On the Brink of Tears

by Peter Rimmer

  When Genevieve walked down the last few yards of her journey to America, she was met by a frenzy. The American producer had done a good job. Beside her, holding her arm, Louis Casimir, the about to be Gerry Hollingsworth, was making the most of her. In a moment of inspiration, Genevieve bent to whisper in his ear.

  “At drama school they told us it was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration and they were wrong. It’s ninety-nine per cent tit and bum. The rest is luck.”

  Down below, the press thought she was whispering sweet nothings in his ear and went into a renewed frenzy.

  An hour later, they were in a yellow taxi on their way to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

  “You are wonderful, Genevieve.”

  “Why thank you, kind sir… But if you don’t take your hand off my knee I’ll give you a clout, Mr Hollingsworth.”

  “We’re going to win.”

  “I hope so.”

  “All our worries left behind us. Tomorrow your picture will be plastered over half the newspapers in New York.”

  “All of them, Mr Hollingsworth.”

  Part 5

  The Age of Innocence — June to December 1936

  1

  Andre Cloete was convinced every butterfly in England was fluttering in his stomach as he walked down the steps from the Lord’s Pavilion. Murray had just been bowled round his legs by the Cambridge spinner leaving Oxford in trouble at fifty-six for three. In his panic, the pitch seemed a mile away while his legs felt they were made of lead.

  On the other side of the rail, halfway down the imposing flight of steps, Tinus Oosthuizen was holding up a South African flag for his friend. Briefly they smiled, which stopped the butterflies fluttering and gave Andre back control of his legs.

  “Good luck,” Andre heard Tinus call as he put his right boot on the grass of the field and strode to the crease.

  Four hours later, he was walking back to the pavilion. Everyone in the Oxford team was waiting for him at the top of the steps. All were politely clapping, Tinus nowhere to be seen.

  “Where were you?” he asked after the game.

  “In the toilet. I couldn’t watch the last few runs for your hundred. You know of course you’re a bloody hero.”

  “It’ll be your turn next year.”

  “Hope so.”

  “The chaps are going to the Mitre. Would you like to join us?”

  “Not today. This is your day, Andre.”

  “You’ll score a ton next year.”

  “I’ll be happy to get in the side. That was the best century I ever saw. Not one chance. Next, you’ll be playing for South Africa on the same field against England. Proud of you. Your father will be proud of you when he reads tomorrow’s newspaper in Cape Town. It’ll be plastered on the front page of the Cape Times. ‘South African wins game for Oxford.’ They’ll have a whole piece on you including your Rhodes Scholarship. Bishops will declare a holiday.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  “Go and get drunk with them, you deserve it. See you on Monday. I want to go and phone Uncle Harry. I’d phone Genevieve in America if I knew her number. I’ll just have to write. Ever since we rowed together on the river she thinks us a team.”

  “You don’t want to come?”

  “Not today. I’m going to drive the green peril straight back to Oxford after I’ve made my call to Hastings Court. Anthony will be tickled pink. He’s playing in his prep school first eleven this year. Before he goes to boarding school next term, poor chap.”

  “Didn’t we enjoy boarding school?”

  “Of course we did. Now run along like a good chap and join the rest of them. I don’t think they’ll be letting you buy any drinks tonight.”

  With wind in his face and his friend having scored one hundred and twelve runs in the annual inter-varsity cricket match, Tinus thought life could never get any better. The fields were green, the trees bursting with life, his scarf trailing out behind the Morgan as he roared his way through the evening air, twilight yet to fold over the English countryside.

  “He got a hundred and twelve, Uncle Harry. You will tell Anthony the ripping news?”

  Good old Uncle Harry was always enthusiastic. It made a chap feel good. All Tinus needed to make the day the best day in his life was to tell Genevieve the good news to her face.

  Then at the top of his voice, Tinus began to sing, his first year up at Oxford having been a happy time for everyone.

  By the time Genevieve had read Tinus’s letter on the set of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, all was well in the England of yore. The bad King John gone; the good King Richard back from his Crusade in the Holy Land; Robin of Loxley restored to his family estate; the Sheriff of Nottingham out on his neck; the rich fleeced, their money given to the poor. Love had prevailed.

  Genevieve, as Maid Marian, dressed in green tights, a tight green jacket, a jaunty green felt pointed hat with a hawk’s feather, her eyes shining on Robin Hood, strode through Sherwood Forest for the last time, elated as the rest of them, months of hard work over, in the can.

  “Well done, everyone,” called out Gerry Hollingsworth the producer as the cameras stopped filming.

  “My lord is generous,” mocked Genevieve, bowing and sweeping off her feathered hat.

  Then they were shouting and hugging each other in the knowledge of a job well done. The fact that Sherwood Forest had moved to the state of Washington USA seemed lost on everyone except Genevieve.

  The letter from Tinus had been a breath of fresh air after the material world of Hollywood, where nothing else seemed to matter other than wealth and fame. Scoring a hundred runs in an amateur cricket match would have meant nothing to the people milling around Genevieve in their excitement.

