Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,94

do. A good strong fantasy life, I’d guess, saves countless people from boredom and depression. It gives them a feeling of being individual. They invent themselves. You know it perfectly well. You are a fantasy to most people.’

‘What about serial killers? Aren’t they fantasists?’

‘There’s a hell to every heaven.’

Moncrieff called, ‘Ready, Thomas,’ and Nash, without comment, went to the place from where he would walk into shot, and pause, and turn his head, and watch Bill Robinson live in his courage-inducing dreamland.

Ed went round explaining the necessity of silence to the neighbours. He shouted, ‘Turn over.’ The cameras reached speed. Ed yelled, ‘Action.’ Nash walked, stopped, turned his head. Perfect. Bill Robinson dropped a piece of exhaust pipe out of nervousness and said, ‘Sorry.’

‘Cut,’ Ed said, disgusted.

‘Don’t say “sorry”,’ I told Bill Robinson, walking towards the garage to join him. ‘It doesn’t matter if you drop something. It doesn’t matter if you swear. It’s normal. Just don’t say “sorry”.’

He grinned. We shot the scene again and he fitted two shining pieces of metal together as if he hadn’t got fifty people watching.

‘Cut,’ Ed yelled with approval, and the neighbours cheered. Nash shook Bill Robinson’s hand and signed autographs. We sold a lot of future cinema tickets, and no one stuck a knife in my back. Not a bad evening, overall.

Returning to Bedford Lodge, Nash and I ate room-service dinner together.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘about the need for fantasy.’

‘Oh… I…’ I hesitated, and stopped, unwilling to sound a fool.

‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘People say… in fact I say… that playacting isn’t a suitable occupation for a serious man. So tell me why it is.’

‘You don’t need me to tell you.’

‘Tell me why you make fantasies, then.’

‘Have some wine.’

‘Don’t duck the issue, dammit.’

‘Well,’ I said, pouring lavishly, ‘I wanted to be a jockey but I grew too big. Anyway, one day I went to see a doctor about some damage I’d done to my shoulder in a racing fall, and she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said “be a jockey” and she lectured me crossly on wasting my time on earth frivolously. I asked her what occupation she would recommend and she sternly told me that the only profession truly helpful and worthwhile was medicine.’

‘Rubbish!’

‘She scorned me for wanting to be merely an entertainer.’

Nash shook his head.

‘So,’ I said, ‘I rationalised it, I suppose. I’m still an entertainer arid always will be, I guess, and I’ve persuaded myself that I do at least as much good as tranquillisers. Everyone can go where their mind takes them. You can live in imaginary places without feeling the real terror or the real pain. I make the images. I open the door. I can inflame… and I can heal… and comfort… and get people to understand… and, for God’s sake, don’t remember a word of this. I’ve just made it up to entertain you.’

He drank his wine thoughtfully.

‘And in this movie that we’re engaged in,’ I said, ‘the dream lovers make the spurned wife’s existence happier. They’re the best way she can face her husband’s affair with her own sister. They’re her refuge… and her revenge.’

He smiled twistedly. ‘My character’s a shit, isn’t he?’

‘Human,’ I said.

‘And are you going to sell Howard on her suicide?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sure she didn’t kill herself. But don’t worry, your character will avenge her death and come up smelling of roses.’

‘Has Howard written those extra scenes?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’re a rogue, Thomas, you know that?’

We finished dinner peaceably, and together with Moncrieff mapped out the next day’s scenes, which were due to take place in the Athenaeum’s look-alike dining-room, happily by now built and ready.

After that meeting I un-Velcroed my restricting knife-repeller with relief and washed without soaking the dressing, and in sleeping shorts thought I’d just take a quick look at the newspaper cuttings about Sonia’s death before inching into bed: and two hours later, warmed by a dressing gown, I was still sitting in an armchair alternately amused and aghast and beginning to understand why Paul had desperately wanted to take away Valentine’s books and why Valentine, perhaps, hadn’t wanted him to have them. In leaving them to me, a comparative stranger, the old man had thought to safeguard the knowledge contained in them, since I couldn’t have understood the significance of the clippings and might simply have thrown them away, a task he should have done himself but had left too late, until his progressing illness made action impossible.

Paul had