“Have you ever been alone in an old theatre at night? There are no places on earth more haunted than theatres. An old theatre houses the ghosts of all things, at least, all things human. Cemeteries are where bodies go, not lives. Not like,’ he paused and looked up at the ceiling, ‘the theatre. We must use the imagination gifted to us. I mean, use the spectre of the performance, the trace of bygone acts. I don’t mean the supernatural. I mean the real ghosts, the people who really did live and die. Odd, that the supernatural would create the natural and then stay hidden within it. Anyway, I’m losing my train of thought, where was I? Ah yes, I remember. Think! Of all the actors and musicians of bygone centuries who have been forgotten, left to the wind whispering. And what goes for actors goes a thousandfold for humankind. I’m talking about the ones who made the theatre from nothing. The ones who brought the whole thing into existence. Most have been forgotten certainly, but have they been forgotten without trace? Hardly. We are actors because we want to make the thing last. What dreams they must have had! Yes, what dreams.” He turned his head away, fighting tears. “Think to when they were back stage on their opening nights, those sacred nights. Butterflies turning into eagles, soaring high to the Gods.” Fenwick made a quick flitting gesture with his hand accompanied by a half whistle through his teeth. “I remember that night better than any night of my life. With my fellow students. There on the stage we bowed on the final night of the run. It was a beautiful thing.” Now tears showed. “The faces of the audience were partially obscured in the dark, but we heard them. And how. How we wept with happiness. Joy swept into our souls, and kept.” His eyes glazed in the light of time’s memory. “And in that moment, everything was possible. To be loved, by strangers, and have evidence of it, to really feel it, that was their dream. And ours. To win and to be loved. To become a part of a dream, and know it. The most beautiful thing in the world, to save a life out there somewhere. That is our hope. That is us.”
“My mother used to say you can tell the goodness of a person in their eyes.” Said Mary, who was one of the young actors.
“Did she?” Replied Fenwick, after deliberating for a moment or two.
Fenwick reclined in the tattered leather-bound chair and craved for the tobacco he had recently prohibited, knowing that he would likely soon succumb. He planned to keep going until all the hairs on his head were white, and then, and only then, give up. Fenwick was sitting with the young actors in one of the dressing rooms of an old London theatre, the mirror bordered with lightbulbs, surrounded by his ghosts, and speaking to the youngsters as if they were an audience that had paid to see him act. He wasn’t officially their teacher; it was more a play of mutual admiration. There they were, the younger ones, just sitting on the cushioned floor looking up at him through their smoke and hanging on his every word. He paused for a moment and took a good drink. He listened carefully to the gentle rattling of the melting ice cubes. It warmed his whole being and in the electric light he suddenly felt at one with the entire universe. No fear at all. His wide-open eyes seemed to be glaring past his surroundings, deep into some other place.
“There was a woman I once knew that had the same dream as us.” His face became suddenly melancholy. “In her small hometown by the sea in the north of England her beauty was infamous. It had driven at least one young man to take his own life and sent four more completely mad, and they are only the ones that are known of. She was a legacy of the Viking shield maidens, a daughter of Freya, marooned in the twentieth century’. They waited for him to continue and glanced at each other before looking back up at him, cajoling him into revealing some secret worth knowing. They thought, perhaps because of the way he held his age, that he possessed wisdom.
“Yes, she was beautiful.” He looked back in time. “Beautiful in an other-worldly, divine way. She had that thing that is impossible to describe in words, one of the things in this world that are beyond language. She possessed the genius of evolution. How it affected her I can’t really tell, but whatever it was, it became a desire to escape her little home town by the sea. That’s what she told me. She had walked alone on rainy northern nights, through the empty streets, thinking her beauty and talent were being wasted with every passing day. So, when the opportunity came to retake all those lost moments she grasped them in her fist, put them in her mouth and breathed them back into her soul. No one could ever take that away from her. And no-one ever did. Her moment of first success was her first true love. When the crowd cheered her for the first time, that night in the theatre in Manchester, she changed, because her soul had been satisfied. That’s what happens when you get what you want. You change.”
