Sunsets Etc.

By Mark Binmore

Sunsets Etc is a glimpse into the life of an actor as he settles into a new home and his retirement phase. A place to escape from everything. Rooms to walk around in. A garden to sit in. To think. To wait. But to wait for what? 

Of course none of this happens. Memories come alive, his ghosts cannot escape and so he revisits the past.  

 

A beautiful friendship. 

The disheartening banal conversations with his parents resulting in a sudden realization that probably not all was what it appeared to be. 

Snippets of a forgotten love spoken in hush tones here and there. 

The fading roar of a director. 

His two patchwork women. 

A table. 

A step back into his acting life. 

Death. Decline. A sunset. A sunrise. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Binmore
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223301486

Book preview

Mark Binmore

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Now Is Not The Time For Trumpets

A Life Of Parties

A ‘Sorta Fairytale

Take Down The Flags

Nemesis

Beautiful Deconstruction

Everything Could Be So Perfect

Published by Fontana

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright ©Mark Binmore 2019

www.markbinmore.com

The right of Anonymous to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher of this book

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

Sunsets Etc is a glimpse into the life of an actor as he settles into a new home and his retirement phase. A place to escape from everything. Rooms to walk around in. A garden to sit in. To think. To wait. But to wait for what? Of course none of this happens. Memories come alive, his ghosts cannot escape and so he revisits the past.

A beautiful friendship. The disheartening banal conversations with his parents resulting in a sudden realization that probably not all was what it appeared to be. Snippets of a forgotten love spoken in hush tones here and there. The fading roar of a director. His two patchwork women. A table. A step back into his acting life. Death. Decline. A sunset. A sunrise.

'Fate always seems to pull the strings

I turned and you were gone.

While standing in the darkened wings

the music box played on.'

For Chris.

Your home inspired me.  Thank you for opening the windows.

And for Tom B. 

For nudging me in my dreams and allowing myself to pay you a compliment.

Annus Novas.

The house is never silent.

Even now, at dawn, it is still shrouded in darkness, except for the sound of muffled footsteps on the paving stones outside, of drunken revellers weaving their way home from midnight celebrations.

That was me once. 

Years ago. 

I remember one occasion when I met someone who worked with me on a film.  They stepped inside and stayed for two years.  It was then for the first time in my life the eternal I became we.  And the parties we would host.  The rooms would be in semi-darkness and through the grey haze of cigarette smoke, the vague shapes of people could be made out, some lounging against walls, others draped over odd bits of furniture. The somewhat subdued hum of voices, interspersed with the clinking of glasses and occasional bursts of laughter could be heard in the background.  Suddenly, a blast of music shattered the calm and filled the room with its vibrant, swinging sound. The reaction was instantaneous, everybody rose as one and started dancing to their favourite top tunes.

But then it all ended in true dramatic style after a fellow actor came for tea and said, 'Now, now. What’s going on? Something’s happened, hasn’t it? You haven’t spoken a word to each other since I arrived.' 

And that was in a different house. 

The present. 

From the garden, the constant drip of water, as regular as a ticking clock on a mantelpiece, falling into the paved courtyard outside the kitchen window. And then it starts, a favourite sound, like that of a crackling wood fire or snowdrift in a forest, the patter of heavy rain.  A new year has begun.  Slowly returning to the land of the living after a rough patch.

Early morning. 

I come downstairs and grind beans for coffee. It’s one of life’s little rituals. I use the same coffee cup every time and cherish those first few, peaceful moments of the day.  Just me and the coffee. Being at home has allowed me time to go through old photographs, write new words, edit, delete.  A cleansing.  I glance through what I wrote last night.

'I can still hear my father calling me.  And I see him as I remember him.  Tall, sculpted face weathered by sun, cold and rain, eyes gentle, forgiving.  He was standing outside calling my name, but I did not hear him.  His voice echoing over fields, growing louder and louder.  And so I would hide.  Sometimes devilment, other times because of shame, but either way with certain fact that sooner or later, he would find me.'

