Robbie's Wife (2 page)

Down two more flights of stairs and into the customs hall I found the line for non-EU passengers and waited while it moved slowly toward the lecterns where customs officers stamped documents, made inquiries. Everyone looked drugged.

“Visiting us on business or pleasure, Mr. Stone?”

“Business.”

“Which is?”

“I’m a screenwriter. I’m working on a new project that takes place in England.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That sounds interesting, sir. I hope you have a profitable stay with us.” He stamped the passport, slid it back.

I went down the long corridor toward the baggage claim, waited as the bags came up until my battered duffel came around, and went out through the green line. Nothing to declare, the sign said. Well, as far as I was concerned I had nothing to say and nobody to say it to. Lately nobody listened anyway.

There was the usual audience at the exit, rows of relatives and friends, limo drivers holding up cards with names on them, people hugging and scooping up grandchildren and kissing.

It would have been easy to hail a taxi but there was the money thing so I went down to the tube, struggled through the crowd and in a few minutes was rocketing in to Central London and the cheap hotel I’d booked before leaving Los Angeles.

I changed trains at King’s Cross and when I came up onto the street near Euston Station it was raining, the kind of gray English rain that always seems to greet my arrival in London.

Two nuns in black habit wearing black raincoats stood under an umbrella at the bus stop. It was a bright red and yellow golfer’s umbrella, wide enough to easily cover both of them, and I thought, great scene in a Woody Allen movie, but of course Woody writes his own scripts. Nobody else paid any attention to them. It was a steady parade of heads down, umbrellas up, Upper Woburn Place filled with black taxis shiny in the rain, those huge red buses lumbering along, and I wanted desperately to find a bed.

The desk clerk at the hotel waited while I found my credit card, ran it through the machine and waited again, wordlessly, while I signed. He slid a key across the counter and I went up the narrow stairs to the second floor, found room 22 and opened the door. It was a small room, barely wider than the bed, and it smelled musty. The window wouldn’t open and I pulled the shade, darkening the room, stripped off my clothes and slid into the bed. Rain drummed on the window but I was almost instantly asleep. The last thing I remembered was the insistent whine of jet engines, a constant noise that still filled my head, shutting out everything else.

I awoke to an insistent knocking and was briefly panic-stricken, as if the noise came from outside the plane, perhaps an engine falling off or someone outside the plane trying to get in, banging on the window next to me, and I was momentarily confused until the room began to focus and I realized I was in the hotel. The banging came from the wall next to my head, an erratic thumping as if someone were softly knocking on the wall from the other side, and then I heard the woman’s voice squeaking out something and a man saying something over and over again and I had the urge to pound on the wall and yell shut the fuck up in there! For Christ’s sake, somebody was getting screwed a foot from my head. I looked at my watch. It was too dark to see the dial so I got out of bed and went to the window, pulling back the shade, but it was dark outside, not raining anymore, the street nearly empty of traffic, and I realized I had slept through the day. On the opposite side of the wall it was quiet. I turned on the light and it was 2:30. I had slept for twelve hours. There was, of course, nothing to do at that hour except wait for daylight. I thought briefly about thumping on the wall and making moaning noises. It was cold in the room, and the handle on the steam radiator was as stuck as the window had been so I dressed and sat on the bed with a blanket around my shoulders going over my notes.

Today I would see Nigel. He was a friend of Richard, my Los Angeles agent, and Richard insisted that I see him, let him know I was in England. “He’s a nice guy,” Richard said. “If you have a problem, you can rely on him.” That was when he slid the treatment for
Pale Horse
back across the desk. “You need to move on,” he said. Then came his little speech about how Hollywood is peopled by teenagers who are frightened at the idea of an original story — they want something that looks like
Son of Titanic
or the sequel to the last thing Tom Hanks made. But the
Pale Horse
idea was dead in the water and maybe I could get going again. He still didn’t see why I insisted on going to England

Six months ago, when I turned sixty, my wife — actually my second wife, but she’d been around a long time — gave up on me, said she was tired of watching me disintegrate, which seemed like an apt metaphor to me. For a long time I’d felt that my life was dissolving, and there were periods when I wondered if writing anything else down was worth the effort. I read something about Wright Morris — he stopped taking photographs and somebody asked him why and he said there wasn’t anything left he wanted to photograph. And then he stopped writing. Same reason.

