There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

by Reginald Hill

  I said, ‘What is it you’re saying to me, Mickey?’

  He sighed and said, ‘Give it a go, will you, Sam? For your own sake. OK, and for my sake too, a bit. I swear I’ve started waking in the night and thinking of ways to get the cancellation insurance. Like torching the set, only that’d mean setting fire to this whole frigging college! So it’d have to mean shooting one of my stars, Sam. Don’t make me have to choose which! I’m not asking much. Just help the kid along. Carry her if you have to. Try to make her look good. Look, I’m not saying you’re not doing your job as things are. You are! The trouble is, you’re strolling along. You’re making it look easy and you’re making her look bad. Sam, we don’t want either. You can’t afford to stroll through another bummer, and I can’t afford that Wanda doesn’t make an impression. Think about it, Sam.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  A telephone rings. Ellie sits up in bed, yawning. I turn over and deliberately give the sheet a tug so that it pulls off her naked body. Annoyed, she snatches at it and I turn back so that she punches my shoulder. I open my eyes.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Telephone.’

  ‘It’s your telephone.’

  I roll over again. She gets out of bed. I hook her foot with mine under the sheet so that she stumbles slightly. She glances back at me in annoyance as she staggers naked to the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ she says into the receiver. ‘Yes! No need to shout. This is a telephone not a bloody megaphone.’

  She comes back to me and shakes me.

  ‘It’s …’

  I sit up before she can finish and say, ‘What?’

  Angrily she says, ‘It’s that fat bastard you work for.’

  I rise, pushing her out of the way and go to the phone.

  ‘Yes. Yes. All right, sir. Right away.’

  I put the phone down and start getting dressed.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘What’s up?’ I say, elbowing her aside so she sits heavily on the bed, eyes opening wide in surprise at my unexpected assault. ‘Those precious, mature and responsible students you’re so proud of, they’ve only broken into our police incident room and occupied it! That’s all!’

  ‘Cut!’

  Wanda stood up. Up to now, nudity or semi-nudity, despite her apparent brashness, had always made her nervous and self-conscious. This time, under my concealed assault, she’d forgotten all about it and her anger was still blazing. But before she could speak, Adamson was with us, teeth twinkling through his beard as he smiled broadly. ‘That was great, darling. That was really something. What do you say, Sam?’

  ‘She did OK,’ I answered non-committally.

  He grimaced at my lack of enthusiasm, then turned back to Wanda, his face alight with pride. As he led her away, she glanced towards me, anger giving way to puzzlement. I pursed my lips at her in the parody of a kiss.

  This was the pattern of the next few days. Whenever Wanda and I were acting together, I pushed, prodded and provoked her into something like a performance. At first there was resistance, then bewilderment, but finally I felt her, like a nervous dancer, begin to relax and respond to her partner’s lead. An unexpected spin-off of this improvement in our screen relationship was that the film’s centre of gravity started shifting. From being a murder mystery with a romantic underplot, it was becoming a modern romance with a mystery background. Morland was kept busy on re-writes and Defoe and Adamson were kept even busier avoiding the abusive protests of the bearded novelist who seemed to have set up camp in the college grounds. Why a man should get so upset about a second-rate detective story I can’t imagine. You’d have thought it was War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice or something!

  I was sitting in my room one night, learning some of the new lines I’d been given. It was a fag, but I was beginning to think there might even be something in this film for my reputation as well as my pocket. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘It’s open,’ I yelled.

  The door swung open. Wanda stood there.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she asked hesitatingly.

  ‘It’s your reputation, dearie,’ I said.

  ‘Then I’ll plead insanity,’ she snapped with a return to her old manner.

  ‘OK,’ I said placatingly. ‘Look, come in, have a seat. I was just going to pour myself a cup of tea. Want one?’

  ‘Tea?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘Aw shit,’ I said, picking up the teapot. ‘You’re on to me! After all that cold tea I’ve drunk pretending it was whisky, the only way I can take my Scotch these days is out of a teapot. Milk?’

