Gulli gave him a sullen stare. ‘What kind of contribution are we looking at?’
‘That’s better,’ Grace said. ‘Now, as you say in your country, we’re on the same page.’
‘And this is the master bedroom,’ the young estate agent said. He was a cocky twenty-five-year-old, toned and muscular, with mussed-up hair, dressed in a charcoal suit and snazzy loafers.
‘It’s a good size,’ he continued. ‘Much more generous than you get with today’s new-builds.’
She looked at the Mishon Mackay estate agency particulars, then stared around the room, taking in the ornate king-size brass bed, a mahogany dressing table, on which sat various bottles of perfume as well as make-up items, and next to it an Art Deco-style chaise longue. A silver framed photograph sat on the dressing table. It was of a couple in swimsuits, lying on the deck of a boat on a calm blue sea. He was smiling, his face tanned, with crow’s feet around his clear blue eyes, as if squinting against bright sunlight, his short, fair hair ruffled by the wind. She was a good-looking woman, with long blonde hair, also flailing in the wind, a happy smile on her face, a slender body in a turquoise bikini.
That was the thing with photography, she thought. Those captured moments. The woman might have scowled ten seconds later, but the memory in that photograph would always be of her smiling. Like a poem by Keats she had read and memorized once, at school, ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’. It was about two lovers, in bas relief on the side of a Grecian urn, about to kiss. That moment frozen in time. They never would kiss, never consummate their relationship, and for that reason, that relationship would last for ever.
Unlike reality.
With a twinge of sadness she turned away and walked over to the window. It had a view of the back garden, and the rear of a neighbour’s house in the next street along. She stared down at a wide strip of lawn, dominated by a Zen water feature in the centre – a cluster of smooth stones, with a dried-up channel around them and a fountain which was not switched on. The grass had recently been mown, but the beds on both sides and at the far end were choked with weeds.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to keep moving,’ the agent said, more arrogantly than apologetically. ‘We have another viewing in twenty minutes. This kind of house is in big demand.’
She lingered for a moment before following him, staring around at the room again. It was too tidy, the bed not slept in, nothing lying around. It had an unaired, unlived-in feeling.
She followed the agent out, across the landing into another room, gently steering her small son, who was absorbed in a handheld computer game. ‘This is the larger of the spare bedrooms,’ the agent said. ‘It’s a good size. Make a nice room for your son, I’d say.’ He looked at the youngster for approval, but the boy did not take his eyes off his game, concentrating as if his life depended on it.
She looked around with interest. Someone was living in this room – a grown man. She noticed a row of highly polished, expensive-looking shoes lined along part of the skirting board. Several suits in dry-cleaner cellophane hanging haphazardly, for lack of a wardrobe. An untidily made bed. Then they went into the bathroom. A row of colognes, aftershave lotion, skin balm, an electric toothbrush and several luxurious black towels on the heated rail. There were moisture droplets inside the shower cabinet, indicating it had been very recently used, and a strong, lingering smell of a man’s cologne filled the room.
‘What is the owner’s reason for selling?’ she asked.
‘He’s a detective, I understand, with Sussex Police.’
She said nothing.
‘This was his marital home,’ he went on. ‘I understand he’s separated from his wife. I don’t know any more, really. I can find out for you if you’re interested?’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘I’ve got a cousin in the police,’ he went on. ‘He said the divorce rate’s very high among coppers.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘Yeah. I suppose it’s their lifestyle. Lot of shift work. Late hours, stuff like that.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
He led them downstairs, into the narrow hallway and through into the sitting room, which was decorated in a minimalist style with futon sofas, and a low, central Japanese table. In one corner stood an antique jukebox, and on the floor in front of it was a mess of old vinyl records, some out of their sleeves, and several untidy piles of CDs. ‘This is nice, big windows and a working fireplace,’ he said. ‘A good family room.’
She stared around, while the boy continued playing his game, an uneven
beep-beep-beep, beep, beep-boing
coming from his device. In particular she stared at the jukebox. Casting her mind back to her life of ten years ago. Then they walked through into a large, open-plan kitchen-dining room.
‘I understand this used to be two rooms which the owner knocked into one. It could of course be kept like this, or changed back to a separate kitchen and dining room,’ he said.
Of course it could!
she thought. And then she noticed the goldfish. It was in a round bowl on the work surface close to a microwave, with a tall plastic hopper for dispensing food, clipped to the side.
She walked over and pressed her face close to the bowl. The fish looked old and bloated, opening and closing its mouth in a slow, steady, gormless rhythm. Whatever golden orange colour it had once had was now faded to a rusty grey.
The boy suddenly looked up from his game, followed his mother over and peered into the bowl, too. ‘
Schöner Goldfisch!
’ he said.
‘
Wirklich hübsch, mein Schatz!
’ she replied.
The estate agent watched her curiously.
‘Marlon?’ she whispered.
The fish opened and closed its mouth.
‘Marlon?’ she repeated.
‘
Warum nennst du ihn Marlon, Mama?
’
‘Because that’s his name,
mein Liebling!
’
The agent frowned. ‘You know its name?’
Could a goldfish live this long, Sandy wondered? Over ten years? ‘Maybe,’ she replied.
‘Larry, we have a bit of a problem with the script,’ the film’s veteran director Jack Jordan said, peering up at the massive chandelier in the Royal Pavilion Banqueting Room. The craggy, world-weary film director, a few days shy of his seventieth birthday, seemed even more gloomy than usual. His eyes, shrouded by the long peak of his baseball cap, looked like two reluctantly prised-open molluscs.
