‘What a spiteful cat you are,’ Evadne grunted at her. ‘You were young once, I can just about recall.’
‘As I was saying,’ Cora went on, declining to rise to the bait, ‘I confront my husband after a cocktail party, a horrific row ensues and I end by hurling a champagne glass at his head.’
‘Mightn’t that be dangerous?’ asked Trubshawe.
‘Oh well, it isn’t actually a proper glass glass, you know. It’s made out of something called Plastic. On the big screen, though, nobody will be able to tell it from the real McCoy.’
‘Any chance, do you suppose, of Hanway coming up with another last-minute improvement to the scene?’
‘Oh, he already has.’
‘He has?’
‘Just as we were packing it in this morning, he told me that he’d thought of a little gag to add a certain piquancy to the row. That champagne glass I mentioned? In the script it’s empty, you understand. Well now, as I raise it above my head, I happen to notice that there’s still some bubbly left inside and I polish it off before I actually throw the glass. Isn’t that just too brilliant? The fact that this woman is not even prepared to waste a few drops of flat champagne on her wastrel of a husband conveys to the audience, far more effectively than would a dozen lines of dialogue, the depth of her contempt for him. Yes, I really do believe that Hanway could be the next Alastair Farjeon.’
*
Back on the set, the novelist and the policeman endeavoured more or less successfully to steer clear of the technicians who were scurrying past them, back, forward, this way and that, rushing out of the studio, then back in, then back out again. Cora, meanwhile, was having her forehead, her chin and the tip of her nose softly dusted by a delicate little Chinese lady of indeterminate age. Gareth Knight was silently rehearsing his dialogue while an effeminate young man with a canary-yellow bandanna, one so tightly knotted as to cause the veins in his neck to stand out, was combing his hair back into wavy perfection. Rex Hanway, a copy of the script tucked under his arm, was peering repeatedly and, it seemed, indiscriminately through his viewfinder. And Hattie Farjeon was sitting alone in her own private nook, her own private world, sublimely indifferent to the hubbub surrounding her, still knitting away as though her life depended upon it.
Everything was finally ready for the first ‘take’. Hanway settled himself into his chair next to the camera, Cato curling up on his lap, while Lettice, clutching a sheaf of notes to her breast, took her place at his side. The set began to echo to repeated cries of ‘Quiet, please!’ Then it was just ‘Quiet!’ Then, finally, ‘Will everybody please shut up! We’re going for a take!’
‘Right,’ said the director to his two performers. ‘This is supposed to be the mother of all marital rows, so I want it to have lots of vigour and vinegar. Don’t forget, Gareth, even though you give as good as you get, you do have an underlying sense of guilt. You know that what Cora is accusing you of is all too true. So, when you start shouting back at her, I still want to see, lurking behind those soulful baby blues of yours, a real defensiveness, a real insecurity. At this stage in the picture we don’t want you to lose the audience’s sympathy.
‘And Cora? This may not be the last straw but, for you, it’s the latest one and you’re not prepared for an instant to let Gareth off the hook. You understand?’
He turned to the camera operator.
‘Camera okay?’
The operator nodded.
‘Sound?’
The sound recordist nodded.
Now it was his own turn to nod, to everyone and no one at once.
‘Okay, let’s go. And – action!’
The clapper-boy read out, ‘If Ever They Find Me Dead, Scene 25, Take 1,’ and clapped his clapper-board.
It was a juicy scene all right, just as had been promised, and both performers, as they prowled about the set, a sumptuously upholstered drawing-room strewn with cocktail-party debris, played it well beyond the hilt.
Cora, a consummate actress when given the opportunity to be one (as Trubshawe was already saying to himself), contrived to be, all at once, warm and abrasive, sensitive yet as tough as old boots. Like a virtuoso ascending, then dizzily redescending, the scales of human bitterness and resentment, holding in her hysteria all the better to let it explode, she never once delivered two different lines of dialogue with the same intonation, never once repeated an effect.
Knight’s performance was almost as thrilling to watch. There were moments when he struck one as no more than an ogreish, drunken, sinisterly jovial bully wearing a fixed grin that could hardly be told apart from a snarl. At others, straining to avoid the gale force of Cora’s fury, her shrill voice and jabbing forefinger, he would protest his innocence with such apparent candour and sincerity that one felt forced to revise all one’s preconceptions as to which of the two bore ultimate responsibility for the failure of their marriage.
So powerfully acted, so nerve-rackingly tense and realistic, was the row – to the point where it felt almost obscene to be eavesdropping on such an intimate tragedy – that, even if everybody on the set had not been ordered to remain silent, they would surely have done so in any case.
Suddenly Knight, drawing himself up to his full six-foot-two height, loomed over a momentarily cowed Cora.
‘Admit it, Louise,’ he said, his voice dropping an octave. ‘Our marriage is a sham.’
‘A sham?’
‘Yes, it’s always been a sham. Right from the day I proposed to you. I asked for your hand, but, as I see now, all you were willing to offer me was your arm.’
‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’
‘You didn’t want a husband. What you were looking for was an escort.’
‘That’s absolutely –’
‘As for love, it’s something you could never give me, because you don’t know what it is. You’ve never known what it is. Which is why,’ he ended sadly, ‘I admit it, I did turn elsewhere.’
By some indefinable alchemy, its secret known only to the greatest actors, the anger that had so disfigured Cora’s features was abruptly replaced by a brief but vivid flash of self-realisation, when one saw not just the woman’s emotional frigidity but also, terrifyingly, that she too had seen it. It was an epiphany which rendered the character, if only for a second or two, sympathetic, even faintly pathetic.
Not more than a couple of seconds later, however, the virago reasserted herself.
‘Why, you …!’ she shrieked, raising the champagne glass above her head. It was at that instant, of course – and everyone simultaneously realised what a brilliant conceit it had been of Hanway’s – that she noticed it was still half-full. A queer, misshapen smile on her lips, she swallowed the champagne at a single go and, raising the glass again, prepared to hurl it at Knight.
Then it happened.
Time itself was suspended. One moment Cora was holding the empty glass above her head, the next she had let it fall onto the floor. With both hands at once she clasped her throat so tightly that her bulging eyes appeared about to pop out of their sockets. Whereupon, straining to scream but managing only to moan, the colour draining from her face, she collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Not again!
The two words resonated in Trubshawe’s brain. It seemed only yesterday that he’d watched a similar scene being played out on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That one turned out to be an April Fool’s hoax. Would this scene, too, prove to be some sort of tasteless practical joke?