “There is a simple solution. Let me play McGrotty as a cockney. I’m a master of the jellied-eels-on-the-Old-Kent-Road dialect. We’re putting this thing on at an international festival, remember, with many more English than Scots in the audience, so there’s no need for us to be narrowly provincial – is there?”

  The truculent man covered his face with his hands and said in a muffled voice, “I will not let you turn my play into a vehicle for your national inferiority complex and your London West End ambitions. Give the part to Rory. He knows how to act it.”

  The director smiled and said brightly, “I wish you were dead. Do you know why I wish you were dead? If you were dead I could turn this script into a great piece of theatre. It has a good plot, meaty parts, some very funny lines and only one defect – an author who has no practical theatrical experience and is hideously alive. Do me a favour. Go away and die.”

  The author, his face very white, left the room with no dignity at all for he stumbled going through the door and made two efforts before slamming it behind him. I had never heard adult people being so deliberately nasty to each other before. The two girls stared at the director with something like awe. Diana said hopefully, “Perhaps he won’t come back.”

  “We need him,” said the director wearily, “we need his name on the programme. Roddy. Rory. He’s gone to drown his sorrows in the Red Lion. Follow him there and buy him pints and tell him what a great writer he is and what a bastard I am and how everybody else is on his side.
He makes these scenes because he wants to be flattered, so lay it on thick. Take Jock with you. The girls and I will get down to some real work together and join you in the pub in forty minutes.”

  213 THE COMPANY

  When Roddy and Rory and I got to the nearest pub the playwright was not there but we bought pints all the same.

  Roddy said, “What do you think of us, Jock?”

  I said, “You are interesting people.”

  Rory said, “What do you think of our director?”

  I said, “Is he queer?”

  “Oh no. Roddy and I are the queers in this company.”

  My insides turned to nearly total panic. I could not have been more embarrassed if they had told me they were Catholics. They were watching me closely so I managed not to react. Roddy said, “You haven’t batted an eyelid. Do you think Rory is joking, Jock?”

  After a silence I said, “Not necessarily.”

  They chuckled as if this was a joke and my insides started to relax. Roddy said, “A friend of poor Helen, are you?”

  I said, “I’m a friend of Alan who is a friend of Helen.”

  Roddy said, “Ah! Alan! I could go for him.”

  Rory said, “I couldn’t. Mind you, if he asked me nicely I would probably submit.”

  I said, “Why did you say ‘poor’ Helen?”

  They told me about Helen and the director and Diana. I then asked if the production had any chance of doing well. Rory said, “There is a chance, yes, there is a slim chance.”

  Roddy said, “It would have a very good chance if Brian gave the lead part to Rory.”

  I said, “Then you are in agreement with what the author said?”

  “Oh yes. Even Helen and Diana say privately that Brian is hopeless in the lead.”

  “Why don’t all of you tell him that?”

  “If we all tell him that he’s perfectly capable of cracking up, then the whole production will fall apart. We’re hanging on in the hope that he sees the light for himself. He might. He’s not a fool.”

  214 THE COMPANY

  I wanted no part in a company which depended on the whims of a raving egoist. I decided that when Helen arrived I would take her aside, quietly tell her this, then apologise and leave.

  The director arrived arm-in-arm with his women. All three were as hectically elated as if they had been drinking and I had no chance to talk quietly with Helen. Her gaiety had a wild, defiant note, she almost reminded me of Jane Russell. I don’t often notice the inside feelings of people but I sensed that Helen would soon be wanting an alternative to that director, an alternative who was completely unlike him. Suddenly I was also elated, so elated that I disguised it by consulting my watch and saying abruptly, “I must go.” “Listen, I’m sorry this evening has been such a shambles,” said the director escorting me to the pub door. “Next week we’ll have that tête-à-tête I promised you, we’ll hammer out a lighting script and arrange to get what you need. The thing to remember is, we’re performing on a bare platform with no curtains or backdrops or any kind of scenery, just desks and chairs and things, so all the transitions and the mood of the setting depend on you. I know you won’t let us down.”

  When making love later that night I was also caressing and entering an image of the desperately elated Helen, so I kept being surprised by the shortness of Denny’s legs.

