Lunching at Laura's

by Claire Rayner

  He didn’t, but he did see Philip Cord. Only five days after he had been given the Thrust job he arrived at the office of the casting agency, just behind Liberty’s in Regent Street, to select the actors who would play his market traders. Tomorrow he would settle down to choosing his Thrust users, who would be of a very different type. And once that was done, the commercial was as good as in the can.

  He grinned at that thought. He had made remarkable progress in the time. The script was written and passed – and to the AP’s surprise he had insisted on writing it himself and had come up with one based on his remembered conversation in the market that the client liked much better than anything the agency had been able to produce – and the preliminary permissions had been given to shoot film in the street. He had booked space at the open air section of the studios City used over at Hammersmith to build the couple of actual market stalls that would be needed for closeups and had the designer busily at work setting them up. If he could get all his casting done in these two days, he told himself, he’d be sitting pretty; he could even bring this damned thing in under the two weeks, which would be gratifying. And with a little care he might even be able to edge it in under budget which would be even more satisfying.

  His lips curled a little as he strode up Regent Street with his hands in his pockets and his raincoat flapping behind him and imagined Buzzy Lethbridge’s face when he presented him with a budget underspend rather than a deficit. Heavens, but that would be good! And then he’d call Laura at the restaurant and ask her to – and he began to walk faster, to stop himself thinking about her, and got to the casting people exactly on the dot of ten o’clock.

  That was the point at which his careful husbandry of time threatened to fall to pieces. The waiting room was full of actors and he glanced at them with a practised eye as he went through, well used to assessing quickly the quality of what he was being offered, and his brows snapped down. He’d told the agency firmly what he wanted; Soho types, he’d said. The people who live and work in Soho have a stamp about them that you can’t miss; he had been thinking of Sam Price and Vittorio Bonner and the other men he had talked to that afternoon when he had gone wandering through Berwick Street market and eaten strawberries from a punnet. That had been not long after he had first met Laura, though at that stage he hadn’t yet become so crazily involved with her – and again he had pushed that thought away and repeated to the casting agency girl, ‘I want Soho types. People viewers’ll believe in as soon as they see ’em without knowing why they do – be sure now. Soho people.’

  Yet here in the waiting room were a motley collection of performers who looked far from right. Not a believable market trader among them; and he glanced again at the rows of chairs in the waiting room as he began to close the door of the office and as the latch clicked realised he had seen someone totally unexpected.

  He stood very still facing the door, staring at the scratched panels but seeing the scene on the other side quite clearly, as though it had been etched on his retina. On one side of the second row of chairs had been sitting a tall man with a handsome if rather battered face and beautifully cut and shaped silver hair; anything less like a market trader he had never seen, though he had to admit he might be able to cast him as a Thrust user. Perhaps he had been called for the wrong day? Perhaps he could get him to come back tomorrow? But more important than him was the man beside him, sitting half turned towards the silver head and hunched over so that he could talk very quietly into the taller man’s ear. Philip Cord. There was no mistaking that dark-gold head and that smooth face with its knowing eyes, and Joel felt again the surge of fury he had known the last time he had seen the man, at the restaurant that night when his whole world had flipped itself on its head and come up looking like Laura Horvath.

  He put his hand out to the doorknob to open the door again and stare and was just stopped by the trilling voice behind him.

  ‘Morning, Mr. Coplin! Good to see you so spot on for time! Your lot usually keep us sitting here for half an hour or longer twiddling our expensive thumbs before they put in an appearance. It’s a pleasure to deal with a real professional –’

  He turned and looked at the woman standing beside the desk. She was wearing exceedingly fashionable clothes which looked as though they belonged to someone else, they suited her so little, and an ingratiating expression on her tired and heavily painted face.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said and nodded perfunctorily. ‘Those people out there – are they for me?’

  She lifted her brows at him, and smiled almost simperingly.

  ‘Indeed they are! Every one of them hand picked exactly to your briefing –’

  ‘Exactly to my briefing?’ The anger that the sight of Philip Cord had triggered in him was still there and he let it out, luxuriating in his own rudeness. ‘Ye Gods, woman, how can you say that? Just one look and it’s got to be obvious to the meanest intelligence that there isn’t one there that’ll be the slightest use to me! Did you look at the script I sent you? I’m looking for stall holders. Market stall holders viewers can believe actually know the price of apples! And what you’ve got out there wouldn’t convince me they were anything but very obvious Equity members as camp as a row of pink tents. I told that girl of yours, spelled it out in words of one syllable. I want Soho types, people who look as though they were born and bred in Soho, who’ve lived there all their lives. If that applies to any one of that crew out there then I’m –’ He swallowed as the woman stood staring at him wide eyed and fearful and took a sharp breath in through his nose.

  ‘Look,’ he said more calmly. ‘I want to talk to the girl I briefed. Where is she?’