“What happened to her?” His melancholy expression turned even more grave.
“I suppose I will never know.” He said and returned to his whiskey.
The two young actors had just graduated from drama school and were at the theatre to audition for a new play about a man who had gone rogue through music. For the last two years they had both been players in an immersive theatre company, which is where they had met. They were eager and anxious to learn. Spending time around Fenwick gave them solace, and occasionally invigorated their ambition. He reminded them that inspiration is only a part of the thing. They both imagined the woman he spoke about in their minds and wondered who she could have been. Mary looked up at Fenwick and said,
“But surely as actors it is what is within that counts? Soul marks us out, as a profession I mean.” Fenwick smiled. The innocence of the young actor uplifted him. The moment made his own soul glimmer.
“Yes, my dears. Quite right. Quite right.” He said. He went to silent thinking, and then Charles said,
“But in our profession, how you look has meaning surely. I mean how you appear, and people prefer beautiful things to look at don’t they? Or you put on make-up and prosthetics to make the character look more ugly, more despicable. But the appearance is still there, dictating to the audience thoughts. To engage the audience’s perception, isn’t that our work? I think ours is the shallowest profession of them all, the one most based on appearances.”
“Our job is to tantalise.” Said Fenwick. He rattled the ice cubes among the whiskey. “We don’t save lives. Like doctors.”
“Oh?” Said Mary as her eyebrows raised like they were being winched to her hair. “I’ve seen it happen, oh yes Fenwick I have. Those at the end of their tether with life, inspired by what they have seen, art I mean………….’ She paused for a draw on her cigarette, ‘so he could ‘live on.’ At this Fenwick’s expression flickered between reminiscence and hope.
“It happened to me with music.” Said Charles.
“Aesthete’s value image, but that doesn’t make us shallow, necessarily. In the English language at least, image is close to imagination.”
“As sophistry to sophistication” added Mary. She stood up in search of the next glass of wine. Fenwick wobbled momentarily due to the speed of her response.
“Yes.” He said before he continued. “It is soul but then again it isn’t. It’s pretending. We are actors. We pretend. The nurse or the soldier deal with actual misery, actual death. We are pretenders. But that’s alright, it’s not a sin in itself. Real beauty can’t be pretended. So don’t take it for granted.”
“But surely some performances, on stage, contain real beauty?”
“Well in those moments they are not pretending then. They can’t be. They are acting out real emotions, do you see the trick? Be thankful for the gifts God has bestowed upon you. I wish I had your looks! Things could have been a lot different if I had. I was destined to rely on character more’s the pity, it was ‘you know who’s decree’ and his eyes reached to the heavens as his index finger joined in the upward.
“But isn’t that what theatre is about? Character? If not, aren’t we just models on a cat walk?” Fenwick returned to his Glenlivet as Mary smiled, first at Charles for his remark and then more broadly at Fenwick who seemed to her in momentary retreat.
“Our job is to make them gasp. Draw them out from their armchairs. Those pompous in their happiness we must encourage to remember the grave. But, don’t overdo it of course.” He tapped his fingers rapidly on invisible air. “We must make those that won’t forgive weep. That is our job. Our solemn duty. We must leave the rest to the writers, or do it ourselves, if inspiration takes us.”
“Have you ever written anything Fenwick?”
“Oh yes, but it’s true most of it went on the fire. When it comes to writing I only have one piece of advice. Write what you want to hear. Maybe it’s something no one else will say. And don’t let bitterness guide your pen. I must have thrown a thousand reems on the fire to discover it.” The young actors didn’t understand what he meant. Charles looked up at the clock on the wall. Soon it would be time to mount the stage and nerves were jangling.
