by Peter Rimmer
“Gerry Hollingsworth flew with me during the war. How Genevieve got her break. He was then Louis Casimir and proud to be Jewish. His people are having a bad time. Seeing I found him Genevieve, he couldn’t very well refuse me tickets for my friends. Barnaby’s launching the girls in some kind of a band at the Windmill. Place has a terrible reputation but Celia doesn’t seem to mind. Just hope she knows what she’s doing, but that’s show business if that’s what she wants. Robert and Freya are staying at Purbeck Manor to look after Genevieve’s grandmother. She’s taken Lord St Clair’s death very badly. I don’t know what to do for her except pray.
“The filet mignon is good but ask for it rare. There’s nothing worse than overcooked beef or underdone wild boar. Anthony came down with the mumps staying with his friend while Genevieve and Bruno Kannberg were writing her book at Hastings Court. Now all the children are in quarantine and no children allowed in the house. Tina never had mumps as a child and has to stay away. Grownup mumps can be serious, according to the doctor. You never know what’s going to happen next with five children. Miss Dixon the new governess is nearly beside herself but I’m sure she can cope. She’s fifty and a real dragon, just what the children needed to stop them running wild. Tina and I are no good at punishing our own children. We both have a bad habit of laughing when they do something positively awful. You’ll find out yourself one day, Tinus, when you have your own children.
“You’d better order your lunch as that chap isn’t going to stand at your elbow all day. Doesn’t Genevieve look smashing, or is it spiffing? I never know what the right words are anymore. There’s definitely going to be a war but it won’t come before you finish university and then you’ll go back to Elephant Walk.”
“I’d want to stay and join the RAF.”
“No you wouldn’t. I promised your mother when she phoned last Christmas from Meikles Hotel. The telephone exchange in Salisbury gave us exactly three minutes. Not enough cables. Andre, how’s the cricket? Tina, what’s the matter? Oh no, you’re not coming down with mumps?”
“It has nothing to do with mumps.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“I’m getting old.”
“Aren’t we all? I’m nearly fifty.”
Tinus, watching the last exchange, took in the man he called Uncle Barnaby. As with all the older men in his extended family, he used the title as a sign of respect. Despite the look from Aunty Tina, a look of panic as if she had lost something very important, Uncle Barnaby carried on his conversation with Celia Larson as if nothing was happening. When Uncle Harry seemed to mentally sigh, catching the glance his wife cast towards Uncle Barnaby, Tinus felt a new pang of understanding; it was not only nineteen-year-olds who had their love lives tied up in knots. When he turned away from the triangle he found Genevieve regarding him across the table with a sad faraway expression on her face. Their eyes locked on each other, neither having to say what the other one was thinking. At the end, Tinus could have sworn Genevieve blew him the lightest kiss in the world.
7
By seven-thirty that evening Gerry Hollingsworth knew the film was going to be a winner and the money would make his wife change her mind whatever he called himself. Across the British Isles every theatre was sold out, his publicity campaign, as he put it to Paul Dexter, ‘a howling success’.
“The best advertising for any product is free publicity,” he told Paul Dexter in the limousine on the way to Leicester Square. “There’s nothing like a scandal to grab everyone’s attention.”
“All we now need is a good film to make them tell their friends.”
“The film is all right. Any film about Robin Hood will be all right. You’ll see, Paul. I feel good despite Carmel.”
“Women always come round when there’s lots of money to be had.”
“Just what I was thinking. If you have money the world sits at your feet. Even Genevieve’s book will work to our advantage, whatever she has to say. How on earth didn’t we own the rights to her story in our contract, Paul? It’s standard practice. Anything anyone makes after we make them a star belongs to us. Without me she wouldn’t have anyone interested in how she was born or where she damn well came from. She’d be just another pretty woman who happened to be a by-blow of the defunct aristocracy. What’s with the public about a title?”
