Mark retreated from the hall with a wave and Cara came out on to the drive to see me off. I kissed her respectfully on both cheeks, a new un-English practice we both seemed to like, and opened the gate in the wall onto the damp nearly noiseless vista of the avenue. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ she said. When the gate clicked shut behind me I walked a few steps in a swift soft confusion of feelings, released but alone. The moist air glistened under the streetlamps and on the roofs of parked cars. I was drunk but unexpectedly nervous, now the moment had come, about seeing Chris Canvey. At the far end of the road was a busier, very different street, with a lit phone box and a minicab office – everything I needed was there, and still I might have fluffed it, but I didn’t.
It was a deep-voiced woman who answered, like an echo of the woman I’d just left. ‘Hullo,’ I said, ‘it’s, um . . . I wondered if Chris was there, by any chance?’
‘Whom shall I say is speaking?’
‘My name’s David.’
‘Ah, yes, indeed,’ she said warmly, and I heard her put the phone down, and after ten seconds brisk footsteps and then a voice, ‘Hello?’ as if he hadn’t been told who it was.
When I got to the house about thirty minutes later it was Chris who let me in, but I was wary somehow of the woman, and I could hear the whine of a tap running somewhere and the bump of it being turned off. It was a biggish, rather dingy-looking house. Chris took my coat politely, but he was smirking as he hung it up. He was in shirtsleeves now, large round bum in suit trousers as he led me down the hall. It was strange to see a second time, and so soon, a person I had had no chance to memorize the first time. It was him all right, it all made sense, but he wasn’t quite the man I’d been picturing on and off throughout dinner. I saw straight away the plumpness, the smudged glasses, things I didn’t think sexy, which seemed only to confirm and heighten my first feeling, that he was irresistible. We went into a sitting room – closed red velvet curtains, the last of a log fire and cigarette smoke, loose covers of the sofa threadbare on the arms. ‘Will you join me in a whisky?’ he said, and out of nerves and my own politeness I said, ‘Yes, OK.’
‘Cheers!’ he said, with a grin, and we clinked glasses and sipped as we stood in front of the fire. We were close to what we wanted, but self-conscious without a crowd around us. ‘So how was your dinner with the Hadlows?’
‘It was all right,’ I said, ‘we had quail.’ He narrowed his eyes, a joke seemed to lurk here, but neither of us could find it. ‘How long did you stay at the Upshaws’?’
‘Oh, I left soon after you.’
‘Don’t we sound grand, with our plutocrat friends . . .’
‘Mm, not really my scene,’ Chris said. ‘Anyway, it felt very dull once you’d gone.’
‘You must have known other people there?’ – trying not to smile.
‘One or two, I suppose, but, you know . . . zero homosexual interest.’
‘I had a funny encounter with one man,’ I said, ‘Martin Causley.’
‘Oh, Martin, yes, did he try and pick you up?’
‘I think he wanted to. Then I made him blush, which I don’t think he liked at all, and he said he had to speak to his wife.’
‘That poor woman.’
‘He’s quite good-looking.’
‘No, he is. Huge cock.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Well . . . apparently.’
Perhaps it was the thought that Chris might have got off with Martin Causley instead of me that made me say softly, ‘For god’s sake,’ holding my drink out in my left hand as I kissed him. Then we looked at each other in a scheming kind of way for five or six seconds, and sat down close together on the sofa, his arm round my waist. The sofa half swallowed us up. I heard the squeak of a floorboard, a sigh as the draught-excluding curtain rose on its rail and a woman in a dressing gown looked round the door – ‘Hello, Claudia,’ Chris said as if he was quite used to being found here with his arm round a stranger. Claudia herself seemed unsurprised. And in a way I still hadn’t adjusted to, I wasn’t a stranger. ‘You recognize David, don’t you.’
‘Well, I just had to say,’ said Claudia, ‘before I turned in, how much we enjoyed you in Hibiscus Hotel.’
‘I’ve told him that,’ said Chris, but quite pleasantly.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said.
‘We were so excited that Christopher met you tonight,’ and as she looked at me, from the edge of the lamplight, I wondered if I’d been lured into something odd.
‘This is Claudia’s house,’ Chris said. ‘I’m just her lodger.’
‘Oh, rather more than that, I think, Christopher, by now,’ Claudia said.
She came forward and reached out a hand – I could only half stand up to shake it. ‘Well, pleased to meet you,’ I said, taking my lead from Chris’s cool tone with her. She looked down at us with a confident smile.
