The Stand-In

Deborah Moggach

Part One

London

One

I’m writing this in Westchester County, New York. Outside, the sky is such a solid blue I could touch it. In here it’s sweltering; my hair feels heavy as a helmet. Through the wall I can hear the afternoon movie. I can hear whoops, and the smattering of gunfire.

When Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon he said it was like a movie. He said: I thought he would just drop. I thought he was going to fall down like in the movies, fall down dead. The guy had five bullets in him.

Spoken like an actor! When you act you are both within a person and outside him, watching. You slide into a character, like fingers into a glove; you are both concealed and exposed by the person you have become. You watch your fingers and your face move; you’re watching the words come out of your mouth. I used to light matches and watch them burn down, until I yelped with pain.

Inhuman, isn’t it? At the moment of death, people part from their body, as if they are suspended above it. They look down quite calmly at the throes they are going through. Actors do this all the time.

You hold your wriggling self out on tongs. You hold other people too.

Trev, wriggling.

Lila, wriggling.

Sometimes it frightens me out of my wits. Next time you watch an actress, I bet you get frightened too.

If I shot myself, would it hurt? Or would I just watch myself, taking notes on how convincingly I die?

I can look at myself, nearly two years ago, as if she isn’t me. She’s acting in a movie. It opens in a North London street, on a gray day in August. She is thirty-eight. She usually wears T-shirts and jeans but as she’s an actress she’s wearing silver today. She’s mousy-blonde. Slimmish. Goodish-looking. Not enough to stop the cars when she’s waiting at a pedestrian crossing; not that sort. Not like Lila.

I see it like a movie; I suppose that’s part of the trouble. And only I know how it will end.

I’d had a humiliating night with Trev, and my thighbones ached. They ached from the making-up part of it, which had gone on till dawn. Down in the street a car alarm had suddenly wailed; we had fallen apart, damply, like two opposing teams giving up when the umpire blows his whistle.

Trev was my inflammation; he was my illness. Him and his smug smile. I was prodding him about his past.

Just some bird I once knew, he had said.

Hasn’t she got a name? I demanded—suddenly, ludicrously righteous on behalf of some long-ago female. He was so cocky. Him and his smug cock, that wept when I touched it. That could make me weep.

We had been together for eighteen months and I was getting worse. I was jealous of everything he had handled. I could be jealous of an old kettle he hadn’t got anymore, how’s that for insanity? I didn’t tell him, of course. Not the extent of it. Alone, I could work myself up to fever pitch—I could even be jealous, in anticipation, of all the women he might sleep with after me. He was only twenty-seven; one day he was going to slip through my fingers.

Him and his stubble. My face felt sore; in the mirror my mouth looked blurred. Flinching, I sponged Number Five over my chin. I was performing in Gertie and the Giants, a kids’ show about the disappearing rain forests. Most of the other actors were students from the Central. We were dressing up as multinational companies—property, timber, McDonald’s—which felled the forests for grazing land. Martin, who was unhappily in love with Adrian, was climbing into an adapted oil drum; he was appearing as Toxic Waste.

We were called First Aid Theater because we drove around in an old ambulance. Once, after a party, I had caught Trev kissing Natalie in it, but he just said he was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

They were more Trev’s age, really. I was thirty-eight, the oldest. I was playing the fairy godmother who guides Gertie through the forest. I give her three wishes and together we save the trees. It was all a bit worthy but I believed in those sorts of things then.

It was a gray, still morning. Through the window I could see the amputated arms of a plane tree; the council had lopped it. I zipped up my silver fairy godmother’s dress from the Oxfam shop. If only I could give myself three wishes, I would keep them all a secret.

