The House of Sleep (16 page)

‘Well, yes, we both will,’ said Sarah. ‘You know, I told you – Ronnie wants to start this theatre group.’

‘Oh yes.’ His spirits took a familiar nosedive; but he was determined to play the game, so he turned to Veronica and asked, ‘How’s that panning out?’

‘Oh, it’s coming along.’ She had opened
The House of Sleep again
, and was only half-listening to the conversation. ‘I’m sussing out potential sponsors at the moment.’

‘Sponsors?’

‘You know, businesses and things. That’s the way things are going these days: private enterprise.’

‘Ronnie’s got a real head-start,’ Sarah enthused. ‘Knowing so much about economics.’

Veronica laughed; not derisively, at this summation of her financial skills, but at something in the book that seemed to have amused her.

‘Bring ‘Em Back Alive,’
she said. ‘
The Paths of the Prudent. Clad in Purple Mist.
’

‘Pardon?’ said Sarah.

‘These are the other books advertised at the back.
The Case of the Painted Girl. Connie Morgan in the Lumber Camp:
wow, that one sounds like a real dyke classic. Listen to these…
Wife in Name Only, At War With Herself, The Gay Triangle
… This is amazing: I think I’ve got material for a thesis here.’ Then she burst out laughing: ‘Oh, look, here’s
one for you, Robert.
You and Your Hand.
Something for you to read while you’re thinking about me and Sarah, perhaps?’

‘Ronnie!’ Scandalized, Sarah kicked her playfully under the table. But when Robert looked into her eyes he saw that they were directed not at him, but at her lover; and they were laughing, laughing joyfully and with a lightness that was for her alone: utterly private, utterly exclusive. He bit back sudden tears and abruptly, for an instant, he lost consciousness: when it returned, it brought in its wake a vivid but unexpected phrase:

…
An your eyes tonight I saw a sightlessness
…

Veronica was getting up to leave. She was saying something.…
A disregard that made me feel
…

Made him feel what? How did he feel?

‘What shall we do, then?’

He heard Veronica’s words now.

‘When are we going to move in?’

‘I’ll come and find you later,’ Sarah was saying. ‘We’ll talk about it then.’

Veronica said goodbye to them both, and left. They didn’t kiss in front of Robert.

Silence imposed itself. Sarah offered him an apologetic smile, and he did his best to return it.

‘What was that about?’ he said at last. ‘You’re moving in together?’

Sarah nodded. ‘She’s coming to live at Ashdown. We’re taking over Geoff’s old room.’

‘Right.’ Something else for him to absorb, to live with. ‘That’ll be nice.’

‘Yes. Yes, I think it will. I think it’ll work.’

‘Good.’ He opened the copy of
The House of Sleep
, skimming through it, seeing nothing. ‘That means your room will be free now, does it?’

‘I suppose so.’
Now
what was he going to ask? Surely he didn’t nurse some fetishistic desire to move in there himself? ‘What about it?’

‘My friend Terry’s looking for a room, that’s all. Would it be OK if I mentioned it to him?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Sarah, hugely relieved. ‘That would be fine.’

Another silence: longer, even more oppressive. Sarah was groping for Smalltalk. A dozen bland, pointless remarks died on her lips.

‘Is this one of Slattery’s?’ Robert asked, still affecting to read the novel.

‘Yes. It goes up there.’ She pointed at the empty space on the shelf.

‘This friend of mine – Terry,’ he said. ‘He keeps a ten pound note in one of these books.’

‘Really? What for?’

‘You know – a fall-back. Just in case he ever gets caught short.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

‘Clever, isn’t it? It must be a million to one chance that anyone would ever find it.’ Sarah could not see where any of this was leading, and Robert’s next fumbling, uncertain words made it little clearer. ‘Sarah, if ever I want to… leave anything for you, I’ll put it here. In this book.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Page…’ (he flicked through the pages at random) ‘… page hundred and seventy-three. Then you’ll always know where to find it.’

‘What sort of thing? You mean money?’

‘Possibly money: or… well, anything, really. I don’t know.’ This was true: he barely knew why he was telling her this. It seemed important, somehow. ‘You’ll remember, won’t you?’

‘Robert…’ she began; but couldn’t bring herself to tell him that in choosing his vehicle for this mysterious communication, he had managed to hit upon the very book which symbolized everything that she and Veronica felt for one another: the signifier of their love. How could she taunt him, now, with that particular irony? It was far too cruel. ‘I’ve got
to go,’ was all she said. ‘I’m… Look, I’m sorry if we teased you.’

Robert ran his finger along the green spine of the book, and said nothing.

‘I’ll see you back at the house: yes?’

‘OK,’ he said. And when Sarah had gone, he stared dumbly opposite him at the space where she had been sitting: struggling to reconcile himself, for the thousandth time, to her absence.

