Sex & Genius Page 4

  When, after a knock, he entered, he found Hilldyard sitting on the edge of the bed in his pyjamas. Tears glistened on his cheeks. He jabbed a thumb towards the record player as if to suggest that the music had got the better of him; but as Michael withdrew, Hilldyard smacked his hand down. 'You think I'm a monster.'

  'No. I . . .'

  'A pig. A fucking shite!'

  Michael flinched at the vehemence.

  'I mean, don't you think it's despicable at my age, putting work before family? The rotten thing is, I have to do it. Even when I can't write. Because I'm a pusillanimous creep. I've got nothing to give, no ounce of human charity, unless I write. People call this dedication self-discipline. But self-discipline would mean trying to help the lives that cross this earth, which I have triumphantly failed to do because I am so utterly preoccupied with my own gifts. I should never have married my wife.' He cleared his throat. 'I refused her children. When she died, she left nothing of herself. And this, you know, stopped me when I could write. When I was free.' His face was strained.

  Michael stood in the middle of the bedroom; his head inclined sympathetically.

  'I have to redeem fifteen years of sterility. And how can I attempt that in the company of a girl who nursed my dying wife?' He shook his head emphatically. 'Frances is a seriously unstable person. You do appreciate?'

  He understood better now.

  'Let me assure you. I have duties to family, but I haven't a hope in hell with Frances under my nose cooking up all sorts of stuff and nonsense when I need peace and seclusion.'

  'Then you've done the right thing.'

  'If only I knew what the right thing was!'

  Michael wanted to reassure him. He came to the end of the bed. 'Start work. Recover your powers. See Frances when you're ready.'

  Hilldyard's eyes were wide with listening, as though he were soothed by the considerateness of the advice. His old fingers plucked at the bedsheet, pressing its fold.

  'You're a writer,' said Michael. 'You have the highest calling.'

  'You don't seriously think I'm going to write another book!'

  He was astonished. 'Of course I do!'

  The old man gave him a level look, assessing the protestation for sincerity. He found what he was looking for and tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling. 'Don't leave me now.'

  'I'm right here,' said Michael.

  'But you can't stay for ever. You're a young man with plenty of wild oats up your sleeve.'

  'I can stay as long as you like.'

  'I bet you've got a hundred better things to do in London town.'

  He checked himself. 'They can wait.'

  'You're a man of the world. There are women to woo and businesses to run. Don't pretend I'm more interesting than all that. Please. I won't believe you.'

  Michael smiled. 'I don't have a girlfriend, so that's not a problem, and as for business . . .'

  'I'm an old fart, Michael. You're young. You don't belong here.'

  He laughed, not knowing why.

  There was silence for a while.

  'As for running a business, I'm bust.'

  It had been good to say the words, to deal them out as survivable fact.

  'Bust!'

  He nodded.

  'Then you must go back! Right away!'

  Michael shook his head. 'It's too late. The damage is done.'

  'It can't be that bad!'

  'I want to stay here and make myself useful.'

  Hilldyard was appreciative and incredulous at the same time. 'You're giving up your business for me?'

  'I'm giving up nothing.'

  Hilldyard was perturbed and astonished.

  There was a moment of silence. When Michael at last spoke his voice was strange. 'There's nothing to give up.'

  The author frowned.

  'Nothing and no one.'

  'Michael, I . . .'

  'You see . . .'

  'I think you should . . .'

  It was like a dagger grinding in, a point of searing pain.

  'My wife died six years ago! I have no children! My company's a write-off!' He exhaled from the bottom of his lungs, a venting of sudden anguish; and then he gazed abstractedly at the old record player. He would endure these emotions. It was his fate to endure them.

  Hilldyard contained his surprise with a look that registered everything.

  'I'm all yours,' said Michael, throwing it off with abrupt self-control. At least he had come clean.

  The author raised a hand and then let it drop. He was strangely silenced.

  Everything since her death, Michael realised, had been a failure; but that was his life; and for the person who fails, vanity dies and life continues anyway, returning one to essential reasons for living.

