by William Boyd
“Knock, knock, who’s there i’ the name of Beelzebub?”
“Very good of you to remember how I like a red carpet, Dorian,” he called up.
“A most mirthful fellow. Don’t linger out there. Come in, come in, for God’s sweet sake, Talbot, darling man!”
Talbot felt a sudden depression enfold him. Bizarrely, he wished he were back in Chiswick having a kitchen supper with Naomi. Be careful, he told himself: eat little, drink less. Yorgos’s telephone call had unsettled him, he knew. It wasn’t typical of the man, very out of character, somehow. He put it to the back of his mind, flung his cigarette away and went up the red carpet and on into the great volumes of the hall. Chequerboard marble flooring; two entire garnitures of silver armour flanked the step to the grand staircase that divided itself against the rear wall beneath a life-sized swagger-portrait of Dorian as Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I. There were thickets of red poinsettias everywhere. How on earth had he found those in high summer? Two ranks of four serving maids stood holding trays of champagne flutes. Talbot forgot his vow of sobriety and took one. Dorian was clearly making a statement tonight.
* * *
—
Elfrida paused in front of a tray of fizzing flutes of champagne.
“Do you have anything soft?” she asked a waitress. “I don’t drink, you see.”
“There’s a bar upstairs, ma’am, you can get a juice or something there.”
“Thank you.” She led Reggie up the stairway, pausing to look at Dorian’s portrait.
“Who’s that?” she said. “Is he meant to be Falstaff?”
“It’s Dorian Villiers as Falstaff to be precise. Don’t you recognise him?”
“I thought it was Orson Welles.”
“He’s probably a guest.”
They could hear the surf-break, the wave-crash of excited conversation coming from the reception rooms on the first floor. Elfrida felt her familiar party-funk afflict her: all those strangers; all those hours of banal conversation with men and women she’d never see again. Why did people bother?
She closed her eyes and held on tightly to the banister, feeling her head swim. Maybe she’d overdone the prophylactic vodka, she wondered.
“Are you all right?” Reggie asked. “Have my glass of champagne.”
“No thanks. I’m just bracing myself.”
“You could just try and have some fun, Elfrida. It’s not a crime, you know.”
* * *
—
Anny and Troy climbed the stairs, Troy with a glass of champagne in his hand. Anny wasn’t drinking as she’d taken a couple of Equanil before she’d left and felt secure, now—in that ideal Equanil haze—clear-eyed yet muffled, somehow, as if she had an invisible force field around her, keeping her safe. She pointed at the portrait.
“Who’s that?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
They walked into the main drawing room. It was crowded with men and women in evening dress. The noise level of the conversation was considerable—Anny resisted the temptation to cover her ears with her hands. Through double doors there was another equally crowded smaller drawing room with crimson walls and many portraits hanging there.
Troy stopped a passing waiter with a canapé tray and ate three squares of smoked salmon one after the other.
“Smoked salmon. Bloody delicious. Have some, Anny.”
“No thanks, I’m not hungry.”
She looked around and saw Talbot talking to a man with a red sash across his chest. Talbot caught her eye and beckoned her and Troy over. Talbot kissed her on the cheek, to her surprise.
“Anny Viklund and Troy Blaze—our illustrious stars. This is Sir Dorian Villiers, our host.”
Villiers bowed and kissed Anny’s hand.
“How lovely to see you again,” he said. He stepped back to take her in. “Radiant. Gorgeous. Incandescent. Meravigliosa.”
“Thank you, kind sir.”
“I don’t think I ever told you properly how thrilled I was to work with you in The Monopoly Affair. Ruddy bloody marvellous.”
Anny smiled and said nothing. She glanced at Troy. Was this some kind of game?
“You must give my love to Porfirio,” Villiers continued. “Tell the old bastard I miss him.”
“Sure,” Anny said.
Villiers spotted someone else across the room.
“Larry!” he bellowed. “Who the fuck invited you?”
He headed off to accost Larry. Talbot sipped his champagne.
