by William Boyd
She switched off the TV when he came into the room and stood up, steadily, and looked at him coldly, intently.
“So,” she said. “Who exactly is it that you’re fucking on this film?”
10
The next morning, after his usual breakfast, Talbot felt suddenly dyspeptic. Back in his room he glugged at his bottle of Previzole, hoping that the chalky fluid might work its magic, worrying that his bloody ulcer was playing up again. It was nothing to do with his daily kipper, he knew—it was the forthcoming confrontation with Reggie over the hiring of Janet Headstone and the mooted rewrite that was making his stomach acids swirl and bubble and torment his duodenum.
He was fully aware of who Janet Headstone was but he had never actually met her. She was a young, brash, self-styled “cockney” novelist and the novels she wrote were racy contemporary working-class stories set in the East End of London. The school of “kitchen sink,” Talbot thought, remarkably enduring. One of Janet Headstone’s novels—Down Canada Water—had been made into a film (starring Samantha Frost) and had become a sizeable cult success, if such an oxymoron were possible, with its young cockney lovers, impossibly handsome and beautiful, ideally fashionable and poor. Janet Headstone had written the script and was suddenly a sought-after name in the British film industry when it was perceived that something “trendy” and cutting-edge “groovy” was required. A blousy, pretty young woman with a noticeable gap in her front teeth, she was often featured in tabloid newspapers, out on the town with various cool and notorious actors, footballers, TV personalities and the like. As far as he was concerned, Talbot had loathed Down Canada Water and he couldn’t understand what this conspiracy between Yorgos and Reggie was hoping to achieve. Hiring someone like Janet Headstone for Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon seemed perverse, a mismatch.
He instructed Joe to bring Reggie over to the production office whenever there was a break for a new set-up. This was not a conversation that could take place with the risk of any of the crew overhearing or even seeing it. Talbot stepped out into the back garden of the production office and had another swig of Previzole. His stomach was on fire. The production office was in a two-storeyed semi-detached house in Napier Street. It was pebble-dashed and had a bit of mock-Tudorbethan half-timbering on its upper floor. It was perfectly comfortable and conveniently placed for most of their Brighton locations. The garden was a bit unkempt and rather too many plastic chairs had been left out in it—most of the production meetings were al fresco in this sunny summer. Talbot wandered around and restored an upended deckchair to normality. He was thinking: what would Peverell Kydd have done in a situation like this? He would probably fire Reggie, for starters; then maybe sue his partner, Yorgos. He didn’t mess about, old Peverell. Another trait his son hadn’t inherited. So what? Talbot said to himself: slash and burn is not my style. Chacun à sa méthode.
At around ten o’clock Reggie knocked on Talbot’s office door—ajar—and wandered in. Talbot had him sit down, had Rosie bring them two cups of filthy coffee and they both lit cigarettes.
Talbot noticed that Reggie had a two-inch scratch on his cheek and three parallel scratches below it on his neck.
“What happened to you?” Talbot asked, pointing.
“Talk about inept. I was mowing the lawn, hit a molehill, tripped and fell into a wire fence.”
“Since when did you ever mow a lawn?”
“I like gardening. It helps me think.”
Talbot left it at that. The marks looked like nail scratches to him. Sharp fingernails raking down Reggie’s face.
“So…” Talbot said, and left his “so” dangling in the air for a second or two.
“I somehow feel I’m about to be chastised,” Reggie said.
“You probably should be chastised. What the hell is going on with Janet Headstone?”
“Ah, right. I get it. Janet Headstone.”
“Precisely. Please explain.”
“Look, I met her at a party,” Reggie leant forward, “and I was telling her about our problems with the script. She said she’d love to help. Then, the next day, I had to see Yorgos about something and in the meeting mentioned Janet and he said, fantastico, she is genius, hire her for four weeks, just like that. I assumed he’d clear it with you.”
“Well, he didn’t. I’ve only just heard.”
“Well, my apologies. You know Yorgos better than I do.”
“I do indeed. How much is Janet Headstone being paid for her month’s work?”
“I think…a thousand a week.”
Talbot didn’t allow his features to flinch an iota.
“That means you’ve lost two days’ shooting.”