  'Well,' said Hilldyard, with an odd sense of occasion. 'I really will have to write a novel!'

  'You will!'

  'Then we'd better get ourselves off to Ravello. As a matter of urgency.'

  Michael's concentration took a moment to clear. He had no idea what Ravello might signify to the old man. It was the place Hilldyard had most wanted to visit, and the place he had most wanted to show Michael.

  'Pass those pills.'

  The pills were on the shelf. Two packets of aspirin and a set of sleeping tablets, kept in reserve for bad nights and backache.

  'Let's go in a couple of days.'

  Hilldyard was suddenly tired. There was nothing more to say, so Michael shortly took his leave. He slid out of the bedroom, pulled the shutters in the lounge and, after turning off lights and slipping the door latch, made his exit. It was a five-minute downhill walk to his hotel.

  The evening air was soft; darkness hung thickly on the higher levels of the town, where shuttered villas and pensioni gathered against the mountain. He walked past the watchful proprietors of restaurants, the bright windows of a tabaccheria, showing postcard carousels and Kodacolor signs; the silent, strolling figures of couples stretching their legs along the Viale before opting for the Cucina or the pizzeria. He stopped by an open gallery. An elegant woman waited at a desk. He gazed through the window, half smiling at the gaudy array – the work of a local artist with a psychedelic palette and an operatic brushstroke. They were familiar scenes: the waterfront, the church, villas gift-wrapped in bougainvillaea.

  His smile faded slowly.

  He always remembered her first show in Cork Street. He remembered arriving like one of the public and seeing her paintings in new frames, mounted on white walls beyond a scented crowd. He had watched her threading her way towards him between the pin-stripes and academy elders, barely daring to look at the epidemic of red dots speckling the walls. Her smile was full of disbelieving excitement, exceptional tension. Christine stood beside him in a glow, catching his eye with a look that attached him to her success. He had seen her paint these pictures in Devon and Rome, in Hereford and Andalusia. He had been with her all along.

  He dallied in the hotel terrace, inhaling the night air. There were a couple of messages folded in his keyhole. He took the key and fetched out a slip of paper and an envelope. His heart beat a little faster.

  He was not being responsible. He should really go home. The envelope reminded him of the reality beyond Positano, and the possible intrusion of that world into this one. He opened the letter quickly and saw that it was handwritten and signed by someone called Adela Fairfax. The name was strangely familiar, but he could not at first place it. She was staying in Positano and wished to meet him as soon as possible. She needed his advice on a certain matter, apologised for her forwardness, and asked him to telephone her the next day.

  Michael was perplexed and curious as he mounted the stairs. He entered his room and something came back to him. He pulled a copy of Screen International from the pile of trade magazines by his bed – an edition he had read on the outward flight – and flipped a few pages till he came to a photograph. It was a still from the BBC's production of Gwendolyn, an adaptation of a minor Victorian novel transmitted the
previous year. He gazed closely at the picture. He was amused at first, but then he frowned in consternation.

  What struck him, as he sat on the bed staring at the bonneted face, was not so much that an actress he had never met wanted to meet him in Positano, but that the face in the picture recalled the girl he had seen on the beach.

  He held the magazine close to.

  Adela Fairfax was Hilldyard's retreating Venus.

  Chapter Four

  Halfway down the viale Pasitea is a restaurant, da Vincenzo's. Next door a caffè. Both establishments stand at a bend in the road, and from the tables on the terrace opposite one has the perfect coastline view. Michael had chosen the caffè as a meeting point, and now found himself sitting face to face with Adela Fairfax, his cappuccino in front of him, the wide sky all around them.

  Until this moment they had not yet spoken. He had responded to the letter by calling her pensione and leaving a message with the hotel-keeper, who took down his suggestion for a time and place. But when the time and place came, he was still unprepared for the sight of a woman in a blue frock, with fair hair and a good figure, rising from her table to greet him.

