The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life Read online

  ‘Stay,’ he said.

  She stayed. He was in control. She surrendered. Before he had even touched her the surrender was total, and in the act of surrender itself she found an intoxicating freedom. That and the wine.

  Ask anything of me. Do what you want. I want to please you more than I want to live. Through you I live. My only beloved lover.

  All this without words and before the first true touch. Her whole body shivered with an anxiety that was both delicious and painful.

  Will I be good enough for him?

  He kissed her. She put her arms round him as she had been longing to do since she had watched him in the train window. She held him and felt his arms hold her, tasted his lips smoky on her lips, and slowly the shivering of her body fell still.

  Taking off her clothes in the little bedroom she caught her jeans on her feet and stumbled. The bed was so narrow they had to hold each other close. Light from the main room fell through the open door, but there was no light here. Her naked body a secret except to his touch. No words. She spoke to him with her hands, her mouth, her body, saying: I am yours for ever.

  She gave herself to him without reserve, asking nothing in return but his undying love.

  This is my room now. This is my bed. This is my lover. Let my real life begin.

  Heart of my heart, my meaning and completion.

  Laura lay in Nick’s arms all that long night, and did not sleep.

  8

  Barry Eagles joins the production meeting late, clutching a Starbucks cappuccino and a pack of Krispy Kreme donuts, smiling his apologies.

  ‘Caught on the bloody phone as usual. Sorry, people. Look, phone off.’

  He sets down his coffee and turns off his phone, a symbolic gesture of commitment that he believes fully compensates for his late arrival.

  ‘Love the final script.’

  ‘Not quite final,’ says Henry. ‘We’re still waiting for Aidan’s notes.’

  ‘Oh, Aidan won’t give you any grief. He’s a real pro.’

  Henry frowns. Christina meets his eyes with a quick look of sympathy. Sweet Christina, twenty-three years old and looks sixteen. The quiet clever one who keeps her head down, the hunched stoop of the young not yet proud of their bodies.

  ‘So where is Aidan?’ says Barry. ‘Isn’t he supposed to be here?’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ says Jo, the production manager. ‘He’s coming straight from Heathrow.’

  ‘The thing is,’ says Henry.

  ‘And your first shooting day is Friday?’

  Jo nods confirmation. ‘Westminster Abbey.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to jump right in. We’re at least one day over budget, maybe two. I know it’s late to be telling you this, but we have to find cuts.’

  ‘Two days!’ Henry is shocked. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Then give me one. Cut the Keats intro, for a start.’

  ‘Cut the Keats intro!’

  Henry’s best visual idea. The presenter holds up a replica Grecian urn and intones Keats’s famous lines: ‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know.’ Then he drops the urn. It smashes in slo-mo close-up. Massey confides to camera: ‘Sheer nonsense, isn’t it? Truth is sometimes ugly. Beauty is often false.’

  ‘I thought you loved it.’

  ‘I do.’ Barry Eagles read English at Brasenose. ‘It’s a gorgeous shocker. But who reads Keats any more?’

  ‘Jesus, Barry. We’re not making the Teletubbies.’

  ‘I need cuts. That’s all I’m saying. Get Aidan to come up with a really contemporary intro, something that doesn’t need any special effects.’

  ‘Aidan’s a busy man.’

  There’s a clue and a half, but Barry misses it. Or chooses not to hear. Henry likes Barry, and God knows he’s saved his bacon with this gig, eight months on the outside and people think you’ve retired. Barry’s the master at winning commissions from channel controllers. Not easy selling a historical documentary on Puritan iconoclasm. And his trump card in the successful pitch was of course Aidan Massey and his nationally famous hair.

  ‘Christina.’ Barry turns to the researcher. ‘Put together some material for Aidan. Possible leads for an intro.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Christina. ‘Best if I pass it by Henry first. It’s his script.’

  God bless the girl.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Barry. Like this is some kind of team logistics.

  ‘I was thinking,’ Christina persists. ‘Henry could write this up as a piece for History Today. His ideas are really original.’

  ‘Let’s get the show out first.’

