Wild Horses Part 32

Nash stood without moving. 'You sound as though you approve,' he said.

'Yes, I do. A good strong fantasy life, I'd guess, saves countless people from boredom and depression. It gives them a feeling of being individual. They invent themselves. You know it perfectly well. You are are a fantasy to most people.' a fantasy to most people.'

'What about serial killers? Aren't they fantasists?'

'There's a h.e.l.l to every heaven.'

Moncrieff called, 'Ready, Thomas,' and Nash, without comment, went to the place from where he would walk into shot, and pause, and turn his head, and watch Bill Robinson live in his courage-inducing dreamland.

Ed went round explaining the necessity of silence to the neighbours. He shouted, 'Turn over.' The cameras reached speed. Ed yelled, 'Action.' Nash walked, stopped, turned his head. Perfect. Bill Robinson dropped a piece of exhaust pipe out of nervousness and said, 'Sorry.'

'Cut,' Ed said, disgusted.

'Don't say "sorry",' I told Bill Robinson, walking towards the garage to join him. 'It doesn't matter if you drop something. It doesn't matter if you swear. It's normal. Just don't say "sorry".'

He grinned. We shot the scene again and he fitted two shining pieces of metal together as if he hadn't got fifty people watching.

'Cut,' Ed yelled with approval, and the neighbours cheered. Nash shook Bill Robinson's hand and signed autographs. We sold a lot of future cinema tickets, and no one stuck a knife in my back. Not a bad evening, overall.

Returning to Bedford Lodge, Nash and I ate room-service dinner together.

'Go on,' he said, 'about the need for fantasy.'

'Oh... I...' I hesitated, and stopped, unwilling to sound a fool.

'Go on,' he urged. 'People say... in fact I I say... that playacting isn't a suitable occupation for a serious man. So tell me why it is.' say... that playacting isn't a suitable occupation for a serious man. So tell me why it is.'

'You don't need me to tell you.'

'Tell me why you make fantasies, then.'

'Have some wine.'

'Don't duck the issue, dammit.'

'Well,' I said, pouring lavishly, 'I wanted to be a jockey but I grew too big. Anyway, one day I went to see a doctor about some damage I'd done to my shoulder in a racing fall, and she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said "be a jockey" and she lectured me crossly on wasting my time on earth frivolously. I asked her what occupation she would recommend and she sternly told me that the only profession truly helpful and worthwhile was medicine.'

'Rubbish!'

'She scorned me for wanting to be merely an entertainer.'

Nash shook his head.

'So,' I said, 'I rationalised it, I suppose. I'm still an entertainer arid always will be, I guess, and I've persuaded myself that I do at least as much good as tranquillisers. Everyone can go where their mind takes them. You can live in imaginary places without feeling the real terror or the real pain. I make the images. I open the door. I can inflame... and I can heal... and comfort... and get people to understand... and, for G.o.d's sake, don't remember a word of this. I've just made it up to entertain you.'

He drank his wine thoughtfully.

'And in this movie that we're engaged in,' I said, 'the dream lovers make the spurned wife's existence happier. They're the best way she can face her husband's affair with her own sister. They're her refuge... and her revenge.'

He smiled twistedly. 'My character's a s.h.i.t, isn't he?'

'Human,' I said.

'And are you going to sell Howard on her suicide?'

I shook my head. 'I'm sure she didn't kill herself. But don't worry, your character will avenge her death and come up smelling of roses.'

'Has Howard written those extra scenes?'

'Not yet.'

'You're a rogue, Thomas, you know that?'

We finished dinner peaceably, and together with Moncrieff mapped out the next day's scenes, which were due to take place in the Athenaeum's look-alike dining-room, happily by now built and ready.

After that meeting I un-Velcroed my restricting knife-repeller with relief and washed without soaking the dressing, and in sleeping shorts thought I'd just take a quick look at the newspaper cuttings about Sonia's death before inching into bed: and two hours later, warmed by a dressing gown, I was still sitting in an armchair alternately amused and aghast and beginning to understand why Paul had desperately wanted to take away Valentine's books and why Valentine, perhaps, hadn't wanted him to have them. In leaving them to me, a comparative stranger, the old man had thought to safeguard the knowledge contained in them, since I couldn't have understood the significance of the clippings and might simply have thrown them away, a task he should have done himself but had left too late, until his progressing illness made action impossible.

