The Red Barn Read online

  DAVID HARE

  The Red Barn

  Based on La Main

  by Georges Simenon

  For Bill

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Production notes

  Characters

  The Red Barn

  Part One: Donald

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Part Two: Mona

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Three: Ingrid

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Like many bookish children, I grew up consuming more detective fiction more than any other kind. Even then I had noticed that stories supposedly driven by narrative depended for their real vitality on establishing ambience. Crime writing came to life when it had density, when you felt that the paint was being laid on thick. A strong sense of time and place was far more exciting than a clever puzzle. Anyone could create a mystery, but only the best could summon up a world in which the mystery could take root.

  My taste in literary fiction – I read every word of Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene – was towards those authors whose techniques most closely resembled those of thriller writers. When, at university, I came across W. H. Auden’s suggestion that Raymond Chandler’s books ‘should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art’ I was bewildered. It had never occurred to me that thrillers were anything less. By then I had already graduated from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to Dashiell Hammett and the chill ambiguity of Patricia Highsmith. But when I discovered that the author of the Maigret series – whom I knew chiefly through the BBC adaptations with Rupert Davies – was also the author of stand-alone novels, my expectations of the genre changed and expanded. These books belonged more alongside Camus and Sartre than Arthur Conan Doyle. The popular joke in Canard Enchainé that ‘M. Simenon makes his living by killing someone every month and then discovering the murderer’ seemed nothing more than that. A joke.

  It’s symptomatic of our misunderstanding of the unique Georges Simenon that so many people believe he was French. In fact, he was Belgian, born in Liège in 1903 and brought up in a poorly defined country which had often suffered under occupation. In Belgium, few people fostered illusions about national greatness. ‘Under occupation,’ he wrote, ‘your overwhelming concern is with what you will eat.’ Simenon’s background, and his lifelong feeling that he was disliked by his mother, left him with the aim of developing, equally as a writer and as a man, a wholly undeluded view of life. As he later observed, ‘It must be great to belong to a group, a nation, a class. It would give you a feeling of superiority. If you’re alone you’re not superior to anyone.’ Or, as he put it rather more bitterly: ‘During earthquakes and wars and floods and shipwrecks you see a love between men that you don’t see at any other time.’

  In fact, he could hardly have been less French. What Frenchman or woman would speak of their loathing of gastronomy – ‘all that terrible fussing about what you eat’? What French writer or politician would agree that ‘Every ideal ends in a fierce struggle against those who do not share it?’ Simenon was particularly horrified by Charles de Gaulle’s pretence that the French had won the war. The untruth offended him. Simenon believed the events of the 1930s and 1940s had defeated the French as thoroughly as they had the Germans. ‘I’ve ceased to believe in evil, only in illness. Nixon believes he’s the champion of the United States, de Gaulle the rebuilder of France. Yet nobody locks them up. Those who invent morals, who define them and impose them, end up believing in them. We’re all hopeless prisoners of what we choose to believe.’

  Simenon, not prone to grand literary statements, once said that he wanted to write like Sophocles or Euripides. Over and again, he describes someone quietly living their life, until some random fait divers – a road accident, a heart attack, an inheritance – brings out a fatal element in their character which trips them up. Striking out towards freedom, they fall instead into captivity. He had the idea that a book, like a Greek play, should be experienced in a single session. ‘You can’t see a tragedy in more than one sitting.’ Serial killers, soon to become the thundering clichés of modern drama, whether speaking Danish, Swedish or English, would have held no appeal for Simenon precisely because they are, by definition, extraordinary - and considerably less common in life than on television. Typically, in one of Simenon’s stories, a single crime is enough to ensure that a hitherto normal life falls apart, with no notice, as though any of us might at any time suddenly encounter a crisis which we will turn out to be powerless to overcome.

  The thrill of reading a novel, said Simenon, is to ‘look through the keyhole to see if other people have the same feelings and instincts you do’. The man who, when adolescent, says he suffered physical pain at the idea that there could be so many women who would escape him, has the intense focus of a voyeur. An ex-journalist, he often describes towns from their canals or railway lines, because from there you could look into the back of residents’ lives and not be deceived by the front. He may have said, ‘Other people collect stamps, I collect human beings,’ but remarkably he refuses at all times to pass judgement on anyone. ‘You will find no priests in my work!’ Not only does Simenon take care to exclude politics, religion, history and philosophy from his character’s dialogue and thoughts, but the deadpan flatness of his prose style and his bare-bone vocabulary create a disturbing absence of moral control. ‘Fifty years ago people had answers, now they don’t.’

