by William Boyd
She wrote a note for Reggie—“Gone to London on business. Call me at home. Back next week. E.”—and she telephoned for a taxi to take her to the station. Reggie would be happy—a whole weekend to fuck whatever tart he was fucking and no wife in view. Bliss.
21
There were a lot of fans that evening, Anny saw, a dozen or more: word must be spreading. She signed their autograph books, looking out for Cornell. She felt her rising panic again. The police hadn’t returned but they might be watching. But then, she reasoned, how would they know when her day’s shooting ended? Why should she stop for the autograph hunters—why not just stride into the hotel? She was safe, she decided, but this was the end, period.
Cornell duly arrived as the last fan left. He was wearing a brown raincoat, his spectacles and a tie, she saw. He almost looked distinguished.
“Hey,” he said, not smiling. “Have you got it?”
“Nice to see you too, Cornell. Yes, I have it.”
She reached into her handbag and found the money. She had wrapped a blue plastic bag around the flat bundles of notes so that it looked like she was handing over a sandwich. Cornell quickly slipped it in his coat pocket.
“Thank you, Anny,” he said. “You just saved my life.”
“Well, enjoy your life. Bon voyage.” She paused. “By the way, it’s in pounds, not dollars. Eight hundred pounds—which is two thousand dollars. If you want dollars you’ll have to change them.”
“Shit. I don’t want to go to a bank.”
“So change it at the airport. It’s a gift, by the way. No need to pay me back. Goodbye.”
She felt the pressure of his hand on her arm, stopping her from leaving.
“Can you get me any more? More would be a help,” he said in his wheedling, sheepish voice.
It made her stern. “There’s no more, Cornell. It’s over. We’re done, we’re through. I cancel all your debts to me.”
“Why are you so bitter, Anny?”
“You have the nerve to ask me that? Jesus.”
“Can I see you again? I miss you.”
“No. You divorced me, remember?”
She walked into the hotel feeling very strange. She refused to look back—but at the same time she realised that she would never see Cornell again, that a significant chapter of her life had just ended. She whirled round, looking for him—but he had gone. A bus had pulled up and a small party of tourists was disembarking. Where was Cornell? How would he cope in Mozambique? It was crazy—stop! She admonished herself. Get a grip. But she felt a heaviness in herself—almost a kind of grief, a bereavement. She hated herself for thinking this but she wanted to see him again—just once more.
She walked across the lobby to collect her key in a strange, confusing miasma of emotions. The unique Cornell Effect, she now recognised. She had sounded so sure of herself but standing there talking to him brought all the memories back, unsettling memories—the push and pull of their relationship, its tireless, tiring variation of attraction and rejection, of fondness and maddened irritation. And she was aware, at the same time, what a huge risk she had taken for him. Why, she asked herself as she picked up her keys from the front desk, why was she prepared to do such a thing for such an infuriating man? Was it some memory of the feelings she once had for him? Some pity she was expressing in witnessing his mad, awkward zeal, the crazy fucked-up principles that had driven him to this disastrous end point in his fraught, inept journey of political activism? Or was it just her nature—maybe it was that, her stupid instinctive response to the neediest of men? She had no answer that made any sense.
Later, when Troy came to her room she could see he felt something was wrong.
“What’s up, babe?” he asked, gently. “Looking all nervy and strung up.”
For a moment Anny felt like telling him of her last encounter with Cornell but decided against it. So she related the details of the Sylvia and Ferdie fiasco and how she had refused to act with them.
“Wow,” Troy said. “Bit heavy. What a day you’ve had, my lovely. You won’t be popular.”
“You wouldn’t act with me if you didn’t like me, didn’t respect me.”
“I suppose so. What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know. I just made my position clear to Rodrigo.”
“You got to do what you’ve got to do, in this life,” he said with a smile and began to undress.
