Seducing Ingrid Bergman (19 page)

Afterwards he watches her pee. ‘Did you come?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What do you mean, sort of?’

‘I sort of came.’

‘Well, did you or didn’t you?’

Her hair hangs down in front of her face. ‘All right, no.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You see? Now you’re angry.’

‘I’m not angry,’ he says.

In the morning, half-awake, Petter hears water from the shower drill into the bath. Unusually Ingrid is up before him. She’s washing me off her, he thinks.

Before taking his own shower, he bends down and executes fifty press-ups on the bedroom floor, feels his heart thump. He finds himself wondering whether one day he will suffer a heart attack from over-exertion. He wonders at the same time whether, following his cardiac arrest, he will be found in an undignified position. He also has time to ponder how absurdly vain such reflections are.

Dressed, he goes downstairs. Pia is in the living room, playing with her new French dolls. Ingrid is in the kitchen, no longer mussed and crumply in her nightdress but smart and crisp-looking in a dark skirt and white top.

He watches her over breakfast, sees her cutting and buttering bread, absorbed in the task. Framed by the kitchen door, he stops to observe her. He hears the tick of two clocks, smells the odour of fresh bread, sees the gleam of the knife as it cuts and spreads. He’s filled with admiration suddenly for this woman, captivated again by his wife. He has failed her, he thinks. He has not been devoted enough. He has concentrated too much on being a good doctor and her manager and not made it clear how much he cares for her. It is all his fault, he tells himself.

He imagines himself no longer here, gone away, dead perhaps. And he imagines, too, after he has vanished, Ingrid continuing as she is now, cutting the bread, carrying on as if nothing has happened, his absence making little visible difference to her. She seems so complete in her loveliness, he can’t believe that she’d need him.

‘That was nice, last night,’ he says.

She shrugs above the plates and the noise of the radio.

He notices as she floats past, ignoring him, that she looks and smells marvellous. He realizes that she must always look and smell like this. Her smell attaches itself to everything – to the sink, its aluminium fixtures, to the pots and pans that hang from their hooks, to the walls. He wants to kick himself for not noticing this more often, for not paying sufficient attention. And he experiences a moment of fear at the thought that these features, this fragrance, might be given to – or stolen by – someone else.

He will be a better husband from now on, he vows. He promises himself that he’ll do his best to improve things, spend less time at the hospital, spend more time with his wife, listen to her, encourage her, cherish and respect her.

Things will be okay, he thinks. Things will be okay.

13

It’s December and snowy when I arrive in New York with a single bag, two cameras, and an increasingly dog-eared copy of
War and Peace
.

My hand hovers over the telephone in my hotel room. I can’t resist the impulse. After several attempts, and still with a substantial time difference and distance in between, I finally manage via the operator to get through to her home.

‘Are your eyes still blue, Miss Bergman?’

‘Who is this?’

‘What’s your favourite song, Miss Bergman?’

‘Capa? Is that you?’

‘I came as soon as I could.’

‘I thought you’d forgotten me.’

Her voice is faint with distance. She’s just had a bath, she says, and now she’s sitting on the edge of her bed.

I think of her with lovely fluffed-up hair, her cheeks and throat all rosy, her body warm inside her gown.

She says, ‘There’s no one else there with you?’

‘Just my Leica under the bed.’ There’s a hiss and slight delay each time before her response. ‘I want you to know that I’ve been good,’ I tell her.

‘I miss you.’

‘You do? Really?’

‘What do you think?’ she says.

*   *   *

The cold in New York gives way to the heat in Los Angeles, where the sun puts such a sheen on things, they gleam unreally, adding a brilliance to the day. Everywhere there are palm trees, and pastel houses, with a sky so big and crystalline it seems the studio must have manufactured it. There are no power cuts or food shortages in this city. At night, the billboards glitter like dispatches from another world. The horizon hovers like a giant smile, fed with the energy that drives a million cars and sets another million kitchen gadgets whirring. The future seems spread before me, new-painted, glossy: the promised land.

I stay in a bungalow at the Garden of Allah. The name is a Californian fancy, part of a need to fill the wilderness. The cool white stucco of the Spanish-style houses disguises the hot social life that thrives just off the Sunset Strip. The rent is high, but the bungalow is furnished. There’s a box hedge outside, and walls frothy with bougainvillea. At night, the scent of eucalyptus and jasmine mixes with the stink of the gingko trees beyond.