  Some time in the following week I visited the warehouse of a theatrical hiring agency and after half an hour’s discussion of the available equipment I had identified the main sorts of stage lighting and learned that it came in floods (which can be faded in or out more or less rapidly) and spots (which can be widened into quite big pools). I never had a tête-à-tête with the director, who was always too busy to attend to practical details, but I worked out a lighting script in discussions with Roddy, who was in charge of properties, and Diana, who was the production manager. When I asked them the colour of the clothes and the furniture they did not think it was my business. I explained that some colours would look vivid or dull, depending on the colour of the light. Roddy said, “I think you’re being too subtle, Jock. A production like ours doesn’t need coloured lighting.”

  215 THE COMPANY

  Diana said, “Wait a minute! Could you make a telephone glow in the dark?”

  I said, “Given an ultra-violet bulb and a telephone coated with the right enamel, certainly I could. Or I could mould a telephone in acetate and put a small bulb inside. But if total darkness is not essential I can make the right colour of phone glow bright in a dimly lit area by putting the right spot on it.”

  Diana said to Roddy, “You see, that might solve the main problem.”

  The play had scenes in which people who were supposed to be in different buildings telephoned each other from opposite sides of the stage. Everyone but the author thought these would be hard to dramatise. Roddy turned quickly to a page in the script and said, “Of course! End of scene five. Harbinger starts his final monologue extreme right, then the lights start to fade, then he shoots himself, slumps over the desk and we cut the floods to a small spot on him which also lights the telephone. Miss Soames enters, picks up the phone, speaks the number, then at the very moment when the other phone starts ringing we see it shining in the dark extreme left! You’re a genius, Jock.”

  They seemed to believe I had given them an idea, though I had only asked what they wanted and told them what could be done. Diana said, “I’ll break it to Brian.”

  Roddy said, “Would it not be easier if we treated it as a technical matter and let Jock just go ahead and do it?”

  Diana said, “No, I’ll break it to Brian. Since the idea comes from Jock he won’t feel threatened.”

  Diana was a very thin girl with irregular features and a lot of common sense. Though not pretty she was attractive, and I could not understand why she and Helen let themselves be loved and bullied by a pretentious idiot like Brian. They treated his rottenest behaviour with motherly protectiveness. Now I come to think of it, so did Roddy and Rory. Brian was very mean with money. He would lead us into the Red Lion after a rehearsal, fling himself dramatically on to a bench, lean back with closed eyes and softly whine, “Get me a drink, somebody.”

  216 THE COMPANY

  Whoever was nearest the bar, Helen or Diana or Roddy or Rory or me (why me?) would buy and bring him a pint, he would swallow a quarter of it in one dramatic gulp, then lie back again with the closed eyes and murmur, “Thanks. I deserved that.”

  Around him the company would nudge and grin at each other, taking care that he did not see them do it. Then I noticed that when he lay back like that his narrow eyes were not always completely shut, and he was actually watching the others nudging and grinning. I understood nobody in that company except the author, a simple soul. The others did not speak to him so I felt obliged to explain the script and the lighting cues. He attended closely then said in a relieved voice, “Yes, that won’t interfere with it.”

  He believed his play would be a success if only the actors followed all his instructions and distinctly pronounced his words. He had no interest apart from that in the direction and lighting of the play, and mainly attended the rehearsals to prevent, as far as he could, the director altering his words.

  The author was not the only one to flee from the rehearsal rooms after an exchange of cruel language. Everyone but myself did it some time. Even the director did it, after Helen disagreed with him over a point, and appealed to the rest of the cast, and they agreed with her. The wounded parties usually rushed to the pub and since I was often free at this stage in the production I was usually asked to follow them and soothe them. This was easily done. I listened to their complaints with great attention and said as little as possible. I allowed myself to show a certain amount of surprise, for the causes of the quarrel were usually different from the argument which expressed it. Helen told me her suspicions about Diana; Diana told me how guilty she felt about Helen; the director told me never to get entangled with women becaus
e it was HELL, Jock, sheer sheer sheer bloody unmitigated Hell; Roddy told me how afraid he was of losing Rory; Rory told me how stiflingly possessive Roddy had become. When they had taught themselves cheerful or tranquil again they would pay me a wee compliment, like “We’re all less tense since you joined us, Jock,” or “You’re very sympathetic toward people who are different from you.”

  217 DENNY’S GRIEF