'Have you spoken to him?'
She nodded.
It was weird looking at her now. Despite everything she was beautiful.
'I'd be marginalised,' he said in a thin voice.
'Marginalised, and a lot richer. Plus you'd have me.' She stated it as a fact, as though she were subject to some pre-existing agreement between them, a bond she implicitly accepted. 'Have you gone off me?'
He was still attracted to her. Nothing would ever change that. But that in itself meant nothing.
'You weren't so indifferent, I seem to recall.'
'I was never indifferent to you.'
She tossed her hair back, flashed her eyes at him. 'Don't freeze me out now.'
He looked the other way, avoiding her appeal. Then, after a moment, he said, 'What d'you really think of me?'
She frowned for an instant, trying to do justice to the question. 'There aren't many people like you, Michael.'
He spoke tonelessly, as if trying out the idea. 'We ignore what happened?'
She rose from her end of the bed and came closer. She sat down in front of him. She was wearing a white cotton shirt and jeans.
'Michael. We've been through hell. But it's a hell that nobody in the world knows anything about. Life doesn't have to be miserable. What's done is done and there's no sin in making a film and trying to rebuild our lives.' She touched his forearm. 'The future holds everything. There's still a chance for us both, you see.'
He let her hand rest on his forearm. It was not unpleasant to feel her touch.
'What else will you do? Go home to a repossessed house and a broke business and a lifetime of guilt? You don't need to suffer any more. You could use the money to pay off your debts and set up shop again. This is just the beginning. I'll take care of you. I promise I will.'
He was almost soothed by these words, and as he looked into her eyes he could see she was sincere. She was offering her support, doing her best to salvage things in her own way; and Michael could almost believe in her love for him, conditional as it was.
He squeezed her hand. The emotion was sudden, uncontrolled, and it hit him in the heart.
'You and I don't have a chance,' he said, 'unless I tear up that contract now.'
She gasped.
He breathed in heavily.
Her face was suddenly stricken.
'I can't accept that your feelings for me are dictated by a piece of paper!'
'Oh.' She masked her face with her hands. She was consumed with woe, had lost all control.
He watched the display with strange detachment. She was obsessed, he realised; had always been obsessed.
'I'm thirty-four,' she said, suddenly.
'What?'
'I've never had a chance like this and I'll never get one again!'
'Thirty-four?'
She nodded shamefully. 'And my real name is Sarah Fowl.'
He was stupefied.
'We actresses' – she shook her head – 'two a penny.'
'Sarah Fowl!'
'Why d'you think I came here? Why d'you think I went to such incredible lengths? This is my last chance before I'm over the hill.'
He stared at her, showing all his astonishment, and getting in return a vulnerable defiance, as if she were daring him not to be repelled by the truth. She wiped a tear from her cheek. It had taken everything to tell him this and now she was fragile.
It struck him as amazing that her strongest card was honesty. Because the truth about Adela was more stirring than the lies she had told him.
'What about Jack Brand?'
It was not the memory that distressed her, but the struggle of being honest. She shook her head. 'Well, anyway, he didn't want to marry me.'
He felt his heart leap.
'I lied to you about my feelings for him.'
He was tense.
'We split up two years ago.'
'Lied?'
'To protect myself. To test you.'
He wanted to stand up and walk. He needed to escape from the shock of her honesty. He went past her and around towards the window. He opened the window and breathed in the fresh air.
Michael stared at the distant terraces on the mountain, at the pale-blue sky. It was a fine autumn morning.
The information she had given him affected everything. He was contemplating new possibilities, strange notions, the bizarre idea that Adela might be vulnerable because of her age, might in fact be a different kind of person. The six years did make a difference, not to him, but to Hollywood. It was late to start in a system that demanded mint-fresh beauty from its stars. He could see that, and he could see how her insecurity would have been worsened by a relationship break-up. She had been deemed unmarriageable, and felt herself, as a consequence, professionally ineligible. And it made him wonder whether her amorous feelings for him, so apparently convenient, were actually based on self-knowledge. She might know the value of his strong feelings. She had been around long enough to judge what kind of man would be good for her. She had identified him, encouraged him, and by an incredible effort of will tried to co-opt him into her professional and emotional come-back. Hence the audacity of her original suggestion: that he should produce the film.
