‘Sebastian Ferrese, Dad.’
‘Who? An Italian. Well, it figures – he’s probably in the Mafia,’ he said in disgust.
‘You can’t say it was ever boring! And although it was violent at times, it seemed true to life.’
‘Not my life.’ He snorted, which made her laugh. He was so absolutely right. The Chicago they had just been shown was light years from the world her parents inhabited, but Laura had been to America now and had recognised some aspects of its modern city life in the film.
Her parents had never lived in a city. They worried about very different problems – sheep picking up one of the many diseases to which they were prone, ewes aborting if a dog got in among the flock and began chasing them, a sudden catastrophic drop in market prices, and the occasional scare about rustlers arriving with a lorry on a dark night, rounding up a whole flock and disappearing with them. The world Sebastian Ferrese’s film reflected was utterly foreign to them, and made them uneasy. But Laura had not only recognised in it something of the underbelly of London life: the grasp of human weakness, the forgiveness, the film’s wry elegiac tone had got right under her skin.
Ten days later Bernie rang and asked her to come back to London at once. ‘Someone has asked to meet you.’
‘Who?’ she asked warily, hoping that she was not going to have a problem with one of the executives from the perfume house whose face she had become. It had happened to her before. Some men seemed to think that if you modelled for their firm you were available to them personally, and they weren’t above trying to blackmail or bully you into bed.
‘Sebastian Ferrese,’ Bernie said.
Laura remembered thinking, Fate again. What else could it have been? Just when Sebastian was on her mind he turned up in her life. It had to be Fate; inevitable and inescapable.
She stared out of the hotel window at the hot blue Venetian sky and shivered at other memories: his mouth buried in her neck, between her breasts, his hands moving …
Behind her she heard a soft sound and turned in time to see a white envelope slide under the door.
It was from him, she knew it. She bit her lower lip, stared at it as if it were a snake. Then she walked slowly across the room to pick it up. Her name was printed on the front in large capital letters.
She tore open the envelope and found a sheet of hotel notepaper, covered in more printing.
GET OUT OF VENICE, YOU BITCH, OR I’LL KILL YOU.
Chapter Two
In his suite three floors higher, Sebastian Ferrese was standing by the window looking at the same view, absorbed in his thoughts. She had changed: he had known that from seeing her in the films she had made since they last met, but it was still a shock to realise that the sensitive, uncertain, gawkily beautiful girl he had met just four years ago had grown an outer gloss, an enamelled surface that had hardened to make her a guarded, remote woman. Four years ago she had had the unaware, vulnerable beauty of a flower. Now the flower had grown thorns to defend itself.
What had happened to her since they had last met? He knew what could happen to beautiful women in the film world: there were so many predators waiting in those deep waters to drag them down into the murky depths.
The air outside flickered in front of his eyes as if something had fallen through it.
Something – or someone.
She had screamed all the way down. Everyone for miles had heard her. People had stood and watched, as if it was a publicity stunt, not real. All the newspapers had commented on that. Even in her moment of death Clea had been performing, and in a sense that had probably been true, because she had always been conscious of being on display, night and day. Since she became a child star at the age of ten Clea’s whole life had been one long performance in front of an audience.
Nothing in her life had been natural, spontaneous, truthful. Like the princess in the old tale, she had been endowed – by fairies, or Fate, or nature – with blonde curls, enormous eyes like violets, a beauty that could stop traffic. She was irresistible to every man she met – from the age of twelve when the powerful, wealthy producer who saw that she got the part she wanted made sure he got her in exchange.
Clea had yelled it at Sebastian when he asked her to marry him, the morning after the first night they slept together. ‘What are you – crazy? You don’t have to marry me because we had sex, stupid! Where’ve you been all your life? Oh, grow up. You think you’re the first dirty bastard to fuck me? Don’t kid yourself. Old Buck Ronay, remember him? The great studio boss, the family man who was so hot on old-fashioned moral values? Fifty years old, bald and sweaty, and he had me on the couch in his office before he signed my first contract.’
