‘Sorry, Richard,’ said Preston sarcastically.
He walked over to the continuity girl and grabbed at her hair in mock anger. She winced with pain. He said, ‘If we don’t get it by quarter past we’ll let the Japs go.’
The four Japanese soldiers were playing bridge on a prop horse carcase. One of them, a fat fellow with a long false moustache, smiled briefly at Preston before bidding.
The producer walked over to me. He said, ‘We’ll never get to the Jap soldiers today.’ Edgar Nicolson was an old crony of Marshall Stone’s. Some rumours said that their friendship was the only reason that Stone was doing this low-budget undistinguished production.
There were other opinions. Preston said that Stone had approached him personally and asked to be in it. Stone said that old friends come before a man’s career. My information was that Stone had had a two-picture obligation to Koolman International after backing out of the Civil War epic they did last year. He’d already done Silent Paradise with Edgar Nicolson and that was in rough assembly. This would fulfil his obligation.
Edgar Nicolson was forty-eight. A short Englishman with a complexion like a raw pork chop. His eyes were bright blue and he had a habit of opening them wide and staring to emphasize the many important things he said. He contrived to dress like a country squire but the cut of his lightweight tweeds, Cardin shirt and Garrick Club tie suggested a successful character actor. His voice was pitched artificially low and it was the voice of an actor. His classless speech was studded with the Americanisms that everyone in the film business picked up, but his clipped articulation would have suited a guards officer briefing his troops for a dawn attack.
‘How are you doing, Edgar?’ He twitched his nose. To say he always looked as if he’d detected a bad smell was a slander: his nose was as inscrutable as his eyes. It was Edgar Nicolson’s tiny mouth that revealed the slightly sour taste that the world had left there. Or perhaps it was only me who saw his mouth like that.
‘If producers worked a forty-hour week, I’d finish work every Tuesday evening.’ He waved his progress sheets in front of me.
‘Your Japs are a bit plump.’
‘They usually play tycoons these days.’ He used his ivory-handled walking-stick to flick a plastic cup out of his path. ‘You know the worst thing about my job?’ He didn’t pause in case I did know. ‘It’s like running up a down-escalator. At the end of any given week which I’ve spent arguing with catering companies about the temperature of the location soup, apologizing to an agent that it should be a Ford – and not a Rolls – that collected his client one morning last week, persuading a shop steward that one muddy field doesn’t justify a protective clothing allowance and pleading with New York to give me an extra ten days on their delivery date without changing their release arrangements – after that kind of week, all anyone on the production knows is that nothing happened: it’s a negative sort of process being a producer.’ He stared at me until I replied.
‘Like running up a down-escalator.’
‘At least like walking up. This industry likes to pretend the producer is some sort of blimpish general dozing in his HQ while the crews fight the battle. In practice it’s the producer taking all the shit so that the crew can work undisturbed.’
‘So Stone’s watching cricket today.’
He smiled. He wasn’t going to be drawn as easily as that. He looked around the roof: they were changing the lighting set up for the third time in half an hour. He called to the runner, ‘I’m going for coffee with Mr Anson, tell me when my rushes are ready.’
On our way to the canteen he showed me his mountain shrine. They had assembled the Buddha there; its nose was taller than the painters and property men who swarmed all over it. There was a smell of freshly sawn wood and quick-drying paint as the chipped edges of the plaster mouldings were covered with gold. The room was hot with the rows of bare bulbs, installed so that the carpenters could work through the night. A set dresser experimenting with joss sticks made a thin plume of sweet-smelling smoke. Already it was convincing enough for the hammering to seem like blasphemy and to make the set dressers whisper as they arranged the flowers and offerings before the enlightened one.
‘All OK, Percy?’ said Nicolson.
The construction manager said, ‘It’ll be ready by morning but I’ll need an extra painter or two on my overtime crew.’
‘Let’s try and make it one,’ said Nicolson. He closed the big mahogany door to muffle the sound of the construction gang. The canteen had once been beautiful but now its moulded ceiling had a pox of damp marks and its paper was torn. With lunch over, the room had been used to park scaffolding and sandbags and pieces of a machine-gun nest.
At the far end of it, the caterers had left urns of coffee, tea and milk, a stack of plastic cups and a tin of biscuits from which all the chocolate ones had been removed. Lunch had been cleared away, apart from a fleet of plastic spoons that had been obsessionally arranged to sail the length of one table, and a steamed potato that had been trodden into the parquet.
‘White?’
I nodded. It was an unusual concession to my taste; Edgar usually knew exactly what was best for everyone. He poured coffee for both of us and we sat down. A youth in a dirty apron appeared from the room beyond. He brandished a plate of biscuits: all of them were chocolate.
Nicolson nodded his thanks to the boy. ‘How’s Mary?’
‘She works too hard.’
He nodded. He sorted through the chocolate biscuits. ‘My wife thinks I have endless lines of big-titted girls trying to get me on to the couch.’
‘I’ll tell her about the chocolate biscuits,’ I warned him.
‘That’s all it needs,’ he devoured a biscuit hungrily. He took a second one, bit into it and then studied the edge as if trying to understand the secret of its manufacture. ‘It’s a great life,’ he said.
The runner returned. “There’s a lady,’ he said to Nicolson.
‘A lady!’ He did a piece of comedy.
‘To see you about casting, she said. She’s with Mr Weinberger.’
‘I know,’ said Nicolson. To me he said, ‘An actress: it won’t take a couple of minutes.’ I nodded. ‘Tell her to come down here,’ Nicolson told the boy.
‘I’m doing a picture called The Farmer’s Wife, after this one: Gothic horror. I’m looking for people. It’s bloody difficult finding a convincing Wisconsin farmer’s wife of about thirty-five. Here in London.’
When the woman came in I recognized her. I’d seen her with Richardson and Olivier at the Old Vic at the end of the war. She had that glazed look that actors get when they have to look for work instead of work looking for them. Goodness knows how many auditions she’d been to in her time. I saw her switch herself on as she came through the door. Nicolson changed too, he used a voice that was not his own, as if it was a plastic overall he put on to stop the blood splashing.
‘I can’t quite remember the name…’
‘Graham.’
Nicolson laughed. ‘Oh, I know your last name, it’s your first name I can’t remember.’ I had the feeling that he would have known her first name if she’d told him that.
‘Dorothy,’ said the woman.
‘Dorothy Graham, of course. I’ve seen you so many times on the stage, Dorothy. It’s wonderful to meet you.’
‘We’ve met before: at a party at Mr Weinberger’s last year.’
‘Oh, sure, I remember. Smoke?’
‘Thank you.’ She declined with a movement of an uncared-for hand.
‘What have you been doing lately, Dorothy?’
‘I