"Opera does not threaten us. Fiction does." Frederick R Karl, A Reader's Guide to the Development of the English Novel in the 18th Century
There was this old English actress called Phoebe Something-Or-Other. Hart-Williams? Hill-West? Skylar never could remember (not that she tried very hard). Phoebe Something-Or-Other was huge, like a big old toad and, on set, in between takes, she sat in a corner and did some kind of sewing. ("Cross-stitch. You should try it, sweetie.") It didn't matter who you were, star of the movie or a faceless runner, you were "sweetie" to her. It got on Skylar's nerves. It was so British. She was tired of everything British, especially the weather.
They were in the make-up trailer, five in the morning in the middle of nowhere. (Kent? Somethingshire?) Wherever it was, it was green and dripping with water. Every day on location they had to stop for rain, most days they never even got started. They were shooting an outdoor scene where Skylar had to ride a horse down a hill towards a big old house. She had to cry as she rode. Then she had to jump off the horse and run towards Phoebe (who was playing her grandmother), standing on the steps of the house. They weren't allowed inside the house.
Skylar would have liked to have seen inside the house. Skylar's tears should be, according to the director, "a mixture of joy and relief, tinged with sadness and regret for what might have been". All that and on a horse! What did he think she was? ("An actress, sweetie?")
The script called for the horse to gallop but they'd compromised on a kind of trot because horses made Skylar want to pee her pants. They were so damn big! Skylar was barely five foot two and way under a hundred pounds. Of course, she looked gigantic on screen but Mom had been helping Skylar keep the pounds off ever since she won the Augusta Sweet Pea Pageant when she was knee-high to a gnat's heel.
They refused to dope the horse so she had to fill herself with Xanax and be hitched up by the horse wrangler and the chief stunt guy. Over and over, because of the rain, because of the petrified expression on Skylar's face. Plus, she had to do the whole thing side-saddle in a dress the size of a Big Top. It was a costume drama, an 18th-century thing, about thwarted passion, from some novel that had won a prize. The Girl Who Went Astray - which was a real dumb title in Skylar's opinion. The crew called it The Girl With Big Tits. Some people had no manners. They were big, it was true, they'd been paid for with the money from a Dr Pepper ad she did when she was 16. She was 22 now. She hoped that if she ever got to be as old as Phoebe someone would shoot her.
In the movie Skylar was playing a hooker who was really an heiress but she didn't know it (until the happy, happy end) because she'd been swapped at birth after her mother died, leaving only a locket behind to identify her by. (Eventually, by Phoebe, her grandmother, et cetera). Harry, Skylar's agent, said she should do the movie so she could "capitalise" on her accent, seeing as it had taken her "so damn long to get it right". That was on account of her being English in her last movie as well. ("All Hollywood A-listers do English," her agent said. "It's the only way you'll ever get an Oscar.") She'd played a spy in the second world war. All very tragic, et cetera. They had shot the whole thing in Hungary. In a Time of Madness, it was called. (It was!) She was killed by a firing-squad at the end. They did 22 takes of that. By the end, the look of suffering on her face was real
They were holding the premiere tonight in Leicester Square. It was the last thing Skylar felt like doing but everyone said it was going to be a big movie (not like this one, for sure). "Selling yourself to the press goes with the territory, sweetie," Phoebe said. As if Skylar, of all people, didn't know that! Skylar knew exactly where Phoebe Something-Or-Other could stick her sewing. And the sun definitely didn't shine there!
Phoebe was eating a bacon roll. "Mm. On-set catering," she said. "The best thing about this job." Yeugh. Skylar tried not to inhale the scent of dead, fried pig, instead she took two Ritalin, to keep the weight down and perk her up (what more could you ask for in a pill?). Peering in the mirror Phoebe said, "Gawd love us -" (or something like that). "What an old crone I am."
"You have a wonderful face!" Skylar's make-up girl gushed at Phoebe. "So much character." "Character" meant old. Skylar didn't want to have any character.
