by Amanda Coe
‘Hey, Vera!’ That lovely smile, as though you’d just given her a present. Hugh was right behind with his own charming smile, not trying quite as hard. Seeing him, Vera realised that she owed him the work. Of course she did: those evenings after a day on set having drinks at his parents’ Chalfont St Peter spread, with Hugh and his brother paraded to do turns for them, wearing side partings and pyjamas straight from Wardrobe. She’d always been nicer than necessary to Hugh, as a way of expiating her fear that Hilary might know about her lapse with Sidney.
‘Vera. You look terrible! In the best possible way …’
He squeezed her fondly as they kissed. ‘Vera’s seen me in my pyjamas.’
Quentin’s smile was willing but uncertain.
‘Darling, Hugh. You were adorable,’ said Vera, squeezing him back.
Vera caught Quentin’s visible relief as she got it. Oh dear.
‘He used to sing Noël Coward songs for us,’ she added for reassurance.
‘Let’s draw a veil, shall we?’
They moved on. Vera wondered, seeing the two of them together. Quentin’s eagerness to understand their interchange was of a piece with her not wearing a bra, parading her vulnerability. She’d never seen that before in an American; openness, yes, tiresomely so sometimes, but not this invitation to wound. Would Hugh be nice to her? He was no Sidney, she knew, but she had heard rumours when his first marriage broke down in his twenties. And come to think of it, there hadn’t been a second marriage, despite a long engagement to someone Vera couldn’t now recall, someone double-barrelled and horsey. Well, looking at them, they made a handsome couple, although Hugh’s Savile Row style was certainly at odds with whatever it was Quentin was calling hers. And she was probably closer to twenty years younger than him than ten, but that was par for the course.
‘Hiya!’
Before they could reach Mike, Katrina detained them both. Vera wondered if they knew Lallie’s true age. Possibly no one did, with the exception of the mother. Maybe she was consulting them about the bra, although Quentin was obviously the last person to ask for advice about that. Quentin patted the woman’s arm, reassuring. Hugh laughed. As they attempted to break away, Lallie appeared. Hopping with energy, as usual, trying to enter the circle of adult conversation, demanding attention and attention and attention. Vera, unfathomably stirred, found herself wanting to shout over, ‘No one’s looking at you,’ and in that moment, Lallie glanced up and caught her eye. Because of course Vera was looking at her. The girl twitched a shy smile of acknowledgement, looked away. The tentative quality of her reaction disarmed Vera. Eleven or twelve, what did it matter? She was a tot.
‘Ravishing, darling.’ Hugh held Lallie at arm’s length, appraising her costume. It was school uniform, broken down to show the kind of home Lallie’s character came from. Lallie gave him a twirl, followed by a few moments of Bruce Forsyth. Vera could see how delighted she was by his approval. She and Quentin might have to fight it out for him, the good-looking swine.
Hugh chucked the girl’s chin as he spoke to Katrina. Lallie’s upturned face was radiant with trust. As long as Hugh’s hand dawdled, on her shoulder now, she shone. But all the while, her eyes played ping-pong between Katrina and Hugh. No tricks missed.
‘I’m not sure we’re going to let you take her away,’ Vera heard. Hugh was addressing Quentin for Lallie’s benefit, and more pointedly, her mother’s. ‘We want to keep her here. We’ve got big plans.’
Quentin’s smile tightened and held. In front of Vera, the grip started up a conversation with Tony about a dolly track and she couldn’t hear any more. She was left with the tantalizing feeling of having witnessed a piece of gossip in the making.
‘I presume those two are at it?’ asked Anne baldly, once Hugh and Quentin had been driven away in that comfy car of his. ‘Oh, I think so, don’t you?’ she said. That, at least, was certain. But what about Lallie? Was what Vera had seen the thin end of a Lallie-shaped wedge destined to come between the two of them? Quentin had suddenly looked less charming after Hugh’s crack about hanging on to her. Perhaps Quentin was a tougher nut than she appeared. Maybe, like the clothes, she simply had a new way, and producers didn’t have to be Hughs and Sidneys any more. And she could certainly talk to people, not in Hugh’s RADA-royal manner, but arm-touchingly, warmly. Well, they would find out, wouldn’t they, if anything went wrong and touch came to shove?