I came across one snapshot I took just before Christmas.  A magical morning when I woke to find snow had fallen, unexpectedly, overnight.  January starts gently in this kitchen, just as it always has, with bacon sizzling and eggs being poached. A humming sound while I cook, glancing out into the little courtyard with its rickety table, ferns and tangle of climbing jasmine.

The kitchen table is unusually tidy. 

A collection of film magazines and old studio photographs. 

A copy of my latest book. 

A pot of mistletoe. 

A single candle burning in a glass jar that once held goose fat. 

A tiny cup of coffee.

Toast crumbs.

Origines. 

I am remembering an occasion, years ago, decades even, when a young editor knocked on the front door of my ceremonial home, to politely enquire whether I would be interested in writing a book about my life.

'Thank you,' I replied, with equal courtesy, 'but I never do anything that has a point.'

I am, what many people would describe as, a methodical man. 

I say this with no sense of false modesty or indeed arrogance.  It is a simple statement of fact.  It is a trait I have been content with all my life. That’s all.

Being methodical, as a matter of fact, can be excessively tiresome and it often irritates me greatly, but I cannot pull away. I sometimes think that I would far prefer to live slumped in some attic of a six-storey Victorian house amidst a litter of junk, filled ashtrays, dirty underclothing, greasy pots and pans, old film scripts and books strewn about everywhere, an on-the-point-of-being-discarded mistress weeping dejectedly on the stairs. There would be damp stains visible on the walls, and an enormous overdraft at the bank or, better still, absolutely no money at all.

Lonely. 

Alone. 

But it just wouldn’t work for me. I have to live in a methodical, orderly manner.  If that vision was reality, I would have emptied the over flowing ashtrays.  I would have tidied up the attic in a flash, white washed the walls, swept away the dust, scrubbed the pots and pans, stacked the books and scripts into some form of chronological order, washed the carpets and recycled the mattress.  And what money I had would be counted and noted and kept in a sock under the floorboards.

Methodical is what I am. 

Orderly is what I have become.

A far cry from my younger days. 

Those carefree years. 

A changed man. 

And yet everything I do in my life is done quite unconsciously. I am not aware that I discard my rubbish in so fastidious, not to say elegant, a fashion. It simply happens. No scattered heaps of detritus or masticated vegetable matter. Neat, tidy, organized packets on a pristine platter. I often wonder, why? I look with quiet astonishment at my contribution to the dustbins.  What instinct makes me behave in this extraordinary fashion? Is it something which l have inherited from my father: a man who was always correct, contained, persistent and fully planned all his life? Or is it some hideous subconscious fault which a psychiatrist would hold against me as a sign of some monstrous flaw in my otherwise apparently serene make-up. Who knows. But it is always there, and it has ruled my life from my earliest days.

Precision.

Order.

A plan.

I live, and I must live, according to a pattern which I have made for myself, and fill it in with great care. I take grave risks with it, of course: bend it, turn it, sometimes even turn it quite over, re-arrange it, re-design it, but it is always within its frame, just as a stained-glass window is bounded by the strong pillars of its stone arch.

If a risk seems to me to be too dangerous, that is one which might shatter the whole amazing fabric itself, then I swiftly modify the risk and find another way to go about the alteration, seeking a less satisfying, less exciting, but far safer way of placing the bright fragments of life. No Nicholson or Sutherland am I: rather a Burne-Jones or Millais. In short, I am not abstract, I am realist. I think. 

Often pinched by doubt.

But, after all, one cannot, at my age, look back down the corridor of one’s life and not have some doubts about the journey one has made.

The doors which one opened are now all closed.

The doors one did not dare to open remain shut.

The corridor is dark; only ahead is lighter.

So one turns and proceeds in that direction.

To go back is madness.

To turn left or right, at this stage, is both exhausting and dangerous.