Everyone (except Skylar) loved Phoebe. They called her a "national treasure", like she was part of the crown jewels. (Skylar had been to the Tower of London, a special out-of-hours visit that someone arranged for her. It was cool.) Whenever anyone needed an English queen in a movie they wheeled in Phoebe. ("Oh, God, yes, sweetie, I've done them all, Elizabeth, Victoria, Mary Q of S, Anne Boleyn - when I was younger, of course.") The way she behaved you would think she was royalty.
"Soothes the nerves," Phoebe said, waving her bit of sewing in Skylar's face. It was a cushion cover with a big pink rose on it. It was almost finished and if you stared at it long enough you felt you were being sucked inside the rose. "You have trouble with your nerves, don't you, sweetie?" Phoebe persisted. The way she said it was real, real catty in Skylar's opinion. "Well, nervous exhaustion," Skylar said. "That was what I was hospitalised with." (It had been all over the papers, no point in denying it.) "Nervous exhaustion is different from nerves," Skylar pointed out. Of course, everyone knew that "nervous exhaustion" meant you were wiped out on drugs or booze or sex (or in Skylar's case all three). She bounced right back though. Two weeks in a clinic in Arizona and she was good to go. Again.
"You know what they say about all publicity being good publicity, Skylar?" her manager, Marty, said. "Well, it's not necessarily true. You don't want a reputation with the studio. Look what happened to Lindsay. Cut down on the partying." But, darn it, she was young! All she wanted was some fun, what was wrong with that? There were no parties out in the godforsaken countryside. Her stunt double (yes, she had a stunt double and no, the stunt double couldn't do the horse galloping thing because the director was a realism Nazi) and her accent coach (who was on set all the time, it was like being back at school) wanted to take her to the local pub last night but she took a couple of Ambien instead and talked to her Mom on the phone until she fell asleep.
The hotel where she was staying didn't even have 24-hour room service. It didn't actually have room service but Skylar's people had a word with someone and now they brought up bad coffee and limp salads to her room. Her personal trainer said she couldn't have coffee but Skylar didn't really care. Her personal trainer who, by the way, was down here in Somethingshire for no reason because there wasn't time for Skylar to work out. No time for Skylar to do anything. So the personal trainer was doing nothing on Skylar's dollar. Like a lot of people.
"Nervous exhaustion. Of course, sweetie," Phoebe said. "I stand corrected. Silly old me. I could get you a pattern? Some wool?" "Gee-whiz, that would be swell, Phoebe." Skylar would rather stick pins in her eyes. She had no intention of cross-stitching big pink flowers on to cushion covers. The very idea made her mad. Or "cross", as they said here. Ha, ha. Skylar preferred to go to her trailer between takes, kick everyone out, pop a couple of Vicodin and watch DVDs of Days of Our Lives that Mom recorded for her. Skylar had been in it for a year when she was 13, playing a kid who was a runaway. That was after years of modelling. "The Crisco Kid" her mother called her but actually she'd lost out on that one to a Scarlett Johansson type. Or maybe it was Scarlett Johansson. For someone with so little past there seemed to be an awful lot of it that Skylar couldn't remember. Days of Our Lives got them out of the trailer park for good and Mom out of the Piggly Wiggly and now Mom was a realtor and wore red lipstick to work every day and had a real nice house in Orange County, all thanks to Skylar. "Don't mention the trailer park in interviews, Skylar," Marty said. But why not? It was the American dream to escape the trailer park and Skylar was the all-American girl.
She yawned and her make-up girl had to stop applying her lipstick. Skylar was so tired. She was making movies back to back because she was real hot at the moment. "Everyone wants you," Marty said. Yeah, sure, everyone who made money out of her. In the mirror she could see her English assistant (Christie? Kirsty?) smiling encouragingly at her. She was holding the biggest umbrella Skylar had ever seen.
"Ready, Miss Schiller?"
Skylar sighed and hitched up her breasts. "Yeah. As I'll ever be."