  It was this fallen universe of compromise that I found so convincing as an adolescent. It matched what I had already seen of life. I knew at first hand that Simenon was right when he said that ‘the criminal is often less guilty than his victim’. But it was only when I was older that I became addicted to the hard stuff – the unsparing novels which take his fatalistic view to its ultimate. If, as is generally thought, Simenon wrote around four hundred books, then about 117 are serious novels, the romans durs which meant most to him. André Gide, one of his many literary admirers, when asked which of Simenon’s books a beginner should read first, famously replied ‘All of them.’ But to my own taste, Simenon’s most searching work came out of his queasy, compromised time in occupied France, and in his desperate hunt thereafter for personal happiness in heavy-drinking exile in the United States. If you want to read three of his greatest books, try the deceptively light Sunday, written in 1958 about a Riviera hotel-keeper who spends a year preparing to kill his wife; try The Widow, published, like The Outsider, in 1942, and at least equal to Camus’ work in portraying a doomed and alienated life; and above all be sure to read Dirty Snow, a story of petty crime and killing at a time of collaboration in a country which remains unnamed, but which is always taken to be France under the Nazis.

  Because he was foolish enough in an interview to claim to have slept with ten thousand women – the real figure, said his third wife, rather crisply, was nearer 1,200 – Simenon has sometimes been accused of misogyny, just as by allowing films to be made of his books at the Berlin-supervised Continental Studios in Vichy France during the war, he was also accused of collaboration. The charge of misogyny at least is unfair. A small man’s fear of women is often his subject, and he describes that fear with his usual pitiless accu
racy. In his books, casual sex is fine, it may or may not be satisfying, but passion is always dangerous because it arouses feelings neither party can control – and loss of control is seen to be a particularly masculine terror. In these circumstances, sex comes closer to despair than to joy. The women he portrays are not usually manipulative or cruel or deceitful. Far from it. They simply possess an inadvertent power to disturb men and to drive them mad. They exercise this power more often in spite of themselves then deliberately. All of his books are, in one way or another, about power of different kinds, and he specialises in depicting the lives of those near the bottom of society – the concierges and the salespeople, the waiters and the clerks – who possess very little. No wonder, when he went to America, that he remarked how everyone was expected to have a hobby, so that in one small field at least they might exercise a measure of domination.

  The inspiration for finally deciding to write a play from Simenon came from my friend Bill Nighy who knew that I was a fan. He gave me a present of a rare first edition of a novel which had been almost entirely forgotten. Even now, I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who claims to have read La Main. In Moura Budberg’s translation, long out of print, the book had been published as The Man on the Bench in the Barn. It was written in 1968, but its atmosphere clearly derived from Simenon’s own period of residence in Connecticut, where he moved to live with his new wife, Denyse Ouimet, in the late 1940s. In the book, the town he then lived in, Lakeville, is renamed Brentwood. His house, Shadow Rock Farm, becomes fictionally Yellow Rock Farm, but the topography and feel of the place are pretty much identical, with beavers playing in a nearby stream, and the local Connecticut community expecting strong but obsolescent standards of private morality. The only detail omitted was Simenon’s own telephone number: Hemlock 5.

  We hear a lot about Henry James and the American’s traditional fascination with Europe. We hear rather less about its opposite. In my view, there is something rare and interesting artistically when a European sensibility engages with American morals. La Main describes America at a point of change, when the suburban world patrolled so brilliantly by writers like Richard Yates, Sloan Wilson and Patricia Highsmith is about to yield to a newer way of life, theoretically freer but equally treacherous. It was characteristic of Simenon to suspect that sexual liberation might not deliver everything it promised. After all, he doubted everything, except his own writing. But it was even more characteristic of him to be in the right place, as he had been in France and Africa before the war, and at the right time, equipped with a reporter’s calm genius for putting a moment in a bottle.

  David Hare

  September 2016

  The Red Barn, produced in association with Scott Rudin, was first performed in the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 6 October 2016. The cast, in order of appearance, was as follows:

  Ingrid Dodd Hope Davis

  Dr Warren Stuart Milligan

  Mona Sanders Elizabeth Debicki

  Ray Sanders Nigel Whitmey

  Donald Dodd Mark Strong

  Patricia Ashbridge Anna Skellern

  Lieutenant Olsen Oliver Alvin-Wilson

  Janet Jade Yourell

  Mr Dodd Michael Elwyn

  Director Robert Icke

  Designer Bunny Christie

  Lighting Designer Paule Constable

  Sound Designer Tom Gibbons

  Characters

  Ingrid Dodd

  Donald Dodd

  Mona Sanders

  Ray Sanders

  Dr Warren

  Patricia Ashbridge

  Lieutenant Olsen

  Janet

  Mr Dodd

  THE RED BARN

  ‘The puppet still worked, but I had cut the strings

  and no one pulled them any longer.’

  Georges Simenon, La Main

  PART ONE: DONALD

  PART TWO: MONA

  PART THREE: INGRID

  Part One: Donald

  ONE

  Lakeville, Connecticut. Saturday, 25 January 1969. The stage is a dark square. Dim at first, then clear, at the very back, coming out of the darkness like an illusion, the projected image of a retina, huge, the detail of the eye complete. Then near the front, a woman in a padded chair, her eyes hidden by complex optical technology. Ingrid Dodd is forty, tall, fair-haired and calm. Dr Warren, fifty, is looking into them. Then he turns the lights on.

