my mobile phone buzzed, and I told him to go ahead, I would join him after I’d talked to O’Hara; if it were in fact O’Hara.
He looked at me straightly and asked the official to pause for my call.
I answered the phone’s summons. ‘Thomas,’ I said.
‘Thomas!’ O’Hara’s voice was loud with annoyance. ‘Where are you?’ Nash could hear him shouting: he winced.
‘Doncaster racecourse.’
‘I’ve had Hollywood on the line. It’s not yet five in the morning there but the company is already furious. Someone made a phone call and then sent a fax of the Drumbeat.’
I said stupidly, ‘A fax?’
‘A fax,’ he confirmed.
‘Who sent it?’
‘The mogul I talked to didn’t say.’
I swallowed. My heart raced. The hand holding the instrument visibly trembled beside my eye. Calm down, I thought.
‘Who did Tyler talk to?’ O’Hara demanded furiously.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No. He was grumbling to everyone who would listen. He may not have known he was spouting to a journalist – or to someone who knew a journalist.’
‘What does he say about it?’
‘The hotel says he blasted off the minute he saw the paper. No one knows where he’s gone.’
‘I tried his home number,’ O’Hara shouted. ‘They say he’s in Newmarket.’
‘More likely the moon.’
‘The mogul I talked to is one of the very top guys, and he wants your head.’
This was it, I thought numbly: and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I needed an impassioned plea in mitigation. Drew a blank.
‘Are you there, Thomas?’
‘Yes.’
‘He says you’re fired.’
I was silent.
‘Hell’s teeth, Thomas, defend yourself.’
‘I warned Howard yesterday not to shoot his mouth off, but I think now that he’d already done it.’
‘Two weeks ago he tried to get the moguls to fire you, if you remember. I pacified them then. But this!’ Words failed him.
I began finally to protest. ‘We’re on target for time. We’re within budget. The company themselves insisted on story changes. I’m making a commercial motion picture, and it isn’t true that there are rows and discord, except with Howard himself.’
‘What’s he saying?’ Nash demanded impatiently.
‘I’m sacked.’
Nash snatched the phone out of my hand.
‘O’Hara? This is Nash. You tell those brain-deads who are our masters that I did not say what the Drumbeat says I did. Your boy is doing an OK job on this movie and if you take him off it at this stage you will get a bummer of a film, and what’s more, they can whistle for me to sign with them ever again.’
Aghast, I snatched the phone back. ‘Nash, you can’t do that. O’Hara, don’t listen to him.’
‘Put him back on the line.’
I handed the phone over, shaking my head. Nash listened to O’Hara for a while and finally said, ‘You told me to trust him. I do. This movie has a good feel. Now you trust me, trust my nose in these matters.’
He listened a bit longer, said ‘Right’ and pressed the power-off button.
‘O’Hara says he’ll call you back in five hours when they will have talked it through in Hollywood. They’re going to hold a breakfast meeting there at nine o’clock, when the big-wigs are all up. O’Hara will sit in on a conference call.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He smiled briefly. ‘My reputation is at stake here, same as yours. I don’t want my green light turning amber.’
‘It never will.’
‘Bad reviews give me indigestion.’
We walked with the patient official across the track and up to the stewards’ privacy. Heads turned sharply all the way as racegoer after racegoer did a double take at the sight of Nash. We had asked for no advance publicity – the parent film company was security hyper-conscious – so that only the top echelon knew whom to expect. I was glad, I found, to have an anonymous face.
They hadn’t waited lunch. Even for mega-stars, racing timetables couldn’t be changed. About twenty stewards and friends were at their roast beef and suitable Yorkshire pudding.
From behind the forks the welcome was as warm and impressed as the most inflated ego could desire, and Nash’s ego, as I was progressively discovering, was far more normal and unassuming than seemed consistent with his eminence.
I’d been in awe of him before I’d met him. I’d metaphorically approached him on my knees, and I’d found, not the temperamental perfectionist I’d been ominously told to expect, but essentially the man I’d seen him play over and over again on the screen, a man, whatever the role or the make-up, of sane intelligence, mentally tough.
I forlornly hoped that the Doncaster stewards and their wives and