Also by Claire Rayner
A STARCH OF APRONS
THE MEDDLERS
MADDIE
CLINICAL JUDGEMENTS
CLAIRE RAYNER
POSTSCRIPTS
ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-044-8
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published 1991
Copyright © Claire Rayner 1991
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-63779
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7181 3457 5
For Lionel C. — Film maker
One
London was not at all as Abner Wiseman had expected it would be. That annoyed him; not because of the difference between reality and expectation but because it made him aware of the fact that he had any expectations at all. He had been so careful not to let himself be influenced in any way: to forget all those cosy Ealing comedies and the gritted-teeth war films that he always, in a kind of shamefaced fashion, enjoyed so much; above all, to ignore all his father had ever said about Europeans and European cities. He was coming to London with an open mind, he had told himself, a mind unpolluted by any hint of prejudice. Yet here he was, standing on the South Bank in the pearl-grey twilight of a damp February evening, staring at the National Film Theatre and finding it unexpected. It was infuriating.
The girl beside him seemed to have the air of divination.
‘It is a little dwarfed, isn’t it? The Festival Hall and the National are so very overpowering, don’t you think? And, of course, the bridge does sit on it rather, doesn’t it?’ And she peered up at the spans of Waterloo Bridge immediately overhead as though remonstrating with them.
‘Mmm?’ He was startled again. To hear someone really speaking to him in those strangled British tones and saying ‘Don’t you think?’ and ‘rather’ in that diffident way; it shouldn’t be like that. Reality was supposed to be different from the movies.
The girl led the way now, pushing past the littered tables where people sat in the dampness hunched over coffee cups in a way that amazed him (to sit outdoors in this weather? They must be crazy), and opened the doors and ushered him inside.
‘They built this place well after the others, of course. Or at least, I think so. I’m not sure whether the National Theatre was already there when they — well, it doesn’t matter. As Spencer Tracy said, “There ain’t much, but what there is is choice.’” And she threw a glance at him, sideways, so see how he responded to her attempt at a Spencer Tracy sort of accent. Kindly, he pretended she hadn’t, and smiled at her.
‘I’m sure it’s a great place,’ he said. ‘And it was very good of you to invite me. I’m looking forward to it all.’
‘Don’t expect too much, though, will you?’ she said anxiously. ‘I mean, the place is — well, the audiences we get aren’t huge you see. Just the ones who understand the medium and love it.’
He managed a grin again. ‘I guess that means you haven’t had much of a show at the booking office for me.’
She went a rich crimson, and he watched with interest as it flooded up from her neck and then slowly subsided.
‘Oh, it’s impossible to say. I mean, lots of people just drop in, and it does rather depend on what’s on the box, you see. Sometimes they have films on television that are almost as good as anything we have here. And they can rent videos too, can’t they? It all depends on people’s interests, of course.’
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he said and patted her shoulder. ‘I couldn’t give a damn — ’ and he almost added, as Clark Gable said, but stopped himself. That wouldn’t be kind. ‘You paid the air ticket, lady, you fetched me here and I appreciate that. I don’t break my heart because they don’t come battering down the doors. Anyway, they never do at home. I’m just another film maker, is all. I still don’t know why you asked me in the first place.’
‘Oh, we wanted you,’ the girl said earnestly. ‘Truly we did. I mean, we’ve had a lot of interest lately in the drama-documentary form, and you did a wonderful job on Uptown Downtown. I’m sure a lot of members will be interested — I mean, the sort who are interested in…’ Her voice trailed away as another girl came hurrying across the lobby towards them.
‘I say, Amanda!’ she called in a high treble, and at once Abner was gripped again by that frisson of surprise. People called Amanda. People saying, ‘I say’, in that breathless way. Jesus!
‘I say, is this Abner Wiseman? Yes? Oh, I’m so glad I caught you. I’ve got someone from Look and Listen here. She tried to get you at your hotel, and you’d already gone. The thing of it is, she’s in a bit of a rush, can’t stay for the screening and the question time after. Wondered if you’d mind awfully giving her a few moments now? Do you mind, Abner, may I call you Abner? It does so help to have something in Look and Listen. It’s one of our most important magazines and we’re running the film for the rest of the week of course and — ’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Glad to. Anything you say,’ and followed her down a long corridor into a small cluttered office, leaving Amanda hovering outside.
‘Good evening, Mr Wiseman.’ The woman in the room looked up, nodded, and made a half-hearted attempt to get to her feet. Abner leaned towards her and shook her hand vigorously, and she looked a little startled; and he thought, goddamnit, now I’m behaving like a stereotyped Yank in one of those British movies. It gets worse and worse.