Outside the door, children were waiting in the community center hall. I ought to be pausing, and thinking myself into my role. Pulling on my tights, I hopped on one leg and knocked against the washbasin. At my age I ought to be in a TV series, shot entirely on film, with a plangent oboe sound track. Adapted from a forgotten feminist novel of the thirties, it would have fetching period costumes, dove-grays and plums, and a row of BAFTA awards. I should be in the West End, appearing in a new play Tom Stoppard wrote especially for me, rather than for Felicity Kendal. I should be playing Viola before it was too late. I should be having a baby.

Seen my leaves? asked a tree.

Seen my plaits? asked Gertie.

Rob, who played a Big Mac, paused and said: They seem strangely quiet.

We looked out the door. The children had gone.

Earlier, I had not noticed anything unusual. It was a terraced street in North London, one of thousands. Why it had been chosen, I never knew. Months later I remembered that moment when I stepped out onto the pavement, in my silver dress. It seemed unnaturally quiet; the air was still, as it is when you are a child and everyone is hiding.

The street had been closed off. I looked up. The houses had eyes; there were faces at the windows. People leaned out, watching. The end of the street was blocked with vans, and lights flared on the last few houses. They looked freshly painted, and I thought for a moment that the council must have restored them.

Then, of course, I realized that they had just been smartened up for some filming. Fat black cables snaked across the street; I stepped over them. Watching the filming was a crowd of people; among them was my lost audience, the children.

Filming is ridiculously alluring. People had been drawn towards the magnet of those bright facades. Temporarily their street had a new identity, as if they had dreamed it. Yesterday the corner shop had been an ordinary newsagent’s, one window boarded up and the other filled with cardboard boxes of disposable diapers. Now it had been transformed into a proper corner shop, the sort you don’t see anymore. It had sweet jars in the window. It looked lurid and yet nostalgic, like the memories of a boozy uncle.

Beside me a small girl picked her nose. A man moved us all back, like cattle.

What’re you filming? I asked. I wanted to add: I’m in the business too.

But the man was muttering into a walkie-talkie. A woman with a pram whispered: "It’s called Sexbusters. She looked at her watch. And I’ve got a chicken in the oven."

Minutes passed. Somebody bumped into me; the children were fidgety, but I knew I had lost them. It was the summer holidays, after all. Nobody was forcing them to see Gertie and the Giants. I thought of Rob, pinioned between his buns; he would be prizing himself out of his Big Mac costume by now. So much for the rain forests.

And then somebody told us all to keep quiet. When you’re ready! came a far voice. A hush fell.

The corner shop door opened, a bell tinkled, and out came a couple.

They dazzled in the light. They were laughing, soundlessly, in the glare. Outside the shop, they paused. The man held a toffee apple. He tenderly passed it to the woman. She took a bite. And then they walked along the pavement, arm in arm, and out of shot.

She’s smaller than I thought, whispered somebody.

Who is she? asked somebody else.

Lila Dune, dickhead! I told you.

More minutes passed. A smell of curry drifted from the unit canteen; it was nearly lunchtime.

The next take was ruined by a plane passing overhead. The next one by a scuffle which broke out among some boys. Get those kids away! shouted the man with the walkie-talkie.

Vaguely bored, I shifted my weight onto the other foot. My thighs still ached; it was the same ache I had had as a child when I had been riding a horse for hours.

I didn’t recognize the actor, but Lila Dune was famous. Well, recognizable. She specialized in daffy, slightly tacky blondes. I had only seen her in a few films; one was a romantic comedy with Nick Nolte, another was something with Burt Reynolds and a lot of cars. She had a supporting role in that one. They were instantly forgettable. They were the sort of movies I only watched when they happened to be repeated on TV.

In the months to follow I reran that moment, my own personal retake, over and over in my head. It was the moment I first saw Lila Dune. A blonde, very pretty woman, dressed in a white suit, came out of a corner shop. Shapely. Surprisingly small, but then weren’t they all? A frisson, yes. But everybody, even another actress, feels a frisson when they see somebody famous, in the flesh, in a street roped off as if there had been an accident. Besides, Lila Dune was American, and this made her more of a star.

