she said. ‘I’ll be all right tomorrow.’
It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.
It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if that city died in the night, no one would know.
I paid my driver and watched the taxi turn to go back to the living city, leaving me alone with twenty pages of final screenplay in my pocket, and my film director employer waiting inside. I stood in the midnight silence, breathing in Ireland and breathing out the damp coal mines in my soul.
Then, I knocked.
The door flew wide almost instantly. John Hampton was there, shoving a glass of sherry into my hand and hauling me in.
‘Good God, kid, you got me curious. Get that coat off. Give me the script. Finished it, eh? So you say. You got me curious. Glad you called from Dublin. The house is empty. Clara’s in Paris with the kids. We’ll have a good read, knock the hell out of your scenes, drink a bottle, be in bed by two and – what’s that?’
The door still stood open. John took a step, tilted his head, closed his eyes, listened.
The wind rustled beyond in the meadows. It made a sound in the clouds like someone turning back the covers of a vast bed.
I listened.
There was the softest moan and sob from somewhere off in the dark fields.
Eyes still shut, John whispered, ‘You know what that is, kid?’
‘What?’
‘Tell you later. Jump.’
With the door slammed, he turned about and, the grand lord of the empty manor, strode ahead of me in his hacking coat, drill slacks, polished half-boots, his hair, as always, windblown from swimming upstream or down with strange women in unfamiliar beds.
Planting himself on the library hearth, he gave me one of those beacon flashes of laugh, the teeth that beckoned like a lighthouse beam swift and gone, as he traded me a second sherry for the screenplay, which he had to seize from my hand.
‘Let’s see what my genius, my left ventricle, my right arm, has birthed. Sit. Drink. Watch.’
He stood astride the hearthstones, warming his backside, leafing my manuscript pages, conscious of me drinking my sherry much too fast, shutting my eyes each time he let a pagedrop and flutter to the carpet. When he finished he let the last pagesail, lit a small cigarillo and puffed it, staring at the ceiling, making me wait.
‘You son of a bitch,’ he said at last, exhaling. ‘It’s good. Damn you to hell, kid. It’s good!’
My entire skeleton collapsed within me. I had not expected such a midriff blow of praise.
‘It needs a little cutting, of course!’
My skeleton reassembled itself.
‘Of course,’ I said.
He bent to gather the pages like a great loping chimpanzee and turned. I felt he wanted to hurl them into the fire. He watched the flames and gripped the pages.
‘Someday, kid,’ he said quietly, ‘you must teach me to write.’
He was relaxing now, accepting the inevitable, full of true admiration.
‘Someday,’ I said, laughing, ‘you must teach me to direct.’
‘The Beast will be our film, son. Quite a team.’
He arose and came to clink glasses with me.
‘Quite a team we are!’ He changed gears. ‘How are the wife and kids?’
‘They’re waiting for me in Sicily where it’s warm.’
‘We’ll get you to them, and sun, straight off! I—’
He froze dramatically, cocked his head, and listened.
‘Hey, what goes on—’ he whispered.
I turned and waited.
This time, outside the great old house, there was the merest thread of sound, like someone running a fingernail over the paint, or someone sliding down out of the dry reach of a tree. Then there was the softest exhalation of a moan, followed by something like a sob.
John leaned in a starkly dramatic pose, like a statue in a stage pantomime, his mouth wide, as if to allow sounds entry to the inner ear. His eyes now unlocked to become as huge as hen’s eggs with pretended alarm.
‘Shall I tell you what that sound is, kid? A banshee!’
‘A what?’ I cried.
‘Banshee!’ he intoned. ‘The ghosts of old women who haunt the roads an hour before someone dies. That’s what that sound was!’ He stepped to the window, raised the shade, and peered out. ‘Sh! Maybe it means – us!’
‘Cut it out, John!’ I laughed, quietly.
‘No, kid, no.’ He fixed his gaze far into the darkness, savoring his melodrama. ‘I lived here ten years. Death’s out there. The banshee always knows! Where were we?’
He broke the spell as simply as that, strode back to the hearth and blinked at my script as if it were a brand new puzzle.
‘You ever figure, Doug, how much The Beast is like me? The hero plowing the seas, plowing women left and right, off round the world and no stops? Maybe that’s why I’m doing it. You ever wonder how many women I’ve had? Hundreds! I—’
He stopped, for my lines on the pagehad shut him again. His face took fire as my words sank in.
‘Brilliant!’
I waited, uncertainly.
‘No, not that!’ He threw my script aside to seize a copy of the London Times off the mantel. ‘This! A brilliant review of your new book of stories!’
‘What?’ I jumped.
‘Easy, kid. I’ll read this grand review to you! You’ll love it. Terrific!’
My heart took water and sank. I could see another joke coming on or, worse, the truth disguised as a joke.
‘Listen!’
