Derek Lister :: The Ice House

A masseur’s cold hands are an awkward thing to meet in a place that sells recuperation. Before anyone has opened the ice house, the service has already told Paul, through his own skin, something about what goes on behind it.

The Ice House went out on BBC One late on Christmas night 1978 and closed the original run of A Ghost Story for Christmas. It is the only one of the eight films not directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who had moved to ITV, and it reached the screen with little of the Jamesian furniture the strand had trained its audience to expect: no antiquary, no Latin inscription, no period costume. John Bowen had already written for the series, adapting The Treasure of Abbot Thomas in 1974, and only the year before he had poisoned John Stride with strychnine in the Play for Today A Photograph. Here he brings Stride back as Paul, recently divorced, checking into a country-house health spa run by a brother and sister, Clovis (Geoffrey Burridge) and Jessica (Elizabeth Romilly). Stride gives him the mild expectancy of a man who has paid to have ordinary difficulties taken off his hands. There is croquet, there are treatments, the other guests are older and say little. For a while the film lets the arrangements look complete.

The building in the grounds deserves more attention than its picturesque menace usually gets. Country estates built ice houses to keep the winter: ice cut from the lake or the pond, packed in straw in a brick pit half under the earth, and brought up in July for the kitchens and the table. It was a way of carrying one season into the next, and it ran on insulation and on other people’s labour, the cutting, the hauling, the packing done by hands nobody in the drawing room needed to see. Bowen’s spa extends that privilege from the larder to the body. Read this way, the place continues an old estate economy in which discomfort is removed from the rooms where guests sit and dealt with somewhere else on the property.

Bob, the masseur (David Beames), is the first person to make that arrangement visible. His cold hands turn a treatment into an encounter with someone else’s distress. When Clovis is out of earshot he warns Paul that stay too long and you get “a touch of the cools”, and asks for help getting away. That night there is a scream. In the morning Bob is gone and Clovis can take over at the massage table, so the guest’s comfort survives the worker’s absence without a gap in the schedule. The substitution is what makes the ice house feel continuous with the business around it, a place where one pair of hands replaces another and the day goes on.

“My brother and I do not approve of death,” one of the siblings says, and the line explains the whole enterprise more plainly than the film ever does again. The spa advertises recovery, while everything it actually does points to storage: a guest can stay physically intact long after the possibility of leaving has gone. Bowen gives Paul a telling occupation for this. He describes himself as someone who helps people get through their lives, which most likely makes him a therapist or counsellor, though the script never says so, and he talks readily about what things cost and what his work is worth.

A professional consoler has come to buy consolation, and he finds a supplier offering the one thing his own trade cannot: an end to having to get through anything at all.

The vine by the ice house flowers in a vivid red and a hard white, and Clovis and Jessica dress in colours that answer it. Their intimacy, which the film allows to read as incestuous, moves through clothing, scent and leaves until the garden seems to have entered the treatment rooms; marks shaped like petals begin to appear on the glass of Paul’s window. Desire has several possible objects here, the sister, the brother, the pair of them, the perfume of the plant, and Bowen leaves them insufficiently sorted. The uncertainty matters, because Paul can scarcely say what he is accepting, and the film is honest enough to leave him, and us, in that condition.

Lister’s staging can be stiff and the photography is flat in places. The measured, oddly formal dialogue sometimes announces the strangeness before it has had time to gather, and the refrain that there is only ice in the ice house is repeated a little too knowingly. Yet the speech does real work. As Paul’s language drifts towards his hosts’ precise phrasing, he becomes easier to receive and harder to reach, and the film’s most persuasive transformation happens inside conversation that remains perfectly civil throughout. The visual exception is his first descent into the ice house, lit only by a letter he sets alight: paper that once carried news from elsewhere is spent as light to see what is kept down there, and for a minute Lister finds the darkness Clark used to find in cathedral crypts and tunnels.

Set beside Bowen’s own Robin Redbreast (1970), the film reverses something. There a rural community took possession of an outsider’s fertility, and the village needed her body to go forward into the next season. Here the keepers of the garden recoil from decay and want nothing to go forward. Both households claim authority over another person’s biological future; this one offers an exhausted man relief from having a future at all, which may be the more tempting offer and is certainly the more modern one.

Its reputation suffered from where it was placed. A Christmas audience waiting for the pleasing terror of M.R. James got something closer to Robert Aickman, and the BFI’s notes for its later home-video release judged it the strand’s most daringly experimental film while admitting it never matched Clark’s set pieces. It was repeated once, in 1982, and then largely forgotten until the BFI brought it back, remastered from the original film materials. There is an irony in the slot that the film itself seems half aware of. Christmas is the night when British television most depends on repetition, on the same rituals preserved and served again each year, and Bowen used it to show a man choosing to be kept exactly as he is.

When Paul is finally led back through the grounds, the route still looks like a walk arranged for a guest. The siblings go with him, one on either side. Beyond the lawn the small building waits among the leaves, part of the property’s ordinary provision, as it was in the years when the ice came up in summer and nobody in the house asked who had cut it.