They didn't wrap until five. Skylar had to get a car back to the Covent Garden Hotel, have her hair and make-up done, choose from the dresses her stylist had been given and be in Leicester Square by eight o'clock. She had another PA waiting for her at the hotel, but he was her friend as well - Marshall. He'd been a kid actor too and a Mousketeer in the Time of Britney. Now he just got paid to hang out with Skylar to stop her dying of boredom and when her stylist wasn't around he was pretty good at picking out clothes. Plus, of course he was a walking drugstore, although most of what Skylar needed was on prescription. She had a great physician back home in LA. He was called Dr Morris and he really listened to Skylar and gave her all kinds of stuff that helped take the edge off and even out the day.
In the end they'd ditched the horse and Skylar just ran down the hill (pretty difficult in that dress), which everyone said looked better after all. Everyone except the director, but what did he know? He was, as they said here, a wanker. A real jerkoff. His last movie went straight to DVD and Skylar wouldn't be surprised if this one did too. "The studio needs a tax writeoff," Marshall said, "and honey, I think you're it." ("Don't listen to that little fag," Marty said. "He pours evil like poison in your ear." Marty could talk pretty fancy when he wanted to.) "Remember Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette?" Marshall said. "'Nuff said, honey."
Her assistant held the umbrella over her while she walked from her trailer to the car. Skylar had asked for some kind of screen so no one could see her on this little journey but it never happened. So maybe she wasn't A-list enough. Someone was going to have to have a word with someone.
"Have a nice time, Miss Schiller," her assistant said as Skylar got into the car.
"Yeah, thanks, Kirsty." "It's Karen, Miss Schiller. But it doesn't matter, you can call me whatever you want." (Jeez, imagine being that desperate.) Skylar decided she'd give her something real nice when they finished shooting. She had a Birkin bag someone had given her that was worth a fortune. Skylar already had two.
"Skylar! Skylar! This way, Skylar! Skylar, Skylar, over here! Skylar, look at me, darlin'!"
You got used to it. It went with the territory, as Phoebe would have said. Her co-star (gay, married, bozo) walked down the red carpet with his hand in the small of her back. She was supposed to do the walk on her own. Harry and Marty would be furious.
She was wearing a cute Stella McCartney dress and a pair of peep-toe Louboutins that were a half-size too big. She'd had two Oxycontin and a half a bottle of champagne before leaving the hotel and was feeling pleasantly floaty. She slept through most of the movie, despite Marty pinching her on one side and Harry on the other, and before she knew it they were back in the Dorchester for the premiere party. Marshall was there, thank the Lord, and gave her some Exefor to keep her going.
Marty and Harry were pretty happy and everyone kept saying how great she was in the movie. Of course, they always said that. She flirted a little with a lot of guys and then this one guy came up and said, "Do I know you?" He was real, real English. When Skylar was a kid Mom had taken on three jobs so she could afford a voice coach to "get the Georgia out of" Skylar and they'd done a lot of that "rain on the Spanish plain" stuff. Skylar had thought it would come in handy for In a Time of Madness but the voice coach on that movie (another friend of Hitler's) said, "Forget everything anyone has ever taught you, Miss Schiller." As if.
The real, real English guy was still standing there like a dork, creasing his brow like a bad actor and saying, "I'm sure I've seen you somewhere before," so Skylar said, "I'm Skylar Schiller - " all polite because that's how Mom raised her, but really, how could he not know who she was when for the last two hours he'd been looking at her face blown up a zillion times? (Although, of course, she'd been dressed down as a spy, which, according to the movie was not a glamorous occupation. No siree.)
He was ordinary-looking but there was something about him that was familiar. Skylar was pretty sure she hadn't slept with him.
He laughed and said, "No, no, no, just joking, of course I know who you are - God - I'd have to have been living at the North Pole for the last two years if I didn't know who you were. I'm a huge fan, I was really concerned when you were taken into hospital, are you all better now? Is it Schiller like the poet?"
All this without taking a breath! A lot of people in England asked about Schiller the poet (and, no, Skylar wasn't related to him), no one in the States ever mentioned him. And then he was off again, "'Alle Menschen werden Brüder' and all that," he said. He flushed as pink as a shrimp when Skylar smiled at him and said, "Yeah. That too." They were right, the English really did speak a different language.
