*
Elise knew, really, that the city owed her nothing. The mountains were there, the beach, the light. She liked the light, this lavender sky at dusk. She and Constance sat opposite each other in the front room as Maria organized them tea. They were slightly stunned, in silence. They had done this; they were here.
Later, wide awake in the gigantic bed at the back of the house, Elise listened to the automatic watering of the grass. Connie slept deeply, but Elise was chilled by the recollection of Maria’s face, her mask of politeness that failed to hide the fatigue behind her eyes.
10
‘Everywhere in Hollywood the marriages are breaking up,’ said Barbara Lowden. ‘The men here are monsters.’
‘Are they?’ said Elise.
‘We are,’ said Matt.
‘And the women,’ said Barbara, laughing.
‘That’s just not true,’ said Shara.
‘My friends say that Los Angeles will eat your brain,’ said Connie, tipping back her gin.
‘I know a dealer who’ll help you with that,’ said Matt and everybody laughed.
Connie probably thought she was acting naturally in front of Barbara, but Elise thought she was just being weird. They were at a welcome dinner to celebrate the impending commencement of filming on Heartlands, in a restaurant called Gino’s, a legendary Beverly Hills spot high up on North Crescent Drive – a two-storey, white-stuccoed villa, with ruby-pink froths of bougainvillea climbing up the walls into the night. Candles lit the path towards the entrance, a plain green door which swung open as they’d approached, as if by its own volition. Their table was secluded, near a small courtyard pool, an illuminated lozenge of turquoise upon which stray petals floated with no direction.
They were a party of seven. Connie, Elise; Connie’s American friend from university, Shara, and her English husband, Matt; then one of the movie’s producers, Bill Gazzara; the director, Eric Williamson, and the pièce de résistance: Barbara Lowden.
Elise had said to Connie before they left the bungalow, that she couldn’t believe that Barbara was actually going to turn up.
‘I expect she likes to be seen,’ Connie had replied.
And now that Barbara had actually turned up, was actually in front of them, Connie was feigning a coolness that didn’t convince Elise. For Elise – with all those nights she’d spent in the theatre, the practical, dignified, hardworking theatre, which should have immunized her to glamour – Barbara was everything she could have hoped for. The woman was miraculous, but not over-cooked. Not carved up, not just a pair of cheekbones walking on air, nor just the fact of her eyes, infamously dark and huge. She was more than beautiful: she was Barbara Lowden.
Beatrice Jones, the character she was playing in Heartlands, was a mess of a matriarch. It was a part with wit and libido, fabulous set-pieces of cruelty, both inflicted and received, that would make all forty-something actresses weep with desire. These parts were all too few and far between.
Barbara Lowden was not forty-something. She must have been in her early fifties, given the longevity of her career, the sweet and grainy nostalgia of her early films, but her elastic beauty had grown only more permanent as the decades passed.
To Elise, watching as Barbara came towards the table in the restaurant, it was as if they were in the presence of an archangel. Here she was, sitting with humans! Barbara’s head was small but leonine, and her forehead was high. Her teeth, when she smiled – and she smiled quickly at Elise – were large. And that extraordinary mouth! The smile pleaded honesty. Her accent still held hints of the South: warm and deep and rolling, wry and musical. The blue-collar twang it was rumoured she’d started with had long evaporated. When she sat down, the air seemed to ripple outwards from the space she’d taken up. Her aura posed an interesting question in Elise’s mind as to whom this dinner was really for.
‘So how are you finding LA?’ Matt said as everyone took their seats. It was a moment before Elise realized he was talking to her.
She’d become familiar with Matt and Shara over the last three weeks. The two couples were spending a lot of time together, with Shara and Connie eager to catch up. Shara had two modes: acting high on the sight of her old friend, or exhausted by everything. She had said she would take them shopping on Melrose, if they wanted. She rarely went these days, but she knew the perfect places for a manicure, a massage, a kiwi-juice cleanse. Shara wasn’t just American; Shara was Californian. She was a painter with family money, and had a huge airy studio overlooking the sea. She seemed a kind person, whose own history threaded six generations deep into this state, when the sun and the land and the water had glinted in the rush of gold, and wooden houses had nothing to do with drinks called Brain On and strip malls. Elise couldn’t imagine that past was any easier, but she was glad to meet Shara and Matt, and to get to know Connie’s friends, a fragment of her past. It made her feel more legitimate.
She thought about Matt’s question. Truthfully, she found the place bizarre. How strange this place could be, a locus of work, not life, where even going to a pool party was about laying the ground for a job! There were the sinister undertones of insincerity from waitresses, more than average idiocies on billboards, and a plurality of everything, dizzying, deeply uncomfortable to her. You either hate it or love it! Shara had told Connie and Elise when they’d visited Matt and Shara’s Malibu home; the inference being that if they hated it, they were square and uppity, European.
‘It’s a bit different,’ she said to him.
Matt laughed. ‘To London?’
‘To everywhere.’
‘Have you ever been to New York?’ he said.
‘Never.’
He looked at her seriously. ‘I think you’d like it there.’
At Matt and Shara’s beach house, when they all sat on the shore, looking at the ocean, Elise secretly believed she’d seen better coastlines in the south of France, and the sand on Malibu was gritty. Elise was glad for Connie’s acts of storytelling that had brought them here, but it seemed that everything was a plan for tomorrow, with nothing for the moment in hand.
Shara was Connie’s age, but Matt was younger, probably about thirty. He was shortish, slender, with a wiry, sprung energy to him, a slim, attractive face, a shadow of stubble and dark circles under his eyes. His hair was a nest, scruffy and tawny-coloured. Apparently he wrote screenplays. Connie said that Shara had met him in a bar in Manchester, and he’d followed her over here to pursue his dreams. So far, none of his screenplays had been picked up. According to Connie, Shara’s parents had thought their only daughter had married some sort of English lord, but had rapidly been disappointed. Matt was very . . . normal. It hurts him, Connie said. Americans can be even snobbier than the Brits. All men are created equal? Some chance. Tonight, he was wearing a white blazer, and he’d rolled up the sleeves. He seemed twitchy. It’s Shara’s money, Connie said. He doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Cicadas whirred in the background of the hills as the party filled their glasses, and Elise was disappointed to find she was not seated next to Barbara, but placed between Matt and Eric Williamson, who had Barbara on his left. She caught Connie’s eye, and they held a conspiratorial moment.