Eureka Read online

  Oh Christ, thought Nat, feeling something shrivel within. ‘Nothing. Not … I was just – your story, about Egypt.’ His voice sounded choked in his throat.

  Harry’s eyes bulged from beneath the eaves of his brow like those of a sumo wrestler about to grapple his opponent. Nat would have laughed at this image, had he not been immobile with terror. He wondered if this was the moment at which the gun would be produced. After a brooding silence Harry said, ‘Last time someone looked at me like that, d’you know what I did to him?’

  ‘Hey, Harry,’ said Berk, coaxingly, ‘we’re all friends here, right?’

  Slowly, very slowly, Harry dragged his eyes away from Nat and rested them on Berk. ‘We’re not friends. This is a business meeting. And next time I call one you’d better make sure the Kraut turns up. Bayern Munich? I’ve shit ’em.’

  He shoved his chair backwards and rose to his feet. He muttered a few words to another of his crew, standing like a statue in its niche, then turned back to stare at his guests. This, Nat decided, was his way of bidding them goodnight. He stalked out of the room without another word. The minion entered and began to clear the table. Berk, straightening, indicated to Nat it was time to leave.

  Outside, the late-spring evening had turned a velvety purplish-black. They walked for a few moments in silence until Berk, shaking his head, said, ‘This guy … this is not my kinda guy.’

  ‘Then why have anything to do with him?’

  ‘You know why,’ he said, and stopped. ‘Jesus, Nat, what the hell were you – I told you not to stare at him.’

  ‘I didn’t mean … Where was the gun anyway?’

  ‘Gun? Who said anything about a gun?’

  ‘You did. You told me, “Don’t stare at the piece.”’

  Berk looked aghast. ‘What? I was talking about his hairpiece. The guy wears a fucking toupee – can’t you tell?’

  Nat was momentarily dumbstruck. ‘Well, you confused me. When I was last in New York “piece” distinctly meant a handgun. Why can’t Americans just speak English? The word you were looking for is wig.’

  Berk had closed his hands as if in prayer and pressed them against his face. ‘Wig, piece, whatever the fuck you wanna call it. Why did you – didn’t your mother tell you it was rude to stare?’

  ‘I’m sure she did. I forget. Mea culpa.’

  ‘You’d better keep out of his way,’ said Berk, flagging down a cab. ‘And you’d better write a great part for the tootsie.’

  Nat chuckled. ‘Right. Just so we’re clear, “tootsie” is his – what? Pet chihuahua? Mother-in-law?’

  ‘Don’t kid around,’ said Berk over his shoulder. ‘And hurry up that goddamn script, else I’ll be paying my own plane fare home.’

  Reiner, back from Germany, was in a near-euphoric mood when he got to the studios on Friday. He was wearing a Bayern club jersey presented to him, apparently, by the team. They had beaten Rangers 1–0 after extra time, and he and Arno had joined ‘the boys’ afterwards for a party at their hotel. (Arno looked like he’d been on a week-long bender.) With the smile even wider than usual, Reiner had instructed the cast and crew to assemble in his office at lunchtime, where ‘a surprise’ would be awaiting them. Berk, chastened by the meeting with Harry Pulver, said that ‘soccer’ was all very well but they had a movie to make – could they not postpone his Bayern celebration till the weekend? But Reiner replied that his gathering had nothing to do with the Cup win.

  Nat, intrigued, had bagged himself a position on one of the sofas and watched as the rest filed in: actors, cameramen, lighting assistants, grips. Sonja, still in full make-up, came and sat next to him. Then Alec Madden drifted in. It seemed they didn’t know what was going on either. The room gradually became so crowded that people leaned against the wall or sat on the floor. Nat was reminded of students cramming themselves into a debating chamber, except the mood felt cheerful, relaxed; nobody was occupying buildings or pushing for a confrontation with the police. Reiner, bespectacled and unshaven, a string of beads over his football shirt, was at his most genial, encouraging people to find a space. When he spotted Vere, sombre in tweeds, he jumped out of his chair and insisted the older man take it. Only Berk, skulking in the doorway, looked ill at ease, suspicious of anything that smacked of the impromptu. Sonja leaned over to whisper in Nat’s ear, ‘He is possibly worried that Reiner will announce a pay rise for everyone.’ Her closeness to him, and the smell of her scent – Mitsouko, he thought – were rather provoking.