The first time Ingrid drives over, she parks some distance away. I meet her beyond the police patrol and the guard dogs employed to ward off intruders.

She’s tanned, her hair a little longer. She’s lost a few pounds, and looks terrific. It’s great to see her, hold her hand again, hear her voice, that accent. Her perfume merges with the aroma of the night flowers, rich and strange.

Is she the same woman I met in Paris? Has she changed in any way?

It occurred to me before I arrived that I might be making a mistake. The wise thing might have been to turn around and go back to Paris. At least there, I know I’ll feel at home. The wise thing might be to tell her we’ve had a wonderful time, that we shouldn’t regret it for a second, but that it’s unrealistic to think we can go on. Then I see how inexpressibly lovely she looks, and just one glance into her eyes, just one glimpse of her smile, is enough to tell me I’d be crazy not to stay.

We talk for hours, catching up, and she’s thrilled to have found me work as a stills photographer on the set.

After an initial diffidence and a lengthy period of kissing, we renew our intimacy, twice.

Once more I feel that revelatory sense of freedom and well-being. Her skin, like sensitized paper, changes colour at the merest touch. And there on the bed our bodies become quick and hot and excited. Her body trembles like a radio turned down low, with a small vibration, a kind of purr. The sensation is so dark and sweet that I long to stay inside her, wanting the feeling to last for ever.

Still, I notice an impulse to cover herself afterwards. She seems unusually shy and guarded, folding her arms across her breasts, denting them.

‘It’s too risky, me coming here,’ she says. ‘I could be seen.’

‘So where are we going to meet?’

She looks sideways as if she’s heard a sound. ‘I don’t know yet. We’ll have to be creative.’

I’m about to say something, but she sets off across the room.

‘Watch this,’ she says.

Without warning she pulls a wig from her bag, a platinum blonde mop that she tries on in front of the mirror. She fluffs it up, regards herself from a series of angles. ‘What do you think?’ she says.

I think it looks odd, comical.

She notices my frown and laughs.

‘Is this really necessary?’

‘I’m afraid it is. The press are everywhere in this town.’ Her attention returns to her hair in the mirror.

‘Can’t you just be yourself?’

She doesn’t answer. Instead she makes a few sly adjustments to the hang of the wig, straightening the strands on either side. Her hands remain poised around her head as if any moment she expects the mop to fall off. She holds the pose for a moment. ‘How does it look?’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

She catches my eye in the mirror, tilts her head. ‘Does it look okay?’

‘I can still see it’s you.’

She lets the hair fall and walks away. She fishes a pair of dark glasses from her pocketbook, different from the pair she had in Paris – darker, more opaque and reflective, the rims lifting upwards, wing-like at the tips. She puts them on, checks them in the mirror before turning to me. Her arms drop to her sides. ‘And now?’ she says.

*   *   *

We sit in a corner of a restaurant in Westwood, at a discreet distance from the other guests. I watch Ingrid consume two scoops of vanilla ice-cream, with a double serving of hot fudge sauce.

‘I’m not allowed to eat this.’

‘Not allowed?’

‘When we’re filming, I’m restricted to cottage cheese and fruit.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘I have to keep the pounds off.’

‘Don’t listen to them.’

‘They pay my wages.’

‘If you’re hungry, you should eat.’

‘Then I wouldn’t look so great.’

‘You look great to me.’

She smiles, lifts her spoon towards me, taps me playfully on the nose. I wipe away the line of ice-cream. A sweet vanilla scent remains. A dimple appears in her right cheek. ‘Once, I put on a stone.’

‘Too many hot fudge sundaes?’

‘And banana splits. I couldn’t resist.’

‘That’s my Joan of Arc.’

‘The studio was furious. They put me on a strict diet. No meat or potatoes, no chocolate or desserts.’

‘What did Petter say?’

‘They told him to put a lock on the refrigerator.’

‘And did he?’

‘He had no choice.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘We were about to shoot. The costumes were all sized. He was under a lot of pressure.’

‘This seems normal to you?’

She shrugs.

I light a cigarette. ‘Next it will be a chastity belt.’

