by William Boyd
27
Jacques returned to Paris the next day. However, nothing seemed to have changed, Anny considered, grateful, convinced she wasn’t thinking wishfully. Maybe he had thought her kiss with Troy was just acting, what actors had to do—to make it seem real. They had been affectionate to each other when they were alone, there were no embarrassing conversations, they themselves kissed with real passion. In bed that night Anny took his cock in her hand and offered to bring him off but he said, No thank you, ma puce, I can do that myself with more expertise. He laughed—they both laughed—and he held her close. There was nothing untoward that she could spot, no hint of suspicion or distrust that she could discern, but she still had this strange feeling that he was quietly watching her, analysing and examining her, as if seeking to detect minute changes in her behaviour or demeanour. Neither of them made any reference to Troy or the filmed kiss.
Two hours after Jacques had left for London to catch his plane she was called by reception.
“Mr. Ingmar Bergman is here to see you.”
Cornell was unshaven and his clothes were creased and rumpled as if he’d been sleeping on someone’s floor. He also seemed significantly more agitated.
“This can’t go on, Cornell,” she said, wearily. “I told you I wouldn’t see you again. They’re looking for you. They’re not stupid. They think you’ll make contact with me. I’m not going to let you drag me down with you.”
“Nobody’s gonna drag you down,” he said. “I’m gone—but I need some more cash. This documentation I need costs a fucking fortune. It’s a nightmare.”
“I don’t want to know!” she shouted at him. “I don’t want to know anything about the shithole you’ve dug for yourself! OK?”
“Give me a break, Anny! Do you know how tough my life is, right now? At this moment?”
“And whose fault is that? Huh?”
She strode into her bedroom and rummaged in her handbags, finding one purse and then another. There was money in them. She counted the dollars she had: $145. She returned to the sitting room and held the notes out for him, her arm stiff. He took them, a little shamefacedly, she thought. She had given money to him once, she reasoned, so it didn’t make any difference if she gave him some more. She was complicit, one way or another. It made her feel a little sick—too late now.
“That’s it,” she said. “You cleaned me out.”
“Could we order something to eat?” he asked. “I’m starving.”
“No. Go away, Cornell, and don’t come back, please. Fucking leave me alone. Get out of my life.”
He looked at her darkly, hurt.
“There was always a mean, bitchy side to you. Look, I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about the money, please. My pleasure. It’s a gift—a parting gift.”
She walked to the door and opened it.
Cornell had his hard-done-by, victim-of-life’s-injustices look on his face as he shuffled out. He touched her cheek and she slapped his hand away.
“How about a goodbye kiss, babe?” he said, meekly.
She kissed him on the cheek. So help me God, she thought.
She closed the door behind him and locked it. She wasn’t tearful, or even angry—she just had a bad feeling that it wasn’t over. She was sure that, one way or another, Cornell Weekes was going to find a way to mess up her life.
She called Troy’s room. He came over to her in five minutes, holding up his usual bottle of red wine as she opened the door to him. They kissed. She hugged him. Now she felt calm, felt the warmth of that strange security that Troy seemed to bring to her.
“Where’s old Jacques-the-lad, eh?” he asked, taking a corkscrew out of his pocket.
“Back to Paris.”
“He doesn’t suspect, does he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t say anything, anyway—though he was acting kind of strange. All sort of watchful. And then fucking Cornell came round wanting more money.”
“You don’t have much luck with your men, do you?” he said, pulling the cork from the bottle with a wet pop. He poured them both a glass and sat down at the table. He smiled. “Apart from me.”
“I’ll give you a trial run,” she said. “You’re off to a good start.”
She began to take off her clothes.
“Day off tomorrow,” Troy said. “Do you want to come and meet my mum and dad?”
“In Swindon?” She had remembered.
“In sunny Swindon.”
She was naked. She came over and sat on his lap. Maybe this was what she needed—a glimpse of normal life. Troy’s parents in Swindon. It would be the best therapy. He kissed her shoulder.
“What do you say?”
“I can’t think of anything in the world I’d rather do,” she said.
28
“Virginia Woolf. Hmmmm…” Calder McPhail drummed his fingers on the desk, frowning. “I thought you said the novel was called The Zigzag Man.”
“Well, it is,” Elfrida said. “That’s underway, as it were. But I had this new idea. The Last Day of Virginia Woolf. I’ve started it, well underway, also. I’ll do The Zigzag Man next.”
“That’s good news, at any rate,” Calder said. “Two novels underway. We like things to be underway.” He seemed sceptical. “It has been a while.”
“Not that long,” Elfrida said. “It’s only ten years. If I were an American novelist no one would think anything of it.” She looked across the desk at her literary agent. She hadn’t actually seen him in the flesh for…She calculated. God. Two years? He’d definitely got fatter, she thought—life must be good. Calder was in his fifties. He’d always been stout, a thick-set barrel of a man, but now his double chin lapped over his collar and he seemed a little flushed. Hypertension? He had a polite Edinburgh accent and a dry, reserved manner that mostly disguised his fully developed sense of humour and a propensity to sudden, intense short-lived rages. She was very fond of him, seeing him as a benign older-brother figure whom she could go to in any hour of need—for almost anything. Such as now. Calder sat back in his chair and exposed the medicine ball that was his belly as if reading her mind.
