by Adam Thorpe
Norma says if I don’t start shooting she’ll quit.
I say to her when you quit acting I’ll start shooting.
I’m rehearsing all of them over and over. Cor blimey. It ain’t like the old days, guv. We had idiot boards in the old days and one walkthrough and then cranked. Now it’s day in day out till it’s on auto and the soul starts to show. Norma says she’s had it up to her eyes with my Frenchy genius and I say honey, that means you’re nearly there. We’re all nearly there. The phantoms don’t like it. I can feel the chill rising up from my toes. Or maybe it’s – nah, rumours are for weak ears, as me muvver used to say.
OK, action. Let’s rock ’n roll. Let’s make this lean, clean and hungry for more.
I mean, Norma’s made it, she’s there, she’s got it by Jove so here’s a still. See what I mean? Uncle Ken’s favourite star but afterwards, after my great-aunt his niece died too early he’d cry if Norma loomed up on the big screen because hey, what’s the difference? He had to be carried out one time, The Secret Rose, 1925. Norma Talmadge as Guinevere. Went up in the furnace. Go see the still but come back toot sweet, OK? This shoot is gonna be so lean, clean and hungry for more you won’t have time to think how fucking awful you feel now the light’s on full outside but keep the curtains closed, for God’s sake. This is an art house. Light spill kills. Don’t bleach me out checking to see if the grey has something different to it. It hasn’t. The Thames and the sky are relations. There’s a smell of burnt cordite and lavatories. People are walking to work over the bridges for crying out loud looking even more hunched up than usual for obvious reasons and with briefcases and rolled-up umbrellas and you get a voice-over from that old scratchy disc you never gave back to the library of Robert Speaight (great guy, great guy) reading the whole of The Wasteland – something London bridge, flowing over something something, probably endlessly, O so many, I had not thought death had undone so many, I must learn the fucking thing off by heart this week so I can impress people round the dinner-table and generally feel culchured and anyway everyone used to learn everything off by heart and wrote amazing letters every day, I feel really inadequate now, really modern and grey and inadequate. Hey, you suddenly have this terrible idea that NOTHING IS GONNA CHANGE except you’ll have more cheques refused, 19’ll be hard to let go of, some of your cheques’ll be dated a hundred years ago. But I can’t help you on that one. Relax. Watch the movie. There are some great battle scenes coming up, cast of millions, no newsreel library footage of fake attacks or army-surplus boots splashing past in mud endlessly until the actor gets too dizzy, no pathetic shots of barbed wire and this lifeless hand lying really gingerly across it, no smoke pellets or flash-bangers or, for Christ’s sake, poppies – fucking Poppies Waving About In Corn (11.5 secs) filched off of some nature programme in 1971 with all the colour drained out of it and bad sparkles. This is not One Day’s Night Too Early (dir. Thornby, 1976, 70 mins, unscreened) for crying out loud.
This is my great statement. If I can find the cap. Because attached to the cap is the bottle. And kind of attached to the bottle but only extremely loosely is the liquor. And I need a slug right now just to get me feeling lean, clean and whatever.
Go see the still while I check out my plumbing.
OH, NORMA. O Norzeldatha goddess of the golden upper world who never wears carmine and smiles softly at me. Forgive that belch. Hurry up please it’s time. Find your fucking seat without manhandling everybody’s crotch and keep your headache down. Another interesting movie fact. The Birth of a Nation tailed out with the whites shipping all the blacks back to Africa only the frames went into the furnace along with the take of the Ku-Klux-Klan guys castrating that wicked fellow in black boot-polish who gets murdered and you’re supposed to applaud. D. W. Griffiths makes Jake over the way look like Robert Kennedy. I’m full of interesting facts like that. Hurry up please it’s time. That reminds me. I know the whole of The Wasteland off by heart. My heart’s fairly unreliable so the rumour goes but here it is. April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull—
Maybe she didn’t like me sounding like Robert Speaight. I even got the scratches and the dust static in the right places. I think Norzeldatha is one of those deities who vanish easily. If you look at them too hard or quote poetry or whatever. Shucks. Cor blimey luvaduck. Here’s to me muvver.
