SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (28 page)

Anyone peering across the river that night at 2 a.m. would have seen the figure of a small well-rounded man, his white
p
yj
amas
flapping in the breeze, peering down at the Severn as though he had dropped something, or someone, in it. Henry had awoken from his dream, and had gone out to reassure himself once more about the currents that raged around him.

Duet

Owen was out walking the walls. It was too early in the day for there to be many people out there yet. He liked it that way. As he walked he dodged the human vomit and the canine faeces, grateful only that it wasn't the other way around. Then he stopped opposite the warehouse and stared. He sometimes thought
John
imagined that shaping words into structures was easy. Because you didn't have to frame them and focus them, John seemed to think they were merely given. Perhaps they were; it wasn't as though Owen had ever made any up. He found them in dictionaries, in poems, on other people's lips. But he couldn't simply write them down like that, could he? He had to place them in their constellations, or they had no significance.

He hadn't been expecting this filming business, but he had started it off hadn't he? And they had always had an agreement between them: wherever it takes us, that's where we go. It had usually been the other way around, with Owen pushing John further than he might have wanted to travel. Now their roles had been switched. He couldn't simply walk away, though that was very much what he would have preferred to do. He stared down at the canal. They had filmed its surface as though it were Deva, the mighty river, the local home of the goddess. It wasn't, of course, but the tight focus shot didn't let you know that. All it told you was that here was enough water for you to drown in. Enough mystery to make a play out of He turned back. John had told him that today could be the last session with him sitting in front of the lens. He had also told him it might be a little different. Owen had a feeling that the change would not necessarily be a pleasant one.

When he arrived back he was surprised to see not one but two chairs set before the window.

'Someone else is joining us,' John said, fiddling with his camera. 'I'll introduce you when we start filming. '

Owen was already sitting in the chair when the doorbell rang.

He had thought about it. It would be Sylvie, wouldn't it? His memory would be indicted for going absent without official leave by the person it had most affected over the years. But when John came back into the room it was with a man, someone Owen had never seen before. John took the visitor's coat and led him over to the other seat, and only when everything was in place, and the camera was once more running, did he speak to Owen.

'Owen, the man sitting next to you is ... '

'I'd prefer to introduce myself, if you don't mind.' John nodded, to indicate he should go ahead.
'Mr
T
readle, my name is Patrick Gregory.'
He waited a moment for that news to sink in, then continued.
'Alex Gregory's father' At this point Owen's eyes shifted from the man sitting beside him to John
T
amworth's face.
He had underestimated John. He'd always told Sylvie that his colleague's fatal weakness was a lack of ruthlessness at the sticking-point. If that had been true before, it didn't seem to be so any more.

Everything was in focus now. Anything once soft in outline had hardened. Patrick Gregory had opened the black notebook he was holding.

'Six months ago you made a film with my daughter; including a scene of such violence that she never got over it. This diary of hers makes it clear that this one scene changed her life for ever Leading in fact to her death. I'd like to read you some of the extracts.' And Patrick started reading out Alex's words. He didn't need to date
t
hem, because the pattern they formed was an unmistakable one of trauma and retreat.

'I really wish I could talk to Isabelle Huppert about how she coped with the scene in Cimino's
Heaven's Gate
when the men rape her. How did she cope with that, the humiliation, her legs apart, blood all over her thighs? She looks terrified. But she fights back, and she must have known what was coming. I can't believe she didn't know what was coming. If I'd known what was coming I could have coped too, and in this film I didn't get to fight back. I only got to drown. Was it so important, Owen, to make sure you had my look of terror, fresh from the factory, to do that to me?'

Mr Gregory stopped then and stared at Owen, but Owen said nothing, so he started reading out the next passage.

'That time in Llandudno when we were filming
Time's Widow,
and you kept saying the take was no good, there wasn't enough grief in my face, then you finally set the shot up and walked across and whispered in my ear, "I'm leaving you, whether you're pregnant or not, pussy." That gave you a wrap, didn't it? What exactly do you think it gave me?

'You told me all I had to do was trust you. You said if I trusted you then everything would come out right. So I trusted you and everything came out wrong. I can't sleep at night without seeing those boys coming at me in those uniforms you put them in. I can see their eyes, feel their hands on my thighs. They weren't gentle hands, Owen. None of it was made any gentler because it was going down on film, you know. It was real. Was it worth it?'

Patrick Gregory read out the final passage he had chosen.

'I won't go to a psychiatrist. I don't believe in that type of medicine. People with their little rational machines poking about inside your head, inside your memory, trying to make adjustments to the mechanism. I've found a way out of this. I'm going away. When I come back I'll be free from everything that Owen Treadle and his world represent. When I come back I'll have the same look of serenity as Lady Pneuma. And for the same reason. '

He closed the book then, and John moved the camera slowly from his face to Owen's. If Owen had been an actor he could have been a good
one,
J
ohn
thought, but he wasn't acting now.

