by Adam Thorpe
I’m badly in love with Norma, of course. It’s complicated. But I know she is completely unattainable. I’m a year and a half off of sixty, for crying out loud. She has a chin that’d make a yob weep. That alone. But the chin is attached to everything else, everything else kind of flows out from the chin and round those grey grey eyes and oh the mouth and ends up being perfect all the way down to her toes. My kind of perfect, anyway. She has a normal voice. It’s not deep or sexy or anything. It killed her career but it’s perfect too, because it doesn’t act. She was very worried, but I said, hey Norma, the Talkie opened its doors to theatre, which occupied the place and surrounded it with barbed wire. How true, she said, and her mouth did something thoughtful that made me have to lean back and stare at the oak beams for a minute. That was Robert Bresson, I murmured, you’d have liked him. Did he do silents? she enquired. I tried to ignore her eyelashes. I flicked a beer-mat casually (we were in the pub in Fawholt, it has a very nice little snug where you don’t get guys who try to tell you about foreigners and stuff, you don’t get anyone normally except this wheezy labrador who lies across your feet for some reason, he’s surprisingly heavy, please don’t ruin it by driving out after the movie and celebrating the first day in honour of me, you won’t all fit in and the garden backs on to a battery pig farm unit) and said, no, but his films are kind of silents with sound, if you see what I mean. The sound is very important. The noises become music. He doesn’t call it cinema he calls it cinematography. He reckons cinema is just filmed theatre. But CINEMATOGRAPHY IS A WRITING WITH IMAGES IN MOVEMENT AND WITH SOUNDS. I tore a used-up page out of my diary and wrote it down for her in block caps in case she forgot it. Norma was stroking the labrador’s head. Its belly was on my feet. Thank you, she breathed. There was something remarkable about her pale hand on the golden kind of velvety stuff on the skull of the labrador. The labrador smelt, actually, but Norma’s scent neutralised it somehow. Her curls swept the beer-mat right off the table, they were that long. I was concerned for her hair getting beer in it from the puddles on the table but then I remembered that you can wash your hair in beer so I didn’t say anything, I just breathed in Norma Talmadge’s scent of rosewater and musk and sunned skin and something they must have put into the clothes in those days because they all smell of it, all those old clothes, all those folds of silk and muslin and lace and stuff. Maybe it’s the lavender they put in the drawers. Maybe. Oh, Norma. The old labrador does not know what it is getting. It does not know what hand is caressing its velvet. I just watch. It farts for God’s sake but we ignore it. Laughter bursts out from the other bar we’re affiliated to by a small hatch but we ignore it. I am alone in England in a country snug with a pint of real ale and Norma Talmadge and it’s summer and the windows are open and the shoot is going fine and I’m not even thinking about the Great War scenes coming up. I must not drink too much. If I drink too much I will get maudlin and gabble and stare at Norma Talmadge’s bare forearms until they flicker out. The secret is not to stare at her for too long. One must only glance. If one stares too
Christ, I’ve passed out.
Of course I’m OK. I couldn’t be telling you I’ve passed out if I was still passed out. It’s just that I wanted to let you know how finding oneself lying on the bathroom floor is not funny, particularly if you think your mother is about to come in and stroke your forehead and then it hits you in the belly that she’s been dead thirty-two years and you’re on the other side of an ocean to boot, mate, with a Texan mosquito on your nose. The doctor asked me what my regular drink was. I said Laphroaig. He couldn’t even spell it. What is that exactly, Ricky? I said Islands Scotch, strong-flavoured with a u, peaty. He said my name isn’t Peter it’s Bob, Ricky. He looked at me real concerned. Can you believe it? He’s given me pills. My murmur’s building into a rumour. I’ve always ignored rumours, as a rule.
