Spring (13 page)

On their first evening there, James left the silent, frightened Garcia, the sulky Shoe, and went into town on his own. He parked on a meter near the station, and set out on foot for nowhere in particular, except that through some instinct he seemed to be making for the sea. Other than the ubiquitous posters, the only sign of the film festival were some tired-­looking men porting video equipment through the streets. It was early evening. As he neared the seafront there were more people in evidence. Most of these people, however, were walking the other way, and when he stepped onto the windy esplanade, under the tall palms and umbrella pines, it seemed to be emptying. The African hawkers were still there with their trays of watches and lighters, but even they were sitting on the lawns under the trees, smoking. Out on the water the yachts and the superyachts, though starting to fade into the smudge of the horizon, had not yet switched on their lights.

In the mothy twilight of the
hôtel de plein air,
Garcia and Shoe were finishing off a litre of warm vodka, taking the stuff out of mugs, mixed with warm orange juice. Shoe kept slapping his large white legs—­he was wearing shorts—­as the invisible mosquitoes went for them. ‘What are we doing for dinner?’ he said when he saw James, though he was inspecting his own legs when he said it. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I’ve eaten, mate,’ James said.

‘Oh. Well what about us?’

‘Take the van. Get something. Whatever.’

‘Can’t take the van.’

‘Why not?’

Shoe held up the Smirnoff. ‘I’m too pissed,’ he said.

‘Well… you should have thought of that.’

‘I thought you’d sort something out.’

‘Why?’ James laughed sourly and went inside.

Shoe had turned out to be a lazy prima donna, always whining about something—­he had made a fuss about not staying in a proper hotel, for instance—­and leaving all the promotional heavy-­lifting to James.

No one showed up to the first screening. The slot was a poor one—­two o’clock, when everyone was still lingering over liquid lunches or taking siestas in their seafront hotels. Still, it was a sad moment when they told the indifferent projectionist that he might as well take the film off the spools. And while Garcia and Shoe got morosely smashed, slumped in cane chairs in the British Pavilion, James spent the whole afternoon—­it was humid and hazy—­schmoozing strangers to ensure that the same thing did not happen the next day.

In that, he succeeded. Half a dozen industry types turned up to the second screening, and all left within ten minutes.

So that was that.

Except, for James, there was a postscript.

On their last night one of the Hollywood studios hosted a junket in the Chateau de la Napoule, to which he had managed to wangle spare invites from someone in the British Pavilion. Still locked into his promotional mindset, he moved through the party, sweating in the dinner jacket he had optimistically packed, and trying to set up an interview for ‘the talent’. The place was full of would-­be showbiz journalists, with their microphones and hot little lights, and squinting into one of these lights Garcia and Shoe played for the last time at being in the movies. Their interviewer was a young woman dressed for a party, in figure-­hugging black with a peach silk rose on her shoulder. She was not English; her voice had a very slight foreign intonation. Probably she was Scandinavian, though she did not look Nordic. She was short, and her hair, except for some silvery threads, was dark and wiry. Her eyes were topaz. ‘And how did you go about getting actors?’ she said.

‘Just rang up agents,’ Eric answered, drunk. ‘Just rang up agents. Spoke to people. Agents…’

She looked uninterested. James had only just managed to persuade her to interview his men, and they were not making a strong impression. Garcia, in particular, was all over the place.

‘And… And what sort of reaction have you had?’ she said, shifting a lock of hair from over her eye.

Standing off to the side, in the shadows, James looked at his polished shoes. There was a pause. He looked up. Julian was smiling steadily. ‘Well, put it this way,’ he said. ‘We’ve had only one person—­of all the people who’ve seen this film here—­we’ve only had one person who actually hated it.’

The interviewer laughed tactlessly, and James found himself liking her. ‘What did they say?’ she said.

There was another pause.

‘They weren’t very polite,’ Julian said. ‘Let’s just say they weren’t very polite…’

It had been an American, who stood up no more than ten minutes into the second screening and muttered, ‘Thanks for wasting my time.’

To which Shoe, with hurt British fury—­‘Thanks for giving us a fair shot.’

‘I have given you a fair shot,’ the American said, making his way noisily to the exit. ‘This is the worst picture I’ve ever seen here. The worst. Saying something.’ Which elicited some nervous laughter from the other members of the audience. The heavy sound-­proof door thudded to—­and then, following an interval of perhaps a minute, the whole place emptied out.

