3

Herstory

HE

Well, I can't speak to your feelings.

SHE

To what are you speaking, if not my feelings?

From Table (1961) by Harauld Hughes,
published by Faber & Faber

Dan has hired an actress to play the young Lady Virginia Lovilocke. Extracts from her book Herstory are to be 'peppered throughout the piece'. I ask Dan why can't we ask the real Lady Lovilocke to read from it herself?

- We've only got her ladyship for an hour, max. And she's probably pretty juddery by now. She's got to be late eighties.

- And has she approved this?

- What do you mean, 'this'?

- Someone playing her?

- Why would I need her permission?

- Courtesy?

- Who are you? Sir Lancelot? Get over yourself, mate - it's not as if anyone owns their life story.

- But you can, and do, own your own book of your life story.

- We're basically promoting it. She should be paying us. Someone might even buy her book.

There is no heating in our abandoned office block; the walls are angry with bubbling mould. The actress is seated against a burnt-orange backdrop designed to evoke 'fading memory'. To her right, just beyond her reminiscences, lies a heap of silty office chairs and a water fountain in the foetal position. A pigeon protests in the light well. Dan beckons me away from the camera.

- Do you think she looks haughty enough?

We are standing by a monitor at the opposite end of the room, next to a whiteboard on which are written the words 'Always be solutioning'.

- Can she hear us?

- I hope not.

I drop my voice to an accusatory hiss.

- What do you mean, 'haughty'?

- I asked the casting lady for someone who had that posh, haughty look.

Dan has maintained the same speaking volume.

- You asked for someone with a posh, haughty look?

- What would you have asked for?

- Not that.

- I think I also said cruel-looking. But in an attractive way. Like, 'You are so far below me you're like a worm to me.'

- You find that attractive?

- Doesn't everyone?

He bounds over to Tony Camera and, even though no one is talking, loudly calls for silence.

Dust motes dance round the tendrils of the actress's beehive. I say 'actress' not just because I don't know her name, but because there is something apposite about using that depersonalised designation - the same abstract mononym used for Felicity Stoat's character in Platform.

Hughes's marriage to Stoat, which lasted from 1953 until its official dissolution in 1980, was unhappy, distant, but creatively productive; his marriage to Lady Lovilocke was happy, close and seemed to put his creativity into endless abeyance. Stoat never wrote her life story, but Lady Lovilocke did. Our actress leans forward to tell it.

CAPTION: '1965'

The first time I saw Harauld, we were in different rooms. I was at a girlfriend's house in Chelsea. She had taken delivery of a rather handsome new television set and wanted to give it a spin. A few of the old crowd had gathered for cocktails, along with some new faces, all illustrious, all attractive and very much part of the London 'scene'. I remember one of our number excitedly informing me that she'd just been to bed with one of The Beatles, she couldn't remember which one, and proceeded to do a terribly funny impression of his accent. I knew The Beatles because I was having an affair with a prominent pop photographer, or I thought I was, until I turned around and saw him enjoying a prolonged snog with a narrow model with long legs and jet-black hair, her miniskirt made micro as it caught on the velvet sofa. 'Well, that's a bust,' I thought, as his hungry hand spidered up her thigh, 'but I suppose that's men for you!'

As those assembled started to pair off and retire to various rooms, I realised I was alone, with only this new device for company. Could anything be more appalling? Drinking wine in front of the television! That's when I saw a man appear on the screen. Or rather, I heard a man from the screen, for I had dozed off, and it was a deep, urgent voice that had roused me. My Chablis had puddled around my own leg. Affronted, in a dreamy sort of way, I looked around for a napkin or anything low-value and absorbent. But the voice stopped me from looking for very long. It contained such potency, such poignancy, that I had to see from whence it came. Surely it would be a large, barrel-chested man, a dishy scrum forward of some kind. But no. The man was tall but slim, with a bookish manner and fierce black eyes. He was wearing a black jacket and a perfectly awful polo neck that made it look like he had no throat. He was standing on a black stage, lit only by a single spotlight. There were a few beads of sweat on his forehead; they danced near a tight throng of veins. He had a gap between his two front teeth and spat rather a lot as he spoke. He was presenting a short play of his called Platform, one of a series that featured in his very own show, entitled The Harauld Hughes Half-Hour Play.

Even when a mostly naked man walked into the room, in search of a sustaining slice of toast, I barely apprehended him. 'Would you like some?' he asked. 'Yes, please,' I'm told I replied, before drifting back to sleep. But I wasn't talking about the toast, and I wasn't talking about the man who had offered to make me some. I was talking about the man on the television. That man, of course, was Harauld Hughes. As I slept, I dreamed of him and hoped to be transported to that spotlight, for us to feel the heat of the arc lamp on us both. I had, in fact, fallen asleep rather close to an actual lamp, and this time it was the smell of my hair burning that woke me up. I bunged my head under the tap and headed straight out to the King's Road to buy a television. I must have looked a fright when I brought it home. My husband, Langley, was appalled. 'What will we do with it?' he said. He didn't notice that I'd had to cut off all my hair.

* * *

The next time I saw Harauld was six years later, at a poetry recital in honour of some of the poems T. S. Eliot thought of writing, but ultimately decided not to. Harauld had a protracted physical altercation with a latecomer that ended with the man losing some of his thumb. In fact, the man's cries can be heard on the vinyl recording of the event. Fortunately, my father was a viscount, and he helped Harauld settle the matter privately. The event certainly brought Harauld and I to one another's attention, but we were both married and already in the middle of other affairs. But the pull between us was to prove irresistible.

'1971'

October 12th

Finally met Harauld Hughes. He's even louder in person, and rather more handsome. His teeth aren't as bad as they look on television, and they're more yellow than black, even though he smokes like a bloody rocket. He gave me a volume of his own poetry. I didn't recognise the publisher. He said it was a limited-edition private pressing. I asked him why he didn't get it published properly. I hope he didn't take it as a slight. Nevertheless, he wrote a touching inscription: 'To Virginia. From Harauld.' 'Will you read it?' he asked. I said I would. 'How will I find out what you thought?' But I could feel Langley at my elbow and said I had to go. On the way back with L in the car, I couldn't stop thinking about H. He'd looked at me with such ferocity that it was either ardour or derision. I can't decide which. I dare say I don't care as long as he's thinking of me.

* * *

Over the years, many people have told me that they're convinced Harauld hated them. When I ask where they got that idea from, they say that it's something to do with the way he looked at them. I tell them not to worry; that, at first, Harauld looks at everyone like they're an ant. I once asked Harauld why he had to look so intensely at people, as if they were insects. 'But I like insects!' he said.

'1976'

Five years later, Harauld was competing in a charity badminton tournament to raise funds for one of those terrible conflicts that kept springing up in Africa, and he asked me to join him for the...