Love Fifteen Page 22

  There are at least fifteen years left till they let me retire. They and I know only too well that headteachers like me don’t grow on trees. I’m still called Mrs. Hampton at school – that’s when I’m not ‘Miss’. Eugene came and gave our mixed-race sixth-form a brilliant talk about our city’s past dependence on slavery. He showed them how those ‘merchant venturers’ who founded your grammar-school were forebears of today’s Wall Street sharks and City bankers. I hope you’ll do the same about your Hollywood years when you come. Has the present head invited you to take the dais? At least you’d know how to dodge when old Quasi positions his hairy arse among the hammer-beams! I’m hoping, when Gene graduates with the good degree he expects, that he’ll get a teaching post at that same school, though he’d prefer the sort of school I taught in and I won’t say he’s wrong.

  We make too much fuss of old age. Life’s long enough for most of us and getting longer. Perhaps Kennedy was lucky to be killed young, while such high hopes still clung to him and before life wore away his shine.

  Last Sunday afternoon I walked with Eugene from the shell of St. Nicholas across the bombed centre around the gutted towers of Mary-le-Port and St. Peter’s, a space they’re already covering with insurance offices and other squalid crap. The best you can say of them is that they look temporary and won’t last. Here, if there ever was, is an opportunity to do what Wren did after the Great Fire. Or will these bomb-sites, up till now weedy, rubbly car parks, become in time a victim of the gods of commerce, not even beautified by age and sentiment?

  I showed your nephew where the Regent stood. He knows little of our relationship, of course, only that we were tutor and pupil. One day I may let him know more. He probably guesses your screenplay is a garbled version of some sort of reality. He can’t believe those Hollywood idiots aren’t jumping at it. He thinks that opening sequence during the two minutes’ silence would be a cinematic gem and laughs like hell at the scenes where I ‘took you in’ and bought you a milk shake in the cinema café. Of course, if they had filmed your screenplay, they’d only have spoilt what has become for me a precious memory. Could you bear to see it taking place in Arkansas or New Jersey, complete with car-chase and schmaltzy music? Such stories belong where they happened. They exist in the detail. Marx was always hot on that. Come home with that script in your hand and you’ll find the new sort of producers here will be fighting to film it. And, Eugene agrees with me, you should rewrite the downbeat ending. In spite of all they’ve been through, let your audience hope for that better world you and I knew so well. It’s coming, darling, trust me.

  Love,

  Hazel…

  Such high hopes! Of course her letters can never be seen by anyone else, though there are times when I long to do an Ancient Mariner and read them to some total stranger in a bar or train. All those concerned have either died or moved so far from my orbit that they wouldn’t welcome my return anyway, especially not to read such a doomed testament.

  Sister Kay’s not geographically far away but a nunnery isn’t easily approachable and she clearly took the veil to retreat from all that had gone before and from the temptation ever to seek a meeting with her natural son.

  Having seen the news of Hazel’s passing in the papers and on line, I was pleased when his invitation to the funeral came and readily put aside a day from my idle semi-retirement to bid her a last goodbye.

  The most frequent trains to the city now stop at Parkway, the suburban station that’s the embryo of a new conurbation beyond Filton where Rose worked for a time at the aircraft factory. But I chose instead to go by one that ended at Temple Meads, the original terminus near the city centre, that lofty Victorian Gothic shed from where I’d made my first journeys to London to work on ‘Henry V’. And where my uncle the porter had tried to carry my suitcase and see me safely on to the train on platform nine.

  Hazel’s son opted for Cremation, of course, no superstitious clapped-out mumbo-jumbo. Whom did I expect to meet on this sad occasion? She’d been in her eighty-eighth year so most of her friends and relations had preceded her to the ovens or their graves. Even Geoff had gone before and his second wife and children would hardly bother, perhaps didn’t even know her. Or of her.

  Who then? Pupils and staff from her long teaching career might send a delegate, though it was twenty-five years since she retired after a long tenure at the huge Comprehensive she’d turned into a brilliant educational success. I knew nothing of her own biological family, only that she’d had no siblings, just a few distant cousins she seldom saw.

