16

I remember the night the Regent closed. At least I was more understanding the second time around. About the way my father felt. The end of an era. An era only fourteen years old—for him—but the cinema business was changing: all bingo now, soon to be bowling (soon to be Iceland). For the final week he would have liked to show a selection of classic movies, a fresh double programme for each of the six days, but for some reason it wasn’t possible. He ended up with Carry On Nurse—I think the second in the series—and an Audie Murphy western. Good popular stuff, of course, but even then the last performance wasn’t well attended. As the main feature was approaching its end Dad took up his position in the foyer, just as he’d done for practically every final performance of the day since 1945; only, his demob suit of the first years had been replaced, as soon as coupons allowed, first by one dinner jacket and then by another. My father wasn’t a handsome man but he looked distinguished in his dinner suit, it gave him an air, and he always seemed a little like the squire—no, there was nothing of condescension in it—more like mine host seeing his guests off at the end of what he trusted had been a good evening. He felt personally responsible. If someone occasionally told him he thought the programme had been rotten, a total waste of time, it genuinely distressed my dad, even if it didn’t altogether surprise him; he always hoped, even with the poorest pictures, that some sort of alchemy might be occurring in the darkness and all his patrons would emerge in a glow, feeling that the world was truly a better place. Poor Dad. In some ways it was his whole life, the enjoyment of those groups of people underneath his roof for three or four hours at a time. He hated it whenever the projector broke down or the heating system packed up. He really worried about what records should be played before the house lights faded.

The final night was different in one way from all the others: a table was brought into the lobby, a table then set with glasses and bottles of wine and bottles of cream soda. There were cocktail sausages and squares of cheddar cheese, bowls of crisps and nuts, plates of biscuits. He’d hired two hundred wineglasses but realized by the time the main film started that despite all his posters and a message to his patrons in the local press he was going to need hardly a quarter of that number. In the event he didn’t need a tenth. People seemed unexpectedly awkward and in a hurry to get away, like worshippers slipping out of church by a side entrance in order to avoid the vicar. The modest party he’d envisaged (I knew he had prepared a speech) had turned into a mere sprinkling of embarrassed customers and stilted conversation and unhappy silences. Even Doris the usherette and Mrs Wilson at the box office had both made excuses, one to do with her own health, one to do with her mother’s, and the projectionist was a kind man but very shy and he too asked if he could possibly cry off. Both the Shipmans and the Kings had declared that, regretfully, they couldn’t come.

So it fell to my mother and me to help Dad through as best we could. Mum got the giggles.

In fact she was almost drunk. Knowing the quantities of wine which wouldn’t be required she had slipped downstairs much earlier than was necessary.

She looked very pretty in her red dress and black heels. Always much fairer than my father or me, she had recently lightened her hair still more and it suited her. She called it her Grace Kelly look.

Fifty-five years ago I had been as merry as her and giggled every bit as much. I had ended the evening by suddenly being sick and not even getting to the lavatory. (And my father, bless him, had never uttered one single word of reproach.) This time I went easy on the wine and tried to make her do the same. But I proved as unsuccessful here as I’d been in discouraging Dad from holding such a function in the first place. My endeavours to keep her upstairs, entertained by games of gin rummy and silly impersonations and by putting on her favourite records, had only managed to make the matter worse.

“Oh, Ethan, don’t be such a spoilsport! You can see how much your father’s over-ordered.”

“But it’s all on sale or return. We don’t have to polish it off.”

“My darling, you should let yourself go a little. I sometimes worry about you, my sweet.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that you always get the fun out of life that you should.”

She hadn’t said this the first time.

“Mum, it’s been a wonderful life. I’m the happiest man in the world.”

“Sez you!”

She touched the tip of my nose with a forefinger. She was already on her second glass.

“You know what really worries me? I’d hate any son of mine to turn into…”

Now she dipped her finger into the wine and flicked at me two drops.

“Turn into what, Mum?”

“Oh, but you mustn’t be offended! A prig—just a teensy-weensy bit of a prig! A very little one.” She measured it: about an inch high.

It speaks volumes for my advanced development that I was, in fact, considerably offended.

“The way you seem to hold yourself aloof; to stand on the outside and quietly observe the rest of us. As if in judgment. Only sometimes. It isn’t serious. But, Ethan—promise. We don’t want a prig in the family, do we?”

“I promise we don’t want a prig in the family do we.” But I couldn’t make my voice as light as I had aimed for.

“Oh, and now I have offended him! Come on, drink my health. Then dance a little dance with me. Tell me I’m forgiven.”

