He gazed blankly at the author.
'Is this what your great love of literature has come to?'
He felt brittle now, dispossessed of resolve. He had been seen into and he stood back from the chair.
In a few hours Frank Coburn would be boarding a plane destined for Naples; Adela had delayed her return. Out there people were still living in the false future he had lied into being. Stress condensed inside him. He could pull the plug on the Americans. Adela could be apologised to, said goodbye to; but to halt these developments was just too painful. Oh yes, he wanted the film all right; he had wanted the symbols that would attach to success. He wanted power and control because without power he was a ghost in the world. But more than that, he wanted redemption from failure. He wanted to be successful, effective, passionate, and through Adela he had seen those things as possible again.
He sat down by the desk, the pangs of resolution and despair blending indigestibly. His chance had been crushed, and for a moment he savoured the bitterness of that.
'You think I've sold out?'
Hilldyard looked down into his hands. He could endure other people's suffering as well as his own.
'You were on the cusp.'
'I'm falling below your very high standards?'
There was silence.
'Life won't allow me your standards.' Suddenly, it was clear to him. 'I'm not a genius. I'm an ordinary mortal who needs to work and have a future.'
The author stroked his forehead, soothing himself. He had many distractions but his main concern now came into focus and he rose from his chair and strolled across to the writing desk where he leaned forward, setting his palms on the edge of the table-top, and presented to Michael a look of intense determination. His lips moved prematurely.
'Michael. Take this into your heart.' He drew into himself the thread of the younger man's concentration. 'When I look at you, I am looking at an artist. I am looking at a man who will only be fulfilled as an artist. I see a person who lives on the finest, most felt responses. And I know in my heart that the key to your life is not public success but intellectual integration. You have yet to find the way of being true to yourself. And when you find it, your unhappiness will cease. Suddenly, you'll be here, dense with purpose, driven to produce the thing that your intelligence tells you is an inexorable response to life. Integrity will be a physical sense of well-being. All this film talk will seem peripheral. Because you are more intelligent. And intelligence that has spread its wings soars over the world of commerce. It is my utter conviction that your happiness lies in this direction. Life hasn't brought you to my doorstep by accident. As for genius–' He squinted. 'Genius does not make a life. Whatever your measure of talent, it will be more than some and less than others, and what matters really is courage. You need to believe that what you think and feel can count. That you can remake the world in your own terms. The important thing is to live and work to the breadth of your unique faculties, and I have no doubt that when the courage is granted you you'll do that. That will be your redemption. Nothing else.'
Michael sat with crossed arms and the author leaned towards him, knuckles on the table. Hilldyard's certainty ran against his astonishment, ran around it, the force of it baffling him as though he had been told something true but incomprehensible.
'You honestly think I'm a writer?'
'A novelist, a biographer. It hardly matters.'
The men faced each other, gazes locked.
Michael laughed oddly. True, he had started to write. He had wanted to capture something. He concentrated on this thought but somehow could not link up with the side of himself that had sat on the balcony, scribbling feverishly; that self seemed airy, unreal.
'How could I be a writer and not know it?'
'That, my dear fellow, has been your whole problem.'
He looked into the author's grey eyes, mirrors of himself. The remark caused him turmoil, as though he were stuck outside self-knowledge.
'I'm thirty-five!'
'Writing is a means to live one's life. It is never too late to live one's life properly.'
'You're making me into an author!'
'I see you becoming one.'
He was desolate. 'But how?'
Hilldyard was vibrant. 'By discovering the courage to express what is positive and beautiful as though your life depended on it.'
Michael crushed his face into his palms. 'I'm not that good!'
'You wouldn't be here in this room if you weren't. I'd have got rid of you.'
He looked up in surprise at Hilldyard's face.
'You need insight, Michael. Insight will come.'
He shook his head. He was aware of his weakness now. 'I need a bloody epiphany.'
Hilldyard stood up, nodded slowly. 'In your case certain things must be burned off.'
Michael clenched his hands together. In every direction so much effort was involved and all the time he was becoming smaller, weaker.
'It's me that'll burn. I'm going bankrupt.'
'Bankrupt! You'll discover an immunity to that kind of loss.'
'Actually–' He wiped an eye. 'I can't bear it.'
'Whatever, you'll live. And having life, you'll keep the only thing that matters. Compared to the eternity of oblivion in store for us the simple possession of consciousness is a miracle. Against that blackness everything we endure, every loss, every sorrow is a kind of asset. So you have to write, because writing is maximal consciousness, maximum life. That alone is the secret of a writer's self-sufficiency.'
The agony seeped through him, squeezed his heart.
'This is your crisis. Have it. Survive it!'
He was nothing, he realised. There was nothing beyond himself.
'It is your bearing as a man, your moral centre, the one thing you can fail or fall short of. Not to develop the unique instrument of your talent is the one cataclysm that awaits you, a failure you might never perceive because perception would be its first casualty.'
