‘In Howard’s book your character is not having an affair with his wife’s sister.’
‘Not?’ He was astonished. He’d spent a whole busy day tumbling about in bedclothes half naked with the actress playing his wife’s sister. ‘However did Howard agree to that?’
I said, ‘Howard also agreed that Cibber, the sister-in-law’s husband, should find out about the affair so that Cibber could have an overpowering reason for his persecution of your character; in fact, for the scene you’re playing here tomorrow.’
Nash said disbelievingly, ‘And none of that was in Howard’s book?’
I shook my head. O’Hara had leaned on Howard from the beginning to spice up the story, in essence warning him ‘No changes, no movie.’ The shifts of mood and plotline that I’d recently introduced were as nothing compared with O’Hara’s earlier manipulations. With me, Howard was fighting a rearguard action, and with luck he would lose that too.
Nash said bemusedly, ‘Is the real Cibber still alive as well? And how about the wife’s sister?’
‘About her, I don’t know. The real Cibber died three or so years ago. Apparently someone dug up this old story about him, which is what gave Howard the idea for his book. But the real Cibber didn’t persecute Jackson Wells as relentlessly as he does in the film. The real Cibber had little power. It was all a pretty low-key story, in reality. Nothing like O’Hara’s version.’
‘Or yours.’
‘Or mine.’
Nash gave me a straight look verging on the suspicious and said, ‘What are you not telling me about more script changes?’
I liked him. I might even trust him. But I’d learned the hard way once that nothing was ever off the record. The urge to confide had to be resisted. Even with O’Hara, I’d been reticent.
‘Devious,’ O’Hara had called me. ‘An illusionist.’
‘It’s what’s needed.’
‘I’ll not deny it. But get the conjuring right.’
Conjurors never explained their tricks. The gasp of surprise was their best reward.
‘I’ll always tell you,’ I said to Nash, ‘what your character would be feeling in any given scene.’
He perceived the evasion. He thought things over in silence for a long full minute while he decided whether or not to demand details I might not give. In the end, what he said was, ‘Trust is a lot to ask.’
I didn’t deny it. After a pause he sighed deeply as if in acceptance, and I supposed he’d embraced blind faith as a way out if the whole enterprise should fail. ‘One should never trust a director…’
In any case he bent his head to his script, reading it again swiftly, then he stood up, left the pages on the table and repeated the whole scene, speaking the lines carefully, forgetting them only once, putting in the pauses, the gestures, the changes of physical balance, the pouncing advance down the horseshoe and the over-towering anger at the end.
Then, without comment, he went through the whole thing again. Even without much sound, the emotion stunned: and he’d put into the last walk-through even the suggestion that he could be a killer, a murderer of wives, however passionately he denied it.
This quiet, concentrated mental vigour, I saw, was what had turned a good actor into a mega-star.
I hadn’t been going to shoot the scene in one long take, but his performance changed my mind. He’d given it a rhythm and intensity one couldn’t get from cutting. The close shot of Cibber’s malevolence could come after.
‘Thanks for this,’ Nash said, breaking off.
‘Anything.’
His smile was ironic. ‘I hear I’m the green light around here.’
‘I ride on your coat tails.’
‘You,’ he said, ‘do not need to grovel.’
We left the set and the house and signed ourselves out with the night-watchman. Nash was driven away in the Roller by his chauffeur, and I returned to Bedford Lodge for a final long session with Moncrieff, discussing the visual impacts and camera angles of tomorrow’s scene.
I was in bed by midnight. At five, the telephone rang beside my head.
‘Thomas?’
Dorothea’s wavery voice, apologetic.
‘I’m on my way,’ I said.
CHAPTER 3
Valentine was dead.
When I arrived in his house I found not the muted private grief I expected, but a showy car, not the doctor’s or the priest’s, parked at the kerbside, and bright lights behind the curtains in every window.
I walked up the concrete path to the closed front door and rang the bell.
After a long pause the door was opened, but not by Dorothea. The man filling the entry was large, soft and unwelcoming. He looked me up and down with a practised superciliousness and said, almost insultingly,