Still

by Adam Thorpe

  I only did what I thought right, Papa. It was to – to soften the blow. I never imagined—

  To frighten a fowl is not the way to catch it, my dear.

  But Papa, I didn’t mean to frighten!

  This is actually going catastrophically, thanks to Boulter’s call. Uncle Kenneth lets a sagoey belch out the secret way, through his nostrils. Mrs Trevelyan turns round and flicks her hand at the servants. This means piss off, basically. George ratches himself upright and growls at the wee milt. The wee milt nods and picks up the tin bowl into which the gravy and wreckage have been interred and stands up and blinks. There’s nothing hand-tinted about her. The smell of Dorothy’s gravy is the most unerotic odour ever devised. For about a century all you can hear is two pairs of shoes making for the door at a respectable pace. George willnae scarper for no one. Butlers niver scarper. They hold their heads high and sedate and stuff. The door closes. Everyone breathes out audibly in the life-saving realisation that they haven’t performed this function for about a century. Inadvertently Uncle Kenneth breaks wind. He does something fussy with his napkin to cover it. It looks like he’s waving the pocket of gas away, but he didn’t mean it to look like that. A lot of things he does are inadvertent. I wish I was more like Uncle Kenneth. I’m a very advertent person, but I still end up screwing things. Screwing things inadvertently is better. I won’t go into this now.

  Mrs Trevelyan’s face is causing Gordon on Camera Two some big hassles. Have I mentioned Gordon, Gordon the Great Grip? My oversight if I haven’t. Also, we were never close. I was never close to my grips. They didn’t have to do much except grip the camera and move it where I told them to, or not move it at all in my Antonioni phase. They all wanted to pan and travel every other shot, because they were bored, they barely had to grip. I said This is to separate the eye from the body. One should not use the camera as if it were a broom. Oh yeah, guv, oh yeah? If only I had believed in myself more. If only I had thrown myself at Robert Bresson’s feet and cried, Je serais votre garçon du thé si vous teach me everything you know, then about ten years later come out forged in a new likeness but not just Robert Bresson Jnr, non – by then I’d have outgrown my master and got my own megaphone. Instead I just went and let the grips do their travels and pans and zooms snickering up the tracking rails and thought, hey, Orson Welles hose-piped like crazy, Tarkovsky pans like he’s looking for his car keys, it can’t be that bad. I had no belief in myself. I kept borrowing drums and banging them, telling myself they were my own. Did I hear some yob cheers out there? Is out there still inhabited in these early late hours? Sorry, I was on about Mrs T’s face. The hash does terrible things to the way you say terrible. My great-grandmother’s visage vaguely resembles the other Mrs T’s visage about a second before the other Mrs T sank the Belgrano. I repeat. The other Mrs T sank the Belgrano.

  You ready out there for a relevatory revelation?

  It’s a crime-reality clip, man. Here goes. We’re in Buckinghamshire, England. We’re peeping through some beeches at this cosy little mansion with nice red roses in front of it. This is Chequers. Chequers is what the Trevelyans shout when they check in chequer but there’s no connection. The Attorney General’s just whipped open the door of the PM’s study having dissolved the speed limit down the M40 and up the A4010 and got most of the gravel drive into the red rose beds and She turns round and fires this question at him about whether it’s legally illegal to sink a hostile ship heading hostilely towards the Exclusion Zone’n Our Brave Boys and the AG looks like he’s swallowed the door-knob which is actually still in his hand and after a few seconds of non-thought in the full glare of Her glare he says um no in a kind of extra-dry sherry sort of way and is about to add several ring binders worth of caveats when she picks up the telephone receiver and shouts Sink It so loudly the AG practically salutes and it’s his joke Sieg Heil type for whenever She’s the other end of the line.

  Wars start in all kinds of weird ways, but that’s one of the weirdest, folks.

