Fallout (11 page)

She came to know the house on Tite Street very well; friends and acquaintances wandering in and out bringing or taking wine, stacks of records, books, hash. Tony’s was a curious world of demi-success; parties that were work meetings; friendships that were professional liaisons. Nina felt privileged to be let in on some of his secrets but knew that most of him was hidden from her. Marianne slipped into the wings of her life as if she, too, were resting, observing with pleasure her daughter’s absorption into Tony’s world. Being unemployed had never been so comfortable.

The Sunday-night gatherings were performances in themselves. Tony would snap and quarrel with nerves, the languor that had so taken her in was a veneer. He did not fear failure, only that nobody would witness his magnificence.

In London as in New York, Tony knew, the play was – as one might say – the thing. Nina was impressed by him, perched on his lily pad at the centre of his little pond, croaking his confidence to the world, but from his vantage point Tony himself felt no satisfaction. He could only see the other ponds: Olivier at the Old Vic, splashing about with Diana Rigg, Tom Stoppard, Michael Horden, spotlit on their glistening, well-loved lily pads; Nottingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, where talent grew like multifarious spawn, admired and revered from hungry London: Ian McKellen, Trevor Griffiths. And then, painfully close and most jealously observed, the Royal Court’s waters reflected his bright green envy, hopping with William Gaskill, Lindsay Anderson, George Devine. Tony shook hands and remembered credits, chatted up agents and spun his network of friendships, but he was not
there
. His was as yet murky water, awaiting talent’s oxygen that it might teem with the right sort of life.

Nina was unofficial hostess at Tite Street, part maid, part girlfriend, but he never made a pass at her. She began to wonder if he were homosexual, at which her mother, with strange relish, laughed,

‘
Nina, you’re so naïve
.’

Tony had a horror of the bourgeois. Nina once suggested vol-au-vents and his outrage was comical and comfortingly acute.

‘If you think I want to make a housewife out of you, you’re wrong,’ he said.

Part of her questioned whether the idea of
wife
– sans curlers and canapés – was as abhorrent.

He took her shopping. She was so pleasingly decorative, he said. The women in the boutiques knew him – sometimes murmured discussions about cheques and light persuasions took place at the till that Nina would embarrassedly ignore. He preferred her to wear trousers, tight-fitting, with waistcoats, translucent ruffled shirts. He liked her skinny and watched what she ate, waspishly. Often he would come to her flat and bring her shoes or necklaces as she dressed, drinking gin and tonic with Marianne as they debated what would suit her and lay on the bed together, laughing, as she turned around for them.

The night of the first preview of
Not Married
they had arranged to meet at the theatre at six. She was dressing when she got his call.

‘Nina, come to the house. We’ll go together.’

When she arrived she found the front door on the latch. She shut it behind her. Noise from below drew her down the steep stair to the kitchen where a little party had made themselves at home. A couple of unemployed actors, a model she had met before and the teenage son of a well-known Irish novelist Tony was cultivating were sitting at the table. Halfway down, seeing Tony was not there, Nina withdrew and went upstairs. She looked into the big drawing room, where the empty furniture and full drinks trolley stood undisturbed. She paused, and then climbed the last flight to the landing. The bedroom door was open. She had never been inside.

‘Tony?’

‘In here.’

He had laid out upon the bed a selection of shirts and ties and was standing in the middle of the room in only his slim black trousers and bare feet. His chest was white and startlingly thin. Nina had never seen him undressed before.

‘Come here.’

He stared at her – not her face, but her chest as she stood before him.

Without saying a word he undid the buttons on her blouse, precisely, one by one, and pushed the half-transparent silk from her shoulders with his fingertips. Nina did not move. Withdrawn and appraising, he gazed at her naked stomach, her small breasts inside her bra and fast-shallow breath moving her chest. Then he took her hands and gripped her fingers, hard.

‘I’m going to be a laughing stock,’ he hissed. ‘
What have I done?
’

Nina sensed the gape of the wide-open door behind her, heard the footsteps of the people below, and voices. She felt acutely isolated, far from her mother, and aware of the two of them standing there, their vulnerability and the fact he was not kissing her – did not seem about to kiss her.

‘It will be fine,’ she said mechanically.

