by William Boyd
“Thank you for that,” Elfrida said, suddenly very keen to leave. “Head fizzing with Virginia Woolf, at the moment. Thank you so much.” She grabbed her pamphlet, smiled and turned away, feeling breathless all of a sudden. That was what happened when she went into a bookshop—she should keep away from them. She needed a drink.
Once settled in the Repulse, a double gin and tonic in front of her, Elfrida contemplated Maitland Bole’s pamphlet. Virginia Woolf had committed suicide on Friday 28 March 1941 by drowning herself in the River Ouse in East Sussex. According to the detailed map in Bole’s pamphlet, the Woolf house in the village of Rodmell was on the edge of the Ouse Valley. Bole wrote: “There are few more evocative and inspiring views than the valley of the Sussex Ouse between Lewes and Newhaven. At dawn the vast water meadows can take on a near-mystical character. ‘O Albion, how do I love thee’ is the thought that comes to my mind when, of an early morn, walking with my dog, Trebizond, the ethereal mists that waft gently in the golden rays of the rising sun turn the whole scene into a tableau of—”
Elfrida closed the pamphlet. She was feeling very strange, though she recognised the sensations. She was inspired, that’s what it was, creative juices were beginning to flow, feeding her imagination. It was like one of those speeded-up sequences in television documentaries when drops of rain begin to dampen the parched craquelure of a dried-out riverbed: mud forms, water trickles, quickens, then becomes a torrent. The Last Day of Virginia Woolf was going to be her salvation, she knew it. In celebration, elated, she finished her gin and tonic in a series of large gulps. First things first. A trip to the village of Rodmell was a matter of urgency and then a pensive stroll along the banks of the River Ouse.
13
Just walk along the Prom, Rodrigo had told her, you won’t notice or be aware of the cameras. Just do your own thing, stop, look out to sea. Take all the time you need. We’ll have three cameras on you, long lenses. The people around you won’t know you’re being filmed. Are you sure? Anny asked. What if somebody recognises me? They won’t, believe me, Rodrigo insisted. So Anny did as he instructed, she put on her sunglasses, stepped out of the car into Brighton’s gull-clawed air, and walked along the esplanade from Waterloo Street to Regency Square and, just as Rodrigo had promised, nobody gawped at her, did a double take, or stopped her and asked for her autograph. Maybe it’s my new black hair, she wondered. Or maybe I’m just not as famous here as I am in the States.
She sauntered along, stopping from time to time, looked at a revolving rack of postcards, paused to listen to a busker, skirted a whelk stall and wandered aimlessly along until she reached Shirley, her assistant, who guided her into her car that whisked her back to Waterloo Street to do it all over again. Rodrigo asked her not to stop at the busker as this whole sequence was designed to go under music, a song from the Beatles, or Dangerous Play, or the Pretty Things, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Antarctica, the Kinks or the Troggs, he said, confidently dropping names at random, or whoever they could afford.
Anny was happy to oblige and set off again, thinking that it was almost like being a normal person, walking like this, unrecognised and unpestered, amongst the holidaymakers, looking down at the shingle beach at the moms and the dads and the kids screaming in the shallow surf. At one stage in her stroll along the front she thought: I could be living a life like this—an ordinary person—if only Gianluca Mavrocordato hadn’t cast me, fresh out of my sophomore year in college, in Aquarius Days, and thereby changed my life forever. The thought made her sad, suddenly. But in that case, she realised, she would never have met Troy Blaze. There were always compensations, if you looked hard enough.
After the third perambulation along the esplanade she was taken back to the unit base where she saw the tall producer, Talbot Kydd, waiting for her outside her caravan.
“Anny, good morning,” he said, smiling politely. “Can I whisk you away for half an hour? Rather urgent.”
“Why? What is it?”
“The police want to talk to you. About your husband. I thought it best to be discreet—so we should go to the production office.”
