Night of Fire Page 22

  Towards the end, when their first embrace brings a gasp from the packed house, he is amazed by the plausibility of her love for her partner – a petite and faintly insipid actress, he thinks. And the curtain comes down on the play’s only sentimental lapse, as they walk away from the audience across a field of asphodel.

  That evening, after a restaurant supper with a subdued cast – the audience response had been mistrustful – they walked back to their garret in silence. He imagined her disappointed, but she was not, she said. She was walking with the supple stride of her stage persona, and her close-cropped hair, cut to accommodate the auburn wig, lent her an odd, chiselled boyishness.

  That night, when he took her in his arms, he knew he was embracing a different woman. Her habitual vivacity had stilled to a new, purposive control. She twisted on top of him and applied her lips to his chest, his throat. He felt bemused for a minute, then compliant, excited. She stared down at him with a kind of triumphant tenderness. His grip came to rest on her thighs. His gaze reached up to hers, saw someone he barely knew. He felt her hands over him, kneading him like earth: she who had seemed so frail.

  Over the next weeks he succumbed to this changed lovemaking. His body grew sensitised and self-aware. Under her hands and mouth, beneath the new strength of her arms, he sometimes felt himself diffusing, as if his body’s limits were no longer his. When he breathed ‘I love you’, he was less sure whom he meant. He felt an inchoate gratitude. He was dissolving at her touch, becoming less known to himself, her tongue deep in his mouth. He dreamt he opened to her like a woman.

  After the play closed, and the theatre reverted to its routine roster of musicals and melodramas, and Linda returned to her London flat, there was no more work. She took a job as a temping secretary, while Steve’s assignments for a provincial newspaper queued up in a humdrum procession of subjects that bored him: sitters characterised only by their function, shot against background offices, council chambers or sports venues.

  When she received work again, the part was light and clownish, created for a slapstick comedy. But now he was wary of saying she had been miscast. He could not tell. She said she could become anybody, given time. She had spent all her childhood in self-created pantomime, pretending to be others. Anyone but her.

  She travelled with her play for eight weeks, while he sporadically followed. She had returned to her impetuous self. They made love in the wings of empty theatres, in dressing rooms, under a seaside pier at night. By the year’s end he had followed her through three more roles. And always there was the struggle to inhabit her new character. She achieved this once by recalling a cousin eerily similar to the woman she was playing. Her cousin’s fluttering gestures and facial tic gave Linda her entry into the role’s psyche. Another time, when some final understanding eluded her, she stepped before dress rehearsal into her costume – a skimpy cocktail dress – and the last clue fell into place.

  Steve wondered how deep these transformations went. Were they ever quite abandoned? ‘No,’ she answered. ‘They become extensions of you. Like a bad haircut. It’s you and not you.’ She primped up her hair comically. ‘After the show’s over, you think they’re gone. But no. Once they’re created, they stick around, waiting. Angry nurse, comedienne, gay biologist. They’re like ghosts inside you. You can summon them back.’

  As if to free her from such alter egos, he redeveloped the negatives of the photographs he had taken months before. They seemed now less shamefully mute than he had thought. She appeared decently herself in them, spirited and pretty, a little older than he had expected. Often he had strained too hard in lighting her, or posed her pretentiously. They were portraits in the image of his desire. No wonder she sometimes looked uneasy. It was in his cine films that she seemed most artlessly real. Their sequences were spontaneous. She was often fooling around. Sometimes she even looked ordinary, and this bewildered him. He was growing tired, he thought, he had studied her too often. He filed the films away.

  It was at a theatre in the West Country, somewhere he later forgot. He had driven half the day to attend her first night. But the play was poor; and on stage, for the first time, she seemed no different from the rest. He found himself no longer focusing on her, but following the drama’s facile development. She was playing an overworked nurse, and her words were as dead as the others’. Some radiance had gone. He blamed the play for this. It had surely deprived her of any motivation. But her recent roles – a teacher, a housewife – were of women without stature or allure, and she had not been able to quicken them. In the interval he was surprised at the audience’s applause. He must be jaded, he thought. He went to the washroom and doused his head in its basin. But the play’s second half seemed no better.

