Extract
Chapter 1
(i)
He thought at first that it was a trick of the light,
a reflection, perhaps, or a large rock below the surface
of the water. The river was flatter there, a horseshoe
curved pool in the shadow of the mountain. He did not
say anything: his father was preoccupied with fishing,
and never spoke much in the morning, anyway. Instead
the boy sat and waited, watching as the sun rose, and
the submerged mass became gradually more distinct. For
a while he teased himself: perhaps it was a whale or
a submarine. But he was ten years old and knew better.
There were no whales or submarines in the mountains
of Slovakia.
Next to him his father cast, wound and recast his rod.
The boy had begged to be brought along on this expedition
and the father had reluctantly agreed. It had rained
so much that week, and they had spent too much time
inside: the boy wanted something to remember when they
went home to the city. But they had been off early,
and it had been a long walk down through the pine woods
into the valley after leaving the car. Now the boy
was
bored, and he glanced at his father, guilty at such
disloyal thoughts.
At last, too restless to sit longer, the boy got up
and began to wander around the wide corner of the river.
Upstream, his father had told him, the water was fast
flowing and treacherous where floods raced through
narrow
gorges, but here the flow had eased and was now beginning
to form ripples around the submerged object. It could,
of course, be a lost, sunken spaceship.
Out of sight of his father the boy felt brave enough
to paddle, and, stepping into the water, he edged closer:
it was something strange and out of place, long and
smooth and still. For some moments he stood in his
gum
boots and stared, and then, treading carefully, began
to make his way around the curve of the river. With
the sun behind him the object soon began to look quite
different.
Suddenly he knew. The outline was that of a car, but
of a size the boy had never seen before: a strange,
wide vehicle, perhaps eight metres in length, lying
at a sharp angle and tilted up towards the bank.
A car? It didn’t seem possible. The nearest track
was several kilometres away, up the mountain and through
dense forest. How could anyone have put a car here?
Very carefully, and using a dead branch to prod the
river bed as he went, he waded deeper into the water.
The vehicle was lying on a bank of sand, and with the
fine day the level of the water had been falling, its
sediment clearing, all morning.
Putting his face close to the surface he stared hard
at the car. It was indeed like a spaceship, with a flat,
wedged nose and banks of broken headlights. Edging sideways
he looked again. Now he could see a tyre, further on
a windscreen. Another two steps took him close to one
of the side windows, but this time he was not at first
sure what he was seeing. Objects were floating in the
goldfish bowl which was the interior---a cigarette packet,
the wrapping for a chocolate bar, a wine glass, a plastic
folder, a man's shoe, a wad of paper; but there was
something else, shimmering and moving like a sea plant
caught in the current.
For a moment he raised his eyes and rested them from
the glare of the water. Then, very carefully, he looked
again. Now he could see: it was hair, long and trailing
like a bridal veil; a woman, floating under water, one
arm up as though in some vain swimming motion, her cheeks
sunken, her mouth open, her eyes staring directly into
his.
In panic the boy stepped back to balance himself: water
splashed over the tops of his gum boots. "Father!"
he called quietly, almost secretly, his voice catching,
breathless. Then he snatched his head back. "Father!
Father!"
The boy's scream lifted off the surface of the river
and echoed around the little wooded valley.
(ii)
Charlie Holyoake stared at the patterns in the cornice
above him, listening hard. The sounds were unmistakable.
Two people were making love in a nearby room. He wondered
if one of them was Belinda. Unhappily, his eyes traced
the corner of the ceiling where the elaborate floral
plasterwork abruptly ended. That was the trouble when
once stately rooms in once stately homes were sub-divided
on the cheap: the sound-proofing was always hopeless.
With an oath and a muffled mew, which was not, he decided,
in any way familiar, the storm of passion abated in
an exhaust of moans. He was relieved. To have heard
Belinda making love would have been too much to bear.
But should it? He turned his head. Next to him a pretty
girl lay sleeping. Her name was Agnieszka. She was Polish
and had once wanted to be an actress. Now she worked
as a stand-in for the most spoilt woman in the world.
He wondered if he was in love with her. He didn't know.
And he thought again about Belinda, picturing her smiling
at him as she had done on those sleepy mornings. She
had always had the prettiest smile. He closed his eyes.
It seemed so long ago. How did he feel about her now?
He wasn't even sure about that any more.
He was thirty and these days uncertain of everything---a
thin, fair, short-sighted Englishman who had had an
idea, just a small idea, and then watched as it had
grown and mutated and won control of all their lives.
That was when he and Belinda had begun to fall apart.
Silently he sighed. Love and movies: a one-handed, blindfolded
juggling act. Too difficult even for Belinda.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly twelve. They
had slept through the morning; but then, virtually
the entire
cast and crew would be having a lie-in, too. A mass
lie-in or a mass lay-in? He played with the words,
pondering
whether this eighteenth century Polish mansion, the
Kapolska Palace, had ever before been host to such
batteries
of well organised adultery.