“I have to go in five minutes, can I ask you, may I be so bold……. any advice for the audition?’ Charles asked the slumped Fenwick as he stood up and brushed himself down. The reclining actor’s response was immediate.
“Use your nerves. Let’s not call it fear quite yet. And remember, when you go on that stage, it’s life that you go to honour. Remember those that came before, and those yet to arrive of course.”
“I shall try and remember that. Thank-you Fenwick.”
“A ti.” Said Fenwick as his fellow actors kissed him goodbye and left the dressing room. The door closed and Fenwick’s world fell again into silence. He poured a little water into the ashtray to aid the extinguishing of his cigarette and then gazed into the dressing room mirror. He wondered why it was common in theatrical dressing rooms to have the mirror so well lit. All those light bulbs. He himself always wanted to hide before a performance. ‘The actor needs to know his own face is why’, he thought again. It was part of his character to keep coming to the same conclusions. He stared at himself unconsciously in the mirror. He didn’t even notice he was doing it until the wrinkled lines of all those long years jumped out at him. He hadn’t always looked like this. So strange how time changes the body, he thought. He could just make out in the reflection his six-year-old face and ten and fifteen and twenty-one and thirty-three and forty-eight and fifty-seven and all the fast times he had spent in between.
The eyes in his head connected with the eyes in the mirror. They had lost none of their fire. He wondered what happens when dreams are fulfilled and wondered also whether the reward was happiness. The inevitable cannot be avoided. Old age was forcing him to ask certain questions which he didn’t seem to will. Questions that he never asked when he was young. Even though he was on the verge of old age he had the strong feeling that the great adventure always lay ahead. Maybe the great adventure was death. Maybe not. He didn’t know. Perhaps the true nature of things was a ludicrous sort of beauty. Then by accident he detected a flicker of fear in his own eyes. He wasn’t, in his nature, a man that dwelt on death, life provided enough of a preoccupation. When death or the expanding universe arose in his mind, neurons would fire, and his imagination would malfunction, sealing him in the firm grip of reality’s laws. He preferred the primary to the secondary world, unlike Ireton. He didn’t regard his imagination as one of the senses.
Still the face in the mirror stared back at him in the unwavering light. With each moment the image became less and less familiar until in the silent stupor of the room his mind registered the reflection as an imposter. A stranger yet to be understood, let alone befriended. But the expression in the reflection suggested the image wanted to converse with him. There was something that talking could expose that thinking never could. The image in the mirror dissolved and suddenly reappeared, metamorphosised into a man he used to know. It was an actor he had worked with in a theatre in Bristol when he was young. He saw the image of the face of this man from his distant past and became overawed with a dreadful panicked sense of fear that had within moments brought him to a fevered nausea. “Hello again.” Said the face in the mirror silently. Fenwick’s teeth began to peel back over his lips in terror and he put his arm over his eyes as if to protect him from the terrible light. He shouted “Go away!” Trembling with emotion. He rubbed over his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket but when he looked again in the mirror all he saw was his old face looking back at him in astonishment, framed by the glowing lightbulbs.
Fenwick picked up a handkerchief and dabbed at his sweating face. He recalled beyond doubt that the shocking vision he had seen in the mirror was an actor he once knew. The actor’s name was Joseph. He had committed suicide by throwing himself off the Woolwich ferry into the black soul dark murk of the Thames only one week previously. It had been reported in The Evening Standard in a small clip on the back pages and he had been alerted to the news by one of his colleagues at the theatre. The news had caused a fissure in Fenwick’s mind. He didn’t mean for the man to die, he just wanted the job, that was all. It wasn’t malevolence. Charles and Mary went to lunch the following week and sat by the window of a pub near Holborn as the rain against the window made them both tingle.
“I met Fenwick this morning.”
“How is he?”
“He seemed a bit troubled. A bit distant.” Said Charles.
“You think so?”
“Something has got to him. He was wan looking. Like he hadn’t slept properly for a while. He looked depressed to me. Like he was suffering.”
