They lay there for some minutes, listening to Claire’s heaving breath return to normal. ‘So that was what you had to show me,’ said Freya, and they laughed together, as if they had agreed on something. They were listening to the party at a distance, an occasional laugh or passing footstep, and thought nothing of it. Then voices came much closer, right outside the door. Freya realised the danger of fooling around in a place people would be using as a cloakroom – but at least they had locked the door.
At that moment the door opened and Claire’s mother Odette stood on the threshold. Her face almost went into spasm as she saw them there, Claire’s naked lower half still on show. Behind Odette a guest peered interestedly around her shoulder. Oh fuck, thought Freya, leaping up like a scalded cat, but Claire took her time, pulling down her dress before she rolled off the bed. In a mildly reproving tone she said, ‘J’aurais préféré que tu frappes à la porte, Maman.’ Only then did it occur to Freya that this had once been Claire’s bedroom. Her mother’s expression passed rapidly from open-mouthed disbelief to a basilisk glare, though she said nothing: the sight of her daughter in a post-coital languor had reduced even her, an unsurprisable bohemian, to silence. She had been there for no more than ten seconds before she slammed the door shut on them.
In the shocked echo of it Freya stood before Claire. She had seen her lock the door – only, she hadn’t. Claire insisted that she had, or at least she had ‘meant to’. Not that it mattered.
‘What? Odette practically caught us in the act – she’ll be telling Didier right now.’
‘No, she won’t,’ Claire said calmly. ‘That’s not how we behave. She’ll be furious with me, of course, but we’ll talk later when she’s calmed down. I can promise you she won’t tell Didier.’
Freya stared at her. ‘But she still knows! And so does that person who was with her.’
Claire shrugged. ‘My mother will hush it up. Darling, you don’t understand how things work here. Discretion is the element we live in. It’s how we’ve always lived. You think my parents have never strayed? Ha! I’m telling you, in their circles it would be more unusual if they hadn’t.’
Freya was shaking her head slowly. ‘All the same, I bet they never cheated with their siblings’ lovers.’
‘Don’t upset yourself. Come over here and sit down.’
Freya smoothed down her rumpled clothes. She picked up her coat – conveniently at hand – and went over to kiss Claire, who grabbed at her wrist. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s changed!’ Freya waited until she unloosed her grip. She straightened and moved to the door. Claire’s eyes were still on her when she looked back. It was horrible, sickening, to have to creep away after what they’d just done. But she knew she couldn’t stay there another minute.
The next morning she quit her apartment and moved to a small hotel while she made arrangements with the Chronicle and settled accounts. She got her deposit back on the hired scooter. She left no forwarding address at Rue Montalembert lest Claire or Didier decided to try and find her. On your mark, get set / Get out of town. Cole Porter again; a song for every occasion. Within the week she was on her way back to London.
INT. HALLWAY OF CHAS’S FLAT – MORNING.
CHAS, in his dressing gown, walks along the hallway to pick up the morning’s post. One letter, addressed to him in a copperplate Edwardian hand, he examines with a frown, and opens to read.
VEREKER(V.O.)
My dear Charles – I much enjoyed meeting you at Jane’s last weekend. But I fear I may have saddled you with a burden. I have never before told anyone about my little secret, and hardly know what I was thinking when I mentioned it to you. Now that I have, I find my pleasure in it somewhat spoiled. Perhaps the whole point of the thing happened to be that it was a secret. You’ll think me crazy, but would you be a good fellow and not repeat what I said?
With my best regards – Hugh Vereker.
CUT TO: Camera on CHAS’s face, grimacing with anxiety. Pensive, he turns back down the hall and up the stairs.
EXT. STREET – AFTERNOON.
A cab pulls up at the kerb and CHAS gets out in front of a tall Georgian terrace in Kensington. He pays the driver and, with a worried glance up at the house, climbs the steps to knock on the door. After some moments VEREKER answers his knock.
INT. HALLWAY – AFTERNOON.
VEREKER laughs merrily on seeing CHAS’s uneasy expression. He invites him inside.
VEREKER
You look like someone who’s up before the beak!
