17
DREAM’S RANSOM
Guests were arriving in fancy dress, for a party of a very special kind. Hundreds of vehicles lined the quiet Buckinghamshire lane, and as I searched for a parking space I was overtaken by a studio van carrying two Marie Antoinettes, a pirate chief, and a trio of Roman senators. Their rouged cheeks and painted lips gave them the look of plague victims on their way to a fever hospital.
My dream of Shanghai had materialised, like all dreams, in the least expected place, among the imposing houses built around the golf course at Sunningdale, little more than a fifteen-minute drive from Shepperton. I had lived for thirty years within sight of the studios but had never stepped inside the huge sound stages and was unprepared for the scale of a major Hollywood production. A genie had sprung from the pages of my novel and was busily conjuring the past into life, working with an extravagance more than a match for the original Shanghai.
The city of memory whose streets I had redrawn within the limits of the printed page had materialised in a fusion of the real and the super-real. Memory had been superseded by a new technology of historical recovery, where past, present, and future could be dismantled and reshuffled at the producer’s whim.
I had set out from Shepperton at seven that morning, expecting to find a small location crew at the Sunningdale mansion. Rented by the film company, the house would play the part of my childhood home in Amherst Avenue. Much of the film had already been shot in Shanghai, where the banks and hotels along the Bund stood unchanged since the Communist seizure of the city in 1949. But the houses in Amherst Avenue were semi-derelict, turned into tenement apartments crammed with Chinese families and makeshift offices. No. 31 Amherst Avenue now contained the New China Electronic Import and Export Agency. Its drive was overgrown, its rotting window frames were supported by bamboo scaffolding, and the swimming pool had been roofed over to provide a damp-proof warehouse.
Fortunately, a reasonable replica of Amherst Avenue lay to hand on the other side of the world, a few miles from the studios at Shepperton. These handsome, half-timbered mansions, built in the 1930s beside the golf course, had served as the models for the houses which the British émigrés like my parents had built in the suburbs of Shanghai—houses whose Tudor exteriors were themselves façades, hiding American bathrooms, kitchens, and air conditioning.
There was something odd in the notion that the home of a near-neighbour could serve so plausibly as my childhood house, as if these Thames Valley towns formed part of Greater Shanghai. While I followed the studio van carrying the party of costumed extras I looked up at the familiar mullioned windows and realised how shrewd an eye the art director had brought to his job. He had convincingly re-created the exotic city of memory from materials far nearer to me than I cared to accept.
In place of the small location crew that I expected, a fleet of vehicles had taken over this quiet corner of Sunningdale. At first sight the scene resembled the evacuation of London—dozens of trailers sat in the surrounding fields, huge marquees stretched their canvas over miles of duckboard, double-decker coaches, restaurant buses, and lavatory trailers were parked in lines, generators drummed at the cold morning air, sending their current through a maze of cables to the location three hundred yards away. A private police force controlled the traffic, and a bus service ferried cast and crew from the trailers and makeup vans.
Not one house, I discovered, but four of the mansions had been rented by the film company, each contributing a segment of my childhood home—one provided a drained swimming pool, another the reception rooms and lawn where the fancy-dress party on the eve of Pearl Harbor would be held, while the third and fourth would re-create the kitchen, the dining room, and my own bedroom. Later that day, as I walked around the site, I stared through the windows of the mansions around the golf course, wondering what other segments of my childhood were hidden among the bridge tables and billiard rooms.
I parked my car on the edge of a commandeered tennis court and watched a team of scene-shifters unloading the 1930s props—Chinese screens, Art Deco lamps, tigerskin rugs, and white telephones. All these technicians, I realised, from the barber who had given me a period short-back-and-sides to the carpenters, lighting specialists, and costume designers, were working to construct a more convincing reality than the original I had known as a child.
The clock of my life had come full circle, in all sorts of unexpected ways. In a kindly gesture, the director had invited me to play the part of a guest at the costume party. Grateful to him, I had accepted with all the nervousness of a passenger volunteering to parachute from an airliner. A benign conspiracy was already in motion. Many of my neighbours had worked for years as part-time extras and had been hired to play internees at Lunghua camp. Only the previous afternoon, leaving the wine store in Shepperton High Street, I was greeted by the mother of a girl who had gone to the same school as Lucy and Alice.
“Jim, I’ve just heard. We’re in the camp together! Tim Bolton and the Staceys are going to be there…”
Not only the mother but her daughter, now twenty-five, would play a Lunghua prisoner. I almost believed that I was dreaming, and that my sleeping mind was recruiting my Shepperton neighbours into the narrative of the dream. Walking home, I wondered why I had come to live in Shepperton in the first place. Thirty years earlier, Miriam and I had picked the town at random, but perhaps I had known even then that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai and that it might well be filmed at these studios, using my own neighbours as extras and the nearby mansions that had inspired the houses in Amherst Avenue. Deep assignments ran through our lives; there were no coincidences.
“Jim, you made it!” One of the American producers waved to me through the electricians and lighting men who were moving in and out of the house. She held my arm, as if suspecting that I might lose my nerve and escape. “We weren’t sure if you were going to turn up.”
