Part 3

3

So, when she’s in her early twenties, at the start of the 1950s, Lorenza Mazzetti arrives in England as part of a group of students invited here from the University of Florence on an initiative to bring people from mainland Europe to help with work on British farms.

She’s the filmmaker whose images I described earlier, the image of the men who can’t speak or hear crossing the rubble conversing with each other and the image of the man with the two suitcases on the edge of the high building.

The Italian students land in Dover and the first thing that happens is a thorough police search of each person bodily, then of each person’s luggage.

The police take Mazzetti’s passport from her. When they give it back she is astonished to see that it’s been stamped with the words Undesirable and Alien.

As it happens Mazzetti will be useless at farm work, too weak and too nervy. With hindsight it’s clear that this is because she’s had quite a war: in 1944, when she was in her teens, a group of Nazi officers arrived at the house in Tuscany where she and her twin sister Paola were being brought up as part of the family of their father’s sister, Nina: the Mazzetti twins’ mother had died not long after giving birth, and so far in their lives they’d been passed from person to person, family to family. But now they were finally home, living with Nina and her husband, Robert Einstein, who was a cousin of Albert Einstein, and their slightly older cousins, Luce and Anna Maria.

That summer the Germans in Italy were being driven back by the oncoming Allied forces. One beautiful sunny day the Wehrmacht officers came to the house and when they couldn’t find Robert, who’d decamped to the woods because he knew they were after him, they did two things.

They wrecked the house.

They killed all the Einsteins they could find – Nina and her daughters.

They decided not to kill Lorenza Mazzetti or her sister because their surname wasn’t Einstein.

The twins, who’d been locked away with other villagers while the killing happened, came back into the house to the dead bodies of their cousins and their aunt.

Their uncle came back to the bodies too. Not long afterwards he committed suicide.

In England, now, Mazzetti is as close to nervous breakdown as you might imagine given such a history. She infuriates the farmer to whose farm she’s

been assigned by not being strong enough to carry heavy sacks, by not being good enough at picking the bad potatoes off a conveyor belt, by burning the dinner she’s meant to be cooking for the other students and by not being fast enough at mucking out a manure heap.

He throws her off the farm.

So she gets herself to London to find a job and somewhere to live.

But something deeply fractured in her means that each job she takes results in a kind of surreality.

A woman employs her as a live-in maid in the suburbs but ends up throwing all her stuff out into the road, calling the police and accusing her of stealing. (Later Mazzetti discovers it’s she who’s been being stolen from by the woman.)

A lovely happy family in a lovely happy house in the city give her a maid’s position and welcome her warmly into their lovely life. But in the lovely happy family she is suddenly even more surrounded by the ghosts, standing and sitting and walking all round her, silent, smiling, bleeding from the places the teenage Mazzetti saw the holes the bullets had made in them.

With my suitcase I run away in search of some unhappiness.

She wanders the streets by herself.

Men follow her about, harassing her for sex.

But London policemen, it turns out, are exceptionally kind to her. They take her out of the rain and give her cups of tea and repeatedly allow her to spend the winter night in the warmth of a police station. And one day when she’s wandering the streets lost, a family sees her lostness and invites her in off the street for a meal in their house. It’s the first time she ever tastes curry.

She eventually gets a job serving and washing dishes at a restaurant near Charing Cross that sells nothing but omelettes and soup.

She manages to keep this job.

But it’s not her real job. What she has always been, since she was a child, is an artist. Very late in what will turn out to be a long life (she’ll die in Rome at the beginning of 2020, at the age of ninety two), her friend Ruggero will recall the way his own family would wake after a siesta when he was a child to find paintings by both the twins filling their garden, paintings leaning up against all the trees.

So while she’s been surviving the foggy London years by the skin of her teeth she’s been painting and drawing all along.

One day she takes herself and her work to the Slade School of Art.

She stands in the entrance hall and asks for a place at the school.

They say a polite no. They explain that you can’t just walk in off the street and ask for a place in the school.

She stands in the front hall and won’t move. She says it again. She wants a place at the art school.

They tell her firmly that it’s not how things are done here and they ask her firmly to leave.

She starts to shout about how she wants to see the director of the school.

A man comes out of a room because of the commotion. He asks her what she wants to see the director for. She tells him she wants a place at the school. She tells him she’s a genius.

He looks at her drawings.

He says, okay, starting tomorrow you’ll be our student.

(He’s the director.)

Soon after she starts at the art school she walks past a cupboard with a notice on it. FILM CLUB. She opens its doors. It’s full of film equipment.

She has never made a film. But she gathers some friends together and they take as much of the equipment as they can carry and move it to her lodgings.

With these friends, and with the help of some very kind strangers, she makes a short film based on one of her favourite stories, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, she says much later in her life, seems like a powerful act of accusation against the daily grind that makes us indifferent to past, present and future injustice. She calls the film K. She charges the cost of the rather complicated technical stuff on it, developing, dubbing and so on, to the University.

