by Leah McLaren
In the window was a glittering brass etching of the Madonna and Baby Jesus. The mother’s eyes were downcast in an expression of milky shyness. Her infant son, by contrast, was improbably alert. In one tiny hand he held his mother’s naked breast like a piece of fruit he was saving for later; the other hand was raised in the air as though he were just coming to the punch line of a complicated anecdote.
Meredith turned and saw two little girls in duffle coats and pirate hats returning from church or brunch with their parents. The adults—slim, tweedy bohemians in their mid-thirties—bickered gently over something. The children amused themselves in the square by jumping up and down on a bench they had found with a loosened board.
“My turn!” the smaller girl demanded, outraged when her sister refused to yield her place on the sproingy surface. The wood groaned and threatened to snap under the older girl’s weight. Meredith felt a twinge of panic. She had a mental vision of the crack, the little girl falling backward, head hitting the cement, a tiny stocking-clad leg rammed into a splintery crevice. The parents, however, seemed oblivious to danger. They looked back and continued their halfhearted dispute (the wife was obviously winning). The girls switched places.
She continued on her run, heading south toward the river, through Ladbroke Grove, across Holland Park Road and into the land of million-pound urban manor homes with their splendid glass awnings and great bowed front windows. Here was one of the few areas in London where residents reserved the right to live in much the same way that their recent ancestors had. Domestics in uniform threw open shutters and gardeners swept stray twigs off flagstones and dumped them into mulch buckets. Meredith ran on, inhaling the expensive perfume of other people’s lives.
Eventually she came to an ivy-covered wall with a small door in it. Meredith darted through and ran up a crooked set of log stairs embedded in the mud. She remembered Holland Park from the haze of early childhood; only then it had seemed less like a park and more like an enchanted forest. She continued through the cultivated glades and garden paths, past the man-made pond with the statue of grumpy Lord Holland in the middle, down the laurel walk, and through the Kyoto Garden with its tinkly waterfall and tiny Japanese houses made out of stone. She cut across the periwinkle ground cover and ran through a gap in the hibiscus shrub, and when she emerged she found herself in a topiary maze surrounded by low walls. Women were pushing carriages—perambulators—with plastic tents draped overtop to keep out the mist.
Meredith jogged on the spot for a moment, trying to decide where to go next. Through a spray of willow branches, she glimpsed a swish of peacock feathers, tempting her back farther, around the bend in the path to where the gardens opened up to the rest of the green.
When she turned the corner, Meredith felt almost physically assaulted by the view before her. In the center of the path was an island of grass fenced off by a series of knee-high iron arches. The animal sanctuary was a sort of cageless zoo populated by terminally bored peacocks and tamed rabbits snacking on compost. It was not the scene that shocked her but the memory. Meredith knew exactly what it felt like to reach her hands out in front of her chest and feel those very iron arches in her fists. Looking at their height, she couldn’t have been more than four or five at the time.
Yes, it was all bleeding through, like one screen image dissolving into another. A day much brighter than this one, and cooler too, judging by the bite of the metal in her grip. A scratchy wool beret on her head she wished she could take off but didn’t dare. They had come here to feed the rabbits. Or one particular rabbit, who Meredith believed was Peter the Rabbit despite the fact that he was black.
This was the memory: the hand of a man reaching down toward her. Skin like soft, worn leather and hairy at the knuckles. On the pinky finger was a ring. A thick gold band. A flash of jade. In her memory, the hand unfolded before her eyes to reveal—what was it? Something pale green and waxy. A wedge of cabbage? Of course! To feed the bunny. And then herself, a small child, still wobbly on her feet, taking the cabbage and throwing it over the fence, giggling, waiting for the black bunny to come and fetch his treat. Meredith could see the bunny, the cabbage, the big hand that she reached for, but try as she might she could not bring the whole man into focus.
11
If only they wouldn’t touch her so much.
