Chapter Seven #2
Beside me, Nick unscrews his bottle, taking a drink, and, restlessly, I let my eyes wander the crew.
Almost everyone is clustered in groups, snacking, chatting.
Only Naomi and Ana stand apart. Naomi’s talking into her phone, looking harassed.
Ana’s bent over her screen – jumper tied around her waist; curls pulled up in a knot – reviewing what we’ve shot.
Back in the old days, she’d have had to wait for everything to be transferred to film: those rushes she used to let me in to see when we were shooting The Go-Between.
I don’t for a moment question whether she’s about to show me anything now.
She looks way too concerned for that. And perturbed: like she’s trying to work something out.
Whether to fire me, maybe.
Shit, I think, more sweat breaking out beneath my tunic. Shit, shit, shit.
‘What was it like?’ Nick asks, cutting through my escalating panic.
‘What was what like?’
‘Iris’s room.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and take a breath, wrenching myself from my inner spiral. ‘Incredible, actually. All the furniture’s still there … ’
‘From the war?’
‘I think so.’
‘Ana didn’t put it there?’
‘No.’ I have to laugh. ‘I checked.’
He laughs too. An actual laugh.
For a second, we laugh together.
Then we trail off, out of practice.
‘You planning on sleeping up there again?’ Nick asks.
‘No,’ I say, and don’t mention how scared I am of what else my imagination might create in its shadows. I’m still trying, very hard, to forget about that. ‘But if I change my mind, I’ll tell you first.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It’s ok.’ I look up at him, into those dark, almost black, eyes, and I don’t know if it’s his stare, or the heat, or this unbearable day, or the simple strangeness of being on a set with him at all, acting out someone else’s love story, as Mum said, but I feel so abruptly overwhelmed, by everything, that I quite genuinely fear I might cry.
‘I really am sorry about earlier,’ I say, fighting to control myself. ‘I hate that you were that worried.’
‘Claude,’ he says, with an exasperated sigh. ‘Of course I was worried.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m always worried about you.’
I’m always worried about you.
Those words, the unmissable catch in Nick’s voice as he said them, prey on me as we get back to work. I realise that’s what I’ve become to everyone – him, Mum, Phil, my sisters, Ana … Felix, even: a worry.
I don’t want to be a worry.
I want to be me, but even as I think it, I see myself as a past tense, and that scares me, because that can’t be good, can it?
Not really, my darling, Mum’s voice tells me.
And I’m back to spiralling again, battling to conceal it as I move around the set to Ana’s instruction, saying my lines over and again.
The tenor’s off, Ana says. The pitch is awry.
We try different blocking, variations on timing, the lines themselves (‘Hello, Iris … ’ ‘Hello again, Iris … ’ ‘Iris, hello … ’), and even though Ana declares herself happy with where we finally get to when, at midnight, she calls an end to the entire sorry exercise, we all know she’s lying.
Everyone’s muted, leaving the set: the crew heading exhaustedly to their assigned trailers; me, Nick, Jeff, Ana, and Naomi returning to the house.
Nick and I barely talk as, zombified, we shower, brush our teeth, and fall into bed.
Nick has to be up again first thing, even though it’s a Sunday.
We’re filming six days on, one day off, and since Emma’s unfortunately no better, but has now been diagnosed with an E.
coli infection (not a twenty-four-hour thing after all: that was the news Naomi was getting on the phone earlier), Naomi’s once again reshuffled her meticulously planned schedule so that Nick, Tim, and the rest of the Mabel’s Fury crew will spend tomorrow and Monday filming inside their plane’s cutaway.
Knowing how shattered Nick is, I expect him to go to sleep instantly when our heads hit our pillows.
But his breathing doesn’t deepen. His body doesn’t take on that tell-tale heaviness.
He remains tense and alert, and I can tell without looking that his eyes are open, fixed on nothingness, staring into his unspoken thoughts.
I can guess all too easily what those thoughts are.
My own keep pulling me the same way: back to who we were; what we so nearly had. I can’t keep my mind in check, like I normally do. It’s impossible, now I’m spending all this time with him.
You remind each other of what you lost, Mum said to me, up on Parliament Hill.
She’s right, we do.
I suspect she’d try to convince me that that’s a good thing. That we both need reminding. To face up to things.
But it doesn’t feel good.
It feels really painful.
It’s at maybe one, or perhaps two – I can’t bring myself to check the time – that Nick moves, on to his side, looking down at me. He shifts his arm, the sheets rustling, and I feel his hand, hovering in the blackness above my shoulder. I hold myself still, biting my lip, waiting for his touch.
