Extract From Wild Horses
CHAPTER ONE
Dying slowly of bone cancer, the old man, shrivelled now, sat as ever in his great armchair, tears of lonely pain sliding down crepuscular cheeks.
That Tuesday, his last, his stringy grip on my wrist tightened convulsively in a long silence while I watched his mouth tremble and move in abortive struggles to speak.
‘Father.’ The words finally wavered out; a whisper, desperate, driven by ultimate need. ‘Father, I must make my confession. I must ask . . . absolution.’
In great surprise and with compassion I said, ‘But . . . I’m not a priest.’
He paid no attention. The feeble voice, a truer measure of affairs than the fiercely clutching hand, simply repeated, ‘Father . . . forgive me.’
‘Valentine,’ I said reasonably, ‘I’m Thomas. Thomas Lyon. Don’t you remember? I’ve come to read to you.’
He could no longer see newsprint or anything straight ahead, though peripheral vision partly remained. I called in more or less every week, both to keep him up to date with the racing columns in the newspapers and also to let his beleaguered and chronically tired old sister go out for shopping and gossip.
I hadn’t actually read to him on that day. When I arrived he’d been suffering badly from one of his intermittent bouts of agony, with Dorothea, his sister, feeding him a teaspoon of liquid morphine and giving him whisky and water to help the numbness work faster.
He hadn’t felt well enough for the racing papers.
‘Just sit with him,’ Dorothea begged. ‘How long can you stay?’
‘Two hours.’
She’d kissed me gratefully on the cheek, stretching on tiptoes, and had hurried away, plump in her late seventies, forthright in mind.
I sat as usual on a tapestry stool right beside the old man, as he liked the physical contact, as if to make up for sight.
The fluttery voice persisted, creeping effortfully into the quiet room, determined and intimate. ‘I confess to God Almighty and to Thee, my Father, that I have sinned exceedingly . . . and I must confess . . . before ... before...’
‘Valentine,’ I repeated more sharply, ‘I’m not a priest.’
It was as if he hadn’t heard. He seemed to be focusing all the energy left in him into one extraordinary spiritual gamble, a last throw of hell-defeating dice on the brink of the abyss.
‘I ask pardon for my mortal sin . . . I ask peace with God ...’
I protested no more. The old man knew he was dying; knew death was near. In earlier weeks he had discussed with equanimity, and even with humour, his lack of a future. He had reminisced about his long life. He’d told me he had left me all his books in his will. Never had he made any mention of even the most rudimentary religious belief, except to remark once that the idea of life after death was a load of superstitious twaddle.
I hadn’t known he was a Roman Catholic.
‘I confess,’ he said, ‘. . . that I killed him . . . God, forgive me. I humbly askpardon. . . I pray toGod Almighty to have mercy on me...’
‘Valentine...’
‘I left the knife with Derry and I killed the Cornish boy and I’ve never said a word about that week and I accuse myself . . . and I lied about everything . . . mea culpa . . . I’ve done such harm . . . I destroyed their lives . . . and they didn’t know, they went on liking me ... I despise myself . . . all this time. Father, give mea penance ... and say the words ... say them ... ego te absolvo . . . I forgive your sins in the name of the Father ... Ibeg you ... Ibeg you...’
I had never heard of the sins he was talking about. His words tumbled out as if on the edge of delirium, making no cohesive sense. I thought it most likely that his sins were dreams; that he was confused, imagining great guilt where none lay.
There was no mistaking, however, the frantic nature of his repeated plea.
‘Father, absolve me. Father, say the words . . . say them,I begyou.’
I couldn’t see what harm it would do. He was desperate to die in peace. Any priest would have given him absolution: who was I cruelly to withhold it? I was not of his faith. I would square it later, I thought, with my own immortal soul.
So I said what he wanted. Said the words, dredging them frommemory. Said them in Latin, as he would clearly understand them, because they seemed less of a lie that way than in bald English.
‘Ego te absolvo,’ I said.
I felt a shiver through my body. Superstition, I thought.
Iremembered more words. They floated on my tongue. ‘Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’
I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The greatest blasphemyof my life to date. God forgive me my sin, I thought.
