The 'champagne' when it came was, indeed, Asti spumante. The crisps on the tray were also Italian. Michael answered the door and received a smile from the hotel-keeper before taking the tray back into the room and putting it on the dressing table.
He looked around for somewhere to sit.
Adela lay in the bath, listening to the radio.
The bedroom was alive with street sounds. The shutters were half open, casting diagonal lines on the rug.
He cleared a pair of embroidered slippers and a make-up bag off the chair and sat down. He considered the room from a sedentary position, the spectator of his own predicament. He had lost control, and now he felt experimental and on borrowed time, and weird, as though he had crossed to the other side of things.
His mouth tasted queer. Something was turning his breath.
Her bathrobe had pleased him: a gorgeous piece of silver-screen satin, a coming together of sex and luxury and womanly self-love. Adela's body deserved sensuous adornment. Like any actress, she knew the secret of her comeliness, its magical allure and special effects. And for a moment back there she seemed like a hologram of ideal beauty, something unbearably lovely, projected from the needs of overwrought nerve-endings.
She came out of the bathroom wrapped to the armpits in a towel and rubbed at her neck and ears with a hand towel. Standing perceptively before her image in the mirror she threaded back wet hair with fine fingers. She was self-possessed, relaxed, abundant. Things were now on course and she could prepare to flourish. She gave a quaint glance at the Asti spumante and then sashayed past to the wardrobe. 'Excuse me,' she said, bending forward by his side and drawing out on the flat of her hand a folded shirt.
He smelt the almond aroma of hair-conditioner.
'Would you like a bath?' She smiled.
He cleared his throat.
She stood over him and let the shirt unfold, as if she were about to put it on.
'Or would you prefer a drink?'
'I'll take a drink.'
'Shall I wear this?'
'You're staying, then?'
She glanced at him and then sat down on the bed, hand cupping the inside of a thigh. 'I'm staying.'
He took the Asti bottle and wrestled off the cork. The fluid fizzed uncontrollably as he poured, cheap foam overflowing the glasses.
She placed a crisp on her tongue and lolled sideways on the bed.
Michael looked at her softly, a long moment.
She took the glass and played it between her hands and the look she gave him then made him blush.
'What happens now?' she said quietly.
His heart rushed. It seemed like an invitation.
'Oh.' He suppressed the hot air bubble in his chest. 'Um . . . The mother of all negotiations.'
'Shall I call Shane?'
'Too early.'
'He'll talk to Frank.'
He shut his eyes as though reading the words off the back of his lids. 'If we play Shane, we play him as a trump card.'
She drew a hair from her cheek. 'Isn't your trump card the option agreement?'
'I'm a one-card player.' He was bluffing on no cards.
'Shane's on our side.'
He looked at her absently.
'I need to square the agents first. They have to swallow the fact I'm producing this film and it's my baby not theirs.'
There was hesitant admiration in her eyes.
'I'll call Adamson tonight.'
'Adamson?'
'Hollywood contact. He'll give me language.'
'God.'
'Yes?'
She did one of her three-quarter-profile poignant gazes. 'I can hardly believe it's true.'
He looked away. 'Nothing's true, yet.'
She sighed with total relief, as though the tension were still escaping in surges. He had brought about the consummation of something she desired with every sinew of her being: the role of a lifetime. Now that the goal was achieved she was relaxing into herself properly. Her aura had changed. He saw in the colour of her skin and the warmth of her smile just how much one lie had done for her.
'Michael?' The towel had ridden up her leg to reveal a line or crease dividing the upper roundness of her thigh from the muscle underneath. 'Will you sit next to me?'
She was ahead of him. He leaned forward.
'Come.'
He moved from the chair to the edge of the bed, bringing his wineglass, too. He sat by her side in appreciative compliance and she turned a holding look on him that let him see at close range the green filaments of her irises, the delicate lashes.
'Cheers,' she said, over her glass.
He could feel her readiness. His closeness was acceptable to her. She knew what he felt, what he might intend, and her easiness encouraged him. He looked at her collarbone, at the cream beneath it.
She placed a hand on his leg.
'Hello,' he said, setting a hand on hers.
'I've taken advantage of you.'
Her hand slid away.
'I've led you on, I think.'
His heart raced.
'There's a problem, Michael.'
He could not think what to think, except that the moment was ghastly.
'I'm in turmoil.'
'What!'
'Oh . . . Jack.'
'Jack?'
'My . . . my boyfriend!'
He waited for more than the repetition of a name, directing all his nerve endings to what she would say next.
'The . . . He called, and . . .' She craned her neck, inarticulate for once.