She remained seated on the bed, her hand plucking the bedspread into creases.
He took a sidelong view of her face, now meeting his gaze across the bed. It was a face that seemed more honest now, transparently paradoxical. She was defiant and rejected, appealing and resigned. The extra years had released themselves, developing in her expression a more complex loveliness than he had seen before.
He realised that from now on she could not pretend.
From the window he could see the southern reaches of the Amalfi coast. Beyond the mountains, Salerno; beyond Salerno, southern Italy. This extraordinary landscape he would leave behind. Soon he would be standing in a London street, wondering what to do with the rest of his life.
Her persistence was oddly magnificent. There seemed nothing more real than Adela's needs. She was the sum of those needs and she was remarkable, a great actress. She had captured his imagination and released his energy and desire. It was not his mission to disappoint her. He had no wish to emulate Hilldyard's insistence on art over friendship.
He went to the suitcase and sprang the catch. He worked his way through folded shirts and trousers, feeling for the plastic file in the bottom of the case.
The contract was still intact, albeit creased and dog-eared. Two signatures met on the final page. All was in apparent good order and he had no idea whether the document would withstand the scrutiny of entertainment lawyers, or executors, or whomever succeeded Basil Curwen.
He placed it on the bed and turned to face her.
He could see from her expression that she was moved. He hesitated for a moment, words not ready.
'Come here,' he said.
She rose from the other side of the bed and came towards him.
He took her hand, pressed it into his. Her lips parted. She breathed in deeply.
'It's yours.'
'What!'
'This contract.'
'Oh, Michael . . .' She wanted to fall into his embrace but he held her wrist tightly.
'I'll assign my rights to you. You can have the option. Whatever the lawyers need from me, I'll sign. Anything you like.' He swallowed.
She frowned.
'But I don't want to be involved and I don't want any money.'
He looked at her intensely.
There was a long pause.
He could not speak. Adela saw this and touched his sleeve lightly.
He shook his head.
'Michael!'
The colour went out of her face.
Suddenly she gripped his arm, half smiled at him. She hesitated for a second, her mind racing. 'You can't turn me down just like that.'
'I would never turn you down.' His heart hammered away. 'I think you're marvellous.'
Adela was distraught and exhausted and wrung her hands in frustra
tion. 'How could you inflict such a choice on me?'
'Because I have no choice.'
'You don't want me?'
'Oh, I do.'
'I'm nothing without this!'
He shook his head hopelessly.
'How could our relationship ever recover from your denying me this chance?'
'I won't deny it. It's yours.'
She laughed in rich anger. 'You're appalling!'
'I know what I am.'
She shook her head, incredulous.
He felt the emotion as a kind of spasm in his gut, as something inflicted on the body like illness, beyond control. He was opened up again, and he knew that he loved this woman and yet he would not go with her if she took the contract.
She stared at him.
The contract lay between them on the bed.
Adela's look darkened slowly, as if she had swallowed something terrible, were subdued by the outrageous effort of digestion, her cheeks becoming grey, her brow contorting; and for a moment he thought she would collapse. She was staring at nothing now, staring into some personal hell, envisioning the future, and her expression froze completely.
He touched her arm, and she looked at him and gradually the colour came back into her cheeks.
She took the contract from the bed and held it for a moment. There was an other-worldly strangeness in her eyes. 'Take it.'
'What?'
'You signed it. You destroy it. If that's how you feel. Why should I be the one to make the choice?'
'Choice?'
'A dead author or a living woman. A literary god, or the person you love.' There was fire in her eyes. 'Go on. Tear it up. Just kick me out of your life like worthless rubbish.'
'You'll lose the film if I do.'
'And you'll lose me, and your money. And your life.'
She had proved herself, he thought. Her fury was conclusive. She did love him.
'Don't go,' he said.
'You obviously have no feelings for me at all.'
'I do.'
'But you're not prepared to prove it, so it doesn't matter. I wouldn't ask you to throw away a chance like this.' She reversed back around the bed, straightened her shirt, looking at him with fierce pride. She made a move to the door, pulled it open dramatically. She was attempting an exit, hoping that he would relent, or think twice before she had gone. It was her last gambit.
