‘Did you see Yarrow yet?’ grins Sam at Matthew in a smooth and tuneful American West Coast accent. ‘My God. I looked at that guy and thought, you lucky fucking son of a bitch. You have no idea what you’re doing and yet suddenly you’re the toast of the festival. And you know what? He doesn’t even understand that! Yarrow thinks he deserves it. Fuck me! I saw Jane and she was like: I’d like to fire him for proving the universe is cosmically unfair, only …’
‘… She’s making ten per cent on that cosmic unfairness,’ finishes Matthew.
‘My point exactly,’ grins Sam. He turns to Emilia, ‘You, dear Ems, are that rarest of things. A client I like better the more I get to know her.’
Emilia gives him a small smile.
‘You’re having a great festival, too, I must say,’ says Matthew, addressing Emilia.
‘It’s Martin’s film,’ she says, in a low and considered Texan drawl, making her sound unfazed by anything. ‘He gets an easy ride from the critics.’ She gives a slow shrug, like success or failure mean very little to her. I’ll bet she does a lot of bikram yoga, thinks Becky.
‘Not always,’ says Sam. ‘I’ve seen Marty take a kicking more than once.’
Sam is dressed in jeans, short enough to display sockless feet in tan leather loafers. Suit jacket and t-shirt. His job is to oil the wheels, smooth the seams and join the cracks, so that his client has a secure platform on which to stand. He is courtier and gatekeeper, turning on a dime between being a bad-ass deal-maker, sensitive confidant and cocktail party wingman. And for all his ice-breaking bonhomie, he never forgets – and never lets anyone else forget – that Emilia is the star, the epicentre of this meeting. Her work quickly dominates the conversation. Her recent gig with Spielberg. How the central heating broke down in a Nepalese hotel when she was shooting at the foot of the Himalayas, and how Sam nearly flew over there himself with a portable heater and bear skins, it got that bad, ha ha!
And time is ticking. They’d have less than an hour, Matthew had told her. And nearly all of that has gone. Why is nobody raising Medea? Should she do it? Is Matthew silently wondering why on earth she’s sitting quietly when she should be pitching the hell out of this actress? She sees it all slipping away and begins to feel nauseous with the smell of bleached tablecloth and the soapy-sweet perfume of an aftershave. No one has committed to anything. They’re going through the motions. Emilia probably hasn’t read the script yet but has been told it’s too late to cancel Matthew, a man who she still wants on her side. But this is now a formality before the next rooftop party. Becky has seen it play out countless times. She has done it herself before, once when a script by a friend of a friend came in and, for the sake of her friendship, she spent an hour trying to tell him that he really couldn’t write without sounding anything less than enthused about his writing. Do you think you might buy it, he’d asked her, towards the end of the hour. It needs a few more drafts, she had said, confident that he’d never get round to that.
‘Were you at the gala party?’ Emilia asks Becky.
Becky flushes, wondering if she’s been staring at the actress without realizing it. ‘No, last night I mostly hung out in the loos.’
Emilia laughs.
‘The French do a great fucking ladies’ toilet, so I’m told,’ says Sam.
‘Good company?’ asks Emilia, rubbing at her kohl-lined eye as if it is gritty and bothering her.
‘I didn’t mean to spend so much time there. I got talking to a director and we just sort of failed to head back to the bar.’
‘Which director?’ asks Matthew.
‘Sharon McManus.’
‘Ah, she’s brilliant,’ says Sam. ‘Love her. Has she done one of yours?’ he asks Matthew.
‘No. Tried to get her for the Austen thing,’ he replies.
Becky shifts uncomfortably in her chair, recalling Sharon’s very different version of events. ‘She’d have been great for that,’ she says: marvelling, not for the first time, at Matthew’s capacity to bend the truth in order to reach the finish line. It’s all just talk until the cheque is signed.
‘What do you think of her films?’ Becky puts it to Emilia too bluntly. She has given her no way out if Emilia hasn’t seen them. Does she need a way out? She’s just done a Scorsese film, at the artier end of his spectrum. Does she want to be that kind of actress?
‘I loved her early shorts,’ says Emilia. ‘There was one called Low Treason that was really funny and weird. She must have made it for about ten pounds.’ The words ‘ten pounds’ sound strange coming from Emilia. She could so easily have said ‘ten bucks’. She likes to be precise, thinks Becky. That matters to this woman. ‘I can’t remember its name, but she also did a short about two sisters trying to build a submarine.’
‘Blue,’ says Becky.
‘That’s the one! Both of them wanting to be in charge.’
‘Two periscopes!’
‘And they end up just staring at each other through them from opposite ends of the submarine, shouting at each other while it sinks. It was smart as well. It was like, Russia and America not remembering that it’s all one planet. It was the whole Cold War with two sisters and a bunch of scrap metal.’
‘It had that Dr Strangelove feel. Absurd and serious.’ Becky smiles, remembering it fondly.
‘Yeah. That stayed with me. I’m kinda jealous you met her, now.’
‘It’s free entry to the ladies’ loos. You just have to wait to pounce on her. Join me next time.’
‘I might do that!’ Emilia gives her a big, chalk-white, shiny, straight-toothed grin.
‘She wants to do Medea as her next film.’ Becky addresses this last remark to Matthew, like she’s sharing an interesting bit of news. A little update that
