Familiar Rooms in Darkness (7 page)

‘What d'you think changed Harry's idealism?'

‘Oh… Success. Success is very seductive. A successful playwright can't go on living in a bedsit in Soho, even if that is where he gets most of his material from. And the world of the theatre draws you in, strokes your fur, makes you purr. Directors, actors, wealthy patrons – it was very hard to stay an angry young man under those circumstances, you know. Though God knows, some tried. I mean, look at Osborne. Poor old thing. What an effort that must have been… Not that Harry was ever a celebrity as such, not like Colin Wilson, say. But he had a following. He was writing ideal material for all those up-and-coming young actors from the provinces – Tom Courtney, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney… Did you know that Finney and I were in Birmingham Rep together? He played Hotspur in Henry the Fifth and I was Katherine…' Cecile paused for some seconds, her eyes fixed on her own past. Then she resumed. ‘The trouble was, by the end of the sixties, that working-class theme was rather played out. People had moved on to other things. Mainly due to the removal of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship, I suppose. There was a great sea change, culturally and morally. We had
Hair
and
Oh! Calcutta!
, nonsense of that kind. Well, by the early seventies, Harry wasn't writing much at all. A few plays for television, that was about it. He was very much caught up in his own busy social life. He drank a lot, I remember. I suspect he was making up for all that lost time.'

‘Lost time?'

Cecile shrugged. ‘As I said, he had his youth to live all over. Those years he spent in Soho, surrounded by artists and writers and God knows who else, largely blind drunk from morning to night so far as I can tell, and Harry toiling away abstemiously… It was as though he was making up for not having taken part in all that. Oh, the seventies, that was Harry's decade for riotous living.'

‘And you?'

Cecile frowned, the first indication she had given of any impatience. ‘Well, I had the children.'

It was the first time she had mentioned them.

‘So you were at home with Charles and Bella, while Harry–'

‘Led his own life, more or less.'

Adam hesitated for a few moments, searching for tactful words. It was past four o'clock, and she had been talking for a long time. She was probably tired. ‘It must have been difficult, Harry beginning to behave in that way, when you both had young children to care for.' He wanted to add that it seemed odd, too, that Harry should go off the rails just when the twins were born, having been apparently solid and dependable up until that point. But he didn't. He waited.

‘That's men for you, isn't it?' She smiled at the banality. ‘He was wonderful at the beginning. We'd waited a long time for a family. He was there at the birth. That wasn't the done thing in those days, you know. Harry insisted. Everything went well with Charles – he was born first – but I had such a dreadful time with Bella. Anyway, when it was all over, Harry went home and celebrated with
friends. And he carried on celebrating from that day forward. Well, it seemed that way. He wasn't there much. He always said he was seeing television people, made excuses of that kind, but he was mostly out on the spree. Just never home. I'm sure it was partly my fault. I was so bound up with the children. They say that, don't they? That women can become so involved with their babies that they shut their husbands out. Maybe I did that…'

She talked on for another twenty minutes or so, until Adam's tape ran out.

‘I don't think we can do any more this afternoon. It's really been invaluable. Thank you for your time. May I come back and talk to you again, if I need to?'

‘Oh, of course. I rather liked talking about those old times. I don't revisit them much, you know. I keep telling myself that I shall save up all my memories for my extreme old age, and take them out and inspect them
then
… Though, of course, that way one might well be dead before one gets round to remembering anything properly.'

‘I wonder,' said Adam, ‘do you happen to have any photographs? From the time when you and Harry first met?'

There was an almost imperceptible hesitation, a slipping of her gaze, and then she said, ‘Of course. Let me fetch some.'

Cecile went to a desk which stood below the window. It was late afternoon by now, and school children trailed along the street outside.

