Seducing Ingrid Bergman Read online

  And it really is. I think about what that means for me. At last I’ll be able to brush my teeth instead of using my finger. I’ll be able to shave using a mirror rather than just by touch. It means I can pay some kid to polish my boots again. It means fresh bread and cheese instead of C-rations. Oranges, maybe. Soap and shampoo. A fresh change of underclothes. Whisky in a glass instead of a tooth mug. The freedom to come and go whenever I please and talk to whoever I want – and no one shooting at me when I raise my camera.

  I don’t go in for crazy angles or anything. Nothing fancy. I just concentrate on getting close enough to see the expression on people’s faces, fix them in the viewfinder, then click. All it takes is a certain sensitivity to the moment and a steady pair of hands, a quick eye and a willingness to push yourself forward. With a camera you can’t help but have a point of view.

  * * *

  Wine cellars bricked up during the war are re-opened. It’s like opening the tombs of the pharaohs. The rich odour of casks and the stored perfumes of Burgundy leak from windows, inundate the streets, thread a delicate ribbon of scent down the avenues. Everywhere, the brasseries and bistros overflow with grateful soldiers. The menus may be shorter and the prices higher, and some of the wine may be sour or corked, but after the first mouthful no one notices; each new glass tastes like a nectar specially brewed.

  We drink to celebrate. We drink to forget. We drink because getting drunk helps to keep the nightmares at bay.

  Irwin reminds me about the dance halls on the rue de Lappe, the casino at Enghien-les-Bains. If you have enough money, he says, there are girls who are also models around the Champs Elysées. If you’re not so flush, there’s always La Maison des Nations, with its Oriental room and prints of Mount Fuji and the girls unfailingly luscious and young. Or if you’re down to your last sou, then there’s still the Bastille. There amid the shadows and the sickly sweet scents, he says, you’ll find women with kohl eyes and black chokers, and though they may be a little older, they’ll still open their legs and give you a wild time.

  It’s a wonder the city doesn’t crumble, he says, with all the fucking that’s going on.

  We end up in the Dôme around midnight. The tables are full. All the windows are open. A thick band of smoke moves levelly across the ceiling and wafts like the conversation into the air outside. The noise is tremendous. Men and women are pressed together so tight that you can almost smell the fermentation. The next thing I know, Irwin is disappearing off, one hand clutched by a long-lashed mademoiselle who stares up at him – adoringly or drunkenly, it’s hard to say – the other raised to wave a helpless goodbye. The poor sap. He doesn’t stand a chance.

  At the same time, I become conscious of a shimmer of colour and scent off to my left. A woman’s face flashes amid a group of friends, a face wide like a cat’s. She keeps glancing in my direction, then pretending she hasn’t. And when she tilts her eyes, the whole room seems to tip sideways. I make my way to where she stands, intent on restoring some kind of balance.

  ‘American?’ she says.

  I shake my head. ‘Hungarian. Budapest.’

  She points at my uniform. ‘You fight with Americans?’

  I fish out my press pass, hand it to her.

  She unfolds it, sees my passport-sized photograph with its official stamp, and reads. ‘Capa?’

  ‘You see that?’ I say. ‘Signed by Eisenhower himself.’

  She nods slowly, impressed.

  Amid the riot and clamour that surround us, she has the coolness of a flower shop. Her face is bright and open, her eyes meltwater-fresh. She twiddles her fingers, indicating that she wants a cigarette. She would have seen the GIs throwing packets of Camel from their jeeps. I pull a cigarette out of my pack and watch as she takes it with one hand, folding her other arm across her chest.

  I pat my pockets for a matchbox.

  She holds the cigarette cocked and ready. The blue flame illuminates her face. She pushes her hair back, tucks it behind her ear. Her eyes are green, her irises flecked with hazel. There’s a blue tint on her eyelids, a dusting like pollen. The sweetness of her perfume cuts through the sourness of the bar.

  ‘I like you,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘We can work on that,’ she says, this time in French.

  With touching clumsiness, someone starts playing a violin, managing a few romantic spasms. If I close my eyes, I could be back in the Café Moderne in Budapest on a Saturday night.

