Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Goodbye, Jippy,’ Lindsay said, kissing him. ‘I hope you have a wonderful holiday. Send me a card…’

  ‘I w-w-will. I…’ There came a lengthy, choking pause. Knowing that Jippy was finally about to volunteer the statement she had sensed was imminent when they were in the garden, Lindsay waited quietly while he fought consonants.

  ‘Y-y-y-yaw…’ Jippy stuck painfully; his brown eyes beseeched her. Lindsay did not prompt, for she knew that could make him seize up completely; she shivered as the wind gusted.

  ‘Y-y-y-York…’ he managed finally. Lindsay stared at him. Drops of sweat now beaded his forehead; his face was pale. Gently, she took his hand.

  ‘York? Do you mean Yorkshire, Jippy? I was thinking of Yorkshire, earlier. When we were in that garden. Did you know?’

  Jippy nodded, then shook his head. He gripped her hand tightly; his own felt deathly cold.

  ‘Ch-ch…’ This word, also, would not be said. Lindsay glanced over her shoulder at the desolate, semi-ruined building, with its forlorn boarded eyes. Church? Was Jippy trying to say church?

  ‘Are you all right, Jippy?’ she began. ‘You look…’ She hesitated; ‘afraid’ was the word that sprang to mind, but she was reluctant to use it. She could sense some alarm, some skin-chilling anxiety; it was being communicated to her from Jippy’s cold hand. His lips were now trembling with the effort of words; his eyes rested on hers with a dog-like fidelity; she could not tell for sure, she realized, whether his expression was happy or sad. He gave a small convulsive jerk of the head and suddenly the word, the phrase, burst through its restrictions.

  ‘Ch-check your machine.’

  Lindsay looked at him blankly. She had been expecting a less mundane statement; according to Markov, Jippy’s words often carried a secondary, hidden meaning, but this suggestion seemed to defy all but the most obvious of interpretations.

  ‘My machine, Jippy? You mean my answering machine? When? Tonight? But I always check it anyway…’

  Jippy’s burst of eloquence was over. This time, he did not shake his head or nod; he bestowed on her instead one of his heartening, benevolent smiles—a smile Lindsay would remember, many months later, when she came to consider the results of this evening, and of Jippy’s advice. He pressed her hand, then climbed into the cab beside Markov. As it drove away, both men waved. Curiouser and curiouser, Lindsay thought, driving home.

  Mindful of Jippy’s words, and still haunted by his expression, she checked her fax and her answering machine immediately she entered her apartment. Her hopes, which had risen high on the drive back here, now fell. No faxes; no messages; the machine’s unwinking red light mocked her. During her absence, no-one had called her—from Yorkshire, or indeed from elsewhere.

  IV

  TOWARDS MIDNIGHT, THE SAME night, Rowland McGuire put down the book he had been reading, rose, and threw another log on the fire. He pulled on the green sweater Lindsay had given him the previous Christmas, and moved quietly past the table where his friend Colin Lascelles was contriving to smoke two cigarettes at once and exude desperation. He opened the door.

  This rented cottage was set high on the north Yorkshire moors. Until his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness beyond, Rowland could see nothing. He drew the door half shut behind him, looked out and waited. After a while, he began to see the tussocky shapes of heather and gorse, the broken suggestions of crags on the horizon and, thrown out across the blackness above him, a glittering profusion of stars.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re going out now?’ Colin called. ‘You’re mad. It’s All Souls’ Night—the night of the dead. The hobgoblins will get you. I’ll find you in the morning, stretched out, stone cold, with your teeth bared in a vampiric smile…’

  ‘I’ll risk it; just for a while. I like walking at night. It would be quite pleasant to breathe. You’ve smoked two hundred cigarettes this evening…’

  ‘Two hundred and two.’ Colin’s voice rose in a wail. ‘I need your advice, Rowland. I’m going insane…’

  ‘You’ve had my advice. I’ve been giving you advice for three days.’

  ‘I need counselling. I need therapy. Jungian analysis might help…’

  ‘You have a point there.’

