The Right Man (11 page)

‘You
see?’ she said, putting the heater on for me. ‘You go and get yourself killed
and I get hit on by some mad rapist in the park.’

She was
right about the sign. It was a completely foolish thing to wade in, thigh-deep,
to try and save an unknown bearded man who had probably drowned some hours or
even days before.

Liz’s
parents separated when she was seven, so she had to learn about loss and
secrets and lies as a child. A good training for grown-up life, it would seem.
Sometimes I feel that having parents who did not divorce puts one at a serious
disadvantage. I, whose parents had stayed together until death parted them
three weeks ago, walked out into the large world with the body of a grown man
and the emotional cunning of a newborn goose. Maybe this was why she was able
to avoid telling me about her Bob. She felt comfortable making separate
compartments out of her life: sex in one place, work in another, children
another, security a fourth, and so on. She felt at ease with the deception
necessary to keep the whole train going. I think of her now as one of those toy
snakes made from slices of bamboo which are joined with wire — each segment a
separate entity but the whole thing moving with a frighteningly real
slinkiness. People like that never seem to suffer the consequences of their
actions, can always shift the responsibility down a couple of segments, causing
no more than a gentle ripple in the whole body, which is often mistaken by mugs
like me for attractiveness. I asked her again about our lives together, hoping
she would volunteer the truth. She assumed I was pressurizing her for sex
again.

‘I
couldn’t possibly sleep with a man I didn’t respect. Surely that’s obvious,’
she said.

‘Why do
you feel you need to look up to a man before you can have a relationship with
him?’ I was diving in now with pointless abandon.

‘I said
respect, not look up to,’ she said, right as usual, and started to make herself
a cup of coffee without getting a cup out for me, or asking if I wanted one
too.

I had
followed her into the kitchen, the only neutral space in the flat.

I
supposed I would have earned her respect more had I been more decisive, had I
either dived straight into the water, thereby heroically drowning myself in the
effort to save him, or been more realistic and known that the guy was a goner,
and phoned the police myself Instead, I had run about a bit, tripped over, got
myself wet and failed to get rid of the weirdo in the yellow shirt. This is
what I imagine she meant by respect. I had not looked like someone you could
respect. I had been ineffectual, clumsy and covered in Thames mud.

‘That’s
not what I meant,’ she hurled back at me, and then, a phrase very often heard, ‘you
stupid, stupid man.

It was
amazing how we could talk in what I thought was English, and have apparently wholly
different meanings for words, an entire vocabulary of misunderstanding.

I found
myself contemplating that I had not made any allowances, in my breakdown of the
hours of the week, for time spent arguing, and wondering whether a fair
apportionment of rowing time would be an appropriate element to take into
consideration. And in whose column ought it to go, for luvviedom’s sake?

Either
way, Liz would still be the one with free time at ‘the end of the week, because
she seemed to have a remarkable ability to decide when a row was finished,
whereas I, on the other hand, am incapable of leaving things in a state of
conflict and need to put things away neatly. I can’t just switch the computer
off. I have to have everything saved as what it is, with a dated safety copy.

No
doubt I exacerbated the situation by standing outside whichever room she was
sulking in and demanding to know who Bob Henderson was. I shouted at her for a
few minutes: things I would regret later. She locked the bedroom door — it was
the bedroom this time, I think — and the sound of smashing furniture emanated.

‘Why
don’t you just go and see a prostitute?’ she yelled through the tantrum. ‘That’s
all you’re after!’

I
decided it would be best to stay overnight at the office for a while.

THREE

IT’S VERY UN-ENGLISH isn’t
it, to reveal information about money. The English economy works on an arcane
gentleman’s agreement that sources shall remain secret. Nevertheless, it seems
relevant to point out the fiscal realities behind Mullin and Ketts here because
I have no inherited wealth and these are the figures I have to bear constantly
in mind in every contact I make, in every conversation I have, whether
assessing a young actress’s earning potential or contemplating education or
health matters for Grace and Liz.

