What They Do in the Dark

QUENTIN DIDN’T REALLY like kids. Like all the stuff in the school, they gave her the Fear. All that trust and shining hope and shit. They were like puppies locking on to you with the big soft eyes and eager little tails at the very moment you tied the sack over their heads and slung them in the river. The thought of having a child of her own to f*ck up made her want to down anything mood-altering she could get her hands on, even those Vicks inhalers they were into in high school, snorting the menthol stuff on the tiny sponge you could prise out from the plastic case. There was a thought … could you get those in the UK?

She hadn’t been near a store. She was in the location–hotel–location bubble. Which was fine, surprisingly, but she’d been insulated by having Hugh around, which was something to get her out of bed in the morning even if she hadn’t been stark awake by three from jet lag. But today, he was back in London. No one would expect the producer to be around the whole time, and God knows he had things to do, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t going to miss him, as she’d told him lightly as they’d said goodnight a few hours before. He’d kissed her forehead. Who ever did that? He was like an uncle in a forties movie, and so, definitely queer. Didn’t stop her craving him though. Already nearly eight hours since her last hit and who knew when she’d score again? Actually, he’d said he’d be back the following night, when they were doing some of the search scenes. She could almost definitely make it till then.

Quentin heaved herself to the bathroom. She’d started taking baths, since she had been told that there wasn’t anything wrong with the shower. That is, it wasn’t malfunctioning, it was just existentially inadequate. She was supposed to be meeting Lallie and her mother for breakfast. This had been Katrina’s suggestion, although something of that nature had definitely been on Quentin’s to-do list, since Clancy back in the office wanted her to put out feelers about the Little Princess movie. There was only the hotel to eat at, or the catering bus, so they were plumping for the hotel. Quentin wasn’t sure if she was relieved or irked that Katrina would be chaperoning. Truth was she’d been avoiding the kid as much as possible. It was impossible to avoid the mom; she’d made herself indispensable in fetching cups of coffee, for one thing, as though she was Quentin’s own personal runner. And Quentin had had to borrow a tampon from her, which always created a bond. Particularly as the woman had then donated the whole goddamn box. But the kid, well.

The hotel dining room was usually full of crew and actors, all grey from lack of sleep and tanking down large plates of fried food. Like that would help (well, maybe it did; they all seemed to live on the stuff. Or maybe that was the reason they were grey?). But that day everyone was already out on set, shooting some of the police scenes, by the time Quentin came down at nine. Only one of the older actresses was left tucked away in a corner, smoking and reading the newspaper. And there were Katrina and Lallie, right on the middle table, Katrina wearing enough make-up for a drag act and Lallie unusually pale and silent. Her greeting was polite enough, but Quentin had seen her bouncing around the set and knew she always had energy to burn.

‘Bit tired,’ said Katrina, rolling her eyes.

It was as if she had taken a key and wound Lallie up. She produced an impression. Garbo. ‘I vant to be alone.’ Beneath it, Quentin could see there had been words. Maybe Lallie hadn’t wanted to come. After all, it was work for her too, shaking that little money-maker. Poor kid.

‘Shall we order breakfast?’

Lallie had a poached egg, Katrina stipulating on her behalf that it should be kept apart from its accompanying toast. Which should be unbuttered. Quentin approved of the juvenile finickiness. From what she’d seen, this was a country generally in need of a little more active discernment. She herself had been negotiating for yogurt for a couple of days, and that morning it cashed out in the shape of a narrow pot, gingerly proffered on a saucer, with a vaguely alarming logo: ‘Ski’. What the hell did skiing have to do with yogurt? She delved, cautiously, as Katrina smoked over her fried stuff and Lallie methodically opened the three foil pats of butter that had come with her order.

‘So you do like butter,’ Quentin observed.

‘Yeah, but I don’t like—’

‘She doesn’t like melted butter,’ interrupted Katrina. ‘She likes butter on toast when it’s gone cold. Don’t know where she gets it from!’

Katrina, Quentin had noticed, was always eager to promote her daughter as some sort of freak, whose eccentricity was unique but whose talents were firmly connected to her. She watched Lallie mush the rectangle of cold butter on to the toast.

‘It’s nicer,’ she said, firmly.

‘So.’ Quentin gathered herself, smiled. Time to shake her own money-maker. She wondered what Hugh was up to. Breakfast at Claridge’s perhaps, or rough sex with some boy he’d picked up; did he give or take? It was hard to work out in one so confidently dominant and yet alertly receptive. Well balanced, that’s what she loved. Complete even. Maybe that was it. Maybe he didn’t need anyone. Maybe he did it with himself in the mirror, or only with boys who looked like him, like a certain movie star her dad had told her about. While looking at himself in the mirror. And where was the harm, as she’d thought at the time? The movie star was so beautiful, why wouldn’t he want to drown in his very own swimming-pool-blue eyes? Of course with Hugh, it wasn’t narcissism exactly. There just didn’t seem that much of a gap between him and the world, a gap that cashed out as any kind of need. Ah, that need, that f*cking need, Quentin. To work.

