by Nigel Planer
THE RIGHT MAN
Nigel Planer
For George and Lesley
ONE
OH DEAR, I’M not yet forty, and I seem to have gone straight from my adolescence into my mid-life crisis without a pause for the prime of my life. There’s never been a bit where I felt, if not exactly in control, then at least at ease. The last two thousand years of much-publicised male supremacy are meant, surely, to have rubbed off on me somewhere along the way. Surely I should be basking even. But it hasn’t felt like that at all. Blimey dimey no. Even now, I am aware how difficult it is for me to admit that there are problems. I am meant to solve problems, not bleed them on to a page.
People always say, ‘You must have known. Some part of you, inside, must have known.’ I contest this. Why must I have known? I did not know. Maybe all the signs were there but I did not go looking for them, maybe I even ignored them. I hate being undermined by those who talk of ‘knowing somewhere inside yourself, as if it was Muggins’s fault not to have been more introspective, more self-doubting, more bloody Freudian. Accidents happen. You walk in front of a bus — maybe your mind is on other things — you don’t know somewhere-deep-inside that it’s going to accelerate and break your pelvis. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to tell whether to feel extraordinarily buoyant, or the other thing. Especially in this business. I didn’t think about it. That I accept. I just didn’t think. Actresses are notoriously promiscuous. Of all people, I should have known that, of course. Liz was not happy, I knew that, and I had redoubled my efforts to make her life more fulfilling. I’d tried to spend more time at home. To switch off work. But our special mornings set aside for romance had been a disaster — difficult when you’ve both been up sharing the feeds — and of course even with all the phones turned down, you can still hear the answer-phone click. But Liz had gone off me sexually well before Grace was born. She no longer bothered to go through the motions, and flinched like a scalded mongoose if I touched her. And when I tried to put my arm around her she would say, ‘I’m not your puppy, you know.’ The underwear I bought her after the birth went down like a serrated steak knife. I was doing my best to change but these days it seemed I couldn’t do anything right.
I just put it down to what she told me to put it down to: that she was worried about getting pregnant, that she was pregnant, that she was breast-feeding, that it had been too late at night, that it had been too early, that it had been too quick for her, that it had been too slow. When we did make love, she used to bark instructions at me, up a bit, down a bit, harder, softer, don’t stop, stop. She chinned me once with her knee, when trying to find a suitable position in a small hotel bed. She’d laughed then and I’d had to go to the doctor with a split lip. After a couple of years of it, I have to admit, I had turned into a bit of a Freddie Fumble and could have won a gold at the Olympics if they had a premature ejaculation event. But I still don’t see how I could have actually known.
‘Hello. You don’t know me. My name’s Sara Henderson. I’m Bob’s wife.’ The voice had a husky waver to it, with the faintest hint of a European accent. Sara was pronounced with a long ‘aa’. As soon as I was sure I’d made the connection, I transferred from the ‘announce’ speaker to line 3, my personal one, cutting out all the warring sounds from the busy office, and Joan, who had taken the call for me, returned her attention to others.
Bob Henderson, Bob Henderson. The slight pause that followed allowed me to run through the two hundred or so names in the immediate-recall part of my brain. Nothing. Either Bob Henderson was not directly connected to me, my clients or any public broadcasting or independent production companies, or my memory was indeed beginning to hit overload. Premature dementia how do you do.
‘Oh, Mrs Henderson. Yes,’ I said with a smile in my voice. This is where I live, in the one-on-one world between mouth and earpiece. This is where my waking hours are spent. ‘What’s this in connection with?’ I didn’t want to let her know that I hadn’t a wit-not-wot who she or her husband were, in case I should have known. It worried me that nowadays, Naomi — the Ketts half of Mullin and Ketts — was right; I was beginning to lose my edge.
I pushed up ‘Henderson R.’ on my Psion.
‘I would like to talk to you, Mr Mullin. I’m sorry to ring you at work like this.’
‘That’s all righty. It’s what I’m here for.’
The only thing to come up was Henderson and Giggs, a company of solicitors who had represented the Elephant film studios in that breach of copyright case with Carlton TV two years ago. Nothing really to do with me, I don’t even know why I had them there.