Sebastian could remember the shock of that moment. He was in love with her: she was so beautiful, with the face of the Madonna, a smooth oval, creamy skin, blue eyes wide and radiant, pink mouth an innocent curve. He could not bear to think about what she had just said.
She had delighted in his pain and disbelief: she loved to get a strong reaction to anything she said or did. She was acting even when she was hurt or sad, her quick, intuitive mind instantly working out how to express what she experienced and get a powerful response from an observer. Later, Sebastian decided that she could not feel anything, unless she had an audience. When she was utterly alone would she sag like one of the puppets in Coppélia, face blank and wooden, body collapsed? He only knew that she could not tolerate solitude, would ask the room-service waiter in a hotel to stay and drink with her if nobody else was around to talk to, would ring friends or acquaintances, anybody who would answer their phone, in the middle of the night, beg them to come over, there and then, never mind if it was three in the morning. She was moody, difficult, charming, enchanting, a world full of women wrapped up in one troubled human being.
That night, in response to his shocked face, her mood had changed. She had laughed at him, boasting, ‘Sure! Old Buck always liked to try out the new kids on the block, and he liked ’em young. Twelve years old, never even had a boyfriend, because my mother wouldn’t let me go anywhere she didn’t come too. Buck told me, “Come, sit here by me on this couch. You’re a pretty little girl. I hope you’re a good girl and do what you’re told,” and I was dumb enough to say, “Yes, sir, I’ll do whatever you want, sir.” Well, that was what my mother had told me to say, so I did, and the next minute he was pushing me backwards and climbing on top of me.’
‘Stop talking like that!’ Sebastian had burst out, feeling sick.
‘It happened! Why the hell shouldn’t I talk about it?’ she yelled back.
Then her voice became a soft dovelike coo. ‘Gee, what’s the matter, honey? You look green around the gills. Too raw for you? I guess you’re the fastidious type.’ Then she was snarling again. ‘Well, buster, you’d better grow out of that if you want to make it in Hollywood. You’re living in the gutter now, big guy. They may wear designer gear and have perfect teeth but they’re predators, every one of them. Of course, I didn’t know that when I was twelve years old. But my mother did and she let me walk into Buck’s office alone.’
‘But afterwards … when you told her …’ He caught the sardonic look she gave him. ‘You did tell her, didn’t you?’
Clea had thrown back her head and laughed again. ‘She knew, dummy. She knew exactly what he was doing to me in there that day – but she was desperate for me to get that part. So she shut her eyes and went deaf while that old bastard screwed me. I started working on the film a month later – and what do you know? Six months later I was a star.’
When Sebastian looked at her in horror and pity she had changed again, spun into one of her tantrums, which he was soon to recognise and even to predict. She shrieked, ‘Don’t you dare look at me as if I was something you’d found in the trash! I should never have told you, should I? Now you think I’m shop-soiled, huh? The engagement’s off, is it? No white wedding for me.’
‘Clea, my God, you don’t imagine I think it was your fault?’ he had stammered stupid
ly.
‘You don’t?’ She mimed amazement, meek gratitude, and even as he hated it, he admired the skill of the born actress. ‘Gee, are you sure? And all these years I’ve been thinking I was the one to blame. I thought I raped him, poor old Buck. I sat there in my frilly pink dress and white shoes, and forced that poor, weak old man to do those sick things to me.’
He had known how badly he was handling it, fumbling uselessly for the right words. ‘Clea, God, what can I say? I’m sorry, so sorry it happened to you.’
Her lovely face was ugly with rage. ‘Fuck you, mister. I wasn’t asking you to be sorry for me, I was just telling you what my life has been like. It started the way it was meant to go on. Men have screwed me, one way or another, from that day on. But I’ve survived. I’ve damned well survived. Buck Ronay’s been buried twenty years. He died in the back of his Rolls-Royce, having a quickie with a Beverly Hills teenage hooker.’
