Hilldyard was aghast.
'For once in your life, James, forget about books and do something for people!'
The shock of it spun him round, as though he had been dealt a blow from an unexpected source and was lost for a reply.
Michael stared at him squarely.
Hilldyard faltered, as though he had been told something that he could not believe.
'I can't survive this, Michael.'
'Sign the contract,' he said softly, 'and your secret is safe for ever.'
He raised the letter contract, the thin thread of his future, and saw it slowly taken by Hilldyard, who knew he was blackmailed and was for the first time in his life collapsing. And Michael saw in the author's shrunken stance that he lacked courage to fight back or face him down. His will had given way and he was shamed, weak.
The author sat on the wooden chair and laid large old hands on the white paper.
Michael could scarcely believe the sight of pen on paper, the casual artist's brush of a signature, making a mark where there was just a line. Hilldyard rested forward, elbows on the table-top, physically inert. He was silent with the vision of consequences; marginally aware of Michael standing behind him. His breathing rose and fell and his rounded back grew rounder. The contract lay under his hand.
Michael waited for a moment, and then he moved to the desk and took the contract between his forefinger and thumb, tugging it gently.
The clasp on his wrist was sudden. The old man's strength intense. But the face was distraught and the fingers slowly relaxed their hold, and, without pulling, Michael's arm was released, and the author's hand remained suspended, fingers outstretched, a weightless wave.
Chapter Twenty-three
He made his way down the wet steps, fingers sliding along the rail. The rain had eased to an average drizzle that dampened his face and neck. He was sheltered between walls but a wind was kicking up, rattling the branches overhead and sending whistling gusts through the streets.
He kept the contracts pressed to his heart under a lapel and watched his feet on the slippery stone. The descent was slow, a dead tread with every sinking heartbeat, a trance of departure from that dim room with its bent-over figure and lowering bookshelves. He had not even closed the door behind him, as if so feeble a courtesy were now out of character, falsely considerate.
On the street he walked through puddles, under blurred lanterns and around cars beaded with wet. The town had vanished into shuttered darkness. Every building was opaque, eyeless, incognisant of his passing. Walking into the wind he felt the pull of his own gravity and then sudden weightlessness, as though his substantiality were tricked with by the lulls and gusts.
He had no desire to return to his hotel and carried on descending through the levels of the town, past the trattoria, the closed-up caffè, the clothes shops in the casbah, the alleys and dimmed restaurants at the bottom. He was numb to the cold and wet and the ghostliness of deserted streets and could only keep sinking down. He came past the church, high and massive above twirling litter on the piazza.
Out on the windswept beach he took the pungent salt air full in the face. He walked against the din of the sea to the harbour jetty, where cresting waves reeled in succession against the quay, smashing pyrotechnic sprays into the air. Gallons splattered on the concrete ramp, walloped the parapet, overflowed the jetty, which drowned in every succeeding roller.
The night was immensely black and charged with tempestuousness, deep reaches of dark energy transmitting agitation in giant shock-waves against the shore. Soaked and cold he chanced his way along the cliff-edge path. Pine trees creaked and moaned in the wind. The sturdy turrets took lashings of rain and sea-water, and Michael with an open mouth and dull heart kept going between the stony ground and the rampaging sea, as though nothing could stop him.
He came in time to a cove, where the waves broke less explosively, the water humping hard against a ledge of stones and receding flaccidly for want of real impact, and he felt himself drawn to the sea, and came off the path and lay against an upside-down boat and turned his face to the cold prickle of raindrops. And then his insides began to ache and he was inundated with heaviness, a pressure on his heart and lungs, almost suffocating, which he had to sit through. He closed his eyes and listened to the crash of the sea and the surf.
He had her now. The knowledge of it was dull. Anticipation was closed off by the heaviness, the aftershock. There was no hurry, anyway, to fuel with anticipation what would come back in her presence. He could wait for that. That value would reassert itself, when the heaviness wore off. Emotion would rise in him, his grievous need, the yearning that distributed its ache through his limbs would all come back and numb the terrible pain of what he had done.