‘Have you ever read A Little Princess?’ she addressed Lallie, smiling her smile.

‘A Little Princess, A Little Princess, ooh, I’m not sure we’ve read that one, have we, luvvie?’

Lallie chewed her toast.

‘No.’

‘She’s not much of a reader,’ confided Katrina. ‘Too much to do.’

‘Well, I’ll make sure you get a copy.’

And then she pitched it, aware that as long as there was a ticket to Hollywood on the table, she could have said it was about a kid giving blow jobs for peanut-butter sandwiches and the mommy would sign her daughter up. It was tempting, but Quentin stuck to the truth. Weirdly, A Little Princess was a book she remembered well from her own childhood. Particularly the ending, when the dad came back. Or was that the one about the trains? It didn’t matter: in a movie the dad would end up coming back for the girl, since that was obviously what everyone would be rooting for.

If she did say so herself, Quentin did a good job. She knew, because Lallie switched her attention from cutting exact triangles from the white of her egg to listening to her. The story began to live in her face. She loved the ending too, Quentin’s version. Katrina was also excited, if only for her own reasons. They were all still talking about it and asking questions when Lallie’s tutor came to find her. The tutor was a hesitant woman in her forties, too fat for her fussy purple blouse. Quentin knew as soon as she saw her she had a drink problem. Holding it together, maybe not yet starting until after lunch, but in another ten years she’d be a wreck. No wonder. Nice career, hon.

‘Off we go! Fractions today.’

Lallie took her time drinking a glass of milk, enforcing her status as the tutor hovered, unconfident of taking a seat. Quentin didn’t suggest she did, and it clearly didn’t occur to Katrina, who operated only out of commitment to the cause of Lallie. Finally, Lallie got up.

‘I’ll get you a copy of the book,’ Quentin told her.

‘Ooh, we’d love that, wouldn’t we, hen?’ said Katrina. ‘I’ll have to read it and all.’ At last, she included the tutor. ‘She’s talking about our Lallie being in a film, in America. The Little Princess. You know, from a book.’

The tutor smiled indefinitely, revealing mottled teeth. ‘Lovely.’ She scooped Lallie along. ‘Isn’t it set in England, though?’

‘Well, they’ll set it where they like, won’t they? Doesn’t have to be in England.’

For a moment, Quentin was apprehensive that Lallie and the tutor would go and leave her to Katrina’s mercies, but after a moment to stub her cigarette with all the vehemence of grinding it into the tutor’s eye, Katrina headed off with them. Maybe she sat in on the lessons? As soon as they’d gone, although she had been desperate for them to go – hey, she could do Garbo herself – Quentin felt the drop, another of those time spools. Maybe another cup of coffee. The coffee here was weird, with a gross kind of skin that clung to your lip, like algae bloom on a stagnant pond. When she glanced around, she was surprised to see the room was empty except for the older woman in the corner, and that all the other tables had been cleared.

‘I think there’s someone in the kitchen, would you like me to knock?’

The actress waved her baton of folded newspaper at the door behind her shoulder. Quentin could see she was nearly done on the crossword.

‘Oh, that’s OK—’

But the actress – she should know her name, probably – was already leaning over and calling through an opened gap: ‘Excuse me, service?’

Over Quentin’s ‘No, really, it’s not a problem’, the woman said she fancied another cup of tea herself. Then, tilting the cup, observed that perhaps it had been coffee? She was no Hugh, but the thespian self-confidence was better than nothing. When the waiter came, smelling of cigarettes, Quentin ordered the drinks and invited the actress to join her.

‘Vera Wyngate.’

Quentin introduced herself. She recognized Vera now from what she had learned to call the rushes. She looked really different with her own hair. Seeing her as herself, Quentin thought she might be familiar from another movie, but it would be kind of rude to ask. If you have to ask, it doesn’t count. Although she had that instant actress intimacy which made her seem almost American, and so potentially impossible to offend. It was nice to be with her, drinking the weird coffee. Vera seemed about as lonely as she was.

‘Back home this time next week, touch wood,’ she told Quentin.

This was London, apparently. Not married ‘any more, thank God’, no kids. Although she knew Quentin was the producer, Vera was the first person she’d met on the movie, including Lallie, who wasn’t trying any sort of angle on her. Even Hugh. Hugh Hugh Hugh.

‘Have you worked with anyone before? The director? Hugh?’

See, it felt nice just to say that, to be in a world where other people potentially knew him. This was Vera’s first time working with a*shole Mike apparently, ‘But I’ve known darling Hugh since he was a baby, practically. His father was a producer too, you know. Sidney Calder. Terrible man.’

The way Vera said this, Quentin could see she’d f*cked Hugh’s dad. He’d f*cked her. Danny-wise, probably. Live and learn, or just keep on living.

‘With the ladies?’ she empathized.

‘Oh, awful, darling. Not that he had much to offer, apart from a part – I mean in a film, because that part –’ Vera gestured and grimaced – ‘not much to write home about, let me tell you. Hugh definitely gets his looks from his mother, I don’t know about anything else, I hasten to add – Hilary Longton, do you know her? She was a lovely actress. Of course Sidney made her give it all up when they got married and had the boys. Hugh adored her, I think. Well, everyone did. Such a shame. She used to turn a blind eye, although Sidney would have just carried on in front of her if she hadn’t, I think. Of course the boys were at boarding school.’

