‘And the little girl,’ said Dominic, after a pause for reflection, and in a tone of some wonder, ‘is now about to be shipped off after him?’
‘That’s the way it looks.’ And she added doubtfully: ‘Maybe just for a visit?’ Dominic said nothing to that; he didn’t think so, either. ‘Well, it seems she’s getting married again. Dorette, I mean. Maybe he doesn’t react too well to the idea of a ready-made daughter nearly fourteen years old.’
‘Or maybe she thinks he won’t. I don’t suppose she’s ever asked him. Or asked the kid what she thinks about it.’ A possible catch was beginning to appear, and he couldn’t help wondering what they were getting themselves into. Still, if the case was as he was beginning to suppose, it could be argued that the little girl would be better off with her father. Or hadn’t he wanted her, either? He seemed to have let her go without too much of a fight, and put the width of the world between them.
‘Still,’ said Tossa, mind-reading beside him, ‘we shall have to go on and take a look at the whole set-up now, I’ve committed us to that. We can always back out if we don’t like the look of it.’
She looked at Dominic warily along her shoulder; there was something in the acute care he was suddenly giving to his driving, and the look of almost painful detachment on his face, that told her he had found himself abruptly reminded how delicate might be the ground on which they were treading. For Tossa also was the child of an egocentric actress, and her early years also had been bedevilled by her mother’s remarriages and haunted by her mother’s wit, charm and success, which left her seedling only shady ground in which to grow. He needn’t have worried, Tossa was very well able, by this time, to make good her right to a place in the sun. The amiable conflict between mother and daughter was fought on equal terms these days, and as long as Dominic was on her side Tossa had the secure feeling that she was winning. Still, all experience remains there in the memory to be drawn upon at need.
‘When you come to think of it,’ said Tossa practically, ‘I might be just the right person for this job. If the kid is going to be flown off to her father in any case, it might as well be with somebody who’s been in much the same boat, and knows the language.’ And somebody else, she thought, but did not say, who’s never had parent trouble in his life, and doesn’t know how lucky he is, but manages to rub off some of the luck on to other people even without realising it.
‘It might, at that,’ agreed Dominic, cheered. ‘Anyhow, let’s go and see.’
By which time they were close to the turn that led to the Somerset studio, and the issue was as good as decided.
The Misses Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood sat side by side on a flimsy, gilded, Empire sofa like twin empresses receiving homage, pretty as new paint and something more than content with each other. ‘Thick as thieves,’ Tossa had said, but in this white, gold and pale blue elegance it seemed an inadmissibly crude phrase – even though the white and gold was gimcrack when you came close to it, and stopped abruptly twenty feet away, to give place to the hollow, cluttered chaos of any other sound stage, littered with skeleton fragments of booms and wiring and cameras and lighting equipment, and a miscellaneous assortment of frayed, bearded, distrait people carrying improbable things and using improbable words in several languages. ‘Cheek by jowl’ suggested itself, Dominic thought, in some underhand way, but could hardly be entertained in face of Eleanor’s resolute and shapely little chin and Marianne’s damask-rose cheek. In view of the late-Empire ball gowns of Indian muslin, the daintily deployed curls, dark brown and scintillating gold, and the white silk mittens that stopped only just short of the creamy shoulders, better settle for hand-in-glove. As sure as fate, that was what they were; and anyone around here who had plans that involved manipulating these two Dresden deities had better watch out, because he would be playing a formidable team.
It was an earnest of their sheer professionalism that even between takes they continued to look in character, Chloe gently grave and cool and exceedingly well-bred, Dorette sparkling and distressed by turns, as extrovert as a fountain. Neither of them put her feet up or lit a cigarette. They sat with one foot delicately tucked behind the other, to show a glimpse of a pretty ankle, as young ladies were taught to sit once, long before the miniskirt and the glorious freedom of tights. Dominic revised a half-conceived notion of what Dorette must be like; she might not be a gifted actress, but she was an intelligent diplomat who could make what gifts she had do just as well.
And talk! She could talk the hind leg off a donkey!
‘… and then, you see, Tossa — Oh, forgive me! May I call you Tossa? You see, I feel I know you already, your mother has talked so much about you. And you’re so like her, did you know that?’ Tossa knew it, and could hardly fail to be flattered by it, even though she often looked in the glass to find the homely, reassuring outlines of her father’s face, less obviously but just as surely there behind the delicate flesh, and the straight, bright, luminous gleam of fun in the eyes that could only have come from him. ‘…and then, his family made it quite impossible, you know. Oh, Satyavan was simply the new India in person, travelled, educated, sophisticated, brilliant and already rich in his own right… he had a company making beautiful cosmetics, and another one running travel agencies all over the east and the Middle East. The family were rupee millionaires even before him, but that was all in textiles, cottons and silks, and they really looked down on anything else. An old family, too, and these Punjabis are very proud. So I was the undesirable one, you see. His mother was broken-hearted when he married me. She’d been widowed for two years then, and Satyavan was the only child, and of course, you know, sons… Hindu sons… Sometimes I think that if only Anjli had been a boy… But she wasn’t, and then there weren’t any more children.’ She wiped away, discreetly and with great dignity, a non-existent tear. ‘Really we never had a chance to bridge the gulf. And it is a real gulf, one would need a lot of patience, and love, and craft… and luck! And luck we didn’t have.’
Dominic hedged his bet still more cautiously. Only a very clever woman would have used the word ‘craft’ just there. Moreover, Chloe, delicately fanning, her wide eyes on her fictional sister with all the critical admiration of a second watching his expert principal in a duel (and without any qualms whatsoever about the outcome), had raised one eyebrow with a connoisseur’s approbation, and the corners of her very charming and very knowing mouth had curled into an infinitesimal and brief smile of pleasure. What chance had any husband with women like these?
‘And he didn’t even try to get custody of Anjli?’ Tossa had seen the omens, too, and reacted with a blunt and discordant question; simply, thought Dominic, to see what would happen.
Dorette’s damask cheek bloomed into the most delicious peach colour, and again faded to the waxen white perfection of magnolias. Dominic was fascinated. The magicians of the world would go grey overnight, worrying how she did that in full view of her audience, at a range of a few feet, and in harsh film lighting.