  ‘I’ll get her at once,’ the woman said, and sniffed nervously and punched the buttons on the phone on her desk. ‘Arlene?’ she snapped after a moment. ‘Come here at once,’ and she slammed the phone down and they both stood waiting, not looking at each other as Joel scowled and tried to push his anger back where it belonged, deep inside. The fact that he hated Philip Cord as much as he did shouldn’t be allowed to spill over to his dealings with people he had to work with, for heaven’s sake – this was ridiculous! But for all his self lecturing, he still smouldered.

  Arlene appeared, a blank faced girl with scarlet hair and very tight leather trousers and a T shirt beneath which small breasts did their best to look important.

  ‘Arlene,’ snapped the woman who was now sitting behind her desk, also trying to look important. ‘What brief did Mr. Coplin here from City Television give you?’

  ‘What, Mrs. Amos?’ the girl said and flicked her eyes at Joel.

  ‘I said, what brief were you given?’

  ‘I told you I wanted Soho types, right?’ Joel snapped, his anger lifting again as he stared at the girl. She looked as though she couldn’t be less interested in him or in Mrs. Amos, or indeed in anything but herself.

  ‘S’right,’ she said. ‘Soho types. An’ that was what I asked the computer for.’

  ‘What did you actually ask it to give you?’ Mrs. Amos said, with a heavy sarcasm. ‘It’s not a person, you know. It’s only a machine, you know. Can’t think for itself, you know. It produces just what it’s asked for and no more. Never heard of the gigo factor? Garbage in, garbage out –’

  ‘Yeah,’ the girl said. ‘That’s right. I punched in I wanted all actors what was Soho types, an’ that’s what we got. Not one of ’em lives anywhere else.’

  Joel closed his eyes in disbelief and then snapped them open again to stare at the girl. ‘Are you saying all those people out there live in Soho?’

  The girl blinked. ‘Tha’s right. Tha’s what you said you wanted, didn’t you? Soho types.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ Joel said and suddenly the anger went, spluttering away on a sea of laughter. ‘Oh, ye gods and a sack of little rabbits. I don’t believe this!’

  ‘Arlene,’ Mrs. Amos said frostily. ‘Go away.’ And the girl shrugged and her buttocks gyrated sulkily out of the office. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr. Cop
lin,’ she went on. ‘I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world. But I’ve been so madly busy I haven’t been able to supervise as I should have done. I grant you I should have done. Normally I’d have checked the brief for myself, for a client as vitally important as City, but really, what with all this fuss about the new Attenborough film and all –’ She made a little moue, desperately trying to mollify him. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am –’

  ‘No point in apologies,’ Joel said, but without rancour. There seemed no point in going on complaining at the woman. He sat down in the chair beside the desk, and pulled out of his pocket the folded script and the notes he had made about the people he needed to cast. ‘Let’s just get on as best we can. Wheel ’em in. I can’t send the poor devils away without at least seeing them. Bad enough to be put up for commercials, without being rejected in the waiting room. So let’s get on with it. But I’ll tell you this much –’ He looked at her sharply. ‘I expect a decent discount on the bill for the waste of my time. Not only do I not pay for the extra session I’m obviously going to need here, but I also get a reduction in the original fee I agreed. Fair enough?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs. Amos said after an anguished moment and then pushed the bell on her desk with a sharp gesture as if it were the girl Arlene. ‘Of course, Mr. Coplin. We’ll begin then. And if you don’t mind I’ll leave you to get on for a while on your own, once they start, so that I can make sure we’ve got the right sort of people coming in for you tomorrow. With a little luck we might be able to keep this down to the original two-day schedule after all.’

  ‘I hope you can,’ Joel said in high good humour now. The absurdity of the girl’s mistake had quite erased his fury. ‘I need all the time I can save. But all the same – a cut rate job, Mrs. Amos, a cut rate but first rate job is what I’m getting out of you! Every one of them lives in Soho!’ And again he laughed as the first actor, a willowy young man in the tightest and most faded jeans Joel had ever seen came hipping his way into the room.

  He worked doggedly through the next two hours hoping every time the door opened to admit the next aspirant that the silver-haired man would come in; or would it be Cord? He doubted that. Surely if he were an actor he’d have been told? He remembered their conversation over dinner at the restaurant, when he’d asked him what he did for a living; what had the man said? He frowned, trying to remember. He’d said nothing, in fact. Had said it wasn’t relevant to the matter they were discussing, which was the ethics of television film-making, and had slid over the question completely. And, Joel told himself flatly, there is no way he’d have done that if he were an actor. They always say what they do for a living. Try and stop ’em –

  Mrs. Amos came back with coffee for him and disappeared again murmuring something incoherent about having to phone round to collect the people he would need to see next day and he nodded abstractedly and went on, listening to accounts of careers and readings of his script in carefully modulated voices, working class accented voices and twanging mid Atlantic voices and none of them was any good at all; and he would smile and nod and thank them for coming in and assure them he would be in touch if he needed them and watch them walk dejectedly out, each of them knowing perfectly well that they’d never hear another word from him. And he would ring the bell and the next would come in and the whole sad and degrading charade would start all over again.