  He found her at her dressing room counter with her head sunk on her arms. The mirror’s opal lights shone harsh on her white neck. She said: ‘That fucking director cut half my lines. I must have sounded idiotic.’

  ‘You didn’t . . .’

  ‘He thought I got it wrong in rehearsal. I didn’t, I had my own interpretation. Or maybe I did get it wrong. I don’t know. He’s a prick.’ Her voice came muffled from her buried head. ‘I don’t know.’

  He stood behind her, touched her shoulders. They were shaking. Her skin looked sallow. Her head jerked up and she stared into the glass. Her cheeks were blotched with mascara. She said: ‘And that side lighting . . . they should ban it. They did some publicity shots on stage and I looked a hundred.’

  Somebody knocked on the door and she swivelled round. She was hoping, he could tell, that a fellow actor was looking in to praise her. But it was a stage hand, trying the wrong room.

  She said: ‘Maybe I should give this thing up.’

  He saw himself standing behind her in the mirror, a shadow. He could find nothing to say. In her anger she looked soured and ordinary. On her dressing table her scattered powders and deodorants appeared sordid to him, and he could not understand her eyes. They had grown unsettled, almost ugly. She said: ‘Why the hell can’t you say anything? I can tell you didn’t like the show, but why . . .’

  ‘I may be wrong. The audience liked it.’

  ‘The audience! This audience are idiots.’ She started to change into her daytime dress, throwing her costume into a basin. This stripping of her dress over her breasts and shoulders used to arouse him. Now he felt only frozen apprehension. He stared at the floor. She would not focus on him, only on his reflection in the mirror. She said: ‘I don’t want to be looked at.’ He tried to find words that would not hurt. Her eyes looked wild and lost. ‘You can’t say anything, can you? Except that I can’t act and I look like shit.’ He watched her struggling into a raincoat, stretching a woollen cap over her head. Then she said: ‘You’d better drive back.’

  It died as suddenly as it had begun. Something vital in her had faded. It seemed to have left her overnight. She appeared immersed in the deadness of her recent roles, as if they had subsumed or inhabited her. Perhaps, after all, it was true that she existed most brightly in the characters of others: she who believed in their existence more than in her own.

  The café was not one he had chosen. There were too many other customers. The window beside them side-lit her face in the way she hated on stage. She looked taut and pale. Their hands lay inert on the table.

  ‘Why did you want to see me?’ she asked, as if this was a business meeting. Two days had gone by before he had returned. ‘I have to be back in the theatre by noon.’ Her hands came up to her face, cradling her cup. He sensed her pent-up anger. At last she said: ‘You want to end us, don’t you?’ She made it sound like a suicide pact.

  He felt this frozen silence coming over him, but he said hoarsely: ‘I can’t tell . . .’ Then the words choked on his guilt.

  She said in the same formal voice: ‘What has changed, then?’

  He wanted to say: You have. Even her eyes no longer seemed extraordinary. They were dull grey. But he only answered: ‘I don’t know. Something has.’

&nbs
p; ‘You don’t know much, do you?’ Now she was set implacably on a course of her own. She could not stop herself. She said: ‘Do you even know how old I am?’

  Softly: ‘No.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t notice a damn thing. You live in a dream of your own. Do you realise you’ve never understood anything about me? Nothing. You’ve just fantasised about me. Gawping from the theatre dark, that’s you. Admiring a fantasy.’ She made a noise like spitting. ‘Well I’m not a goddam fantasy. I’m real. Does that shock you? And I’m thirty-one years old.’

  He stared at her. She stared defiantly back. Now that he knew her age, he had the illusion that she was altering before his eyes. But he said: ‘I don’t care about your age. To me you were beautiful.’