I felt nothing else, I’m sure. And nothing else would have happened if I hadn’t recognized Eric.

The unit was breaking for lunch, and I was about to leave. Just then a stocky man, dressed in a white coat, came out of the corner shop and lit a cheroot. He was playing the shopkeeper and I knew him because, years before, he had played a dentist in a sitcom for Anglia TV and I’d had a tiny part. Besides, we shared the same agent and had met once or twice at her Christmas drinks.

He was chatting to the walkie-talkie man when he saw me and waved. I threaded my way through the crowd.

He pointed to my dress. Where’s the ball, Cinders?

I told him about Gertie, and turned to the other man. You stole my audience.

This is Jules Sampson, said Eric. Terrific actress. We have the same agent, Maggie Fitch.

The man shook my hand, and apologized for stealing my children.

It doesn’t matter, I said. It was our last show, anyway. The council’s been rate-capped; they’ve canceled our grant.

So much for the British theater, said Eric. So what’re you going to do, sweetheart?

I shrugged. Repaint my flat. Trouble was, I had just repainted it.

How can you tell if somebody’s an actor? asked Eric. When they go for a crap they take the phone off the hook.

In case Columbia Pictures calls, I said.

Or even a dog food commercial …

Or even an Allied Carpets commercial …

Or even a voice-over for dog food, I said.

Eric barked. Then he looked solemn. Let us not denigrate the humble voice-over. Repeat-repeat-repeat …

The man, whose name I hadn’t caught, was gazing at me. Anyone told you something? he asked.

What could I reply to that? What?

You look amazingly like Lila.

I raised my eyebrows. So I could be a film star too?

Same build, he said. He looked me up and down, as if inspecting a piece of masonry. Similar bone structure.

I should have felt more flattered. After all, Lila Dune was gorgeous. In darkened cinemas all over the world, men throbbed for her. She was the archetypal bleached blonde who looked as if she had just got out of bed. She had the snub, kittenish face that is both helpless and seductive.

But any comparison is a form of theft. For some reason, I felt more diluted, as if he had stolen from me my mousier hair, my heavier features, the Jules-ness which didn’t match up to Lila Dune.

Perhaps I was more flattered than that. Probably. By now I can’t tell; hindsight has confused my memory of that moment. Standing there in my fairy godmother’s dress that sultry August day, I had no idea of the wishes that would be granted not to Gertie but to myself, and how powerless I would be to resist them. Nor did I realize that the granting itself would be a form of theft, for nothing is given without something else being extracted. All human beings deal in more or less disguised exchange, and we only realize that we are both the robbers and the robbed when the most important thing of all is stolen from us.

I didn’t think of any of that then. Two summers ago I wasn’t a simpler creature, just a less aware one. I went to the pub with First Aid, and the pram woman must have gone home to her roast chicken, and all the children dispersed and I never saw any of them again. And in a hundred homes that evening somebody told somebody else that they had seen Lila Dune, and nobody told anybody that they had seen me.

That sounds egocentric. It is. But when I say me, I also mean you.

Two

Of course I should never have got involved with Trevor. Nor, as it turned out, should he have got involved with me. Funnily enough, I can picture him quite clearly now, but for months I kept his face a blur, on purpose, so our eyes couldn’t meet. It still helps, slightly.

He was utterly, and devastatingly, charming. It was as simple as that. I bet he would have charmed you, too, unless he was knocking off your wife, and even then you might have eventually forgiven him because somewhere, underneath it all, you both knew that he was one of the boys. A man’s man. A bloke. One of the lads.

He could sell anybody anything. In fact, that was how we met, when he sold me some chimney pots. I put them on my balcony, for plants. I later discovered they were double the price I would have paid anywhere else, but by then it was too late.