“That chap Smythe who first helped her as an agent took the biography rights out of her contract when he gave us back what he said was an acceptable draft. We missed it.”
“You missed it, Paul. I never miss anything. That was your job.”
“You can’t think of everything.”
“You should. I did. Every paper in England ran the Genevieve and Gregory L’Amour story.”
“They are very photogenic.”
“Of course they are.”
“When are you going back to America?”
“Monday, if your telephoned reports about tonight from the rest of Britain are correct. I need to sell the film into more American cinemas so we can open them all on the same night with Robin Hood and his Merry Men. My goodness, what a crass title.”
“Do you have a next film for Genevieve? Do you know, Gerry, I heard you never laid the girl?”
“Patience, Paul. It’s all timing. All women get insecure at one time or the other in their lives and then they’re easy to manipulate. The best things in life take time. It’s the chase that is all the fun. Just look at her now walking up the red carpet. Makes more than your mouth water. Look at her looking into his eyes and look at all the cameramen looking at the pair of them. You’d think she loved that bastard instead of despising him. You know something, Paul, inside that man’s head is absolutely nothing. He’s just a pretty face. It’s the camera for some reason that makes him look sincere. The public will love him.”
“So you’re not going to use him again?”
“Of course I am. With Genevieve. I’m looking for a script to bring them together again. We’ll milk them both dry.”
“Aren’t you jealous of him?”
“I’m never jealous of anyone who makes me money, Paul. You should know that. We’d better go in. The red carpet calls. The next two hours will tell us what the public think of our film. Robin Hood, I wonder if he ever did exist? Lucky for us the legend lives on.”
“Who the hell cares, if he makes us money? Sorry about the book rights, Gerry Hollingsworth.”
“So you should be. Longman printed twenty thousand copies. They’ll be the ones to make real money not Genevieve and her ghost-writer friend. What a terrible thing to call the person who does all the real work writing the book. Genevieve can barely write her own name.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Oh, I think it is. It’s the businessman who should make the money. The rest of them just provide the product. The best product in the world won’t make a penny if it isn’t sold properly. They’ve got to excite the press. People have to be told what to buy. To the winner the spoils. Tonight we win, Paul Dexter, whatever Carmel has to say about me. Do you know she even tried to throw me out of my house? Can you believe these women? She’d have spent her life being a nothing without me. They forget what they do in life. Any one of them can do the job of bringing up kids if the husband has money. I often wonder why we marry the one we did.”
“Isn’t it because of love?”
“Don’t be daft. Lust, maybe. Love is something we sell them in a cinema. Why I encouraged their affair. At one stage during the filming they were looking at each other so dopily it made me want to laugh. But I didn’t laugh once I saw those rushes. That dopey look looks like real love up there on the screen. You’ll see. Wow, what a crowd. Not a drop of rain. The gods are with us tonight, I feel it in my bones. Poor Carmel. She doesn’t know what she is missing, or the kids. Even the kids will stop hating me once they see how much money their father is making. Some idiot said money was the root of all evil. I say money is the route to go for any successful life. Do you know, not one newspaper has men
tioned I was once Louis Casimir?”
Slowly, majestically, like some king wanting the manage of unruly jades, as Gerry Hollingsworth put it the next day to Paul Dexter, mincing up the words of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the two film executives stepped from the inside safety of the tinted-window limousine onto the pavement outside the cinema.
As they walked up the red carpet into the theatre both of them had big smiles on their faces to show the crowd. Then they were inside in their seats. The lights went down. The show began. Everyone in the cinema found themselves transported into another world, a better world where good always transcended evil, where women were always beautiful and good men always strong. The world of fantasy where people always fell deeply in love forever.
In the weeks after, Genevieve went back to America to make a new film, this time travelling by aeroplane across the pond. Her film played to packed houses the length and breadth of England while the country moved closer to war, and Harry Brigandshaw tried again to persuade his wife to go back to Rhodesia and leave Europe’s problems behind them.