Sex was important to everyone, but to movie people it
was an occupational obsession. Movie people knew about
sex. They were diviners for it, scholars of it, gluttons
for it. The first day of location shooting on any movie
was virtually the declaration of an open season when
it came to sex; Steven Spielberg had once said something
like that, and Shadows On A Wall was hardly any movie.
Perhaps nervous exhaustion had something to do with
it, or boredom, or simply the many months of insane
extravagance, but, as the budget, and the way-over budget,
had risen to ever more startling heights, so had the
sexual energy of almost the entire company. Without
doubt, Shadows On A Wall was an extraordinarily tumescent
production, and he tried to calculate just how many
couplings would already have taken place in the Kapolska
Palace that morning. At least, he told himself, it took
his mind off Belinda, off the movie...
He stopped there. No it didn't. Nothing took his mind
off the movie.
He considered the girl next to him. She was breathing
softly, curled up, her arms crossed over palely freckled
breasts, her face almost perfectly triangular in shape,
her light hair spreading across the pillow. Such a pretty
girl, Agnieszka. Agnes. It sounded better in Polish.
And he wondered if she loved him.
He hoped not, but how could he tell? How could she tell?
How could any of them tell anything? They were in the
middle of a gigantic fiasco---a grand folly of unprecedented,
imperial proportions. "Shadows On A Wall: Shooting
Just Goes On And On And On And...", a headline
had run without exaggeration in the The Hollywood Reporter
the previous week. In a disastrous campaign like this
how could anyone have any judgement left? Shadows On
A Wall was a blindfolded rhinoceros of a movie, a runaway,
trotting wilfully across Europe, a hundred million dollar
production caught up and entangled on a giant tusk of
ego.
And yet..? He knew it was madness, but he couldn't stop
hoping. Shadows On a Wall was the best idea he had ever
had.
"You know your trouble, you think too much,"
he imagined Belinda teasing the way she used to. "That's
all you do, just lie around in beds and baths all day,
thinking and hoping."
His pride fought back: "Of course, I do. What else
am I supposed to do? That's what writers do. They think
and they hope."
Putting Belinda from his mind he climbed out of bed
and made his way to the tall window. There had been
so much rain recently, soaking days of mud and confusion
as they had tried, with the help of the Polish Army,
to re-enact Napoleon's march on Moscow. If things had
gone according to schedule it would have been shot the
previous autumn, but nothing had gone to schedule on
Shadows On A Wall. And now the Polish Army had been
called away on Easter manoeuvres, against what imaginary
enemy he couldn't imagine.
Pulling back the heavy, red curtains he looked out on
the day. He was surprised. It was sunny, suddenly spring,
and he allowed himself the luxury of imagining that
things might begin to get better. A hundred million
dollars better? a voice inside him mocked.
Below him on the gravel driveway was a scattering of
activity: electricians rolling cables, a couple of grips
examining a damaged length of track, two costume assistants
carrying a rail of gold trimmed cavalry officers' uniforms
to the former stables where they had set up their ironing
boards, and tall, thatch-haired Billy Yeo and his documentary
makers, busy as ever, shooting the crew relaxing for
his television series, The Making Of Shadows On A Wall.
Nearby Gully Pepper, the unit publicist, was chatting
with the German second assistant director, Markus Muller,
pretending not to watch Billy filming as she had been
pretending for the past six months. It was her job to
make sure he filmed only what the studio considered
the positive side to Shadows On A Wall, but Billy saw
things differently: their's had been a long and unrelenting
duel. Poor Billy, Charlie thought. After everything
he did for me, I let him down.
Looking away he gazed across the lawn to where a young
girl with straight, black, shoulder length hair and
large glasses was sitting on a kitchen chair, a writing
pad in her hands, her pretty face shaded by the three
cornered Napoleonic hat she had been given by the costume
department. She would never have been his choice, but
she had made the perfect Camille de Malignon.
He stepped back from the window. With the crew on the
point of mutiny shooting had been suspended for the
Easter weekend. They had been filming off and on for
nearly six months, often extended fourteen hour days,
but the more they shot the more the director wanted;
and still they were nowhere near finished. Over two
million feet of film exposed and no end in sight; it
didn't seem possible.
"Bruno Messenger, you're a megalomaniacal bastard,"
Charlie said out loud, as he ritually said every morning,
and, stepping over a small barricade of discarded rewritten
pink pages of script, he went into the small bathroom
and ran the bath water.
