‘So this film,’ he began, ‘what’s it about?’
Billie considered for a moment. ‘Well, it’s a love story. Two friends fall for the same woman. She’s engaged to one, but she’s having an affair with the other. But what the men actually fall out over is a famous writer they both admire. There’s a kind of secret involved in this writer’s work that’s never come out. Eventually one of them cracks the secret, but he won’t tell his friend what it is.’
Joey stared at her, waiting. ‘Is that it?’
‘More or less.’
‘What ’appens in the end?’
‘I don’t know, to be honest. Nobody’s read the full script – it’s not finished.’
He gave a pfff of disdain. ‘Call that a story?’
‘Maybe you should wait till you see it.’
‘I know them sort of films. They’re foreign, they come with lotsa moody shots of corridors and go on for hours. Prob’ly in black and white.’
Billie shook her head. ‘Colour. And it’s not so dull as all that. There’s sex and drugs in it.’
‘Any fights?’
She hesitated, and he laughed at his question being taken seriously. Billie’s gaze was distracted by a figure approaching from the far end. She gave him a wave and Nat waved back. He had spied her a while ago, and wondered about the stranger she was talking to – possibly the hotel concierge, though as he got nearer he saw the man’s sinewy paleness, and his rather cocksure stance. The suit was nicely cut, slim silhouette, no turn-ups on the trousers. You could tell it wasn’t Cecil Gee or Burton. It was coming to something when even the louts could afford handmade.
‘Here’s someone who could explain it better than me,’ said Billie.
‘Explain what?’ asked Nat.
‘The film,’ she said. ‘This feller would like to know what it’s about.’
Nat, cutting a glance at him, gave an exaggerated shrug and cleared his throat. ‘It’s “about” all manner of things: ambition, envy, competitiveness, altered states, enlightenment, despair, death. It is about secrets and the value of keeping secrets. And it is about the mysterious power of art – is the meaning in a work of art as important as its overall effect?’
Joey, his expression unreadable behind his sunglasses, turned to Billie. ‘You sure this film isn’t in black and white?’
Nat, stung by this insolence, was weighing up a tart riposte when Joey bared his long white teeth in a smile of savage amiability. ‘Joey Meres,’ he said, thrusting out his hand.
‘Nat Fane,’ he replied. Joey looked at him harder.
‘The writer, yeah?’
‘I am,’ he said, his pride restored.
‘You had that spot of bother with Harry. How’s the nose?’
Nat, bristling again, said, ‘It’s fine. How do you know? Are you a friend of Harry’s?’
‘Not exactly. Business associate. His eyes and ears, you might say.’
Nat recoiled inwardly. The palmy bliss of his Mediterranean idyll had just felt a stiffening gust. ‘Welcome aboard,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. He listened to their chat for a few minutes before taking a strategic glance at his watch. ‘Will you excuse me? There’s something I’ve just remembered I must do.’
Nat walked off, and once out of sight around the corner he quickened his step. He made first for Gina’s bedroom, where his knock received no reply. He checked the bar and the terrace garden, but she wasn’t there either. He checked the main filming suite, where they had closed the set for Chas’s dream sequence: two hours of Sonja ‘in the nod’, as Ronnie had leeringly put it. Think, think. Back in the lobby he ran into Julie the script girl, who reckoned she might be up at the tennis court. Following the sound of the ball – thock! thock! – Nat sweated his way up a gravel path to the court, the sawing of cicadas maddening in his ear. The court’s asphalt surface glowed an arsenic green. There was Gina – hair up, racket in a twin-fisted hold – locked in a tense rally with Helen, the assistant hairdresser.
He watched them for a while; when a wild shot flew over the fence and brought them to a halt, Nat called out to her. Gina, beaded with sweat, bounded over to greet him through the chain-link. The shortness of her tennis skirt, of all her skirts, irresistibly pulled Nat’s gaze downwards. It was his recent and intimate proximity to the area beneath the skirt that now concerned him.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said, catching her breath. ‘Fancy a game?’
Nat smiled tightly. ‘May I have a word? Just the two of us.’ He saw Helen approaching from the corner of his eye. Gina beamed, and turned to her partner.