Anyway, it’s a Bank Holiday. No one’ll be flowing over the bridge looking like death. I forgot that. Instead there might be one or two flowing under the bridge looking like death. Stay alert.
Take Five. Jazz in the interval. And you’re still complaining?
Action.
For God’s sake, before I disintegrate.
Shaaaddap, son. Or you git a clip round yer neck and strung up by it.
Twilight. Crane down slowly through leaves and tighten on lit window with a frame of some fragrant climber grown too thick Sylvia’s shaking to simulate breeze and in homage to all the great classics that start like this, the only difference here being that we’re not inside Pinewood we’re outside, we’re in the perfumed twilit garden of Hamilton Lodge Fawholt Wiltshire, des res par excellence and certainly not Des my brother’s sort of res but yer actual double extra clotted cream desirable toff stuff, once affiliated to enormous country mansion but enormous country mansion got burnt down in 1823 when old Lord Tutt last of the line dropped his bedside candle on pre-safety regulation blanket and whoomph. Bumpy sort of graveyard feel to the nettle and briar patch at the end of the lawn if you’re masochistic or phantasmal enough to want to feel it being only indication of enormous country mansion, even in 1914, right side of. Is this lean enough? Probably not. Less history. OK. Squeeze through window without breaking it and here we are in the company of a post-prandial Trevelyan family sans Mr T who is busy up in London obviously because the business is really shaky, not enough people are disinfecting or antisepting themselves, maybe Hamilton Lodge will have to be let or even sold, horror of horrors. William (ah! he has not been Removed, that’s a relief, innit?) and Agatha and Giles are playing a card game. Mrs Trevelyan is in an easy chair resting her eyelids. Dorothy is taking up some curtains and giving a rocking-chair a hard time. It’s a nice room, if a little musty for some reason. The gaslight is soft and patchy and not very good for reading or for Mike, but Mrs Trevelyan’s Tennyson is face down on her stomach, so no one’s reading. Dorothy is humming and the rocking-chair’s complaining and the antlered clock from Baden-Baden’s tutting at how time flies as it always does and there’s a nightingale, it must be, outside and now and again the slap of the cards and Mrs Trevelyan’s stomach which she can’t do anything about, maybe it’s the weight of the book so she lifts the book and adjusts her spectacles and her long face notches downwards so her chin triples up – she’s put on weight since we last saw her, or maybe it’s just sag, we all have it, it’s called decomposition – and tries to read some. The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in HA! That was William. It made her jerk. Do you have to, dear? she says. Her nape hits the antimacassar. Sorry, Ma, says William. Mother, please, sighs Ma. Mother or Madre even. But not Ma, Ma is—
She wants to say common but glances over her spectacles at Dorothy first and the coast is clear, Dorothy is deep in her curtains.
Common, Mrs T breathes.
She turns a page. She knows these poems pretty well off by heart. She kind of flickers over them and actually it reassures her, seeing that no one’s come along and sneaked around changing the words here and there. Bosey’s in the village with a pair of huge speakers for the far-off dog bark in case the wheezy labrador doesn’t. It doesn’t. Far-off dog bark courtesy of Bosey and a couple of whopping woofers oof. Hit that funny-bone. Mrs T raises her head and I’m sorry but her face fills all the available space, you’re lucky this isn’t wide screen or you’d have her ear lobes and the grease on the antimacassar as well. The dog bark makes her
think of death. Don’t ask me why, I’m not Mr Nosey. Old yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. She finds ‘In Memoriam’ so she can check up the rest of the section which starts off with Old yew etc. To touch thy thousand years of gloom. She sees that line before the others, it’s her favourite, gloom is actually her favourite word, she can snuck right up into it and hide. O not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand someone going up the back stairs. The maid, it’s all right, it’s not the mummy from the newspaper serial or Mr Hyde or Frankenstein from Frankenstein. To touch thy thousand clink. There is definitely a clink. There’s the thumping of someone going up the back stairs and a kind of clink like they’re dragging after them a ball and chain. Mrs T’s nerve count goes way up. She fingers her skin problem above her tea-gown’s fairly low neckline. She didn’t change for dinner tonight, she’s still in her tea-gown with cake crumbs down the front and no corset, she’s getting to be a slob but it’s family and her flesh has only just found its non-corsetted position, it takes hours, it’s like a sponge getting back to normal in very slow motion after being squeezed or whatever. Who is that? she says, querulously. Martita Hunt who’s playing Mrs T wanted to know how to say that line so I said querulously and wondered where the word had popped up from. Sometimes things happen like that. Martita had to have querulously explained to her so my God-given moment was a waste of time. My great-grandmother waits for an answer and discreetly smells the finger that’s been fingering her sore problem and it’s the usual smell, no change, it stinks.