Some days later she’s called in to see the school director again.

He asks her about a large sum of money she’s signed for in the name of the University without asking anyone’s permission.

He warns her she’s liable to go to jail if she’s falsified a financial signature.

She starts to shake. But she tells him about the film.

Okay, he says. This is what we’ll do. We’ll show this film to the rest of the students and I’ll decide when I see whether they like it or not what I’m going to do with you.

At the film’s first showing he introduces her to someone he’s invited to see the film too, a man who’s the director of the British Film Institute.

The British Film Institute director, the art school director and the art school students clap and cheer at the end of the film she’s made.

The BFI awards her an experimental film grant.

She starts working on a new film with this money.

It’s a story about two deaf mutes who live and work in the rubble and the looming old architecture of London’s east end, where they walk the streets talking to each other in sign language, about love, about how to keep properly clean and decent in the dusty postwar aftermath and about things they find strange or beautiful. They’re often followed around by a crowd of funny and merciless children.

This film is called Together.

Like K, it is small, slight, immensely powerful, it is both everyday and near-apocalyptic and it is like nothing any other filmmaker is making at the time.

She meets the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson.

He helps her with the edit of Together.

With him, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, she becomes one of the founders of the Free Cinema movement. Their film work and programming revolutionize the possibilities in British filmmaking. Meanwhile, at the 1956

Cannes Film Festival, Together is applauded and loved by both critics and audiences.

Around this time Lorenza Mazzetti returns to Italy to live with her twin sister for a while. Don’t imagine those ghosts have left her in peace throughout all the above; the bleeding ghosts still accompany her, wherever she is, whatever she’s doing. They’d been in my unconscious for too long.

So she writes a novel called Il Cielo Cade. The Sky Falls. It’s about the murder of her family, about the religious and political divisions that divide and rule people, and is told from the point of view of a very young child.

After it, she writes another, Con Rabbia, the literal translation of which is With Rage, or Angrily. It’s a sequel to The Sky Falls and it’s told from the perspective of an adolescent revolutionary soul infuriated by the indifference she sees everywhere after the war regardless of what has happened to so many people. I couldn’t live in calmness and boredom any more. My hand has touched blood and tragedy and I know that while boredom was dozing reality was preparing the apocalypse.

Over the course of her life Mazzetti will paint, exhibit, write and publish in many forms and make more short film interludes; like all her work these

short film pieces are about the rupture that happens when innocence and knowledge meet, and about how to retain that innocence even at the core of a smashed-up adult psyche. She will build a puppet theatre in the Campo di Fiori in the centre of Rome and perform over the years to countless audiences her version of Punch and Judy.

Her last great project, Album di Famiglia, or Family Album – a set of paintings featuring portraits of her family up to the time of the murders, and visions of the Tuscan countryside in a sunny, gorgeous summer with Nazis under the trees and fascists teaching the schoolchildren – will bring to mind artists like Henri Matisse and Charlotte Salomon, by their style, by a shared understanding of the way light falls regardless of what it falls on, and by their sheer colourfulness.

—

Does a life end at the death?

How do we define a life?

How do we come to understand what time is, what we’ll do with it, what it’ll do with us?

Everybody’s lifeline is broken somewhere.

Much of what I’ve told you here can be found in Lorenza Mazzetti’s novels, and in her memoir, Diario Londinese, published in English as London Diaries.

The English word for summer comes from the Old English sumor, from the proto-indo-european root sam, meaning both one and together.

I can’t remember where this next quote you’re about to read is from. It’s nothing to do with Mazzetti, though it’s everything to do with her, and us all.

But I copied it into a notebook some years ago and now I can’t find its source.

Creativity is cultural not because it is derivative of it, but because it aims to heal culture. Art saturated with the unconscious acts like a compensatory dream in the individual: it tries to rebalance and address deep-rooted problems.

—

As Mazzetti tells it, not long after the summer killing of her family, a vanguard of Allied soldiers arrives at the house in Italy where they’ve been murdered. English and Scottish soldiers find a couple of shellshocked children sitting beside some newly filled graves.

The first thing they do is teach those children to sing some songs, in English.

The first song they teach them?

You Are My Sunshine.

Meet me here in two hours exactly, Grace said. I’m going for a walk.

It was Saturday morning. They were still in Suffolk. They were standing on the pavement outside a cafe in the sunny cold.

A walk? her daughter said.

Yes, Grace said.

By yourself? her daughter said.

By myself, Grace said.

You don’t go for walks, her daughter said. I don’t remember you going for a walk ever.

You are not the expert on me, Grace said.

Can’t we come? her daughter said.

No, Grace said.

Why? her daughter said.

You’ll be bored, Grace said.

I won’t, her daughter said. He might.

You need to give me some cash, her son said.

What for? Grace said.

The people will get angry if we wait here for two hours and don’t buy anything to eat or drink, her son said.

You just ate a huge breakfast, Grace said.

Yeah but we can’t wait around for all that time in a cafe and not pay for something, her son said.