After autograph hounds and those nude photos on the Internet, the touching was definitely the worst thing about Kathleen Swain’s job. The poking, the prodding, the fiddling with laces and clips and zippers. The powdering and repowdering and pincurling and plucking of follicles. In her twenty-five years as a working actress, Kathleen had been groomed to within an inch of her life, and she was sick of it. But the more the preening annoyed her, the more she needed it. The vicious cycle of aging. And so she submitted to the ever--burgeoning hours of adjustments. Some days she felt that if one more smiling lady came at her with a daub of liquid foundation, or a yawning eyelash curler, she would simply disappear—poof!—having been primped to death.
Not to mention the misery of small talk. Day after day, hour upon hour of sitting in an overheated trailer trying to turn the conversation around to what the hairstylist did for her summer vacation. (As if she cared! And yet, one obviously couldn’t talk about oneself. She’d learned her lesson on that score after she showed up for makeup one morning several years earlier with an unstoppable nosebleed, then spotted the following week’s tabloid headline: KAY SWAIN DRUGS HELL—accompanied by a paparazzo shot of her stumbling out of the gym without makeup.) No, these people, as chatty and folksy as they might seem, were not to be trusted. And the only way to get them to stop asking questions about you was to ask them questions about themselves, their families and their grim little Wal-Mart-furnished lives. This, however, required feigning an interest. And while Kathleen Swain was paid millions to pretend emotions she did not feel in front of the camera, she found doing the same thing in real life to be a chore.
Luckily Vicky from Essex, the new makeup artist on the Crouch show, seemed to need absolutely no prompting when it came to pouring out the details of her personal life. As she put the final touches on Kathleen’s eyeliner, she continued the monologue she’d launched into forty-five minutes earlier when she began sponging beige foundation on her subject’s forehead.
“An’ I told ’im the last time I saw ’im, I did. I said, darling, I love you too, but I ain’t putting up wif no more of this nonsense wiffout a ring. I’m a traditional girl, see? Not one a fese old slappers who jes goes ’round shagging everyfing that moves fer the bloody fun of it. If ’e wants a good time, ’e can go down the road and get ’iself some of that, ’e can.”
Kathleen’s gaze slid over to the portable television in the corner. The volume was turned down on an episode of a soap opera, one of those grim dramas that followed the lives of a group of depressed and unattractive poor people living in a hard-luck town—the sort of show that could have been made only in Britain. Or Canada. On the screen a teenage girl was spoon-feeding mashed banana to an infant. An old man in a shopkeeper’s apron walked into the frame and they began to shout at each other, jaws chomping noiselessly at the air.
Just as Vicky was about to launch into the story of her sister’s recent divorce (“Di’int trust ’im as far as I could throw ’im. And was I right?”), the trailer door swung open and the new costume girl staggered in carrying a bale of petticoats, purple taffeta and corsetry that made Kathleen’s lower back spasm just looking at it.
“Morning ladies,” said Mish, dumping the garments on the nearest daybed. “Another frock for the return rack. Our dear director has decided he doesn’t like taffeta—apparently it interferes with the light.”
Vicky acknowledged Mish with only the slightest nod. As she applied a final dusting of powder to the plasticized tip of Kathleen’s nose, Vicky continued with her story. “As I was saying, Miss Swain, my sister Abbie, she gets ’itched up to this bloke and wiffin two months the police is called in ’cause ’ees—”
Kathleen turned her cheek and Vicky hovered above her face with the powder puff. “Vicky, I think that’s enough for now. It’s time I got into my costume. You’re free to go.”
As Vicky packed up her case and huffed out of the room, Kathleen turned her attention to Mish. The girl had her back to Kathleen and was anxiously sorting through a rack of vintage undergarments, which, with their array of laces and stays and hooks, resembled torture devices. Even more painful to look at was Mish’s own outfit, Kathleen thought. How could she bend over—let alone walk—in that skirt and those ridiculous clogs? And that black lace top—it was simply beyond the beyond. A one-way ticket to the back pages of Us magazine, if worn on a red carpet—which, thank God for this girl, it never would be. She watched without lifting herself from the makeup chair as Mish dropped an ancient garter belt between two hatboxes.
