Michael paused for a moment, and then ran after him along the arcaded corridor towards the flight of steps.
Halfway up the steps Hilldyard turned above him. Their faces were a yard apart, the author's warped by distress.
'You've finished me.'
Michael clutched the old man's arm.
His skin changed colour, the shadow of premonition.
Abruptly, frantically, he tried to free his arm and Michael held on. The old man was right before him, but looking to a further point, askance, while his breath brushed Michael's neck.
'Now it's me that has no option,' he said, and twisted violently so that Michael lost his grip.
He made good his escape, forcing himself up the remaining steps into the foyer where he hurried on to the doors and the street without a backward glance.
Mahler sat in a chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. Hammond was a frozen bystander, champagne glass held loosely in hand. Gloria Sabbatini and Rick Weislob stood in conference at a distance and gave Michael Lear, when he returned, the briefest of glances.
He came back into the silent group with no care for their thoughts. Hammond did not see him, would not register his presence. Only Adela acknowledged his stare with an expression that was neither hard nor penitent. She had the look of someone exposed. She trembled still with the shock of what she had said.
'That went well,' said Hammond, knocking back the champagne.
The actor's interests had not been furthered. He was deciding what to do about it. 'Where's Frank?'
'Ahh.' Mahler checked his watch. 'He's in LA.'
'Fuck, this is uncool.'
Michael wanted to speak to her. Her look told him not to try. Her arms were crossed tightly against remonstration or appeal.
Weislob and Sabbatini wandered over. 'Relax, chief. We got the contracts. We got the rights. He fucks around, we ringfence him.'
'Are you totally coked?'
'Hey, this is a done deal. It's legally ours.'
'Rick.' Mahler's voice was tired, on edge. 'There's a duress point.'
'To prove which he has to crap on himself.'
Michael subsided in shame.
Hammond took up the point. 'You're saying he won't sue because we know he's a sex fiend?'
'He didn't hang around for second helpings.'
Mahler groaned.
'We just go ahead and make the film!'
Weislob jabbed away with his mobile phone, as if it were grafted to his hand. 'Listen, Michael did the duress. We're bona fide purchasers for value without notice.'
'We just had a faceful of fucking notice!'
'Suppose we lose the notice?'
Michael could not believe his ears.
'You mean we agree to lose the notice?'
'The old guy never came here. Our word against his. Six eyewitnesses never saw nothing. And if he wants to remember telling us duress, we get our memories back and remind him what Adela said.'
'Which was untrue,' said Michael.
She shook her head, shivering.
'What's the truth, Michael?' Hammond was cruel-faced.
'Chief, this isn't about truth. It's about the law of contract.'
He went right up to her. She could save herself now or be damned for ever.
'Tell them it was a lie!'
She raised a hand.
'Take it back.'
She fixed him with a look of plaintive intensity. Her frightened eyes begged him to be sensible, to go with the flow, to move with, not against her.
'Find her another role,' he said.
Hammond shrugged. 'Like they really grow on trees.'
'You can't make this film!'
'You sold us the fucking rights,' said Weislob. 'Who are you to talk?'
Michael wanted to touch her face. She wanted to let him touch it but her eyes said no.
'She was lying,' he said.
'Michael!'
'You can't make the film on the basis of her allegations. You can't blackmail Hilldyard with lies. Don't you understand? She wants the part. She'll say anything!'
She caught his arm and pushed him backwards, towards the balcony rail, shoving him away from the others, her lips drawn, wrists locked, revealing something unfamiliar to the men behind her. She stood with her back to them. Her eyes were jewel-bright.
'You know it's true,' she hissed. 'You told me!'
'In confidence!'
'He's admitted it!'
'He admitted duress! The rest you told them! You've got to take it back.'
She shook her head, almost smiling at the paradox. 'But it's the truth!'
On either side he saw staring faces, Hammond, Mahler, Sabbatini.