Did you hear something, Mother? says Giles. He’s a little bit older, his skin is tighter over the muscle and stuff, he’s kind of a man now, nine months can make a lot of difference at this age or even at fifty-eight. He’s holding up a card like a semaphore flag or something. The other two are out of focus in the gloom. I don’t want people to see Norma Talmadge too abruptly in this scene and swoon.
Going up the stairs, says Mrs T. But it doesn’t matter.
Milly, I’d a-thought, says Dorothy. She twists round in her chair and the wicker’s really having a hard time now. Mrs T sighs and blinks so fast it reminds her of the monster scene in Conquest of the Pole so she stops. I’d a-thought Milly, Dorothy goes on. Yes, yes, says Mrs Trevelyan. She finds Dorothy’s fat helpfulness trying at times. Binker out! comes from the card table. It’s Giles. Giles has binkered out. Don’t ask me the rules of Hamilton Snap, for God’s sake, not now. Sorry, it’s not Giles, it’s William. They pretty much have the same voice sometimes. My mistake. I don’t make many. William’s raising his hand and showing three fingers. Oh come on, Willo, says Giles, you can’t give up that easily. I can and I have, says William. Giles tuts and looks across at Agatha. She shrugs in profile edged out golden by the gas-lamp on the side table. Not a great start to the scene for Norma but I’m not dealing in tinsel here. Anyway, says Willo, I want to check up on my catch. What did you find today, dear? says his mother. Willo stands and tugs his jacket straight. An uncommon variety of a common butterfly, he says. You and I might think poncy smart-ass sorry arse but remember, people talked posher in those days if they were posh, like they looked posher if they were posh. It was the same at the other end, they kept their clothes going for decades with a darning needle and they talked pretty well in dialect, things were more different when they were different, no one wore jeans for a start off – I mean not one of my stoodents wears a skirt these days, the only difference from the back is that the girls’ bottoms tend to push out and wiggle and make me look at them, it’s a great shame, I’m an unreconstructed romantic – even Zelda’s wearing jeans for crying out loud and they all talk like they’re chewing the same gum. Shaddap. Is that exciting? queries my great-grandmother. William makes a face – I can’t be more specific, the light’s bad. It all depends, he murmurs. I never understood the pleasure where your father was concerned, says Mrs T. What is the pleasure in it? William frowns and scratches the wrist under his left cuff. I am referring to your interest, my dear. She catches a small eructation of stomach gas in her fist. A fairly sizeable if dismantled hunk of beef is currently battling its way down and things are not incredibly tip-top in there, take it from me.
