Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

him, I would come over with a fit of the vapours like Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons whenever he undressed me, causing the affair to fizzle out, and I thought, about that time, how incorrect it was that the promiscuous should be thought of as jaded where they were really innocent, that they were not so much fools slow to understand the fact that human variety is far from infinite, that the exploration should be in oneself rather than of others, but a different kind of fool, happy in the illusion that human variety was infinite – having said all of which, and despite the fact that I was hardly Catherine M. (and doubtless sixteen-year-old readers will at this point be asking themselves, ‘Where's this promiscuous patch she keeps talking about?’), I must have been feeling a slight lesion of identity, a slight blurring of definition, a slightly stretched kind of feeling, because when a man with curly hair and a long nose asked me who I was one night in a bar, I surprised myself by saying, and almost meaning, ‘Oh, just some girl.’

       26

      Marcus Denning was an actor who had appeared in a series of adverts for instant coffee in the early 90s as a thirtysomething vet who goes to work in the country because, as he tells his mother in the first commercial: ‘I'm a vet, Mum. I belong in the country. Country air, country people, country ways.’

      No sooner has he arrived (‘But I haven't even unpacked yet!’) than he is doing something indeterminate to an ailing but photogenic cow. ‘That's that, then,’ says the kindly yet curmudgeonly farmer. Marcus, transmitting with great delicacy a millisecond of umbrage, counters with: ‘A coffee would be nice …’ (the embedded catch-phrase). But the farmer doesn't have any!

      ‘Good job I brought my own,’ Marcus says, still cleverly conveying a scintilla of urban disdain for rural hospitality. Fences are mended over a cup of instant at the farmhouse table. Indeed, so taken is the farmer by this metropolitan concoction that he threatens to retain the jar ‘until next time’. Marcus now has to convey, in one-and-a-half seconds,

       shock

       reflex urban possessiveness

       the softening of that possessive impulse as he comprehends the farmer's disguised compliment

       and soul-deep satisfaction as he realises he's been accepted, thus escaping the surly bonds of his transparently suffocating maternal relationship

      Don't knock the ad actor, master of micro-technique. So recognisable was he as this vet at the time, that he'd come out of his house the week before I met him to see a group of people standing round an injured bird, and they'd turned and looked at him, clearly expecting him to do something about it. He'd even been in the News of the World under the headline ‘RAT VET LOVER – Coffee Vet Cheats!’ when an ex-girlfriend sold her story about how he'd left her for another woman.

      The girl who he'd left the kiss-and-tell artist for, he told me, used to lounge around in front of the telly and would, bored, shout through to him in the kitchen, ‘Come on, Maz, shove it up my box!’ Marcus was a master of that very thespian accomplishment – the unimaginably dirty one-liner, or indeed any story to do with sex, and over the next year I would ask for my favourites again and again. My very favourite was a story about a friend of his whose sex life with his wife had deteriorated to the point where sex had become a once-weekly treat scheduled for the weekend. One Wednesday night, Marcus's friend had reached out to touch his wife on the hip as they lay there in bed and the wife had turned to him and hissed: ‘IS it Saturday?’ The best storytellers always know how to make your flesh creep. Is it Saturday? became a catch-phrase between us, the sort of totem lovers use to ward off bad luck when they're rich in love themselves.

      They're exactly the kind of dirty stories Brian Blessed might tell to break the ice at a read-through. But they used to make me laugh and laugh, putting my hands together with a satisfied clap: ‘Tell it again, Marcus …!’

      Marcus's family were aristocratic and deeply eccentric. His maternal grandfather had been an hereditary baronet (‘rare as rocking horse shit these days’) and the whole lot of them (mother, father, three sisters and Marcus) went around on motorbikes. When Marcus had been younger, they used to go on nudist holidays together on their motorbikes, the kids in sidecars. The family had once been invited to a drinks party on the compound to which they went, naked, on their motorbikes. Their hostess, wearing an evening gown and pearls, ushered them into a room full of similarly dressed people. Marcus insisted on leaving, but his father was mortified and ticked him off for being so rude. ‘Rude?’ Marcus sobbed. ‘Aubrey, we're naked.’ It was like a grand trumping of my own Adam and Eve indiscretions with the draught-excluding snake. He'd do an impression of Aubrey getting back from the party, sitting on the stairs with his balls out, sighing, ‘I met a wonderful couple. She's seventy-one and has just taken up the piano and is already on grade 5. He's just designed the postgraduate centre at Maidstone General Hospital. Such a lovely airy room …’

      Aubrey was a GP who operated an out-of-hours service and used to take calls during the family's suppers, which Marcus relayed to me: ‘Mister Coombes, if you think I'm coming out to provide digital manipulation to your wife's recalcitrant stools, you can think again!’ ‘Tell it again, Marcus …!’

      He had a cousin called Marie who had won Best Actress on the Edinburgh Fringe six years earlier for playing Nora in A Doll's House. She'd received a fan letter from a man who maintained that her Nora was the only English one he'd seen who retained a hint of the phonetic hardness of Ibsen's Norwegian. ‘In short,’ it said in a PS, ‘you were so good I pissed my cords.’

      And each time he told it, the letter would get funnier and funnier, and he'd do a perfect little impression of Marie's face falling as she got to the bottom of the page.

      Aubrey was posh, but his dreamy wife Janie was incredibly posh. She was a twin, and fiercely proud of it, as if it were a personal achievement. She and her twin sister Duzz (Dorothy? Dolores? Dusty? Doris?) once volunteered to have tests done on them at the Great Ormond Street Hospital and arrived there expecting to be fêted and shown through to a buffet, only to find literally hundreds of other twins in the corridors. Already somewhat put out, they were poked and prodded and urine-sampled and thoroughly out of temper when Marcus and I went to pick them up:

      ‘Goodness. What a day!’

      ‘What did they do to you?’

      ‘It would be much easier to tell you what they didn't do.’

      ‘What didn't they do?’

      ‘Well, they didn't fuck us.’

      I had been there but I would still be asking him what had happened: ‘Oh, tell it again …!’

      And they were like this all the time, each one of them, his father, his mother, his sisters, his brothers-in-law, his five-year-old niece with her imaginary friends Dot Com and Direct Debit. It wasn't as if Marcus cherry-picked these stories, it was normal. The first time I went to visit the clan in Dorset for the weekend, Janie came downstairs to breakfast holding an enormous vibrator and asked me in the nicest possible way, as if it were a paperback that she'd found on the stairs, ‘Antonia, my love, is this yours?’ I demurred and went for a wander around the house, the rooms upon rooms, a colossal ballroom with just a single bed in the corner and a bowl out to catch the leaks from the ceiling. A nursery in the attic entirely filled with an ancient train-set. A four-poster bed with tights blatantly knotted around each post. In one of the corridors I ran into Aubrey: ‘Oh, hello! I've been walking around the house and do you know everybody is in bed with their lover. It's marvellous’

      That evening over dinner, the family tirelessly berated Marcus's brother-in-law for failing to go down on his wife, Marcus's sister Jennifer. The indictment lasted well into coffee. ‘But why?’ Janie kept saying, gripping the brother-in-law's hand, genuinely distressed.

      ‘We're not trying to make you feel bad; it's just so unfair!’