by William Boyd
‘Why the hell are you living here, anyway?’ he says.
‘This is where they put me.’
‘No, no, no, we’ve got to get you into the hotel with the rest of the cast and crew. Leave it to me.’ He wanders off into the night.
The next day, keen for it to pass as quickly as possible, Bethany takes a bus from Faith-next-the-Sea along the coast to Hunstanton. ‘Hunston,’ the bus driver corrects her pronunciation when she pays for her ticket, ‘Sunny Hunny.’ She wanders around the town and buys herself a sandwich and a can of Coke. She takes a photograph of the curious striped cliffs with their horizontal bands of white and red chalk making them look like some kind of giant cake.
It is a cool hazy day and she peers across the Wash failing to make out the Lincolnshire shore. Given the weather conditions she decides against a boat trip to Seal Island to seal-watch and finds herself a sheltered corner where she sends texts to various people. To her mother; to her father in California (‘Movie going great!’); to her girl friends – Moxy, Jez and Arabella. She also sends a blunt text to her so-called boyfriend, Kasimierz, who has promised to come and visit her on set but seems to be the busiest man in London. She has been looking forward to them playing house (and making love) in the tilting Faith-next-the-Sea caravan but he seems determined to disappoint her. ‘Two days left. The clock is ticking. B’ is all she sends him. Everyone else replies over the course of the afternoon except Kasimierz – which casts her down somewhat. It’s drizzling when she reaches the bus stop and she smokes two cigarettes as she waits with four old ladies for the bus back along the coast. They stare at her as if she’s some kind of alien.
It’s dusk when she reaches the caravan park and as she’s walking towards her caravan she meets Gareth Gonzalez Wintle coming the other way.
‘Hey, Bethany,’ he says. ‘I’ve been knocking on your door for five minutes, I was convinced you were inside. All the lights were on.’
They decide to go to the pub for a quick drink. Two hours later Bethany is still listening to Gareth’s complaints (‘horror’, ‘arid’, ‘maggoty’, ‘cock-crowing egomaniacs’, ‘repulsive’, ‘mental dwarves’, ‘jaded sense of futility’ are some of the words and phrases she logs away). Eventually she asks him.
‘Gareth, was there something you wanted to tell me?’
‘Ah … yeah. You are a fantastically beautiful young woman.’
‘Not that.’
‘I love your long hair, your lips, your green eyes. Blueish-grey eyes.’ Gareth has had four gin and tonics by now.
‘Not that. Why did you come to my caravan?’
‘We wrapped early. Felt like a chat. You’re a very easy person to talk to, Bethany. No, I was just feeling kinda … down, low. Yeah? I’m thinking of chucking it all in after this piece-of-shit film. Clearing out.’
‘To Spain?’
He looks at her, baffled.
‘Why would I go to Spain?’
‘I don’t know. Your name, I suppose. I assumed you were half Spanish – Gonzalez.’
‘Oh. No, I’m English. I’m from Surrey. I just stuck Gonzalez in to make me sound more interesting. “A Gareth Wintle film”, “A film by Gareth Wintle” – doesn’t work. No way.’
‘What’s wrong with being called Gareth Wintle?’
‘Because I sound like … like a weather forecaster. Like a children’s TV host. An ink-stained clerk in a Dickens novel. Gareth Gonzalez Wintle – whole different ball game.’
Bethany says she has to get back. Gareth suggests buying a bottle of wine and having a nightcap. Bethany is firm.
‘No thanks, Gareth. My big day tomorrow.’
‘What? … Oh, yeah …’
Bethany sits in her costume on the lower floor of the double-decker cafeteria bus where they eat their meals waiting for the second assistant-director (a harassed girl called Frankie) to come and fetch her on set. Bethany is wearing a shapeless grey coarse-wool dress with an apron, wooden clogs and her hair is coiled and pinned up under a cloth bonnet, her face plain and scrubbed.
