In the Still of the Night

by Charlotte Lamb

  Sean said, ‘Harriet lives alone, too. Why don’t you have her to stay for a few days? I’ll talk to her.’

  Annie noted his calm assumption of being able to talk Harriet into anything. He was probably right, Harriet always took anything he said very seriously; Annie had several times watched Sean talk Harriet into changing her mind. Just how close were they? And why did it bother her so much to think about that?

  ‘I’d better get back to her,’ he said, ‘We’re working on the location schedule for six months ahead. The location manager is still negotiating with the police and a couple of big banks over two locations in Cheap-side – if we agree to all their demands we’ll go over budget, and Billy will go bananas.’

  ‘I hate working on location in winter,’ Annie said, remembering the raw and bitter weather in Petticoat Lane on Sunday.

  ‘Everyone does, but it really makes the series,’ Sean said drily. ‘I hope your mother is better today. Bye, Annie.’

  Trudie seemed to be in less pain, but she was very vague; Annie was worried that the drugs they were giving her were making her memory lapses worse. She remembered who Annie was but she kept forgetting where she was, and why. When she did remember, she pleaded, ‘I want to come home. Take me home, Annie.’

  Annie wished to God she could. The ward was so crowded. She hated the mingled smells of floor polish, antiseptic and tired flowers, and it was depressing to see all these frightened, sick old people crammed together like sardines.

  She looked unhappily at her mother. ‘I can’t, Mum – you can’t walk, you know that. As soon as you’re well enough to travel, though, I’ll take you home, I promise.’

  Trudie closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. She didn’t mention anyone trying to kill her this time. Annie left after a while; the sister said her mother wouldn’t wake up for ages.

  ‘She seems to be drugged up to the eyeballs,’ accused Annie.

  ‘We have to keep her sedated because the pain is pretty bad, and she’s in no state to stand it. Don’t worry, Miss Lang, we do know what we’re doing.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ Annie hurriedly soothed, hearing the touchiness in the other’s voice.

  The ward sister hesitated, then said, ‘You know, you are going to have to face it, your mother is very confused and she’s getting worse. She needs a secure environment where she can be watched twenty-four hours a day. You should be planning for the future.’

  Annie left, heavy-hearted. When she got home Tracy was still there, waiting for her, so that she could let Annie into the house and give her the new set of keys.

  ‘Can’t stop, my sister’s got the kids. There were a couple of phone messages, I left them on the pad.’

  ‘I’ll find them. Thanks for staying late.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ Tracy’s hazel eyes were concerned. ‘Look, if you get nervous during the night, give me a ring. I’ll have to bring the kids, but I’ll come over if you need me. I don’t like to think of you being here alone at night if there’s some crazy guy trying to break in! You ought to get someone to stay with you until your mother comes back. Not that …’ She stopped and gave Annie an uncertain look, flushing.

  ‘Not that my mother would be much help in an emergency,’ Annie finished for her, grimacing. ‘No, poor love, she wouldn’t, but I still feel better having her in the house!’

  Alone again, Annie went round the house, checking that every door and window was locked, then she settled down to go over her words for tomorrow’s filming. They had rehearsed last week, but that seemed a very long time ago.

  She went to bed early, afraid to go to sleep and yet knowing she had to – she was tempted to ring Harriet, but she had to face being alone sooner or later, so she took a sleeping pill to make sure she got some sleep or she wouldn’t be fit to work tomorrow.

  She had set her alarm as usual; when it went off she woke with a violent start and then sat up, in pitch darkness, fumbled with her bedside lamp, and as it came on looking hurriedly around the room. This morning there was nothing out of place. She gave a long sigh of relief and slid out of bed. She had to hurry; the car from the studio would be here in fifteen minutes.

  Before she left, she rang the hospital; the night sister was still on duty and was irritable when she first answered the phone, but as soon as she heard who was calling her voice changed.

  ‘Oh, hello! Your mother has had a good night, Miss Lang. Now don’t you worry, we’re taking the best of care of her.’

  ‘Was she still in a lot of pain during the night?’

  ‘No, she’s coming along nicely, for someone her age.’