‘It’s about Bob and Elizabeth.’
Elizabeth Heyton. One of my lesser actress clients was a few names down the list on my Psion. She’d done a fair amount of voice-work, some of it must have been for Elephant; my mind was making wild connections. Had Elizabeth Heyton been uncharacteristically inebriated in a dubbing session and wrecked the joint?
‘Could we perhaps meet for a cup of coffee or something? I can’t go into all this on the phone. I’m round the corner from your office at the moment actually. I’m sorry,’ the Saara woman purred.
In the main office, Naomi and Tilda, our trainee, had the champagne out early — celebrating some minor revenge they’d wreaked on the BBC. I declined to join them for a plastic beakerful, put on my coat and went out into the raging cacophony of the Soho day. Like an unbearable unstructured concrete jazz piece with an intrusive brass section. I’m very sensitive to noise.
It was surprisingly warm, with a breeze. The outside world disappears when at work in Meard Street, suddenly to hit you in the face on descending into Soho. London was gearing up early for the tourist influx. Up in the control tower of Mullin and Ketts one might as well be on the moon or in an arctic shelter for all one is aware of the seasons, or the natural world. When it’s cold, we all say it’s cold and turn up the heating. When it’s hot, we curse and open the windows. It’s not a frightfully modern building and so doesn’t possess air-conditioning, which is just as well as far as I’m concerned; the constant sound of humming gets on my nerves.
I suppose I love Soho, but more from a sort of protracted osmosis than any actual passion. I’ve been squeezing a living out of it for more than a decade now. Tucked up behind Shaftesbury Avenue, its narrow buildings — some of them like ours at Meard Street dating back to the eighteenth century — heaped on top of each other in a jumble of opposites. Old Soho ironmongers and delicatessens are the off-beats to a rhythm of changing restaurant fronts. The gay and street-bar scene co-exists with traditional prostitution and strip-joint businesses. Below grimy plastic signs saying ‘Model’ open doors lead to uneven narrow staircases. Outside skin-flick houses, bored and over-made-up women say ‘Live girls, sir’ to the street in general. It would be no place to bring up a child.
Patisserie Valerie was crowded as usual and I had to squeeze in between two pony-tailed ‘indie’ execs to get one seat and hold another. In here the sharp edges of the hubbub were dampened by the cakes and bread on the shelves which lined the walls. I scanned all the faces of women on their own for a possible Sara Henderson. No one reacted particularly. I ordered a coffee.
An expensive- and theatrical-looking woman found the door and after peering through the window, came in and stood anxiously by the crowded counter, looking for someone inside. For me. She was wearing unnecessary dark glasses and had on a considerable amount of jewellery. I waited a couple of seconds, taking her in, before lifting my hand to draw her attention. She turned her gaze rather dramatically in my direction and started shaking her head. Puzzled, I stood up and squeezed back past the pony-tails.
‘Mr Mullin? We can’t talk here, it’s far too public,’ she said and plucked at my sleeve. She had too mu
ch lipstick on and little deposits of it had clustered at the corners of her mouth. There was an enveloping scent as well.
‘Well, I … Let’s go somewhere else then,’ I said. And without thinking, held the door for her. She seemed to expect it.
If this woman hadn’t been, or at some point aspired to be, an actress, I would have eaten my Filofax.
‘Where will you take me?’ she whispered, like a slave girl in a Spartacus movie, as if it was a foregone conclusion that I wanted to ravish her.
We were heading towards the Groucho and the Soho House but somehow I didn’t fancy taking this unknown Bette Davis figure among the biz-folk. Who knows how embarrassing she might turn out to be?
I turned into the first sandwich bar we came across and sat her down in the back, away from the window, on a little black wire chair.
‘Is she very beautiful, your Elizabeth? Tell me. Do you love her a lot?’
‘Listen. Mrs Henderson. You’re going to have to go previous a bit with this. I really don’t actually know who you are, or what I’m doing here.’
‘I am Sara.’ Again, with the long Russian-sounding ‘aa’.
‘Well, I’m Guy. How do you do?’
‘You have a child, Guy?’