‘I’ll see you in the morning, I expect,’ she said.
‘Well . . .’ I said, thrown by the mood of permission, almost put off by it, so that I saw myself making some silly excuse and going back to the lodgings in Acton.
‘There are a number of things I’d like to ask you,’ she said, ‘– about the theatre. The actor’s life.’
‘Well, goodnight, then, Claudia,’ Chris said.
The curtain rose again, a minute after she’d gone, as we were starting to chew at each other – ‘I forgot my book,’ she said, and tiptoed out again with a guilty grimace.
Upstairs he closed the bedroom door and stood there, so eager he was almost hesitant, eyes reading my look for instructions, ready for whatever I wanted most. I hardly knew, beyond the basics, but I took on the role, I sat on the edge of the bed, and had him kneel in front of me, where I could also admire him from behind in the wardrobe mirror. At first I avoided colluding with my own expression, but it took on undeniable interest as things got more serious – until I stood up, and we both got properly undressed and moved on to the astonishing next stage.
It was a mixture, Claudia’s house, of comfort and squalor. Next morning, on the alarm, hungover, happily amazed, I had to pick up Chris’s rhythm, he was out of the room, then back: ‘Just a quick one, please,’ he said, the bath already running – he needed to be out of the house by 8.15. I worried about Claudia, but apparently she was a late riser. I got into the water after Chris, to save time, and again, as I dried with a towel that I felt had been used before, the figure whose eye I held in the mirror seemed amused if a little bewildered to find himself here, and to be doing this. Chris went to make breakfast, and I followed him downstairs into the red-tiled hall with a wary fascination at seeing it in daylight. I went into the sitting room, the light switch not working, so I stepped through the shadows, past sofa and bureau and fringed standard lamp, to tug open the dark velvet curtains, which slid back smoothly enough with a click of wooden rings on the oak rail. Outside there was a lawn overwhelmed by a bay tree thirty feet high – I thought of Gilbert’s dwarf conifers at Crackers, and the mood of helplessness that grew with them, year by year. In the room, in the curtains themselves, there was the smell of cigarettes and of the ashes of the fire. The large friendly sofa, which had nearly rolled Chris and me up in itself last night, sprawled like a drunk out cold in the early light. The room had an atmosphere, old family furniture, I guessed, handed down and knocked about in the process, china dogs on the mantelpiece, and above it a portrait of a bishop, perhaps, in his robes, in a fancy gilt frame that had lost a corner. The little side tables, the photographs on one, the figures and ormolu clock on the other, were grey with dust, but a confidence in background, Claudia’s accent, posh but louche, could be heard. I opened the door, the curtain rose on its rod, and as I went into the hall I wondered about seeing Chris again, before Terra left London to scandalize Ipswich and Colchester. I didn’t know, but one small scheming part of me ran on into the months ahead, and being with him, and this house being the setting. It had the glamour of London in it, just a bit, of people doing what they liked in the great blended hum of the city, which hung in this empty hallway even now, the faint far-off roar like a noise in my own head. In the hall I caught another mood, dreamy for a second then sharper-edged – the big family house on Boars Hill where Walt lived with Stella and Jenny and Nick a long-lost three years ago: a different sort of house, but with a lasting aroma of dust and old carpets and yesterday’s fire.
When I got to the theatre in Ipswich there was a letter at the stage-door for me, in writing I didn’t know, but which then had the lovely and almost alarming interest of being Chris’s. Pale mauve flame of the envelope opened in near-darkness back-stage, and two folded pages with the ghost of the Rothmans he’d smoked as he wrote them – round-handed, blue biro, fast and efficient and also childlike, pressed hard into the paper. I’d never had a love letter before. I went into the Gents to read it properly, glowing at its rudeness and its confidence, his allusions to what we had done and were going to do. By the next day I knew it as well as my own part – I could hear him clearly, sensed his live presence in the stale cigarette smoke, but the words he chose and the way he formed his letters made me see him in a new light.
In Ipswich we did R&J, fairly settled in by now, and boosted by a further good review in the New Statesman. There was also an annoyingly positive notice in the Telegraph, which Esme had clipped out and sent to me; Ray reduced this to the one word ‘Startling’ for the poster. Like many resolute outsiders he had a tortured idea of success. Praise in the Guardian for a Terra production was welcome, and in the Workers’ Weekly valuable and true, but almost identical phrases in the Times or Telegraph showed he’d failed in his mission to outrage. His greatest dread was of acceptance by the mainstream – eunuchry he called it. The grant he received from the Arts Council was an insult he could neither mention nor forget. He never admitted to me how much Mark Hadlow gave him.