He had been a fool to ignore this.
'Right now I don't know what to do. I suppose things aren't quite over. He's got his hooks in me somewhere . . .'
She sat in the limpness of her shame, and he saw that all this 'boyfriend' might stand for had crept up on her and seized her in a way he had not witnessed before; it had taken this moment to bring it to the surface.
He placed his glass delicately on the tray and felt desire curdling in him. He had lied his way into nothing, a double humiliation, and the disappointment was merciless.
'I need this project so much, you see . . . I desperately need a gig.'
He heard this from a distance.
She remained still by his side, as if reckoning the consequences of admission.
He scratched his chin. The first impact was like a burn or cut, a nasty moment followed by numbness; misery later.
'I like you,' she said. 'I do like you.'
He was able to foresee sorrow. Although he had lied to her and had given himself a false opportunity, the true thing, the spur to his deception, was that he honestly wanted her; and what he felt, as he sat like a statue, was the immensity of that need. He would have to pack the thwarted force back into himself. The need of years.
'I just don't know what would happen.'
'I see.'
'I want to be honest with you. You of all people.'
He sighed at the dull compensation of honesty.
'What I probably need is an affair.' She avoided his gaze. 'Not what you need. I think you deserve something nutritious.'
He grunted, incredulous.
'You're very serious, Michael.'
'What sort of ''affair''?' he heard himself asking in a strange voice.
'A means to an end,' she said quickly.
He rubbed his forehead.
'I have no idea what I would feel at the moment.' She chucked up her chin.
'What end?'
'Getting over Jack. Or getting him back.'
'You want him back?'
She was half playful, half serious, a victim of her own uncertainty. 'I don't know what I want!'
He nodded, understanding nothing.
'I don't want to use you.'
'Who do you want to use?'
'Nobody! I'm not like that.'
There was a silence in which he felt racked by jealousy.
'You need love, I think. And whatever I could offer, it might not be that.'
Her honesty pained him.
'This is a weird conversation. I mean . . . I mean, nothing's really happened.'
After a pause he stood up and walked to the balcony. He noticed that the light outside had changed. Foreshortened figures crossed the road. One of the restaurant owners from the upper town was snatching out gesticulations before an elegant woman as she moved a display rack into her shop.
He should not have let his hopes run high. Life was not like that. His big chance had been a delusion. Michael bit his lip and felt all hope subside. He must come clean with her. He had a duty to own up, even though it would mean the end of their relationship.
'We must talk to Shane,' she said.
He turned.
She rose to her feet, cradling her arms, throwing her hair back.
'He should know what we know. He mustn't hear it from the agents or he'll think we've been manoeuvring behind his back.'
Two half-drunk glasses stood on the tray.
'Now you've got the option, you're in a very strong position and I don't want to alienate him. Without him we're nothing. We've got to be smart!'
He was struck suddenly by the memory of Hilldyard's confession. The truth was so much stranger than one imagined; shocking. And it came to him then – that Hilldyard had wrecked everything. There was no fall-back now.
'Michael.' She drew closer.
'What?'
'Are you OK?'
He allowed himself a laugh.
'What's wrong?'
In the mirror he could see the slant of her neck half draped by hair.
She hitched the towel over her bosom with a hooked finger. She was a picture of thoughtful concern.
'We have to be honest with each other.' She came towards him, to give him her face close up.
He nodded.
She touched his forearm. 'Do you really want this film?'
Her touch had its own special current.
'Do you?'
Her eyes searched him for an answer, plumbing his reticence. It was the most important question and she had asked it pleadingly, as though she were really saying something else.
He frowned.
'I must know.'
Her finger moved on his arm.
'Do you?'
It was a caress.
She was intense, almost hypnotised.
He understood now.
'Do you?'
He leaned towards the uplift of her mouth which grazed his lips, pausing and pressing, darning out a slow kiss, her hair on his cheek. And when he grabbed her, the towel slipped and her breasts were full in his hands as though she had put them there. He was taut with the shock of her nakedness, everything for the taking, Adela full on, gasping as he clutched at her.
On the bed she was forceful and tumultuous and freely possessed of her own choreography. She crawled on the mattress in a mobile swoon, hair everywhere, everything on offer as a present to pleasure, which he could not begin to consume with kisses and caresses. And as they manoeuvred around each other's bodies, Michael's edginess turned to relief, the deep relief of making love to someone wholeheartedly, without guilt, without doubt, in a blaze of arousal, as though Adela's lovely body were a temple in which could be worshipped the best of her, and the best of himself.