There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

by Reginald Hill

  Adamson made up his mind.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll mix to a big close-up of the kiss, then follow on with the rest of the scene. OK?’

  Wanda returned and made a big production of breathing on us both for inspection. The garlic was still there, but distant now. I looked at Adamson and nodded.

  ‘Right, studio,’ he called. ‘Positions. And roll ’em!’

  I kiss Ellie passionately, then we break apart.

  ‘Well, Sergeant!’ she says. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’

  I reach forward and tug the belt of her dressing-gown. It falls open revealing her naked body beneath.

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ I say.

  I pick her up in my arms and walk towards the bedroom door. She coils herself around me. We pass through the door and I heel it shut behind me.

  We were in a dark world of metal scaffolding and wooden props leaning against a solid brick wall.

  I set Wanda down and she said, ‘Jesus! I’ll be black and blue where you got hold of me. This the first time you’ve had hold of a naked woman, or what? It’d figure.’

  I reached out and tweaked a nipple.

  ‘Wanda, baby, with the weight you’re putting on, you’re surely too much woman for poor little me.’

  Angrily, she pulled her dressing-gown around her and with a look of sheer hatred pushed past me to return to the set.

  That night I had a drink with Gordon Griffin in the college bar. The steward and his wife were mightily unimpressed by the showbiz stars they were serving. Or perhaps, in my case, they simply didn’t recognize me. I was still an athletic thirty-year-old on the screen, but out of the lights and the make-up, I was looking my age plus a bit extra these days.

  Gordon and I went back a long way, both professionally and personally. We’d met in one of my earliest films. It was odd: Gordon was much the same age as me, but he was already playing chunky middle-aged character parts in his mid-twenties. We’d laughed at the incongruity then. Now the incongruous thing was that I looked like playing handsome young heroes till I drew my pension. This I didn’t find so funny.

  Our personal connection was that we’d shared a wife. His first, and indeed only, wife had divorced him to become my second. You may remember the fun the papers had at the time, mainly because of the accusations my first wife, Sandra, hurled around. I’d met her at drama school and we’d married young. Nothing in her low-key career ever matched up to the talent for tragic drama she displayed during our divorce. She’d read (unsuccessfully) for the part of Lady Byron in a short-lived West End play the previous year and this was the role she chose for herself. Insinuations of violent, brutal and perverted behaviour abounded. She even suggested that I needed to undergo psychiatric treatment, and only my lawyer’s threat of suing her for every one of the innumerable pennies she managed to screw out of me shut her mouth subsequently.

  Annie Griffin’s parting from Gordon was much quieter. There was some natural coldness between Gordon and me for a little while, but the cause of this had disappeared with my divorce from Annie three years later, and we’d worked together on a couple of occasions since.

  Now he said, ‘Are we going to finish this picture, Sam?’

  ‘Give me one good reason why not.’

  ‘I’ll give you two. You and Wanda. What’ve you got against the girl, anyway?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing, Gord. Nature supplies her own objections. I know that in these uncritical days, mere acting ability counts for very little, but tell me true, does she even look or sound right for the part?’

  Gordon smiled and said, ‘Hell, she may not have been my choice, but I’m no great shakes at casting. I’d have offered Scarlett O’Hara to Mae West!’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Then whose choice was she and why?’

  He waved his glass at the steward to warn him it was time to make another. The steward looked away and yawned.

  ‘That’s obvious and it’s also unfair. She was Andy’s choice because she’s Andy’s wife. But that doesn’t make her the wrong choice. Hell, if you ask yourself whose choice you were, and why, what’s the answer?’

  I thought about this.

  ‘I should like to think that I was everyone’s choice, because I’m a fine acting talent and could bring real conviction and power to the part,’ I intoned magniloquently.

  ‘Sure,’ he laughed. ‘That’s true. But it’s also true that you were Mickey Defoe’s choice because the old husky voice and the big brown eyes can still get the ladies squirming in their stalls, and also because you haven’t made a film for nearly two years, and the last couple you made were real bummers, so low-Budget Mickey could afford you!’

