Part 7 (1/2)

Then, on cue, she walked backwards straight into the little girl, causing her to topple over onto the floor.

The actress at once got to her knees to help her back up.

'Oh, sweetheart, I'm terribly sorry. Gosh, aren't I the clumsy one. Are you all right? No bruises?'

When the little girl solemnly shook her head, Leolia on a sudden impulse kissed her on the right cheek.

And it was at that instant that Knight swiftly stepped forward. He too knelt down beside the little girl and, neatly timing his gesture to coincide with Leolia's, kissed her on the left cheek. To anyone who happened to be watching them and if none of the extras were, everybody behind the camera was the effect was exactly as though they were kissing each other through the child.

Then, just like someone speaking into a telephone, Knight whispered into the child's dainty little ear: 'I love you, Margot.'

'Oh, Julian ...' a tremulous Leolia Drake answered into the other ear. 'Please don't. Not here. Someone may hear us.'

'How can anyone hear us,' he countered smoothly, 'when we have our own private 'phone? There's no danger of a crossed line.'

The child's uncomprehending eyes darted from left to right and back again.

'Say it, darling,' said Knight, 'please let me hear you say it.'

'Say what?'

'That you love me too.'

'Oh, I do. I do so love you.'

To and fro went the little girl's eyes, like those of a spectator at the centre-court at Wimbledon.

The novelist and the detective watched in fascination as the camera now began to glide backward along its little section of railway track while at the same time, in a perfectly coordinated movement, it rose up into the dank and powdery studio air on an extensible ladder, a ladder that itself gradually stretched out over the entire set until there wasn't a single one of the dozen revellers who hadn't swum into, then again out of, its ken.

It eventually came to a halt directly in front of Cora herself. She was glaring implacably at the flirtatious couple. Her face contorted by spasms of jealousy, she mumbled a curse under her breath. Then, with perfect timing, her fingers snapped into two equal halves the slender, fine-spun stem of her champagne gla.s.s.

'Cut!' cried Rex Hanway.

Chapter Seven.

Evadne Mount, Eustace Trubshawe and Cora Rutherford were seated at a corner table in the studio cafeteria what in the picture-making business is known as the commissary. In the real world, the word would have been 'canteen'. Notwithstanding the autographed snapshots, aligned along all four of its walls, of several of Elstree's best-loved players David Farrar and Jeanne De Casalis, Guy Rolfe and Beatrice Varley, Joseph Tomelty and Joyce Grenfell a canteen is what it resembled and a canteen is what it was.

Since the room itself was nearly as draughty and cavernous as the sound stage from which they'd repaired for lunch, none of them had felt inclined to remove their heavy outdoor coats. Cora had even kept her gloves on, except that, with her innate stylishness, she contrived to convince everybody else that a gloved canteen lunch was the very latest thing, le dernier cri, as she herself would have put it, and this in spite of the fact that, to protect her elaborately mounted pompadour, she was also forced to sport a set of unsightly rose-pink curlers.

The other tables were monopolised by the same gaudily outfitted extras whom Evadne and Trubshawe had already admired when they first entered the studio. At one table a Ruritanian Hussar was lunching in the company of two ladies-in-waiting from Louis XIV's Versailles. At another an elderly bobby with a nicotiny walrus moustache, his helmet posed upright on the table-top like an outsized salt cellar, chatted amiably to the very last individual with whom his real-life equivalent would ever be caught lunching, a wiry cat-burglar clad in a black body stocking. And, sitting alone at a third, a queer, hatchet-faced woman was furiously knitting away at some monstrosity in purple wool. Paying as little attention to her fellow-lunchers in the commissary as they were paying to her, she laid aside her work-in-progress only to swallow the odd mouthful of semolina pudding.

'Psst, Cora,' Evadne finally whispered.

'H'm?'

'Tell me. Madame Lafarge over there? Do you know her?'

Cora turned her head, unconcerned as to whether she might be observed doing so by the target of the novelist's curiosity.

'Why, that's Hattie, of course,' she said dismissively.

'Hattie?'

'Hattie Farjeon. Farje's wife. Widow, I mean.'

'Farjeon's widow? What on earth is she doing here?'

'Oh, Hattie's always been present on the set during the making of Farje's films. You would see her, in a corner, sitting and knitting all by herself, never addressing a word to a soul, as mousy and uncommunicative as she is now. Officially, she was Farje's script consultant, but the true reason for her presence, as we all knew, was to guarantee there was no hanky-panky between him and his leading ladies. Hanky-panky or, so I've heard, ”w.a.n.ky-spanky”. I wouldn't know myself,' she concluded virtuously.

'But why is she here today? With Farjeon dead and all?'

Cora toyed with her corned beef.

'Who knows? Maybe Levey Benjamin Levey, the producer of the picture regards her as a good-luck fetish. It was Farje's series of hits, you know, that made him a millionaire. Or maybe she still has a financial involvement in the project and is keeping a watch over her own interests. Or maybe she just wants to be sure that Hanway is faithful to her husband's script.'

'But that's just it,' said Evadne.

'What's just it?'

'Hanway hasn't been faithful to the script. Just this morning he introduced the idea of using a child's ears as pair of telephone receivers. I must say, I thought it rather wonderful of him to come up with such a clever new piece of business right there on the set.'

'Oh, I do so agree!' the actress replied. 'You don't suppose Farje's genius could somehow be flowing through him? Emanations, you know,' she said vaguely. 'Or do I mean ectoplasm?'

In disgust she shoved away the aforementioned viands.

'G.o.d, this is foul muck. Even the bread-and-marge is stale.'

Lighting up a cigarette, she returned to the subject at hand.

'Yes, if he keeps it up, Hanway may well become the new Farjeon. Farje also used to have these brilliant last-minute intuitions. I remember when I popped in to visit dear Ty Tyrone Power to you yokels when he was filming An American in Plaster-of-Paris Oh, crumbs!'

Without completing the reminiscence, she picked up her knife and fork again, bent low over her plate and addressed her undivided attention to the meal that she had only just rejected.

'For G.o.d's sake, whatever you do,' she whispered, 'please, please don't look round! Don't make eye contact!'

'Who is it we shouldn't make eye contact with?' asked Evadne, as, to the actress's dismay, she did proceed to look round, at once finding herself face to face, indeed eye to eye, with an earnest, sallow-complexioned young man who, with his shaven head, rimless dark gla.s.ses, neatly trimmed goatee and black high-necked polo jersey, would have seemed more at home in some smoke-infested jazz cellar in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Bearing a tray of food, he was clearly on his way to join them.

'Now you've done it,' hissed Cora.

The young man coolly returned the novelist's gaze, stepped up to the table and nodded to Cora. Conjuring an impromptu smile as adroitly as though inserting a set of new false teeth between her lips, she extended her right hand towards him. He held it for a moment, raised it to his own lips and lightly kissed the b.u.t.ton of her suede glove.

('How very Continental!' Evadne Mount mouthed to the Chief-Inspector.) 'Ah, Mademoiselle Ruzzerford,' he said in a near-impenetrable French accent, 'you are looking as charmante as evair.'

'Why, thank you so much, Philippe,' Cora replied. 'Perhaps you'd care to join us for lunch? As you see, we have a free fourth place.'

'Oh, but that would be most kind,' said the Frenchman, who had in fact already begun circling the table towards the unoccupied seat.