  Annie sighed. ‘Sorry to call you so early in the morning, but I won’t get another chance later.’

  ‘Off to the studio, I suppose?’ The night sister’s voice was fascinated. ‘You do get up early. Practically a night worker, like me, but your life is much more glamorous and exciting.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Annie said wryly.

  ‘Well, I’d change places with you any day,’ the sister said. ‘I bet you got hundreds of Valentines – I only got one! But that’s the one that matters!’

  She couldn’t get away from reminders of Valentine’s Day, thought Annie later, as she was driven past shop windows still covered in a rash of red hearts and romantic cards, shiny heart-shaped balloons bobbing against the glass. It was an icy grey morning; she couldn’t stop shivering.

  ‘Why do we have Valentine’s Day at such a dead time of year?’ she thought aloud.

  ‘Cheer us all up and keep us going until spring? And make money,’ her driver said cheerfully, swearing as a boy on a motorbike swerved past them. ‘Lunatic!’ he yelled after the rider.

  The boy looked back, saw Jason’s black face and snarled, ‘Get stuffed, nigger!’ sticking two fingers in the air in an obscene gesture.

  Jason didn’t respond but his shoulders, under his black leather jacket, rose and fell in an involuntary, revealing shrug. Although she couldn’t see his face, Annie felt his anger and his pain.

  ‘How many Valentines did you get, Jason?’ she asked, to comfort him.

  His shoulders relaxed again, he shot her a grin in the mirror over his head. ‘Six. One of them from Angela, my fiancée.’

  He had been engaged to Angela ever since Annie met him. A backing singer with a group which was doing good business in the London pubs that year, Angela had a figure that made men’s heads turn and a voice like molasses. Annie had met her at a party thrown by Harriet for everyone associated with the series: technical people, actors, the catering staff, the drivers. Harriet had left nobody out, typically generous and thoughtful.

  Angela seemed nice enough, but she was not, Jason said, favoured by his mother, who had very strict views on the sort of girl she wanted for her only son and thought Angela wasn’t good enough for her boy. Neither of the engaged couple seemed in a hurry to get married, however. Annie suspected that marriage was not actually on Angela’s mind at all. She enjoyed her life as a single girl too much.

  ‘Who were the others from?’

  ‘I got my ideas,’ Jason said, laughing.

  Annie knew that quite a few girls who worked at the television studios fancied him, including one of the make-up girls who always asked after him when she was doing Annie’s face and hair. With his warm black skin, Jason was sinewy and lithe, had a lazy, sexy way of walking and a grin as wide as Texas.

  ‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘A couple of sackfuls, right?’

  She managed a smile, nodding.

  ‘I love getting them, don’t you? Especially when they’re not signed and you have to guess who sent them … and you can send them yourself without feeling stoopid. You can write something really lush … yours forever … be mine forever … without being afraid of getting laughed at. I love it, I’m a romantic. Yeah, that’s me!’

  Annie wished he would stop talking about it. She couldn’t bear it. ‘How’s your mum?’ she asked him.

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said, beaming be
cause she had asked, and watching her in the mirror, making a mental note of what she was wearing this morning, so that he could tell his mum that night, when he got home. Proud as punch, his mum was, that he drove Annie every day.

  She never missed an episode of The Force, and the first thing she would say when Jason got in that night was, what did she wear today? Mind you, it was usually the same thing in the mornings; old blue jeans, a warm jacket in winter, a shirt in summer, a sweater, soft leather moccasins. She never wore make-up either, not that she needed it, with that clear, pale skin, and those great big blue eyes.

  Jason’s mum wanted to hear about the designer label gear. Mum couldn’t afford stuff like that, of course, but she spent every spare penny she had on clothes, she loved them, and she was still a good-looking woman, although she was big, with rich, smooth skin and lots of it – a cushiony woman, with big breasts and swinging hips.