My main incy-wincy problem with Norma is her accent. She can handle Zelda but Agatha’s giving her problems. I refuse to dub over, I dunno, Celia Johnson or somebody. Hey, we’ll work on it. I’ll take her out on picnics and we’ll stare at the sheep-sprinkled downs and I’ll put on my Polaroids to cut the glare off her white muslin and lead her gently through the exercises. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. You should see the way her lips cope with that. I don’t want you to think she’s a drawler, by the way. She’s not. She’s US posh, for God’s sake. She can handle it. One day she’ll come in and it’ll be there. Don’t act, Norma. Free yourself. Free Agatha. Free the real Agatha from the fictitious Agatha you had imagined. Richard, is that that French genius who liked silents again? Yes, Norma. If I say anything profound it’s normally on permanent loan. Have another cucumber and watercress sandwich. This is the summer of 1914. Relax. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. The bombs on the Somme aren’t falling on the Tom. Not yet, not yet, anyhow. The Irish situation is what we’re supposed to be worrying about right now. I like it. She calls me Richard. Only my mother ever called me Richard.
One day she cried. Almost on my shoulder. I have a squeaky voice, she said. It’s a lovely voice, I replied. Your eye-liner’s running. We were facing a wheatfield, by the way, to put you in the picture. The wheatfield is in wide screen format. Don’t watch this scene on TV, it’ll make a nonsense of it, you won’t even be able to see us, we’ll just be a brown dot and a white dot close together, a cinema screen is one hundred times larger than a TV screen, watching a movie movie on TV’s like admiring the Mona Lisa on a postage stamp, it’s a travesty – hey, why do you think I only show stills in my classes for God’s sake? OK, there’ve been complaints, I’ve had letters from Crew-Cut and others over the years saying the students are complaining, didn’t I know HCDVA has the biggest and bestest video collection in Texas, I should use all the facilities available and stuff and I reply yeah yeah, but we don’t have a facility called a cinema with a standard or even wide format screen and popcorn and a till lady with carmine lips and some framed stills, do we? I don’t want to go into this now, I have some very important scenes coming up, this movie’s way behind schedule, Bosey’s drinking too much extremely real ale, I’m getting sunburn can you believe it. So this wheatfield is like a copper ocean breaking in front of us in wide screen and Norma Talmadge is in tears. Silver tears are running down her cheeks. I’m sorry I couldn’t fit a full-size wide screen in the suite, by the way. You can imagine the problems. I did the best I could. Drinks are still on the house. I hope no one’s snoring. Maybe some tea or coffee would be nice, it must be about that time of the morning, unless tea and coffee are being given up for the millennium. It’s a really lovely natural voice, I said. I was a star, a great star, she cried. Now I’m not even in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Now the only thing people remember me for is what I said to the autograph hunters after my retirement so-called. What did you say to the autograph hunters, Norma? You mean you don’t even know that? I may have done, but it’s slipped my mind, honey.
She stood up. She was magnificent. Her hair was tossed by the breeze, you couldn’t really tell the difference between her hair and the ocean of corn because just at that moment this great cloud shadow was moving over it. She spread her arms out. The breeze was exploring the billowing possibilities of her muslin and lace. I shaded my eyes because I’d forgotten my Polaroids. Sheep-bells sounded across the valley completely naturally, we’re not talking Boseysound here we’re talking untampered wild track – and I jerked because there was a shepherd with a crook in the combe shading his eyes in the same way I was shading mine and it was him. The shepherd, for crying out loud. He’s got some scenes coming up, he’s fairly vital, stick with me. Her voice rang out. OK, OK, maybe not without a certain nasal quality but basically lovely.
Go away, go away! I don’t need you any more! That’s what I said. Go away, go away! I don’t need you any more!
Her arms came down and she looked at the ground. I almost clapped but I didn’t think it appropriate. She had freed the real Norma from the fictitious Norma. Now she can play
Agatha, I thought, once we’ve found the accent. I took a bite out of my tongue sandwich and nipped my thumb. She came and sat beside me again. She had no shoes on, she’d taken them off because the grassy bank was soft and warm. Perfect feet. I guess the talkies took away what I had to say, she said. I grunted. My mouth was full of tongue. I think you’ve had that one before, sorry. The wheatfield hissed and rolled. Maybe it was barley. Maybe I got the clean effects wrong, but no one’ll notice. No one knows what fings like that sound like any more.
