‘But what if he talks about what happened? How you reacted? Frank will guess …’
‘That I knocked him out because he was pawing at you? It doesn’t exactly paint him in the best light, does it? I don’t think he will be in a hurry to tell anyone. Not when he’s the hero of his own story. You’re worrying too much.’
‘What about Gaspari?’
‘Not a chance. If he has guessed, then he is on our side.’
She runs a hand through her hair. ‘It could have ruined everything.’
He nods. ‘All right. I’m sorry.’
‘Good.’ A brief smile. And then, with a quick movement, she turns her face up and kisses him. It is almost violent, and he thinks he again tastes the salt of tears on her lips. But before he can look at her properly, she pulls away.
‘Goodnight, Hal.’
‘Goodnight, Stella.’
36
He is sitting on deck, looking across at San Remo, the sorbet colours paled by the morning light. They set sail soon for Cannes. It will be the first time he has left Italy in several years.
In his mind he is threading the stages of their journey together. In Cannes, he will do some reconnaissance the morning before the screening, and find somewhere disreputable-looking enough to make them new documents without any risk of it getting back to the police. He’ll use his old photograph, but Stella doesn’t have her passport. Truss has it. It is too much of a risk to try and take it from him, and chance him noticing. Hal feels certain, though, that they will work something out. He feels certain about all of it – about the rightness of it – more than he has about anything in as long as he can remember. He feels as though he has reconnected with life. He wants to wrest things from it. Incredible to think that such a short time ago he was quite content to drift through it.
With their new documents they will board a ferry to Tangiers. It will all happen during the screening. He won’t enter the cinema at all: in the chaos, he won’t be missed. Then Stella, halfway through, will excuse herself to go to the bathroom, and never return. Hal has studied a map of the city in the library room. The ferry port is within running distance: he’ll be waiting with their tickets.
In making these plans, it has become real. The disaster of yesterday evening feels like something that happened in a dream. The future is before them, in all its captivating uncertainty.
‘Morning.’
He turns. Earl Morgan looks terrible. The bruise is in the first, purple stage: the eye swollen, almost half-closed. In strange empathy, Hal’s knuckles smart with the memory of the blow. Hal wonders if the Contessa or Gaspari have seen him yet. Their leading man looks like he has been in a bar brawl – which isn’t altogether so far from the truth.
‘Good morning.’
‘Look, old man,’ Morgan says, ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry?’ Hal wonders if the actor was so drunk that he has forgotten how it all played out.
Morgan indicates the other seat. ‘All right if I sit there?’
‘Of course.’
He collapses into it. ‘Here’s how it is. I’m a mess, I know it.’ Hal can’t think of any way to refute it without sounding disingenuous, and remains silent. ‘I think I got lost somewhere along the way.’
When Hal doesn’t answer, he says, ‘Can I tell you a story?’ And then, showing a surprising level of awareness, ‘It can’t go in that piece you’re writing, of course.’
Hal almost laughs. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It won’t go in.’
‘The problem,’ Morgan says, ‘is that I’m not who people think I am.’
‘Are any of us?’
‘You are. You’ve got it together, I can tell.’
‘I’m flattered,’ Hal says, ‘but it’s not true. And besides, you’re an actor. Surely it comes with the territory, pretending to be someone else?’
Morgan covers his face with his hand, and then drags it down until his features are distorted in a grotesque mask. ‘But that’s the thing,’ he says. ‘In the movies, I’m the hero. I’m running around saving the good folk, killing baddies, winning the broad.’
‘Like in POW.’ Hal remembers it well. He and Suze had gone to watch it at the Lumiere. If only it had all been like that, he had thought at the time: light and dark, good and evil. Enemies who were never vulnerable, or afraid, or simply like men also caught up in a catastrophe not of their own choosing. The enemies in the film had made no secret of their desire to kill innocents, to enact evil. They had exploded in conflagrations, fallen riddled with bullets, snarling until the end. And around him in the picture house, the audience had roared their approval: many of them schoolboys still in short trousers. In the midst of all of it had been Morgan: the affable, handsome, all-American hero. Morgan without, yet, the yellowish cast to the whites of his eyes.
Morgan groans. ‘That’s the worst of all.’
‘What do you mean?’