Seducing Ingrid Bergman (32 page)

Everything around her grows cold and dark. She staggers over suppressed gulps, feels her cheeks now hot with tears.

The truth hits her. The world has an edge and Capa has fallen off it.

Impressions rush in on her, converge in a single spot at the centre of her chest. Her throat swells so that she can hardly swallow.

She remembers the smell of him in her bed, the way he made it warm and musky, lending it a sweet heaviness; she remembers the wet shine of his eyes and how he’d stretch there next to her so that she could touch the whole length of his body; she recalls how he found everything funny – not because it was, particularly, but because the sense of merriment he felt couldn’t help but spill – and now something in her revolts at the thought that he could have gone from the world. Her whole being shouts out, ‘No!’

And yet part of her feels ashamed. What right does she have to feel this grief? She had the chance to save him from himself, didn’t she, to prevent him going away again? She had the power to rescue him. And she let him go. Let him go in order to protect herself.

She realizes something else: she always thought this moment would come, always feared it was inevitable. It seems obvious now, looking back, that things were going to turn out this way. He went to a place she couldn’t go, somewhere she couldn’t follow, and while she tried hard to imagine a world in which they might be together for ever, she always came up against this area of darkness, a space she could not live inside.

Her legs unsteady, she emerges onto the stage. The theatre is empty. She stands for a few seconds, lost in the silence, contemplating the red plush seats, the litter of used tickets, the hanging branches of lights.

Without warning, a man emerges from the shadows brandishing a camera.

*   *   *

In moving forwards to meet the moment, I feel the wind rush from some dark mouth like the future hungrily sucking me in.

My blood is using up the redness of the world. It feels like there’s a needle in my chest when I breathe. At first I try to resist the pain. Then I give myself up to the hurt that surges through my body. And slowly comes a remote floaty sensation. My brain shuffles pictures, generating an inner mingled hum.

My fingers open like a starfish and return slowly to a limp leaf curl.

I enter a vast nameless space, shadowless, beyond perspective, where it’s impossible to know what is up or down.

It’s a moment of exceptional balance.

Everything grows hushed as at an eclipse.

I think of Ingrid. It is her image that enters my head, and though there have been other women and several years in between, I can’t forget her because I know it was my one chance to get out of this mess, to avoid all this horror, and I blew it.

I can’t let go of the memory of her face because it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and it makes me happy to think of it even though I’m lost. And while I’m startled by the vastness and the silence, things don’t seem quite so terrible in this instant, just still and quiet and blind.

At the last possible second, the world goes stretchy. A dream-like distension, moving from colour to black and white.

The moment composes itself.

The darkness possesses me, inhabits and takes hold of me, grows without me knowing until I find myself consumed.

My eyes like a doll’s are lifeless, misted like the skin of a plum.

It’s as though someone has opened the back of a camera in sunlight and all the images have whited-out.

Past and future dissolve until there’s only the present, this instant, now. And slowly in this crumpled moment, emptied of the vibrations of life, I feel absorbed like a liquid, embraced like a lover, a whisper of dust, still warm.

*   *   *

‘Miss Bergman?’

Ingrid looks up, startled as the photographer takes a shot of her standing alone on the stage.

The flash blinds her for a second then fades, leaving Ingrid’s face frozen in the afterglow. There follows another explosion of light as he gets right up close.

‘Thank you, Miss Bergman,’ he says.

And as he retreats, with the spots of light still staining her eyes like glimmers in a cave, there’s something about his jaunty walk, his rapid manner, his roguish charm and streetwise liveliness that makes her want to call him back. But by the time she’s registered the fact, he’s gone, vanished as if by magic at the back of the theatre, slipped through the door beyond.

She feels herself grow pale, which is strange because her face has always enjoyed high colour. It’s part of her shyness, her lid-fluttering diffidence – that sudden rush of blood through the capillaries to the thin surface of her skin. What she would do for that now, to enjoy that hectic element in her veins again and feel her face quicken with a hot prickly flush. At this moment, it is heat she needs.

All she can think of is Capa, the fact that he’s gone. She wants to hold him, shake him back to life, tell him how glad he made her, how happy she felt just being with him. And while she knows that it’s too late and there are too many moments to recover, still something of him lingers in the dark, a recreated sweetness that mingles with the warm scents of the June evening beyond.

Live intelligently, he once told her.

She stands motionless, a mockery of heroism in her medieval breastplate and ridiculously fringed hair. She thinks about what he said, and in this instant a gust of love runs through her. She holds her breath for what seems longer than is possible while her ice-blue eyes grow clear again and the lights strike unexpected rainbows on the stage.

Alfred Hitchcock slyly dramatized the relationship between Robert Capa and Ingrid Bergman in his film
Rear Window
, released in
1954
.

That same year, covering the beginnings of the war in Vietnam, Capa stepped on a landmine and was killed. He was
40
.

Ingrid left Petter Lindstrom for Italian director Roberto Rossellini. The resulting scandal forced her to leave America. Though it yielded three children, including the actress Isabella Rossellini, the marriage failed. Ingrid made a successful Hollywood comeback in 1956, went on to secure two further Academy Awards, and married once more. She died on her 67th birthday after a final glass of champagne.

Acknowledgements

Books that proved especially useful in researching the novel include Robert Capa’s memoir of the Second World War,
Slightly Out of Focus
and Ingrid Bergman’s autobiography,
My Story
, written with Alan Burgess. In addition, biographies of Capa by Richard Whelan and Alex Kershaw, and of Bergman by Charlotte Chandler, Laurence Leamer, Donald Spoto and David Thomson helped to establish the essential facts within which the fiction is framed.

Thanks to my agent, Caroline Davidson, for her wise counsel and endless patience, and to Victoria Kwee, Laura Macdougall and Isobel Ramsden for their many helpful suggestions. Thanks to Venetia Butterfield at Viking for her initial faith and subsequent encouragement, and to Elspeth Sinclair for her impeccable editing. Thanks to Katy Ricks and Sevenoaks School for the award of a Taylor Fellowship, which helped give me time to write. And thanks ultimately to Ruth, Saul and Ethan for their love and unstinting support.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

SEDUCING INGRID BERGMAN.
Copyright © 2012 by Chris Greenhalgh. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

The extract on page vii is taken from
Great Stars: Ingrid Bergman
by David Thomson (Penguin Books, 2009). Copyright © David Thomson, 2009.

www.stmartins.com

First published in Great Britain by the Penguin Group

First U.S. Edition: March 2014

eISBN 9781250034977

First eBook edition: February 2014