'Is she very beautiful as well as persuasive?'
The tone did not please him. And then he remembered something. 'You seemed to think so.'
'What!'
' ''Venus reversing her birth''!'
Hilldyard flinched. 'That girl!'
Michael nodded and watched carefully.
'She's a young woman!'
'Twenty-eight.'
Hilldyard inhabited the state of astonishment very physically, eyebrows knitted, fingers wandering. With his open mouth he seemed to be drinking in the information as though there were now a lot more to the matter. He had been struck by the sight of a nameless bather, had taken his impression, preserved it in memory, only to find the owner of the impression turning up at his back door as a real person demanding something in exchange.
'What's her name?'
'Adela Fairfax.'
Hilldyard needed a few moments. 'She wants to play Anna?' he said softly.
'Yes.'
The mouth opened, breath going out.
Michael sensed something.
'Is there a resemblance?'
'Resemblance?' The laugh was ugly, a bark of contempt. 'Oh God, you'd never want Anna's double on the screen.'
He felt himself colouring.
'Her face had been lived in, Michael. She had lines under her eyes. Experience had written on her face, her body. Time was attacking her. But she was the full person, Michael. Not some corkscrew blonde. Not some nubile clone any beachload of adolescent strummers could fancy.'
Michael tried to absorb the contempt. He had set himself up for this.
'I think there's more to her than that.'
'Do you? You think she can play the woman who stopped me in my tracks for fifteen years, the creature I've bathed in the best words I could wring from my pen?'
He hesitated. He felt the full heat of Hilldyard's integrity, his passion for the truth bearing down on the issue.
'She's an acclaimed Shakespearian actress.'
'She's fluff.'
'She's talented, James!'
'She's twenty years too young for the part!'
'Then they'll age her!'
'Don't you see! They don't want my character. They want a lovely young fresh woman for the audience to fall in love with, and to hell with the book, they'll recast the story round her. And there goes the point of my novel. A total bastardisation!'
Michael frowned. Hollywood's blandishments had affected even his judgement. The glare of interest from famous actors, the production millions, the flattery of all that focusing its beam on a particular book dazzled away obvious objections.
'Fine. That makes it easier for me to tell her.'
'Easier for you?'
'I obviously agree with you.'
There was a pause. The author was incipiently dissatisfied. 'She'll be awfully upset.'
'That's her problem.'
'There are difficult scenes ahead. She'll make it your problem.'
Michael shrugged. 'I can explain it to her.'
'She'll make you take pity on her.'
He was irritated. 'James, you haven't met her. She's intelligent. She'll respect your decision.'
'You're very taken.'
The insinuation frustrated him. 'Not with the idea of a film! To be perfectly frank, what I liked about her was her enthusiasm for your writing!'
'I see. Soul mates.'
'We've only met once.'
'All the more testimony to her allure.'
'Or her intelligence!'
'Intelligence!' he spat. 'Nobody with intelligence would suggest the idea.'
It was like a blow that at one strike disposed of Adela, her talent, her integrity, the reality of her view of things, and to Michael it was terrible to think so harsh a verdict might be true. Because if Adela were tainted by the vulgar urge to turn books into films, he too had been crass in offering to help her. He could suffer the criticism if it came from Hilldyard, but he saw, in a flash, the loneliness such rigorous standards implied.
'Michael.' Hilldyard was worked up, forceful. 'I can't expect you to relay my feelings to this girl.'
'You can!'
'She won't let up. Until she's seen me. Exerted her wiles.'
He shook his head. 'She's not like that!'
'Don't you see? This eloquent actress. She's using you as a stepping stone. She won't take a no until she's had a crack at me.'
'You make her sound hideous!'
'Then prove me wrong.'
'What?'
'Bring her to the villa.'
He felt oppressed. 'That's not necessary.'
'I'd like a word with this young Venus.'
'James!'
'Especially as she's so intelligent and discriminating.'
'Please don't!'
'And then we will see.'
'See what?'
Hilldyard tossed his napkin on the table. 'Which of us is right.'
