Work was the only thing left now that made life pass in a faintly bearable fashion. As good old Sherlock Holmes said to Watson in The Sign of Four: “Work is the best antidote to sorrow”, and the only antidote he himself saw to the devastation of losing Helen was to launch himself back into a gruelling schedule of films. It was the one thing he knew he could do, after all. As she kept reminding him. It’s your gift, my darling. Use it. And the distraction of immersing oneself in other characters was an imperative, he now saw. A welcome refuge from reality.
The third assistant director brought a cup of tea, an apple and a plate of cheese from the catering truck to the chair with Peter Cushing’s name on the back.
“Bless you.”
Occasionally, very occasionally, that’s what he did feel.
Blessed.
It was a blessing, mainly, to be back working with so many familiar faces. Yes, there were new ones, young and fresh, and of course that was good and healthy too. The young ones, who hadn’t met him in person before, possibly didn’t notice or remark that he had become sombre, withdrawn, fragile behind his unerring politeness and professionalism—it was the older ones who saw that, all too well. In the make-up mirror he had never looked so terribly gaunt and perhaps they imagined, charitably, it was part of his characterization as the cold, zealous Puritan, Gustav Weil. But it was nothing to do with the dark tone of the film, everything to do with the dark pall cast over his life.
Those who knew him, really knew him, acknowledged that a part of him had died two months ago.
Yet the un-dead lived on.
Here he was at Pinewood and Black Park in the company of vampire twins and a young, dynamic Count Karnstein so seethingly bestial-looking in the shape of Damien Thomas he might well snatch the reins from Christopher Lee and become the Dracula for a new generation. The third in the trilogy, this excursion was being trumpeted loudly by the company as Peter Cushing’s return to the Hammer fold. Once more written by Tudor Gates, heavily influenced by Vincent Price’s Witchfinder General, it was the tale of a vampire-hunting posse with Peter Cushing at its head. And with top billing.
He remembered clearly the lunch a month earlier with his agent, John Redway, and the leather-jacketed young director John Hough at L’Aperitif restaurant in Brown’s Hotel, Mayfair.
“You’re returning to combat evil, Peter,” the director had said. But he wanted a darker tone. He didn’t want it to be a fairy tale like other Hammers. He wanted to reinvent the horror genre.
Cushing had said nothing as he listened, but thought the genre didn’t need reinventing. The genre was doing very well as it was, thank you very much. He did think the idea was original, however, and the director had convinced him over three courses and wine of his intention to make it as a bleak morality play, manipulating the audience’s expectation of good and evil by having them side with the vampires against the pious austerity of Gustav Weil, the twisted, God-fearing witch-hunter, uncle to the vampire twins, Frieda and Maria, played by the pretty Collinson sisters—Maltese girls whose claim to fame was being the first identical twin centrefold for Playboy, in the title role. Twins of Evil—or was it called Twins of Dracula now, the American distributor’s illogical and factually incorrect alternative?
“You see, Peter, real evil is not so easy to spot in real life,” the director had said. “In real life, evil people look like you and me. We pass them in the street.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And that’s what I want to capture with this film. The nature of true evil.”
Whether it would be a success or not Cushing couldn’t know. He would do his best. He always did. He had an inkling how this sort of film worked after all these years and that’s what he would bring to the proceedings. That’s what they were paying for. That and, of course, his name.
His name.
He remembered the conversation in the dark of the Oxford cinema.
According to the Fount of All Knowledge, Carl’s mother moved to Salisbury shortly after Gledhill died, to live with her sister and set up a shop together. He hoped for once the gossip contained some semblance of accuracy. If she sought to rebuild her life afresh, that could only be a good thing. For her, and the boy.
For himself, there were other films on the horizon. He’d told John Redway to turn nothing down. He’d read the script of Dracula: Chelsea and it was rather good. He was looking forward to playing not only Lorrimer Van Helsing in the present day, but also his grandfather, in a startling opening flashback, fighting Christopher Lee on the back of a hurtling, out of control stagecoach before impaling him with a broken cartwheel. And if that was a success there were plans for other Draculas. Another treatment by Jimmy Sangster had been commissioned that he knew of, which boded well, and he hoped Michael Carreras would grasp the reins and take Hammer into a new era.
One of the more imminent offers was a role from Milton in his latest portmanteau movie Tales from the Crypt, but he didn’t care for the part, a variation of The Monkey’s Paw. Instead he’d asked if he could play the lonely, widowed old man, Grimsdyke, who returns from the grave to exact poetic justice on his persecutor. A crucial scene would require Grimsdyke to be talking to his beloved dead wife, and he planned to ask Milton if he’d mind if he used a photograph of Helen on the set. Then he could say, as he’d wished for many a long year, that they’d finally made a film together.
As it was, her photograph was never far away. He kept one above his writing desk at home, and another beside his mirror in his dressing room or make-up truck. At home he always set a place for her at the dinner table, and not a day went by when he didn’t talk to her.
Hopefully there’d be other movies in the pipeline. They’d keep the wolf from the door and the dark thoughts at bay—ironic, given their subject matter. Not that he could see his grief becoming any less all-consuming with the passage of time. Time, as far as he could imagine, could do nothing to diminish the pain. The lines by Samuel Beckett often came to mind: “I can’t go on, I must go on, I will go on,” and he knew that the third AD would be back before too long, to say they were ready for him.
But for the next few minutes until that happened, he would rest and try to clear his mind as he always did before a take, and picked up his Boots cassette recorder from between his feet, put on the small earphones and closed his eyes. He pressed “Play”. The beauty of Elgar’s Sospiri gave way to Noel Coward singing ‘If Love were All’.
One of Helen’s favourites, and his own.
He had lost the one thing that made living real and joyful, the person who was his whole life, and without her there was no meaning or point any more. But what had others lost? Yet, they survived.
He pictured the boy on his bicycle riding away, the rolled up magazine in his pocket.
Whilst he was living, he knew, time would move inexorably onward and the attending loneliness would be beyond description, but the one thing that would keep him going was the absolute knowledge that he would be united with Helen again one day.
The spokes of the bicycle wheel turned, gathering speed, blurring.
Life must go on, yes, but in the end—after the end—life was not important, just pictures on a screen, absorbing for as long as they lasted, causing us to weep and laugh, perhaps, but when the images are gone we step out blinking into the light.