Love and Death on Long Island (3 page)

It so happened that I was standing in front of a cinema. It was one of those vast
lumpen
pleasure palaces, now somewhat the worse for wear, peeling and unappealing, as you might say, that had been erected in the earliest postwar years to satisfy the cravings of a populace starved of myth and glamour, of fantasy and wit, and only waiting to capitulate to the easy, whorish and irresistible charms of that oblong swathe of alternative reality, the so-called silver screen. How many simple hearts had once quickened at the prospect of its scarlet-and-gold jewel box of an auditorium, its every single nook and cranny an encrustation of gaudy decorative frostwork, bas-reliefs and arabesques, Little Egypt friezes and Chinatown chinoiserie? And wouldn't those same hearts beat faster still at the instant the lights dimmed, the ruched curtains parted and the entire auditorium, orchestra stalls and balconies alike, gazed as raptly into the screen as a crescent of doting relatives into a newborn's cot? Isn't it Goethe who writes somewhere of the city of Rome as being inhabited by two distinct but harmoniously reconciled citizenries: the Roman people itself but also that noble minority of classical statues alongside which it unheedingly goes about its business? In England's cities, too, generation
upon generation lived alongside their own ‘ennobling' statuary – the statuary, here, of a world of screen-shadows – to whose fulgent and ingratiating presence they were long in unrepentant thrall. Alas, though, whatever used to be their cheap grandeur, these statues are now almost as ancient and superannuated as Goethe's; and the museums in which they were housed, like this cinema halfway between Hampstead and St. John's Wood, with its streaky, slablike concrete walls and scratched, discoloured paint, its forlornness of urban disuse and disrepair, only testify to their irreversible fall from grace.

For me, in any case, the massive overhang of its broad marquee provided merely a roof under which, uncramped, I could shelter for a minute or two, this picture palace's foyer having been designed in full and confident expectation of the kind of milling, good-natured throng that had long since abandoned it. As the rain was beginning now to beat down so heavily that the pavement looked as though it were receiving so many stabbing pains to the chest, I quickly stepped underneath and, shaking out the collar of my overcoat in the orthodox style, morosely stared at the streaming thoroughfare in front of me.

I had never partaken of the joyous simplicity of filmgoing – in fact, improbable as it must sound, I had been to the cinema not more than a dozen times in my life, in the most diverse and unpromising circumstances. I could remember seeing, for example, in the slightly bibulous company of two Cambridge acquaintances, a bad, recklessly abbreviated
Hamlet
with Olivier; and once with my wife, on a shopping excursion to the West
End, an idiotic Hollywood comedy, which someone or other had recommended, about a lascivious Californian hairdresser, a sort of odious ambulant phallus, in the throes of self-revelation. It was after that film that I vowed I would never visit a cinema again, and I never did. Nor had any film producer ever made enquiries as to the possibility of adapting one of my novels. If one had so enquired, then, founding my judgment upon that
Hamlet
and that hairdresser and upon not much else, I should have had the extreme pleasure, once more, of saying no.

Saying no, I thought, that has always been my forte, and no wonder, given that the stupidity of the world is rivalled only by its ugliness. And just at that moment I fancy a rather ugly, sarcastic little grin disfigured the lower half of my face as it suddenly struck me that this matter of the interview with which I was so preoccupied was after all by no means ended; that the unaccountable failure of my interviewer to make an appearance could hardly by itself close the chapter; and that, when the features editor of that deplorable self-styled ‘magazine for men' telephoned me, as surely he would, to apologise for having inconvenienced me unnecessarily, and also no doubt to propose setting an alternative date, then, released as I would be from the need to respect any of the professional or even the simple human courtesies, I would seize the opportunity of letting him know precisely what I thought of him.

So delightful was the prospect of revenge that for the first time since walking out that day, and despite an awareness that my heart was beating a trifle too fast, I felt relatively at peace with myself. I drew a cigarette
from my battered silver case and lit it. It was raining quite as violently as ever. Unless a cab were to chance to pass, an unlikely eventuality, I could not think of going home as yet. I blew the cigarette smoke out through my nostrils, tilting my head backwards as I tend to do, in an exquisitely refined parody of equine breathing or snorting. At the half-dozen others who like me had taken cover under the cinema's marquee, and were now huddled together in a semi-circle as though feeling that circumstances had obliged them to introduce themselves, I extended a brief, unobservant and unrequited glance and almost at once gazed away again. Then my eyes rested at last, merely for want of anything more stimulating to turn to, on the central buttress of the marquee, a sturdy four-square column that also served, by means of a display cabinet of seven or eight still photographs, to advertise the current programme.