  When the room had settled Reiner stood before them, smiling. He said he was sorry for not organising a more comfortable assembly room, but this was a spur-of-the-moment thing so his office would have to do. ‘And at least everyone will now remember where they were when they first heard this.’ So saying, he called over to his sound operator, Franck, asking him if they were ‘ready to go’. Franck mumbled something and raised his thumb. Only then did Nat notice that two huge speakers had been positioned on either side of the room. A sudden amplified hiss made a few of them jump and the music began to play: a dense, chugging bass-and-drum beat overlaid with whining rock guitar, then a familiar voice – in an unfamiliar hectoring style – took hold. It was clear to everyone who it was. The rock stomp gave way, for a period, to an Edwardian variety orchestra, serenading an imaginary audience; then it was back to the fuzz-guitar, the snap of the gated snare, the somewhat ranting vocal. Sonja cupped her hand over Nat’s ear again, only this time she had to speak up because the music was at full blast. ‘It’s their new one. Reiner told me about it. It’s called Sgt. Pepper.’

  The music relaxed after that raucous overture. The band’s wide-stepping harmonies seemed to pour out of the speakers in great waves, rolling over the room with their melodic swagger. Irritated at first by their youth and good looks, Nat had affected to disdain the Beatles as just a beat combo riding a fluke. He clung to the elitist’s reflexive suspicion of popular taste: whatever the masses exalted, he despised, however much he may have enjoyed it otherwise. They were too universally adored to be any good. Weren’t they? His resistance, worn down over the years, broke altogether on the release of Revolver, which didn’t sound like any pop music he’d ever heard, by anyone. He was reluctant to play the juvenile game of having ‘a favourite’, but even there he couldn’t help himself: John, of course. He loved his sardonic nasal twang, his offhanded insolence at press conferences, the conspiratorial fervour he shared with McCartney when performing onstage, like they both had some urgent secret to communicate. He had a sense that Lennon might be a spanker.

  On the other side of the room Billie looked about her. The abrasive start to the record had left her bemused; she didn’t much care for it, really. It reminded her of the heavy stuff Jeff listened to, like Jimi Hendrix, with the guitars amped up to a scream. McCartney had been almost shouting to make himself heard. Now, as the songs unfolded, like flowers, she began surrendering to it; around her people had the stunned, pleasured air of concertgoers. Some lovely thing about getting better had stuck in her head – it sounded so friendly, somehow. Tilting her gaze she found Nat, who acknowledged her with a lift of his brow, as if to say ‘This is fun’, or maybe ‘This is weird’. Billie had long known a new Beatles record was coming, though after the ‘Strawberry Fields’/‘Penny Lane’ single she hardly knew what to expect. That last song, for instance, seemed to come out of nowhere – yet it was distinctly and sensationally their own. It began with John singing something terribly sad about a car crash, with lots of echo on it. Halfway through it changed, an alarm clock rang, and Paul took up the vocal – a more humdrum sort of lyric in double time with a piano behind it – before it switched back to John’s echoey dreamlike ramble. And then another spiralling orchestral crescendo, up, up, climbing to the tippy-toppiest notes of the scale until the whole construction collapsed on a great concluding note

  DNNNNNNNNNNNNN …

  They were all silent as the last reverb faded away. Someone began to clap, and catching the spontaneous mood the rest
of them joined in. Reiner, who had been leaning back on his desk, entranced, pushed himself upright.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, as the applause thinned, ‘you have just been listening to the future.’

  Afterwards they talked about it in the studio canteen. Nat had been enraptured, but he was struggling to articulate its effect. He wanted to know what the others had made of it.

  ‘Friends of mine saw them years ago when they were in Hamburg,’ said Sonja. ‘Rough young men in leather jackets, playing rock and roll. Now they seem like composers, the way they put things together.’

  ‘That last song was out of this world,’ said Nat. ‘Who’d have thought the band that sang “Love Me Do” would ever be capable of that?’