He had heard that story – everyone told it, laughing, loving the idea of the father figure of the film industry dying that way. He had thought it funny too. Not now, though. Now he just felt sick.
‘Poetic justice, huh?’ Clea said, laughing harshly. ‘They cremated him in Beverly Hills. Pity they waited till he was dead. I didn’t go to his funeral. I wasn’t enough of a hypocrite. Everyone else went – there were huge crowds. Well, his two sons still have a lot of power. Afterwards they sprinkled his ashes over the Malibu coastline, from a plane. I watched them from my bungalow and laughed. I was still alive and a star, with more money than even I could spend, so to hell with Buck, in every sense of the goddamned word! If there’s one man in hell it’s bound to be Buck Ronay.’
He had been breathless with admiration of her courage. He had taken her hand and kissed it. ‘You’re wonderful. I love you and I’d be deeply honoured if you’d marry me. What we just did wasn’t having sex, Clea, I was making love to you because I love you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.’
Maybe she had meant to marry him all along. Had merely been showing him what he was really getting – not the icon of Hollywood, the great star, the goddess with the perfect body, but a woman who had been maimed yet was a survivor, with scars to prove it. She had told him the truth about herself, then waited to see if he would back off. Clea liked to set little tests for men, watch them jump through hoops for her. She manipulated everyone she met, but especially men – which, she once told Sebastian, was fair enough, considering what men had done to her in the past. He had seen the justice in that, even when it was him who was paying the bill for a guy he had never even met, who had been dead for years.
In those first months they couldn’t have enough of each other. He still remembered the wildness and tirelessness with which they had made love. Clea always screamed when she came. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she would shriek, shuddering with pleasure, her smooth body arching in orgasm.
‘No, no, no,’ she had screamed, three years ago, all the way down to meet her death, while the busy traffic moved on and people below were quite unaware at first that she was falling towards them, like Icarus, burning from flying too high and setting the sky on fire.
At three o’clock that afternoon, the Venetian TV news began with images of the start of the film festival: the arrivals at the airport, snatched pictures of smiling, waving stars hurrying past, interviews with one or two better-known names, clips of the film for which they had been nominated. Then a reporter rapidly sketched in the gossip: who was in town, who had been nominated but had not come, who had not been nominated but had arrived anyway.
Towards the end of the item the scene switched to the lobby of the Hotel Excelsior. The camera skimmed famous faces, picked up the international babble, then Sebastian flashed into view. The viewers were shown him grabbing Laura’s arm, saw her white, distressed face briefly, before she was tugged away into the lift.
The microphone hadn’t picked up anything that was said – it had not been close enough – but it hadn’t needed to: the faces said it all. The pretty, dark-haired reporter speculated excitedly, talked about the film Laura and Sebastian had made together, about the gossip surrounding them at the time. She reminded the viewers of Sebastian’s Venetian birth, his marriage to one of the biggest stars Hollywood had ever known, then related the story of Clea’s death.
‘Nobody knows the truth of what happened that day, accident or suicide, or—’ The girl broke off, gazing into the camera. ‘Well, who knows? But Sebastian Ferrese is home again, after years in America, one of the biggest names in cinema today, a universally acknowledged genius of film, and it would seem fitting for him to win the award for best director here, in his own city.’
Many people in Venice saw the report: Sebastian, in his hotel room, bleakly regarding the screen, hearing all that the reporter did not actually say but hinted at; the members of his film crew, sitting in an American-style bar in the city; Melanie, in her room, talking on the phone to her office in London, with one eye on the TV. Laura did not see it: she was in her bath, listening to Puccini on her headphones and trying not to think about anything at all.
Sebastian’s camera man, Sidney McKenna, drained his glass of whisky and called over to the barman to bring another round.
‘Not for me,’ Valerie Hyde said, nursing her Cinzano, her black eyes smouldering.
‘Girlie, you look as if you badly need a few drinks.’ Sidney rarely spoke much, but when he did he was usually blunt and incisive.
