Fallout (30 page)

‘We’re
us
,’ she said, terrified of being parted from him.

‘Shut up.’

Paul wiped his eyes, sniffed, and put his hands in his pockets. He looked away, down the street, recovering some learned projection of masculinity – for her benefit, or his own.

Leigh watched his profile. She felt very clear, her thoughts were sharp and controlled.

‘Paul. Listen to me. Luke is in love with Nina—’

Paul laughed, disdainful.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know, but listen. He was saying that he’s unhappy and then he gave me his coat. He didn’t
do
anything else. He was talking about
her
. I know that you think I . . .’

Paul listened, head up, alert to her.

She gathered her courage. ‘I know you think I’m in love with him,’ she said.

He looked at her then and she had nowhere to hide.

‘Paul, I’m not.’

He didn’t say anything, but his look –

She took a breath, and said the unsayable. If she didn’t, it would always be there between them.

‘There was – something.’ She saw him flinch. ‘But it’s not real. I promise you.’

She went over to him, put her hand on his hand and held it.

‘When I was little . . . my father and his girlfriends,’ she said, ‘you know it all, I’ve told you.’

Paul nodded.

‘Every single day was like a lie or a justification of one. It was like brainwashing. It was like the bloody
Manchurian Candidate
.’

Paul laughed. He tried not to.

‘No trust. None. That’s not what I want. I’m not stupid. I can choose. It’s not him, Paul. It’s
you
. I’m not one of those girls destroying herself for . . .’

And she thought of Luke; the brightness of him, the too many sides to feel safe with any of them.

‘For nothing,’ she finished, and she felt a burden that had weighed her down lift. She’d tried her hardest. Honesty. Honesty and strength, she had nothing else to give him.

Then Paul put his arms round her and held her. He hugged her tightly. She was filled with gratitude. It was done. They were safe. She was safe.

The next morning Luke bought a newspaper and went to a phone box with a stack of coins. By the afternoon he had found himself a two-bedroom flat in Bayswater. After he had been to the letting agent’s office to sign the lease he called Nina – put the phone down after two rings and then called back. She answered immediately.

‘I knew it was you.’

‘You should work for MI5,’ said Luke. ‘Meet me.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry about last night, Luke. I was—’

‘Don’t be silly. I’ll wait for you on the corner.’

When they met she couldn’t do anything but cry. They stood there by the brown river with the wind blowing hard against them, cold and insistent, and he held her against him.

‘I’ve found us a flat,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

She came home to find Tony in the hall. Pushing the door closed on the wind, she leaned against it, still in her mac, clutching her raw-cold fingers together. She knew she looked wild, fresh with love and crying, no excuse ready for where she had been. But Tony did not ask. He seemed unusually cheerful.

‘Get your passport, darling,’ he said; ‘we’re going to the provinces.’

‘What?’ She sounded like an idiot child, wrong-footed yet again and slow.

‘There are a
million
plays to see,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been putting them off. Come on – you’ll love it.’

‘Where?’

‘Manchester first.’ He seemed to notice her appearance for the first time. ‘Darling, you’re freezing.’

Nina didn’t answer. There was no coincidence in the timing of this sudden whim.

‘Nina?’

And there it was; presented with the opportunity to refuse him she found she could not. She was bound to go, she was voiceless.

‘Why don’t you pack?’ he prompted. ‘You’ve left things at the dry cleaner’s, I was just off to collect them. Shall we get a move on?’

And Nina went past him up the stairs.

‘I’ll just run a bath,’ she said.

Luke moved out of Paul’s two days later. His typewriter, the bags he’d arrived with four years before, boxes of books and a record player – all found their new home in the first-floor rooms on Moscow Road. A new bed. New walls and window.

The telephone wasn’t connected yet and so he had to go out to a phone box. Enjoying the playful transparency, he let it ring just twice again, then called back and waited, holding the coin against the slot, ready – but she did not answer.

He tried again an hour later but there was still no answer.

The next morning a woman he didn’t recognise answered the phone.

‘Mr and Mrs Moore have gone away,’ she said.

‘Away?’

