Chapter 27: Clary - The Golden Hours

Dear Heart,

California continues to be the most absurd place I have ever been. I’m aware that I’ve been practically nowhere, but I suspect if I were in Ouagadougou or Peking, I would not find it stranger. Yesterday, on the freeway, I saw a lorry with a house on the back. An actual bungalow! They were taking it somewhere where they would put it down and someone would move in. Nothing stays the same for five minutes. They’re just always putting things up and taking things down and moving them around. You expect it on the studio lot, where the pretend places get used for a hundred different dramas a year – the high-street store that’s painted a different colour twice a week for different movies, the poor train they keep on its own little stretch of track, that’s always being held up by different villains, sometimes different gangs, twice a day, and the bank that’s always being robbed, the stable and the barroom where the same cowboys go in and out, in and out, in different colour hats. There’s a couple of horses which I swear are in every Western you ever saw. But the city is the same! You feel all the time that something important is going on just round the corner, or behind some front, but then it’s just more road, more shacks, maybe an oil-rig derrick, more sweaty men in suits wiping their foreheads and cleaning their glasses, more palm trees, more cars, another neon sign on a bar in a dusty wind.

I get the feeling that it’s something to do with earthquakes, and the fact that they’re always expecting one, so permanence is not really in their repertoire. Even the fact that in theory we talk the same language is an absurdity. Nothing that looks the same is the same. The meals are gigantic. The pavement is hot. Nobody walks. The cars look like spaceships. God knows what the spaceships look like, but they have spaceships – real ones! I honestly can’t tell if I hate it or love it. Don’t worry, there is little chance of me running away with this particular circus. They’ve given me a little house which smells both damp and warm. It’s rather like the one in ‘In A Lonely Place’, do you remember, where Bogart and Gloria Grahame are always passing each other meaningfully in the courtyard with the palms. God I wish I could write something half that good – but also, how insane, that kind of love. I do love you madly but mostly I’m so glad that I love you sanely. Anyway, the house is rather heavy inside, and dark, quite opposite to outside where the sky is too bright to look at. Archie, darling, thank you for not minding too much. I was so afraid you’d be terribly hurt, and I would have put you first. I think. Obviously it’s safe to say so now but I think I really would have. And seriously, they’ve changed everything so much you’d never even recognise it as my play. I did like the script I wrote when it was going to be Terence Stamp playing the kind-of-you and Francesca Annis playing the not-me-at-all, but this is much safer, for us and for our reputations. Casting seems to be a full-time job: they’ve gone from Richard Burton and Ava Gardner to Doris Day and Dean Martin (in which case it might as well be a musical frankly). I dream of Paul Newman and Louise Brooks – yes, I know she’s 103, anyway everything seems up for grabs, and shooting is due to start apparently the week after next. There’s an awful lot of tough little sex kittens about, platinum-topped with fringed gingham bikinis, and I do fear they’ll cast one of those. Of course I want something rather more Douglas Sirk, but I fear they think he’s too old-fashioned. Perhaps they’ll get bored and send me home! I’m doing very little: they send me a car; I go to the studio and hang about, either being moved from under people’s feet or lurking in the commissary (canteen – full of interesting types! Masses of very funny American Jews from Russia). Then I hang about with the writers until somebody suggests I go to a screening, and that’s the rest of the day done for. I’m seeing about three films a day and the other writers explain to me why they work or don’t. It’s an absolute film school and I do think I might try my hand at some more scripts. I think in London it would be easier to do what one wants. There’s an Irishman here, Gerry O’Leary, who lives in London and says he’ll introduce me to people. And I did go to a party in a swimming pool! I have never felt so English in my life. Like a glompy great loaf of unbaked bread on a shelf of exquisite miniature Viennoiserie. Full make-up in the noonday sun, perfect little scarlet toenails at the end of perfect little brown feet kicking up perfect little sprays of bright turquoise chlorine water. Quite terrifying.

Darling Archie, perhaps (or Maybe, as they say here; they don’t know what I mean by Perhaps, and howl with laughter at Actually) we can have everything we want.

I hope you had/are having a lovely time at Fakenham, and if you’re back at home which of course you must be I hope you aren’t having dinner with Mrs Evans every night in Mayfair. Has she come up with final dates yet? I know you say she doesn’t but she does fancy you.

How are the nippers? Dad and Zoë? Polly and Gerald? Aunt Rachel? Uncle Hugh and Jemima? Please send everybody my love and DON’T READ THEM THIS LETTER not even the funny bits.

Love,

your wicked runaway wife

She was having so much fun she didn’t really want to tell him.