“I think,” she said, as if the idea had just come to her, “an advance for both novels would be perfect. Stagger the payments, you know, every three months. It would spur me on.”
“Tell me more,” he said.
And Elfrida did. The Last Day would be an imagined, subjective exploration of the few hours that Virginia Woolf experienced between waking and dying by drowning on 28 March 1941. It would be scarifying, revelatory, audacious.
Calder seemed a little underwhelmed.
“Is anyone actually interested in Woolf these days?” Calder said. “I mean, seriously interested. She’s a bit passé, no?”
“Well, I am. And I don’t even particularly like her work. She’s a fascinating instance of…Of a type of human being, a case study.” She paused. “She’s the most interesting woman writer of the twentieth century,” she added boldly, not quite believing her own propaganda.
“I beg to differ,” Calder said. “Wealthy, snobbish, over-privileged, physically unattractive, English intellectuals fucking each other. Nice houses, good interior decoration, hot and cold running servants. This is 1968, Elfrida. Look around you. Germany, France, the U.S.A., Vietnam. The world is on fire, changing. Don’t go backwards.”
“They are still people, Calder. Human beings…” Elfrida wondered what she would say next. “And people come to us, us novelists, looking for information.”
“About what?”
“About other people. About all the other people in the world. What we’re thinking, what we need, what we dream about, what we hate. What makes us tick, basically. People are opaque, utterly mysterious. Even those dearest to us are closed books. If you want to know what human beings are like, actually
like, if you want to know what’s going on in their heads behind those masks we all wear—then read a novel.”
She stopped, a bit astounded at her peroration. She couldn’t remember when she had last talked for so long, uninterrupted, so passionate, so relatively eloquent, by her standards. Was it the gin she had drunk before their meeting or was it her novelist’s brain, suddenly active again after its decade’s dormancy, like an animal stirring after hibernation?
“It sounds all a bit recherché. The Zigzag Man seems an easier sell. Tell me about that.”
“The Last Day is the novel I’ll write next,” she said with what she hoped sounded like adamantine confidence. “Do me a two-book deal, there’s a clever agent.”
“I’ve done three two-book deals for you, Elfrida, and your publishers are still waiting for the contracted books. Are you familiar with the concept of the law of diminishing returns?”
She ignored him. “I haven’t been well. But now I am. I’m fizzing with energy. Full of piss and vinegar.”
He held up his pale hands, palms forward.
“All right, all right. I’ll call Ginevra. Tell her the good news.”
Ginevra Russell was her editor.
“Is she still alive?”
“Just about. Funnily enough, she asked exactly the same question about you, last week.”
“Ha-ha. Liar.”
“She did ask if I’d seen hide or hair of you. Same difference.”
They talked on about Ginevra and her personal hygiene issues. Then they gossiped further and laughed a lot. Yes, Calder was her friend, Elfrida registered, an ally. Not just a tenpercenter, as Reggie referred to the Hollywood agents he had to deal with.
As she left, he warmly kissed her goodbye at the door, giving her a brief, untypical hug.
“You know I’ll do my best,” he said. “But don’t expect mountains of cash. You’ve got quite a debt at Muir & Melhuish. It won’t be easy.”
“Nothing in life is easy, darling Calder. Soldier on.”
29
John Saxonwood looked at the file in front of him and stirred the air above it with his fingers as if trying to dissipate some unpleasant smell.
“Smoke and mirrors, Talbot,” he said. “And in medieval French legalese. No wonder I was suspicious.”
“It must be some elaborate plan of Yorgos’s,” Talbot said. “I’ll talk to him—he’ll explain everything.”
“You seem very confident that all is well.”
“I am. He’s full of schemes, Yorgos. He just hasn’t fully filled me in on the details of this one.”
“I look forward to eventual enlightenment. But, as far as I can tell, he’s trying to defraud you.”
“Impossible. Never. No, no, not Yorgos.”
John spread his hands in surrender.
“I can only report what I see in front of me,” he said. “I think you’ll have to be a bit firmer than that. Screw him down.”
“He’s one of my oldest friends, John. He’s saved the business at least twice. He’s Zoë’s godfather, for Christ’s sake. Why should he be trying to defraud me?”
“Shall we say, ‘money’? Or ‘power’? Or ‘influence’? When you’re playing for these stakes friendship seems to slip down the ranking priorities.”
Talbot gave up trying to persuade John of Yorgos’s essential, if idiosyncratic, probity and took a copy of the contract and its translation away with him and taxied back to Primrose Hill—without reading a line—to pick up the Alvis. While he was in the flat he telephoned the caretaker who looked after the building and its fabric to check on the progress with the glazier who was booked in to fix the downstairs window. All was in hand, he was told.
Naomi had asked him how he had cut his forehead and he made up a story about a light falling from a gantry on set and showering everyone with shards of glass.
“My God,” she said. “What if it had hit your eye?”