‘Helen, can we have a quick break?’
They walked round to the furthest corner of the court, the latticed fence still separating them. Gina chatted and practised her strokes as she went, plainly oblivious of any danger in the offing. Nat half listened to some funny story she wanted to tell him, then gave her a level stare.
‘Do you know someone called Joey Meres?’
Gina frowned a moment. ‘Joey? Of course. He’s one of Harry’s boys.’
‘Well, he’s here.’
‘What, in the hotel? What’s he doing here?’
‘At present he’s chatting up Billie by the pool. Why he’s here – that’s what worries me. What kind of work does he do for Harry?’
‘Oh, you know … collecting debts, sorting people out, keeping Harry informed. He does a bit of everything.’
‘“Sorting people out.” You mean, beating them up? Putting them in hospital?’
‘I do know he’s been in prison.’
I’m a dead man, thought Nat. ‘You realise that if Harry gets wind of what we’ve been up to –’
‘No, no,’ said Gina. ‘Joey’s not here to spy on you – on us.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Film sets are notorious; everyone knows they’re just mobile knocking shops.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Harry’s sent him here for a reason, Gina.’
‘Well, yeah. But not for that. Harry would never suspect you.’
Nat paused: her emphasis on that last word was too decided to ignore. ‘Why would he not suspect me?’
Gina’s gaze shifted away, and she gave her mouth a doubtful tweak. ‘Same reason no one else would – he thinks you’re queer.’
They were fixing the boom above Hugh Vereker’s bed for the scene with Chas. The night before, Nat and Reiner had had a long discussion with Vere in his suite. They had somehow managed to keep the truth of Vere’s illness a secret between them. The story presented to the unit was that he had been unwell from a gastric condition but was now recovering; nobody seemed to doubt it. The director had treated his stricken actor with a notable delicacy of feeling. Berk himself had been kept in the dark, though he had taken Nat aside on the night Vere arrived at the hotel to pour out his worries about the old man. ‘Reminds me of my grandpa,’ he’d muttered, ‘after they’d laid him out.’
As he and Reiner had talked through the scene Vere listened intently, offering a suggestion as to how this or that line might work best. By the end of the evening they had it more or less down. Vere had drily remarked that a deathbed scene in his present state should be no great test of his talent. Nat had felt another surge of love for his old friend, who had already sacrificed himself in making the trip from London. Now he had gone one better: with death looming at his shoulder he had even found a way to make them laugh.
In the morning, he appeared on set looking dreadful. He had slept badly, it seemed, though that would hardly account for the hacking cough or the grey pallor of his skin. Nat overheard Reiner asking him if he wished to postpone the filming – they could juggle the schedule. But Vere insisted they went ahead. He was determined not to let anyone down. Ronnie Stiles, wearing the square ‘librarian’ spectacles that so suited him as Chas, had stolen up quietly behind Nat as they waited for the camera to roll.
‘How’s yer bum for love bites?’ he said with a smirk.
For a heart-stopping moment Nat
imagined that Ronnie had got wind of his recent adventure with Gina and Sonja, but it soon became apparent that this was merely another of his uncouth salutations.
‘Fine, when I last looked,’ he replied. ‘Are you ready for your big scene?’
Ronnie just laughed. He had the impregnable self-confidence of the unreflective. He looked around the set, where they were still rigging the lights. Vere, in a cotton nightgown, was seated on his own, smoking.
‘Gotta hand it to them make-up girls,’ Ronnie said under his breath to Nat. ‘Anyone lookin’ at him would think he was dead already!’
The following evening the whole unit got together for dinner. Most of the Portofino sequences were done, and a skeleton crew would be leaving in a couple of days for a week’s shoot in Rome. The rest of them would be going back to London. Billie felt a weird relief that it was nearly over. On the one hand she’d loved the hotel, the weather had been super and they’d had some laughs. On the other, she felt harrowed by Vere’s frailty – clearly, he was far from well – and discomfited by the odd atmosphere that had trailed Joey Meres onto the set. Though she rather liked him, he was regarded with suspicion by most of the crew, who knew him to be a ‘face’ around London. The toothy grin, which ought to have tempered his saturnine menace, served only to compound it.
