On their first evening there, James left the silent, frightened Garcia, the sulky Shoe, and went into town on his own. He parked on a meter near the station, and set out on foot for nowhere in particular, except that through some instinct he seemed to be making for the sea. Other than the ubiquitous posters, the only sign of the film festival were some tired-looking men porting video equipment through the streets. It was early evening. As he neared the seafront there were more people in evidence. Most of these people, however, were walking the other way, and when he stepped onto the windy esplanade, under the tall palms and umbrella pines, it seemed to be emptying. The African hawkers were still there with their trays of watches and lighters, but even they were sitting on the lawns under the trees, smoking. Out on the water the yachts and the superyachts, though starting to fade into the smudge of the horizon, had not yet switched on their lights.
In the mothy twilight of the hôtel de plein air, Garcia and Shoe were finishing off a litre of warm vodka, taking the stuff out of mugs, mixed with warm orange juice. Shoe kept slapping his large white legs—he was wearing shorts—as the invisible mosquitoes went for them. ‘What are we doing for dinner?’ he said when he saw James, though he was inspecting his own legs when he said it. ‘I’m starving.’
‘I’ve eaten, mate,’ James said.
‘Oh. Well what about us?’
‘Take the van. Get something. Whatever.’
‘Can’t take the van.’
‘Why not?’
Shoe held up the Smirnoff. ‘I’m too pissed,’ he said.
‘Well… you should have thought of that.’
‘I thought you’d sort something out.’
‘Why?’ James laughed sourly and went inside.
Shoe had turned out to be a lazy prima donna, always whining about something—he had made a fuss about not staying in a proper hotel, for instance—and leaving all the promotional heavy-lifting to James.
No one showed up to the first screening. The slot was a poor one—two o’clock, when everyone was still lingering over liquid lunches or taking siestas in their seafront hotels. Still, it was a sad moment when they told the indifferent projectionist that he might as well take the film off the spools. And while Garcia and Shoe got morosely smashed, slumped in cane chairs in the British Pavilion, James spent the whole afternoon—it was humid and hazy—schmoozing strangers to ensure that the same thing did not happen the next day.
In that, he succeeded. Half a dozen industry types turned up to the second screening, and all left within ten minutes.
So that was that.
Except, for James, there was a postscript.
On their last night one of the Hollywood studios hosted a junket in the Chateau de la Napoule, to which he had managed to wangle spare invites from someone in the British Pavilion. Still locked into his promotional mindset, he moved through the party, sweating in the dinner jacket he had optimistically packed, and trying to set up an interview for ‘the talent’. The place was full of would-be showbiz journalists, with their microphones and hot little lights, and squinting into one of these lights Garcia and Shoe played for the last time at being in the movies. Their interviewer was a young woman dressed for a party, in figure-hugging black with a peach silk rose on her shoulder. She was not English; her voice had a very slight foreign intonation. Probably she was Scandinavian, though she did not look Nordic. She was short, and her hair, except for some silvery threads, was dark and wiry. Her eyes were topaz. ‘And how did you go about getting actors?’ she said.
‘Just rang up agents,’ Eric answered, drunk. ‘Just rang up agents. Spoke to people. Agents…’
She looked uninterested. James had only just managed to persuade her to interview his men, and they were not making a strong impression. Garcia, in particular, was all over the place.
‘And… And what sort of reaction have you had?’ she said, shifting a lock of hair from over her eye.
Standing off to the side, in the shadows, James looked at his polished shoes. There was a pause. He looked up. Julian was smiling steadily. ‘Well, put it this way,’ he said. ‘We’ve had only one person—of all the people who’ve seen this film here—we’ve only had one person who actually hated it.’
The interviewer laughed tactlessly, and James found himself liking her. ‘What did they say?’ she said.
There was another pause.
‘They weren’t very polite,’ Julian said. ‘Let’s just say they weren’t very polite…’
It had been an American, who stood up no more than ten minutes into the second screening and muttered, ‘Thanks for wasting my time.’
To which Shoe, with hurt British fury—‘Thanks for giving us a fair shot.’
‘I have given you a fair shot,’ the American said, making his way noisily to the exit. ‘This is the worst picture I’ve ever seen here. The worst. Saying something.’ Which elicited some nervous laughter from the other members of the audience. The heavy sound-proof door thudded to—and then, following an interval of perhaps a minute, the whole place emptied out.
‘And,’ said the Scandinavian interviewer, struggling for questions, ‘what would you say about independent production?’
‘It’s excellent.’ Garcia.
‘Why?’
Garcia laughed as if it was a stupid question. ‘Nobody can argue with us. You know, if they tell me I can’t write… There’s the proof. It’s there, on the screen. If they tell Julian he can’t direct… If they tell James he can’t produce… There’s the proof…’
‘James?’
They turned to him.
He smiled warily—and immediately Garcia and Shoe were pulling him into the white light, were holding an arm each, ignoring his modest protests. He no longer wanted to be publicly paraded with them. They embarrassed him now. And the small Scandinavian interviewer was quite attractive, in a pixie-ish way. Garcia’s arm was heavy on his shoulders; Shoe was still holding his left wrist.
‘This is James,’ Garcia said, showing a leery smile. ‘Say hello, James.’
‘James’s the money man,’ put in Shoe.
‘Thanks, Julian,’ James said, freeing his wrist. He wanted to shrug off Garcia’s ponderous embrace too, but decided that any attempt to do this—if it led to a scuffle—might just make things worse. Smiling faintly, the interviewer was looking at him, twisting a strand of her tough hair around a finger. ‘Well I would be the money man,’ he said, trying to make light of the situation. ‘If there was any.’ He noticed that she had exquisite skin, exactly the shade of very weak and milky Nescafé.
He was pleased not to have to spend another night in the mobile home with Garcia and Shoe, who snored so sonorously that the people in the next-door home had insisted on being moved. The hôtel de plein air was a low, humid spot, pleasing to mosquitoes, where the turf was squelchy underfoot and the duckboards in the showers were mildewed and black. Not that Miriam was staying in the belle-époque elegance of the Carlton. She had an overpriced shoebox near the main-line station, within earshot of the platform tannoy, especially in the quiet of the early morning, through open windows. It was at such an hour that James walked through lemony sunlight to where he had left the van, with his silk-lapelled jacket over his arm.
Shoe was sitting on a white plastic chair on the smear of concrete that passed for a terrace in front of the mobile home. He was wrapped in towels, even his hair. Walking down the hill, James was surprised not to stir with irritation at the mere sight of him sitting there, towel-headed, his narrow beard still damp from the shower.
‘Morning,’ he said.