Anny wondered, afterwards, why sex with Troy was so easy; why “making love” with him was so uncomplicated and mutually pleasurable. Maybe the answer was simple. Troy was always hard—always—there was never any issue with tumescence. That concern had been a constant problem with her other lovers, Mavrocordato and Cornell in particular. Even Jacques needed his little rituals—he would disappear into the bathroom for two minutes before they went to bed and he liked to drink a lot first. It was a bit hit and miss with Jacques: sometimes good, sometimes awkward, half-achieved. There was always that slight undercurrent of worry—like hearing a mosquito in a room—that somehow spoilt things. Too much brain involved, too much thinking. But not with Troy. All she had to do was take off her clothes and he was ready for action.
“We’re like two animals, mating,” she said to him.
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“No, I mean we feel the need and we just, you know, do it.”
“But you’re beautiful, Anny. That’s what turns me on. Your beautiful face, your incredible body. I can’t resist. Anyway, animals only do it to breed.”
“True,” she said. “I take it back.”
He jumped out of bed, his cock swinging, still heavy, she saw, still engorged, and he went looking for his bottle of wine.
“Want some?” he said, from across the room, holding up the bottle.
“No. I took my pills.”
“Why do you take all those pills? You’re not sick.” He came over with his glass of wine and sat on the side of the bed.
“I need them—for when I’m worried. Or I can’t sleep. Or I can’t wake up.”
“You’re taking pills to cancel out the effect of the pills you’ve taken. Not clever. I don’t take drugs.”
“Alcohol is a drug,” she said. “You’ve got a drug in your hand.”
“No, it’s not. Drinking is a natural act. Breathing smoke into your lungs, injecting yourself, sniffing powder up your nose or swallowing powerful chemicals is not natural. It’s not in our nature. Drinking is—it’s like eating, breathing, pissing.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “I don’t want to get stoned. It’s a safety net for me. I’m like a high-wire act. I need my net.”
“I’ll be your net,” Troy said.
Anny was going to kiss him in gratitude but the phone rang. It was the front desk.
“Hello, Miss Viklund, we have a Mister Jacques Soldat here for you.”
“OK. Could you send him up in five minutes? I just have to finish a meeting. Thank you.”
She thought she was going to vomit.
“Send who up?” Troy said.
“My boyfriend from Paris. He’s here.”
“Fuck! What do we do?”
When she opened the door to Jacques five minutes later she was dressed. She kissed him and clung to him and whispered in his ear.
“We’re just finishing a script meeting,” she whispered. “He’ll be gone in a minute.”
She led Jacques from the hallway into the suite’s sitting room. Troy sat at the table, also fully dressed, script open in front of him. Opposite him there was another open script—hers.
“Troy, this is Jacques. Jacques, Troy.”
They shook hands.
“Heard a lot about you, man,” Troy said. “Good to meet you.”
“Enchanté.”
Anny closed her script. She was finding it diffi
cult to breathe. She wanted to take great lungfuls of air.
“Got a big scene tomorrow,” Troy said. “Thought we’d better go through it on our own.”
“I don’t want to interrupt,” Jacques said.
“We’re pretty much done.” Troy picked up the script. “See you tomorrow, Anny.”
“See you.”
“Nice to meet you, Jacques.”
“It was a pleasure.”
When Troy had gone Jacques took her in his arms, staring into her eyes, tilting her chin up with a finger.
“Why didn’t you goddam tell me you were coming?” she said, firmly, pre-empting his awkward question.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well, it worked.”
Jacques released her and poured himself a glass of wine from Troy’s bottle.
“What happened with Cornell?” he asked.
“I gave him money.”
“Enough?”
“I gave him what he asked for. I told him that was it. Finished.” She heard her own voice, as if it was being broadcast from a radio—full of conviction, so assured. How could she do this? She was an actress, after all, she thought—as long as Jacques didn’t know she was acting.
“Anyway,” Jacques said. “I’m here now. All your troubles are over.”
