Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  III

  ‘…THE THAMES,’ LINDSAY SAID, raising her voice and peering upwards at the white, bloodless face of a complete stranger, an exceedingly tall, vampiric and emaciated man, whose features she could only just see through candle smoke, cigarette smoke, and some peculiar foggy density to the air, apparent throughout this vast and crowded room, but especially dense in this area, to which she had been bobbed, tossed and cast like so much flotsam and jetsam.

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  The pale man had backed against a pillar, towards which he too had been tossed some moments before. Jammed against his right elbow, was a shorter, fatter man with a ponytail, who was waving a glass in one hand, and a large prawn in the other. This man was haranguing a satellite group on the subject of Scorsese’s movies.

  ‘Mayhem,’ he yelled. ‘Steadicam. Mean Streets, my friends. Note the tracking shots, yes?’

  Another piece of human driftwood hit Lindsay hard from behind. She stumbled, then righted herself. She had arrived late; most of the other party guests appeared to have arrived early and were already wrecked. She gazed helplessly around her. If this room was like an aircraft carrier—and it was; several planes could have been parked in this space—its decks were awash. Waves of random conversations kept breaking over her; people surged on all sides; she could not even see properly, since it seemed Lulu Sabatier eschewed electric light. This entire, huge, confusing loft space, with a bewilderment of metal stairways; jutting, galleried upper decks; dark archways which might lead somewhere or nowhere, was lit by candles. In the centre of the deck, or floor, was a lipstick-coloured couch, to which party-goers clung like a life-raft, and thrumming up through her feet, she could sense some mysterious energy, like the power of a whirring turbine, buried deep in the bowels of a ship. The throb and pulse of this power source had a propulsive effect. Lindsay felt it was propelling her through the dark and the smoke to some vital but as yet undisclosed destination. She felt she would surely arrive somewhere eventually, but meanwhile she felt unstable, not too sure of her balance, and faintly sea-sick.

  She peered up at the landmark of the tall Dracula man. He had just avoided being speared by his fat neighbour’s cocktail stick and was looking down at Lindsay with a mad desperation.

  ‘I can’t hear,’ he shouted. ‘You cannot hear a goddamn thing in here…’

  ‘The Thames,’ Lindsay yelled, with equal desperation. ‘I said, this place is very hard to find, isn’t it? I nearly drove into the Thames twice…’

  The pale man, she perceived, was not interested in this. He was not interested in Lindsay either, but—hedging his bets—he was not yet prepared to be uninterested. She could already see that he had an acute case of party squint, partly caused by alcohol, she suspected, but also caused by visual dilemmas.

  It was not easy to keep one eye perpetually on the entrance doors, in case someone came in, while keeping the other eye on two hundred guests, all of whom kept milling back and forth, and any one of whom might be (several certainly were) someone as well. Nor was he prepared to cast off Lindsay yet; she too, after all, might turn out to be someone, though he seemed to find that possibility unlikely. He performed another periscopic manoeuvre—a process assisted by the length of his neck—then, with an irritable frantic air, bent one eye upon her from a great height.

  ‘Fog,’ he shouted. ‘This room is full of fucking fog. Why has Lulu opened the fucking windows? I mean, it’s October. It’s Hallowe’en, for fuck’s sake. What kind of maniac opens the windows in October? The fog comes in off the river. It mists the whole place up…’

  ‘If Lulu didn’t open the windows,’ Lindsay yelled, ‘it would be impossible to breathe…’

  ‘Ahhh…’ Momentary hope dawned in his eyes. ‘You know Lulu then?’

  ‘Intimately,’ replied Lindsay, who had still to identify her hostess, let alone be introduced to her. ‘Lulu and I go way back.’

  This statement, designed to annoy, had an arresting effect. The pale man’s fly-eyes stopped swivelling. He clasped Lindsay’s arm in a demented grip, and said something frantic and inaudible, something washed away by the incoming tide of adjacent conversations.

  ‘…Is he here?’ Lindsay heard, as the conversations ebbed. ‘Because fucking Lulu swore he was coming…Only reason I’m here…Have to speak to…Urgent…Project…Script. This man is my god. I mean no exaggeration, my god.’

  ‘Is who here?’ Lindsay shouted back, decoding this.

  ‘Court. Tomas Court.’

