‘He’s here? Did you say Tomas was here?’
‘No, I said maybe he was here.’ The pale man swayed. ‘I said Lulu said he’d be here. Look, d’you mind fucking letting go of me?’
‘Apologies, my friend.’ The ponytail stepped back half an inch, and with difficulty focused upon Lindsay.
‘And this is?’
‘I don’t know who this is,’ the pale man replied in an aggrieved tone. ‘She knows Lulu. She says she knows Lulu…’ He paused. ‘Whereas I’ve never fucking met Lulu. I’ve been here eight times and I’ve never met her yet’
This surprising information seemed to forge an instant bond. The two men embraced.
‘Shake, pal.’ They shook. ‘I’m beginning to wonder, my friend,’ the ponytail remarked, in Jacobean tones, ‘whether Lulu exists.’
‘She says she does.’ The pale man turned accusingly to Lindsay. ‘Knows her intimately. Friends from way back…’
Fixing her with his eyes, in so far as he was able, the ponytail demanded to know where, in that case, Lulu was. ‘Because,’ he said, swaying like a yachtsman, ‘I’ve been promised an introduction to Tomas. I spoke to a very very close aide of Lulu’s called Pat.’
The two men eyed each other.
‘Pat? Pat?’ The pale man sighed. ‘That rings a bell. But there’s a lot of aides. Lulu has a confusing number of aides…’
‘True. An ear to the ground, however. On the inside of the inside. On the ball. That’s Lulu’s strength. Elusive, though, my friend. Cancels lunch dates…’
‘Doesn’t return calls. Can’t be fucking reached…’
‘Here tonight though. Definitely here—somewhere. I have assurances. Lulu’s here—and so is Tomas Court.’
Lindsay, growing anxious to escape, attempted to edge away, but the group behind her pushed her back. Oblivious to her presence, an expression of demented reverence came upon the pale man’s face.
‘Tomas Court!’ he cried. ‘I worship that man. I bow down before him. I say—and I don’t fucking care who hears me say it—I say: that man is my god.’
‘A director of genius, my friend. No argument. Dead Heat?’
‘Incandescent. I’ve seen it fifteen times. A masterpiece. I fucking wept.’
‘Pure film, my friend. In a class of its own. Except…’
‘The spider sequence?’
‘Cheap. I would have to say that. Edging towards the cheap.’
‘Vulgar?’
‘My friend, I’d have to agree. Seriously vulgar. Even jejune. You could say—a mistake.’
‘He makes mistakes!’ Here, the pale man became very animated. ‘OK, it’s heresy, but I’ll say it: Tomas Court makes mistakes, misjudgements. And Dead Heat is riddled with them…’
‘The end is lousy. Dead Heat has a lousy ending. Personally, I have my doubts about the beginning, as well…’
‘What’s your view on the editing?’
‘A fucking shambles.’
‘Dialogue?’
‘Please. I could write better dialogue in my sleep.’
‘No heart, my friend.’ Ponytail sighed. ‘It’s all window dressing. Smart-ass movie graduate stuff. Post-modern posturing. Hommage. Quotes. Does Tomas Court even understand genre, my friend? That’s the question I ask myself…’
‘Understand it? He couldn’t spell it.’
‘He’s sold out, in my view. He’s peaked, let’s face it. He peaked a while ago. He was a flash in the pan. He…’
‘Actually, he’s over there,’ said Lindsay, who had now decided that she disliked these two cabaret artists very much. ‘He’s over there by the door,’ she continued, giving them both the sweetest smile she possessed.
‘Don’t you see him? By the door, with Lulu.’
She pointed across the room. There, in a thick cluster by the entrance, stood a tall and dramatically dressed woman of a certain age, who jutted up from the heaving crowd like a gaunt, weatherbeaten lighthouse. None of her companions was Tomas Court, now so famous that Lindsay would have recognized him, and the tall woman was not Lulu Sabatier, but paleface and ponytail deserved punishment, and this woman was, without a doubt, the most terminally boring woman Lindsay had ever met in her life. Grasping Lindsay as she entered, she had pinned her to the wall and gone through her last screenplay scene by scene and comma by comma. Emma was mad about it, she said; Michelle had read it—it was female, female, female—and Michelle had flipped.
