Despite the immense publicity attached to the Van Stratten family, little was ever known about the old dowager’s death — officially she tripped over a second-floor balcony — and Charles retired completely from the limelight of international celebrity for the next five years. Now and then he would emerge briefly at the Venice Biennale, or serve as co-sponsor of some cultural foundation, but otherwise he retreated into the vacuum left by his mother’s death. Rumour had it — at least in Ciraquito — that Charles himself had been responsible for her quietus, as if revenging (how long overdue!) the tragedy of Oedipus, when the dowager, scenting the prospect of a third liaison, had descended like Jocasta upon Lagoon West and caught Charles and his paramour in flagrante.
Much as I liked the story, the first glimpse of Charles Van Stratten dispelled the possibility. Five years after his mother’s death, Charles still behaved as if she were watching his every movement through tripod-mounted opera glasses on some distant balcony. His youthful figure was a little more portly, but his handsome aristocratic face, its strong jaw belied by an indefinable weakness around the mouth, seemed somehow daunted and indecisive, as if he lacked complete conviction in his own identity.
Shortly after the arrival in Ciraquito of Orpheus Productions, the property manager visited the cafs in the artists’ quarters, canvassing for scenic designers. Like most of the painters in Ciraquito and Vermilion Sands, I was passing through one of my longer creative pauses. I had stayed on in the town after the season ended, idling away the long, empty afternoons under the awning at the Caf Fresco, and was already showing symptoms of beach fatigue irreversible boredom and inertia. The prospect of actual work seemed almost a novelty.
‘Aphrodite 80,’ Raymond Mayo explained when he returned to our table after a kerb-side discussion. ‘The whole thing reeks of integrity they want local artists to paint the flats, large abstract designs for the desert backgrounds. They’ll pay a dollar per square foot.’
‘That’s rather mean,’ I commented.
‘The property manager apologized, but Van Stratten is a millionaire — money means nothing to him. If it’s any consolation, Raphael and Michelangelo were paid a smaller rate for the Sistine Chapel.’
‘Van Stratten has a bigger budget,’ Tony Sapphire reminded him. ‘Besides, the modern painter is a more complex type, his integrity needs to be buttressed by substantial assurances. Is Paul a painter in the tradition of Leonardo and Larry Rivers, or a cut-price dauber?’
Moodily we watched the distant figure of the property manager move from caf to caf.
‘How many square feet do they want?’ I asked.
‘About a Million,’ Raymond said.
Later that afternoon, as we turned off the Red Beach road and were waved on past the guardhouse to Lagoon West, we could hear the sonic sculptures high among the reefs echoing and hooting to the cavalcade of cars speeding over the hills. Droves of startled rays scattered in the air like clouds of exploding soot, their frantic cries lost among the spires and reefs. Preoccupied by the prospect of our vast fees — I had hastily sworn in Tony and Raymond as my assistants — we barely noticed the strange landscape we were crossing, the great gargoyles of red basalt that uncoiled themselves into the air like the spires of demented cathedrals. From the Red Beach — Vermilion Sands highway — the hills seemed permanently veiled by the sand haze, and Lagoon West, although given a brief notoriety by the death of Mrs Van Stratten, remained isolated and unknown. From the beach-houses on the southern shore of the sand-lake two miles away, the distant terraces and tiered balconies of the summer-house could just be seen across the fused sand, jutting into the cerise evening sky like a stack of dominoes. There was no access to the house along the beach. Quartz veins cut deep fissures into the surface, the reefs of ragged sandstone reared into the air like the rusting skeletons of forgotten ships.
The whole of Lagoon West was a continuous slide area. Periodically a soft boom would disturb the morning silence as one of the galleries of compacted sand, its intricate grottoes and colonnades like an inverted baroque palace, would suddenly dissolve and avalanche gently into the internal precipice below. Most years Charles Van Stratten was away in Europe, and the house was believed to be empty. The only sound the occupants of the beach villas would hear was the faint music of the sonic sculptures carried across the lake by the thermal rollers.