You don’t have to stay here the whole time, Grace said. You could go and do something, anything. Go and explore. It’s a lovely day.

It’s freezing, her daughter said.

Go down to the beach, Grace said. There’s a putting green. Go to the putting green.

It won’t be open, her son said. It’s February.

Why don’t you want us to come with you? her daughter said.

Her daughter didn’t really want to come with her. Really she was just being meddlesome because she sensed Grace wanted some time to herself for some reason.

Because believe it or not I want some time to myself. For my own reasons, Grace said.

Where are you going to go? her daughter said.

To look at an old church, Grace said.

You are not, her daughter said.

How about you two go the amusement arcade, Grace said. That’ll be open. Go to the pier.

I’m not going to an arcade, her daughter said.

I’ll need some money if we’ve got to spend time in an arcade, her son said.

Grace got her purse out and gave him a £20 note.

That’s not nearly enough, he said. That’s only ten shots on a Terminator.

It is more than enough, and in any case you’ve to give half of that to Sacha, Grace said.

I already factored Sacha in on the ten shots, her son said.

We can get them to change it here at the till, her daughter said. I’ll do it.

No, I’ll do it, her son said. I’ll do it at the arcade.

I’m not going to an arcade, her daughter said. Give it to me now and I’ll get the man at the till to change it.

No, her son said.

Right, Grace said, whatever. Go and do anything you like, I don’t care what it is you do, so long as you both meet me right here outside this cafe, nowhere else, at twelve, I’ve ordered a taxi, there’s a London train from Ipswich at two thirty.

She wants private time to herself for a secret reason, her daughter said.

That’s correct, Grace said. Bye.

She set off in the direction she thought was right. It might be completely wrong. It’d been thirty years. She didn’t remember the name of the church, or maybe never actually knew it. She didn’t remember anything more than that she’d found it by chance, it was out of town, about a mile maybe? Then down a single track road skirted by bramble bushes.

At the edge of the town there was a housing estate that wasn’t there before.

It was perfectly possible the church wouldn’t be there any more, or that someone’d have turned it into a bijou second home, or even that it’d have fallen into the sea. It wasn’t that far from the edge of things if she remembered rightly.

Behind her, her children were still squabbling in the street. She didn’t even turn her head. She walked on as if they didn’t exist, as if she’d never had them, they were someone else’s responsibility and nothing to do with her.

She crossed the bridge between the town and the marsh and went towards the housing estate on the hill.

Then turn right at the marsh.

Then look for the little road.

If she turned left here, she saw, the road would take her to the house they’d met the old man in yesterday, who’d mistaken her son for his sister.

Poor Robert!

But he was so happy to think he’d seen her, Charlotte said last night at supper.

They ate in a wooden-walled restaurant in the hotel. There were candles.

It was very nice, actually.

Just overjoyed at the notion that he’d somehow seen her, Charlotte said.

It didn’t put him up or down that Robert wasn’t her.

I’m not a girl, her son said. I don’t look like a girl.

But something about you. The person you are. It gave that man a great deal of pleasure, Charlotte said. Something about you hit home for him. It’s not about whether you’re a girl.

But I don’t, he said. Look like a girl.

There’s nothing wrong with a boy looking like a girl, Charlotte said. In fact it’s generally accepted that it’s a core quality of true beauty, a bit of symbiosis between the genders.

A bit of what? her son said.

Symbiosis, Arthur said.

Like in biology? her son said.

The old man they’d met was a hundred and four years old. A hundred and four! They talked about that over supper. They talked about how amazing it was that the woman looking after him wasn’t related to him, they were just friends, he was living on her grace, or her family’s, in these latter years of his life, just because they’d been neighbours when she was a child. They talked about her telling them how it was the first time since she’d known him that the old man had ever said anything about having a sister.

And he was just full of happiness, Charlotte said. His sister, there in front of him. Even though she wasn’t.

Is that symbiosis? her son said.

Like meeting history personified, meeting him, Grace said. What a story.

Alive since the First World War. Interned in the Second World War.

That’s patronizing, her son said. He’s a person. He’s not history.

We have a war story too, her daughter said. Our dad’s mother. I’m named after her. Her name was Sacha Albert. Have you ever heard of her? She was

a concert violinist.

Jeff insisted, Grace said. I wanted to call her my own mother’s name.

Thank God she didn’t, her daughter said. Or you’d all be talking right now to someone called Sybil.

Laughter round the table.

Grace didn’t laugh.

Her daughter cast a guilt-stricken look at Grace. Her daughter knew it was a delicate matter.

But Grace was out for a meal with some people who were nice, kind, if still virtual strangers, so she decided to be gracious, nodded to her daughter that it was all right to talk about her father’s side of the family.

Her daughter gave her a grateful glance back and went on talking about Jeff’s family.

She was French, her daughter said. She died when I was ten.

I was seven, her son said.