“Great character,” he said, with mild enthusiasm.
“Who does he think I am?” Anny asked.
“I think…I think it might be Melissa Blake,” Talbot said. “Don’t worry—he never listens to anyone. Let’s see if we can find Rodrigo in this mob.”
The three of them began to negotiate their way across the heaving, shifting room. Anny slipped her hand into Troy’s.
* * *
—
Dorian’s house had a full-sized ballroom at the rear with a sprung wooden floor. Ten tables for twelve were set up in it, each table with a floral centrepiece ringed by four candelabra, candles lit. It had taken Elfrida five minutes peering over shoulders at the placement easel to find her seat—miles from Reggie but she wasn’t worried about not being near him. She was sitting between a foreign man who spoke exclusively in German to the woman on his left, and a quiet bespectacled fellow who pushed his food around his plate looking for fragments he could eat. He said he was Dorian’s stockbroker. He apologised for eating so slowly.
“I’ve had about fifteen feet of my intestines removed,” he explained. “I can hardly eat a thing, you see.” He found a disc of carrot and popped it in his mouth and chewed carefully.
As Reggie was out of sight somewhere across the room Elfrida had moved on to white wine after her glass of orange juice. She put on her spectacles and contemplated the room, or what she could see of it from her table. She spotted Dirk Bogarde and Jill Bennett and someone she was pretty sure was Claudia Cardinale. Matthew Maxwell was on the next table and, she was convinced, so was Morgan von Hoffman.
“Isn’t that Morgan von Hoffman over there?” she said to her stockbroker neighbour.
“I wouldn’t have the faintest, sorry. Out of my depth.”
She saw Talbot Kydd wandering by and waved at him. He came over.
“You’re not leaving us, are you?” she asked.
“Just going to inspect the facilities.”
“I did enjoy the concert the other night. How was the second half?”
“Splendid. Rather diminished by the Strauss.”
She leant over the back of her chair and inclined her head. “By the way, is that Morgan von Hoffman over there? Table on the left.”
Talbot glanced over.
“No. It’s Max von Sydow.”
“I thought I recognised him.”
“I’ll see you later,” he said and moved on.
Elfrida turned to the stockbroker.
“It’s Max von Sydow,” she said. “At least I got the ‘von’ right.”
“Who’s he?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She saw a waiter passing and called for another glass of wine.
She thought back to her encounter with Talbot Kydd at the Royal Festival Hall. It had given her an unwelcome shock bumping into him like that—it was always a bit strange, not to say shattering, to suddenly meet someone out of familiar context. He’d been perfectly charming, though, of course—no doubt suffering from the same unwelcome shock as she. Charm, she thought: a very elusive English concept, very loaded. To her it meant closed, polite, coldly affable, able to make conversation about nothing. That summed up Talbot Kydd quite well, she reckoned.
She told the waiter to leave the bottle.
Yes, Talbot Kydd, always in a dark suit and ti
e, always well groomed. Yes, he was groomed—good word—groomed to impenetrability. She remembered Reggie had said that Talbot had enjoyed a “good war,” whatever that meant. Surely you had a “good war” if you survived it, unmaimed. Simple as that. Of course, he’d been a soldier. That explained a lot. A soldier in the movie business—bizarre.
“Charming man,” she said to the stockbroker.
“Absolutely. Sorry, who?”
“Talbot Kydd, the film producer.”
“Oh, Talbot Kydd. Dorian loves him.”
* * *
—
When Anny found her seat and discovered she wasn’t sitting beside Troy she made him bring his name card over and swap it.
“Nobody will know,” she said.
Troy looked at the card.
“You could have been sitting beside Eric Burdon,” he said. “Now you’ve got me.”
“You’re the one I want, baby,” she said. “When can we go back to the hotel?”
“We’d better wait until the meal’s over. At least.”
She put on her sunglasses while he went to put Eric Burdon’s card where his had been. The candlelight was making her dizzy.