∗

Terry came into the Café about ten minutes later, and found Robert bent over an exercise book, his tongue protruding abstractedly from between his teeth, his hunched shoulders suggesting gloom and concentration in equal measure.

‘You look like someone agonizing over the first draft of his suicide note,’ he said.

Robert gave a short, mirthless laugh, and snapped the exercise book shut with surprising alacrity. He didn’t want Terry – or anybody else – to know that he had started writing a poem about Sarah.

‘Mind if we interrupt your labours?’ Terry asked.

‘We?’

‘Yes, I’m supposed to be meeting some people.’

‘No, that’s all right. Sit down. I’ve got some news for you, anyway. I think I may have solved your accommodation problem.’ Then he told him about Sarah’s newly vacant room.

Terry had recently decided to leave his campus hall of residence, because of a noisy next-door neighbour who was preventing him from getting the necessary fourteen hours’ sleep a day. He liked the idea of coming to live at Ashdown, and the arrangement was already settled by the time his friends joined them at the table. They were both film students, one called Luke, the other Cheryl; they wore the traditional film department uniform of black Oxfam cast-offs, and, like Terry, looked sorely in need of a few square meals and a long holiday in the sun.

‘What’s this book, then?’ asked Luke, picking up
The House of Sleep.

Robert winced to see him handling it. He felt as though a holy relic were being defiled.

‘It’s just something I found on the shelf,’ he said. He tried to take the book back, but Luke was hanging on to it.

‘So who’s Frank King, then?’ He looked at one of the front pages, and ran his eye down the list of other novels by the same author. ‘It says here that one of his books was made into a film.’

‘That’s right,’ said Terry. ‘
The Ghoul
, it was called. Filmed in 1932, with Boris Karloff and Cedric Hardwicke.’

‘
The Ghoul
? I never heard of it.’

‘Ah!’ Terry beamed with triumph. ‘That’s because all the prints have gone missing. In England and America, anyway.’

Robert discreetly replaced the book on the shelf.

‘So how do you know about it?’ asked Luke.

‘Well, I’ve been reading this piece about lost films. And in fact –’ Terry paused, looking pleased with himself ‘– I’ve developed a theory about them. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Great,’ said Cheryl. ‘Another of your theories.’ She was smiling, though.

It seemed that Terry’s latest theory had been conceived that very morning, after a particularly tantalizing and elusive dream, something to do with apple blossom, and a blondehaired woman, a sunlit hillside and a broad-brimmed hat. It concerned lost films and lost dreams, and Robert, for one, was quite happy to listen and let it wash over him, if only to purge himself of the memory of his latest encounter with Sarah and Veronica.

‘I know it’s a cliché to say that films are like dreams – like a collective unconscious,’ Terry began, ‘but I was thinking that nobody’s ever really followed the idea through. There are different sorts of dreams, aren’t there? And so obviously there are horror movies, which are like nightmares, and then there are dirty movies like
Deep Throat and Emmanuelle
,
which are like wet dreams.’ He sipped from his mug of treacly hot chocolate, warming to his subject. ‘Then there are remakes, and stories which keep getting told again and again, and those are like recurring dreams. And there are consoling, visionary dreams, like
Lost Horizon or The Wizard of Oz.
But when a film gets lost, and it’s never been shown, and the print goes missing and nobody’s ever seen it, that’s the most beautiful kind of dream of all. Because that’s the kind of dream that might just have been the best one you’ve ever had in your life, only it slips from your mind just as you’re waking up, and a few seconds later you can’t remember a thing about it.’

‘Does that ever happen, though?’ Robert asked. ‘I mean, surely if someone’s gone to all the trouble and expense of making a film, then they’re not just going to lock it away in a vault and never show it to anyone.’

For the benefit of this
naïf
, the movie experts ran through an inventory of all the lost movies they could think of: the eight-hour version of
Greed
, Jerry Lewis’s
The Day the Clown Cried
, about a clown who works in the Nazi concentration camps, the missing reels of
The Magnificent Ambersons
, Orson Welles’s legendary
The Other Side of the Wind, The Blockhouse
– a Second World War drama starring Peter Sellers, shot entirely in a warren of underground bunkers beneath the island of Guernsey – the missing gas chamber scene from
Double Indemnity
, the four deleted sequences from
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
…

‘But Wilder’s such a middlebrow talent, anyway,’ said Terry. ‘Who would ever go to the trouble of restoring one of his films?’

‘He’s my favourite director, actually,’ said Luke. ‘Who’s yours?’

This, of course, was a favourite game. Terry puckered his lips. ‘I don’t think I have one,’ he said. ‘Or at least, I’m sure that he’s out there, somewhere, but I just haven’t found him yet.’