He watched her standing there, her last few seconds in the room, conveying to him a look of pitiful emotion and controlled distress.
'Goodbye, Michael. I'm sorry I came to see you. Goodbye.' She raised a hand. There was a tear in her eye.
He nodded again, holding her gaze. 'Adela!'
She gasped. 'Yes?'
'Adela.'
She stared at him.
He held up the contract as if to show her something, a gesture of appeal, of self-doubt.
There was a terrible expectancy in her eyes.
'Don't go,' he said.
'Michael!'
She lurched forward.
He tore the contract before her eyes, two smart shreds back and forth, and let the pieces flutter to the floor.
She gasped and then gazed at him glassy-eyed, her look dimming.
'Don't go!' he said.
She stared at the remains of the contract, at what he had just done to her.
'Adela!'
She looked at him, but without recognition. And then she turned quickly and walked out of the room. He heard the sound of her receding footsteps in the hotel corridor.
* * *
He spent the morning in the gardens of the Palazzo Rufolo, strolling between parterres and gazing at the view to the south, the mountainous coastline that veered into a hazy distance. The air was soft and warm. The garden autumnally moist. He inhaled the tang of decaying leaves and the smell of stone in the courtyard. Under the trunk of a pine tree he stopped and gazed up into its net of green, looking at the twinkling light in its needles and listening to the birdsong around him.
Later, he went back to the hotel. He spent the afternoon at a table in his room. He had asked in reception for writing paper and was now self-contained, alone with his thoughts. At the top of the page were notes, half-sentences, ideas jotted down; and then a column of writing which grew over the following hours, a long paragraph, the words coming easily; so that Michael, as he wrote, forgot himself physically, his tired eyes and the ache in the pit of his stomach and his stubbly chin; and became fastened instead to what was in memory, the surges of it, like incoming waves on a wide shore, limitless, mesmerising, inextinguishably his.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am more grateful to Liz Calder and Arabella Stein than they will ever know.
I go down on one knee for my priceless agent, Felicity Rubinstein; and on the other for Claire Wrathall, rock-like editor. I go down on both knees and mabye even further for my wife, Fiona, without whose influence and support this book might never have been written.
I am also indebted to Evan Jones, Lawrence Norfolk, Katrine MacGibbon, Mark McCrum and Mark Roberts for sharp readings and timely encouragement; and to Mary Tomlinson for her flexible rigour.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Conrad Williams was born in Canada.
Formerly a lawyer, he is now a film agent.
He lives in London.
Also available by Conrad Williams
Unfinished Business
Mike is a literary agent with high standards and a passion for great writing. He is equally discriminating in matters of the heart and ready to fall in love. But when his best client sacks him and his hopes of marriage are dashed, Mike begins to fall apart. Emotionally reeling, he seeks respite in the beautiful wilderness of the Black Mountains, only to discover that his old flame, Madelin, and her husband now live there too. Drawn into the midst of their marital crisis, his humiliation is perfected as their superfluous middle man.
But when a top agent suggests a plot to restore his fortunes, Mike begins to come alive again. It looks like love and achievement might be his at last – if he is prepared to do the wrong thing, and do it ruthlessly.
Unfinished Business is an entertaining novel about literary and romantic affairs in marriage and work.
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/conrad-williams
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/unfinished-business-9781448215515/
The Concert Pianist
Philip Morahan is a great pianist who can no longer play the piano. At fifty-two he is childless, single, and utterly used up by music. His desperate attempt to retrieve a lost personal life at the expense of his career leads to a roller-coaster of crises and confrontations – with ex-girlfriends, ironic protégés, record magnates and his exquisitely sympathetic new agent. For if Philip is to recover his talent and the power to love he must face his own nature dead on, and then the tragedy that haunts him.
‘Thoughtful and passionate’
The Times
‘Devastating ... Intellectually engaged ... A remarkably well-wrought narrative’
Guardian
‘Audacious ... exhilarating ... brilliant’
Gramophone
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/conrad-williams
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-concert-pianist-9781408881057/
First published 2002
This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal p
rosecution and civil claims for damages.
Copyright © 2002 by Conrad Williams
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
epub ISBN-13: 978 1 4088 8280 1
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Sex & Genius Page 34
