Ancient Light (13 page)

Dawn Devonport was the last to arrive, naturally, being the starriest star among us. Her limousine, one of those special sleek black shiny jobs, probably armour-plated, with tinted, opaque windows and a menacing grille, wallowed heavily on its reinforced suspension as it drew up to the door. The driver, spruce in dove-grey and a cap with a shiny peak, hopped out in that burly yet balletic way they do and whisked open the rear door and the lady extricated herself from the deep back seat with practised deftness, affording the merest glimpse of the underside of one long, honey-hued leg. A couple of dozen of her fans had been waiting to greet her, huddled on the pavement in the cutting wind—how did they know where to come to, or am I being naïve?—and now they broke into a ragged round of applause that sounded to my ear more derisive than adoring. As she made her way between them she seemed not to walk but waft, borne along in the bubble of her inviolable beauty.

Her real name is Stubbs, or Scrubbs, something unsuitably blunt like that, so it is no wonder that she should have hurried to change it—but why, oh, why Devonport? She is known in the trade, inevitably, as the Casting Couch, though I am surprised these youngsters today should know of such a thing, which surely went out with the Metros, the Goldwyns and the Mayers. She truly is a captivating creature. The only flaw in her loveliness that I can detect is a faint, a very faint, greyish down all over her skin that under the camera seems the tremulous bloom of a peach but that in real life makes her look as grimy as a street-urchin. I hasten to say that I find this hint of the slums exciting in a way that I cannot account for, and were I younger—well, were I younger I should imagine myself capable of all sorts of things and probably end up making a great fool of myself. She came into our midst, where we waited for her in the large and draughty hallway of the house, to a chorus of clearings of male throats—we must have sounded like a colony of bullfrogs at the steamy height of the mating season—and glided at once at a sea-horse’s slight, forwards-leaning incline straight to Toby Taggart, our director, and laid two fingers of one hand on his wrist and did that famous wisp of a smile, glancing blurredly off to the side, and spoke rapidly a breathless word or two meant for him alone to hear.

You will be surprised to learn that she is a slight person, far slighter, certainly, than she appears on the screen, where she looms in huge brightness with all the magnificence and majesty of Diana of the Three Roads herself. She is impossibly thin, as they all have to be these days—‘Oh, but I don’t eat,’ she told me, with a tinkly laugh, when we broke for lunch and I gallantly offered to fetch her a sandwich—especially on the inner sides of her upper arms, I notice, which are positively concave, with sinews unpleasantly on display under the pallid skin that makes me think, I am sorry to say, of a plucked chicken. It is hard to tell what the rest of her is like, I mean in real life, for of course there is little of her that has not been bared already to public view, particularly in her earliest roles when she was eager to show the jaded mammoths who run her world just what stuff she was made of, but on the big screen all flesh becomes blanded over and made to seem as suave and densely resistant as plastic. She has something of the flapper about her, an impression which I am sure she fosters deliberately. She favours little pointed, high-sided shoes that button up the front, and old-fashioned stockings with seams, and diaphanous, tunic-like dresses inside which her lithe and seemingly weightless body moves, as though independent of any restraint, to its own sinuous, nervy rhythm. Have you noticed that you do not see her hands in close-up? They are another flaw, although I like them, also. They are large, too large certainly for their delicate wrists, and strongly veined, with big-knuckled, spatulate fingers.

For all the worked-at fragility of the image she presents to her public she has a certain mannish way to her that again is to my liking. She smokes—yes, did you not know?—with burly application, thrusting her face forwards and sideways and dragging on the fag with her lips stuck out, which makes her look as plebeian as any gaffer or grip. She sits with her elbows planted on her knees and holds things, a tea mug, a rolled-up script, in a tight, two-handed grasp, those big knuckles taut and shiny and more like knuckle-dusters than knuckles. Her voice, too, in certain registers, is huskier surely than it should be. I wonder if there is something particular to the movie life that coarsens actresses and hardens their sensibilities, as too much exercising over-develops their muscles. Perhaps that is what makes them so disturbingly attractive to most of the male half of the audience, and probably to half of the female half as well, that impression they give of being a third gender, overmastering and impregnable.