‘That woman there.’ Lindsay pointed again. ‘The one in the burnous. That’s Lulu. She’s been waiting there for Tomas Court all evening. He just came in, a second ago. Sharon Stone was with him, I think…’
‘Christ…’ Paleface and ponytail convulsed. Parting the waters, they hit the waves at speed; as some wind in the room took up the cry ‘Tomas Court, Tomas Court’ a host of back-up vessels surged in their wake. A social tide turned; two, four, ten, fifteen, thirty others caught the prevailing current and made for the beachhead of the burnous. Lindsay, well satisfied, watched this armada with delight. The burnous woman, used to being avoided, greeted her new-found popularity with stupefaction. Lindsay slipped her moorings, shifted behind the now-vacant pillar, and resolved to lie low, over the horizon, out of sight.
She had been at the party less than an hour by then; it felt like a week. Somewhere during the course of the evening, she had lost her grip, and time and age had run amok. A rattled forty by the time she left her apartment, she suddenly turned thirty in the elevator here as, soothed by recondite muzak, she glided up.
The elevator was multi-mirrored, and its lighting had been unusually flattering. Looking at what appeared to be several well-dressed, passably pretty women who, since she was the only female present, were presumably herself, Lindsay experienced pre-party optimism; it was as pungent as snuff. The true source of this optimism, she realized a second later, was not really her own reflection, but the apparently admiring glance of the elevator’s only other occupant, a tall, dark-haired American, who had held the doors for her, who had wished her ‘Good Evening’, and who bore a passing resemblance to Rowland McGuire. It was as she noticed this resemblance that she hit thirty, a promising age. However, on reaching Lulu Sabatier’s loft-palace, he remarked, ‘Nice dress, babe,’ and Lindsay, realizing he looked nothing like Rowland at all, hit thirty-eight.
Thanks to paleface and ponytail, she was now sixty-five, going on eighty-two. She did not smoke, she had never smoked, but she now needed a cigarette badly. Also alcohol; yes, it was certainly a mistake in these circumstances to be drinking prudent Perrier and ice. What she needed was a triple brandy, or intravenous vodka perhaps. Since she was driving, the best she could risk was a glass of champagne. If she drank it extremely fast, however, having eaten nothing since lunch, perhaps all these frogs would turn into princes; perhaps all these basilisk women would turn and welcome her; perhaps the air would begin to ring with good fellowship and wit. And if that transformation failed to occur, as seemed likely, she would find Markov and Jippy and insist on escape.
Confidence, confidence, she muttered to herself, easing between knotty groups of people who showed no inclination to admit her. She grabbed a glass of champagne from a scurrying waiter and found a haven of relative quiet and space in an embrasure by the windows. She drank half of the champagne with medicinal speed. Here, she was able to conceal herself from paleface and ponytail and any revenge they might seek. She moved back behind a huge and magnificent swagged curtain, constructed from plebeian sailcloth, but fringed with partrician silks, and, watching the ceaseless ebb and flow, waited for the magic potion—it was Krug—to take effect.
Here, with a view down through wisps and drifts of mist to the sleek black curve of the river, she became calmer. Below her, she discovered, lay a garden, a garden that was subtly and theatrically lit, with a dark central fish pool, clipped topiary shapes, and some pale statuary. She could see a goddess or two, one lacking arms, a lovely blind nereid, and a nymph on a pedestal, who appeared to ward off the attention
s of a nearby god. It was an enchanting garden, made the more beautiful by the flow of the river beyond, and she found that the garden—or the champagne—was soothing her. Her age steadied and approached normal; the throb of those mysterious party turbines seemed quieter. Leaning against the iron balustrade across the open window, she inhaled damp, foggy city air. Was she in London? She felt she might have been elsewhere, anywhere. She was beginning to feel like Alice, made tiny enough to enter Wonderland by swallowing the contents of a bottle labelled, ‘Drink me’, and then made absurdly tall by nibbling a cake.
