by Ann Swinfen
Tony turned to her with a look of real misery. 'I've tried. I can't pull it off. It's all I can do not to follow her around with my tongue hanging out.'
Lisa gave a small gasp as another pain hit her.
'You all right?' asked Tony. 'Finished with the tray?'
'Yes,' said Lisa in a tight voice. 'I think I've stupidly given myself indigestion.'
'Bad luck.' Tony moved the tray on to the bedside table and patted her shoulder absently. He walked over to the window. Down in the garden, Alice was still talking to Simon Frobisher. He had hoped that his visit to Lisa might have made Alice miss him, but she didn't even seem to have noticed. From behind him, he heard another gasp from Lisa. As he turned around, she said in a small voice,
'Tony, you'd better get Paul. And ask Mabel to phone for the doctor. I think the baby might be coming.'
Chapter 7
'The Great Eccentrics,' said Nigel, crumbling his garlic bread. 'That's the working title. 'Gives me plenty of scope. But the approach is going to be serious. An in-depth study of the social relevance of eccentricity in English cultural development over the last four hundred years. Part history, part art and culture, part sociological documentary. None of this galloping about taking a cutesie look at funny buildings and telling gushing anecdotes. This will be the first time the significance of the socially non-norm-oriented behaviour of the so-called eccentric will have been examined and given a public airing on prime-time television. Ten two-hour slots.' He could not keep the triumph out of his voice, although it jarred with his usual pose of nonchalant indifference.
'Do you have anyone lined up yet?' Giles asked casually, taking a pull at his beer. Nigel was right. He was a wine man himself, but this was really something, this beer.
'I've got a list of experts as long as your arm. I'm just starting to approach them, but that won't be a problem. They'll jump at it.' Nigel began to eat his salade aux fruits de mer with rapidity. 'You know what they're like, these academics. Queuing up to get their names on the telly. I don't need to pay much attention to what they say, I just want their names in the line-up, to lend the whole thing weight. This is my baby, and I'm going to make it the way I want. I'm directing and producing, with Jack Witherspoon as my number two.'
That was good, thought Giles. Jack was 100 per cent top quality. Where Nigel had the creative flair and the ability to raise the funds, Jack would ensure that each production was meticulous and everything ran smoothly. He couldn't, however, quite see where he himself would fit in. He was beginning to hope – just a very faint whisper of a hope – that Nigel was going to ask him to front the series, to do a Michael Wood. For a brief moment he felt almost dizzy with excitement, then he reined himself in. Surely Nigel would be wanting to do that himself?
'This is going to be the series that gives me the world ratings, old boy,' said Nigel, who affected a dated slang along with his bow-ties and collar-length hair. 'Remember Civilisation? Well, this is going to do for cultural eccentrics what Clark did for mainstream culture. We're already in negotiation with companies in the States and Europe, but that is all completely hush-hush at the moment, so not a word to anyone. I want to get the deals sewn up before I release the news to the press – the BIG story all in one go.'
He's definitely going to front it himself, thought Giles.
'Here are some of the personalities and places I've roughed out.' Nigel pushed aside his half-eaten salad and pulled several folded sheets of paper from the inside pocket of his golden calf-suede bomber jacket. 'Cast your eyes over those.' He took a jaunty gulp of his beer.
It did look good. Giles ate with one hand and grasped the notes in the other. He had to hold them some distance away from him, because he had left his reading glasses in the pocket of his overcoat, which was lying on the back seat of Nigel's car.
'This is brilliant,' he said, truthfully. There was a lot of interesting stuff here. Handled properly, it could make a fantastic series.
'Like the other half?' Nigel got up without waiting for an answer and made his way to the bar. He was the kind of man for whom crowds gave way. Despite the Saturday lunchtime press, he passed straight through and was served immediately by the barman.