  Eugene greeted me at Canford Cemetery and introduced me to his middle-aged wife, adult son and daughter. What did they know of me? He himself only saw me as his mother’s favoured private pupil who later became a good friend. His true parentage remained a well-kept secret, even from him. In those days there were so many skeletons hidden in so many closets that the shameful vagueness everyone practised helped keep it all in the dark. Now only Kay and I were alive to tell the tale, though of course never would. Perhaps it’s as well that, despite Hazel’s hopes, the screenplay Lest We Forget, in which we’d all appeared (but heavily disguised), had never become a film. A dozen producers had toyed with it, shown some passing interest, played the enjoyable game of fantasy casting, solicited a few star names and, when they declined or ‘passed’ as the current euphemism has it, finally moved on. I’m still finessing it, looking for the right ending that can say enough about Utopia, the real subject, not just about our affair. The many drafts fill a sizeable box on the shelf with twenty or more similar scripts, all promising, none made. And on another shelf almost as many volumes of this Diary that began in the sixties and continues like a tapeworm, covertly fed by my daily stint, growing ever longer. I’m prouder of that than my other stuff. It’s the story of a life no-one will ever read, yet which I always write with a semi-awareness that someone might. As it were, with a pair of eyes behind me, another mind always needing to know what I already do. So who else would be interested? Not Hazel now. Eugene, of course, impossible. Kay certainly not.

  And there she was, in one of the front pews, my big sister, now also Sister Cathérine! Or Soeur to be exact, as her Trappist order is in south-western France. Not far off today, of course, a mere ninety minutes from the local airport. How had she heard? Not from me. Well, nowadays (an old man’s word) everyone knows everything, instantly, easily, and her death must have been posted, the funeral announced in the sort of periodical or linkage she’s allowed. Do nuns have Internet? In our national press on the obit pages she’s ‘Hazel Hampton CBE for services to education.’

  She looks pretty good for seventy-seven, in her neat grey habit with the smart headdress. Studious-looking rather than pious, spectacled and upright, but given to the old sudden bursts of tinkling laughter, once the service was over, a sound echoing down sixty years and more. No pious solemnity then. Eugene led me over and was evidently pleased to effect our meeting. My sister, his unbeknownst mother, any resemblances hidden by age and their different skins, – hers pallid, his light brown – and his close-cropped curly receding hair, hers hidden by the modern cowl, he with a satisfied paunch, she skinny as ever. She’d had a dispensation to make this journey, tying it to a visit to another to some convent in South Wales. When the delegates from Hazel’s old school moved away, she and I were free to stroll, pretending to look at the floral tributes laid out near the chapel, most from people in Education, some from old pupils and their children and children’s children, generations my first lover had helped towards better lives.

  “What d’you think of your son?” I asked when we were out of earshot. “I guess this is the first time you’ve met since you let him go.”

  “Not mine. Hers. And a credit to her. A living tribute. Even more telling than those people just moving off.”

  “He’s a real champ, yes.”

  “Oh, that’s a grand one!” she said as we paused to read the written card beside an expensive wreath. From the much-married Inky Black in New
Zealand.

  I filled her in on his later life.

  “Clever old dog, I understand, retired rich as Croesus. Spotted a gap in the market, decent airport meals all over Australasia. Much of his fortune went in alimony but there’s plenty to spare for his many grandchildren. You know he was always mad for you.”

  “T’was not to be. And you? No regrets not to have had a family?”

  “I never wanted kids. A factor left out of my make-up. A genetic lacuna. Unnatural, I guess. An inborn lack.”

  “Or d’you think perhaps an instinct that was aborted by too much too young ?”

  “Meaning what ?”

  “Oh, come on, the late-departed taught you more than imperial history.”

  “I was never sure you knew.”

  I followed as she moved along the grassy verge with its border of bouquets and wreaths. Eugene was thanking and bidding goodbye to those guests who weren’t going on to a reception at his house beside nearby Blaise Castle.

  “Of course I knew. From soon after she came to tutor you at Villa Borghese. Sometimes you both looked as though you’d just run a marathon.”

  “Whereas I hadn’t a clue about you and your American friends.”

  “Another life, isn’t it ? Don’t you feel that now we’re pushing eighty? We’ve lived more than one life each?”

  “Many more. Though mine less than yours. Look at you-Academic. Theologian. Author. Convert. Religious politician. What’s the job description for that bit? Papal Legate ?”

  “Hardly. A lowly functionary.”

  “Like me on the film of Henry the Fifth ? A papal go-fer?”

  “Pretty much. But you – soldier, screenwriter, husband twice, lecturer and teacher – in Film, is it ?”