“Now everyone will know you’re a film star,” he said, returning and sitting down beside her.
A waiter put a glazed and shivering crab mousse in front of them. Troy had a taste.
“Not bad,” he said. “Fishy.” He forked the rest into his mouth.
“You can have mine,” Anny said, passing it over.
* * *
—
Talbot was at Dorian’s table, sitting beside Dorian’s wife, Bruna Casanero, who, Talbot was surprised to see, was not only very beautiful but heavily pregnant. She must be at least thirty years younger than Dorian, Talbot calculated, and discovered she spoke good, heavily accented English. Her pregnant belly was extraordinarily neat, as if a small glass cloche or cantaloupe melon was stuffed under the crêpe de Chine of her azure dress. Dorian was across the table from her and he kept blowing kisses in their direction. Bruna found this very amusing.
Talbot noticed that Dorian had grown his hair to collar length and it was newly coloured an even butterscotch-beige—the better to take the years off, Talbot supposed. He had liked Dorian’s previous, second wife, Vanessa, a shrewd sardonic woman who seemed to have Dorian’s measure and would cut him off whenever his hyperbole seemed to be veering out of control.
Bruna was speaking to him.
“Sorry?”
“Have you children, Talbot?”
“A son and a daughter.”
“And their names?”
“Humphrey and Zoë.”
“This I like. I am naming my son Ercole. He is to be my firstborn. In English is Hercules.”
“Right. You know he’s a boy. Amazing.”
“I know he is a boy.” She pressed her hands on her neat dome. “Because he is calling to me.”
“Hercules Villiers. What a name!”
Talbot pushed his uneaten cheesecake away a few inches as Dorian rapped loudly on a glass carafe—its clear crystal ring silencing the ballroom—and rose to his feet to scattered applause.
“As Chaucer said—or should have said if he had any bloody sense,” Dorian began, his booming voice and legendary projection requiring no electronic amplification, “fain would ye come to this fair borough yclept Bright Towne, where ye may wench and wassail to your haertès content!”
* * *
—
Elfrida felt her head begin to nod. She had sat through some long speeches in her time but Dorian Villiers was breaking all records. He was now talking in appallingly accented Italian to his wife—la molta piú bellissima sposa é mamma del mondo, or some such rubbish. She could hardly bear to listen any more. She looked around for a waiter with a bottle of wine but all the serving staff seemed to have disappeared for the speech. Very wise—she was about to do the same, she decided. She slowly shifted back her chair, whispered, “Do excuse me,” to the stockbroker and slipped away, leaving her clutch bag at her place, sign that her departure was temporary.
She found a waiter clearing glasses away in the crimson drawing room and he fetched her a glass of white wine. She needed the loo, she realised, and followed arrow-signs upstairs to the bedroom, bathroom and cloakroom floor of the Villiers mansion.
However, the lavatory she eventually found, off a wide corridor with pale blue carpeting, was occupied. Seconds after she’d tried the locked door it opened and a man appeared. He was in his forties, she supposed, and was wearing those fashionable round wire-rimmed spectacles. His thick dry greying hair was severely parted, just off-centre, like a white firebreak driven through dense forest, she thought. His velvet dinner jacket looked a bit threadbare and his bow tie was askew.
She apologised, he apologised, then he asked if she knew where the coats were kept. He had handed in a briefcase but it seemed to have disappeared.
“I came coatless,” she said. “You’re not leaving, are you? In the middle of the speeches?”
“I’ve got to get a train back to London,” he said. “You don’t happen to have a spare cigarette on you, by any chance?”
“Sorry. Non-smoker.” She sipped her wine. There was something sympathetic about this man, she decided, in a downtrodden way, with his diffident scholar’s look.
“Are you a friend of Dorian’s?” he asked.
“Never met him. Are you?”
“I’m not sure if ‘friend’ is the right word. I gave him a good review about ten years ago and he now invites me to all his parties. All the time.”
“A review?”
“I used to be a theatre critic in the past. I think he was in Blithe Spirit. I can’t remember.”
