Hanif Kureishi: Midnight All Day

I had been finding it difficult to break with my background in South London. The men I grew up with were tough and loud-mouthed, bragging of their ignorance and crudity. They believed aggression was their most necessary tool. On leaving school they became villains and thieves. In their twenties, when they had children, they turned to car dealing, building or ‘security’. They continued to go to football matches, drank heavily, and pursued teenage longings, ideals to which they had become addicted. What I want to do — act — represents an inexplicable ambition that intimidates them and, by its nature, will leave them behind. I am not saying that there are not any working-class actors. I hope to play many parts. I want to transform myself until I become unrecognisable. But I will not become an actor for whom being working class is ‘an act’. No cops or criminals in TV series for me.

In the pub with these friends I try to retain the accent and attitudes of my past, but I have emerged from the anonymous world and they are contemptuous and provocative. ‘Give us a speech, Larry. To buy a drink or not to buy a drink!’ they chant, pulling at my expensive shirt. I am about to get into a fight over divergent ideas of who I should be. I begin to consider them cowardly, living only little lives, full of bold talk, but doing nothing and going nowhere. It is not until later that Florence teaches me that part of being successful is the ability to bear envy and plain dislike.

I am not educated. If she notices it, Florence never comments on my ignorance. She can be light-headed and frivolous herself; once she shopped for two days. Nevertheless, she sits me down in front of the most exacting films. Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, for instance, she thinks it necessary we both absorb through repetition; it is as if she is singing along with the film, or, in the case of that work, moaning. She does not categorise these things as art, as I do, but uses them as objects of immediate application.

Almost as soon as I met Florence, she altered the direction of my life. The Royal Shakespeare Company had offered me a two-year contract. I would share a cottage in Stratford. She would sit with me beside the Avon. I had celebrated in Joe Aliens with friends, and my agent was working on the contract.

To celebrate, I took Florence out to lunch to celebrate. I read in a mazagine that the restaurant was one of the smartest in London, but she swung about in her chair. I should have remembered that she dislikes eating — she is as thin and flat-chested as a dancer. Certainly she does not like sitting down for her food surrounded by people she has seen on television and considers pompous and talentless.

‘I have to tell you that you must turn the Stratford opportunity down,’ she said.

‘It’s every young actor’s dream, Florence.’

‘Rob, don’t be such a common little fool. They’re too small, too small,’ she said. ‘Not only that suit you’re wearing, but the parts. Going to the Royal Shakespeare Company will be a waste of time.’ She flicks my nose with her fingernail.

‘Ow.’

‘You must listen to me.’

I did.

My agent was amazed and furious. Without entirely knowing why, I took Florence’s advice. Soon I am playing big roles in little places: Biff in Death of a Salesman, in Bristol; the lead in a new play in Cheltenham; Romeo in Yorkshire.

With a girlfriend she came on the train to see a preview, and we travelled back together late at night, drinking wine in plastic cups. She anatomised my performance so severely I took notes. ‘There were a couple of awful moments when you tried to have us laugh at the character you were playing,’ she said. ‘I thought, if he does that again I will go to the box office and ask for my money back!’

Criticism, I suppose, reminded me of my dependency on her. Yet, when she was finished, and I was almost finished off, she continued to look at me without any diminishment of desire and love.

It was fine by her if I took small parts on television or in films. I had to get used to the camera so that I could concentrate on movies, ‘like Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis’. She said she understood what women would like about me on screen, when I could only laugh at such an idea. Also she said that most actors see only moments; I had to learn how to develop a part through the whole film. She told me to learn as much as I could, for when it took off for me, it would happen very quickly. She even suggested that I should direct movies, saying, ‘If you generate your own work it will give you another kind of pleasure.’

Like my friends at drama school, my head was full of schemes and fantasies. I have always been impressed by people who live with deliberation; but ambition, or desire in the world, makes me apprehensive. I am afraid of what I want, of where it might take me, and what it might make others think of me. Yet, as Florence explains, how are cathedrals and banks built, diseases eliminated, dictators crushed, football matches won — without frustration and the longing to overcome it? Often the simplest things have to be explained. Florence fills me with hope, but ensures it is based on the possible.

I have little idea what Florence dreams of and of what kind of world she inhabits with Archie, who is in ‘property’; I doubt she is ensnared in some kind of Doll’s House. In the middle of the city in which I live there is an undisturbed English continuity: they are London ‘bohemians’. It is an expensive indolence and carelessness, but the money for country houses, and for villas in France and the West Indies, for parties, the opera, excursions and weekends away, never runs out. This set has known one another for generations; their parents were friends and lovers in those alcoholic times, the fifties and sixties. Perhaps Florence is lost in something she does not entirely like or understand, but when she calls her husband’s world ‘grown up’ I resent the idea that she considers my world childish. My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live according to her own desire.

*

‘Rob,’ I say.

Florence’s husband offers me his be-ringed hand. I can hardly bear to touch him, and he must find me damp with apprehension.

‘Archie O’Hara. Stayed here before?’

‘No … I just came down … to get away.’

‘From what?’

‘You know.’

‘Yes,’ he says, indifferently. ‘Don’t I know. That’s what we’re doing. Getting away.’

We sit there and Martha looks at us as if we all know one another. Archie wears a blue jacket, white shirt and yellow corduroys; his face is smooth and well fed. As Florence has chosen to be with him — most of the time — he must, I imagine, have some unusual qualities. Is he completely dissimilar to me, or does he resemble me in ways I cannot see? Perhaps I will learn.

‘How long are you staying?’ I ask.

He puffs on his cigar and says nothing.

Martha says, ‘I could tell you where to go and what to look at, if you want.’

Archie says, ‘Thanks, but I’ve been thinking of getting another country place. I inherited a stately home as they call them these days, with a lot of Japanese photographing me through the windows. Sometimes I feel like sitting there in a dress and tiara. My wife says you can’t sit down without farting into the dust of a dozen centuries. So we might have to drive round … estate agents and all that.’

I say, ‘Does your wife like the country?’

‘London women have fantasies about fields. But she suffers from hay fever. I can’t see the point in going to a place where you know no one. But then I can’t see the point in anything.’

He puts his head back and laughs.

‘Are you depressed?’