“Yorgos said it could come out of the contingency fund.”
“But this isn’t a fucking contingency, Reggie. We have a script, a very good, very expensive script by Andrew Marvell, no less. What do you think he’s going to say when he discovers Janet Headstone is rewriting him? He’s a nightmare, a bully. Who’s going to break the news to him? You?”
Reggie ignored the question.
“It’s not rewriting, it’s extra writing. Marvell wouldn’t—couldn’t —do the stuff Jan’s thinking about.”
“Oh, it’s ‘Jan,’ is it?”
“Look, all right—we’re chums. We’ve met a few times. We’re on the same wavelength. She’s delightful—fresh, different. You’d love her.”
“Be that as it may. What I resent, Reggie, is that you didn’t even think of coming to me—to see what I thought about the idea. You went over my head—or around my body—to Yorgos. He’s the softest touch and you know it. It’s disloyal.”
“I’d never be disloyal to you, Talbot.”
“But you just have been, my dear. We’ve got a new writer on this film I’m producing who costs a grand a week and I—me, the producer—am the last to know.”
The rest of the meeting did not go so well. Talbot wanted to make Reggie “Rodrigo” Tipton squirm and he pretty much achieved his objective, he was glad to note. Reggie went back off to the set in a churlish and fractious mood. Talbot felt some mild vindication.
But he also felt the acid burn in his duodenum. Stress, confrontation, wasn’t good for him but he knew that more confrontation was called for. Yorgos, this time. He told Joe he was going up to London and that he’d be back tomorrow morning.
He had the Alvis brought round from the Grand’s garage and settled down for the drive up the A23. It was good to be behind the wheel, sensing the powerful thrum of the three-litre engine vibrating through the car’s bodywork, admiring the wide silver bonnet in front of him “eating up” the road as the advertising brochures boasted. This model, the TF 21 drophead coupé, just a year old, could do 120 mph at full stretch. As it was, he overtook other cars and toiling lorries with effortless surges of acceleration. He smelt the new leather of the upholstered seats, his eyes flicking over the dials on the dashboard with their quivering needles like a fighter pilot on a low-level mission over hostile territory. Sometimes cars were simply wonderful: the Alvis at speed made him feel young again.
The offices of YSK Films Ltd were in Great Marlborough Street, one block to the south of Oxford Street. North Soho was how Talbot described the location when people asked him where he worked. YS was Yorgos Samsa and K was Kydd. Yorgos owned 51% of the company and, as he had once pointed out, if Talbot had insisted on his name going in first place the company would be called KYS—not an acronymic euphony to be sought, as Talbot immediately agreed. He was perfectly happy with YSK Films Ltd.
Yorgos Samsa rose from his desk as Talbot stepped into his office, his sallow face distorted in the widest of smiles. He kissed Talbot three times on his cheeks—left, right, left—and drew up a chair to the small coffee table in front of the window where informal meetings were held. Cigarettes were lit, coffee was provided. All seemed as it had alwa
ys been—only the nagging semi-betrayal of Reggie and Janet Headstone tarnished the enviable good feeling between the two partners.
As a young man, barely in his twenties, Yorgos Samsa had fled Germany in 1933 on Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship and had made his way to England. That was one story. Talbot had overheard other conversations where Yorgos claimed to have been the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the Black Sea and had been offered a Nansen passport by the League of Nations; or else Yorgos had been the victim of a trumped-up court case in Transnistria, wherever that was, and had been obliged to escape Transnistrian injustice. Yorgos liked keeping his biography vague. In fact, Talbot had no clear idea what his nationality, or nationalities, was or were. He had sought an answer many times but the reply was always ambiguous: “I’m a fruit salad, Talbot, a bit of everything,” or, “I come from here, I come from there,” or “My parents were gypsies, Roma, they never told me.” And so on. “Let’s just say I’m a peculiar English gentleman—like you,” Yorgos had told him once. And that was as much as Talbot had ever learned—he quickly stopped asking.
Yorgos was exceptionally fat, though his Savile Row tailors constructed immaculately cut, long-jacketed, double-breasted suits that made him look heftily solid rather than obese. His hair was dyed black and his wide face was pitted with the history of severe adolescent acne. He spoke almost excellent English with the faintest, unlocatable foreign accent. He liked to use colloquialisms as evidence of his fluency but his grasp of them was unsure.
