Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 21

On Mondays he would go down to the police station and then the Princess Louise, coming back late and maybe even sleeping in the office. On Tuesdays he would usually go down to Paddington Green CID to get stories there and spend the evening at a public meeting. On Wednesdays he was busy putting the paper to bed. Thursdays and Fridays – that was my chance. The long, long weekends he disappeared. If you'd have been there, you'd have wanted to be his friend or his lover, if only to turn his fire outwards from you. Jim was the first principled man I had ever met, my father apart, sardonic and fearless like Sydney Carton. He was the first man I had ever met. But I hardly ever saw him now, and had no real reasons to engage him in conversation. So I became more besotted. The sentence ‘Jim's putting the paper to bed’ could incapacitate me for an hour. Yet he was as oblivious of me as an actor on a screen, and one always falls for those who cannot return your gaze, the blithe, the unaware, the one across the lawn.

In the single-figure audiences at the pub theatres where I was sent to review plays and where the actors could detect my gaze, I yearned for Jim and for the remove of the big screen, where actors moved in innocence of my eyes. My first plan was to impress him with the commitment of my reviews. I found out a lot of statistics and waved them at him like breasts at the pub on Thursday.

‘Did you know that there are 38,000 members of Equity, and at any one time only 13,400 are actually in work? It's shocking.’

‘In what way shocking?’

‘It's union-bashing, isn't it? Listen, these are working people. If there are fifty fringe theatres in London and they've got a cast of, let's say, an average of six per play, then that's, uh, 300 people, and if the Equity minimum is £85 a week, then that's 300 people living on a pittance. Eighty-five pounds a week!’

‘That's more than twice what you earn, love.’

My other plan was simply to write such astonishingly unforgettable reviews – reviews you could poke your eye out on – that notice would simply have to be paid. They were skull-crackingly bad. But they looked quite good. About a monologue on Virginia Woolf I wrote: ‘“I am mad! I hear voices! Not only that, I write them down!” That is, I suggest, what the character wanted to say. But where in all of this is our delicious wine? Our great little knitter?’ The worse the plays the more free I felt to woo Jim with this unique voice. And so it became a kind of competition. The more terrible the plays were the more terrible the reviews were. It was a contest of terribility. I wafted my pen around like Isadora Duncan, desperate for a glance from him. And one day he did call me over.

‘Listen, Sally. You've got to stop writing these reviews or Eric's going to sack you. And if he does that, you're fucked.’

I could feel the wind from Naked tugging at me, trying to tear me off London and suck me up the Archway Road towards the motorway and the oubliettes of the North. I also thought: He's noticed me. I wanted him. I even want him now, as I write, a painful need, never since matched, to touch him, though he was like a jagged piece of corrugated iron which would cut you no matter how you held it.