However, there was not the least shadow of a doubt in my mind when I crunched gently up the gravel path towards this house one golden November day over ten years years ago.

Ten years. 

A whole decade has passed. 

From the moment that I turned off the narrow road between giant conifer trees and wound up the hill among spiky amber grasses, jutting rocky outcrops, crimson brambles, sparkling little springs of crystal water in verdant bog, all under a sky the colour of Faberge’s blue enamel, I knew that this road was it.  I was on the right track and that my pattern was intact. And that the house, framed in its saffron vine and a large orange and lemon tree, was just about to fit into that pattern as smoothly and effortlessly as a foot into a well-worn slipper.

After months of trailing about the city, I had some churlish notion of living by the sea again like I did when I was a child.  Living amongst derelict boarding houses, paint decaying.  It was just that, a notion, a thought.  It wasn’t meant to be.  You can never go back. 

I am a London boy. 

It was in my early twenties that I was launched fatefully into the world of Soho Bohemia, a world of dives and drunks whose tentacles would never let me go. I had been innocent until then, unmoulded: Soho cast me. All too quickly, I made up for lost time. It became my second home, often my first.  I moved out of my father's shadow and into my own world.  I knew that I had found my ideal. It was instinctively, physically, and most important, spiritually, the exact fragment which I needed to complete my orderly pattern. There it was, glowing brightly in the sun.  Waiting for me to embrace it and fit it into my life.

Which I did. 

But I had nearly forgotten.

I had been here before.

When I first came to this house twenty or so years before, it was George who opened the doors to greet me. 

Delightful George.

Mythomaniacal, egotistical, and often unable to tell the truth or the difference between it and fiction, he was a photographer, writer, and a drunk, redeemed by at least one grace: that of self-awareness. 

'One of the more bizarre aspects of my life is the way it has veered from triumph to disaster without my seeming to notice the change.'

He was the son of a renowned foreign correspondent, author of some forgotten bestseller and, like his son, an alcoholic.

'My father's guilt made me guilty,' George said to me one day, as much about his sexuality as his addiction to drink. He remained in thrall to his father's fame, even when his own exceeded it.  His true talent and value lay in observations of a world whose patrons were too busy drinking to document themselves. He was unable to write a book without putting himself in it; an attempt to render himself as part of some nostalgic myth. We all wondered how he remembered in-depth conversations from the night before. He probably didn't: he was already being excused for behaviour he could not recall.  It was bizarre to read about such sacred monsters of Bohemia I had known for many years.  But his books we read before we were ordered to applaud his success. 

Dear George. 

He was a very private man. In later life he just decided that he would withdraw. He found a place to live and simply went into hiding. In some ways, it was not unlike him; if he decided that things weren't right, he would withdraw into himself and not contact anybody.  You always saw him first in a crowd, his blaze of blond hair and dandy suits picking him out like a lighthouse in fog; a cluster of people roaring with laughter as he scribbled jokes and observations on a pocket pad faster and more engagingly than anyone else could speak. He laughed a lot and moved in a crackle of energy and wit. He discovered the charms of the sailors and barrow boys of Limehouse before decamping to this house. 

I remember when I arrived he was munching on a buttery hazelnut biscuit. The house was so different then.  I can close my eyes and see it all.  The white interior of his hip four-storey home was infused with the old-fashioned smell of baking, and his kitchen sinks were piled high with delightful dirty dishes. I remember a platter that he consumed the previous night contained a dish of sticky pork ribs, was immersed in cloudy water, while a baking bowl and greasy baking sheets were stacked high nearby. The rest of the old fashioned all-white kitchen was absolutely spotless.  A bowl of citrus fruits. 

'I feel lost without a lemon in the kitchen,' he once said. 

George was a much-admired writer. 

He enthralled me. 

Inspired me. 

I adored him. 