“Poor Fenwick. I wonder what it could be.” Said Charles. Secretly Mary knew. The summer before she had stayed briefly with Joseph on the Isle of Wight. They soon developed a symbiotic friendship which had fully blossomed within a few long days. When news reached her that Joseph was dead, she fainted in front of the cast of the play, a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the repertory theatre at Frinton-On-Sea. And now as she slowly caressed the edge of her gin and tonic tumbler a look of great sadness came naturally in her eyes, a look that Charles registered. He knew her well enough and for a fleeting moment thought that she might be hiding something, some secret perhaps.
“I was hoping you might know.” She said.
That same afternoon Fenwick, (pronounced Fennick to himself and those that knew him and Fen-wick by those who didn’t, postmen, dole officer’s and the like) decided to leave the theatre and go for a walk over the river into the west end. It was an autumn day in England, the perfect conditions for facing depression and for clarifying moods. He walked through the thousand colour park and nature extracted his fear and anxiety. He became calm, like he was a child again on the green leafy sidings on the railway tracks on summers days in south London, where death did not exist.
He liked to walk alone sometimes. But only sometimes. He would occasionally boast to people how happy he was in his own company, but the reality was since his childhood and all through his life he needed the company of others almost, at times, to the point of craving. That’s why his hermit allusions were myth. But then again, he saw the ability he had to delude himself as a great strength. He walked from his small flat on the council estate where he lived alone, along the busy streets of cars and buses until he came to the bridge that spanned the river and stopped to light a cigarette. He looked over the water and used imagination and memory to envisage Soho in his mind’s eye, an area of the world that was to him in hiatus. He recalled what the man had said to him about the glory days of London in the late 1960’s, the colour and the genius. “The best place……………….’ he paused for thought ‘in the world.’ His dreaming continued after the cigarette had singed his fingers. “Where are they all now?” He wondered. He imagined bodies in graves, decomposed, eaten by millipedes and worms. “There is a kind of beauty to all truth, even the most melancholic kind’ he thought. The autumn wind picked up and dry, dead leaves began to hit against the lower part of his legs. He walked across the bridge and stopped half way where he turned three hundred and sixty degrees to take in the scene. “Good old London.” He said aloud. Once he had imbibed his fill he carried on his way, concerned if he looked too long, he might break the spell. To Fenwick, London was a country. It was its own entity, its own nation almost, with its own particular history, its own customs, its own laws and above all, its own imagination. It could never be one thing because it was always changing. He would smile inwardly when the claim was made that there were greater cities in the world. He looked at the sunlight dancing on the Thames and saw Blake and Shakespeare in the mortal impermanence of the water. ‘Even Mozart has played here’ he thought.
For the thousandth time he got on the escalator at London Bridge station and descended to the bowels. It was, until that day, the place he hated most. The dreary concourse churning out the same old stream. He looked at the crowd like bees in the hive, heads down, eyes fixed and drifting, ignoring each other as they went about their dull games. It was as if everyone’s life was on pause until they got somewhere else. He felt the old rancour conjured up by the soulless place. And then, suddenly, as he glided down the escalator, he saw it all differently. He saw the man with the hands in his pockets on his way out of London to visit his elderly Grandparents. It was kindness extant. He saw a woman carrying a violin case and wondered what music might be played soon. He saw two old friends meeting. What he had loathed, shunned and dreaded for so long, in a moment, became the source of all love.
When he was away from the river and walking the streets towards the Strand, he retreated into his private thoughts watching the people busying themselves going here and there. His mind turned slowly to his own work. Out of all professions, the aging process is perhaps strangest of all for the actor. There are ways of making a young actor look convincingly old, but not the other way around. That’s how it was, at this time, for Fenwick. He no longer desired to look at his own face, (at least not for long anyway). He felt he had the face the people who rejected him deserved.
