Having a live-in nanny is one of the privileges of wealth, but I can understand that people might think it brings privacy problems. I suppose it might, but not when the nanny in question is Ethel Reid. She’s the soul of discretion, a fountain of wisdom, and a hell of a laugh to boot. She’s taken our new lifestyle in her stride, the kids love her, and so do we.
‘Lunchtime for the wee ones,’ she called out, walking carefully across the tiles to pick up Jonathan, as Janet and Tom scrambled out of the pool. ‘The big ones can look after themselves.’
That suited us. Normally we eat as a family whenever we can, but that day Susie and I had a lunchtime appointment. The approach had come out of the blue, when I was in Spain, mid-way through Minghella’s Quixote movie; it wasn’t made via Roscoe, but direct to me, and it was from a novelist. He’d done some on-line research, found out where I was and had got in touch through the production company. The guy’s name was Benedict Luker; he sent me a copy of his newly published work, Blue Star Falling, and invited me, in a very roundabout way, to read it and tell him what I thought. I get a fair amount of stuff like that and, to be brutal about it, most of it is recycled on the instant, but there was something about this guy’s pitch that made me treat it differently. It was probably the letter that did it: I still have it.
Dear Oz
I can’t think of a single good reason why you should want to read this escapist crap. If you can come up with one, maybe you can share it with me, so that I can blag some other unsuspecting bastard.
Yours, not holding my breath,
Benedict Luker
Mysterian.
Yes, it was the letter; after that, how could I not look at it? Whoever this guy was, he’d managed to throw my switch. Besides, I had no scripts to consider, I’d exhausted my reading pile, and it’s bloody difficult to find English-language novels in a village in Extremadura that’s not all that far from the back of beyond.
It wasn’t the longest or most challenging book I’d ever read, but it got me hooked nonetheless. It seemed to be Luker’s first novel; it was a fast-action off-beat whodunit, in which the author was, curiously, his own leading character. I’d encountered something like it before, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember where. It was the kind of book that looks as if it’s meant to be read in bed, just before the light goes out, but if you do, you find yourself awake all night, or at least until it’s finished.
When it was, and when Luker the private-eye hero had caught the bad guys, and the Blue Star, which turned out to be a fist-sized diamond, just before it fell into an industrial crusher that would have turned it into a thousand twinkles, I wrote to him, at the New York post-office box address he’d provided. I told him it was the best yarn I’d encountered in a long time and that I couldn’t think of a good reason not to read it.
A week later, I received a second letter.
Dear Oz
Thanks. Your opinion matches mine. Now, can you think of a single good reason why you shouldn’t buy the movie rights?
Yours,
Benedict Luker
Actually, I could think of many excellent reasons. I’m an actor, not a producer. I may be a success in the movie business, but I know eff all about virtually all of it. Finding writers, a director, casting, putting a crew together, choosing locations, handling the logistical problems, many of them totally unpredictable: I’d seen it all done, but I hadn’t a bloody clue how to do any of it.
But I knew a man who had.
I sent Luker a one-sentence holding reply, ‘I’m trying to think of one,’ then called my ex in-law and asked him to get hold of a copy of the book. When I told him why I wanted him to read it, Miles questioned my mental condition but said he would. He called me back two days later, all business, and said, ‘Okay, here’s what you do. I’ll come in fifty-fifty on a three-year option and if it gets as far as production we can run it through my company, as long as you agree to play the lead and I get to direct. And don’t offer him much money, a hundred thousand dollars tops, and remember, it’s an option to produce and the money’s an advance against future income.’
I understood most of that, or at least enough to write to Luker and invite him to meet me in Monaco once I was clear of other commitments. He agreed and we set up a lunch meeting in the rooftop grill of the Hotel de Paris, in Casino Square. I looked down on it as we climbed out of the pool, then checked my watch. ‘Christ,’ I said to Susie, ‘we’ve only got half an hour.’
She smiled up at me, and those cherries seemed to wink. ‘Well, ain’t that too damn bad,’ she said.
2
We were twenty minutes behind schedule when we set out for the Hotel de Paris, and even then, Susie’s hair was still damp. She had included herself in the meeting because she had read the book and enjoyed it and, as she put it, because there was no way in this lifetime that I was going to lunch in the H de P without her.
We’d only have been fifteen minutes late if the phone hadn’t rung, and if Audrey Kent hadn’t been in the toilet. But it did, and she was, so I picked it up.
‘Oz, it’s you.’
I knew that voice; by God, did I know it. ‘Last time I looked in the mirror it was,’ I told Primavera. ‘Which of your diverse personalities is on the other end of the line, and where the hell are you?’
‘I’m me,’ she replied. ‘The concerned mother missing her son.’
‘Not the devious tramp on a mission to ruin my life?’
‘Not this time.’
Prim and I had had a little difficulty a year or so before. She had been a very silly girl, and had paid various penalties, including a six-month prison term, and loss of custody of our son. I knew which had hurt her the most.
I had seen her once since she’d been inside, when we’d been at Loch Lomond and she’d come to visit Tom. Susie would have been behaving reasonably if she’d raised hell about that, since she’d been as much a potential victim of Prim’s failed scam as I had, but she’s as generous a woman as I’ve ever known, and she’d forgiven her. Guilt came into it, maybe: the early stage of our relationship, Susie’s and mine, was more than a little adulterous.
‘So, I repeat,’ I went on, ‘where the fuckaya? We’re short for time here.’
‘I’m in Monte Carlo.’ Why was I not surprised by that? Because I knew Prim too well, that’s why: she’d lost her ability to set me off balance. ‘I’ve checked into the Columbus, and I’d like to see Tom.’
‘A little notice would have been nice.’
‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry.’
Bollocks, I thought. Prim and ‘sorry’ were strangers to each other.
‘They only gave me my passport back three days ago, after I finished my probation period. I wasn’t a hundred per cent certain that they would, and I didn’t want to make an arrangement and then have to disappoint him.’
‘I can accept that,’ I told her. ‘But you can’t just sweep in unannounced. We agreed that he has to be prepared for each visit. Susie and I are already late for a lunch date; I can’t deal with it right now. Tomorrow morning, fine, but not today.’
‘Okay,’ she conceded, slightly grumpily. ‘But what am I going to do in the meantime?’
I glanced at Susie; she shrugged her tanned shoulders. ‘Get in a taxi and come to the Hotel de Paris, Le Grill on the roof. You can have lunch with us, make up a foursome. You might even be amused by it.’
‘I can’t just drop everything and come.’
‘Everything, as in what exactly? You were ready to bomb up here and see Tom. Just get your ass’ (Gone Hollywood: can’t help it) ‘in a taxi and don’t argue.’ I hung up on her.