Sextet Read online

  Sextet

  Sally Beauman

  For Alexander Mackinnon

  fear ioúl gasda, caraid

  gasda, agus duine gasda.

  Contents

  INTERVIEW

  I

  HALLOWE’EN

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  BONFIRE NIGHT

  VII

  FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  TWO LETTERS AND FOUR FAXES

  XII

  THANKSGIVING

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  ADVENT

  XVII

  About the Author

  There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America.

  D. H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, 1924

  Hippolyta: ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

  Theseus: More strange than true: I never may believe

  These antique fables, nor these fairy toys,

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends…

  Such tricks hath strong imagination,

  That if it would but apprehend some joy,

  It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

  Or in the night, imagining some fear,

  How easy is a bush supposed a bear.

  Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  INTERVIEW

  I

  WAS SHE AFRAID OR not afraid? The interview was drawing to a close; from outside the theatre dressing-room, where it was taking place, came the murmur of traffic and the wash of rain; it was early afternoon, yet the light was already beginning to fade.

  Across the room from her interviewer, both women seated on hard upright chairs, the actress Natasha Lawrence was positioned with her back to her dressing-table and its mirrors, which reflected her in triplicate. She was leaning forward a little, hands clasped in her lap, answering a question about her work. She did so in a low, somewhat hesitant voice, which, mingling with the sound of rain and the faint purr of a humidifier, had a lulling effect. Was she afraid? This question, and most of the other questions her interviewer, Gini Hunter, would have liked to ask, had not been, and apparently could not be, voiced.

  This interview, like many Gini had conducted in the past, had been hedged around with restrictions from the first. For the past year, Natasha Lawrence had been playing the title role in Estella, a musical by a celebrated English composer which had been a succès fou in London, and was now a succès fou in New York. The musical was based on Dickens’s Great Expectations, and adjustments had been made to the novel. The part of Estella, that lovely poisonous child, trained up by mad Miss Havisham to break men’s hearts, was given greater prominence in the musical than in the book. There had been surprise when Natasha Lawrence took this role—her first singing role—for her fame was as a movie actress. Confounding the critics, however, she had proved to have a powerful, true, sweet singing voice. This, combined with her acting ability, never in doubt, had helped to turn Estella into a triumph. Gini Hunter, an agnostic where musicals were concerned, admired Lawrence’s performance, but retained a strong preference for the original novel; this preference, obviously, she had been careful not to express.

  Now, after nearly a year of eight performances a week at the Minskoff theatre, an exhausting and demanding schedule, Natasha Lawrence was leaving the show. She was being replaced by a slightly less famous name, and the rumour was that bookings were beginning to fall off. Natasha Lawrence was returning to film work, specifically to a movie directed by her former husband, Tomas Court; this movie, Gini gathered, was to be shot in England—and beyond that would not be discussed. She was here, for The New York Times, at the behest of an editor friend there. She would interview Natasha Lawrence as she prepared to leave the cast of Estella. That, at least, was the reason for the interview, or its peg, given to the collection of press agents, PR representatives, secretaries and aides who stood between Natasha Lawrence and the outside world; the true reason behind the decision to run the piece was rather different—as, in Gini’s experience, was usually the case.

  ‘I hear talk,’ said Gini’s editor friend, a young man who was rising fast; so fast was he rising that he had attention span difficulties; one of his eyes, Gini always felt, was permanently fixed on what he was going to do and be next. He was playing with rubber bands, a quirk of his.

  ‘Talk, talk, talk,’ he amplified, flicking a band and catching it. ‘Talk about the ex-husband, for a start, white hope of American movies et cetera et cetera—but a strange man, by all accounts. Why the divorce? They still work together. I find that weird. Don’t you find that weird? I can tell you, I wouldn’t get on the same airplane as my ex-wife.’

  He paused; he toyed with deflecting to the subject of his own marital sufferings—a favoured topic—eyed Gini and changed his mind.