But it doesn’t come.
It’s only when he moves again, back away from me with a heavy sigh, that I realise he was waiting for me to turn to him; reassure him that I wouldn’t push him away.
I think about doing it now.
Reaching out to him.
I tense, almost, almost ready to.
Then he sighs again, and it’s somehow easier to remain where I am.
Thinking about myself as a past tense.
Remembering our tiny little boy.
With the tears I’ve been containing all afternoon, leaking silently from my eyes.
Nick wasn’t in Los Angeles the night I miscarried.
He was in New York, working. I drove myself to the hospital when the pain started, and didn’t telephone him, or Mum, because I knew what was happening and I was terrified to make it real by involving them.
But my OB had Nick’s number. She summoned him back.
‘He’s on his way,’ she told me, as they wheeled me into the delivery room.
At twenty weeks, you have to go through labour.
It’s the loneliest and most scared I’ve ever felt.
All I wanted, was Nick.
It’s a long flight to LA from New York, though.
It was all done by the time he arrived.
I lost a lot of blood. They put me under. I don’t remember that happening.
But when I woke, there Nick was, by my side, holding my hand in both of his. It was our hands that he was looking at when I opened my eyes. He didn’t immediately realise that I’d come around, so he didn’t know I was looking at him.
It was the only time I saw him cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, my voice cracking, because I couldn’t bear it. I just couldn’t bear it.
‘No,’ he said, pressing my hand to his lips. ‘None of this is your fault.’
‘It is.’
‘No. I should have been here … ’
‘You couldn’t have done anything.’
‘I should have been here,’ he repeated.
‘You’re here now,’ I said, and had been grateful for that at least.
I’d still been able to need him, then.
We’d still been able to need each other.
But the next day, I spiked a fever, started bleeding more, and had to go back into theatre.
The day after that, my OB broke it to us that it was unlikely I’d ever be able to carry a baby to term – scarring, misshapen uterus; I couldn’t listen to her words – and Nick told me that he didn’t mind, all he cared about was that I was all right, but I didn’t believe him.
I couldn’t believe him. How could he not mind?
My heart was shattered.
I think it was then, even before we left the hospital, that I started to pull away from him.
Because it made me angry, it made me so bloody furious, that he was pretending like everything was going to be all right, when, to me, our whole world had ended.
He didn’t ask me about the labour, and I can see now that that was probably because he was afraid to make me relive it, but at the time, I resented his silence.
Resented that I’d had to endure it when he just got to ignore it, which I know wasn’t fair, or right, but it was just so much easier being angry, than being sad.
Nick was patient with me, at first.
‘Fine, Claude,’ he said, ‘you need a punching bag. Use me. I’m here for it.’
But it wasn’t long before he fell back on anger too, and we rowed, a lot, screaming rows, neither of us listening, just raging at the single unchangeable loss that was tearing us apart.
Until quickly, way too quickly it got so it was easier to be silent, than say anything, and better to be apart than together, because the being together was just too painful.
That was when the running started: to South Africa, then Sicily, for me; into all those bars for Nick.
And the faces of the women he was pictured with weren’t always different.
There was one in particular who kept cropping up.
The tabloids never failed to highlight her, drawing comparisons between her pretty, smiling features, and Nick’s long line of exes.
Who is she? I’ve asked Nick.
I’ve got no idea, he’s told me.
I’ve wanted to believe him.
I’ve tried to believe him.
I used to trust absolutely that he left his good time ways behind when we got together, but god it hurts, taunting myself with how far his need to escape might have taken him backwards.
I’ve hurt him too. I do know that.
We keep hurting each other.
And yet, when we each got the call about doing this movie, our agents making it clear that the studio was only interested in securing us as a double-act, we both agreed without hesitation.
We drove up here to Doverley together.
We’re lying together now, beneath the same 1,000 thread count sheets.
I really want to think that means there’s some hope left in us.
Through my tears, I shift on my pillow, ready to turn to Nick after all.
But he, oblivious, is already moving, pushing the sheets back and reaching for his phone, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me.
So, I stay where I am.
He fixates on whatever’s got his attention on his screen, and I keep pretending to sleep, until, at last, sleep comes.
When I wake again in the morning, emerging with a jolt from the dreams that abruptly release me – such strange, compelling dreams in which, over and again, I see myself with Nick, reshooting Robbie and Iris’s reunion in scores of different ways, all over the house, and down at the base – my first instinct is to tell Nick about them.
But our bed is empty.
The room is silent.
It’s not yet light outside, and he is already gone.