Eureka Read online

  VEREKER

  Charles? Please. I wanted to apologise. I gather I most unwittingly wounded you at dinner. Jane told me you wrote that notice in the Middle.

  CHAS

  Oh, don’t worry. No bones broken – I think.

  VEREKER

  I feel awful about it. Really. Will you do me the honour of sharing a drink before you dash off?

  CHAS, hesitant, is mollified by his charm, and perhaps flattered by his attention. He nods agreement.

  INT. SMOKING ROOM – NIGHT.

  CHAS and VEREKER sit in matching wingback armchairs. The lights are low, the mood conspiratorial.

  VEREKER

  It’s the strangest thing. I don’t usually read newspaper reviews, and I wouldn’t have done today if Jane hadn’t ambushed me. The truth is, whether they’re good or bad – and yours was exceptionally good – they have all, I should say, comprehensively missed the point.

  CHAS

  Ah. So what do you consider the, um, point?

  VEREKER

  I suppose I mean the particular thing I’ve written my books for. (He pauses.) There is in my work an idea that governs the whole and gives it meaning. It’s a little trick of mine, from book to book. It animates every page, every line. I call it a trick, but really – putting modesty aside – it’s an exquisite scheme.

  CHAS

  And no critic has spotted it?

  VEREKER

  Not one! Nor will they. I’ve given them clues – right there, plain as your face – and still they stumble about in the dark. So it has become, by default, my secret.

  CHAS

  Which I dare say you rather enjoy …

  VEREKER

  (smiling)

  I confess I do. I almost live to see if it will ever be detected. But I needn’t worry – it won’t.

  CHAS

  That makes me determined to discover it. You say it informs every line. Is it a kind of esoteric message?

  VEREKER

  It can’t be expressed in journalese, I’m afraid.

  CHAS

  Journalese is all I have.

  VEREKER

  And fiction is all I have. We each choose our own.

  CHAS

  Well, at least tell me this: is the secret something in the style or something in the thought?

  VEREKER

  I must away to my bed, dear boy. Don’t bother about it.

  He rises to his feet, extending his hand. CHAS rises too, and they shake.

  CHAS

  I wouldn’t bother – except that you’ve made it seem so very enthralling. Is it something … beautiful?

  VEREKER

  The loveliest thing in the world. Goodnight, then.

  VEREKER walks away, but stops at the door and turns to find CHAS looking after him in puzzlement. He smiles, and waves a finger. ‘Give it up – give it up!’

  He exits, leaving CHAS alone, gazing into the distance.

  3

  Nat angled the Silver Cloud through the slender funnel of the mews entrance and parked. His agent’s offices were round the corner on Wimpole Street. He could have come on foot – it was only a ten-minute stroll – but arriving by car felt more appropriate to his status as a client. ‘I’ve got the Roller outside on a meter’ was a sentence he relished delivering. It tickled him to think how much he loved this car, the long sleekness of it, the purring throb of the engine beneath him, the way other vehicles seemed to defer to it on the road, moving out of its path. All hail to thee, Fane of Albany! The one ant at the picnic was the appearance of an identical motor in Antonioni’s latest, Blow-Up. Now people would assume that he was trying to emulate David Hemmings, looking oh-so-cool in his white jeans and shirt unbuttoned down to here as he piloted his Rolls around London. Nat had bought his a year before, but sensed he would still look like the copycat.

  In the foyer of Penelope Rolfe Management he flashed a smile at a couple of dolly birds clicking by, their outfits and make-up as vividly coloured as a kingfisher. Their smiles in return inclined Nat to wonder if they had the smallest idea who he was. The corridor leading to Penny’s office displayed framed posters of her clients’ plays and movies. He always felt reassured to see his own, an American promo for The Hot Number, flamboyantly signed in marker pen by himself. Six years ago, improbably. Through the open door Penny, on the phone as ever, silently beckoned him forward with her bejewelled hand.

  ‘Let’s keep that our little secret,’ she said, winding up with her invisible interlocutor and unloosing a cackle at their reply. ‘All right, my love, bye-bye.’

  Penny cradled the receiver and spread her palms in beatific welcome. She was wearing one of her paisley turbans and a sky-blue star-printed jersey dress (‘Biba, darling’). Her face, tanned and shielded by the huge tinted lenses of her spectacles, gave her a faintly mythological aspect: half agent, half owl.