And she really did hope he wasn’t spending too much time with Mrs Evans, not because she didn’t trust him absolutely (and really, Mrs Evans was hardly an erotic temptation, though of course you could never tell, men were so peculiar), but because she knew he’d get in a moral taffle with himself about what he owed her, and that should be avoided if at all possible. He did take things seriously. Which of course was one of the things she loved about him.

Dear Wicked Runaway Wife,

Everybody is well. Thanks to your munificent family, we’re not even starving. Or lonely. Rachel tells me everything about everyone, including such lost treasures as Teddy – did you know he has a housekeeper who keeps a photograph of Louise, and is very keen for her to visit? I wonder if we shouldn’t all go. It’s rather an opportunity, isn’t it? Apparently it’s pronounced acRAH, not Ackrer. Did you know about Villy becoming an antique jewellery expert? The mind boggles and yet it makes perfect sense. In her way she is herself an antique jewel. The twins have won some things at gymkhanas (is that how you spell it?).

Harriet is delightful. We discuss literature over dinner and she makes up essay titles for me. Last week it was, ‘Love requires an object, anything will do; when I was a child, I loved a pumping-engine, thought it every bit as beautiful as you: discuss with reference to Francis of Assisi, ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, and the life of Sam Cooke.’ Needless to say her thinking is much better than mine. Bertie is wondering if it’s too late to become an opera singer (I suggested the Frog Orchestra might be grateful for his contributions) and O Buttercup my Buttercup flings herself from Nanny’s knee to mine and back with every change of the wind, or her mood, whichever is more frequent. She loves school, and has acquired a best friend, a tiny African girl – Nigerian, I think. They make a very pretty example of modern social harmony. It’s interesting to see how people react to them. Mostly with a sort of slightly surprised self-conscious benevolence, which is better than the alternative of course, but might be tiring for Lola if it’s going to continue all her life. They both make very nice wax crayon portraits on sugar paper, and can add at least two and two.

London drib-drabbles along, Mrs Evans is behaving perfectly well, we all miss you terribly, specially me. Please come home.

With love from your remarkably well-behaved husband

He didn’t tell her how antisocial Rupert was being. It would upset her and she was too far away to do anything about it.

Nor did he tell her about the dinner he’d had with Mrs Evans, ostensibly to discuss the plans for the exhibition and the private view.

He didn’t really believe that Mrs Evans (she’d asked him to call her Sonia but he would not, and as a result he called her nothing at all) could make him ‘successful’. He couldn’t let himself fantasise about something like that. But she had arranged this exhibition, and for him to be interviewed by the Sunday Times, and had invited people to the show who he would never have dreamt would want to see his work. And they were coming. He might, if nothing else, make some money to contribute to this house and this new independent life. All of which was good. But Clary laughed at the length of time the woman held his hand. And that wasn’t funny. It was awkward and, actually, potentially perilous.

He had expected the presence of at least one other person at the dinner, but it turned out to be just the two of them, at a little corner table. It wasn’t that anything happened, or even that much was said. But phrases like ‘I’m so glad to get you to myself at last’ and ‘You really are a very special person, Archie’ don’t mean nothing, even if you laugh them off. And a gentleman should be able to recognise and accept that and respond accordingly. It’s not kind or sensible to pretend it’s not happening, out of faux (or indeed genuine) modesty, or disinclination to believe it, or embarrassment. It was his job, he knew, not to leave his hands on the restaurant table for Mrs Evans to lean over and pat; not to let her catch his eye. His job to smile cheerfully; mention Clary every four sentences; to let the maître d’ help her with her coat rather than do it himself; to draw back his forearm before she could put her hand on it as he stood by her cab, and to say, ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Evans, my family and I are all so grateful for everything you’re doing for my career.’

And his job to ponder the best way to extricate himself, after all her work and the good things she was making happen for him. Was it caddish, or was it just practical, to wait till after the exhibition? Would he be milking her for what he could get, and then deserting her? Would it be worse – or even possible – but anyway more damaging to both of them, surely – to break with her now, before the exhibition?

Had Clary been with him, he would have talked it through with her, made sure that they were a united front. He half admired the sarky, funny way Clary manifested her totally unnecessary jealousy, but he would never, for one second, risk her happiness and her peace of mind.

Sitting in the tall, airy studio that Mrs Evans was lending him, he stared at his own paintings drying, and pondered.

A sip of tea, a long sigh.

A walk in Holland Park: the peacocks howling, the children scampering, the leaves turning and beginning to pile up.

The crisp air.

He made his decision: he would tell Clary all about it as soon as she got back; detach himself from Mrs Evans after the exhibition because anything else was impracticable, and if people thought him an ungrateful cad, so be it. The only way to prevent that would be to shame Mrs Evans in public for her affections, and ridiculing a woman was not in his repertoire.