  He had speculated, of course. She had heard perhaps about The Other House, was pursuing him for a role. The scripts had gone out to casting directors and talent agents and there were good female parts, or would have been, if the production had not been cancelled.

  He had approached the caffè with controlled amusement. It was something of a novelty to be meeting an actress.

  His instincts seemed right at first. Adela was wearing Ray-Bans and flipping through a glossy magazine. Her posture was extremely considered, frock flowing, arms draped, as though she had noticed the view and placed herself before it to best effect. Up close, however, he appreciated that she was giving a cool shoulder to the men on the neighbouring table, whose cleft chins and mirror shades panned off when he arrived.

  She was relieved, delighted. She pulled off her Ray-Bans with a smile, eyebrows arching in grateful surprise at the sight of the man who had produced himself so obligingly. She rose from the seat and offered a hand.

  Her face was unbelievably fresh. Adela Fairfax had the fairest complexion. The irises were green and when she looked up at him, her eyes seemed to follow him into himself. Already she was concentrating, getting a sense of the person she was so keen to meet and whose privacy she had intruded upon. When she pulled off her band, loosening her hair, it seemed a glamorous gesture, but a nervous one, too, as if she were anxious to make the best impression. They sat down and she caught her sleeve on a coffee cup. But then Michael arranged his legs under the table and, as he did so, she allowed him to take a longer look at her, and to register, before a word was spoken, the reality of this curious meeting. The mutual expectation was almost comic. A smile crossed her face. Despite fair skin, she had dark eyebrows, which suddenly converged.

  'I'm really sorry to have disturbed you.'

  'Not at all.'

  'You're so kind to meet me like this.'

  She had a natural speaking voice, warm and clear.

  'I'm not trying to be mysterious or anything.'

  He laughed away his awkwardness. 'Of course not!'

  'I could have put more in the letter, but there's so much to explain and – as they say in my trade – I wanted to take it from the top.'

  'Well, it's very nice to meet you.'

  She smiled broadly. 'What an imposition!'

  'Impose, impose,' he smiled back, catching her perfume on the breeze.

  She was easier now, elbows propped on the table, wrists floppy. She noticed a waiter coming out of the caffè and raised a quick arm, drawing him across the road with a smile.

  'Have you been here long?' she asked.

  'Oh, ten days or so.'

  This seemed to please her. 'Isn't it wonderful!'

  Henodded easily. The waiter stood over him and he ordered a coffee.

  'Are you on holiday?' he enquired.

  'No . . . I . . . I desperately need a break and I'd love to stay–' She flung her hair back. 'But things at home are hectic, and my only excuse for coming here is to see you.'

  He raised a humorous eyebrow.

  'All will be explained.' She smiled, enjoying herself. She had recovered her confidence. 'Promise me that you'll tell me to shut up if any of this gets tedious. You see, there's lots to explain.'

  'I promise,' he said solemnly.

  'Can I ask another favour?' She was suddenly concerned. 'Would you treat this in confidence?'

  He shrugged, covering his curiosity. 'Of course.'

  'And for your trouble may I buy you dinner?'

  'Oh!' He was pleasantly surprised. 'Well, I hope I can justify it!'

  She set her hands on her lap, repairing her comportment for the next stage. 'I'll tell you about myself first.'

  He noted again her fineness of posture, which made best use of table and chair, and gave her some force of address, as though bearing were itself part of a process of thought. She gazed at him directly as she spoke, telling him what he needed to know, but making no assumptions about his knowledge or interest. She was twenty-eight, young and ambitious with much before her, but already distinguished in her field, and by Michael's standards extremely successful.

