Clea had thrown back her head and laughed again. ‘She knew, dummy. She knew exactly what he was doing to me in there that day – but she was desperate for me to get that part. So she shut her eyes and went deaf while that old bastard screwed me. I started working on the film a month later – and what do you know? Six months later I was a star.’
When Sebastian looked at her in horror and pity she had changed again, spun into one of her tantrums, which he was soon to recognise and even to predict. She shrieked, ‘Don’t you dare look at me as if I was something you’d found in the trash! I should never have told you, should I? Now you think I’m shop-soiled, huh? The engagement’s off, is it? No white wedding for me.’
‘Clea, my God, you don’t imagine I think it was your fault?’ he had stammered stupid
ly.
‘You don’t?’ She mimed amazement, meek gratitude, and even as he hated it, he admired the skill of the born actress. ‘Gee, are you sure? And all these years I’ve been thinking I was the one to blame. I thought I raped him, poor old Buck. I sat there in my frilly pink dress and white shoes, and forced that poor, weak old man to do those sick things to me.’
He had known how badly he was handling it, fumbling uselessly for the right words. ‘Clea, God, what can I say? I’m sorry, so sorry it happened to you.’
Her lovely face was ugly with rage. ‘Fuck you, mister. I wasn’t asking you to be sorry for me, I was just telling you what my life has been like. It started the way it was meant to go on. Men have screwed me, one way or another, from that day on. But I’ve survived. I’ve damned well survived. Buck Ronay’s been buried twenty years. He died in the back of his Rolls-Royce, having a quickie with a Beverly Hills teenage hooker.’
He had heard that story – everyone told it, laughing, loving the idea of the father figure of the film industry dying that way. He had thought it funny too. Not now, though. Now he just felt sick.
‘Poetic justice, huh?’ Clea said, laughing harshly. ‘They cremated him in Beverly Hills. Pity they waited till he was dead. I didn’t go to his funeral. I wasn’t enough of a hypocrite. Everyone else went – there were huge crowds. Well, his two sons still have a lot of power. Afterwards they sprinkled his ashes over the Malibu coastline, from a plane. I watched them from my bungalow and laughed. I was still alive and a star, with more money than even I could spend, so to hell with Buck, in every sense of the goddamned word! If there’s one man in hell it’s bound to be Buck Ronay.’
He had been breathless with admiration of her courage. He had taken her hand and kissed it. ‘You’re wonderful. I love you and I’d be deeply honoured if you’d marry me. What we just did wasn’t having sex, Clea, I was making love to you because I love you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.’
Maybe she had meant to marry him all along. Had merely been showing him what he was really getting – not the icon of Hollywood, the great star, the goddess with the perfect body, but a woman who had been maimed yet was a survivor, with scars to prove it. She had told him the truth about herself, then waited to see if he would back off. Clea liked to set little tests for men, watch them jump through hoops for her. She manipulated everyone she met, but especially men – which, she once told Sebastian, was fair enough, considering what men had done to her in the past. He had seen the justice in that, even when it was him who was paying the bill for a guy he had never even met, who had been dead for years.
In those first months they couldn’t have enough of each other. He still remembered the wildness and tirelessness with which they had made love. Clea always screamed when she came. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she would shriek, shuddering with pleasure, her smooth body arching in orgasm.
‘No, no, no,’ she had screamed, three years ago, all the way down to meet her death, while the busy traffic moved on and people below were quite unaware at first that she was falling towards them, like Icarus, burning from flying too high and setting the sky on fire.
At three o’clock that afternoon, the Venetian TV news began with images of the start of the film festival: the arrivals at the airport, snatched pictures of smiling, waving stars hurrying past, interviews with one or two better-known names, clips of the film for which they had been nominated. Then a reporter rapidly sketched in the gossip: who was in town, who had been nominated but had not come, who had not been nominated but had arrived anyway.
Towards the end of the item the scene switched to the lobby of the Hotel Excelsior. The camera skimmed famous faces, picked up the international babble, then Sebastian flashed into view. The viewers were shown him grabbing Laura’s arm, saw her white, distressed face briefly, before she was tugged away into the lift.
The microphone hadn’t picked up anything that was said – it had not been close enough – but it hadn’t needed to: the faces said it all. The pretty, dark-haired reporter speculated excitedly, talked about the film Laura and Sebastian had made together, about the gossip surrounding them at the time. She reminded the viewers of Sebastian’s Venetian birth, his marriage to one of the biggest stars Hollywood had ever known, then related the story of Clea’s death.
‘Nobody knows the truth of what happened that day, accident or suicide, or—’ The girl broke off, gazing into the camera. ‘Well, who knows? But Sebastian Ferrese is home again, after years in America, one of the biggest names in cinema today, a universally acknowledged genius of film, and it would seem fitting for him to win the award for best director here, in his own city.’
Many people in Venice saw the report: Sebastian, in his hotel room, bleakly regarding the screen, hearing all that the reporter did not actually say but hinted at; the members of his film crew, sitting in an American-style bar in the city; Melanie, in her room, talking on the phone to her office in London, with one eye on the TV. Laura did not see it: she was in her bath, listening to Puccini on her headphones and trying not to think about anything at all.
Sebastian’s camera man, Sidney McKenna, drained his glass of whisky and called over to the barman to bring another round.
‘Not for me,’ Valerie Hyde said, nursing her Cinzano, her black eyes smouldering.
‘Girlie, you look as if you badly need a few drinks.’ Sidney rarely spoke much, but when he did he was usually blunt and incisive.
‘Don’t start on me, Sid,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘We can see that. You’ve been grim ever since she showed up. It was bound to happen one day – the film business is a small world.’
‘She’s bad for him. If he hadn’t met her, Clea would be alive today.’
There was silence in their little group; people glanced furtively at each other, the bar so quiet that you could hear the slap, slap, slap of the water in the side canal on which it stood.
‘Better not say that to anyone else,’ Sidney said softly. ‘Unless you want to destroy him. Is that what you want, Val?’
‘Sod off.’ She finished her drink and got up. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
As she went out she met an American journalist who tried to stop her, giving her an ingenuous, open smile. ‘Hi, there, Val, how’re you? Let me buy you a drink.’
‘Not today, Frankie baby,’ she said, brushing past his detaining hand.
He let her go, caught sight of the rest of the crew at the bar and sloped over there, still smiling that cheerful, friendly smile, his stock-in-trade, the banner of his kind.