The dreadful tension subsided in the old man. The rheumy near-blind eyes closed. The grip on my wrist loosened: the old hand fell away. His face relaxed. He faintly smiled, and then grew still.
Alarmed, I felt for a pulse under his jaw and was relieved to feel the threadlike beat. He didn’t move under my touch. I shook him a little, but he didn’t wake. After five minutes I shook him again, more strongly, without results. Indecisively then I got up from my seat beside him and, crossing to the telephone, dialled the number prominently written on a notepad nearby, to get through to his doctor.
The medicine man was less than pleased.
‘I’ve told the old fool he should be in hospital,’he said. ‘I can’t keep running out to hold his hand. Who are you, anyway? And where’s Mrs Pannier?’
‘I’m a visitor,’ I said. ‘Mrs Pannier is out shopping.’
‘Is he groaning?’ demanded the doctor.
‘He was, earlier. Mrs Pannier gave him some painkiller before she went out. Then he was talking. Now he’s in a sort of sleep from which I can’t seem to wake him.’
The doctor growled a smothered curse and crashed his receiver into its cradle, leaving me to guess his intentions.
I hoped that he wouldn’t send a wailing ambulance with busy figures and stretchers and all the rough paraphernalia of making the terminally ill feel worse. Old Valentine had wanted to die quietly in his own bed. Waiting there, I regretted my call to the doctor, thinking that I’d probably set in motion, in my anxiety, precisely what Valentine had most wanted to avoid.
Feeling stupid and remorseful, I sat opposite the steadily sleeping man, no longer on a stool beside him but in a more comfortable armchair.
The room was warm. He wore blue cotton pyjamas, with a rug over his knees. He sat near the window, bare branched trees outside giving promise of a spring he wouldn’t know.
The study-like room, intensely his own, charted an unusual journey through time that had begun in heavy manual labour and ended in journalism. Born the son of a farrier, he’d been apprenticed to the forge in childhood, working the bellows for his father, skinny arms straining, young eyes excited by the noise and the fire. There had never been any question that he would follow in the trade, nor had he in fact veered towards anything else until his working pattern had long been settled.
Framed fading photographs on his walls showed a young Valentine with the biceps and pectorals of a giant, a prizewinning wielder of brute power with the wide happy grin of an innocent. But the idyll of the village smithy under the chestnut tree had already long gone. Valentine in his maturity had driven from job to job with his tools and portable brazier in a mobile working van.
He had for years shod a stableful of racehorses trained by my grandfather. He’d looked after the feet of the ponies I’d been given to ride. He had seemed to me to be already a wise man of incredible age, though I knew now he’d been barely sixty-five when I was ten.
His education had consisted of reading (the racing newspapers), writing (bills for his customers) and arithmetic (costing the work and materials so that he made a profit). Not until his forties had his mental capacity expanded to match his muscles. Not until, he’d told me during the past debilitated weeks, not decisively until in his job he was no longer expected to make individual shoes to fit the hooves of horses, but to trim the hooves to fit mass-produced uniform shoes. No longer was he expected to hammer white-hot iron bars into shape, but to tap softer metals cold.
He had begun to read history and biography, at first all to do with racing but later with wider horizons. He had begun in shy anonymity to submit observations and anecdotes to the newspapers he daily studied. He wrote about horses, people, events, opinions. One of the papers had given him a regular column with a regular salary and room to grow a reputation. While still plying his original trade, Valentine had become an honoured institution in print, truly admired and enjoyed for his insights and his wit.
As physical strength waned, his journalistic prowess had grown. He’d written on into his eighties, written into semi-blindness, written indeed until four weeks earlier, when the cancer battle had entered the stage of defeat.
And this was the old man, amusing, wise and revered, who had poured out in panic an apparently unbearable secret.
‘I killed the Cornish boy...’
He must have meant, I thought, that he was blaming himself for an error in his shoeing, that by some mischance a lost nail in a race had caused a fatal accident to a jockey.
Not for nothing had Valentine adopted often enough the doctrine of doing things thoroughly, quoting now and then the fable of the horseshoe nail. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost . . . little oversights led to great disasters.
A dying mind, I thought again, was scrambling old small guilts into mountainous terrors. Poor old Valentine. I watched him sleep, the white hair scanty on his scalp, big blotchy freckles brown in his skin.