‘Yes, we have a child, Grace, but …’
‘This is very difficult for me,’ she said and went quiet as my coffee and her mineral water arrived.
We sat in our own pool of silence for a few seconds in the middle of the shouting sprawl, during which she looked at me all the time, and then she picked up her tiny black designer handbag and, with unsteady hands, picked out a tissue and a photograph.
She dabbed at her nose with the tissue. Her nails were perfect and painted. She passed me the photograph, putting the tissue back in her bag, which she left open on her lap.
The photograph was of three rather ugly boys in white shirts with matching tartan ties, aged probably between eight and eleven. It wasn’t a relaxed home pic but a formal studio job, with the boys lined up in size order, on a bench. Their faces professionally angled in three-quarter profile, their hair neatly parted. I nodded and handed it back to her. It went into the bag with a snap.
‘I don’t like to do this,’ she said, ‘but these are my boys.’
Momentarily, I considered taking out the photo of Grace, standing with no knickers in a bucket in the garden, which lives in my wallet. But it seemed inappropriate.
‘He has a family from before as well,’ she said. ‘He has done this before.’
She had taken out a ten-pound note and put it on the table under her glass. She rose.
‘Forgive me,’ she said. I stood and sat again. At the door of the sandwich bar she gave me a long, intense look, the meaning of which was obscure and then turned away swiftly and left. Perfect timing had we been in a black-and-white 1930s movie; somewhat camp for Soho in 1998.
I sat finishing my coffee. I took out the photo of Grace in the bucket and put the tenner in my wallet. I paid with change from my pocket and walked back towards Mullin and Ketts.
Without really thinking, I walked past our door and all the way up Frith Street to Soho Square. I walked around Soho Square. I walked into Soho Square and sat on a bench, just across from three cider drinkers. One of them started to approach me so I left Soho Square and walked north.
The entertainment business fizzles out somewhere beyond Great Titchfield Street, although I did have to smile hello at a video editor I know, and at Johnnie Starkey, an elderly agent, who must have been on his way back to Golden Square after a Greek lunch.
I kept walking.
Things like this don’t happen to me. Its meaning was surely clear and yet so clichéd as to be unbelievable. I ran it past myself several times to see if I could get the joke. Had Sara Henderson been hired by someone? Was she a sort of ‘affair-o-gram’? It was half past four and the sound of the traffic was getting to me. Back in the office, the girls were already a tad pissed. As I hurriedly got my things together to leave, a not-joining-in-ness from Naomi told me that the females had probably been talking about me while I had been out walking.
I have discussed infidelity often with Naomi — in theory, of course — and once or twice with Joan and Tilda. You get to do that kind of thing if you work in an all-female environment. They don’t like those close to them to hold differing opinions, I’ve discovered, there has to be a sort of common ground. They want everyone to feel the same way about things, and about men in particular. One year they even managed somehow to synchronize their periods. That was tough on me, as you can imagine. One thing agreed by all the women in the office was that the secret to a good relationship is finding the right man. The moment he shows signs of being typically like other men, non-attentive or unable to commit, or just plain wrong, then the consensus was he should be dropped or avoided and the search must continue.
The irony of this wisdom as far as Naomi Ketts was concerned was that she was an absolutely hopeless judge of character, falling again and again for charismatic men with power, money and, inevitably, wives and children. She would announce these disasters regularly at work and in wine bars, well, to anyone willing to listen actually. The last one was with quite a big-shot BBC producer, whose name I withhold, who got dropped in the franchise reshuffle and moved to Nottingham with his wife and kids. We always knew when old Ketts had found one. She would become indignant, self-pitying and shirty for a few months. Angry with her lot in life. A tough and brassy woman at work, but in her lonely flat in Highgate a hopeless co-dependent looking for big daddy. When I asked her if the man’s wife knew, she said, ‘She must have known, everybody knew.’ It was true that everybody did most likely know. Naomi is never the most discreet of women when it comes to sexual matters. But in this case I suspected ‘everybody’ included everybody except the man’s wife. I felt sorry for them all, and for Naomi’s shrink, who must have had even more of an earful of it than all of us at Muffin and Ketts. I wondered if I was the only person in the whole of glorious show-business who didn’t know about Bob Henderson and my Liz.
