Eureka
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anthony Quinn
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Summer, 1967. As London shimmers in a heat haze and swoons to the sound of Sergeant Pepper, a mystery film – Eureka – is being shot by German wunderkind Reiner Werther Kloss.
The screenwriter, Nat Fane, would do anything for a hit but can’t see straight for all the acid he’s dropping. Fledgling actress Billie Cantrip is hoping for her big break but can’t find a way out of her troubled relationship with an older man. And journalist Freya Wyley wants to know why so much of what Kloss touches turns to ash in his wake.
Meanwhile, the parallel drama of Nat’s screenplay starts unfurling its own deep secrets. Sexy, funny, nasty, Eureka probes the dark side of creativity, the elusiveness of art and the torment of love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2013 he was the film critic of the Independent. Eureka is his sixth novel. His previous books are The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award; Half of the Human Race, The Streets, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize; Curtain Call, which was chosen for Waterstones and Mail on Sunday Book Clubs and Freya, a Radio 2 Book Club choice.
ALSO BY ANTHONY QUINN
The Rescue Man
Half of the Human Race
The Streets
Curtain Call
Freya
For Dan Franklin
ANTHONY QUINN
Eureka
Believe me, there are certain mysteries, certain secrets in my own work which even I don’t understand, nor do I try to do so … Mysteries have to be respected if they are to retain their power. Art disturbs: science reassures.
Georges Braque
1
EUREKA!
Nat had been staring at the word for an age. He had typed it upon sitting down first thing this morning, and it had squatted there at the top of the page, alone and unbudging, ever since. Eureka. From the Greek, I have found it. The irony of that wasn’t lost on him. Not only had he not found it, he barely knew where to start looking. And yet the word had seemed to him such a promising one, bristling with scholarly pride, an intellectual yahoo. Eureka. He must have first heard it, like everyone else, at school: Archimedes seeing the water rise as he lowered himself into his bath and suddenly understanding that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged, which in turn would solve the problem of measuring the volume of irregular objects. ‘Eureka!’ he supposedly cried. Or, as the class wag had translated it: ‘This bath water’s too bloody hot.’
For want of something else, he typed:
A screenplay by Nathaniel Fane
Nat had once been an instinctive writer, and trusted his gift to the extent that he could simply turn up at his desk in the morning and start clattering away, his fingers a blur over the typewriter. The reassuring metallic rat-a-tat-tat of the keys would carry him through to lunch, and even if he didn’t get it right straight away – who on earth did? – the words kept pouring out of him. By the end of the day he would have ten or twelve pages of dialogue. Now every tall white sheet of A4 loomed like an Everest.
He had written his first screenplay eight years earlier, a racy romantic comedy called The Hot Number, which had won him an Academy Award. His name, already well known in British drama, became a fixture in showbiz gossip columns. Film producers sought him out; society people fawned over him. ‘Nat Fame’, the rhyme he had cultivated from youth, had become his cherished sobriquet.
Early success proved, as it so often does, a false friend. He had written a number of screenplays since; only two of them had been produced. The last one, Square in the Circle, was strafed by villainously bad reviews, and went up in flames. He was paid, of course, but it didn’t much salve his pride. Nor did it keep his name where he wanted it, front and centre in the public consciousness. His latest enterprise was to adapt for the screen a story by Henry James. The immediate task had been to find a new title – the producers had what they called a problem with The Figure in the Carpet. There wasn’t much support for the word ‘figure’. And they all hated ‘carpet’. When he proposed Eureka they didn’t seem very enthused by that, either. A Greek what? asked Berk Cosenza, the moneyman from New York. Nat was in a room of blank-faced executives; only when he half recalled an account of some king using the eureka theory to determine the purity of gold in his crown did Berk lift his head and squint in his direction. Gold? he said. Nat wasn’t sure of the details, but having caught the scent of interest he quickly pressed his tiny sponge of information for all it was worth.
It had nearly run dry when Berk began to nod his head. He held up his palms straight and spread an imaginary line through the air. ‘Eureka,’ he said. A couple of others echoed the word in cautious approval. Nat, wise to the shifting currents of favour, returned an expression intended to suggest that this stroke of inspiration was entirely down to Berk’s genius. He had got his title.
And two weeks later that was all he had got. He rose from his desk, yawned and lit a cigarette, standing in the wonky parallelogram of sunlight laid across the carpet. From his window he could see the parapet of the Royal Academy, his next-door neighbour. Nat had lived at Albany for six years, though he had recently moved to a larger set on the top floor; he liked to think of himself going up in the world. He had spent a fortune redecorating the flat, replacing the patterned, swagged look with a lot of chic black-and-white Italian furniture. He’d had the carpets ripped up and the toffee-coloured parquet beneath lacquered to a high gleam, and into the bedroom had imported a huge polar-bear skin. On this he liked to loll and imagine himself borne aloft, like Hannibal on his elephant. Mirrored glass was inlaid everywhere, for the way it made the light dance in the room. The kitchen, where he never prepared anything more than an omelette, was an angular symphony in marble and steel. The expense was not in vain, either. Queen had done a photo shoot of the set when they came to interview him.