  ‘Were.’ She lifted the coffee cup to her face again. For a second he thought she was choking: a sound between coughing and a sob. He reached awkwardly to touch her arm, but it flinched away. When she recovered her voice, it was stone hard. ‘Has it occurred to you, Steve, that you’re a bit of a phoney?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All this gawking at faces and landscapes like they were hiding something! Your drivel about essences! No, it’s appearances that obsess you. Just looks.’

  He started to blush: a reaction since childhood. Whenever accused, however falsely, he blushed. But he was glad to avenge himself: ‘I’m just doing what you do. Trying to discover a centre, a character. It’s no different, Linda’ – but her name sounded alien now – ‘except that what you do doesn’t last, does it? It’s gone in a week or two. What’s left is just publicity shots of it. Photographs. They may be lousy, but they’re all that’s left.’

  He saw her teeth clench, but did not know whether from anger or wretchedness. She stood up abruptly. ‘I have to go now.’

  He knew she did not. It was barely eleven o’clock. Her voice sounded throaty and distant. His rancour vanished as he thought: so she’s leaving. He would not see her again. He heard himself say: ‘What will you do now?’ He meant in future months, in years.

  She thought a moment, suddenly laughed. ‘I’ll go back to Act One. That’s what actors do. Every night.’

  He stood too, as if to embrace her, but her hands deflected him, palms outwards, trembling in the air between them. ‘Don’t.’ She was looking at him suddenly with a brimming sadness. Then she pushed past him to the door.

  He made as if to stop her. He could resist her anger, but not her tears. But she did not see. He would have asked her back. Yet he was glad, in the end, that he did not.

  Browsing the Internet’s disordered dreams, you come upon advice about the make-up for slanted eyes: how eyeliner can extend the lower lid until it almost meets the artfully tilted eyebrow above. There are misguided sites for plastic surgery to reduce eye slant; others that expose how the look may be mistakenly created through a facelift. There are Chinese blessed with a canthic tilt at the eye’s outer edge, and beautiful black women who look like cats.

  He scrolled through images with a hypnotised weariness. It was like a sickness, in which days could go by. He missed five work assignments. He gazed on these faces as if they were fictions (and some of them were). And he walked the streets. For months his mind had pictured only her, blinding him to anyone else around him. Now, with distant fascination, he noticed women passing in the shops, women in advertisements, women on magazine covers.

  He trawled the web for Linda’s reflection, and found Korean actresses and narrow-eyed Finns and even bird-like cartoon figures. Only once did he come upon her as he first remembered her, or almost, but he never located the website again. Her photographs made him long for her too much, and he burned them. Her attack on him still ached from time to time, like an embedded splinter. She was wrong, of course, appearances were more than surfaces. The smallest facial feature might betray the character. Even the first, faint start of flesh beneath the breastbone – he had captured hers on his Leica – disclosed something uniquely personal and inward. He saw a woman on television – a svelte dancer – in whom this intimation was so unbearably eloquent that he wanted to meet her; but she danced only in the show’s background, and it was impossible to tell, from the credits, who she was.

  He discovered a computer game called Quest for the Grail. Its hero had to navigate labyrinthine castles, scaling battlements and forcing gates, then entered passageways whose doors succeeded one another into near-infinity. He unlocked chambers whose curtained walls must be parted to reveal something else, and something beyond that, in ever-delayed promise. And all this he could play from a keypad. He took mistaken byways and dead ends, of course – his hero was only human – but returned to penetrate farther and deeper, until the game closed because of his banked-up mistakes.

  The hero then returned to the start. Scroll down beneath him and the legend read: ‘I will never surrender’. He knew this was a ploy of the game’s manufacturer, to make him try again. But he thought: this time . . .