Hold wheatfield.
I’m thinking. While I’m thinking just enjoy the wheatfield or barley or whatever it is. We’re too late for poppies, this is July, maybe there are one or two but they’re lost in all the copper. I had some Technicolor poppy shots against green corn that practically bust the lab printer but they went up in smoke and got in my neighbour’s eyes instead. Too bad. I’m thinking how tricky this shoot’s going to be. Norma’s ready, the crew’s ready, the scenery’s ready, the house is ready. Everybody’s ready except me. You’re ready, even.
I am nervous, actually.
I have some great actors, don’t get me wrong. I have a great crew. I have a great audience. I have a great landscape. We have great weather. OK, there’s been some thunder, but it’s been way off, over Gloucestershire or Oxfordshire or wherever. We have the largest collection of period agricultural machinery and real live shire horses since they weren’t period. My extras are well-behaved and have crooked backs and bad teeth if they need them and all the right tools and they’re ready to go and they don’t overact, either. I’m nervous because I don’t know whether I am mentally in the right condition to cope with it all. I am also in love with my leading lady. The last time I was in love with my leading lady it wrecked everything and we got married and then she killed herself. Moreover I have some very difficult scenes ahead of me. They are actually very personal. The phantoms won’t like it. They won’t like it at all. And there’s something about the atmosphere. The atmosphere is not healthy. We sit on the lawn and discuss the shoot timetable or how Milly carries the bucket up the stairs realistically so it doesn’t look like she at no point in her life has ever carried a bucket of water up some back stairs because the girl playing Milly was born and brought up in High Wycombe in a four-bedroom Wimpey for crying out loud – and I don’t like the atmosphere. Actually, it frightens me. It’s ridiculous sitting here on the lawn in the summer of 1914 and not feeling self-conscious about it and hey, maybe that’s what’s frightening me about the atmosphere. Everyone’s waiting without knowing they are waiting. I’m watching my great-aunt sweeping her hand over the grass and I’m wondering how I get Norma to act like that, like it doesn’t look as if she’s waiting for something just because this is July 1914. I mean, Henry Hopeless-Poet Peterson couldn’t help being born in July 1914 and I can’t help it that my great-uncle and my grandfather did what they did in July 1914. The fact that the world is just about to fuck itself up in the biggest way yet in the history of the world has nothing to do with this very personal and frankly embarrassing incident to do with my great-uncle and my grandfather and Millicent known as Milly Stephenson while they were in the country house in the summer of 1914 with vicars hallooing and gnats clouding and brooks burbling and picnic cloths getting settled down all over onto stiff tussocks that kind of refuse to flatten out until the crockery gets weighty enough or some smart-arse with a monocle that never drops out finds the clover patch.
Still time, go see. Number oh heck Thirteen.
I’M GLAD YOU made it back. Because you never know.
It’s from Uncle Kenneth’s home-made movie called The Family Outing. The white streak is not a bird’s-dropping on its descent but a scratch, it’s a very old film, it hops and flares and sparkles and then bleaches out for a moment right in the middle of a crazy croquet game in this meadow like there’s been a nuclear strike thirty-odd years too soon. Mrs Trevelyan is hidden behind Giles doing a tango with Mr Trevelyan’s shooting-stick because Mr Trevelyan doesn’t like sitting on the ground but right now he’s gone off to look at the perch in the river. I guess Agatha blurred herself looking round at William putting the teacup on his head. Dig that hamper, huh? It tied on to the back of the motor car. The last shot in the film is of dust, a very large cloud of white dust. I guess they didn’t really leave Uncle Ken behind cranking away so he had to walk back with the tripod and camera and stuff, it was a kind of set up, they stopped and reversed after a few minutes and Uncle Kenneth loaded the motor car and then off they went probably covered in white dust because they would have had to have reversed into their own cloud before it had settled and Mrs T moaned about it all the way back while Mr T shouted underneath his goggles. I have no idea what he was shouting, they passed me on the road and even though it was an Adler Open Tourer with a maximum speed of around forty-five m.p.h. it was too fast and fairly noisy and anyway I was choking, my eyelashes went white, I got flint-chips in my mouth and stippling my kneecaps, it was awful. Adler is German, by the way. They kept her hidden away down here until it was safe to show her in about 1925 and between 1914 and about 1919 they went round in a big and extremely comfortable Napier Torpedo instead. Hey, Mr Trevelyan could afford it, the disinfectant and antiseptic line was booming all of a sudden, business had never been so busy, even his patent portable packs plus bandage and tweezers went down a treat, they built an extension on the factory, he could’ve bought twelve Napier Torpedoes if he’d so desired, that clever-socks at the Club didn’t open his mouth again about Trevelyan losing out to Izal – even if clever-socks hadn’t been dead by the time things got really going he wouldn’t have opened his mouth again.