“How could I miss it? I don’t mind saying, Kathy, it feels pretty strange…”
“I bet it does. It’s a good thing you decided against coming to Shanghai with us. How does the house look?”
“Uncanny.” White pigeons released during the shooting of the children’s party the previous day still strutted on the lawn, and a security man sent them fluttering into the roof. “I should have bought it thirty years ago.”
“Then you’d have had nothing to write about. And we wouldn’t be here … We’re shooting the party in about an hour, so you’ll have to change. The dresser’s waiting for you upstairs.”
“I need a disguise…”
While we spoke I became aware that a three-man film crew was quietly recording our exchange for a documentary about the production, a film within a film that took its place in the corridor of mirrors. This sense of illusions trapped within illusions persisted as I entered the large bedroom on the first floor. Here the principal actors were changing into their costumes, a cheery group whom I recognised from scores of films and television plays. Their faces seemed oddly different, but when they put on their makeup they grew more real. By contrast, I felt an impostor inside my John Bull costume of red tailcoat, top hat, and Union Jack waistcoat.
Later, in the long drawing room overlooking the garden, I stood with the party guests in a virtual replica of the house at Amherst Avenue. On the table beside me were copies of Time and Life dated December 1941, a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and I almost expected the white telephone to ring with a warning that we should leave on the next passenger steamer for Singapore.
Standing with a glass of whisky in my hand, I felt curiously like one of the intruders who sometimes gate-crashed my parents’ parties—Axis agents posing as real-estate dealers, professional bridge players with a sideline in morphine, ex-nightclub hostesses on the lookout for my mother’s jewellery box—whom Boy and Number 2 Boy would escort firmly to the door. I waited for my parents to appear and ask me to leave, failing to recognise me in this caricature costume.
“Hello…
” An engaging twelve-year-old with a slim face and mature eyes stood in front of me, wearing Turkish slippers, spangled vest, and trousers. He introduced himself confidently.
“I’m you…”
As he extended his hand I could see him doubting if this overweight figure could ever have resembled himself.
“… and we’re your mum and dad!”
An attractive couple in their early thirties, he in pirate costume, she dressed as a milkmaid, greeted me laughingly. While we spoke the lights filled the drawing room with a powerful glare. The dream was about to dream itself. The camera crew were ready for a tracking shot through the party. After talking to each other about the threat of war, the guests would say their goodbyes and step through the hallway into the drive, where a second camera would record our departure.
The director came up to me with a friendly word.
“All set, Jim?” He nodded encouragingly. “Just relax—put a hand on your hip. You look as if you know how to hold a glass of whisky.”
“I’ve had a little practice—but that’s as far as it goes.”
“What about a line of dialogue? You can give yourself one right now.”
I stared at him, too tongue-tied to even say my name. He patted me reassuringly and walked back to the monitor. Everyone fell silent and the camera began to turn. I felt myself drifting into a trance, trying to imagine this line of dialogue missing from my earlier life, which I had spent my entire career trying to define.
Followed by the camera, we moved towards the hall. Lights were shining in the driveway, reflected from the polished roofs of the cars into which we would step. Drawn up on the raked gravel were a Buick roadster of the 1930s, a high-roofed Packard like my parents’ car, a black gangster’s Chrysler with running boards and white-wall tyres, and a 1940 Lincoln Zephyr convertible. Beside them stood Chinese chauffeurs in prewar Shanghai uniforms, caps under their arms as they opened the rear doors for the departing guests.
Staring at the scene, I tried to focus my eyes on the camera and the watching crowd beyond the gates. I stepped into the rear seat of the Packard, remembering in time to remove my top hat. The actor playing my chauffeur closed the door and took his seat behind the wheel. As the cars moved across the drive between the departing guests I felt that I was being carried away from this quiet Buckinghamshire lane, across another world and another time to the Shanghai of half a century earlier, towards the lights of the Bund and the department stores of the Nanking Road, through the French Concession to the tramline terminus at the end of the Avenue Joffre, to the barbed-wire checkpoints that led to the western suburbs and the high-gabled house where a small English boy played with his German toys, surprised by the white pigeons that had taken shelter on his roof.
* * *
The cabin stewards cleared away the last drinks before we landed, moving nimbly through the debris of the twelve-hour flight from London. Sitting beside Cleo in the front row, the cockpit of the 747 far above us, I peered over her shoulder at the northeast suburbs of Los Angeles. Vast highways busy with cars stretched across the sun-filled landscape, covered by a yellow haze as if the sand had begun to evaporate from the desert.
“Swimming pools…” Cleo pointed below. “Thousands of them. When the rains fail these people will survive. How do you feel?”
“Fine. I’ll recover. As if I’ve taken too many amphetamines.”
“You have. Don’t worry, you’ll land in about three days, when it’s all over.”
“I hope so. It’s a long way to go to a movie.”
“But what a movie.” In fact, neither of us had seen the film. “It’s a shame you’re in fancy dress—no one will recognise you.”
“It’s hardly a major role.”
“Rubbish—it’s modest but crucial.”
“Cleo, I may have been edited out altogether.”
