Читать книгу A Hard Time to Be a Father - Fay Weldon - Страница 11

You’ll never guess what happened to me in Helsinki. How my life changed, when I was there last October. Let me tell you! The trees in that much-islanded, much-forested Northern country – you’ve never seen so many islands, so much forest, so low and misty and large an autumn sun – were just on the turn; the rather boring universal green giving up and suddenly glowing into reds and yellows and browns. ‘Ruska’ is what the Finns call this annual triumph of variety over uniformity; something so dramatic they even have this special name for it. It is, I suppose, the last flaring surge of summer: like a woman of fifty who throws out the black shoes she’s worn all her life and shods herself in greens and pinks, feeling she’d better make the best of things while she can. Not that I’m fifty, in case you’re wondering, I’m twenty-nine; but twenty-nine can feel pretty old. Older, I imagine, than fifty, because around thirty the tick-tock of the biological clock can sound pretty loud in a woman’s ear.

My mother wants me to stay home, get married, have children.

‘Settle down, Jude,’ she’d plead. ‘It’s what I want for you.’

‘I can’t think why,’ I’d say. ‘You never did.’

‘That’s different,’ she’d say, and pour another whisky and light up her cigar. My mother is a professional golf coach, and has been ever since my father walked out twenty-five years ago. She had to do something to earn a living. She’s a healthy and athletic woman, though she must be over sixty, and men are still for ever knocking at her door, though she doesn’t often let them in. The whisky and cigar syndrome is no problem (or only to my sister Chris). I see it as just my mother’s rather old-fashioned way of saying to a man, ‘I’m as good as you. What do I want you for?’

‘Christ,’ I say to my sister, ‘Mother’s whisky is always well watered. The cigar goes out after ten seconds. What are you worrying about?’ But Chris is a nurse. She was seven when my father left. I was four.

My mother’s determination that I should settle down seems to me a fine example of GUP. What do I mean by GUP? It’s the Great Universal Paradox which rules our lives. See it at work in any obstetric ward, at the very beginning of things. There you’ll find a woman who only ever wanted a baby but hers was stillborn, and another who’s just had a living baby she doesn’t want, and someone in for a sterilisation and another for a termination, and another with a threatened miscarriage, and another resting up before sextuplets, having taken too much fertility drug – and all will be weeping. All want different things so passionately; and nature takes no notice at all of what they want. Nature just rumbles on insanely, refining the race.

What you want you can’t have: what you do have, you don’t want. That’s GUP.

When I arrived in Helsinki I was in love with Andreas Anders, who didn’t love me. And I was loved by Tony Schuster, whom I didn’t love. My loving of Andreas Anders loomed large in my life, and had done so for six years. Tony Schuster loving me, which he had for all of seven days, meant to me next to nothing; that’s the way GUP goes. Andreas Anders not loving me made me feel fat and stupid: so if Tony Schuster was capable of loving someone as fat and stupid as me, what did that make Tony Schuster? Some sort of wimp? In other words, as famously spoken by Marx (not Karl, but the third brother) tearing up the long-sought invitation to join – ‘Who wants to belong to a club of which I’m a member?’ GUP.

Finland is just across a strip of sea from the Soviet Union, though the government is of a rather different kind and in Finland women seem to run everything, whereas in Russia it’s the men. Finland is noble but Russia is exciting. Little Finnish children always look so healthy, bright-eyed, well-mittened and properly fed to keep out the cold. Yes, yes, I know. I’m broody. Bright, bright clothes they wear, in Helsinki. Terrifically fashionable. Lots of suede, so soft it looks and acts like linen.

We were in Helsinki to make a six-part thriller called Lenin in Love for BBC TV. Helsinki’s Great Square is the same period, same proportions, same size as Moscow’s Red Square, so it gets used by film companies a great deal. Filming in Red Square itself is always a hassle: there’s a lot of worried security men about and they like to read the script and object if it says anything detrimental about the Soviet Union – and the script usually does: that being the whole point of cold-war thrillers. Their wrongness, our tightness. The queue for Lenin’s tomb is always getting into shot, and you can hardly ask the punters to move on, when they’ve railed all the way in from Tashkent or Samarkand to be there. So off everyone goes to Helsinki to film the Moscow bits. Doctor Zhivago was made in Finland.

