Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“Why not? He’s a millionaire—must be. He can’t act, as you say, and Majestic probably has him all sewn up anyhow, but there’s no law to stop a man from investing in something he’s interested in. Maybe I’ll make another picture as good as Erste Freundschaft or the one they didn’t let me finish. He’s a likeable fellow, Greg is—I get along with him fine.”

Carey half smiled. She did not know whether her main impulse was to warn Paul of Greg or vice versa—to warn Paul that Greg, though rich, was doubtless protected by lawyers and agents and business advisers who would certainly not let him put any substantial stake in a Saffron picture; to warn Greg also, in case by some miracle of Paul’s persuasion he should need it, that Paul was a splendid director who had probably, over a period of years, and balancing fabulous success against equally fabulous failure, won more personal prestige and lost more producers’ money than anyone else in the business… And then, in sheer weariness, the thought came: Why should she warn either of them? Greg could look after himself, and so in his own way could Paul… perhaps it had been the mistake of her life ever to think of Paul as helpless—it was like the old problem in Candida—who was really the strong man, the poet or the other fellow?

She said, speaking more in fatigue than in complaint: “So after all this, Paul… all the trouble… the fighting… you’re giving it up… the thing we came out here for…”

“WE? Doesn’t affect YOU, Carey. Right now you’re hot as a firecracker, as they say in these fantastic faubourgs. Didn’t you catch Randolph’s hint when he said he’d been talking to Michaelson? I’ll bet he wants you for another picture.”

Another picture. The thought made a grey shape in her mind. She wondered if she could ever act again; but she had so often wondered this (sometimes five minutes before the curtain rose on a performance in which she did especially well) that she had come to disregard the misgiving as a mere symptom of mood; but now it would not be disregarded. And whether it was still foolish, or true for the first time, the fact remained that she was only good enough to satisfy herself when she had also to satisfy Paul. She could ‘get by’, of course, without him; she had done, many times in plays, and doubtless it would be even easier in pictures; doubtless too there were other directors just as great by any outsider’s reckoning. But the grey shape was still in her mind.

Paul was saying something about the Critics’ Dinner that night and the possibility that the picture might win a similar award from the New York critics. “If it does it’ll mean a trip there for us—Greg, you and me.”

“Oh dear, I don’t know that I want to go.”

“Studio expense. See a few shows.” He had no particular care for money, but he was like a child if he could make someone else pay for a jaunt.

She shook her head. “I’m too tired, Paul.”

“Tired?”

“Yes… I don’t know how I’ll even get through tonight.”

He stared at her intently for a moment. “You look tired too.” He announced that with an air of discovery. “Come up and have a drink. I don’t believe you’ve ever been in my apartment.”

She never had—which might have seemed strange to others, but had not really surprised her. It was a penthouse at the beach, decorated in rather delicate pastel shades—the same standardized charm that you could buy anywhere for enough money, only she guessed Paul had paid far too much. He pulled back the drapes to expose the view of boulevard, harbour, and ocean; then mixed her a whisky and soda. “You know, Carey, it won’t be so bad here for you. You’ll be a big success without much trouble, and I’ll tell you why—it isn’t acting they want, it’s a funny kind of personality. You have that—by God you have—you make the camera sing like an instrument.”

“I must tell Norris that, because he almost prophesied it.”

“Norris? Oh yes. What’s he doing now? You hear from him?”

“He’s travelling in South America—with Austen.”

“Pleasure trip?”

“Austen will try to make it that. He needs it.”

“Austen?”

“No, Norris. He had a—a sort of breakdown after the strain of the war and the accident. He was IN the war, not just in uniform. He drove an ambulance for four years.”

“Couldn’t Austen have kept him out of it?”

“He could, and would have, but Norris wouldn’t let him.”

“What is the boy then—a fool or a hero?”

“Probably neither.”

“You miss them, I guess, now the picture’s finished?”

“Yes… especially Norris.”

“Why especially him?”

A quite fantastic impulse seized her, so that she said, hearing the words with a certain excitement: “Suppose I said I loved him?”

“WHAT?”

She smiled. Let him misunderstand her; it would perhaps be revealing, like the play within the play in Hamlet. For she could never discuss with him the real predicament without the mask, the protection of an acting part. “You heard me,” she said, “as they say in all the damned scripts you ever read out here.”

He looked uneasy. “I—I don’t get it, Carey. Are you joking? A boy half your age?”

“A little more than half.”

He snorted. “Good God, I don’t believe it. He’s practically your son.”

“Ah, now, if only he were…”

The speaking of the lines eased her, as so often at the opening of a play.

“Perfectly absurd,” he mouthed gruffly.

And it was, but the show must go on. “Oh, come now, Paul, use your imagination. You’ve handled situations like this in pictures, haven’t you? Too censorable to be shown over here, but all right for the Continent… People are people everywhere. The Saffron touch. You see life as it is, don’t you, not gift-wrapped?”

He sat heavily on the couch, his head bowed as in disgust or silent prayer. After a pause he said: “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“What do you advise?”

“Does he think he’s in love with you?”

At this she fluffed; she could not involve Norris in such a whim. “No,” she answered, after hesitation.

“Well, that makes it simple.”

“Simple?”

“Because there’s nothing you CAN do.”

“And that makes it simple?” (Back now in full stride.)

“I’m in a blind alley—I can’t move forward or backward—I’m just plain stuck, and that’s what makes it simple—as simple as being note-perfect in the Hammerklavier.”

He got up abruptly and glowered down at her. “Carey, what’s the matter with you? Is this a game—a gag of some kind? I can’t remember you in this mood ever before.”

“I never have been. Perhaps this is a first time—Erste Freundschaft.”

“You mean…” He weighed an interpretation in his mind and was clearly disconcerted. “You mean—you never were—in love—with ME?”

“Does the sun have to be like the moon?”

“What the devil does that signify?”

“You were the sun, of course, but the moon, as everyone knows, is for love.”

Like all other bad lines he had ever encountered, this maddened him. “For Christ’s sake… a cue for a song in a fifth-rate musical! What IS the matter with you? Talk sense. You’re not on the stage now…”

“But Paul, don’t you remember that at moments of intense emotion an actor has to act?—it’s the only way he can come to terms with things… it’s the consolation he has as an artist… you told me all that once…”

Even in his angry bafflement he picked up two words out of her speech and made, so to say, a ring round them. “Intense emotion?”

“Yes, Paul. Intense emotion—but not yet remembered in tranquillity. Whose definition was that? Perhaps I’m a fond foolish woman, and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind… Ophelia might have said that too.”