  ‘Talk about the bodyguards,’ he continued, putting a bracelet of rubber bands about his wrist. ‘Never moves a step without them, I hear. Why? Your common or garden Hollywood paranoia, d’you think, or more than that? Is she afraid? If so, of whom? Of what?’

  Gini sighed. ‘I’ll ask,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect an answer. Do you?’

  ‘You never know.’ The rising young man gave her an evasive look. He was already losing interest, Gini felt; his attention was returning to the man he would be tomorrow, or the day after that. ‘The Conrad,’ he said, surprising Gini. ‘I hear she’s after an apartment in the Conrad building. Why? Prestige? Security? She won’t get it, of course. She has about as much chance of moving in there as I have of moving into the White House…’ He paused. ‘Less.’

  Gini agreed with this. The Conrad building, once described as the East Side’s answer to the Dakota—a description that applied to its architecture, not its residents—was well known as one of the most desirable, conservative strongholds in New York. Gini could not pass it without imagining fortifications: castellated walls, a drawbridge. The Conrad, a bastion, was not the kind of building that admitted actresses, particularly beautiful, still-young, divorced actresses with a child—Natasha Lawrence had a boy, aged six or seven, she would have to check, from her marriage to Tomas Court.

  ‘You want me to ask her about the Conrad?’ Gini said. ‘She’s even less likely to discuss that. Anything else?’

  ‘A little glimpse of her soul.’ The rising young man was not without wit or charm; he smiled. ‘Come on, Gini, you know. Insights. Insights. Who she truly is. What makes her tick…’

  Gini gave him a look. She rose. ‘How many words?’ she said.

  ‘Fifteen hundred.’ The young man removed the rubber wristbands, tossed them up and caught them—a neat trick.

  ‘How many words?’ Gini repeated.

  ‘Oh, all right. Thirteen hundred. Thirteen-fifty max.’

  ‘Fine. You want the glimpse of soul in my lead paragraph, or can I save it for the close? Thirteen hundred words gives me a whole lot of choice.’

  ‘Now, Gini, don’t be humorous,’ the young man said.

  ‘Why not? This is a farce.’

  ‘True. True. How long have you got with her?’

  ‘One hour. In her dressing-room.’

  ‘Ah, well.’ The editor shrugged. ‘Maybe she’ll open her heart to you even so…’

  ‘And if she doesn’t? Which she won’t.’

  ‘Then we run the picture bigger,’ he replied with a yawn. ‘What else?’

  In the quiet of the dressing-room now, the actress was continuing to speak in that low, lulling voice. The humidifier purred; every so often, its machinery unde
rwent some minor galvanic disturbance; it would whirr and click, send out a sudden puff of water vapour, then revert to its steady background steaming. The actress was answering a question Gini had asked her about the most famous of the movies she had made with her husband, Dead Heat. That movie had been controversial, to say the least; Natasha Lawrence spoke of it in a measured, intelligent but impersonal way, as if it had been directed by a stranger and the leading part had been played, not by herself, but by someone else. Gini glanced towards her tape recorder, which was patiently recording this answer; most of the answer was unusable for journalistic purposes, and Gini suspected Natasha Lawrence knew that. She glanced at her watch; she had less than ten minutes left. It occurred to her that Lawrence, who had controlled the circumstances of this interview from the first, was still controlling it.

  ‘No personal questions,’ the press agent handling all publicity for Estella had said. That stricture had been repeated by the others who formed a protective shield between Lawrence and the outside world, as, over the weeks leading up to the interview, its date, time and location had constantly been unpicked and restitched. It had been reiterated finally, the previous day, by a deep-voiced and heavily accented woman named Angelica, the dragon-woman who was Natasha Lawrence’s chief guardian—or so other journalists said.

  Angelica’s role was part domestic, part managerial, part protective, said these sources, advising Gini to stay well out of her way. Angelica, officially, was nanny and caretaker to the actress’s son; unofficially, she was caretaker also to the actress herself.