Chapter Twenty-four
'Come on, Cheer up.' She slapped his haunch. 'You're soaked, Lear.'
He lay inert on the bed. His legs ached.
She kneeled beside him, unpinning her hair, which she had worn in a chignon for the Hammond dinner. He could smell the fabric of her tights near his face.
The Sirenuse Hotel had called a taxi for its guest, sending her uptown in snug insulation from wind and rain. She was dry and chic in a satin jacket and black frock. Her shoes, quickly discarded, lay on the floor mat.
'Let me tell you, partner, this is going to be a milestone movie. Think Wuthering Heights for a modern audience. The book needs opening out. I mean that's all right, isn't it? It has the potential. Shane wants a contemporary English Patient.'
She had slipped into the hotel entrance without being seen, and come along the corridor and into his room without knocking. She had the offstage aura of a woman acclaimed by applause, buoyed up and glowing, and clinging to the swell of success wherever she took herself. She entered stealthily and had the composure to offer through her nervousness a smile, a look of wholehearted directed beauty at the man on the bed, before asking her question. He gestured vaguely, and she found the contracts on his table. She was silent for a moment, respectful of the evidence. Her lips moved as she turned the pages and saw the signature, and knew at last her quest had ended. And then she collapsed on the chair with a gasp.
She sat open-mouthed, silvery earrings dangling against her neck.
'He's got flu. We drank Lemsip and champagne.'
She closed her eyes against the emotion.
He wondered for the first time whether Adela Fairfax was her real name.
'He's already directing the film in his head. He knows the look of it. Knows what he wants from me.' She drew forward, pushed herself up. 'Do I seem sort of mature?'
He could see her reflection in the mirror.
'I think I understand what's going on now. It's like he's an artist, or a sculptor or something. He knows how to work with faces. How to mould a performance out of material. Hey, something incredible. You know Cathy Astor? Twenty-one and annoyingly beautiful. Shane told me Keith Halliday's casting her as Anna Karenina. Can you believe it! One phone call. No meeting. Halliday thinks she's the next Vivien Leigh. Utterly nauseating if Shane hadn't told me that I had a quality of still passionateness, or something.' She checked her face in the mirror, imagining the 'something'.
She turned, suddenly seething with affirmation. 'It's nice to know one's not on the shelf in one's thirtieth year.' She cocked a hip, put her knee on the bed. 'You have to meet his producer. Does all Shane's films.'
She was kneeling on the bed and she could see his face for the first time.
His throat was dry. 'Producer?'
'Go with the flow, Michael.'
'Is he in love with you, then?'
She began to loosen her hair, unwinding it against a shoulder.
'Oh, don't worry about that.'
It did not seem to matter now. Things would take their course.
'You'll like him.' She released her earrings. 'He's actually quite real.'
She claimed the hotel room was a manners thing, a gesture of respect. 'He's saying, ''I'm just like you guys but I've lu
cked into all this wealth and let's share the fun.'' His schedule's crazy. When he sees the people he respects, he gives it everything because normally he's surrounded by agents and managers, and the people who matter really matter. The hotel thing is just tact.'
He blinked. He was unwell. 'Do you fancy him?'
She pressed his chest with the heel of her hand. 'I'm here, aren't I?'
'Does he know?'
'Know I'm here?' She frowned disapprovingly. 'Why, he's dreaming of sore throats and blocked sinuses on the biggest bed you've ever seen.' She took his hand, squeezed the palm. 'What happened?'
He closed his eyes, could not answer.
Her hand reached his face, pushed back the damp hair on his temple. She traced his hairline with a fingernail.
He could hear her breathing as she dwelt on the sight of his face on the pillow, and touched his cheek, and the corner of his mouth.
'Beautiful man.'
Adamson had called. He had learned of developments from the agency mole, whom Weislob had phoned after Michael's meet with Coburn. 'Sabbatini and Mahler are on the way. Coburn's flying back. Jets'll swap sonic booms mid-Atlantic. Is the eleven o'clock meeting confirmed?'
Coburn's departure made no sense to him.