  ‘Rowland, I’m having communication difficulties; severe ones. That bloody man’s unavailable; he’s not taking calls. And my fax machine won’t feed; it’s making these puking noises, Rowland, every time I redial…’

  ‘Tough,’ said Rowland, and closed the door.

  Ignoring the primal, plaintive cries this action provoked, Rowland crossed the cottage’s small untended garden, opened its reluctant gate, breathed in the freshness of the air and began to walk up the steep track beyond.

  Somewhere below him, hidden by the curvature of the hills, lay the cluster of church and farms which comprised the only settlement resembling a village for many miles. From that hamlet, as he walked, came the sound of a church bell tolling midnight. An infinitesimal pause on each stroke, before the clapper struck bronze; the turning of a day, the turning of a month; not a night of ill-omen, Rowland thought, increasing his pace, but, rightly, a night when the dead were remembered or placated, and prayers were said for the salvation of their souls.

  It was not the dead, but the living who were on his mind as he walked. As soon as he was alone, he felt the touch of a hand, heard the whisper of a voice; since the hand and the voice belonged to a woman now the wife of another man, and mother to that man’s child, he tried at once to push her away and drown all remembrance of her. He had tactics for this process; sooner or later, they usually succeeded. It was harder here, in this isolated place, than it was in London, where he could be distracted by the hurly-burly of work, but even so the exorcism could be achieved.

  Facts, and the contemplation of facts, helped; it was also useful to have problems that needed solving. Lacking now the enjoyable immediate difficulties he could rely on in London—investigations, deadlines, departmental politicking, the constant pursuit of news—he turned his mind instead to his friend Colin Lascelles’s current difficulties, which were now reaching crisis point. These difficulties Rowland had been co-opted to solve. Colin, as he noisily insisted, was suffering; his sufferings emanated from his current employer, the ‘bloody man’, not taking his calls that evening, the American film director, Tomas Court.

  Quite how he had been cast in the Sherlock Holmes role in this saga, Rowland was unsure. Colin’s techniques, as usual, had involved emotional blackmail, hysteria, genuine pathos and winning charm; Rowland had found himself shifted by millimetres from the role of spectator to the role of participator. Now, apparently, he was on the case and expected to solve it by means of his intellectual and deductive powers. Colin had a touching faith in these powers; Rowland had rather less faith, but he was fond of Colin and anxious to help him, so now, walking on, he set his mind to his task.

  In Colin’s view, canvassed with great frequency, all his current difficulties could be overcome, and the looming crisis averted, if only they could, together, decode Court’s perplexing character.

  ‘If we could just figure him out, Rowland,’ he had announced earlier that day, ‘my problems would be over. I’m not reading him, that’s the trouble. He’s like a bloody anagram—and it’s an anagram I can’t solve on my own.’

  Rowland, who was gifted at anagrams, indeed at verbal puzzles of all kinds, now set himself the task of rearranging the vowels and consonants that comprised what he knew of this famous man. It interested him to do so, since Court was a director Rowland admired, though he was sometimes repelled by the darkness and chilly precision of his films. These films, it seemed to Rowland, set a series of cinematic traps for their audience; they were orchestrated with great care, although that care was often well disguised. Certain critics, and they tended to be ageing and male, missed the shape and purpose of Court’s movies, unable to see beyond their genre disguise. Younger critics, and Rowland agreed with them, could see the use Court made of cinematic conventions
. To Rowland, Court’s movies had an inexorable logic; frame by frame, they bore the stamp of his vision; they were conceived, shot and edited by a cunning and well-disciplined directorial hand.

  The movies then, Rowland thought, were his best clue to Court’s character; beyond them, the facts were few. Court rarely gave interviews, and any biographical evidence was minimal. He was of Czech descent, and as far as Rowland could remember, had grown up poor in the Midwest, at some point Anglicizing his original family name. He was now in his forties, and had come to movies unusually late for an American new-wave director. He was not some Hollywood wunderkind, but had studied movies as a mature student, after several years in the military, in—as far as Rowland could recall—the Marines. His early work as a director attracted an art-house following; it was only after his marriage to the already famous Natasha Lawrence that his career took off. With their third film together, Dead Heat, the Court cult truly began. Now Tomas Court was divorced, some parties claiming the divorce was bitter, others amicable; whatever the truth, Court and his former wife continued to work together, and were about to do so again, as Colin confirmed. According to Colin, Tomas Court had loved and lost—in which case, Rowland thought dourly, Court’s circumstances mirrored his own.

