was eight in the morning in England now. Viorel pictured the hallway of Martha’s Devon rectory – he’d never thought of it as home, just the house he came back to after boarding school: the faded Regency wallpaper, the neatly stacked pile of constituency post on the hall table next to the phone, and thought how far away it all was. Not just geographically, but emotionally. It was another world.
‘Yes, Mother,’ he said wearily. ‘Dorian Rasmirez is remaking it. He’s one of the—’
‘But why?’ Martha interrupted. ‘The original was a masterpiece. Let’s face it, my love, with the best will in the world, you’re hardly going to do a better job than Olivier. Are you?’
And there you had it. Just like that, Viorel’s mother had taken his triumph and squeezed all the joy out of it. Just like she always did.
The British public revered Martha Hudson for her heavily publicized fight to rescue Viorel as a baby from a horrific Romanian orphanage. Viorel’s earliest memories were of strangers coming up to him and telling him how lucky he was, and what a wonderful mother he had. In reality, however, his childhood had been horribly lonely. Though he didn’t want for material comforts, he knew that Martha never really loved him. It wasn’t personal. Martha Hudson had never really loved anyone except Martha Hudson. But it left Viorel feeling doubly rejected, not to mention permanently displaced.
His career had driven a further wedge between him and his mother. Martha Hudson had never wanted her son to become an actor. She wanted Viorel to be a doctor. In her fantasy, he would have gone back to Romania, the country of his birth, to help the poor, orphaned children still left there – ideally his return would be documented by photographers from the Daily Mail, which would inevitably remind readers of Martha’s own selflessness (for adopting him in the first place), and devotion to children’s causes everywhere.
But it hadn’t worked out that way. Viorel had selfishly decided to pursue fame and fortune instead. Martha could have forgiven him for trying. What galled her was that he had succeeded, to the point where he was now infinitely more famous than she would ever be.
‘I’ll be better paid than Olivier,’ said Viorel. ‘They’ve offered me five million dollars.’
Even Martha Hudson paused at this number. It was a pause-worthy number.
You’re impressed, you mean-spirited cow, thought Viorel. Just admit it.
But of course, Martha didn’t. ‘Oh well,’ she sniffed, ungraciously. ‘That’s all well and good, I suppose. But money isn’t everything you know, darling. Now look, I must run. I’ve got a select committee meeting this afternoon and I’m going to be late for my train.’
It was Terence Dee who had rescued Viorel from England and his mother’s stifling ambitions. Martha Hudson had only ever seen her son as a PR tool, an adorable, photogenic prop with which to bolster her image as the caring face of the Tory party. But Terence saw something else in Viorel: talent.
After Eton, Viorel dutifully followed his mother’s bidding and went up to Cambridge to read medicine at Peterhouse. But that was where Martha Hudson’s fairytale abruptly ended. After joining Footlights, Cambridge’s famous dramatic society Viorel was talent-spotted at the end of his first year by a London agent, and immediately cast in a British rom-com, Bottom’s Up. The movie went straight to video, but Viorel Hudson’s smouldering performance as a Casanova con man was good enough to get him noticed by Terence Dee, then the most powerful casting agent in Hollywood. In his mid-fifties, with a shaggy mop of dyed blond hair and a penchant for wearing pastel sweaters draped casually around his shoulders, Terence Dee was as flamboyantly gay as any Vegas drag queen, and it would be fair to say that his early interest in the edible young Englishman was not strictly professional. But clearly, Terence had no hard feelings over Viorel’s lack of hard feelings, for his own sex in general, and Terence in particular. He swiftly found the boy both a manager and an apartment in LA, on condition that Viorel drop out of university and pursue his acting career full time.
Viorel did not need to be asked twice. After a brief, frosty farewell with his mother over lunch in London (and a longer, warmer one with his girlfriend Lucinda, his co-star on Bottoms Up, and the woman who had finally relieved him of his virginity; despite his astonishing good looks, Viorel was a late bloomer), he boarded a flight to LAX and never looked back.
That was five years, six movies and countless hundreds of women ago, and in all that time Viorel had not returned to England once. Largely because of Martha, but also because he wanted to leave his shy, lonely childhood self behind. US audiences might idolize him for his Britishness: that clipped, Hugh Grant accent that for some unfathomable reason seemed to make American girls swoon, but Vio Hudson considered himself an Angelino through and through. From day one he had adored Los Angeles: the sunshine, the optimism, the gorgeous, liberated, oh-so-available women. Best of all, no one in LA had ever heard of Martha Hudson MP. And, though the US press had inevitably got hold of the story of Viorel’s childhood adoption, with the help of a first-class PR team, Vio had at last managed to shake off the image of victimhood that had haunted him all his life. Yes, he was adopted. Yes, his mother was a politician. So what? All that mattered now was that he was a star, a player, a winner. Hollywood had offered Viorel Hudson the second reinvention of his short life, and this time, it was on his own terms.
He’d made it. And he had no one to thank for his success but himself.
After hanging up on his mother, Viorel was home in ten minutes. He had left Rose Da Luca in bed at the Chateau (but not before paying the bill in full and ordering breakfast and roses for her the next morning – no need to be a dick about these things). As much as he loved bedding beautiful women – and Rose really had been beautiful, in a class of her own – Viorel was pathological in his need to wake up alone and, whenever possible, in his own bed. By using hotels for sex, he was able to satisfactorily compartmentalize his life and protect his privacy. His apartment, right on the sand at the end of Navy, a quiet, no-man’s-land between Santa Monica and Venice proper, was his sanctuary. Vio unashamedly adored the attention, glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but even he needed to know he could shut the door on the madness at the end of the day. Viorel Hudson the man was outgoing, sociable and charming. But the lonely, angry little boy he had once been still needed a fortress to retreat to.
Hidden from the street by a forbidding grey stone wall, into which was set a pair of prison-like, reinforced-steel security gates, Vio’s apartment was that fortress. Once inside, however, the feeling of space, light and openness was incredible. In the living room, floor-to-ceiling windows provided a jaw-dropping view of the ocean, shimmering grey-blue beyond the empty, white-sand beach. Give or take the occasional cyclist, no one came by this quiet stretch of coastline. Sipping his coffee on the balcony in the mornings, Vio often forgot he was in a city at all, with nothing but the distant caw of seagulls and soft crashing of waves to break the silence. The apartment wasn’t huge by movie-star standards: about two thousand square feet of lateral space. But Viorel had made it feel infinitely bigger with his simple, modern decor, the clean, geometric lines of his furniture and the calming palette of whites and greys that somehow managed to feel warm in winter and cool in summer. Had he not been an actor, he often thought he might have made a good designer, or perhaps even an architect. Every time he walked through his front door he felt a warm sense of pride, like a parent coming home to a beloved child. It was the first and only place he had ever felt completely at home, and he loved it.
Throwing his keys on the kitchen countertop, he kicked off his shoes and wandered back into the master bedroom. Dropping the rest of his clothes in a heap on the floor – Cecilia, his housekeeper, would clean up in the morning – he skipped the bathroom and crawled straight into the delicious comfort of his Frette sheets. His limbs throbbed with exhaustion, Rose had really put him through his paces, but he was too preoccupied to sleep.
Five
