A Mysterious Affair of Style

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘Rex Hanway?’ said Trubshawe. ‘He’s the producer of the picture, right?’

  ‘Lord, no!’ she fluttered. ‘Please never let him hear you call him that. He’s the director. He took over after Mr Farjeon – well, I’m sure you heard about Mr Farjeon’s untimely demise.’

  ‘And Cora?’ enquired Evadne Mount. ‘Has she started filming yet?’

  At the actress’s name, what had never been more than a polite and perfunctory smile was altogether wiped off Lettice Morley’s face.

  ‘Miss Rutherford? Ah well, she is, I suppose, a great artist but I’m afraid, like not a few great artists, she – now how shall I express this? – she can sometimes be a touch inconsiderate of her colleagues’ needs. The picture business is, you must know, a collective activity and some of our leading stars, our leading ladies in particular, unfortunately lack what might be called the collective spirit. Films are like trains. If they run at all, they have to run on schedule.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘she’s late.’

  ‘If you’re talking about this morning, forty minutes late. It really is most trying for Mr Hanway. Especially as Miss Rutherford’s role is by no means crucial.’

  The novelist laughed.

  ‘Cora, I’m afraid, is one of those people who are always unpunctual and yet who always have an excuse, a different one for every occasion.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s all very charming, I dare say, but on a film set unpunctuality is the cardinal sin, one that’s forgiven – and then very grudgingly – only if it’s been committed by a major star, a Margaret Lockwood, you know, or a Linden Travers. Whereas Cora Rutherford …’

  She left the remainder of her comment unaired, not just because she had perhaps realised she was at risk of overstepping the bounds of professional propriety but also because, at that very moment, wearing a trim little cocktail dress, black with mauve linings, and brandishing her inevitable cigarette-holder, the actress herself finally wafted into view.

  Evadne and Trubshawe watched from a distance as Cora approached someone seated on a folding canvas chair on whose back was printed, as they now noticed, the words Mr Hanway. As with the male character in the opening scene of the film itself, however, such as it had been recounted to them by Cora, no more than his own back, along with a mere pinch of his profile, was visible to them; and it was only when he turned his head to hear what the actress’s excuse might be for holding up the proceedings that they were granted a more complete view of his facial features. His age, difficult to judge, could have been anywhere between thirty and forty. His face was somehow both intense and expressionless, with eyes of an unnervingly glassy inscrutability. He was wearing, of all improbable items of attire, a labourer’s boiler-suit, but a boiler-suit so flawlessly fashioned that his elegant silk tie seemed not at all a mismatch. And on his lap sat an exquisitely bony Siamese cat, washing its face with those nervy little paw-flicks that are irresistibly reminiscent of the hapless flailings of a punch-drunk prizefighter.

  ‘Rex darling!’ cried the actress. ‘I know, I know, late again. But I swear to you, it wasn’t my fault. When I’m late, it’s always for my art, and surely any artist, especially the kind of perfectionist I am, may be forgiven for that.’

  After a brief silence, while starting to caress the cat with such vigour he risked wearing it out, Hanway replied, ‘My dear Cora, what I want from you isn’t perfectionism but perfection. What was the problem this time?’

  Cora tugged heartlessly at her cocktail dress.

  ‘This was the problem. I had to ask Vi to take the waist in again. It was so unbecoming it made me look, well, can you imagine, blowsy. Blowsy, me? Wouldn’t do at all.’

  She leaned over to stroke the silky, sulky cat, now all the sulkier at having her ablutions disturbed.

  ‘Nice pussy,’ she cooed nervously. ‘Who’s a pretty pussy?’

  Hanway donned a mask of heroic patience.

  ‘Let me remind you, Cora, you are supposed to be playing the dowdy neglected wife. We can’t have you looking too alluring.’

  The director suddenly snapped out of his languor. Lifting the cat up off his lap, he disengaged its claws from the hem of his boiler-suit as cautiously as a hiker untangling a strand of his jumper from a barbed-wire fence and plumped it down on a canvas chair that was next to his own and on the back of which was printed the name Cato. Then, leaping to his feet, he clapped his hands together.