And her mother’d died in the war when she was only three, her daughter said. And the people who brought our grandmother up, they knew she’d died because a girl came to see them in the war and told them what had happened.

She said people had seen her be shot dead after she tried to help a lady in a market square stand up after a Nazi knocked her down.

We don’t know if any of that old story of their father’s is true, Grace said.

It is true, her daughter said. Gran told us.

That doesn’t make it true, Grace said. Or any truer than most family lore.

Anyway, their father insisted when she was born that she get called after his mother, and who was I to argue. It’s a great story. Also it meant I got to choose Robert’s name.

And I wasn’t named after anybody, her son said.

That’s because I wanted you free of inference, Grace said.

It’s not just a story, her daughter said. It’s true.

We’ve got all her violins, her son said. They’re all just in a cupboard.

Nobody plays them. Nobody knows how. There are five, in their violin cases. Like violin coffins. Nobody ever takes them out. Nobody even looks at them any more.

There’s one really small one, her daughter said. We think it’s the first one she had when she was a kid in the 1940s, it’s called a quarter-size. It’s only this big.

Smaller than that, her son said.

Grace changed the subject by teasing Arthur about the girl.

I thought you came all this way to meet a man who knew your mother. Not to meet girls, Grace said.

In the end, the old man hadn’t seemed to remember about Arthur’s mother. But he’d taken Arthur’s hand and held it and wouldn’t let it go and he fell asleep holding it and Arthur, Charlotte told them later, had stayed with him until about half an hour before they all met for supper which was hours later.

I didn’t want to wake him, Arthur said.

You didn’t want to leave that girl Elizabeth, Grace said.

Charlotte put an arm round his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek.

Too right, she said.

So it’s a fact, Grace said. You really don’t mind him looking at another woman like that. You two really aren’t together then.

No they aren’t, her son said.

Been there, done that, Arthur said. Much better now.

Not that I’d mind who he looked at even if we were together, Charlotte said. Love happens.

Yes, her son said. It does.

You can’t deny it, Charlotte said. And you probably shouldn’t.

Wish I was young again, Grace said.

Anyway, Art’s like my brother now, Charlotte said.

Poor you, her daughter said.

It’s true, she’s like a sister to me, Arthur said.

Poor you, her son said.

Time is short, Grace said. Prime is short. Good for you. I envy you. All your lives ahead of you like that. You’ve got to use every moment. Because in the blink of an eye it’s past you, and you never get your time again.

Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that’s rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That’s what it’s all about.

Ah, Grace said. So naive. I was young once too and believed such things.

You’re not old now, Grace, Charlotte said.

But Grace was finding Charlotte, who kept saying her name in that annoying way, a bit patronizing now.

And who knew that people were interned in England in the last war? she said instead.

I did, her son said.

You did not, her daughter said.

I did, her son said. I did know.

I suppose if he was a German, Grace said, they had to. For everybody’s safety.

Dad’s got stamps in his war collection, her son said. Isle of Man.

What’s wrong with your supper, Robert? Grace said.

I’m just not very hungry, he said.

What do you need instead? Charlotte said. Can we get it for you?

Charlotte’s hand was in the air for the waiter.

I need symbiosis, her son said.

I don’t think they have that on the menu, her daughter said.

Grace, walking through town next day, smiles. Her clever daughter.

Her clever daughter had noticed how the stone in that corner of the old man’s room was really remarkably like the stone Arthur was carrying around with him. And when Arthur opened the bag and got the stone out to give to the old man, told him his mother had asked him to do this in her will and put it on the bed, the old man saw it and said the weird thing, the stone is a child –, Grace said at dinner last night. What a strange thing to –

No, her daughter interrupted. That’s not what he said. He said you’ve brought back the child.

The woman called Elizabeth had asked Arthur to hand her the stone.

She’d placed it in the curve of the piece of sculpture the man had in his bedroom.

It looks really good there, her daughter said.

The piece of sculpture was a real piece, the woman told them when the old man was dozing, by the artist Barbara Hepworth. Grace had thought it unlikely. What kind of old man’s got a Barbara Hepworth sculpture just lying around?

But when she’d gone to bed she couldn’t get the thought of that piece of stone out of her head. Well, that’s what art is, maybe. Something that impresses mysteriously on you and you don’t know why. They did look good together, the two stones, the curved one with the hole in it, the perfectly spherical one.

Walking along a pavement now, the front of her head filled with an image.

The image was her own mother’s face, but as if made into a mask. A death mask or a life mask? Neither. A mask of her mother’s face beyond both life and death, beyond happy and sad, alive and dead at once – no, not at all dead, nothing dead about it, not in any way. It was clean, and pure in the bone structure, the outline. It had skin the colour of life, hair scraped back off the forehead in repose, and it was made of stone. Next to it a smaller stone mask was the face of Grace’s fourteen year old self, the age she was the year her mother died and the face she was wearing the moment she set fire to an armchair in the front room of their house, her just-dead mother’s armchair. In her head as she walked along pavement the two faces sat blank-eyed next to each other.