‘Don’t start on me, Sid,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘We can see that. You’ve been grim ever since she showed up. It was bound to happen one day – the film business is a small world.’
‘She’s bad for him. If he hadn’t met her, Clea would be alive today.’
There was silence in their little group; people glanced furtively at each other, the bar so quiet that you could hear the slap, slap, slap of the water in the side canal on which it stood.
‘Better not say that to anyone else,’ Sidney said softly. ‘Unless you want to destroy him. Is that what you want, Val?’
‘Sod off.’ She finished her drink and got up. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
As she went out she met an American journalist who tried to stop her, giving her an ingenuous, open smile. ‘Hi, there, Val, how’re you? Let me buy you a drink.’
‘Not today, Frankie baby,’ she said, brushing past his detaining hand.
He let her go, caught sight of the rest of the crew at the bar and sloped over there, still smiling that cheerful, friendly smile, his stock-in-trade, the banner of his kind.
‘Hi, guys! How’re you all doing? I can see you’re a few drinks ahead. Let me catch up – the drinks are on me.’
‘Don’t waste your money, fella,’ Sidney told him kindly. ‘None of us are talking to the press today.’
‘Don’t be so suspicious,’ Frank Wiltshire reproached him. ‘What story do you think I’m after? And I thought we were buddies.’
‘You’ve never had any buddies, Frank. You know that. You only have victims and targets, and we don’t intend to be either so stop trying to con us.’
Frank glanced up at the TV over the bar. ‘You been watching that?’ His eyes skimmed back to catch any betraying expression on their faces, but nobody answered or even looked at him.
Unsurprised, he went on, ‘I’ve always wondered how much fire there was behind all that smoke. Did Sebastian have an affair with the girl? Did Clea find out about it? How did Clea die, exactly? The inquest just skated over the surface, didn’t it? All the real questions never even got asked, let alone answered.’
Sidney slid off the bar stool. ‘Got to go. Ciao.’
The others said, in a confused mutter, ‘Ciao,’ and wandered away without looking back. Frank Wiltshire ordered another drink and sat alone for a while, contemplating just how to write the story.
Across the water, in the old city, others saw the news item too. In a high-raftered room on the first floor, a man in grubby dungarees and an old
rust-coloured T-shirt turned, a small, delicate chisel in one hand, a matching-sized hammer in the other, to glance at the TV screen through the protective goggles he wore.
As the newscast ended, a door creaked open behind him and a woman walked in. She paused to look at the television, which was now showing a series of adverts. Chuckling children lifted spoonfuls of cereal to their mouths while a mother beamed approvingly behind them; then a cartoon mouse began to caper across the screen. The woman walked over, feet scrunching on flakes of chipped stone, and switched off the TV.
‘You saw?’
‘Sebastian on the news? Yes. Well, we knew he’d been nominated, didn’t we? It was on the cards he would come. He was bound to come back here one day. I’m surprised it wasn’t sooner.’ The man turned back to his work, the muscles in his arm rippling visibly as he tapped the hammer against the chisel. ‘Who’s this Laura Erskine? Her face seemed familiar. Actress?’
‘You know as much about her as I do – you heard what that girl on TV said. She was in one of his films. There were rumours that they’d had an affair, not long before his wife killed herself. Maybe that was why. She had to have a reason for throwing herself out of that window – or getting pushed out.’
The man frowned behind his goggles. ‘You can’t really suspect Sebastian of murder?’
‘It’s in his blood, treachery and cruelty.’ The woman walked to the window, which ran from ceiling to floor and could be closed off with ancient, cracking wooden shutters from which the paint had long since peeled, stared out at the blue sky, her back to her son. Watching her, he thought how depressing it was always to see her in black. Didn’t she ever yearn to wear something else? The world was so full of colour and yet she shut it all out, quite deliberately. It was an affront to God, rejecting the wonderful gift he had given the world.
‘Oh, everyone is capable of cruelty. Even you, Mamma.’
Deep and Silent Waters Page 4