“Mum!”

For she had now begun to hum it: Tell me I’m forgiven, for making you cry… And she had taken my hands and was pulling me back and forth in a grotesque parody of some form of light fantastic—could it be a quickstep?

“There you are! You see! So stiff. You should unbend. There’s nobody watching, nobody passing on the pavement. You could even do a striptease.”

None of this had taken place before.

“Come on. Do a striptease! I feel so absolutely convinced you would strip to advantage! What a long time since I’ve seen my little boy all bare.”

She retrieved her glass and raised it to me as she swayed in a far more graceful imitation of a dance than when she’d had to propel her lumpish son in front of her.

She winked at me.

“Mum, I’ll be right back. Just a minute or two.”

I found my father standing at the rear of the stalls and looking as if he were positively willing his patrons into finding the film funny; assessing the frequency and depth of their laughter in relation to last opportunities. Lost opportunities.

“Dad. Mum’s in the foyer getting tight. I think you ought to be there.”

“Your mother? Tight? No!”

“Well, no. Not tight. But well on the way.”

“Oh, let her be. She enjoys her little glass of wine; doesn’t often get the chance. And I ordered far more than we need.”

“She won’t thank us, though…not if we let her make a fool of herself.”

“Baloney,” he said. “It’s the last night. It’s a celebration. I may well come and get tight, too. To keep her company. You mustn’t be a wet blanket.”

Spoilsport. Prig. Judgmental. Wet blanket. All within the space of five or ten minutes. Was that really the image I projected? Perhaps the image I projected wasn’t particularly important yet the happiest man in the world now felt remarkably deflated.

I went upstairs to the flat, bypassed the lobby. Sat on my bed and tried to pray but felt too rebellious. Hard done by. Hurt.

Prigs and judges and wet blankets: weren’t they far more the types who’d be able to pray?

It was a Saturday. I’d come home this weekend especially for my father’s big event, to see whether, having failed to persuade him not to hold it, I could help him improve things in any way. I had bought A Pictorial History of the Talkies to present to him at the end of the evening—or, rather, to leave casually lying on the table by his chair—in appreciation, partly, of that particular act of forbearance he didn’t even know about but which had been one of the many kind things I would chiefly remember him for. Tomorrow I’d be returning to Cambridge.

I had stayed on at Cambridge to do an MA. Now, sitting on my bed—and very much in the light of what my parents had just said—I briefly reviewed my university career. Reviewed my sixth-form days. Reviewed my whole social history. Perhaps I wasn’t the life and soul of the party but I had never set out to be. Perhaps I didn’t too often throw back my head to enjoy a really good laugh yet I wasn’t that type. I would smile at things and softly chuckle. I hoped that I was fun to be with—always tried to be a good companion. But in spite of my increased self-confidence, I still had moments of shyness, was still at times a scaredy-cat, although I thought this wasn’t obvious. I tended to be serious about life, more so perhaps than I had been in the past, more into politics and world affairs and all that sort of thing, but I wasn’t a wet blanket.

Or was I?

People sometimes said, “A degree in Divinity? What in heaven’s name made you choose Divinity?” And I would have to answer lamely that I found it interesting. “But what are you going to do with it? You’re surely not planning to enter the Church?” (Few remembered to say ‘Synagogue’.) “No, no,” I’d reply, “nothing like that. Future still very vague!” But Divinity didn’t turn you into a wet blanket.

Did it?

And could I really be judgmental? For twenty years I’d tried to echo John Bradford who in 1550 saw a group of criminals being led away to execution and exclaimed, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford!” Besides, I had far too much to remember from my previous existence (as well as having plenty to remember from this one) to be in any position to throw stones. I truly didn’t believe I was judgmental.

But prig? I looked it up in the dictionary. A person who is smugly self-righteous and narrow minded. C18: of unknown origin.

Certainly my life was not developing in quite the way I had imagined. I had pictured myself sowing my wild oats, having a swinging sex life well before the Swinging Sixties, going all out for a stage career. I had always envied actors…those who were constantly in work. I thought I knew my goal.

But I found that what in fact had appealed to me was really the camaraderie of the theatre, the laughter, the sense of belonging, the thought of cutting a figure. I possessed no burning ambition to act. And since there were thousands of others who did, was it then fair to take up room which somebody else would occupy more worthily?

And as for the sex: was it shyness, or the spirit of the nineteen-fifties, or an unwillingness to engage in merely casual encounters? Don Juan no longer seemed a character to emulate.