'Don't you have anything to say to me?'

'Sorry. I'm sorry for everything.'

'That doesn't seem like enough.'

'I know.'

'There must be something else. '

Owen seemed to be finding it difficult to speak,
something
J
ohn
Tamworth could never recall before.

'If she had died in war,' he said finally, 'and I had been her commanding officer, would you hold that against me?' The older man thought for a minute before speaking.

'Not if you had behaved responsibly in the battle. Not if you hadn't needlessly put your troops in harm's way.'

'Do you believe it's possible to make a film about war that's as serious as war is?'

'I'd have to think about that.'

'Well, I do. That's what I believe. That's my philosophy. It might be the wrong one, but it's mine. And if I couldn't make it real, then the film would have no value. I did what I thought was necessary to give those images reality.'

'You seem to have taken away my daughter's reality in the process.'

'She should have cared more about the outcome and less about the cost. When Visconti made
Death in Venice
he gave Dirk Bogarde some powder to put on his face that nearly took the flesh off
…
when Millais painted his Ophelia in the bath, Elizabeth Siddall nearly died of pneumonia
…
I didn't think she'd be so vulnerable. If I'd thought that, I'd have done it with someone else.'

'But you'd still have done it?'

'Yes. I would still have done it.'

Mr Gregory looked at Owen now with an air of professional scrutiny. He was in no doubt that the man was telling the truth, but he was not sure what the worth of this truth was; certainly not his daughter's life.

'It had better be good then, Mr Owen. This film that cost my daughter whatever tranquillity she'd managed to achieve in her mind. Is it possible to see it?'

Owen looked at John, and John looked uneasy as he closed down the camera, but he went across to his shelf and brought back the blank plastic case with the DVD inside it.

'This is an advance copy. The screening's still under discussion.

There's some concern about the violence.'

'Can we watch it then?'

'Now?'

'You do have a DVD-player here, I assume.'

*

John pulled the curtains, having made them all a cup of coffee, and they sat down together to watch the film: the writer, the director, and the father of the young woman whose image had moved through the ravaged landscapes with the anguish of Cassandra, or sometimes the mute stoicism of the young woman in Bresson's
Balthasar.
There was a lot more voice-over than dialogue. Owen had been assiduous. There were quotations from Herodotus and Caesar, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles,
Hitler, Churchill, Wilfred Owen, Tony Harrison. And each set of words was accompanied by the same ragged bunch of anonymous soldiers, fighting, killing, being killed, looting, raping. The mystery at the heart of this mystery play was how we could continue to do this to one another, after thousands of years of seeing the consequences. They moved across a devastated landscape, something like the paintings Paul Nash made of the trenches. The music
throughout
was taken

from one or another of Bach's cello suites, and the unavoidable plangency of that sound combined with the images was irrefutably moving. And then towards the end a new set of characters turned up for the torture and the female booty. What had happened was that Alex had grown so used to the boys doing the acting with her that she no longer looked afraid. She knew them too well to have the genuine look of fear that Owen wanted. They had all enacted so many horrors together that horror had been temporarily transcended. They had become too comfortable in their images of one another. So he'd had an idea: they'd set the scene up, and then at the last minute he'd put the boys from the street in. He made the other actors give him the costumes back and told them to take the night off. He'd picked some local rabble, hanging about out there.

'What do we have to do?'

'Put some funny clothes on and act nasty.'

'We do that anyway.'

'I'll pay you for it.'

'How much?'

'Fifty pounds each.'

'Where and when?'

That's what had happened. But even Owen had been astounded at their feral menace as they swooped around, and then descended on, Alex. He was hidden just off camera, and he could tell as she clutched his hand that this was genuine terror. Which had been what he had wanted, wasn't it? It wasn't as though he was glorifying war or rape, after all. The image of the horror had to be real to warn against the reality of the actual horror. To confront the mystery, the horror of the passion, day after day.

In the film, when they'd done with her, they threw her body into the river. Which was the canal standing in for Deva, the war goddess who presided over the slaughter and the subjugation. The body wrapped in dirty garments floated on the surface. And the final scenes showed the Dee Estuary, the delta where the river met the sea and the waves ran one into another. The saddest of the cello suites played as the image faded out.

John pulled the curtains back as the credits scrolled. Mr Gregory watched carefully to see that his daughter's name was properly credited. It was. He had investigated rape cases, and he tried to view these scenes with the same objectivity that he'd listened to the evidence years before. But he couldn't. He had seen the terror in his daughter's eyes. There was no faking that. Mr Gregory now stood up. He turned to look at Owen.

'If it had been pornography, I would have done everything in my power to destroy you. But it isn't. I can't doubt your seriousness of purpose, even if I can only lament your methods. I hope you don't seduce all your young actresses. Could I have a copy of the film, please?'