  You know who told me that? A judge. A judge on a plane. I travelled First Class in those days and they had those posh lounges, remember remember? You probably don’t remember because you were jemmied into Economy Class getting to know your knees intimately if only you could focus that close or fumbling for your crusts but I promise you they did, it was in the swollen lump on the top, I used to worry about what would happen to us if the pilot decided to fly under a bridge or something. I used to worry a lot in those days. Anyway, Judge Bollocks and I were spread out all through the polar night in these huge armchairs up in the lounge pod of a 747 working our way quickly through several gift-packs of Courvoisier on the Old Bailey and boy, did I learn a lot. I had enough scenarios to keep me in jail for the rest of my life, I was a swaying D Notice, I felt incredibly vital and dangerous, I got convinced the stewardess had poison on the tips of her eyelashes so I stopped tickling my cheeks with them but by the time I was carried out on a Heathrow stretcher my tapes had been ninety-nine per cent wiped, I could only remember two of the incredible relevations but no one was interested, they just told me to stop upsetting the Non-EEC queue with my bad language. I tried to get my pal Jerry Freeman hooked into this Belgrano thing and also into how the Ayatollah had been put there as a thick stooge by the CIA and how he’d just gone AWOL to their amazed amazement but Jerry said, Ricky, you look terrible. Go find yourself some Alka-Seltzer and I might give you one of our teaser promos to play around with.

  Cunt.

  Hey, it’s all true, I tell ya! I wanna be taken seriously! I want Special Branch to break down the door and seize my canisters! I wanna be gagged by the British Establishment! I want Zelda to come and visit me in my bare cell! Yeah. I want her to weep her heart out and beg my forgiveness and my shaven head to nod all but imperceptibly eventually and my bruised and battered lips to touch hers about three hours before a brute hand-tinted hand drags her off and says here’s your cup of tea, miss, sorry about the milk, it’s that nasty pasteurised stuff but you know how it is, it’s so much easier to keep in the station with all this toing and froing and funny hours’n that and you get used to it, I suppose. Funny how you get used to things. Hang on, I’ve just got to give him a little kick and then I’ll get you some sugar. Oof. Lumps or powder? They say there’s no difference but there is, there is.

  Great days, grand days.

  My great-grandmother’s face. OK, so who’s the Belgrano? Hey, let’s be a bit more period, period. So who’s the Titanic? ’Cos, OK, maybe it did take about 3,000 years to make that iceberg and about three and a half seconds for that iceberg to blow its nose on some steel and turn Mr Trevelyan’s second cousin into a dinner-jacketed rest home for molluscs but my great-grandmother’s face is not exactly soft and warm, baby. TITANICEBERG! That’s not my joke. It’s what some wag of a teenage Lloyds Insurance clerk scribbled on his jotter on 16 April last year before his boss saw it and dropped him out the window, according to Mr Trevelyan. The problem for Gordon the Grip is that however hard he tries he can’t get the focus right. There’s something really hairy going on and it’s to do with Mrs Trevelyan’s face having this quiver all over it. That’s the main difference between it and an iceberg. Icebergs don’t have nervous problems, they take it easy for a long long time and then when they’re ready just drift around for a few years giving everyone else nervous problems. We know the type, huh? But Mrs Trevelyan’s not like that, she gives everyone else nervous problems because she has too many and to spare. So Gordon can’t get a grip on this thing and he’s saying Ricky, we got gnats – and I’m saying don’t worry, if she ends up looking like something by Francis Bacon that’s fine by me. The quiver is actually the muscles in the face getting beat up by the nerve guys. These guys are high on tonic wine and dandelion coffee and Crappy’s Miracle Elixir and are having a great time. Mrs T lifts her chin up and lets everyone see her neuralgia, just in case someone out there is still in doubt of the extremity of the ordeal she is undergoing. To the prickle of the face is added the twi
nge of her running sores as they unstick from the embroidery around her throat. Hey, don’t feel sorry for her. That’s the whole point. Polish your salver and look at her through that. Anything else and you’ll be turned to stone she’ll suck and spit out. Don’t be a prune, OK?

  Then there’s this sound of tissue-paper tearing and it’s her voice. She’s asking a leading question so wake up, the fireworks are pre-war issue, the Thames flows on softly, there’s not gonna be a revolution.

  Where is he, Agatha?

