In truth, he’s been living mostly in and out of hotels the past year or so—hardly tents or caravans—where he’s fed by unseen restaurant minions. Last time he was in his own kitchen, there were signs of mice taking over.
As she heads back outside, she realizes that she didn’t show him his room. But through the kitchen window, she sees that he is busy enough. She simply has to trust him. He is just an ambitious young man doing his job. He asked to stay for three nights, and when she said yes, she forgot that Sunday is when Franklin’s paralegals are showing up to take Morty’s business files.
She rakes the weeds and the wilted blooms into a pile, throws them by handfuls into the basket. She hears the house phone ringing and lets it be.
Cooking—simple cooking, nothing fancy—calms Nick. Clever, his sudden idea at the shop of making Tomasina a meal. Two birds with one stone: his unraveling nerves and her completely rightful sense of invasion.
How perfect to be alone in Lear’s kitchen. He removes his jacket and muffler and hangs them on an empty peg on the rack by the door. He runs a hand along one sleeve of a plain brown canvas coat that must have been Lear’s. The sleeve is frayed at the wrist. It’s the one Tomasina put on when she took him to the studio last week. (He wonders if she freely wore Lear’s clothes when he was alive, that sharing of garments a kinship usually claimed by a lover or spouse.) Nick reaches into the pocket: yes, the key. Not that he’d use it without her permission.
Glancing out the window to make sure Tomasina is still occupied, he takes down the coat and puts it on. As the air held within it is displaced, the coat gives up its hoarded aromas: wool, laundry powder, hay. It fits him like a barrel around the middle, but the shoulders sit square on his. Nick stands a bit taller than Lear ever did; in his prime, however, Lear was also slim.
Time to get to work—the easy, immediate work. He replaces the coat on its peg.
Lear’s kitchen isn’t especially large, which meets with Nick’s approval. He’s been to parties at posh American homes where a glimpse through the swinging door, as the servants hustle about, reveals a space the size of a small airline hangar, lighting harsh, surfaces cold and metallic. This room has a cottagey atmosphere, colors earthen, the light cast by wall sconces, not by industrial floodlights.
The pots hang from hooks on the ceiling, knives are sheathed in a block by the cooker, tea towels hang on a rack next to the sink. A sensible kitchen. He pauses to touch and admire the rustic ceramic tiles set in the wall behind glass apothecary jars holding flour, sugar, tea bags. The tiles are glazed an iridescent forest green, the odd fellow embossed with a stag or a boar or—ha!—is that a hedgehog? A porcupine? The counter is copper aged to a mottled umber.
Open any of the drawers or cupboards in Mum’s kitchen and you’d confront an unpredictable hotchpotch—at least until the end, her last place, where Nick made an effort to sort and organize, discard the chipped tumblers and splintered wooden spoons. If Mum had precious little time to cook, she had even less to establish physical order.
In his London flat, Nick’s kitchen is plain, the surfaces wooden, cupboards white. But this is a storybook kitchen—the kitchen, in literal fact, of a storybook writer. Framed on the only bit of exposed wall is a drawing of a bear—no, an etching. The bear looms in an open doorway, stooping a bit, snowflakes swirling around his bulk. In the foreground, seen from behind, a girl with long black hair raises her hands in fright. Penciled beneath is the line “Have no fear! I will not harm you. I am only cold and would wish to warm my coat beside your hearth.”
Cradling the bowl of eggs and milk in his left arm, whisking with his right, Nick stands before the print and wonders about its origins. It’s not Lear’s work. Lear illustrated few fairy tales—though there was speculation he was aiming toward a new edition of his beloved Alice. One of Andrew’s early concepts for the film had been to weave visual references to Alice through the scenes of Lear’s life in the city. “Too much, and probably too twee,” he finally concluded.
Nick’s last conversation with Andrew was better than the one in his office, that awkward meeting with Jake and Hardy, followed by lunch with the pixieish wife (who turned out to be an intellectual property lawyer; imagine that prenup!). California is not a place Nick could ever envision as home. After a few days in L.A., he’s homesick for the restorative gloom of January in London, pigeon-colored skies and blustery damp. Kendra loved California, told him he was a snob. She was thrilled when a photo popped up on some gossipy website showing the two of them sharing a kiss at that place with the stars embedded in the pavement. When the notices for Taormina began to build, Kendra took out a Google alert on Nick; nearly every day she’d receive at least a crumb of news including his name. She would hold her phone up to Nick, saying something like “You are gaining traction, love.” At first he couldn’t deny how exciting it was to see himself becoming a Somebody. It was like sitting for a portrait, watching his likeness accrue and intensify as something separate from yet fully dependent on his flesh-and-blood being. But then he grew weary of Kendra’s daily crowing at her tiny screen. And after the Oscar, once the actual thing, the shiny, rather steroidal-looking fellow, had sat on his dining table for a month, once the press siege had begun to abate, Nick found himself wondering whether anything essential had changed in his life. The answer was no. Not that nonessentials couldn’t drive you mad.
He met Andrew on neutral ground this time: lunch at a Brazilian tapas lounge on Sunset, a hipster hangout by night, sleepy by day. Andrew acknowledged that the story line of the trauma in the shed needn’t be set in stone, so long as they kept to the same location and sets. He also liked the idea of giving a more pivotal role to Jessica, the actress playing the younger Frieda, Lear’s mum. She had just received a run of good press for her leading role in a black-comedy series about a mobster’s wife who receives a blood transfusion that gives her the knack of knowing, absolutely, whether someone is lying or telling the truth.
“But how do you think it will affect your character in the later story?” said Andrew. “The New York scenes, the ones with Magda when you realize she’s losing touch with reality. Which we’d have to reexamine, too.” Magda is the actress playing Lear’s mother as her mind begins to falter.
“Spot-on question,” Nick answered. “I need to get back east, I really do want that time in Lear’s house, his studio.”
“A little sleuthing?” Cunning smile.
“I wouldn’t call it that. I simply plan to ask everything I can of Tomasina Daulair. Draw her out.”
“The caretaker woman.”
“Oh, she was—is—more than that.”
“Nick, you are such a well-behaved boy.” Andrew’s voice was kind, but Nick felt belittled.
“Andrew, I’m going to give you the performance of a bloody lifetime,” he said. “Don’t expect me to ‘behave.’?”