Poor little Hugh. It was like they were related. Movie brats. She hadn’t known that. Although she imagined it was all a little different here, kind of simultaneously downscale and yet classier than her Hollywood biog.

‘But Hughie’s an absolute sweetie.’

The way Vera spoke, Quentin could see she didn’t get it. Him. No matter. Vera shepherded her cigarette ash into one corner of the plastic ashtray, confidentially rearranged her shoulders.

‘But now – what do you think about the girl?’

For a sick heartbeat Quentin thought she was talking about a girl in connection with Hugh, a fiancée, as he’d probably call her, some pissy bitch with a creamy complexion and crystal vowels. But of course, she realized, once she’d interpreted Vera’s offstage flick of the eyes, she meant Lallie.

‘She’s quite a package.’

Vera nodded. ‘Isn’t she just.’

OK, so there was real dislike there. What was that about? Jealousy?

‘Poor little thing,’ said Vera, unsympathetically. ‘Of course it all comes from the mother.’

‘That’s traditional, I guess.’

‘God, yes. Don’t put your daughter on the stage … of course there’s a kind of genius there.’

Quentin never responded well to the G-word. She’d grown up in a town of geniuses, and the über-geniuses were always distinguished by how many people around them they could destroy, the über-über-geniuses by how spectacularly they could destroy themselves into the bargain. Lallie would have to rack herself up a few habits and burn through a few waster husbands before you could start approaching that word. And she didn’t even need a bra yet.

‘And she loves the limelight, no doubt about it. Mind you, don’t we all? Not you, darling. I’m sure the backroom stuff is much more well adjusted.’

Yeah, right. Quentin thought of all the kids she went to high school with, the f*ck-ups with geniuses for parents. Herself probably included. True, the spawn of actors were more straightforwardly damaged: addictions, suicidal tendencies, nymphomania. The producers’ and writers’ and directors’ and designers’ kids took a more smorgasbord approach to neurosis, in her experience. There was a kind of hopeless simplicity, in the actors’ kids, in knowing you’d never be as beautiful or successful as your mom or dad, whereas such as she, well, they all had to work that stuff out, be their own personal Hamlet … anyway, that wasn’t Lallie’s potential problem. And Lallie’s potential problems weren’t her problem either. She was here to pretend to be a producer and functioning human and recruit Lallie for the other movie, maybe. She was kind of getting that Vera wasn’t unduly preoccupied with Lallie’s welfare herself.

‘Are there problems?’ she asked. ‘On set …’

‘Not that I can see.’ Vera’s regret was obvious. ‘Works like clockwork, poor mite. Absolute trouper, Mike’s probably told you.’

Quentin was yet to have much of a conversation with Mike. He was too twitchy, and come to think of it, Hugh had intervened between them without her really noticing. Silent diplomacy. She liked that. But it wouldn’t have mattered if Mike had sat her down and told her that Lallie threw tantrums and turned up four hours late every day and demanded he personally wipe her ass. She could see from the rushes – everyone always loves the dailies: thanks, Dad – that Lallie was something else. It didn’t matter, the Mom and the W.C. Fields impressions and the tacky TV show (which she hadn’t seen, but from what the agent and the Mom had said about it she could tell it was tack all the way). Because what Lallie had, money couldn’t buy, although God knows it was going to give it the old college try. And she, Quentin Genevieve Montpellier, was heading up the line. Just step into this sack, kid, there’s a heap of dollar bills at the bottom, and excuse me while I find something to tie it up with.

IT WAS REALLY only because of Gemma that Pauline went back to school before it broke up. Admitting this, especially to herself, would have infuriated her. As far as she was concerned, she went back because there was nothing better to do now Joanne was out of the house. At least at school she existed, if only to get done and spend hours standing outside Mr Scott’s office waiting to get done by him. And it was just as bad as she’d feared about the film and the auditions; it was all anyone talked about, even the teachers. Everyone was excited because the film people had been in at the weekend already and left stuff that showed the way they’d decorated the school to look different, and they all surrounded Mr Fletcher the caretaker in the playground at playtime to ask him everything about it, Gemma included.

Because of her talking to Mr Fletcher, Pauline didn’t realize until dinnertime that Gemma was avoiding her. In the queue, she talked to one of her snot-bag friends as though Pauline’s voice didn’t make noise. It was only when she pushed her on the shoulder that Gemma did this crap pretending to notice her face. They weren’t allowed to be on the same table at dinner itself, but Pauline could see Gemma from where she was sitting, serving up mince from the tin. Pauline finished her own meat and veg and square of flan ages before Gemma, then bided her time mouthing her tepid glass of water, metallic from the jug, with grey bits of mince sunk at the bottom. The moment Gemma pushed back her chair, Pauline was making for the door to meet her.

‘Do you want to play skellingtons or owt?’