  ‘All right, everybody in place! We’re going to rehearse the scene!’

  Turning to Lettice, who had been diligently hovering over him throughout his brief exchange with Cora, he said, ‘I want all the extras on set.’

  Cora, meanwhile, aware of her friends’ presence, mouthed a flighty ‘Yoo-hoo!’ and waved over to them. Raising her kohl-rimmed eyes as though to say ‘No rest for the weary!’, she then huddled together with Hanway while he presumably gave her a few final instructions on how the scene was to be played. At the same time, the extras had begun to position themselves as ordered. There were a dozen of them, half male, half female, all in smart evening dress. And, bringing up the rear, chaperoned by a spinsterish, stern-faced nanny, were two children, a cherubic boy of about ten, the picture of brattish disgruntlement in his starchy sailor-suit, and a shy little girl less than half his age who, in her beribboned white party frock and miniature ballet pumps, was a Mabel Lucie Atwell postcard teased into dimpled, pink-cheeked life.

  Then it was the turn of the film’s two leads to walk onto the set. If Gareth Knight was no longer quite the jeune premier, yet with his raven-black moustache, his suave throw-away manner and above all his smile, that fabled smile of his that had broken many a shopgirl’s heart, he still managed to cut an enviably dashing and devil-may-care figure. As for Leolia Drake, the actress who had been chosen to replace the late Patsy Sloots, she certainly had what is known in the trade as a photogenic physique, being luscious, gorgeous, curvaceous, voluptuous and all those other quintessentially feminine adjectives that end in ‘ous’.

  ‘By the Lord Harry!’ exclaimed Trubshawe, smacking his lips. ‘Now that’s what I call a real corker.’

  Without for an instant compromising his stencilled-on smile, Knight bowed curtly to Cora and shook Hanway’s hand. The director stepped over to offer a few words of encouragement to the two children. The scene was ready to be rehearsed.

  And it was a scene, as Trubshawe remarked at once, that bore a striking resemblance to the premise of Evadne’s Eeny-Meeny-Murder-Mo. The setting was a chic cocktail party and, even if he was still almost totally ignorant of the ramifications of the film’s plot, he had soon worked out, from the dry runs which the actors were put through by Hanway, not only that the party was being given by Knight and his wife (Cora’s role) but also that the latter, while playing the perfect hostess, was keeping a watchful eye on the rather too attentive court her husband had started to pay to the very youngest and sexiest of their guests, the film’s heroine (Leolia Drake’s role).

  It was when Knight actually went so far as to whisper sweet nothings in Drake’s ear, sweet nothings which may not have been audible but were certainly visible, that the crisis erupted. A glass of champagne in her hand, Cora was seen to become so enraged by her philandering better half that she ended by snapping its stem in two. At which point, even though the camera hadn’t been turning, the director bawled out, ‘Cut!’

  In all there were four run-throughs. None of them, however, appeared to satisfy Rex Hanway. Each of his ‘Cuts!’ sounded more fretful than the last. And, after the fourth and final rehearsal, nearly sliding off his canvas chair in frustration, he cried out:

  ‘No! No, no, no, no, no! This won’t do at all!’

  Everyone, cast, crew and extras alike, fell silent. No matter how insecure his authority had been in the first few days, Hanway now commanded a silent respect from his underlings.

  Lettice got to her knees in front of him.

  ‘But, Rex, it’s exactly what we have in the script.’
<
br />   ‘What do I care?’ said Hanway intemperately. ‘The script is wrong.’

  ‘Wrong? But –’

  ‘It isn’t The Brothers Karamazov, for God’s sake. It’s just a blue-print.’

  ‘Of course, Rex, of course.’

  ‘No, no, there’s something missing, there’s definitely something missing. It’s boring. It’s a big nothing of a scene. It’s not even a big nothing, it’s a small nothing, it’s a nothing nothing.’

  He held up a clenched fist hard against his brow in a possibly conscious imitation of Rodin’s Thinker.

  ‘Perhaps, darling,’ ventured Cora, ‘if we –’

  ‘Be quiet, please!’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see I’m thinking?’