CHAS
As well I might. I’m afraid I’ve been indiscreet – I’m so very sorry, Mr Vereker.
VEREKER
Call me Hugh. Calm yourself – it can’t be all that bad.
He nods towards a living room and leads the way.
INT. LIVING ROOM – AFTERNOON.
A modestly but tastefully furnished room with long windows overlooking a leafy square. VEREKER stands with his back to the chimney piece while CHAS, in an air of contrition, sits on a chesterfield facing him.
CHAS
I got your letter this morning but – too late. I’ve already told someone.
VEREKER
Ah …
CHAS
You must think me such a waggle-tongue. It’s my friend George Corvick – the one who commissioned that review for the Middle – and what’s worse, I’m sure he’s gone and told someone else. A woman. They’ll try to figure it out together.
VEREKER
Never mind. You weren’t to know. Mea culpa – I ought to have been more circumspect.
CHAS
I swear to you I won’t tell anyone else. But I think George will be the very devil to shake off. He half suspected there was some mystery about your work from the start.
VEREKER
Did he now? Corvick, you say … And the woman?
CHAS
Gwendolen Erme. A novelist. The two of them are very close. I dare say they’ll one day be –
VEREKER
Married? Hmm. That may help them.
CHAS
To discover the secret? How?
VEREKER
We must give them time. To be honest, I still don’t envisage anyone getting to the bottom of it, even a writer. Especially a writer.
CHAS
It’s funny, but the more you talk about it the more eager I am to hunt it down. I sense that it requires some imaginative leap on the reader’s part –
VEREKER
(smiling)
– ‘and with one bound he had grasped it!’
CHAS
You’re teasing me. You don’t think I’m up to it, do you?
VEREKER
I think you’re a clever chap who should look elsewhere for adventure. This one’s not for you.
CHAS
Maybe. I’ve chased hopeless causes before. But I wouldn’t underestimate my friend. He’s much cleverer than me, and he knows your work inside out. If there’s one man who could winkle out the secret, this – what? – figure in the carpet, it’s George.
VEREKER
Ha! I rather like that.
CHAS
The idea of it being discovered?
VEREKER
No, no, that won’t happen. I mean the phrase you just used – ‘the figure in the carpet’. I once thought of it as a string that my pearls were strung on.
CHAS
As in ‘pearls before swine’?
VEREKER
(laughing)
I haven’t such a low opinion of my readers, Charles. As a matter of fact I’ve always considered them quite a discerning bunch. That’s why I’m surprised none of them has ever spotted it – the ‘figure’.
CHAS
Can you be sure – no one?
VEREKER
In forty years of writing I’ve received a fair bit of post from readers, and I’ve never picked up so much as a sniff.
CHAS
All the more reason I must apply myself.
VEREKER
Give it up, dear boy.
Camera fixes on VEREKER’s face, kindly, wistful, and expressive of a farewell.
EXT. DOORSTEP – AFTERNOON.
The front door has been closed. CHAS stands at the bottom of the steps for a moment, looking up at the sky, lost. Then he snaps out of it, looks at his watch and walks away.
5
Cutting down Vigo Street into Soho Nat stopped at a flower seller’s and bought a small carnation for his buttonhole. The antique foppery of the gesture appealed to him. ‘I am the only person of the smallest importance in London at present who wears a buttonhole’ – he recalled the line from An Ideal Husband. He was also wearing his white suit, intending to make a splash at lunch, though it was high-risk attire for a bustling Italian restaurant now he thought about it: one careless waiter and you’d be traipsing off with an actual splash to the dry-cleaner’s. The Rolls was in for a service, otherwise he would have driven the half-mile to Romilly Street.
He was in a good mood. The April air had a benign, rinsed feel, and the sky wore a fetching shade of denim, patched here and there by cotton-wool clouds. That morning’s post had brought a letter from Freya, which put a spring in his step. The dear girl was coming back to town sooner than planned, though she didn’t say why. The week’s other good news was that Penny had got him eighteen grand for the Eureka screenplay plus a percentage, more than he’d dared hope for. At least someone still believed in his talent.