Grace shook her head, shook herself back into a story of herself she could take some control of.

She was on her way to find a churchyard. She’d visited it one summer.

She passed a building with a film poster outside it.

Paths of Glory.

It caught her eye because the building was an old cinema. It was the old cinema –

and this was the point at which a memory, one she didn’t even know she had, cracked open inside her head like the green of a seed cracking through the husk around it –

backstage in the little town cinema,

quaint little place ain’t it quaint and dainty

(that’s Claire Dunn singy-speaking like she’s in a Sondheim show), 1989,

summer of discontent,

they’re doing a two-night run here, Shakespeare tonight, Dickens tomorrow. It’s hardly a theatre, darling, rearrange your expectations, Frank said when they arrived, and he’s right. They’re performing the play in front of a bright white cinema screen because there are no drapes or curtain of any kind, terrible lighting deck, no stage to speak of, just a narrow platform, and there isn’t any backstage as such, just a box room stuffed full of the whole cast right now, fourteen people all trying to remember their lines and no mirror to do the make-up in.

Which is why Grace is sitting outside by herself on the concrete steps that lead down out of the back door. She’s finished her first acts. Her character’s dead and gone now till her cue, that sky up there is an early evening blue, the

birds high, the ones her mother used to say the thing about when they arrived, well Grace, that’s the summer here. And when they were gone, well Grace, that’s the summer gone –

and then someone hisses behind her,

Grace for fuck sake, you’re on, you’re late, you’re on –

Shit!

and she ups and races back in, up the stairs, through the bendy corridor, and belts at speed right out on to the platform to take up her Act 5 pose as the dead queen’s statue.

And then she sees Gerry and Nige are still on, still telling the audience all the amazing things that’ve happened offstage.

Which makes it still scene 2.

She’s not due on for several pages.

Ah.

Uh oh.

So she just sort of stands there, middle of the platform, frozen in mid-run, doesn’t know what to do with her hands, and now the whole audience (and the place is packed out tonight for such a little out-of-the-way town) has seen, running like a girl, a queen who’s meant to be dead – which is the whole point, she has to be dead then come alive at the right moment for the play to work.

She takes three steps back.

She’s now standing roughly where the curtain that’s meant to hide her is meant to be.

She straightens her back, raises her hand, takes up her statue pose.

One or two people in the audience laugh uncertainly.

The boys are looking at her in confusion.

Then Gerry starts his lines again. They say their lines like she’s not on the stage. Nige goes off and Ralph and Ed come on to say theirs. Ralph stares at her in a panic. He has a hard enough time remembering lines as it is. Stalwart Ed keeps going in his reedy voice. They get through the scene, then Frank and Joy and Jen and Tim and Tony and Tom etc troop on for scene 3 and they see her there and all stand back aghast.

Especially Joy, who’s wheeling the curtain frame on that Grace is supposed to be hidden behind, and who’s got so many lines about how they’re all going to see something amazing which is hidden from them behind this very curtain right now.

Grace holds her pose.

She holds her hand just so. She looks straight through Joy. Joy finally gets it, stops wheeling the curtain aimlessly up and down the platform like a hospital nurse, and positions it in front of Grace.

Whew.

They start the scene.

The people in the audience who know the story already have been guffawing for the last several minutes. The people who don’t, well, God help them. Now that she’s behind the curtain she shakes her arm to get rid of the pins and needles. She’s got twenty five lines till behold and say tis well.

Then the curtain gets wheeled away and she has to hold the statue pose while they all look at her, first as a statue, then as a living body, and 120 lines before her cue to speak: turn good lady our Perdita is found. She gets her lines ready in her head.

You gods look down

and from your sacred vials

pour your graces

upon my daughter’s head.

You gods look down

and from your sacred –

But –

ah.

Frank said a West End casting agent on holiday in the area is in tonight.

Grace behind the curtain breaks into a cold sweat.

It was Claire Dunn who cued her.

Was it? It was.

She’s 99% sure.

Claire Dunn has sabotaged Grace’s only chance so far at anything West End.

You gods look down

Did she do it on purpose?

Did she know what she was doing?

You gods look down

—

Next day the female members of STD (Sublime Tension Drama) (don’t bother making the jokes, everyone in STD has heard them all before) are meeting in the cinema – which is like a pot with its lid on it on a lit gas ring

in this heat – to rehearse a sticky bit of The World As It Rolled. The male members (har-har), except for Ed who’s directing The World, are in the local hotel’s very nice garden having beer and a pub lunch. They are lucky sods.

Ed gets them all to sit round on the platform in front of the cinema screen.

He says he’s got an exercise for them to do. He tells them he wants them to think about the word meander.

Me, he says. Ander.

They all look blank.

In other words, make myself other, Ed says. Make yourself someone else.