He wasn’t tall—hardly taller than me. He was slim and wiry and twice as alive as anyone I’d ever met. That might be a strange word to use now but it’s the nearest I can get. As if, within him, wires stretched tight, tingling. Dark hair, bright eyes, wicked grin. Impish. And always restless—jangling his van keys, fidgety, alert. As with many attractive people, one knew exactly what he’d been like as a child. Graceful, elusive, utterly unselfconscious. And when suddenly he fixed his eyes on you, it was such high voltage that your bones melted.

Oh, I don’t know; it doesn’t really capture him. I’d simply say that, wherever he was, that was the place things happened. Once, on a motorway, I followed a beautiful sports car just because I wanted to be near it. I felt it knew, better than the rest of us, just where it was going.

In many ways we weren’t suited at all. For a start, he was hardly an intellectual. My father was a deputy headmaster. His father was a builder. He worked for his local council, modernizing old properties in North London. He would tear out Victorian fireplaces and install central heating. Trev, still in his teens, realized that half a mile away the middle classes were gentrifying their homes, so he would load the fireplaces into his dad’s van and flog them to the Laura Ashley crowd. He was a wood stripper and a wife stripper; he was streetwise and skip-smart. Once he sold a woman some paneling her next-door neighbor had thrown into a skip right outside her own front door. And, as he so charmingly put it, got his leg over into the bargain.

When I met him he was twenty-five, and moved in a swarthy netherworld of junk shops, men with vans, men with dogs, men with mates who could get you anything. Dealers, fixers, men who lived as instinctively as foxes. He disappeared for days with them on mega piss-ups. Brought up on ponies and piano lessons, I found it all irresistibly dodgy.

I was eleven years older than he was and he liked to point out my antique features. But every love affair is a form of barter; as one acquaintance said, You want him for his body and he wants you for your head. He said I had class. He was impressed by my collection of books and by the fact that he had once seen me on TV; it was a short-lived drama series on Channel 4 and I had played a probation officer. I suppose, in a minor way, he must have found this glamorous. I wasn’t well known, and most of the jobs I’d had were in small fringe theaters that put on undiscovered European classics, and that were only reviewed in City Limits. With my looks I was frequently cast as a repressed, intelligent wife—Dorothea Casaubon, for instance, in an adaptation of Middlemarch that a now-defunct company staged above a kebab house in Tufnell Park. Leave It to Soak, a BBC daytime series on household management. That sort of thing. Like most working actresses I had never had a big break, but I just about earned a living doing just about anything—voice-overs, school workshops, a video called Forgotten Women in History for the Open University. And though I didn’t have many close friends I knew a lot of people in the business. It’s a tight, enclosed world, and not as bitchy as people think. In fact it’s loyal, because nobody in the world is as insecure as an actor, and nobody knows quite how one feels except another one.

And there is nobody as insecure as an actress in her late thirties, who sees the good roles slipping away to younger women and her own antique features, inexorably, appearing.

From the moment he met me, Trev wanted to be a writer. Not to write, but to be a writer, which meant doing deals about something more interesting than furniture. He pictured lunches in Soho brasseries with husky-voiced female journalists who asked him about his working methods. He pictured signing his books, like a pop star, for a queue of groupies. He pictured status. Money, of course. Above all, possibilities. Overnight, he thought, his life could change. Columbia Pictures could call—not for me, but for him.

He had a bed-sitter in Islington. He started to write, at night. I lived a few miles away in Belsize Park, a creamy, stuccoed, middle-class sort of neighborhood. In the evenings, in thrall to him, I would truss myself up in a suspender belt and stockings because he loved to touch my skin there. I spent a fortune in Fenwick’s; I made solitary, sensual pilgrimages there and, under the stern, dominatrix eye of the Austrian assistant, laced myself into basques so tight I could hardly breathe. I felt like a starlet. My body was aging, but he aroused it in ways I had never felt before and I wanted to suffer for my pleasures. Under my misleading clothes I was his harlot. Pathetic, wasn’t it?