But that face, ah, that face. I cannot describe it, which is to say I refuse to describe it. Who does not know it, anyway, its every plane and shade and pore? What young man’s fevered dreams has it not gazed out of, or into, grave and grey-eyed, sweetly sad, omnivorously erotic? There is a delicate sprinkle of freckles to either side of the bridge of her nose; they are russet, old gold, dark chocolate; for the screen she hides them under extra-thick applications of slap, but should not, for they are terribly affecting, as we actors say, in their delicate appeal. She is poised and thoroughly self-possessed, as you would imagine, yet I detect, deep down in her, at the very base of her being, a beat of primordial terror, a quivering along the nerves so rapid and faint it hardly registers, the vibration of that fear that everyone in our trade is prone to—and everyone outside it, too, for all I know—the simple, blank, insupportable fear of being found out.

I liked her from the moment when shambling Toby Taggart took her by the elbow—talk about a contrast!—and steered her to where I was loitering, studiedly inspecting my fingernails, and introduced her to me, her superannuated leading man. As she approached I did not miss the faint frown, half dismay and half appalled amusement, that puckered the flawless patch of pale skin between her eyebrows when she beheld me, nor the infinitesimal grim squaring of the shoulders that she could not keep herself from doing. I was not offended. The script calls for some strenuous grapplings between her and me, which cannot be an appetising prospect for one so lovely, so delicate, so flagrantly young. I do not recall what I said, or stammered, when Toby had introduced us; she, I think, complained of the cold. Toby, mishearing her, surely, gave a big, slow, desperate-seeming laugh, a noise like that of a heavy item of furniture being trundled across an uncarpeted wooden floor. We were all by now in a state of faint hysteria.

Shaking hands always gives me the shivers, the unwarranted clammy intimacy of it and that awful sense of having something pumped out of one, plus the impossibility of knowing just when to disengage and take back one’s poor, shrinking paw; Dawn Devonport must have had lessons, however, and that veinous hand of hers had hardly touched mine before it was briskly withdrawn—no, not briskly, but in a swiftly sliding caress that slowed for a quarter of a second just as it was letting go, as trapeze artists let go of each other’s fingertips in that languorous and seemingly wistful way when they part in mid-air. She gave me, too, the same sideways-glancing smile that she had given Toby, and stepped back, and a moment later we were all trooping into a high-ceilinged, many-windowed room on the ground floor, stumbling behind the star, the star of stars, like a chain gang in our invisible shackles and treading on each other’s heels.

The room was entirely done in white, even the floorboards had been gone over with a daubing of what looked like pipe-clay, and there was nothing in it except a couple of dozen cheap-looking, hoop-backed wooden chairs ranged against the four walls, leaving a large bare space in the middle that had a worryingly punitive look to it, as if it were there that the dunces among us, the ones who forgot their lines or tripped over the props, would be made to stand, singled out in our confusion and shame. Three tall, rattly sash windows looked out on the river. Toby Taggart, thinking to put us at our ease, waved a broad square hand and told us we could sit wherever we wished, and as we bumped into each other, all heading in a herd for what looked like the most inconspicuous corner, something that had been there when we were milling outside in the hall, some hint of magical possibilities that we had all felt for a moment, was suddenly gone, and it was dispiritingly as if we were at the end and not the beginning of this fantastical dream-venture. How fragile is this absurd trade in which I have spent my life pretending to be other people, above all pretending not to be myself.

To start off, Toby said that he would call on the scriptwriter to fill us in on the background to our tale, as he put it.
Our tale
: so typical of Toby in his poshest mode—you do know his mother was Lady Somebody Somebody, I forget the name, very grand? What a contrast to his actor father, Taggart the Tearaway, which was the yellow press’s delighted label for this larger-than-life, best-loved and worst actor of his generation. As you see, I have been making it my business to gather what facts I can about the principals in whose hothouse company I shall be working in these coming weeks and months.