Paul had wanted Valentine's books and papers, and Paul was dead. I looked at the Delta-cast jacket standing empty and mute on a table and felt a strong urge to fasten it on again, even at two in the morning.

In describing Sonia to me, Valentine had called her a mouse, but that couldn't have been how he'd thought of her when she was alive. The folder of clippings about her held two large photographs, both the likenesses of a vividly pretty young woman with a carefree spirit and, I would have said, considerable carnal knowledge.

One of the photographs was an expert, glossy, eight by ten black and white version of the coloured photo Lucy had lent me of 'Sonia and Pig'. In Valentine's photo the young man's presence had been deleted. Sonia smiled alone.

The second photo was of Sonia in her wedding dress, again aone, and again with nothing virginal about her eyes. My mother, of all people, had once instructed me about the difference: once a woman had slept with a man, she said, the woman would develop little pouches in her lower eyelids which would show when she smiled. Sonia was smiling in both pictures, and the small pouches were there unmistakably.

Valentine had said the book made her out to be a poor little b.i.t.c.h and, in saying that, he'd intended to mislead. The folder held clippings about her death from a myriad of newspapers and, in the most derogatory of the various accounts, in those most overtly speculatory about Mrs Wells's fidelity to Jackson, someone and it had to have been Valentine himself had stricken the accounts through and through with red biro and had written No! No! as if in pain.

I took everything out of the Sonia folder and found that beside the photos and the whole sheaf of newspaper cuttings, there were two frail dried roses, a brief note about shoeing which started 'Darling Valentine', and a wisp of creamy lace-edged panties.

Valentine had confessed he'd been too easily aroused by young women, Professor Derry had said. According to Valentine's own collection of memories, one of those young women had been Sonia Wells.

Poor old sod, I thought. He had been sixty, nearly, when she died. I was young enough to have considered sixty the far side of acute s.e.xual obsession: Valentine enlightened even from beyond the grave.

The emotional vigour of the thick Sonia file blinded me for a long while to the slim folder underneath which lay at the bottom of the box: but this folder proved, when I read the contents carefully, to be raw explosive material in search of a detonator.

In search of myself.

I slept for five hours, put on the carapace, went back to work. Sat.u.r.day morning. I struck it off in my mind's calendar as Day Nineteen of production, or almost a third of my time allowed.

It rained all day, which didn't matter as we were engaged indoors in the Athenaeum dining-room, shooting the scene where Cibber's suspicions of his wife's canoodling gelled into inescapable certainty. Cibber and Silva endlessly said yes please and no thank you to actor-waiters, chewed endless mouthfuls of food, and in Silva's case spitting them out immediately I said 'Cut'; drank endless sips of wine-coloured water; waved (in Cibber's case) to unidentified acquaintances across the room; conducted a conversation of concentrated spite with rigidly smiling lips and a vivid awareness of social status. Jockey Club membership, to Cibber, meant not publicly slapping your wife's face in the most conservative dining-room in London.

Howard, I thought, as I listened and watched, had surpa.s.sed himself in understanding and reproducing the constraints of cla.s.s on the potentially dangerous ego of a rejected male.

Silva sneered at Cibber with her eyes, her mouth saccharine. Silva told him she couldn't bear his hands on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Cibber, destroyed within, looked around to make sure the waiters hadn't heard. Both players gave the film enormously good value for money.

Breaking for lunch, with the close-ups to do in the afternoon, I returned for a respite to Bedford Lodge and found Nash in my rooms sprawling in an armchair and having an easy time with Lucy. She, in consequence, had, as her morning's work, itemised the contents of barely one and a half cartons.

'Oh, hallo,' she greeted me from her knees, 'what would you like me to do with three boxfuls of huge old encyclopaedias?'

'How old?'

She pulled out one large volume and investigated. 'Forty years!' Her voice made forty years unimaginable. Nash reflexly winced.

'Just label them and leave them,' I said.

'Right. Oh... and I haven't come across any photo alb.u.ms, that you wanted me to look for, but I did find a lot of snaps in an old chocolate box. What do you want me to do with those?'

'In a chocolate box...?'