It was all getting too much, he told himself, as he allowed the fussy girl who had brought him in to provide him with coffee and generally mother-hen him; it was all too much. A bit of jet lag, maybe? And he took a deep breath to check on how tired he was. But that told him nothing. He just knew he felt as tight as a freshly boiled frankfurter trying to burst out of its skin. His nerves seemed to stretch over the surface of his body in a net that twanged and resonated, and he took another deep breath, this time to calm himself. Crazy, all of it. To be like this just because he had come to London? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d spoken at one of those art theatre-type places. New York was crawling with them, and he’d spoken at more college movie clubs than he could remember; they even had one in Newark, and last time he’d been home to see the folks he’d spoken there, and that hadn’t worried him, even though there’d been an audience standing at the back, the place was so full.
‘It’s good of you to give me this time, Mr Wiseman.’ The woman sitting on the other side of the desk dragged him back into the present. He’d been on the verge of sliding into that damned morass of memory again. Just thinking the word ‘Newark’ had brought it up
in front of his eyes, blotting out the walls covered in movie posters and stills, the desk piled with paper and the battered filing cabinets. ‘I find it so much better to get a one-to-one conversation if I can at these events. So difficult to really get any questions dealt with in depth don’t you agree, when you’re in a crowd?’
‘It won’t be that much of a crowd,’ he said and practised his smile again. He’d done a lot of smiling since he’d got here. He felt it was necessary, faced with people who, on the whole, did not use their faces to express much at all. She looked back at him seriously and then bent her head to her notebook and scribbled.
‘Why should that be?’
He shrugged. ‘Hell, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what Miss — um — what the girl from the office said. She picked me up at the hotel and brought me here and she said — ’
‘Yes?’ the woman said, not looking up, clearly quite uninterested in how he had reached the chair facing her. It was enough he was here; and something in her manner chilled him, made him feel the way he had when he had gone through his oral examinations in graduate school.
‘Tell me, Mr Wiseman, why have you chosen to come here to London now, when in the past you’ve always refused? I remember when you got your Cannes award for Uptown Downtown the NFT invited you for a lecture, but you wouldn’t come, and I understand that the distributors wanted you to do a tour and told you they could make a lot more of your film if you’d agree to come and sponsor it, but you wouldn’t. But now, for a showing all these years later, here you are.’
She lifted her head now and looked at him and he stared back, at the long face with its unhealthy pallid skin, dark eyes behind round deliberately unfashionable glasses and the lank dust-coloured hair that framed it all. Her expression was politely enquiring but there was no real spark of humanity in there, he told himself, and felt anger begin to tighten in his belly.
‘It wasn’t convenient at the time,’ he said, and gave her a winning smile. It was important, he felt obscurely, not to let her know she had got under his skin, though why it was important he had no idea. Who was she after all? Just a goddamned journalist.
She lifted her brows. ‘Ah. Not convenient.’ And again she bent her head and scribbled in her notebook as though he’d said something of great significance. ‘It wasn’t that you didn’t think it worth your while to come to Britain with your film?’
‘Oh no! Of course not!’ He knew where he was now. This was wounded chauvinism; he’d heard New York scribblers put British directors and writers through the same hassle and now he felt more comfortable. He wouldn’t have to explain to this wall of unfriendliness about his father and the real reason he hadn’t come here before. ‘It was truly a personal thing-family-you understand?’
She lifted her brows again, and to his fury he heard the words come tumbling out of him and cursed yet again his own volubility. As if it mattered what this woman thought, as if he had to apologise. He had nothing to apologise for, but here he was, going on and on, the words rolling out of him, and he sat and listened to himself talking, knowing himself to be a fool and unable to stop it.
‘Listen, my father—I got a father, you know? And the old man got very worried about some things. Like Europe. He got very screwed up if I talked of coming to Europe. Since he was an old man, and it mattered to him—I didn’t come. It’s as simple as that, no more. An old man has a notion; so I’m a young one, but what good does it do to me to ignore his notions? He was entitled, God knows—’
‘Yet you’ve come now.’ The woman had her head a little to one side now, like a bird, watching him through those damned round glasses.
‘I’ve come now because he died,’ he said and tried to smile again. ‘I thought, this time I can come.’
‘Oh.’ It wasn’t a question, just a non-committal sound, and he shook his head at her, irritated again.
‘Now it’s convenient. So tell me, do you want to talk about me or about the film?’
‘Oh, about both,’ she said and looked down at her notebook. ‘I was just interested to know about why you were here. I thought perhaps that now the British film industry is less — anguished, shall we say, than it was, you might be planning to make your next film here.’
Relief flooded over him and beneath it, anger at himself. He did it over and over again; getting defensive when there was nothing to be defensive about. The woman hadn’t been getting at him at all, hadn’t been anti-American either. He could see that now. Her questions were perfectly reasonable, and he’d given her all that guff about his father. Goddamnit — and he sighed once more and produced his practised smile.