‘Over here,’ she says, wagging her spoon at me, ‘you need to understand, Petter controls everything – my schedule, my career. And what he doesn’t control, the studio does.’

‘And you let them?’

‘They’d say they were protecting me.’

‘You’re a human being, not an industry. You let everyone drive you. All you do is work.’

‘I hate not working.’

‘So then you’re happy?’

She shakes a cigarette from the crumpled pack on the table – another thing she knows she shouldn’t do. ‘I’m married to a man I don’t love.’

‘Have you tried telling him?’

Her legs begin a confidential jostling. ‘It’s easier to lie.’

‘Why don’t you leave him?’

She blows out a column of smoke. ‘Are you offering me an alternative?’

Window light falls on one side of her face. Little wisps of hair glitter in a frizz, a kind of halo. She pushes her bowl away, catches the waiter’s eye, asks for the check.

A little knife twists inside me. It occurs to me to ask, ‘Do you still make love to him?’

She rummages for her purse, finds it. ‘We have sex occasionally, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Isn’t that the same?’

Her eyes darken. With a little snap of the clasp, she twists her purse shut. ‘You want to know about our lovemaking?’ She folds her arms on the table, leans forward. ‘He keeps his eyes closed when he’s fucking me. He turns his head to the wall. Then afterwards he looks at me as though he hates me, as though I got what I deserve.’

*   *   *

She’s being slowly poisoned.

That’s what it says in the script. Her head aches. She asks for the blinds to be drawn because the light hurts her eyes. Ingrid suspects the screenwriter added these details to suit Hitchcock, who hates being in direct sunlight.

She’s playing a woman called Alicia Huberman, whose father, a Nazi spy, is convicted of treason against the United States.

Capa laughed when he first heard that.

She’s also a woman
good at making friends with gentlemen
.

Capa laughed when he heard that, too.

Alicia’s father’s friends have repaired to Rio after the war, and she’s persuaded by Devlin, an FBI agent played by Cary Grant, to infiltrate their group. At Devlin’s bidding, but against her better judgement, Alicia allows herself to be seduced by the Nazi mastermind. To gain the group’s full confidence, she even agrees to marry the man, though he is twice her age. Alicia, meanwhile, falls in love with Devlin. The feeling is mutual, but he’s too fat-headed to declare his affections. So she lives in constant torment, sucked in by a kind of vertigo. She discovers that the cadre is amassing stocks of uranium ore, storing it in wine bottles. But her cover is blown and now her husband, together with his evil mother, is slowly poisoning her.

In
Spellbound
, she had to play a human glacier who melts in the presence of Gregory Peck. Now, in
Notorious
, she plays a woman of raw instinct and emotional need who must harden her heart – even if it kills her – to do her patriotic duty, to do what Cary Grant tells her is right.

The schedule is punishing. Each morning she wakes at 5 a.m. The first thing she does is check to see that Pia is still sleeping soundly. The next thing she thinks about is Capa. Next she thinks about Alicia. And then she thinks about food.

She’s permitted a breakfast of dry toast and grapefruit, and occasionally scrambled eggs. She’s allowed one glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee, black. It’s a regime the studio insists upon, and Petter is charged with enforcing it.

Arriving on the lot at 6 a.m., Ingrid experiences the kind of certainty and sureness she rarely knows outside. She enjoys the drive each morning through the studio gates – the spurt of the fountain in the courtyard, the tall white spider of the water tower, the smell of wood as new sets are constructed, the long aisles of numbered stage sets like a lesson in perspective. She’s always on time, always courteous to the technicians, with a kind word for the make-up lady and a kiss for the boy who slips a sugar lump into her coffee first thing.

Depending on progress, they usually finish shooting around 7 p.m. and retire for drinks to Hitchcock’s office on the lot.

Part of her likes the routine, thrives on it. She knows she should count herself lucky. Being here and making movies is the stuff of dreams, a fantasy fulfilled.

Why, then, does she feel so unhappy?

In one sense it’s all very simple. She loves Capa; she no longer loves her husband. The position could be spelled out in a telegram. In another sense, though, she sees that the whole situation is monstrously complex. So, when considering her predicament, she finds herself stumbling over words, qualifying and correcting herself, still uncertain how she feels.