She was looking around the room for Marshall to come and rescue her when who should pop up out of nowhere but Phoebe Something-Or-Other. She was dressed as if she'd been involved in a terrible accident in a fabric mill, bits of chiffon trailing everywhere. She smiled at Skylar, showing horrible yellow teeth - didn't they have orthodontists in this country? - and said, "Have you been introduced properly to His Royal Highness?"
Well, you could have knocked Skylar down with a feather.
"I was a good friend of his grandmother," Phoebe said before scooting off again, hanging on to her glass of gin as if she was on a Ouija board.
"So ... " Skylar said. Was she supposed to curtsy? She gave a tiny little bob, just in case. "So, Prince ... " Which one was he? The one who was going to be King one day or the other one? She was suddenly aware of the big wad of gum in her mouth. It didn't seem appropriate when you were talking (possibly) to the future King of England.
"Prince Alfred, but please call me Alfie."
"So, Prince Alfie ... I didn't know they let you go to movies and that kind of stuff." Oh real lame, Skylar, real lame.
"Oh, we get let out occasionally," he laughed. "And it's just Alfie."
"OK, just Alfie."
"I'm a huge fan, did I say that?"
"Yeah." He looked a whole lot cuter now that he was royal.
"Skylar. Like skylark," he said. "But without the K," Skylar pointed out.
"I thought you were a blonde," he said, waving vaguely in the direction of her hair.
"I'm not really anything," Skylar said. "I'm whatever they want me to be."
"Mm. Me too," he said. "Shall we get out of here? Go to a club or something?"
"People will talk," Skylar said, suddenly, unaccountably nervous.
"People are talking," he said.
"I have to be home by midnight, or I turn into a pumpkin," Skylar said. She wanted him to think she was funny. Or interesting. Or something.
"Actually, I think it's the carriage that turns into a pumpkin," he said. "We've got one like that."
On the Pont-Neuf, two gendarmes roller-bladed past them. They made it look chic. Only the French could do that, Campbell thought. She needed hot tea. She felt nauseous with tiredness and jet-lag. Or maybe she was coming down with something. Think how many germs you shared on a transatlantic flight. Millions probably. "I need tea," she said to Joel.
"Sure," he said.
"Can we look for a cafe?"
Joel sighed. Campbell knew he was contemplating the unwelcome idea of negotiating food and drink with a Parisian. When they were here last time, five years ago on honeymoon, everyone had seemed charming and friendly, now the same people (more or less) were surly and uncommunicative. Between them she and Joel had pretty good French - when he was a child Joel lived in Switzerland because his father was something big in international banking and Campbell had majored in European languages at Brown before she fast-tracked law - but when they started speaking to anyone in French they cut them off impatiently as soon as they heard the American in their voices. The irony was that then they started talking to them in their appalling English! Twenty-four hours and the French were already "they" and "them" - the enemy.
"At least they don't smoke in cafes any more," Campbell said encouragingly.
It wasn't until they'd walked almost all the way back to their hotel near the Madeleine that they found somewhere both of them were prepared to compromise on. The window was full of exquisite cakes that were like works of art, that were works of art. They ignited a kind of mad desire in Campbell, made her feel so greedy that she wanted to eat every cake in the window.
"This one then?" she said, feigning indifference.
"Sure," Joel said, not feigning indifference. He didn't have a sweet tooth.
He'd been in a bad mood ever since they landed on French soil. Their luggage had gone missing at Charles de Gaulle and it had made him endlessly fretful. But it turned up this morning at the hotel and when they opened their suitcases their neat, pressed clothes (irredeemably American) were all present and correct so he really didn't have to keep going on about it. All the time looking for something to complain about. She supposed he had been argumentative for weeks, but here, removed from his everyday New York context, his petulance seemed to pervade everything.