‘Who is it? I can take a message.’

‘No. Thank you,’ said Luke, and went back to the empty flat where the bags of food he had bought for them both sat on the kitchen counter where he had left them.

In the afternoon he tried to work, but could not, struggling to absorb the body-blow of her wilful desertion. He couldn’t understand what might be in her head. He sat at his desk and got nothing done. The flat was unfamiliar and he was used to concentrating despite Paul and Leigh. Silence was too large a thing to fill without the wall of activity to enclose him.

She had gone away.

The next day he gave in and went to her house – even rang the bell. When the daily opened the door he stood there, asking stupid, pushing questions, until she shut him out, suspicious of him. He didn’t blame her. If half of what he felt showed he must have frightened her.

There were several plays to see in various cities. They stayed in hotels and in those anonymous beds Tony had more interest in her sexually than he did in their own. She thought he must have sensed the danger of her leaving him; his rituals were more overtly dominating. Protecting herself from pain she did not have the luxury of courage. Nina had been too ashamed to tell Luke before she and Tony went, whilst away she was too bound up with surviving.

He had not used her like a boy since the first time, after her birthday party – the night
In Custody
had closed – but now, freed from the responsibility of context, he forced himself into her that way again. The second night they were gone he told her to get up on her hands and knees. No preparation. No seduction. But this time Nina fought him. She had become accustomed to restraint but was helplessly frightened of the pain, and could not help it. She fought him, and Tony smacked her head and face – just twice – and did not stop shoving himself into her. The smacking was so unlike him, more shocking even than what he was doing to her, that she stopped fighting. She stayed still. She learned, as he required her to, to relax. It never took him long to finish. She would make her body go limp, absent herself, and achieve sometimes a dream-like state where fantasies of rescue would release her. While he abused her body she set her mind on other paths to safer places. She would lose herself in dream-visions of Luke saving her, and their escape together, until the very fact of one thing being done to her so invasively while her heart found safety in another became connected. Pain and freedom, linked by hard sensation, became one.

Washing afterwards, or in her seat in the theatre, fully dressed, she would reflect on what was happening to her and wonder at it.
This is just the same
– she would think, as she watched a play, or went backstage, or stood in the comfort of a theatre bar as Tony talked.
This is normal. It’s not as if he wants me very often. My life hasn’t changed a bit. I’m fine.

When they came back to London two weeks later, when she was alone and feeling more herself, she called Luke.

‘I didn’t know where you were,’ he said, and cried.

‘I’m back now,’ she said coolly. ‘Can we forget about it?’

Nina’s award sat on the mantelpiece in the living room. She was between jobs, and resting.

Rest on your laurels if you like
,
Nina
, said her mother,
but you’ll turn around and realise you’re thirty. What then?

Tony was producing a new play by David Ward for the Adelphi and in negotiation for the management of a West End theatre that he wouldn’t talk about for fear of jinxing it. As he left the house excitedly, adjusting his clothes, calling for her to find things for him, see him off, wish him luck, she would wait until the door closed, and a full minute to pass, and then pick up the phone.

‘He’s gone,’ she would say. ‘Can I come now?’

And Luke always said yes. He always wanted her. His bed was clean. He cooked for her. He told her to come to him whenever she wanted to. At first she respected his working hours but she found such reassurance in keeping him from writing that she could not resist it. She alone could trump the ace of his creativity. She could make him forget everything but her.

And so their horizons narrowed; Luke waited for her, and she came to him. They stopped talking about the future but formed the sharp secrecy, the limited habits of an affair. When Luke made love to her it was a sweet counterpoint to the fearful rush of sex she was used to. He made it possible for her to live more happily with her husband.