My journey to Islington was punctuated by traffic lights. At one, I would tilt my driving mirror and apply lipstick; at the next, Caledonian Road, I would brush my hair. Heart thumping, I would prepare myself for him in my exposed little dressing room. I delayed these preparations until I was in my car. That passersby could share my final touches made the whole thing highly erotic. I have always liked to be watched.

Of course he sponged off me. It was I who brought along the food and wine, who lent him money and who ended the evening with an empty cigarette packet. But I didn’t even admit to myself that I noticed. I just cooked him dinner, and when he moved near me my mouth went dry. For months, like a student, I didn’t even know what was on the TV. In his disgusting, peeling kitchenette he touched me and I opened up to him like a flower. We would eat first because he was so hungry; then he would put on a Ry Cooder tape and pull me onto his bed. He liked screwing, slowly, to slide guitar music.

In the small hours I would drive home, damp, flushed, my skin burning and my blouse buttoned up wrong. When I breathed heavily, I could smell his scent on my face. I would pass through the same traffic lights in reverse order. Those shabby intersections were stupidly dear to me. Intimate, momentarily, with the darkened houses either side, I would take out my brush and tackle my matted hair. I’d always wanted to be really messed up by a man. By the time I reached Belsize Park I still hadn’t got out the tangles.

I felt buffeted, bruised, heavier. Liberated. I felt wonderful. Trev was the sort of jerk who, seeing some angry feminist, could say that all she needed was a good fuck. I told you I despised myself.

When I arrived home I would have a long bath and rejoin my other self. Back in his bed-sitter he would work. Once he started he wrote fast, and soon he had written several rather derivative short stories and a stage play. This was called Use Me, and it was about a middle-class woman who was in masochistic thrall to her plumber. It was extremely explicit, and a lot of it took place on her kitchen table. Stripped pine, of course.

I’ll try to be objective about this. It wasn’t exactly a good play—its plot was hopeless, and I told myself the woman was unconvincing. I didn’t like to think about her too much. But he had two talents that many better writers don’t possess. He wrote exactly as he spoke: direct, slangy, and rude. And, more important—though it shouldn’t be—he knew how to sell.

He used me, of course, just as he used my car and my washing machine and my slavish older body. He used my contacts in the theater, and after nearly a year of rewrites, phone calls, boozy lunches, and relentless charm, he got an acquaintance of mine, a radical producer, a likely lad himself, to put together a production above a pub in Tottenham.

It opened that August. I thought I would be offered the lead, but the part went to the director’s ex-wife because she was being nasty about access to their kids and he wanted to soften her up. Of course I acted as if I didn’t mind. Trev never guessed. But then he never guessed what a terrific actress I was. Nobody did.

Trev’s bed-sit was revolting, but he never suggested leaving it and moving in with me. It was on the ground floor of a house on a busy one-way street. The only sign of neighbors was when the traffic wardens appeared and the cry went from flat to flat, They’re here, they’re here! as if the recruiting officers had arrived. It faced a furniture superstore. All day, happy couples double-parked outside, and reappeared carrying household items. He groaned at the baby seats in the backs of their cars and said, Catch me changing diapers. Stroking the inside of his thigh, I murmured, Catch me.

His mattress was on the floor. When I climbed to my feet, my back ached. I’m too old for this, I thought. Naked, I filled the kettle at his sink. I kept my back to him so he couldn’t see my slack belly. It was Saturday afternoon.

Outside, two children rattled something metal along the railings.

One of them said: I can swallow my burps.

So fucking what? said the other.

The street was veiled by the previous tenant’s net curtains; Trev was no homemaker. I switched on the kettle. I should be at my dance class. When I saw them I would have to lie, yet again.

But then I was good at lying. The night before I had told Trev that I couldn’t see him because I was going out. In fact, I had eaten toasted cheese and watched Bergerac. However, I wanted him to think that I had another life; more than that, I wanted to convince myself that I still had some sort of life within myself, and that I could last an evening alone. And I had lasted, hadn’t I?