At the production office—Anny was surprised to see it was an ordinary house in an ordinary street—she was shown into a front room, full of plastic chairs, where she declined the offer of a cup of coffee or tea. She felt calm: she had decided to say nothing. In fact, she was beginning to wonder if she had been hallucinating when she thought she had seen Cornell in the crowd that day when they were filming at the bus stop. She had looked away and looked back but there had been no sign of him. Autosuggestion, she supposed—triggered by the mention of his name. She lit a cigarette, had a couple of puffs, then put it out. An unordered cup of coffee was brought to her, nevertheless—it looked disgusting. It had brown congealed blobs of undissolved coffee powder floating on the surface.
The door opened and two men were shown in. One of them, she could tell instantly, was American—the cut of his jacket, the button-down shirt, the shiny penny loafers gave him away. The other was English, young, stout, with sideburns and a thin drooping moustache.
“Miss Viklund, thank you for seeing us,” the Englishman said. “I’m Detective Inspector Desmondson, Special Branch.”
“What’s Special Branch?”
He didn’t answer, just carried on with his introductions.
“This is Agent Radetski.”
Agent Radetski was a small wiry man, also young, with a crew cut and a lopsided smile that he was trying to straighten as he offered his hand and showed her his badge with the other. She looked at it. Federal Bureau of Investigation. She felt her mouth go dry.
Desmondson arranged three plastic chairs in a rough triangle and they sat down.
Agent Radetski cleared his throat.
“I believe you’re aware that your husband, Cornell Weekes, is a fugitive,” he began.
“He’s not my husband.”
“Forgive me: your ex-husband.”
“I haven’t seen him for nearly two years. I really know nothing about him, what he’s doing or his whereabouts. We’re not in touch at all. I didn’t even know he was in prison.” This wasn’t true but she wanted to erect the stoutest of stone walls around herself.
“We believe he’s in England,” Desmondson interjected. “We have fairly good, positive sightings of him landing at Dover on a ferry from France.”
“He flew from Montreal to Lisbon, Portugal, a week or ten days ago,” Radetski said. “That much we can be sure of.”
“I don’t care,” Anny said. “You might as well tell me that Sirhan Sirhan was a fugitive. It means as much to me.”
The two men glanced at each other.
“We’re concerned that he may try to make contact here with you in Brighton,” Radetski said. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Be my guest.”
Both Radetski and Desmondson lit cigarettes.
“Why would he make contact with me?” Anny said, keeping her voice level. “We divorced. I’ve had nothing—nothing—to do with him since our divorce. He’s sort of a non-person to me.” She paused. “It was a strange divorce—but entirely his idea, not mine. He didn’t want to be married to me any more—he hated me working in the movie business. That’s where we are. Why would he make contact?”
“When you’re on the run,” Radetski said, patiently, as if talking to a backward child, “when you’re on our ‘most wanted’ list, when Interpol has been alerted throughout Europe—you get desperate.”
“Any port in a storm,” DI Desmondson said, with a sympathetic smile.
“He won’t come near me,” Anny said with some vehemence. “I don’t hate him, but too much has happened. Too much water under the bridge, if you know what I mean.”
“I would just ask you to be on your guard,” Radetski said.
“If you see him, if you see any trace of him, if he tries to contact you, please let us know.” Des
mondson leant forward and gave her his card. “Twenty-four hours a day.”
She took it without looking at it.
“What exactly did he do?” she asked, feigning ignorance, the better to protect herself, she thought. “I know he set off a bomb.”
Radetski sighed. “He planted three bombs, in fact. One outside a San Diego recruiting station for the U.S. military, one at the Pasadena Republican Party office, and one at the gatehouse of Fort Mitchell, Nevada. Only one detonated—at Fort Mitchell—two soldiers were wounded, one seriously—lost both his legs. The other bombs were disarmed—his fingerprints were all over them.”
“Why? My God. Why would he do this? What was he—”
“There was a kind of press release, to coincide with the bombings, sent to the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He said he was declaring war against the American Reich and invited the population to rise up and join him.”
Anny felt weak—a hollowing-out inside of her, as if her guts had been removed. Cornell—how fucked up could one person be?
“Is he insane?” she said quietly.
“I suspect not. But we won’t know for sure until we apprehend him.”
