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.Come to think of it, I can’t remember if it’s identified as the Crown in the film, said Kilpatrick.Maybe he just wanted to do it to show he could, said Gordon, an exercise in style.A piece of magic.Isn’t that what films are about, making things appear to be what they are not? A forgery perhaps, but then forgery’s one of those crimes we secretly admire, we all feel a kind of glee when the experts are fooled.We’ve arrived, by the way, said Gordon.Kilpatrick had not been aware of the vehicle’s stopping.The passenger door opened seemingly by itself.Odilon the chauffeur was poised at its side when they disembarked.As they did so Kilpatrick saw one of those massive oak-doored portals you come across in certain streets in Paris.Odilon retired to the limousine.Gordon went up to the portal and pressed a button on the intercom.It gave off a noise as if of short-wave radio.Gordon spoke into the speaker.Doctor WhoThe doorbell rang.I went to the front door.It was the postman.He gave me an armful of post.Three days’ backlog addressed to John Kilfeather, 41 Elsinore Gardens, Belfast BT15 3FB, whether Northern Ireland or UK: letters, junk mail, packages.It was the morning after the day of my return to my dwelling place.Some show, said the postman, gesturing with a nod of his head to the street behind him.Three figures in white coveralls were shuffling at a snail’s pace down the pavement on this side of the road, three others on the other, holding long white wands in front of them like blind men, one or other of them stooping from time to time to examine the ground in greater detail, sometimes picking up something invisible to me and either discarding it, or depositing it in a plastic bag; and I supposed they must be blind indeed to anything beyond their immediate field of vision, a matter of a square yard or so at a time, so concentrated did they seem on their task.I nodded back at the postman.In the time it took me to sign for some packages, bid the postman good-day, and turn to go back into the house, the figures in white coveralls had barely moved from where they had been.I took the post into the front room and took a Stanley knife to the three packages.I knew they were books.One bore the sender’s name, Tgl Harmattan 2, Paris.This would be the Cocteau, Tour du monde en 80 jours.I couldn’t remember what the others might be; I order many books online.As it turned out, one was Three British Screenplays, edited by Roger Manvell and published by Methuen of London in 1950.The screenplays were of Brief Encounter, Odd Man Out, and Scott of the Antarctic.I had ordered it for Odd Man Out, but the other titles were not without interest.I opened the book and found the first page of Odd Man Out.I rolled a cigarette.This is what I read:1.Passenger ’plane.A scene from a passenger ’plane which is above cloudbanks.The clouds drift past, and as the ’plane banks and then dives, the scene is momentarily obscured, until we catch a glimpse of a large city in a gap between the wisping clouds.Sunlight shines through the clouds which thin and finally disappear, revealing the great scene below, with mountains surrounding the city.We dive swiftly down and approach towers, smoke stacks, tall steeples and see everything in sharper definition.Then into view there comes a busy main street with traffic and pedestrians moving below, gazing into shop-windows.Dissolve toI lit the cigarette, as I thought of it.As I smoked, the fog of memory cleared and I remembered the flying dreams of my childhood, when I would soar and swoop over Belfast, diving swiftly down and gliding along Royal Avenue at rooftop height, then just above head height.It is 1950-something, and I float above a bobbing sea of hats and caps.I am invisible to the crowds that throng the street, walking purposefully or aimlessly or gazing into shop windows and I do not know whether I am remembering a dream or daydreaming in the here and now, making it up as I go along.I take another draw of the roll-up and pause to hover at the window of Burton’s the Tailor, admiring the three-piece navy herringbone suit displayed on a headless mannequin.Three buttons, narrow lapels, narrow trouser cuffs, it must be the late 1960s now.Gone for a Burton, as in dead, the suit you are laid out in when your time comes.I know that Burton’s, where I got my first proper suit, is long since gone.So is the suit, into what oubliette I do not know.I’m daydreaming now, remembering.I’m coming on eighteen.This will be a birthday suit, so to speak.My father is standing outside the cubicle where I am being measured behind the drawn curtain: chest, shoulders, arms, waist, leg, the tailor deploying his tape with practised ease, jotting down my details in a notebook.I am in his book now, the suit already beginning to take shape in his mind’s eye.I feel slightly stoned.I lay the book on the desk and see a rolled cigarette beside it.I realize I am stoned.Only now do I get the scent of the Black Rose.Now I remember I’d rolled a joint just before my forced evacuation, and left it lying on the desk in my distraction.I am smoking a joint not the cigarette I’ve just rolled.I put it down to a happy accident.I’m beginning to see everything in sharper definition.I flick through the screenplay at random.Facing page 96 is a black and white still, captioned ‘SCENE 156: Shell realizes that Johnny is hidden in the Bar of the Four Winds’.Of course.The Four Winds.I remember that John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, also wrote The House of the Four Winds, a book I’ve never read, and I wonder if Carol Reed had it in mind when he renamed the Crown Bar.I think of the four points of the compass, and then of the Morning Star, whose sign is a compass rose or star, and again I remember that October afternoon which seems a life ago, the thunderstorm, and rain spattering the pages of the missing notebook.I look at the still.The character known as Shell, attired in shabby overcoat, scarf and bowler hat, is in the immediate foreground, glancing suspiciously to his right at something or someone out of shot.There are some twenty other men in the bar, many of them wearing hats or flat caps.Four of them, wearing white mackintoshes, look like detectives but are most likely not.It’s just what men wore back then, in 1947.Behind the bar is the chief barman, played by William Hartnell, who later went on to play the first Doctor Who.What was his name? Fencie, that was it.Implication of illicit dealings.The fence who sells on stolen goods, which are under defence of secrecy [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]