Catching his reflection in the wide plate-glass window of a shop he halted and primped his hair. He was preparing for his entrance; the window was his mirror in the wings. Given his love of performance, of being a performer, it was still a source of wonder to him that he’d never made it as an actor. He had once believed it his destiny. At Oxford he had blazed across student stages like a micrometeorite, his lithe, quicksilver movement and confiding gestures mesmerising the uptilted faces in the stalls. The cheers he would get! He was talked about as the young pretender to Olivier. Even Freya, no pushover, thought he had something, and wrote a glowing profile of him when she was briefly at Cherwell. He still had the cutting and from time to time would take it out to peruse. In the piece they had used one of his more pretentious claims to theatrical greatness as a pull-quote: ‘Irving is the Father. Olivier is the Son. And I am the Holy Ghost.’
The silly boast proved truer than he could have guessed. After his bright start he all but vanished amid the icy altitudes of the West End. Where he had once enchanted and provoked his fellow students he could find no purchase on the affections of London theatregoers, and the harder he tried the more shrill and desperate he became. He never really understood why. Freya had once suggested that his natural tendency to perform in company, to be always ‘on’, had exhausted his vitality as an actor – he had nothing left to give onstage. He thought it might have been his ambition to direct that had undone him. Required to coach performance in others he somehow mislaid his own spontaneity. He seldom fluffed a line, and yet the words no longer sounded natural in his mouth. In the end he had to concede defeat. He missed it, though, all the same.
He was continuing on his way when ahead of him on the pavement he saw the tall, tousled figure of Ossian Blackler approaching. Nat fixed his gaze on the middle distance, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed. They hadn’t seen one another in a few years, during which time Ossie had become exasperatingly famous. A painter and printmaker, he had long outsold his contemporaries; nowadays several of his pictures hung in the Tate. Nat could hardly bear to admit that his desire to remain friends was in inverse proportion to Ossie’s burgeoning celebrity.
‘Hey.’
Nat froze, and turned a surprised face. ‘Ossie? Good Lord!’
‘Were you just trying to avoid me?’ Ossie’s saturnine brow was poised to take offence.
‘What? Of course not. I was miles away. How are you?’ Nat felt his heart sink even as he asked the question. Ossie was hopeless at small talk.
He ignored his enquiry; he was staring, almost glowering, at Nat’s white suit. ‘What’s with the outfit?’
‘Oh, just off to lunch. At the Trat.’
‘Bit fancy for the Trat, isn’t it? Who’s the company? Princess Margaret?’
Ossie’s drab work shirt and jacket – the favoured duds of bohemian Soho – seemed to rebuke Nat’s flamboyance.
‘Actually I’m meeting Reiner Werther Kloss. We’re making a film together.’
‘Oh yeah. Saw something of his once. Queer, I heard.’
‘I believe he is that way inclined. He’s also something of a wunderkind in the German cinema.’
Ossie frowned for a moment before unleashing one of his manic machine-gun laughs – ha ha ha ha ha – each ha humourlessly enunciated. ‘“Wunderkind”,’ he said in echo, as though Nat couldn’t possibly be serious.
‘He’s got talent, whatever designation you’d prefer,’ he said defensively.
‘Someone told me they saw you driving a Roller about. Sounds like you’re doing all right.’
‘You had one, didn’t you, a few years back? When you came to dinner at Onslow Square.’
Ossie nodded vaguely. ‘Yeah. I sold it. High maintenance.’ For a moment Nat wondered if he was hard up, but Ossie soon doused that spark of hope. ‘I got an Aston Martin instead. Bit like a toy – but fun.’
‘Seeing anyone at the moment?’ Nat’s voice seemed strangulated in his throat. He dreaded to hear of Ossie’s latest conquest, but at least it steered them off the subject of prosperity.
‘I’ve forsworn girlfriends for a while, they’re just …’
‘High maintenance?’ Nat offered.
Ossie didn’t hear the joke. ‘So long as I get my end away I’m not bothered.’ He had never set great store by charm. Nat sighed and glanced at his watch.
‘I’d better cut along, dear boy.’
