Daniel Martin (19 page)

We had no relationship outside work. Usually she went out and bought me sandwiches, occasionally I took her out to lunch in one of the cheaper places near by. But finally I came to hear a little about her broken marriage. It had been to one of the Poles who had escaped to Britain and become a fighter ace. Peace had turned him into a sadistic drunkard and dabbler in expatriate politics. Now she lived with her Polish mother somewhere behind Marble Arch. Just how much of a monster he had been, and remained, to her in private I did not hear in detail until later, but that was already hinted at. She was a dry woman and had her share of the gallows humour that hangs over moviemaking like the smell of malt over a brewery; but she gave the impression that this was defensive, cryptic coloration. Something in her had been badly hurt by her marriage. I lost her when the production schedules and all the rest had to be got out, and I missed her. I was very careful not to talk much about her to Nell. They met once or twice and Nell didn’t like her, or professed not to; but she was beginning to dislike everyone on that side of my life by then and she evidently saw no cause for sexual jealousy.

There was some final rewriting to be done when we started shooting, again down at Pinewood. Tony notoriously hated working with idle faces watching behind him, and I didn’t go to the sets very much. Andrea and I were often alone in the production office. I started going down there when it was no longer really necessary. Word gets round the film industry much faster than in any other artistic world; and the word was that this script was good, that Tony was pleased with it, that I was learning fast, I was reliable… I basked in that. I wanted to learn the other techniques of my new business, too. Secretly I even had dreams of directing myself one day.

I had about this, time with plenty of unhelpful advice from Nell, to face up to what I wanted to be. Another script was already in the offing. It was not really a dilemma. I knew (or thought I knew) that the cinema could never be as serious for me as the theatre. But it was fun, and it brought in the money. If I wanted to say something really personal and ‘important’, it could only be on the stage. A new play I had in mind (which eventually became The Production) would establish that: that I had the compromises, the false pressures and premises of the film world in perspective. But I felt I wasn’t ready for it for a while; and perhaps I was also a little scared insulting the goose that laid the golden script-fees. I was certainly too close to the present production to invent safely unrecognizable characters.

Above all there was the need to prove to Nell that she was wrong. When I took the third script, however, there was a marital lull. She seemed to accept that I was not going to give up this alternative career; and that if she couldn’t approve of it, she could at least approve the money it was bringing in. My new agent had seen to it that I was no longer in the bargain basement. I indulged Nell. I knew we were spending too much, but if it brought more peace at home I felt it was justifiable.

Then something predictive: one noon down at the studio Andrea seemed depressed a little, Dan asked her why, and she said it was her birthday, something about birthdays when you were a child… how you never quite grew up enough to treat them as ordinary days. Dan went straight to the canteen and bought a half-bottle of champagne. She laughed, they drank it. Then at lunch Dan announced the birthday to the others, there was more champagne… it was nothing. By chance afterwards he and she went back to the production office alone together. The empty half-bottle sitting on her desk: she turned and kissed him. It wasn’t the kiss, which was quick and affectionate, against his cheek, not his mouth, but a fractional hesitation of the embrace, a waiting, an equally brief look in her eyes before she turned away to make some phone-call. Dan knew she was saying the camaraderie was on her side a pretence. That was all. Someone came in, and the next day it was exactly as before.

Then a few nights later: Nell and Dan had just gone to bed and he made one of those gestures all husbands and wives evolve and recognize as a suggestion. It was very sharply rebuffed. He said sorry; as lightly as possible. But Nell lay stiff as a rake. After fifteen seconds of that she got angrily out of bed and lit a cigarette; another sort of preamble he had come to recognize only too well.

‘What is it this time?’

‘You know damn well what it is.’

‘That’s why I asked the question.’

She hated what she called his ‘B-movie sarcasms’. She said nothing, but ripped one of the curtains aside and stared out at the night.

‘I don’t know what you want out of life.’

‘I want a divorce.’

He had come home late and they had had to rush out to dinner with friends to be precise, with the girl who had got her the former job at the publishers and her husband. Dan knew she hadn’t enjoyed the evening, that she had been brewing over something, and had put it down to the other girl, the tittle-tattle about publishing: the illogical envy of a career she did not really want again. But this was something new.

‘Why?’

He waited, but she said nothing. He was suddenly very scared, he had some notion that Jane had been mad and… he asked why again.

‘You know why.’

‘That I deprived you of a job you loathed when you actually did it?’

‘Oh for God’s sake.’ There was more silence. Then she said, ‘You’re a bloody good liar, I’ll give you that.’

‘I don’t begin to know what this is all about.’

‘It’s about the affaire you’re having with that Polish cow.’

He let out a breath outwardly of amused contempt for the accusation, inwardly of relief.

‘Okay. Let’s have it. Or was the letter anonymous?’

‘You admit it?’

‘I admit absolutely nothing. Except that I wish you were a Polish cow. Instead of a paranoiac little English bitch.’

‘Yes, you’d love that.’

Dan got out of bed to go to her, but she turned on him before he could reach her. He could see her face in the streetlights from below. It managed to look both frightened and venomous or obsessed. And it stopped him: the feeling that she had undergone some secret change of personality, that he no longer knew or understood her at all.

He said, ‘It’s not true, Nell.’

‘Her ex-husband telephoned me this afternoon. And told me a few facts about her. You’re apparently beating a well-trodden path. Suppose you know that.’

‘But the man’s a bloody lunatic. She’s already had to get a court order to stop him pestering her mother. The whole office knows that.’

They stood six feet apart, facing each other.

‘He sounded very sane to me.’

‘Well we’ll see what the law thinks. I’ll sue the sod for slander.’

‘He says it’s all over Pinewood. Everyone knows.’