  After Errol Flynn turned down the part, not even acknowledging her existence, the newly christened Gerry Hollingsworth had pursued another rising star for the part, despite Genevieve being a head taller than her prospective leading man.

  “Why should his height matter, stand him on an orange box and film down to his knees. It’s what appears on the screen that counts. As long as the public believe he is strong and tall the reality doesn’t matter. This is Hollywood, Genevieve. The land of make believe. They want to believe in love. They want good to win over evil. They want the sun to shine. Anything to contrast their own miserable lives working in a factory. Our job is to take them out of their misery for two hours of time, to transport them into the world they want but can never get. Who cares whether the actor playing him is only five feet tall when Robin Hood appears on screen as the man of their dreams? It’s all illusion. The only time in life when they get what they want. They don’t even realise they are stuffing their face with popcorn, they are drawn so deeply into the film up on the screen. We give them what they want, Genevieve. We show them their dream, sitting in the dark in a cinema.”

  “Will he take the part, Mr Hollingsworth?”

  “Who knows? And please don’t call me Mr Hollingsworth.”

  They had told her the money had come from the Jews. Both the writer and the American producer were Jews.

  “You see, Genevieve, it’s how we run away from our misery by living our lives through films. Our world becomes the world of Robin Hood, a beautiful smiling world where the rich are robbed for the poor. We make people smile. We smile ourselves. No one cares whether we are Jews. They can’t see us, only you as the beautiful Maid Marian trumpeting the triumph of good over evil. They don’t see you as Genevieve up there on the screen. Yes, it’s a Jewish business but no one cares. Sir Jacob Rosenzweig, an English Jew in New York, lent us the money. Not out of charity. He’ll get twenty per cent of the gross if the film is a success.”

  “And if it flops, Mr Hollingsworth?”

  “With your beautiful face, how could it flop? They were German and French bankers before they came to London and New York.”

  “How does he still use his title?”

  “He’s not yet an American citizen, somethi
ng we all will be someday soon.”

  In the end, Gregory L’Amour had taken the part of Robin Hood. They were made for each other, so it seemed for a while, on and off the screen. Now the film, like Genevieve’s affair with Gregory L’Amour, was over.

  Putting the letter back in the small pocket of her green hunting jacket after reading it again, Genevieve felt homesick. She could hear the sound of the chock as the bat hit the ball and flew to the boundary.

  “Well played,” she said.

  “I know, I was good.”

  “Not you, Gregory. A friend of mine. Scored a century at Lord’s.”

  “What are you talking about, Genevieve?”

  “What are you going to do?” asked another voice as she watched her American co-star walk away.

  “Go home, I suppose. I’ve been in America over a year… Oh, you mean him? Nothing. Why should I? For a brief few weeks, I was infatuated with Robin Hood. It helps the chemistry on film. He’s just another predator.”

  “The newspapers say you are going to marry him.”

  “That’s publicity. To get the film talked about. All part of the business.”

  “Was having an affair with him part of the business?”

  “No… You are very perceptive.”

  “I’m a writer. We have to be perceptive. Even Robin Hood has to be true. You are very beautiful, Genevieve.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not if it makes you happy. I can’t see what you are all looking at even when I look in the mirror, something I do as little as possible.”

  “Don’t you watch what we put of you on film?”

  “That’s narcissism.”

  “Gregory L’Amour likes watching the rushes.”

  “That’s why I’m going home. He’s in love with himself.”

  “Will you make another film with him?”

  “Not if I can help it. Did you know his real name is Joseph Pott? Will you excuse me? I’m going to change. I want to be myself again.”

  “Don’t go back to England. There’s going to be a war.”

  “More reason for going home. My father’s family have been in the same part of England for a very long time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My grandfather is the seventeenth Baron St Clair of Purbeck.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “As a matter of fact I am not. We’ll defend England, all right. The last conqueror was William of Normandy. The same man who brought my ancestor from France to England. And that’s real history and not Robin Hood.”

  “Does Gerry Hollingsworth know?”

  “Probably. I’m a bastard. My mother was a barmaid at the Running Horses at Mickleham.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She had me and lived happily ever after. My father still supports her. He’s a gentleman.”

  “Do you see him?”

  “Of course. I love him very much. I’ve been the apple of his eye ever since I can remember. That kind of love is genuine… When it’s all over I feel flat. Don’t you? All that expectation and then it’s over. Just another film. A film that now belongs to everyone else.”

  The next day they all went their separate ways, the last of the work left to the editors. Genevieve went up to Canada, catching a boat from Vancouver that would take her to England. She wanted to be alone. To think. To try to see where life might take her. The boat was a freighter carrying timber from British Columbia to Europe. There were four passengers on the Canadian boat who ate their meals with the officers.

  By the time the ship reached the English port of Bristol they were all friends. No one on board had seen her first film. No one had gawped at her.

  As Genevieve put her luggage into a taxi to go to the railway station, she wondered if such anonymity would ever happen to her again once Robin Hood was the success they all expected. The film was due to have its first night at the Odeon in Leicester Square where many of the actors would be together again for the premiere at the start of November.