He pulled up the sash window and listened to the hum of traffic that wafted over the rooftops from Piccadilly. A morning’s mooching had driven him to distraction. His typewriter waited – the conscience in the room. Could he justify sloping out for an hour or so? It was the writer’s dilemma: you become so sick of your own company, and yet you daren’t be too long away from it. He picked up his sweater from the back of the chair and slung it over his shoulders, Riviera-style. He gave himself a quick dousing of L’Heure Bleue, and set out.
In the Albany courtyard he lingered for a moment, enjoying the monkish quiet. It still seemed remarkable to him that such tranquillity existed with central London right on the doorstep. So: back or front? The building’s Janus-faced aspect was another thing he delighted in. Leave by the front entrance and you were absorbed into the soothing gentility of St James, with its clubs and galleries and tailors. Slip out the back door and a right turn would pull you into the venereal embrace of Soho and its lovely squalor.
He chose the front way. The problem of Eu
reka might be more easily resolved by immersion in the smart neighbourhood Henry James preferred. Here on Jermyn Street he could imagine the rattle of carriage wheels and the rustle of crinolines familiar to the citizens of fin-de-siècle London. Except they were doing away with all that: the producers wanted it to be a present-day version of the story. So, out with the frock coats and opera hats, in with the brocade suits and kipper ties. The plot remained the same. Two friends revere an ageing novelist, Hugh Vereker. The narrator, a critic, writes an article about Vereker’s latest book; shortly afterwards he happens to meet the author himself, who suavely but firmly dismisses the efforts of the critic – of every critic – to locate the essential ‘secret’ of his work, ‘the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet’. The other friend, George, on hearing this, takes up the challenge and rereads Vereker’s books in search of their elusive secret. The attempt to unravel it becomes an increasingly fractious contest between them.
Having read it again, Nat felt that something had shifted in his understanding. Now the veils and screens of its intellectual puzzle seemed merely a decoy, a diversion from the central drama of the story, which was the unresolved triangle between George, his fiancée Gwen and the narrator, Chas. Was it actually a romance, disguised as a literary teaser? Or the other way round? He would have to decide, and sooner rather than later. The studio wanted the first draft in six weeks’ time.
At the little newsagent’s on Bury Street he bought twenty Peter Stuyvesant and a stack of magazines, which he carted into Wilton’s and laid to one side of his luncheon table: they still called it luncheon here. With a plate of oysters before him he riffled through Town, Esquire, the New Yorker. By the time he was finishing his sole meunière he had polished off Playboy, Queen, the Statesman, Vogue and Paris Match. He read impatiently, pecking at titbits and quickly discarding them. Nothing properly held his attention in this restless mood; he would get halfway through an article and abandon it, bored. It was only while he was idling through that day’s Chronicle that he found something that made him sit up in his chair.
The German film director Reiner Werther Kloss was the toast of the Parisian beau monde this week. His film The Private Life of Hanna K, about a fragile romance between a French maquisard and a German woman during the war, has been a box-office smash in France. It was marked by a gala dinner in his honour last night at the Palais-Royal. Kloss, 33, wunderkind of the new German cinema, behaved on the occasion with perfect affability and good manners. At a press conference he thanked his hosts and said that he continued to be honoured everywhere but in his own land. ‘Maybe film directors are today’s prophets,’ he joked. He added that he looked forward to working on his next film, an adaptation of the Henry James story ‘The Figure in the Carpet’. ‘It’s a strange piece, something I’ve wanted to do for years,’ he said in his quiet voice. ‘It is about the mysterious conundrum of art, this story – about the way writing torments and obsesses us, can lure us into madness. Sonja [Zertz, leading lady in three of his pictures] will star, also Vere Summerhill, one of the great British actors.’ It is understood that the film will be a modernised version of the story, set mainly in London and Italy. Can Henry James be brought up to date? ‘Of course, he’s a modern,’ the director replied. ‘He used also words like “fag end” and “dudes”. That’s up to date. We have someone writing the screenplay at the moment, so we should be ready to shoot it this summer. I have the greatest hopes for this film.’
Nat snapped the paper shut in a spasm of irritation. He and Reiner Werther Kloss had yet to meet, it was true, but that was no excuse for the director to sound quite so offhand about the script. He had ‘someone’ writing the screenplay, did he? Just fancy. Would it have killed him to identify that ‘someone’ as the award-winning screenwriter Nathaniel Fane?
He prickled as he thought of his consequence in the world slipping. There was no stock on the market more irrational than the stock of artistic popularity. His was on a downward plunge, it seemed. He had never minded disobliging references to himself in the papers, so long as they were accompanied by a photograph and his name was spelt correctly. What he couldn’t bear, what absolutely put a crimp on his day, was being anonymous, reduced to a mere ‘someone’, an also-ran. He would ask Penny, his agent, to contact the Chronicle – casually – giving notice that, further to yesterday’s news item, etc., Nat Fane would be writing the screenplay of Reiner Werther Kloss’s next film. Just that. Readers had to be kept informed, after all.