‘Him?’ said Cheryl.

‘It would have to be someone of… uncompromising integrity. Someone who writes as well as directs. Film for me is fundamentally the expression of one artist’s personal vision.’

If the others thought that he was being pretentious, they held their tongues.

‘I want to write myself, eventually. And direct. I’m writing a script at the moment, in fact.’

Robert sipped his stone-cold coffee, Cheryl started unwrapping a sugar cube and Luke examined his nails.

‘I’ll tell you about it, shall I? It’s the life story of this man, you see, and he’s going to be played by the same actor all the way through and it’s going to be shot over a period of fifty years. You’ll see him age from a young boy to an old man in the space of one and a half hours. Brutal jump cuts from his face at the age of twenty, full of youthful enthusiasm, to his face at the age of seventy, lined with bitterness and disillusionment. A vertiginous, fast-forward chronicle of hope withering into despair.’

There was a short pause. Then Luke said: ‘Rather difficult to insure, I would have thought,’ and got up to pay the bill.

∗

Christmas came and went, the spring term began, and within a few weeks Terry decided that he had at last discovered his favourite director. In the small hours of one Saturday morning, BB Cz screened a subtitled print of
Il Costo della Pesca
(
Dearly Have We Paid for the Mullet
), Salvatore Ortese’s 1947 neorealist drama of two rival families in the small fishing village of Trapani. Although he was distantly familiar with the name of this little-known Italian film-maker, Terry had never seen any of his work before; and its impact was immediate, revelatory, like a thunderclap. He watched it alone, in the darkness of Ashdown’s television room, after drinking half a bottle of red wine: before the film started his senses were muddled and he felt ready for bed, but within five minutes he was wide
awake again, and rushed upstairs to his bedroom in order to retrieve a notebook in which to record his responses. He was transfixed by the extreme close-ups of the ancient, weathered old fishermen’s faces (‘face as landscape’, he wrote in the book), by the stark black and white photography of the austere Sicilian coastline (‘landscape as character’, he added) and by the primal simplicity of the drama and its rigorous concentration on the painful economics of the characters’ lives (‘vigorous concatenation pinful ergonomics’, he wrote, having finished off the rest of the bottle). It seemed to Terry that here at last was a director who, by combining an unaffected sympathy for the lives of ordinary people with a plain but finely-judged cinematic vocabulary, represented everything he thought the medium should aspire towards.

Later in the afternoon that same Saturday, he arrived at the university library just before it was about to close and photocopied the entry for Ortese from the
Cambridge Companion to Film:

ORTESE, SALVATORE
(1913-75). Italian director, worked in editing and dubbing from the mid-thirties and was rumoured to have assisted ROSSELLINI (qv) on the screenplay of
Luciano Serra, Pilota
(1938). He directed numerous short documentaries during the war, and made his feature film début with
Il Costo della Pesca
(
Dearly Have We Paid for the Mullet
, 1947) which along with Rossellini’s
Roma, Città Aperta
and
De Sica’s Sciuscià
(both qv) marked the first flowerings of neo-realism. His films of the 1950s, including
Paese Senza Pietà
(
Land Without Pity
, 1951) and the more upbeat
Morte da Fame
(
Death from Starvation
, 1955), show his continuing commitment to the movement which he felt had been betrayed by his fellow directors, particularly De Sica, the sentimentality of whose
Umberto D
(1952) he publicly reviled. As the Italian cinema of the 1960s fell under the sway of fashionable sex comedies and the gaudy excesses of Federico FELLINI (qv), the bleakness of Ortese’s view of economic and human relations merely intensified, and his one colour film for a major studio from this period,
É la Vita!
(
Life’s Like That
, 1964), had to be
re-shot because its ending was considered unduly pessimistic. (The film concerns a loving mother who turns prostitute in order to pay for her schizophrenic son’s medical treatment. Finally she becomes housemaid to a wealthy Florentine couple, but in Ortese’s original version, just as she has almost raised enough money for her family to move out of their cramped and unsanitary apartment, she loses both her legs in a freak vacuum-cleaning accident.) Ortese’s last film has never been publicly shown. A reputedly horrific, remorseless indictment of the military establishment, and – in its director’s words – ‘a hymn to the degradation of the human spirit’,
Sergente Cesso
(
Latrine Duty
[US:
The Army Stinks
], 1972) failed to find a distributor and indeed has only ever been seen by a handful of people, including one Italian critic who is said to have left a screening after only ten minutes and told reporters that Ortese ‘should be put to sleep like a sick animal’. Unable to raise any more money for film projects, Ortese spent the last three years of his life as a virtual recluse in the Tuscan mountains, where he died of pneumonia in the winter of 1975.