  She loved to get dressed and go out dancing, and she knew what suited her, she had a good colour sense. That was important to Jason, too. Colours changed his moods – red put him into fight mode, orange made him happy, green was better than a tranquilliser. Angela wore a lot of black; black was sexy on a woman, especially when she wasn’t wearing much at all, a black lace bra and panties, or a black slip with nothing underneath – that really turned him on, seeing all that smooth coffee-coloured skin through black silk and lace.

  ‘Did you go anywhere hot on your night off?’ he asked Annie, who was being very quiet.

  She started as if she had been miles away, then blinked, shook her head. What could she tell him? That she had been half out of her mind? He didn’t want to know that, and she couldn’t talk about it. Who could she talk to about what was eating her up inside?

  ‘You wasting yourself, girl,’ Jason said and she laughed, her mouth crooked with irony.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Sure are – wasting your opportunities.’ That was what his mum always said when he told her Annie wasn’t the party type.

  ‘She prefers to go home and take a hot bath and relax, she isn’t one for ritzy occasions, no first-night parties for her,’ he always told his mum.

  ‘If I was her!’ his mum would sigh. ‘What a waste!’

  ‘If you was Annie, mum, you’d set the town on fire!’ he agreed, and his mum always began to laugh with her deep old-whisky laugh, not that she drank whisky, not mum. She liked a drop of rum in her coffee now and then, but she was no heavy drinker. Her voice just naturally came out with that smoky, husky sound because she had spent so many years singing her tonsils out, first in church, where their gospel choir was famous, and then in the clubs.

  ‘I should have gone on singing when I was a girl instead of marrying your father. I’d have been another Bessie Smith,’ she said. And she would have been, he’d bet his life on it. She had tried to get him to sing when he was a little kid, but he hadn’t inherited her voice, nor did he want a showbiz life. He loved cars, that was all he ever wanted to do, drive cars, own cars, maybe one day have his own garage.

  ‘You a big disappointment to me, Jason, honey,’ his mother would say, shaking her head. ‘With your looks you could have been a star, if you’d only had a voice and some temperament. You got no temperament, boy. That’s your problem.’

  ‘Mum, my problem is you,’ he would say, and she would start to laugh again.

  ‘No, boy – you wrong. Your problem is trashy girls with no class.’ You could never win an argument with his mum.

  Jason slowed as they reached the studio gates, where they had to be checked by the uniformed man in his glass cubicle.

  There were usually a few people hanging around the-gates to celebrity-spot, even at this hour in freezing Febuary. The old faithfuls knew what time the actors arrived; they peered into the windows of the car, recognised Annie in the tight blue jeans and white sweater, her slicked back, very short blonde hair under a midnight-blue and silver Chanel scarf.

  ‘Annie!

  ‘It’s Annie Lang!’

  Some of them rapped on the car windows to get her attention, leaned on the side of the car. That always alarmed her.

  ‘Loved the show on Tuesday!’ one of them said, and hands waved in a flurry of pink palms and fingers.

  ‘Did you get my Valentine’s card?’ yelled someone, and in a reflex action she swung her head to stare, but it was only a teenager, a boy with spots and long hair.

  She managed a forced smile, gave him a wave, then the gates opened and they drove through into the studio complex. Purpose-built a few years ago the three black-glass towers were set well apart in grass lawns, bisected by wide roads along which studio traffic permanently moved; carrying costumes, props, furniture from place to place. The complex was often used as the background for sci-fi productions; filmed by night from the right angle it took on the slightly sinister air of a futuristic city, the black glass windows glowing like a string of black opals against the sky.

  Filmed by day it looked pretty weird too, thought Annie, staring out of the car as they drove to the back of Tower Two, which housed the studio where the indoor scenes of her series were shot, and where the offices of the staff who produced the programme were housed. As well as shooting on location, in the City itself, in order to get convincing backgrounds they had a mock-up of a city street which had been built for them and which could be changed as required by the carpenters and scene designers.

  Many offices were unlit, the staff hadn’t yet arrived, but when they passed the bay of the mail department it was blazing with light. A post office van was unloading.

  Jason pulled up beside the main entrance of Tower Two and Annie smiled at him as he came round to open her door and help her out.

  ‘Thanks, Jason, see you.’