Having forked out his last $100,000 to keep the production going, Larry Brooker was in no mood for yet another tantrum from this chronic worrier. He ended his phone call to their sales agent, who had the great news that he had just managed to sell Romanian rights in
The King’s Lover
for 50,000 bucks. The agent assured him this was a very good price for Romania. Yeah, right, it might be, but at their current rate of cash burn, 50,000 bucks was barely enough to keep the pre-production going for four more days; and that was before deducting the 20 per cent sales commission that would be sliced off the top.
Brooker was feeling particularly spaced out and irritable today – a combination of jet lag, and the sleeping pill he had taken to counteract it which felt like it was only kicking in now, some fifteen hours after he had popped it. Problems. There were always problems on productions. As the producer, you had to keep the whole thing together, and you were always up against the wall of the schedule, with every conceivable event you could imagine conspiring against you to get less footage in the can each day than you needed – and as a consequence to send you soaring over budget. Production on any movie became a morass of many different, simultaneous problems melded into one giant motherfucker. Weather, accidents, tantrums, local bureaucracy, script lines that did not work when you tried to film them, neurotic actors, jealous actors, bitchy actors, egotistical actors, drunk actors, slow actors; God love them all.
In his experience the movie directors themselves were among the worst offenders. He’d never worked with one who hadn’t moaned about the length of time he had to get a crucial scene in the can, or about the lack of budget for special effects, or the shooting schedule he was meant to stick to. Why did every fucking film director he’d ever worked with need a wet nurse?
‘What kind of a problem, Jack?’ he responded.
‘Well, a bit of a technical problem with the script.’
Just from the way Jordan spoke, Brooker got the sense he was about to be mightily pissed off. In his baggy black T-shirt, even baggier jeans and his signature black Gucci loafers, he looked his director squarely in the eyes. ‘What technical problem, exactly?’
All of Jordan’s acolytes stood around him, like he was some kind of deity. The Location Manager, the Line Producer, the Production Secretary, the Production Designer, the Director of Photography, the First Assistant Director, and his Personal Assistant.
‘With the script? What kind of
technical
problem?’
‘Looks like whoever researched it has screwed up, big time.’
‘Perhaps I could explain, Mr Brooker,’ said Louise Hulme, the Royal Pavilion’s resident historian who had been assigned to the production. She was a pleasant, academic-looking woman, with long fair hair clipped back, wearing a pink summer dress and sensible white shoes. ‘You have this scene in your script which is a key moment in the relationship between King George and Maria Fitzherbert. It’s when he ends their relationship by telling her he doesn’t love her any more.’
Brooker squinted at her, not liking her school-marmy manner. ‘You gonna tell me their relationship never ended?’
‘Not at all, it did indeed end. But in your script, George tells Maria when they are seated next to each other at a banquet at this table.’
‘Uh huh,’ Brooker said. His phone vibrated. He pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at the display.
INTERNATIONAL
was all that was there. Probably someone calling about money he owed. He killed the call and turned his focus back to Louise Hulme.
‘Well, the first problem is one of historical fact, Mr Brooker. You see, during the time when George the Fourth and Maria were lovers, this building was only a modest farmhouse. All the grand building works, such as this Banqueting Room, weren’t started until a considerable time later. This room was actually completed five years after their relationship ended, so it is impossible that that conversation could have happened in here.’
She delivered the information with an assured, know-all smile that profoundly irritated Brooker. This room was stunning, it looked a fitting place for a king to dump his mistress. Who cared about historical accuracy? A handful of academic pedants, that was who. No one in a movie theatre in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Springfield, Missouri, or Brooksville, Florida was going to give a shit whether this room had been built then or not.
‘I guess we’ll have to take a bit of artistic licence there,’ he said. ‘This is a movie, it’s entertainment, not a documentary.’
‘Quite,’ Louise Hulme said, with a smile that masked a frown of disapproval. ‘But you do have another historical inaccuracy in your scenario.’
‘What’s that?’ He shot a glance at Jack Jordan, whose gloom seemed to have deepened further, as if the world were now in the final seconds of countdown to self-destruct.
‘Well, the thing is,’ Louise Hulme continued, ‘George did not have the courage to end the relationship face to face. So he did it in what I suppose would be the contemporary equivalent of an email, or even a tweet.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Well, he held a very important banquet in honour of the King of France – and did not invite Mrs Fitzherbert. In the court etiquette of the day, that was as formal a signal that a relationship was at an end as you could give.’
‘Lady, I respect you know your history,’ Brooker said. ‘But that’s just not something that translates cinematically. This is one of the biggest scenes in our movie. It’s the emotional climax of our whole story! They’re seated, centre stage at the table, surrounded by all these grand people, his friend Beau Brummell just opposite, and he drops the bombshell.’
‘It’s just not how it happened,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, it’s how it’s gonna
have
to have happened! Just look at this room; look around it! This is one of the most stunning rooms I’ve ever seen. I can just imagine the light from the candles on the table and the chandelier playing on her face as she turns from delight to abject misery!’
‘There’s another problem, Mr Brooker,’ she said, her tone becoming increasingly acid. ‘About Prinny.’
‘Prinny? Who’s
Prinny
?’
The woman looked at him reproachfully. ‘That was King George’s nickname – the name everyone called him by.’
‘Ah, okay.’
‘You don’t seem to have done your research very well,’ Louise Hulme said. ‘If you don’t mind my saying.’
Keeping a lid on his anger, Brooker replied, ‘Lady, you need to understand this is a movie, okay? I’m not a historian, I’m a movie producer.’
‘Well, the thing you should know is that Prinny became very nervous about the chandelier – he refused to sit directly beneath it.’
He stared up at the vast crystal sculpture, suspended from the claws of a dragon beneath the domed ceiling. It was wonderfully dramatic. This was going to make an amazingly visual scene. ‘Yeah? Well in my movie, he’s gonna sit beneath it,’ he said, defiantly.