‘And,’ said the Scandinavian interviewer, struggling for questions, ‘what would you say about independent production?’

‘It’s excellent.’ Garcia.

‘Why?’

Garcia laughed as if it was a stupid question. ‘Nobody can argue with us. You know, if they tell me I can’t write… There’s the proof. It’s there, on the screen. If they tell Julian he can’t direct… If they tell James he can’t produce… There’s the proof…’

‘James?’

They turned to him.

He smiled warily—­and immediately Garcia and Shoe were pulling him into the white light, were holding an arm each, ignoring his modest protests. He no longer wanted to be publicly paraded with them. They embarrassed him now. And the small Scandinavian interviewer was quite attractive, in a pixie-­ish way. Garcia’s arm was heavy on his shoulders; Shoe was still holding his left wrist.

‘This is James,’ Garcia said, showing a leery smile. ‘Say hello, James.’

‘James’s the money man,’ put in Shoe.

‘Thanks, Julian,’ James said, freeing his wrist. He wanted to shrug off Garcia’s ponderous embrace too, but decided that any attempt to do this—­if it led to a scuffle—­might just make things worse. Smiling faintly, the interviewer was looking at him, twisting a strand of her tough hair around a finger. ‘Well I would be the money man,’ he said, trying to make light of the situation. ‘If there was any.’ He noticed that she had exquisite skin, exactly the shade of very weak and milky Nescafé.

He was pleased not to have to spend another night in the mobile home with Garcia and Shoe, who snored so sonorously that the people in the next-­door home had insisted on being moved. The
hôtel de plein air
was a low, humid spot, pleasing to mosquitoes, where the turf was squelchy underfoot and the duckboards in the showers were mildewed and black. Not that Miriam was staying in the belle-­époque elegance of the Carlton. She had an overpriced shoebox near the main-­line station, within earshot of the platform tannoy, especially in the quiet of the early morning, through open windows. It was at such an hour that James walked through lemony sunlight to where he had left the van, with his silk-­lapelled jacket over his arm.

Shoe was sitting on a white plastic chair on the smear of concrete that passed for a terrace in front of the mobile home. He was wrapped in towels, even his hair. Walking down the hill, James was surprised not to stir with irritation at the mere sight of him sitting there, towel-­headed, his narrow beard still damp from the shower.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Shoe just nodded. He was on the phone. He spent several hours a day on the phone to his wife. For the last four mornings, James had listened to one side of an ill-­tempered and seemingly endless dispute through the negligible partitions of the mobile home. This morning, however, he was pleasingly impervious to the self-­importance and monotony of Julian’s voice. He even felt sorry for him, to see him sitting there in his towels, negotiating some tired issue of matrimonial politics. He left him out in the mild morning air, and went inside.

There was no sign of Garcia, and when Julian finally tossed the phone down on the white plastic table, James stuck his head out and said, ‘Where’s Eric?’

Eric, Julian said, had vanished overnight. He had left a note. Initially, Julian had thought it was a suicide note.
By the time you read this I will be gone
… In fact, Eric had simply taken a train to Paris, and from there another to London. In the note, he said he had had to leave immediately—­unable to stand another moment of slow-­motion failure—­and that he did not want to see either of them ever again.

It was nearly noon when they set out in strong sunlight, leaving the wreck of their hopes on the Côte d’Azur. They stopped for lunch at a motorway service station near Avignon—­Julian eating his fill, as always when the production (i.e. James) was paying, loading his tray with starter,
steak frites
and pudding, wine, while James watched in silence. It was, however, a vacant and not a savage silence. In his pocket he had a piece of paper with Miriam’s London number on it, and while Julian fed he stared out the window, at fleecy flotillas standing still in the shining monochrome sky.

