Yet I’ve always walked around London in the afternoons and evenings. These are relatively long distances, and I look at shops, obscure theatres and strange museums, otherwise my body feels clogged up after a morning’s desk work.
The party was held not in my friend’s flat, but in her rich brother’s place, which turned out to be one of those five-floor, wide stucco houses near the zoo.
When at last I got to the door, a handful of kids in their twenties turned up at the same time.
‘It’s you,’ said one, staring. ‘We’re doing you. You’re on the syllabus.’
‘I hope I’m not causing you too much discomfort,’ I replied.
‘We wondered if you might tell us what you were trying to do with —’
‘I wish I could remember,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘We heard you were sour and cynical,’ murmured another, adding, ‘and you don’t look anything like your picture on the back of your books.’
My friend whose party it was came to the door, took my arm and led me through the house. Perhaps she thought I might run away. The truth is, these parties make me as anxious now as they did when I was twenty-five. What’s worse is knowing that these terrors, destructive of one’s pleasures as they are, are not only generated by one’s own mind, but are still inexplicable. As you age, the source of your convolutedly self-stymieing behaviour seems almost beyond reach in the past; why, now, would you want to untangle it?
‘Don’t you just hate the young beautiful ones with their vanity and sentences beginning with the words “when I left Oxford”, or “RADA”?’ she said, getting me a drink. ‘But they’re a necessity at any good party. A necessity anywhere anyone fancies a fuck, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Not that they’d want either of us too close to them,’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said.
She took me out into the garden, where most people had gathered. It was surprisingly large, with both open and wooded areas, and I couldn’t see the limits of it. Parts were lit by lanterns hung from trees; other areas were invitingly dark. There was a jazz combo, food, animated conversation and everyone in minimal summer clothing.
I had fetched some food and a drink and was looking for a place to sit when my friend approached me again.
‘Adam,’ she said. ‘Now, don’t make a fuss, dear.’
‘What is it?’
My heart always sinks when I hear the words ‘there’s someone who wants to meet you’.
‘Who is it?’
I sighed inwardly, and, no doubt, outwardly, when it turned out to be a young man at drama school, a tyro actor. He was standing behind her.
‘Would you mind if I sat with you for a bit?’ he said. He was going to ask me for a job, I knew it. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want work.’
I laughed. ‘Let’s find a bench.’
I wouldn’t be curmudgeonly on such a delightful evening. Why shouldn’t I listen to an actor? My life has been spent with those who transform themselves in the dark and make a living by calculating the effect they have on others.
My friend, seeing we were okay, left us.
I said, ‘I can’t stand up for long.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘A back problem. Only age, in other words.’
He smiled and pointed. ‘There’s a nice spot over there.’
We walked through the garden to a bench surrounded by bushes where we could look out on the rest of the party.
‘Ralph,’ he said. I put down my food and we shook hands. He was a beautiful young man, tall, handsome and confident, without seeming immodest. ‘I know who you are. Before we talk, let me get us more champagne.’
Whether it was the influence of Ralph, or the luminous, almost supernatural quality that the night seemed to have, I couldn’t help noticing how well groomed everyone seemed, particularly the pierced, tattooed young men, as decorated as a jeweller’s window, with their hair dyed in contrasting colours. Apart from the gym, these boys must have kept fit twisting and untwisting numerous jars, tubs and bottles. They dressed to show off their bodies rather than their clothes.
One of the pleasures of being a man has been that of watching women dress and undress, paint and unpaint. When it comes to their bodies, women believe they’re wearing the inside on the outside. However, the scale of the upkeep, the shop scouring and forethought, the possibilities of judgement, criticism and sartorial inaccuracy as, in contrast, the man splashes water on his face and steps without fear into whatever he can find at the end of the bed and then out into the street, have never been enviable to me.
When Ralph returned and I busied myself eating and looking, he praised my work with enthusiasm and, more importantly, with extensive knowledge, even of its obscurer aspects. He’d seen the films I’d written and many productions of my numerous plays. He’d read my essays, reviews and recently published memoirs Too Late. (What a dismal business that final addition and subtraction had been, like writing an interminable will, and nothing to be done about any of it, except to turn and torture it in the hope of a more favourable outlook.) He knew my work well; it seemed to have meant a lot to him. Praise can be a trial; I endured it.
I was about to go to the trouble of standing up to fetch more food when Ralph mentioned an actor who’d played a small part in one of my plays in the early 1970s, and had died of leukaemia soon after.
‘Extraordinary actor,’ he said. ‘With a melancholy we all identified with.’
‘He was a good friend,’ I said. ‘But you wouldn’t remember his performance.’
‘But I do.’
‘How old were you, four?’
‘I was right there. In the stalls. I always had the best seats.’
I studied his face as best I could in the available light. There was no doubt that he was in his early twenties.
‘You must be mistaken,’ I said. ‘Is it what you heard? I’ve been spending time with a friend, someone I consider Britain’s finest post-war director. Where is his work now? There can be no record of how it felt to watch a particular production. Even a film of it will yield no idea of the atmosphere, the size, the feeling of the work. Mind you,’ I added, ‘there are plenty of directors who’d admit that that was a mercy.’
He interrupted. ‘I was there, and I wasn’t a kid. Adam, do you have a little more time?’
I looked about, recognising many familiar faces, some as wrinkled as old penises. I’d worked and argued with some of these people for more than thirty years. These days, when we met it was less an excited human exchange than a litany of decline; no one would put on our work, and if they did it wasn’t sufficiently praised. Such bitterness, more than we were entitled to, was enervating. Or we would talk of grandchildren, hospitals, funerals and memorial services, saying how much we missed so-and-so, wondering, all the while, who would be next, when it would be our turn.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Why would I be in a hurry? I was only thinking recently that after a certain age one always seems to be about to go to bed. But it’s a relief to be done with success. I can lie down with the electric blanket on, listening to opera and reading badly. What a luxury reading badly can be, or doing anything badly for that matter.’