Take a wander through the concept of multiple selfhood. Because this is the very beating heart of the story of David Copperfield. Think of all those different names he gets called all through his life, Trot, Trotwood, Daisy, Davy. And yet he’s still the same person. Isn’t he? So I want us all to do an exercise where we literally become someone else in front of all our eyes. Yet we still remain ourselves. Let’s go anticlockwise. Joy. You start.

Do what anticlockwise? Joy says.

Joy is Frank’s sister who’s been drafted in at the last minute, because someone else dropped out, to play Paulina in his Winter’s Tale. She isn’t really a drama type though her Paulina is really impressive for someone who’s not a bona fide actor of serious intent; she usually works in an estate agent’s, has taken the summer off to do this because Frank is directing the Shakespeare and asked her to, so is only here on sufferance and can never be arsed to play along with what she calls all the workshop shite.

I want you to other yourself, Ed says.

Anticlockwise? Joy says.

I want you to take the line: The clock began to strike, and I began to cry simultaneously, Ed says. And before you say it, I want you to go right back to the moment of birth of someone who’s in you, but is other than yourself.

Yeah but I’ll be doing that anyway when I’m acting, Joy says. Won’t I? So why bother?

Ed looks personally hurt.

He is a sweet chap, gay. He’s sleeping with Nige, everybody knows, though they’re all acting like it’s a really big secret. Grace has her own couple of secrets. She’s sleeping with both Tom and Jen (Florizel and Perdita) and neither Tom nor Jen knows about the other. Nobody in the whole group knows, which takes some organizing, but so far she’s pulling it off. Jen and Tom both think she’s committed to each of them, at least for the summer.

At the same time she’s made it clear to both that she’s not really available and can’t commit for longer; she’s told them about Gordon Stone, her longterm boyfriend at home.

(In reality there’s no home and there’s no such person. Gordonstoun is the name of a posh school in Scotland that her mother used to work at before she met her father. Prince Charles went there.)

An argument breaks out before any other inner selves have been accessed by any of the cast.

The argument is the same one they keep having. It is getting tiresome. It’s about why Leontes in The Winter’s Tale wigs out quite soon after the start of the play.

The argument is about feminism. Again.

Grace sighs.

But it’s not about gender, she says. It’s just a blight. A blight comes down on him, on his mind and on his country from nowhere. It’s irrational. It has no source. It just happens. Like things do, they just suddenly change, and it’s to teach us that everything is fragile and that what happiness we think we’ve got and imagine will be forever ours can be taken away from us in the blink of an eye. You’re bringing 1989 politics to a 1623 play.

1611, Ed says.

Okay, Grace says, but the point still stands. Give or take a decade in the 1600s.

Yeah but you can’t know that, Grace, unless you’re an expert in history between 1611 and 1623, Ginette says.

For fuck sake, Grace says.

They bring up all the lines again about women’s utterance, women’s tongues, the jealousy Leontes is feeling because his wife is better with language than he is.

Yeah but this is all just, like, notes in the margin, Grace says. What’s really happened is as random as, I don’t know, a plague. Like frost on flowers. A blight. It comes from absolutely nowhere. Shakespeare has Leontes say it. His brain’s infected.

Yeah but an infection still comes from something or somewhere, Ginette says.

And other themes in the play signal that the thing that needs to be cured is the relations between the genders, Jen says.

Even Jen, with whom she’s secretly sleeping, is siding against her.

Grace shakes her head.

They know nothing about real loss. None of them.

It’s just what happens, she says. A sad tale’s best for winter. So Shakespeare injects sadness, like a device, a playwright’s device, he infects things with winter precisely so that he can have a summer, make a merry tale come out of a sad one.

Ed puts on his teacher voice.

Let’s look for a moment, shall we, at the very start, he says. The very first scene. What Camillo says is it is a gallant child that physics the subject.

Grace can’t be bothered to argue any more.

Physics was never my subject, she says.

No, Grace, Ed says. Physic doesn’t mean physics here.

Give me a break, Grace says.

It means something that makes people well, Ed says. And subject here means a citizen, the subjects, the people in the kingdom. It’s about what makes the people in the kingdom ill or well.

And that’s whether the person in charge is a misogynistic tyrannous bad leader, a bigoted useless king or governor who tells everybody that unless they toe his line they’re traitors and betrayers, Ginette says.

Yeah and that’s all tied in with the gender dichotomy in the play. Can’t deny it, Grace, someone else says.

Then Claire says:

If only Tom was here too, eh Grace? Then we could all talk openly about Shakespeare’s intentions in his use of the words infection and affection and what happens when people aren’t as transparent with other people as they should be being.

What you on about, Clairey? Jen says.

I’m on about which of us in the company are getting a surplus of Grace, Claire says.

I’ve certainly had a surplus of this, Grace says. I’m off for a smoke.

Claire winks at her.

Come back a new Grace, yeah? Claire says.

It’s, wow, like you know the whole play, Claire. All the places the word grace gets used. It’s amazing how much of it you know off by heart, Ed says.

Photographic memory, Claire is saying. Come back soon, Grace. Jen and Tom’ll be waiting, we all will. Hoping for a better Grace.