Halfway down the second page of the notes, Giles saw 'St Martins: commune for artists and musicians. Pre-dated sixties movements by nearly twenty years. Leading eccentric: Natasha Devereux, Russian archduchess. Survival of the aristocratic patron. Prime site for visuals. Sculptor/recluse: Gregor Baranowski. Works found in major collections world-wide. Exclusive interview??? Peter Kaufmann, Auschwitz victim. Totalitarianism and art??? How commune run. How out-lasted sixties. Free love???'
Nigel set the beer down on the table and looked at Giles. 'Well?'
Giles took a drink to give himself time, and started again on his steak and kidney pie.
'It looks really fantastic, Nigel. Great stuff. But it's a good thing you're coming down to see St Martins for yourself!' He gave a laugh, to take away the sting. 'It isn't quite like that.' He pointed with his knife at the papers.
'OK, fine. Give,' said Nigel imperturbably.
'Well, it isn't a commune in the sixties sense, it's a residential trust. Everyone pays rent according to their means into the trust funds. It's all very organised, with a committee and proper trust documents. Natasha's husband Edmund set all that up before he was killed in the war.'
'OK. I buy that.' Nigel was scribbling in a notebook.
'Also, Natasha is a princess, not an archduchess.'
'Same thing,' said Nigel dismissively.
'And she doesn't like people to make a thing of it.'
Nigel shrugged.
'She's also pretty hard up. She's more of a leader and guiding light than a patron. She had to make her own way, you know, as a painter. In post World War I Paris.'
'Yeah, I knew she painted.'
Giles felt a slight twinge of doubt at Nigel's offhand tone. How well had Nigel done his homework? One did not say of Natasha that she had just 'painted'. She had been famous between the wars, a leading figure in the art world – and even more famous afterwards, if it came to that. His own interest in Frances had first been aroused because someone had told him whose granddaughter she was.
'Also, it may be quite difficult to get interviews with either Gregor or Peter. They're both very wary of publicity.'
'Ah, but with you on the inside –!' Nigel flashed him a brilliant smile.
Giles swallowed. 'Well, naturally, I'll do my best. But I felt I had to warn you.'
'Sure, sure.'
'And absolutely no free love.' For a brief, wild moment, Giles tried to envisage Irina and Mabel in the context of free love, and snorted some of his beer down the wrong way. Nigel thumped him sympathetically on the back.
'You're right about the visuals, though,' said Giles, when he could speak again. 'It's an amazing place. Practically every architectural period from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. And because the family has never had a great deal of money, most of it's stayed unaltered, apart from the Georgian façade slapped on to the front of the sixteenth-century house. There's a vast, rambling garden that Frances and her brother ran wild in when they were children. Kids love it. Ours used to howl like anything when we brought them home from holidays there. You could get some brilliant wide-angled shots of the house across the grounds. Birgit and Peter Kaufmann laid out the gardens in the fifties, with different areas to represent different periods of St Martins – a Tudor knot garden, a formal parterre, and so on. You could do something with that – marry them to the corresponding bits of the house. Aerial shots, too – coming up over the meadow from the Ludbrook and swinging round over the chapel and the house.' Giles found he was getting quite excited himself.
'There's a chapel? Great!' Nigel scribbled again. 'What about the studios?'
'Old barns and stables. Very cleverly done. Natasha designed them herself, and did the whole conversion with the help of one local joiner and the founder members of the community.
It was pretty amazing, I suppose, given post-war austerity. The acoustics in the music rooms are supposed to be very good. You could use that. Have a shot of a quartet, maybe, rehearsing in one of the studios.'
'Right. You said "community"?'
'Yes, it's never been called a commune. That would give the wrong impression altogether.'
'I'm thinking of using St Martins for the lead programme. It has all that variety – architecture, gardens, music, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and so on. A microcosm of what we'll be covering throughout the series. Except – the piece I read didn't mention any writers.'
Ah, thought Giles. He's only read that piece in the Sunday supplement about the fiftieth anniversary. He hasn't researched it at all yet. That gives me a bit of an edge.
'Writers haven't been a major factor. There was someone, I believe, who was part of the verse drama movement in the fifties, but that was before my time. He went off to be a professor at an Australian university, I think. There's another dramatist there now, Jonathan Deerley. You'll know his stuff, of course.' Call his bluff, thought Giles.