It was a fair point, he admitted, had it actually happened, and he thought again of his narrow escape from the falling coupler. But then life was full of narrow escapes and one was probably only aware of 10% of them, if that. He drove back to Brighton in a perplexed and darkening mood, feeling his duodenum beginning to burn. Some sort of confrontation with Yorgos was inevitable if they were going to sort out this curious business about the Burning Leaves contract. What was Yorgos playing at? What was really going on? He refused to underwrite John Saxonwood’s pessimistic analysis. It was far more likely that this was some elaborate scheme that Yorgos had concocted and they were all going to make far more money as a result. All the same, he was conscious that he kept making the case for Yorgos—and not for himself. Was he in a state of denial? Perhaps, he conceded, but sometimes being in a state of denial was what was required. He turned his head right and left as he sped down the A23 towards Brighton, easing his neck muscles. Try to stay calm, he said to himself, if only for the sake of your ulcer. All this will pass.
Ferdie Meares was waiting for him in the production office when he arrived—clearly in a state about something. Talbot sat him down in his office and poured them both a Scotch, maintaining a polite smile on his face.
“What seems to be the problem, Ferdie? I can tell you’re not happy.”
“I’m not. I’m fucking furious.”
“We don’t like furious. What’s the trouble?”
“It’s my catchphrase.”
“Your catchphrase…Remind me of it.”
“ ‘I’m excited! Are you?’ ”
“I remember now. And what’s the issue?”
“Your so-called director, Rodrigo Arsehole Tipton, won’t let me say it in my scenes.”
“Well, maybe it’s not appropriate.”
“It’s in my contract.”
Talbot called for Ferdie’s contract and checked. Sure enough, there it was in some subclause. Ferdie Meares was contractually permitted to utter his catchphrase—“I’m excited! Are you?”—on at least two occasions during the filming of the scenes in which he participated.
“I think you should have a quiet word with Rodrigo,” Ferdie said.
“I will,” Talbot said. “Consider it done.”
“And why have my scenes with Anny Viklund been changed? I was looking forward to working with her.”
“It’s that kind of film, Ferdie. Fluid, ever-changing, in the spirit of the times we live in. It’s 1968. Swingin’ London and all that hoo-ha. We’re making little alterations every day—everyone has to live with these changes.”
“Does Andy Marvell know?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because he’s a friend. He’s one of the reasons I agreed to do this film.”
Lying bastard, Talbot thought.
“I think Andy’s in LA,” he said, vaguely.
“He won’t be happy if you’re tinkering with his script,” Meares said and stood up. It was a covert threat, Talbot realised as he showed him out.
“I don’t think your catchphrase was in Marvell’s script, come to that.”
“Andy won’t be happy,” Ferdie reiterated, just in case, Talbot thought. “No fucking fear. Not one little bit.”
Talbot had a unit car drive him to the set. They were out in the countryside, between Burwash and Herstmonceux, picking up shots of the yellow Mini motoring through idyllic East Sussex. More opportunities for great music over, Reggie had said. Talbot found him watching a Test match on a portable TV near the camera lorry. Talbot explained the contractual situation regarding Ferdie Meares’s catchphrase. Reggie refused point-blank to incorporate “I’m excited! Are you?” into any segment of Ladder to the Moon.
“No, Talbot, I’m sorry. It’s demeaning. This is a serious film—not some pantomime in a provincial theatre.”
“Just let him say it and then cut it out in the edit.”
&n
bsp; “But that means surrendering to the cunt that is Ferdie Meares.”
“Lose a battle, win the war.”
“He’ll sue us. Safer to say ‘no’ now.”
“He can’t afford to sue us.”
Talbot hoped he had persuaded Reggie that the way of least resistance was the only route to take on this occasion and left him to his cricket, wandering off to see if he could locate a cup of tea. He spotted Tony During, the director of photography, standing by a camera crane waiting for the Mini to come barrelling down a sunken cart track. He was a bearded man with a sallow complexion, who always looked under the weather. Talbot remembered that he’d just had flu.
“Hi, Tony,” he said. “Feeling better?”
“Sorry, guv?”
“The flu.”
“What? Ah, yeah, much better, thanks, guv.”
He found Joe standing by the tea lady and her trolley, the steam from the urn thickened by the afternoon sunshine, like ectoplasm. Joe handed him a polystyrene cup of tea the colour of wet sand.
“Don’t forget you’ve got a meeting at five,” Joe said. “Back in the office.”
“Who with?”
He lowered his voice. “The investigator.”
“Ah, you found one. Good.”
“He was in the Yellow Pages, as it happened. Wasn’t difficult.”
“Well, that’s what the Yellow Pages’re for, I suppose.” He looked around. “Where are Troy and Anny?”
“They’ve got a day off. We’re doing all this car stuff with their stand-ins.”
“Right,” he said. “I’d better get back then.”
The investigator was waiting in the sitting room of the Napier Street office when Talbot arrived. He was young, in his thirties, gauntly handsome, pale and starveling thin, with dark tousled hair that came down to his shoulders. He was wearing a tight black suit and a bootlace tie. His shoes had very pointed toes. He was chewing gum.
He sat across the desk from Talbot, leant back and grandly crossed his legs after proffering his card.