  I won’t say I didn’t mind this from Gordon, but I minded it less than I would have done from a lot of other people.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Admitting that there may be just a smidgeon of truth in what you say, the fact remains that I’m in the picture because of the effect I have on the sex organs of a mass public, whereas Wanda’s in it because of her effect on the sex organ of one ageing director. I rest my case.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re pretty good at cases, Sam. You’ve had the practice,’ he said bitterly.

  I understood at once what he was getting at. Many years ago, one of my films had folded up because of a disagreement between myself and the female lead. By chance it had been Annie, his ex. Or not by chance. Some Hollywood producer had thought it smart to co-star us, though she was hardly a name in her own right. Our already creaking marriage had burst right open under the strain of a passionate screen love-affair. In a scene when she was supposed to slap my face, she’d really let go and almost took my head off. Instinctively, I’d retaliated with a left hook which laid her cold. The director had remonstrated with me. I reckoned he was probably sticking it to Annie on the sly, so I gave him one too and walked off the set. That was the end of the film, of course, and somehow I got all the blame. The lawyers had a field day in the wreckage. It cost me a not-so-small fortune, but I survived with the bonus of an extra gloss on my hell-raising reputation, which is always good box-office. But, as I’d eventually discovered, a man may walk on water but he’ll sink in crap, and a succession of lousy films plus too much booze had brought me back to Mickey Defoe.

  I said, ‘Don’t worry, Gordon. This one will get finished, I promise you. For one thing, Wanda’s not my wife, thank God!’

  I thought of my Estelle, young, beautiful, a mother, and above all, not an actress and I thanked my lucky stars. I didn’t try to explain this to Griffin. I guessed he had as much need for success as I had. At least my name was still known, but he’d dropped out of sight for the past couple of years, doing God knows what, and he needed a success to remind people he was still alive. Well, he’d probably got the part for it. In fact, Dalziel was just a bit too meaty for my taste. I’d no desire to find myself playing second fiddle to Gord in the reviews!

  I tried to lighten the atmosphere by saying, ‘I’ve heard nothing of Annie for a long while now. She must be quieting down.’

  Annie’s career had nose-dived after our split and eventually she’d followed it into a deep pool of booze from which she emerged from time to time to perform antics which were often pretty comic – from a safe distance. She’d been crazy enough to marry the director, thus saving me the permanent halter of alimony. He’d tried to build a big movie around her, got into all kinds of trouble, and when inevitably the whole project collapsed leaving him penniless, he’d gone for a long walk in the Pacific. Christ, who writes these scripts? You’ve got to laugh if you don’t want to cry.

  Gordon wasn’t laughing much. He said to me in a rather flat voice, ‘You never hear anything, then?’

  ‘Not even a begging letter for the last couple of years. Probably the calm before the storm, knowing Annie.’

  ‘Probably,’ he said. He finished his drink and left with a rather short good night. The poor bastard was still worrying about his future, I guessed. Weren’t we all? At least I knew what mine was going
to be. I conjured up a picture of my lovely Estelle with little Fiona on her knee, and suddenly the days that stretched ahead seemed endless.

  I’m sitting in my room at the college. The door burst open and Ellie rushes in.

  ‘That fat bastard!’

  ‘Mr Dalziel, you mean?’

  ‘You recognize the description! Christ, it’s like having Attila the Hun on campus! Do you know, he’s helped himself to all the students’ confidential files?’

  I laugh and say, ‘I thought in the modern education system students didn’t have confidential files. What happened to open access?’

  ‘You know, Peter, I sometimes think you’re as bad as he is. At least there’s no mistaking him!’

  I say, ‘He’s investigating a murder, Ellie. We’re investigating a murder. You know it’s been confirmed those were Girling’s bones? Put that alongside that dead girl in the sand-dunes and you’ve got something a lot more serious than some kids’ sensibilities.’

  Suddenly she drops down on her knees in front of me and looks at me very seriously.

  ‘Peter, you haven’t changed, have you? Not that much, anyway. I mean, I don’t want to feel I may be getting involved with a …’

  ‘With a fascist pig?’ I laugh. ‘And what’s this about may be getting involved? There was no maybe about the other night.’