  Still intent on releasing memory’s grip, the last clinging grasp of its small, cold-fingered hand, Rowland turned his mind from such considerations. The track forked here, and he decided to head off to his left, making for the shadowy outcrop of rocks high above him. He began to consider his richest source of information, his friend Colin. Colin was scarcely the most reliable of witnesses, but he was an entertaining one. With a sense of growing relief and amusement, walking on, Rowland considered Tomas Court the professional, who had erupted into Colin Lascelles’s life, via a 2 a.m. telephone call from America some eight months before.

  At that time, Tomas Court had been riding high on the critical and commercial success of Dead Heat (Genre: thriller. Setting: an unidentified American city). There was advance-word praise for his then soon-to-be-released movie, Willow Song (Genre: film noir. Setting: a Paris populated by American Émigrés; according to Lindsay’s son, Tom, subsequently: ‘A cross between Tarantino and Henry James’).

  In that telephone call, Court had informed Colin that he was now planning to make his first movie in England, and that it was to be an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel. It would star, as most of Court’s movies did, his erstwhile wife, Natasha Lawrence; it would be produced and scripted, as were all his movies, by Court himself. Colin had been surprised by this information, since the subject matter represented a departure from Court’s previous movies. Later, on reflection, he was less surprised. Court’s work had always been eclectic, and he liked to experiment with different genres; if a director such as Scorsese could move from mafiosi to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, why shouldn’t Court decide to take a similar course?

  Colin, who had been fast asleep when the call came through, and who discovered he had a blinding hangover when awakened, realized, at some point in the conversation—it dawned on him slowly—that Court was virtually offering him the job of this movie’s location manager. At which point, fumbling for light switch and cigarettes in the dark, he requested further details. When? He was told. Studio, backers? He was told that too. Financing, budget? A stream of precise and impressive figures flowed down the phone. By that time, Colin had the light on; he was holding a pad and pencil in his right hand and juggling two lighted cigarettes in his left. Elation was taking hold. He had just agreed to meet Court in Prague, two days later, and Court was about to hang up, when it occurred to Colin, through qualms of residual intoxication and mounting excitement, that there were other rather more vital questions he should have asked.

  He duly asked them. In particular, he asked which nineteenth-century novel Court meant to film. To his surprise, Court then became evasive. The name of the novel was not given over the telephone, nor was it given at the subsequent first meeting in Prague; a meeting which took place in a huge, shuttered, dimly lit hotel suite, and which lasted precisely one hour. During that hour, the tall, quietly spoken Court asked questions, and Colin, who was nervous, talked a great deal. He was not allowed to smoke—Court claimed to suffer from asthma, and indeed several asthma inhalers were in prominent view. By the time he left, Colin felt he had overcome this disadvantage, that he had talked good sense and acquitted himself reasonably well.

  It was only later, as he went over and over the interview in his mind, that he realized how inconclusive, how puzzling, it had been. Recollecting it, it became disorderly; a dusty imprecision now clouded his view. He realized he could not recall exactly what Tomas Court had said, and that he had spoken very little. He realized that, having expected to acquire information, he had acquired virtually none—meanwhile he himself had given too much away.

  ‘I talked,’ he had told Rowland, over a drink a few days later. ‘I damn well never drew breath, God knows why. Something came over me. He just sat there; he wasn’t even asking questions by then, and I suddenly felt this compulsion. It was like the confessional. Worse. I just gabbled away…’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He sank his head in his hands. ‘My father, my brother’s funeral, my American great-aunt—you remember, Rowland, Great-Aunt Emily; you met her a few times.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Worse—it gets worse, Rowland…’

  ‘Not the Qantas flight?’ Rowland sighed. ‘Tell me you didn’t do that, Colin…’

  ‘I did, I did. The woman on the plane—I told him the whole story. Twice. I want to die…’