The old man rose from his chair, and Michael waited a moment before getting up and following him out of the restaurant, glancing distractedly at the remaining diners as he went. A waiter nodded him goodbye as he moved to the wicket gate, giving him to understand that Hilldyard had paid the bill on his return from the lavatory. He caught up with him on the footpath outside and they walked off in silence.
In his heart he felt the lightness of his own will, of his own meanings, which travelled meagrely next to the solemn figure of Hilldyard.
After a few uncomfortable moments, Hilldyard took him by the sleeve. He came to a halt, inhaling deeply. The leafy smell was sweet, evocative: a poplar tree.
The tight clasp eased.
Hilldyard smiled and for a moment rested his hand on Michael's back, as if to pat him along the path.
Later, in the bus, Michael sat swaying with the movement of the vehicle as it lurched around tight bends. The author had sunk heavily into his seat; he seemed pensive, full of the things they had touched on over lunch. Michael noted with tired admiration the old man's ability to go on thinking about things, refining experiences that Michael had only felt, and which were passing in his case over the edge of memory, feelings that he had not known what to do with, feelings misused, unchannelled, frustrated. He had not managed any kind of memorial for Christine in the end. And now she too was passing over the horizon, the sense of her almost lost to remembrance, her spirit slowly parting as the pain eased.
He gazed up at the leaves overhead, and at the fading sky.
Chapter Eight
He sat in the late-afternoon cool of his room, glancing through the shutters at the rose-light on the mountains, and dialled Adela's hotel number. He could already feel how intensely she would listen. The hotel number was engaged and after three successive attempts he decided to have a bath. He set the taps running and sauntered around easing off his clothes, entering into pensive nudity. He stood in front of the mirror considering his angular shoulders and pale arms and the flurry of hair on his chest.
He must disappoint her and then prepare her. It was almost impossible to convey the hazards of the meeting without alarming her, and yet hard to brief her without pre-empting Hilldyard. Hilldyard's reasons were for him to convey. Michael would just tell her that the answer was no, the reasons were personal, and that the author, as a courtesy, had invited her for a drink. He would invoke her tact discreetly. Too much information and she would become curious, and whilst he wanted to do justice to her curiosity, he wanted her to take the hint. The difficulty was that in his relationship with Hilldyard he wanted everything to succeed. He had stood up for Adela, and the onus was on him to deliver to the author's scrutiny a woman of intelligence and discretion whom he would find it impossible to dislike. Adela must be that person; and she must be it because that was her nature, not because Michael had warned her.
He strolled naked across the floor tiles to the balcony. The light had shifted its tint. The upper reaches of the sky were indigo. The suddenness of dusk brought cool smells into being. He folded his arms and breathed
in the sea air and with the inhalation came relief. He had the piercing sense that life was OK. While he could stand here beholding the fairy-lit mountains and the partnered mauve of sea and sky, all human worries could be resolved. He wanted to remain in the afterspell of his lunch with Hilldyard, to set things down as if fresh from a vision. He had written in the past, but never considered himself a writer. Perhaps he could come to it late. And perhaps writing was a question of necessity rather than talent. Certainly, in this setting, working with this novelist, to write was a natural extension of things. He had begun to crave the intimate connection that language could give him to his own past. He wanted to commit himself to paper, and he had to accept that Adela's disappointment and Hilldyard's irritability would soon be water under the bridge. If he felt a final concern for her, it was really a desire to be good to someone still in the world, pitting her desires and ideals against the grinding commercial machine, trying to have a career and a value. He wished her well, and he wanted to be remembered kindly, as part of an experience not entirely futile. In that frame of mind he picked up the receiver and dialled again. The tone rang and he was put through instantly.
She was dignified when he broke the bad news. If the result were a disappointment, at least it was final.
He was impressed. She was obviously upset but her self-control was instant. Perhaps their first conversation had prepared her. Despite her former impatience she was suddenly accepting, wise enough to know this would be it.
