My heart had settled a little, and although my blood still rushed in my ears, I gathered courage. I leaned forward and laced my fingers around the back of his neck.
“David, I know you are married and involved me in those photographs to procure a divorce. I’ve worked it out about Marjorie, too. But it’s no good.” I gazed at him imploringly, as conscious of the movements of my lips and eyes as when I was in front of the camera. “I don’t care about other women. I can’t stay away from you, no matter what’s happened between us. I’ve realized how much I love you. And now I know how much I desire you.”
He was staring at me, his nostrils flaring a little as he breathed. He was trying to take in what my words meant. I did not know what effect cocaine had on the system or how soon it would wear off, but his countenance had changed again. David the amiable lover, the intelligent schemer, the exacting director, the consummate liar, had been obliterated by a man filled with bright-eyed, brittle excitement. He did not attempt to unclasp my hands, but sat there imprisoned, his gaze fixed on my face. “What are you telling me, Clara?” he asked faintly. “What do you want?”
I put my head on one side and contemplated him, allowing one of my narrow straps to fall off my shoulder. “I can’t go on being that silly little girl I was. I want to be famous, David. I don’t care about the photographs, or the court case. It’ll be good publicity for the picture, as you said. I only care about you. I want to be with you, and be your lover, and come to your house, and do all the things film people do. I want to get my name in the newspapers. I want to live while I’m young. I want to be rich and I want to be happy.”
He took hold of my dress strap and restored it, slowly, to its position on my shoulder. At the touch of his fingers, sorrow for the loss of my first love affair cascaded over me like an ice shower. Afraid I might cry, I hung my head.
“I know a good way to be happy, Clara.” He took my chin and lifted my face. “If you are willing.”
Tears did come, though they did not fall. I hoped he would interpret them as tears of relief. “Of course. I’d like to go somewhere alone with you,” I told him. “Away from all these people.” Before he could reply I stood up and tugged at his hand. “I’ve spent such a boring evening at this party, making up to that tiresome boy, Stefano, in the hope of seeing you. I kept waiting for you to appear here, in the ballroom. But you were in the garden all the time!”
He got up, his eyes fixed on my face. “Stefano Bassini is notorious for … tell me, Clara, did he give you anything?”
I nodded. “Some stuff – I think it’s called marijuana. But it didn’t do anything. Have you got any of that white powder you were sniffing in the garden?” I began to pull him towards the doors to the terrace. “Can I try some?” The words Aidan had repeated so many times, “get him to the beach, get him to the beach”, sounded in my ears, and helped me act out what we had rehearsed. I blinked away the tears. “Come on, let’s go down to the beach, and you can show me what to do. Do you like swimming in the dark? I love it!”
David’s usual perceptiveness and cynicism had been obliterated by the drug. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face, and his eyes looked a very dark blue. “Skinny-dipping?” he asked.
I led him onto the terrace, and round towards the front of the house. I had to get him away as soon as possible, before Stefano came looking for me and my glass of water. “Look, the path’s just here.”
Aidan had shown me the path that led from the road below Giovanni’s villa to the beach on the far curve of the bay. Not many bathers went there, by day or night; it was beyond the rocks, and few visitors to Castiglioncello had the inclination to climb over them. But those villa owners who did not have their own private beach had cut a set of steps which twisted their way steeply down to the cove.
David and I had no light. We had to rely on what spilled over from the blazing villa above, and even that faded as we drew nearer the beach. I stumbled often in my high-heeled shoes, but managed to hang on to David’s arm, and at last we reached the pebbles. I collapsed onto my knees, tearing my silk stockings, but did not care. I had only one more thing to do.
Almost blinded by the pain in my head, and unable to see David’s face in the darkness anyway, I reached towards him. He grasped my elbows and pulled me up. His body felt hot, just as it had in that hotel room, when he had put his arms around me from behind, and I had wondered if he was ill. What had been in his pocket that day? Had he been planning to return to Le Grenier and “that ghastly set”?