* * *

The very springiness of the still air seems sad to him. Perhaps it is just the way the warming air, on these early spring days, is so sharp with transience. The end of something, the start of something new. Time. It is intrinsically sad. Last night, for instance, James had woken in the dark to hear Hugo lapping at his waterbowl in the kitchen, and for some sleep-­fuddled reason he had thought—­
Many years from now, when Hugo is long dead, I will remember this specific moment, in the middle of the night, and the sound of him lapping innocently at his waterbowl.
And with a start of sadness it had seemed to him that Hugo
was
long dead—­how short his life was!—­and that he was hearing the sound of his thirsty lapping from a deep well of time. He unleashes him. St George’s Gardens is a little graveyard. Daffodils sprout eagerly between the tombs. Hidden behind the School of Pharmacology, it is usually very quiet—­this morning, the only other human presence is a man tidying away last year’s leaves. Hugo trots over to a white stone obelisk, and pisses on its pitted plinth.

Somewhere, in one of the trees, the first tit of spring is singing. He stands there listening to its song—­its up-­down song. Two notes, starting on the higher one. Up-­down up-­down up-­down up-­down up-­down. It sings them in sets of five. The sound of spring in London. Up and down. Like the next few days. The next few days are up and down.

When he finally spoke to her, for the first time since leaving her flat on Tuesday morning, she sounded irritable. (That he took to be a positive sign, since it was not him she was irritated with.) She said someone was off sick…

‘What, someone else?’

‘There’s a flu going round.’

… and she had been asked to do two nightshifts, tonight and tomorrow, starting at ten.

Testing the meaning of ‘for a while’—­as in, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while’—­he suggested they meet in the early evening.

‘Maybe,’ she said, as if thinking about it. ‘Phone me later.’ (
Up!
)

He did phone her later, in the middle of the afternoon, and she seemed to have lost interest in the idea. She said vaguely that she wasn’t sure what time she would be home—­she was out somewhere—­and that she would phone him.

Hours passed without her doing so. (
Down.
)

Five fifteen found him in a Spitalfields pub with Mike, a friend from his City days. When they were settled with their pints, James asked after his wife and kids. They were fine, Mike said. He had thickened since James first knew him. His wrists, his neck. Though he wasn’t losing his hair—­or not much—­somehow his head had an increasingly taut, polished look. He had taken, in the last month or two, to wearing a three-­piece suit. (James was in nondescript mufti—­designer jeans, a soft zippered top, Adidas.) Night was starting to fall outside on Commercial Street when Mike went to the bar for a second pair of pints and James tried Katherine again. When she did not answer he felt deflated. He started to tell Mike, in outline, what was happening. ‘Yeah?’ Mike said. Though not unsympathetic, the way he said it made the story seem insignificant. It made it seem as if next to his own unmentioned worries—­London school fees, the state of the markets, the travails of a long-­standing marriage—­James’s situation was essentially frivolous.

And though he was in fact a few years younger, James felt that Mike was older than him now, that he had managed the transition to a sort of maturity.

His phone let him know, in the usual way, that he had a text message. The message said—­
I’m home! Where are you?

‘What is it?’ Mike said.

James was staring at the screen of his phone. ‘I’ve got to go after this pint, mate.’

‘Fair enough.’

He phoned her as he walked under the heatless lights of Spitalfields Market—­an empty space after dark, except for the metal frames of the stalls and their multiple pale shadows—­and said he was on his way to Moorgate tube.

They met in the Old Queen’s Head. ‘I’m working later,’ she pointed out, when he asked if she wanted a drink. He himself was quite tipsy from the two pints he had had with Mike, and perhaps also from the unexpected pleasure of her presence. (He put out his hand and touched her.) Whatever the reason, he was in fine form. He told her about Fontwell Park yesterday—­upmarket pastoral, no shortage of men in green tweed suits and fedoras—­and about Miller. Miller was one of the green-­tweed-­suit wearers. He looked, James said, like an ambitious farmer on about a million quid of EU subsidies a year.

‘And what happened to your horse?’ she said.

‘She fell.’

‘She fell!’

Even later, James felt unable simply to ask Miller if the fall—­and the nightmarish ten minutes that followed while the screens were swelling out on the track—­was planned, was part of the trainer’s plot, or whether it was just something that happened. He found himself unable even to insinuate that it might have been planned. It just seemed too shocking—­that
that
was the way Miller had planned to stop her. And indeed, while the screens were still up and keeping their terrible secret, and James was standing there waiting for the worst with tears in his eyes, Miller had said, ‘Wasn’t expecting that.’ Un­fortunately, the way he said it, working a lighter, was not entirely persuasive. ‘Normally she jumps super,’ he said later, when the suspense was over. ‘She’s schooled super. Don’t know what happened there.’