Daniel Martin (18 page)

The shooting was almost finished before it happened. Dan had stopped going to Pinewood and was working on the final revisions of The Red Barn. Nell had gone to her office to proofread. Just before midday the telephone rang. That voice. Circe claimed she had a script she wanted Ulysses to read, if he was free for lunch Dan suddenly found both ropes and mast were imaginary. He took a taxi, went to Curzon Street, and screwed her. To be exact, he had not gone with that definitely in mind; but his usually inventive imagination had failed for once. The door had been opened by an already naked girl. He could only have turned and walked away. Many years later he met her by chance, indeed even sat opposite her at a Hollywood dinner party. She was more famous, or infamous, by then, and perhaps she was being discreet; but he had the impression that she had completely forgotten that they had ever been to bed together.

It had been done in silence, at some length; she had proved better at sex than at acting; and it had happened only that once. Deep down it confirmed his experience with Jane, though this time the dialogue about whether there was to be a future was cut down to two or three lines. He wasn’t going to break up his marriage, she didn’t expect him to; so let’s get on with it. There really was, rather to Dan’s surprise, a script she had been offered. He took it away with him and probably she expected him to bring it back and claim reading fees. Instead he talked about it with her over the telephone and returned it by post. She didn’t seriously object when he killed further conversation, at least carnal, dead. She behaved as she was, beneath the dramatic pretensions: a sporting amateur, and satisfied as soon as flesh had trumped brains.

I mustn’t dismiss this too lightly; the cynicism came later. Dan left the flat feeling stunned with self-shock; and I remember he had a miserable afternoon. He wandered across Hyde Park and ended up, heaven knows why, in the Geological Museum; perhaps because it was devoted to the nonhuman. Then he sat for an hour or more in a pub, even though he knew Nell would probably be home before him and he would have to invent some alibi. In fact she stayed on late to finish a set of proofs and he was given ample time to collect his wits and his damaged mask. It was very clear to him that he had done something wicked and that he must not let it happen again. But of course he had graduated; with Jane there had been a deeply suppressed but mutually recognized feeling, a justifying sense of uniqueness, of enormous difficulty, that this was (at least in hindsight) a springboard to higher, nobler things: to the life she now led, in fact.

But now he had done it with a slut, not only in a brothel decor but in a brothel way; only the money had been missing. He underwent the usual sequence of guilt and self-justification: he had been trapped by Nell, he needed freedom… by which he principally meant, though he hardly admitted it to himself, the freedom to exploit his growing success. So Nell became a foolishly high premium he had paid to insure against failure in life, both sexual and professional. He had long known he was not unattractive to women, but the adventure in Curzon Street went to his head after the first shock of it. He decided he must be very attractive—and I use ‘must’ in both its descriptive and prescriptive sense. He adopted the disgusting habit of trying out this charm much more consciously than before. Always well out of Nell’s sight, of course. He told himself it was only a game, a little revenge.

And also a little recompense, since outwardly he did try quite hard for a while to be more concerned for Nell. In July he handed in the finished version of The Red Barn to his new agent, waited to have his first reaction (warm and excited), then drove off with her for a holiday in France. They idled down to Provence, eked out four weeks there, then idled back. It was a success from the start: the weather, the food, the countryside, the sex, the suddenly discussible feeling that they had drifted apart during those previous months. Dan telephoned back to London from Avignon; both theatre producers who had by then read the play wanted it… he and Nell had the most expensive dinner of their then lives that evening, and came to other decisions over it. Nell would stop working and go in for motherhood, they would find a bigger flat or a small house as soon as they got back. However, that was delayed beyond the three weeks Nell’s holiday allowance originally planned. She sent her letter of resignation from a drowsy little port, charmingly free of the vulgar mob, called St Tropez.