Gemma said she didn’t, that she was going to play two-ball with Christina, who was already installed by the Juniors’ wall. So Pauline followed her, watching, which was tolerated, although no one invited her to have a go. And when the bell shrilled for afternoon lessons, she got in the line behind Gemma and pushed the box into her hand.

‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s a present for yer.’

Gemma opened the box containing Joanne’s charm.

‘It’s a guitar. You put it on a bracelet, like. It’s gold. I got it for me mam’s birthday.’

Gemma dangled it. ‘Gold? Really?’

‘Cross me heart.’ She could see that Gemma liked it.

‘Why hasn’t your mum got it if it’s her present?’

‘She already had one the same so she said it was all right if I wanted to give it to someone else.’

Gemma put the guitar back in the box, careful to centre it in its little red satin bed before she slid it in the pocket of her dress. Pauline felt so happy she sat in her class until four o’clock without bothering any of her neighbours, just thinking about Gemma’s house and the life she lived there. She got done for not listening to the teacher, but not the way she got done for pinching or kicking or taking pencils. Ever since she had been to Gemma’s house, she had run this daydream to herself, like a groove in a record. When Gemma had gone to the toilet, before they had played the murder game, Pauline had taken the opportunity to have a really good look around her bedroom. It was like the telly. Everything matched. She had opened a drawer and there were Gemma’s knickers and vests and socks laid out, clean and separate from each other. She didn’t recognize the socks at first, because they were balled in pairs. When she got home that night after she’d scarpered over the fence, she found as many socks as possible – she and Cheryl did what they could from a common pool – and tried to arrange them in these satisfying spheres. It wasn’t the same. Pauline realized that she needed Gemma’s kind of white socks, and she didn’t own any white socks; the best pair she had was some pale green pop socks left by Joanne. She’d been wearing those ever since Joanne had gone, although one of them was now quite badly laddered.

‘I’m not allowed pop socks until I start secondary,’ said Gemma critically, focusing on the ladder. But Pauline was listening. She nicked a blue pair from a shoe shop in town which kept a rack of them by the door and presented the packet to Gemma on her way into school the next day. The day after that, it was a Kit Kat, and on Thursday, a purse that had made its way to the house, brand new and shiny red, with a big-toothed zip all the way round. When Gemma undid the zip, curious to examine the inside, it disclosed a row of long metal loops, one of them holding a key. This disappointed them both.

‘It belonged to my mam,’ said Pauline. ‘She said you could have it ’cos she’s got a new one but she must have forgotten to take out the key, like.’

Gemma seemed satisfied by this.

‘Do you want the key back?’

‘Yeah.’

Pauline took it, although she knew it didn’t open any door round at hers. Her lie made her half believe the key really did belong to Joanne, so it was nice to have. Gemma didn’t play with her for long, though, at playtime, and at dinnertime play she couldn’t find her at all. Now they were in different classes there wasn’t any queuing to do together either, except at dinner. She got kept in after the last bell for swearing, and as Mrs Maclaren started her weary telling off, Pauline could hear the noise of everyone else spreading through the playground and disappearing through the gates.

‘I’ve got to go, Miss.’

‘You’re not going anywhere, Pauline, until you’ve realized what and what isn’t acceptable behaviour in my class.’

‘I know, Miss, I’m sorry, Miss, but I’ve got to go and look after me little brother, Miss.’

‘Well, he’ll have to wait, won’t he?’

Pauline was sure she could hear Gemma laughing in the mix of voices below the window. Mrs Maclaren had quickly finished telling her off and was tidying up the classroom, picking up dropped pencils, repositioning chairs casually upended on desks that might topple on to Mr Fletcher when he came to clean the floor. As she turned with a duster and began swiping her maths lesson into the chalky fog on the board, Pauline made a run for it. She was so quick down the stairs she didn’t know if Mrs Maclaren was coming after her, but once she was out of the gate she allowed herself a glance round and sure enough she was, gasping fury and shouting for other people to stop her, as though she’d stolen something.

‘Come on!’

Pauline grabbed Gemma’s school dress and pulled her past the gate. Gemma ran, docile. She wasn’t as fast as Pauline, and tried to ask what was happening. Pauline tugged her for a good way across the playing field, until she could see that Mrs Maclaren wasn’t going to continue the chase. The teacher was waving her arms a few feet beyond the gate, the stupid bitch.

‘Can I come to your house?’ she asked Gemma.

‘You what?’

‘I can’t go home ’cos me mam’s poorly and she says I’m not allowed to stay hanging round town.’

Gemma cast a look back at stringy Mrs Maclaren, who was retreating into the school.

‘Why were you running? What did you do?’

‘She started chasing me – I didn’t do owt. I reckon she’s turned, you know, like what your dad’s girlfriend did at your house.’

Pauline rolled her eyeballs and lurched, knock-kneed and zombified. Gemma almost giggled, swerved away so she couldn’t get her.

‘So can I come then?’

‘I’m not allowed,’ said Gemma. ‘I’ve got to meet me mum at her salon.’

‘I’ll come with you then.’

