found her. She’s lovely actually. She lives with an Italian architect. So I didn’t have a mother until I was forty-one.”
“That must have been awkward, when you met her.” He frowned sympathetically, thinking about it, and glanced at her.
“It wasn’t really. Emotional, but not awkward. She’s a very sweet woman. She ran off with another man and my father never forgave her, so he told us she was dead, and we were young enough to believe him. My younger sister was a baby, and my older sister and I were two and three when she left. And when I was three, we moved away. We were all babies really.”
“Your father just took you and moved to California? Brave man.”
“Yes, and complicated.”
“Of course, who isn’t?” He had a point. “That’s what’s so interesting about what you and I do. I direct actors to express emotion and pull it out of their souls, and imagine it. You try to connect with the material at an emotional level, and apply something you’ve experienced to what you’re doing and channel it for the viewer. It’s magic really.” It was an intriguing way to describe it. “What you do is a pantomime of emotion really for people who want to feel and don’t know how to, or don’t know what they should be feeling, so you show them, and I tell you how to show them. It all fits together rather nicely. Like Kabuki.
“I lived in Japan for a year too. Fascinating people, gorgeous place. A little too foreign for me, though. And very repressed. It’s important there not to show emotion. That doesn’t work for me. Of course the British would like to be like that too. They’re very proud of how cold they are, but they aren’t really. I have them crying like babies with our shows,” he said, looking pleased. She could hardly wait to work with him and see what it was like. “My son is very British. My daughter is more like me. She’s an artist, when she’s not working at the magazine. I thought she’d want to become an actress, but she didn’t.”
“My father loved that I’m an actress.”
“Of course, you can express everything he couldn’t.” She had never thought of it that way and wondered if it was true.
As they approached Victoria Falls, which he pointed out to her from the air, he told her some things about the scenes they would be shooting, and the place where they were staying, and by the time they had exchanged histories, and eaten the sandwiches, they landed at a small airport, where a Land Rover was waiting for them, and a truck for her bags and the supplies he had picked up in Harare that morning. They were on their way to the camp twenty minutes later, once everything was loaded. Rufus drove her himself in the Land Rover, at first on tar roads, and then on gravel as they bumped along.
It took them just under an hour to reach the camp, where natives in starched white uniforms waited to serve the guests, sitting on wide porches with tables and chairs, drinking and eating. There were several buildings where the rooms were, and a cluster of tents. It looked more like a luxury hotel than a camp, which Gemma was relieved to see, and there was a fleet of vehicles they used to drive out among the animals. It was safari at its cleanest, safest, and most pristine. Many tourists preferred more rugged conditions in remoter areas, Rufus commented, but he knew his cast wouldn’t.
“Not too bad, eh?” He smiled at her as he turned off the engine and half a dozen men in white uniforms ran toward them to assist them from the car. Her bags were already disappearing into the main building on the heads of porters.
“Thank you so much for driving me,” she said warmly, “and coming to Harare.”
“I wanted to get to know you a bit better before we start working together. You’re a very interesting woman,” he said appreciatively. And she thought he was fascinating with his boyhood and his background, his parents and his children, and the places he had lived, and all that he understood about their trade, and the artistry behind it. “Dinner with the cast at eight tonight. Jeans, long-sleeve shirt, boots, and insect repellent. No toilet paper needed,” he instructed her and she laughed.