The female orgasm, that’s the rub. That’s the blinking bafflement. With men, the word orgasm refers to a specific moment in time: the moment of ejaculation — or, as the Australians would have it, ‘slime’, as in ‘Have you slimed yet?’ However, with women it seems to be more of a generic term, and is something on which surprisingly few of the women of my acquaintance seem to agree. In my years of working in an all female environment, I have heard the female orgasm defined in so many different ways as to warrant a sub-section in the dictionary, like the Innuit and their supposed hundred and fifty words for snow. Some women say they have never had an orgasm, some only when masturbating, some are exclusively clitoral, some come all over, others from nipple stimulation, one maintaining that only breast-feeding was truly orgasmic. Some go multiple, others once a year. Some can only achieve fulfilment within intimacy, others only with illicit lovers, casual sex or strangers. If the ads are to be believed, high-calorie ice— cream has something to do with it, as do motorcycles, chocolate, caring conversation and model boys covered in car grease. Tania in the office flies in the face of current accepted wisdom, claiming she can come only from repeated vaginal penetration with her boyfriend in the missionary position. Highly unfashionable. Despite this multiplicity of opinion, ‘You never made me come’ is still one of the worst put-downs available to a woman when trying to humiliate an irritating mate. There is also the faking option — unavailable to men — although my Liz would not have bothered with that one. I sometimes wish she had; it might at least have shown willing.
Once I timed her. I know that’s unromantic, but twenty-four minutes! Eighteen minutes of stimulation with no sign of life from her, then a few brief minutes of arousal — still with her eyes closed — followed by her orgasm: twenty seconds of groaning and a slight tremble followed by silence. Maybe I should have tried harder, been sexier, but my arm was tired. I was worried I might develop Repetitive Strain Injury. I ran out of
dirty talk after four minutes, which may make me sound like a wimp, but four minutes is one minute longer than a pop record and eight times longer than the average commercial.
Ever onwards. In the half-hour I’d been out dealing with Mrs Henderson and her theatrics there were nine call-back messages for me, three scripts to skim and the problem of the undelivered manuscript of Neil James’s first novel to deal with. Neil was turning into a problem client in general. A blunder kid. Too much mopping up to do, not enough creative play.
Naomi Ketts and I worked ridiculously hard to get this agency off the ground and keep it flapping about in the sparkly blue. It’s taken us ten years of near obsessive dedication. We’ve been through a lot together and now have developed a working relationship which is completely symbiotic. Often, we don’t even need to speak, we know what the other is thinking before it has been thought. But unlike me, she still gets a thrill out of the whole shebang. She still flies off the handle, shouts at the girls, gets rip-roaringly drunk to celebrate a deal clinched. Still goes to see all the new shows. Studies the business press like a circling vulture. Still vibrates to the electric charge of it all. She still needs that entertainment-biz petrol.
I can’t really call it a mid-life crisis — I’m too young for that, I hope — but in the last couple of years I’ve definitely gone through some sort of sci-fi dooweeoo time shuffle. Much of what goes on at work just seems, well, adolescent to me now, and it’s definitely to do with Grace. April the fifth 1994, 2.30 a.m., 8lb 3oz. When they bunged her, covered in white stuff, her fanny all blue, into my arms at Queen Charlotte’s that night, I had a profound feeling of something. Not that everything else became meaningless, not that. But priorities suddenly seemed to shift into a different focus. A new sense of proportion prevailed.
What I’ve been trying to do since Grace was born is to narrow down my field of hands-on operation to just seven clients, my ‘heavy seven’. Maybe a couple more: Jenny Thompson perhaps, Simon Eggleston — Barbara Stenner of course — but basically, keep my personal client list small enough to be able to take a more active role in child-rearing. Ideally, I would like to work only three days a week, maybe doing the rest from home. Obviously I could never stop seeking out new talent — that would be unsafe — but I am very happy nowadays to delegate work on my forty or so other clients, to Naomi or Tilda in the office. Both of whom are more than competent.