'He's invisible to clients,' Adamson explained. 'A God-like deal-maker, behind-the-scenes mystique and other clichés. Mahler does all the Hammond meets, and you're on to something weird here because Mahler is the one nice guy in Hollywood. Like, he's nicer than us. He's nicer than your mom. He'll schmooze you and Hammond through the agenda, and Sabbatini will ink the deal. Have Sirenuse fax me the contract. Don't care whether I'm sleeping, shagging or shitting. I'll comment by return.'
He had done it for her, too. She knew that.
'Take your shirt off. It's damp.' She leaned over him. 'Come on.'
He could not move.
She stroked his face. 'It'll do you good to tell me.'
'Is Adela Fairfax your real name?'
She laughed, a bright, ringing laugh full of nerves and music.
'What's your real name?'
'That's a secret.'
'Tell me.'
'You tell me yours, and I'll tell you mine.'
'You know mine.'
He lay on his side. He was unable to say anything more.
'Shall I go, Michael?'
He would not answer this.
'Shall I go or do you want me to stay?'
He looked up at her kneeling over him, her hair suspended above his face, lips ajar. Her eye was so steady, as if something were fast gathering inside her. He could only respond with the look of a man temporarily unable to express anything. His passivity misled her.
He could hear the bedsprings move as she arched forward, unzipping her dress and loosening her bra. She let the material fall around her shoulders, ran the straps of her brassiére down her arms. And when she reached for his shirt button and he dared to stare at the woman on his bed, vulnerably undressed, but biting her lip with a gaze that was sexually clamorous, it was the strangest moment he had known.
Slowly, expressionlessly, she lowered her mouth and breasts around his face and neck, a compress of flesh and breath, as though trying to assuage his guilt with the comfort of a body that wanted him to know he was desired.
He was in a wilderness, and she was spilling over him, drowning him.
'I'll tell you,' he gasped.
She breathed hard, erotically fastened.
'Adela!'
'I'm here . . .'
'Listen!'
'Listening.'
'Please!'
Her hair confused him, blinded him.
'You want to know?' He pulled back, pushed away.
She was open-mouthed.
'I'll tell you!'
Everything that tormented him should torment her. On what other terms could they touch each other's bodies.
'Michael!' Her eyes went round with the sting of rejection.
'This is not a stage play. You can't perform your way through what's going on!'
'You wouldn't tell me!'
'But do you really want to know?'
She leaned on one hand, angry and hurt.
He realised with a pang that there would never be anyone else he could tell and if he must tell her then she must want to know for his sake.
'Look at me,' she said tremblingly.
He stared at her. She would never be able to absolve him. What he had done to Hilldyard was not hers to forgive.
She half covered herself, looked at him with indignant beauty. 'What more do you want?'
'I did it for your sake!'
'And here I am!'
She had to enter into the awfulness of it and know what had been done and take into herself everything he felt, because one conscience alone was insufficient. He had to trust her, to grasp it, to tell no one. It was the only bond they could have.
It took him fifteen minutes to get it out, beginning to end, the mess in Hilldyard's living room, the retreat to the study, the confessions and revelations, the confidences, the moment of treachery and the final bitter exchange, and as it poured through him he felt swollen with guilt. Necessity had made him behave in the most unconscionable way and he could no longer understand the necessity. He was not hardened. She had to take on board what was happening to him, because Michael did not understand it himself.
She lay on her side as he spoke, hand on brow and finger in the corner of her mouth.
He felt sick, and sickness was a kind of selfhood. It proved the existence of a moral nature, and he could turn the pain of it on to his sense of Adela. She became defined against this.
'And now you tell me Shane has a producer and wants to fuck with the book.'
'He wants to open it out.'
There was a long silence.
Now he had told her, he realised that she could not easily speak. So many things that one might try to express cancelled themselves out. They had done wrong and there was no simple way of living with the knowledge of that.
'So he's gay, or what?'
'Gay?'
'In love with you, obviously.'
The deduction struck him as perverse.
'You're his muse.'
'Is this all you have to say?'
'Well, frankly, I'm absolutely thrilled.'