  ‘Where? Where?’ cried the ponytailed neighbour, as this magic name was uttered. He spun round like a dervish, grabbed the pale man with one hand and Lindsay with the other, spilling champagne down her dress.

  ‘He’s here? Did you say Tomas was here?’

  ‘No, I said maybe he was here.’ The pale man swayed. ‘I said Lulu said he’d be here. Look, d’you mind fucking letting go of me?’

  ‘Apologies, my friend.’ The ponytail stepped back half an inch, and with difficulty focused upon Lindsay.

  ‘And this is?’

  ‘I don’t know who this is,’ the pale man replied in an aggrieved tone. ‘She knows Lulu. She says she knows Lulu…’ He paused. ‘Whereas I’ve never fucking met Lulu. I’ve been here eight times and I’ve never met her yet’

  This surprising information seemed to forge an instant bond. The two men embraced.

  ‘Shake, pal.’ They shook. ‘I’m beginning to wonder, my friend,’ the ponytail remarked, in Jacobean tones, ‘whether Lulu exists.’

  ‘She says she does.’ The pale man turned accusingly to Lindsay. ‘Knows her intimately. Friends from way back…’

  Fixing her with his eyes, in so far as he was able, the ponytail demanded to know where, in that case, Lulu was. ‘Because,’ he said, swaying like a yachtsman, ‘I’ve been promised an introduction to Tomas. I spoke to a very very close aide of Lulu’s called Pat.’

  The two men eyed each other.

  ‘Pat? Pat?’ The pale man sighed. ‘That rings a bell. But there’s a lot of aides. Lulu has a confusing number of aides…’

  ‘True. An ear to the ground, however. On the inside of the inside. On the ball. That’s Lulu’s strength. Elusive, though, my friend. Cancels lunch dates…’

  ‘Doesn’t return calls. Can’t be fucking reached…’

  ‘Here tonight though. Definitely here—somewhere. I have assurances. Lulu’s here—and so is Tomas Court.’

  Lindsay, growing anxious to escape, attempted to edge away, but the group behind her pushed her back. Oblivious to her presence, an expression of demented reverence came upon the pale man’s face.

  ‘Tomas Court!’ he cried. ‘I worship that man. I bow down before him. I say—and I don’t fucking care who hears me say it—I say: that man is my god.’

  ‘A director of genius, my friend. No argument. Dead Heat?’

  ‘Incandescent. I’ve seen it fifteen times. A masterpiece. I fucking wept.’

  ‘Pure film, my friend. In a class of its own. Except…’

  ‘The spider sequence?’

  ‘Cheap. I would have to say that. Edging towards the cheap.’

  ‘Vulgar?’

  ‘My friend, I’d have to agree. Seriously vulgar. Even jejune. You could say—a mistake.’

  ‘He makes mistakes!’ Here, the pale man became very animated. ‘OK, it’s heresy, but I’ll say it: Tomas Court makes mistakes, misjudgements. And Dead Heat is riddled with them…’

  ‘The end is lousy. Dead Heat has a lousy ending. Personally, I have my doubts about the beginning, as well…’

  ‘What’s your view on the editing?’

  ‘A fucking shambles.’

  ‘Dialogue?’

  ‘Please. I could write better dialogue in my sleep.’

  ‘No heart, my friend.’ Ponytail sighed. ‘It’s all window dressing. Smart-ass movie graduate stuff. Post-modern posturing. Hommage. Quotes. Does Tomas Court even understand genre, my friend? That’s the question I ask myself…�
��

  ‘Understand it? He couldn’t spell it.’

  ‘He’s sold out, in my view. He’s peaked, let’s face it. He peaked a while ago. He was a flash in the pan. He…’

  ‘Actually, he’s over there,’ said Lindsay, who had now decided that she disliked these two cabaret artists very much. ‘He’s over there by the door,’ she continued, giving them both the sweetest smile she possessed.

  ‘Don’t you see him? By the door, with Lulu.’

  She pointed across the room. There, in a thick cluster by the entrance, stood a tall and dramatically dressed woman of a certain age, who jutted up from the heaving crowd like a gaunt, weatherbeaten lighthouse. None of her companions was Tomas Court, now so famous that Lindsay would have recognized him, and the tall woman was not Lulu Sabatier, but paleface and ponytail deserved punishment, and this woman was, without a doubt, the most terminally boring woman Lindsay had ever met in her life. Grasping Lindsay as she entered, she had pinned her to the wall and gone through her last screenplay scene by scene and comma by comma. Emma was mad about it, she said; Michelle had read it—it was female, female, female—and Michelle had flipped.