22
Within a minute—less—Talbot knew the girl was all wrong. Even to refer to her as a “girl” was something of a joke. He had placed the usual advertisement in the Photographers’ Journal. “Young male or female models sought for medical textbook and fine-art magazines. Excellent physical condition essential.” He had had three immediate responses—two male and one female—and had chosen the one, the supposed young female, with a London address. There was no point in bringing some lad down from Scotland or Yorkshire for a couple of hours in the studio.
The young woman who had presented herself at the garden gate at the appointed hour (as instructed) smiled and said, “Hi, I’m Lorraine.” She was small and perilously thin with dyed black hair badly cut in that strange feathered style, he saw, and, Talbot reckoned, was closer to thirty than to twenty. She looked nothing like the photograph she had sent as evidence of her modelling suitability. He always insisted on a photograph as there was a particular type of girl he needed. The type of girl was vital—gamine verging on feral—and he could usually tell from the photos they sent. But this Lorraine looked entirely different from her promotional image and, he could see, she wasn’t in excellent physical condition, either. Her pallor made the acne scars that dimpled her jawbone more obvious, a sad stippling of pink and blue spots, and the belt of her jeans was buckled below the improbable swell of a small pot belly for someone so manifestly skinny. Was she pregnant? He felt the sudden weariness of unforeseen disappointment descend on him; the mildly bitter realisation that the world has let you down again.
All the same he showed Lorraine into the house and into the drawing room, cursing his bad luck. He had to make this encounter end as soon as possible.
“I’m really sorry,” Talbot said, “but my camera seems to be broken.” He gestured at his Rolleiflex mounted on its stand. Everything was set up for the shoot—the linen backdrop, the 500-watt spot, the photo-flood spot. “I’m going to have to get it fixed. Apologies.”
“Don’t you have another camera?”
“Of course, several. But they’re not right for this job. Unfortunately.”
He took out his wallet and gave Lorraine the £10 note, the fee they had agreed on.
She took the note, turned it over, scrutinised it, folded it and tucked it in a pocket, petulantly, almost sneeringly, Talbot thought.
“Well, waste of a Saturday for me,” she said with some aggression. “Came all the way from Dagenham.”
Talbot found a fiver in his pocket and handed it over.
“For your expenses. Just one of those damn things. Very sorry.”
“Yeah.” Lorraine looked at him knowingly. “We could still—you know—even if your camera’s broke.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m not stupid, Mr. Eastman. We all know what ‘Young female models’ means. I done this before, many times. We could have some fun. You’ve paid me. I’ve come all this way.”
“I think,” Talbot said, closing his eyes, “you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I’m a professional photographer.”
“Wrong end of the stick?” Lorraine repeated. “Let’s have a look at your stick, then. There’s all sorts of things I can do with a stick…”
“I think you’d better leave, if you don’t mind.”
Talbot showed her out, feigning outraged dignity, terse and silent. As he saw the sagging seat of her denim jeans—no buttocks there—he suddenly realised she must be a drug addict of some kind. Caveat emptor.
At the garden door Lorraine pointed a finger in his face and said, “Remember, I know where you live. You can’t do this sort of thing.”
“And I know who you are,” Talbot replied, evenly, affecting unconcern. “And so will my solicitor, if I experience any problems with you.” He recognised that he had this patrician, unprovable conviction that any threat of the “law” unnerved poor or working-class people.
“Fuck you, you perve, you old cunt,” Lorraine said and wandered off down the road with her £15.
Talbot closed and locked the garden door, relief warming him, able to relax, now. It was very rare for his models to turn nasty or threatening. This had only happened twice before—both times with young men. It was disturbing to have a woman insult him. Advertising in bona fide photographic magazines seemed to be the ideal cover. There were dozens of similarly encoded advertisements on the back pages of these journals—for male and female models—all couched in terms of absolute probity, and all concealing the usual carnal motives, no doubt.