  Billie smiled. ‘I loved the middle bit, when it changed to Paul. It’s like one moment he’s conscious and the next he’s fallen down a rabbit hole and entered somewhere – I don’t know – where things don’t make sense, but it doesn’t matter, because they don’t have to. You just have to be there, to let the experience come to you.’ She made an apologetic shrug – that had probably sounded a bit fey, she thought.

  Nat was staring at her, an odd look on his face. She felt herself colouring with embarrassment. But instead of making some satirical reply he said, almost dreamily, ‘You’re absolutely right. In fact you’ve just given me the most wonderful idea.’

  She sensed he was quite serious. ‘Oh, well … my pleasure,’ she replied, thinking he might continue, but he was off in a reverie. Along the table she saw Vere, eating a small salad. She wasn’t sure if he preferred to have his lunch alone, but instinctively she leaned towards him.

  ‘Did you enjoy that, Vere?’

  Startled, Vere looked around, blinking his way back to attention. ‘You mean Reiner’s little entertainment? Yes, I was rather taken by it. Talented musicians. Something of the music hall, I thought, in there. I enjoyed the oompah one very much.’

  Nat looked sly. ‘I had an idea you’d be a fan.’

  Vere seemed to hear the insinuation. ‘Well, of course. I liked them in that silly film they did, horsing around. They’ve grown their hair a bit since then.’

  Billie turned to Sonja. ‘I didn’t know Reiner was so –’

  ‘Oh, he loves them. When we’ve been on set in Germany he plays them all the time. They are – what is the phrase? – his good-luck charm. I remember him playing one song over and over: “Day Tripper”.’

  Nat nodded slowly. ‘I fancy it’s going to become impossible to talk about their music any more without mentioning drugs. That sense of dislocation. When Billie talked about falling down the rabbit hole just then it came to me that certain of these songs describe – in the common parlance – a trip.’

  ‘Not an experience I’m familiar with, I’m afraid,’ said Vere.

  ‘You’ve never tripped?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve done that,’ said Vere, twinkling. ‘I mean I’ve never fallen down a rabbit hole.’

  At the end of lunch they were ambling towards the sound stage for that afternoon’s scenes when Billie caught Nat at the door. She had been trying to get a private word with him all week, but now that the moment had come she felt tongue-tied.

  ‘We were talking the other night – I asked you, do you remember …?’

  ‘You may have to remind me,’ said Nat.

  ‘About you coming to dinner?’

  ‘Of course!’

  The only thing was, she hurried on, would he mind coming instead to her mum’s house in Kentish Town? Her own flat was small and grotty, not really made for entertaining, whereas her mum’s would be cosy – and her sister was a really good cook. Nat secretly thought it a little strange, having envisaged an intimate supper à deux rather than a ‘cosy’ night en famille. He knew there was a boyfriend on the scene, though Billie didn’t talk about him in a way that invited curiosity. Perhaps he wasn’t made for entertaining, either. And her mother being there was probably a sign of encouragement, a meet-and-greet opportunity – out with the old boyfriend, in with the new.

  She had surprised him. The light-fingered opportunist he had first encountered at Brown’s had turned out to be a charmer. The faint vibrations of self-doubt coming off her only enhanced the allure. He had stuck his neck out when he’d suggested her for Jane – she was untried in front of a camera – but the gamble had paid off; he knew that Reiner was pleased with her. She’d repaid his faith in other ways, too, never complaining, always on time, friendly to everyone. Compared with Pandora she was a veritable paragon of humility. On previous films he hadn’t hung around on set, owing to the boredom involved and the daily mortification of his screenplay being mangled in front of his eyes. It was like sausages; you didn’t really want to see what went into the making of a film. With Eureka it was different, since the provisional – unfinished – nature of the script required him to be on hand for tinkering. Yet he’d found himself secretly enthused on arriving at the studio each day, knowing that some part of it would entail the open and entirely legitimate contemplation of Billie Cantrip. She had one of those faces, pretty at a certain angle, pretty ordinary at another. Not so much the girl next door as … the girl next door but one. So what? Looks weren’t everything. But everybody liked to look.