Andreas Anders is the Director of Lenin in Love. Tony Schuster is the cameraman. I’m the PA. I have a degree in Politics and Economics and moved over from Research to Production five years ago; seeing I had a better chance of being close to Andreas Anders. You’d think a bright girl like me would think about something other than love, but at twenty-nine it gets you, it gets you! Twenty-nine years old and no children or live-in-lover, let alone a husband. Not that I actually wanted any of those things. In the film and TV world there’s not all that much permanent in-living. You just have to pack up and go, when the call comes, even when you’re in the middle of scrambling his breakfast eggs. Or he, yours. Men tend to do the cooking, these days, in the circles in which I live. Let’s not say ‘live’. Let’s say ‘move’.

I’d been the researcher on Andreas Anders’ first film. I was twenty-three then and straight out of college. It was a teledrama called Mary’s Son, about a woman’s fertility problems. It was during the first week of filming – Andreas took me along with him: he said he needed a researcher on set though actually he wanted me in his bed – that I both developed my theory on GUP and fell in love with him. At the end of the second week Andreas fell in love with his star, Caroline Christopherson, the girl who was playing Mary. And I was courteously and instantly dismissed from his bed. Nightmare time. I’d got all through college repelling all boarders: now this.

But Andreas Anders! His face is pale and haunted: he has wide, kind, set-apart grey eyes, and he’s tall, and broad-shouldered. He has long, fine hands, and what could I do? I loved him. That he should look at me, little me, in the first place! Pick me out from all the others? Even for a minute, let alone a week, let alone a fortnight, what a marvel! At least when he fell for Caroline Christopherson it was serious. They got married. And now she’s world-famous and plays the lead in big budget movies, and is a box-office draw, which irritates Andreas, since he’s so obviously the one with the talent, the creativity, and the brains: Caroline just has star quality. When it gets bad for Andreas, why there I am in bed with him again and he’s telling me all about it. They have a child, Phoebe, who gets left behind with nannies. Andreas doesn’t like that either. I don’t say, ‘But you’re the one doing the leaving too,’ because I seldom say to him what I really think. That’s what this one-sided love does to you. Turns you into an idiot. I hate myself but I’m tongue-tied.

How can I compete with C.C., as he calls her? That kind of film-starry quality is real enough: a kind of glowing magnetism: a way of moving – just a gesture of a hand, the flick of an eye – which draws other eyes to itself. I don’t look too bad, I tell myself. Though I suppose where C.C. looks slim I just look plain thin. Both our hair frizzes out all over the place, but hers shines at the same time as frizzing. I do not know how that effect is achieved. If I did, friend, I would let you know. I look more intelligent than she does, but that’s not the point. On the contrary. Andreas Anders once complained I always looked judgemental. That was when we were doing a studio play up at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios, Light from the Bedroom. My first PA job. C.C. was giving birth to little Phoebe in Paris while we were taping in Birmingham. Andreas couldn’t leave the show: well, how could he? He and I stayed at the Holiday Inn. He is the most amazing lover.

I don’t let on how much I care. I pretend it means nothing to me. If he thought it hurt, he’d stay clear of me. He doesn’t mean to be unkind. I just act kind of light and worldly. I don’t want to put him off. Would you? GUP again! If you love them, don’t let them know it. ‘I love you’ is the great turn-off to the uncommitted man.

And now here’s Tony Schuster saying ‘I love you’ to me, publicly, leaning down from his dolly as he glides about in the misty air of Helsinki’s Great Square. The mist’s driving the lighting man crazy. The scenes are intended to be dreamlike, but all prefer the man-made kind of mist to the one God has on offer. Man’s is easier to control. ‘Let’s leave this life,’ Tony says. ‘Let’s run off together to a Desert Island.’

‘You mean like Castaway?’ I ask. I know film people. Everything relates back to celluloid.