The filming day wore on with no sign of Vera’s scene being called. The little boy delivered to be Lallie’s character’s little brother proved undirectable, and Mike got the shot only through the monkeys-typing-Shakespeare approach of endless takes. In the end, they dropped the dialogue and hoped the child could simply manage to open the door, which he achieved without mishap around take fifty-eight. Anne of course was faultless, but a bulb blew on a light, and Tony and his gang took an age consulting over how best to replace it and then discovering the bulb they needed was back at the unit base.
Waiting for the runner to return on his motorbike, they decided to set up for Vera’s scene, but the arrival of the bulb set them back on their original course. Vera could see how it would go. Barring a miracle, her scene was going to drop off the end of the day. One more night at the hotel, at least, and God knows when or if they’d bother to pick up the missing scene. Well, it had happened before and it would happen again. No one was looking at her.
I WAKE UP the morning of the audition with a balloon of joyous dread bobbing in my stomach. It’s impossible to eat breakfast, although Mum nags, and I know if I don’t make the attempt she might decide I’m ill and use it as an excuse to stop me going. She seems to want to do that quite badly, so I’m on best behaviour. Ian doesn’t help by making lots of comments about me being a film star and being ready for my close-up. In the end Mum tells him to give over, which is a relief. He’s taken aback by her command, which she barely bothers to coat with another tone. It’s the kind of thing she says to Dad all the time, but she’s never done it before with Ian. It makes me see the permanence of this arrangement between them. The balloon tugs inside me, heavy.
Although we’ll be at school, we don’t have to wear uniform, and we approach disaster when I appear wearing my dungarees as a tribute to Lallie. Mum says I need to put on a dress instead. I very strongly want to wear the dungarees; they are what I’ve been wearing every time I’ve been to the audition before drifting off to sleep, and Lallie has got talking to me about them (‘Nice dungarees’, ‘Thanks’), and we’ve become friends and live together in her TV house with Marmaduke the butler. Mum, though, insists on a dress. Will it be the same? Will it even be possible to enjoy meeting Lallie wearing a dress? I appeal to Ian, who sides with Mum even though I know he’d prefer to support me. In the end it comes down to an ultimatum: do I want to go to the audition?
We arrive ten minutes before the official start, me in a dress, and the hall is already packed. Christina isn’t there – they left for Butlin’s at the weekend – so I sit near Michelle and Maria from my class. The mums and dads hover for the spare ten minutes, during which Mum gets out a brush and refinishes my hair. Then they’re all told to go away by a woman who was there when we signed up, an oldish woman with lots of interesting rings on her fingers and clothes of a kind I’ve never come across; they don’t match, but she’s smart. She has a posh voice, which helps to quell us, and doesn’t seem the type to be got around.
‘Thank you so much for coming today,’ she says. ‘As you know, it won’t be possible to use each and every one of you, although I think I’m right in saying that there will be a scene in the playground where anyone who wants to can appear … ?’ She dips her head towards a man, neither young nor old, just grown-up age, who is clearly important. He nods tightly.
‘So let’s get started! I’m Julia, by the way, the casting director – you’ll be meeting me first. And this is Michael, the director, Mike, who some of you will be meeting later. He’s a very busy man! Oh, and Pam, my assistant – she’ll be seeing some of y
ou as well.’
Pam is one of the other people, mixed in with the teachers, there to shepherd us. She’s younger and has a friendly look I like, although Julia clearly doesn’t think much of her.