She was puzzled to be invited to drinks. He painted it as a courtesy, and this half worked, but he detected some reserve. They arranged a time, Michael noting his secretarial function. Somehow he'd been assigned the role of factotum, which meant that she had taken his report as definitive, but also that she was somehow at arm's length from him. Drinks with the author would be fine, but it was not what she had come for.
Michael wondered whether she would renew her offer of dinner. The call was winding down, and as the final cadences approached he was tempted to prompt her. But Adela was the one who had made the suggestion, had insisted on it, and if she quite forgot when the time came, what was the point?
She thanked him, looked forward to seeing him at Hilldyard's, and then rang off. He replaced the receiver and gazed for a moment at the bedspread.
He eased himself into the bath. He wondered whether he felt used. He stared at the clammy ceiling and doubted whether he cut any kind of figure with women these days. He wondered whether he was bypassing women, or they were bypassing him. He felt it as a slight; but there was no slight. Nothing had happened. No expectations had been aroused. He had been nice to her, and she had been grateful to him, and that was that, and back to business as usual.
He felt the heat of the water bring tiredness around his eyes. He turned on his side, immersing a leg, the water lapping at his chin and mouth. He felt like a foetus in an enamel womb. He lay sideways in the bath with a melancholia that had touched him before, disappointment becoming torpor. It was a torpor that made him see the water with sluggish eyes, like an alligator about to submerge. He wondered, in this bathroom, who he was and what he would represent to a woman. There was the intimate sense of his own immersed body; but what was the body in itself, its limbs prone and unflexed in level water? Who would want this long-jointed shape in a bed, a body so similar to others in its properties and desires? Who out there would desire him in particular?
Desire was dormant in Michael.
In the past six months he had hardly looked at a woman. Erections had deserted him. The area between his legs felt fallow, bland, as if there were some deep recoiling of his potency. And he made the connection easily enough, because the slow collapse of his business, the out-of-controlness of debts, the meltdown of first this and then that project had deflated him. When Michael's company began to die, desire withered inside him. He could no longer project himself with any sense of fundamental balls. He had passed the age when good looks in a man mattered. He was thirty-five, and at thirty-five you had to be more than a set of sensitivities. Your antlers had to be locked with the world. You had to be alive with the current of applied values. Otherwise what were you that people could subscribe to? What sense of purpose, or mastery, or good terms with life could he present to a woman?
He had walked past the top shelves in newsagents', looking at the jigsaw body parts with a dim curiosity, vaguely hoping that the flesh cartoon would trigger some figment of lust. He had stared at bottoms and breasts and felt alien, not of this world.
Gradually, as work got worse, he stopped noticing the lack of lust. He noticed instead a more general failure of wit and acumen, a slowing down of essential reactions. He experienced psycho-motor retardation, the loss of spontaneity, memory lapses. Even conversation began to elude him. In his stew of worries he mislaid the ability to empathise, to think laterally. He was disconnected from insight. Exactly how he might 'be' with a woman deserted him. And of course, in this state, certain women were intrigued by his self-effacement – rare in a handsome man – which was actually despair on hold. Michael had not even been able to satisfy their curiosity, so that eventually they were bored; as bored as he was with himself.
He shut his eyes, feeling the soap bar melt between his fingers. When the phone rang he was already gone, asleep, and had to come back from a world away. He jetted out of the bath, took a towel and forced himself into wakefulness. He sat on the bed, blinked, grasped the receiver.
'Afternoon, Michael.' The voice from nine thousand miles away was loud and clear.
'Hello?'
'Have I got news for you!'
Adamson was talking from his LA office. He had a huddle with his partner at ten, a day of meetings beyond that. Speaking to Michael Lear was number one on his agenda.
Michael tried to interrupt. Adamson was on heat, flowing all over him.
He had done the research, found a mole in Coburn Agency. Paul Chapman, English, twenty-five, an aspiring screenwriter who subsidised his writing by penning reader's reports for Weislob's department. Chapman liked Adamson's girlfriend and was prepared to be bitterly indiscreet about anything to do with Coburn Agency. Chapman sucked up to Weislob for work, read nights and weekends covering literary material for him, and was in the loop on house projects. He loathed Weislob from the tips of his toes, and needed to discharge contamination by slagging him off when anyone would present a listening ear. He had done a report on The Last Muse.
