‘Oh, well,’ said Brian, ‘I don’t know how much we can worry about them.’
‘You don’t want them to see the film? If it’s only for people who play chemin de fer, it isn’t going to do very well.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Brian. ‘Crockford’s was packed on Friday.’
She gave up.
‘Anyway, what did you think of it?’ Brian asked.
‘It’s terrible.’
‘They know it’s terrible. They’re getting John Osborne to rewrite it. And he’s putting in a lot of jokes for your character.’
‘Is he going to explain why they end up shooting people in Wales?’
‘They’re up a mountain, Sophie. There are no mountains in Paris or London or wherever you want them to be shooting people. Honestly. What are you looking for?’
Sophie could see that it wasn’t a script one could spend any time arguing about. You either did it or you turned it down. She had nothing else to do, and the money was extraordinary, and Brian was very excited. If she insisted on being an actress, then this was exactly the sort of thing she should be acting in, he thought. She was only one or two moves away from the gold spray paint and the bikinis, and then the world was hers. Clive, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care one way or the other whether she disappeared off to Wales.
‘I’ll say no if you want me to.’
‘Why on earth would I want you to say no?’
‘Because you’d miss me too much.’
‘I’ll come to Wales and see you.’
‘Will you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And can I ask you a favour?’
‘Anything.’
‘Will you feed Brando?’
She had been sent a Siamese cat by a proud Blackpool pet shop. It had been delivered to the BBC in a van and the van driver wouldn’t take it back again.
‘That would be lovely. I’ll feel connected to you when you’re gone.’
He didn’t come to Wales. (He didn’t feed the cat either. When she got back, Brando had gone.)
John Osborne, it turned out, was not available for the rewrite of Chemin de Fer. (Sophie suggested Tony and Bill, but the American producers weren’t interested.) A man who’d written something for a Dean Martin film did it instead. He put in three jokes for her character, two of which were removed before the shoot and one of which didn’t survive the edit. She hated the director.
She liked the leading man, a French pop singer named Johnny Solo, presumably by his manager rather than by Monsieur and Madame Solo. He was charming and extraordinarily handsome, and after he’d chased her around the hotel they were staying in, she could no longer remember why she was running away, so she stopped. It wasn’t as if she had a boyfriend, as far as she could tell. Johnny was a terrible actor, though, and in any case he couldn’t speak English. Most days Sophie had to ask the cameras to stop rolling, because she could only listen to the French pop star’s American accent with a straight face for very short periods of time. They had a bad script, an awful director and a terrible leading man; it was all so hopeless that she didn’t even have to consider her own performance, luckily.
Clive didn’t call her until a few days before they were supposed to start rehearsing again.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said.
‘Where have I been? Nowhere. You, meanwhile, have been lounging around in your underwear in Wales, while Johnny Foreigner ogles.’
‘You could have ogled, if you’d come to Wales.’
‘Who goes all the way to Wales for an ogle? Especially a second-hand ogle.’
She didn’t want to have a conversation about second-hand ogling, and she certainly didn’t want a conversation about Johnny Foreigner.
‘What did you do instead, then?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he said airily. ‘Thinking. Reading. Taking stock.’
She wished he’d chosen any three other activities – space exploration, say, and needlework and coal mining. He wasn’t a thinker or a reader or a stock-taker.
‘Seeing girls?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘ “For God’s sake” is different from “No”.’
She couldn’t seem to stop herself. And what right did she have to say anything, when she’d stopped running from Johnny Foreigner? If Clive had come to Wales, though, she wouldn’t have stopped running. She’d have run and run.
‘I was actually phoning to ask you out to dinner,’ he said eventually. There was to be no further discussion about the precise meaning of the expression ‘For God’s sake’, apparently.
She shrugged down the phone, but he couldn’t see her, so in the end she had to say yes.