Ossie gave a lift to his chin, a sign of farewell. Nat had moved off when he was suddenly called back. ‘Oh, yeah. They’re putting on a retrospective for me. You should come along.’
‘Right. Whereabouts?’
‘Royal Academy,’ he said without flourish, and walked off.
It was Ossie’s habit – Freya had first pointed it out – never to say hello or goodbye. Nat glanced back at his retreating figure. He had tossed out that last bit of news with enviable nonchalance. In anyone else you would have suspected an act, but Ossie seemed genuinely indifferent. Perhaps his old friend Jerry Dicks had it right. ‘Ossie has only two passions in life: painting and fucking.’ But could you be an artist and not care about status? Nat himself was eaten up with anxious striving, with his own place in the pecking order, to the point that he could not separate achievement from success, though he knew them to be quite different things. It was maddening to be so competitive, but there was no helping it.
He was pleased to find himself the last to arrive at the Trattoria Terrazza, already abuzz with Thursday’s lunch crowd. Mario, the owner, greeted him with a dip of the head that was at once familiar and deferential, then coaxed him towards his other guests. Penny saw him first, and waved. She was seated at twelve o’clock on the round table, flanked on one side by Berk Cosenza, the American producer, and a slim, lynx-eyed beauty he recognised as Sonja Zertz, Reiner’s leading lady. On Penny’s other side sat a plump, fidgety man in horn-rimmed spectacles who was introduced as Arno, Reiner’s editor; next to him was Ronnie Stiles, a pretty-boy cockney actor who was lined up to play the narrator figure, Chas. To Ronnie’s right was a diminutive, lightly bearded youth who wore a Chinese worker’s cap, a dark blue sailor jacket and an air of quiet concentration; he was in the middle of showing his companions the trick of lighting a matchstick with his thumb. On seeing Nat he smiled with his eyes, as though to say ‘I’ll be with you in a minute’, then focused on his match trick. He was evidently one of Reiner’s entourage of gofers. So where was the man himself?
He took the seat next to the youth, who for an encore repeated the trick with both thumbs. As each matchstick
flared simultaneously, the others – led by Penny – laughed their appreciation and cried ‘Bravo!’ Nat, feeling obliged to join in, presumed this was the apprentice’s warm-up while they waited for the master to appear. When the applause died away the youth turned to him and said in a soft, faintly accented voice, ‘Hello, I am very pleased to meet you. Reiner Werther Kloss.’
Nat almost fell off his chair in surprise. ‘Ah, I see – um, Nathaniel Fane. Nat.’
‘Yes, I know,’ replied Reiner, fixing his gaze intently upon him. ‘I greatly admired your work on The Hot Number. It – was ist der? – it hit my funny bone.’
‘Not painfully, I hope,’ said Nat, still trying to take in the fact that this unexceptional stripling was actually a hotshot film-maker. ‘I had no idea you were so … youthful.’
Reiner shrugged modestly. ‘I’m thirty-three. I have no magical elixir.’
A purring voice on his right interrupted them. ‘You are not so very old yourself,’ said Sonja. ‘What – thirty-five, thirty-six?’
‘Thirty-seven,’ smiled Nat, avoiding Penny’s eye.
‘Which makes me, like, Grandma Moses,’ said Berk from across the table. ‘Let’s order some food, I’m starvin’ Marvin.’
They consulted their tasselled menus while Berk chuntered on about the great restaurants ‘back home’. Heavyset, his muscle all gone to fat, Berk wore the expensive, too-tight clothes of an ex-prizefighter: an open-necked paisley shirt beneath a seersucker jacket. Sweat beaded on his brow, and he kept swiping it away with a huge white handkerchief. Whenever someone mentioned a favourite Italian in London he would immediately top it with a better place he knew round the corner from their offices in New York, run by a mama who rolled her own pasta, or ‘paahsta’ as he called it. Sonja, having listened, gave a long blink, as if trying to forget what she’d just heard, and turned to face Nat. Her low-lidded gaze and the half-smile on her lips suggested someone readier to be amused than instructed. Her cocked head invited him to speak.
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