AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘Of course not. Well, thank you anyway.’

  ‘That’s all right. Er – Magnus.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘That stuff you were telling me about Piers, about the gossip.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You see quite a lot of them. You don’t think it – well, upsets Chloe, do you?’

  ‘I don’t imagine so. In any case, Chloe’s innocence and adoration of your son-in-law is such that if she found Piers personally beating up an old lady in a dark alley, she’d think he was merely indulging in a little method acting.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Caroline. ‘And I wish you wouldn’t refer to him as my son-in-law. It makes me feel old. Goodbye, Magnus.’

  ‘No,’ said Chloe. ‘No, no, no. I’m sorry, Piers, but it’s an appalling, horrible idea, and it makes me feel physically sick. Please don’t ever mention anything like it again.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Piers, and the grey eyes were granite-hard as he looked at her, ‘don’t be so melodramatic, Chloe. I’m only asking.’

  ‘I know what you’re asking,’ said Chloe, ‘and the answer is no. And don’t use that horrible language, I hate it. If you so much as mention it again, we are going home, the three of us, and you can stay here and do whatever you like.’

  ‘Dear God, you are ridiculous,’ said Piers. ‘I cannot believe we are having this conversation.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately I can,’ said Chloe. ‘Now please go away. Go and finish making that horrible film as fast as you can. I want to get out of this house and this town as you call it, and this whole miserable business.’

  ‘Chloe, for God’s sake,’ said Piers and his face was oddly desperate as he looked at her, ‘I need Pandora for this. It’s just a few small scenes. She would be perfect, and I could wrap this whole sequence up.’

  ‘Piers, Hollywood is full of children dying to get into movies. With mothers who are dying for them to get into movies. Go and find one of them.’

  ‘Chloe, you don’t seem to understand. That could take days, weeks. I want a very small and beautiful child with red hair. We happen to have one in the next room. Now we are horribly over-budget and overtime as it is, it would be one small thing you could do to help. You’re not over-strong in that direction. Why not make an effort just for once?’

  ‘You bastard,’ said Chloe, surprising herself by the violence of her own reaction, ‘you bastard. I do everything I can for you, against considerable odds, and –’

  ‘Oh, spare me,’ said Piers, ‘I cannot stand this self-abasement. The point is, you could do this one thing for me, and make my life immeasurably simpler, and you’re deliberately making it much harder.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I am making your life hard, Piers. I happen to be more concerned with Pandora’s. I can’t and I won’t agree to this. If necessary I shall take Pandora home to England. I’m desperately homesick anyway.’

  He stared at her in silence for a moment, and then said, ‘You really are unbelievably unsupportive, you know. I have grown extremely weary of your whining.’ The phone rang. He picked it up and not only his voice but his face changed, became warm, smiling. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘oh, Robin, hi. No, it’s fine of course. Sure. Yes, I’ll be there in five minutes.’ He put the phone down, looked at Chloe. ‘I’m going now,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you later. When you feel a little calmer, perhaps you would consider this again.’

  ‘I’m perfectly calm,’ said Chloe, ‘and there is nothing to consider. Pandora is not going to become a Hollywood brat. Goodbye, Piers.’ She picked up a magazine and began reading it very intently.

  Piers glared at her, and then walked out, closing the door very quietly behind him. He never shouted or slammed doors; he lost his temper in an icily controlled way. She found it disturbing; she would have preferred slams and shouts.

  When he had gone, she got up very slowly and wearily, and walked into the shower. She stood there for ages, in the pounding hot water – even showers in California were excessive – trying to decide what to do. If Piers really wanted Pandora in his wretched film, he would have her. There was nothing she could really do to override him. All her threats were empty and he knew it. Unless – unless she did take her home, home to England. She decided she would actually be prepared to do that. It seemed to her the most terrible prospect: to have the child, already precocious and spoilt beyond belief, acutely aware of her beauty, her charms, her talents, dragged into the claustrophobic spotlight of appearing in her father’s film; being on the set every day, pampered and praised, watched, admired, cosseted, exclaimed over. It would be appalling. Chloe, who loathed the film business more every day, shrank from the prospect. And if Pandora herself got an idea that it might happen, a very noisy, multicoloured balloon really would go up. Pandora was enchantment herself if she got her own way; if she didn’t, then demons paled beside what she became.

