four times Madeleine and I had visited the picture house in Westbury, too. But this was like entering another world. Intolerance was playing – what good fortune was that? To see the most extravagant film in the history of film-making in the most extravagant movie theatre in the history of movie theatres! I watched it – the first half – and I was spellbound. As we all are, of course, when first we see it. I would have liked to stay to the end and watch it again, and again, and possibly spend the rest of my life in there, staring at that cinema screen. But after a while the image, though I tried to banish it, of my papa gazing listlessly out of his window, all alone, burned through even D. W. Griffith’s most extravagant depictions, and I had to go.
I ran all the way to his boarding house – arrived at his door breathless, full of excitement. And before his melancholy overcame us both, I tried to pass on a little of the magic: I described to him, before even I had sat down, the Rialto’s vaulted golden ceiling, and the row upon row of gilt and velvet chairs. I told him about the spotlights that danced in time to the music on either side of the enormous cinema screen, and of the golden organ sound which filled every corner of that massive space. I told him of the phenomenal, unimaginable tricks of Mr Griffith’s camera – the ‘close-ups’ on actors’ faces, magnified so as to fill the entire screen, allowing the audience to read every flicker of their smallest emotion. I told him about the ghostly superimposing of one image upon another, the different-coloured tints – sepia, blue, amber – all the tricks which Mr Griffith used to tell his story; and of the live elephants in his Babylon, and of the thousands upon thousands of extras and of the sheer, extraordinary scale of the film, and the theatre, and the wonderful, beautiful world just waiting to be discovered outside his window . . . I tried my best. I did. I tried to lure him back to the Rialto to watch the film with me.
God knows what miracle I had been hoping for. Of course he wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t have done so before, when he was still well. Papa belonged to the generation who believed that movies were designed for the degenerate masses, not for him – and most certainly not for his daughter.
By then, in any case, Papa never left his room – except, I suppose, to stock up on liquor, since he seemed never to run out. Often, when I came to see him, he wouldn’t talk to me. When he did, when he volunteered any comment at all, it was almost only in relation to Mrs de Saulles.
Was she well?
No.
Did she speak of him?
No.
Had she sent a message?
Of course not.
Whole hours would pass and he wouldn’t speak a word. I would tidy the room, cook for him, chatter about this and that – anything that came into my head: England, mostly; memories of happier times. I would tell him my feeble gossip – that Madeleine was seeing a car mechanic in Westbury; that Mr Hademak had written again to Mary Pickford – but my father rarely responded. I told him the typewriter lent to me by Mr de Saulles was broken.
‘What d’you want it for anyway?’ he asked suddenly. His voice made me jump.
‘For my writing,’ I reminded him. ‘I am still writing stories and – scenarios and things . . . ’
‘Ah, yes . . . Like your mother. Always scribbling . . . ’
I hadn’t known it. I had no memory. I asked him to tell me more – scribbling what? Did he possess anything, still, which she had written? But he wouldn’t be drawn. Wouldn’t speak.
I had lost the art of coaxing him from his melancholy.
Endlessly, clumsily, stubbornly, I would ask him about his ‘future plans’, though of course I knew he had none. He would pretend not to hear me.
Once, when I was feeling very brave, I asked if he had yet been in contact with Mr Guglielmi. ‘I’m sure he’d be quite a friend to you . . . ’ I said.
With a flicker of the old spirit, he replied, ‘I would be most awfully grateful, Lola, if you didn’t mention that repulsive little gigolo to me by name or implication. Ever again.’
‘Papa, do you still have an address or a telephone number for him?’ I persevered. ‘I could telephone him myself, if you prefer?’
He gave a mirthless, unkind little snort. ‘You shall do no such thing.’
Often he would ignore me altogether, and simply drink, and gaze out of that window onto the noisy, lively street below. I would sit with him – and try very hard to remember the years he had looked after me; all the warmth and humour and joy he had shared with me, in his own particular way. And I would look at him, so wrapped in his defeat, and try to remind myself of the times when he had been a different man, whom I could still easily love – but I did. I did still love him.
Our hours together seemed to crawl. Through the stillness, and our silence, and the window he insisted on keeping shut tight, the sounds of the city would seep in; the sounds of a whole world, still fighting at life, not yet despairing . . . I am sorry to say there were times, on those long afternoons, when I yearned to be out there, and away from him, and free of him. I wished for it so intensely it was almost as if I wished he were dead.
I don’t believe my presence helped him much. There were times, I’m sure of it, when he longed for me to leave him as much as I longed to be gone – mostly, I think, he wanted nothing any more but to be left in peace. I explain all this to myself and maybe one day – who knows? – I might even believe it.
Papa would wince when he saw me sometimes. There I would stand, bright and early each Sunday morning, fresh and young and bursting with life, and smiling, carrying groceries – as if I believed he might one day eat something. And I would watch, and try not to wince, as he slowly absorbed the disappointment – that it was only me standing at his door. Not Mrs de Saulles. Or my mother. Or any of the others. Just his daughter, whom he used to love. I would see the weariness return to his face, and the sorrow – because he did still love me. Enough to try his best not to hurt me. I would watch him struggling with the impulse to close the door in my face; and then the monumental effort it took for him to summon some spark of warmth, and to reassure me that he was so terribly delighted I had come . . .
I heard nothing from Rudy. The days passed and I longed for him – I’m afraid I thought more of him than of my father’s suffering. I thought of him all day and all night.
Mr Hademak saw me moping about one morning, squinting over his shoulder as he arranged Mrs de Saulles’s post on her breakfast tray. He said, with his great shoulders still turned to me, but the back of his neck glowing beetroot red, ‘You do it effry morning, Jennifer.’
‘Do what?’
‘And if you’re waiting for correspondences from any one person or gentleman in particular,’ he said, ‘you must understand that any . . . person . . . in particular . . . won’t be so rude to write it to you here. He can’t. It would be a very unhappy idea. To keep our little ship steady. And so I have said to him it might be better if he is writing in the care of a certain boarding-house. And that is I am sure what he is doing . . . ’
So,