At the dinner Joey was seated next to Gina, the only one who seemed at ease in his company. Even Berk, on his other side, looked like a man who’d just noticed a scorpion in the soup tureen. But the room eventually relaxed under the influence of the wine and the occasion; their ten days at the hotel were nearly up, and the awareness of their imminent dispersal whipped up a sentimental mood. Toasts and bibulous avowals of companionship were made. Berk paid a tearful tribute to Reiner, and another, longer one to Vere, whom he called the finest British actor of the last thirty years, an accolade Nat had previously heard him apply to Olivier, Gielgud and James Mason. Vere accepted the compliment with a grave bow.
Later, one of the crew took over the piano, and Nat announced the start of party pieces. Caro kicked them off with ‘Puppet on a String’; Berk sang ‘Luck Be a Lady’, shaking imaginary dice in his chubby fist; Ronnie and Alec Madden did a scene from Double Indemnity (Ronnie, in a wig, played Barbara Stanwyck, bringing the house down); Billie sang ‘Norwegian Wood’ and then harmonised with Helen on ‘Baby’s in Black’. When Vere was begged for a turn he shook his head, and Nat, coming to his rescue, performed a little monologue Vere had made famous in one of his 1930s romances.
The surprise of the evening came late on. Nat had thought Sonja might refuse the call – for an actress she could be curiously shy of the spotlight – but when Reiner whispered something in her ear she gave a reluctant laugh and rose from the table.
‘I have been asked to do this very sad song.’
She had a quiet word with the pianist before beginning. It was from a Brecht–Weill opera, she explained, about a woman who had staked her life on the love of a man, and was then betrayed. Halfway through the song Sonja stopped abruptly; up to that moment she had held herself quite still, caressing the words. When she resumed, she sang in English.
Surabaya Johnny, no one’s meaner than you.
Surabaya Johnny – my God and I still love you.
At a nod from her the pianist picked up the rhythm, his choppy, bar-room chords pushing it onwards. Sonja herself seemed to have flicked some internal switch; an electric charge crackled off her. She stalked around the room, vamping, declaiming, imploring, upbraiding the mysterious ‘Johnny’. As the song slowed and built to its climax she circled Joey Meres, once, twice, then grabbed his tie and leaned in to his face. Her eyes burned with accusation.
You wanted it all, Johnny,
I gave you more, Johnny.
Take that damn pipe out of your mouth, you rat.
The whole room seemed to be ravished by her performance. It was as if the song had been written not only for her, but about her. Sonja let Joey’s tie drop, faced the room, and bowed. A stunned pause held for a moment. The first to start clapping was Joey, who looked tickled to death at his impromptu part in the proceedings. He rose, and with a gallant flourish took Sonja’s hand and kissed it. The room went up in a roar of whistles and cheers.
Nat awoke from a dream the next morning and hauled himself out of bed. He dressed quickly, and without stopping for breakfast walked down to the harbour. He went into a gaudy little shop selling beach gear, Ambre Solaire, tourist tat, and found what he was looking for within half a minute. He hurried back to the hotel still gingerly holding on to the dream, half afraid he might jolt himself and accidentally tip the image out of his head. He and Reiner had talked about ‘Chas’s trip’ over and over without getting anywhere. Now he snatched up a sheet of hotel notepaper and wrote it out in ten minutes.
He made his way up to the roof terrace, where they were preparing for the last day of photography. Reiner had just blocked a scene between Alec Madden and Ronnie, charting the wrangle between Chas and George over Vereker’s estate. Nat suffered a little wobble of insecurity as he stepped around crew people and over a writhing sea of cables and leads. The idea had come to him in a flash, and might be the sort of thing that would wither and die under the cold scrutiny of anyone else. Except that Reiner was not like anyone else; he delighted in the odd and the unexpected, and trusted Nat as a connoisseur of the same.
He looked up at his approach. ‘What’s that?’
‘Got it down at the harbour,’ replied Nat, holding a red hula hoop, like the one he’d seen the girl playing with on his first day in Portofino. The memory of her performance had resurfaced in his sleep. ‘I think I’ve got it – Chas’s trip, part two of the Henry James acid experience. And this time we don’t have to nick from the Beatles.’