I don’t see how anyone can play Hermione properly yet be so dead to the text, someone says behind Grace as she pushes the firedoors open.

Why d’you keep bringing Tom into it? Grace hears Jen say as the doors swing shut behind her.

Relief.

Blazing light after the dark.

Hot out here in the full sun. Grace, cold to the core, shivers. She stands for a minute, lights a cigarette.

She walks to the corner, looks out over the flat expanse of land beyond the town. There’s a heat haze off the tarmac at the edge where the houses stop.

This summer, they’ve been saying in the papers, is the finest summer of this whole century, even better than the one in 1976. 1940. 1914.

She drops the cigarette half smoked, grinds it into the pavement.

Fuck them and their themes.

She simply sets off.

She doesn’t care where she’s going, she’s going somewhere, anywhere away from the world as it rolls, away from the envy with its own mini heat haze coming off Claire, who’s possibly after Tom or maybe Jen, but above all has clearly seen the truly amazing effect on every audience a statue that comes to life can have when the people watching don’t expect it, and so, wants Grace’s part.

Or maybe she just likes causing trouble.

A lot of people find that kind of thing stimulating.

Grace shrugs as she walks along.

The sex with Tom is kind of what you’d expect, does the job. The sex with Jen is pretty good, Jen is unexpectedly heady and determined. There’s a bit of having to listen to Jen’s emotional turmoil about her brother who’s a drug addict. But Grace has the patience and the right facial (or facile) expression; she’s an actor. Anyway it’s worth it to give herself the space from Tom, who can’t quite believe his luck at getting to fuck someone who’s got such a main role in the show and last time they did it told her he loves her and how in love he is, which always makes Grace literally want to throw up.

She walks past a house where some neighbours are having an altercation.

A woman is standing on the pavement with her arm round the shoulder of a shamefaced boy. Her son? His mother? The woman has the boy in the grip of

a loving vice and is shouting at a substantially bosomed woman in the doorway of the house, and what she’s shouting is, it’s a brothel, it’s nothing but a brothel you’re keeping.

The woman in the doorway has a smile going up one side of her face while the other side is straight, which makes her face look a bit like a torturer. She says in a calm voice full of passive aggression, which, when Grace hears it, she decides to remember as a good example of someone like this should she ever have to act someone like it, the boy’s just enjoying himself, Mrs Mallard. He’s just having a good time.

He’s twelve years old, the woman on the pavement shouts back.

He’s not doing anything to hurt anyone, Mrs Mallard, the smug woman in the doorway says as Grace walks past.

As she passes the boy casts a glance at Grace.

She winks at him. He looks away.

He’s got a mother.

He doesn’t know how fucking lucky he is.

She crosses a parched marsh with its yellow burnt grasses and its noise of insects. She takes a single track road that opens up off to her right because it looks so nice. It’s a road clearly not much used by anybody. There’s a grassline running up the centre of it, and tree branches meeting over it, bramble bush tentacles reaching out towards each other from either side.

It’s beautiful, she thinks.

She waves away some midges.

A tiny bird – a wren? flies across her path. Hello, bird.

Hedgerow.

Greenness.

Verge and leaf and grass, long seed-headed grasses.

The light gold, dark gold of the fields spreading back away from the sea, and the green of everything, green, dark green, the trees ahead down the road throwing long English shadows, like if you imagine a summer.

The patches of sunlight that come through them in the distance down the road, shining on its surface like a road shines after rain when the sun hits it.

Her inner grammar comes apart. Sentences don’t have to comply. It’s nice.

The swaying fullness of those trees.

Look what’s happened to her in just twenty minutes roaming about under an English summer sun.

She’s come over all thoughtful.

But that’s summer for you. Summer’s like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn’t just a merry tale. Because there’s no merry tale without the darkness.

And summer’s surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We’re always looking for it, looking to it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it’s not just possible but assured, there’s a natural harmony that’ll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you. As if what it was always all about, your time on earth, was the full happy stretch of all the muscles of the body on a warmed patch of grass, one long sweet stem of that grass in the mouth.

Care free.

What a thought.

Summer.

The Summer’s Tale.

There’s no such play, Grace.

Don’t be fooled.

The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won’t be held to account – because summer won’t be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.

Not even this one she’s in exists. Even though it’s apparently the best summer so far of the century. Not even when she’s quite literally walking down a road as beautiful and archetypal as this through an actual perfect summer afternoon.

So we mourn it while we’re in it.

Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer.

Even while I’m right at the heart of it I just can’t get to the heart of it.

—

Ten minutes later the road comes to an end in a tree glade with a couple of spaces for cars. To one side there’s an old church, a small stone one with a graveyard settling round it, leafy, its stones skewy under old trees. Its gate is open. Its door is open at the end of its path. Music is coming out of its open door.

Who’s playing Nick Drake in a church? Bryter Layter, pretty flute, very 1970s.

What trendy vicar thinks Nick Drake is good church music?