  Oh, beloved Christina. How I would love to write an article, a book even. But who would publish me? Too late now, my colours nailed to the television mast, I sail on over the ocean of development. The voyages grow longer, the sightings of land rarer, and all of it discovered, inhabited, ruled.

  Television, the great image factory. Images the tool of the devil. Calvin called the human mind ‘a perpetual forge of idols’. Finitum non est capax infiniti. Our little minds can’t imagine the mystery that is God, and so we create lesser gods to worship. ‘Houses of pictures,’ Henry Clark called churches, and that was not a term of approval. Pictures induce spiritual fornication.

  Henry has his eyes closed in the heart of the meeting.

  What am I doing here?

  The door springs open and in bounces a small man with a big head, supposedly off an overnight plane. He’s pulsating with nervous energy.

  ‘Late, late!’ cries the star of the show. ‘Mea culpa! BA culpa! On the ground twenty minutes late, no jetway, seven miles of glazed corridors. Coffee! Feed me coffee! Henry, my man! Greetings! The countdown has begun. We’re going to have fun.’

  ‘Glad you made it, Aidan,’ says Barry, ushering him to one of the black leather and chrome steel chairs. ‘Our last gathering before you go over the top.’

  Henry watches Aidan Massey gulping black coffee, jerking his upper body back and forth as he pours out the stream of unrelated observations that passes for brilliance. His shock of auburn hair flops over his outsize brow, the hair the authenticator of genius in this image-infantile culture.

  Entirely independently of all that is passing in the room, Henry has an idea for the new intro. He makes a note.

  Barry is telling Aidan there’ll have to be some minor cuts. Aidan takes this in his stride.

  ‘I’ll be winging it anyway,’ he declares. ‘What you have on paper there is no more than a sketch.’

  ‘A fucking good sketch, Aidan. It’s going to be knock-out.’

  ‘I’m in Henry’s hands.’ Oh, you sly shitbag. ‘I’m the clay on the spinning wheel. Henry will mould me. Won’t you, Henry?’

  ‘Do my best, Aidan.’

  Barry throws a copy of the Spectator across the table.

  ‘Did you see this? Television’s sexiest intellectuals. You’re number three.’

  Of course he’s seen it. The page is already framed and hanging in his downstairs lavatory. But he reads it like it’s an amusing surprise.

  ‘Michael Ignatieff at number one. Melvyn Bragg at number two. Who votes on this? Spectator readers? Of what sexual orientation? Stock up on Vaseline, Henry. For your lenses, of course.’

  And shoot you in close-up so the Spectator readers never see that your legs are too short for your body. The trademark Aidan Massey in-your-face presenting style, widely praised for ‘immediacy’ and ‘attack’, in fact devised to frame out the star’s dwarfish build.

  ‘Maybe you should give me your notes, Aidan. So we can run out a final version of the script.’

  ‘The final version is what comes out of my mouth as the camera rolls, Henry. I know that must drive you crazy. It’s not how the book says. But it’s what I do, and it has the minor merit of not sounding rehearsed. My kind of television isn’t a lecture. It’s a conversation with the viewer. I want him, or preferably her, to follow what I’m saying. To get drawn in, to be hun
gry for more. So I plead guilty.’ He taps the Spectator on the table. ‘I’m a seducer.’

  ‘Images are the tool of the devil,’ says Barry, quoting from the script.

  Aidan Massey’s eyes cloud over. He’s momentarily unsure which term is the source of the humour.

  ‘One of your lines,’ prompts Barry. ‘I love the irony. Today’s devil imagery has to be television.’

  Henry meets Christina’s eyes. They both know Aidan hasn’t read the script. He has no idea where the line comes from. Fuck it, enough. Tell it like it is.

  ‘Are you okay with what I’ve written for you, Aidan? After all, you’ve had no real input since our first meeting.’

  Aidan Massey turns his big handsome head towards Henry and gazes at him in silence: a silence made all the more potent by its contrast with his usual volubility.

  ‘Ever heard of the alien blow-job theory?’ he says at last.

  ‘Can’t say I have, Aidan.’