Gemma looked horrified. ‘You can’t. I’ll get done.’

‘I meant I’ll come into town with you, spaz.’

She could see Gemma couldn’t think of an excuse. It was a free country, anyway.

‘He’s not me dad,’ Gemma said, as they headed for the subway where the perv lurked. ‘When you said my dad’s girlfriend. He isn’t my dad.’

They didn’t say much else to each other, but Pauline was content with the two of them together, side by side, as long as it lasted. She didn’t know what Gemma had meant by a salon, so it was a surprise when they stopped outside a hairdresser’s and Gemma said it was her mum’s work. A customer was coming out as they stood by the front, which was brown glass with cartoony pictures stuck against the window of women with hairdos. Before the door shut again, Pauline inhaled an acrid tang. The customer looked nothing like the vast-eyed women in the pictures, although her hair did, exactly.

‘You’d better go, I’ll get done.’

Gemma hustled her out of sight of the window, towards the men’s clothes shop next door.

‘I’ll get done!’

She left her there and went inside the salon, releasing another waft of cooked hair. Pauline edged round and peeped, to see Gemma marching through the reception and past the waiting women there, towards the back, which was divided from the front by a wrought-iron screen that allowed incoherent glimpses of basins and driers and bits of Gemma with bits of her mum, reflected in bits of mirror. Pauline sank down and sat on the pavement, her back against the window of the men’s outfitters. Dreamily, she scratched at her knickers, where she itched. She decided to wait, so she could talk to Gemma when she got out. It was another warm day.

Pauline absorbed herself for a while smearing pictures into the glass of the men’s shop window. The lower section where she was sitting was painted black from the inside. As she finessed a knob and balls, the owner hammered on the glass and told her to clear off. So, for a while, she made slow circuits of the precinct. A pub, a haberdasher’s, some kind of office business you couldn’t see into, a bakery. She realized she was hungry. Staring at the uniform rows of long doughnuts piped with cream and a single scab of garish jam, she saw herself reflected. Her own hair was monstrous. Pauline had thought at home of taking the scissors to it, but it belonged to Joanne, the transformation of the peroxide, and as long as it stayed her body possessed something of her mother, even if her true ugliness advanced every day with the dark regrowth. One of these days, she saw, catching herself in the bakery window, her real hair would be longer than the white bits. By that time Joanne might be back.

She nicked a doughnut. It was a simple matter of waiting until the woman at the counter was talking to a customer, then leaning in from the open door and plucking one from the display. Pauline didn’t run off, because experience taught her that the running was often what alerted them that you’d nicked something. Licking a channel through the cream, it occurred to her that she could offer the doughnut to Gemma, who loved sweet stuff. Then she remembered that she’d already given her the purse thing that day, and allowed herself to eat it, taking her time.

Lolled against a wall, she was still scavenging sugar from her chin and fingers when Gemma finally left the salon with her mum. It took a second for Pauline to recognize the mum because her hair was a different colour from when she’d last seen her at school. Today it was a dense brown. She had Gemma by the hand and was giving her a talking to of some kind, tugging Gemma back towards her now and again as though she was trying to escape, which she wasn’t. Gemma’s face held the rebuke. She’d got a comic in the hand her mum wasn’t hanging on to.

‘What are you looking at?’

Pauline was amazed. Gemma’s mum was staring straight at her, savage.

‘I’ve seen you hanging about – what do you want, eh?’

Ordinarily, Pauline would have told her to f*ck off. As it was, she and Gemma stared at each other, locked in bewilderment.

‘I – I go to school with her.’

‘She does, Mum.’

Gemma dropped her comic and had to pick it up. Her mum had a look entirely familiar to Pauline from Joanne – it meant free-roaming rage that had just found an outlet.

‘What’s your name, eh?’

‘Pauline.’

‘Pauline what?’

‘Pauline Bright,’ offered Gemma, cravenly.

‘What, from that lot down Clay Lane?’

She didn’t need a response. Gemma’s mum pulled Gemma’s arm like she was cracking a whip.

‘I don’t want you hanging round her!’

‘I’m not, Mum, honest!’

‘And you, leave her alone from now on or I’ll get the police on to you!’

‘I wasn’t doing owt!’

The habitual phrase leaped from Pauline with a new meaning. Injustice seared a blade of tears in her throat.

‘I know you’ve been fighting – I sent a letter to the school! So stay away! I’m warning you. Scruffy little beggar.’

The woman’s face was ugly beneath her make-up, rearing towards her. Pauline spat. Then she ran.

‘I wasn’t doing owt, you f*cking bitch!’

She stopped running when she couldn’t breathe easily any more. She didn’t want to go home, so she took a long loop back to the bus station and watched the buses arrive and depart, the people getting on and off, until the short night darkened. She hadn’t even done owt either, except try to be nice. She f*cking hated Gemma’s mum, the f*cking bitch.

Call sheet: ‘That Summer’

July 3rd 1975.

Director: Michael Keys

DOP: Anthony Williams, BSC.

First AD: Derek Powell.

2.00 p.m. call.