  ‘What? Oh, that. That’s nothing. I do this …’

  She leans forward between my legs and puts her hand on my inner thigh.

  ‘… and up you come. I stop it, and down you go. Simple reflexes. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s about us, the kind of people we are, how we think. Peter, they’re saying you think that Sam Fallowfield may have killed Anita. Is that true?’

  ‘How the hell do I know what they’re saying?’ I ask. ‘They hide in corners when the dreaded fuzz approaches.’

  ‘I mean, is it true that’s what you believe? Because, if you can believe something as stupid as that, then there can’t be any hope for us.’

  ‘I’m not in the hope business, Ellie,’ I say steadily. ‘I’m in the justice business.’

  She stands up and shakes her head.

  ‘Well, at least we know where we stand,’ she says.

  She leaves the room.

  I lean back in my chair and say, ‘Oh shit!’

  ‘Cut,’ said Adamson. ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad. Well done, honey.’

  He really does think she’s great! I told myself, still amazed every time I made this discovery. I rated Adamson as a good workaday director, able to produce solid, box-office films. It was dismaying to see what a blind spot he had for Wanda. She knew her lines and that was about the most you could say. She needed direction more than any actor I’d ever seen and all she got from Adamson was complacent approval. Yet he was sharp enough to notice any deficiencies in my performance!

  Wanda smiled rather wanly at his praise. She was not so stupid she didn’t know there was something lacking, but she was too inexperienced to know how to set about improving matters. Well, she’d get no help from me. Since the garlic business we’d been icily polite. Today I’d been rather surprised, as she knelt between my legs and caressed my thigh, to feel a faint frisson of sexual excitement, but I made damn sure she didn’t catch on. I could imagine the fun she’d have if she found me susceptible to that kind of provocation.

  That night I had dinner with Mickey Defoe. He was in close confabulation with Dick Morland, the head scriptwriter, when I came to his table.

  ‘Don’t tell me, you’re writing me out,’ I said.

  ‘No, just trimming a bit of fat,’ said Mickey.

  ‘The author’s here, did you know?’ said Morland to Defoe. ‘Should I OK this with him?’

  ‘No way,’ said Defoe tetchily. ‘Listen, he’s got no rights, that guy. He signed them all away for more bread than he’s ever seen in one bunch in his life. I wish to fuck he’d stay away and spend it and not hang around here like the ghost at the feast.’

  I’d seen the novelist a couple of times, a gaunt bearded figure, always skulking furtively in the background. I was willing to be friendly ’till Morland told me one of his main gripes was that I was far too old and temperamentally unsuited for the part of Pascoe. After that, I kept out of his way.

  ‘One thing,’ I said. ‘Why’s Gord Griffin got all the best lines? I’m feeling a bit like his straight man.’

  ‘Yeah, but you get all the steamy sex plus the big action climax,’ said Defoe. ‘It’ll be you they remember, believe me. If they remember anything.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Morland left and I started on my soup and waited for Defoe to start on me.

  Mickey and I went back even further than me and Griffin. He was a Canadian who’d learnt the film business from the bottom up in California in the ’forties and ’fifties. He’d transferred his action centre to the UK not, as he now liked people to believe, because he’d refused to cooperate with the McCarthy Hollywood witch-hunt, but because his sharp nose had somehow scented the London-centred Swinging Sixties while Carnaby Street was still just a Soho alleyway. He spotted me at the Old Vic playing Hotspur in my genuine Geordie accent and signed me up for my first film part in the title role of Roderick Random which is still a popular historical romp on the telly. I saw it only last week and sat amazed at the incredibly vital younger stranger who was usurping my name.

  Mickey had got me tied up for one more film, an Indian Mutiny melodrama, before I moved off to Hollywood, and out of his price league, on a wave of young Olivier notices.

  Since then, I’d been everywhere, and done everything except what I was always promising interviewers, return to the stage. In fact I’d done a couple of short tours in a Shakespeare’s-greatest-hits compendium, but these had been more in the nature of celebrity appearances than real acting. As one critic had unkindly put it, ‘Sam Stuart’s royal progress round the country continues to pull in the provincials. One recalls his illustrious namesake, King James the First, who declared as he travelled south to claim the English crown, that if he’d shown the people his bare behind they would still have cheered!’