'Sure, sure,' said Nigel gracefully, without batting an eyelid. 'He'll do. We'll just have a few excerpts from his work – background material.'
'Not sure he's very suitable,' said Giles, thinking of Jonathan's turgid and impenetrable prose going out to the prime-time TV audience. 'Of course, we could always use other Herefordshire writers.' He noticed that he had used 'we', unconsciously allying himself with the project.
'Good idea.' Nigel scribbled. 'Er – Housman.'
Giles bit back the urge to say, 'No, that's Shropshire.' Better not risk getting up Nigel's nose. He contented himself with a noncommittal grunt.
He had noticed an omission from Nigel's notes. 'Of course,' he said, calmly, 'there's Hugh Appleton.'
'Hugh Appleton? Hugh Appleton has some connection with St Martins?'
'Yes,' said Giles, sitting back and looking complacently at Nigel. 'He's my brother-in-law.'
'Holy Moses,' said Nigel reverently. 'Any chance we could get an interview with him?'
'I'll see what I can do.' Giles waved his hand airily. 'I may be able to fix it for you.'
Having played this trump card, he waited to see whether Nigel was going to reveal what, exactly, he had in mind for Giles. He was conscious of being on firmer ground now.
Nigel made further notes, then laid down his pen and drank some more of his beer. 'Now, I expect you'd like to know how you fit into the picture.'
Giles nodded, with the right mixture of interest and unconcern.
'I see this as a very visual series. Lots of subtle camera work. Even with the face-to-face interviews, I plan to have quite a lot of it happening off camera while the visuals reinforce the verbals – a layered feel to it, a kind of metaphor for the whole deeper significance of the meaning I am planning to convey.'
Get on with it, thought Giles. Stop waffling about. He smiled knowingly and nodded.
'So I want you for the voice-overs,' said Nigel.
Voice-overs. Giles felt as though he was sagging in his chair like a punctured balloon. To hide this from Nigel, he took up his knife and fork again, to finish his pie. It was difficult to be sure whether rage or disappointment had the upper hand.
'Voice-overs,' he said neutrally.
Nigel watched the other man clinically. He was ten years younger than Giles, and looked after himself. He could (and did) pass for thirty-nine when he chose. How could an actor let himself go like that? Couldn't the old fool see what a chance he was being offered? He'd never be more than a mediocre actor. This latest thing he'd done had brought him to the attention of the public, which was one reason Nigel wanted him, but it was a flash in the pan and wouldn't be sustained. Chums in the business had told him the second series was going to flop. But Giles had a great voice, one of the great voices around at the moment. Look at him – ageing, balding, fat – who did he think he was: Gielgud or Olivier at thirty? Stuffing himself with all that animal grease and fat. Nigel's ascetic lip curled slightly. But he wanted that voice, so he became persuasive.
'I've never understood why you haven't done it before, Giles. With your voice – you should be fighting the punters off. Look at all the top names doing voice-overs for cultural series nowadays: Anna, Tony – all the people with the top-rank voices.' To put the fellow at his ease he picked daintily at a king prawn covered with a rocket and lovage dressing.
'Well . . .' said Giles. He was thinking furiously. Nigel was right. There were some top names in the business doing this kind of voice-over narration now. You got a major credit line. And the studio work, building the narration around the edited tapes, could be fitted in with other commitments. It was going to be something really big, Nigel's series. It gave you a kind of status, doing that sort of thing. One of our senior actors. Great names of the theatre. He turned the phrases over, seeing the reviews in his mind's eye. He had, with difficulty, let go of his image of himself as a glamorous leading man when he had agreed to Vet in Hot Water. But he wasn't entirely at ease with the notion of himself as a sitcom man. He'd always been a serious actor, damn it!
Culture, with a touch of humour, looking at eccentrics. But – not to be on camera!
He tried out his voice inside his head – rolling, sonorous, with an underlying warmth. This man, the viewers would feel, knows a thing or two about life.