‘You might be able to use some of these in your book…' She drew out two large albums and brought
them back to the table. She sat down and opened the first, smiling. As she turned the pages of the album, Adam realized how much it would please her to think of her young self living again in the pages of some biography. There were many pictures of her, theatre stills, mostly, from the fifties and early sixties, showing a tall girl with wavy blonde hair and well-defined features, and the figure of the times, with a nipped waist and pointed breasts. He could probably use no more than one in the biography. The ones which interested him more were the casual snapshots, Harry and Cecile with various theatrical celebrities, some forgotten, some still well known. There was Harry in his youth – smiling eyes, handsome, rather roguish features, light-brown hair slightly receding, the same spare, muscled body, slight in stature. There, evident in these early photos, was the quiet dynamism which Adam had occasionally sensed in those long talks with the older Harry, in the days before his death.

Cecile sat back in her chair, let Adam take over the page-turning. She seemed tired. Adam told himself he would go soon. He paused at a picture larger than the others, which had the look of having once been in a frame but later stuffed away out of sight in the album. It was of Cecile and Harry on their wedding day. A group of people outside Kensington Register Office, Cecile in a smartly tailored dress, short gloves, hat brim shading her eyes, laughing, clutching a small posy of flowers. Harry in a loose-jacketed suit, trousers with turn-ups, scarcely any taller than his wife in her high heels. Adam immediately recognized Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon among the group, and felt a little thrill of excitement.
This was definitely one he could use. He turned the book towards Cecile.

‘This photo of your wedding – can you tell me exactly who everyone is?'

Cecile leaned forward. She gave a quick frown of surprise when she saw the photograph. She took it from Adam's hand and gazed at it for some seconds. She recited names, one by one, without hesitation, then handed it back to Adam.

‘What about this man?' He pointed at the image of a young man with dark, slicked-back hair, who stood just behind Harry, slightly shorter than him, staring at the camera with unsmiling eyes.

Cecile glanced briefly at the picture again. ‘I really can't remember. Some photographer friend of Harry's, I think. I didn't know him well.' She leaned back in her chair, evidently fatigued. Adam could read the subtle signals telling him that his time was up. He stared back at the picture. His instinct told him that Cecile knew very well who the man was, but was choosing not to say.

‘May I take this picture?' he asked. ‘And a few of the ones of yourself? I'll bring them back, of course.'

Again, an instant's hesitation– but she agreed. She selected some of herself and Harry, and Adam tucked these, together with the wedding photograph, into his bag.

Cecile picked up the other album. ‘There are some more here,' she said, opening it as though, despite her tiredness, she suddenly wanted to postpone Adam's departure. ‘They're mostly of the children.'

Even the picture of the infant Bella had a potent effect on Adam. He smiled at the sight of her in a smocked
baby dress, sitting on a rug with her brother, toes bare, curls brushed. She had been lovely from the word go. He progressed through the album, hardly glancing at Charles, the sturdy toddler, or Harry and Cecile, the proud parents. It was a revelation to see Bella grow through the years as he turned the pages, the features changing imperceptibly, the wide-eyed childish innocence turning gradually into fresh, scarcely aware sexuality. He wouldn't ask for any of these now. He knew he would have to come back another time, once he had spoken to Charles and Bella. He would go through these pictures at greater length then. He had enough for the time being.