Suddenly, he kissed me.
I had thought about this moment for a long time, wondering if it would ever come, and how I would feel if it did. During sleepless nights I had sat at my bedroom window, contemplating the shifting sea and the black sky. Despite everything, the thought of David’s kiss thrilled me still. And yet the thought of being kissed by a man I knew to be vain, unscrupulous and self-seeking repulsed me. There seemed no middle way between these two extremes. Could repulsion be thrilling? If it could, perhaps that explained the popularity of horror films and the ghoulish devotion of Sunday newspaper readers to stories of murder. But despite everything David had done, I longed for the moment to come. And now it had.
I felt nothing. His kiss did not feel like it used to feel; in fact, it felt nothing like a kiss. All I registered was wet lips plastered over mine like sticking-tape. It was neither thrill nor revulsion. I remembered the electric spark that had buzzed through my body when he had taken me in his arms for the first time, but I did not feel it now. The power I had been so afraid would eternally weaken me had itself been weakened. When he is weak, we will be strong, Aidan had assured me.
I pushed my hands gently against David’s chest, easing my body away. “Have you got some, you know…?” I asked.
His hand went to his pocket, and I heard the crackling of paper. “Here,” he said, “sit down.”
I sat beside him on the beach. He gave me a thousand-lira note and told me to roll it up, then he held out a piece of silver foil like that in chewing-gum packets, on which was a small pile of the white powder. “Sniff it up one nostril,” he instructed.
I bent down, started to roll up the note, but stopped, and held out it to him. “Show me.”
Sighing, he rolled the note, put it to his nostril and bent over the powder. And at that moment, Aidan stepped from between the rocks, his camera round his neck and a flash bulb held aloft. Before David could move he had taken a photograph. Then, for good measure, he took another, of David’s horrified face, and another, of David’s arms looming towards the camera as he tried to wrench it from Aidan’s hands.
For the second time, I watched them fight. This time, though, Aidan had the upper hand. On his side he had the darkness, David’s drug-addled state, and his faithful accomplice. I picked up the specially sharpened penknife Aidan had tossed beside me on the stones, cut the leather strap of the camera and made off with it, up the path, back to the road and, I hoped, the motorcycle Aidan had left hidden in the trees.
As soon as the buildings of Castiglioncello began to appear on the road, I stopped the motorcycle, turned off the engine and pushed it through the blackness of the early hours. It was hard work; though it wasn’t a very big machine, and I had practised pushing it, by the time I wheeled it into the courtyard I was exhausted. The ride had chilled me; the sweater Aidan had left with the motorcycle had been little protection over my thin party dress, and the headache that had plagued me all evening still gripped my skull. All I wished for was a bath and bed. But before I could enter the flat, I had to do what Aidan and I had agreed.
I opened the door of the lavatory we shared with the couple upstairs. It was inconvenient having to come down to the courtyard every time we wished to use it. But for our purposes tonight, it was a godsend. Once I was inside and had shut the door, I was in utter darkness.
The sleeves of Aidan’s sweater covered my hands. I shook them back, carefully rewound the film and removed the spool. I had practised this, too, in
the dark, twenty or thirty times. Then I took an oilskin packet of the kind fishermen use to store their hooks, pushed the spool of film into one of the compartments and folded the packet. I tied it as securely as I could, climbed onto the lavatory seat, reached up and hid it in the cistern.
Then, trembling with relief, I pushed the motorcycle into the neglected shed behind the building and padlocked it shut. Then, with the key in my hand, I tiptoed up our stairs and into my bedroom. I had not the energy to heat water for a bath. I lay down fully dressed, with the smell of the smoke on Aidan’s sweater in my nostrils and the calling of early-morning seagulls in my ears, and fell into a death-like sleep.
