The Woodcutter. Reginald Hill

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      When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

      That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.

      She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.

      Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in The Pillars of the Community at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.

      ‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’

      To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a recordbreaking run!’

      So it had proved.

      Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.

      At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.

      Psychiatry gave her that option, but she soon discovered that the observer had to be an actor too. When she read Hadda’s account of his first encounters with Imogen, she felt a great surge of excitement. To be sure, there was a deal of hyperbole here. The bolder the picture he painted of himself as the victim of a grand passion for one woman, the dimmer his sense of that other degrading and disgusting passion became. But in his effort to stress that his love for Imogen was based on some collision of mind and spirit rather than simply a natural adolescent lust, he had fallen into a trap of his own setting.

      What did he say? Here it was…there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen…Yet he’d been sexually roused by this prepubescent figure, and sexually satisfied too. This was probably what he saw in his fantasies thereafter, this was the source of those desires that had brought about his downfall.

      She recalled a passage in the first piece he’d written for her, when he was in his best hard-nosed thriller mode.

       Imogen was sitting up in bed by this time. Even in these fraught circumstances I was distracted by sight of her perfect breasts.

      Stressing his red-blooded maleness, trying to distract her attention, and his own, away from the fact that it was unformed new-budding bosoms that really turned him on.

      And now she knew she would need to call upon her acting skills when next she saw him. She must give no hint that she saw in this narrative anything more than an honest and moving account of first love. Indeed, it might be well to give him a quick glimpse of that Freudian prurience he was accusing her of. He was, she judged, a man who liked to be right, who was used to having his assessments of people and policies confirmed. No way could she hope to drive such a man to that final climactic confrontation with his own dark inner self, but with care and patience she might eventually lead him there.

      Another spur to caution was the fact that he’d obviously got the writing bug. She’d seen this happen in other cases. The people she dealt with were more often than not obsessive characters and this was something she liked to use to her advantage. Her guess was that he’d have another exercise book ready for her, but if she annoyed him, he’d punish her by not handing it over.

      That was his weapon.

      Hers of course was his desire that what he wrote should be read! СКАЧАТЬ