“Fuckbugger. Sorry, Ms. Swain, I’ll be with you in just a moment.”
Kathleen felt a rare but not unfamiliar wave of self-disgust wash over her. When did I become such a complete bitch? she wondered. Was it before or after wardrobe girls started having better bodies than me? She vowed to try to be nicer to her inferiors, more folksy and down to earth, like Julia Roberts, who was said to always be chumming around with the crew and who had actually ended up marrying that handsome second camera assistant.
Mish handed Kathleen a piece of stretchy flesh-toned undergarment that looked, to Kathleen’s eye, like a linebacker’s jockstrap.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s for under your corset. To keep everything...smooth.”
“And who requested this, may I ask?”
Mish seemed to stiffen. Smiled. “No one requested it. The company sent it to me and I just thought you might want to try it. Apparently Nicole Kidman wore one all the way through Cold Mountain.”
“Nicole?” Kathleen wrinkled her nose and looked down at the support garment, held gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. “But she’s a stick.”
“Exactly.” Mish nodded.
“Well, okay. I guess it can’t hurt, can it?” Kathleen smiled. On second thought there was something about this new girl she liked. Trusted, even. In fact, she seemed to recall having had a conversation with her earlier in the shoot. Or was that the other one with the dark hair? Anyway, she felt unusually relaxed with these Canadians. English accents made her tense. She slipped off her robe and began struggling into the girdle, rotating her hips like a novice belly dancer while hoisting the elastic up over her thighs. Mish stepped behind her and began to help.
“I’ve become such a disgusting pig ever since I started trying for a baby,” Kathleen laughed, feeling proud of herself for employing self-deprecating humor (very endearing and down-to-earth). “It’s all the folic acid I have to eat now. Bowls and bowls of peanuts all day long. I mean, really you’re only supposed to have a small handful, but I haven’t allowed myself nuts in decades. Once I get started I can’t stop. It’s like...”
“A free-for-all?”
“Exactly! A nut orgy. Oh—ow.” Kathleen winced as Mish tugged the corset strings in another quarter of an inch.
“Sorry, almost done.” Mish double-knotted the string and began rummaging through the rack for the matching petticoat. “How’s that going, then?”
Kathleen exhaled to make her rib cage as narrow as possible. “Oh, fine. You know.”
Actually Mish didn’t. Nor did she bother to say so.
The digital trill from a tiny silver cell phone distracted Swain. She pressed the phone to her ear with one hand and waved the other like a flipper. “Just a second. Where’s that remote?”
Mish dropped the laces and began searching the trailer until she found it under a copy of HEAT magazine.
“Oprah,” said Swain, and then, directing her attention into the phone, “She’s just getting it. What channel again? Twenty-four? Okay. I’ll call you after.”
Mish turned on the TV and there was the Most Loved Woman in the World. The studio audience applauded hysterically until Winfrey shushed them with four papal sweeps of her arms.
“And on today’s show we’ll be talking about the issue of late-in-life fertility,” Oprah was teleprompted. “Specifically, how late is too late? When should a woman start to worry and when is it too late to try? We’ll be talking to a group of women who have succeeded in conceiving later in life—one of our guests had her first baby at the age of fifty-two! Can you believe that, y’all? And a couple of other women who have not succeeded in making their dreams of motherhood come true, despite the best medical efforts. Some of these women felt they waited too long, and they are here to tell other women who want to conceive not to make the same mistake they did by putting things off until it’s just too late.”
Mish, who had been searching for a needle and thread to repair a hem, fell still. “Do you want me to come back later?” she asked.
“No, no, stay,” said Swain. “That was my assistant calling. My fertility doctor in L.A. is going on maternity leave, so we have to find another specialist and apparently there’s this guy on Oprah who’s written some book. Can you believe what a coincidence this is? I mean, we were just talking about this and now it’s on Oprah—it must be a sign.”
Swain motioned for silence as the commercials finished and the Oprah theme music introduced the next segment.
