security that led me to use O’Hara’s safe instead of my own, but anyway, I did it.
Still in O’Hara’s rooms I looked up the number of Ridley Wells in the local phone directory, and tried it, but there was no answer.
On returning to my own rooms I found Nash, on the point of leaving, announcing that he was going to spend the afternoon watching racing on TV while betting by phone with a bookmaker I’d arranged for him.
‘Is it still on, for tonight?’ he asked, pausing in the doorway.
‘Certainly is, if the rain stops, which it is supposed to.’
‘How do you expect me to ride a horse in the goddam dark?’
‘There will be moonlight. Moncrieff’s arranging it.’
‘What about goddam rabbit holes?’
‘There aren’t any on Newmarket’s gallops,’ I assured him.
‘But what if I fall off!’
‘We’ll pick you up and put you back in the saddle.’
‘I hate you sometimes, Thomas.’ He grinned and went on his way. I left Lucy up to her elbows in decades of form books, collected my minders in the lobby and was bowled the short mile back to the stables.
On my way back to ‘The Athenaeum’ I detoured into the downstairs office, used chiefly by Ed, where we had the business paraphernalia of telephones, faxes, and large-capacity copier, and asked the young woman operating everything there to keep on trying Ridley Wells’s number for me, and if he returned home and answered the summons, to put the call through to me upstairs immediately.
‘But you said never to do that, in case the phone rang during a shot.’
‘We can re-shoot,’ I said. ‘I want to catch this man. OK?’
She nodded, reassured, and I went upstairs to re-coax Cibber and Silva into their most venomous faces.
Ridley Wells answered his telephone at three-thirty, and sounded drunk.
I said, ‘Do you remember you asked our producer, O’Hara, if we had any riding work for you in our film?’
‘He said you hadn’t.’
‘Right. But now we have. Are you still interested?’ I mentioned a fee for a morning’s work large enough to hook a bigger fish than Ridley, and he didn’t even ask what the job entailed.
I said, ‘We’ll send a car for you tomorrow morning at seven. It will bring you to the stables where we’re keeping our horses. You don’t need to bring anything with you. We’ll supply you with clothes from our wardrobe department. We’ll supply the horse for you to ride. We don’t want you to do anything out of the ordinary or dangerous on the horse. We’re just short of a rider for a scene we’re shooting tomorrow.’
‘Got you,’ he said grandly.
‘Don’t forget,’ I insisted.
‘Mum’s the word, old boy.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Mum’s not the word. If you’re not sober in the morning, then no job and no fee.’
After a pause he said, ‘Got you,’ again, and I hoped he meant it.
When we’d finished the close-ups and the day’s work was safely on its way to London for processing I ran the previous day’s rushes in the screening room, happy for Bill Robinson’s sake that he and his monster bike positively quivered with shining power, filling Nash’s character with the determination he needed if he were to take action.
From fantasy, courage, I thought. I wanted the film to assert that old idea, but without ramming it down anyone’s throat. I wanted people to see that they had always known it. To open coors. A door-opener; that was my function.
It stopped raining more or less at the time forecast – miraculous – and Moncrieff busied himself in the stable-yard supervising the loading of cameras, films, lights and crews onto trucks for the ‘moonlit’ shots of Nash on the Heath.
Nash arrived to the minute, no surprise, and came out of the house half an hour later in riding clothes and night-time makeup, carrying his helmet and demanding a thoroughly tranquillised mount.
‘If your fans could only hear you!’ I remarked dryly.
‘You, Thomas,’ he said, smiling, ‘can go try 6G in a brake turn at low level.’
I shook my head. Nash could fly fast jet aircraft – when not under a restrictive contract in mid-film – and I couldn’t. Nash’s pre-mega-star hair-raising CV included air force service in fighters, all part of his mystique.
‘The scene comes a night or two before the motor bikes,’ I said. ‘You have been accused. You are worried. OK?’
He nodded. The screenplay had included the night-on-the-horse scene from the beginning, and he was prepared.
We drove the camera truck slowly up the road by the hill, Nash in the saddle