Deep and Silent Waters (2 page)

‘It made me look like a hooker.’

‘It pulled the audiences in, dummy! Put bums on seats.’

Melanie’s expression said, What else matters? She had a strictly cash mind, and would never have allowed Laura to accept the role in
Goodnight, World, and Goodbye
, a low-budget film for which she’d earned just enough to keep body and soul together, if there had been any alternative. But Laura wasn’t being offered many parts. Her name had no pulling power, so Melanie shrugged and told her to take it just for the sake of the experience. Better to be in work than out of it.

‘Bread on the waters, darling,’ she said. ‘And it could be fun.’

It was the best fun Laura had ever had. She had learnt a lot from working in an ensemble cast of unknown names, a cheerful, friendly group with not a single star among them. None of them, cast or crew, had believed the film would make any money, let alone attract any awards, but they had all loved working on it and become great friends. Laura still saw them whenever she was in London.

When she first saw the posters she had been amazed to find that she dominated the foreground: sexily posed in black lace bra and panties, her legs looking even longer than they were in real life, her breasts like melons, her green eyes slanting and cat-like, hair a blaze of flame around a face they had made somehow sultry and sensual. Laura had been deeply embarrassed. She had had no training as an actress, and was always afraid of being exposed as a know-nothing fraud. Her professional insecurity was mirrored by her lack of self-confidence in every other direction, all of which sprang from being too tall; since she was a schoolgirl she had felt like a giraffe in a world of pygmies.

Melanie had been her agent since she was offered her first film; but they were friends, too. Laura needed someone to talk to, someone she could trust. She couldn’t confide in her showbiz crowd: they loved to gossip and would pass on anything she told them. She certainly couldn’t talk to anyone back home, her parents, her sister or her old friends. Not about Sebastian. They would have been so shocked. She couldn’t tell them about her pain and grief, the longing she could not suppress although she had tried to forget him, the shameful jealousy of his wife. Rachel Lear was a legendary star, a cinema icon, an ice-blonde with a body men dreamt about, while Laura was just a skinny little red-headed nobody.

Melanie, though, was a tough, sophisticated city dweller, used to the muddle and confusion of people’s lives. Nothing Laura had told her came as any surprise, nor had she been shocked. She had simply said, ‘Use your head, lovey, forget him and get on with your career,’ and Laura had been trying ever since to take that advice.

‘I won’t win this award, so I won’t bother to go,’ she said now.

Melanie knew what was on her mind. ‘Look, he’s out in the jungles of South America, shooting some weirdo film about a lost tribe. He’ll be so late finishing it he can’t possibly make it to Venice by August.’

‘He
was
nominated, though, wasn’t he? For
Instant Death
?’

Pulling a face, Melanie admitted, ‘Yeah, he got a best director nomination for that. Thought it was a pretty crappy film, myself, too arty-farty for me. And it didn’t do well at the box office – the public obviously agreed with me – but it has a cult following. So I’m told.’

‘I thought it was brilliant.’ Laura had seen it three times. She saw all his films, had got them all on video and had watched them so often she knew them frame by frame, every word, every look, every gesture. She always hoped they would help her to understand him. There was a darkness in them that reflected the dark centre of Sebastian’s mind, a sexual energy, a deeply sensual force.

‘Yeah, but you’re one of his fans, aren’t you, darling?’ Melanie said cynically. Melanie detested anything that smacked of elitism. She called herself a socialist, but the truth was that she was one of life’s awkward squad, always out of step and spoiling for a fight. Luckily her prejudices happened to coincide with public taste, which made her a wonderful litmus paper for anyone trying to guess which way an audience might jump.

Laura reacted hotly. ‘Sebastian is one of the best directors in the world, Mel! He’s a genius.’

‘You mean he’s crazy, always goes over budget, is completely unreliable, spends money like water, won’t take advice. Is that what you call being a genius? He needs to do huge business at the box office to make up for all that.’

‘And he does!’

‘Huh!’ snorted Melanie.

‘With a lot of films he makes big money, Mel. He can always find somebody to bankroll him for his next film.’

