Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,19

good nature, it seemed.

I waited until Betty had bustled across, plump and loving like Dorothea, and until Robbie Gill had left, during which period Paul half a dozen times told me I had no need to remain. While he was at one point busy patronising the doctor, Dorothea confided to me guiltily that she had locked Valentine’s sitting-room door, dear, just in case, and had hidden the key in the pink vase in her bedroom.

I kissed her cheek, smiling, and drove off to work, half an hour late again but offering no apology.

Rehearsal and lighting took all morning. Each of the non-speaking characters, Jockey Club members, had to be positioned in his armchair and taken through the responses to Nash Rourke’s long vehement defence.

‘Act scandalised here,’ I prompted, ‘then disbelieving, then throw up hands, throw down pencil, look angry, you think the man’s guilty and lying. Right everyone, we go through it again.’

And again and again, with Nash’s stand-in repeating the speech and pausing step by forward step for Moncrieff’s lighting plans to be finalised. Cibber, at the head of the table, kept making fruity jokes as usual and running down the government in the normal bored manner of an old character actor who’d long abandoned hopes of Hamlet. Cibber – I called most of the cast by their script names as I found it less confusing all round – Cibber was going to give a crack-up later of such truth and misery that he would garner good critical mentions while detesting me for a long time after, but as yet he coasted along on ‘heard the one about the sperm and the lawyer, old boy?’

Cibber had been chosen by the casting director because of his upper-class appearance and voice; and I had no complaints about these, but only with his facile assumption that they were enough, when to me they were merely a start.

We broke briefly for lunch. Nash Rourke arrived in good time for make-up, and did one silent walk-through under the lights, for Moncrieff to check he had the same colour temperatures as with the stand-in.

Owing to Nash having rehearsed in private the evening before, the ‘Jockey Club members’ were not prepared for what they were going to see, and as I particularly wanted to record their spontaneous reactions in advance of their rehearsed version, I announced that the first take was in this case not to be considered to be a rehearsal, but would be the real thing: that action, failing only the set falling to pieces, would continue from start to finish, whatever was seeming to go wrong.

‘Continuous,’ I said. ‘No stops. Right?’

Everyone nodded, even if doubt could be spotted here and there. Except for unrepeatable effects involving five hundred extras, first takes were rarely those seen on the screen.

With the world-weariness of unlimited experience, Nash understood what I wanted, but that didn’t guarantee that he would deliver. That day, however, from some motive of his own, he decided generously to go along with the all-out take one, and performed with such vibrating power that the mouths round the table fell open with real incredulity. Moncrieff said the hairs on his own neck stood up, let alone those of the cast. Cibber instinctively slid down in his chair as Nash came to a thunderous halt leaning over him, and after a second or two of dead silence, when I said a shade breathlessly, ‘Cut, and print,’ the crews and actors as if of one mind applauded.

Nash shrugged it off. ‘Well, it’s strongly written…’

He retraced his steps to leave the horseshoe and came over to where I stood.

‘Well?’ he said.

I was practically speechless.

‘Go on,’ Nash said. ‘Say it. Say “Do it again”.’

His eyes smiled.

‘Do it again,’ I said.

We repositioned and reloaded the cameras and repeated the scene twice more. All three takes went miraculously without glitches, and all three were printable, but it wasn’t only I who thought the first electric beyond insulation.

‘That man could murder,’ Moncrieff said of Nash thoughtfully.

‘He was acting.’

‘No.’ He shivered slightly. ‘I mean, in fact.’

CHAPTER 4

Howard had heard that the enquiry scene had given a galvanising, positively animating jolt to the whole production. He’d been told, by about ten different people, that Nash had said ‘It’s strongly written’: and Howard knew that he hadn’t written what Nash had yelled.

‘You,’ he said furiously, facing me after dinner across a small table in the Bedford Lodge Hotel bar, far too public a venue for his emotions, ‘you changed the script.’

‘Well,’ I said peaceably,