I know
this may make me seem grubby, small-minded, like some Dickensian clerk, but
that’s tough cookies, I’ll have to put up with the drop in image credibility in
order to clarify my position, as much for myself as for any purpose.

At Mullin
and Ketts we have ninety clients, forty mine, forty Naomi’s. The remaining ten
are looked after by Tilda, who is our trainee. These clients bring us in
approximately £150,000 a year in commission. We pay Tilda £12,000 out of this,
or more if she exceeds her targets. The office costs us £35,000 a year in rent
and expenses. Our theatre tickets, travel, stationery, etc. come to about
£20,000 a year. Joan gets £9,000 and Sarah, who is part-time, gets £3,000.

This
leaves Naomi and me about £25—35,000 a year each before tax, although of
course, if we have had a bad year, like ‘93, it’s a lot less, and at the
beginning, we ploughed everything we could back in, to get going. We have no
formalized salary agreements because it depends on the state of the industry. I
tend to have more high-profile clients than her, although she does have a
couple of soap stars and a commercials artist who earn well. I do have a few
directors and one or two clients who write — or, like Neil, fail to write —
scripts and books, but on the whole I deal in performers. Everyone knows the
best client to have is a dead writer; you just collect. But at Mullin and Ketts
we have no such luxuries, it’s very much a hand-to-mouth existence. Sometimes
it’s been my clients who have seen us through the hard times, sometimes Naomi’s.
There’s no real way of controlling it and every day is a worry. We could
collapse at any moment.

At the
building in Meard Street, we have four rooms, well, three and a half really.
There’s Naomi’s office, my office, the main room and a sort of kitchenette the
other side of the stairs which has just enough room for a camp bed in it for
overnights when working late in town, and it was here that I stayed some nights
when things were becoming fraught between Liz and me. A couple of times I’ve
even gone back home to bath and bed Grace and then if Liz wasn’t going out, I’ve
come back up to the office. Couldn’t really get any proper work done obviously,
because most people have gone home. A call to LA was always a good excuse, though.

A night
in the office was a strange affair. Really nothing to do but phone. There were
no real books or anything in there, and, anyway, being so near to work made
concentrating on anything else almost impossible. I sat worrying about Susan
Planter and decided to check Jeremy’s income slips since they’d been in such a
mess at his home. That would be useful. There were definitely a few
irregularities, our fault. I made a note to get Joan on to it in the morning. And
one rather large late payment, again our fault. Our expenses book wasn’t being
filled in properly any more either. Any one of us could have been driving
around in our own chauffeur-driven limo for all that was down on paper. You
have to do everything yourself, it seems. Lucky that the office girls don’t
know what my real nickname is, what it was at school, I mean: Muggins.

I
became agitated and decided to leave business for the night. I cracked open the
emergency champagne and poured myself some into a coffee mug. I’d replace it in
the morning. I stared at the phone. The ventilation system from the Chinese
restaurant three floors below was humming, and in another fifteen minutes the
tape loops from the strip-joint next door would start up again and then I’d be
done for. ‘We’re gonna make this a night to remembaaaa …’ over and over
again. Somehow, in the day, with all the women in the office and the buzz of
deals and the banter, the sound of Soho did not intrude into the consciousness.
Once everyone was gone, though, the noises crowded in as reminders of the
harshness and cheapness outside. The loud woman next door was screaming at her
man again, ‘Don’t come back here! Go to her! Fuck her! Go to her!’ This seemed
to be a nightly ritual followed by noisy sex. Occasionally this pre-coital slagging
match would include the sound of kitchen utensils clattering against the wall.
Once I heard gunshots down the street, but there was nothing about it in the
papers the next day.