  This time the last curtain will part. It may be days before I reach the end, but the doors will open one by one. I know them better now. At certain points you may announce your decision aloud, so that my hero’s voice intones: ‘I choose the second door on the left, to enter the green chamber . . .’ If you are adroit, your appointed route will reach a perfect end. But I can’t tell what this end is. I make too many mistakes. I go into the wrong halls, or wander down corridors to nowhere.

  It is hard to wrench myself from this fantasy back into sunlit life. But today I have to photograph a church wedding. It’s a long time since I did that. The groom, a young businessman, stands a foot taller than his bride, who walks up the aisle on her father’s arm with a look of terror under her veil. She is fair and plump. I shoot some close-ups near the altar, but the couple’s disparity in height turns these ludicrous, and the priest’s bald head wobbles between them like a light bulb. As the congregation stands to sing ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’ one of the small bridesmaids drops her bouquet and starts to walk out. The congregation splits into laughter or alarm. But the senior bridesmaid – a beautiful young woman – shepherds the child into her arms, and holds her there.

  I struggle to find light readings from the chiaroscuro of the chancel, but I capture the moment of their vows, she inaudible, he booming like a major-domo. Their return down the aisle, her veil thrown back from a face now smiling, and their exit in a snowfall of confetti are ideal to the camera, and behind them the small bridesmaid is toying with her coronet of honeysuckle, as if for my lens. The couple’s parents join them for a photo shoot in the porch, and for a while I see nothing but faces shining in the June heat, garnished with wide hats and buttonholes. The bridesmaids stand brilliant in shell-pink satin, while the bride and groom gaze at one another as though surprised at what they’ve done. Then, as I pan for close-ups, there swims into my viewfinder the unearthly radiance of two oblique green eyes. For a moment they are looking straight into the lens, as if into my own, then they veer away and are lost among the others.

  In the ballroom of a neighbouring hotel, where the canapés and champagne circulate among a throng of unphotogenic guests, I concentrate on whoever looks important. I know this now. There are people who carry with them a petty aura of prestige, and when my photos are at last submitted to the bride’s parents, they are sure to grumble: ‘But there aren’t any of . . .’ and ‘But where is Lady . . .?’ I do my best. The groom’s father, at least, is a handsome man, and I manage some canny shots of guests laughing at the best man’s fatuous speech.

  Then I find her. She is standing alone, not laughing, and the satin that looks pretty on the smaller bridesmaids falls from her bare shoulders in a coral-coloured sheen, shaping itself to a tall figure with high breasts. She looks, at this moment, very young. Those strange, vivid eyes meet the probing of my camera with a wide, innocent stare.

  When the speeches end, the bride’s father bustles over and gathers the couple for another photo shoot. My lights are already set up in a nearby roo
m, but the bridal pair and their officious parents take up such unnatural poses that I have constantly to realign them, even while I fear that next door some guests, perhaps she, are filtering away.

  And when I return, she is gone. The groom offers me a champagne glass, but it shakes uncontrollably in my hand and I have to set it down. Less than twenty minutes, and she is gone. I search the corridors and the car park. My stomach aches. When the couple reunite to cut the wedding cake, she still does not appear, and I photograph the stilted ceremony from every angle, while the Leica quivers in my fingers and my eyes wander. As soon as it is over, I stack away my cameras and make for the lavatories. I think I will be sick. My legs judder over the carpets. I retch into the basin, but nothing comes. A throbbing starts up in my head. Two guests come in to pee, laughing together. I glimpse my face in the mirror, smooth back my hair.

  Out in the passageway, from the opposite door, the entrance to the women’s washrooms, the small bridesmaid emerges with drying tears, and turns to hug her as she follows behind, then runs back to the party. I stare stupidly into her eyes. She has her back to the passage wall. She says: ‘Oh, you’re the photographer.’

  The photographer. How did she say it? I can’t recall. But I read a kind of contempt. I am not one of the guests. I am just the photographer, an employee. I hear my voice detached, saying things I do not mean to say, separate. ‘Oh I’m not the photographer. I’m just helping somebody. Sort of . . .’