'Well, yes. It's got flowers on the lid. Pretty old.'

'Er... where's the box?'

She opened a carton that had once held a Fax machine, and from it produced several box files full of ancient racecards and newspaper clippings of winners that Valentine had regularly shod. 'Here's the chocolate box,' Lucy said, lifting out and handing me a faded and battered gold-coloured cardboard box with flowers like dahlias on the lid. 'I didn't make a list of the photos. Do you want me to?'

'No,' I said absently, taking off the lid and finding small ancient pictures inside, many in long ago faded colours with curling edges. Pictures of Valentine and his wife, pictures of Dorothea and her husband, a photo or two of Meredith Derry and his wife, and several of Dorothea with her child: with her nice looking little boy, Paul. Pictures when life was fine, before time loused it up.

'How about ordering us all some lunch?' I said.

Nash did the ordering. 'What do you want to drink, Thomas?'

'Lethe,' I said.

'Not until you've finished the movie.'

'What's Lethe?' Lucy asked.

Nash said, 'The river in the underworld that, if you drink it, makes you sleep and forget about living.'

'Oh.'

'For ever,' Nash added. 'But Thomas doesn't mean that.'

Lucy covered non-comprehension in activity with the marker pen.

At the bottom of the chocolate box, I came across a larger print, the colours still not razor sharp, but in a better state of preservation. It was of a group of young people, all looking about twenty. On the back of the photo were two simple words 'The Gang'.

The Gang.

The gang consisted of five young men and a girl.

I sat staring at it for long enough for the other two to notice.

'What is it?' Nash asked. 'What have you found?'

I handed the photo to Lucy, who glanced at it, did a double take and then exclaimed, 'Why, that's Dad, isn't it? How young young he looks.' She turned the photo over. 'The Gang,' she read aloud. 'That's his handwriting, isn't it?' he looks.' She turned the photo over. 'The Gang,' she read aloud. 'That's his handwriting, isn't it?'

'You'd know better than I would.'

'I'm sure of it.'

'Who are the people with him? Who are the gang?' I asked.

She studied the picture. 'That's Sonia, isn't it? It must be.'

Nash took the photo out of Lucy's hand and peered at it himself, nodding. 'That's definitely your father, and the girl looks like the photo you lent us... and that boy next to her, that's the other one in that photo... that's surely "Pig".'

'I suppose so,' Lucy said doubtfully. 'And that one on the end, he looks like...' She stopped, both unsure and disturbed.

'Like who?' I asked.

'He's not like that any more. He's, well... bloated bloated... now. That's my Uncle Ridley. He looks lovely there. How awful awful, what time does to people.'

'Yes.' Nash and I said it in unison. An endless host of barely recognisable old actors and actresses lived on in Hollywood in inelastic skins, everything sagging but the memory of glamour, their youthful selves mocking them relentlessly from rented videos and movie channels.

'Who are the others?' I asked.

'I don't know them,' Lucy said, handing the photo back to me.

I said, 'They look people of your age.'

'Yes, they do.' She found it unremarkable. 'Do you want me to repack this box?'

'Yes, please. But leave out the chocolate box.'

'OK.'

Lunch came and we ate. Ziggy phoned the hotel from Norway.

'I cannot reach O'Hara's number,' he complained.

'He's gone back to LA.' I said. 'How are the horses?'

'Working well.'

'Good. The production department has found a disused stable yard for them to stay in, only ten miles from our beach.' I fished a piece of paper out of an inner pocket and spelled the address for him patiently, letter by letter. 'Phone me after you've landed at Immingham on Monday if you have any problems.'

'Yes, Thomas.'

'Well done, Ziggy.'

He laughed, pleased, and departed.

I left Nash and Lucy drinking coffee and, taking with me both 'The Gang' photo and the lower file from the previous night's reading, went along to O'Hara's suite, let myself in with his key and stowed Valentine's mementos in the safe, with the knives. All the rooms in the hotel were equipped with individual small safes, which each guest could set to open to his own choice of combination. I hardly liked to acknowledge the instinct for extra security that led me to use O'Hara's safe instead of my own, but anyway, I did it.

Still in O'Hara's rooms I looked up the number of Ridley Wells in the local phone directory, and tried it, but there was no answer.