For a long time, no one came. Valentine’s breathing grew heavier, but not to the point of snoring. I looked round the familiar room, at the horses’ photographs I’d come to know well in the past few months, at the framed awards on the dark green wall, the flower-printed curtains, the worn brown carpet, the studded leather chairs, the basic portable typewriter on an unfussy desk, the struggling potted plant.
Nothing had changed from week to week: only the old man’s tenure there was slipping away.
One wall, shelved from floor to ceiling, held the books that I supposed would soon be mine. There were years and years of form books listing thousands upon thousands of bygone races, with a small red dot inked in beside the name of every horse Valentine had fitted with racing shoes for the test.
Winners, hundreds of them, had been accorded an exclamation mark.
Below the form books there were many volumes of an ancient encyclopaedia and rows of glossily jacketed life stories of recently dead racing titans, their bustling, swearing vigour reduced to pale paper memories. I’d met many of those people. My grandfather was among them. Their world, their passions, their achievements were passing into oblivion and already the young jockeys I’d star-gazed at ten were grandfathers.
I wondered who would write Valentine’s life story, a worthy subject if ever there was one. He had steadfastly refused to write it himself, despite heavy prompting from all around. Too boring, he’d said. Tomorrow’s world, that was where interest lay.
Dorothea came back apologetically half an hour late and tried without success to rouse her brother. I told her I’d phoned the doctor fruitlessly, which didn’t surprise her.
‘He says Valentine should be in hospital,’ she said.
‘Valentine refuses to go. He and the doctor swear at each other.’ She shrugged resignedly. ‘I expect the doctor will comein time. He usually does.’
‘I’ll have to leave you,’ I said regretfully. ‘I’m already overdue at a meeting.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you by any chance Roman Catholic?’ I asked. ‘I mean . . . Valentine said something about wanting a priest.’
‘A priest?’ She looked astounded. ‘He was rambling on all morning . . . his mind is going . . . but the old bugger would never ask for a priest.’
‘I just thought . . . perhaps . . . last rites?’ Dorothea gave me a look of sweet sisterly exasperation.
‘Our mother was Roman Catholic, but not Dad. Lot of nonsense, he used to say. Valentine and I grew up outside the Church and were never the worse for it. Our mother died when he was sixteen and I was eleven. A mass was said for her. Dad took us to that but it made him sweat, he said. Anyway, Valentine’s not much of a sinner except for swearing and such, and I know that being so weak as he is he wouldn’t want to be bothered by a priest.’
‘I just thought I’d tell you,’ I said.
‘You’re a dear to come here, Thomas, but I know you’re mistaken.’ She paused. ‘My poor dear boy is very ill now, isn’t he?’ She looked down at him in concern. ‘Much worse?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Going.’ She nodded, and tears came into her eyes. ‘We’ve known it would come, but when it happens . . . oh, dear.’
‘He’s had a good life.’
She disregarded the inadequate words and said forlornly, ‘I’ll be so alone.’
‘Couldn’t you live with your son?’
‘No!’ She straightened herself scornfully. ‘Paul is forty-five and pompous and domineering, though I hate to say it, and I don’t get on with his wife. They have three obnoxious teenagers who switch on deafening radios all the time until the walls vibrate.’ She broke off and smoothed her brother’s unresponsive head fondly. ‘No. Me and Valentine, we set up home here together when his Cathy died and my Bill passed on. Well, you know all that . . . and we always liked each other, Valentine and me, and I’ll miss him.I’ll miss him something awful, but I’ll stay here.’ She swallowed. ‘I’ll get used to being alone, same as I did after Bill went.’
Dorothea, like many elderly women, it seemed to me, had a resolute independence that survived where youth quaked. With help once daily from the district nurse, she’d cared for her failing brother, taking on ever more personal tasks for him, exhausting herself to give him comfort and painkillers when he lay awake in the night. She might mourn him when he’d gone, but her dark-rimmed eyes showed she was much overdue on rest.