They'd spent their honeymoon in a quaint little hotel in the Marais but it was fully booked this week and they had ended up in a middle-of-the-range place that seemed characterless in comparison. Breakfast this morning had been a rather spare buffet - little pats of foil-wrapped butter still hard from the freezer, greasy pastries and a bowl of fruit salad that surely hadn't been made fresh that morning. Only the coffee had passed muster, although Joel had to ask twice for a refill from the crabby woman in charge. In their hotel in the Marais they had taken breakfast in a little open-air courtyard at the back of the hotel, the walls of which were covered in vines. But that had been June and this was inhospitable November and the breakfast room was in a dimly lit old cave beneath the building. Their fellow guests, a German family and a group of Japanese businessmen, seemed dispirited and subdued, as if they too had realised they should never have come here.
The morning sky was opaque, the colour of Tupperware. It threatened rain all the time as they walked to Les Invalides. ("Let's not revisit anything," Campbell had said, leafing through their Eyewitness Guide to Paris on the plane. "We should go to places we didn't do last time.")
"Maybe there was a good reason for not coming here before," Joel said as they wandered listlessly round an exhibit in Les Invalides about Paris during the second world war. "I mean it's pretty depressing."
"Well, war is depressing," Campbell said. Last time they had taken a bateau-mouche along the Seine and they had held hands in the sunshine and Campbell had rested her head on Joel's shoulder and felt she'd arrived at the place she was supposed to be.
Campbell spent so long contemplating Napoleon's weird, enormous tomb - strange to think what a small man was inside it - that when she looked around she could find no sign of Joel. They never stuck together in galleries and museums but nor did they stray too far from each other. Campbell used to think there was an invisible cord that bound them, one to another. Not this time apparently. Half an hour later and she still hadn't come across him. She went outside and hung around for a while, looking out for his familiar figure. She had left her cell in the hotel safe so she had no way of contacting him, she hadn't thought she would need to.
Then the clouds finally broke so she headed for a cafe. It was crowded and steamy but she managed to find a table and ordered a coffee and something big and gooey that just about put her into a diabetic coma. Back home in Manhattan she would have been eating grilled chicken or fish, a salad on the side. Here it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Her mind felt cool and uncluttered without Joel. There were empty places inside her that he usually filled. Or perhaps there was just less of her without him. That was not necessarily a bad thing.
Five years since they were married, a big ceremony in the Hamptons, on the lawn of a house owned by friends of Joel's parents. Juliet roses, a quartet playing Mozart, dress by Vera Wang. The whole shebang. If that Campbell could have seen herself five years into the future she would have expected a child by now, a dog at least. A house with a yard. Just went to show.
She ordered another cup of coffee. Campbell never simply sat, never wasted time. There was always something to occupy her, papers or files, or if not work then a dinner party to go to, or to cook for, a movie to see, a show. Talking, reading, writing, thinking, always talking. Even when they made love she and Joel talked to each other. Maybe they'd talked too much, maybe that was why they had run out of words.
People came and went. Food was eaten, checks were paid, tips were left. Time was wasted. Campbell had another cup of coffee. Was it worth trying to order decaff? Probably not, she imagined that the French scoffed at decaff.
She was both anchored and adrift. In the old world. An American in Paris. She should have a book with her. She should be reading James or Hemingway. Or maybe not.
It was nearly five o'clock by the time she meandered back to the hotel. Joel was lying on the bed watching an incomprehensible French quiz on TV. He glanced at her briefly and said, "Why did you leave me in Les Invalides?" and she said, "I didn't. You left me."
"No, I didn't."
They could have gone on for ever like that, Campbell supposed, batting right and wrong backwards and forwards, but she just didn't care enough to keep returning the argument. She went into the bathroom, stripped off and stepped into the shower.
He wasn't the heir, he was "the spare". That meant that if his brother Prince James ("Jamie") died, Alfie would be King. So only a teeny-tiny step away. Of course, the old King, their father ("Papa"), would have to die first. After Alfie it was some crazy cousin of their father's. ("The line of succession" it was called.) Jamie and Alfie weren't allowed to travel on the same plane because no one wanted the crazy cousin to inherit the throne if they went down together in flames. It was all written down in stone thousands of years ago. Skylar found it real interesting, being with Alfie was like being with living history. He was fun though, not like Jamie who was very solemn, like he already had that big, old, heavy crown weighing his head down. She didn't meet the King because he was off on tour somewhere but she did go to an official dinner where she was camouflaged (as Alfie put it) by the presence of lots of other celebrities. She was seated between the deputy prime minister and a man who made giant sculptures from trash. The flatware was gold.