My first view of the house.  I remember not uttering a word as I came under the vaulted ceiling and stood before a small, compact house of lilac-coloured brick.  I inhaled sensuously the strange, haunting, and rather haunted, atmosphere of the place.  I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand.  On that occasion, where I had called to discuss some characterization he had written which I was portraying on film, I remember he made me a coffee that trickled thickly from the machine into a delicate white porcelain cup, before he decided to have one himself.

'I don’t normally, but what the heck,' I think he said, I may be wrong, so many years have passed.  Don’t we all just make believe the dialogue from years gone by?

But he would be grinning, his outfit of navy and black a dramatic counterpoint to his immediate surroundings. Together we snacked on his newly baked biscuits. He was trying out a new recipe, and was worried that the centres aren’t as soft as he’d hoped. Delicious as the cookies were, though, I was too distracted by the view of his garden to pay much attention to them. The French doors were thrown open and I couldn’t resist bounding through them to the overgrown, fecund haven George had me dreaming about through his recent correspondence.

The garden was exactly as he described, heaven. Here, within six neatly hedged square beds, I saw an attractive jumble of various types of tomato, squashes, beans, beetroot, chard, cabbages, carrots, and lots and lots of potatoes.  There were fruit trees overhanging each bed and the whole space was enclosed by high hedges, trellises and walls. On a wooden table stood terracotta pots of baby kale seedlings in wooden crates. A ball of twine, various hand tools, gardening gloves and sacks of perfect compost which all seemed to create an artful illusion of rural bliss, even though we were just yards away from the busy main road that runs past the front of the house.  And that, of course, is the point. It’s a serene and peaceful space, and George, readily agrees that it suited his now solitary lifestyle.  His thoughts interrupted by a cough, a stutter, a warning.  Something which everyone including George ignored. 

Fatally. 

On his living-room work table I remembered seeing a book entitled The English Plum open at a page which showed a pretty watercolour of Victorian plums. George always took his writing as seriously as he took his food. He used to tell me he rose at six every day to start typing and did not stop until teatime, bar shopping trips for food. He created stories and characters.  He invented a bygone village life which he tried to create here in his garden.  His novels were wry regional social comedies, laced with gentle humour and subtle social commentary. He was also a keen observer of nature and the changing seasons.

Nostalgia.

It was, as he said, a meticulous and painstaking process.

'My idea of hell is socializing with other writers,' he once said. 'I can’t bear it. The whole network thing drives me mad.'

George had started writing after his acutely asthmatic mother died when he was nine years old.  The young boy was given his first piece of garden to tend as a means to forget and mourn.

'We’d moved to the country so that Dad could be nearer the woman who was to become my stepmother, and I was bored and asked for a garden,' he explained.  'Then one day I came home from school to see a sign that read George's Garden.  Dad had given me a patch next to his that he didn’t know what to do with, and though it was hard and dry I did start to grow things like carrots. He was a big gardener and if I have green fingers at all they’ve come from him. For me, one of the best smells in the world is when you break off a tomato plant. It reminds me of walking into Dad’s greenhouse when he was pruning his tomatoes. That has stayed with me.

The smell. 

The memory. 

But that was a long time ago.

The memory of his mother lingered in his books.  The principal character, Miss Artichoke, was the happily married schoolteacher in a small village school, an acerbic and yet compassionate observer of village life.  I remember coming in from the garden and George welcoming me to sit in his sparsely furnished white living room, underneath two portraits of a Dutch couple. 

'I discovered after I got them that it was their wedding anniversary, so I opened a bottle of champagne and we had a toast,' he said. 'Then one day I was gazing at them again and I realized I’d bought portraits of people who reminded me of my mum and dad. She has that gentleness.  I would like them to stay here as part of the house.' 

I remember nodding. 

But why was he letting me know?

My last memory of George was seeing him brush off the last of the biscuit crumbs, before standing, rather awkwardly and walking into the kitchen to raid the fridge to find something to eat for his solitary tea. Cold spare ribs and a bit of salad.