Genevieve had said goodbye to Tinus on the night of the premiere in Leicester Square before she was again swallowed up in the euphoria that poured out of the cinema with the people transported even for a brief while from their imminent problems. She had no idea if she would ever see him again, a feeling of loss she likened to death when she said goodbye to her mother at the beginning of November.
After he found out about her affair with Gregory L’Amour, she never heard another word from him; her only hope was he was working so hard on his PPE degree he had no time for distractions.
“Calf love, ducky,” her mother assured her. “We all go through it, like losing our virginity. What do you want to be, a farmer’s wife in the middle of Africa with darkies all around you? Enough to give anyone the creeps. You go back to America and find yourself a rich man. My friend Joan from Lambeth says that in America when you marry a man he has to give you half his money which you keep when he wants a divorce if the divorce is his fault. Good-looking women in America have got it made. The husband either has to put up with their nagging or pay through the neck; why women in America have so much power over their men.”
“Would you come and live with me if I was rich and divorced?”
“Don’t be daft. I’ve already got my bum in the butter.”
“What about Hitler?”
“What’s he got to do with me? Your father may have gone to live in the country but he still pays my bills. You know what, Genevieve, had Merlin married me and I hadn’t married Corporal Ray Owen, poor sod who never got a life, I’d be Lady Muck. Not that your father had any idea of marrying Esther despite all the rubbish you wrote in your book. Had a good laugh, me and Joan, when she read out the parts of the book. Proper little romantic, my daughter. How’s the book selling? Remember it was my idea. Put the money in a safe place where no one can get at it. You go and have a nice time in America and forget your young man at Oxford. I’m going to put in a phone so we can at least talk to each other every now and again.”
“Will you be all right, Mum?
“’Course I will. Why ever not? It’s your father you should worry about, buried in the country at his age. At least in London there were places for him to go. What’s he done with poor Smithers?”
“Left him to look after the flat in Park Lane.”
“Good. Then Merlin will come back again. Sometimes we get together for a good natter about old times. The best memories we make are when we are young. Your father was quite a card in his day. They all were during the war, trying to get the best out of life before it was too late… So it’s an aeroplane this time? Wouldn’t catch me dead on one of them things. Now off you go. You’re fidgeting. What’s the new film called?”
“They haven’t got one yet. My first job is the premiere of Robin Hood in New York. He says the good returns in Britain have made the Americans more interested. He’s been letting it build up before releasing the film in the cinemas.”
“Who’s he?”
“Mr Hollingsworth.”
“Watch out for him. Never trust a man who changes his name. You mark my words. What’s he doing with his wife and family?”
“They’re staying in England for the moment.”
“Poor bloody wife. In America she’d have got half his money. Here she can’t get a divorce unless she can prove he’s been with another woman. The men laugh at us women in England, according to my friend Joan. What you doing with all them clothes you bought yourself?”
“Sending them over by boat. You can only take so much luggage on the aircraft. Sent a trunk off two weeks ago to New York. They are going to meet me at the airport and take me to the hotel where they’ve put my trunk.”
“It’s all go isn’t it?”
“Never stops.”
“Give your mother a kiss and bugger off before I start to cry.”
The second year of Philosophy, Politics and Economics was more interesting to Tinus than the first. The philosophy had really made him think; to be a good politician, a man had to be devious. While in economics, to make money for yourself required twisting the rules and riding with the swings of an economic market that never stayed the same. Tinus had even asked his tutor if being a crook was a pre-requisite for making money after the professor had explained what went wrong in America that led to the depression. The men who came out of the crash smiling had all used knowledge only possessed by a few insiders to manipulate the price of the share.
“Can a man make money from an honest day’s work?”
“Maybe in Africa, Oosthuizen. By making the fallow land bring forth new fruit.”
“But it’s easier to crook people if the law lets you get away with it?”
“I wouldn’t put it so bluntly.”