Skylar had to be smuggled in and out of the palace. (The palace! It was awesome!) She hadn't told Mom yet because Alfie said it was very important that their love was kept a secret and if Mom knew about it she'd be on the cover of the Enquirer shooting her mouth off about "Queen Skylar".
They wrapped. Finally. And the rain stopped and Skylar had two whole weeks to herself. And, by chance, Alfie had two whole weeks too. He was in the military. He'd just finished learning to be a soldier and now he was going to go on to learn to be a sailor. And after that, maybe a pilot. It was like they were expecting him to fight a war single-handed.
The English summer seemed to be a pretty busy time for people like Jamie and Alfie and their friends - a lot of boating and horse racing and garden parties which Skylar thought would be cool but Alfie said, "God, I don't want to parade you round the season, I just want you to myself." So they went and stayed in what he called a cottage but what Skylar would have called a mansion on "the Sandringham estate" (it took her a while to work that one out).
Skylar didn't bother with make-up. She wore jeans or nothing. She didn't even need any pills, just a couple of Vicodin now and then. A woman (Sonia? Sylvia?) came every day in a big SUV and left meals for them in the kitchen. Someone came in and cleaned, but real quiet, so you wouldn't know they were there.
They had a lot of sex and when they were worn out with the sex they went into the woods and shot things. Skylar was a good shot, she'd been taught by a step-daddy called Hoyt, but she refused to kill anything as pretty as a deer so they just aimed at tin cans. "You're good," Alfie said. "Between us we could take on the world." Sometimes they took a picnic into the woods. Of course, they were never really alone, there were security guys everywhere, but Skylar was used to being watched by people.
She liked waking up every morning and seeing Alfie's cheerful face looking down at her. He woke up early, he said Eton had done that to him. Eton is a school. It was funny how when you got real fond of someone they started to look handsome. She began to imagine she could do this for ever. They'd get married and have little princes and princesses and Skylar would wear tweed and maybe even learn cross-stitch.
And then one morning Skylar, butt-naked, opened the door to Sonia/Silvia and, hey presto, the next morning, there was her photograph in one of the papers that a security guy showed them. "Royal love nest," it said. And a whole lot of other stuff as well, obviously.
There was a huge fuss, breach of royal security, Alfred could have been shot with a gun not a camera, et cetera, but a lot more column inches devoted to Skylar, of course. Alfie was real upset. "They can't let me have anything," he said. "Even you." "Especially not me," Skylar said.
Then it just went crazy, they were in every newspaper and celebrity magazine. Skylar thought she was famous before but this was awesome. She turned her cell off. Otherwise it just rang off the hook. Marty and Harry, Marshall, her Mom, hundreds of other people who all depended on Skylar. Their two weeks was up. She was supposed to be in LA, shooting had already started on her new movie. Alfie was supposed to be on a ship somewhere. Instead they were holed up on "the Sandringham estate" like outlaws. "We can't stay here for ever," Skylar said to Alfie and he said, "Why not?" and she felt real sad because she knew he really wanted to stay here for ever with her. And he knew he couldn't.
Then Skylar opened the door again. Fully clothed, she'd learnt her lesson, and who was standing there? Only the King with a capital "K".
"Can I come in?" he asked. As if he didn't own the place!
"Sure, your Royal Majesty," Skylar said. (She'd been learning all the right things to say. Just in case.) "Alfie's in the bathtub. Shall I get him?"
Turned out it was her he'd come to see. He wanted "a word". About how the monarchy was "being brought into disrepute". How things were pretty bad anyway for them (really?) without "this kind of scandal". He was nice, she liked him, she could tell he didn't want to upset her. He did though.