But there was a slight climb-down in her voice.

‘Nell, the man’s deranged, for Christ’s sake. Apparently he started doing this with her mother last year. He’s a Catholic, he won’t give her a divorce, he… honest to God, how can you believe such rubbish?’

‘Because it could so easily be true.’ Dan turned away and found the cigarettes. He must have been angry, because he felt like agreeing with her—and telling her why. But she jumped on. ‘He saw you going into her flat last week.’

‘I gave her a lift home. She asked me up to meet her mother. Just a drink. That was all. Half an hour.’

‘Which you forgot to mention.’

‘I seem to remember you were too full of the horrors of motherhood for any normal conversation that evening.’

She digested that. ‘Do you usually give her lifts home?’

‘She’s running a production office, for God’s sake. She’s usually the last to leave. No.’

‘You seem to know an awful lot about her.’

‘As I have a perfect right to. She’s also good at her job. And a nice human being.’ He took a breath. ‘Liking her is not infidelity, Nell.’

She had gone back to staring out of the window. Dan sat on the end of the bed.

‘I suppose you tell her all about the paranoiac little English bitch you made the mistake of marrying.’

‘That’s so cheap I’m not going to answer it.’

There was a silence; it was rather like a medieval joust. After each tilt she had to think up some new trick of attack.

‘You’re cutting me absolutely out of your life. I know nothing about you any more. Sidney rang this afternoon.’ Sidney was Dan’s new agent. ‘About the American offer. I don’t even know what the American offer is.’

‘It’s another possible script. Nothing’s settled yet. And I haven’t cut you out of my life. You’ve done that yourself.’

‘You’re becoming something I don’t understand.’

‘Because you don’t want to grow up. You want nothing to change.’

She gave a bitter sniff. ‘Of course. I simply adore this ghastly white elephant of a flat and being cooped up in it every day while you go off and… ‘

‘Then let’s move. Let’s get a house. An au pair. A nanny. Whatever you want.

‘As long as I leave you in peace.’

‘I see. I drop everything so that you can have someone to row with all day long.’

She spoke in a quieter voice. ‘I don’t know why Anthony and Jane can live such an affectionate and civilized life together and we’

‘Oh—fuck Anthony and Jane.’ But when he went on, it was more evenly. ‘If anyone’s having an affaire, it’s you. With them.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Well it’s true. If you wanted to marry a don and live among the dreaming spires, then why the hell… ‘

‘Because you were different then.’

‘So were you.’

‘You started it.’

And so on, and so on. It ended in her tears, and a new batch of resolutions. But they had no consistency. She rang up her friend, and started reading again; but then got bored with that. First, she would stick it out at the flat; then we had a brief phase of house-hunting, only to discover that prices were beginning to rise; and neither of us ever felt certain we really liked what we looked at. Once again her heart became set on somewhere in the country—that became the priority. She blamed London, in some moods, for everything that had gone wrong.

Perhaps the greatest irony was that the incident brought Andrea and myself an important step closer to what finally took place. I felt had to warn her about what the wretched Vladislav was doing and somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do so in the office. I had to wait several days, but then Nell and Caro and I went down to Wytham for the weekend and Nell decided to stay on till the Wednesday or rather, in pursuit of one of the new resolutions, did not want to stay on, but I talked her into it. So I took Andrea out to dinner one evening. I didn’t mislead her, I told her I had something rather difficult to say. I think she must have guessed, though she was shocked when she knew, very apologetic, wanted to meet Nell to explain… but Nell had made me promise not to do what I was doing. She had rather rapidly promoted the ‘Polish cow’ to ‘poor woman.

At last, at the Chinese restaurant we went to, I was given the full story of Andrea’s marriage. She’d been in the WAAP during the war and her knowledge of Polish had made her posting and work obvious. She had fallen for Vladislav, married him in no time; his fundamental instabilities had seemed natural enough, part of the stress of scrambles, missions, swastikas stencilled beneath the cockpit. But peace, the deal with Stalin, had turned him anti-British; as did his failure to make it as a commercial airline pilot. He was already drinking heavily by then. Andrea had been dragged through the Polish thing and the Catholic thing and the expatriate thing; and had also discovered that she could never have children… all of which had left her with a kind of sad contempt for everything Polish (except her mother) and a continuing guilt over the rogue male she had married. Becoming what she was now had saved her life; or at any rate, her own sanity. Even then I sensed a much deeper despair than the cynical shell she sometimes wore at the office suggested. She felt trapped in some hopeless way. In effect she was both Nell and Dan: Nell, in leading a life that did not satisfy her full self; and Dan, in feeling she had been tricked into a wrong marriage. She told me she had had a number of affaires since the marriage died, but it had always seemed as if ‘some other woman’ was involved. One such liaison, it shocked me to learn (not its having happened, but my not having realized it) had been with Tony, a year before. He was married, with a family, it had all been conducted in great secrecy. They’re all rats in our business, she said, even the nicest.

I mustn’t make Andrea sound too coolly objective about herself or too stolid and sexless physically. She was what the French call une belle laide; someone whose charm grew very slowly on you. The body misled, especially beside the twenty-year-old birds producers hire to make their coffee and soothe their eyes and egos. But the face was really rather striking and the eyes were remarkable, incomparably the finest I have ever known well. This produced a little advantage for her, since they were always the thing one wanted most to look at. She was not a woman it was easy to keep at a distance, there was something of the conscious femme fatale about her. Perhaps it was a compensation for the purely physical attractions prettier women can use. She certainly knew she possessed more magnetism than most men realized when they first met her. Then she was older than I was and not only in the literal sense—perhaps something vaguely maternal about her body… I don’t know.