Seb is gripping his mug so hard that she half expects it to crack beneath his fingers. She looks at him for a long while, tries to see him as he once was.
‘I’ve known you longer than I knew my own husband,’ she says.
Seb takes a while to respond. ‘I’ve never thought of it like that.’
‘And you’re still just as stubborn,’ she says. ‘You both are. I’ve spent half my life wanting to bang your heads together.’ She chokes out a laugh, and tears spill out of her eyes as she does so. ‘Nothing is keeping you apart but yourselves. So, please. For his sake. And for mine. Stop wasting time.’
There’s a very long silence.
After a while, Seb sniffs, wipes his own tears from his cheeks. ‘Can I think about it?’
‘No, you can’t,’ Maisie says. ‘You’ve had enough time to think.’
And Seb laughs, because he knows that she’s right.
a journalist
Clara Cowan isn’t stuck in the past.
That will be the first line of the piece the journalist is going to write, because it’s clear that all the early buzz for her new film has misunderstood something fundamental. This isn’t some confessional about what happened on the set ofThe Sons. It’s not a retread ofAn Enormous Mind, either, nor is it a self-conscious pivot fromMalcontent. It’s something else entirely. Something great.
‘She’s ready for you.’
The journalist has been sitting in the lounge section of a suite at the Soho Hotel, waiting nervously for the publicist to call her in. She was a huge fan of Cowan even before she was allowed to see a top-secret, hush-hush screener of the new film in the production company’s private screening room this morning. Tonight, the movie will screen to its first proper audience. The journalist stands and smooths out the raw silk trousers she has painstakingly selected for the occasion of interviewing her idol. She is led into a room where the lights seem brighter than they are, is seated on a sofa that feels deeper than it really is.
What does Cowan look like? The journalist’s eyes adjust.Smaller than you’d expect. Older than a lot of the familiar photos. Immaculate style, expensive-looking jewellery, that loosely buttoned linen shirt that has become a trademark look for a whole generation of female film students. Something in her eyes that suggests she’s never going to tell you the whole story.
The journalist is already writing the piece in her head.Clara Cowan isn’t stuck in the past. Even when she’s fixing me with those famously piercing eyes in the interview room of a Soho hotel, I get the sense that she’s looking forwards, not back.
There’ll be time to edit. The sensibility is what matters.
‘It’s a pleasure,’ the journalist says. ‘I loved the film.’
‘Thank you,’ says Cowan. ‘It was a joy to make.’
‘That comes across.’ Right into it, then. ‘What did you draw on, for all that joy?’
Cowan is surprisingly unguarded today. The journalist had been told she was a difficult interview, but right now, she talks about her daughter, about the happiness she has brought into her life. About love, and about how every different kind of it informs every other. The Dictaphone sitting on the coffee table between them does all the note-taking, so the journalist takes a moment to wipe her brow, to scan down the list of questions she’s prepared. The ones her editor made her put in, about Jacob Steele.
‘What inspired the story?’
Steele has been back in the headlines recently. It must have been vindicating, for Cowan, that her name was rarely mentioned. No one cares about the drama behindThe Sonsany more. The film took on a life of its own, and such stories becamefootnotes. It’s a dramatic industry, and a fickle one. Of late, the journalist’s colleagues are far more interested in the catastrophic failure of Steele’s directorial debut, a film shot pompously in black and white, a script so clunky that it practically shot sparks as it scraped towards the end of its two-hour-and-forty-minute runtime. Cowan doesn’t seem the type to gloat. She’s never said anything in public about her relationship with Steele, nor did she address the rumours about her daughter’s parentage. She quietly reclaimed the name of the first short film she’d made with Steele, used it to christen her fledgling production company.Sonder. Directing pays well, but directing scripts you’ve written, with an exec producer credit, pays better. Clara Cowan has a net worth you can google, and has probably earned the right to step back for a bit. She wants to incubate other writers and directors. To bring their ideas to the screen.
‘It’s a love story,’ Cowan says. ‘And when you write a love story, you draw on this vast wealth of love stories already out there. And some of your own experiences, of course.’
They talk about her favourite love stories. They talk about the convention of the rom-com, about the condescension around art made for women, by women. They talk about more than this. As the analogue clock on the wall ticks away, the journalist circles certain questions, crosses others out. She taps her pen against a certain one, near the bottom of the page. Whatever happened to Seb Bonami?
‘Does it annoy you?’ the journalist says. ‘Everyone assuming it’s your life, up there on the screen?’
Cowan smiles. ‘It used to,’ she says. ‘But I haven’t exactly helped to dispel those assumptions.’ A knowing look. ‘Itismylife. In an abstract sense, at least. When I write a script, when I turn it into a film, I’m saying, this is how I see things.’ She gestures with her hands, rings on every finger. ‘If someone else feels seen by that, then I guess I’ve done my job.’
The journalist doesn’t say, I felt seen, because she fears it would be ingratiating, unprofessional. ‘So it’s not a true story?’ she ventures, instead.
‘If it’s true to anything, then it’s true to a portion of my life that has been and gone.’ Cowan’s voice is suddenly sharp-edged. ‘I made it before—’ she begins, but the sentence peters out. ‘It belongs to the time in which I made it. Which is fine. That’s the reality of art.’
‘Would you change it?’ the journalist asks.
‘No,’ Cowan says. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing.’
