‘My favourite agent, Matty Perelmann. Go on.’
‘It seems that his favourite client gave him my number to contact without telling him that France was six hours ahead of New York time, not the other way round.’
‘Matty thinks Brooklyn is the centre of the universe.’
Leila grabbed the canvas off the easel and hurled it to the back of the room. ‘He may be right, but here on the whirling periphery of the galaxy a call in the middle of the night destroys a masterpiece.’
‘Come on, what did the old slave-driver want?’
‘To tell you that your voice-overs have been re-scheduled for the day after tomorrow. That you’re to book your own ticket and the production company will reimburse you. I think that’s all he said, but I was asleep. I often am at that time of night. Does it sound right?’
Merlin grunted. ‘You wouldn’t have an airline schedule?’
Leila’s arm described an arc of chaos. ‘Does it look like I’m going to need one in the near future, Merl? A bus timetable maybe, if I raid the piggy bank.’
‘Can I use your phone to call Bordeaux airport?’
Leila studied his face for a moment, close up. ‘Oh dear, you look like a little boy whose playmate had to go home.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
She poked him in the solar plexus. ‘You’re sulking because Jay isn’t coming out to play and now Mommy Perelmann has said you’ve got to come in and do your homework.’
‘I am not.’
There were more questions in Leila’s smile than the Inquisition had come up with. ‘Well, I am at least right about one thing, Merlin, old buddy. You’ve fallen in love. You really have.’ Her laugh was without malice. ‘I hope it hurts, you bastard. It’s about time you knew what it felt like.’
‘Thanks for the sympathy.’
She released him and started hunting through a pile of books for the telephone directory. ‘What’s a voice-over? Matty made it sound exciting.’
‘Matty was born and raised in Brooklyn. He can make paying him a 90 per cent commission sound exciting.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘Voicing-over,’ explained Merlin, ‘is dubbing a commentary I wrote months ago to a film that should have died on the cutting room floor. I sit in a viewing theatre with a film editor I’ve never seen before, watching a scratchy black-and-white print covered in chinagraph marks and trying not to miss the cues and to match my voice to what it sounded like half a year ago when I had sinusitis and spoke the in vision bits against the background of revving tank engines and rather close mortar fire. That’s what voicing-over is.’
‘And what’s the film about?’
He yawned. ‘It’s the story of my hundredth death-defying visit to the front line. I can’t remember where.’
She threw the phone directory at him. ‘Poor Merl! You are feeling sorry for yourself, aren’t you? If you turn off the self-pity, I’ll make you an omelette while you call the airport.’
‘You’re going to cook for me?’ Merlin’s amazement was genuine.
‘The condemned man ate a hearty meal. Can you see a clean pan anywhere? I know there is one somewhere.’ Leila cleared the top of the stove with a sweep of her arm and a crash of crockery breaking. ‘And pour me a dose of Cinzano. It’s all I have alcoholic. At least breathing New York air will get Jay out of your system. Did you sleep together?’
He was thumbing through the pages. ‘Not the way you mean.’
‘Is there a new way?’ Leila flashed her eyes at him. ‘Something I’ve been missing?’
Merlin held the glass of vermouth for her while she sipped it, an egg in each hand.
‘If you have to know,’ he said, ‘we both slept in my camper – in separate bunks.’
‘Merlin Freeman and a beautiful girl spending the night in separate beds,’ Leila whistled. ‘Now I’ve heard everything. This must be true love.’
Chapter 4
Beneath the smoking pine-resin torches in the heavy iron wall brackets, all the colours of the Middle Ages were to be found in the costumes of silk, satin and velvet. The trestle tables of the banqueting hall sported plaster replicas of the delicacies of the period: roast sucking pig, venison and wild boar with a centre piece of a silver glazed swan with a gilded beak that floated on a lake of green pastry. Only the dessert fruit was real: grapes, persimmons and pomegranates. The brightly dressed guests were all walk-ons. Carl Moritz helped himself to a handful of grapes off a properties trolley and earned a hard look from the girl SM.