The bill was shocking, as it always was at Wilton’s. He paid and left, wondering where he might go to escape his oubliette of insignificance. A place where he might be spotted, pointed at, talked about. Outside, the March afternoon was mild, the sky clouded and sunless. He was near his club, the Nines, on Dover Street, but dropping in there would hardly buff up his diminished lustre; at this hour it was unlikely anyone would be around, and if there were they’d probably be asleep. He sauntered on, until he came to Brown’s, and decided that he fancied tea in the hotel’s lounge. This too proved a disappointment, a room whose air was dead but for the tinkle of china and the genteel murmur of a couple of elderly ladies who’d been there since 1951. He sank down onto a sofa, ordered a pot of Earl Grey and asked the waitress to bring him some newspapers, so as to check where else his name was being ignored.
Another thing nagged him about the Kloss piece, the remark the director had made about the themes inherent in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’. He’d got the stuff about writing as a torment and an obsession. But what was this about ‘luring us into madness’? Where on earth was that in James’s story? Perhaps the German’s imperfect command of English had misled him; perhaps he hadn’t meant to say that, or else he had been misquoted.
He had returned from the gents and was pouring himself another cup of milkless tea when he noticed something odd. His wallet, parked on the table, looked conspicuously slimmer. It had been plumped with a wodge of ten-pound notes – now there was just one. He looked about the room, mystified more than outraged. The two old ladies were still blahing away; a couple of American tourists had just settled in across the room – non-starters as suspects. His visit to the loo had lasted all of three minutes, maybe four, so whoever it was must have been quick about it. He supposed it might have been some light-fingered opportunist happening to pass by, but the lounge was so somnolent at this hour even that seemed unlikely. It was why he had thought it perfectly safe to leave on the table in the first place.
The waitress, catching his eye, approached him with an obliging smile. She wore a cap and white pinafore over black. He wasn’t going to make a fuss, but beckoned her forward conspiratorially.
‘Miss, did you happen to see anyone hovering about this table a moment ago? I ask because my wallet appears to have been relieved of about, ooh, a hundred pounds.’
The girl’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘You mean’ – she dropped her voice to a scandalised half-whisper – ‘stolen?’
‘That is exactly what I mean.’ Close up, she was almost cartoonish in her prettiness: heart-shaped face, button-nosed, violet-coloured eyes framed by long, dark lashes. The pancake make-up was as thickly applied as an actress’s. Beneath it, her expression looked pained to the point of tearfulness.
‘Oh, how awful! But I’m sorry, I – I didn’t see anyone.’
Nat clicked his tongue gently and glanced about the room again, though he sensed the uselessness of further scrutiny. ‘I’ve heard of “daylight robbery” yet never quite believed in it. So there’s a lesson. I suppose I should – would you be good enough to fetch your manager for me?’
She paused for a moment, sympathy still in her voice but a distant concern crinkling her eyes. ‘I’m not sure he’s here at the moment,’ she said. Then she gestured at the violated wallet. ‘Did they really take … everything?’
Nat stared at her, and chuckled. ‘Well, they left me a tip. A tenner. But I’d been expecting to keep the lot.’ When she still stood there,
he adapted his tone to something more businesslike. ‘Perhaps you could find someone else in authority.’
The girl gave an obedient nod, and withdrew. Stupid of him, really; he’d only taken it out of his pocket because he didn’t like the thing spoiling the line of his suit. But it was just money after all, it wasn’t valuable stuff, not like the time they’d burgled the flat in Onslow Square, taken all the jewellery and peed on the carpets. That was horrible, barbarous …
Of a sudden he understood, and quickly rose from the sofa. He crossed the room and turned down the staff corridor where he’d seen her disappear. A liveried waiter halted, about to stop him – then didn’t. He walked on through the clanging kitchen and its steaming miasma, past white-coated staff too busy or indifferent to notice him. Instinct had taken over and directed his steps out into a service yard, where he found his waitress alone, leaning against a wall. Her cap was off, exposing a prim bun of mid-brown hair. She had just taken out a cigarette when she saw him, her face stiffening with surprise.
‘Hello again,’ said Nat, moving in close and producing his packet of Stuyvesant. ‘So sorry to interrupt your break. Here, have one of mine.’
The girl, faltering, said, ‘You’re not supposed to – it’s for staff only …’
‘Oh, I’m sure we can bend the rules just this once. And you did say your manager wasn’t around.’ He beamed charmingly at her, still holding the proffered smoke. With a twitch of reluctance she took one, and averted her gaze.
‘Do you have a match?’ he asked.
As she reached into her pocket Nat took a step forward and seized her wrist. She gasped in surprise, and tried to pull away, but his grip was as strong as whipcord.
‘Get off me,’ she hissed, eyes daggered at him. ‘I’ll scream and have the police on you.’
Nat smiled. ‘Really? Go on then, let’s hear it.’