Darling, p.1
Darling, page 1
DARLING
by Frederic Raphael
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
A Note on the Author
I
The girl said: “Me? What do you want me for?”
“We’re just doing some interviews,” the boy said. They had pointed her out across the street and he had been sent to pick her up. “If you wouldn’t mind answering some questions. For the telly.”
“Oh, for the telly.”
“Yes. If you’d come this way.”
“What sort of thing?”
“They’ll explain.”
“What program?”
The boy’s pocket bristled with important pens with loose plastic caps. “They’ll explain it all to you.”
She went quickly around the lumpy cameras and lights, skipped cables, to see the man with the microphone. He wasn’t anyone she had ever seen before, but he had the familiar microphone in his hand, holding it flat with the mesh dome at chest level to a dark girl he was questioning.
The boy with the pens came back with a clipboard and led her by the arm out of the vicinity.
“If I could just have your name and address and that.”
“What is this exactly?”
The director said: “If we could get on—”
The interviewer, in a suede jacket of course, came up to Diana, unwrapping a cough drop. “It’s only a release clause.” He had large brown eyes and a mouth that looked keen to be amused. His hair flopped over his forehead, but was receding on either side of it. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
“Look,” the director was calling to him, “we must get on, love.”
“My father always told me not to sign strange documents.”
“Your father was quite right. But it’s only to give us permission to use whatever you say. Nothing sinister.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She felt as if she had known him for some time. With the microphone in his hand, his face was luminous with interest. The questions were about convention. Did she think of herself as unconventional? Oh, yes, she did indeed. She was nothing like what her parents thought a young girl should be. Look at her clothes! But weren’t her clothes conventional? Conventional what? Conventional something. Well, yes, she saw that (she was wearing tight jeans and a hairy sweater and Positano sandals, not that she’d been to Positano), but at least she wasn’t ordinary. She didn’t believe in the things she’d been brought up to believe in. She wasn’t conventional in that sense.
“Thank you.” His face lost its look of luminous interest, as if the current in it had been switched off. She smiled, almost embarrassed now, as she remembered doing at the end of an excuse-me when she’d been dancing with someone she had never seen before; while the music lasted there was a sort of intimacy (hand was in hand, after all, body v. body) and then it was finished and they were strangers.
He interviewed two other girls, both conventionally unconventional in jeans and hairy sweaters and pony tails and sandals, though not necessarily Positano, and teased them with similar ease about the conventionality of unconventionality, till she had an uneasy notion of what the program might finally look like. She stood by one of the heavy lamps which shed milky light on the scene. She should really have been getting on (she swung her empty shopping basket with the list inside it), but she could not let go of the occasion.
“Hullo, you still here?” He was taking things off a canvas-backed chair and loading them into his pockets.
“I suppose this is going to be a send-up,” she said, happy to have the key phrase available. Perhaps he would see a fellow pro in her if he heard her use it.
“Send-up? Whatever do you mean?”
“I suppose you’re going to make us all look silly,” she said.
“When someone looks the way you look,” he said, clutching a scuffed briefcase under his armpit, “what does it matter how she looks?”
“Sorry?” When she failed to understand, she had a peculiarly tragic look, her wide mouth pouting, lips barely parted.
“It doesn’t matter.” He could hardly resist touching her elbow. “Skip it. No one could make you look silly.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Have you finished now?”
“I have. Want some coffee?”
“Wouldn’t mind. Are you on the telly much? I don’t remember seeing you.”
“I am on the telly much”—he smiled—“and no one ever remembers seeing me. It’s depressing. No, I’m not on that much. I do the odd bit.”
“I don’t look at the telly much. Except at Mummy and Daddy’s, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’re not really a telly person then. I mean, permanently.”
“No,” he said, “I’m not. I’m a general all-round hack. Bit of this, bit of that.”
“What else do you do?”
“I review books. You know books. Those things with pages very square people still occasionally read in the secrecy of their own homes.”
“I have heard of them,” she said.
“When did you last read a book?”
“Oh, now, I thought the interview was over.”
“Sorry. I get stuck in my inquisitorial manner.”
“I was reading one last night. I suppose you’d count it as a book.”
“What magazine was it?”
“What do you mean, magazine? It was poetry actually. Do you count poetry?”
“I count poetry.”
“Dylan Thomas actually.”
“Dylan, were you?”
“Do you like him?”
“I have done. I have done.”
“Why, what did he do to you?”
He stopped with the coffee halfway to his lips and smiled at her as if he had just seen her. He put the coffee down and laughed. “He’s gone out of fashion, the swine.”
“I don’t know whether I really understand it, but it does something to me.”
