she was due to stop and deliver her economically suspicious lines. Tony was a distinguished-looking man in his fifties with a leonine head of white hair; DOPs always seemed to have that same air of civilized self-containment about them, like little boys adept at Meccano, which they all very likely had been. You always knew their nails would be clean, an assumption certainly not to be made about directors.
Vera and Tony had actually been an item on a film (which one – Summer Sins? And You Beside Me? Some lovey-dovey rubbish) in the mid-fifties; her an overripe Rank starlet and him a slightly younger focus puller. It was nothing but a nice memory to her: cheap spaghetti in Soho trattorias and polite sex back at her flat in yet-to-be swinging Chelsea. Tony in bed was, like Tony professionally, unintrusive and precise. She had an image of him bent over her muff, his hair, then ash blond, masking his face, his concentration touchingly absolute.
‘Hair in the gate?’ she liked to think she’d quipped, although she probably hadn’t, since he wasn’t a joky lay and she’d tried to be sensitive to things like that.
Of course it was traditional for leading ladies to fall in love with their cinematographers, possibly out of some sort of survival instinct, since the glow of mutual attraction ensured the best close-ups and the most flattering lighting. There was a story about an American star (Myrna Loy? Jean Arthur?) who had had her career ruined when she married, so spurning the DOP on whom she had always relied to give her a dewiness on screen that had deserted her in life. Maybe it was spite, or maybe he just saw her more clearly without the haze of sex and wanted to pass that revelation on to the audience. Either way she was over, playing the kind of roles Vera was now pleased to get, bitter mothers and nosy bystanders. Vera had never worked with DOPs good enough to make a difference to what she’d once had, apart from Tony. And there the timing had been wrong: him on the way up, and her on the way down.
Vera watched as Lallie left make-up and skipped along towards the cluster of lights. She wondered if Tony would still feel a frisson, with an eleven-year-old leading lady. After all, the kid hardly needed to look any younger; angles and keylights were an irrelevance. And in any case, tastes had changed. As far as Vera could see, glamour had become a word filthier than any of the ones now so fashionably bandied about on screen (not in this one though; apparently they were hoping for an ‘A’, Double ‘A’ at worst).
There was a harassed-looking woman following the girl, picking her way around the mud in inappropriate high-heeled boots. A chaperone: Vera recognized the style. Among the crew of any film involving kids, you could pick out the least maternal, hardest-faced woman, and that would be the chaperone. Then she saw that high-heels-and-no-knickers was actually making her stumbling way to the catering van, abandoning her charge.
‘Lallie! What d’you want?’ she shouted. Her voice wasn’t the standard nicotine bass Vera was expecting, but jarringly soft and girlish. She had another look. The chaperone’s make-up was heavier than any the actors were wearing – it included false eyelashes – and her nails, lacquered metallic brown, looked as though she could use them to open tins. But she was younger beneath all this get-up than Vera’s first sight of her had led her to believe.
‘Lallie!’ the woman called reproachfully. ‘I said what d’you want for your breakfast?’
‘Not hungry!’ shouted Lallie, uninterrupted in her nimble journey across the mud.
‘She’s never hungry,’ the woman confided breathily, almost whiningly, to Vera, rolling her black-fringed eyes. She had a gentle northern accent – Teesside, Vera guessed.
‘It is a bit early,’ Vera consoled, inhabiting her homely head-scarf guise.
‘Penguins, she’ll have,’ said the woman who had served Vera her sandwich with a Rothman’s (now smoked) parked in her mouth.
‘Oh aye, she’d live on them,’ breathed the chaperone.
‘Kids,’ Vera said, since the tone of the scene demanded it. There was a little silence after this. Vera saw Lallie reach the illuminated point where Tony conferred with his crew. She danced around them, inaudible at this distance, but no doubt treating them to another round of her impressions.
‘Do you ever get a bit of peace?’ she asked the chaperone, who had lit her own cigarette and was devouring it with a cup of the