The film was evidently a period piece, a prettified evocation, from the costumes shown in the stills, of that Edwardian era that constitutes one of the supreme pathetico-nostalgic Arcadias of the popular English imagination. In the first photograph to catch my attention a virginal young woman in a white dress and holding a white parasol was to be seen, escorted by a shirt-sleeved youth, wading through a meadow knee-high in unkempt, reedlike grasses and flowers. In another the same young woman, in more sombre clothes, was striking a fugitive attitude amid the statuary of what was unmistakably the piazza Signoria in Florence. A third represented a group of people of various ages in the shady and over-furnished interior of what I already knew or half-knew, by some
form of intimate conviction, to be a Florentine boarding house, a
pensione
.

I had of course not seen the film. I recognised none of the actors. Yet somewhere inside my head, as a shivering thing unexplained by my intellect but quite real to my senses, I felt obscurely familiar with these characters and the settings in which they moved. Before even I read the film's title, inscribed as it was on a white underline bordering each of the stills, I knew that it was an adaptation of a novel by Forster, one far from being my own personal favourite but of which I had spoken at length to the ageing author himself, who had befriended me at Cambridge and whose protégé to a certain extent I had become. (I say to a certain extent, for it was a privilege I only gradually discovered I had been sharing with other young undergraduates of similar promise.)

I bent over to look more attentively at the stills. The film appeared surprisingly faithful to at least the textures and trappings of the book upon which it was based: scene after scene, character after character, I contrived to identify without any great problem and indeed with something very nearly approaching a pleasurable
frisson
.

The rain, driven off course by a high, blustery wind, so that I had to withdraw ever further into the foyer, showed no sign of letting up. Slate-blue in the gathering dusk, the street presented a singularly uninviting perspective. It occurred to me that, even if I did succeed in returning home without getting soaked through, though God knew how, what awaited me there was a miserable supper of cold cuts, by now probably curling at the edges, which my housekeeper (who didn't ‘do' for me on a Sunday) would have left sandwiched between a couple
of plates on my kitchen table. And so it was that, feeling just a trifle light-headed, rather like a schoolboy playing truant, I decided to go in and watch the film. I would see this adaptation of my mentor's novel, I would fairly cheerfully relax a lifetime vow, then treat myself,
une fois n'est pas coutume
, to dinner in a small French restaurant in Hampstead where my wife and I had oftentimes eaten together. Now that the whole mortifying business was being miraculously transformed into an amusing self-indulgence, I little cared whether the performance was halfway through or nearly at an end; however, it so fell out that it was timed to start in just under ten minutes.

When I entered the cinema, my heart sinking a little at the foyer's tawdry appointments, its smoky, wing-shaped light fittings and its carpeting so threadbare that the company logo which had been woven into it would have been legible only to those who knew exactly what they were looking at, it took me a while to locate the box office, which also served as a refreshment stand and was stocked with every type of confectionery, with popcorn machines and a soft-drink dispenser giving off a glow of such lustrous intensity as only chemistry has the secret. The cashier, a tiny, fat Filipina with a delicate bone structure, whose open palm was already thrust at me before I had time enough to reach for my wallet, took the crumpled note I handed her, drew forth a ticket, tore it in half, handed one half back to me and rammed some change home into my own outstretched palm, all in a single arc of unblinking indolence. I stared at her for a moment but at first said nothing. Then, when I began to ask, ‘Where …?', she cocked her plump little head in the very vaguest of directions – the auditorium was
somewhere behind me, was all I could gather – and turned at once to whatever it was under the counter, a book, a magazine, possibly a half-knitted jumper, that the banal routine of selling a ticket had come to interrupt.