“Of course you haven’t! How could they?” she huffed, indignant at the very idea. “You’re the only one who was really there.”
“I’m not sure that’s true—I think the actors felt that I was the odd man out, the only one who wasn’t real. Most of them had been back to Shanghai.”
“You could have gone with them.”
“I know, but I hadn’t the nerve. I wasn’t ready to face everything again—I’ve spent my whole life trying to sort it out. This is the right way to go back to Shanghai, inside a film. In a sense they started shooting it fifty years ago…”
The world premiere would be held in three days’ time, at a theatre in Westwood. Seat belt fastened, I waited as the plane turned over the sea and swept in across the idle waves. Despite the long flight from London, and what I had said to Cleo, I felt remarkably at ease. I looked down at the deserted beaches, with their isolated palms standing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean that I had last seen in 1946. I had never visited Los Angeles, but it seemed right that my childhood should meet its end in this desert city whose limitless imagination had remythologised the past and invented the future.
An hour later we were rolling along the San Diego freeway in the studio car, looking at the landscape of Los Angeles that neither of us had seen before but which was instantly familiar. Thousands of films and television series had installed an intact replica of the city in our minds, far more accurate than the preposterous Beefeater and pearly queen image conveyed by the British Tourist Board. Vaguely garish bungalows and storefronts stretched for miles under the tangle of overhead wires, a terrain of ticky-tack and painted glue fading in the sun, as if the entire city were a dusty film set waiting to be refurbished in some as yet to be financed production. I loved every inch of it and felt instantly at home.
Then, as we left the freeway and joined Santa Monica Boulevard, I saw the first anomaly, a jarring intrusion from another level of reality. A billboard the size of a tennis court stood beside the road, advertising the film we had come to see, my own name below those of the producers and director. For a moment the dream had woken and summoned its sleeper.
Identical signs reared over the rooftops of Los Angeles, and even over Sunset Boulevard, where another writer, Joe Gillis, had become entangled in the Hollywood dream. In our hotel I switched on the television set to find commercials for the film filling the screen with low-flying Mustangs, a real Shanghai burning again as Japanese soldiers marched down the Bund and my boyhood self was swept up in a panic of coolies and office clerks. Arm in arm, Cleo and I stared from our terrace at the billboard over Wilshire Boulevard. My past had escaped from my head and was clambering across the rooftops like some doomed creature in a forties monster movie.
Happily, the irony of all this was not lost on Cleo.
“How did Sinbad get the genie back in the bottle? Think.”
“God knows—some piece of low cunning, I suppose.”
“You’ve spent years writing about the media landscape, and now it’s escaped and stood you in the palm of its hand.”
“I’ll rent a car tomorrow. We’ll find the real Los Angeles.”
“Dear, wake up. This is the real Los Angeles.”
The next morning we set out on a circuit of this mysterious city. Entire districts sat in the musty sunlight like intact fragments of television episodes, as strangely familiar as the revisited streets of one’s childhood. Far from being the youngest, Los Angeles was the oldest city of the twentieth century, the Troy of its collective imagination. The ground courses of our deepest dreams were layered into its past among the filling stations and freeways.
* * *
On the day before the premiere, while Cleo was visiting English friends in Santa Barbara, the reception desk rang to say that a Mrs. Weinstock had called to see me. Assuming she was a local journalist, I asked the desk clerk to send her up to our suite. Moments later, I opened the door to find a handsome American woman in her middle sixties, strikingly dressed in a Persian-lamb coat and silk hat. Her commanding eyes rose instantly to the challenge when I failed to recognise her.
“James, you’re too busy to remember me?” S
he stepped forward, in a heady aura of perfume and expensive fabrics. She seized my shoulders and pressed my face to her smooth cheeks. “Olga! Olga Ulianova from Shanghai!”
“Olga…?” I was pinned against the television screen by my childhood governess, who had materialised from the Hollywood sky like the billboards and TV commercials. “Olga … I can’t believe it…”
“So you’d better start now.” She glanced around the suite, taking in every detail of the books on the table, Cleo’s clothes hanging in the bedroom, the open suitcases and presentation photographs. As she sized me up, deciding that no more than a few seconds’ inspection was needed, I tried to remember the edgy young woman I had last seen in the Del Monte nightclub. Despite the years, her features were almost unchanged, the lips as cutting as ever, the hectic eyes carrying out an inventory of my clothes, self-confidence, integration into the real world. But her face wore a curious mask, as if a child’s cheeks, nose, and chin had been slung from her temples, through which glared the penetrating eyes and sharp teeth of an old woman.
“You haven’t changed, James. Not even a little. You’re still riding your pedal bike.” She smiled shrewdly, slipping her coat across a chair. “But now you remember me?”
“Olga, yes … I’m still amazed to see you. Did the studio arrange this?”
“The studio? Everything isn’t a film, James. My daughter and I are staying with our friends in Van Nuys, so I thought, Let’s see how my James is.”
“I’m glad you did. But you got out of Shanghai?”
“Of course! Once the Americans left. Believe me, James, I’m not designed for Communism. I’m living in San Francisco for many years now…”