One end of the medieval hall of Oakham Castle had been cleared of everything anachronistic. The other end, where Carl was sitting, was crammed with hi-tech television recording equipment. Between two cameras he could see Jay’s group, dressed in medieval costume, in a pool of television lighting. They were accompanying her in a song of the Third Crusade. Carl stood up and moved sideways to get a better view of Jay. Her powerful soprano voice rang out clearly above the sound of flute, lute, rebec and harp as she lamented her lover, far away on Crusade in the Holy Land:
‘De ce sui molt deceiie / Quant ne fui au convoier …’
On the chorus, the other voices joined in:
‘Dex, quant crieront Outree / Sire, aidies au pelerin …’
Carl could hear the director’s voice coming from the nearest cameraman’s headphones, directing the shot: ‘Camera three, give me a big close-up of Jay facing right. Hold it. On two. Track and zoom in very slowly all the way to a BCU of Jay facing left. Now mix from two to three …’
Spell-bound by the music, Carl had never heard Jay sing so well. And her group was on top form, light-years ahead of their standard the last time he had heard them perform. A group of wardrobe and make-up assistants clustered round the colour monitor where the SM was standing so that Carl was forced to watch the image in the camera viewfinder. It was small and black-and-white but Jay’s high-boned face, framed by the severe lines of a wimple, was stunning, regal and powerful. The song ended in total silence, to facilitate the editing. There was no applause; that would be dubbed on afterwards with the post-recorded links.
After a short break and a consultation between the stage manager and Jay, the musicians changed instruments to play the final number in the programme, this time with Jay on the recorder. Carl shut his eyes and listened to every nuance of each note she played. From a banal little tune, Jay was making music. Her charisma suffused the other players, making the ensemble sound as one instrument.
Carl was remembering the time when Jay and he had been music students and played duets together on summer evenings. It seemed a long time ago. At the end of the recording he waited in the shadows until the crew had finished congratulating Jay and the others on their playing. Only then did he walk into the lit performance area. In his dark suit and camel hair coat hung cloak-like over his shoulders, he made an incongruous figure among the jeans and shirt-sleeves of the television crew. Jay turned to him, her eyes bright and cheeks full of colour. He took her hand and kissed it.
‘You played superbly,’ he said sincerely. ‘I feel very humble.’
She laughed, high on the performance.
‘I’m not joking.’ He wanted her to understand. ‘I’ve only heard playing like that a few times in my life. If I can give you one piece of advice …’
She was already turning away from him as the producer arrived with an entourage of assistants and a stills photographer in tow.
‘…it’s to throw away your concert flute,’ Carl held onto Jay’s hand until he had finished. ‘You were made for the music you played today. No one else ever played it like that.’ He was uncertain whether she had heard.
*
Anti-climax hung heavy in the air, as it always did for Jay after a performance. In the dressing-room set aside for the two women artistes, she had changed into her street clothes and was packing away her instruments. The other musicians had gone. Outside, only the television riggers were left, rolling up cables and wheeling equipment away o
n trolleys.
The day had passed like lightning. It seemed only minutes since she had arrived and hung up her costume in the dressing room that morning. Then, her main worry had been the stiffness in her left hand where she had cut it at Châlus, and how much rather than whether it would harm her playing.
She had peeled Merlin’s dressing off, to put on an ordinary sticking-plaster which she had borrowed from Trish, the other girl in the ensemble, only to find no cut or even a scar. Her hand appeared to have healed without trace. In all the hustle of getting ready, there had been no time to wonder about it.
She opened the waste-bin under the dressing table and unfolded the pad of lint. There was dried blood in the centre of it, but no corresponding scar on her skin and, far from being stiff, her hands and fingers were more supple than she could ever remember.