  She hurried inside and walked up a flight of stairs to the wardrobe department, a huge open barn of a place filled to bursting with rails of clothes from every period, from futuristic plastic uniforms for space drama to fur tails for cavemen. There was a surreal feel to the place, but the women who worked there seemed unaware of the bizarre nature of their surroundings.

  In her black case Annie had the clothes she had worn in Petticoat Lane; she checked them back in to the woman in charge this morning.

  ‘Sorry, I had to rush off before I could change. I don’t need anything else – I’m only in two scenes today, and I’m supposed to be off duty, so I’ll be wearing what I’ve got on.’

  Indifferently, the woman nodded, and Annie hurried away to make-up. When she got down to the studio, she found the rest of the cast already there, huddled on hard wooden chairs feverishly reading their scripts while lighting men swarmed around adjusting overhead arcs, trying not to trip over the snaking cables which littered the floor.

  The director this morning was Henry Walpole, a short, bristly man with a lot of hair and a low boiling point.

  ‘I wondered when you were going to get here!’ he said, scowling at Annie.

  ‘Sorry, am I late?’ she asked, consulting her watch and seeing that she was five minutes late. ‘Oh, come on, Henry – only just!’

  ‘I don’t like clock-watching! I wanted to talk the scene through with you and Derek before we had a run-through.’

  They were working in one of the usual sets the series used, an interior shot in the City police station. Derek Fenn was already in position, leaning his elbows on the desk, in uniform, watching her take up her own position for this scene, which they had rehearsed midweek.

  Harriet in a black leather jacket and black jeans, came along after a couple of takes. ‘How are things going, Henry? OK?’

  ‘Bloody awful, Derek keeps forgetting his words and Annie seems to have five thumbs on every hand this morning, she keeps dropping things,’ he growled, his face resentful because he thought she was checking up on him.

  Maybe she was? thought Annie. Harriet was getting just like Billy Grenaby – she had a hundred different jobs to do but she still checked up on everybody who worked for her and made sure they were doing their
job properly. She couldn’t delegate easily.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll get great performances out of them, Henry,’ said Harriet soothingly, and went over to talk to the gaffer, Jack Wilkins, and his best boy, little Jim. They went into a huddle while Henry watched them sulkily.

  ‘We’re discussing next month’s schedules,’ Harriet reassured him as she came back. She handed him a printed sheet of schedules. ‘It goes up on the board tomorrow, everyone!’ she told the rest of the crew. Harriet was popular with the technical people; she always treated craftsmen with enormous respect – she took their advice before every scene, standing with them, studying every angle of the picture framed in the camera’s eye, before they made up their minds where to position a camera, earnestly discussing noise levels with the sound man, frowning over cables with electricians, watching closely as the lighting people worked.

  She’s very ambitious, and she’s going places, Annie thought, watching her and Jack, but she is so clever in the way she manages people.

  Mike Waterford and Annie had a short scene later that morning. Mike was in a playful mood; the scene required him to bend over her while she was seated at a desk, so, while they waited for the lighting to be adjusted he curled his hand upwards to fondle her breast. She smacked his hand down, but a few seconds later it was back, squeezing her nipple.

  ‘Keep your bloody hands to yourself!’ she snapped at him.

  He turned a wide-eyed look. ‘Sorry? What did I do?’

  She glared back. ‘As if you didn’t know!’

  Henry interrupted with a bellow like an angry bull.

  ‘Shut up, the pair of you! Mike, stop touching Annie up, for God’s sake. Everyone, ten minutes for coffee, OK? And be back promptly.’

  Annie drank black coffee, glaring at Mike’s back as he chatted up one of the studio staff, a lithe little blonde in tight jeans. Mike’s hand strolled softly up and down her back, over her smooth buttocks. She giggled.

  Silly little bitch, Annie thought. Why do women fall for men like him? The very idea of his hands on her made her sick. She couldn’t understand her own sex; they must be deaf, blind, dumb. Most of all dumb. Or so many women wouldn’t climb into Mike Waterford’s bed. He didn’t even have to use bribery or blackmail, the way Roger Keats had done. Women fought to let him use them.