She sat down tiredly on the tapestry stool and held her brother’s hand. He breathed slowly, shallowly, the sound rasping. Fading daylight from the window beside Valentine fell softly on the aged couple, light and shadow emphasising the rounded commitmentofthe one and the skeletal dependence of the other, the hovering imminence of death as plain as if the scythe had hung above their heads.
I wished I had a camera. Wished indeed for a whole camera crew. My normal day-to-day life involved the catching of emotion on the wing, the recording of ephemeral images to illumine a bedrock of truth. I dealt with unreality to give illusion the insight of revelation.
I directed films.
Knowing that one day I would use and re-create the quiet drama before me, I looked at my watch and asked Dorothea if I might use her telephone.
‘Of course, dear. On the desk.’ I reached Ed, my earnest assistant, who as usual sounded flustered in my absence.
‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘I’m running late. Is everyone there? Well, get some drinks sent over. Keep them happy, but don’t let Jimmy have more than two Gand Ts, and make sure we have enough copies of the script alterations. Right? Good. See you.’
I regretted having to leave Dorothea at such a time, but in fact I’d squeezed my visit into a day’s schedule that had made no provision for it, keeping the promise I’d given week after week.
Three months back, in the preliminary pre-production stage of the film I was currently engaged on, I’d called to see Valentine as a brief matter of courtesy, a gesture to tell him Iremembered him in the old days in my grandfather’s time, and had always admired, even if from a distance, his emergence as a sage.
‘Sage my foot!’ He’d disclaimed the flattery but enjoyed it all the same. ‘I can’t see very well these days, boy. How about reading to me for a bit?’
He lived on the outer edge of Newmarket, the town long held to be the home and heart of the horseracing industry worldwide. ‘Headquarters’, the racing press called it. Fifteen hundred of the thoroughbred e´ lite rocketed there over the windswept training gallops and over the wide difficult tracks, throwing up occasional prodigies that passed their glorious genes to flying generations of the future. An ancient wealth-producing business, the breeding of fast horses.
I was on the point of leaving when the front doorbell rang, and to save Dorothea’s tired feet I went to answer it.
A short thirtyish man stood there looking at his watch, impatient.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
He gave me a brief glance and called past me, ‘Dorothea?’
Regardless of fatigue, she appeared from Valentine’s room and said miserably, ‘He’s . . . in a coma, I think. Come in. This is Thomas Lyon who’s been reading to Valentine, like I told you.’
As if on an afterthought, she finished the introduction, flapping a hand and saying, ‘Robbie Gill, our doctor.’
Robbie Gill had red hair, a Scots accent, no small-talk and a poor bedside manner. He carried a medical bag into Valentine’s room and snapped it open. He rolled up the ill man’s eyelids with his thumb and pensively held one of the fragile wrists. Then he silently busied himself with stethoscope, syringes and swabs.
‘We’d better get him to bed,’ he said finally. No mention, I was glad to notice, of transportation to hospital.
‘Is he – ?’ Dorothea asked anxiously, leaving the question hovering, not wanting an affirmative answer.
‘Dying?’ Robbie Gill said it kindly enough in his brusque way. ‘In a day or two, I’d say. Can’t tell. His old heart’s still fairly strong. I don’t really think he’ll wake again, but he might. It partly depends on what he wants.’
‘How do you mean, what he wants?’ I asked, surprised.
He spent time answering me, chiefly, I thought, for Dorothea’s sake, but also from a teacher’s pleasure in imparting technical information.
‘Old people,’ he said, ‘very often stay alive if there’s something they particularly want to do, and then after they’ve done it they die quite quickly. This week I’ve lost a patient who wanted to see her grandson married. She went to the wedding and enjoyed it, and was dead two days later. Common occurrence. If Valentine has no unfinished business, he may slip away very soon. If he were looking forward to receiving another award, something like that, it might be different. He’s a strong-willed man, and amazing things can happen even with cancer as advanced as this.’
Dorothea shook her head sadly. ‘No awards.’
‘Then let’s get him settled. I’ve arranged for Nurse Davies to pop in late this evening. She’ll give him another injection, which will keep him free from any pain he might feel in the night, and I’ll come back first thing in the morning. The old codger’s beaten me, dammit. He’s got his way. I’ll not move him now. He can die here at home.’
Dorothea’s tears thanked him.