He’s right. Hymn to timeless melancholy. Hymn to English summer.

The graveyard is overgrown, full of bees and flowers. Grace goes up the path between the flowers’ nodding heads. She stands outside the door.

Someone inside the church is whistling along with the tune. There’s a light scraping noise. The noise stops. It starts again. It stops. That explains the workman’s van in the parking space.

There’s a light coloured stone in the wall above her head. The words carved into it say:

THE NIGHT IS FAR SPENT

THE DAY IS AT HAND

LET US THEREFORE CAST OFF

THE WORKS OF DARKNESS

AND LET US PUT ON

THE ARMOUR OF LIGHT

ST PAUL : ROMANS

13 : 12

1 8 7 9

In days of old, she thinks. When knights were bold. And women weren’t invented. They wrapped their arms around a tree. And had to be contented.

That old rhyme. She didn’t even know she still had it in her head. Her mother and father, her father was running the new car in, a Sunday afternoon, she sat on the back seat eight years old and laughed because they were laughing and it was funny and lovely.

You had to think up something that didn’t exist in the times when knights were bold, and then make it rhyme. Her father was very good at thinking up rhymes though mainly the rhymes were about men doing things to women, things Grace didn’t really understand but knew were meant to be funny.

In days of old when knights were bold and bras were not for burning.

They took them off the girls at night to help them with the churning.

Laughter.

In days of old when knights were bold and women didn’t work.

Her mother finished that one with the word berserk.

In days of old when knights were bold and girls were never blunt.

Don’t, her mother said laughing. Don’t dare.

What? I was only going to say take a punt, her father said.

Laughter.

Grace had laughed too, in the back. They both turned and looked at her laughing, exchanged a look with each other and laughed again but in a different way.

In days of old when knights were bold and women said don’t dare. They pulled the ones they wanted into bedrooms by the hair.

Laughter, laughter.

Long ago laughter.

Were knights ever bold? Grace, twenty two, feels a chill at her back from the stone church wall she’s leaning against.

A man in the church is bending to one of the long bench seats. He seems to be scraping it. Maybe he’s cleaning it. He hears someone behind him and he stops, looks up, sees her in the doorway reading the stone.

He switches his cassette machine off.

Hi, he says.

Oh hi, she says.

He’s about thirty, quite good-looking, a bit like James Taylor on the front of Sweet Baby James but with his hair tied back in a ponytail.

Don’t let me disturb you, she says.

I was just about to say the same, he says. I’m sorry I was playing music, I didn’t expect anyone to come in. Generally nobody does.

He puts the sander down, gestures to the little chapel behind him.

Please. Stay as long as you like, he says.

No, it’s okay, I don’t need to, she says, I’m not here because it’s a church or anything.

Ah, he says. Okay.

I was just walking past, she says, and the door was open and I heard the music, I like Nick Drake.

You’re a person of taste, he says.

What are you making? she says.

I’m restoring this pew, he says.

He tells her he’s been replacing a piece of snapped-off seat and is cleaning and sanding the place where the new piece joins the old. He wipes away some little shreds of sanded wood. There’s a slot in the seat where the wood is a different shade from the rest of the seat.

You can’t even see a join, she says. Except for the colour difference.

That’s really good.

Not seeing the join, that’s the whole point, he says.

How do you get it to look the same as the rest of the seat? she says. Or do you just leave it like that and it’ll weather with time?

Little miracle, he says.

He holds up a tin of woodstain.

He puts it down, takes a cigarette from behind his ear and offers it to her.

That’s okay. It’s your only one, she says.

I’ve a tobacconist’s shop right here in my pocket, he says.

He opens a tin, starts rolling another one then and there.

Oh. Okay then. Thanks, she says. What a great thing it must be, to be able to make a seat like that look so good.

The best thing is, it’ll last, he says. Decades. Simple pleasures.

Simple pleasures, she says. I was just walking along thinking about them.

Well, about how I tend to wish pleasures were a lot simpler than they end up being.

He laughs.

He licks the cigarette paper along its edge.

Uh huh? he says.

Oh, you know, she says. How even when things are lovely it’s like we can’t help blocking them from ourselves. What a lovely summer it is and how, it’s like, no matter what we do, we can’t get near its loveliness.

He gestures to her to come over to the open door where he lights their roll-ups.

They stand in the cool stone shade.

Summer, he says.

Summer, she says.

You know it’s also what the lintel in a building gets called? he says.

What is? she says.

Summer. The most important beam, structurally, he says. Holds up a floor, a ceiling, both. There’s one, there, look.

He points behind them at a little balcony hanging as if in mid air.

Now that’s what I call a lovely summer, he says.

Usually with such a good-looking man Grace’d just be looking at him and pretending to listen and thinking her own thoughts. But she is surprised to find herself quite interested in what he just said.

I never knew that, she says.

It can take a great weight, a summer, he says. It’s why they also call horses that carry a great weight summers too.

Really? she says.