And Luke, living alone, made few demands on her. He got up at seven and worked on
Diversion
until one and didn’t bother cooking with nobody there to feed. Having cooked for his father since he was nine he’d never had that luxury – or lack – before. He ate sandwiches from the café on his street or soup from tins. If Nina said she could see him, then the afternoons were for her; if she could not he worked again until the evening. When he couldn’t sleep he worked at night, too. The play saved him. There was nothing else when he was writing it. He wrote and he waited. He didn’t believe she meant to harm him; she did not know his constant lack that he had been reduced to craving. He fought against it but he lost the fight. It was an extremis he’d adored, but now he could not stop, and he began to dread the febrile shadow left when she was gone. Sometimes, even when she was with him he felt it, even when she was in his arms, when he was inside her, it was as if he could not touch her, could never get deep enough into her to make her real.

He would have liked to rest, just a little bit, and feel at home, as he had when he, Paul and Leigh were together. He missed Paul even though he saw him often. And he missed Leigh. He tried to understand that she did not need him, but it didn’t make rightful sense because their intimacy was intact in his head, a steady dialogue that didn’t fade. Sometimes it felt to him as though he were writing a postcard every day to everyone he had ever loved.

The new play – the second play,
Diversion
– had changed so often it was as if he had written three plays, with three plays’ learning crammed into it. He had been determined to strap himself down to a full-length mature narrative, even as instinct carried him from the well-made shapes of the past. He wasn’t Beckett, he knew, and he couldn’t surrender the hard-won shapes of story on a whim.
If it was good enough for Shakespeare
, he had once said to a furious Jack Payne,
it’s good enough for us
. But proper form was more easily read than done. If the play was political – and he felt it was – it would be politics truthfully discovered, not applied. And so he fought with it, putting in elements, taking them out – time sequences shuffled, dream sequences put in and discarded, put back in subtler tones; monologues slashed and built and slashed again.

Diversion
was about the conflict between a father and son. Instead of the old order replaced by the new – the revolution of the sixties that now seemed pitiful to Luke in its innocence – in
Diversion
it was the son who sought order; the younger man seeking to repair the damage of inheritance. It was not the son who was anarchic but the father. Luke thought of his play as he thought of life itself; as a tragedy with jokes. In it, the son’s carefully built framework, his false home, was destroyed in the end by the chaos of his upbringing. As hard as he fought, the past had forged him a path and he could not leave it. The play was Luke’s close companion and his bitter enemy. It was the very best that he could do. It must be better than he was. It was work to him; it was play and escape. He loved it, was as ashamed of its shortcomings as his own. Until one Wednesday afternoon, reluctantly, it was done.

He sat at his desk in the new silence of the moments that followed its end, the pages stacked and corrected in front of him. He ought to have felt happy but he did not. The first thought that came to him was that if it were produced he would be able to work on it again and delay the abandonment, this feeling that was like a death.

Paul and Leigh had known the play since its earliest, smallest life. Luke picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Paul?’

‘Luke.’

‘Busy?’

‘You might say.’ This had become Paul’s habitual tone with him now; guarded, cool.

‘Would you read
Diversion
? It’s done. Sort of.’

Paul had gone into partnership with Maggie O’Hanlan. They had met at the birthday party at the Nag’s Head, and talked about forming a production company on and off since then. They shared a tiny office in Soho, a stone’s throw from the Duke of York’s, where Leigh was still stage manager. Maggie was a divorcee of thirty-five, setting up on her own having left both the partnership of her marriage and the company she shared in New York with her ex-husband. She had red hair and, like Paul, she chain-smoked – but hers were Gauloises and they only nicked cigarettes from one another in moments of crisis. Her ex-husband was a producer about whom the term
Broadway impresario
was increasingly used. Maggie’s sensibilities suited London better. She felt there was too little innovation in New York, restricted as it was by commerce, what she called the ‘low business of show business’. Maggie hated musicals and the brutal coin-flip of success or failure dictated by first-night reviews that saw plays open and close in a week. She had worked on one big-budget show that had such poor notices on opening night half the cast hadn’t even bothered to come in the next day. In Britain – despite the fast-crumbling infrastructure, despite the tide of American pulp washing over the airways, despite the power failure of the tailspin economy – everyone talked about theatre. The death of the West End was announced regularly but still it had not died. In Britain theatre was not bread and circuses but a poke in the eye, a joker – a
play
. London. London, Maggie said, was theatre’s beating heart. Why would she work anywhere else?