'Well,' he said again, consideringly. 'It certainly sounds interesting, Nigel. Of course, I'm not quite sure how things are going to work out with Vet. We may be doing another series,' he lied manfully. 'I'll need to have a word with Peregrine, see what else he has lined up for me.'
'Actually,' said Nigel, gathering up his belongings and standing up, 'I've already had a quick word with Peregrine. He seemed very keen, but he wanted me to tell you all about it myself. So you'll come on board then?'
'Yes,' said Giles. Then, not wanting to sound churlish, 'Great. Really great. I'll look forward to it.'
* * *
'Definitely contractions,' said Dr Porter, winding up his stethoscope and packing it away into his bag. 'As your waters haven't broken yet, it might just be a false alarm, but we'll get you into the maternity unit where we can keep an eye on you. Your blood pressure is up a bit too.'
'It has been up for a couple of weeks,' said Lisa. 'My doctor in Worcester said it wasn't enough to worry about.'
'No more it is, but you'll be better going straight into hospital now. Is there someone who can drive you, or shall I phone for an ambulance? You'll be quicker by car.'
'My husband can take me.' Lisa drew her breath in suddenly, with a sharp hiss, between her teeth. She was determined not to make a fuss about this business of giving birth, but the pains clutching her were worse than anything she had ever experienced or imagined.
'No rush,' said the doctor calmly, as Paul came back into the bedroom. He was used to dealing with first-time fathers and their panic reactions. 'Just pack an overnight bag for your wife and get her gently down to the car. I'll phone through to the maternity unit, then I'll drive into Hereford behind you and see you safely installed. Take your time. It may all come to nothing – another four weeks, did you say, till baby is due? Even if he's decided to put in an appearance early, these things always take much longer than you might suppose, especially first babies.'
At the bottom of the wide old staircase Frances was waiting for him. They were old friends. Jim Porter had seen all her children through illnesses and broken limbs on their childhood visits to St Martins. They looked at one another.
'Not a false alarm, is it, Jim?'
'Could be, but I doubt it. All yours were early, weren't they? I remember, Frances, the scare you gave me when you started to produce Katya down here on my patch – what was it, fourteen years ago?'
'Thirteen. I remember it well. You hadn't had an over-forty mother before.'
'Scared me to death, but you took it very calmly.'
'I was so pleased that she was going to be born here, righ
t at St Martins. My old doctor in Reading had retired and I didn't like the new man. I was pleased as Punch she decided to arrive when she did. Probably the only time in her life Katya's ever been early for anything.'
'Three hours flat. We could have got you into hospital, you know. There would have been time, but you were so stubborn.'
She smiled serenely. 'I knew everything was going to be fine. I'd already had four, remember. I could just feel things were all right.'
'Luckily for us both, they were. Look, could I use your phone? I want to alert the maternity unit.'
* * *
I can feel myself floating, thinks Frances. She has politely but firmly refused all forms of painkiller and the portable gas machine. I've managed without before, she says. I can do it again.
With Anya, the pain had been terrible. How can something so natural tear you apart? Why should the giving of life be accompanied by this terrible, devastating pain? No wonder the authors of Genesis felt compelled to find a logical explanation for it. 'In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.' Old male patriarchs. She wept with the unfairness of it during the thirty-six hours of hell Anya put her through, but her determination not to lose control of her body, to manage the pain, made her refuse any relief for it.
'Pregnant!' Giles had shouted. 'You're pregnant? God, you've really cocked things up, haven't you?'
Her own first thought had been, We've really cocked it up. She counted the months. The baby would arrive only a few weeks before her final examinations. Would she be allowed to sit them? The college had made enough fuss about her marrying. It was against college regulations. Eventually they had made an exception, but how would they react to this? She was half appalled and half elated at the thought of the baby, still undetectable but alive there inside her. But at Giles's reaction she was immediately upset and on the defensive. She cried a good deal, uncontrollably, unlike herself, and eventually he calmed down and accepted the situation.