William is trying to deblush himself. It involves digging his nail into his palm and wiggling his ears a bit and thinking white. It never works. He’s blushed because of his mother’s selection of words and the vow he made this afternoon on Wot Hill and the recent mention of Milly the maid all kind of going into the same hot soup of his brain and spilling over his face. I’m not saying Mrs T selected words like pleasure and your interest deliberately but some of the deliberate wires in her brain are crossed with some of the undeliberate and the result is electrocution if you get too close. Hey, it’s only nine months since the classic sequence up the linden tree avenue and the oft-excerpted clip of Mrs T realising that her younger son wasn’t deceased but instead had brought scandal and ruin down on the family head so things are bound to be a bit tender still. I had a lot of incredibly subtle development but it all got up my neighbour’s nose and in his eyes because I went crazy and panicked and – hey, don’t cry over spilt milk as me muvver’d say, dabbing her eyes. If I’d kept it all in you’d have left way before the end, or gone to sleep on the floor, or maybe the hotel cleaners would’ve started to hoover around your feet for crying out loud. There’s nothing more depressing than outstaying your welcome and having people hoovering around your feet. Maybe that’s how Death’ll come – maybe Death’ll come not with a scythe but a hoover, in a hotel cleaner’s outfit, before you’ve checked behind the bedside-table for anything embarrassing like screwed-up tissues and skid-marked underpants and the middle spread of Labia and stuff. Oh shit. I feel depressed now. I’ve booked the suite until midday, for Christ’s sake. If they start to hoover and pick up the Twiglets and broken glass and underpants and barbed wire and stuff before midday then tell them scram, OK? SCRAM, like that. Unless they’re non-white, in which case the palefaces amongst you be politer because we of the unhealthy hue have a lot of colonial shit to expiate, you’re not on a cocoa plantation or something, we might as well start the fresh dawn as we mean to go on. On second thoughts, don’t say SCRAM like that even if they’re white, UNLESS they’re stoodents from New Zealand or Texas or someplace hired for the day, in which case the class oppression thing doesn’t apply and you can just kick their butts right out. See how sensitive I am, guv?
This vow. Basically it was to stop tossing off for the rest of the hols. OK. I said this scene was going to be personal. He was up on Wot Hill which is just off Mirsdyke earthwork and it’s a fairly amazing place, I’ve been there five times other than for the shoot of William standing up there with his arms crossed making this vow so that the Ancient British god asleep in Wot Hill’d take notice and make sure it was kept, and the first time I could see way out to the Black Mountains of Wales for God’s sake and decided to settle for good in the English countryside because the day was beautiful, there was this goldeny haze, the only sign of a pylon was this little flashy thing and the corn was high and the trees were full and there was even a steeple sticking up and two villages over to the left with real church towers for crying out loud. The next day it was heavy cloud cover, I was on another planet, we had to postpone the shoot, I felt terrible. I kept bumping into pylons and bungalows and refrigerator trucks unloading and stuff and when I got into my hired car with the sticky clutch (Ford Escort, what else, we have to keep the budget down somehow) and drove out on to the high downland again I got a flat tyre from an incy-wincy coil of barbed wire some agricultural jerk had left on the side and there was this incredibly depressing report on the car radio about something, I think it was on drunk Eskimos or maybe disappearing gypsies, I can’t remember now, this is two years back, it stayed grey for a week would you believe which is why I’m still in Houston, Texas, despite its complete lack of aesthet
ic or spiritual qualities apart from the Rothko Chapel where the flies know me really well by now. The point to ram home with delicacy and candour is that William is fairly screwed up at the moment but only fairly, he’ll make it through, he’ll be mentally strong and healthy enough and basically totally ready to play an extremely important, progressive and influential part in the History of Twentieth-Century European Painting by the time that fucking howitzer’s on its recoil and flipping the leaves on its camouflage net, it’s all right, I musn’t exaggerate for the sake of dramatic interest or whatever. Fuck it.
Sorry.
He’s been at home now for nine months. He has a periodic tutor by the name of Frank Franklin who’s very intense and trying to write a novel about this tutor who’s very intense and they get along fine. Maybe twenty years back it would have been different, naughty William would have gone to sea and served behind the mast or whatever. He’s been developing his drawing skills and getting deeper and deeper into lepidopterology. Basically he’s coming through. He’s lucky he’s got a mother like my great-grandmother and a father whose business is going through a bad patch so he can’t take anything else on board and who is actually a soft-hearted guy like me. If he had a mother who cared it might have been stickier, because once Mrs T had accepted the situation she forgot about it, she has a short attention span, he’s lucky. OK. This was all in the burnt rushes. It’s complex and contradictory but it took about a quarter-second for the howitzer shell to undo it all. You see why I burnt it all. Why am I making this movie? Shaddap.