He looked at her in consternation. 'Have you no conscience?'
'If I had a conscience I'd send Frances to Scotland Yard.'
His heart failed.
She was upon him suddenly, pinning him to the bedstead.
'He's got a crush on you. It's obvious. Any woman could see it. But don't confuse the dotage of a homosexual sugar-daddy with the esteem of a great novelist.'
He looked her hard in the face, as if double-checking the intention behind the words.
'He wants you to be his beautiful manservant. And you fell for the muse routine because it's so flattering.'
'You really believe that!'
'It's wonderful to be told you're inspiring. Specially if your career's in a mess.'
'He rescued me!'
'Ha!' She grasped his neck victoriously. 'I'm the one that's rescuing you.'
He realised suddenly that she was not acting. This was Adela. Or whoever Adela was behind her name.
'No woman's going to share you with him. He knows it and he's fighting his corner, guilt-tripping the hell out of you. It's just a book, for God's sake. And if you wanted me, you had to get the option and lose him.'
He smiled bitterly. She had described it exactly.
'Look at me.' She spread her arms gloriously. 'Aren't I worth it?'
Something inside him coagulated.
'I am.' She grabbed his shoulders. 'I am.'
'Nothing's worth this feeling.'
'Stop feeling and start fondling.' She laughed. 'Take it out on your wicked mistress.'
Quickly, she had her hands around his trouser belt, was pulling his fly.
He clasped her wrists but she broke free and with one
hard tug had him uncovered, naked to his thighs, and the look in her eye was such that he could not move. 'I'll suck you,' she said.
He felt through his coldness an involuntary displacement, control deserting him, a removal of will from his head to his nether regions, a tingle through chest and belly that he tried to withhold for fear of complicity until the truth was out, the incriminating flicker beneath her triumphant green eyes, which she saw and he saw her seeing.
'Oh.' He felt a hot ache, almost a nausea of desire that had no choice but to enfold in its pangs the spice of guilt, making desire more piquant, and the union of her mouth and his penis self-consciously wicked and ultimately lustful; and as he went under, into the pit of his neediness, taking and then giving, and his agony converted and swelled to a storm of copulation in which Adela became rudely abandoned and completely herself, he knew she was only acting in the one sense that this was a scene of her making, because she had found in him something that she wanted, and that in such collisions of dark energy he possessed her, too. This, then, was Adela.
They lay panting on the floor, Michael a dead weight over her, her throat still rising with the last strains.
He saw the iron leg of the bed and the floor tiles close up.
He had touched the point he was aiming for.
'Michael,' she said softly. She held him in her arms. 'I'd better get back.'
Chapter Twenty-five
Hollywood agents stole each other's clients, and when they pounced, swooping on a star on holiday in Hawaii, or helicoptering on to an actor's yacht, or presenting a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce for use on the set of a film packaged by a rival, it was not the ethically free stealth that awed Michael when he read of the stories in Variety, but the gung-ho commandeering of expensive transport. Jets chartered, helicopters hired, yachts and speedboats jumped on so agents could be seamlessly in place around someone else's client. Steroid representation meant showbiz gestures, a blank-cheque attitude to making the pitch, and it struck Michael as hair-raising that Coburn Agency were propelling another two agents around the earth's curve so that Hammond could be assisted to meet him on a Saturday morning in an Italian town. Such supersonic ubiquity was the index of a client's power. His agents were on twenty-four-hour call, could be airborne any moment, made to move like pinballs across continents. They were the suits and the suits did not have private lives or suffer jet-lag. They were simply units of representation who could take their Hollywood functions to any venue, beach or rain-forest, protecting a client's interests without deviation or regard for local scenery. Coburn had scrambled Sabbatini and Mahler, the humans in his office, to fly through nine time zones, hard-drive against their body clocks, in order that Michael, when he arrived at the Sirenuse Hotel on a Saturday morning, could be greeted by the gentlemanly Mahler as a long-lost friend and guided through the foyer to an equally personable handshake with Gloria Sabbatini, Coburn's in-house attorney, wearing white chemise and power-jacket.
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