Evadne clucked her tongue sympathetically.
‘You really, really wanted the part, didn’t you, precious?’
The mask was now slipping off altogether. The tears that glittered in her eyes – even when, as on the present occasion, there was nothing affected or simulated about her distress, Cora remained a star to her fingertips, and a star’s tears don’t just glisten, they glitter – were as distressing to behold as a woman’s, as any woman’s, tears always are.
‘Oh, Evie, you can’t know what I was willing to do to get it. You can’t know how I pleaded, how I grovelled. I had my agent ring Farje’s office every single day, morning and afternoon. He turned me down twenty times. Said I was too old, too old-fashioned, mutton dressed as lamb, jumped-up trash.’
‘Jumped-up trash? He actually said that?’
‘To my face, Evie, to my face!’
‘Oh, my poor darling,’ murmured the novelist, swiftly glancing around the restaurant to check whether anybody had chanced to catch Cora in her moment of panic. Needless to say, everybody was watching her, for the Ivy itself had already begun to buzz with the news of Farjeon’s death.
‘And we weren’t even alone.’
‘No!’
‘He was with his latest discovery, Patsy Sloots. Patsy Sloots! What a name! He apparently plucked her from the chorus line in the new Crazy Gang revue.
‘Now that is jumped-up trash. You remember Dorothy Parker’s quip? “Let’s go watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut from A to B.” From what I hear, little Patsy’s gamut doesn’t even stretch to B. Her speciality is bottoming bills rather than topping them. But she’s just the sort of skinny blonde ninny Farje always did fall for. And there she was, draped over his desk at Elstree, looking as though her whole body, not only her face, had been lifted, while he was telling me that my number was up. I couldn’t believe how he enjoyed humiliating me!’
Evadne had more than once been witness to her friend’s vulnerability, but it had always been when they were tête-à-tête, in the privacy and intimacy of either woman’s flat. That Cora should be on the point of breaking down here, the cynosure of the Ivy, was a vivid indication of what losing out on such an opportunity meant to her.
‘And yet,’ she said softly, ‘you did let yourself be humiliated.’
‘It was my very last chance. Such a role – I know I could have been superb in it, I just know! That’s why I was ready to grovel before him. And the horrible irony of it all,’ she said, the words choking in her throat, ‘is that I believe, I truly believe, he always did mean to give the part to me. My agent assured me that no other actress had been tested. Farje simply couldn’t resist torturing me anyway, just for his own perverted amusement. And, yes,’ – she turned to an embarrassed Trubshawe, who had tried during her tirade to render himself as inconspicuous as was possible for the large, hulking man that he was – ‘actors will do anything to land a halfway decent part, anything.’
‘As I already told you, I know nothing about the picture business,’ Trubshawe replied, ‘but Farjeon was only the director, after all. If the script has been written, can’t they just find somebody else to direct the film?’
‘You’re right,’ Cora replied coldly.
‘Well, I did think –’
‘I say you’re right. You do know nothing about the picture business.’
‘Now now, Cora,’ said Evadne, ‘I realise how terribly upset you must be, but it’s unfair to take it out on poor Eustace. He only means to be kind.’
Cora immediately took Trubshawe’s right hand in her own and squeezed it.
‘Mea culpissima,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes with the folded tip of her napkin. ‘Oh dear, I’ve been shedding so many tears my cheeks are rusty. Sorry to be so beastly. Forgive me?’
‘Course I do,’ he said magnanimously. ‘I quite understand.’
‘And what you just suggested, well, I wouldn’t like you to think it was totally beside the point. If it were any other film director who had suddenly died, that’s exactly what would happen – the studio would simply hire somebody else to take his place. The problem is, there is nobody else who can take Farje’s place.’
For a moment not one of the trio spoke. Then Evadne delivered herself of one of those edifying truisms which sometimes do succeed, in the short term, in easing an uncomfortable situation.
‘Darling Cora,’ she said, ‘something’s bound to turn up. It always does. You know better than most that Life is more like the Pictures than the Pictures are like Life – if you take my meaning – which, to be frank, I’m not at all sure I do myself.’
Little did she know how true these trite, unsingular words of hers were destined to prove …
Chapter Four
The very next morning, as Trubshawe was tucking into a breakfast that consisted of one pork sausage and two thin slices of fried bread (an egg had become a once-a-fortnight treat, if that), he heard his Daily Sentinel thump onto the door mat. He stood up, padded along the hallway in his dressing-gown and slippers, picked up the newspaper and scanned its front-page headline.
‘Famous Film Producer Dies in Fire!’ is what it screamed at him.
Back in the kitchen, he took his place once more at the little oblong table tucked away in a cosy, windowless corner, stirred his tea, treated the bundled-up newspaper to a noisy, impatient straightening-out, started mechanically to chew on a modest mouthful of sausage and turned his attention to the article in question.
Even before he had read a line of it, however, his eye was drawn to the two portrait photographs between which it was sandwiched.
The first was of a man in his mid-forties with a face so puffily corpulent it looked as though a twinned pair of thinner faces had been rolled into one and a double chin so fat and fleshy it spilled onto his white shirt-collar like a soufflé oozing out over the top of a cooking-pot. This, according to its caption, was ‘Alastair Farjeon, the world-famous producer, familiarly known to those in the film business as Farje’.
H’m, said Trubshawe to himself, so he wasn’t alone in having a problem distinguishing a producer from a director.
The second was of a poutily unsmiling young woman. Despite her faintly beady piglet eyes and an elongated slash of a mouth that her lip rouge accentuated to near-freakish proportions, she was an undeniably attractive specimen of feminine allure, except that hers was a kind of chilly, standoffish, inaccessible beauty – ‘marmoreal’ was the fancy adjective that came to mind – by which he personally had never felt aroused. The caption to her photograph read: ‘22-year-old Patsy Sloots, Mr Farjeon’s ill-fated discovery’.
Trubshawe now turned to the article itself.
Shaken to its glamorous foundations, the British cinema world was in mourning today following the tragic death of Alastair Farjeon, the celebrated producer of such classic pictures as An American in Plaster-of-Paris, The Perfect Criminal, The Yes Man Said No and others too numerous to mention.
The 47-year-old Mr Farjeon perished in a fire yesterday afternoon while week-ending at his luxurious and secluded residence in Cookham. A second fatal victim of the flames which swept uncontrollably through the wooden chalet-style villa was Patsy Sloots, the 22-year-old dancer and promising motion-picture actress whom Mr Farjeon, widely regarded as the British cinema’s foremost discoverer of new talent, had spotted in the chorus line of the Crazy Gang revue, You Know What Sailors Are!, currently in its second year at the Victoria Palace.
It was at exactly 4.45 pm that the Cookham police and fire brigade were simultaneously alerted to the conflagration by one of Mr Farjeon’s neighbours, a Mrs Thelma Bentley, who reported to them of having seen, as she stepped into her garden to mow the lawn, a ‘wall of flames’ rising out of the villa’s living-room windows. Unfortunately, by the time three separate fire-engines had arrived on the scene only a few minutes later, the fire was too far advanced to be immediately extinguished and the villa itself proved impossible of access, or even of approach, so intense was the heat given off.