“What does it do to you?”
“It makes me feel—I don’t know—as if things could be terribly important, as if time could stop and get thicker. Do you know?”
“Sort of.”
“I can never express myself.”
“I think you’ve expressed it very well. Time seems to go so quickly, like water falling out of the bottom of a bag. I can never express myself! What do you do?”
“I’m a model of sorts—”
“Not that you need to do anything. What sorts?”
“Anything that comes up. Hair styles. Bits and pieces.”
“The face that launched a thousand permanent waves.”
“Sort of thing.”
When the bill came, he pulled a heap of change out of his pocket and dumped it on the mottled table top to sort out the one and four. She took money from her purse.
“Come on,” he said. “This is on the BBC.”
“Oh, well, in that case.” She had already put her money between them, but now she returned it to her bag.
“I should think so.”
“When’s it going to be on?” she asked, as they stood at the corner where he was to go one way and she the other.
“Long time yet. We’ve got all the editing to do. You never really know when these things’ll go out.”
“I expect I shall be cut out anyway. I’ve got a friend—Christine Rank, I don’t know if you know her—she’s always getting bits in films and then she’s never in them.”
“I don’t think they’ll cut you out.”
“Oh, well.”
“Why don’t you come and see it when it’s finally ampexed?”
“Whatted?”
“Put on tape.”
“It’d be absolutely super. I’d love to.”
“I’ll give you a call. They’ve got your name and number, haven’t they?”
“Should do. It’s Diana Scott when you’re looking.”
“Right. I’ll give you a jolly old tinkle.”
“That’d be super. Um, by the way, can I ask? What’s your name?”
“Robert Gold,” he said. “And you’re Diana Scott.”
“Right,” she said. “Robert Gold.”
II
“It was a super program,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, but I know what I’m talking about,” he said, “and it was—in the words of the bard—a pissing awful program.”
“I thought I looked ghastly, but it was a super program. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You looked super,” he said, “and the program was ghastly and that is absolutely that. I looked even more like a brokenhearted undertaker than usual. I have a face that always looks tragic in the presence of the trivial. And inevitably vice versa.”
“How does it look when it looks vice versa?”
“What? Oh. Never mind. It was trivial all the same. Dick’s one of those directors who always
“I thought you looked frightfully lean and intelligent,” she said. They were going down the concrete steps to the parking lot. Behind them, the great drum of the television center raised dish after dish of offices into a pallid sky.
“I am frightfully lean and intelligent,” he had to say. “But it doesn’t help.”
“Why do you need help?”
“I don’t need help. But it doesn’t help.” He led her toward a Mark X Jaguar which gave off lustrous intimations of gilt. “Come,” he cried, “climb into my supercharged pfennig pfarthing and let us away from these blighted shores.”
She said: “Is this really yours?”
“What do you mean,” he asked indignantly, “is this really mine? Of course it isn’t really mine.” He turned—his key already out—and attacked the lock of a Morris 1100. “What do you think I am? Sorry about the mess.” There was a clutter of scripts, books, and general junk all over the seat. “I always seem to be chucking things in and I never manage to chuck them out again. Here, have an acid drop. Gift of a frenzied fan.”
“I’d adore an acid drop,” she said, lifting her legs inside and tossing strands of newly released hair from her eyes.
“Have two. Nay, have three. Nay, have the bleeding lot.” He tipped them all into her lap. “I’ve got a tree with hundreds on at home. I water it with the milk of human kindness and up come acid drops.”
“Are you Jewish?”
“Why?”
“Well, Gold.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, I am, partly. About eight-carat, I should say. My grandfather was entirely Jewish and we’ve been watering it down ever since. I’m a quadroon, roughly, I think.”
“What a lovely thing to be! What does it mean?”
“It means I’m a quarter polluted.”
“I should adore to be Jewish.”
“Why on earth?” Robert packed up and went forward in fast first gear toward the gate where the attendant squinted at them on bent knees.
“Dark and mysterious sort of thing. Jewesses always look terribly sexy, apart from anything else.”
“Suggests to me that your knowledge of Jewesses is extremely limited. Some Jewesses look terribly sexy and some Jewesses, like some gentilesses, most certainly do not.”
“Is there really a word gentiless?”
He nodded. “No.”
“Aren’t you difficult?”
“I suppose I am.”
“Always making jokes and things. Don’t you like being serious?”
“I don’t think I dare to be very often,” he said, “except when it’s put on for the gaping millions. That’s the real thing.”
They had stopped to wait for the traffic which flowed in narrow files in either direction.
“Do you think we shall ever get across?” she wondered. “What is it?”
He was staring at her. “Nothing,” he said.