Trev came up behind me. Sometimes he licked my spine. Sometimes he made up an alphabet of all the parts of my body. Sometimes he wrote in pen on my buttocks, words I couldn’t see until I found a mirror. Once it was affectionate; once it was a recipe for hot cross buns. He had invented it, of course; he was hopeless at cooking. Today he was blind, and tried to find out who I was.

Mmm … female, he said, burying his face in my hair. He ran his hands over my shoulders, and cupped my breasts. Thought so. Right first time. Intelligent nipples. You’re a barrister. He groaned. Black high heels, severe skirt … I shook my head. He ran his hands down my waist. Hmmm … prose-bearing hips. You’re one of those novelist birds. You write about adultery amongst the quiche eaters and you want to be shagged by Melvyn Bragg.

No fear. And quiche is passé.

No? Wrong? He ran his hand lower. I tensed. He paused, his fingers damp. Ah, he murmured. Now I know. He whispered to me, his breath warm in my ear. As he whispered, my body opened like a mouth. I turned to him, my legs buckling. He pulled the bathroom door shut behind me, and pressed me against the panels. I was still wet, from the last time. Whimpering, I gripped him as he slid into me.

Hayley! A woman’s voice, close. Throw it away!

A child cried. A car revved up and I smelled exhaust smoke. Saturday was humming along a few feet away. The door rattled as I bumped against it.

He put his hand behind my head, to cushion it, and smiled into my face. As a lover he could be surprisingly, and temporarily, considerate.

And all the time I was watching myself move and listening to my own high cries. Inhuman, those noises, aren’t they? I played them to him, and to all the audiences I had never reached. The people leaned forward in their seats.

Glued together, we slid to the floor and finally ended up on the bed. The kettle spouted steam onto the wallpaper. Afterwards he laughed, stroking my cheek with his finger. I got up and began making the tea all over again.

Guess who I saw yesterday, I said, opening the fridge. I took out the milk and sniffed it. Lila Dune.

He groaned. Lila Dune!

She’s in London, making a picture. I paused. Probably earns as much as the council’s entire arts budget for the year. I turned. He was lying on the mattress, his eyes closed. What’s the matter?

Lila Dune, he murmured. I’m getting another erection.

Why? I looked down at him. Anyway, you’re not.

"Remember her in Touch and Go?"

I nodded. Lousy film. You must’ve still been in nappies.

I was a throbbing teenager. Remember when she came out of the swimming pool, all wet, and—

All right, all right! I searched for the packet of tea bags I had bought him. Anyway, she’s ancient now.

Only your age.

She’s older! Probably not, actually. When I was caught on the offbeat, my own age could surprise me. Thirty-eight was what other women were, women I saw shopping.

You should be grateful I like mature women. With my incredible sex drive and their experience … He closed his eyes again. "I had this photo of her up on my wall, from Time Out, she was poured into this dress, and I’d go to bed and—"

Spare us your jejune masturbatory fantasies—

Her, and Angie Dickinson in that cop thing—

Angie Dickinson! You really are a gerontophile.

A what?

I was scrubbing out his mugs. I looked inside them. These are grotesque.

I wanted him home with me, drinking out of my own clean teacups. I wanted him to want to live with me. I wanted his socks and his underpants in my cupboard, under my own tight roof. I wanted him to have never known any woman but me. I was humiliatingly jealous, and it was getting out of hand. Usually I disguised it. When, for instance, he mentioned some long-ago holiday in Spain, I tried with various veiled assumptions to prove that his companion was female. She was, of course—I found that out when the subject of topless beaches came up. I felt a sort of curdled satisfaction, a bitter sediment in my stomach. I almost relished my own distress. Pornographically, I aroused myself with visions of them in a hundred hotel beds. It was insane, of course; I knew that. However young they are, everybody has a past—I had a past, for Christ’s sake, and eleven more years of it than he did, but he never seemed that interested. My efforts to inflame him only made him amused, and left me feeling flustered and juvenile.

