I found it one day jammed at the back of a drawer. I meant to give it to Dad, but he won’t talk about Sonia. He won’t let us mention her, ever. So I just kept it.’ She opened the small handbag swinging from her shoulder and handed me a creased but clearly distinguishable snapshot of a pretty girl and a good-looking young man, not Jackson. ‘You won’t make Yvonne look like her, will you?’
Shaking my head, I turned the photo over and read the pencilled information on the back, ‘Sonia and Pig.’
‘Who is Pig?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve never heard Dad mention him. But that’s Dad’s handwriting, so he must have known him, long ago.’
‘Long ago before you were born.’
‘I’m eighteen,’ she said.
I felt old. I said, ‘Could I borrow the photo for a while?’
She looked doubtful. ‘I don’t want to lose it.’
‘Until tomorrow?’ I suggested. ‘If you came here again tomorrow…’
‘I don’t think there’s a chance. Dad didn’t really want to come at all. He only gave in to Mum so that she could meet Nash Rourke.’
‘Could you and your mother come tomorrow?’
‘She won’t do anything if Dad doesn’t like it.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t have a car of my own.’
‘Lend me the photo for an hour, then.’
She brightened and agreed, and I gave the photo to Moncrieff with an on-my-knees expression, begging him to do me a clear negative from which we could get a positive print. It would take the usual day for travelling to London to the laboratory for development, but with reasonable luck I’d have it back in the morning.
In the morning. Die today. Shut up, I thought.
‘Do you, ‘I asked Lucy later, ‘have a computer and a printer at home?’
‘Of course, we do,’ she answered, puzzled. ‘No one can farm without one, nowadays. The paperwork drives Dad loco. Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondered. We use one here all the time.’ I enlarged on it, defusing my enquiry. ‘Every inch of film, every lens used, every focal stop… we have a script supervisor entering the lot. We can lay our hands on any frame of film that way, and also make sure we have continuity if we shoot the next scene days later.’
She nodded in partial understanding and said, ‘And who are all those odd people you see on the credits? Grips, gaffers… who are they?’
‘Grips move equipment. The gaffer is in charge of the lighting equipment. The most important chap at the moment is the production manager. He’s the person who arranges for vehicles and scenery and props and all sorts of things to be in the right place when we need them.’
‘And you,’ she said with unflattering doubt, ‘are in overall charge of the whole thing?
‘I and the producer.’ I pointed to O’Hara. ‘No us, no film.’
She said baldly, ‘Dad said so, but Mum thought you were too young.’
‘Are you always so frank?’
‘Sixteen was hell,’ she said. ‘Tongue-tied. Not long ago I broke out of the egg.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Dad says I talk nonsense.’
‘No better time for it. Stay and have dinner. I’ll take you home later.’
‘Sorry.’ The response was automatic, the blue eyes full of the warnings she’d been given about date-rape and such. ‘Not on our own.’
I smiled wryly. I’d thought only of not being knifed, not of bed. I’m losing it, I thought, wanting my life saved by an eighteen-year-old still half in the cradle. I fetched her snap from Moncrieff- thumbs up, he said – and returned it to her.
‘I didn’t mean,’ she said awkwardly, sixteen surfacing again after all. ‘I mean, I don’t want to offend you…’
‘But no casting couches. It’s all right.’
She blushed and retreated, sane and confused, to her parents, and I thought bed wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.
The trouble with making films, I acknowledged, was the way the occupation gobbled time. For the three months of any pre-production, I worked flat out to put the film together, choosing locations, getting the feel – the vision – in place, altering the screenplay, living with the characters. During production, like now, I worked seven days a week with little sleep. Post-production – the recording of music and sound effects, the cutting together of scenes and parts of scenes to make an impact and tell a story, the debates and the meetings and the previews – all of those often had to be scrambled into just a further three months. And with one film done, another crowded on my heels. I’d made three films lately in