It was to this landscape, with its imperceptible transition between the real and the superreal, that Charles Van Stratten had brought the camera crews and location vans of Orpheus Productions, Inc. As the Lincoln joined the column of cars moving towards the summer-house, we could see the great canvas hoardings, at least two hundred yards wide and thirty feet high, which a team of construction workers was erecting among the reefs a quarter of a mile from the house. Decorated with abstract symbols, these would serve as backdrops to the action, and form a fragmentary labyrinth winding in and out of the hills and dunes.
One of the large terraces below the summer-house served as a parking lot, and we made our way through the unloading crews to where a group of men in crocodile-skin slacks and raffia shirts — then the uniform of avant- garde film men — were gathered around a heavily jowled man like a perspiring bear who was holding a stack of script boards under one arm and gesticulating wildly with the other. This was Orson Kanin, director of Aphrodite 80 and co-owner with Charles Van Stratten of Orpheus Productions. Sometime enfant terrible of the futurist cinema, but now a portly barrel-stomached fifty, Kanin had made his reputation some twenty years earlier with Blind Orpheus, a neo-Freudian, horror-film version of the Greek legend. According to Kanin’s interpretation, Orpheus deliberately breaks the taboo and looks Eurydice in the face because he wants to be rid of her; in a famous nightmare sequence which projects his unconscious loathing, he becomes increasingly aware of something cold and strange about his resurrected wife, and finds that she is a disintegrating corpse.
As we joined the periphery of the group, a characteristic Kanin script conference was in full swing, a non-stop pantomime of dramatized incidents from the imaginary script, anecdotes, salary promises and bad puns, all delivered in a rich fruity baritone. Sitting on the balustrade beside Kanin was a handsome, youthful man with a sensitive face whom I recognized to be Charles Van Stratten. Now and then, sotto voce, he would interject some comment that would be noted by one of the secretaries and incorporated into Kanin’s monologue.
As the conference proceeded I gathered that they would begin to shoot the film in some three weeks’ time, and that it would be performed entirely without script. Kanin only seemed perturbed by the fact that no one had yet been found to play the Aphrodite of Aphrodite 80 but Charles Van Stratten interposed here to assure Kanin that he himself would provide the actress.
At this eyebrows were raised knowingly. ‘Of course,’ Raymond murmured. ‘Droit de seigneur. I wonder who the next Mrs Van Stratten is?’
But Charles Van Stratten seemed unaware of these snide undertones. Catching sight of me, he excused himself and came over to us.
‘Paul Golding?’ He took my hand in a soft but warm grip. We had never met but I presumed he recognized me from the photographs in the art reviews. ‘Kanin told me you’d agreed to do the scenery. It’s wonderfully encouraging.’ He spoke in a light, pleasant voice absolutely without affectation. ‘There’s so much confusion here it’s a relief to know that at least the scenic designs will be first-class.’ Before I could demur he took my arm and began to walk away along the terrace towards the hoardings in the distance. ‘Let’s get some air. Kanin will keep this up for a couple of hours at least.’
Leaving Raymond and Tony, I followed him across the huge marble squares.
‘Kanin keeps worrying about his leading actress,’ he went on. ‘Kanin always marries his latest protg — he claims it’s the only way he can make them respond fully to his direction, but I suspect there’s an old-fashioned puritan lurking within the cavalier. This time he’s going to be disappointed, though not by the actress, may I add. The Aphrodite I have in mind will outshine Mios’s.’
‘The film sounds rather ambitious,’ I commented, ‘but I’m sure Kanin is equal to it.’
‘Of course he is. He’s very nearly a genius, and that should be good enough.’ He paused for a moment, hands in the pockets of his dove-grey suit, before translating himself like a chess piece along a diagonal square. ‘It’s a fascinating subject, you know. The title is misleading, a box-office concession. The film is really Kanin’s final examination of the Orpheus legend. The whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other. How much reality can we stand?’
We reached one of the huge hoardings that stretched away among the reefs. Jutting upwards from the spires and grottoes, it seemed to shut off half the sky, and already I felt the atmosphere of shifting illusion and reality that enclosed the whole of Lagoon West, the subtle displacement of time and space. The great hoardings seemed to be both barriers and corridors. Leading away radially from the house and breaking up the landscape, of which they revealed sudden unrelated glimpses, they introduced a curiously appealing element of uncertainty into the placid afternoon, an impression reinforced by the emptiness and enigmatic presence of the summer-house.