  She seems tense and expectant. I notice how she holds her cigarette some distance from her body as if she’s ready to give it away. I notice, too, the pale band of skin on the third finger of her left hand where a ring has been removed. And there’s something fragile about her that makes me want to protect her, to clear a space around her, and make sure that she’s all right.

  After a few shy words and a little kissing, and the kind of speed you associate with a dream, we’re alone together in the warm shadows and silence of my hotel bedroom, the lights of cars re-tilting the angles of the walls.

  She pulls the single pin in her bun. A plait unravels, slips down like a sigh. In lifting her dress, she gives off a sweet smell, an odour composed of shampoo, tobacco, lipstick, powder. She seems to pour herself upwards. Bits of her hair cling to the fabric as she tugs the slip over her head. And giddy as if we were breathing helium, we immerse ourselves, descend into each other. The night becomes all raw sensation, blind will, and I experience an incredible warmth across the whole of my body.

  Afterwards, naked, lazy, sitting up in bed, we share a cigarette.

  ‘I won’t stay,’ she says.

  ‘You can if you like.’

  I stroke her hair, which seems to spark in the darkness and change colour as my fingers move through it. I switch on the lamp. And it’s only now that I see the thick pencil line she’s drawn down the back of her legs to pretend she’s wearing stockings.

  ‘I’ll be gone in the morning,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll still be here in the afternoon.’

  She smiles, looks around, takes in the room, its bare furnishings and mess of magazines and clothes. She sees the cameras on the floor in the bag next to my boots, but it’s my helmet she seems most interested in. She’s surprised by how heavy it is, and holds it with both hands for a moment as if measuring its weight. She tries it on. It’s too big for her, and her hair squeezes out the sides in little blonde licks. She tilts it, regards herself in the mirror, watches it wobble on her head, and when one long strand snags in the straps as she removes it, I feel something take a deep scoop out of my chest.

  * * *

  Floor-to-ceiling white wardrobes contain rails of dresses, black at one end and white at the other, with all the other colours – navy, camel, lemon, teal-green, magenta – pressed next to each other in between. Ingrid looks at them, hands on hips, and frowns. Evening dresses, cocktail dresses, ball gowns, a small mink coat. They hang like shadows of herself, clinging to an imagined silhouette. She runs her fingertips across them, enjoying the answer of the fabrics. A current shoots through her, a crackle of static, as she feels the textiles scrape against her nail.

  Now that she’s famous and acclaimed, she can’t just pull something on; she has to think about everything she wears because she will be noticed, and the way she dresses will be commented upon in the magazines. This is a fact, a consequence of her success, and there’s no point bitching about it.

  She does her best to retain a private existence, to keep her feet firmly on the ground. She works hard, remains dedicated, professional. She’s known for the commitment she shows to her roles, the conviction she gives to them. But it’s as if, at times, the barrier between her public and personal life dissolves, the two blending imperceptibly together like adjacent paints. And she understands how easy it is to be seduced by stardom, to grow blind to its predations. She’s seen it happen often enough. Her husband warns her daily of its dangers, reminds her she must stay on her guard.

  One moment, she reflects, you’re a young girl – virginal, uncertain – trying for bit parts in the theatre in Stockholm. The next you’re a full-grown woman and a Hollywood actress accepting an Academy Award.

  How does that happen?

  She can scarcely believe it sometimes.

  The strange thing is, this life enjoys its own kind of ordinariness after a time. The airplane travel, the swimming pools, the jewellery and expensive clothes all have their everyday texture just like everything else. And it’s crazy, she considers, but for a time you can fool yourself that this is what you really want. Stuck in this sunlit bubble, sucked in by the luxury, it’s easy to believe that you’re just a beat from fulfilling your dreams.

  Why does she want to be a movie star anyway?