So I hit on the idea of closing off my life in Los Angeles, taking what little I had left in my bank account and going off someplace where there was nothing to remind me of my impending sense of failure. I had a long talk with Richard who, bless him, had stuck with me through it all, suffering my whining and self-doubts, and I told him I was going to sell off everything I had, take all of my money and change it into English pounds and rent a cottage on the edge of nowhere and write non-stop until I had finished something that would satisfy the jackals and we would all make a piss-pot full of money and I would charter a yacht in the Aegean and we would all lie naked on the deck in the sun and give the finger to the rest of the world.

Richard didn’t say much. Why England? he asked.

It’s an ocean away, I told him, and they speak English. He countered with, why not San Francisco or New Orleans or Hawaii where there was sun? They speak English there, too. But he agreed that maybe a change of scene would help to jump-start me.

That was the actual word he used. Jump-start. And I had, for an instant, an image of a yellow tow truck backing up to me and attaching those red and black cables to my nose and tongue and starting the engine. There was this tremendous jolt that ran through my brain and suddenly I was writing at a furious pace, words appearing on pages, brilliant words, and there were lines of people waiting anxiously to snatch them as the pages filled.

Richard said he would let Nigel know I was coming. If I needed anything, Nigel would help. I could tell that he thought I was doing something stupid. I closed my apartment, sold my car, gave away my clothes and books to Goodwill, and now here I was, in a grotty English hotel waiting for daylight. The rain had started again. I had enough money to last six months, the receipt for the car rental, and a letter from the farmer at White Church Farm on the coast of Dorset where I’d rented a cottage telling me how to get there and boasting that the cottage had “all the amenities including an en suite toilet.”

It had turned gray outside the window and suddenly there was more thumping beyond the wall and I thought, Oh Christ, the rabbits are at it again and I banged on the wall with the heel of my hand, counterpoint to their rhythm, and I put my mouth next to the wall and began to chant, “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, Oh shit, I’m coming!” and then I stopped and it was quiet on the other side of the wall, too. Not nice, Jack, I said to myself.

Finally, unable to stay shivering in the room any longer, I dressed and went down through the narrow lobby, let myself out into the slackening rain and walked toward Russell Square. There was early morning traffic, the white noise of tires on the wet street, and I looked for some place where I could get coffee or, more likely, tea, and maybe something to eat since I was suddenly ravenous.

The cafe had tables with a plastic surface that felt slightly sticky and behind the counter was a black woman with an enormous turban and a rich Caribbean voice who had a tiny grill. The menu on a chalkboard read “Full English breakfast” and I ordered one at the counter and sat at a table looking out at the wet street, more pedestrians now, buses full of people. It was nearly six o’clock. The woman called out to me and I picked up the thick white plate. On it were two greasy fried eggs, some bacon that looked more like fatty ham, two pieces of toast burned hard as rock, and a soggy slice of fried tomato. The tea was in a big mug, almost chocolate in color, rich with cream, and it was the only part of the meal that was good but I ate everything. I knew I’d pay dearly for the experience in another hour.

Back at the hotel I showered and sorted out my notes, re-packed my bag, checked the map to see where the car hire place was, and finally, at ten o’clock, I went downstairs and dropped the key on the desk in front of the clerk who silently took it and I went out to find that the rain had stopped again and it looked as if the sun was trying to break through, the weak light coming off the pavement in a dull reflection.

I took the underground to Charing Cross, came up into a full London traffic rush, nearly got myself killed because I looked the wrong way, and finally found Nigel’s office in a building that looked like it had probably housed Charles Dickens’ agent. I’d met Nigel once at a cocktail party in Los Angeles that Richard threw when MGM bought a script of mine. It never actually got filmed, but they paid me a shitload of money. That was the year we bought the house in Laurel Canyon. It seemed very easy.

