No, it was the Chinese that frightened him. Six hundred million people in the same line of fire. They had made it to the negotiating table in Geneva, to discuss the fate of Indochina. Khrushchev had called in old Molotov, dusted down his good suit and sent him to Switzerland to do his best. He wasn’t sure that the experience of that crafty and decrepit revolutionary would be enough to resolve the situation in favour of the Soviet Union. Probably not.
Meanwhile the Americans were manoeuvring in the shadows. They had made contact with Bao Dai, the emperor of Vietnam, and filled his pockets with money to persuade him to go back to his own country and act as their puppet. Hundreds of thousands of dollars from American taxpayers being handed over to a decadent Indochinese aristocrat, who threw them away at the casino in Evian. Because it was there that he had decided to wait for the outcome of the Geneva Conference. And they bankrolled him and his court of dwarfs and belly-dancers, to use him as a joker and reinstate him in Vietnam. The Americans were the least parsimonious people the world had ever seen.
The general shuddered with rage. He started jotting down some notes on a piece of paper. He would have to activate the Swiss resident, and the French one: any scraps of phrases exchanged in the corridors of Geneva would have to be on his desk within the hour. No less important: keep as close an eye as possible on Bao Dai. If the Americans planned to put that feeble alcoholic back on the throne, he would have to be informed of it in good time.
Finally he got to his feet, cracked the joints of his neck and his shoulders, and walked the ten paces that separated him from the window. The curtains had gone. He looked outside and once again he had the sensation of being part of an enormous clockwork mechanism. Part of history.
Chapter 58
In the sky over California, 2 May
As the plane came down over Los Angeles, Cary felt that energy again. It had just been a shiver behind his ears, when, in his sitting room at home, they had suggested his mission to Yugoslavia. Then it had turned into emotion, concealed with aplomb, at the moment of his meeting with Tito. It had turned into fear on the island of
Sipan, when they had shot at him and he had had to turn himself into a hundred-metre sprinter. And those two strange Italians who had helped him. He hadn’t been able to work out what they were doing down there, but they had been nice, and equipped to deal with such a weird situation.
He looked out of the window to see the hills, but he couldn’t get his bearings. They would be landing at the same military camp from which they had left. They hadn’t added anything else, perhaps because no one knew (it was still a secret operation), and certainly anyone who did know was ashamed of what had happened. They hadn’t come out of it looking all that great. And not just Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the Americans, who had supported the operation.
How had Bondurant coped in his place? When he finally got through to Betsy, on the private line put at his disposal by the military, she had given him nothing but the vaguest of hints. The business about the regimental tie was water under the bridge, he could almost laugh about it now. His good humour had really returned. His enthusiasm for things, which he thought he had lost, and which he had thought would never return, the enthusiasm that Betsy had tried without success to help him feel again as they travelled around the world, had grown back within him like a climbing plant. He couldn’t say why, but as he headed for home he felt regenerated.
Once again he was a mature actor, nostalgic for himself, but even more nostalgic for other people, keen to be put to the test again, to demonstrate that the public, that boundless expanse of anonymous eyes, still wanted him.
Once again he was Archie Leach, a little boy receiving his first applause, and running to old Pender with a face that said, ‘I did it, you see? And they’re clapping for me!’
Archie needed that, it was his nature. Showing himself that he was still capable of getting excited, and of getting other people excited. Coming out of his shell and challenging the world to tell him to his face, if it was brave enough, that he no longer knew how to walk on his hands or throw skittles. He wanted to confront them with the grim countenance of a man who has conquered life at considerable expense, and doesn’t want to let it go.
Cary would follow him. For him, too, it was a question of narcissism.
Clusters of houses at the edge of the city emerged between the gaps in the clouds. The young pilot assigned to them told them they would be landing in a few minutes.
Cary fastened his belt and relaxed into his seat. He could concentrate on the years that had passed, without rancour. Clearly, the age of Cary Grant was coming to an end. Marlon Brando and James Dean were conquering eyes and hearts. Handsome and introverted, problematic, a little boastful and a little insecure. Cary knew that the old-style fascination of his generation of actors would make way for the new army of male stars, with their pose of tender-hearted rebels. But that meant nothing. He was still there, his shoulders weighed down with experience and grooming. He would never wear a singlet or a leather jacket, he still had something to teach. Yes, they still needed him. They needed the reassuring smile of a man holding a door open for a woman to let her into the bedroom. They needed the ready quip and the double entendre. The secure, relaxed expression, for every man who wanted to see himself mirrored in Cary Grant, and imagine that his fascination was perhaps not something out of reach. That ideal friend and lover, whom anyone would have been happy to meet in a train, reading a good book and willing to chat amiably about any topic under the sun.
He nodded to himself. He still wanted female conquests. He certainly wouldn’t have said that to Betsy. But when he had phoned Hitch to tell him he was there, and that he had been reassured by the fact that Grace Kelly was going to be his screen partner, he had realised that this was yet another challenge. Old Hitch knew how to tease him; he was better at it than anyone else. They had understood one another from the very first: Englishmen on American soil, in love with Hollywood, but capable of changing it, attached to the cinema, as one with the movies, and in some ways inseparable for almost fifteen years.
Grace Kelly was the most beautiful woman of the moment. With sex deep inside, not on the surface, as Hitch liked it. Sex had to be part of the mystery, not spoken, implicit in a look, in the right line in the script, in a detail. Sex was a subtle allusion somewhere between romanticism and irony. Something made to measure for Cary Grant.
Working with Hitchcock again was what it would take for him to start again. He was the only person capable of understanding his passion for details, capable of talking for hours about the level of liquid in a glass, and who could at the same time size him up with a glance.
The pilot leaned back from behind the curtain, displaying his best smile. ‘Mr Kaplan, we’re there. We’re about to land.’
That ludicrous pseudonym again. As though the pilots hadn’t recognised him. Military protocol was truly idiotic.
He started thinking once again about the fifty years of his life, and wondered how many active years he still had ahead of him. Five, ten?
He smiled at his reflection in the window.
What did it matter? He would play the game until he was breathless. Without overdoing it, without claiming to be able to keep up with the young guys, but also without being left in the shadows. He would walk rather than run, he would stroll down the same street with impeccable style, as he always did. People would have to wait with bated breath for the day when he said ‘enough’. He would leave them yearning for more, and how!