I loved arriving in a new town and seeing the posters up. There was the glamour of appearing for a few nights only, and the much sharper sense than in London of being judged, against last week’s visitors, and the ones who came back every year and were so popular. In London we merged with the life of the surrounding streets, but on tour we stepped off the train as a troupe, a multicoloured rabble of men and women with a cheerful and possibly threatening appearance. We straggled along with our bags to whatever cheap boarding-house had been found for us. Sometimes when we got to the theatre the van was already there, and quite often it wasn’t there yet; on such occasions Ray installed himself in the pub, or if it was the afternoon in a cafe, and made himself available for interview by the local press. When the van rolled up with Betsy at the wheel there was all the rush and excitement of the get-in, and the pressing inescapable sense for the whole team of time moving rapidly on. I liked the different moods of places we played in, and in larger towns the sense I had even while acting of the pride that the regulars took in having a theatre and going to it. The stage lighting gave glimpses of all these shadowy spaces, warehouses, drill-halls, now and then the gilt mouldings and two boxes of a proper old playhouse, or the concrete and blue plush of a brand-new building. The Arts in Ipswich was more like a chapel or church hall, narrow gallery all round, and a stage at knee-level of the front row of the stalls. The first night we pretty well filled it, almost three hundred people, though it thinned out a certain amount at the interval.
Johnny got our landlady there to take our photo outside her establishment – a risk, as the slightly blurred and sideways-sloping print confirmed when he got it back from the chemist’s. But there we are, a team, an amazingly motley fifteen: Ken Mallow in the middle, Capulet and about to tackle Lear, ‘Instinctive actor,’ Ray said, ‘does amazing things, but has no idea why’, our senior member but too grouchy and scowling to be a father-figure to the rest of us. Pale little Wendy and skinny Jack Marks, big dark Derek Dos Passos, with Olu Samson from Lagos beside him, burly blond Gary Molesey next to Betsy the Jamaican SM in her desert boots and dungarees. Johnny, whose father was an immigrant from Goa, stands next to brilliant red-haired Ruth, whose Bristol accent Ray treasured and mocked undecidedly, and then there’s me, Dave Win, looking very happy and also, as often in photographs, residually anxious, in a way I think the others never noticed.
Ray stands with pointed modesty at the end, small but with a large despotic presence; his style is professionally nondescript, tight faded jeans like everyone else, belted tan-leather jacket, thick greying hair swept back under the wide-topped workman’s cap that he kept on even indoors. He looks as if he might be on his way to the pub or the bookies’, an off-duty salesman of some sort, with a battered briefcase in one hand; but in fact he was a well-connected artist, he’d worked with Charles Marowitz and David Hare, and he was a ‘good friend’ of Peter Brook, who’d come to his Titus Andronicus in Margate and ‘very much seen the point of it,’ Ray said. With his other hand he holds a cigarette just under his chin, impatient to get on with smoking it once the picture’s been taken.
‘We’re on tour,’ Ray would say, ‘not on holiday.’ And oddly, with no homes to go to, we felt a bit trapped – my first taste of the new isolation of touring, a bleakness beneath the adventure and the focused energy of work. In the days in Ipswich and then in Colchester we fitted in rehearsals for Lear, Ray’s most ambitious show yet, due to open in Leicester six weeks later. I was Edgar, and grappling already with the problems of having three plays in my head at the same time. We were all in at ten the first morning, more or less, basic warm-ups, and then Ray said, ‘I was thinking the Death Circle.’ This was an exercise he’d borrowed from Marowitz but typically customized and made more alarming: the whole cast had to tramp round in a circle, singing whatever they liked at the top of their voices, and at unexpected moments Ray would clap or whistle and whoever was beside him had to drop down dead, while the others carried on until only one person was left marching and singing their song, often with a quaver of genuine terror. But today Ken said, ‘Can we not do that, Ray?’ – no one else could have done so and been listened to, but Ray listened to Ken, and with only a hint of reluctance said, ‘All right, then, Ken, as you like, let’s get started.’ That remission made us all more cheerful.