'Not very glamorous, is it?' he said. 

I beg to differ. 

But that was then.

Of course it looked so different when George left.  Fitting myself into it proved, on the other hand, to be quite another matter. I remember how it was when it was empty.  I noticed so much had changed but at same time, most of it still felt like it was before. 

The ground floor consisted of three separate quarters. Aside from the kitchen there was a huge lounge area with a vast canopied fireplace and what used to be the music room complete with a stone sink in one corner and a set of dusty sequinned drums and a music stand set in the centre of the tiled floor. The Dutch couple painting was of course long gone.  I often wondered what happened to it but no one ever knew.  Next door, down a couple of steps, the basements and cellars.  Good storage but not for much else.  On the second floor, arrived at by a curving slate staircase, another sitting-room with an upright piano and, bizarrely, a photograph of Che Guevara; beyond it three small bedrooms and a pitch dark bathroom. On the same level, just beside Mr Guevara, a door led up two steps into a sort of black pit, which had a stove and a sink and could have held two people in a grave emergency, and one in extreme discomfort. Two more floors above provided an array of empty rooms, all floorboards and white walls.  Above all this, running the length of the entire house, was a vast attic room which had recently been converted. That’s all. I admired the circular windows in the attic and the view from them of the garden and houses below, and the sky shining like a sheet of silver paper. I was instantly in love. If the house did not quite contain the accommodation which I knew I should require for this permanent abode, it did contain the space. In my mind I rapidly decided that the ground floor should be opened up to form one enormous fifty-foot room, retaining the kitchen part, arching through the separating stable walls. The ceilings were all, most fortunately, on the same level; the floors rather attractively, I thought, on differing ones. I should retain the canopied fireplace, convert the attic into perhaps my private study where I could think and write, put in an extra bathroom, and come to terms with the black pit at some later date.

The house had limitless possibilities, only my bank balance was restricting. So I must go carefully at the start, and with the invaluable help of an architect friend, and a rough set of scribbled sketches in his notebook, the ideas conceived between us all rapidly became almost-possibilities. Almost fact indeed.  My friend nodded sagely and assured me that, as long as I did not desire a swimming-pool, marble stairs, plate-glass windows, wrought iron, and central heating throughout, it need not cost me a fortune. I asked only that the house be made large enough within its walls to provide the accommodation I required and that it should, above all else, retain the character which five hundred years had bestowed upon it. I didn’t want to destroy what soul George had left here.  Part of him I wanted to retain but for what reason I did not know.  We were acquaintances, nothing more.  Maybe it was just my way of saying thank you for whatever. 

The arches which we would make through, the downstairs walls must be irregular, the floors not completely level, the windows must be in sympathy with the ones which already existed, and the plaster must have the texture of centuries instantly imposed upon it. My friend was suddenly relieved and almost affable.  He later confessed that he had heard that I was in the movies and expected to have to gut the house, build a sauna, install five bathrooms and a swimming-pool, and string Venetian lanterns from every ceiling. When I asked him what he would have done had I insisted on these bits of kitsch, he said sharply that he would have quitted the job.

He stayed, thankfully, and promised that everything would be perfectly ready and in order by the time I arrived back from my work on From Here For Now a film I was working on in Italy, which was soon to start. He had no qualms, a splendid workforce of well-trained craftsmen, understood my sympathetic feelings for the house, would only use the most ancient of materials, and assured me that I could have every confidence in him. I had.

It was all very orderly.

Just what I wanted.

Except that I had not yet got it.

A small point; but important.

Before the building works, the battle to secure the house raged. My bank stumbled about, blind to the fact that I was desperately anxious lest some other person might make an offer right away and move in. Papers and forms wandered through the air between London and Naples, where I was installed at that time filming and living in a yellow painted rented villa above a slum village, and I travelled desperately back and forth to London almost weekly to show good faith and to re-assure my bank manager and the house seller, a power of attorney acting on behalf of George I was later