I think Dan might at some point during that happy month have confessed to the Curzon Street coupling, but he had some buried terror as to how confession might then run on; or he clung to his secrets. In truth he remained intensely selfish. But the sun gave Nell a new body, contraceptives were abandoned, the heat made them both continuously randy… if he still surreptitiously eyed other female bodies, it was without envy. They ran out of money (both permitted and illegal) and had to make do on the way back with fleapits and cheaper and cheaper picnic meals; but even that had been fun. For months afterwards the experience remained their true honeymoon; and not only because Nell proved to have conceived first time round. What the holiday also proved, alas, was that they could be happy (as at Oxford) only in the unreal, not the real. But neither of them saw that then.

The Red Barn was, I think, if not genuinely new, at least fresh. It was probably lucky that I had only the sketchiest notion at the time of what Brecht was getting at. I came on the idea by pure chance, happening one day to pick up a contemporary account of the William Corder trial. All Maria Marten had meant to me before was the type exemplar of ham rural fustian. But I saw at once that there was an entertaining historical play to be disinterred. It had taken me some time to realize that William was the central character, not Maria; and I did take enormous pains over the dialogue. But the play’s success was a team job: it had the best series of sets of its year, five fat and a number of good small parts. The cattle were with it from the start.

The anatomy of first major success is like the young human body, a miracle only the owner can fully savour… and even then, only at the time. Dan, at any rate, went through that following winter in a state of smug euphoria, well above the flak from minor setbacks. The only serious professional disappointment was the failure to get a New York production going; but in the New Year the play went on in Sweden and West Germany, with negotiations for rights in progress with several other countries. The private clouds on the horizon did not seem very important at the time.

Though the 99-year lease I bought of the Notting Hill flat was probably the best business deal I ever did, unaided, in my life, Dan and Nell began having doubts as soon as they moved in. It was partly that miserable drive to keep up with the Joneses that is endemic in the show-business world. They started to feel they had quite unnecessarily undersold themselves. The sort of people they now began to mix with all lived in so much nicer surroundings and so much more stylishly above their income, in many cases. They had seen small houses in St John’s Wood, in Islington, in Fulham, and then promptly compared them unfavourably with the cottage at Wytham. A cottage there was on the market and they secretly hankered after that at the same time as they found a dozen reasons for its impossibility. For the first time in his life Dan now had an accountant: the cost of the lease in London meant they could not sanely afford the price of the cottage. Everything in the new home had finally to come from Heal’s and they ran up huge bills. That did not prevent Nell from frequently blaming him later for not buying what they could not afford.

She had a tetchy pregnancy and took increasingly against the flat. One day it would be too large, the next it was ‘mad’ not having realized a garden for the baby ought to have been the priority. Increasingly she resented being left alone, increasingly she harked back to our ‘dear little’ mews. Cooking had never amused her, and in the last months of her pregnancy we took to going out almost every evening. I came to learn it was a way of avoiding rows. I mustn’t exaggerate, she shared some of Dan’s euphoria over the play, there was the baby… most of the time it was merely a feeling that the flat was probably a mistake, but not one of primary importance. Caro was born on April 10th, and for a time other problems were forgotten. Dan had completed the first draft of his next play; and in the same week that he became a father he signed for his second film-script.

I suppose the most terrible marriages are where the child is the wedge (or is used as the wedge) that splits the stone. Caro proved difficult, she seemed to run the gamut of all the ills that babies can make themselves heirs to, and she exhausted Nell both nervously and physically. I think I bore my share, I worked at home during the first draft. But somehow Caro became tacitly like the flat itself: a good idea at the time, but only too often an apparent mistake in the actual experience. Then there was a certain amount of sisterly rivalry—Jane, pregnant again herself, had turned into a model mother, and Nell felt obliged to run in that race. I tried to persuade her to give up one of the two spare bedrooms we had to an au pair girl anyone to keep her company, even some out-of-work actress. But Nell would neither cope nor admit that she could not cope; later she claimed that it was solely fear of what would happen when she took herself off to Wytham.

She did that more and more as the summer wore on and I had to spend more time away from the flat. I would see her and the baby solicitously on to the train at Paddington; and then return rather too happily to the flat and my work. I usually went down to fetch her at the next weekend, but my periods of freedom assumed the aspect of holidays. She had travelled that Oxford line so much more frequently. Perhaps the real trouble started there: in the bond among the three of them and the children in Oxford, from which Dan was now partially excluded though it was not apparent to him then.

