‘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.
The priority of the eighteen-strong team of firemen was therefore to get the blaze sufficiently under control to ensure that it would not spread to adjacent residences, all of whose occupants were speedily evacuated. At the height of the conflagration, a heavy pall of smoke was visible from a distance of up to thirty miles away.
At 6.15 firemen were finally able to gain entry to what was now no more than a smoking, skeletal carcass. There the horrific discovery was made of two badly burnt corpses. These have still to be officially identified, but the police have already let it be known to this reporter that there would seem to be no doubt at all that they are Mr Farjeon, the film producer, and his young protégée.
Asked if there was any suspicion of foul play, Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D., the officer in charge of the case, confined himself to stating that the circumstances of the catastrophe would be thoroughly investigated but that every indication so far suggested that it had been a tragic accident.
Later, interviewed on the telephone, the well-known film-maker Herbert (I Live in Grosvenor Square) Wilcox paid a warm and heartfelt tribute to Mr Farjeon. ‘His death,’ he said, ‘is a tragedy for the post-war revival of the British film industry. He was a true artist who brought clever ideas and bizarre angles to a medium which has never been more sorely in need of them. One did not have to approve of all his work to sense that one was in the presence of genius.’
Maurice Elvey, whose many popular pictures have included The Lamp Still Burns and Strawberry Roan, declared, ‘I doubt we shall see his like again.’
The investigation continues.
Trubshawe then turned to the newspaper’s necrological page. There was, as he noted at once, a lengthy, laudatory obituary of Farjeon himself but none at all of the far less celebrated Patsy Sloots. Her name, indeed, was mentioned only once in Farjeon’s own obituary, as the actress who had been selected to play the leading female role in the producer’s (as the obituarist also insisted on describing him) new project, If Ever They Find Me Dead, alongside Gareth Knight, Patricia Roc, Mary Clare, Raymond Lovell, Felix Aylmer and – ‘At last!’ muttered Trubshawe – Cora Rutherford.
He laid the newspaper down and began to mull over what he had just read. Burnt to death! What a ghastly way to go! Puts you on a par with Joan of Arc and – what was the name of the Italian scientist condemned to death for heresy? – Giordano somebody? – Bruno! – Giordano Bruno! We all shudder inwardly whenever we read of how these martyrs were roped to the stake and the faggots piled up around their bare feet and everything set alight and how long did it take before they were asphyxiated and surely the fact itself of asphyxiation couldn’t quite mean that they wouldn’t have started to feel the flames creeping up their legs? It didn’t bear thinking of …
Yet, after all, both Joan of Arc and Giordano Bruno were long dead, centuries long dead, ghosts who belonged to a dim, unknowable past and who have survived into the present as
not much more than musty illustrations in a schoolboy’s history-book. What about all those ordinary what’s-their-names who simply had the misfortune to be caught inside a blazing building? Not Alastair Farjeon, of course, who certainly wasn’t a what’s-his-name and, from all accounts, couldn’t have been further from ordinary. No, think instead of those decent, hard-working, God-fearing East End folk who, bombed out of their beds in the Blitz, some of them at least, suffered no less hideous a fate than Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno, except that their names will never ring gloriously down the ages. Yes, it did make you think …
He thought, as well, of the news, the slightly startling news, that the case had been assigned to Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D. Well, well, well. Young Tom Calvert, already an Inspector. And in Richmond, too – a pip of a posting, if he wasn’t mistaken. He had known Tom’s father well and had followed the son’s progress when he was just a policeman on the beat, down Bermondsey way, he seemed to recall. He had been the kind of fair and friendly bobby everybody warmed to. Always had a gobstopper or a digestive biscuit for the poorer kiddies, always greeted the regulars at the Horse and Groom with a cheery ‘Evening all!’, never laid too heavy a hand on the shoulder of some bedraggled old biddy who’d had a tawny port or three over the limit. And now he’s an Inspector, if you please.
His reflections turned next to Cora Rutherford. It was a queer experience meeting up with her again after the passage of so many years – years, he couldn’t help feeling, that had taken their toll on her once flawless façade. She was still, to be sure, the epitome of sheen and self-assurance, still enhaloed by that lustrous aura of the ethereal and the unapproachable that, against all the odds, theatricals and – what would you call them? cinematicals? – somehow manage to preserve, more or less intact, into their dotage, their anecdotage, as the old joke has it. There could be no doubt, though, that she no longer possessed the bubbly vivaciousness of old, quite that potent mixture of film-star poise and spoilt-child petulance that had made her, a decade before, so distinctive a personality. And the fact that she was the very last to be cited among the players who had been cast in Farjeon’s new picture, coupled with the equally telling fact that, when she realised that it was no longer going to be made, she had let herself go to pieces so rashly and recklessly – and in the swankiest restaurant in London, too – only confirmed that she wasn’t nearly as confident now of her – what’s the word? magnetism? – as when they had first met. It was sad, of course, it was really dreadfully sad. But, after all, just what was the woman’s age? Fifty? Sixty?
Trubshawe remembered how Evie had revealed, during his interrogation of her at ffolkes Manor, that she and Cora had once shared a minuscule flat in Bloomsbury when they were both barely out of their teens and – no, no, try to forget what else she had inadvertently let slip about that cohabitation of theirs! At any rate, it all did seem to imply that actress and novelist were pretty much the same age, and the latter, he knew, was certainly no spring chicken. No summer chicken either. Autumn, he said to himself, autumn was the season, late autumn at that. Poor woman, he mused, and he did feel a genuine sympathy for Cora’s plight. Life was assuredly no sinecure for an actress past her prime.