"Gee-whiz, Your Majesty," Skylar said. "We're just two young people who love each other, we shouldn't have to battle the whole world." This was a line from a teen movie she'd done way back when, but she reckoned it was a pretty safe bet that the King hadn't seen it.
He had an attaché case with him and he fished inside it and came up with a DVD that looked blank and said, "Do you know what I have here?"
"A blank DVD?"
"No, I'm afraid there is a film on it, Miss Schiller. Here are some stills from it," he said, digging into his case again. He handed over a folder of photographs to Skylar and said, "Recognise them?"
It was just a movie. A lot of people got started that way. True, she was only 15 and she'd lied about her age. It was just before the Dr Pepper commercial when she thought she was never going to break into the big time. And, OK, so the sex in the movie was real but it wasn't as if she'd never had sex before ("You may as well be paid for it," Mom said) and it wasn't for distribution, just for some rich guy who wanted to star in his own porno show and was prepared to pay real big bucks for the privilege of doing it with Skylar in every room in his house. (It was a pretty big house.) Yeah, and so what if some of it wasn't very nice, life wasn't very nice, was it? And she'd managed to erase it from her head and now here was the King of England, no less, showing her a reminder of it.
It wasn't pretty. (Did he watch the whole thing? The scene in the bathroom?)
"I can have it held back," he said. "It's in all our interests. But only if you give him up. And believe me, Miss Schiller, I say that knowing how much pain it will cause the pair of you."
"We have to sacrifice our love?" Skylar said, which was another line from the movie. The teen one, not the porno one.
By the time Alfie was out of the bathtub his "Papa" had gone and Skylar was the one who had to tell him that she didn't love him any more. And it was only when she said the words, and watched his face crumple like a kid's, that she realised that the words were a lie. Love pinched her heart. They said love hurt, and it turns out it did. Who knew?
A dead sky. Everything flat, like white paint. They endured a terrible afternoon at Versailles. Even getting inside was an endurance test in their ongoing stand-off with the French. "Why can't they just have a sign that says Entrée?" Joel fumed. "Everything's so perversely illogical with the French." They didn't like Versailles, it was big and overblown, like every other European palace they'd ever been to. They'd done Europe one summer when they were students. They'd only had one day in Paris, that was one of the reasons they had come back here on honeymoon.
Campbell liked Le Petit Trianon, it was pretty and orderly and there was a cute donkey. She fed potato chips to the fish in the stream.
"How can you like it?" Joel said. "It's artificial, a pretend place for a woman who was - rightly - doomed." Yesterday they had argued about a friend who'd called their first child, a boy, "Giuseppe". They weren't Italian and Joel said the name was therefore "stupid" and "pretentious". Campbell liked the name. She wondered what Joel would call a son if he had one. Not something Italian, apparently.
They were going to the Opera. The hotel concierge had got them expensive tickets to La Traviata and they got dressed up in their best clothes, which, being Americans, weren't much different from their ordinary clothes and had schlepped along the road to the Palais Garnier which Campbell thought was a gorgeous building and Joel, of course, thought was "grotesquely overdone". It turned out that it didn't matter what it was because it was the wrong building.
"Jesus Christ," Joel said. "Didn't you check?"
"Me?"
They managed to haul themselves into a cab and get to the Opera Bastille which Campbell thought was a soulless modern building and Joel thought was contemporary and sensible. They were cross and sweaty and only made it to their seats (right in the middle of a row, of course, and after many "Excusez-mois") with seconds to spare before curtain up.
"Which opera is La Traviata?" Campbell whispered as the overture struck up. She wasn't good with opera. Joel's parents had season tickets to the Met because that was the kind of people they were.
"Tragic inappropriate love, abandonment, death," he whispered back. "Yes, but which one?"
It was some kind of bank holiday in England and they were showing 101 Dalmatians in the middle of the afternoon. Skylar and Marshall watched it on the hotel TV. He'd been a real friend. The security guys had driven her back to London yesterday and dropped her off at a hotel, "very discreet, in Knightsbridge" one of them said to her. She wasn't sure who was picking up the check. She was flying out tomorrow. Both Marty and Harry said they were going to be at the airport to meet her and then she had to be straight on set next morning. They made it sound like she was going to be locked up and they were her jailers.