‘How did you guess?’ He looks surprised. He’s not all that bright. Or perhaps I’m just too bright for everyone’s comfort. For all his gliding to and fro on his great new black macho electronic camera with its built-in Citroën-type suspension – ‘This camera cost £250,000,’ he snaps, if anyone so much as touches the great shiny thing – I can’t take Tony seriously. He has quite an ordinary, pleasant, everyday face. He’s thirty-nine, and has a lot of wiry black hair. Andreas’s hair is fair and fine. ‘I love you!’ Tony Schuster yells, for all the world to hear. ‘Run off with me, do!’

I think his loving me so publicly annoys Andreas, but he doesn’t show it. Tony’s one of the top cameramen around: they can be temperamental. It’s as well for a Director to hold his fire, unless it’s something that really matters – a smooth fifty-second track in for example – not like love, or desire, which everyone knows is just some kind of by-product of all the creative energy floating around a set.

‘I love you’ is a great turn-off for the female committed elsewhere. GUP.

Sometimes I do agree to have a drink with Tony, when it’s a wrap for the day, and we all stagger back to the bar of the Hesperia. Except for Andreas, who’s staying at the Helsinki Inter-Continental. When I heard C.C. was coming to join her husband and hold his hand through the whole month of Helsinki shooting, I put them in a different hotel (I do location accommodation, inter alia) from the rest of us. I thought I couldn’t bear their happiness too near me. We’d be going off to Rome presently, anyway, and C.C. wouldn’t be following us there. She’d be going, not back to little Phoebe, but to Hollywood for some rubbishy block-busting new series, which Andreas despised. He had the Art, she made the money.

‘It’s so clichéd I can’t bear it,’ Tony would moan. ‘The PA in love with the Director! You’re worth more than that.’

More than being in love with Andreas? How could such a thing be possible?

Tony’s wife had just left him, taking the children. He’d been away from home just once too often. When she wanted him where was he? Up the Himalayas filming Snowy Waste or under the Atlantic with Sonar Soundings or in the Philippines with Lolly a Go-Go. When he didn’t turn down Lenin in Love because he couldn’t miss an opportunity of working with Andreas Anders, the Great Director, Sara waited for him to say ‘yes’ to the call from his agent, and he did, of course, having said he’d say no, and at that point she packed. The wives do.

‘You love films more than me,’ she said. And so Tony did. Now he thought he was in love with me. I knew what was going on. His wife had left, he was sad and worried; love on the set’s a great diversion. On the whole, you last as long as the project does; not a moment longer. Sometimes it sticks – look at Andreas and C.C.; me and Andreas – but mostly it’s all, as I say, just surplus energy taking sexual/romantic form. I know so much, and so little too. GUP!

‘You have no pattern for a happy married life,’ laments my mother. ‘All my fault.’

‘I don’t want to be married,’ I say. If I was married how could I follow Andreas round the world? But I don’t tell her that. His favourite PA! I’m good at my job: by God, I’m good at it. He won’t find fault with me.

‘Without you!’ he once said (that was Love in a Hot Climate: we were in a really ritzy room at the Meriden in Lisbon: C.C. was off in Sydney and Andreas thought she was having an affair with the male lead), ‘Without you, Jude, I wouldn’t be half the director I am!’ A real working partnership we have, Andreas and me, oh, yes! His fingers running through my hair when there’s nothing else to do, and hotel rooms in strange cities can be lonely; you need your friends around.

Before I left for Helsinki my mother said something strange. ‘Your father ran off with a girl from Finland,’ she said. ‘Our au pair. Just make sure you come back.’ Now my mother never said anything at all about my father if she could help it. And my sister Chris and I seldom asked. Questions about our dad upset her. And it doesn’t do to upset a woman who is a golf coach by profession. She gets put off her stroke, and if she loses her job, how will any of you live? Our house went with the job. On the edge of the golf course. Thwack, thwee, muted shouts – to me the sound of childhood.

I expect if your husband ran off with the Finnish au pair you wouldn’t want to dwell on it much. This was the first I’d heard of it. Chris and I had tried to trace our father, when she was twenty-one and I was eighteen, but we never got very far. I can’t say we tried hard. Who wants to be in touch with a father who doesn’t want to be in touch with you? Apart from the fun of the thing, I suppose. Sister Chris had been oddly worried about my going to Helsinki.