He looked at her again. 'Truth means nothing to you.'
He saw the reaction, the alarm of it striking her, as if honesty could compel something at last.
She endured his grip. 'You'll spoil everything, Michael.'
His fingers sank into her arm and with the pain of it she sidestepped, breasts jiggling. She widened her eyes in desperate appeal. 'For us, then!'
There was a depth of vulnerability in her look.
'I need you,' she breathed.
'Need me?'
'This is working!' Her eyes flickered.
'Are you trying to tell me something?'
'I'm trying to tell you . . .'
Her eyes spoke of something nascent, something mutual, some strange kinship caught up in the whole bad business, of two consciences in the same state of desire and disrepair and difficulty. In the hard look she gave him he saw her contempt for Hammond, and her knowledge of the risk she was taking in simply staring at him in this way when the others were so close.
'I want you,' she said, between clenched teeth.
It came to him suddenly. This was how her love would work. He hesitated, drew closer, inhaled the full incense of her nearness. 'Tell them it was a lie, then. Tell them for ''us'' '.
Something dark crossed her face: a lapse, an inward distraction.
The moment had come.
She gasped, reaching out to him with the tip of her finger, which brushed his jacket.
'Michael . . .'
The connection was loosening, a thing stretching out, a grip sliding, sliding, until suddenly the hands parted and she was dropping away, her dress fluttering in the free-fall of separation.
'Adela!'
It hit him like a blow in the chest, something knocking him back.
She turned violently to the others, shouted at them. 'It's all true.'
'Despicable,' he yelled, a voice-ricochet around the pool.
It came across his vision like a whorl of black and it blinded him as he stood there, hands hanging, ready to drop, and through the dots he saw shapes, a wing or throbbing form that seemed to grip his throat and choke him until he felt the balcony rail in his back and the hard ground under his knee-cap and felt himself gasping and conscious again.
They stared at him as he rose.
It came to him quickly. The contracts were still on the table.
'Adela!' He took one of her earrings from his pocket, held it up, let it dangle from his fingers.
She could not hide her embarrassment, and when he threw it at her she fumbled the catch and dropped it.
'Now d'you believe me?' he asked Hammond.
The actor was transparent for a moment.
'She'd do anything.'
'It's not mine,' she said.
Michael saw the ugliness of her desperation.
'She'll fuck anybody,' he said, staring at Hammond, connecting the two of them, hot-wiring them together. 'Even you!'
He made it to the table in swift strides, gathering the two Hammond agreements and tearing them up, a crossways shredding and ripping into small pieces. He took his agreement with Hilldyard and stuck it in his pocket. And then Weislob came at him terrier-like, adding his hands to the tussle, and getting Michael's elbow on his cheekbone.
'Fuck sake,' said Hammond in the far-off background; Weislo
b was pulling weightlessly and deflectably, and Michael could see through the tunnel of his resolution that nothing was not torn or scattered and that he had in his hand the signature page, ripped in half, which he needed as evidence.
With heat in his eyes he turned for a last look at the actress, at the agonised stances of the agents, at the trumped face of Shane Hammond, and then made his way around the pool, away from the group, away from the five-star view of the town, the champagne buckets and parasols and deluxe recliners.
Chapter Twenty-six
His limbs ached through and through, muscles hurting with effort as he pushed up the third flight of steps.
He had started off walking up the hill, a hollow feeling in the small of his back, as though he were slow in gaining the necessary velocity of escape. When he passed the taxi-rank by Adela's pensione, impulse turned to panic, and he threw himself at the mile of road that led up to Hilldyard's villa. He ran with spattering feet past scooters and tourists and familiar shopfronts, and felt revulsion coming up in waves from his stomach.
