A Postillion Struck by Lightning (46 page)
Read A Postillion Struck by Lightning Online
Authors: Dirk Bogarde
In despair I reached up and finished off the Hennessy bottle and shoved it upside down into the wastepaper basket. Un Sospiro droned through the room mournfully.
“I don't want to be a Movie Star! They keep asking me if I want to
be
one ⦠for God's sake! I'm nearly forty! I never wanted to be one, not from the beginning ⦠and always on my own terms ⦠this is on their terms ⦠I want to go back to those Dull Little English Movies they keep sneering about ⦠maybe I
am
a late developer but it's too late to develop into something I don't want to be ⦠Call Vidor tomorrow, and Feldman, call them now, tonight⦠help me!”
Wearily Tony switched off the player. I watched him hopefully, cunningly, through a haze of Hennessy and self pity, this time tomorrow I'd be on that Pan Am flight out of this monstrous place filled with monstrous, ugly, people. Carefully he slid Un Sospiro back into its yellow cover, not looking at me, preoccupied, worried, thoughtful. I knew all the danger signs.
“What is it?”
“Well⦔
“Well what, for God's sake?”
“Well⦠no one's ever done it before ⦔
“Done what?”
“Eighty-five minutes of Classical Musicâ¦without a Double.”
“Oh shit! Who'll know? Who'll care?”
“You will,” he said evenly and placed the record carefully back on the pile.
Victor Aller looked up from his piano without welcome. He finished off whatever he was playing and sat silent.
“Your eyes look funny. Smog?”
“Yes ⦠it's bad today.”
“When I first came here it was all Citrus orchards⦠sky was blue⦔
“Could you go through my bit of the Campanella ⦠slowly for me?”
“Sure ⦠but it gets hellish fast.”
“I'll just watch ⦠watch your hands⦔
“Here we go. La Campanella ⦔
“Play it three or four times, will you ⦠at that speed?”
I stood there watching those beautiful hands moving across the keys with elegance, love and confidence. He looked up at me and smiled through his glittery glasses:
“What are you doing, waiting for the lightning to strike?”
“Something like that,” I said.
2 My sister and I in the village, 1932
Aleford's stallion in Great Meadow
3 Jane Newbold, my mother, sister, self and Lally Cuckmere Haven, 1931
Family picnic with the Renault. Ashdown Forest, 1929
4 My mother, Elizabeth, Rogan, 1938
Family group by the pond, November 1940
5 Grandfather Aimé on the Amazon, 1907-8
6 My maternal grandfather as Charles Surface, “The School for Scandal”
My mother with Abe Barker in “Bunty Pulls The Strings”, Haymarket Theatre, 1911
7 Myself as Raleigh, Mr (Lionel) Cox as Osborne in “Journey's End”, Newick, 1938
William Wightman with members of the Company, Uckfield, June 1939
8 My father in his office at Printing House Square,
The Times
, 1938
Satyres Wood, the Somme, 1916. From my sketch books of 1938-39
9 Self and Natalie Jordan, “Grief Goes Over”, Amersham 1940
Lieutenant Anthony Forwood, R.A., Summer 1940
The Playhouse, Amersham on the Hill, 1940
The pen and ink drawings that appear throughout the text are by the author
Self taken by my father one morning at
The Times
for the audition at the Old Vic, August 1939.
1 My sister and I sitting on the back stairs, July 1927.
2(a) My sister and I in the village. She wearing her “hate”. 1932.
2(b) Aleford's stallion (Dobbin) in Great Meadow. Self and sister.
3(b) Family picnic with the Renault. Ashdown Forest, 1929.
4(a) My mother, Elizabeth, Rogan, 1938.