Trev didn’t reflect on the past or anticipate the future. I suppose that was part of his attraction for someone like me, who schemed and brooded. He lived simply, in the present, like an animal.

Once I went to a wine bar where an ex-girlfriend of his worked. Her name was Dawn. Like a lovesick schoolgirl, I found myself writing her name down the margin of a script I was learning. Dawn. DAWN. The wine bar was in Battersea, the other side of London. For my own equilibrium I convinced myself I needed to go to that area anyway, to look at some bathroom fixtures. I almost convinced myself with my own performance, spending all the morning looking at bidets. Then I lingered outside the wine bar, casually, like somebody on a first date. She was dark, and very pretty. I went in and sat down; as she passed, I gazed at her mouth and her breasts with such attention that I alarmed myself. Obsession, I guess, is a form of desire; when I paid, my hand was trembling. I went back at night, and watched. When I looked at my watch, I had been there forty minutes. I felt like an assassin, waiting for a celebrity. I sat there, night after night.

I’m telling you this in case you understand it. By now I can’t tell how normal I was—in some way, you would know better than I would. I have had to remodel my own past, you see, in the light of what happened. It’s the only way I can make sense of it, but by doing this I have lost the exact reality. It’s as if there has been an explosion in my kitchen; I’ve returned to find my saucepans buckled. The blast has altered my possessions forever; I can never knock them back into their former shape—not quite.

A girl in my class at school was later killed in an air crash. When I think of her she isn’t Anna-the-schoolgirl, but Anna-who-was-soon-to-die. When a tragedy occurs you don’t only lose the person concerned, you also lose your accurate, unclouded memory of them. It is doubly sad, for you lose out not once but twice.

Three

The following Monday I had a phone call from my agent.

At first I couldn’t grasp what it was about. A man I hadn’t heard of had phoned from a film company.

For me? My stomach churned.

He met you on Friday, said Maggie. Don’t you remember?

Friday?

Maggie, my agent, didn’t sound too excited about any of this. In fact, she almost sounded diffident—not a word that sprang to mind when her clients described her.

It was the movie Sexbusters. No, it wasn’t exactly a part. On the other hand, it was work. Lila Dune’s stand-in had been beaten up by her ex-husband.

Whose ex-husband?

Not Lila’s, darling. Her own. Anyway, she’s gone into hospital and they need another stand-in right away. Like tomorrow. They’ve got three more weeks of filming and, well, darling.

Well, darling meant Well, darling, we’ve not got much else on the cards, have we? Well, darling, beggars can’t be choosers, four hundred pounds a week’s not to be sniffed at, darling, and my other phone’s ringing.

I said I’d think about it, darling, and phone her back.

I finally tracked Trev down at Look Back in Ongar. This was a secondhand furniture shop, down the Essex Road, that belonged to one of his mates. Trev was using the phone; he was always using people’s phones. He loved the telephone like an American.

Look Back in Ongar specialized in the sort of chintzy suburban furniture that used to belong to people’s aunts but was now high style. I sat down. Going out with Trev didn’t always make me feel old. In many ways it was rejuvenating. Besides, when we were alone we could simply be a couple—lips, bodies, fights. Alone with somebody, you adjust to them and they to you; there is no third person to mirror back to you your discrepancies.

It was his friends who reminded me of my age. With them, I realized that Trev was practically another generation. They seemed cocky and yet unweathered; they seemed young. In their company he took on their color, chameleonlike, and it seemed as if he had always been this way. This disturbed me so much I pretended I didn’t notice.

