‘It got so bad by the end of the first three days that there was talk all over again of closing down the picture.’
‘What happened?’ asked Evadne.
‘What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. On the fourth day – that would have been Thursday – he was a new man. You could almost see the confidence ooze out of his pores. How he overcame his stage fright or screen fright or whatever you care to call it, I have no idea, but that he had overcome it there wasn’t the slightest doubt at all. Drink? Dope? Medication? Whichever it was, he suddenly seemed to know not only what he wanted but how he’d be able to obtain it.
‘The transformation was uncanny. He would bark orders at gaffers and grips, he knew how to talk shop with the technical crew and, as for the actors, he had them eating out of his hand. The studio bosses are delighted with the rushes – don’t ask what those are, Trubshawe, I’ll tell you some sunny day – the money men never stop rubbing their sweaty palms together, everything is running on rails.’
‘You know, Cora,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘what you’ve just been describing, I actually don’t find so hard to explain. Matter of fact, I’ve often had exactly the same experience myself.’
‘You?’
‘Absolutely. I sit at my old Oliver typewriter and I sit and I sit and nothing happens. Then, who knows how or why, all of a sudden I find myself merrily typing away. It’s as though my fingers have started to have ideas of their own, ideas they don’t even bother consulting me about. And the oddest part of it all is that it usually turns out to be my best stuff.’
None too interested in the metaphysics of literary creation, Cora shrugged her shoulders.
‘What can I say? As I remarked to Orson only the other day, that’s the business we call show.’
Extracting from her handbag two or three delicate little tools of her trade, she rapidly adjusted her face, a face that had begun to bear an increasingly distant acquaintance with her age, and said:
‘Voilà. Evie will be waiting for you, Trubbers, to pick her up at her Albany flat – at, shall we say, nine o’clock tomorrow morning? You’ll drive down to Elstree, where I’ll meet you, show you round, introduce you to some of the cast and crew, the usual drill. Then I’ll do my big scene in the afternoon. Right?’
Trubshawe had only to nod his head.
Chapter Six
The next morning he rang Evadne Mount’s doorbell at exactly quarter-to-nine.
‘Unpunctual,’ she scowled, ushering him in. ‘I might have known.’
‘Unpunctual?’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, really! What will you say next?’ He consulted his watch. ‘It’s just 8.45. I’m fifteen minutes early.’
‘Precisely. Being early is also a form of unpunctuality, you know. Now, because I’m obliged to keep you waiting for fifteen minutes, you’ve made me feel guilty. No, my dear Eustace, if we’re to continue seeing one another, you must learn to be on time. And I do mean on time.’
Before he could take umbrage at her Jesuitical logic, she rushed past him onto the landing. Her ancient Sealyham terrier Gilbert (named after Chesterton, as she explained to the Chief-Inspector) had waddled out of the flat as soon as he noticed its open front door and, for the sake of the Albany’s lush carpeting, immediately had to be coaxed back in again.
‘Like all of us, I’m afraid,’ she sighed, ‘poor Gilbert has become a teensy bit leaky in his declining years.’
When they were finally off, Gilbert having been safely retrieved, it took Trubshawe less than an hour to motor down to Elstree. The studio itself, however, proved a cruel disappointment to both of them. Imposing as it was, it resembled less the popular conception of a Factory of Dreams than it did some commonplace industrial plant, a tannery, perhaps, or a large brickyard. Architecturally without distinction, being all rain-streaked concrete walls and crude corrugated roofing, it was, as Trubshawe scornfully remarked, a warehouse, neither more nor less. Glamour there was none. No more was there the faintest hint of Romance.
At the main entrance, moreover, an obstreperous gate-keeper, a typical petty tyrant of the genus bureaucratum, immediately barred their way.
‘Can’t let you in,’ he said, ‘if you don’t have an appointment.’
Evadne Mount, naturally, would have none of this.
‘An appointment!’ she barked at him. ‘Good heavens, you silly juggins, do you suppose, do you really suppose, that we would have travelled all the way down here from Town if we didn’t have an appointment?’
‘Show us it, then,’ said the gate-keeper suspiciously.
‘The appointment was made in person. How can I show you what was never committed to print?’
‘In that case, I can’t allow you through. It would be more than my job’s worth.’
‘Nonsense! I tell you, my good man, we’ve come to pay a call on Miss Cora Rutherford – at her own request. I repeat, Cora Rutherford. If you don’t open up these gates at once, I shall make it my business to see that you’re replaced by someone who will. You’ll find out then just how much your job is worth.’
For a few seconds he nervously agonised over what to do.
‘P’raps if I was to phone …’
Evadne subjected him to her patented ‘How like a man!’ expression.
‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. My fear is that Miss Rutherford is already in a state of anxiety, perhaps wondering if we’ve been involved in some frightful accident. She’ll be furious – no, no, no, if I know Cora, she’ll be incandescent! – when she learns that we aren’t at her side because you were just too bloody-minded to let us in. Permit us to pass, will you, if you know what’s good for you.’
Still hesitant, conscious of setting a precedent he was likely to regret, he finally raised the barrier and granted the two visitors access to the hallowed inner sanctum. When the car entered the studio grounds, Evadne had to chuckle as she peered through its rear-view mirror and observed, decreasing in size as they themselves advanced, the poor gate-keeper now quite visibly appalled at the liberty he’d been gulled into letting them take.
A few minutes later, Trubshawe having parked the Rover, the question arose of locating Studio 3, in which, as Cora had told them, If Ever They Find Me Dead was being filmed. An obvious solution would have been to ask their way of some passer-by. There was, though, a problem. Practically all the passers-by who crossed their path seemed to be decked out in extravagant fancy-dress costume. They met Roundheads and Cavaliers, Gypsies and Musketeers, Regency Fops and Pearly Queens, from none of whom they would have felt at ease soliciting so mundane a direction.
As often happens, however, wandering among the prefabricated hangars of which the studio complex seemed to be almost wholly composed, they suddenly and providentially found themselves standing in front of the largest of all. Inscribed on its tall metal door was the legend: Studio 3. They were there.
Now literary legend has it that, once he had been interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’, the poet Coleridge found himself ever after incapable of recapturing the rapturous inspiration which had produced the first few indelible stanzas of Kubla Khan. Heaven knows (was the thought running through Evadne Mount’s mind as she contemplated the spectacle which confronted them when she opened the door) how anything of enduring value could be created inside a studio that appeared to be home to Porlock’s entire population.