From this time on, I feel less guilty. Nell began to stew when she was in London and mull over the injustices of her new role. They rapidly grew far worse than the old ones at the publisher’s as with the mews, that tended to become a beautiful broken future instead of the disliked stopgap it had actually seemed to her at the time; and would suddenly seem again, with that illogicality I find the least endearing thing in the female sex, if I proposed the simple solution of asking her old employers for work she could do at home.

The hopeless downward progression of this kind of situation, especially when the two involved have more than their ration of intransigent selfishness, has become so familiar nowadays that I won’t spell out all the stages. Such changes in a person’s character, and in the character of a relationship, don’t announce themselves dramatically; they steal slowly over months, masking themselves behind reconciliations, periods of happiness, new resolves. Like some forms of lethal disease, they invite every myth of comforting explanation before they exact the truth.

I suppose nothing was more symptomatic of the hidden cancer than Nell’s reversed attitude to my film work. She began to resent it without distinction with some reason in the case of the first film when it appeared. The critics slated it, though two—one of whom was Barney Dillon—saved my embarrassment a little by excepting the script from their general thumbs-down. But the new script promised better, and I was enjoying the experience of working with Tony. He was not a great director by any stretch of the adjective, but not a fool, either, and a marked improvement on his predecessor.

The plot was based on an original idea of his, a psychological thriller, which we called The Intruder at the time, though it was released as Face in the Window. He knew what he wanted and made me work to get it; and at the same time was open to ideas. I learnt a lot from him also on the business of demarcation lines. Nell took against my enthusiasm when I came back from sessions with him, and I began to hide it… if it still wasn’t spoken, it was implicit in her attitude that I had sold out, I was on the grab for quick success and cheap limelight. Anthony and Jane’s names were invoked one evening, when something had been spoken. They couldn’t understand why I should want to get involved in such a corrupt demimonde, why playwriting was not enough… or so she said. They certainly didn’t say so to my face, though I sensed a growing distance between us, a breakdown of vocabulary and shared values. The cinema also internationalizes; and I began to see them as obscurely provincial. Two forms of profound obstinacy were gearing up for battle; and I resented the fifth column Nell now formed in my own camp.

One evening, it must have been in July or August, I came home to find Nell and Caro had decamped to Wytham without warning. We had had a long row the previous night and she had still been asleep when I left for the office after breakfast. I went down and fetched her back at the weekend. Perhaps Anthony still knew nothing then, but I could see a questioning and reproachful light in Jane’s eyes. Nell had certainly talked to her. That made me very angry, though I managed to conceal it.

I was by then doing the second draft. Because there was some mess-up over the availability dates of one of the chief actors, there was a hurry to get the new film off the ground. I was given a room at the production office and a part-time secretary. Andrea was two years older than me and half-Polish, not really a humble secretary at all, but already well on her way to being one of the best production secretaries on this side of the Atlantic: a kind of regimental sergeant-major, though her breed must use tact and a cool head where the other struts and bellows. I liked her at once for her professionalism: impossible not to admire the speed and accuracy with which she typed out my drafts and would talk about them, sometimes suggest a useful cut, point out a weakness. She didn’t attract me physically, she had rather a heavy body and there was something about her of that accusing resignation of the career girl. I didn’t know then that she had been married, since she seldom talked about herself. The only thing Slavonic about her, or at least not English, were her eyes. They were very fine, very direct, almost jade-green, much lighter than hazel. It all happened very slowly; began merely as a feeling of relief, the contrast between never knowing how an evening with Nell would end and coming to rely on that useful, intelligent camaraderie in the office to give some point and sanity to daily life. She came sometimes when I went to show new scenes to Tony, who used to fire off his own suggestions faster than I could write them down, and I could see he felt the same about her as I did myself: that she was a pro to her fingertips and a good shrewd head to have at one’s side.