I awoke to an empty apartment. I did not need to look at my watch; the height of the sun told me it was too late to go to my Italian class even if I had wished to. I wandered through rooms shaded and striped by the shutters, thinking about Aidan. His plan had been to get away from the beach as fast as he could, negotiating the coastline back to Castiglioncello in the hope that David would not be able to do the same. I imagined David, beside himself with rage, weaving his way up the path to the road. Had he gone back to the villa, collected his car and driven to wherever he was staying, his brain fuzzy, his body grazed from the stony beach where he had struggled with Aidan?
He definitely would not have reported the incident truthfully, if he reported it at all. Perhaps he would explain away his appearance by cursing that madman Aidan Tobias, who had turned up out of nowhere and attacked him again! Aidan had impressed upon me the importance of hiding the roll of film and, when they were printed, the photographs. “David Penn’s got contacts everywhere,” he had explained. “I wouldn’t put it past him to get us burgled.”
When I had bathed and dressed, I stepped into the white light of mid-morning and crossed the road, intending to visit the bread shop and maybe pick up a punnet of strawberries from the fruit stall.
But I had hardly reached the opposite pavement when I saw something that brought me to a halt. Aidan, who should be busy on location at this time, was standing on the corner. Hatless, with a cigarette dangling from one hand and his jacket from the other, he gave me a sheepish smile.
“Got the prints,” he said. “Got the sack, too. Again.”
I bought the bread and strawberries and some pastries, and Aidan and I walked through the bleached streets to our little green-tiled courtyard and up the steps to the apartment. It was cool enough, but Aidan went straight to the bottle of water he had left packed in ice from the ice van that morning and poured us each a glass. “Let’s pretend this has got a shot of whisky in it,” he said, and we drank.
“May I see the photographs?” I asked impatiently. “How did you get them done so quickly? And, for that matter, why have you been sacked?”
He put down his glass. “Actually, that’s all one question and all one answer. I sneaked into the darkroom to develop the photographs instead of getting ready for my scene. Of course, in came the cinematographer, who guards that darkroom as if it were his only child, or possibly his wife, and bawled me out.”
“That’s hardly enough to fire you, though, is it?”
“Ah. Well, I was already on my fifth or sixth warning. You know what I’m like, bored to death with it all. Gio kept letting me off, as I’m a sort of friend, but even he had to give in when the cinematographer, the costume lady, the AD and even the old codger who makes the coffee started to moan about me.” He put his hand in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a white envelope about the size of an ordinary letter. “By the time they’d finished arguing, I’d managed to get these photographs done, so when Gio came and said it was the last straw, I scarpered before they could change their minds.”
He laid out the photographs on the table: David about to sniff the cocaine; David holding his hand in front of his face, though not succeeding in hiding it; David lunging at the camera with rage in his eyes. I looked at them, and the world swam. I blinked away the inexplicable tears. “They’re perfect, Aidan.”
He gathered them and put them back in their envelope. “I wouldn’t have got them at all if you hadn’t done your bit so superlatively well.” He held up the envelope. “Got the negatives in here as well. I’ll put them in a bank deposit box.”
“Aidan…” I began. There was a confession on my lips; I wasn’t sure whether to make it. But even if I regretted it afterwards, I could not be anything but truthful to a man who had bared such painful truths of his own. “About doing my bit superlatively well.”
He was puzzled. “Yes?”
“When I was with David, it was strange. It was confusing. It was as if I saw two people.”
Aidan was frowning, but his eyes willed me to go on.
“I’m not explaining this very well, am I? What I mean is that I wasn’t repelled by him. The moment I saw him I remembered how much I … felt for him.”
“And?” said Aidan, still watching me, still frowning.
“And so it wasn’t superlative acting or anything. He believed me because the emotion I felt was actually that – emotion. I was even nearly crying. On the beach, when he kissed me, I was sure I’d be repelled. But I wasn’t.”
Aidan’s head went down; his hair flopped over his forehead. Incongruously, I decided he needed to go to the barber. “So you are still in love with him,” he said in a small voice. “Is that what you are saying?”
