‘Thank you for coming,’ I said abruptly. ‘Good night Joanna.’
She said, surprised, ‘Wouldn’t you like some more coffee... or something?’
Or something. Yes.
I said, ‘I couldn’t eat or drink another thing. Anyway... there’s Brian...’
‘Brian’s in Manchester, on tour,’ she said. But it was a statement of fact, not an invitation.
‘Oh. Well, all the same, I think I’d better get some sleep,’ I said.
‘All right, then.’ She was undisturbed. ‘A lovely dinner, Rob. Thank you.’ She put her hand for a moment on my shoulder in a friendly fashion and smiled good night. She put the key in her door and opened it and waved briefly to me as I turned and started back down the mews. She shut her door. I swore violently, aloud. It wasn’t much relief. I looked up at the sky. The stars went on whizzing round in their courses, uncaring and cold.
Five
They gave me what in the Finn family was known as F.I.P. treatment at the Universal Telecast Studios. Fairly Important Person. It meant being met by someone well enough up in the hierarchy of the organisation for it to be clear that trouble was being taken, but not so high that he needed to be supported by lieutenants.
My mother was a connoisseur of all the shades between V.I.P. and F.I.P. and invariably noticed every detail of the pains or lack of them taken to make her feel comfortable. Her awareness had rubbed off on to me at a very early age and the whole gambit caused me a lot of quiet amusement when I grew up. Years of being a U.I.P. (Unimportant Person) had only sharpened my appreciation.
I went through the swinging glass doors into the large echoing entrance hall and asked the girl at the reception desk where I should go. She smiled kindly. Would I sit down, she said, gesturing to a near-by sofa. I sat. She spoke down the telephone, ‘Mr. Finn is here, Gordon.’
Within ten seconds a burly young man with freckles and a rising-young-executive, navy-blue, pin-striped suit advanced briskly from one of the corridors.
‘Mr. Finn?’ he said expansively, holding out a hand protruding from a snowy, gold-linked shirt cuff.
‘Yes,’ I said, standing up and shaking hands.
‘Glad to have you here. I am Gordon Kildare, Associate Producer. Maurice is up in the studio running over the last minute details, so I suggest we go along and have a drink and a sandwich first.’ He led the way down the corridor he had come from and we turned in through an open door into a small impersonal reception room. On the table stood bottles and glasses and four plates of fat freshly-cut and appetising-looking sandwiches.
‘What will you have?’ he asked hospitably, his hands hovering over the bottles.
‘Nothing, thank you,’ I said.
He was not put out. ‘Perhaps afterwards, then?’ He poured some whisky into a glass, added soda and raised it to me, smiling. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Is this your first time on television?’
I nodded.
‘The great thing is to be natural.’ He picked up a sandwich with a pink filling and took a squelchy bite.
The door opened and two more men came in. Introduced to me as Dan something and Paul something, they were a shade less carefully dressed than Gordon Kildare, to whom they deferred. They too dug into the sandwiches and filled their glasses, and wished me luck and told me to be natural.
Maurice Kemp-Lore strode briskly in with a couple of sports-jacketed assistants in tow.
‘My dear chap,’ he greeted me, shaking me warmly by the hand. ‘Glad to see you’re here in good time. Has Gordon been looking after you? That’s right. Now, what are you drinking?’
‘Nothing just now,’ I said.
‘Oh? Oh well, never mind. Perhaps afterwards? You got the list of questions all right?’
I nodded.
‘Have you thought out some answers?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good, good. That’s fine,’ he said.
Gordon handed him a well-filled glass and offered him the sandwiches. The assistants helped themselves. It dawned on me that the refreshments provided for the entertainment of visitors probably served all of them as their main evening meal.
Kemp-Lore looked at his watch. ‘Our other guest is cutting it rather fine.’ As he spoke the telephone rang. Gordon answered it, listened briefly, said ‘He’s here, Maurice,’ and opened the door.
Kemp-Lore went out first, followed by Gordon and either Dan or Paul, who looked very much alike. It was a more impressive welcoming committee than had been accorded me: I smiled to think of what my mother would have said.
A sports-jacketed assistant offered me sandwiches.
‘No?’ he said. ‘Oh, well, a lot of people feel like that beforehand. You’ll be very hungry afterwards.’ He put two sandwiches carefully together and stretched open his mouth to bite them.
The voice of Kemp-Lore could be heard coming back along the corridor talking with someone who spoke in a harsh voice with a nasal twang. I wondered idly who the other guest would be and whether I knew him. At the doorway Kemp-Lore stood respectfully back to let his guest precede him into the room. My spirits sank. Paunch and horn-rims well to the fore, Mr. John Ballerton allowed himself to be ushered in.
Kemp-Lore introduced all the television men to him. ‘And Rob Finn, of course, you know?’ he said.
Ballerton nodded coldly in my direction without meeting my eyes. Evidently it still rankled with him that I had seen him sicking up beside Art’s body. Perhaps he knew that I had not kept it a secret from the other jockeys.
‘It’s time we went up to the studio, I think,’ Kemp-Lore said, looking enquiringly at Gordon, who nodded.
We all filed out into the corridor, and as I passed the table I noticed the sandwich plates now held nothing but crumbs and a few straggly pieces of cress.
The smallish studio held a chaotic-looking tangle of cameras trailing their thick cables over the floor. To one side there was a shallow carpet-covered platform on which stood three low-slung chairs and a coffee table. A tray with three cups, cream jug and sugar basin shared the table with three empty balloon brandy glasses, a silver cigarette box and two large glass ash-trays.
Kemp-Lore took Ballerton and me towards this arrangement.
‘We want to look as informal as possible,’ he said pleasantly. ‘As if we had just had dinner and were talking over coffee and brandy and cigars.’
He asked Ballerton to sit in the left-hand chair and me in the right, and then took his place between us. Set in front and slightly to one side stood a monitor set with a blank screen; and in a semicircle a battery of cameras converged their menacing black lenses in our direction.
Gordon and his assistants spent some time checking their lights, which dazed us with a dazzling intensity for a few moments, and then tested for sound while the three of us made stilted conversation over the empty cups. When he was satisfied, Gordon came over to us. ‘You all need make-up,’ he said. ‘Maurice, you’ll see to yours as usual? Then Mr. Ballerton and Mr. Finn, I’ll show you where to go, if you will follow me?’
He led us to a small room off one corner of the studio. There were two girls there in pink overalls and bright smiles.
‘It won’t take long,’ they said, smoothing coloured cream into our skins. ‘Just a little darkener under the eyes... that’s right. Now powder...’ They patted the powder on with pads of cotton wool, carefully flicking off the excess. ‘That’s all.’
I looked in the mirror. The make-up softened and blurred both the outlines of the face and texture of the skin. I didn’t much care for it.
‘You’d look ill on television without it,’ the girls assured us. ‘You need make-up to look natural and healthy.’