‘Well, not precisely. Let me say I have ideas for a film that could involve Britain — in a way.’
‘Can you explain that a little more?’ She stared at him owlishly.
‘Well, at this stage it isn’t — there isn’t a lot to explain. Let me just say that I’m doing some — um — research for a new movie.’
‘Is that all?’ Still she looked owlish, and quite without any real interest. ‘I’d heard that finance might be of interest to you here.’
He stared. ‘Who told you that?’
She waved one hand vaguely. ‘Oh, here and there. People talk, you know. In this business. You know how it is.’
‘I don’t see how anyone could talk about me and my plans,’ he said and now he let his irritation show. ‘I mean, goddamnit, I hardly know what they are myself yet.’
How the hell did this woman know that he was trawling for backers here? Did she know, too, that at home he wasn’t regarded as worth a bent dime? That he’d tried all the usual ways and got nowhere? Great stuff you make, Abner, they’d all said, or something like it. Great stuff. For the art houses, you know. Not commercial, hey? And right now we’re looking for returns on our dollars. Not a good time, Abner. Come back in a year or two.
So he’d talked to one or two people and they’d told him there was money in Europe, if he went looking for it, and then Hyman had died and — but he didn’t want to think about his father and so he didn’t. Instead he glared at the woman opposite him.
‘I’m still at the preliminary stages,’ he said stiffly.
She nodded. ‘So I heard right. Will it be the same sort of film as Uptown Downtown?’
‘You mean will it be about drugs and kids on the streets? No.’ He was tired of it, sick and tired of it. He’d made half a dozen films, on a hell of a lot of different themes, but the only one they ever remembered was U.D. Not that he had anything against it; it had won him his Oscar, albeit in a largely disregarded documentary category, though it wasn’t really a documentary at all — but there it was; that was how the Academy had categorised it. And it wasn’t a bad film. In fact, it had been a damned good one and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. But then Yesterday’s Babies had been good too, and that had been about something quite different; and what about Wall of Silence? Yet all these goddamned people ever asked about was U.D. Well, he’d change all that. Wait until they saw what he’d do with this one. It was going to be —
‘What then?’
‘At this stage I’d rather not say — ’ he began but she shook her head at him.
‘Oh, you should, really you should, Mr Wiseman.’ For the first time she smiled, an odd little wriggle of the lips that vanished almost as soon as it appeared. ‘If you’re looking for backing it could do a lot for you to have something about it in Look and Listen. We’re quite a powerful magazine, you know.’
‘Everyone says that,’ he said and stared at her. He was sick and tired of puffed-up scribblers labelling themselves and their two-bit rags as the be-all and end-all.
‘And everyone’s right,’ she said, almost heartily. ‘Look and Listen is the best. So you might as well tell me. It’ll be a useful thing for you to do.’
He was amused then; the thickness of some skins! And his amusement made him relax. After all, where was the harm? And she had a point at that. Maybe someone in the business would read about him and what
he was looking for, and come out of the woodwork looking for him instead of leaving him to make all the running.
‘Well, why not? OK, I’m planning a film to be called Postscripts. It’ll be a feature film again, but like U.D. — I’m sorry, Uptown Downtown — based on real people in a real situation. The fewest actors I can get away with, real people living their own lives is what I want — ’
‘What sort of lives?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘American lives like U.D.? Or Brazilian lives like Yesterday’s Babies? Or even prisoners’ lives like Wall of Silence?’
The last of his hostility faded in a wash of gratitude. Someone who remembered his very first film; it was as though she’d kissed him. ‘You liked Wall of Silence?’
‘It was fascinating,’ she said primly, and he laughed aloud.
‘Wow, that was some put-down,’ he said and made a rueful face. ‘I should know better than to ask.’
‘Well, it was a first film. There’d be something wrong if it was your best, wouldn’t there?’ She still wasn’t smiling, but it was clear to him now that this woman wasn’t at all unpleasant. He seeming hostility was no more than shyness taken to a painful degree, and he wondered briefly how come someone as in-turned as this lady clearly was should be a journalist. And he shook himself a little. How come anyone like him should be a moviemaker? We all do what we fall into doing. These things happen to us; we don’t ordain them. And he grinned at the pomposity of his own thought and nodded at her.
‘Well, I suppose so.’
‘So, what sort of lives?’
‘Pardon me?’ He had been thinking his own thoughts again and blinked at her, a little confused.
‘The new film. What sort of lives will it be about? These people living their own real lives in real situations. What sort of — ’
‘Oh yes. Well, now, this is a difficult thing to explain. But I’ll try. The Holocaust — ’
Her face seemed to stiffen. ‘Oh, I see. You’re making a fiftieth anniversary film?’
Postscripts Page 1