‘You and your lifestyle!’ she said, when I rang the Nurses’ Home to say I was off to work on Lenin in Love. She’d just been made Night Sister of Men’s Orthopaedic. Quite a cheerful ward, she said. At least they mostly got better. ‘Can’t you ever stay in one place, Jude. You’ll get AIDS if you don’t watch out. You film-people!’ Chris had my lifestyle all wrong. I was astonishingly sedate. There’d only ever been Andreas Anders, apart from a few forgettables. It was pathetic, really. But somehow men seem to know if your emotions are occupied elsewhere. You send out ‘I belong to someone bigger than you’ signals, just as much if you’re wretchedly involved as if you’re happily married.

My mother and sister were right to worry, as it happened. Because a strange thing did happen to me in Helsinki. I was walking with Tony in the Rural Life Museum one Sunday and explaining why I wouldn’t go to bed with him, and what was wrong with his psyche. He was looking quite wretched and pale, as men will in such circumstances. The Museum is in fact an open-air park devoted to the artefacts of Finland’s past. We were admiring an elegant wooden church boat which could hold a hundred people – entire villages would row themselves to church in these boats if they so chose – when my attention was caught by one of those familiar groups of people, complete with cameras and sound equipment. This lot were clustered round and filming one of the enormous orange toadstools with yellow spots they have in these parts. Proper traditional pixie toadstools. Hallucinogenic, they say.

And the sound man put down his gear – he was taking white sound, I presumed: a toadstool hardly makes much noise, even in its growing, which can be pretty rapid – and walked over to me. He wasn’t young. Sixty or so, I suppose. Quite heavy round his middle: pleasant looking: intelligent: glasses.

‘Hello,’ he said, in English.

‘Hello,’ I said, and I thought where have I seen that face before? And then I realised, why! whenever I look in the mirror, or when I look at Chris: that’s where I’ve seen it. More the latter, because both Chris and he were overweight. It looked worse on her. He was really quite attractive.

‘You’re with the English film crew, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘I saw you in the Square yesterday. It had to be you. Jude Iscarry.’

‘Or Judas Iscariot or Jude the Obscure,’ I said, playing for time, because my heart was pounding. ‘Take your pick!’

‘Your mother said you’d gone into films,’ he said. ‘Chip off the old block.’

‘You’re my father,’ I said.

‘’Fraid so,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know she was in touch with you,’ I said. It was all I could say. Tony just stood and looked on. Moments in a person’s life!

‘I passed by five years back,’ my father said, ‘but she advised me strongly to keep away, so I did. Though I’d have liked to have stayed. Quite a powerful stroke, your mother.’

‘She’s had to develop it,’ I said.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘But she always was independent, wanted to be father and mother too.’

‘That’s no excuse,’ I said.

Tony left us and he, my father, whose name was Saul Iscarry, took me out to lunch. We had pancakes, caviar and sour cream, washed down by tots of vodka. The best food in the world. The Finns have the highest heart disease rate in the world. So Chris had assured me, before I set off for Helsinki.

My father had eventually married his Vieno, my mother’s au pair, and actually gone to the Moscow Film School, and now he was one of the best sound men in the world (he said) and had Finnish nationality, but lived in Leningrad. Vieno was a doctor, they had three children, and what with visa problems and general business and so forth there hadn’t been much point in keeping in touch, let alone the time. (Roubles are just one of those currencies that make it difficult for a father to support his abandoned children.) But he’d thought of Chris and me a lot.

Big deal, I thought, but said nothing. What was the point?

Now we were in touch, he said, we must keep in touch. He was glad I was in films. The best life in the world, he said, if you had the temperament. But why was I only a PA? Why wasn’t I a producer, at the very least? Ah. Well. He said he’d like to see Chris. How was she? Just fine, I said. She’d have to come over and see him some time, since visas for him were so complicated. If you ask me visas are as complicated as you care to make them, but I didn’t say that either.

I said Chris would be over to see him next Easter. That gave her six months to lose three stone. She should be able to do that. A girl likes to be at her best when she meets up with her old dad.