This was the second visit of the Shadows On A Wall unit
to Poland, the entire production being housed in the
Kapolska Palace, a mansion in the mountains in the south
east of the country where it bordered on Slovakia. Only
Sam Jordan, perhaps an eccentric choice for Napoleon,
but undeniably handsome, and the matchingly beautiful,
if nudgingly certifiable, Yale Meredith, who was playing
Marie Walewska, were not living in the palace. Being
stars they had each been allocated houses of their own---two
specially renovated white pavilions at opposite ends
of the Kapolska estate, where they could live untroubled
by anything approaching reality. In her house, Yale
was surrounded by her shift-working retinue of companion,
bodyguards, driver, secretary, voice coach, trainer,
dresser and personal make-up artist; in his, Jordan,
though he had just as many minions to call upon, lived
in the vain isolation that some called mystery. No one,
other than the women selected for sex, got too close
to Sam Jordan.
Bruno Messenger, as director, could have demanded a
house, too, but had taken instead a large suite of rooms
on the first floor of the Kapolska, where he lived surrounded
by his court, the cinematographer, the art director
and, most importantly, his chief minister, the man doing
the day to day running of the movie, Al Mutton.
Al Mutton was not the producer of Shadows On A Wall,
though he behaved as if he were: Al Mutton was the associate
producer, and friend of the director. The producer,
and man with overall responsibility, was Harvey Bamberg.
But while Harvey Bamberg fretted about the desperate
calls and faxes from the studio in California, about
what attitude Familia Gallego, the co-financiers, might
be about to take, about the global marketing strategy
the movie would need to compensate for the albatross
factor which had dogged every moment of shooting, and,
most of all, about the estimated final cost of production,
Al Mutton took his orders from Bruno Messenger and carried
on spending. And seemingly no-one could stop them: not
the studio, and definitely not Harvey Bamberg. With
his pot belly, baby face, shiny scalp and vague smell
of talcum powder, Harvey Bamberg was no match for these
fellows.
With a loud jangling the telephone in the bedroom rang.
Turning off the bath taps Charlie went to answer it.
Agnieszka, now awake, smiled as she handed him the phone.
She had a perfectly guileless expression, but then she
hadn't been in movies very long.
The caller was Nathalie Seillans. She was calling from
Paris. Nathalie Seillans was the wife of Harvey Bamberg,
amazing though that might seem. In her day men would
have done many things to please Nathalie Seillans, and
Nathalie Seillans had pleased many men. This was no
longer her day but, despite himself, Charlie always
felt a slight blush of excitement when he found himself
talking to her. "I'm sorry to disturb you, Charlie,
but do you know where Harvey is? I've been calling his
room for two hours."
Charlie couldn't help. "I haven't seen him since
we wrapped last night. Maybe he's just so tired he's
sleeping right through the phone." That seemed
possible. In recent weeks Harvey, beleagured and desperate,
had been wracked with exhaustion.
"Harvey would never sleep through a ringing telephone,"
Nathalie dismissed the suggestion. "He might miss
a deal."
"Perhaps he's somewhere doing a deal, or out driving...
it's a nice day here..."
"Well, yes. All right, Charlie. Perhaps if you
see him you could ask him to call me."
"Of course," said Charlie. Things had been
difficult for Harvey with Nathalie recently. When she
called he always ran.
"And, Charlie, how went the monster yesterday?"
Charlie groaned: "Oh, you know....how the monster
goes every day. The more the monster gets the more the
monster wants. Nothing changes. Not with Bruno Messenger,
anyway. Some day we'll laugh about all this, but..."
"Perhaps..." The producer's wife sounded doubtful,
too.
There was a moment's reflection and then they hung
up. Charlie turned to Agnieszka. "If you bump into
Harvey will you tell him to call Nathalie. She can't
find him."
Agnieszka nodded. Then she said: "Perhaps he's
with Bruno."
"No, he hates Bruno."
"Yes, but he was with him last night after the
shoot."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. In Harvey's car. Penn Stadtler too,
I think."
"Penn Stadtler?" That was more than surprising.
With thousands of Polish extras waiting in the rain
Bruno Messenger had stopped shooting for two hours to
talk to Penn Stadtler about the movie's music. No ordinary
film composer would have turned up in the most remote
corner of Europe to discuss music which could better
be talked about in London or Los Angeles. But Penn Stadtler
wasn't just a composer: he was a rock star composer.
"Rock stars and movies," Harvey Bamberg had
bitched for months, nervous of anything concerning Stadtler.
"Give them a sniff and they become addicted. Who
wants electric guitars and synthesisers in a movie about
Napoleon, anyway?"
Charlie hadn't answered: they had both known that Bruno
Messenger did. Now he shrugged: "Oh, well, maybe
that's where he is...with Bruno. You never know, perhaps
Harvey will even start liking the bastard again."
Agnieszka pulled a doubtful face and slipped further
under the sheets.
Charlie looked at her. She was a lovely girl. For a
moment he hesitated, then, giving in, he slipped back
into the shelter of his bed, and put Harvey Bamberg
and Bruno Messenger from his mind. It was not difficult.
It was a rest day, and Agnieszka was very restful. This
was what movie people did on the mornings of rest days
in the distant corners of Poland.