  ‘What little secret would that be?’ said Nat, planting himself in a customised white-leather swivel chair.

  ‘Hnnh?’

  ‘You said on the phone, just now, about a secret.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be one if I told you.’ Her eyebrows arched saucily. ‘So I have news. Herr Kloss – Reiner – will be in town next week, very eager to meet you, can’t wait to read the script. Which is …?’

  ‘Showing all the symptoms of genius; I need merely to keep the patient comfortable.’ He thought it prudent not to admit he’d only written twelve pages. Film was a procrastinator’s business, in any case: they wouldn’t respect him if he delivered on time. ‘Did you hear back from the Chronicle?’

  ‘Yes, they said their correspondent didn’t mention your name in the Paris article for one good reason – she wasn’t told you were writing the script.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Yes, a staff writer. I made a note of her name … Freya Wyley.’

  ‘Freya?! Good heavens, of all the –’

  ‘You know her?’

  He did, very well. They had been friends since Oxford, more than twenty years now, and would meet whenever she was in London. She was a restless spirit, so it wasn’t easy to keep track of her. Last he’d heard she was on secondment in Paris, which would explain her being at Reiner’s press conference. According to Penny, she had been trying to get an interview for the Chronicle, but Reiner was proving uncooperative.

  ‘He’s right to be wary,’ said Nat. ‘Freya Wyley isn’t someone to tangle with. She’s sharp as a briar.’

  ‘She ever get her claws into you?’

  Nat allowed himself a wistful smile. ‘No. Though not for my want of trying.’

  Penny’s gaze crinkled in confusion. ‘You mean …’

  He shook his head, pricked by an unbidden memory of a night they had once spent together, years back, her in tiny black knickers, holding a Martini and laughing at the highwayman’s mask he wore. He’d loved that helpless laugh, the way she threw her head back so you could see the inside of her mouth. If ever there had been in his life The One That Got Away, it was Freya. Penny was still staring at him.

  ‘It was nothing – a passing fancy,’ he said, and coughed to announce a change of subject. ‘Have you talked money with them yet?’

  ‘I’ve arsked for twenty,’ Penny drawled. ‘They’ll probably go in at ten, so fifteen might be realistic.’

  ‘If fifteen is realism it may be time for me to switch to romance,’ said Nat, curling his lip.

  Penny gave a disapproving tut to this response. He had to realise, she said, he’d been out of the game for a while. You were only as good as your last script, and his last couple had been flops. Fifteen grand would be good money, in the circumstances. They talked about percentages and the fee he could expect if they didn’t complete on Eureka.

  ‘It’ll get done, though,’ Penny said. ‘Reiner needs a hit as much as you do.’

  ‘What? He’s just won a prize for Hanna K.’

  ‘He made that three years ago. There’s been one since that got destroyed in a warehouse fire – turns out t
he negative wasn’t insured. Very fishy.’

  ‘How did I not know this?’

  ‘It was hushed up, darling. Story like that comes out it could make things very difficult; backers get nervous, the studio gets cold feet. Reiner’s a lucky boy – they managed to bury it.’

  Nat was quietly impressed by Penny’s worldliness. He had doubted her judgement on occasion – she praised mediocrity and disdained anything with a whiff of experiment – but when it came to insider gossip she could be relied upon to serve up the goods, piping hot. The idea that Reiner Werther Kloss had got his fingers burnt was rather amusing. Penny in the meantime had switched to her brusque femme d’affaires tone.

  ‘Leave the money to me. You just get that script done. When we meet next week it’s important that you show him you’re someone who’s dynamic, who’s go-ahead. I know that might be a stretch.’

  Nat laughed. ‘Your confidence in me is touching.’

  ‘Well, I thought at least you’d have a draft to show me. What’ve you been doing all this time?’

  By a saving coincidence a secretary chose that moment to tap at the door and tell Penny her next appointment was here. Nat, rising from his seat, had been spared an inquisition, though Penny continued her pep talk as she escorted him down the corridor. She’d heard that Reiner was quite the taskmaster on set (‘You know what those Germans are like’) and wouldn’t put up with slackers. This wasn’t just any old job.