Nigel was in his early fifties, one of those Englishmen who went to the right schools and had a house in the country and a little place in France and knew a lot about wine and which was the right club in London in which to be seen. He asked how Richard was and what my plans were and I told him I had rented a cottage in Dorset and planned to spend the next six months writing non-stop, a script about a coast-watcher in World War II, that I’d spent the last month doing research and had found an old man in Dorset who had been a coast-watcher and it would be one of those movies steeped in the war, sex, intrigue, a sure-fire winner, and as I talked I knew that I was making it all up as I went along, that I had no old coast-watcher and I didn’t have a script like that in mind, but it began to actually sound good, and I realized that I was making the same kind of pitch I’d made countless times to a bunch of Hollywood film people, trying, as I watched their faces begin to reflect thoughts of lunch or tennis, to pull them back, inventing absurd scenarios, trying to get them to think about me and my brilliance rather than drift off to thoughts of spending the afternoon in the beach house at Malibu banging the mistress.

There was, of course, no point in making a pitch to Nigel. He was merely a friend of Richard who might, if I needed help, put me in touch with someone. He was Richard’s friend, not mine, and he wished me luck and told me to keep in touch with him, my, Dorset was a good place to go if you didn’t want to be disturbed, sort of like dropping back into the 19th century if you asked him.

He looked at his watch, asked if there was anything else he could do and I thought briefly about saying fuck you, Nigel, but didn’t because his disinterest was natural. I was the client of a friend, we had met once, and then he said, “Be sure to let me see a treatment of your coast-watcher script,” and I knew that was a perfunctory offer, merely being polite, and I could hear Richard’s voice in the background reminding me that I was stepping off into the abyss. I had a moment of panic, knowing that Nigel couldn’t care less about my fictional coast-watcher, and knowing that I didn’t have a story, only the feeling that my brain was empty. I remembered reading somewhere that Fitzgerald thought he had used up everything. That the writing was gone and he was just like everyone else. Still, I had my cottage in Dorset reserved, and I would make a fresh start on something new. I felt as if I had wiped the slate clean and all that remained was for me to make the first new marks on it. I wanted desperately for things to change.

Downstairs, just outside the building I was accosted by a panhandler and I dropped all of my American change in his outstretched cap. Try spending that, I thought.

It was gray again when I found the car hire agency, a tiny office in the corner of a garage at the end of the Northern Line, and it took less than half an hour to get on the road. The kid who gave me the keys assured me that I could be in Dorset well before dark, take the M25 to the M3, get off at the A303, go to Dorchester, ask somebody there for directions. Otherwise, “you’ll get lost in the fookin’ hedgerows,” he said.

It was white-knuckle time until I got onto the M3, driving a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side; the empty seat to my left seemed insanely wrong and I had trouble judging where the other side of the car was. Once I nearly got wiped out at a roundabout by a truck, looked the wrong way again and it came out of nowhere, missed the car by inches. On the motorway it seemed like every driver was intent on winning the Grand Prix at Brand’s Hatch, ripping along through a fine rain, and I tried to maintain a steady 60 mph, a slow crawl for most English except for the occasional Morris Minor with some old couple. By the time I realized I was hungry it was two o’clock and I was down in the countryside, the fields green, the sky still heavy. I turned off on the A303, a two-lane road where heavy trucks, no, they were lorries now, filled three quarters of the road and I stopped at a lay-by where a van was parked with a big sign that announced tea and sandwiches. The sandwich was not much more than two slices of white bread with some sort of ground meat paste smeared over it and the tea was a paper mug that seemed to be mostly milk but it was hot and the man who sold it gave me directions to Dorchester. I showed him my map to White Church Farm and he said yes, he’d been down along the coast, not hard to find, head for Lyme Regis, lots of signposting, not to worry.

It was late afternoon, the rain gone but the sky still heavy and darkening, when I found White Church Farm down a muddy track with the sea just beyond. Mr. Orchard, the farmer, came out of the low stone farmhouse, wearing a pair of muddy Wellington boots and a yellow rain parka.