  The dance band stops mid-rag. Glasses tinkle. A 300-foot gash appears in Agatha’s chest. Don’t panic: up to four watertight compartments can be flooded. Now all the fifth watertight compartment needs is some diving boards. Her heart jumps anyway, holding its nose.

  Who – who do you mean, Mother?

  Out of the neuralgic mist looms a small smile. At least, one half of the mouth kind of pushes up and stays there twitching. Try it. It makes you feel just what Mrs Trevelyan’s feeling right at this moment.

  Don’t overdo it, my dear. You’ve never been an awfully good fibber, right from when you swore blind you had not wetted your drawers one long-ago morning.

  Uncle Kenneth bows his head to hide his flush. Ninety per cent of it is shame at finding the idea of his niece in wet drawers dashed erotic. The other ten per cent is fairly selfless embarrassment on her behalf. Agatha looks away. She doesn’t have a lot to look away to, but some dwarf chrysanthemums on the little round table under the standard lamp in the corner are really honoured to have her attention for a minute, especially as this is their last day on earth because Mrs Trevelyan has a thing about wilt, and these are either suffering from hyphomycetous fungi, or are just old. Being a dwarf chrysanthemum in 1913 is not exactly prestigious, you don’t get poems written about you and stuff, like the tea roses and the lilacs and the white flags of iris or whatever. Being an old dwarf chrysanthemum is sad because there isn’t a lot of poignancy in being an old dwarf chrysanthemum – not even Henry Peterson wrote an elegy to an old dwarf chrysanthemum. The nearest he got was a mention of frost blight on his asters in De Profundis (Willesden Wedlock, The Aphid Press, 1967).

  The fifth watertight compartment is now an aquarium. I know what these flowers feel like. Agatha doesn’t because she’s like Zelda, she’s full of sap, she’s got juice and it’s tingling at the tips of her fingers and on the edges of her lips and sometimes at the base of her spine when she just sits on her dressing-table stool with nothing but a chemise between her buttocks and the cushion so she can feel the velvet making an impression. I have to say, without any kind of snigger, that this chemise is silk. I’ve tried to get Zelda to hire a complete neo-Georgian outfit because I told her I said you know what some guy once said? He said that if you haven’t taken an early-twentieth-century lady’s clothes off you haven’t known real love or real joy. It’s like an archaeological excavation, getting through to the body. You have to take along a Thermos and have tea-breaks and stop for sandwiches. By the time you get to the breasts you’ve taken a degree in costume making and you’ve still got to unbutton your spats and your waistcoat and your combinations and make sure your fob-watch doesn’t get stepped on and stuff and don’t forget your bowler hat, you’ve still got your bowler hat on, sir, and you realise the maid is in here and expecting to have a romp too and she’s got all those detachable frilly collars and cuffs and stuff let alone the hairpins. By the time you’ve undone the apron ties and separated that little starched scarab with your blunt fingers you can’t hold her hand and get to the first one yawning in the bed without falling over about three day’s worth of washing and ironing. As Jean Cocteau put it, and he’d done it in his youf, in PARIS for crying out loud, It’s as eef a murder has taken place, non? Oui, oui. Zelda didn’t buy it. She was into No Loitering. She’d sit on the bed in what she usually wore at the weekend and quite frankly there wasn’t a lot of difference. I mean, if it was shorts and T-shirt disrobing took about two seconds per item equals four seconds and one for the panties if she’d bothered equals five and if it was her Zen robe thing she’d just lift it up and over her head like she was changing channels and there she was, nude under her hair while I was still lining my shoes up. The fact that what I really liked was the challenge of the hunt kind of escaped her. I said I liked to glimpse to start with, just to glimpse her honey-coloured skin flickering through the trees, you know, the Diana or is it Daphne chased by Apollo thing – that maybe she could keep her Zen robe on and just lifted up while we did it but she said honey, only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no wind stirs and anyway you might stain it. She made me feel really fetishistic. Maybe Dr Lousebrain likes instant nakedness like he likes instant philosophy.

  Beatrice.

  Yes, Arthur?

