Lorimer obediently headed off, passing thirty feet of trestle table with many urns and plates, trays and baskets of high-calorie food. People stood in front of it, sampling, munching, sipping, slurping, waiting. He heard a man shout, ‘Kill that blonde, Jim!’ but no one paid any attention.
Flavia had told him that the film was a romantic comedy and the next room, he guessed, contained the set that would concern her and where she would utter her immortal line about Tyimotheh’s subterfuge. There was a glossy dining table with sixteen chairs and laid for a substantial meal, if the ranked silverware was anything to go by More people were polishing crystal glasses and touching up and adjusting the floral table centres. Beyond this set was a long, high-ceilinged room that must have been an old hospital ward, divided down the middle by a row of bulb-ringed dressing tables and racks of clothes. Here he encountered his first actors – men and women in evening clothes of the 1920s, having their hair combed, lipstick retouched, jewellery fastened and checked against the evidence contained in many polaroid photographs.
A woman with wild, backcombed blue-black hair and holding a small sponge asked if she could help. Now that he was amongst actors he fell back on the truth. ‘I’m with the insurance company,’ he said.
‘Oh. You’ll want, um, Fred Gladden. If you don’t mind waiting I’ll get someone to find him for you.’
‘Thanks.’ Lorimer knew from experience that this could take a minute, an hour or might never actually come about, so he moved away and leant against a wall, safe for a while. The minute came and went as he stood there discreetly, arms folded, watching the comings and goings, as meaningful to him as the busy scurryings of an ant colony. Then he suddenly remembered, unprompted, that his father had died a few hours previously and realized that already time had passed when he had not been thinking about him, indeed had completely forgotten about him and his death and this made him unbearably sad. Sad to think how easy it was not to think about Bogdan Blocj, how easy it was to find yourself in a state where you were not regretting that you would never hold his hand again.
His vision shimmered and all the bright lights acquired blurry coronas. He exhaled and inhaled, filling his lungs with air and asked himself what he was doing here, standing around on this film set under false pretences, engaged on this foolish forlorn quest. His father had been dead for a matter of hours, shouldn’t he be doing something respectful, sober, suitably mournful? Such as what? His father wouldn’t care, in fact the old Bogdan Blocj might have approved of something so sexily inopportune, trying to win back his girl… He made another dutiful filial effort, trying to conjure up some idea of the man beyond the idea of ‘Dad’, a man he remembered most readily standing in his brown overall, clipboard in hand, spectacles on the end of his nose, amongst his shelves of well-wrapped cardboard boxes… But nothing else came. The man he knew best had been the smiling, mute invalid, a dapper, silent figure in his blazer and flannels and neat white beard whose twinkling eyes seemed to see everything and nothing at all…Jesus Christ, he roused himself, get a grip: he had his own life to live and it was a life that was going downhill fast. Some sort of brakes had to be applied before the whole thing came apart –
Flavia Malinverno entered the room at the far end, carrying a book, and sat down on a wooden form.
He edged closer, circling round and approaching from the side, unchallenged and unquestioned, realizing that in his classically cut suit people might take him for an extra. Flavia was wearing a black wig, bobbed, with a low fringe that seemed to be resting on her improbably long, false eyelashes. She was reading Malign Fiesta by Wyndham Lewis – good for you, girl, he thought, professional, diligent actor – and his heart bulged and sagged with pathetic, humiliating longing for her. But what has anyone in the history of humankind ever been able to do about that sort of thing, he thought as he slid on to the bench beside her – without her looking up – and inched along stealthily, who has ever been able to control that category of pure feeling?