Grace was playing near the
river, too near, she was toddling still and in her sun hat and a nappy. By now,
I’d had this dream, or a version of it, so often that I knew, even asleep, what
its outcome would be. It was almost a ritual. I looked around for the wooden
danger sign. Sure enough, it was to my left. ‘No bathing: dangerous water’, it
said, but it was broken and there were weird symbols painted on it as well.
That was new. Grace looked behind at me, before putting her foot too close to
the edge. In that moment when I would have found myself falling into the shiny
blackness of the water in Grace’s place, there was a heaving sound. Suddenly,
Neil James was there, coming out of the water like a corny special-effects
giant. It was Neil, or the drowning man at Putney, or both, they were the same.
Neil’s beard had grown to Biblical dimensions and horrible green stuff was
coming out of his mouth and nostrils, just like the drowning man. Neil held me
back, his presence preventing me from throwing myself over the edge for Grace.
Neil submerged exactly like the drowning man had done, taking Grace with him. Leaving
the surface black and rippling and shiny. I could not see Grace. She was gone.
I awoke as if landing from a great height. Bloody Neil. Getting into my dreams
now and messing them about.

I lay
in the grey dawn on the creaky camp bed with the cold street lighting intruding
across the ceiling. Maybe Liz was right, I should go to a prostitute. Have a
bit of in-out. Get rid. Maybe that was all there was to me. Maybe she would
respect me if I was like that, if I was more honest about being like that. I
could live down to her expectations and she could relax into resenting my
mobility. Like proper mummies and daddies. Once when driving through Bayswater
with Grace in the back baby seat, I stopped at the lights and, turning round to
talk to her, my move was mistaken by a skinny leather-mini-skirted streetwalker
for interest. She hadn’t seen Grace in the back there. She approached the open
front passenger window and stared in at me with stark, drug-glazed eyes and
said, ‘Fancy a blow job?’ before she noticed Grace. As the lights changed she
gave us both a look of such hatred that had I believed in the evil eye, I would
have asked the garage to exorcise the car next time it went in for a service.

It was
six thirty, I might as well get up now anyway. The morning dust cart had
started its grinding mere yards away in Dean Street, and it was making the
windows rattle in their frames. I could go and have coffee somewhere Italian
and look as if I was the kind of guy who had breakfast with important American
producers.

They
wouldn’t even see Neil for the Ayckbourn tour. I’d had to spend some minutes
obliterating self-doubts, and think positive. The biggest kick you can get as
an agent is persuading someone to see a client they wouldn’t normally have thought
of for a job. This has to be done with great skill. Maybe you have an actress
who is commonly perceived as a light comedienne, who normally does cute and
cuddly — a Felicity Kendal, say, or a Penelope Wilton — and she wants to
develop her range, and you know she can do it and she’s ready — kids grown up,
or recently single, for example — and there’s a role in a TV film as an
alcoholic having a breakdown, or a politically active barrister, or an AIDS
victim wife, or whatever. You must enter into casual talks with the casting
director, going through all the obvious choices for the part, rounding up the
usual suspects, and subtly deriding them with remarks such as: ‘Yes, so and so
could do it, but we all
know
she could do it.’ Late on in the
conversation, almost as an afterthought, with self-deprecating innocence, you
must pong in the name of the client you have in mind, as in:

‘Well,
we haven’t discussed Felicity, or Penelope or whoever, because no ordinary
person would even have thought of seeing her for the part, but God knows, if
anyone’s brave enough to give it a try then you are.’ You must help them to
think they had the idea. You must facilitate their adventurousness.

I’ve
never been proud about flattery. However outrageous it becomes, however much it
might be denied, people inevitably place flattering remarks on a reserved shelf
in their minds, a special inner mantelpiece for the Oscars, but nothing could
persuade this lot to consider Neil. I even tried telling them of his recent
weight gain in the hope that they would see him for the side-kick dickhead
part, but zilch. They already had what they wanted firmly fixed in their minds,
and for some reason, Neil it wasn’t. I couldn’t push it too far because I was
in the midst of negotiating the finer points of a contract with them for dear
old Barbara Stenner to play the lead part in the same tour, and we hadn’t yet
discussed her billing, touring allowance and days off. I didn’t want to queer
Barbara’s pitch. It was a depressing phone call all round, especially since I’d
had Barbara on the phone earlier saying she’d rather not do the tour at all. ‘The
last thing on earth I want is to take this tired old pair of tits round the
provinces again,’ as she had put it.