  Arthur is discomfited by the fact that she says yes Arthur without looking at him, without so much as a tilt of her head. It often happens. He doesn’t feel like the Big Chief of Trevelyan Antiseptics & Disinfectants when she does this, or the Head of the Trevelyan Household By Law, or even the Sole Source of Cash. It’s like being a mainbeam with bad woodworm. But when you’re up against someone with a face like an iceberg and nervous problems, you’ve got to navigate very carefully. Twenty-four-hour look-out, full radio contact with the International Ice Patrol, keep to the right shipping lane. Right not as in right or left, but right as in correct, in case there’s some fatal confusion, because the left might be the right one, in this case. He sighs and folds his hands together. It’s queer how they do it without getting in a tangle. All those fingers.

  Beatrice, I think we must take this whole thing coolly. Keep your head cool and your feet warm, as Father used to say. It’s all damned awkward, but nothing worse.

  Nothing worse, Arthur?

  As we thought it to be, only half an hour ago, my dear.

  Thank you for reminding me, Arthur. I do believe I had quite forgot. Silly me.

  Arthur tuts and purses his lips and lets the air out slowly, which is what he usually does when Beatrice fires her sarcannons. Tuts and blows and pats his cavalry horse and turns to Wellington and says, I do believe, sir, my leg has been took clean orf. It’s hopeless. He withdraws his hands and knits his brows and slumps a little. The table stretches out before him like, you’ve guessed it, the Valley of Death. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. Half an hour ago he was blown off a cliff. A ledge caught him, bruised but still kicking, by Jove. The ledge is frightfully small and very high up. Be thankful for small ledges. My son is not dead. Hurrah! Hurrah!

  You remind me, Arthur, of the man who struck a brick wall with his head repeatedly because it was so very pleasant when he stopped.

  For God’s sake, Beatrice, be thankful for small ledges! I mean mercies! Nay, not small ledges at all, but great ones, a great mercy I mean in this case! Our son is not—

  He never was, Arthur! Anyone would think that he was Lazarus raised miraculously from the dead! You are falling for their little wicked game!

  Whose game? What game?

  To visit on us a greater evil that wasn’t true in order that the lesser but still considerable evil that is true be heartily welcomed. I will not play this game, Agatha, Kenneth! I will not! Where is your brother?

  He is upstairs, Mother.

  I thought so!

  She leans back in her chair, triumphant. This is a touch horrendous. Forget the Titanic, it’s gone, the iceberg’s a lousy metaphor, I used it because everyone else uses it here – it’s only sixteen months, their attention span is longer than ours by about three seconds under sixteen months, they’re still shuddering, the 1,513 drowned are still scattered on the sea-bed of the nation, to quote Henry Peterson’s one famous line (On the Bridge, privately printed pamphlet, 1956). I wanna go Tennysonian, Miss. You may, Thornby. OK, long slow pan, wide screen, a tad slomo. The victory pennants are fluttering, the crows are cawing, the riderless horses snort in the mist, one with an arrow in its flank tries to rise and the arrow whoops bends just like rubber and i
t’s one of my great unanswered questions: Did Bresson mean it to bend? I’m talking about the closing frames of the finest film in the world ever: Lancelot du Lac. You know how many times I’ve seen it? Twenty-two. No piece of white fabric has ever been covered by anything so great before or since. Dr Turdsville has never seen it. Godard is God, he says. Sure, I remarked, Godard is good, but not God. Bresson is possibly God. I think I’ve seen The Pickpocket, he said. So that’s where you learnt the trade, I replied. You picked mine right under my heart. Hey, Rick, let’s call it quits. It’s been a year now, huh? The thing is, you think the guy’s making no effort. You’d think he’d pretend he knew every last shot of Robert Bresson. You’d be wrong. He is making a great effort. He’s making a great effort to show how the tinsel town commercial crap is great art. He’d turn a dog turd on his shoe into great art, because he can talk. He can talk students into thinking a commercial for Pepsi-Cola is as good as 8½. I’d like to shut him up, actually. I think he’s dangerous. I’d like to ride into town and clean it up. Make it safe for great art. Make it safe from Mordreds and Morgan le Fays and all those men and women with urinals instead of percipience in their upstairs. Upstairs? echoes Mr Trevelyan making me jump. Yes, I suppose he must be. I suppose he must have gone somewhere.