  ‘A touch,’ she said, sitting down uneasily. ‘Listen, there’s something I want to ask, like, what’s going on? To start with, you were always blocking me out, putting me down. These past few days you’ve been pushing me around, trying to make me look good. Why the change? You got religion, or what?’

  ‘You mean you’ve actually noticed?’ I mocked. ‘Wonders will never cease. But don’t get overexcited, darling. My motive is purely non-altruistic. It’s down to the folding stuff, I fear. To be quite frank, we great stars can only afford so many flops and I’m running out of credit. This has got to be a half-way decent movie if I’m to remain a marketable commodity. But I deny blocking you out. Indeed, all I had to do to demonstrate your natural awfulness was stand aside to give the world a clear view.’

  Surprisingly, this did not anger her.

  Instead she nodded, looking almost relieved.

  ‘Money. That figures. OK, smart-ass, you’re right. I’m new to this game and I’m pretty useless at it. It’s a lot different from jumping up and down and squawling at a bunch of hop-heads. But I learn quickly. All I want to say is, from now on, there’s no need to prod and punch. Just tell me, OK? We’ll rehearse it till you give me the green light, then we’ll do it. OK?’

  I sipped my tea slowly. I was a little taken aback. It’s inconvenient when people don’t stick to their scripts, like as if Garbo should say, ‘I fancy a bit of company!’

  I said, ‘Look, Wanda, all right, I’ve been doing my best for you these past few days, but Andy’s the director. He looks after rehearsals, he calls the shots. I mean, how come he hasn’t been coaching you, anyway? Christ, he’s pretty good at his job, and you are married to him, remember?’

  This was something which had puzzled me recently; if I could get a better performance out of Wanda just by manipulating her on the set, why wasn’t Adamson doing the same from his vastly superior vantage-point?

  Wanda looked as if she wasn’t going to answer, then she said flatly, ‘Andy loves me. He thinks I’m poetry in motion. That’s nice, believe me. But he reckons all I’ve got to do is appear on the screen and everyone else will feel the same way. I’ve asked him for advice and you know what he says? Be yourself, baby. That’s it! What I need to put me right is a hard-nosed shit who reckons the better I do, the richer he’ll get.’

  ‘I accept the invitation,’ I said. ‘You eaten yet? Go get your grub, then be back here with your script in an hour. Don’t slam the door as you leave!’

  She stood up. She hadn’t touched her tea.

  As she opened the door I said, ‘Mind you, baby, I’m going to miss punching and prodding you.’

  ‘Piss off!’ she said.

  But she didn’t slam the door.

  During the next week, Wanda and I did a lot of rehearsing together in our spare time. I said we should mention it to Andy but she shrugged and said ‘Let’s see if he notices, right?’ so I suppose she didn’t say anything. There was no difficulty for her in getting away. Doting husband Adamson might be, but he was also (his wife’s acting ability apart) a thoroughgoing professional, and you don’t get a full-length feature shot in three-and-a-half weeks by working a nine-to-five day. He worked hard and so did Wanda, coming to my room at every opportunity to be coached in her next scenes. People must have noticed. Gordon Griffin certainly did. He said one day, ‘You and Wanda still just good enemies, then?’


  He said it with an insinuating sneer which was not typical of the guy. He’d always resented my success with women, as if every conquest reminded him of my affair with Annie, but he’d never come at me like this before. Then it occurred to me that it wasn’t simply that he thought I was screwing Wanda. What was really bugging him was that we were now acting so well together! Not a day passed without some new slant of the script to show off our burgeoning partnership. And as the Ellie/Pascoe romance grew in importance, the part of Dalziel diminished from a major character role to not much more than a comic cameo. This was yet another source of loud complaint from the bearded novelist who was kept at such a distance that he needed to be loud in order to be heard.

  I said, ‘Shove it, Gord.’