CAST: John Reed [PC MERCHANT], Anne Fortune

[MARY], TBC [LITTLE BROTHER], Vera Wyngate

[WOMAN IN CAR].

LOCATION: Moxton Rd, Carr Hill, Doncaster.

Scenes 80, 83.


80. EXT. RESIDENTIAL ST. DAY.

PC MERCHANT arrives to break the news to JUNE’s mother and father.


83. EXT/INT. RESIDENTIAL ST. DAY.

WOMAN IN CAR sees PC MERCHANT leave JUNE’s house.


Today was Vera’s swanswong. When she’d been sent the script, she’d had pages more, including a court scene, but it had all been cut. Since she got paid the same fee, she really didn’t mind, although actually it was always nice to work – not just to have a job, but to turn up and have a natter and get to know the lie of the land. Of course that was clear the moment you set foot on set; whether it was a happy crew, whether there was a star or another cast member creating intrigue and unhappiness with the director (usually, in her experience, and God knows she’d done this herself in her time, because they felt they were being ignored), whether there were two stars jostling for supremacy or creating some magic because they were either at it or so desperate to be that the thwarted energy crackled its way into the can. All these things and a million others were apparent in a couple of hours, but none made a blind bit of difference to how good a film was. A happy set was absolutely no guarantee of a good film. One of the most enjoyable experiences of Vera’s career had been on a heated biopic of Edward Elgar called Hidden Rhapsody, which had turned out a tortured stinker despite incontinent daily giggles. Of course the script had never been in its favour – come to think of it, most of the giggles had been triggered by the lines they had to say.

She couldn’t really tell whether this one was any good, script-wise. It was sparse, as seemed the fashion these days, and the story was a little grim for Vera’s taste. Personally, she liked a love story. But the atmosphere on set, beyond the industrious concentration you took for granted as men and women dedicated themselves to sorting out the myriad problems they specialized in (floor cables, a squeaking door, a shiny chin), was uncharacteristically hard to discern. Make-up were always the first port of call for cast intrigue, but that afternoon, Vera could get very little out of them as they drabbed her down. It wasn’t that they weren’t forthcoming. There just seemed, disappointingly, little to tell.

‘Mr Bogarde’s a lovely man. Very professional,’ the girl observed, sponging pancake on to Vera’s jawline with an even roll of the wrist.

‘Hiya!’

The friendliness in the voice was toffee-apple sweet and just as brittle. The mother, of course, smart as paint as usual, ciggie on.

‘Hello, darling.’

One had to be friendly. One was, in the end, friendly. And surely if there was gossip, this woman, having the least to do, might be the source of it.

‘Ooh, mind if I take the weight off?’

Yvonne? Julie, was it? No, that was the make-up girl – perched on the vacant chair between Vera and the actor playing PC Plod.

‘You all right, Katrina?’

Katrina. Katrina pulled a face into the mirror, and for the first time Vera caught a glimpse of the daughter behind the slap. Maybe that’s why she wore so much make-up, to cement the mobility in her features that would have made her part of a joke.

‘All go, as per. Costume tests. Don’t know why they can’t do them at the hotel, but there you are. His Nibs wants to have a look.’

This explained why Katrina and the girl were on the set when they weren’t on the call sheet. Of course the business of filming was just the tip of a vast iceberg of other business concerning filming. Don’t think everyone’s looking at you, as her own mother used to say.

‘That’s a nice colour.’ The girl in charge of Vera nodded at Katrina’s nails, which were lacquered cinnamon brown. Katrina splayed her fingers critically.

‘I’m not sure, me. Did it in a rush.’

‘Ooh, reminds me, you’ve not got any on, have you, love?’

Vera waved her naked hands at the mirror. She knew better. Woman In Car wasn’t the manicure type, poor old drudge. The girl caught her left hand, scanned her nails just to be sure.

‘Haven’t you got nice hands,’ she said. Vera did, as a matter of fact, but it was, after all, the most meaningless of compliments, even to a woman her age. Although wasn’t it dear Viv Leigh who had been told early in her career that her hands were too big, and so had slogged to find ways of gesturing on stage to disguise the fact? They must have been like absolute shovels for anyone to notice, really. Vera suspected malice on the part of the producer who had made this observation, wresting back power from all that beauty. She knew the type. Darling Hugh’s dad had been a prime example – it might even have been him who had given Viv the complex.

‘Do you know, darling Viv Leigh was told—’

But Katrina had started at the same time as her, leaning in with the promise of scandal. Vera aborted her own anecdote.

‘Anyway, girls, big news.’

She cast a melodramatic look at PC Plod, on the other side of her. He had his eyes shut.

‘We’ve had a chat with the American producer.’

The second girl funnelled her mouth. Lallie’s face reappeared beneath Katrina’s mask of make-up, pantomiming excitement.

‘They want her to go over. Do this film.’

‘What film?’ asked Vera’s girl.

‘It’s from a book. The Littlest Princess. Lead part. I can’t believe it, me.’

Katrina and both girls jiggled in unified excitement. Vera smiled.

‘I mean, they’ll do screen tests and that. Fly us over. I’ve never been to America.’