They polished up the sort of furniture my parents would have thrown out. They dressed like dudes and put gel on their hair. They played the jukebox in reconstituted Soho bars and discovered, for themselves, the Buddy Holly songs that I knew from my childhood. One of them had even asked me, respectfully, what it was like in the sixties, as if I were a museum specimen. I had replied, tartly, that in the Flower Power year of 1967 I was still only sixteen. Trev had sucked his thumb and said: And I was only five. This gave me a jolt, as if I were sitting in a train and it suddenly shunted backwards. Or, indeed, forwards. This happened quite often, with me and Trev. Depending on my mood I found it piquant, irritating, or disturbing. Sometimes I just found it gratifying.

I waited until Max, the owner, had gone out of the shop. A TV company was hiring a three-piece suite and he was loading it into a van. I moved next to Trev and told him about the stand-in offer. I wanted us to be like a real couple, and for him to join in the decision making. Besides, I was curious to see his reaction. With a thump, I realized I didn’t know him well enough to guess how he would answer.

He was seeing his agent later that day and he’d had his hair cut. He wore his wide peacock-blue shirt and his red leather tie. He looked like an advertisement for Coca-Cola. I gazed at his legs, spread-eagled. It hurt to look at him; instead I gazed at the shelves of hideous plaster odalisques. I didn’t really mind about the stand-in job, you see, one way or another. At that moment I simply ached with pain, from wanting to have his baby.

Think of the contacts! he was saying. Once you’re in with those guys. He fished for one of my cigarettes.

Know what you do? I said. You just stand there while they set up the shot. While they light you. You’re just a dummy.

Listen, dummy. It’s the first step. Where’s your matches?

"You’re not even an understudy. Christ, you’re not even an extra!"

Look, you’ll be on a film set. Big geezers with cigars. Anyway, I want to know what she’s like. Hey, I’ll get to meet her!

Trev, I’m an actress! I’ve played Hedda Gabler. Well, above a pub I had. In Cardiff.

Listen, prune-face. He ran his finger down my cheek. Play your cards right and next stop Hollywood. Maybe she’ll be run over by a bus and you’ll take the lead. He lay back, exhaling smoke. I’d be quite happy with Laurel Canyon.

Ah, Laurel. The starlet with the big knockers who so admires your work.

He opened one eye, looked at me and closed it again. Imagine it. Socking great swimming pool. Some uniformed berk bringing us Bacardi cocktails. Crumpet coming out of the woodwork. He sighed. You lying there, scripts dangling from your painted fingernails like Faye Dunaway.

I don’t want to go to California. I want to work at the National Theater. I picked at a hole in the sofa upholstery. Neil Simon said it was paradise with a lobotomy.

The National Theater?

I dug him with my elbow. You’re not interested in my career. You’re not even interested in the bloody theater. This was true. He preferred going to the movies; practically the only play he had seen was his own. You just want to be rich and famous.

Don’t you?

I want to play Cleopatra, with Peter Brook directing me.

But I wasn’t playing Cleopatra, was I? And then I had to explain who Peter Brook was, because Trev had never heard of him.

On the way home I bought some fruit. It was a sunny day and I was wearing a halter-neck dress I had just made. For the first time in my life, however, the greengrocer didn’t call me love or darling. He called me Mum.

For some reason, this decided me.

And that’s where my story really begins. Although you could say it began eighteen months earlier, when I first glimpsed Trevor in that architectural salvage yard, surrounded by his priapic chimney pots.

Four

I come from a silent household. Perhaps that’s why I find the fluster of filming so attractive. My father was the deputy head of a grammar school. He was a bookish, inward man who wasn’t good at what is called relating—a word he loathed. I don’t remember him ever touching me, or indeed my mother, with affection. The only way I could tell he was pleased with me—when I got my A-level results, for instance—was when he went to his bureau, fetched his camera, and took my photo. When he died, years later, I went through his things. He had kept all my letters in separate plastic folders, each dated in careful typing. I should have been touched—I was, momentarily—but I was also repelled by his secretiveness, and angry at the sheer waste of all that feeling.

I was disturbed, too, because I recognized