‘I promise I’ll find you something,’ he said. ‘Better than this. A real play. We’ll find a good play.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘I’m just extremely . . .’ His eyelids fluttered, his lips seemed to disobey him. ‘Frightened,’ he said at last.

Unable to sustain eye-contact Nina took in the clothes on the bed, the bottle of vodka on the bedside table, drawn blinds and crumpled curtains. She couldn’t tell if he should start drinking or stop.

‘You are so good,’ he said. Then stepped away abruptly and with his normal irritation said, ‘I just can’t fucking decide at
all
what to wear. Not at all.’

Nina fumbled with her task and looked at the crisp, virtually identical white shirts, and the narrow ties in lemon yellow, pale blue, black. ‘I think that black one is the best,’ she offered. ‘Smart.’

He took the tie from the bed and looped it between his hands.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ he announced. He picked up a shirt and began to remove the pins.

‘Cover up, Nina,’ he said.

The critics despised it, but
Not Married
was an unashamed success. Where first the tribal youth-invasion of the musical
Hair
and then
Oh! Calcutta!
had trampled three centuries’ legal veto on stage nudity,
Not Married
made capital of freedom’s gain without even so much as a nod to the avant-garde. There were naked or semi-naked shower scenes, bedroom scenes, even a naked card game – strip-poker, naturally – and audiences deserted the BBC in the corner and Dick Francis on the bedside table to revel in the slamming doors and bare behinds; the cosy, naughty, empty-headed girls with fully dressed apologetic men pursuing them. For a few weeks after it opened the theatre was picketed by an uneasy alliance of feminists and Christians, and once the revue was perceived by the press as a slice of the country’s moral decline the public gobbled it up.

At the Savoy Grill after the opening night, celebrating with the financiers and the lead actors, Tony praised the cast, dismissed the still uncertain future of the show and, without pausing in his conversation, slipped his butter knife from the plate in front of him. Reaching under the damask tablecloth, he ran the cool blade lightly up Nina’s inner thigh. She felt the shock of the metal against her warm skin, sensing its edge. For twenty minutes he stroked her with the steel, high enough for danger, up and down. And Nina gripped his other hand with hers while, helpless and shocked, she lost herself to it; trying not to move in her chair, terrified they would be noticed, disturbed and almost tearful – silent. She excused herself and went to the lavatory, leaning against the cubicle wall and masturbating, silently, viciously, with her eyes screwed shut, not thinking of anything but the feeling of need he pulled out from her.

Afterwards, washing her hands, she did not have her handbag and could not leave a tip for the tiny old lady attendant who politely handed her a towel.

When she got back to the table she didn’t look up for some time and Tony did not acknowledge her. The plates had been cleared, she noticed, and a fresh martini placed in front of her. She took an icy sip of it – and then another.

‘No,’ she heard Tony saying quietly to the actress sitting on his other side, ‘my mother was rather grand. She married my father in secret because her family wouldn’t have stood it despite his wealth. She was from Scotland; a wonderful but cold-hearted woman.’

Nina put her glass down not seeing the napkin bunched beneath it, and the glass tipped and fell. The vodka pooled across the cloth and was absorbed.

‘Silly girl,’ said Tony to her,
sotto voce
.

A few miles from the Comedy in lowly, proud, pub theatre, Graft, with more compromises than they could ever have anticipated, pulled and pushed Mike Wall’s mining play,
Deaf Hill
, to its opening.

Leigh’s invaluable contribution had been the concept: that the mine, the house, the whole set, were bright white. Instead of trying to show the blackness of the coalmines, the darkness of the lives of the characters in shadow – and very often without electricity – she had the idea that filth, physical and emotional, was best played out against a spotless backdrop. It had been the one thing the company could agree about. Halfway through rehearsals Jack Payne had decided the parts should be played by non-actors, real miners, whose authenticity would make something fresh of a play creaking beneath the weight of its politics. The irony of breaking Equity rules to tell a story of the moral stronghold of the NUM did not escape the rest of them and the corner table at the Lord Grafton became more Speakers’ Corner than pub. In the end Jack lost the argument and the working men of Wakefield were spared the discomfort. But
Deaf Hill
, which had seemed so truthful, brutal, on the page, in rehearsal beat a weary, grinding rhythm.

‘You know what the problem is, don’t you?’ Luke said to Paul as they walked home through another inky, powerless night.