  Chloe walked out of the shower and into her room; she could hear Pandora now, outside, laughing, playing near the pool, and looked down; she was wearing the sky-blue bikini Piers had bought for her (and Chloe didn’t approve of that either, she hated seeing little girls dressed up like starlets, she had told him, and Piers had laughed and said Pandora was a star to him, not a starlet, a very special little star), her small body golden brown, her dark red curls tied in a bobbing topknot. Tiny, little more than a baby really, not yet three, she was beautiful; she would make an enchanting attendant for Titania (with her own dark red hair), a companion to Peaseblossom (who had a dazzling, brilliant red mop); she could see why Piers wanted her. But he wasn’t going to have her. Somehow she would stop it.

  She spent a miserable day; she was sick of the sunshine, sick of the pool, sick of the whole damn thing. It was spring now, and they had been there since just before Christmas. Christmas was Los Angeles at its most ridiculous with fake snow piled up and set with Christmas trees at strategic points along Hollywood Boulevard, fairy lights strung between the palm trees in Beverly Hills and carols like ‘In the Deep Midwinter’ playing in all the elevators. Chloe had been initially amused by it, and then became ferociously homesick. Spring seemed very little different, apart from the lack of the fake snow: one of the things she hated most was the lack of seasons. They were living in a rented house in Bel Air, and she hated it, lush and lavish as it was, hated being there; she was lonely and bored, and missed everyone, her friends, Joe, even her mother, terribly. Joe had been out a couple of months earlier and, slightly to her surprise, so had Magnus Phillips, researching, he said, some article on the casting couch culture. Piers had been cool towards him, and had not encouraged Chloe to invite him to stay, but she was so delighted to see a friendly face, hear an English voice (and a humorous one at that, standing in a corner with her at one party and whispering scandalous comments on almost everyone in the room) that she had insisted. Magnus only actually stayed in Los Angeles for four days, then disappeared, saying rather vaguely that he was off down the coast for a day or two; when he came back, he stayed less than twenty-four hours and flew out, much to Chloe’s disappointment and Piers’s patent relief.

  ‘I thought you liked Magnus,’ she said to him, as they ate dinner that night, at the appallingly Californian hour of six o’clock, and he said he had liked him, very much, but he had heard just one too many stories about his untrustworthiness and he would prefer to have less to do with him in future.

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have asked him to be Ned’s godfather,’ said Chloe light-heartedly, but Piers seemed genuinely troubled by the whole thing, so she abandoned the discussion, and diverted his attention by asking him about the problems he had been having with his lighting director which led to a hour-long exposition on the difference in lighting fantasy and reality, something which the director clearly didn’t understand. Chloe didn’t point out that Piers had hired the lighting director personally and at immense expense.

 
She had made a few friends at the dance class she had enrolled in, but they were not soul-mates, to put it mildly; although charmingly easy to get along with, they seemed to her to lack a sense of either humour or proportion, and would discuss with equal intensity and at equal length, as they sat around their identically shaped and landscaped swimming pools, their weight, their skin, their exercise routines, their sexual responses and the progress of the Vietnam War. Sometimes as she sat in the sunshine, Chloe would grow a little sleepy and confused, and would drift off over one set of LA-speak encompassing personal therapists, inadequate responses (both intellectual and sexual), hormonal imbalances and multi-orgasmic tendencies, and come to over another, taking in abuse of power, a moral edge, radicalization and imperialistic tendencies. It seemed to her that most of the phrases were interchangeable.

  Piers, on the other hand, with his perfect ear for accent, for dialogue, for phrasing, loved it all; he could switch from his own perfect classic English to a kind of mellifluous west coast mid Atlantic without it sounding in the least phoney or patronizing; and he could use the words too, the Hollywood talk, the self-indulgent egocentric conversations that were not really so different from London theatre talk, but with psycho-babble thrown in. The first time she had heard it, had heard him debating in all seriousness whether the fear of his physical self or the fear of what the camera might find was the prime force in creating a character on screen, she had almost laughed, thinking he was sending himself up; but she had learnt quickly that while he was saying those things, with those people, he meant them, believed them, believed in what he was saying. And then of course, she knew, he would get back to the dining rooms of London and repeat them, word for word, only laughing, indulgently to be sure, but still laughing at the people he had left behind, who were so intellectually unsophisticated, so intense, so creatively shallow, compared with the company he now found himself in.