His lungs gave out on the third turn, when Positano revolved on its axis and the sea flattened out like a bedspread, here and there pricked by an islet, and the twists of the road threw vista upon vista across his path. He panted along, unable to think, but knowing that he had been in the centre of something awful. What had happened on the Sirenuse terrace was perfidy touching down, like the snout of a tornado, syphoning away all human decency. He was the point around which foul winds turned, and now, as he ran again, he was running to shed contamination, flaring along in the dire fear that Hilldyard had collapsed in horror.
He lived only in the present now. He had no concern for what the author might say to him. He was ready to endure anything.
The front door was locked. He grabbed the handle, tried the key Hilldyard had given him. The middle of the door budged under the weight of his shoulder but the top was fastened from within. He knocked hard, calling loudly. He waited, panting, keeping nothing in reserve for the moment when the door opened. He knew what the look in those eyes would mean. He tried to get his breath back. The air was too thin. An old woman with stockings sagging at the ankle gave him a wide berth as she passed along the alley.
He was faint. The blackness came back, rising like water in a tank. He thought he would expire on the step and bent double, reaching for the wall and becoming for an instant so weak that he did not care if the door opened and Hilldyard found him in a heap on the ground. He felt the stone under his palm and allowed himself to collapse against the door.
Sunlight poured on to the opposite wall. The sun was full on from somewhere up there, and the sky royal blue. He lay back, sweat on his chest, the veins on his neck throbbing, and felt himself levitated into the blue above, sky-diving into azure; and as he swooned in the depths of its colour, adrift in its purity, he felt the ghost of his original self steel into him and for a second he was torn apart by the searing beauty of the blue heaven. The sun had set things ablaze, splashingly, dazzlingly, and he was part of light. Light caught his hands, smote lines along the alley. He gasped at the pain of a sensation which seemed to stave him in at the temples.
He dropped on his knees like a penitent, put his finger through the letterbox, and yelled into the hall. He knew Hilldyard was there.
Back in his hotel room there was a moment of normality when he picked up the telephone and dialled and pretended that it was an ordinary day and that, if the telephone rang, James would pick it up, and Michael would say something quick before ringing off but know at least that he was OK. The phone rang endlessly, so he dialled again, and it rang endlessly again. He smacked the receiver down with frustration and lay on the bed thinking that one hour had passed since he left the hotel. The uncertainty was killing him.
Lying on his back he was prey to thoughts which afflicted him as physical pain. He imagined Hilldyard's cold body, skin grey, the spirit no longer present, the capacities of a remarkable mind switched off for ever.
'It can't be that bad,' he said, rising up and standing by the balcony. The sea was sparkling; the roofs below were a glinting white. Bougainvillaea covered balconies and courtyards.
One could not be a high priest of art and a fornicator. No man could stand by his art demanding its importance to humanity and be known as an adulterer, a near paedophile, the proximate cause of his niece's madness and his wife's death. If you believed in the novel as Hilldyard did; if you set a standard of moral consciousness by which to regard humanity, then you had to be exemplary. Every writer wanted posterity on his own terms and, for Hilldyard, posterity had just gone to the dogs.
Out on the street, running again, he thought about climbing over a garden wall to gain access. He could go in through a neighbour's house. Worry was beginning to exhaust him. He was flagging. He went past the shops and trattoria like a jogger, ducking under awnings and dodging parked cars, fists bunched. And then, as he approached a hairpin bend, he thought he saw Adela through the rear window of a black Mercedes that was coming into the bend from the opposite direction. He stood transfixed, then hurled himself in its path, hands up, shins fearing impact. Rubber rasped, the bonnet skewed sideways, a car in the opposite lane screeched to a halt, its nose ducking on a handbrake. A woman screamed nearby, and then the driver erupted, yelling in soprano outrage, shaking his fists, and Michael reeled back like a madman, turning on his heel and running off in the opposite direction.
Hilldyard's neighbours were not in. He beat his fists red proving the point.