In the 1930s, having arrived in England from somewhere in continental Europe, he secured employment in the accountancy department of Peverell Kydd’s film company. His manifest talents with numbers had been spotted by Peverell and he had been swiftly promoted. When Talbot, on his father’s death in 1948, had inherited the company the obvious right-hand man had to be Yorgos. And then, during a difficult financial crisis in the 1950s—Talbot married, school fees for two children, an exorbitant and unexpected tax demand and a contrary stepmother who had raided Talbot’s trust fund—Yorgos had somehow raised the necessary cash to maintain solvency and the partnership was created, formally. YSK Films Ltd. was born and the company was divided with 51% in Yorgos’s favour. Films were made, money was made, but the air of mystery persisted.
Before Talbot could even bring the subject up, Yorgos apologised for the Janet Headstone misunderstanding.
“It’s entirely my fault, Talbot. I thought you had agreed with Reggie. I should have asked, checked.” He slapped the back of one hand with the other, sharply. “Bad boy, Yorgos. But look—a horse can be led to water and we can strike gold. I’ll make a small announcement to the press, to the trades: ‘Janet Headstone hired to write for the Ladder film. Tony Blaze, Anny Viklund.’ Talk-talk, chit-chatter. It’s all good for us.”
“Troy Blaze,” Talbot said. “We’d better get that right or the Applebys will take out a contract.”
“Troy, Troy, Troy. Old man’s brain, Talbot.”
Talbot had to agree that hiring Janet Headstone wasn’t all bad news, necessarily.
“But what about Andrew Marvell?” he said. Marvell was the first writer. A difficult, impossible man.
“We just pay him more money. No credit for Headstone. He’ll shut up his face. He’s only interested in cash.”
Yorgos went back to his desk and returned with a file.
“More important business,” he said. “I have the contract for Burning Leaves. We own it, every job and tackle.” He beamed. “You are a very, very clever man, Talbot. Your papa would be proud of you.”
“Be that as it may.”
Talbot opened the file to find a multi-page contract. There was a lawyer’s letter paperclipped to the first page with a letterhead he didn’t recognise.
“Who is—who are—Cordwainer, Goodforth and Bonvoisin?”
“Big international firm. They’ve done all the legal work.”
“Why? What’s wrong with John Saxonwood?” John Saxonwood was YSK Films’ retained lawyer. An old army friend.
Yorgos leant forward and steepled his fingers.
“John Saxonwood can’t practise law in California. He’s fine for England but not for something as huge as Burning Leaves. This is the big one, Talbot, I tell you—the Pyramids, the Titanic, the Suez Canal. Everything changes for us, for YSK, with Burning Leaves, thanks to you.”
After their meeting—all friends, more apologies proffered, everything settled—Talbot taxied to John Saxonwood’s office in the City near the Bank of England. The place was shabby. In the waiting room parched spider plants were expiring on window ledges, year-old magazines were loosely stacked on a table, the carpet was stained. Talbot wondered if such neglect was deliberate, sending a message of some kind. One that he couldn’t easily decrypt, anyway.
John Saxonwood offered him tea or whisky. Talbot thought it was time for alcohol.
“Very nice little Speyside malt I found near Forres,” Saxonwood said. “Glen Feshan.”
He shook a dead fly out of a tumbler and poured an inch of straw-coloured whisky into it.
“Slangevar.”
Talbot took a sniff then a large sip before he ventured onto the subject of Cordwainer, Goodforth and Bonvoisin.
“I think I’ve encountered Goodforth. Sam M. Goodforth, if you please. American. Never heard of the others,” Saxonwood said. “I can look them up. I don’t think they’re based in London.” He wandered across to his office’s bookshelves to search for some legal reference book.
John Saxonwood was very tall, six foot six, with gaunt, even features marred by a large broken nose, skewed to the left. He and Talbot had met in 1940, young subalterns in the East Sussex Light Infantry—“The Martlets,” as the regiment was known—and had fought together and idled together throughout the Second World War as the Martlets had progressed through North Africa and on into Italy.