  ‘Never mind…’ Rowland tried to sound encouraging. ‘Things must have improved. What about work? Did you tell him—’

  ‘Work?’ Colin gave a bitter, mirthless cry. ‘I never mentioned work. I meant to, obviously. I was going to tell him my Visconti anecdote. I thought that might go down well. But I didn’t. I just sicked up all this stuff. Feelings—I talked about feelings. I could die of embarrassment. He’ll never use me now. I told him things I didn’t even know until that exact moment. I wasn’t even looking at him; I was too intimidated. I was just staring at those blasted asthma inhalers and spilling out my soul.’

  Colin’s Sophoclean gloom proved unfounded, and his predictions were not fulfilled. Court subsequently offered him the job of this movie’s location manager, but several more weeks, another meeting and innumerable telephone calls later, he still had not seen a script, even a draft script, even an outline, and he still did not know the name of the nineteenth-century novel Court intended to film.

  Others, he discovered, on making delicate enquiries, were similarly in the dark. Court, it seemed, was hard to pin down, but had been flitting in and out of London over the past months and seeing people. He had approached the doyenne of British casting directors; he might have secured the services of a legendary, autocratic and inspirational designer; he had had talks with technicians and SFX specialists; agents had been lunched; certain actors had been wooed—even the name of Nic Hicks had been mentioned—and now gusts of rumour, counter-rumour, expectation and surmise had begun to waft around London’s fashionable watering holes. A tremendous, inchoate energy had been released, but just as, on each of these flitting visits, it swirled up into a dust-storm of excitement and activity, Tomas Court would depart.

  He would depart to a film festival in Berlin, or to Los Angeles for post-production work, then sneak previews of Willow Song. He would swoop off to Reykjavik for two days, or Oslo for three, or Athens for an hour and a half. Alternatively—and as Rowland understood it, this was the present situation—he would be holed up in the ranch he had recently bought in northern Montana, situated near the Glacier National Park, and consisting of 10,000 acres of rock, river and trees—this according to Colin, who had never been there.

  These absences, as far as Rowland could understand, made little difference since, wherever he was, whether in a limousine, or mid-air, or holed
up in his wilderness stronghold, Tomas Court communicated. From him, or from one of his numerous aides, assistants and sidekicks, issued a daily, sometimes an hourly, flow of letters, faxes and calls. The tenor of these, Rowland gathered, was terse. In person and on paper, Tomas Court seemed a man of few words. Of the few words employed, his favourite was ‘No’.

  Extracting information from him, Colin had rapidly discovered, was as difficult as finding a vein to extract blood from in a sinewy arm; when the vein was located, the blood refused to flow. Nor was he alone in this difficulty, Colin found, encountering the famous actor Nic Hicks one evening in a theatre bar.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Hicks said languidly, eyeing Colin and affecting indifference—Hicks was currently very hot indeed, and liked to emphasize this; but Colin, who had known him virtually since birth, was not deceived. Neither man liked the other. ‘He’s talked to my agent, obviously,’ Nic Hicks went on. ‘Played his cards very close to his chest. I get so sick of those power games, don’t you? I said to her, Yawn, yawn—just tell him to send the script and I’ll read it. Meantime, darling, he can join the queue.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Colin replied, stoutly and vengefully. ‘I hear he’s after Ralph, anyway…’ Nic Hicks paled. ‘So I wouldn’t fret if I were you.’

  Colin renewed his enquiries elsewhere and was similarly thwarted. Everyone caught up in the Court operation, it seemed—the technicians, the agents, the casting directors—felt that they knew what was going on until, like Colin, they analysed the situation later and discovered they had been fed mere droplets of sustenance, just enough to keep them engaged, but no more.

  It had taken Colin over a month to discover that the movie Court planned was based (loosely, Court stressed) on the last novel by the least known, and least admired, of the three Brontës; it was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Colin was not a great reader of fiction, and he was suspicious of female novelists; he had managed to avoid ever reading a single work by any of the Brontë sisters. He was proud of this feat and in another situation might have boasted of it; confronted by Tomas Court, he immediately lied.