  ‘No personal questions,’ she had rasped down the telephone to Gini. ‘You’ve got that? No questions about her son, or her marriage, or her divorce, or Tomas Court. And don’t think you’ll be able to wait a while and then feed them in when your tape’s switched off. You have one hour. In that hour, you can ask her about her movies, or her stage work, or Estella; she’s there to talk about her work and nothing else. She has to conserve her energy, and her voice. It’s demanding, playing an eight-performance week. You’re lucky to be seeing her at all—and if I had my way, you wouldn’t be. So those are the terms, and don’t imagine you can ingratiate yourself and alter them once you’re in there. She won’t fall for that.’

  Indeed she would not, Gini thought, looking at the actress, who, gentle in appearance, and gentle-voiced, conveyed nonetheless a certain steeliness Gini did not altogether like. She had been expecting that Lawrence would eventually drop her guard, at least enough to become expansive, and her own questions had been designed to provoke expansiveness. Gini had tried the technique of leaving a silence at the end of the actress’s answers—a silence most interviewees felt a compulsion to fill. Neither angled questions nor silences were effective; Natasha Lawrence said what she had to say, then stopped. She was adept at putting the onus on the interviewer; she did not belittle the questions asked exactly and she showed no signs of impatience, yet however much Gini crafted the questions, she answered as if she found them predictable, as if she were now speaking from a prepared script.

  She was better at evasion, diversion and deflection than most politicians. Gini, watching the minutes tick away, resigned herself to the fact that there would be, as she had anticipated, no breakthrough here. She angled another question at her, to which the actress began on a patient reply. She addressed this reply, as she had done most of the others, to the floor; Gini, free to look away, searched the room for something, anything, which would lend colour to an article she could already see would be workmanlike at best.

  This dressing-room—and she was sure Lawrence had chosen it as the location for the interview for that reason—was an anonymous place. The dressing-table behind Lawrence was bare of telegrams, cards or photographs. It resembled a table in an operating theatre; instead of gauzes, clamps and knives, there lay, in serried rows, the instruments of Lawrence’s profession, with the aid of which she could transform her own appearance, eight times a week. There were soft sable brushes, little pots, tubes and sticks of colour, a huge crystal jar of pinkish powder, on which nestled an unlikely thistledowny pink powder puff.

  Across the room, lined up on a shelf, was a lustrous row of Estella wigs. Next to them, hanging from a rack and protected by a white sheet, were the various costumes Lawrence wore as Estella, including that cruel child’s first-act white dress. They had a patient air, these costumes, Gini thought, as if waiting for the actress to inhabit and vivify them. That slippery white organdie was like a chrysalis, waiting for the lovely poisonous butterfly Estella to hatch.

  Could you play a character like Estella, Gini wondered, a woman trained up from her earliest youth to break men’s hearts, unless somewhere within you, you had the germ of such characteristics yourself? Estella, after all, was the embodiment of poor, mad, jilted Miss Havisham’s revenge on the male sex, and spiritual murder was her intent. Could you play such a woman, or indeed the strange ambivalent women Lawrence had played in her former husband’s movies, without being able to imagine them? And could you imagine them if you did not, inside the husk of the psyche, contain some little seed which, given the right soil, water and nutrients, might have made you into such a woman yourself?

  She did not know the answer to that question, which applied, she supposed in passing, to other women besides actresses. She would have liked to ask it, but could think of no way of posing it which would not sound banal or trite.

  She had less than five minutes left. She turned back to the actress and looked at her carefully as she continued to speak. Famous though she was, a physical description of her would be necessary for this article, and Lawrence was not easy to describe: beauty never was. She was wearing a very plain, dark dress; the three mirrors behind her on the dressing-table framed her lovely head. The two outer mirrors of this triptych were angled; all three were lit with bare, glowing bulbs, which created a halo, a fizz of light, around her dark, heavy hair, and her pale face and neck. The effect was to suggest that there was more than one woman seated opposite her; as Lawrence moved, or gestured, her other ghostly selves in the mirrors also did.

