the action switched to a small American town and their merry little Christmas, I found myself yearning for aliens or a tidal wave or a big monkey to come along and destroy the lot. If Cyd’s theory about the omens of your first film were true, then we would be lucky to last the evening.
Then gradually, as all of James Stewart’s hopes and dreams began to recede, I found myself drawn into this story of a man who had lost sight of why he was alive.
The film was far tougher than I remembered it when it had been flickering in black and white in the background of my multicoloured childhood, sandwiched between Christmas Top of the Pops and my mum’s turkey sandwiches.
As his world starts to unravel, James Stewart abuses one of his children’s teachers on the phone and gets punched out by her husband in a bar. He bitterly resents the loving wife he gave up his dreams of travelling the world for. Most shocking of all, he is rotten to his children – an irritable, bad-tempered bully. But you know that it’s not because he doesn’t love them enough. It’s because he loves them so much.
In the darkness, Cyd reached over and squeezed my hand.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Everything works out all right in the end.’
It was still light when we came out of the film, but only just. We bought slices of pizza in the NFT café and ate them at those long wooden tables outside where you have to share with other people and you feel like a student.
The NFT is in an ugly building in a beautiful part of town. It’s inside a dumb concrete sixties block plonked down just where the Thames curls south as it passes under the shadow of Waterloo Bridge, and it faces right across the river from the lights of the Victoria embankment and St Paul’s. That’s where Cyd told me that she had grown up in a home full of women and movies.
‘The first film my parents saw together was Gone with the Wind,’ she said. ‘And after my dad died, my mom saw it sixteen times alone. She would have seen it more often. But she was trying to ration herself.’
Cyd was the youngest of four sisters. Her mother worked as a nurse at the Texas Medical Center – ‘Where big shots go to get their hearts fixed’ – and her father had driven trucks out in the oil fields.
‘Houston is an oil town,’ she said. ‘When oil prices are high, life is sweet. And when oil prices fall through the floor, we tighten our belts. But for better or worse, for richer or poorer, Houston is always an oil town.’
The way she told it, her parents never came off their honeymoon. Even when they had four teenage daughters, they would still hold hands in public and give each other a single flower and leave love notes in lunch boxes.
‘When I was twelve, it embarrassed me,’ Cyd said. ‘Now I love it. Now I love it that they were that much in love. I know what you’re thinking – maybe they were never really like that and I just like to remember them that way. Maybe they got on each other’s nerves and snapped at each other. But I know what I saw. They were mad about each other. They chose right.’
Then one Sunday she was with her friends in the Dairy Queen at the Galleria shopping mall when her oldest sister came to find her to tell her that their father had died of a heart attack.
‘My mom didn’t grow old overnight,’ Cyd said. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. She just sort of retreated into the past. Maybe she figured that the best was over. She still went to work. She still cooked our meals. But now she watched a lot of old movies. And some of her video collection must have rubbed off on me. Because when I met the guy I came to England for, I thought he was Rhett Butler.’
I am never comfortable when the conversation turns to someone’s old partners. All those hopes that came to nothing, all those wounds that haven’t healed, all the bitterness and disappointment of seeing your love get left out for the dustbin men – it seems to take the shine off the whole evening. And she could feel it too. She changed the subject, veering away from her sad story by playing chirpy tourist guide.
‘Did you know that Houston was the first word spoken on the moon?’ she said. ‘That’s a fact. Neil Armstrong said to Mission Control – Houston, Tranquillity base here. The Eagle has landed.’
‘Until I met you, I never really thought about Houston,’ I said. ‘It’s not one of those American cities that you can see in your head.’
‘It’s not like here,’ she said. ‘If it’s got a second coat of paint, it’s an antique. We have these drinking joints by the side of the road called ice houses where all the women look like they just stepped out of a Hank Williams song. But if you’re young you go to the Yucatan Liquor Store on a Saturday night where the girls try to look like Pamela Anderson and the boys can’t help looking like Meatloaf.’
‘It sounds a bit like Essex,’ I said. ‘So where did you meet this English guy?’
‘At the Yucatan Liquor Store. On a Saturday night. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I said no. Then he asked me if I wanted to dance and I said yes. He was working in Houston as a despatch rider. That’s what he does. He delivers stuff on a motorbike. Sort of a glamorous postman. Naturally, I was impressed.’
‘And he didn’t turn out to be Rhett Butler after all?’
‘Well, you know,’ she said. ‘Not even Clark Gable turned out to be Rhett Butler, did he?’
‘But you came to London with him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why didn’t you stay over there? Did they kick him out?’
‘Oh, no. We were married. He had his Green Card. Did you know a Green Card is really pink?’
I shook my head.
‘It surprised us, too. We had to go through those interviews with immigration officials who make sure you’re really in love. We showed them our wedding album and it wasn’t a problem. We could have stayed there forever.’ She thought about it. ‘I think he felt like he should be doing more with his life. America can make you feel like a bit of a failure. So we came here.’
‘And what went wrong?’
‘Everything.’ She looked at me. ‘He was into the bamboo. Do you know what that means?’
I shook my head. ‘Is it some drug thing?’
‘No. Well, in a way. It means he liked Asian girls. And still does. And always will.’
‘Asian girls?’
‘You know – Korean girls. Chinese. Japanese. Philippinas. He wasn’t that fussy – which is a bit insulting to Asian women, as they can look as different to each other as a Swede and a Turk. But he genuinely didn’t care, as long as they were Asian. The night we met, he was at the Yucatan with a little Vietnamese girl. We have a lot of Vietnamese in Houston.’
‘Asian? You mean Orientals.’
‘You can’t say Orientals any more. It’s considered insulting – like Negro or stewardess. You have to say African-American and flight attendant. And Asian instead of Oriental.’
‘To me, Asian sounds like Indian.’
‘Sorry, mister. That’s what you have to say.’