“Look, don’t get me wrong,” Saxonwood said as Talbot explained further. “I like Yorgos. You and he have made me a great deal of money over the years but he’s talking nonsense. I can do deals in California—I do them all the time—I just hire a Californian lawyer. I could hire Goodforth if I wanted. So what’s the problem? Doesn’t add up.”
Talbot explained further. “As you know, this play that we own—rather the film rights of this play that we own—is a very hot property.”
“I know. I’ve seen it, remember? Is it still running?”
“Came off a month ago. More than a year on Broadway; now ten months in the West End. It’s touring everywhere. Time for the film.”
Saxonwood topped up their Glen Feshans.
“Well, don’t sign anything unless I tell you to. Understood? I’ve got a funny, somewhat troubling feeling about all this. Makes my joints ache.”
“Absolutely. I’ll copy you in on everything.”
“Delightful fellow though he is, he can be very persuasive, our Yorgos. Be warned.”
“He’s my partner, John. An old friend. He saved my bacon.”
“That’s exactly why you have to be extra careful.”
“Listen, I found this play. Yorgos had nothing to do with it. We may be partners but The Smell of Burning Leaves was my discovery, entirely. I own it, morally speaking.”
“ ‘Morally speaking’ isn’t a term that lawyers recognise. Nor do film producers.”
Talbot took a taxi back to the car park in Soho where he’d left the Alvis, still thinking about the strange set of circumstances that had brought him to The Smell of Burning Leaves.
In 1965 he had been in New York for a series of meetings. One weekend, on the Saturday, he had gone down to Greenwich Village and wandered along Christopher Street. As he strolled, he saw young men holding hands, men walking with their arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing and relaxed. In a small bar he saw two men kissing openly. He felt like a ghost—a ghost from the past—or
an alien: a tall, bald, suited Englishman, about to turn sixty, mingling with these young men who were now unconcernedly living, in public, what had been their secret lives before. He had felt strange—both liberated and ashamed: liberated to realise that there was nothing to stop him behaving like them if he really wanted to, and ashamed at the camouflage he had erected around himself for his protection: his demeanour, his wife, his children.
After he left the bar he took a wrong turning. It was early evening and in a side street he came across a small church that had been converted into a theatre. The play that was advertised was called The Smell of Burning Leaves, written by a woman called Fleur Schwartz. On a whim—he was still troubled by his Christopher Street revelation and needed distraction—he decided to buy a ticket.
Two hours later he knew he had witnessed something extraordinary. At least ten people in the small theatre—it sat about sixty, all told—had walked out noisily, outraged. That night he telephoned John Saxonwood at his home and said that on Monday morning, one way or another, YSK had to option the film rights of a play called The Smell of Burning Leaves by Fleur Schwartz. Money no object.
Fleur Schwartz, it turned out, was dead—a suicide at thirty-three—but her estate, in the shape of her mother, was more than happy—delighted—to grant an eighteen-month renewable option for $1,000 against a buy-out of $10,000. Talbot signed the contract a week later and paid the money. Three months later, Buck Lowry, no less, opened the play on Broadway—and the rest was theatre history. YSK was, as Yorgos put it, sitting on top of a river of gold.
What made Burning Leaves a scandalous, sell-out success was its subject. In a word: incest. In the play the central character, “Bud” Lagrange, develops an unhealthy sexual interest in his twenty-year-old daughter Esmerelda, who has returned to the family home after her divorce from her abusive husband, Freeborn. The milieu was white trash, Southern variety. It is high summer in some Louisiana hamlet, everyone is sweating, wearing the minimal amount of clothes that basic propriety demands. The title is explained during a conversation Bud has with a friend. He says that every time Esmerelda comes close to him he can smell her. What does she smell of? the friend asks. She smells of burning leaves, Bud replies. Eventually, after a series of increasingly fraught confrontations—Freeborn tries vainly, violently, to reclaim his bride—Bud’s immoral cravings get the better of him and, one evening, drunk, he assaults his daughter at the climax of Act II and tries to rape her. Esmerelda kills her father with a kitchen knife. Standing above him, bloodied, knife in hand, she screams a feral scream of triumph. Curtain down.