He sometimes walked around London on his own precisely because it made him lonely, or perhaps more accurately, because it made him feel alone. As if he were apart and a part from, and of the human race. Once, when he was walking through Victoria Underground Station at rush hour, he saw a man lying on the floor having a heart attack. It’s true there was a ticket guard that worked there crouched over the ailing man calling his colleague for assistance but he never forgot the image of the droves of people that walked by en masse, as if they were a great herd of wildebeest, and a lion had come to take one of them away.
It was just after midday. Thinking a couple of drinks would underpin the excitement and freedom of the morning he thought he would walk in the direction of one of his favourite London pubs, The Forlorn Hope, to greet midday with a clink. The one thing that could correctly steer his aimless London walks was booze or ‘the sauce’ or ‘the source’ as he was sometimes heard saying.
Fenwick had become an actor at the age of sixteen when he appeared in a local play at the amateur dramatic society. He only had one line ‘I haven’t seen him today; did you try the Red Lion?’ a line which he never forgot. He was an actor constantly on the cusp, like the vast majority of that said profession, but he had had some good roles, some in west end theatres and a few notable television and film appearances during the 1970’s and 1980’s but by the last decade of the twentieth century his career had waned and, as in his private life, he struggled for even a walk on part. The keen glimmer in his stare remained true however. As he approached his 67th year he had remained remarkedly untouched by a lifetime’s hard living and he expected to keel over any day now, or worse, the thing that he really did secretly fear or let us say did well to keep locked away at the back of his mind was some sort of illness that would gift him a slow, lingering death where his memory would die before his body. A great insult he felt to those who never lingered when they did have life in them.
Dark clouds appeared overhead and doused Fleet Street in rain so Fenwick made a twenty second walk to the nearest pub whose sign outside seemed to him like two open arms ready for a hug and he ducked in through the door just as two patrons were leaving with their faces contorting to the prospect of getting wet. He thanked them for keeping the door open for him and entered. He thought of what he had said about the ghosts that haunt the theatres and concluded it must also be true of pubs. He pushed his damp white hair to one side and he pressed his handkerchief to dry his face which came alive at its removal at the spectacle of the pub he had overlooked for many years. He used to go to Fleet Street in the great days of the newspaper, when the secrets of Whitehall were disseminated over strong beer and ploughman’s lunches. Now it was no more. Modern technology, or ‘progress,’ had seen to that.
It would do until the rain passed, or he found someone to share a cab into Soho with. Hackney carriages had always been a great luxury to Fenwick, when it came to drink and walk or be driven sober, he would without exception opt for the former. He looked around the pub and saw the youngsters in suits on their lunchtime sojourn knowing that every working person there, which was almost the entire clientele, would soon vacate and he could even have the pub to himself.
“Can I get a large Rioja please?” He spied the assortment of crisps and nuts behind the bar but then decided against eating as it was a Monday and he remembered that was the day he liked to fast. He turned around to see a man hunched at the bar and smiled as they made eye contact.
“What the fuck are you looking at. You ain’t fucking Millwall.” The man spiked in an aggressive way. Fenwick turned his head and looked away and remembered the irrefutable logic of an old friend of his that had once said in response to Fenwick’s story about being the victim of a robbery ‘there’s cunts out there old son.’ Fenwick turned to the aggressive stranger and said “Wonderful thing chance. Have a good day.” He smiled at the aggressive young man and absolved himself of spiteful thoughts. The slightly bewildered man had no response. He turned, tutted and absconded, confused at having been forgiven.