“Our expert today is Dr. Joe Veil, a fertility specialist and the author of Baby Love: The New Battle for Motherhood. He’s here to give us the straight goods on what women trying to get pregnant later in life can realistically expect. Now tell us, Dr. Veil, what kind of odds is an average woman facing who’s decided she wants to get pregnant at, say, the age of forty? We see it all the time on television, or in the tabloids. Seems every established middle-aged movie star and pop singer is walkin’ around with a bump these days. Is it really as easy as they make it look?”
The camera swiveled over to Dr. Joe Veil. He loosened his collar as he spoke. “Actually, Oprah, it’s not as easy as it looks.” Dr. Veil launched into a litany of the risks and difficulties involved in late-in-life pregnancies. Swain, however, was too busy swooning to listen.
“He’s a dish, isn’t he? Did she say he’s a practising fertility specialist?”
“I hink ho.” Mish’s mouth was full of pins.
Swain stabbed a finger into her phone keypad and began talking almost immediately. “I think he could be the one. Yeah—yeah. That’s him. Find out for me as soon as you can. I don’t care if we have to fly him over here and put him up at the Ritz. Get him yesterday. Me want.”
She got off the phone and let out a significant whoosh. Mish was doing up the final buttons of her collar.
“Do you have children?” Swain asked.
“I haven’t got a maternal bone in my body.” Mish grabbed Swain’s dress off the rack so fiercely she felt the shoulder seam rip. “We’d better get you on set. You’re already late for your call.”
“Oh, for Chrissake, where is she?”
Richard was agitated and talking to himself. Meredith, who was sitting in her usual spot to the left, pretended not to hear. Instead, she focused on her notes for the next scene.
The shoot had moved locations to Kewkesbury Park, a sprawling Edwardian country house located at the end of the Northern tube line, and the crew had just finished setting up for one of the film’s most complicated and expensive segments—the ballroom dancing scene. Dozens of extras from the London Ballet Academy milled around the set waiting to take their places for the waltz sequence. They held their heads self-consciously high (even for dancers) as a result of the rustling vintage silks they wore, the women in bustles and the men in tails and top hats. The crew members moved among them adjusting lights and lenses in militaristic form.
Kathleen Swain was late for her call and things were behind schedule as usual. Meredith had spent much of the morning wandering from room to room, exploring the corridors and back stairwells, each one leading to another set of rooms that opened onto another s
et of rooms. The place was damp and drafty, the ancient plaster striped with water marks from the rain that had seeped its way indoors over the years. Everything reeked of mold. And yet, to Meredith (who had a fondness for the ancient and austere), the place was beautiful.
The house, after all, was very nearly a celebrity in and of itself. In the past couple of years alone it had appeared in dozens of BBC Agatha Christie dramas, and a reality TV series in which middle-class Brits reenacted the life of Edwardian aristocrats and their servants, as well as doubling as the interior of Windsor Castle in the TV version of Diana: Her True Story. So much production went on here, in fact, that the owner, an impoverished duke who bred dorgis (a demented-looking cross between dachshunds and corgis), had confined his living quarters to three rooms above the garage at the end of the lane. While production companies and tourists overran the grand house of his ancestors, the duke lived the cramped, frugal existence of an inner-city welfare recipient.
The crew had been waiting for Swain for most of the morning, and now Richard was becoming visibly agitated. He had already sent the first assistant around to her trailer twice, to no avail. Meredith pulled a chair over to a corner of the room, not far from the monitor where Richard was pacing and tossing out commands to his crew, and began to scribble down the complicated set of shot descriptions they had discussed the day before in rehearsal. Start MS angle toward ballroom door. Inspector enters. Pan his walk X-L-R across room past waltzing dancers. Hold Full 4/should over Inspector to Miss Celia seated on the sidelines...And so on, describing the entire scene through the unblinking eye of the camera in her secret continuity girl language. Meredith spent so much time at work translating, in cryptic point-form and code, what things looked like from the outside, that she often amused herself by doing the same thing in real life. Bored on the subway or over dinner, she would find herself making shot descriptions of scenes as they were playing themselves out.