  He hated casting, always had, but never did what some directors did, leaving it entirely to the casting people. And he grinned as he thought of what might have happened this time if he’d done that. Ye Gods, ask for Soho types and what he got were people who lived in Soho –

  Again the door opened and there he was; the tall, silver-haired man who had been talking to – or rather had been talked to – by Philip Cord. He stood there in the doorway, hovering a little and smiling in a practised style and for the first time Joel stood up.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said and lifted his brows at him. ‘Now, haven’t I seen you somewhere before? I wonder where?’ And it was true that looking at the man now there was a familiarity about him; but whether that was because he had actually seen him before today, or because he had noticed him in the waiting room, it was impossible to say. Ever since he’d first set eyes on him he’d been thinking about him, after all.

  The tall man smiled even more widely, gratified by the comment. ‘I’ve done a good deal of commercial work,’ he murmured. ‘The Mars and Venus chocolate promotion and that rather odd but effective little ad for Genesis floor cleaner –’

  ‘No –’ Joel said thoughtfully. ‘Somewhere else.’ He sat down and gestured to the older man to sit too. He did so with a great elegance. ‘Somewhere social –’

  Philip Cord and Laura he was thinking. That man with Laura; and that gave him an idea, a line to the way to bring Cord into the conversation. ‘Now, could it be at that splendid Hungarian restaurant in Little Vinegar Yard? I seem to recall –’

  The silver haired man smiled even more widely. ‘That is very possible,’ he said and his voice now was relaxed and silky, with a rich undertone to it that was very pleasing. Very much an actor’s voice, Joel registered at the back of his mind. ‘It belongs to my family.’

  Joel blinked, and said nothing, shocked into silence. He had trawled an unbaited line across a pool he had suspected had no fish in it and come up with a catch so huge it took his breath away.

  The other man seemed unaware of the effect he had had, however, and went on, ‘My cousin Laura runs it, of course. Everyone in Soho knows Laura, don’t they? She’s a darling. I’m a first cousin.’ He leaned forward and pointed to his name on the schedule that Mrs. Amos had left on the desk beside Joel. ‘Paul Balog. How do you do.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Joel responded automatically and then said without thinking, ‘And the man who was talking to you as I came through the waiting room – he’s your cousin too?’

  The smile vanished from Paul Salog’s face. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I noticed you as I came through the waiting room,’ Joel said and then, ashamed of his own mendacity, added, ‘You’re a striking looking man, Mr. Balog. I saw you and thought – you could be one of the Thrust users I need for this film. And happened to notice the man you were talking to.’

  Paul relaxed visibly, leaning back in his chair, and the smile reappeared, smoother and more winning than ever. ‘I’m glad you thought me useful,’ he murmured. ‘Do you want me to read the script?’

  Joel shook his head. ‘It’s a pleasant job, Mr. Balog. On screen for several seconds and no dialogue. You simply have to walk through the market, collecting admiring glances and being very very degagé and sophisticated. You look the part to a T.’

  He was beginning to loathe himself more and more; he who had always been so professional, never employing anyone who wasn’t precisely right for the job, who had offended actor friends by passing them over in favour of strangers who seemed to him better for the job, to behave so? And all because of his jealousy over a woman who was quite uninterested in him as far as he could tell. Disgusting!

  ‘Leave the name of your agent, and we’ll get the contract out to you. If you want the job. It’s planned for a long run, I believe. Should be plenty of residuals in it.’

  Paul lifted his chin with a little gesture of pure exaltation. Clearly even a job without lines was something he badly wanted.

  Joel smiled at him, friendly and relaxed now. ‘So, tell me, this other cousin of yours – I think I’ve seen him before. Actually met him with your cousin when I dined there the other night, Philip something?

  Paul nodded. ‘Philip Cord.’ He seemed to have lost his anxiety at the mention of the man, but still Joel thought there was a watchfulness about him.

  ‘Is he an actor?’

  Paul laughed then, a little sharp sound that had bitterness in it. ‘Philip – an actor? Heavens no. I’m not sure what he does, to be truthful. Something to do with art galleries. And he’s interested in various other things.’ He stood up, and
smoothed down his jacket with an elegant little gesture. Then I can tell my agent I definitely have this job, Mr. – ah – Coplin?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Joel said. ‘We start filming next Monday. I’ll send a schedule. Tell me – if he’s not an actor, why was he here?’

  Paul hesitated. ‘I’m sorry about that. I – there was something he wanted to discuss with me. It was important private business. He – er – he arrived at home just as I was leaving and walked along with me, so that we could talk. We hadn’t quite finished when we got here. I’m sorry if –’

  Joel shook his head. ‘Not important at all,’ he said, hoping he sounded as offhand as he was trying to be. ‘I was just curious. So – we’ll see you on Monday then.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Paul said and moved to the door. ‘I look forward to working with you. Good morning –’ And he opened the door and began to leave.

  ‘I’m glad you live in Soho, Mr. Balog!’ Joel said and then grinned. ‘I have to tell you you wouldn’t have been called for this otherwise. No, don’t look like that. I’ll explain some other time. It’s just rather funny. And – and – give my regards to your cousin Miss Horvath, if you see her.’