Fay Weldon - Watching Me, Watching You

Brian, who nowadays said in public that Alec, in the great school report of life, got good marks for contracts, but bad marks for integrity, tried to take no notice. But he felt confused, as the world changed about him, and goodies became baddies — from Castro to the IRA to Israel and even cigarette smoking became unfashionable. He drank to clear the confusion.

The BBC actually rejected a script and a stage play at the Aldwych was taken off after two weeks. ‘How about a film?’ asked Alec. ‘Hollywood calls.’

‘Never,’ said Brian.

‘A television series? Good money. Good practice.’ Brian put the phone down.

He knocked down a television producer in an Indian restaurant, appeared in Court, and was given a conditional discharge, but the Evening Standard picked up the story and ran a piece about Brian’s recent succession of creative disasters, and referred to his ‘emotional stalinism’.

‘We’ll sue,’ said Brian to Alec.

‘We won’t,’ said Alec to Brian. ‘We’ll work out what it means and see if it fits.’ Alec was back on the straight and narrow path to glory.

Instead, Brian married Rea, a fragile blonde actress with a passionate nature, who stopped him drinking by sleeping with him only when he was sober. They went back to Bradford in search of Brian’s roots, but found flyovers and bypasses where the red brick back-to-backs of his childhood had been. His parents now lived on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise block. Rea did not like the place at all. Shopping baskets were filled with white sliced bread and Mr Kipling cakes, and mothers slapped their children in the streets, and youths smoked and swore on corners. ‘I think you’d better forget your roots,’ said Rea. She did not want anything to do with Helen, who was still not pretty, in spite of her name.

Brian and Rea set up a fashionable home and gave fashionable dinners for writers with international reputations and New York publishers and notable film directors of a non-commercial kind, mostly from Europe, and filled the house with fashionable stripped pine and Victorian biscuit tins — ‘Oh the colours! Those faded reds and crimsons!’ — and Brian, to give himself time to think, wrote a comedy about the upper classes and the encroaching Arabs, which did very well in the West End. ‘Christ, you have sold out,’ wrote Audrey, out of the blue. ‘Making people laugh is a perfectly serious ambition,’ he wrote back. He needed money. Rea was very expensive. He hadn’t realised. She would import Batik silk just to make curtains — the yellows and browns. Ironwork had to be genuine Coalbrookdale: steak had to be fillet: clothes had to be Bonnie Cashin.

‘How about doing the rewrites on a film? Rome, not Hollywood. Money’s fantastic,’ said Alec. ‘All right,’ said Brian.

Brian could not understand why, to his eye, the house looked more and more like an old junk shop, the more Rea spent. And why she spoiled fillet steak with garlic and laughed him out of liking chips. He fell rather suddenly and startlingly out of love with Rea. She bought Christmas Trees without even the pretence of roots — merest branches posing as proper trees — and failed to deal properly with the needles, which of course would fall in profusion, so that he would find them all the year round, in piles of dust in corners and stuck, slant-wise and painful, into the fabric of his clothes. ‘They’ve been dry-cleaned, Brian. Surely my duty to your clothes stops there?’

He felt out of sympathy with her, and rightly critical. She lived on the surface of her life: she lacked complexity. She either laughed at his moods and sensitivities, or, worse, failed to notice them. If he got drunk and hit her — which on one or two lamentable occasions happened, when he was busy rewriting the rewrites, and Rome would ring and the demand would be for this line in and this line out, taking the very last scrap of integrity from the script, and every drop of remaining dignity from himself — if he then lashed out at Rea, he had the impression that it was merely, for her, a scene in a play in which she thought she should never have accepted a part in the first place. He suffered. She would not even wear his black eye boldly, as his mother had worn his father’s, but used make-up to disguise it. Everything, with Rea, was disguise, because there was no real self. She acted. She acted the part of wife, hostess, lover, connoisseur of impossible objects. She even acted being pregnant, but when it came to the point, had abortions, and then made him feel responsible by saying it was his lack of enthusiasm for the baby which induced her to have them. ‘I didn’t want to see you acting mother,’ he said. ‘That’s true enough. At least I know what a real mother is. You don’t. It’s not your fault. You’ve had no mother.’ Rea’s mother had died when she was born. It was a source of some sorrow to her.

Rea had no mother, no roots, no soul. Brian felt it acutely. Times were bad between them.

Brian delivered scripts late, or sloppily written, or not at all. First drafts failed to get to second draft stage. There were arguments about broken contracts. Brian was half-pleased, half-humiliated. There seemed nothing to write about. Nothing, in a changing world, that a writer could put his finger on and cry, stop, that’s it: and hold back the world for a minute or two, to allow it to look at itself.

‘Tax man’s at the door,’ said Alec. And so he was, hammering away. ‘Television series?’

‘Not yet,’ said Brian. ‘Not quite yet.’

Brian found Rea in bed, in his and her bed, with a second-rate cameraman. ‘That’s it,’ said Brian. ‘Out!’ ‘Not on your nelly,’ said Rea. ‘You go, I’ll stay.’

Rea countered, by solicitor’s letter, his accusations of adultery with accusations of mental cruelty, which he could not understand, and physical cruelty, which he could. He let her have everything. ‘You never were quite real to me,’ he said to her, when he called to collect his clothes, in the bold New Year of 1976. ‘You lived in a play.’

‘You wrote it,’ she said, sourly, and slammed the front door after him, and the shock made the brown Christmas Tree, stuck carelessly outside for the dustmen to collect, lose the last of its needles.

He felt the world was ending, in a sour dream. He was nearly forty, and had nothing.

‘Except friends, fans, freedom, a reputation, and a queue of TV producers outside your door,’ said Alec. Brian let one or two of them in. With Rea out of the way he could work properly again. He sent a large sum of money to his parents. They sent it back.

‘We have everything we need,’ they wrote. ‘Our pensions are more than sufficient. You save it for a rainy day. You need it more than we do.’

He was hurt, feeling the reproach, and redirected the money to Audrey. She kept it, but sent no thanks.

Brian felt old. The world was full of young men in jeans, and more than a few of them were competent writers, quicker, cheaper, more sober, and harder-working than he, snatching the work from under his nose; and the best and brightest girls behaved as girls never had since the beginning of time, expecting him to make coffee and saying ‘Don’t ring me, I’ll ring you’: and the theatre had lost its shape, and its giants, and the proscenium arch had gone, and everyone ran round pretending the writer was no one special, just someone with a job to do: and a stage play had become just a television play, with a live audience.

Unsatisfactory times. The young women still came. They preferred him, if anything, to their contemporaries. They had a surface politeness. They would ask him what the matter was, on those mornings when he turned his face to the wall, and couldn’t get up, and his phone would ring, and he couldn’t bring himself to answer it. ‘I’ve lost my roots,’ he’d say. They could not of course believe him, and took his mournfulness as a slur upon their sexuality, and an insult to their femininity. But what he said was at last true. He could no longer send down feelers into his past, into the black, crumbling, moving soil of his childhood.