(Forgive my presumptuousness in telling you all this, by the way, but if I don't I'm going to lose my husband.)
I had never seen a movie before. Not one. I had lived ten years absolutely untroubled by the knowledge of such things. I suppose I'm a bit stupid, really. ‘That's Marlon Brando,’ my father said. ‘He's the best actor in the world.’ I watched, delighted to be up late, being initiated into the privileges of adulthood, studying this Marlon Brando, this actor, who was now at the centre of a brawl. Some men put Brando under a shower, the women fled upstairs, and Brando began to cry. He walked outside the house in his wet T-shirt, and I saw him – like Blanche Dubois sees him when she first comes to the Kowalskis' apartment in Elysian Fields, like audiences first saw him, tormenting Jessica Tandy in the original Streetcar in the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1947, like Tennessee Williams first saw him, in his original stage direction: Animal joy in his being is implicit in all of his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and the taking of it, not with weak indulgence dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens.
I saw and I saw and I still see. I like to revisit all my favourite bits of his face, to tour them. The folds over the corners of his eyes which make it seem as if a force is pressing down on him, as if he's subject to a doubled gravity. There's a kind of thumbprint on his brow where something powerful has marked him. The Golden Gate mouth too beautiful not to be disgusted by the ugliness of the human speech it must form. The curve where his jawbone meets his neck, seemingly the locus of all the strength in his head. The T-shirt torn so that it hangs off one shoulder like an emperor's toga. Brando was calling upstairs like a tomcat: ‘Stella!! STELLA!!!’ The thunderclap volume of his voice had the power to hurt.
‘What's the matter?’ my father was suddenly saying. And something did seem to be going wrong with me. Air was coming in but it wasn't going out. Brando sank to his knees before Stella, burying his face in her thighs. Everything was beginning to shut down on me. My breathing had become an alarming fish-pant. ‘Don't ever leave me, baby! Don't ever leave me!’ the best actor in the world was murmuring, semi-audible under my breathing. My parents had forgotten the film and ferried me to the kitchen table where my father quizzed me about things I might have eaten. Maybe I'd had a peanut-stuffed lobster stashed under my pillow? I couldn't muster the breath to reply. Time was beginning to thicken and deepen. I could see very clearly the fur coat of dust on our never-used fondue set. My mother gave up trying to open the airways in my throat with a spoon and called an ambulance. It was all happening very far away – I was dying, peacefully. And like a stone in the shoe of my peace was the fear that was beginning to harden into a certainty, that although dying wasn't so bad I would not be able to bear the humiliation of having my mother know why I had died. And she knew perfectly well. She understood precisely why I was gasping like a dog on a summer's day while next door in New Orleans Marlon Brando was smashing crockery. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had stopped hyperventilating and had to listen, suffused with shame, as my parents tried to talk their way round what had happened. Everybody was standing about lying their heads off. But what would the ambulance men have said if they'd known the truth? ‘Marlon Brando, Mrs Quirke? Do you think that was wise? We've had two Montgomery Clifts and a McQueen tonight already.’
This was the formative incident of my childhood. We lived in a tiny hill village in the South of France where every Saturday old Claude would lead his donkey Napoleon up the winding rocky path to the village square, laden with dusty old reels of film. The loveable village blacksmith, Rémi, would set up his projector facing the whitewashed wall of the church, Claude would feed in those magical strips of colour and light, and everyone would abandon their baking and games of pétanque and come rushing into the square agog with excitement to see the wondrous spectacles: Police Academy 6, Porky's, Evil Dead 2, Conan the Destroyer and Turner & Hooch.
I had been banned from the magical screenings in the square since I seemed so overwhelmed by the power of these ‘movies’. Yet old Claude took pity on me and allowed me to climb up his ancient olive tree from whose branches –
Alright. It wasn't the formative incident of my childhood. Life isn't so neatly patterned. But the first time I saw Marlon Brando, I nearly died.
Some time afterwards you could have found me standing outside Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford with my elder brother Saul and my younger brother Ben, all three of us holding up the books we had just bought with our pocket money so my mother could take a picture. Ben's book was called Where Do I Come From? and Saul's was called What is Happening to Me? My book was called Who Am I? Who am I? I'm a girl who loves actors.
We lived next door to the writer Jan Morris, and one day my mother said to me, ‘Antonia, listen, I've got something to tell you. James from next door is now Jan. So if you see him wearing a dress, tell her how pretty it is.’ And I thought: Isn't that nice? Anything to do with sex was nice. Sex had our respect. The defining struggle of my father's life had been between the Catholic priesthood and my mother. Sex had fought with God, as an equal, until they could both see each other's point of view. The children were the winners. And so we liked sex. As a nurse, my mother tended to turn everything into biology. ‘That bit at the top,’ she would say, when Ben and I were in the bath, ‘is Ben's foreskin. And those are his testicles!’ Bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. At fancy dress parties Saul and Ben and I went naked as Adam, Cain and Eve, saving on the price of costumes. We carried an enormous brown-and-yellow-striped home-knitted snake that was otherwise used as a draught-excluder. When we grew too old to go as Adam and Eve, we attended parties as Pollution, dressed in black and trailing empty cans of tuna while our new brothers and sisters nakedly paraded the snake. We were eco-friendly. The stickers in our car said ‘Nurses Against the Bomb’ and ‘Goats Rule’.
When my father became a psychologist, we moved to Manchester and lived in a modest house with campaigning students as lodgers, and the children kept coming: Patrick, Suzannah, Luke and Molly. ‘Do you know what Mum and Dad are?’ Suzannah asked me and my friend Mischa, as the three of us whiled away an afternoon inserting Crayolas into our vaginas. ‘What?’ ‘Perverts, that's what they are.’ ‘Perverts,’ I whispered to myself, rather liking the sound of it. Mischa's glamorous Australian mother Jill wrote the questions for University Challenge among piles of textbooks in her kitchen. It was not a happy house. Jill drank, and kept a bitter eye on Mischa's father Bruce, who came and went in a chocolate Jaguar, supposedly dealing antiques from the boot but mostly parked around the corner with the woman from Thresher's.
Right off the bat, my mother wasn't keen on Mischa, having caught me leaning up against a bureau inhaling on a pencil and saying to Ben: ‘You are a cold-hearted prick who wants to see me hanging from a tree in the garden.’ I had been possessed by the glamour of adultery. The atmosphere at Mischa's was always one of potential murder. The phenomenal scale of the arguments. The range and randomness of the information spilled, the strength-regathering silences in between. When she wasn't working, Jill sat stiffly in an armchair in the study, her dark hair falling to her waist in one solid piece like a bin-bag. There she would relay the drama down the telephone to Bamber Gascoigne.
‘Oh, thank Christ,’ she said when Gascoigne picked up at the other end. ‘Bamber – he's here! But he's pissed.’ Bruce, sober, handed her a glass of water and some aspirin. Jill looked up at him and spoke, low, into the phone. ‘He's making me take some pills. I don't know what they are.’
On