  I wasn’t going to waste time explaining the truth, which was that the relationship between Wanda and me was purely professional. At a personal level, we were still kicking away at each other’s shins. But even an exchange of abuse is an exchange of information, and I suppose we both learned things about the other. I learned that she was from a working-class background in the Midlands, that she’d started work in a factory at sixteen, that her real name was Brenda Fenby, that she’d gone punk because she was skinny and shy and ugly and the fluorescent hair and crazy clothes concealed all this, that she started singing because she was too terrified not to accept a dare, that … well, I suppose we’d got a little way past an exchange of abuse by the time I learned all this. What she learned about me, Christ knows. I’d never really talked about myself except in a formalized media-interview aren’t-I-the-interesting-one? kind of way. Now I talked as we drank tea – never anything stronger – in breaks from our rehearsals, and I never realized how much I was telling her about myself till she surprised me later by how much she knew!

  For all that, I still believed our relationship was professional. If so, it was professionalism itself that ruined things.

  We were rehearsing an important scene in which I come back to my room to find my briefcase open and Ellie on the phone. I accuse her of reading my latest report and trying to warn the chief suspect. We start struggling for the phone and end up on the floor where we make love, leaving me uncertain as to how much her motive in this has been simply to cause delay.

  It was a good dramatic scene, arising naturally out of the script’s new direction, though it had precious little to do with the plot of the novel. Indeed, things had developed so that we were working towards two possible endings, in one of which Pascoe tells Dalziel to stuff the police force and rides off into the sunset with Ellie, while in the other his career wins, he solves the case (it was the art lecturer and the president of the students’ union who done it) and he and Ellie part for ever. The second was closest to the original, but the first was dramatically very attractive even though it would probably send the bearded novelist running amok with his felt-tipped pen!

  But good though the scene we were rehearsing was, we didn’t seem to be able to get it right.

  ‘Not to worry,’ I said to Wanda. ‘In any scene that involves you undressing, the audience will be too occupied trying to get a flash of your tits to worry about fine acting.’

  ‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble! We’re rolling around with our clothes on!’

  We’d gone as far as me taking my jacket off and Wanda pulling up her skirt over her knees, which wasn’t very far, before we fell on to the floor. And that, I thought was quite enough.

  ‘Hang about,’ I said uneasily. ‘This is just a rehearsal, and we’re on our own up here …’

  ‘Is that what bothers you?’ she cried. ‘Jesus! It’s all right to flash the honourable member in front of a gang of giggling technicians, but not just in front of me! For Chrissake, I promise not to laugh. Come on!’

  ‘OK,’ I said reluctantly. ‘OK.’

  I come into my room. The first thing I see is my briefcase open on the table with papers scattered around.

  Then I spot Ellie. She is standing frozen with the telephone in her hand. I stand frozen also and look at her.

  Suddenly she slams the phone down. The noise breaks the spell.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Just borrowing your phone.’

  I advance and look at my notes and reports.

  Then it dawns on me.

  ‘This means something to you it doesn’t to me,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t be absurd. I was just curious …’

  ‘It means something! Ellie, who were you phoning?’

  I advance on her. She stands firm, saying nothing. I pick up the phone.

  ‘Then let’s organize a little test, shall we? You’ve probably been a big help to us, love. Let’s see who starts running!’

  I begin to dial. She grabs at the phone. I push her away. She flings herself at me, clawing at my face. I release the phone to defend myself. We wrestle each other to the floor. Gradually, inevitably, our aggression becomes sexual. We tear off enough of each other’s clothes to bring ourselves into contact. Almost immediately I enter her and our cries of orgasmic delight are mutual and instantaneous.

  ‘Cut,’ whispered Wanda in my ear.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Wanda. I didn’t plan this …’

  ‘You dare apologize and I’ll pull your balls off!’

  ‘No I’m not apologizing; I’m …’

  To be honest I’d no idea what I was doing! I was saved from further errors of explanation by Wanda saying, ‘Christ! Look at the time. Andy’ll be back shortly. I’d better run.’