‘Mm?’ Paul said, through the damp end of his roll-up.

‘The play,’ said Luke, ‘is terrible.’

‘Helpful,’ said Paul, and laughed.

‘Paul! The scenes don’t work because the polemic is like a bloody sledgehammer.’

‘If you say agitprop again I’ll lay you out,’ said Paul grimly. ‘Mike thinks he’s fucking Bertolt Brecht and Jack agrees with him.’

‘Well, he’s not Arthur Miller. He reminds me of this old man used to shout at us from the corner by the paper mill in Seston every day. And the interval kills what drama there is stone dead. Paul, we want to cut it right down; you know I’m right.’

Paul laughed again. ‘Tell Mike that—’

‘I will if you like,’ said Luke. ‘I
hate
bad work. The characters are stereotypes,’ he gestured, hugely, ‘the dialogue is as stilted as a giraffe with a false leg.’

‘Well, you can sort it tomorrow on your own. I can’t come in.’

This was so unlike Paul that Luke stopped dead in the street. Paul turned.

‘What?’

‘We open in a week and a half – or are bloody meant to – and you can’t come in tomorrow morning? Why?’

‘Leigh,’ said Paul, shortly, and flashed a smile that was so innocent and irrepressible he looked like a boy. ‘She won’t be there either.’

Luke’s eyebrows went up as he absorbed the fact of Paul’s new priority. He made a performance of taking off his greatcoat and hooking it over his shoulder.

‘What d’you want to bunk off tomorrow for?’ he asked.

‘Her mother is in London and we’re going to the zoo.’

Luke laughed – and then stopped, realising this was no laughing matter.

‘Oh,’ he said slowly; kind. ‘Gotcha.’

They walked on for a bit.

‘Where does her mother live normally?’ he asked.

‘Left Highgate for Manhattan.’

‘All right for some.’

‘Yep.’

And so the next day while Paul and Leigh went to the zoo with her mother from New York, Luke met the appalled actors, the already murderous Jack and the outraged Mike with his proposed cuts. The play limped to its grim opening and ran for three weeks, a qualified success, punctuated somehow fatuously by the ill-chosen
Duchess of Malfi
. Afterwards, Mike Wall returned to Wakefield, the actors to unemployment and Graft were left with a few boxes full of stinking costumes the Arts Council grant had been too tight to have cleaned.

‘You could have lit the air in that theatre like a fart,’ said Luke succinctly.

Following
Deaf Hill
– with Paul and Jack Payne unable to agree on a new play – Graft took refuge in Shakespeare, alternating a surreal
Tempest
with a virtually two-handed
Macbeth
, heavily influenced by Brook’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
but without his magic or the budget with which to realise it. They cast a talented young actor and actress straight out of drama school. The speeches and exchanges came almost back to back barely punctuated by other characters, as if the cues were merely stage directions for the marriage. Paul, Luke, Leigh and Jack text-cut and set-built in a frenzy of broken deadlines, late nights and long mornings. Luke could see that the others were exhausted but for him Graft was a vital engine. Its successes inspired him; its failures provided counterpoints. In any gap, with any opportunity, he wrote, controlling his own work as he could not control the collaboration.

During the days Paul was old-fashioned in his coolness towards Leigh. They were only alone when he gave her a lift home at night. Luke would wait in the car while Paul saw Leigh to her door, and kissed her. Murmured conversations.

‘You looked nice today.’

‘So did you.’

‘I want to take you out properly.’

Then he would say goodnight, run down the steps and drive home talking to Luke about the plays, Jack, anything, but really – Luke recognised – talking about Leigh. Fifteen minutes in the hallway of Leigh’s flat standing on old envelopes and listening out for the neighbours made Paul happy all the way, and happy through the night, knowing he would see her again in the morning.

For Leigh, being with Paul alone in the night-time hallway was more peaceful than erotic. Beautiful, easeful, calm; the precious pause between work and sleep, away from the others. Away from Luke. Because even when she was alone in her bed she did not have any rest from Luke. The stretch of empty wall by her front door was now only the place where they had kissed. Where he had whispered to her about her suspected or figurative virginity. He had backed her up against that cold wall. They had held hands. Beginning to love Paul as she was, Leigh could not face in herself that he was the one thing that gave her safety from Luke.