  She had learnt to cope with it all, had learnt to perform quite skilfully at the life there, the screenings, the self-indulgent, narcissistic, egocentric gatherings, to sit and smile at least at the parties, even the wild, hedonistic affairs, where the cocaine was laid out in one room, and the sexual activities in another, but she still didn’t like it. She felt lonely, small, of no importance, even more so than she did in London, there on sufferance, although everyone tried so hard to be nice to her (which made her feel guilty in itself); and to protect her, latterly at least, from the humiliation of the latest gossip, the scandal, which of course she was aware of. How could she not be, after – what? – two, three years now of it, of finally recognizing there was some basis to it, facing it, accepting it? Never spoken of, of course, never acknowledged between them, between her and Piers, just a darkness, a haunting wretchedness. Each time, every time, she thought she could stand it no longer; every time she swallowed it, swallowed her pride, her humiliation, told herself it was nothing, of no importance, that it was her Piers truly loved, wanted, needed – above all needed, that awful stifling claustrophobic need that had once seemed so precious, so wonderful and was now such a terrible, heavy burden.

  Chloe went shopping after lunch and bought herself three extremely expensive dresses; she always spent money when they had had a row, it was the only way she could think of to get at Piers. He had told her to ease up on their spending briefly: that they had a slight – ‘only slight’ – cash-flow crisis, that the year in Los Angeles was proving expensive. Well, that was the least of her worries. She felt sore with misery, and also with self-doubt; was she really unsupportive, did she really whine all the time? Well if she did, she thought, with a flash of sudden violent rage, he had only himself to blame. He had hardly worked at shoring up her self-confidence. Nevertheless, she had to live with it. Make the absolute most of it, concentrate – no, not concentrate; what were the words of that song? one of Joe’s favourites – accentuate the positive. Certainly at this particular moment in time she had no choice. She had got herself into this hot, lumpy, acutely uncomfortable bed, and she had to lie on it.

  She prepared dinner herself, put some wine on ice, changed into one of the new dresses. She waited for Piers by the poolhouse; at ten o’clock she put the wine back in the fridge, the dinner in the freezer. She knew, or supposed she knew, where he was; she shut it determinedly from her thoughts. She had grown very skilful at doing that. It was the only way she could handle it. He didn’t come home until after midnight; he didn’t call, didn’t even send a message. She heard him come in; she lay awake for hours, half dreading, half hoping he would come to their room. He didn’t.

  In the morning he looked white and drawn and was totally cold towards her. He kissed the children goodbye and left after a breakfast eaten in stark silence. Chloe spent another wretched morning by the pool, and then, on a whim, and in a desperate burst of courage, decided to go down to the studio and share the lunch break with Piers. She hated doing it, hated exposing herself in all her Englishness, her unsuitableness, to the cast, the crew, the intensely staid little world they all inhabited (although they were always friendly, always made her welcome when she did appear on the set); but the fierceness of her quarrel with Piers had made her uneasy and she felt as always it was she who should try to set it right. It would probably please him that she had made the effort, gone to the studio, and he would certainly not be publicly hostile to her; it was one of his virtues anyway that he forgave swiftly and easily, never bore her grudges.