She thought of Alice, swimming in a lake of her own tears. She thought of Alice, a most sensible girl, stabilizing her size fluctuations by—how had she done it exactly? Lindsay frowned down at the imperceptible flow of the river below, trying to remember—by eating from alternate sides of a mushroom, she thought—and a vivid image came to her of reading this story aloud to Tom when he was seven, perhaps eight. It was a period, she knew, of some background pain, one of the last occasions when her ex-husband, down on his luck and thrown out by the latest girl, had attempted to come back.
It was probably the time, if she were accurate, when she finally realized, five years after her divorce, that she neither loved nor needed him any more. She could remember looking at him, as he stood in the doorway; she could remember the faint surprise she had felt as she realized that she had loved, married, divorced, and agonized over a man whom she neither liked nor respected; a man who had wasted too much of her time. How stupid I was, she had thought, closing the door.
Yes, all of that had been happening; yet now, looking back, she found that those incidents had drifted away, and in their place, anchoring her, distinct as the links of a chain, were her evenings with her son; evening after blessed evening, hour after peaceful hour, in which they shared the fantastic adventures of a Victorian child, encircled by lamplight, absorbed in a story, both of them contented and wanting nothing more.
Over a decade ago, those evenings, now. Sharp as a poignard, Lindsay felt the familiar stab of regret. Such states of grace did not, and could not, endure; childish things, and even the most adult of children’s books, were put away. Children grew up, and now her son’s need for her company was diminished and infrequent—as she had always accepted it would one day be.
It would have been consoling, she thought, watching the river flow, to know that someone else did still retain a need for her; the kind of need that accompanies love: a husband, an enduring partner. It would have been easier and less painful, Lindsay sometimes believed, to adjust to her present state had she not had to do so alone. However, alone she was and alone she was likely to remain, and the worst possible way of dealing with that was to indulge in this kind of melancholy introspection. Lindsay pinched herself viciously—one of her cures—and read herself a few bracing lectures. She turned her back firmly on the river and the lovely shadowy garden below; such views encouraged nostalgia and self-pity, she feared.
She eddied out into the party again, trying to convince herself that she was glad to be there.
After some while, she managed to accost a tiny waiter, bearing a huge platter aloft. He presented her with tiny but delectable offerings: a wren’s egg with a paring of black truffle; a tadpole-shaped blini glistening with caviar—real caviar, as it proved. She forced a conversation with some mad-hatter movie journalist about something; she talked to Tweedledum and Tweedledee who, in her experience, were always present at all parties. She was addressed by a dozy dormouse; by a duchess—and she actually was a duchess, or so some unctuous caterpillar of a man confirmed. There were a number of queens here, of course—in fact, queens were particularly thick on the ground. She looked desperately around and behind and beside them for Markov, certain to be queening it on an occasion such as this. But she could find no sign of him, or of silent Jippy, and after a while the utter randomness of these unlikely conversations began to tell. Lindsay felt afflicted with egos: me, me, me, cried her interlocutors—my screenplay, my company, my role, my percentage, my agent, my image…Lindsay fled.
It occurred to her—she had seen a flight of steps—that somewhere there must be a way down to that tempting garden below, perhaps via one of the archways, or one of the corridors which seemed to lead off this aircraft-carrier deck. Carefully, she navigated in what seemed to be approximately the right direction. She was a little delayed, en route, first by the famous and poisonous actor, Nic Hicks, who mistook her for someone else, and then by a man who claimed she was his third wife and the love of his life. She was further held up by an impetuous man who grabbed her arm, waved a bottle of pills, and announced he was about to commit suicide; on Lindsay’s informing him that, in these circumstances his decision was perfectly understandable, he had a change of heart and decided to have another drink instead.
At last, still nursing a few dregs of champagne, she found herself alone in a corridor, a long white corridor, lined with posters for, and stills from, famous movies: Casablanca, Persona, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, La Règle du Jeu, Pulp Fiction, Jules et Jim, Dead Heat, Bicycle Thieves, The Virgin Spring…Lindsay had seen all of these films, many with Tom who was a film buff and movie addict. She passed along the display, slowing first at one, then another. She came to a halt in front of the celebrated poster for Tomas Court’s third and breakthrough movie, Dead Heat, the film paleface and ponytail had been lauding and denigrating earlier.