See what I mean? I can’t help it. I just can’t help mentioning the war.
Actually, I’m in a fairly bad way. My nails are too long. I have stubble. I smell. I’ve really declined. So what’s new? you cry. Thank you. Well, my nails are longer, my stubble is thicker, my smell is worse. OK? Hey, my ex-analyst would’ve said that I have placed myself completely beyond sexual reach where it’s safe, Rick. Thank you, Moira. I would say it’s because I am fairly depressed but I know you have to pay for this incredibly luxurious fortieth-floor apartment somehow. Yup, Zelda is very happy in her woodlands home listening to birdsong and her husband going to the toilet every morning. They come to work together in the car, it makes me puke. Then he lectures some desirable T-shirts on disruption and deconstruction and fragmentation and instabilities and decentering and conflicting layers of information and why e.g. Ricky Thornby is a prehistoric jerk for thinking Citizen Kane is an incy-wincy bit better than this Pepsi Cola commercial we’re going to discuss right now for two and a half hours with a whole lotta words that sound as if they kill you in the end after a lot of suffering or like an in-house NASA journal for propulsion engineers and then he goes back in the car with Zelda to his nice little newly-constructed woodlands home and watches Citizen Kane on cable before centering himself between her legs and resolving all conflicting layers of information therein oh yuk, oh gross. Meanwhile the guy who’s billed as The Most Unreconstructed Conservative In The Western Hemisphere lives an incredibly progressive life. I mean, he can’t even find the cap to go on his hooch if he doesn’t finish it in one night, he’s so fucking decentered or whatever. The Laphroaig got too expensive. Blow me down. I think there’s every chance I might just wrap up eternally before my complex masterwork is finished. Or maybe the noo millennium will come along sooner than I thought and you’ll all be watching a white screen.
Laserdick’d really like that. He’d say it was as original as that book of Malcolm Lowry’s he caught me out over. The one that got burnt in the fire. He really liked my son’s carpet squares, did I tell you that? Or maybe that was Hal the Computer. I get confused. Except that Hal the Computer looks like a dry-run for the Bearded Lady in Freaks. Todd is clean-shaven. Maybe he can’t. Maybe he has some pellicular defect.
It’s pointless. My anger is pointless. This born-again guy suggested I pray for him every nigh
t. Todd Lazenby, not the born-again. Nice positive prayers, he said. Prayers you can warm your hands at. Sure, I said, but we know who’s tied to the faggots and screaming. The born-again said I was lost and would probably go straight to the Devil without passing Go. Hey, you play Monopoly? I cried. Yeah, he replied, I picked it up while I was trying to convert students in England. So now we play Monopoly once a month at my place. He cheats, I think, but it’s company. He gets all the hotels in Mayfair and stuff. The most I get is a side-alley in Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper operated probably. It’s something. He’d like to play for real cash, he says, but I said that would kinda spoil it, Clifford. He has this terrible aftershave. I’ve told him. He just says he’d like to meet Jesus smelling sweet. I scowl at him from under my matted hair-line but he’s concentrating too hard to notice. I think he nicks me spondulicks when I go out to the whisky crate or to the toilet but I can’t prove it. Sometimes I call him Des. Ho hum.