“A theatre critic! Fascinating.”
“Yes.” He repeated the word, quietly. “Fascinating.”
“Are you still a theatre critic?” she asked.
“No. I was sacked. And now, actually, I’m a novelist. Not a very successful one but I somehow scrape a living.”
“How intriguing. Would I have heard of you?”
“My name’s Laurence Falconer.”
“I have heard of you,” Elfrida said, “I’m sure. Anyway, congratulations. Better to be a novelist than a theatre critic, I suppose.”
“Dark and dirty work but someone has to do it.”
“Have you written many novels?”
“Over twenty or so. At least. Thirty? I’ve lost count.”
“Good Lord.” Elfrida emptied her glass and set it down. “That’s an oeuvre.”
“I do use a few noms de plume. Keeps me out of mischief.”
“Do you find it easy? Writing, I mean?”
He frowned. “I suppose…No, is the short answer. But it’s sort of fulfilling.”
“People forget how much sheer hard craft is involved.”
He looked at her more closely, peering at her, as if trying to identify her. She realised she’d spoken unthinkingly.
“Do you write novels?”
She considered denying it, as she usually did, but thought, what the hell?
“I’m thinking about it. Writing a novel, I mean.”
He put his hands in his pockets and exhaled noisily as he stared at her, swaying slightly. She realised he was very drunk. In vino veritas.
“It’s a long and very bumpy road, as somebody once remarked,” he said. “Probably another novelist.”
“Bumpy roads, very bumpy roads, long ones, fair enough. As long as there are no mudslides or earthquakes.”
“Oh, there may be the odd earthquake, but low on the Richter scale, usually.”
“But there are compensations. In your experience?” Elfrida asked, smiling.
“You are the ultimate one-man band, I suppose. Not to be sniffed at, that.”
“Yes. Sounds perfect.”
He smiled at her, his eyes bright through his round lenses. She suddenly felt her bladder straining.
“Lovely to meet you, Laurence Falconer. Good luck. Excuse me.”
She stepped into the lavatory and locked the door and leant back against it, exhilarated, almost shocked. Fancy meeting a fellow novelist. Maybe it was a sign.
* * *
—
“Can we go?” Anny said to Troy. “I’m so tired. He must have spoken for an hour.”
“It was certainly over thirty minutes,” Troy said, looking at his watch. “No notes either. He’s a great actor.”
“That doesn’t excuse him. Let’s split.”
Troy was finishing her cheesecake.
“OK, babe. Give me a minute.” He looked around. “We should say goodbye to Rodrigo.”
“We’ll see him tomorrow. It doesn’t matter.”
A man in a dark suit carrying a clipboard appeared at their table.
“Excuse me. Miss Viklund?”
“Yes? What is it?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt but there are two gentlemen downstairs who would like to speak to you.”
Troy interjected.
“Sorry, man. Look—lots of people want to speak to Miss Viklund. This is a private party. Yeah? Tell them to approach the production office.”
The man with the clipboard bent his head and whispered in Troy’s ear as Anny looked on, bemused. Troy started nodding.
“Is there a private room?” Troy asked.
“Of course.”
“What’s going on, Troy?” Anny said—she’d never seen him look like this.
“I think we’d better go with this man, doll.”
* * *
—
Elfrida returned to the ballroom. It was clear that the dinner was slowly breaking up after coffee and petits fours had been served. Men were lighting cigars, decanters of port were circulating, and people were beginning to drift back to the reception rooms for the party’s endgame, whatever that might be. Elfrida found her table and saw that both her dining companions had left. She picked up her clutch bag and retrieved the card with the Rottingdean taxi firm’s number on it. Now to find a telephone in this impossible house. Her brain was beginning to feel a bit muddy and slow. Better stop drinking wine, she said to herself, even though her mood was good, not to say high, after her encounter upstairs. She looked around and saw Talbot Kydd talking to a pregnant woman and wandered over. Talbot smiled politely as she approached.