She is remarkably calm, she thinks, given that she is about to play her one big scene in this film. In it she enters John Milton’s study with a basket of logs for the fire. Milton is asleep in his armchair. The complete manuscript of Paradise Lost is placed on a stool by his side. A small coal from the fire spits out and lands on the manuscript, where it smoulders, smoke rising. Amy Coster steps forward and plucks it off, burning her fingers in the process. She stifles her cry of pain and tiptoes out of the parlour, so quietly that Milton snoozes on, unaware. Amy knows she’s saved her master’s work from burning – we, the audience, realize how close posterity came to losing the greatest epic poem in English literature, but for the quick thinking of an illiterate chambermaid, or so it says in the script. Bethany wonders how Gareth will film it – something tricksy, no doubt, she supposes – the coal spitting from the fire in slow motion, a whip-pan round to see Amy enter, the sizzle of burning flesh as she picks up the ember –
She stops herself, Gareth has come in. He puts on what she can only describe as a sickly smile.
‘Hey, Bethany. Bit of a slight change of plan …’
Bethany would have liked to leave at once but by the time she has changed out of her costume, been to the accountant to be paid and is ready to be driven back to the caravan she is told by Frankie that the unit car will pick her up at nine the next morning to take her to Norwich station.
She packs her things away in her suitcase and goes to the pub where she drinks two double vodkas and cranberry juice and eats a steak and kidney pie with chips followed by apple crumble. She’s pleased that not once has she felt like crying, even at the moment when Gareth told her that her scene was cancelled. The whole film is changing, he said – bullishly, unapologetically – yeah, Harold isn’t happy, isn’t a happy camper. Chaz Charles has come up with a significant rewrite. The young schizophrenic John Milton is changing to Detective Inspector John Milton, a charismatic cop following up a serial killer who leaves clues taken from Paradise Lost on the bodies of his victims – the whole flashback-period part of the film is being majorly reduced. The title is now Lost Exit to Paradise.
Bethany, feeling very full, walks back to the caravan park from the pub analysing her mood – cold anger, she would say. Mature resignation. A certain cynicism. A worldly acknowledgement about how easy it was to be let down in this life.
Her cold anger intensifies when she sees Gareth ‘Gonzalez’ Wintle waiting outside her caravan.
‘I don’t have anything to say to you, Gareth.’
‘I want to apologize, Bethany. Just five minutes.’
She lets him in and they sit facing each other across the scratched Formica of the fold-down snack table.
‘It stinks, this business,’ he says with what seems like real bitterness. ‘That’s why I’m getting out. I’m taking your advice.’
‘What advice?’
‘I’m going to Spain.’
‘Great. Anyway, no hard feelings, Gareth. I just wish you’d told me last night instead of letting me come in, go to wardrobe and make-up, then sit around like a complete prat preparing myself when everybody knew – except me. This is my first film.’
‘I know, I know. I’m weak, Bethany. Weak. Craven. And I was distracted. By you. I was enjoying being with you.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve got to pack,’ Bethany lies.
‘Listen. You’ll be in the film. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll make sure you get a credit as well.’ He gestures out the names, horizontally, with thumb and forefinger. ‘Amy Coster – Bethany Mellmoth. You’ll get your Equity card, it’ll look good in Spotlight, put it on your CV.’
That would be something, at least, Bethany thinks, reaching for her cigarettes – but Gareth intercepts her outstretched hand, taking it in both his.
‘You won’t have wasted your time, Bethany,’ he says. He brings her hand to his lips, smiles at her, kisses her knuckles. ‘Can I stay the night?’
Bethany can’t sleep. Her crowding thoughts won’t let her. So as soon as she sees it growing light outside, she dresses, pulls on her wellingtons and coat and scarf and goes for a final walk on the beach.
The tide is out and she walks hundreds of yards down the wet sand to the surf’s edge. The light is ghostly, monochrome, almost as if she’s in a black and white photograph – the black sea, the silvery grey clouds, the beach shining, nacreous, softly gilded by the shrouded, rising sun. When she told Gareth to get out and told him how pathetic, suburban and nauseating she thought he was, how gutless, vapid and maggoty, he had sneered at her at first, laughed and then, to her alarm, had teared-up and turned away, then sniffed and tossed his head and said in a small, suddenly hoarse voice that he just wanted to be with someone he liked, how he hated everyone on the film except Bethany, no big deal, no sex required, just company. She held the door open for him and he asked if he could kiss her goodbye. So she let him kiss her cheek, shook his hand, said she would see him in London once the film was over and he walked away.