'He's our stethoscope, Michael. Through him we can listen to the heart of Coburn Agency. The sound of atrophy, straining arteries, sclerotic valves. You're going to love this.'
He had asked for the information. For courtesy's sake he would have to hear him out.
Adamson set the scene with loving attention to detail. To appreciate the low-down Michael needed context.
'Coburn's like number ten in the charts, right. Not one of the behemoths. But dynamic. They want to break out. And now is their chance. Remember the plane that pancaked last year? Three honchos from Interstar. Three ten-per-centers slam into a mountain. Pilot sneezed. Heavy litigation. That was Interstar's chief exec Mart Korea, plus Abe Golden and Naim Johns, three lynchpins totally smudged on this low-grade mountain in Arizona. OK. And what's happened? Every agent in town is hitting on Interstar's clients because everybody in town knows that without Korea Interstar isn't Interstar. Nobody who's living in that agency can hold it together. A feeding frenzy. Talentscope is in there. Creative Artists Management are picking them off. The little guys are pitching in. It's like the baker's window's smashed, and there's tits and robins on the counter and fucking great eagles airlifting whole loaves. To begin with Talentscope had it pretty good. Fifteen of the top thesps at Interstar were biding their time, waiting to see how the balance of power moved. Interstar's strength derived from its packaging abilities, right, and the stars on their list didn't want to fragment the powerbase by leaking all over Hollywood. But they had to go somewhere. Well, Sam Calloway signed with Talentscope. He's big. With him you'd ex
pect to get Michael Morton, cos they work together. And Morton is friends with Rex Polanski, etc, etc, a fat string of sausages crossing the road to Talentscope. But Calloway split after six weeks. He fuckolaed them, slouched off to his manager, and God in Christ knows what's happening, because if those bloodsuckers at Talentscope couldn't keep Calloway sweet, why would Morton and Polanski and Dolores Black sign on? Hammond repeated the formula. He signed with Talentscope and pissed on their chips five months ago. There's a bad smell in that agency. Dog turd in the boardroom.' He cleared his throat. 'So Hammond pulls out, Callo-way's in limbo, and apart from a few B-string defectors Interstar's intact. This is like six months ago. Before Thinking Time. Before Hammond was in the top five. Enter Frank Coburn.'
Michael lay in his towel on the bed, powerless to interrupt but strangely fascinated.
'Let me give you Coburn. He's a middle-aged guy with a strong jaw and a bald head. He wears a walrus moustache and a string tie. He's one of the most physically arresting people you've seen. Hypnotic. Oozes protective power. The guy mesmerises talent like headlights freeze bunnies. Somehow Coburn got to Hammond. And he didn't do a one-man pitch. He co-presented with Tom Mahler, who's like number four in the pecking order. Mahler has perfect manners, he's literate, wears a tie-pin. He reps Clarice Burnaby, and if the man can eat her shit he's gotta be good. What Coburn was proposing was total service: packaging, tax advice, estate agency, procuration, you name it. Three agents for the price of one. Three disciplines: Mahler as lead agent, attorney Gloria Sabbatini for deals, tax; and our favourite person in the world Rick Weislob on project co-ordination, script shit. Meanwhile Coburn does the politics, the overview, the Caesar thing.'
Michael arranged himself for the elongating monologue.
'Now see it from Coburn's perspective. Hammond's friends with all kinds of talent at Interstar: Vidal Sorenson, Jasper Phillips, Barry and Omar Cazenove. Same tune. If Coburn can get these guys under his wing, he can begin to crank up for the big time. It's a confidence trick, a momentum thing. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but if just one fish stays hooked he can reel in plenty more. And don't think he hasn't started. His footsoldiers are out there tickling people's balls. They're saying, We got Hammond. We want you, too. Meanwhile, suck on this. Mahler is learning Shakespeare by heart – to pillow-talk Hammond. And some cute secretary is doing Hammond's shopping for him.' Adamson whooped with laughter.
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