The meeting was over; the detectives carefully stubbed out their cigarettes and Agent Radetski asked Anny for her autograph—for his daughter.
14
“Is she all right?” Talbot asked Joe.
“She’s gone a bit quiet,” Joe said. “So we’ve pushed back her shooting today. I took her to the hotel. Rodrigo thought it best that she had the afternoon off. Big scene tomorrow.”
“What’s that?”
“The love scene with Troy.”
“God. The nude scene?”
“There’s still some debate about that,” Joe said—but he couldn’t hide his curiosity. “What exactly did the police say, boss?”
“This fellow on the run from the FBI, Cornell Weekes, may be heading to Brighton.”
“Seriously?”
“Anny’s the only person he knows in this country. They were married, briefly, apparently. It’s a bit worrying…”
Joe looked impressed. “And that was an FBI agent, was it, in the office? Blimey.”
“Just what we need—an FBI fugitive.” He looked heavenwards, as if beseeching the gods of cinema to spare him.
“Oh, yes,” Joe said. “Sylvia Slaye would like to see you.”
Talbot felt his ulcer burn.
“Where is she?”
“Costumes.”
Talbot walked over to the day’s unit base that was set up in a municipal car park near Chapel Street. As he approached he saw the usual untidy cluster of vehicles—actors’ trailers, catering and lavatory facilities, hair and make-up and costumes in their larger trucks with steps extending from the rear, and all manner of vans and lorries parked hither and thither, filled with arc lights and cables and camera equipment. A bit like a battalion headquarters, he always thought, with a very lazy adjutant, who hadn’t heard of parallel lines.
He climbed the steps to costumes like a man going to the scaffold. He had worked with Sylvia Slaye before so he knew what to expect.
“I’m not decent, darling!” she shrieked as he came through the door.
Before he turned away he caught a glimpse of folds of white flesh, red panties and a red bra and a mop of peroxide-bleached hair emerging through the collar of a purple-sequinned dress.
“You can turn around now, you dirty old man, you.”
He turned. Sylvia was tugging at and smoothing down the creases of her dress over her haunches. She hadn’t lost any weight since their last meeting, he saw. She wrapped a pink feather boa round her neck.
“Ta-dah!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms wide.
They kissed. Talbot took a step back. The dress was far too tight for her plump frame and there was a lot of cleavage on display. The hem was short—mid-thigh.
“What do you think?” Sylvia said, striking a pose.
“You’re meant to be a housewife, you know, Sylvia. You look like…You’re too…glamorous.”
“Come off it, Talbie. That’s what they want from Sylvia Slaye—a bit of glamour in their sad little lives.”
He smiled. He would have to have a word with Rodrigo. This was absurd.
She was now sitting down on a stool forcing her feet into stilettoes, the pressure of her extended arms deepening the deep crease between her breasts. To think she was known as the English Brigitte Bardot once, Talbot thought, remembering her in her heyday in the ’50s when they had worked together on Sudden Death in Soho. She had specialised in gangsters’ molls and doomed “ladies of the night” in a few cheap and lurid thrillers before she had struck box-office gold in a series of films about a character called Milly Jenkins. Milly Jenkins Goes Camping, Milly Jenkins Gets Married, Milly Jenkins Joins the Army and half a dozen others, all saucy British comedies, packed with sexual innuendo and frequent glimpses of Sylvia’s increasingly ample curves.
He remembered now—it was the Applebys who had insisted on Sylvia. The Applebys with their distant but potent and unignorable influence. Talbot offered Sylvia a hand as she rose unsteadily to her feet. She was playing Mrs. Bracegirdle, Emily’s mother. Ferdie Meares was Mr. Bracegirdle.
“I always thought you were a mean, penny-pinching bastard, Talbot Kydd,” a man’s voice came from behind him.
As if on cue, Ferdie Meares wandered into costumes, his wide, insincere smile meant to indicate he was joking. He was wearing an orange-hued tweed suit as if he’d come up to town from some rural fastness. “I don’t know what persuaded me to accept your miserable offer.”
