Inside the car, Roger pressed a button causing a screen to come down between driver and passengers. He lifted up a flap in the seat, pulling out an ice-filled bucket containing champagne and glasses. ‘The Hollywood treatment!’
‘Where’s this moonshine I’ve been hearing all about?’ said Bart, wiping his forehead with a hanky.
‘In the bathtubs of Irish thugs,’ said Roger. ‘So how’s the wife? Jean tells me she’s pregnant again.’
Roger was of course Jean’s producer friend. She’d be at Davenport now, lying on his furniture, eating his food and reaching out with her white claw of a hand to stroke Bettina’s swollen belly. As if she had a stake in what was growing inside.
Bart nodded, drinking. The delicate champagne bubbles were popping against his upper lip. ‘Everything is hunky-dory.’
Roger crossed his legs like a woman, his trousers hitching up to show a salmon-pink sock. ‘Me, I could never do what you did. Couldn’t live with a woman. Not after growing up with six sisters.’
They were driving down a broad road lined with fat palm trees. One tree had a rope dangling out of its thick fronds, and hanging from the bottom of the rope, by its leg, was a baby doll with no arms. The car stopped at an intersection, outside an employment office, and there stood a group of men – white, black, Mexican – wearing baggy brown trousers and white short-sleeved shirts, tieless. A truck pulled up and they started piling into the open back of its cab. Orange-pickers, maybe. How depressing.
‘So how do you find being your beau’s assistant?’ Roger asked Étienne.
Étienne was pressing his champagne flute against his neck. ‘He has always told me what to do. Now I am getting paid.’
‘Oh, I like it!’ said Roger, squeezing his knees and baring his teeth. ‘Jean tells me you’re an artist?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Étienne, evasively.
Étienne had grown weary of the label ‘artist’. With art in general. Back in Paris he’d discovered that a few of his artist friends had died, a couple from alcohol abuse, one from starvation and exposure, two others from TB. He fell back into selling his arse in the back streets of the Quartier Pigalle – on hearing this, Bart took great enjoyment in exhibiting an almost Buddha-like show of non-judgement (he did of course judge, inwardly).
Étienne loved playing with Tabby (he enjoyed the simplicity of children) but the rest of the time he seemed edgy and bored and was smoking more hashish than usual. He’d taken an interest in learning card tricks, which Bart had at first found charming, but now it was just annoying. He carried a pack with him wherever he went and was always dipping into his pocket to retrieve them and practise, even when on the lavatory. ‘Idle hands are the devil’s playground, non?’ he’d say, separating the cards in a blur, trousers around his ankles.
‘Ah, here we are,’ said Roger.
They had pulled up into a vast, sun-bright lot.
‘Is that Kay Francis?’ said Étienne, his nose touching the window glass.
‘No,’ said Roger, following his gaze, ‘that’s a prostitute.’ He leaned forward, hands on his thighs: ‘But what’s the difference, right?’
The hot cab exploded with laughter. Actress, prostitute – what’s the difference? Hahaha. It’s funny because it’s true! Whores as far as the eye can see. Two whores sitting in your car right now. And what does that make you, Roger?
‘I am of course joking,’ he said, wiping his eye with a bejewelled finger. ‘Kay Francis is an impeccable woman.’
Three things he hated about filming The Mortician. Firstly: the make-up. He was up at four every morning and promptly driven to the set, where he had to sit perfectly still for three hours – three whole hours – so that a dullard called Peter could attach prosthetics – a crooked nose and gaunt cheekbones – and then slather on a thick cake of make-up.
The second thing: sobriety. He couldn’t get drunk, not with the early mornings, and he just wasn’t capable of moderate drinking – it’d taken him three decades to learn this sorry truth. He dined with Étienne alone in the evenings, drinking soda water and spearing his salad leaves and poached fish with rising resentment; he’d had to lose sixteen pounds in order to play the role of Crabbe. Meanwhile, Étienne gobbled up sirloin steak and blocks of bread and cheese. Afterwards they’d return to the hotel and go straight to bed, usually too tired to fuck. And when they did fuck, it was perfunctory and rushed; minimal kissing, a race to come first. The last time they’d fucked like they meant it had been in 1929.
The third thing and the worst thing: being away from Tabby. He tried to speak to her on the telephone once, and the second he heard her nasal girl-squeak – ‘Dada, when are you coming home?’ – he’d dropped the mouthpiece and had to lean against the wall to steady himself. It felt like someone had prised open his ribcage and kicked him squarely in the heart.
There were also plenty of things he merely disliked, such as the catering staff, a bunch of old shrews who giggled enigmatically whenever he tried to speak to them, and the ongoing heatwave – it seemed like every ten minutes he had to covertly sneak a hand down his trousers to peel his sticky testicles from his thigh.
There was much to love too. Lillian White, the female lead, for starters. A former Ziegfeld girl, she had bright blue eyes, dyed black hair and immortal skin. She smoked constantly and exuded an aura of sex so potent one could almost smell it. They’d hit it off immediately and spent most lunchtimes together in her caravan. She’d once had a drink thrown over her by Gloria Swanson over a dispute in a poker game (‘I deserved it – I was cheating’) and another time licked Tallulah Bankhead’s left nipple (‘on a dare’). She had a whole bagful of stories and extracted them with wide-eyed zeal, laughing open-throated at each scandalous punchline.
And of course there was Roger. His first day on set Bart had felt overwhelmed by the cameras and the harsh lighting, sweating so much that his prosthetic chin began to slide away. He had no idea what he was doing. He spent lunch break sitting under a cardboard cut-out of a vulture. I can’t do this, he thought, staring unseeing at the sweating tomato slices on his tray. He was going to ruin this whole production. Thought he was good enough for Hollywood, that’s what everyone would think.
Roger found him. He lowered himself to the floor with difficulty and was silent for a long time, his brogues creaking. Finally, he said, ‘Valentino apparently shat his pants his first day on set of The Sheik. Everyone could smell it.’
Bart managed fairly well after that.
Shooting was suspended on the second day due to a rewrite of the script – Roger had met with the board and they’d expressed concern over a certain ‘subliminal element’. They thought Crabbe and his assistant, played by Lillian, should end up falling in love. ‘Some uptight cunts with too much time on their hands are gonna turn my film into dog shit,’ complained Roger. Bart now had to play the role in a way that justified the reciprocated love of a beautiful girl. ‘OK, so our Eddie’s got a face only a mother could love,’ Roger said to him, ‘but so long as you can make it seem like he’d be a good lover, I think we can get away with this. Essentially, I want you to look like you live for eating pussy. You’re hungry for it.’