  ‘It goes like this. In every survey of sexual habits, around seventy per cent of adults say they’ve been on the receiving end of oral sex. But only forty per cent say they’ve given oral sex. That leaves thirty per cent of the adult population getting blow-jobs that no one’s giving. Hence the postulation that every night teams of aliens descend on the nation’s bedrooms.’

  Barry Eagles laughs. Christina smiles. Henry does neither.

  ‘Not following you, Aidan.’

  ‘Things are never the way they seem.’

  ‘About the script—’

  ‘Don’t worry about the script, Henry. I’ll make it work.’

  Later Henry finds himself in the men’s room occupying a niche next to Barry Eagles.

  ‘Aidan happy?’ says Barry, who left the meeting when the detailed work began.

  ‘Yes, he’s happy.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘You do realize Aidan hasn’t written a word of the script?’

  ‘But he’s okay with it, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he’s okay with it. But it’s my script.’

  Barry expels a sigh.

  ‘Look, Henry.’ He struggles with the buttons of his fly. ‘Aidan’s a professor of history, not an actor. He brings the project authority.’

  ‘Fake authority.’

  ‘You want to tell the viewers that?’

  ‘No,’ says Henry.

  ‘Life’s not perfect.’

  ‘What pisses me off is I’m actually proud of what I’ve done. It’s my research, my thesis. It just might be brilliant.’

  ‘But if we don’t have Aidan, we don’t have a series. Channel Four isn’t going to buy you as the presenter.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You could try asking Aidan to go with a co-writing credit.’

  ‘Oh, sure. He’d love that.’

  He returns to the planning meeting, where they’re revising the script to make the necessary cuts. Aidan looks up from the pages with a triumphant smile.

  ‘I can’t believe what I’m reading here, Henry. You’ve caught my phrases, my thought processes, my fucking soul. Fuck you, man! It’s like you’re inside my head!’

  ‘So you don’t have many changes?’

  ‘Why would I want changes? You’ve channelled me. Listen.’

  He reads out a paragraph of script as if performing to camera, striding up and down the room. When he’s done the others clap and he leans over Henry, seated at the table, and embraces him.

  ‘Soul brother!’ he says.

  What’s the use? The dead weight of his own anger exhausts him.

  I’m walking on walls and below only clouds.

  9

  The noise they make, thinks Alan Strachan. How is it possible that eighty children can make so much noise and still eat their lunch? The throat is not designed for shouting and eating at the same time. They must be shouting between mouthfuls.

  ‘Sir, can I leave the rest, sir?’

  ‘No. You’ve hardly touched it.’

  ‘But sir, it’s horrible. It makes me want to be sick.’

  ‘You don’t know till you try.’

  ‘Do you want me to be sick, sir?’

  ‘Well, it would vary the monotony.’

  ‘All right then. Here goes.’

  Not a bad kid, Victoria. She’ll do anything to get attention. Never sees her parents, of course. They’re too busy in their high-powered jobs earning the money to give their children all they could possibly desire except the one thing they want.

  ‘No cheating now. No fingers down the throat.’

  A crowd forming. Reassert control.

  ‘Back to your tables, everyone.’

  ‘Is Victoria really going to be sick, sir?’

  ‘Sir sir. Hold up your hand like this sir. Then when I shoot let it flop down like it’s dead.’

  ‘What is this, Jamie?’

  ‘Just a joke sir.’

  ‘All right. There you are.’

  ‘Poof!’

  Down goes the hand. Howls of laughter.

  ‘You’re a poof sir. Just a joke sir.’

  Erch-erch-chukka-erch. Oh God she’s going to do it.

  ‘If you’re sick, Victoria, you clear it up yourself.’

  ‘Sir!’ Face red with straining, eyes wide with the injustice of it. ‘That’s changing the rules!’

  ‘Not at all. Retch and chuck it, fetch the bucket.’

  ‘You just made that up.’

  ‘True.’ Look at the time. ‘I have to go. Aimee, can I leave them to you? I’m behind on my marking.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Off you go.’

  ‘Bless you.’