“You’re at liberty to turn it down, Ferdie, dear chap. Nobody wants to force you to be in this film.”
“And pass up the chance of our screen reunion? Do me a favour, sunshine.” Meares went and stood by Sylvia, putting his arm around her and kissing her wetly on a cheek. He was an abnormally thin man with a weak chin, beaky nose and protruding eyes. He had been the put-upon foil of a comic duo in variety shows—Moore and Meares—that had ended on Moore’s sudden and premature death. However, Ferdie went on to make a good living in films, playing the prissy, fussy comic fool in innumerable British movies—the ineffectual teacher, the officious clerk at the Labour Exchange, the inept soldier who couldn’t march, and so on. A singularly unpleasant individual, Talbot thought, forcing a smile.
“Always happy to have you on board, Ferdie,” he lied.
“I shall just have to get my reward in heaven,” Meares said, smiling back with dead eyes.
“You wanted to see me, Sylvia,” Talbot said, turning to her.
“Yes…We’re not happy with our accommodation,” she said. “Are we, Ferdie?”
“Nor our means of transportation, come to that,” Ferdie added.
Talbot turned them over to Joe. They were only required for a couple of days’ filming but they wanted suites in the Metropole and their own cars with drivers, permanently available. Neither perk was in their contracts, but what the hell. Talbot wandered back to the Grand feeling strangely depressed. Sylvia and Ferdie were all wrong, completely wrong, nobody would believe them as Anny Viklund’s parents and, moreover, he knew that Reggie “Rodrigo” Tipton hadn’t half the force of personality necessary to combat their massive egos and their proliferating demands. Perhaps they could be cut out in the edit, he thought, trying to console himself.
He had the Alvis brought round and, settled behind the wheel, headed east along the coast road towards Rye. He needed this time away from Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon. Back to my world, he thought, and an interlude of sanity.
15
“But you told me you were divorced,” Troy said. “So why would he come looking for you?”
Anny closed her eyes, feeling like crying again.
“I don’t fucking know.
He’s very confused. He planted three bombs. He’s declared war against the U.S.”
“Bloody hell,” Troy said. “Why did you marry him? Sounds a complete nutter.”
“He was different,” Anny said. “He was like no one I’d ever met. Passionate about everything.” Then in a spasm of honesty added, “He reminded me of my father.”
She watched Troy frown, clearly trying to come to terms with this concept. They were lying in bed in Anny’s suite, it was late, well after midnight. Troy had brought his usual bottle of wine with him but Anny hadn’t drunk any. She had taken two Equanils after the interview with the detectives, she had been so shaken by their unwelcome news.
“What did your dad do?” Troy asked.
“What?”
“What was his job?”
“He was a pharmacist.”
“What’s that? Some kind of farmer?”
“You call them chemists, I think.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Was that in Sweden?”
“No. It was in a place called Lake Harbo, in Minnesota.” She turned to face Troy and snuggled into him as he folded his arms around her. “In America. I’m American. My dad was a ‘chemist’ in Lake Harbo. He had his own shop—Viklund Pharmacy. The place is full of Swedish immigrants.”
“Have you got any brothers or sisters?”
“I’ve got a brother, two years older than me: Lars.”
“Weird name! Lars…”
“Yeah. Unlike Troy.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s in the army, in Vietnam.”
Anny told Troy a short version of her history. Born in Lake Harbo, Minnesota in 1940, not far from Minneapolis. Father named Kurt; mother named Hilma. Everything was fine until Hilma had an affair with a man called Melker Eliasson and went back to Sweden with him. The war was over. Two years later Hilma Viklund died in a car crash. Anny, who had no tangible memory of her mother, and brother Lars were brought up by their aunt, Kurt’s sister, Sigrid. Anny graduated from Lake Harbo High School and went to Rosenberg College to study Veterinary Science. She liked acting and was in the college’s amateur dramatic society. One day, on a whim, she went to Minneapolis to audition for a film by Gianluca Mavrocordato. Mavrocordato chose her from 1,000 girls that he’d seen in his countrywide search for a new star. She played the lead in his film Aquarius Days and her life was changed forever.