And so much for His Almighty Majesty being able to suppress anything because clips from that movie were all over the internet. Apparently it was called The Baron (Skylar didn't know it was called anything) and everyone was guessing who "the Baron" was but Skylar remembered that was what he called his doohickey.
"You mean his dick?" Marshall said, lighting up a joint. Skylar never did dope, she didn't believe in taking drugs.
"Can we not talk about it any more? Please?" It was all shameful and horrible, worse than anything Lindsay or Britney, or even Paris, had ever done.
She took a couple of Xanax and then a couple more when they didn't kick in. They got through a lot of champagne before Cruella de Vil was vanquished. Marshall gave her some Oxycontin and then they got steak and fries on room service and more champagne, chased with a couple of Adderall. Then Marshall went to sleep at the end of Skylar's Emperor bed and she popped a couple of Ambien and phoned Mom but she wasn't in. Skylar was asleep before Mom got to the end of her answerphone message. She was real tired. Real, real tired.
"I hate modern interpretations," Joel said in the interval. They stayed in their seats. Campbell would have liked a drink but not enough to get up and fight her way through to the bar. And Joel wasn't offering to go, which he would have done once.
"It's so self-referential," he said. "I mean why can't Violetta just be Violetta? Nineteenth-century courtesan, or whatever she was. Big dress, fans. Why does it have to be drugs and Hollywood and all that minimalism. The British royal family, for Christ's sake."
"Why does it make you so mad?" Campbell said. "It's just an opera."
"Everything makes me mad."
"Especially me?"
He made a funny little jerking motion with his head which could have been interpreted in a number of ways. And then the interval was over.
Skylar felt real comfortable. Like she had no worries and someone was taking care of her. Someone was taking care of her, lots of someones. Nurses and doctors and she could tell they all had her best interests at heart. A machine was keeping her going. She could hear the tick and hiss of it. She loved that machine. Her Mom was there. Harry and Marty were in and out. Marshall had come with her in the ambulance but Marty had kicked him out. Kirsty or whatever her name had been here and Skylar remembered she hadn't given her the Birkin bag at the end of the shoot. She felt real bad about that. She hoped it wouldn't count against her.
She heard Phoebe Something-Or-Other's theatrical voice saying, "Poor lamb, I just brought her this," and one of the nurses said, "It's lovely to meet you, Miss Hope-Walters, I'm such a fan."
He never came. Alfie. Skylar supposed he wasn't allowed. He would have come if he could have done, she was sure. She loved him. It was one true thought and it lived inside her and made her shine with light.
Campbell didn't think the story had been cheapened. It moved her in a way she simply hadn't expected. When it came to the deathbed scene she couldn't hold back a noisy, hiccupy sob and she saw Joel shrink away from her in embarrassment. Part of her had been hoping the ending would change. It was tragic. It felt more real than her own life. Perhaps that was the tragedy.
She was real, real sorry for the way things had turned out. If she had her time over she would do things differently, but it didn't really matter now. A life was what you made of it. And Skylar had done her best. But gee-whiz, she sure would have liked a bit more time. She hoped there was a heaven and that she'd done enough to get in. She hoped there would be dogs (no horses!) and she could eat all she wanted without getting any heavier.
And then he was there! She heard a nurse murmur, "Your Royal Highness," and then she felt him take her hand. He was crying and his hot, wet tears fell on her skin and burned right through to her bones and she felt the light inside her again.
It was funny but right at the end, after her lovely machine was switched off (by Mom) it was as if she was right there, awake and alive, and the last thing she saw was this cushion with a big pink rose cross-stitched on it. It was ugly. Real, real ugly. But as Mom would have said, "It's the thought that counts." And then that was it. The End.
• Public booking for the Glyndebourne 75th anniversary season opens Saturday 18 April. Box office 01273 813813, glyndebourne.com