  Nor is it a lie. Staff room or classroom? Jimmy’ll be in the staff room and he’ll go on clearing his throat until I talk to him and all he has to talk about these days is the Sussex County Chronicle, for God’s sake you’d think he was filing copy for the New York Times. Ten minutes in the classroom then zip home.

  Funny old room. The French windows rattle in the slightest breeze and the desks are never straight. Not that I care. At least there’s a view over the playing fields to the Downs. So, Alice Dickinson. My Journey.

  My mother takes me in the car to the station were I catch the train to London were my father lives. he is always bisy so when I go to visit him its only for an hour really and all the rest of the time is my journey. my journey is not very interesting not like when mum comes on the train with me so I dont know what else to write. coming back on the train is just like going out on the train except all the stations happen backwards and sometimes its dark. if my mother is still at work my granma meets me and so my journey is over.

  Dear God why don’t I shoot myself now? How can I go on living in this vale of unshed tears? No parent would ever send their child to school if they knew what they reveal daily, hourly, about their monotonous egotistical cruelties. Pretend not to notice. Correct the spelling, urge the use of capital letters, instil some sense of punctuation. And all the time before our eyes the hearts harden and the wonder dies.

  And what of them, my own composition markers, my anonymous readers, my judges? How can I tell them that for me writing is more than fancy, even more than vocation? My mission is to rekindle the dying fire, to fan it to blazing heat. Just give me half a chance. Give me a leg up. Let me get one foot on the lowest rung of the ladder and you’ll see me climb. Twenty-nine years old and I swore I would be on my way by thirty, three months to go, why else the solitude, why else the low pay and even lower esteem? For how can I not see it in their eyes, the surprise and the pity, he seems such a capable young man, what’s he doing teaching in a Sussex prep school, you’d think he’d have more ambition than that. Oh yes I have ambition. More even than your little dreams of swimming pools and personalized number plates. Long after I’ve forgotten you and your children, you’ll be telling fibs in pubs about how you knew me once.

  Alan Strachan looks up at the clock on the classroom wall. Forty minutes before the next period, every minute of that time needed for marking. Why
didn’t I do it yesterday evening as I planned? Because I was tired. Always tired in the evening. Not so much tired as out of hope. The reservoir of hope starts full each morning and trickles away in the course of the day. Evenings are dark times. Thank God for television, the light that cheers but does not inebriate.

  Go now.

  He puts the compositions back in the folder unmarked and leaves at a brisk walk. His car, a fifteen-year-old VW Beetle convertible, starts first time, by no means a courtesy he can presume upon, and he takes this as a good omen. Out onto the lethal main road with its long straight where drivers accelerate and overtake and die. Off again at the defunct petrol station and down the lane into the village of Glynde where he lives. Mrs Temple-Morris coming out of her front door as he emerges from his car.

  ‘You’re home early, Alan.’

  ‘Just to check the post.’

  ‘Oh, the post. It’s all bills these days. I leave all that to David.’ She raises heavily-pencilled eyebrows, delivers a secret smile. ‘Not that he ever makes himself useful.’

  She sashays off to drive into Lewes to buy the evening meal for the husband who comes home late and leaves early and plays golf all weekend. Fifty if she’s a day and still flirting like a teenager.

  He pushes open the door to the small terraced house, feels the resistance of the mail heaped on the mat. The hall is dark, as surprised as Mrs Temple-Morris to see him at this unconventional hour. He stoops and gathers, moves on into the kitchen, heart pounding. Turns on the kitchen light, the daylight outside dull with cloud. The latest TLS, a phone bill, a brochure for discount sofas. And a white envelope with a typed address. This could be it. Has to be it. He opens the envelope at once, ripping the sealed flap with a decisive stroke of his index finger, and takes out the folded sheet of paper within.

  The first glance reveals the red logo on the top right. Now that all doubt is ended and he knows he holds his future in his hands he is overwhelmed by fear.

  Let it be over. Whatever the verdict let it slide into the past and its power to hurt me be furred over by time. Assume the worst. Reach beyond rejection. Refuse to be defeated.