Yet did this turn me into a prig?

In any case, I told myself. You were what you were. You did your damnedest to avoid the pitfalls. And when you couldn’t manage it, it was best that you should know. Clearly.

Then you went on trying.

Full stop.

End of conversation.

I returned downstairs.

As I did so, I heard the National Anthem. My father was already in the foyer—as he would have been on any other evening—gently rubbing his hands while he waited. My mother was tapping her foot quite happily to a tune that now remained inside her head. But she looked all right; only my father’s worried glances might have suggested otherwise. The vanguard of the audience came dribbling out, mainly comprised of the younger element, the ones who’d been sitting in the back row and who would now have to find new venues for their petting. My father said, “Good evening, would you like some wine?” and held out a filled glass in either hand. These first arrivals looked at one another and giggled and murmured, “What’s this for?—yeah—don’t mind—ta!” A card had been screened during the interval announcing that there would be wine served after the performance, and why, but not everyone, plainly, would have had their eyes fixed on the screen. I went and helped my father pass round the drinks and the savouries. By now the main body of the audience was either slipping out—with heads studiously lowered—or else lingering, irresolute. But there were perhaps three or four couples who showed the right amount of appreciation and regret. “We’re so much going to miss our cinema,” they’d say, “what a shame this all is!” “Yes,” I’d reply, “rotten old television, let’s hope at least it has the grace to feel guilty!… And did you happen to see any of these at the Regent?” For Dad and I had spent a cheerfully nostalgic morning going through his stock of old posters, picking out those which were either the most colourful or else advertised our favourite movies, then pinning them up wherever we could find the space. Bandit of Sherwood Forest, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Born Yesterday, Magnificent Obsession, Guys and Dolls… There must have been about fifty of them. “Do you think the day will ever come when we can buy old films and play them on the box?”

But such questions didn’t accomplish much. I had wanted to get Johnny and one or two others to come—Gordon had by then gone off to be a pop star—yet Dad had asked me not to, on the grounds that somehow it wouldn’t seem quite honest, nor quite dignified, and certainly the first of these objections had got through to me. Johnny and Simon, however, and some of Mum’s and Dad’s own friends, along with Gwen and Max and Gramps and Nana, would definitely have put a bit of a sparkle into things—even if privately they had considered the whole proceeding a mite pathetic.

“My father’s really choked,” I said, “to hear the Regent’s going to be demolished.” But only two people asked me if he had another job or where we were now going to live. In fact we weren’t sure. There were several months before we’d have to move, and I was still trying to deter my parents from finally picking on London. They hadn’t been happy there before. My father had missed his allotment—there’d been a waiting list in the area where they’d settled—and the only sympathetic job to come his way had been at the Classic in Baker Street, which had turned out to be another cinema soon having to douse its lights. They hadn’t made any real friends in London, either. It had all been rather gloomy.

But it proved impossible to find the proper arguments.

Tonight, though, my mother did her utmost to enliven the proceedings. She hadn’t yet become depressed, as was going to happen in the years ahead.

“Would anybody like to dance with me? Poor man’s Grace Kelly. Looking for the poor woman’s Gene Kelly. Any takers? Roll up!”

She weaved amongst the rest of us and undeniably added some much-required pizzazz. “‘Ten cents a dance, that’s all they pay me, oh how they weigh me down…’”

Also variety.

“Anyone here do conjuring tricks? Juggling? Has anybody any balls?”

She sang again.

“‘Knees up, Mother Brown. Knees up, Mother Brown. Under the table you must go, ee-ay-ee-ay-ee-ay-oh!’”

My father did his best, as well…to carry on doggedly with his own one-sided conversations and pretend he saw nothing wrong. By now, though, people were either standing there and frankly watching Mum, or else edging towards the doors like a dribble of tactful sheep. It must have been evident to him for sometime that his little speech of gratitude and regret and good wishes wasn’t going to be called upon. I felt sad for him, and slightly angry. It was what I think he’d regarded as the climax of his career, albeit with supposedly another fifteen years to run.

Mum finished her song and performed a curtsey. Unfortunately she wobbled—and then fell. The floor wasn’t carpeted, she fell with quite a bump. Dad and I rushed over. She seemed disorientated, blankly shook her head when asked if she was hurt. She stood between us. Looked around in sorrowful surprise.

And then, without a word, she soundlessly—but copiously—threw up. Eight people, not counting Dad and me, had their coats and trousers and shoes and stockings pretty well splashed. One woman even asked to have her handbag sent to the cleaners.