‘It’s lucky he has you,’ the doctor told her, ‘and don’t make yourself ill.’ He looked from her to my height assessingly, and said, ‘You look bigger than both of us. Can you carry him? Nurse Davies would help Dorothea move him, as she always does, but usually he’s conscious and doing his best to walk. Can you manage him on your own?’
I nodded. He weighed pathetically little for a man once as strong as horses. I lifted the tall sleeping figure in myarms and carried him from his armchair, through the small hallway and into his bedroom, putting him down gently on the white sheet, revealed by Dorothea peeling back the bed covers. Her brother’s breathing rasped. I straightened his pyjamas and helped Dorothea cover him.Hedidn’t wake.Hehad died inside, I thought, from the moment he’d believed in his absolution.
I didn’t bring up the subject of a priest again with Dorothea, nor mention it to the doctor. I was convinced they would both disapprove of what I’d done, even though Valentine was now dying in peace because of it. Leave things as they are, I decided. Don’t add to Dorothea’s distress.
I kissed the old lady, shook hands with the doctor and, offering vague but willing future help, drove back to my job.
Life, both real and imaginary, was loud and vigorous along in Newmarket, where the company I was working for had rented an empty racing stable for three months, paying the bankrupt owner-trainer enough to keep him in multiple child-support for ever.
Although a good hour late for the script conference I’d called for five-thirty, I did not apologise, having found that the bunch I was working with took regrets for weakness, chiefly because of their own personal insecurities. It was essential, I understood, for them to regard me as rock, even if to myself sometimes the rock was no more durable than compressed sand.
They were gathered in what had earlier been the dining-room of the trainer’s cavernous house (all the furniture having passed under the bankruptcy hammer, satiny green and gold striped paper still adhering richly to the walls) and were variously draped round a basic trestle table, sitting on collapsible white plastic garden chairs on the bare boards of the floor. The drinks provided by the catering unit had barely lasted the hour: no one on the production was wasting money on excess comfort.
‘Right,’ I said, ousting Ed from the seat I wanted, halfway along one side of the table, ‘have you all read the alterations and additions?’
They had. Three were character actors, one a cine-matographer, one a production manager, one a note-taker, one an assistant director – Ed – and one a scriptwriter that I would like to have done without. He had made the current changes at my reasonable insistence, but felt aggrieved. He believed I was intent on giving a slant to the story that departed at ninety degrees from his original vision.
He was right.
It was disastrously easy to make bad horseracing pictures and only possible to do it at bankable level, in my view, if racing became the framing background to human drama. I’d been given the present job for three reasons that I knew of, the third being that I’d previously stood two animal stories on their heads with profitable results, the second being that I’d been trained in my work in Hollywood, the source of finance for the present epic, and – first – that I’d spent my childhood and teens in racing stables and might be considered to know the industrial terrain.
We were ten days into production: that is to say we had shot about one-sixth of the picture, or, putting it another way, roughly twenty minutes a day of usable footage, whole cloth from which the final film would be cut. We’d been scheduled to finish in sixty working days; a span of under ten weeks, as rest days were precious and rare. I, as director, decided which scenes would actually be shot on which days, though I’d made and distributed in advance a programmeto which we mostly adhered.
‘As you’ve seen,’ I said generally, ‘these changes mean that tomorrow we’ll be shooting on the railed forecourt in front of the Jockey Club’s headquarters in the High Street. Cars arrive and leave through the gates. The local police will help with the town’s regular traffic from eleven to twelve only, so all of our arrivals and departures will be condensed into that time. The Jockey Club has agreed to our using their front door for entering and leaving shots. The internal sets have, of course, been built here in this house. You three . . .’ I said to the actors, ‘. . . can put some useful poison into your various encounters. George, be sly. Iago stuff. You are now secretly engineering Cibber’s downfall.’
The script-writer moaned, ‘That’s not the right inter-pretation. I don’t like what you’ve made medo. Those two are very good friends.’
‘Only up to the point of opportunist betrayal,’ I said.