  ‘Fortunately I’m not just any old writer,’ said Nat crisply.

  Back in the foyer it was busier than before; clients were flopped on sofas, chatting to one another, waiting their turn. All this hopefulness, this hunger, he thought; it was almost poignant. Penny had called to one of the seated throng, who rose and came towards them. Nat did a double take as she passed him. He’d seen that face before – under a waitress’s cap at Brown’s.

  ‘Um, hello?’

  The girl, taken by surprise, stared at him.

  ‘You’ve met?’ said Penny, frowning from one to the other.

  ‘I believe we have, just the once. Though I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘It’s Billie,’ she said quietly, feeling her heart go like a greyhound.

  Nat inclined his head graciously, but his smile was devilish. ‘I seem to recall you were in … accounts?’

  Billie felt herself blush, but Penny, oblivious to the teasing, put in: ‘Don’t be daft, Nat, Billie’s going to be one of our best young actresses.’

  ‘Of course! My mistake. I remember your performance.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve seen her then?’ asked Penny, interested now.

  ‘Indeed I have. She quite stole the show.’ Nat, seeing the girl’s mortification, decided to take pity. ‘Look after her, Penny. She’s got talent, this one.’

  He said his goodbyes, and strolled out. Billie, who had managed a wan smile in thanks, felt her breathing slowly calm to normal. He had spared her. Penny was gassing on about something, but Billie was too hysterical with relief to listen to it.

  Nat swung the car east along Wigmore Street. The morning was warm enough to have the hood down. A little breeze ruffled his hair. He was still thinking about the girl – Billie, indeed – and the coincidence of their having the same agent. Naughty of him, really, to put her through that but at least he hadn’t given her away in front of Penny. After their little confrontation at the hotel he was probably the last person in the world she’d thought, or hoped, to meet again; but London was like that, throwing people together.

  She looked different from the first time. More nuance in the planes and angles of her face. He supposed she was twenty-two, twenty-three, maybe. No, he wouldn’t dream of it. He’d been out with actresses before; a long time ago he’d even married one. He and Pandora had met at Oxford, and trod the boards together: they still talked somewhere, surely, of their Beatrice and Benedick at the Playhouse, and their last-night coup de théâtre when they surprised everyone, including the director, by swapping roles. He’d secretly thought his Beatrice was in a superior class to her Benedick, but let that go. After university they had got together in London and within a year were hitched. They were too young, of course, and too alike, being ambitious, attention-seeking and wildly competitive. Her career in the West End had taken off while he was still trundling along the runway. He winced to think of her ‘luminous’ performance as Juliet at the Criterion; his own, as Tybalt, was mauled by the critics. Following another disaster, as Octavian in Antony and Cleopatra, Nat retired from acting, though he could never forget the humiliation. Pandora went off to New York; he went off to write plays; the marriage went off the boil.

  Aside from the conflict of temperaments, there had been the problem of his very particular sexual predilections. He had made clear to Pandy from the outset that he enjoyed spanking and being spanked, preferably with a cane or crop, though an open hand would do at a pinch. It always intrigued him to see the effect this disclosure had. Certain women he had tried to initiate into the practice made no attempt to disguise their revulsion; others had given it a go, as one might an alarming dish on a foreign menu, then decided it wasn’t their thing. Pandy had taken to it in a combative spirit, as he might have guessed, leaving both of them black and blue for a while. Yet it became apparent that spanking was not, for her, anything to do with pleasure; she had willed herself into the habit for his sake, and once the bloom of love had withered, she partook of it with mechanical forbearance. Nat, sorrowful, began seeking partners for his purposes elsewhere; he suspected that his wife had already had recourse to her own. Those terrible rows, though, and the tantrums! Even there they had competed with one another, to be meaner, madder. When they finally separated someone enquired as to which of them would get custody of the anecdotes.