  ‘I was only going to suggest –’

  Again, though, she was prevented from completing her sentence. As suddenly and dramatically as he had planted it, Hanway removed the fist from his brow.

  ‘I’ve got it!’

  He stood up and marched purposefully onto the set, led his trio of principals off to one side and began whispering to them. When they had understood his new instructions – Cora fervently nodding in agreement, Leolia Drake beaming up at him, Gareth Knight shaking his head in mute admiration – Hanway snapped his fingers for the little girl to be brought over. More whispering – on this occasion, it took her somewhat longer to comprehend his intentions. Yet she too, once light had dawned on her, started to giggle. Then he had a few quiet words with his cameraman, who at once proceeded to make the necessary adjustments.

  The scene was now ready to be filmed. Silence was repeatedly called for – one hapless member of the crew being collectively cursed by his mates for sneezing three times in a row – and Hanway, poised expectantly on the edge of his chair, finally shouted, ‘Action!’

  At first nothing had changed. Holding the same glass of champagne, Cora made the same desultory chit-chat with the same dinner-suited male extra, all the while spying on Knight, who, exchanging the same monosyllabic pleasantries as he zigzagged across the crowded room, nevertheless made the same circuitous beeline for Leolia Drake. She, meanwhile, as though fearful of the intensity of her feelings towards him, attempted to avoid catching his eye as she slowly sidled away towards the door.

  Then, on cue, she walked backwards straight into the little girl, causing her to topple over onto the floor.

  The actress at once got to her knees to help her back up.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart, I’m terribly sorry. Gosh, aren’t I the clumsy one. Are you all right? No bruises?’

  When the little girl solemnly shook her head, Leolia on a sudden impulse kissed her on the right cheek.

  And it was at that instant that Knight swiftly stepped forward. He too knelt down beside the little girl and, neatly timing his gesture to coincide with Leolia’s, kissed her on the left cheek. To anyone who happened to be watching them – and if none of the extras were, everybody behind the camera was – the effect was exactly as though they were kissing each other through the child.

  Then, just like someone speaking into a telephone, Knight whispered into the child’s dainty little ear:

  ‘I love you, Margot.’

  ‘Oh, Julian …’ a tremulous Leolia Drake answered into the other ear. ‘Please don’t. Not here. Someone may hear us.’

  ‘How can anyone hear us,’ he countered smoothly, ‘when we have our own private ’phone? There’s no danger of a crossed line.’

  The child’s uncomprehending eyes darted from left to right and back again.

  ‘Say it, darling,’ said Knight, ‘please let me hear you say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That you love me too.’

  ‘Oh, I do. I do so love you.’

  To and fro went the little girl’s eyes, like those of a spectator at the centre-court at Wimbledon.

  The novelist and the detective watched in fascination as the camera now began to glide backward along its little section of railway track while at the same time, in a perfectly coordinated movement, it rose up into the dank and powdery studio air on an extensible ladder, a ladder that itself gradually stretched out over the entire set until there wasn’t a single one of the dozen revellers who hadn’t swum into, then again out of, its ken.

  It eventually came to a halt directly in front of Cora herself. She was glaring implacably at the flirtatious couple. Her face contorted by spasms of jealousy, she mumbled a curse under her breath. Then, with perfect timing, her fingers snapped into two equal halves the slender, fine-spun stem of her champagne glass.

  ‘Cut!’ cried Rex Hanway.

  Chapter Seven

  Evadne Mount, Eustace Trubshawe and Cora Rutherford were seated at a corner table in the studio cafeteria – what in the picture-making business is known as the commissary. In the real world, the word would have been ‘canteen’. Notwithstanding the autographed snapshots, aligned along all four of its walls, of several of Elstree’s best-loved players – David Farrar and Jeanne De Casalis, Guy Rolfe and Beatrice Varley, Joseph Tomelty and Joyce Grenfell – a canteen is what it resembled and a canteen is what it was.

  Since the room itself was nearly as draughty and cavernous as the sound stage from which they’d repaired for lunch, none of them had felt inclined to remove their heavy outdoor coats. Cora had even kept her gloves on, except that, with her innate stylishness, she contrived to convince everybody else that a gloved canteen lunch was the very latest thing, le dernier cri, as she herself would have put it, and this in spite of the fact that, to protect her elaborately mounted pompadour, she was also forced to sport a set of unsightly rose-pink curlers.