  Because being herself is never quite enough, she supposes. And she loves that strange, mesmerized state she enters when she’s preparing for a role. The way she can hide away and transport herself to another time and place, immerse herself in a different life like a bath until it feels real. Then a point comes when she’s taken over. An energy possesses her. She feels a heat behind her ears. It’s as if she enters a secret existence, as if she’s admitted into the mystery of another human being, and only she has the key. It’s the kind of thrill you get when someone touches the back of your neck and you’re not expecting it. It’s incredibly intimate, and suddenly she’s able to see everything at a slant, the way her character does. It’s like living two lives at once, and she relishes that.

  Her work gives her intense satisfaction; she loses any idea of time when she’s on set; then when she’s not working, she feels as if she’s wasting her days not doing anything. The way she figures it, she owes a debt to the world and needs to add something, to create something worthwhile; she f
eels she must earn her place.

  But that’s not the end of it. There’s something else, she knows. In her more vulnerable moments, she feels as though an impostor has taken over her body, colonized her somehow, as if a parasite is slowly eating away at her flesh. She feels this other woman’s presence like a negative, a dark other, penetrating her skin and leaving its imprint. At times she feels it dissolving her insides like an acid, burning away what’s left of herself, so that even after a standing ovation, she can still yield to an impulse to run to the bathroom and cry.

  It has taken time, but she’s reconciled herself slowly to the exposure. The photographs and films, she finds, grow to have a life of their own, a shadowy existence, remote from her. She manages it for the most part with the help of her husband, who is also her manager, and who works hard to puncture the Hollywood bubble, preventing success from going to her head.

  Nevertheless, when she’s invited along with Larry Adler and Jack Benny to help entertain the troops following the end of the war, she grabs the chance to escape, to rediscover herself, to breathe the reinvigorated air of freedom on faraway shores.

  She hasn’t been to Europe since before Pia was born. It will be good for her and good for her career, enlarging her audience, Petter agrees. But when he comes in now and sees her contemplating the open wardrobes, sees the number of cases laid out on the bed and the number of dresses she’s filling them with, he asks, ‘How long is it you’re going for?’

  She needn’t worry. He’s only teasing. He gives her a kiss on the forehead, warm and tender, though with a vaguely patronizing note mixed in – not so she minds, though, because that’s how he always is and she has grown used to it. She doesn’t take offence; in fact she finds it endearing. She responds with genuine affection even if there’s little heat in the embrace.

  ‘Don’t eat too much ice-cream,’ he says.

  ‘What will you do? Cut off my allowance?’

  ‘Don’t drink or smoke too much. It’s bad for your complexion.’

  ‘You could still come.’

  ‘You know how busy the hospital is.’

  ‘And check up on me night and day.’

  ‘I’ll leave that to Joe.’

  Ingrid offers him a tolerant look. She knows he means well. He’s a dear, really. What would she do without him? He organizes everything, attends to the arrangements, ensures every last detail is taken care of. She never has to worry and she loves him for that. She pouts, touches his nose with her finger and runs the same finger down the length of his tie.

  Before leaving the room, Petter can’t resist offering one last piece of advice. ‘And remember, don’t sign anything without me seeing it first.’

  She goes on folding her clothes and nodding, saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ in a sing-song voice, though when it comes to closing the cases, she does so firmly and snaps the buckles tight.

  * * *

  A chain of hands ensures that her luggage arrives at the airport safe and on time.

  She waits in the lounge with a hollow feeling in her stomach and remembers how she kissed Petter goodbye and hugged a tearful Pia tight. She has never been away from her daughter for this long before, nor has she ever been this far apart. She’s discussed it with Pia, who is happy that her mommy – Ingrid still can’t get used to the idea that her daughter has an American accent – is doing her bit for the war effort, doing her best to raise the morale of the troops. But it’s one thing, she knows, to contemplate a parting in the abstract; it’s another to sit in the airport and be confronted with separation as an actual fact. In this instant, Ingrid experiences a primitive need to be with Pia, an ache that for a few minutes approaches a consumptive hunger. She will miss her terribly. She pictures herself sitting next to her in bed on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper, and remembers her smell, the exact aqua colour of her eyes, the golden freckle on her left iris. And she recalls how, in a desperately affectionate gesture, the girl had tried to copy her mother’s wink. As Ingrid thinks of this, involuntarily she repeats the way Pia had wrinkled her nose, closing both eyes at the same time as though taking a photograph.