“No, not at all! I just needed to tell you the truth. I was unprepared for the rush of memories and recognition of what he looks like and everything that I felt in that moment. But when he kissed me I felt nothing, Aidan, nothing! And then it all came back – the way he duped me, his infidelity, his treatment of your mother, his lies… Please, believe me, my love for him has passed. It’s dead.”
When Aidan had put the photographs back in his pocket, he waited a few moments in silence. Then he came closer to where I stood by the table. “Clara, are you crying?”
“No, of course not.”
I looked up at him. The muscles of his face and neck had tensed, as if he were bracing himself for something. But his eyes were full of tenderness. Hoping he would not see how affected I was, I said, “You told me once that my life has changed too much for me to go back to my Welsh valley and marry a farmer. And it has.”
Without speaking, he took me in his arms and held me to his chest, his chin resting on the top of my head. We stayed like that for a long time. Then I drew back and lifted my face, and looked into his. The very first time I had seen him, on the set of the film, I had thought how actorish his face was – sharp-angled, with the intense look so necessary for the screen. And sitting beside me when I had collapsed on his stairs, he had looked at me as if every memory, every thought, the essence of his being was concentrated in that moment. He was careless, it was true, but his carelessness did not carry irresponsibility with it. He knew what was morally right and did it.
He put his cheek on mine. “Clara … please answer me one question,” he began, but I put my finger on his lip.
“Shh. I know what you want to ask, and there is no need. I am where I wish to be. I will never go anywhere else unless you want me to.”
He kissed me, and I kissed him. It was not like those kisses with David in hotels and taxis, which had been frenzied, guilty, a means to an end. It was like being swept up and kept aloft by a current of feeling. We kissed and kissed. Flies landed on the strawberries and pastries, but we were too preoccupied to brush them away. I could not predict what would happen when David saw the pictures. But today, Aidan and I were safe in our little room, behind the shutters while the sun beat down outside, and the little fountain played in the courtyard, and the world was at peace.
No one tried to burgle us. No one came to the apartment offering money for the photographs. David, it appeared, was waiting for a lawyer in America to send him an important package. He knew when he was beaten.
Aidan spent the next few days photographing Castiglioncello, and using the motorcycle to take his camera further afield too.
His intention was to set up a photography business. Photography was the art of the future, he told me. I had promised to go with him, wherever he went, but he gave no clue as to where he, and his business, might be.
Barely a year ago, I had felt myself to be on the threshold of life, poised to make my name as a film actress. I had been convinced the world waited to adore me every bit as slavishly as it adored Gladys Cooper or Lilian Hall-Davis. But now, I was not convinced of anything. I was still on the threshold of life – I had turned nineteen a few weeks ago – but what lay before me?
The feeling of fascination with, and revulsion towards, the world of film-making had not disappeared. In fact, it had grown stronger. What I had told David in the ballroom of Giovanni’s villa was the opposite of the truth. I did not want to do what film people did. I had no wish to go to parties at Le Grenier and sniff cocaine and get drunk. I loved the film-making itself, but I did not love the life that went with it. And there seemed no way of avoiding that life. A film star, whatever she might do to prevent it, was of interest to the public and would have to do what the public wanted. She must appear exquisitely dressed at lavish events, conduct romances with other film stars while coyly denying it, and give interviews to women’s magazines in which she gave tips on smoothing the complexion and curling the hair. In private, she must endlessly fight off lascivious men offering her their money and their bodies – and the little screws of white powder in their pockets.
I could not do that.
Opening the doors to the balcony, I stood there in full sunlight, watching flocks of swifts circling in the radiant sky. In the distance I heard a rumble, and shaded my eyes. There, trailing a little cloud of dust, was Aidan on the motorcycle, putt-putting down the hill to the town. A wave of affection swept over me. I knew in my heart that if I were to keep my promise, I would have to trust Aidan the way I had trusted David. To be a gentleman. To resist the desire to take advantage of my youth and inexperience. To love me.
101 Pieces of Me Page 16
