Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke
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Название: Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers
Автор: Antonia Quirke
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007323494
isbn:
Two days before the end of my final term, I was stopped by a Modern English Language tutor on the stairs of the department after finding I had failed my degree. He asked, a little hurt, why I had never been to one of his lectures in three years or, indeed, to anyone's lectures or classes whatsoever.
‘Is it drugs?’
‘Well, no. I just haven't washed my hair for a while. I've been a bit all over the place.’
‘You're sure it's not drugs? It's always drugs. Sure? Well, why didn't you come and see me? Everyone else does – the place is swimming in doctors' notes. It's exams.’
I figured what the hell and told him everything, including how I'd been sacked from the travel agent's for absent-mindedly selling forty tickets to Glastonbury on a coach that didn't exist, and he looked at me, still very kindly, and said that if I'd come and told him about all this a month ago he could probably have bumped me up to a Pass, though some of my papers had been truly terrible, he said, really, for shame. ‘You just wrote “no time to finish!” at the bottom of all these blank pages.’
Through the window of his room, where he had ushered me, you couldn't quite see the Waterstone's where I had stolen the books. I told him about that too. He nodded and said nothing, leaning forward in his chair with his hands latticed on his knees, occasionally unfolding them to hand me a tissue and looking down at my feet, dirty in their sandals, so that I could cry unwatched.
‘It's too late to do anything about all the paperbacks. But since you've clearly never opened the textbooks, you can simply put them back, can't you?’ he said, as gently as Denholm Elliott chiding Helena Bonham Carter to be a better person in A Room with a View. ‘What are you planning on doing now? Isn't there anything you're interested in doing? Something you particularly like?’
I couldn't stop crying long enough to reply. Where was Wilson? Who was going to protect him?
‘Nothing you like? Nothing you love doing?’
‘I like the movies …’ I said, uselessly.
He asked if I'd be interested in a work placement on a local paper where he knew the deputy editor. I said I didn't think I'd make a very good journalist, but he looked so pained I immediately changed tack and agreed, putting on a face that I hoped suggested I was worthy of redemption. Later that week I did what he advised about the books, like a tooth fairy – one that leaves Bauer's Grammatical and Lexical Variance in a heavy bag by the lift. As I made my way out of the shop, an assistant pursued me with the bag.
‘But I don't want it!’ I said.
‘Well, neither do we, to be honest. We have trouble giving this stuff away in the holidays.’
So I went round to Foyles and left it there instead.
From the top, then. Very, very fine, dry blond hair which conforms to the shape of his head and, as he has aged, looks like a wig or the helmet-like hair you clip onto a Lego man. Good hair for a David Lynch. A forehead which is still miraculously smooth, the skin very tight to it, the bone very tangible, the first great curve of his head a section of a sphere. His whole face is full of spheres. The eyebrows are faint and fall away. The bridge of the nose is where there has been an impact of pain. There are two, not deep, vertical lines which, taken with the declining eyebrows, make him look harrowed. The curve of the eyeballs is very visible under his eyelids – his face has started to become beautiful. And unusual. He cannot seem to open his eyes very wide, as if the eyelids have too far to travel back up the curve of the eyeballs. The eyes themselves are ethnically unplaceable, a speckled pale blue. Under them are deep pre-Raphaelite shadows (which in time have become real pouches). These shadows are immensely beautiful. And now you begin to see just how exquisite the face is. The nose is incredibly fine and straight, a nose which ladies in Beverly Hills might pick from a catalogue. The ears are sleek to his head: he looks like a bird. In the hollows beneath the cheekbones, like ripples playing on the underside of a bridge, lines of beauty continually form and reform. Everything about the face keeps getting finer – you feel you could crush his bones like a sparrow's bones. The outline of the lips is as sharp as the outline of a baby's lips. The cut in his top lip is like the V of a child-drawn seagull. There is a gap between his teeth which adds to the general feeling of sickness – again, you notice how beauty and sickness are bound together here in this pre-Raphaelite way. The lips are red, like the lips in a Tennyson horror poem. They might be poisonous. Take the head in your hands and turn it to a three-quarter profile. It's heart-shaped, and the line that runs from his forehead to his sharp chin, full of double curves, is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You're at a loss to say why – it's explicable by mathematics, no doubt – but that line looks like the definition of beauty. And everything is amazingly smooth and golden. A sick beauty, made of gold. The most beautiful: Christopher Walken.
My mother was confused about what I should wear on the first day of my work placement at the Camden New Journal, torn between recommending a formal skirt and blouse and actually wanting me to wear the uniform of, say, Alan Dershowitz's elaborately casual team of legal students in Reversal of Fortune. ‘It's time to get your shit together,’ she said down the phone, pleased, because she believed that working at a local paper meant that I was in effect working against the system. ‘It's your job to get the truth out there!’ she reminded me. ‘It's your job to sniff out the truth!’
Propriety won out, so I wore low blue court shoes, a white blouse with a sweetheart bow, carried a neat handbag, and was very nervous on the way to work. It is important to communicate the extent of my ignorance. Getting on the bus, I looked at the change in my hand and thought: What is money? What do banks do? Seeing the headline on someone's newspaper, I thought: What's the Cabinet, exactly? I know they're Major's advisors, but are they actually MPs?
Inside the Camden New Journal – and there was no one to stop me from walking on in, no one around very much at all – was a room with grey walls and no discernible floor, just layers of newspapers and food wrappers, cake boxes, sandwich cartons, cigarette sleeves, flattened Cup-a-Soups. There were several desks constructed out of piles of back editions on which cigarettes had been left to burn out: the desks were singed but had never ignited because the newspapers were damp. The room was a shrine to the cigarette. All around were styrofoam cups hedgehogged with butts, and the three-bar electric heater was encrusted with bits of charcoaled tobacco and frazzled stands of hair where people had stooped down to spark up. Through the frosted glass of a raised office I could make out someone sitting low in their chair with their head back, not moving. Asleep? The only other person in the room was a man of around forty with a floor-length yellow coat talking into the phone in a Liverpudlian accent under a poster of Ivor Cutler. He beckoned me over.
He was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He had fine wavy reddish-brown hair which curled beneath a long pointed chin. His pale skin was covered in sore-looking freckles and from his cracked lips dangled a dead roll-up. He looked like a fox in the late stages of heroin addiction, or someone СКАЧАТЬ