A group of fourth-years is led away by Pam. As it becomes clear that this is all that is going to happen, everyone goes quieter and starts to get bored. I’ve brought my ballet bag with me, at Mum’s suggestion, just in case I need to slip my shoes on (I’ve brought tap as well) and show them what I can do, and Michelle and Maria and I occupy ourselves for a time with its contents, them trying on my shoes and me showing them a few tap steps sitting down with my knees up in the air.
The fourth-years come back, full of pioneering self-importance, and another ten are sent in. Everyone crowds round the returned group, eager for news, but we’re marshalled back in line with a few tantalizing scraps. These are soon amplified into concrete rumours: apparently one boy, Andrew Meeton, had to swear. Maria asserts, disappointingly, that the swear word was ‘bugger’. But it reaches me from the other side of the row that what he actually had to do was pull his trousers down and show them his arse. I am suitably shocked, but confident that, being a girl, nothing of that sort will be required of me. Admittedly, the tap shoes are looking doubtful. I eat the two chocolate digestives Mum has tucked into the bag for a snack. The chocolate is melted from the heat, so I lick my fingers and the spaces between my fingers clean, like a cat having a wash.
The next lot out claim they are being given speaking parts. Well, two of them. I start to feel worried: what if all the good parts have been given out by the time they get to third-years? What if all the parts have gone? I count the obstacles in front of me, up to forty-two. Four more groups. By now Dawn and Maria and I have stopped talking and are slumped against the wall. This is not how I expected it to be.
And then I see her. Standing at the door, near the vaulting horse where Mr Scott parks his papers on assembly days. There is a strange second of delay between recognizing her and knowing who she is, then the impossible reality flows into that gap, flooding me with magic. Lallie. As familiar as my mum. There. Not on the telly. In my life, human. Smaller than I think of her, although of course she is literally tiny on the telly screen, but small, smaller than I am. She is with her mum, who I recognize from magazine photos, but she’s actually talking to Julia, who now seems less stern. I am so bound up in my thirsty intake of the scene that the thought of telling Michelle or Maria doesn’t even form: I am all looking.
Lallie is wearing a peaked cap over her springy hair, and oh God, matching orange dungarees. Her clothes, as I knew they would be, are perfect. She doesn’t do anything, just talks – she seems to be chewing gum – with her hands tucked into the bib of her dungarees and one plimsolled foot balanced on top of the standing foot in a way I immediately note and decide to copy. But how can she be so small? Just as a stirring of recognition snakes through the hall like a run of dominoes coming down, she moves on. Julia gives her a kiss – a kiss! – although it is not the kind of kiss I am accustomed to receiving, it’s a kiss between equals, her mum puts her hand on her shoulder, and they disappear through the door. The recognition has now become shouts of ‘That’s her!’ and ‘Lallie!’ and I see her buck as her name is called and turn back to respond, although her mum is still herding her out. She gives an uncertain smile and a wave, just like any girl our age would, with friendliness in it and apology, a botched gesture that she seems to want to take back as she goes. She’s gone. For a few seconds I watch the doorway, the way I watch the picture on the turned-off TV even after it’s shrunk to nothing.
‘That wa’n’t her!’ Michelle says scornfully. I argue roundly, along with Maria and the others, but she won’t be convinced, perhaps because she was one of the last to notice her. And all the time I feel elation and sadness, striped together like toothpaste; elation at the sheer glamour of Lallie appearing in my life, and sadness that her separate existence is now an experienced fact, confirming my failure to be her. We are not even alike, despite the freckles and the tap. She is small in a way I will never be, she is dark, she is her. I am forever me. It doesn’t stop me craving the orange dungarees.
Nearly an hour later, we are called in. The balloon in my stomach has now risen to my throat, making me feel sick. I know that if they ask me to sing, it will come out as croaking. My pulse beats in my ears. Pam holds us in a corridor outside the classroom where the important people are and tries to chat to us, but I have to keep swallowing to stop myself from vomiting. She says they won’t be long and rolls her eyes. She says there’s nothing to be nervous about, and that if we aren’t chosen it doesn’t mean anything bad, it’s just a matter of them looking for children who fit into an idea they have for the script. It’s the script, really, she says, and having the right sort of look. The possibility of not being chosen leaks bile into my mouth. I ask if there’s time for me to get a drink from the water fountain at the end of the corridor, and she says, ‘Of course.’