  Dr Warren I don’t think you’ve anything to worry about. Your sight’s perfect. You see everything.

  He removes the machinery. Her eyes are green.

  Your eyes are in perfect shape, Mrs Dodd.

  Ingrid I was worried.

  Dr Warren No need to be.

  Ingrid My father suffered from glaucoma.

  Dr Warren What did your father do?

  Ingrid He was a surgeon.

  Dr Warren Tell me your maiden name. Remind me.

  Ingrid Whitaker.

  Dr Warren Ah yes. Dr Irving Whitaker. What a privilege. To be the daughter of such a great man.

  Ingrid gathers up her coat and handbag.

  When we look for glaucoma, we expect the retinal ganglion cells to be in a characteristic pattern of loss. We look for ocular hypertension, raised intraocular pressure, increased aqueous humour. There’s no sign of any of those.

  Ingrid It’s called the silent thief of sight, isn’t it?

  Dr Warren Yes.

  Ingrid Because you don’t notice it happening.

  Dr Warren May I?

  He hands her remaining shopping bag.

  Ingrid Thank you.

  Dr Warren There’s no such thing as perfect sight. But for a person of your age, yours is as good as it gets.

  He shakes her hand.

  You’re a very fortunate woman, Mrs Dodd.

  TWO

  The stage expands and heightens to turn into a massive snowstorm. A driving blizzard and howling winds. The noise is tremendous. Through the snow comes the beam of a flashlight. Three figures are fighting their way through the snow. One of them is Ingrid, who is holding hands with Mona Sanders. She is thirty-eight, very small, dark, sensual, weighs next to nothing. Behind them comes Donald Dodd. He is forty-five. All three are dressed in smart, regular winter coats, which are inadequate for the conditions.

  Mona Can anyone see Ray?

  Ray Yes, I’m here.

  A fourth figure appears. Ray, like Donald, is forty-five, but slightly more imposing, with brown hair.

  Donald Ray, keep close! Come on, everyone, stick together, stick together! It isn’t far.

  Ray I can’t see. I can’t see anything!

  Donald Then take hold of my hand.

  The two women are making headway at the front. Ray takes hold of Donald.

  Stay close! Stick close! Stick with me.

  Ray Donald, you’re letting go!

  Donald I’m here. I’m right here. I’m right beside you.

  Ray Where’s your hand?

  The flashlight flickers and goes out. Driving snow. The storm becomes deafening.

  Ingrid What’s happened?

  Donald The flashlight’s gone. You go ahead, we’ll follow you.

  Ingrid Mona, are you all right?

  Mona I’m fine, I’m making it.

  Donald Stay up ahead

  Mona Is Ray with Donald?

  Ingrid Yes. I think so. I can’t see anything.

  Mona Where’s the house?

  Ingrid It must be close.

  The two women disappear. Donald has turned round and is looking for Ray.

  Donald Ray! Ray! Where are you? I can’t see you. Where are you?

  The distant sound of Ray’s voice: ‘I’m here. I’m over here!’

  Donald Where? Where? WHERE?

  Only Donald is visible now. He is standing stock still in the middle of the storm.

  Ray? Where are you? Ray?

  The snow thickens. White-out.

  THREE

  The living room of Yellow Rock Farm.
A well-appointed clapboard house. The door opens and in comes Ingrid. She is covered in snow, and barely able to breathe. She goes to turn on the lights. The sound of the switch clicking. She tries several times. Everything’s out. The only light is from outside the windows and from the embers of a fire burning in the grate. Just behind Ingrid in comes Mona, also covered in snow, completely exhausted.

  There you are.

  Mona Thank God.

  Ingrid You made it.

  Mona I was close. I kept close.

  Ingrid I can’t breathe. Even now.

  Mona I know. It’s –

  Ingrid Every time I breathe it’s like –

  Mona Where are the men? Did you see the men?

  Ingrid Swallowing a sword. They were just behind.

  Mona I haven’t heard Ray.

  Ingrid Ray was there. Hold on, someone’s coming. It looks like Donald.

  Donald comes in.

  Donald Are you there? Are you safe?

  Mona Yes.

  Ingrid You’re alone.

  Donald My God, that’s the worst I’ve ever seen. It’s been bad, but never –

  Mona Have you seen Ray?

  Donald Not in the last –

  Ingrid I think we were out there for an hour.

  Donald is clicking vainly at the light switch. Ingrid calls through the house.

  Ingrid Ray! Ray!

  Donald We need a light.

  Ingrid The power’s out.

  Donald We’re going to need heat. Whatever happens, we need to stay warm.