  The other tables were monopolised by the same gaudily outfitted extras whom Evadne and Trubshawe had already admired when they first entered the studio. At one table a Ruritanian Hussar was lunching in the company of two ladies-in-waiting from Louis XIV’s Versailles. At another an elderly bobby with a nicotiny walrus moustache, his helmet posed upright on the table-top like an outsized salt cellar, chatted amiably to the very last individual with whom his real-life equivalent would ever be caught lunching, a wiry cat-burglar clad in a black body stocking. And, sitting alone at a third, a queer, hatchet-faced woman was furiously knitting away at some monstrosity in purple wool. Paying as little attention to her fellow-lunchers in the commissary as they were paying to her, she laid aside her work-in-progress only to swallow the odd mouthful of semolina pudding.

  ‘Psst, Cora,’ Evadne finally whispered.

  ‘H’m?’

  ‘Tell me. Madame Lafarge over there? Do you know her?’

  Cora turned her head, unconcerned as to whether she might be observed doing so by the target of the novelist’s curiosity.

  ‘Why, that’s Hattie, of course,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘Hattie?’

  ‘Hattie Farjeon. Farje’s wife. Widow, I mean.’

  ‘Farjeon’s widow? What on earth is she doing here?’

  ‘Oh, Hattie’s always been present on the set during the making of Farje’s films. You would see her, in a corner, sitting and knitting all by herself, never addressing a word to a soul, as mousy and uncommunicative as she is now. Officially, she was Farje’s script consultant, but the true reason for her presence, as we all knew, was to guarantee there was no hanky-panky between him and his leading ladies. Hanky-panky or, so I’ve heard, “wanky-spanky”. I wouldn’t know myself,’ she concluded virtuously.

  ‘But why is she here today? With Farjeon dead and all?’

  Cora toyed with her corned beef.

  ‘Who knows? Maybe Levey – Benjamin Levey, the producer of the picture – regards her as a good-luck fetish. It was Farje’s series of hits, you know, that made him a millionaire. Or maybe she still has a financial involvement in the project and is keeping a watch over her own interests. Or maybe she just wants to be sure that Hanway is faithful to her husband’s script.’

  ‘But that’s just it,’ said Evadne.

  ‘What’s just it?’

  ‘Hanway has
n’t been faithful to the script. Just this morning he introduced the idea of using a child’s ears as pair of telephone receivers. I must say, I thought it rather wonderful of him to come up with such a clever new piece of business right there on the set.’

  ‘Oh, I do so agree!’ the actress replied. ‘You don’t suppose Farje’s genius could somehow be flowing through him? Emanations, you know,’ she said vaguely. ‘Or do I mean ectoplasm?’

  In disgust she shoved away the aforementioned viands.

  ‘God, this is foul muck. Even the bread-and-marge is stale.’

  Lighting up a cigarette, she returned to the subject at hand.

  ‘Yes, if he keeps it up, Hanway may well become the new Farjeon. Farje also used to have these brilliant last-minute intuitions. I remember when I popped in to visit dear Ty – Tyrone Power to you yokels – when he was filming An American in Plaster-of-Paris – Oh, crumbs!’

  Without completing the reminiscence, she picked up her knife and fork again, bent low over her plate and addressed her undivided attention to the meal that she had only just rejected.

  ‘For God’s sake, whatever you do,’ she whispered, ‘please, please don’t look round! Don’t make eye contact!’

  ‘Who is it we shouldn’t make eye contact with?’ asked Evadne, as, to the actress’s dismay, she did proceed to look round, at once finding herself face to face, indeed eye to eye, with an earnest, sallow-complexioned young man who, with his shaven head, rimless dark glasses, neatly trimmed goatee and black high-necked polo jersey, would have seemed more at home in some smoke-infested jazz cellar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Bearing a tray of food, he was clearly on his way to join them.

  ‘Now you’ve done it,’ hissed Cora.