Howard Tyler, the writer, had already complained about small earlier changes to the producer, to the accountant and to the film company’s top brass, all without getting me fired. I could put up with his animosity in the same way as I stifled irritation at his round granny glasses, his relentlessly prim little mouth and his determination to insert long pointless silences where only movement and action would fill cinema seats. He adored convoluted unspoken subtleties that were beyond most actors’ powers. He should have stuck to the voluminous moody novels whence he came.
His book that he’d adapted for the present film was loosely based on a real-life story, a twenty-six-year-old Newmarket racing scandal very successfully hushed up. Howard’s fictional version purported to be the truth, but almost certainly wasn’t, as none of the still living real participants had shown the slightest sign of indignant rebuttal.
‘You’ll find you each have a plan of the Jockey Club forecourt,’ I said to the meeting. They nodded, flicking over pages. ‘Also,’ I went on, ‘you’ve a list of the order of shooting, with approximate times. The three cars involved will be driven to the forecourt first thing in the morning. Get all the crews alerted so that lights and cameras can be set up where shown on the plan. If everyone’s willing and ready, we should finish well before the daylight yellows. Any questions?’
There were always questions. To ask a question meant attention had been paid and, as often happened, it was actors with the smallest parts who asked most. George, in this case, wanted to know how his character would develop from the extra scene. Only, I enlightened him, as just one more factor in Cibber’s troubles. Cibber, eventually, would crack. Bang. Fireworks. Cibber said ‘Hallelujah’ gratefully. George compressed his mouth.
‘But they were friends,’ Howard repeated stubbornly.
‘As we discussed,’ I said mildly, ‘if Cibber cracks, your motivation makes better sense.’
He opened his little mouth, saw everyone else nodding, folded his lips and began to act as if Cibber’s cracking was all his own idea.
‘If it rains tomorrow,’ I said, ‘we’ll shoot the internal Jockey Club scenes instead and trust it will be fine on Thursday. We are due to complete the first Newmarket segment on Saturday. On Sunday, as I think you know, we’re shifting the horses forty miles west to Huntingdon racecourse, to the stable block there. Actors and technicians will travel early on Monday morning. Rehearsals, Monday, from noon onwards. Shooting Tuesday to Friday, return here the following weekend. Ed will distribute times and running order to everyone concerned. OK? Oh, and by the way, the rushes from yesterday are fine. Thought you’d like to know. It was a lot of hard work, but worth it.’
The resulting sighs round the table camefrom relief. We’d spent the whole day in the stable yard, the human action in the foreground taking place against a background of routine equine life. Never could rows of horses have been mucked out, fed, watered and groomed more times in any twelve hours before: but we had enough shots in the can to give the fictional stable unending life.
The script meeting over, everyone dispersed except a tall thin, disjointed-looking man in an untidy beard and unkempt clothes whose unimpressive appearance hid an artistic confidence as unassailable as granite. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded. He slouched in his seat and waited until all backs but our own had passed through the door.
‘You wanted me to stay?’ he asked. ‘Ed said.’
‘Yes.’
Every film with any hope of acclaimed success needed an eye that saw all life as through a camera lens. Someone to whom focus and light intensities were extrasensory dimensions taken for granted. His title on the credits might variously be ‘cinematographer’ or ‘director of photography’. I’d had a mathematical friend once who said he thought in algebra: Moncrieff, director of photography, thought in moving light and shadows.
We were used to each other. This was our third film together. I’d been disconcerted the first time by his surrealist sense of humour, then seen that it was the aquifer of his geysers of visual genius, then felt that to work without him would leave me nakedly exposed in the realm of translating my own perceptions into revelations on the screen. When I told Moncrieff what I wanted an audience to understand, he could instinctively slant a lens to achieve it.
We had once staged a ‘last rites’ scene for a man about to be murdered by terrorists: the ultimate cruelty of that wicked blasphemy had been underscored by Moncrieff’s lighting of the faces; the petrified victim, the sweating priest and the hard men’s absence of mercy. Ego te absolvo . . . it had brought me death threats by post.
On that Tuesday in Newmarket I asked Moncrieff, ‘Have you seen the railings outside the Jockey Club? The ones enclosing the private parking forecourt?’
‘Tall and black? Yes.’
‘I want a shot that emphasises the barrier qualities. I want to establish the way the railings shut out everyone but the e´ lite. Inside can be mandarins of racing. Outside, hoi polloi.’