Fenwick had arranged to meet Ireton at the Dog and Bell but the torrential London rain was keeping him ensconced for the duration of the bottle of claret. Paradise. He savoured every mouthful of the elixir, courting the rain and venerating all that grows. He looked out at the people rushing around on fleet street in the rain and realised not only was he alive, but that he had done some good living. “Heaven is dying and knowing you brought at least a little love into the world. If I could write a letter from heaven that is what it would say. Alas, it looks like there is only oblivion out there.” He looked up at the clock on the wall and noticed that he was already late for his meeting with Ireton. They were old friends, different in character but similar in spirit. They had been friends since their early twenties. Fenwick had a dislike of British politics and a liking of England, Ireton had a loathing of Thatcher and her clan, and a strong desire to leave England behind. ‘Too many memories’ he said in an all-encompassing way. He had never welcomed the thought of a life in one place. He had in fact lived in many places and claimed once to Fenwick that he was only in London for work and it had been ‘twelve long dark years since’.
Ireton entered the near empty pub and breathed in the aroma. He swirled it from his nostrils to his senses and then finally his mind as he rolled the smell of the carpet and the dish washed stagnant beer tang around, as if they were at the bottom of a wine glass. He looked around and saw Fenwick in the corner reading the racing post. This meant he was skint until payday. He always gambled when he was down to his last. It had always been like that. Resting by his glass of mild was a collection of Heaney’s poems. He was like that too.
‘Ah. There you are. I thought you were getting the bus,’ said Fenwick.
“Solvitur ambulando.” Replied Ireton.
‘On the sauce already?’
‘The source?’
‘The sauce.’
‘The source of the sauce?’
‘No, I mean the sauce of the source.’
‘What is this sorcery? I can assure you I am in no way indebted to the black arts.’
‘Glad to hear it, I had my doubts.’ Unglazed, the eyes of Ireton made their way to the bar where he ordered two Glenfiddich’s, a pint of Guiness and a pint of amber ale from a landlord in a shirt and tie.
“So, how have you been? Any work on the horizon? I see you’re reading the racing post. You’ve been thespianing.’ It was their euphemism for unemployment. To the two old friend’s unemployment was nothing to be ashamed of. In their own ways they had had the best times of their lives when unemployed, poor by choice, and free, with the constant support of sunshine and music. It was much harder psychologically to have nothing when it was cold. This, explained Fenwick, was the motivating factor of western history. “There’s an audition next week for an advert for a gin company. They want someone to play the waiter in some restaurant or other. Worth getting out of bed for.”
“When are you going to try and do some serious work?”
“You mean the comedy?”
“Yes.”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Cheers.” And they lifted their glasses and clinked. Before he downed the drink, he took a moment to notice the light shining through the amber gold liquid which made him think of the universe and evolution at almost the same moment, as he had done the night before. The whiskey rolled down his throat leaving the afterburn of the Scots in its wake.
“How about you. Still at the same place?
“Do you mean have I been sacked since last week?’
“Yes.’
‘No.”
They sat in silence in the corner of the pub both having the simultaneous thought that work was becoming more relevant and less interesting the older they got.
“Let’s go outside for a smoke.” They bemoaned the smoking ban as they walked outside into the cold day but although they missed the freedom of the old days, they both accepted it was probably for the best. The thought of cancer always invigorated Fenwick, but never enough to ever make him give up.
“I read this today.” Said Ireton and he produced a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘The highest goal of art is not to show the world as it really is but to show it what it could be.’
He looked at his friend long and hard.
“Maybe the worst thing in this world is to live in fear. Or should I say, devote yourself to comfort? Did you have the chance to do different things with your life but worried always about the loss of what you have. When you die you lose everything, and die we must. We only have our adventures, in the end.” Said Fenwick, in a failed attempt at a direct response.
The next day Fenwick received the news he had failed the audition. In the moment of rejection his mind turned to Joseph, and to her. Her memory becoming more distant and vivid as each season changed. He looked into the shaving mirror, splashed the razor around in the foamy sink and wondered to himself whether enough books had been written, or was there still room for more. Should there be a new literature for this century, or should we just borrow from the past from now on. He felt a flex of guilt at even thinking the thought. He thought about Ireton’s note. ‘Of course there should be new art’ he said to himself.
Feature Image: Donald Tong