  Cruising to the end of Goodge Street he laughed out loud, remembering. He held the wheel lightly in one hand, while with the other he drummed out a little tattoo on his fingertips. He noticed one or two admiring glances from passers-by as he dawdled at the lights. Everyone loved you in a Roller. His journey had become aimless, which was fine; the car gave him a dreamy sense of cushioned escape. As he did a circuit of Russell Square he saw that they were pulling down the old Imperial Hotel. Great dusty gaps yawned through scaffolding while the remains of the terracotta brickwork made a last stand, mortified by their denuding. Nat didn’t much care. He had no feeling for Victorian architecture and its fussy self-importance; he liked Georgian solidity and the clean, austere lines of modernism, and dismissed almost everything in between. The Imperial did have some history, though. Freya had once told him about a murder committed there in the thirties – one of the ‘tiepin’ killings – and it had also hosted the occasion of his first London lunch with Jimmy Erskine, theatre critic, bon viveur and an early champion of Nat’s. It must have been ’48 or ’49, just after he came down from Oxford. He’d dined out on the story of Jimmy halfway through lunch leaning across the table to ask, sotto voce, ‘Are you absolutely sure you’re not homosexual?’

  Poor old Jimmy. Another Victorian relic gone. He had lived to a great age – though after bestriding the London theatre scene for nearly half a century he had been in mournful decline. The Chronicle had put him out to grass and most of his books were out of print. His final volume of memoirs, Ecce Homo, had been published to no fanfare at all. Freya had written a fond profile of him in his grumpy anecdotage, and Nat had rounded up various well-wishers and theatrical bores for a dinner to mark his eighty-fifth birthday. About three years ago he had spotted Jimmy dining with his faithful secretary-servant George in the Ivy and had sent over a bottle of champagne. Jimmy had dispatched a note in return, two words, shakily written: non vintage?! At the end of lunch he had watched the old man being helped to rise on a pair of sticks and totter out with agonising slowness. At the time he thought that he might never see him again.

  He was right. Jimmy died the day after Churchill, in January ’65, thus ensuring that his final curtain attracted even less notice than it ordinarily would ha
ve done. The obituaries dribbled out, brief, respectful, lukewarm. It struck Nat that barely anyone appeared to remember who he was. At his memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields the organist played Chopin, Elgar and the slow movement from the ‘Emperor’ concerto. Nat delivered a generous and tender eulogy, but he was privately dismayed that so few were there to hear it. Jimmy had outlived many of his contemporaries, but it was still a paltry attendance for someone who had been a legend of hectic sociability. Later, he wondered whether he had been mourning the man or the evanescence of stardom itself, the blaze before the inevitable dissolve. As Jimmy used to say, Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse.

  Nat had never paid for a prostitute and did not consider himself a swinger. He had once stumbled upon an orgy, but had held back from participating. His own preferences in sexual theatre were for one or two women, in a variety of submissive and dominant permutations. He wanted sex to be a game of pleasure, wherein fantasies were a democratic enactment, each partner submitting to the other in equal degree. It still puzzled him that people should recoil from spanking, or think it perverted, for he saw it himself as innocent as the swish of a badminton racket.

  This evening he had a date with Naomi, a woman he’d met about six months ago through an ad in the personal columns of Gent, a favourite magazine. It read: ‘Pliant girl seeks strict diet of fun and games.’ Nat had scented a submissive, and wrote to her, suggesting they went on ‘a diet’ together. He signed himself Citizen Cane. Some weeks later he received a terse reply: ‘Send for me.’ A phone number was appended. They met at a club in Soho. Naomi turned out to be grey-eyed, well dressed, witty, and divorced. Just like me, thought Nat delightedly. They drank Negronis. When he asked her how she envisaged the rest of the evening, she replied, ‘Back to your place for a good hiding.’ Without further ado they repaired to Albany.

  Since then they had fallen into a semi-relationship, meeting for intensive and exhausting sessions of spanking, usually followed by sex. Their fantasies seemed to match one another’s exactly, and they varied their role-playing in combinations of master and maid, priest and acolyte, doctor and patient, teacher and pupil. Naomi, a dancer by profession, had amazing stamina. Quite a lot of the fun, for Nat, was talking about it afterwards. Did she prefer to be struck by a cane or a hairbrush? How did she like that whip across her bum? Had he gone too hard – or not hard enough? Only later did it occur to him to ask her whether she had had other replies to her advert in Gent. Oh yes, she said, about three hundred, all told. Seeing the shocked expression on his face she admitted she’d only replied to a handful. A handful being … how many? She shrugged: five or six. And those respondents, it seemed, were all occasional performers in her bedroom. Though he rebuked himself for his jealousy, he felt let down.