He decided to run down to the tourist office in the centro. He wanted an English-speaking person who would know what to do. On the way, he passed the entrance to the police station and felt unequal to the ponderousness of official help. Further down, the tourist office was shut. Exhausted and dispirited, he wondered whether the Sirenuse could help him. He imagined himself at the desk of the five-star hotel trying to explain the crisis but he couldn't bear the thought of seeing Mahler or Hammond again.
He went into the church and sat on a bench in the gloom, inhaling the aroma of brass polish and incense. The confessional boxes were spaced along the wall. Candles flickered before side-altars. In the next pew an old lady blubberingly prayed. He threw his head back and gazed at the dim frescos on the dome above, at the altar cross, and the painting of the hooded virgin, her face fallen in sorrow. He felt the urge to pray even though he did not believe in God. Soon he was outside again, staring at the piazza.
He decided to write a note on a scrap of paper and stick it through Hilldyard's letterbox.
Later, when he had pushed the note through the old man's door, and was wandering past vegetable stalls in the upper part of town, he saw a gate which snared his curiosity and drew him through an arch into the cemetery, which was perched on the edge of the hill and open to a view of the pink sea and the rosy yonder of mountainside villas. The stems of three pine trees divided the view.
He eased down on to a bench and gazed at the trees, letting his breath come back and his limbs solidify with exhaustion before noticing the girl he had seen before. She was right there, at the bottom of the cemetery, by an easel; dead still.
He started and missed a heartbeat as though electrocuted by the sight of her. It was a vision that returned to haunt him in the middle of the night when he lay on the bed in his stuffy room hounded into wakefulness by a dream of Rick Weislob and Bambi licking icecreams, and Frank Coburn venting fire and brimstone from a cathedral pulpit in a sermon about morals and the Hollywood system.
He lay arms wide across the mattress and felt his heart accelerate from a dead beat into grim thudding. He needed to swallow air. He could not move, was stuck where he lay. Panic went through him as the day's faces returned to haunt him: Mahler and Weislob, Coburn and Hammond, Adela, who seemed sketchy, as though she were already fading into the past tense to which she now irreversibly belonged, until he smelled her scent on his pillow and recoiled from the shock of it.
And as the agony abated and he was force
d to remember again her head in his groin and the golden sands of her cascading hair, he went on to think more easefully of the girl painter in the cemetery, a person unknown to him, but belonging to him in the way that images do when they fuse the uncannily familiar with the sharply unexpected.
He lay in darkness, cocooned by the night. He could not understand how he had come to be so bad. He marvelled at the awfulness of what he had done. He was responsible, he knew. That was the astonishing thing. Blame was inescapable. There was no coming to terms with that; merely the living of it.
He did not care much whether he lived or died.
In the morning he spoke to the hotel manager. She tried to call Signor Correggio using a number in the telephone book, but either the number was wrong or the solicitor was out; so he asked her to call the police. After a lengthy exchange that seemed to cover a number of other topics he was told that a police car would collect him from the bottom of the steps and they would drive up to Hilldyard's house.
The day was beautiful. The bonnet of the car shone as it approached. Even the moustache of the carabiniere seemed to shine as he rolled down the window and told Michael to get in the back. The car smelled clean inside, of after-shave and upholstery.
They drove to the top of the town. Michael directed him into the alley behind Hilldyard's house.
They arrived at the front door. The situation had been explained.
The policeman assessed the exterior wall of the building before stepping forward and knocking on the door.
They waited absently. Michael's throat was dry.
After a respectful interval the procedure was repeated, three sharp knocks followed by a smoothing of moustaches and a glance around the alley.
Michael felt the silence drumming on his ears. He began to feel weak.
It was now legitimate for the policeman to go to stage two. He raised his hand to the door knob and turned it.
The door opened.
Michael blenched with surprise. The policeman turned to watch his reaction. They stood outside looking in through the hall. Light flooded in from the living room.
He went in first, and the policeman followed supportively, removing his cap and brushing his feet on the mat.
Sex & Genius Page 32