‘You won’t want to come back!’

‘Lallie won’t. She’s mad about anything American, her. She’s heard about this ice cream, what is it – thirty flavours or something.’

But Katrina was in too good a mood to pursue the line of disparagement.

‘What about her TV show?’

‘Oh well, now you’re asking. It’s early days, isn’t it? The agent’ll sort it out.’

Vera could see that any American mess of pottage would buy Lallie’s English career as far as the mother was concerned. And who was to say she was wrong about that? She herself, fresh from her first film (Small Talk), had once had that prospect spread before her. It had lasted all of a week, and had coincided with her being squired around town by a rather dishy Yank producer who was raising finance for a Roman epic. What was glorious was that she would have gone to bed with him anyway – only American men and Scandinavians had those chests – so when he started talking about plane tickets and test scenes and how good she’d look in a toga, it was pure gravy. It had all evaporated, of course. Within weeks, he’d flown back to the States and forgotten her. But the excitement of thinking, age twenty, that all of that was going to be hers had been like nothing else.

‘She’ll go down a bomb,’ said Vera. ‘Americans eat up talent. Is it the woman you’ve been talking to? Quentin?’

The girls sniggered. ‘Quentin.’

Vera’s girl stopped dabbing.

‘She doesn’t wear a bra!’

‘It’s all the rage, isn’t it?’ said Vera. ‘Maybe she’s a women’s libber.’

‘I couldn’t go without a bra, me,’ said Katrina, who was small-breasted. ‘Wouldn’t feel right.’

She cast another look. The sleeping policeman continued comatose. Everyone had forgotten there was a man in the room.

‘Talking of …’ Katrina addressed Vera’s make-up girl. ‘Do you think our Lallie needs a bit of help?’ She skimmed her chest.

‘Is she developing?’

Katrina nodded as though she’d just asked for sympathy.

‘Just starting.’

‘Bless her.’

‘It doesn’t notice,’ said the second girl. ‘What do wardrobe say?’

‘They put her in something quite tight, you know, a T-shirt, and you can really see.’

‘Bless her.’

‘Oh God, talking of, I’d best get back.’

Katrina looked for somewhere to put out her cigarette. The make-up girl reached over Vera and gave her an ashtray.

‘It’s just –’ Katrina dragoned smoke through her nostrils as she mashed the butt – ‘I thought, best to get it sorted out now before the Yanks have a proper look at her, you know?’

She mimicked squashing her own breasts down, giggling.

‘She needs to be eleven.’

The girls laughed. Katrina unfolded herself from the chair, picked up her handbag. With a reorganizing glance back at the mirror, correcting a smudge of eyeliner, she was gone.

‘Bless her. How old is she then?’ asked Vera’s girl.

‘Forty-two,’ said Vera.

The other girl, Julie, tapped excess powder from her brush, with a cautionary look down at the inert policeman. ‘I think she’s thirteen, or coming up to it,’ she mouthed.

Vera wasn’t surprised. She herself was three, or was it four years younger than that, when she’d started out. They’d shaved off a year at the Charm School, as was standard, and along the way she’d dropped a few more. No doubt, once she was in sight of sixty, she might hover in the late fifties for a bit. Age range early forties to early fifties, as her agent would doggedly maintain.

Released from make-up and costume, Vera settled herself with a cup of tea and a ciggie. Her scene wasn’t scheduled until the end of the day. It was supposed to come after the scene where PC Merchant – he had revived suspiciously quickly once Katrina had gone – delivered the news to the girl’s mother. But despite appearing as a single scene on the call sheet, he actually delivered the news in close-up, medium and long shots, with his car pulling up, with the mother opening the door, with the little brother noticing the car from inside the house and calling out ‘Mum’, so there were many permutations of lights to set and cables to lay.

It was a lovely day, and she had a chair and a paper, although she’d nearly finished the crossword. Happily, she knew Anne Fortune, the actress playing the mother. Like her, Anne had descended from more glamorous roles, although in truth she’d never been in Vera’s league, looks-wise, so as the years piled on she’d always got more work, particularly as she was legitimately northern and hadn’t erased her accent. Since it was Anne’s first day on set, she looked to Vera for names and faces, the basic drill.

‘Who’s that?’

It was the American girl, Quentin, arriving with Hugh. Anne hooted at the name, although she was careful not to let Quentin see once she knew she was from the studio. Vera and Anne watched the two of them make their way through the crew, Hugh holding the girl’s elbow and dipping to breathe names as she deployed those marvellous teeth. She really did wear the most extraordinary clothes. The younger generation had their own way, and Vera lived close enough to the King’s Road to see most of it, but surely if you were a professional woman who expected to command respect you needed to take that into account? Quentin’s glossy hair slithered over bare brown shoulders, while her braless nipples, nuzzling the thin stuff of her blouse, stirred a wake of wistful male glances as she and Hugh advanced. Delicious, of course. Vera liked her, actually. Quentin spoke to her as though she mattered. And she emanated such a lot of anxious energy; it was hard not to respond and soothe, even knowing that Quentin retained the power of life and death, professionally speaking.