Toby’s mention of the writer set us all to craning like, well, like cranes, for most of us had not realised he was among us. We quickly isolated him, the mysterious Mr Jaybee, lurking alone in a corner and, after we had all fixed on him, looking as alarmed as Miss Muffet on her tuffet when the spider came along. In fact, as I discovered, I had misheard again, and he is not Jaybee but JB, for this is how Axel Vander’s biographer is known to those who have any claim to intimacy with him. Yes, the perpetrator of our script is the same one who wrote the life-story, a thing I had not been aware of until now. He is a somewhat shifty and self-effacing fellow of about my vintage; I had the impression he is ill at ease at finding himself here—probably he considers himself many cuts above mere screenwork. So this is the chap who writes like Walter Pater in a delirium! He hummed and hawed for a bit, while Toby waited on him with a smile of pained benevolence, and at last somehow the teller of our tale got going. He had very little to share with us that was not in the script, but rehearsed a long rigmarole of how he had embarked on his biography of Axel Vander after a fortuitous encounter in Antwerp—birthplace of the real, the ur-Vander, as you will recall if you have been paying attention—with the scholar who claimed to have unmasked the old fraud, the fake Vander, that is. This part itself makes quite a tale. The scholar, an emeritus professor of Post-Punk Studies from the University of Nebraska by the name of Fargo DeWinter—‘No, sir, you are right, the fair town of Fargo ain’t in Nebraska, as so many folk seem to think’—through diligence and application had found and brought to light a number of anti-Semitic articles written by Vander during the war for the collaborationist paper
Vlaamsche Gazet
. DeWinter confessed to being more amused than shocked by the enormities that Vander was said to have got away with, not merely foul writings in a now defunct newspaper but, if we are to believe it, the murder, or mercy-killing, which no doubt is what the scoundrel himself would have claimed it was, of an ailing and inconvenient spouse. The latter piece of mischief had remained hidden until JB put Billie Stryker on to Vander’s noisome scent and the whole truth came out—not, as JB observed with his sickly smile, that the truth is ever whole or, if it is, that it is likely to come out. These revelations were made too late to harm the egregious Vander, who by then was late himself, but they as good as destroyed his posthumous reputation.

We worked until midday. I felt giddy and there was a buzzing in my head. The white surfaces everywhere, and the gale outside that made the windows boom in their frames, and the river surging and the cold sunlight glittering on the roiling water, all gave me the sense of taking part in a nautical romp, a piece of amateur theatricals, say, put on aboard a sailing ship, with the crew for cast, the tars got up in shore rig and the cabin boy in flounces. Sandwiches and bottled water had been provided in an upstairs room. I took my paper plate and paper cup into the haven of the bay of one of the big windows and let the light of outdoors bathe my jangled nerves. The higher elevation here afforded a broader, more steeply angled view of the river, and despite the dizziness I kept my gaze fixed on this precipitous waterscape and away from the others milling about the trestle table at my back, where the makeshift lunch was laid out. It will seem absurd, but I always feel shy among a crowd of actors, especially at the start of a production, shy and vaguely menaced, I am not sure how or by what. A cast of actors is in some way more unruly than any other gathering, impatiently awaiting something, a command, a direction, that will give them purpose, will show them their marks, and make them calm. This tendency of mine to hold aloof is I suspect the reason for my reputation as an egoist—an egoist, among actors!—and a cause, in my years of success, for resentment against me. But I was always just as uncertain as the rest of them, gabbling over my lines in my head and shivering from stage-fright. I wonder people could not see that, if not the audience then at least my fellow players, the more perceptive among them.

The question recurred: why was I there? How was it I had landed this plum part without applying for it, without even an audition? Had I felt one or two of the younger ones among the cast smirking in my direction with a mixture of resentment and mockery? Another reason to turn my back on the lot of them. But, Lord, I did feel the weight of my years. I always suffered worse stage-fright offstage than on.

I sensed her presence before I glanced to my right to find her standing beside me, facing out, as I was, also with a paper cup clutched in her cupped hands. All women for me have an aura but the Dawn Devonports, scarce as they are, fairly flare.
The Invention of the Past
, in its movie version, has a dozen characters but really there are only two parts worth speaking of, me as Vander and she as his Cora, and already, as is the way of these things—she is probably no more immune than I am to the envy of others—a bond of sorts had begun to forge itself between us, and we found ourselves quite easy together there, or as easy as two actors standing in each other’s light could hope to be.