Bethany sets off, heading north up the beach, allowing the foamy wavelets to wet her boots. My God, she thinks – get real, girl. ‘Paradise Lost starring Bethany Mellmoth’. She pauses, turns to face the black, restless sea and spreads her arms, shouting at the top of her voice:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe …
Her voice sounds small and lonely, she thinks, so she stops, hearing only the wave-crash and the distant cry of gulls and she has another of those being-and-nothingness moments that makes her shiver. Time to go home, to the caravan to have a cup of coffee and some toast and marmalade. She turns and strides back towards Faith-next-the-Sea but she’s only gone a few paces when she sees something that makes her change direction. It’s a dead seagull, left by the retreating tide, she supposes, white, grey and seemingly untouched, lying on its back, one wing out, one wing folded, its head tipped to the side as if it was sleeping. It looks pure and beautiful, she thinks, and reaches into her bag for her camera, very calm and composed.
She takes a photograph, inspired by the seagull’s transcendent stillness, the unblemished smooth whiteness of its breast feathers. There’s a play called The Seagull she remembers. Who wrote it? She wanders homeward, up the beach towards her caravan, urging her brain to come up with the author. That’s right, Chekhov, Anton Chekhov. Perhaps it’s a sign, she thinks, a symbol that she shouldn’t give up her acting career. Just because her first film has been such a disaster doesn’t mean she should pack it all in. No, she is destined to be an actress, she’s sure – but if the cinema won’t have her there is always the theatre. The theatre, she thinks, the West End, Shaftesbury Avenue … The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, starring Bethany Mellmoth … She walks up the beach towards Faith-next-the-Sea, pondering this exciting alternative future for herself, her stride lengthening with new enthusiasm, then she finds herself skipping – actually skipping along the sand – something she hasn’t done since she was a child.
Four …
Bethany is in a quandary – and she doesn’t like quandaries. It’s 20 December. Five days to go. The fact that this is a Christmas quandary makes it no more bearable. In truth she thinks that this fact makes it more unbearable. Her mother and father – nearly two-decades divorced – both demand her presence on Christmas Day. The quandary will be resolved – Bethany is good at resolving things – but she hasn’t quite figured out how – yet.
Her father – Zane Mellmoth – texted her from his home in California. ‘Coming to London. Must see you Christmas Day lunch. Big surprise. Lots to celebrate.’ Bethany had felt the first prescient pang of worry: all her life, all her twenty-two years, she had eaten a Christmas Day lunch with her mother. She was four years old when her father left home and she has no memories of a Christmas lunch with him ever – although, logically, she assumes she must have had four. She telephones her mother, Alannah.
‘Mum – what do you say to us having a supper this year, this Christmas?’
‘Our having,’ her mother corrects her grammar. ‘Gerund.’ Then adds, ‘You must be joking. Don’t. You know how important it is to me – our Christmas lunch.’
Bethany does. Zane Mellmoth walked out on his wife sometime between breakfast and lunch on Christmas Day. Alannah and Bethany had a lunch alone. Four-year-old Bethany and her mother. It is a sacramental, immoveable feast for Alannah Mellmoth that has nothing to do with the notional birth of one so-called Jesus Christ in Bethlehem millennia ago. For Alannah Mellmoth, Christmas lunch with her daughter is symbolic proof of her ability to survive and flourish without that sad pathetic bastard she once called her husband.
As if – Bethany says to herself, indulging in some justifiable self-pity – as if my life isn’t complicated enough. Emotionally, the last year has been difficult. Sholto leaving her like that, so suddenly – spontaneously and without any warning – to go travelling in Namibia and Laos. Professionally, also, the picture is just as bleak. After dropping out of her literature course early in the year her various subsequent jobs as shop assistant, novelist and film extra all ended either prematurely or unhappily with nothing really achieved. What she needs is a quiet Christmas at home, nice food and telly, time to chill and regather her thoughts, make new plans for the coming year, see where her destiny lies, set new goals, dream fresh dreams …
Bethany has a new motto, a mantra that she chants to herself to ward off the demon procrastination. DO IT NOW! She waits until her mother goes out to the gym and calls her father in Los Angeles where he is a Professor of Psychogeography at a small private university called Brandiwine University California. She apologizes for waking him up: she’s forgotten about the time difference.