  ‘That woman there.’ Lindsay pointed again. ‘The one in the burnous. That’s Lulu. She’s been waiting there for Tomas Court all evening. He just came in, a second ago. Sharon Stone was with him, I think…’

  ‘Christ…’ Paleface and ponytail convulsed. Parting the waters, they hit the waves at speed; as some wind in the room took up the cry ‘Tomas Court, Tomas Court’ a host of back-up vessels surged in their wake. A social tide turned; two, four, ten, fifteen, thirty others caught the prevailing current and made for the beachhead of the burnous. Lindsay, well satisfied, watched this armada with delight. The burnous woman, used to being avoided, greeted her new-found popularity with stupefaction. Lindsay slipped her moorings, shifted behind the now-vacant pillar, and resolved to lie low, over the horizon, out of sight.

  She had been at the party less than an hour by then; it felt like a week. Somewhere during the course of the evening, she had lost her grip, and time and age had run amok. A rattled forty by the time she left her apartment, she suddenly turned thirty in the elevator here as, soothed by recondite muzak, she glided up.

  The elevator was multi-mirrored, and its lighting had been unusually flattering. Looking at what appeared to be several well-dressed, passably pretty women who, since she was the only female present, were presumably herself, Lindsay experienced pre-party optimism; it was as pungent as snuff. The true source of this optimism, she realized a second later, was not really her own reflection, but the apparently admiring glance of the elevator’s only other occupant, a tall, dark-haired American, who had held the doors for her, who had wished her ‘Good Evening’, and who bore a passing resemblance to Rowland McGuire. It was as she noticed this resemblance that she hit thirty, a promising age. However, on reaching Lulu Sabatier’s loft-palace, he remarked, ‘Nice dress, babe,’ and Lindsay, realizing he looked nothing like Rowland at all, hit thirty-eight.

  Thanks to paleface and ponytail, she was now sixty-five, going on eighty-two. She did not smoke, she had never smoked, but she now needed a cigarette badly. Also alcohol; yes, it was certainly a mistake in these circumstances to be drinking prudent Perrier and ice. What she needed was a triple brandy, or intravenous vodka perhaps. Since she was driving, the best she could risk was a glass of champagne. If she drank it extremely fast, however, having eaten nothing since lunch, perhaps all these frogs would turn into princes; perhaps all these basilisk women would turn and welcome her; perhaps the air would begin to ring with good fellowship and wit. And if that transformation failed to occur, as seemed likely, she would find Markov and Jippy and insist on escape.

  Confidence, confidence, she muttered to herself, easing between knotty groups of people who showed no inclination to admit her. She grabbed a glass of champagne from a scurrying waiter and found a haven of relative quiet and space in an embrasure by the windows. She drank half of the champagne with medicinal speed. Here, she was able to conceal herself from paleface and ponytail and any revenge they might seek. She moved back behind a huge and magnificent swagged curtain, constructed from plebeian sailcloth, but fringed with partrician silks, and, watching the ceaseless ebb and flow, waited for the magic potion—it was Krug—to take effect.

  Here, with a view down through wisps and drifts of mist to the sleek black curve of the river, she became calmer. Below her, she discovered, lay a garden, a garden that was subtly and theatrically lit, with a dark central fish pool, clipped topiary shapes, and some pale statuary. She could see a goddess or two, one lacking arms, a lovely blind nereid, and a nymph on a pedestal, who appeared to ward off the attentions of a nearby god. It was an enchanting garden, made the more beautiful by the flow of the river beyond, and she found that the garden—or the champagne—was soothing her. Her age steadied and approached normal; the throb of those mysterious party turbines seemed quieter. Leaning against the iron balustrade across the open window, she inhaled damp, foggy city air. Was she in London? She felt she might have been elsewhere, anywhere. She was beginning to feel like Alice, made tiny enough to enter Wonderland by swallowing the contents of a bottle labelled, ‘Drink me’, and then made absurdly tall by nibbling a cake.

