Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,20

‘not very much. Most of it was your words exactly.’

‘But not the feeling,’ he complained. ‘You wilfully misinterpreted my intention. You told Nash to lose control and threaten Gibber. You told him to look like a killer, you must have done, otherwise he wouldn’t have thought of it, not from what I wrote.’

‘Look, Howard,’ I said with resignation, ‘we’d better come once and for all to an understanding. I don’t want to quarrel with you. I want us to work together to produce a good film, but you did sign a contract –’

‘What you think is a good film,’ he interrupted, ‘and what I think is a film truthful to my book, are totally opposite. All you care about is how much money it makes.’

I took a large bracing mouthful of post-prandial cognac (to hell with the non-alcohol ethos) and decided to explain a few basic facts of movie life to the unrealistic idealist opposite me, his prim round glasses gleaming over earnest brown eyes and his small mouth contracting further in pique.

‘I’m a name,’ he insisted. ‘My readers expect subtlety, understatement and psychological depth. What you’re giving them is sex and violence.’

‘Have another vodka and cranberry juice?’

‘No.’

‘Howard,’ I said, ‘don’t you understand what you agreed to? O’Hara put together a package that brought finance from one of the top seven studios. However much one may regret it, they don’t fund moody films to play in art houses. They are strictly in the business for profit. The bottom line, Howard.’

‘Obscene,’ he said, disapprovingly.

I said, ‘O’Hara’s chief bargaining promise with the big-seven movie company was that we would, between us, produce a film that at least wouldn’t lose them money. Your own soft-focus view of an ancient scandal obviously worked fine as a novel, and there’s much of that that I’ve insisted on retaining. I’ve fought for you, whatever you may think.’

‘What, precisely, have you retained?’ he demanded, hurting.

‘You wrote the whole first quarter as a semi-ghost story about the dream lovers of the wife who ended up hanged.’

‘Yes.’

‘Her dreams and illusions are in the screenplay,’ I reminded him. ‘Her lovers are jockeys, the way you wrote them. But who were the real jockeys? Did they ride the horses her husband trained?’

‘They were in her mind.’

‘But why did she hang, Howard? Was she topped by one of the dream lovers? Did she do it herself? Did her husband kill her?’

After a pause he said, ‘No one knows.’

‘I know they don’t,’ I said. ‘At least, no one ever told. But an ending of no explanation at all isn’t going to get people paying to see the film.’

He said sarcastically, ‘That bottom line again.’

‘I’ll give you the dream lovers,’ I said. ‘And you’ll allow me an earthly explanation.’

‘That’s not fair.’

I gazed at him. He was old enough to know that few things were fair. Most five-year-olds had already discovered it.

‘What we are dealing with here,’ I said, changing tack, ‘is three versions of the same story.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We have the story you wrote in your book. We have the story we’re shooting in the film. And somewhere out of sight, way back in history, is what actually happened. Three views of the same facts.’

Howard didn’t argue.

I said, ‘By Sunday, Howard, I’d like you to come up with a rational explanation of the wife’s death.’

‘But it’s already Thursday evening!’ he exclaimed, horrified.

‘You’ve had literally years to work it out.’

‘But no one knows!’

‘Then guess.’

‘I can’t,’ he protested belligerently, ‘I’ve tried.’

‘Then I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I’ll work with you on the necessary scenes. We’ll use most of your script as written, but your inconclusive ending is impossible.’

‘But it’s what happened. There wasn’t any ending to the story.’

‘For the film, there has to be.’

‘Don’t you care about the facts?’

‘Perhaps, if we look closely enough,’ I said, only half meaning it, ‘we might ourselves uncover those facts. What if we actually could find out what really happened?’

‘You can’t,’ Howard said flatly. ‘No one knows.’

‘No one’s saying. That’s different.’ I paused. ‘What did Jackson Wells tell you, when you went to see him?’

O’Hara had asked Howard the same thing, he’d told me, and Howard, to O’Hara’s utter disbelief, had said he hadn’t consulted Jackson Wells at all. Howard hadn’t thought it necessary. Howard didn’t want to risk unwelcome anti-climactic disclosures from Jackson Wells that might upset his lyrical tale of the dream lovers and the semi-mystical death.

Moncrieff, strolling into the bar, seeing us, and crossing without hesitation to join us, saved Howard from having to answer.

Howard and