And Evadne Mount herself? Quite a character, she was. It’s strange. If he had been asked, Trubshawe would unquestionably have answered that he hadn’t given her more than a passing thought in the decade since their initial encounter. Even when he read her novels (and had taken the trouble to catch up with her long-running stage play, The Tourist Trap, whose murderer had turned out, to his naïve surprise and obscure resentment, to be the investigating police officer), he had found them so absorbing that it simply hadn’t occurred to him to attribute their qualities to a woman he had actually met – just as a mother, watching her offspring grow up, soon forgets that these autonomous and increasingly independent little beings were once the inhabitants of her own womb.
Yes, he was a fan of Evadne Mount’s work; nor was he in any way ashamed to admit it. Yet he almost never spoke to his cluster of acquaintances of his enthusiasm for her whodunits and, on the very rare occasions he did, it was not at all his manner airily to brag of having struck up an acquaintanceship with their author.
By chance, however, she had walked back into his life – or rather, he had walked back into hers, as into a lamp-post – and, less than twenty-four hours later, here he was thinking of her and Cora Rutherford and Alastair Farjeon and Patsy Sloots and young Tom Calvert and all. Like her or loathe her, impossible as she often could be, things did tend to happen around Evadne Mount.
And that was the crux of the matter. Nothing much tended any longer to happen around him. After years of serving the Law, years of being universally respected as one of the Yard’s top men, here he was, what, a codger? Yes, a codger. An old geezer.
He owned a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached house in Golders Green in which he lived a pleasant, comfortable, semi-detached life. He had a thriving little vegetable garden in which he would grow his own leeks and radishes and carrots. He had an ever-diminishing circle of friends from the old days whom he would meet for a congenial pint in his local hostelry. And he had an occasional, these days extremely occasional, lunch in Town with a few pals from the Yard.
When it was with former colleagues of his own generation that he lunched, it was a real treat. He enjoyed reminiscing with his peers about the curiously, paradoxically, innocent criminals whom they had all dealt with at one time or another over the years, criminals for whom, by virtue of an unvarying, even comforting, routine of arrest, charge, trial, sentence, release and re-arrest, they had all acquired a certain fondness.
But every so often, or every so seldom, he would be invited out to lunch by one of the younger crowd, somebody whose mentor he’d once been or flattered himself he’d been – and that tended to prove something of an ordeal.
It wasn’t just the mortifying impression they left, however kindly disposed they seemed to be towards him, that, compared to their methods, his generation’s had been almost comically outmoded; that, far from having advanced the science of criminology, as he secretly prided himself he had done, he and his contemporaries had actually set it back a couple of decades. It was also the fact that they all appeared to be engaged on fascinating cases which, just to hear about, caused his mouth literally to water.
He felt old and irrelevant, a back-number. If he offered a suggestion as to how they might proceed on some ongoing case, they would listen politely enough until he had finished speaking, then simply pick up where they had left off as though he himself had never opened his mouth. Contrariwise, if he pointed out some striking resemblance between that ongoing case and one with which he himself had been involved several years back, they would shake their heads with ill-concealed amusement, as though to answer him would merely be to humour him, and they would end by remarking, unfailingly, ‘You know, Mr Trubshawe, things have changed since your day …’
Ah yes, things had changed since his day … But if it wouldn’t be true to say that he had got definitively used to his becalmed way of life, at least he had, if one can phrase it so, got used to not getting used to it. Until, that is, he had idly wandered into the tearoom of the Ritz Hotel and heard the unforgettable – and, he realised, never quite forgotten – voice of Evadne Mount, his old sparring partner.
How that same voice, ten years before, had set his false teeth on edge! And how, yesterday, he couldn’t deny it, how it had positively rejuvenated him! As had everything that followed. After tea at the Ritz, a visit to a grand West End theatre, a marvellously funny hoax of which he was just as willing a victim as anybody else in the audience, dinner at the Ivy with Evadne and Cora Rutherford, and finally the shock, but equally (admit it, Trubshawe) the secret thrill, of hearing, before the news hit the headlines, of the death of a famous film director whose name had meant nothing to him just the day before. All that, a good deal more than had happened to him in the past ten years, squeezed into just sixteen hour
s!
He sat there, at his oblong kitchen table, sucking on his unlit pipe. He had never really looked forward to retirement but had had to resign himself to what was, after all, the ruthless way of a ruthless world. You worked hard for forty years – work, in his case, which he loved unreservedly – and then you retired. Or, as again in his case, you were retired.
His own luck, however, had run out almost at once. His wife, with whom he’d looked forward to sharing his retirement, had passed away only a few months after he quit the Yard. His loyal old Labrador, Tobermory, had been shot dead on the moors near ffolkes Manor. Just one exciting thing had happened to him in all the years that followed – meeting Evadne Mount again. Would there be, he wondered wistfully, any more to come?
Naturally, he would never have contemplated ringing her up, even had he known her telephone number. But then a sudden remembrance came to him. What was it she had said? That she could be found at the Ritz every day at teatime. So what if he, Trubshawe, ‘just happened’ to stroll into the hotel one day at around five o’clock and what if he ‘just happened’ to run into her? Oh, not today, not tomorrow, not even the day after tomorrow. Towards the end of the week, perhaps? Or at the beginning of next?
He shook his head sadly. That wouldn’t do at all.
What troubled him wasn’t that Evadne Mount would get ‘the wrong idea’ – considering their respective ages, appearances and dispositions, nothing could be more improbable – but that she would get the right idea. That she would realise at once he’d become a lonely old man whose need for company was such he actually hoped she would accept the terminally lame excuse that he had chanced to drop, yet again, into the poshest hotel in London.
No, forget it. The novelist had re-exited his life as swiftly and casually as he had re-entered hers.
A Mysterious Affair of Style Page 5