  Things had changed since those days, and I had changed with them in one way, though of course, in another, I had not been permitted to change at all. Change is a property of reality and an actor is only intermittently a real person, while a film actor is not even flesh and blood. If anyone asked who I was, the best I could do would be to run them my films and say, ‘I’m in there somewhere.’ An actor’s only form of definition in the real world is how much he can charge.

  And now Mickey Defoe could afford me again.

  Over a bowl of cold soup, he said, ‘You seen the rushes, Sam?’

  ‘Some. They’re OK.’

  ‘That’s about all, though. OK.’

  ‘It’s a low-budget thriller, Mickey. That guy with the beard might think his book was great literature but it wasn’t even a bestseller. There aren’t any Oscars in this for anyone.’

  ‘Why the hell not? Even a nomination would help. We’ve got a good enough team, right?’

  I shrugged and said, ‘There’s something about producer’s purses and sow’s ears.’

  ‘Meaning Wanda?’

  I said, ‘Look, Mickey, a year ago she was bouncing up and down with purple hair and clown’s make-up in front of one of the worst bands ever to squeeze into the Top Fifty on a bad week. Then Andy gets the hots for her and, being an old-fashioned kind of idiot, feels he’s got to marry her in order to have his wicked way.’

  ‘That’s pretty rich coming from a guy with your track record, Sam.’

  I laughed and said, ‘But I never married out of my weight. Anyway, Andy’s been lugging her around ever since, having his ear bent every time he’s on the job by that squeaky little voice reminding him he promised to get her into movies. At last he’s done it, God help us. Trouble is, you can take a horse to water, but only God can stop it crapping.’

  ‘You’re full of wise little saws today, Sam,’ said D
efoe. ‘Listen, you knew about Wanda when I signed you up, right?’

  ‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I knew about “this exciting new talent” who was going to sell the movie to a “big young audience” to occupy the seats not packed by the big old audience I’m going to sell it to. Instead, what do I find I’m landed with? A no-hoper who’s justifiably unknown even in the circles she allegedly shone in. I met this kid the other day who’s really into rock. I said to him, “Wanda Sigal?” and he said, “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.” True story. Well, almost.’

  He soaked up the lees of his soup with a bread roll and said, ‘I’m sorry you two don’t hit it off, Sam. I don’t think she’s so bad though. There’s something there if you’ll only help it come out. Listen, you’ve seen the early rushes. The camera likes her, you’ve got to admit that. Just like it likes you, Sam.’

  I didn’t like to qualify my objections to Wanda but I had to admit this was true. She couldn’t act and she was wrong for the part, but the camera certainly liked her.

  ‘I’ll level with you, Sam,’ said Mickey, sensing my reluctant agreement. ‘You’re not the only one who’s had a bad run lately. I need this one real bad, you with me? I’m hocked up to the eyes, Sam.’

  ‘You mean you’ve got your own money tied up here?’ I said in amazement. Like all wise old producers, Mickey Defoe usually kept his commercial and private assets separated by at least a mile of impenetrable legal clauses.

  ‘Yeah. Everything I’ve got. Plus a helluva lot I ain’t! This needs to be a real earner for me, Sam. You too, from what I hear.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ I flashed.

  ‘Nothing. Only that you’ve got a family now. You showed me the photos, remember? Cute kid, that Fiona. But it’s a real responsibility, Sam, bringing up a family. You won’t be able to throw good money after bad the way you used to. And OK, so you’ve got your front money in the bank, but this time you’ll want your percentage to be more than a percentage of sweet f.a.’

  He was right, of course. Becoming a father at last had changed things. My first three wives had had several things in common, namely they were British actresses, second-rate, greedy, malicious, and by either God’s or their own design, infertile. My fourth and, I intended, final wife, Estelle, was a darling American girl, sweet-natured, domesticated, nothing to do with acting, and the loving mother of my year-old baby.