Adam thanked Cecile for the coffee, and for her time and patience. She stood at the front door as Adam made his way to his car, waved as he set off, then went back inside to clear away the coffee cups. The photograph albums still lay on the table. With a faint sigh, almost one of reluctance, Cecile sat down and drew them towards her, turning the pages once more. She dwelt on the pictures of herself as a young woman. Such pleasure one could take in the enduring image of one's loveliness. It almost obliterated the yearning pain of its brief, illusory transition. She contemplated a picture of herself, with a group of other people, in the foyer of the Royal Court. It was the opening night of
The Entertainer
, quite an occasion. Olivier had actually asked to play that part… There was a man who had always known what was good for him, unlike a lot of actors she knew. She gazed at herself, remembering the rustling feel of that dress, her first Dior, very chic. That was something girls missed today – the sensuousness of petticoats, that feeling of femininity…
She closed her eyes, suddenly recalling, for no particular reason, the scent of cologne, Four-seven-eleven, and rouge in those little round green cardboard pots. How funny. What days they had been, the days of Harry's early success. The people they had met. Dylan Thomas, trying one of her Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes and then cadging half a dozen. Robert Helpmann – so courteous and kind to her at some party where she felt out of place. What had been the occasion? Was it with some of Harry's bohemian friends? Probably. Not that Harry had stayed bohemian for long. After the huge success of
Foremost First
, which Michael Langham produced, Harry had bought his first car, a Vauxhall Sniper Gazelle, of all things. A thousand pounds, it had cost. An absolutely enormous sum of money in those days. She remembered driving to see that revue with Tommy Cooper and Shirley Bassey,
Blue Magic
, in the days when you could park just about anywhere in London in the evenings, and then for supper at a jazz club…

No one ever told you, when you were young, that it wouldn't last. Well, maybe they did, but you never listened, never believed. People would laugh, nowadays, at the suggestion that the fifties had ever been a time of glamour, of wonderful innocence mixed with perfect sophistication. For them, the decade was an Osbert Lancaster joke. But in certain innocent ways the fifties had been glamorous and shining. She knew. She had been there.

The next day Adam spent the morning on the phone to two commissioning editors, trying to whip up a bit of
interest in an idea for a series of articles on women's prisons, and chasing up money for articles for which he hadn't yet been paid. In some superstitious way, he didn't want to eat into the large slice of the advance which presently sat in his bank account. What if he never finished this biography? The thought of having to pay the money back haunted him. It was difficult to find time for both the biography and his freelance work, but he had already determined that he would spend that afternoon following up the mystery man in the wedding photograph. He had a feeling that it might not be time wasted.

Armed with the photograph, he set off for the London Library. Painstakingly he looked up books on fifties and sixties Soho, trying to assess which ones would produce most in the way of photographs. The list he finished up with was dispiritingly long, covering both biography and topography, and it took him some time, tramping through the echoing rows and stacks, to track down volumes which looked as though they would be any good.

He sat in the hush of the reading room, turning the pages in search of photographs, soon feeling thoroughly nauseated by black-and-white fifties images of depressing streets, battered faces, smoky nightclubs and dreary pubs. Until he opened the fourth volume. He had hardly flicked through the first few pages, not much expecting to find anything, when there was a picture of his man, flanked by a very young Jeffrey Bernard with his coat collar turned up against the shiverings of another morning hangover, and Jeffrey's brother, Bruce. Once again the anonymous man was staring directly at the camera in a defiant fashion, one that made everyone else in the photo redundant.

Adam's eyes flicked to the caption.
Bruce and Jeffrey Bernard with the photographer George Meacher
.

George Meacher. The name rang bells, but not very clear ones. Perhaps he was dead. Most of the people from that era seemed to be, except for George Melly. Adam flicked through to the index and looked up the final listing for Meacher. According to this book, an account of Soho life from the thirties to the sixties, George Meacher had still been alive and kicking at the time of the book's publication in the early nineties, so there was reason to hope he was still around. Adam turned back to the photo of Meacher with the Bernard brothers, and studied the gimlet eyes. Meacher had an indestructible look about him. Adam closed the book, and thought for a few moments. Perhaps Giles could help him.

In his former career as a journalist, Giles had started off as a staff reporter on the
Express
– a job that seemed to have consisted of endless drinking at Poppins and other Fleet Street watering holes. Adam enjoyed the sense of vicarious nostalgia engendered by Giles's tales of Fleet Street's golden age, before the diaspora, when idleness and drunkenness had apparently gone hand-in-hand with journalistic brilliance. Giles, partly because he enjoyed the company of writers and artists, and partly because he would drink anywhere with anyone, had been a frequenter not only of Fleet Street boozers but of Soho pubs, so there was a very good chance that he knew something of George Meacher, dead or alive.