  As the taxi moved through the streets of Bristol, Genevieve was inordinately happy. She was going to surprise him by going straight to Oxford. There would be less time in her future for rowing anonymously on the Thames.

  By the time she stepped onto the train, her luggage back in the luggage van, her mind was full of the ominous words on the billboards she had seen on every newsstand on every street corner: Tensions grow over Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland

  Instead of changing trains at Reading for Oxford, Genevieve went through to London, paying the ticket inspector the extra fare on the train. At Paddington Station, she phoned her father at his flat in Hyde Park.

  “Where are you?”

  “Paddington Station, platform ten.”

  “Stay where you are. What’s the matter, Genevieve?”

  “I’m frightened. What’s going on in Germany? The American papers don’t say much about England.”

  “I’m going down to Dorset this afternoon. We can go together. Did you finish the film?”

  “It’s all over.”

  “So will England be if we don’t do something about Hitler. Will your luggage fit in the car?”

  “No. I’ll leave most of it at the left luggage office until I decide where I am going to live.”

  Half an hour later they were on their way out of the station, in her father’s Bentley 3 Litre.

  “Aren’t you going the wrong way if we want to drive down to Dorset?”

  “First I want you to see your mother. You’ve been away a long time. She’s lonely, Genevieve.”

  “Aren’t we all? Sometimes on the set with people all around me was the worst. Even though everyone in America calls each other by their Christian name, on a film set we were all strangers. People thrown together by the film for a few months, everything disjointed. In the theatre, I could get into a part and stay there for hours, long after the curtain came down. In film you take shots of everything. The editors put it together, give it continuity. I never felt I was inside the part, playing another person. It was just me dressed up. They don’t even take all the shots in sequence.”

  “Did you write to her?”

  “For a while. Mother doesn’t write letters.”

  “She can’t, or not without difficulty. Give her a hug and have a cup of tea.”

  “When did you last make a call?”

  “With you, before you left for America.”

  “Do all love affairs fizzle out? Come to nothing?”

  “You must find out for yourself.”

  “What does she do all day? It’s one thing to have money but if you don’t have to work, what do you do all day?”

  “Are you asking about your mother or about me? I have a routine that includes the club, a walk in the park in good weather, seeing friends, your Uncle Barnaby, who is only down the road. Once a week I sit down at my desk and pay the bills. My money is safe in the Bank of England so I don’t have to think about that since I sold my Vickers shares at the end of the war.”

  “Don’t you get bored?”

  “I’m long past being bored. Once or twice I’ve found myself missing my days in the trenches. In the trenches with Jerry shooting at you there was no time to think of yourself. In wartime, people are closer to each other. What they talk about is real. Men get bored too easily in peacetime and end up wanting to fight each other. Women have the children to bring up and stop them thinking of themselves. When we get to your mother’s flat I will stay in the car so as not to distract her and make it all uncomfortable.”

  “What are we going to do with her?”

  “Why don’t you ask your mother? She’ll tell you. She’ll never tell me. Why doesn’t she find herself a man?”

  “Don’t be silly, Daddy, and lose your support? My mother may well be bored but she does have money. She likes not having to work. It can’t be worse doing nothing than serving drinks in a bar to drunks all day. She had her time.
She had you. A handsome officer fighting for his country. What else could a barmaid want?”

  “I just thought there was more to life than temporary happiness.”

  Her mother was still in her dressing gown after lunch, her hair in disarray; she was not wearing make-up. When Genevieve kissed her, she could smell the booze on her mother’s breath. Genevieve looked around the small Chelsea flat for the bottle.

  “I put it away before I answered the door.”

  “Did you expect me?”

  “Thought you were in America, luv. How’ve you been?”

  “Do you ever go out?”

  “Not much. What’s the point? Tarted up I look like an old dragon. I got nothing no one wants except this nice flat and an income. I’m not stupid. Don’t want no bum living off Esther. What would your father say?”

  “He’s downstairs in the car. We’re driving down to Dorset. Want me to bring him up?”

  “Looking like this! Don’t be daft. He’s a good man. Bet he was the one what made you come and see your old mother.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “Might as well be… Want a drink? It’s gin. Drink it with a drop of orange cordial. Just a bit at a time. You don’t get your looks from me, more’s the pity. Just look at you, Genevieve… What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Making a film.”

  “I asked what you been doing?”

  “Making a fool of myself with a man called Gregory. Once they’ve had you they don’t care.”

  “Told you. Who’s Gregory?”

  “My leading man.”

  “Good. He’s not important. It’s the men with the money you got to keep on the hook. How’s Mr Casimir?”

  “Still on the hook. He’s now Mr Hollingsworth, no longer a Jew.”

  “Good for you. Good for him. No point in sticking your neck out. Mind if I help myself? Where you going to live?”

  “The flat’s been sublet in St John’s Wood for another year.”

  “No, which country? You can always move back here if you stay in London. Go on, bugger off. You’re fidgeting, Genevieve. You don’t want to drink with your mother?”