Jay stroked the skin on the back of her hand. Merlin the Magician? He had said that was what other reporters called him. She was sorry he had not been there to see and hear her perform. She recalled every note of the performance, as a musician can. Not only had she played as though possessed, she had also inspired the other musicians and pushed them far past their normal playing limits – as a single player can sometimes carry a whole team to victory on the sports field. Exactly how she had done it would have been impossible to describe to a non-musician.
The praise from Andy Burrows and the crew meant little to her; of those who had been listening, only Carl had a musician’s ear. She gathered up the instrument cases and the holdall with her costume. Both hands full, she switched out the dressing room light with her elbow and backed into the corridor between the dressing rooms. The only light was coming from a green EXIT sign at the far end. From the corner of her eye Jay saw a woman waiting in the dim green light, dressed in some kind of veil. She thought Trish must have come back for something – a garment, an instrument rest, some music that had been left behind.
‘Did you forget something?’ she called.
There was no reply. Jay found the corridor light switch, put down her holdall and pressed it. The corridor was empty. There was no one there.
Chapter 5
On the other side of the Atlantic, Merlin was trying to join in the group euphoria that comes when a television programme is in the can.
‘Great! Really great!’ That’s a fantastic job you’ve done on the commentary.’ The producer pumped Merlin’s hand and gripped his forearm to show extra sincerity. His smile showed an expensive amount of dentistry. ‘I hope we get this thing together, Merl. I really do.’
To deflect the tide of bonhomie, Merlin indicated the editor standing beside them on the rain-slicked pavement. The taped together film cans under her arm contained the now commentated version of Lebanon: The Forgotten War. ‘Thank Hannah,’ he said. ‘She did a really great job stitching all the bits together: film, videotape, stock shots … I couldn’t even spot the joins myself.’
The producer’s arm went around Hannah’s shoulder in a brotherly hug. ‘The network has already seen a mute rough-cut. When they see a dubbed show-print, they’re gonna love it, I just know.’
‘I hope so,’ said Merlin.
He kept trying to press the auto-hype button; it seemed unfair to stay cool when all these nice things were being said. Over an expensive luncheon he had listened to the plans for a whole series entitled: The Forgotten Wars of Merlin Freeman. But all the while he had wanted to escape.
‘It was great to work with you, Merl,’ said Hannah. Getting into the cab, she dropped the cue sheets onto the wet pavement where they blew away into the gutter and disappeared into the neon-lit dusk of Manhattan. Merlin shut the door of the cab and watched them all drive away, leaving him outside the dubbing suite. It was drizzling. He turned up his coat collar and started walking towards Times Square. He had tried ringing Jay’s London number several times since arriving in New York. The first few times he had left messages but eventually had run out of things one could say to a machine. He wandered through streets he had known a lifetime ago and past a block where he had lived briefly during his second marriage. For the first time ever, New York seemed a foreign city. It wasn’t the place that had changed, but him. The idea of looking up old friends held no appeal but neither did an empty hotel room.
A Doubledays shop sign drew Merlin across the road. He scanned the display of new war books in the window; several of the authors were friends. He went inside and browsed through the books, drifting slowly along the shelves to kill time and hoping that the rain would ease off. In the History section there was a single copy of a thick biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, which he bought without opening. He took it into the coffee shop next door and devoured the contents of page after page without skipping a word. Before falling asleep that night he finished reading all four hundred pages.
Next morning, Merlin rose early and took a cab north out of the city to Fort Tryon, overlooking the Hudson River. There he stood in the queue of tourists waiting for the Romanesque cloister to open. It was an annexe of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, built to house the medieval collections. Inside the cloister, built from twelfth and thirteenth century stones brought over from Europe, he found what he was looking for. The book had described the carved capital sitting on its simple stone column as being from a church in south-west France. It was said to be the finest likeness extant of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and had been carved to commemorate the visit to the town in 1156 of Duchess Eleanor and her second husband, Count Henry of Anjou, known to history as Henry II of England. Sheltered from erosion through eight centuries, the heads of the young duke and duchess were as cleanly chiselled as the day they had been carved.