He was suddenly distracted by a series of metallic clangs and dull slaps of planks being dropped from a height, then a chorus of raucous shouts from the street. Looking up, he could see that the back of the next-door house had a shrouding of scaffolding. The noise must mean they were scaffolding the front, now. “As noisy as a gang of scaffolders,” he thought, the simile coming into his head, for some reason. He went back inside and poured himself a large Scotch and soda, somewhat unnerved by his encounter with Lorraine. So much for his plans for this Saturday, this precious weekend. He had been looking forward to his photography session—you never knew what such encounters might bring in their train, that was an essential part of the thrill—but now he had an empty day to himself before he was due to head for the Royal Festival Hall and Humphrey’s concert.
He searched among the few books he kept here at the flat and found a copy of A Room With a View. He had a sudden pang of memory about Zoë who had studied A Passage to India for O level. “It’s by Em Forster,” she had told him confidently. She had been a very sweet sixteen, all right, he thought, slow to leave her pre-teen child-self, as if reluctant to confront the adulthood heading remorselessly, speedily, for her. She had liked her father’s company then, he remembered—they had seen a lot of each other. And then it all changed.
He topped up his Scotch, picked up his cigarettes and went back down to the garden and settled on the bench in the shade of the apple tree. Perhaps he’d pop out to the new Italian restaurant on Erskine Road later and have a plate of pasta.
He lit a cigarette and opened his book but seeing the printed page suddenly made him think of Yorgos and the Burning Leaves contract. He had deliberately pushed the matter to the back of his mind, thinking—surely—that John Saxonwood was over-reacting. The contract was in French, John had said, and, as far as he could tell, the film rights in the play were now assigned by YSK to a company based in Luxembourg called FUMODOR S.A. He, Talbot Kydd, was named as one of the directors of the company but was not the owner, or had not contributed a share to the sum
of money—500,000 francs—that was required as an escrow deposit for all limited-liability companies in Luxembourg. And that, John said, was his concern. Who put up that money? Yorgos? Or Yorgos and some partners? Why wasn’t he, Talbot, invited to contribute? There must be a simple explanation, Talbot said, let me talk to Yorgos. I’m not sleeping easy, John Saxonwood said.
Talbot thought about this turn of events. Hand on heart, he would swear on the proverbial stack of bibles that Yorgos Samsa would never knowingly attempt to deceive him, let alone defraud him. Maybe he was being naïve but Yorgos had saved his professional life on at least three occasions. Of course, he was something of a dodgy customer—he was a film producer, for God’s sake—but this FUMODOR S.A. scheme must be something that would benefit YSK Films further down the line: tax efficiency, rebates, subventions, grants, something like that. And in any event he hadn’t signed anything, so for the moment all was stasis. It could wait until he had a chance for a proper conversation, could look Yorgos squarely in the eye and discover precisely what his clever scheme was.
He read a few pages of A Room With a View before the sudden intrusion of music distracted him. That bloody song again—about the park and the cake in the rain and the missing recipe. He stood up and shaded his eyes: there was a shirtless man standing at the highest level of the scaffolding fiddling with what looked like a large portable radio and, at the same time, was yelling incoherent instructions to his colleagues at the front of the house. Something about the scaffolder’s poise and musculature made Talbot stride into the flat and return seconds later with his Pentax, fitted with a long telephoto lens. Keeping to the shade cast by the apple tree to make him less obvious, Talbot focussed on the man. He was coming down slowly, tightening bolts at each level with some kind of spanner and shifting planks with short kicks of his boots so they sat more securely. He was shirtless because the day was warm and Talbot could see through his lens, as the man climbed down to another level, that he was young, thirty or so, lean and muscled with a tapered back, broad shoulders and flat discs of pectorals. As he tightened the bolts of the clamps that held the scaffolding poles Talbot could see the shift and flex of his muscles beneath his lightly tanned, slightly grubby skin.