Moncrieff nodded.
I said, ‘I also want to give an impression that the people inside, Cibber and George, the Jockey Club members, are themselves prisoners in their own conventions. Behind bars, one might say.’
Moncrieff nodded.
‘And,’ I said, ‘take a five-second shot of the hinges of the gates as they open, also as they close.’
‘Right.’
‘The scene between Cibber and George is shot to begin with from outside the bars. I’d like the zoo aspect made clear. Then track the lens forward between the railings to establish where they’re standing. The rest of that conversation is in close-ups.’
Moncrieff nodded. He seldommade notes while we talked, but he would write a meticulous worksheet before bedtime.
‘We’re not being judgmental,’ I said. ‘Not heavy handed. No great social stance. Just a fleeting impression.’
‘A feather touch,’ Moncrieff said. ‘Got you.’
‘Contributing to Cibber’s crack-up,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘I’ll get Howard to write that crack-up tomorrow,’ I said. ‘It’s mainly a matter of a shift in intensity fromthe calmscene already in the script. Howard just needs to put some juice into it.’
‘Howard’s juice is watered cranberry.’ Moncrieff picked up a vodka bottle fromamong the drinks clutter, and squinted at it against the light. ‘Empty,’ he commented morosely. ‘Have you tried vodka and cranberry juice? It’s disgusting.’
Howard drank it all the time.
‘Howard,’ Moncrieff said, ‘is radioactive waste. You can’t get rid of it safely.’
He knew as well as I did that Howard Tyler’s name on the billboards would bring to the film both the lending library audience and attention fromupmarket critics. Howard Tyler won prestigious prizes and had received honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic. Moncrieff and I were considered lucky to be working with such a luminous figure.
Few authors could, or even wanted to, write screenplays of their own novels: Howard Tyler had been nominated for an Oscar at his first attempt and subsequently refused to sell his film rights unless the package included himself. Moncrieff and I were stuck with Howard, to put it briefly, as fast as it seemed he was stuck with me.
Our producer, bald, sixty, a heavily-framed American, had put a canny deal together for the company. Big-name author (Howard), proven camera wizard (Moncrieff), vastly successful producer (himself) and young but experienced director (T. Lyon), all allied to one mega-star (male) and one deliciously pretty new actress; money spent on the big names and saved on the actress and me. He, producer O’Hara, had told me once that in the matter of acting talent it was a waste of resources employing five big stars in any one picture. One great star would bring in the customers and maybe two could be afforded. Get more and the costs would run away with the gross.
O’Hara had taught me a lot about finance and Moncrieff a lot about illusion. I’d begun to feel recently that I finally understood my trade – but was realistic enough to know that at any minute I could judge everything wrong and come an artistic cropper. If public reaction could be reliably foretold, there would be no flops. No one could ever be sure about public taste: it was as fickle as horseracing luck.
O’Hara, that Tuesday, was already in the Bedford Lodge Hotel dining-room when I joined him for dinner. The studio bosses liked him to keep an eye on what I was doing, and report back. He marched into operations accordingly week by week, sometimes from London, sometimes from California, spending a couple of days watching the shooting and an evening with me going over the state of the budget and the time schedule.
Owing to his sensible planning in the first place, I hoped we would come in under budget and with a couple of days to spare, which would encourage any future employers to believe I had organisational talents.
‘Yesterday’s rushes were good, and this morning went well,’ O’Hara said objectively. ‘Where did you get to this afternoon? Ed couldn’t find you.’
I paused with a glass of studio-impressing Perrier halfway to my mouth, remembering vividly the rasping of Valentine’s breath.
‘I was here in Newmarket,’ I said, putting down the water. ‘I’ve a friend who’s dying. I called to see him.’
‘Oh.’ O’Hara showed no censure, registering the explanation as a reason, not an excuse. He knew anyway – and took it for granted – that I’d started work at six that morning and would put in eighteen hours most days until we’d completed the shooting.
‘Is he a filmman?’ O’Hara asked.
‘No. Racing. . .a racing writer.’
‘Oh. Nothing to do with us, then.’
‘No,’ I said.
Ah, well. One can get things wrong.