Read Fascination for Free Online

They’ve just ordered puddings and more beer. I try to imaginemyself as Pascal’s step-father: I have to come to terms with the fact that there would be three of us in any future arrangement. Perhaps we could find him a place in a boarding school. Benji and Max went away at his age and seemed perfectly happy all those years at Farnham Hall – which reminds me: where are they now? What’re they doing? My salmon-caesar has arrived: scant sign of any salmon.
    Café Méridien, Cannes. I ate here when I first came to Cannes with
Two-and-a-Half Grand
. I remember this little bistro so well, remember the surging, irrepressible confidence of my mood – my first film and selected for ‘Un Certain Regard’ – nothing could stop me. I remember walking past this place one early morning and pausing to watch as the patron hosed down the pavement and began setting out the tables. I saw a saturnine man performing the very same routine this morning and had the odd sensation of being aware that all those years ago I had stood on this exact spot and watched the same ritual – that here one’s life had, for once, come a genuine full circle. Flash back: I was twenty-nine years old. Benji was two, Max was on the way… To think Annie and I were happy then…
    Tanja called from Prague, where she’s filming. They’re overrunning, she doesn’t think she can make the screening. It’s in her fucking contract, for Christ’s sake: she has to be released for publicity. I have to call the studio: a screening of
The Sleep Thief
at the Cannes Film Festival and no Tanja Baiocchi – what’s that going to look like? What signal will it send?
    The little hotel I used to stay in is now called the Hotel Carlone. In a video-shop I found an old copy of
Dix-Mille Balles
(
Two-and-a-Half Grand
). I almost wept.
    What colour is Tanja’s hair? Caramel. Butterscotch. Fudge. Toffee… All edible, all sweets.
    Idea for my next film, to be called
Blue on Blue
– the term used in the British Army for those occasions in warfare when you accidentally kill someone on your own side.

    Meditation on the navel: a scar that every human being carries… A baby’s cry requires no translation… A scream has no accent… A yawn is understood the world over… The banal truths of life are no less true, despite their banality.
    Saw Terry Mulvehey’s new movie
The Last Rebel
(how did he get into Director’s Fortnight and not me?). Completely preposterous and yet beautiful film. The story of
Wings of a Dove
grafted on to the American Civil War. No attempt to make the men’s hairstyles look remotely nineteenth-century. Mulvehey will sacrifice anything if it will provide a beautiful shot – narrative plausibility, character development, pace, suspense: everything yields to the lovely image. Compositionally, the film is flawless, but as a real story about real people –
rien
. Vanity and nullity. Tanja has not returned my calls all week. I sent her a text-message demanding to know who was Pascal’s father. I worry, perhaps, that I’ve made a crucial error.
    The Duke of Kent has been renamed The Flaming Terrapin in my absence. Curious name for a pub, but what do I know? We now have music (all but overwhelmed by the collective bellow of conversation), we now have mute televisions showing a rain-lashed golf tournament between competing bright umbrellas. I push my chargrilled Thai chicken around my plate and order another glass of golden, sun-pervaded Australian Chardonnay (my third).
    It is Friday lunchtime and you can sense the rowdy, burgeoning, weekend release of appetites. These young people in their twenties and thirties are eating and drinking and smoking as if their lives depended on it. And they do of course: their lives depend on them ceasing to eat, drink and smoke like this. Fuel Britannia. What is it about us? On the evidence of the crowd in this pub we have become a nation of careless, reckless trenchermen and trencherwomen. Strapping girls drinking pints