Merlin stared at the woman’s face. There was no question it was Jay. The same high cheek bones and wide open eyes, sensual lips and strong nose looked down at him with a half smile as though savouring a joke that had lasted for the better part of a thousand years. How long he stood there, Merlin had no idea. His mind was grappling with two sets of memories. There were his recent memories of Jay, but there were other, more troubling ones stirred up by the head on the column: memories that had pricked him in that first second when he met Jay on the tow path with Leila. Jay and the veiled woman in Baron Kempfer’s garden.
Aware of a museum attendant staring at him, Merlin wandered round the other three sides of the cloister, looking idly around but seeing nothing as he racked his mind logically for clues. It was like opening drawers in a filing cabinet. If Work/France was empty, he tried School History Lessons and so on. But every possible drawer was blank.
He waited until the attendant was answering a visitor’s query and had his back turned before stepping up onto the stone bench beneath the column, to get as close as possible to the heads at the angle he wanted. The previous day’s rain had cleared up. Sunlight poured through a small bull’s eye window on the outside of the cloister. Concealed beneath Merlin’s lightweight raincoat was a camera with an 80-200 mm. zoom lens and a motor-drive. Merlin adjusted exposure and focused on the head. Through the lens the likeness of Jay was uncanny.
‘Hey! You can’t do that, mister! It says Don’t Climb On the Stones. Can’t you read?’
Thanks to the speed of the motor drive, Merlin had shot twelve close-ups of Eleanor’s head before the attendant yanked him down from the bench. To convince the man that he had simply not understood the notice, Merlin spoke Arabic. He put the lens cap on the camera and through sign language conveyed that he would not do it again. He left the attendant muttering rudenesses to a colleague and walked out of the cloister with a smile on his face and a story in his head.
*
‘You don’t have to sell it to me, Merlin. I’m your agent. I’m on your side, you know that.’ Matty Perelmann held up both hands in surrender and managed somehow to light another cigarette from the stub of the previous one, all in one gesture. The bags under his eyes looked like he was having a new face made and still had several fittings to go. He picked up a telephone that was ringing, growled into it a coup
le of times in his gravelly voice, picked up another one, finished both conversations and dropped the phones back onto their rests, pressed a button and growled into the intercom: ‘No more calls.’
Then he sat back in his padded leather chair, stretched and yawned, ‘Let me give you a one word answer. How about: No?’
‘Look at the pictures,’ Merlin insisted.
‘I got eyes.’
Merlin held up a close up of Jay singing at Châlus. ‘This is the girl.’ He held up a print of the head on the column at the Metropolitan Museum. ‘And this is a likeness of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine who is probably an ancestor of that same girl. She lived eight centuries ago, Matty. Eight hundred years. Right?’
‘Thank you, Professor. Counting I know.’
‘Now look at the black-and-white prints of those two shots I made last night.’ Merlin held them up.
‘So that’s why I had to find you a darkroom to play around in at midnight? And me thinking you’d gone into hard porn.’
Merlin ignored that. ‘This girl is the double of her ancestor, Matty. Without the colour and printed dark and grainy, you can hardly tell the statue from the girl, can you?’
‘I agree, maestro. But what does that prove? Me, I go two months without shaving and I look like Moses, but even my own kids don’t obey my commandments.’
Merlin pulled his chair round to Matty’s side of the desk. ‘You could sell this story to National Geographic,’ he urged. ‘Tell them it’s a psychic treasure hunt. It’s all there in front of you.’ He tapped the draft title: International Musician Hunts Treasure Hidden By Famous Ancestor. ‘I borrowed the hotel porter’s old typewriter and spent the whole of yesterday afternoon in my room, getting a treatment down on paper for you.’
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 13