The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life by William Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page A

yours for ever.
    She gave herself to him without reserve, asking nothing in return but his undying love.
    This is my room now. This is my bed. This is my lover. Let my real life begin.
    Heart of my heart, my meaning and completion.
    Laura lay in Nick’s arms all that long night, and did not sleep.

8
    Barry Eagles joins the production meeting late, clutching a Starbucks cappuccino and a pack of Krispy Kreme donuts, smiling his apologies.
    ‘Caught on the bloody phone as usual. Sorry, people. Look, phone off.’
    He sets down his coffee and turns off his phone, a symbolic gesture of commitment that he believes fully compensates for his late arrival.
    ‘Love the final script.’
    ‘Not quite final,’ says Henry. ‘We’re still waiting for Aidan’s notes.’
    ‘Oh, Aidan won’t give you any grief. He’s a real pro.’
    Henry frowns. Christina meets his eyes with a quick look of sympathy. Sweet Christina, twenty-three years old and looks sixteen. The quiet clever one who keeps her head down, the hunched stoop of the young not yet proud of their bodies.
    ‘So where is Aidan?’ says Barry. ‘Isn’t he supposed to be here?’
    ‘He’s on his way,’ says Jo, the production manager. ‘He’s coming straight from Heathrow.’
    ‘The thing is,’ says Henry.
    ‘And your first shooting day is Friday?’
    Jo nods confirmation. ‘Westminster Abbey.’
    ‘Okay, I’m going to jump right in. We’re at least one day over budget, maybe two. I know it’s late to be telling you this, but we have to find cuts.’
    ‘Two days!’ Henry is shocked. ‘I can’t do it.’
    ‘Then give me one. Cut the Keats intro, for a start.’
    ‘Cut the Keats intro!’
    Henry’s best visual idea. The presenter holds up a replica Grecian urn and intones Keats’s famous lines: ‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know.’ Then he drops the urn. It smashes in slo-mo close-up. Massey confides to camera: ‘Sheer nonsense, isn’t it? Truth is sometimes ugly. Beauty is often false.’
    ‘I thought you loved it.’
    ‘I do.’ Barry Eagles read English at Brasenose. ‘It’s a gorgeous shocker. But who reads Keats any more?’
    ‘Jesus, Barry. We’re not making the Teletubbies.’
    ‘I need cuts. That’s all I’m saying. Get Aidan to come up with a really contemporary intro, something that doesn’t need any special effects.’
    ‘Aidan’s a busy man.’
    There’s a clue and a half, but Barry misses it. Or chooses not to hear. Henry likes Barry, and God knows he’s saved his bacon with this gig, eight months on the outside and people think you’ve retired. Barry’s the master at winning commissions from channel controllers. Not easy selling a historical documentary on Puritan iconoclasm. And his trump card in the successful pitch was of course Aidan Massey and his nationally famous hair.
    ‘Christina.’ Barry turns to the researcher. ‘Put together some material for Aidan. Possible leads for an intro.’
    ‘Okay,’ says Christina. ‘Best if I pass it by Henry first. It’s his script.’
    God bless the girl.
    ‘Whatever,’ says Barry. Like this is some kind of team logistics.
    ‘I was thinking,’ Christina persists. ‘Henry could write this up as a piece for History Today . His ideas are really original.’
    ‘Let’s get the show out first.’
    Oh, beloved Christina. How I would love to write an article, a book even. But who would publish me? Too late now, my colours nailed to the television mast, I sail on over the ocean of development. The voyages grow longer, the sightings of land rarer, and all of it discovered, inhabited, ruled.
    Television, the great image factory. Images the tool of the devil. Calvin called the human mind ‘a perpetual forge of idols’. Finitum non est capax infiniti . Our little minds can’t imagine the mystery that is God, and so we create lesser gods to worship. ‘Houses of pictures,’ Henry Clark called churches, and that was not a