  She thought of Alice, swimming in a lake of her own tears. She thought of Alice, a most sensible girl, stabilizing her size fluctuations by—how had she done it exactly? Lindsay frowned down at the imperceptible flow of the river below, trying to remember—by eating from alternate sides of a mushroom, she thought—and a vivid image came to her of reading this story aloud to Tom when he was seven, perhaps eight. It was a period, she knew, of some background pain, one of the last occasions when her ex-husband, down on his luck and thrown out by the latest girl, had attempted to come back.

  It was probably the time, if she were accurate, when she finally realized, five years after her divorce, that she neither loved nor needed him any more. She could remember looking at him, as he stood in the doorway; she could remember the faint surprise she had felt as she realized that she had loved, married, divorced, and agonized over a man whom she neither liked nor respected; a man who had wasted too much of her time. How stupid I was, she had thought, closing the door.

  Yes, all of that had been happening; yet now, looking back, she found that those incidents had drifted away, and in their place, anchoring her, distinct as the links of a chain, were her evenings with her son; evening after blessed evening, hour after peaceful hour, in which they shared the fantastic adventures of a Victorian child, encircled by lamplight, absorbed in a story, both of them contented and wanting nothing more.

  Over a decade ago, those evenings, now. Sharp as a poignard, Lindsay felt the familiar stab of regret. Such states of grace did not, and could not, endure; childish things, and even the most adult of children’s books, were put away. Children grew up, and now her son’s need for her company was diminished and infrequent—as she had always accepted it would one day be.

  It would have been consoling, she thought, watching the river flow, to know that someone else did still retain a need for her; the kind of need that accompanies love: a husband, an enduring partner. It would have been easier and less painful, Lindsay sometimes believed, to adjust to her present state had she not had to do so alone. However, alone she was and alone she was likely to remain, and the worst possible way of dealing with that was to indulge in this kind of melancholy introspection. Lindsay pinched herself viciously—one of her cures—and read herself a few bracing lectures. She turned her back firmly on the river and the lovely shadowy garden below; such views encouraged nostalgia and self-pity, she feared.

  She eddied out into the party again, trying to convince herself that she was glad to be there.

  After some while, she managed to accost a tiny waiter, bearing a huge platter aloft. He presented her with tiny but delectable offerings: a wren’s egg with a paring of black truffle; a tadpole-shaped blini glistening with caviar—
real caviar, as it proved. She forced a conversation with some mad-hatter movie journalist about something; she talked to Tweedledum and Tweedledee who, in her experience, were always present at all parties. She was addressed by a dozy dormouse; by a duchess—and she actually was a duchess, or so some unctuous caterpillar of a man confirmed. There were a number of queens here, of course—in fact, queens were particularly thick on the ground. She looked desperately around and behind and beside them for Markov, certain to be queening it on an occasion such as this. But she could find no sign of him, or of silent Jippy, and after a while the utter randomness of these unlikely conversations began to tell. Lindsay felt afflicted with egos: me, me, me, cried her interlocutors—my screenplay, my company, my role, my percentage, my agent, my image…Lindsay fled.

  It occurred to her—she had seen a flight of steps—that somewhere there must be a way down to that tempting garden below, perhaps via one of the archways, or one of the corridors which seemed to lead off this aircraft-carrier deck. Carefully, she navigated in what seemed to be approximately the right direction. She was a little delayed, en route, first by the famous and poisonous actor, Nic Hicks, who mistook her for someone else, and then by a man who claimed she was his third wife and the love of his life. She was further held up by an impetuous man who grabbed her arm, waved a bottle of pills, and announced he was about to commit suicide; on Lindsay’s informing him that, in these circumstances his decision was perfectly understandable, he had a change of heart and decided to have another drink instead.

  At last, still nursing a few dregs of champagne, she found herself alone in a corridor, a long white corridor, lined with posters for, and stills from, famous movies: Casablanca, Persona, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, La Règle du Jeu, Pulp Fiction, Jules et Jim, Dead Heat, Bicycle Thieves, The Virgin Spring…Lindsay had seen all of these films, many with Tom who was a film buff and movie addict. She passed along the display, slowing first at one, then another. She came to a halt in front of the celebrated poster for Tomas Court’s third and breakthrough movie, Dead Heat, the film paleface and ponytail had been lauding and denigrating earlier.