I rehearsed in the soft blue tracksuit I’d had at school, rescued from Crackers and given a new life: it showed I had barely changed size in the past six years. We were working in a first sketchy way on Act Two, where Edgar learns that he must flee the court, and decides to disguise himself as a beggar. Scene Three is simply his twenty-line speech, in complex language of the kind I liked learning, and I was off the book already – it came easily to me but it made Ray disgruntled, ‘If you learn it too soon you run false, by the time we open you’ve forgotten what the fucking words mean.’ I jogged into the middle of the space among the chairs and tables, and expounded Edgar’s situation. ‘My face I’ll grime with filth, / Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots, / And with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky.’ As I spoke I pulled at my clothes and devised other gestures I knew Ray was bound to condemn and replace with his own ideas straight afterwards. He paced round me, smoking and nodding slowly in a way that in him rarely signalled approval; and left a long silence at the end, so that I looked at him and said, ‘Or do you think, perhaps—’
‘I hope,’ he said, ‘of course, very much, that Gielgud can be persuaded to play the part of Edgar the next time round. But for now can we please have Dave Win, young man with a grievance and a healthy suspicion of fine words. Thanks so much.’
I took it, as you had to with Ray, and half listened as he said what he thought I should do, and I wondered, did I have a grievance? I felt most of the company, without looking far, could find something that had harmed them, and oppressed them, and unfairly held them back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I knew that I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice. ‘So we’ll run it again, and as I say, find the panic, the spirit of improvisation.’ ‘OK . . .’ ‘His life’s in danger, he’s not singing an aria.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘some arias are very—’ ‘And this time for god’s sake strip off, get used to all that.’ ‘Oh . . . OK,’ and I glanced at the others, at big camp Gary studying his part with raised eyebrows and a hint of a smile – it was almost, but not quite, a joke for the actors, the nudity in Terra shows. Gary got his kit off whenever he could, Jack and Olu I’d seen naked in the Arden play, but this was my initiation. I couldn’t say I hadn’t seen it coming. So I did it, and as I said, ‘whiles I may scape I will preserve myself’ I pulled my top over my head and threw it aside and felt the cool, close to chill, of the room. It was a fair bit of business to add to the speech, prising off one shoe and then the other in the following lines, and then for good measure my socks. Ray sat now, staring through smoke, and when I got to ‘presented nakedness’ I tore off the bottoms and my underpants, and threw them away too. I poked and scratched at myself in the lines about Bedlam beggars mortifying their bare arms. I felt it was going down well, it was a relief and in fact rather more than that to the secret exhibitionist in me. ‘Poor Turlygod!’ I shouted, ‘poor Tom! / That’s something yet. Edgar I nothing am’ – and here Lear and the Fool and Kent, waiting to come on, did look a bit uncertain, as I strolled back to pick up my clothes, and I knew that the mood of the rehearsal had been stretched and changed by my nakedness, though everyone studied their scripts as if a little private appraisal had not been smuggled in as a question of art.
It was a different sort of challenge the next week doing Stan Creeley’s Bodies at Essex University – not in a theatre but in a large low room in the students’ union. The whole campus was less than ten years old, and already weathered by student use and a recent three-week sit-in. The cafe on the ‘plaza’ had windows papered over with posters and stickers; and in the hallway too there was a whole wall of curling and dropping posters, the old pins pilfered to put up the new ones. Each time the tall glass doors from the wind-tunnel plaza were flung open by someone arriving or leaving, the notices chattered and whispered across the length of the board. The massive self-involvement of student life felt far off, but not dead to me, I saw red and yellow fliers for their own Dram Soc’s Merchant of Venice, and I felt anxiously excited for them, and the ideas of future careers as actors that some of them were bound to be gripped by.
For Bodies the audience were seated on three sides of the room, and the cast, for ten minutes before the show started, were seated in a row on the fourth, hunched or bored and vaguely restless, as if waiting their turn at the barber’s, not talking to each other and showing no interest at all in the public coming in. This neglect quickly gave the audience an unexpected interest – they stared it down blokishly or talked among themselves, but a certain discomfort at being a spectator had crept in, the latent embarrassment of theatre that Ray liked to work on. One or two nodded and smiled at us, as if to a professor about to start a seminar; we let our eyes run over them unseeing. The show came after their supper in hall, when they could have been doing something else, or nothing at all. We of course were doing our job, but at such times our job seemed to ride very free of the usual concept of acting, which as Ray said was bourgeois crap. Even so, I was running through my part with the quick steady heartbeat of anticipation and noting the whole rows of empty chairs. Then the customary chatter crammed in before the lights go down faltered, and we sat in spontaneous silence for a minute or more, till the blackout.