His head swung back as though he had been struck. He tried to hold in his mind the sense of himself as a writer and immediately weakened. He believed in the value of literature, had sustained himself for years with a love of poetry and drama, had often experienced the heightened perceptions of this novel or that play and regarded such moments as something essential, sublimely human; but when challenged to express his perceptions, and to become himself a creator, he felt drained to the core. Something was demanded that he could not supply. He was challenged to be of the best material and felt himself lacking.
He needed, he realised simply, to exist in the dimension of ordinary reality before submerging into the virtual domain of art.
'I believe in you, Michael, because you have inspired me. How many men does one meet these days of such fineness, such sentience?' He laid a hand on Michael's shoulder. 'What is essential in you is innocence.'
He sagged.
'Your painful life has turned you into something precious. You writhe, but the writhing won't overcome what is true in you. At heart I think you're incorruptible.'
He shuddered with embarrassment. He was offered sympathy and kindness and could do nothing with them.
The author stood behind the chair, fingers pressuring his collarbone, as though to press in certitude and self-belief.
'Don't take this in the wrong way,' he said softly, evenly. 'You've become for me a kind of muse. Thanks to you I've been given another book to write.' He hesitated, realising something afresh. 'You've given me a character.'
Michael felt the fingers on his shoulder squeezing gently.
'Someone I hardly dreamed could exist any more.'
It came as a double-take, astonishment suspended. 'You're using me?'
'Someone like you.'
He turned in his chair and looked at the fragile old face.
'As a character in your book?'
'As the first impression, the kernel.'
Michael was overwhelmed by a sense of irony. He was going to enter fiction whe
n he had barely existed in life. Hilldyard was using him, taking him, syringing him out of life into art.
'Don't . . . you mustn't spoil yourself . . . You give me the current . . . I mean, there's work to be done. This is a declaration, you see. Of my great fondness for you and a love for something you have kindled in me. I need you to stay.'
Michael consulted the open palms of his hands in a trance of wonder. On top of chagrin came a new emotion, a kind of apathy, as if to be told such things was to receive a burden, and to stand for something valuable which he could not enjoy in himself. He felt, bitterly, as though he could only exist for other people's benefit.
'We can help each other,' said Hilldyard, standing behind him. 'I mean, before you came along, I was a decaying geriatric. But now' – he smacked his palm on the mess of papers – 'I'm off again, feeling, thinking, writing, and if you can do that for me, I can do something for you. You're at an age when great things are possible. I want to see you through to the next stage. And this is the place to do it. Away from distraction.'
It flashed up in his mind and before he could stop himself the words were out. 'You want me to sacrifice my life to your novel?'
Hilldyard flinched. He was quickly dignified. 'If you believe in anything, you believe in my writing. And you believe in it because literature is an absolute. That's why you came here. And you know that I have only ever written for the kindred souls who believe that all this' – he glanced at the books – 'matters supremely.'
Michael made a gesture, a wave of apology. Even shame felt numb.
'And in your heart you want to help.'
Hilldyard hovered, patting his shoulder again, then trod discreetly over to the window, to the sweltering blueness of sea and sky.
Michael covered his brow. A course had been offered to him, an alternative way. It was the final draft of their previously vague collaboration and on the face of it he was offered extraordinary tuition in becoming an artist. He tried to fasten on it. There was nothing to grasp immediately, just the conception of something he could not feel from inside. The one thing he needed to do he had not the strength to believe in, and this failure was the cornerstone of other failings: a weakness his father had probably despised.
Hilldyard's presence sat on his freedom of thought. His omniscience was suffocating.
He pondered his change of heart. After he had kissed Adela everything had become gathered; a hard energy came up from way down, passion and ambition wound into suffocating need. It was a need that knew the desperate importance of its own fulfilment and which eclipsed the artistic self. One kiss sent stabs of yearning through his heart. For the first time in years he felt emotion as a positive energy. It was like a natural resource that had to be exploited. The raw painfulness of containing such regenerative desire was almost unbearable. She had been sent to him. She was compensation for a ruined life, for the loss of Christine, and she had arrived at a time when he was ready. He clutched his head in despair. He could not say this to Hilldyard, but it agonised him that Hilldyard could not understand his need, and would not help his return to normal life by giving him the one thing he required to secure Adela: the film rights. If Hilldyard could not understand the pain of Michael's necessities, why should he nurture Hilldyard's?
The misery of the situation gave him weary strength. He knew where he stood now. He would have to go back and the reality of that was worth stating bluntly.
'My brother called this morning.'
Hilldyard nodded attentively.
'I have to go back to London.'
'Oh!'
'This film' – there was no harm in candour, now that it would get him nothing – 'was my only hope.'
Hilldyard shook his head. 'Go and come back.'
'Perhaps.'
'You must come back!'
He slouched, eyes down. 'I have no free will any more.'
'But . . .'
'I have to face the music.'
'My boy, it's only music!'
He grew pale. 'It is devastation.'
'Companies come and go,' Hilldyard waved. 'People live their long lives.'