  She put on another of the new dresses, a white silk from Valentino, and drove across town towards West Hollywood and the studio in the pale blue Mercedes convertible that Piers had hired for her, feeling sick with nerves. She knew it was silly: that everyone would greet her rapturously, that Piers would, whatever his feelings, kiss her fondly, make a space for her at the table (he always ate with the crew, never stayed alone in the caravan; it was all part of his rather studied conviviality). And, sure enough, the man at the gate smiled at her and saluted and said, ‘Hi, Mrs Windsor,’ and as she walked across the parking lot she met a couple of actors she knew who kissed her ecstatically and said what a treat it was to see her, and told her she looked wonderful. ‘They’re just shooting the last scene, on Stage Two,’ said one of them, so she made her way over to Stage Two, slipped quietly in through one of the side doors and edged her way very slowly towards the set, marvelling as always at the huge number of people who seemed to have to be present at even the smallest scene: not just the director, the cameramen, the lighting cameramen, the sound engineers, the make-up people, the hairdressers and the dressers, but dozens more, carpenters, gofers, grips, and a whole crowd more who seemed to be there only to watch. She thought (as she always thought, every time) how extraordinary it was that this great shuffling, hustling, apparently disorderly and disparate group of people standing there behind the cameras were all actually as much a physical part of the film as the actors themselves, crucial, essential to what was going on before it, with equal parts to play, talents to contribute, and yet in the final result, up there on the screen, they became invisible, except in a small line in the credits. She joined them, slightly nervous that she would be noticed, would spoil things in some way, would cause problems.

  It was indeed the last scene and: ‘Give me your hands if we be friends,’ Puck had called out, reaching out to Piers, to Tabitha, and they, laughing, gave their hands. Chloe, enchanted, forgetting her distress, stood and stared at the breathtaking beauty of the drifting fairy forest, seemingly sprung up in the middle of the set, wonderfully real and strangely believable despite the steel girders above it, hung with wires and lights, the cameras mounted high on trolleys, the concrete floor, the constant ebb and flow of people wearing dirty jeans and dirtier T-shirts: that was what mattered, that was real, the banks of flowers, the trailing ropes of foliage, the swirling blue-white mists, peopled with drifting fairy folk with pale ethereal faces. She looked at Robin’s wild faun-like face, turning from Piers to Tabitha and back again, calling out, his sweet light voi
ce singing into music, ‘And Robin shall restore amends,’ and she believed in it totally, just for a moment or two; then someone behind her swore under his breath, lit a cigarette, and sharply the whole scene epitomized for her the confusion and lack of reality in this strange world, the nightmare of the whole situation; she looked at Robin Goodfellow, or was it Robin Leveret, damn him, God, she hated him, standing there, holding Piers’s hand, and was it her fevered imagination, or was he really massaging his palm insidiously gently, and were the loving, tender eyes turned to him really Oberon’s, or were they Piers’s own? She felt she had no idea where the midsummer night ended and the harsh, hot day began, where Athens ceased to exist and Los Angeles took over, where Titania ceased to be and Tabitha became herself again; the whole thing was a long, ceaseless, confusing nightmare. If only, she thought, her heart aching, if only it were true, that their time here was truly over, if only they, as well as Puck, were speaking the very last words on the Hollywood stage, if only they could go home to England, to London, to Stebbings, if only she were back in a soft, cool climate with flat English voices and calm English ways instead of the heat and the sunshine and the California drawl and the Beverly Hills excesses, the gilded, open prison that was Hollywood.

  Well it was nearly over, here at least; only another few months or so. And then they would be home, home in England.

  She realized the scene was over, that everyone was breaking up; she took a deep breath and went further forward towards the stage, where Piers was talking intently to the assistant director, and to Robin Leveret, and she waited again, too nervous to interrupt. She studied Robin interestedly, as if he were a strange biological specimen (as indeed he could be called, she thought, smiling to herself, briefly, harshly cynical). He had a very strong, large presence, although physically he was small, and slight; he was older than he seemed too, not the beautiful boy he appeared to be on stage (and even on screen) but a man well into his twenties, possibly older. She had got a great pleasure from observing this, from noting the fine lines around his great blue eyes, the petulant droop of the cupid’s-bow mouth, the drifts of white in the golden curls. The whole company adored him: Tabitha called him her darling boy, David Montague called him his muse, Liza her beloved. It had been a great coup, getting him, Piers had told her initially when he was casting the film, he was actually a dancer with the International Ballet, but with a rare talent for speaking (and singing) verse. He also, Piers had said, had an extraordinary grasp not just of his own part but of the whole production. ‘One day I would like to direct a ballet, with him,’ Piers had said, ‘that would be a great experience,’ and she had nodded, unsuspicious in those early halcyon days, merely awed as always by the range of Piers’s talents and the breadth of his ambition.