Bodies was already famous for its long first scene played in total darkness. Voices are heard, very quietly, ‘. . . or between the thighs . . .’, ‘. . . you see she likes it better from the other side – yes, round the backside . . .’, ‘. . . he has such stamina, doesn’t he . . .’ Two or three conversations, or strings of exchanges, which the audience try to make sense of, as coming from characters, while gradually the green exit lights illuminate the space, eyes adapt, and just about make out six figures, four men and two women, seated on the ground, and talking with insouciant frankness about sex. Sex with persons not present, and then, pretty clearly, and imminently, with each other. The near-darkness is an obstacle, and a blessing. Then as stage-lights edge up out of nothing the weirdly free talk becomes inhibited, the players react with dismay to the sight of the audience, they stand up, peering at them, Creeley says, ‘as if at a long-feared threat made manifest’, and the minute or more of dumb show that follows seems to the audience agonizingly longer, as the actors do what they declined to do before, they face them down, hold their eye, refuse to be intimidated, before turning and stalking off into another blackout. We all had evening dress under our scrubs, and now there was one of Ray’s famous quick-changes, before we re-entered for a second scene, a party, all rococo chit-chat, some of it quite funny, with the catalogue of sexual positions and perversions still fresh in the viewer’s mind. ‘Puerile’ the Evening Standard had called it, ‘undeniably clever’ Time Out, and again, just by seconds, as the lights slowly strengthened on the students’ faces, I thought what on earth would I have made of all this at their age, virginal and knowing sex mainly through images and hearsay. I saw them taking it, some grinning nervously, some loving it, some upset to be listening, and then seen listening.
The day I got back to London Chris said he needed to see me at lunchtime, couldn’t wait till the evening. He worked in a tall gleaming building in Victoria Street, high up on the twentieth floor: some time, he said, he would show me his office, the view of the Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, but not today. I chose the bridge over the lake in St James’s Park, and got there unintentionally early. The Blue Bridge it’s called, its arc so slight it barely rises in its stride across the water. The lake was broken and glittering in the breeze, and I didn’t think, till I stood at the centre, of my meeting with Nick three years earlier, in another park a mile or so away, our miserable lunch, and the ducks on the Serpentine below. Here much more exotic-looking waterbirds were pushing about, and I had a sense of life now at a brisker tempo, in a brighter key.
I was the one with the news, and we ate a sandwich sitting on a bench while I told him about R&J, and Bodies at the university, but for some reason I kept the Lear rehearsal to myself. I think I wanted it to surprise him, when he came up for the weekend to Leicester to see it. But I said how the sex-talk in Bodies had been tricky for the actors, in rehearsal, and how I saw it all differently since I’d met him and done quite a few of the things Stan Creeley’s characters described. Chris loved this, he was easy to flatter and amuse, and anything to do with me seemed to have an exaggerated magic for him; but after a minute, as I talked and made it all as entertaining as I could, it was clear he was smiling in helpless excitement at my being there touchably and kissably in front of him, his head shaking, dumbly biting his lip and not taking in a word I was saying. ‘I don’t think you’re really very interested in how the play went, are you?’ I said.
‘I am, honey . . . the audience were laughing and Wendy hurt her foot.’
‘Mm, OK,’ I said, but a sort of satire had come into his attention. All he really wanted was me.
He had to get back to the office, and I went with him that way, onto Birdcage Walk. There was no one within a hundred yards of us, on the tree-shaded pavement, and we kissed goodbye, had a hug that turned into a bit of a snog, reckless somehow but not to be resisted. It should have been Chris, but it was me who said, ‘God, I can’t wait for tonight!’ We stood back, laughing and thinking, hand in hand, rather sweetly, though I heard voices and I glanced aside, through the railings and low shrubbery, into the garden of the tall grand house beside us. French windows were open, and at a table on the terrace an older man in a dark suit was talking to a younger one, who had his back to us and seemed to be writing things down. It took me several staring seconds then to focus, and to levitate, and hanging high up swivel the scene round. The older man’s voice was unmistakable, the quick surges in volume when he made a point, and of course the daft architect glasses; the bulkiness of Giles I still hadn’t grown used to, the hair thick on the collar, and Chris I think had never met him or taken him in: he meant nothing to him. I made a funny face, pulled his hand and drew him away; I don’t think he knew we’d come back to the beginning, though now, thank god, on the other side of the fence.