When he chose, Sebastian had the charm of the devil. He could hypnotise hard-headed businessmen into believing every word he said, and he had the same effect on women, especially actresses, Laura thought bleakly. He got good performances out of them by focusing those dark eyes on them and making them his creatures. She had been mesmerised while she worked with him – they had been cocooned together in an intimacy so strong that she had thought she knew Sebastian better than anyone else in the world ever had. Only later did she begin to question that belief.

‘God knows how he does it.’ Melanie grimaced. ‘Whatever you say, I don’t believe
Instant Death
has a prayer. It’s up against films that have broken box-office records worldwide – and, anyway, he’s running so late on this South American film that the word is the backers might pull out before he shoots the last reel.’

‘That’s crazy! Why can’t they let him finish it first?’

‘Apparently they haven’t even seen any rushes yet. They keep demanding that Sebastian send over some of the stuff he’s shot but he ignores them. A couple of the stars have been taken ill – the food is terrible in those places – and they’re plagued by mosquitoes. Some of the crew have gone down with malaria.’ Melanie shuddered. ‘I hate places like that. Insects and dirt and bad food. Give me a city any time.’

Laura laughed. ‘Sebastian would agree with you, he hates working in remote places. Most of his films have been shot in cities – London, New York, San Francisco.’

A shiver ran down her spine as she remembered a recurring dream she had whenever she was strained. She could never recall how it began, but it always ended the same way. She was in a shadowy hotel room, impersonal, comfortable, characterless, and she and Sebastian were quarrelling, although she could never remember what about. Suddenly, his hands would shoot out towards her throat which made her back away, aware of an open window behind her, the familiar noises of a city street far below. Then he would give her a violent shove, and she would fall backwards, out of the window, down, down, through empty air, screaming. She always woke up before she hit the ground. For hours afterwards she would sit up in bed, shivering and icy cold.

It had never happened, of course, not to Laura. It had been his wife who had fallen out of a window. Why did she always dream it had happened to her?

Guilt, Laura thought bleakly, because she had been jealous of his wife. She had bought every newspaper that covered the inquest and read every word over and over again. Witnesses had talked of his wife under pressure on her most recent film, arriving late on set, losing her temper, turning nasty when she forgot her lines, or stumbling around so drunk that she kept banging into scenery. A post-mortem had shown that she had been drunk the day she died. She could easily have lost her balance and fallen out of the open window which had a waist-high sill – a dangerous window, the coroner said, and added that her husband should have kept her away from it. His criticisms were mild, though, because another witness had been present, Sebastian’s assistant, Valerie Hyde, who claimed that he had been nowhere near his wife when she fell. Rachel Lear had opened the window and leaned out too far.

A thin, brisk, down-to-earth woman, with a direct way of looking at anyone she spoke to, Valerie made a convincing witness. But Laura knew something that the coroner could not have known: Valerie Hyde would go to the stake for Sebastian; would cheat or steal for him. She might have been telling the truth, of course, but she would not have hesitated to lie.

Melanie said abruptly, ‘You
must
go to Venice, Laura – this is your first nomination, you
have
to be there.’

Laura shook her head. ‘Who am I up against?’

Reluctantly Melanie told her the names, and Laura threw up her hands. ‘Well, there you are! They’re all better actresses than me, and better known, too. I don’t have a chance.’

Furious, Melanie said, ‘Well, if you don’t go, I can’t. I’ve never been to the Venice Film Festival and I’m dying to. It’s a great excuse to buy a really stunning new frock on expenses. It’s not often I can do that. And you can’t wear just anything to Venice – it’s supposed to be even more glamorous than Cannes.’

Melanie loved clothes, far more even than films or plays. Her whole face lit up when she talked about them. She should have become a dress designer, but she had missed her chance, early on, by getting a job as a secretary to a theatrical agent instead of going to college to study art and textiles. Her Russian-Jewish father had been in the rag trade in the East End, and as a child, Melanie had been dressed like a little princess. It had left her with a passion for style and cut, and a taste for the exotic, which perfectly suited her long, straight black hair and huge leonine gold eyes.