  She had trained at RADA, then gone to the RSC. In her early twenties she played Charmian at Stratford, and Desdemona in a West End transfer, but her first big break was in Jack Unswick's Lothario, a production that Michael remembered from its saucy posters and commercial aura of lust and wit. Television followed. She was Belinda in The Bartholomew Saga, Cissy in First Daughter, and a year later, at the fair age of twenty-seven, her features appeared on the cover of the Radio Times; she had landed Gwendolyn, eponymous heroine of a primetime mini-series. The role had an establishing effect. It defined her particular appeal and gave to the audience an old-fashioned demeanour, of beauty emboldened by courage and quickened by pain, and the exquisite expression, lost to the modern world, of sublimated passion. Michael had seen it in the Screen International still, and he saw it now very well. Adela was fair and glowing, but the quick lashes and dark eyebrows created an impression of acute inner life. She smiled, but she smiled in different ways, and he realised as he sat listening that there was an engaging transparency in the range of her looks, and those eyes – so candid in their clarity of colour – were very suggestive of feeling. She spoke her own script, told her own story, but every word located the source of a particular emotion, precisely remembered, carefully conveyed.

  There had been many offers after Gwendolyn. Many dud scripts. The American networks desired her; the National beckoned. West Coast talent agencies were taking an interest, keeping her in sights. She wanted movie roles but had no bankability; the only concrete breaks were for dubious projects, erotic thrillers, subsidised Euro films stitched together by a dozen financiers in too many languages. The BBC had another classic in the offing, but that was to be typecast.

  'I don't want to be stuck in the heroine ghetto. I mean, I think those characters are fascinating, beautiful in a way, and I can reach them quite well. I don't know, perhaps they still express a great deal of what it is to be a woman. But before I become terminally typecast I want to play something ambivalent, more modern. That must be the next thing. And I think I've found it.'

  He was intrigued.

  'Or rather, it's found me.'

  She frowned again, as though digesting something.

  'A really big movie,' she said quietly. 'Fully financed, fully packaged. The lead's a huge star.' She gazed at him earnestly, as though still moved by that fact. 'Shane Hammond. He's approached me to play the main female role.'

  Michael nodded appreciatively. 'That's wonderful.'

  'Yes, and it's a project you know something about.'

  'I do?'

  Her face was a picture of seriousness. 'The Shane Hammond project.'

  Michael had to think quickly. Hammond was of course a household name, but it took a moment to
make the connection. He was curious and then slightly nonplussed.

  'Shane and I were in Uncle Vanya at Chichester,' she said.

  It was a non sequitur, but he nodded.

  'He and my older sister were at RADA. We go back.'

  He sat quietly, letting this information settle on his mind.

  'You're a friend of his?' he asked.

  'Probably less than a friend and more than a colleague.' She was suddenly lit up. 'We hadn't spoken in years. I never thought I'd see him again–' She sighed admiringly. 'He's so mega.'

  He smiled.

  'Humungous,' she gleamed. 'According to my agent, Shane's number-one bankable. Not to mention incredibly good-looking and a brilliant actor.'

  'He's big, all right.'

  Her eyes were wide with marvel and mirth. 'His head must be enormous.'

  Michael nodded. 'I dare say.'

  Shane Hammond had gone from Harold Pinter revivals, Shakespeare stagings at the National, and low-budget art-house movies to an Oscar and film stardom in about three years. He had acting kudos and box-office clout. Thinking Time did three hundred and fifty million world-wide; Charisma took a Palme d'Or and six Golden Globes. Hammond was in the almost unique position of being a star who was a real actor, a good-looking man who could inhabit very different roles. He had gone to Hollywood and retained his independence, mixing genre hits with art-house fare, action thrillers and Shakespeare remakes.

  'I thought he was out there being God, and then I got a call.'

  Michael refused to anticipate. He was very engrossed.

  'In the middle of the night. Shane's on location. I'm in bed. A weird call. There's a voice, which I don't really recognise. A few pleasantries, 4 a.m., you know. Then, will I read a book, please. No explanation. Much implication.'

  'What was the book?'

  'The Last Muse.'

  He nodded slowly.

  'By James Hilldyard. Bernie – my agent – bikes the manuscript from Basil Curwen. I've read it by teatime the next day.' She shot him a clear, green-eyed glance. 'It really knocked me out.'