It showed a still from that movie which had now become so famous it was part of the collective consciousness, imprinted on the minds of almost everyone, whether they had seen the actual movie or not. This image, reproduced on a million T-shirts, had first been seen by Lindsay some eighteen months before in New York; it had been blown up 30 feet high, and had been fronting the façade of a movie theatre on Madison. A marriage of beauty and menace, she had thought then; she had found it disturbing, and still did.
It was a cunningly lit, rear-view shot of Natasha Lawrence, still Tomas Court’s wife when the movie was shot, but divorced from him shortly after its premiere. She was barebacked, and was framed by a suggestion of a white curtain to her left, and by a blank white wall in front and to the right of her. Lawrence’s singularly beautiful face could not be seen; her dark hair was cropped as short as a boy’s; her right arm was lifted and pressed against the wall; her left arm was pressed against her side; a shaft of light slanted against the curve of her spine, below which the picture was cropped.
This image might have been, and in some senses was, an Ingres-like tribute to the beauty and allure of a woman’s back, though Lawrence was thinner than any of Ingres’s Odalisques. The eye was drawn by the exquisite pallor of the skin, by the arch of the slender neck, by the line of the spine; it suggested the skeletal, while celebrating the voluptuousness of flesh. Then, gradually, the eye was drawn by what appeared, at a casual glance, to be some small birthmark or blemish, a small dark patch high on the left scapula. On closer examination, this dark area proved to be neither a blemish, nor a tattoo—most people’s second assumption—but a spider, an actual spider, a real spider, of modest dimensions, with delicate legs and black skin. Discovering this, women had been known to shriek and shrink back; Lindsay herself, who could deal with spiders, had felt a certain revulsion. A Freudian revulsion, Tom had later annoyingly claimed; a revulsion Court no doubt intended, Rowland McGuire had remarked, since Court was the most manipulative of directors—and the most manipulative of men, or so it was said.
Looking at this image now, Lindsay felt she saw elements in it which she had missed before; the image, and the very violent sequence from which it was taken—a sequence she had never watched in its entirety, because she always covered her eyes—seemed to her to have a riddling multiplicity of meanings: it could be read both ways, she felt; from the right and from the left.
She was about to pass on towards the stairs, which she could now see at the end of this corridor, and which she hoped, if her navigation were accurate, might lead down to the garden below, when a
small accident occurred. Stepping back, eyes still on that poster for Dead Heat, she collided with a woman, and—apologizing—swung around. The woman, equally startled it seemed, almost dropped the four laden plates she was balancing, and gave a small cry of alarm.
‘Whoops,’ she said, in a strong Australian or New Zealand accent, as a solitary olive bounced off the plates, rolled along the corridor, and came to rest in front of some bookshelves by the stairs.
Lindsay, guiltily aware that she might now be trespassing, looked the woman up and down. She was tall and gaunt, with a large nose, rabbity teeth, small, round, granny glasses, and an arresting head of long, thick, near-white hair. Despite the hair colour, she was, Lindsay realized, around forty years old, no more. She was wearing what might have been a uniform: a neat black dress with white collar and cuffs, but no apron. Was she a waitress? Lindsay looked at the woman, and then at the plates she was somewhat furtively carrying.
‘Goodies,’ said the woman, following the direction of Lindsay’s glance.
The woman appeared to have raided the sumptuous buffet table Lindsay had glimpsed earlier, through the crowds. Heaped on the plates were cheeses and grapes; there was a large wedge of some spectacular gilded pastry pie, some of the wrens’ eggs, a glistening pyramid of caviar. There might have been some lobster—Lindsay thought she glimpsed a claw—and on the largest of the plates was a cornucopia arrangement of little tarts and cakes and miniaturized meringues, spun-sugar confections, marzipan amuse-gueules and tiny black chocolate petits fours. Balanced on top of them was a marzipan apple, tinted pink and green, with a clove for a stem; a pretty conceit. This, to Lindsay’s surprise, the gaunt woman suddenly passed to her.
‘Delicious, yeah?’ It was delicious. ‘Mrs Sabatier is really pleased with these caterers. She says they’re a find.’
‘I expect I shouldn’t be here,’ Lindsay said, extracting the clove, and, for want of anywhere else, putting it in her pocket. ‘I hope this isn’t out of bounds…’