  The opening night of the Ossian Blackler retrospective at the Royal Academy was one of those events where the bohemian beau monde met their plutocratic counterparts head-on. You could distinguish one tribe from the other by their respective commitment to velvet or jewellery. Velvet frock coats, velvet skirts, velvet loons, velvet jackets, velvet fedoras, velvet waistcoats, velvet furbelows, velvet minis, everywhere you looked someone had it on: velvet was simply the element you moved in, the unspoken sartorial handshake of the party-going classes. Freya was wearing a slim-cut bottle-green trouser suit, in velvet, and was half wishing she’d chosen something else.

  The faces and ages of the assembled were wholly disparate: blanched debby girls with kohled eyelashes, lizard-skinned old ladies with handbags to match, mop-haired Lotharios with Zapata moustaches, choleric old boys in club blazers, skinny models in frilled blouses and thigh-high boots, society matrons in black with costly bangles flashing on their wrists. They drank sparkling wine. Freya had brought along her friend Fosh, a photographer colleague from their days on the bygone magazine Frame. Stocky and stubbly, he carried the extra plumpness of middle age with an undefiant ease; he had been around ‘beautiful people’ too long to be afflicted with self-consciousness. He was surveying the room with the sceptical eye of a smudger, though it was an evening off for him.

  ‘Same old faces, every night. You wonder what on earth they have to say to each other. Must be all of twenty-four hours since they last met. And what’s this we’re drinking? Crémant? Thought at least they’d break out the champagne for Ossie.’

  ‘You’ve changed,’ Freya said. ‘Time was when you’d have loved being surrounded by dolly birds and tipping back free booze.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Married man, now,’ Fosh said with peeved pride, his eyes devouring a pair of young women on a flounce-by.

  ‘Being married shouldn’t exclude you from having fun. Or from having a good ogle, it would seem.’

  Fosh gave her a sidelong look. ‘God, you’re like Lindy – never fails to catch me having a shufti at the talent.’

  ‘That must be nice for her.’

  ‘You can look – even if you can’t touch,’ he said with a note of regret.

  ‘Talking of which, we should try and have a once-over of the paintings before it gets too crowded.’

  They pushed off into the heaving sea of guests, some of them clustered around the paintings, more of them absorbed in each other’s company. The Blackler oeuvre dated from 1946, when he was still at the Central School of Art; street scenes from his stamping ground of Paddington and Soho mingled with early portraits of ill-looking girlfriends and fly young men in dark suits and ties. His speciality was the nuanced notation of flesh colours, translucent and bluish in the strain
ed years of rationing, then graduating to a more ambitious palette of greys, creams, pinks as pale as onion skins. Nudes started to proliferate in his work, though exhibited en masse Freya couldn’t help noticing that as the brushwork got bolder Ossie’s feeling for the person within grew coarser. His sympathy for these vulnerable forked creatures appeared to thin before her eyes.

  Fosh saw them differently. In his early years Ossie had struggled to impose himself. Like many young painters he borrowed from his masters, muddling their styles. Once he had discovered his own technique, he was liberated. No longer did he feel obliged to soften the reality of the human condition – the shrunken, sagging flesh, the defeated expressions. He had scoured his work of sentimentality, refusing to compromise or to mollify. After years of uncertainty he had learned to paint as he saw.

  ‘I’m not denying the bravura of it,’ said Freya, standing before a portrait of Hetty Cavendish, a favourite model of Ossie’s whom she had once known. ‘I just think, along the way, he’s become blind to them as people. Goya could be hard on his subjects, too, but he never denied them a soul. There’s something too ruthless in Ossie.’

  ‘He’s got a misanthropic streak, it’s true. But he’s still a genius.’

  ‘I’m afraid I disagree,’ said Freya. ‘“Dazzling” technique is a wonderful thing, but on its own it can’t make you a genius. There has to be something else behind it.’

  Fosh stared at her. ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something vital. Maybe it’s to do with feeling.’

  ‘Oh, come on –’

  Their debate was abruptly curtailed by a voice calling her name. Looking round she saw Nat approach, with a strikingly handsome woman in tow. Her face seemed familiar: she was slender-hipped, with amused blue-green eyes and a Slavic slope to the cheekbones.

  ‘I thought you’d be here,’ Nat said, leaning in to kiss Freya. He introduced his companion as Sonja Zertz, smaller than she appeared on-screen but possibly more exquisite. Sonja offered her hand and a ‘hello’ that sounded as if she’d rather been looking forward to this moment. Freya returned a helpless smile.