There were three doors on the far side of the foyer; they were unmarked, yet they also appeared to be signalling ‘Keep Out'. So, instead, I climbed a wide central stairway which led to a gallery lined with signed portraits of waxily personable male film stars – the signature had been scrawled on each of these portraits at such an angle it seemed as though the signatory were wearing it on his lapel like a sprig of lily of the valley. To the right, ahead of me, I noticed a pair of swing doors; when I opened these and passed through a small, interlinking antechamber bounded by yet more swing doors on the other side, I found myself inside the auditorium.

It was pitch-dark. I remained motionless for a moment to give my eyes a chance to block in the space. No usherette came forward out of the gloom to guide me to a seat, and the screen's as yet unfocused images – a beach, a tangle of semi-clothed bodies whose roseate flesh tints were as one with the sumptuously setting sun against which they were composed, an unexpectedly sudden shot of a crimson-and-yellow striped beach ball in gigantic close-up – confirmed that they must be fragments of a trailer or commercial.

As the contours of the auditorium slowly materialised, what struck me most forcibly was how sparse the attendance was: with those five or six rows nearest the screen completely unoccupied; with only an odd isolated figure,
his knees propped nonchalantly against the place in front, in the half-dozen rows after that; and with the great majority of the public concentrated in one section on the left side of the stalls at the back, whether because it was from there that one had the best view of the screen or because regular cinema patrons have a natural and, so to speak, tribal disposition to bunching themselves together, to letting themselves drift towards seating areas given a seal of approval by those of their brethren already installed. It being the case, however, that my own disposition, as man and artist, consumer and creator, was to fly in the face of all such clannish conditioning, to persist in singing a song of my own amid a crowd singing theirs, and even, were ever that crowd to be collectively converted to mine, to begin singing a different song altogether, I strode down the aisle and took a place not only as far to the right as the ‘public' was to the left but perhaps further forward than I would have been tempted to choose had everything else been equal. Having briefly sat down as though to claim the seat, I at once rose to my feet again and slipped off my scarf and overcoat. Then I sat down a second time and squinted quizzically up at the screen.

But I very soon started to feel oddly restless and ill at ease. On the screen, in the time it had taken me to settle into my seat, night had fallen. A cortège of young, garishly caparisoned and helmetless motorcyclists, hair flaming about their heads in the current generated by their machines, suddenly blasted out of nowhere; upon their manoeuvring a deserted street corner, the rear wheel of each and every motorcycle proceeded to skid in unnervingly vivid close-up until it felt as though its rider
were about to be propelled right into the camera; and in the middle distance, presumably because of just this ungodly grate and screech of tyres, a row of windows began lighting up one after the other to mildly humorous effect. Whereupon, to my increasing perplexity, the scene shifted yet again. The spectator was invited to contemplate the somewhat implausibly ivied wall of a college; the camera at first closing in on two brightly illuminated windows in which could be seen, flouncing back and forth or flopping on to an enormous bed whose pink satin bedspread was heaped high with an unusually varied assortment of dolls, teddy bears and soft toys, a trio of giggling and chattering young women in different layers of undress and in one instance almost total nudity; then drawing back to reveal, beneath the windows, flitting about in a little thicket of shrubs and spying on the girls through a hotly disputed pair of binoculars, the motorcyclists of the earlier scene. I stirred more uneasily than ever. Already I knew in spite of myself that the motorcyclists' ringleader was called Cory or Corey and that, having somehow forfeited the affection of one Dora Mae, this Cory or Corey planned, as he informed an acolyte, a frightful-looking youth who went under the name of Kiddo and had acne, greasy slicked-down side-whiskers and a truly unprepossessing set of buck teeth, to photograph her in the nude and so blackmail her into continuing to ‘date' him. Or something like that. But before I succeeded in mulling over that puzzler, one of the scantily clad young women happened to glance out of the window, saw the clandestine prowlers in the shrubbery and at once assumed a pose conventionally expressive of outraged chastity. There followed a fanfare
of girlish shrieks, the hasty drawing down of blinds and the apparition in the college grounds of a battleaxe of a headmistress-cum-matron sporting a grotesquely outmoded pair of pince-nez on her thin, hollow-chambered nose. ‘Oh shit!' muttered Cory or Corey, and the whole gang of voyeurs made a bolt for their motorcycles.