“Look,” she pointed out, “a gap.”
He let out the clutch rather jerkily, to make it across in a hurry. They squeezed between a tanker truck and an oncoming Jaguar which flashed reproving lights. Robert changed gear with another jerk (“Sod the thing”) and something fell forward off the rear seat. Diana turned to restore it to its proper place. It was a badly chipped child’s car seat.
He drove seriously for a while. She studied his face, detecting—didn’t she?— the faintest downward droop to the nose, a certain promising fullness in the lips which were set firmly together but which twitched, as if unaware of her, as if the sense of humor which they suggested were a permanent feature of that slightly sallow, alert face. Surely he was allowing her this free view of him, making himself known to her not by the spray of general chat with which he decorated every usual minute but by this grave silence. At last he judged she had had time enough.
“Am I going to see you again?” he asked.
“No,” she replied.
III
They met again almost immediately. He had been asked to do a piece about photographers and they needed a model. It was for Town Magazine. Four of the new wave photographers were to take pictures of her without knowing how any of the others had seen her. She could scarcely turn it down; it was a golden opportunity. What reason could there be for turning it down?
Afterwards, of course, he had to spend some time with her getting material for what he was going to write, the inch-wide text between the sexy photos. She was almost embarrassed at how little there was to tell him. Her life had been very ordinary. “I was born at an early age, that sort of thing,” she told him. “Father in insurance, mother in debt.” She felt obliged to joke, now that he contemplated her with seriousness. Thinking of her as a subject, he treated her with gravity, with extreme consideration. He made no jokes when he was being his professional self. “She wasn’t ever really in debt. She spent though, you know, more than we could afford sometimes. Not that anything was ever exactly said. It was more an atmosphere.”
“I know.”
“Yes. No, actually we were quite comfortable, I suppose. Genteel, you know. Très suburban, when you come to think about it. I always felt an awfully long way from things, if you know what I mean. Always admiring things I could never hope to do or be. Wimbledon can seem a long way from town.”
“What made you think of modeling?”
“Crikey, I don’t know. I had the face, I suppose. People were always sort of looking at me. I remember once—”
“Go on.”
“Not really worth—”
“What?”
“No, I remember once. Not really relevant. We were having a picnic on Wimbledon Common one time, I remember, I must’ve been about eight. Felicity was eleven, that’s right.”
“Felicity?”
“My sister. She’s married to a stockbroker, lives in Woldingham. Anyway, I remember we were having this picnic on the heath, all the mothers from roundabout used to sit in this one particular area, you know, being frightfully daring, all out there in the open instead of shut in their tight little gardens sort of thing. I can’t have been more than eight. Anyway, suddenly there was this sort of commotion. Well, not really commotion, a kind of atmosphere. Everyone began to whisper in a very elaborate sort of way, the mums, you know. Turned out some bloke was watching us through field glasses apparently. Some peeper behind the bushes sort of idea. I hadn’t really got any idea what it was all about at the time. And then I sort of did. I remember my mother calling me and I sort of deliberately didn’t hear and went skipping off in the other direction. I remember she grabbed me and jerked me almost off my feet. I didn’t really understand and yet I sort of did. Anyway as soon as she let me go, I pulled my skirt right up in front of my face, you know, and showed him my legs. Mummy was furious. I think she smacked me. I can’t remember. I think she did.”
“People are very odd about that sort of thing.”
“And Wimbledon people odder than most. I don’t know what that’s got to do with being a model. However, I think I had the idea that if he’d come to have a peep he must have come to have a peep at me. But I daresay I didn’t really think that at all at the time. I was always being picked out to do things, you know, decorative things. I mean, for instance, I was the Virgin at the Christmas play at school. What’re you smiling at?”
“I wasn’t smiling.”
“Oh, you know what suburbia’s like. They were always saying things about my face being my fortune and wasn’t Mummy lucky, she didn’t have to worry about finding me a husband. You see how frantically dull it all is really, my story.”
“I don’t find it dull,” he said.
“I suppose in some funny way I’ve always felt that I was excluded from things. I remember whenever people talked about an exclusive club I always assumed it excluded me.”
“So young,” Robert Gold, said, smiling, “and so paranoid.”
“Well, I’m afraid that’s how I was. Don’t ask me why.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Honestly!”
“Honestly.”
“Suburbia, I suppose. Oh, and my mother. It’s always Mother, isn’t it? Always worried about what people were going to think and how people who were smart looked or behaved or whatever it was. She always wanted to be a bit better than she was, not that there was really anything wrong with what we were. She always would have preferred the next size up, if you know what I mean. If only she was an inch taller she would have had the most marvelous view in the world.”