  The length and weight of her hair was apparent only in the mirrors, for she wore it drawn back from her face and gathered in heavy coils at the nape of her neck. Was she beautiful? Yes, she was surely very beautiful, Gini thought, but the grammar of beauty was hard to convey. Did it consist in those dark straight brows, in the etch of the cheek-bones, or did it reside in those astonishing inky blue-black eyes, which could convey on screen, or in the huge spaces of a theatre, the tiniest nuance of emotion, the smallest flicker of thought?

  It was perhaps in its mobility that the beauty of this face lay, for Natasha Lawrence’s features were expressive, even when her words were not. She looked wary and tense, also fatigued; whatever else she was afraid, or not afraid of, she was certainly fearful of questions, Gini saw. She glanced at her watch; the actress was already rising to her feet. She had two minutes left.

  ‘Do you mind having to live with bodyguards?’ Gini said.

  The question took the actress by surprise, as she had hoped it would. She covered that surprise quickly.

  ‘Of course. But—it’s necessary. In my position…’ She gave a small shrug. ‘I’ve lived with them for years now. You get used to it.’

  ‘I heard—’ Gini began, reaching across to switch off her tape.

  ‘I’m sure you heard a lot of things.’ The actress gave a slight smile; she began to move towards the door.

  ‘Is it worse when you’re appearing in a theatre? You must feel more protected on a movie set…’

  ‘Not really. You feel protected nowhere. Is your tape recorder off? I don’t want to discuss this.’

  Gini put the tape recorder in her bag and rose. Quite suddenly, she found she was tired of this; she could not wait for this meeting to be over, to leave the theatre. Interviews were supposed to elicit information, yet this type of interview rarely did; for this failing, rightly or wrongly, she blamed the assumptions and procedures of the in
terview process, not herself. After an hour’s conversation, she had obtained perhaps three or four remarks which she could weave into her profile of the actress efficiently enough; the resulting article would tell readers something and nothing, she thought.

  She looked at the actress, who was about to open the dressing-room door, and for the sake of her rising young editor, tossed in one final question, expecting no reply.

  ‘Is it true you’re considering moving to the Conrad building?’ she said.

  To her astonishment, the actress showed greater animation at this than she had done throughout the interview. She smiled, then laughed.

  ‘How do these stories start?’ she said. ‘The Conrad? I don’t think they’d welcome me with open arms, do you? No, I’m moving back to California. I’ve bought a house in the hills outside Hollywood. It’s being decorated for me by…’ And she mentioned a fashionable West Coast name; she gave a small sigh. ‘It’s due to be finished this week, so as soon as I finish in Estella…’

  ‘Can I use that?’

  ‘Yes. It’s no secret I’m going back to California. I’m sorry, but the hour is up…’

  She held out her hand and took Gini’s briefly in her own. Some polite farewell was expressed; Gini was reminded of the final prearranged conditions of this interview: that a copy of the article should be made available in advance of publication, so that the accuracy of the facts—and only the facts, the actress said with another smile—could be checked. Then she found herself outside in the corridor with the door firmly shut.

  Gini negotiated the labyrinthine backstage corridors, faint with a residual scent of make-up, hair lacquer, disinfectant and sweat. She came out into the alleyway that led down to the stage door; it was still raining, and Manhattan had not yet emerged from the day’s permanent dusk. She was taking the shuttle back to Washington DC, where her husband Pascal and their baby son awaited her. It was Hallowe’en, and—the interview already receding from her mind—she was anxious to be back. She walked towards Times Square, the bluish exhaust-heavy air pungent with the smells of a city winter, of pretzels and of chestnuts roasting at some corner ahead. She tried to hold on to her interview as she hailed a yellow cab and persuaded its driver, a driver of desperate, demented appearance, who spoke virtually no English, to take her out now, yes now, to the airport.