  * * *

  In the morning, my head pounds, and I’m conscious of nothing but this fist knocking insistently at a door inside my skull.

  Slowly, like something seeping towards me under the door, the realization comes: she’s gone. No note, no address, nothing. Only a dent in the pillow and a crimp in the sheets, a faint flavour of perfume to remind me she existed and that she was here at all.

  I smile to remember last night. It hardly seems real. Then a darker thought enters my head.

  Everything I own in the world is in this room. I sit up quickly, check my wallet, run through all the leaves. To my relief, no money is missing. And my cameras? There’s my bag on the floor under the bed next to my boots. In it there are forty-seven rolls of film still undeveloped, cartons of flashbulbs, a bundle of ID papers, the latest copies of Life and Picture Post. Packed in a separate compartment are silk stockings, French perfume, a silver hip-flask and a left-handed corkscrew. The cameras are still there. She’s taken nothing as far as I can see. Not even my helmet. There it is still, with one long blonde strand of hair snagged in the strap. The details of my blood group lie snug in the lining with my two last letters: one to my mother – God bless her Jewish heart – and the other to a girl, only the name changes quite a lot.

  Is it my fault if I defend myself badly against women?

  I collapse back onto the bed. My head thumps from the effort. My mouth is parched, my tongue like sandpaper. I turn my face to the wall and try to sleep some more, but it’s noisy up here on the top floor. The pigeons scrabble on the skylight, their tiny feet scratching the glass. Personnel carriers and trucks, each with a fat white star on the side, drone down the street, shaking the light fixtures, making the windows tremble in their frames. The sound of wooden-soled shoes echoes on the cobbles, clack clack clack, the Nazis having requisitioned all the leather during the war. A boy hawks newspapers enthusiastically in the square. It’s all so noisy. The howitzers and bombardments I could sleep through, but not all this.

  A telephone sits on the bedside table. A walnut dresser and cane chair are the only other furniture apart from the bed. I don’t know what time it is or how long I’ve slept, though I suspect it’s already mid-morning. I stare at the telephone, willing it to ring, and for someone to say something, to tell me what happens next. It lies there like a dark mouth, silent.

  My toes protrude pinkly from beneath the white sheet. I wriggle them. Proof, at least, that I am alive.

  I drag myself out of bed.

  Half a dozen birds take flight as I open the shutters. Their wings make a wap wap sound like a flat tyre. I lean my head out the window and breathe, taking a slice of high cool air.

  Sunstruck, the city stretches below: its pavements and roofs, its pigeons and brick chimney pots, its horse chestnuts and benches. Military jeeps and vehicles move like wind-up toys; bicycles glide as if on rails.

  A few minutes later I’m standing, a white towel wrapped around my waist, shaving foam framing my face, a cigarette plugged in the side of my mouth, holding a razor while I turn on the tap.

  The pipes chug and clank loudly. Rust-coloured water dribbles miserably into the sink. This can’t be true. It’s less the colour that bothers me, more the fact that it’s cold.

  I telephone through to reception.

  ‘If you want hot water, Monsieur,’ says the man, ‘then you need to stay at the Ritz.’

  ‘Tell the manager I’m very disappointed. I bet the Nazis had hot water when they were here.’ I sigh, wipe a clot of foam from the mouth of the telephone and put down the receiver without quite slamming it.

  It takes ages to fill the tub with lukewarm water, though at least it runs clear after the first few spurts of orange.

  The level sways when I step in. The water is tepid at best. A rash of goosebumps extends along my arms and legs. I pinch my nose and slide back until my head is submerged and the water closes over me. I hold my breath for as long as I can. It’s the best cure for a hangover I know – the best, that is, aside from an oxygen mask or a parachute jump at 6,000 feet. So I lie there, cold and motionless, my stomach hollow, my head still thick, the acid aftertaste of the wine mixing with the fact that I haven’t eaten to produce a burning sensation in my gut.