‘You’ve grown up a fine handsome girl, Jude,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of you,’ and you know, that meant a great deal to me. More than it should have. If anyone was to take the credit for the way I was it should have been my mother. Oh, Great Universal Paradox which runs our lives – that what should please us doesn’t, and what does please us, shouldn’t!

He had to go back to work, my father said. The pixie toadstool called. The crew could not be kept waiting. When could it ever, in any country, in any language in the world? We exchanged addresses. He went.

And I took myself off to the little Greek Orthodox church that’s tucked away behind the Great Square, and there I sat down. I had to be quiet: absorb what had just happened. I didn’t kneel. I’m not very religious. I just sat, and thought, and rested. The unexpected is tiring.

It’s a small, ancient building: a chapel rather than a church. But it blazes with intricate icons and gold leaf and crimson velvet; everything shimmers: there’s no way it can’t: there must be a thousand candles at least stuck all around, lit by the faithful at their own expense. It’s a sensuous, somehow Mediterranean place, stuck here as if by accident in this cold northern land. The air was heavy with incense: that and candle smoke smarted the eyes: or was I crying? And in the ears was the gentle murmur of the faithful, the click click of the telling of beads. Yes, I was crying. But I don’t think from wretchedness. Relief, happiness almost, at something completed. My father: no longer fantasy, just a man.

And there in front of me, a couple of rows nearer the great glittery altar, was sitting Andreas Anders. He looked round and saw me. I wish he hadn’t. I wanted to just go on sitting there, alone, thinking. But he got up and came to sit next to me. How good-looking he was. His bright eyes glittered in the candlelight.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘she’s not coming to Helsinki after all. gHad you heard?’

By ‘she’ he always meant Caroline Christopherson. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’d better give her up altogether, don’t you? Divorce, or something drastic. I can’t stand the strain.’

‘Let’s go outside,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the place for such conversations.’ Nor was it. As I say, I’m not one for religion, but some sort of God was here in this place, albeit in heavy disguise, and didn’t want to hear all this soggy, emotional mish-mash.

So we went out, Andreas and me. And he tucked his arm into mine and said, ‘Shall we go back to the Inter-Continental, just you and me?’ and I pulled my arm away and said, ‘No, I won’t. What a monster you are!’ and heard myself saying it, and knew I meant it, and there I was, out of love with him. Just like that. ‘A monster?’ he asked, hurt and confused. But I didn’t even want to discuss it. It wasn’t worth it. I’d see the Lenin in Love through, of course, because I was a professional, but that was all. The man was an egocentric maniac.

I left him staring after me, his worm turned, and I went back to the Hesperia and found Tony in my bedroom and told him to stop messing about and for heaven’s sake somehow get his wife and children back. If he wanted to get out of the business, let him do it with the proper person.

‘Is this what finding a long lost father can do?’ he asked, as he left. ‘And I had such high hopes…’

And all I could do was suppose it was: that, and simply Finland itself.

In the past Finland has always been conquered or annexed or governed by someone else – this vast flat stretch, on top of the world, of islands and forests – but now it has its own identity, its own pride: it looks not to its previous masters, Sweden and Russia, but to itself. How odd, to identify so with a nation! Perhaps it’s hereditary, in the genes: like ending up in the film business. My dad ran off with a Finn: one mustn’t forget that. Perhaps he somehow felt the same connection, and can be forgiven.

And that’s the strange thing that happened to me in Helsinki, last October, and how my life has changed. And I called this story ‘Falling in Love in Helsinki’, not ‘Out of Love’, because although it’s true I fell out of love with Andreas, out of love with love (which is a real blight), somehow I fell into love with life. Or with God, call it what you will, there in that chapel. Whatever, I found myself sufficiently enamoured of just the sheer dignity of creation to realise I shouldn’t offend it the way I had been doing. I think everything’s going to be all right now. I’ll make out. I might even leave the film business altogether. Not go into a convent, or anything so extreme. But I might try politics. It’s what I’m trained for.

As for GUP, the Great Universal Paradox, that’s real enough. What I marvel at now is how happy so many of us manage to be, so much of the time, in spite of it.