'You see–' Michael wiped his nose. 'You do see, James.' He would not get another chance at happiness. 'Your scruples are standing between me and survival.'
'Oh really!' The author was fraught. 'Don't torment me. My scruples are my religion, my faith.'
'A little mercy could save my home, all the money I have in the world!'
Hilldyard squinted in sympathy.
'It's in your gift,' Michael said, all-earnestly. 'Just a signature. A gesture between friends.'
'I can't.'
'You want me to stay?'
Hilldyard was distressed.
'James.' He grabbed the author's hand. The fingers were thick, soft, firmly responsive. 'I'll make the film and come back. I'll set up an office here. I don't have to be in London all the time.'
The author grimaced, squeezed tight. 'I cannot believe that.'
'Let the film be a tribute to our friendship.'
'Oh God!'
'Please!'
Hilldyard shook his head, eyes glistening.
'James!'
'I . . .' The old man's breathing was stertorous. He sighed profoundly. 'The essence of being an artist is a terrible loneliness precisely because there are certain matters on which one cannot compromise.'
Michael withdrew his hand and crossed to the window: the bright view, the coruscating sea and emerald pine. He felt ashamed to the core of his being. He had jettisoned dignity. But dignity was void now. Dignity had lost the argument and Michael, suddenly feeling that the truth was obvious, turned to Hilldyard and said, 'Does it matter what they do to the book?'
Hilldyard scowled.
'Let there be a film,' he said flamboyantly. 'Even if it's crap, does it matter?'
'It matters to me.'
He raised his voice. 'More than the welfare of another human being?'
Hilldyard coloured brilliantly.
'You don't know what I'm facing!'
'What are you facing?'
Bleakness swept over him like wind.
Hilldyard caught him by the arm. He brought his face up to Michael's.
'What have you done?'
He could not speak for a moment.
Hilldyard followed first one eye then the other, testing and penetrating, waiting and seeing, watching out the crisis. He put his hand under Michael's jaw, touched the flesh of his cheek.
'My only chance. My last chance!'
Hilldyard regarded Michael passionately, with declaratory fire. 'The beginning starts now.'
'Help me!'
The author went white.
'Give me the option.'
There was a silence and then something queer crossed Hilldyard's face, a shadow of fear.
'James . . .'
'Frances and I were lovers.'
The author seemed to shrink, a fairy-tale reversion into toad-like form.
' ''Anna'' is Frances, you see.'
He did not understand.
'She was fifteen years old. Joan died, and Frances went mad.'
Michael received the author's stare like a sheet of ice-water.
'The book is tainted, Michael.'
His thoughts tripped over each other, could not catch up. He was winded by surprise.
'There's your ''reason''.'
'Frances was fifteen!'
'Don't judge!'
He frowned with a sense of the bizarre, the uncanny. 'You had sex with her?'
Hilldyard's face went an ecstasy of red.
Michael could not contain the idea. 'You told me ''Anna'' was middle-aged.'
' ''Anna'' never existed.'
'But you told me . . . ?'
'It was a lie!'
Michael was shaken.
'So that you wouldn't hate me. So you wouldn't desert me.' Hilldyard took his forearm. 'You see, I had to write the book but its contents are a lie and a cover-up and pray God some day you will understand why i
t is a betrayal of myself and of Frances and Joan and must never be published or filmed, and that is what I have to tell you and that is an end to it!'
Michael was suddenly overcome, as if run through.
Hilldyard squeezed his arm.
There was a hard locking of eyes.
He pushed away and got his hand to the door handle.
'Michael! You wouldn't sell your wife's memory.' Hilldyard aimed a finger at him. 'I won't sell mine.'
Chapter Fifteen
Two german girls, busts expressed by the straps of their rucksacks, stood outside a pensione. The windows were shuttered but a side-door was open and the travellers pondered their choice. A cat came past on the road, stretchily satisfied by board and lodging.
Michael emerged from a passageway and slipped between two parked cars, lips moving as he reset his sunglasses.
He stood by the parapet at the road's edge sightlessly gazing at the terraces, at the tapestries of vine falling between them.
He walked, not to her hotel, but high above the town, on a road that wound round gorges and under the branches of walnut trees.
It was only lunchtime but already the sun had passed mid-point in the sky, lowering its angle and casting an afternoon lustre of mellow gold on the distant buildings near the beach; deepening shadows in the cleft of the town, so that an entire hotel was immersed in shade, and, higher up, raising whitewashed walls to a dazzle. Rooftiles became crimson, the soft-hued washes of innumerable façades lit up, window glass refracted slivers of blinding light.
The air up here was fresher, sharp-scented with pine resin. Great jigsaw clouds hung in the blue. A gentle wind ebbed in from the wide plate of the sea, which caught the light in a million places. From way off bright items of sound reached his ear as he stood and gazed at the view. There was something both vivid and placid about the squeak of a scooter, or dog-echo, or men shouting their salutations in some far corner of the town, as if nothing could escape, however remote, the ravine's transfiguring acoustic.
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