  She wriggled out from under me and got dressed swiftly. I watched in silence.

  ‘Sam, I’ll see you tomorrow, OK? Thanks for … everything.’ She grinned widely. ‘One thing, though: when we do this scene on the set, don’t get carried away!’

  Then she was gone.

  I sat up late that night with a bottle of Scotch. This was the first time I’d strayed off the straight and narrow since the birth of Fiona. Even before that in the eighteen months of my marriage to Estelle I’d never done anything that had the faintest chance of getting back to her. There was no reason why this should either, but I had bad vibrations.

  In the morning things seemed clearer. To these modern kids, a quick screw was little more than trying a new drink. They had none of the sexual hang-ups of my generation. As for me, it ill became a fading superstar with four marriages and any number of brief encounters behind him to agonize over something so inconsequential as banging his leading lady. Hell, back in Hollywood it was almost written into the contract!

  With such comforting thoughts I went to work and soon discovered how inconsequential it wasn’t to everyone else. I guess that most of the cast and crew had already been assuming, like Gordon, that there was more than mere rehearsal going on behind the door of my room. The difference now was Wanda’s manner. Though we’d been working together much better, hitherto we’d kept our public relationship pretty cool and formal. Now she greeted me with a big hello! laughed at my jokes, consulted my opinion, and deferred to my judgment, in a way which had eyebrows raising like hats at a passing cortège. I tried to distance her with a couple of cutting remarks, But she just laughed the more as if I were the funniest thing since Groucho Marx.

  I caught Andy Adamson looking at me very thoughtfully once or twice. Fortunately his mind was preoccupied by other things that day. We were into the final week of shooting and decision time was here. How was the film going to end? You don’t need to shoot a film chronologically, of course. Costume, set, and simple convenience dictate the shooting script order. Now was the time to finish the film in story terms to leave a couple of days to go back and tidy up the beginning so that it fitted whatever ending was chosen.

  It had sometimes occurred to me how much more convenient life would be with such an arrangement!

  A conference was called that evening. I had a sick feeling that Adamson had summoned it to make a public accusation that I was screwing his wife, and I was mightily relieved to find him deep in discussion of t
he film with Mickey Defoe, Dick Morland the scriptwriter, Jake Allen the head cameraman, and Gordon Griffin. Wanda was nowhere in sight.

  ‘Sam. Good,’ said Adamson. ‘Let’s run the rushes and all have our say. Dick’s come up with an interesting idea and I’d like to toss it around.’

  The idea, I suspect, was Adamson’s own. Screenwriters rarely initiate. Their skill is basically canine: they sniff around till they work out what master wants.

  What’s certainly true, though, is that a film has a life of its own, and that’s what wins Oscars. You can get together the best director, cast, crew and script money can buy, and still come up with a bummer. No one can forecast the organic growth of a movie in its shooting. And occasionally you get one that starts as a carrot and ends as an orchid.

  Something of this process had happened here.

  Somewhere along the line, the simple, straightforward detective thriller had changed course. I’d seen the individual rushes of my own scenes, but now we were shown the whole of the story-so-far spliced together in a rough cut. The effect was staggering. For a start, Adamson’s use of artificial sunlight and wind with a dull March sky in the background gave the strange impression that everything was happening in the eye of some grim tropical storm. Jake’s wizardry with the camera had conjured a sense of Gothic menace out of the rather dull eighteenth-century house at the centre of the campus. And the comic element, so important in the initial script, had been left on the cutting-room floor. But the most important shift of emphasis lay in the affair between Ellie and Pascoe. I knew the script had been adjusted to bring this to the fore, but in this version it came across as a huge and potentially destructive obsessive passion. Even the awkwardness of Wanda’s acting in some of the early scenes, plus the casualness of mine, came across as a kind of sexual uncertainty which slowly vanished as we entered each other’s soul and body. The rough-cut ended leaving me feeling that the story was fast approaching some tremendous climax. But what was it to be?