After she had started at Harlequin Pictures, Paula had made herself familiar with its back catalogue. The company was only getting started and had just a couple of releases out there, neither of which she had seen. Roland had, of course. He said the first, a biopic of Nell Gwynne, was wearily typical of the stagey, romantic melodramas that everyone was making these days, and he wasn’t sure how seriously one should take ‘this bilge.’ But the second, Ad Astra, My Darling, was ‘interesting.’
This was one of Roland’s words, which could denote genuine curiosity or the precursor for a tongue lashing.
‘It’s certainly slicker, and the fascination with mountebanks and fairground hucksters shades into, I don’t know … It’s all very heightened, varnished, if you like. Are we supposed to believe that place along the river actually exists, or even could exist? But then the shot of the girl applying her lipstick in tight close-up, it was rather influenced by the surrealists. You have to make up your mind what you’re doing and this is all over the bloody place. Why are some parts in black-and-white and some in colour? It’s a distraction, a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. But there’s certainly some talent there, I don’t think it’s a total write-off.’
‘They long to shoot only in Technicolor, but the stock isn’t easy to get hold of and even when they can often it’s just too expensive for the budget, so they have to make do.’ She had typed and filed many letters to film stock manufacturers, so this aspect of their forthcoming production she was familiar with.
‘They should stick to black-and-white, it has purity. Colour is like a lurid dream.’
‘Funnily enough that’s sort of what Mr. Fulton said last week. That – I think I’ve got this right – cinema is a highly organised hallucination which mimics real life, but a real life full of visions and ghosts.’
‘Oh, did he now? And what did you reply? Or did you just clatter away in respectful silence on your typewriter? Girls have no opinions worth listening to. What are you all for, exactly; it’s a mystery to me.’
‘You know perfectly well what we’re for. Or what you think we’re for, you filthy beast.’
‘Oh, that.’ He ran his hand along her thigh. She would have liked to have brushed it away but she never did. It was all too arousing. He kissed her. She lay back on the cushions on his old leather sofa and waited, gazing up at the ceiling rose, a whorl of plaster ivy leaves. They might stand and move over to the bed, or do it here, among the fraying cushions. She preferred the bed, he liked the danger of toppling onto the floor and dragging her down with him. Sex, in those days, was terribly easy. Sex was around all the time, waiting for an opportunity. Roland was only punctilious about his bedside drawer of rubber johnnies. ‘No surprises coming, if that’s what you’re hoping for, and then an engagement ring. There’ll be no more Quinns marching out of my loins.’
But now he drew away and said, ‘Well, come on? How did you respond?’
‘I don’t know why you go on at me like this. You could just leave me alone if you think I’m so unsatisfactory.’
‘Not you, it’s all the girls. You’re not properly human, you know. Especially you, you’ve no education to speak of.’
‘Then find a girl who has.’
‘I don’t want one of those frights. Never can keep their seams straight. You’re like a mannequin, very beautiful. Normally you’d be out of my league. So, so fuckable. Now I want to hear more about this conversation. Continue.’
She was flattered, she was conceited, she was pleased to be both out of his league and fuckable. Outside the window snow had fallen on Primrose Hill, the sunset turned it pink like a Christmas card. ‘Nature can be utterly vulgar and clichéd,’ Roland said. Dark was coming in, she stood up and drew the curtains. She bent to turn on the lamps.
‘You seem at home here,’ Roland said. ‘Are you angling to move in?’
‘Of course not, don’t be silly, that would be …’
‘Would be what?’
The phrase ‘living in sin’ came to her and she swallowed it, it was tiresome being called a provincial bourgeois.
‘I’d really like my own flat. I think I could afford it in a few months.’
‘I’d have quite liked you to have moved in, actually.’
‘So I could cook your meals and do the housework? No thanks.’
‘Where will you live?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Chelsea?’
It was the first place that came into her head.
‘You’ll have to ask for a raise to afford that.’
‘I might get one. Mr. Fulton has something in mind for me.’
‘What on earth …?’
‘Mr. Fulton is interested in my mother’s story. About when she was a young girl in Latvia and she was wandering in the forest with a basket of mushrooms and met a band of Bolsheviks.’ She giggled.
‘And what is Fulton’s interest?’
‘He thinks, or I think he thinks, that it might be their next picture.’
‘Extraordinary. A fairy tale, of course.’
‘I suppose so. I wonder how he thinks it might end, but then he rushed off before I could ask. How funny, my mother’s life portrayed in film.’
‘A highly organised hallucination. Which is what that story might actually have been, when you think about it.’
‘Really? Why on earth would she make that sort of thing up?’
‘I assume her subconscious had an agenda of some sort, I don’t know. You go into the forest and who are you when you come out again? That’s what my Swiss Cottage woman is trying to find out.’
‘I don’t think my mother has that much of an imagination.’
‘You don’t need one, darling, it’s all going on at another level. I expect she was just expressing the desire to be fucked.’
‘You go too far, you can’t say that about Mummy! She was only fourteen, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Are you never going to grow out of your provincial bourgeois phase?’
‘Stop saying that.’
‘I’ll give you provinces. My sister was fucked in a railway carriage between Bournemouth and Weymouth. By a clergyman. She was seventeen. Or so she says. What do you think? Is such a story just a mask for her adolescent sexual fantasies?’
‘How horrible, did she go to the police, report him?’
‘Of course not, which is why it probably never happened. Now your mother and these Reds, she makes up a whole crowd of forbidden young men to populate her fantasies.’
‘Oh, stop, please stop.’
‘All hot and bothered, are we? Upset because Mummy might be a bit of a tart?’
She could leave now, or they would have sex, and to her shame in the years to come, she would remember that she had stayed and they had got up and gone to bed in the winter afternoon. Roland remarked afterwards, ‘Well, you came like a fucking steam train, darling. What was it that so turned you on?’