Her skin was either olive or golden, depending on her health and mood, and Melanie needed colour to bring to life the beauty buried in her generously endowed flesh. She was larger than life, in every sense of the word, lion-hearted, a fighter, voluble and open-handed. She fell in and out of love with the same fierce concentration.

Over the last three years, she had built up Laura’s career with that same intense commitment, but it had been Sebastian who had made Laura an actress. Indeed, it had been Sebastian who had told her she needed an agent, when he first offered her a contract, and who has suggested Melanie, saying he had heard she was good. She didn’t have many clients yet, but would work harder for Laura than someone whose books were already full of stars. Some actors might have suspected a secret deal between Sebastian and Melanie, but they would have been wrong. Far from conspiring with him, Melanie couldn’t wait to get Laura more money from someone else. She had never had much time for Sebastian, and he knew it. That, to Laura, was testament to his integrity: he had picked Melanie as the best agent for her, in spite of knowing Melanie didn’t think highly of him.

Sighing, Laura said, ‘Mel, I really don’t want to go. It’ll be a nightmare – those occasions always are, noisy, overcrowded, flashbulbs going off all the time, hordes of people grabbing at you, … like going for a swim in a tank full of piranhas.’

‘You’re an actress, for heaven’s sake. How can you be afraid of an audience?’ Mel had never been shy or nervous in her life.

‘I’ve never been on a stage – you know that! Or had any training,’ Laura protested. ‘I’m not scared of cameras or film crews. They’re always too busy with their own job to have time to stare at me, and if I mess up or fluff a line I can always do it again. But on a stage it’s live. It can go wrong in front of hundreds of people. You can make a fool of yourself.’

She had learnt her trade by working at it, had picked it up as she went along, by making friends with the camera men, sound men, lighting men. She listened to everything they said and related it to what she already knew, watched them work with such open fascination that they were happy to suggest how she should pitch her voice, how she should move, and to show her how little she needed to do to make an effect. A sideways flick of the eyes could show fear, suspicion, jealousy without a word being spoken.

Melanie changed tack. ‘You won’t have to act, lovely, just stand there and smile, and say thank you if you win – and winning is a long shot, remember. But you’ll see Venice – and it’ll blow your mind. Sebastian was born there, wasn’t he? I read that somewhere. Born in Venice, but brought up in California, wasn’t it? They said he was born in a palazzo on the Grand Canal.’ She gave her cynical little grin. ‘I always said he was a fantasist, didn’t I?’

Had it been fantasy? When Sebastian talked about his childhood Laura had believed him. It had seemed the perfect place for him to have been born: a Renaissance palazzo in the most beautiful city in the world. Only later, when death had entered the equation, did she begin to doubt him.

During the months they were working together she would have refused point blank to believe Sebastian capable of murder – but after Rachel’s death she no longer knew what she believed. How much truth had he ever told her? she wondered and she kept thinking that once you have admitted one doubt you find more hidden inside you, which multiply like flies on summer evenings, becoming a buzzing, stinging multitude in your brain, driving you mad.

‘Venice is one of those experiences that change your life,’ Melanie said. ‘Once you see it, you’ll never be the same again.’

That was what Laura was afraid of. She was uneasy about going to a place that had been so important in Sebastian’s life. She remembered everything he had said about his childhood in the golden palace on the Grand Canal, with its marble floors and walls, hung with ancient, fading tapestries that made the rooms whisper and echo as they stirred in the chill breeze. Sebastian had talked of long, dark corridors through which you had to find your way, like Theseus in the maze, from room to room, and out at last into the garden full of orange and lemon trees five foot high, in great terracotta pots padded with straw to keep the chill of winter at bay.

It was based on a geometric pattern, he had said, narrow gravel paths between low box hedges within which stood paired statues of Roman gods: Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus. In the centre, standing on one winged foot, the other pointing backwards, stood Mercury, his staff angled at the window of one room from which over the centuries, family legend said, several members of the Angeli family had fallen to their deaths.

‘Murdered?’ she had whispered, ready to believe him if he said yes. Everyone knew about Renaissance princes who bumped off their enemies – the Borgias, the Visconti, even the Doge of Venice himself.