I’m bowed over the warmish nub of water when someone claps my back, making me wet my chin. Before I turn I already know who it is; no one else barges and pokes like this.
‘Give over!’ I rub my cheek as though the water has hurt it. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Come for’t film, haven’t I?’
She looks, for Pauline, as though she’s made an effort. Two hair grips hold her black-and-white hair back at the forehead, which is noticeably cleaner than the rest of her face below, and she’s wearing a dress. She’s standing too close to me, like she does, and I automatically start breathing through my mouth.
‘You can’t come with me,’ I say, indicating Michelle and Maria and the nice lady. ‘You have to go and wait in the hall.’
As so often when I talk to her, I’m not sure if Pauline is ignoring me or hasn’t heard in the first place. She just comes with me when I head back to my group.
‘I saw Lallie Paluza,’ I can’t resist telling her, although it means nothing to her. She puts something in my hand: a Flake, almost liquid in its wrapper.
‘I don’t want it,’ I say, and try to hand it back.
‘I got it for you.’
‘I don’t want it!’
But there’s nothing I can do because she won’t take it, and now the door to the classroom has opened and disastrously the nice lady is telling us to go in. I try to explain about the Flake and Pauline, but they both end up in the room with me, Michelle and Maria. We face a table full of grown-ups; there is the woman, Julia, and the important man, Michael. Also another man who smiles nicely and winks, who is called Hugh. I can see they have a list in front of them and recognize, with relief, the mechanisms that will save me and eject Pauline.
‘What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’ asks Hugh.
‘It’s a Flake,’ I tell them, to mystifying amusement. ‘She gave it me, I don’t want it, it’s all melted!’
‘Why don’t you put it in the bin,’ Julia suggests coolly, her amusement less genuine than the two men’s. I’m grateful for this, as well as scared. She’s scanning the list for Pauline’s name.
‘She’s not on the list, Miss,’ I say.
‘Oh, well,’ says Michael. ‘What’s your name?’ and Julia takes up her pen and writes at the bottom, where there’s a blank bit.
‘Bright, as it sounds?’
If I could kill Pauline, I would. The Flake wrapper has leaked chocolate on to my palm and I lick it away so I don’t get choc olate on my dress, but this amuses Hugh even more, I can see, as though he thinks I can’t resist eating even at this crucial moment.
They ask us questions, about how old we are and what we’re doing for the summer holidays.
‘I’m going to Spain with my mum and dad,’ I tell them, shame at turning Ian into my dad piled on to the shame of what’s actually happened between my mum and dad. When it’s her turn, Pauline claims that she’s going to Spain too, with her parents, and I want to shout that she’s a liar, but I’m a liar too. After this, Mic
hael asks Pauline to come closer to the table, and asks her a lot more questions, about school, and her brothers and sisters, and although Pauline tells some more whoppers robbed from me, about liking reading and making up stories (although she stops short of claiming she too wants to be a teacher when she grows up), the more questions he asks, the more she begins to talk to Michael properly, looking at him instead of off to one side of him like she usually does, and all the time he’s staring at her, flanked by the two other grown-ups, who also look and look. I prepare a few of my own answers so I’ll be ready for similar questions, but there’s no need. They thank us all and the door opens and the nice lady scoops us out into the corridor again. That’s it.
Michelle and Maria are giggly and relieved. I turn to Pauline and push her so hard she bangs back against the wall.
‘You’re a liar, you!’
‘Oy, steady …’ The nice lady gets hold of my shoulder.
‘She told lies.’
‘I never!’
‘It doesn’t matter, chick,’ the lady admonishes. ‘It’s not like an exam. They just want to get a look at you really, sort of get an idea of what you’re like. It’s not the end of the world, is it?’