“Isn’t Joseph Kennedy, in a Socratic society of good, what Plato would have called an evil man where now he’s a very rich man in America with political pretensions for his children? One of the richest, I read in the paper.”
“I’m glad you came to my rooms to ask these questions. Society is very complex in its diversification. What Kennedy is alleged to have done, bootlegging liquor, is now an honest occupation without the legal restrictions of Prohibition.”
“But not as profitable. They’ve locked up Al Capone for tax evasion and a good part of his money came from selling illegal liquor.”
“Kennedy has political connections. Trading shares with inside information and selling the market short will one day be against the law, in my opinion.”
“You wouldn’t then call him a gentleman?”
“Not in the British sense of the word.”
“I’m glad I’m reading PPE and not geology as was my first intention, and go on to join the Anglo-American corporation in Johannesburg. Instead of wasting my life making a salary, the amount of which is determined by how nice you are to someone senior, I’m going to become a politician.”
“An honest one I hope, Oosthuizen.”
“Is there such a thing, Mr Bowden? Was there ever a truly good man who became a politician, who in Plato’s philosophy only attempted to do that which was right and not what was politically expedient?”
“In a perfect world. Why in England under Queen Victoria they didn’t pay the members of parliament for all intents and purposes. A man had to be rich first before going into politics. Rich and a gentleman.”
“Did it help?”
“We created the biggest empire the world has ever known.”
“I’m not sure if that answers the question.”
“Like the Romans, every British administration was honest. It’s a privilege, Oosthuizen, to be born into a society that has a culture of not stealing from each other. Culprits were ostracised by their own society for breaking the rules of a gentleman. It’s worked as well as the Roman Empire. Corrupt government is man’s worst evil. History is littered with it, as you suggest. When history judges the British Empire it will have something to say abo
ut our snobbery, our class system that keeps the rulers away from social contact with the common people. I don’t think it will say we were dishonest. Some of the colonial people talk of being oppressed, though the thought comes from some of their own people looking for power. Plato says a good government is one that maintains law and order and moves the economy forward to the best benefit of all the governed people. Are your people in Rhodesia not being offered schooling in missions, medical attention, help when they run out of food? I know some of your history. Isn’t British rule better than being raided by a Matabele impi every second year to steal your cattle and women?”
“Tembo says that doesn’t matter if a man loses his pride under a foreign ruler.”
“Who is Tembo?”
“Tembo Makoni. He’s the boss boy on our farm.”
“Maybe if you called him farm manager it would help. How old is this boy?”
“Fifty or sixty.”
“That’s my point. Plato, I rather think, would have given him a nicer title to call himself.”
“He’d still be the boss boy.”
“Think about it, Oosthuizen, if you want to become a successful politician. A good politician has to make a man feel important whatever his status in life. That is if he wants the man to vote for him.”
“The blacks don’t vote in Rhodesia.”
“Don’t or can’t?”
“Can’t. They’d throw us out of the country if they did, despite all our good and honest government.”
“Are you laughing at me, Oosthuizen?”
“Of course not, sir. Whatever gave you that impression? I’m just trying to learn what’s going on in the world.”
“And you shall at Oxford.”
After the private discussion with his tutor, a man Tinus wanted to admire, Tinus found himself thinking in circles.
Back in his room, for the first time since he was a small boy, Tinus felt lonely. Andre was going back to South Africa. Since his last visit to London in August, when they had stayed at the Williams Hotel and he had first read about Genevieve’s affair with Gregory L’Amour, there had been no contact with Genevieve after the brief goodbye at the premiere of her film. By the time Tinus returned to Oxford he was convinced it was all over with their lives together. By now, he told himself as he walked across the cold quadrangle, she would be long back in America and back in the arms of her lover. To make his life more miserable, he had been to see Robin Hood three more times at the local cinema, the very sight of the two of them together up on the screen churning his stomach for weeks afterwards.