EXT. A ROOF TERRACE – DAY.
A blinding sun creates a shimmer around the walls. A silhouetted figure, blurred at first, seems to be dancing. Close-up on a woman, in a bikini, languidly revolving a hula hoop around her midriff. The sun at her back makes it difficult to identify her, but in fleeting moments the woman’s face is visible: it is GWEN. She is seen from multiple angles, while a long jazz intro resolves itself into a version of ‘My Favourite Things’.
Then, in flash cuts, another figure appears at the corner of the screen. A man, in a patterned shirt and white trousers, watches GWEN rolling the hoop around her. We see the reflection of the woman in the man’s sunglasses. Is the man CHAS? It looks like him, but it could be a stranger who resembles CHAS. We see him edging closer to the woman, who continues her twirling, oblivious. The man, entranced by the spectacle, finally reaches out to touch her. As he does so the sun goes into eclipse, and all is dark. When the light returns the man is in a daze, wondering what has just happened: the woman is gone. Bemused, he turns to go, then spots the hula hoop lying on the ground where she stood.
He picks it up, flips it over himself as if to check something. Then he walks away, the melody of ‘My Favourite Things’ fading into the air.
Reiner filmed Sonja’s twirling with multiple cameras, all running at different frame rates to capture her movement from slow to fast and back to slow. The sun, vital to the sequence, never wavered, and neither did Sonja, who did take after take, uncomplaining. The trouble had come from another direction. Reiner, inspired by a detail in Nat’s script – that the man watching Gwen may or may not be Chas – decided someone else should stand in for Ronnie Stiles.
‘But I’m Chas,’ said Ronnie. ‘He’s me.’
‘Ah, but, Ronnie, you must remember this is a trip, and under such an influence we are strangers to ourselves. Chas is at once himself and not himself, and to express this ambiguity we need a double – a Doppelgänger, you know the word?’
‘No I bloody don’t,’ snapped Ronnie. He stood with hands on hips, glaring at Reiner. ‘This ain’t on. You just wanna wind me up.’
But Reiner shook his head. ‘No. I want only to make this scene the best it can be.’ He looked around at the others, as thoug
h calling them to witness. ‘Our passion is our task.’
Ronnie, snorting at this gnomic phrase, turned on his heel and stalked off, muttering something about lawyers. Reiner, oblivious, scratched his beard and seemed to commune with himself. What he did next nobody could have predicted. Nat watched as he strolled to the edge of the terrace where Joey Meres was leaning against a wall, smoking. He still wore a dark suit, white shirt and black tie; only his aviator sunglasses suggested he might not be an undertaker. They talked in low voices for a few moments; at one point Joey plucked at his tie, as though Reiner had asked about it. He shrugged a little, apparently amused, and then followed the director back to his high chair.
‘Mr Meres,’ said Reiner, ‘has graciously agreed to stand in for the scene.’ A short ironic cheer went up, and Joey, smiling, gave his neck a quick sideways twist, like a boxer limbering up.
‘S’long as I don’t have to learn any lines,’ said Joey.
‘It is a scene entirely without dialogue. I want you only to gaze, to ravish your eyes upon this lovely creature.’
Joey shot a sidelong glance at Sonja, arms folded, in her black bikini. ‘I think I can manage that.’
Reiner took another appraising look at Joey. ‘It is a pity Ronnie left so suddenly. We could have borrowed his shirt. On second thoughts, perhaps what you’re wearing already is the thing. No dress code for a hallucination.’ He looked around at the bemused faces of his crew. ‘Camera!’
It had just gone five when Reiner decided that he’d got what he wanted and called it a day. The sun was shrinking to a distant fireball on the horizon. Someone suggested a farewell drink to Portofino, and gradually they drifted away in twos and threes down to the harbour. In the crowded bar where they gathered Nat found himself chatting to Joey, his neck pink from sunburn. He was actually quite a good egg once you unpeeled the hard shell. His father had been a barber when they lived near King’s Cross; his mum was a char. Joey had got a place at the local grammar school, but he’d been too keen on sport to bother with studying. Billie, overhearing, asked him where they had lived in King’s Cross.
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