‘Hey, Vera!’ That lovely smile, as though you’d just given her a present. Hugh was right behind with his own charming smile, not trying quite as hard. Seeing him, Vera realised that she owed him the work. Of course she did: those evenings after a day on set having drinks at his parents’ Chalfont St Peter spread, with Hugh and his brother paraded to do turns for them, wearing side partings and pyjamas straight from Wardrobe. She’d always been nicer than necessary to Hugh, as a way of expiating her fear that Hilary might know about her lapse with Sidney.

‘Vera. You look terrible! In the best possible way …’

He squeezed her fondly as they kissed. ‘Vera’s seen me in my pyjamas.’

Quentin’s smile was willing but uncertain.

‘Darling, Hugh. You were adorable,’ said Vera, squeezing him back.

Vera caught Quentin’s visible relief as she got it. Oh dear.

‘He used to sing Noël Coward songs for us,’ she added for reassurance.

‘Let’s draw a veil, shall we?’

They moved on. Vera wondered, seeing the two of them together. Quentin’s eagerness to understand their interchange was of a piece with her not wearing a bra, parading her vulnerability. She’d never seen that before in an American; openness, yes, tiresomely so sometimes, but not this invitation to wound. Would Hugh be nice to her? He was no Sidney, she knew, but she had heard rumours when his first marriage broke down in his twenties. And come to think of it, there hadn’t been a second marriage, despite a long engagement to someone Vera couldn’t now recall, someone double-barrelled and horsey. Well, looking at them, they made a handsome couple, although Hugh’s Savile Row style was certainly at odds with whatever it was Quentin was calling hers. And she was probably closer to twenty years younger than him than ten, but that was par for the course.

‘Hiya!’

Before they could reach Mike, Katrina detained them both. Vera wondered if they knew Lallie’s true age. Possibly no one did, with the exception of the mother. Maybe she was consulting them about the bra, although Quentin was obviously the last person to ask for advice about that. Quentin patted the woman’s arm, reassuring. Hugh laughed. As they attempted to break away, Lallie appeared. Hopping with energy, as usual, trying to enter the circle of adult conversation, demanding attention and attention and attention. Vera, unfathomably stirred, found herself wanting to shout over, ‘No one’s looking at you,’ and in that moment, Lallie glanced up and caught her eye. Because of course Vera was looking at her. The girl twitched a shy smile of acknowledgement, looked away. The tentative quality of her reaction disarmed Vera. Eleven or twelve, what did it matter? She was a tot.

‘Ravishing, darling.’ Hugh held Lallie at arm’s length, appraising her costume. It was school uniform, broken down to show the kind of home Lallie’s character came from. Lallie gave him a twirl, followed by a few moments of Bruce Forsyth. Vera could see how delighted she was by his approval. She and Quentin might have to fight it out for him, the good-looking swine.

Hugh chucked the girl’s chin as he spoke to Katrina. Lallie’s upturned face was radiant with trust. As long as Hugh’s hand dawdled, on her shoulder now, she shone. But all the while, her eyes played ping-pong between Katrina and Hugh. No tricks missed.

‘I’m not sure we’re going to let you take her away,’ Vera heard. Hugh was addressing Quentin for Lallie’s benefit, and more pointedly, her mother’s. ‘We want to keep her here. We’ve got big plans.’

Quentin’s smile tightened and held. In front of Vera, the grip started up a conversation with Tony about a dolly track and she couldn’t hear any more. She was left with the tantalizing feeling of having witnessed a piece of gossip in the making.

‘I presume those two are at it?’ asked Anne baldly, once Hugh and Quentin had been driven away in that comfy car of his. ‘Oh, I think so, don’t you?’ she said. That, at least, was certain. But what about Lallie? Was what Vera had seen the thin end of a Lallie-shaped wedge destined to come between the two of them? Quentin had suddenly looked less charming after Hugh’s crack about hanging on to her. Perhaps Quentin was a tougher nut than she appeared. Maybe, like the clothes, she simply had a new way, and producers didn’t have to be Hughs and Sidneys any more. And she could certainly talk to people, not in Hugh’s RADA-royal manner, but arm-touchingly, warmly. Well, they would find out, wouldn’t they, if anything went wrong and touch came to shove?

The filming day wore on with no sign of Vera’s scene being called. The little boy delivered to be Lallie’s character’s little brother proved undirectable, and Mike got the shot only through the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare approach of endless takes. In the end, they dropped the dialogue and hoped the child could simply manage to open the door, which he achieved without mishap around take fifty-eight. Anne of course was faultless, but a bulb blew on a light, and Tony and his gang took an age consulting over how best to replace it and then discovering the bulb they needed was back at the unit base.

Waiting for the runner to return on his motorbike, they decided to set up for Vera’s scene, but the arrival of the bulb set them back on their original course. Vera could see how it would go. Barring a miracle, her scene was going to drop off the end of the day. One more night at the hotel, at least, and God knows when or if they’d bother to pick up the missing scene. Well, it had happened before and it would happen again. No one was looking at her.