‘Dad,’ she says, ‘I can’t do Christmas lunch. How about supper?’
‘We won’t be in London at suppertime,’ her father says. ‘We’re driving to Devon after lunch to see Grandma. Why don’t you come?’
Bethany says she can’t.
‘It has to be lunch, honey,’ her father says. ‘We’re only in London for twenty-four hours.’ Only when she hangs up does she realize he kept saying ‘we’.
Do it now, do it now, Bethany says to herself when her mother arrives home from her work. However, she waits until her mother is on her third glass of wine before she breaks the news that her ex-husband will be in London on Christmas Day.
‘So that’s why you don’t want to have lunch with me,’ Alannah says, nodding grimly.
Bethany explains that Zane is only in the city for twenty-four hours, that he’s going to see his mother in Devon.
‘I don’t want to have lunch with him, particularly,’ Bethany says, ‘but I would like to see him. I haven’t seen him for two years.’
Alannah stares at her in that direct way she has, as if she’s checking my face for tiny blemishes, Bethany thinks – it’s most disconcerting.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘Maybe a Christmas dinner would be nice. I know, I’ll get a capon.’
‘What’s a capon?’ Bethany asks, hugely relieved.
‘A castrated cock,’ Alannah says. ‘It’ll be ideally symbolic.’
On Christmas Eve, Bethany rides the lift in the Fedora Palace Grand to the penthouse floor. Her father is staying in the Alcazar suite. They hug and Zane Mellmoth kisses his daughter’s face many times. His hair is much greyer, Bethany thinks, realizing that her father is now over fifty. But he looks thinner, fitter and his hair is cut in a short neat crewcut like that playwright, what’s his name? Bethany is annoyed she can’t remember.
‘Come and look at the view,’ Zane says and leads her to the floor-to-ceiling window. She looks down the silver river towards Tower Bridge and at the glittering night-time city spread in front of her.
‘Wow,’ she says, ‘this suite must cost a fort –’
‘I’m here with Chi-Chi,’ her father interrupts quietly.
&nb
sp; Bethany is aware that Chi-Chi is her father’s girlfriend but that’s about all she knows about her.
‘Great,’ Bethany says, ‘I’m really looking forward to meet –’
‘We’re going to get married. In Bali, on New Year’s Eve.’
‘Amazing, how romant –’
‘She’s pregnant. You’re going to have a little brother.’
At this moment a tall thin Chinese girl comes in from a bedroom, dressed in black.
‘This is Chi-Chi. Chi-Chi, this is my daughter, Bethany. Didn’t I tell you she was gorgeous?’
Chi-Chi hugs Bethany and Bethany feels the small hard convexity of Chi-Chi’s pregnant belly press against her.
‘I love your hair,’ Chi-Chi says. Her accent is American. ‘It’s so cool. So long and thick. God, I’d pay a small fortune to have hair like that.’
As Zane Mellmoth pours champagne at the suite’s small cocktail bar Bethany takes the opportunity to look Chi-Chi over as she sits on the white leather sofa, texting, her legs folded underneath her, her back rigid, held like a dancer. She’s very beautiful, Bethany realizes, and wonders how old she is. She goes and sits beside her.
‘How did you and Dad meet?’ Bethany asks.
Chi-Chi stops texting and frowns, as if she can’t remember for a moment. ‘My Achilles tendon snapped,’ she says. ‘I was a dancer.’
‘Ballet?’ Bethany asks.
‘Contemporary. So I figured I’d go back to school while I recovered.’
Zane comes over with the champagne glasses.
‘I took this guy’s class,’ she says, pouting a kiss at Zane. ‘He was teaching from Novaville, it just blew me away.’
Novaville is Zane Mellmoth’s only published book – and the basis of his academic reputation, Bethany knows – a psychogeographic, situationist analysis of the modern city as if it were a newly discovered planet. Bethany has tried to read it many times.