  “Media Studies, yeah. Those who can do, those who can’t blah-blah… How d’you feel about him ?”

  We were saying more in this slow saunter than in the previous sixty-something years.

  “Happy he’s turned out well. His life seems blessed. Otherwise he’s a stranger. Seeing him doesn’t make the earth move. It’s all so long ago, Theo.”

  Old age, I wanted to suggest to her, has its consolations, not least a loss of interest in what goes on. But that would be to pretend as usual to be resigned to the living death of an empty life and the loss of my lust and love. She’d clearly replaced her early appetites with a wilful celibacy and a love of God. Or by being as dishonest as I was. Nor did I admit that my libido’s not yet entirely quiescent, that the sight of a pretty woman can still arouse ghostly urges, a tentative rising-to-the-occasion. They look at me these days, head on, no evasion, often smiling, knowing I’m unlikely to jump on them, though in fact they still rouse symptoms of the appetite I had for Margo and for poor dear Hazel.

  Poor? What was poor about her ? So Utopia never came. So she was deceived about the way the world wags? So what? When that great world let her down, she lowered her sights, changed her targets. Disillusion came slowly. She never quite lost the optimism that made her believe in my future as a maker of marvellous movies. Or education as universal healer. When I failed her, she accomodated that too and was even proud of my pathetic years in adult education. Media studies! The history of film. Film itself a mere pebble on the beach of Art and I was only passing on a few views and a little knowledge to kids who’d decided Film School beats working.

  Later, at the reception in Eugene’s pleasant home, he asked me again to address the Sixth Form of my old school on Political Cinema. It’s where he now teaches History and runs the film society. To stand on that same podium where old Hines bored us rigid except for the one occasion when he introduced Olivier ? No. I couldn’t bear the thought of today’s back-row boys, the wits of Five C, sniggering over their flickergraphs while as I struggled to hold their interest. Flickergraphs? Do me a favour ! All those miniature cinemas they can hold in a hand and operate with their thumbs. What could I possibly tell them that they don’t already know? So no, Gene, not fucking likely. To have old Quasi releasing a load on my balding noddle, I don’t think so.

  Do I envy them their ease, their multiple options? No need to forge excuse-games notes, wait for films to be shown in cinemas, or hang about outside picture houses for a likely adult to ‘take them in’.

  Kay and I went together to the station for our trains, hers to Wales, mine to Paddington and home.

  Before sitting to write up the day, I ran the only movie I’ve actually made, the compilation of me and HeatherHazel, Fred and Rose, Rose and the Canadians, all of us at tea, that I privately call Villa Borghese. That wholesome wickedness that others would have seen as sinful, a thirty year old teacher fucking a fifteen-year-old boy. The grainy monochrome images will soon self-destroy so I’d better copy it first. Or download. The day in my home city when Hazel gave me the cans I returned later to the high bridge and stood a long time considering throwing them over. I couldn’t. No-one must ever find and project such pictures of shameless joy. And, having replaced it in the can, I ran the Hollywood version, the soft-porn skin flick Margo made when her attempts at an acting career had failed, just like Hazel’s brave new world. There she is, with excellent lighting, forever beautiful, giving a flagrant performance well within her narrow range. On the track her whimpers and simulated (I hope) cries of joy never fail to rouse my lust, even now, the last hurrah. She was a lost soul, cursed with a beauty she couldn’t handle. Not at all a bad woman either. Good and generous in a way but undiscerning, easily led. By me among others. No regrets though. The part of me that loved her on the 21 was alive still in L.A. and for some time after. Without that erotic adventure, I’d have been merely good, perhaps always regretful. For both of us California was a barren land, as Hazel always feared it might be. I guess I needed both.

  How to deal with disillusion, that’s half the battle. Hazel’s letters remind me that the end of Communism didn’t cause her the anguish I’d expected. It was as though she’d known for years and kept the secret to herself that such a vision couldn’t ever become reality. She rode with the punch.

  Her ashes are being delivered to Eugene. She asked him to scatter them over the gorge from the bridge. This reminded me of old Jimmie’s teaching us about Daedalus and Icarus, the boy who flew too high, melted his wings and fell to earth. “Mister Light,” he said one Tuesday morning, “I shouldn’t try it if I were you.”

  “But, Sir, what about it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all ?”

  “No. Feet on the ground then you won’t be disappointed.”

  THE END