by Jilly Cooper
The only person not ravished by the rushes was Hermione. She was in the habit of pestering her agent, Howie Denston, twenty times a day, even ordering him to ring up and tell her chauffeur to turn down the car radio when she was being driven the half-mile from River House to Valhalla.
Now she told Howie to tell Tristan she could only film in the afternoons, when her big brown eyes were fully open. She also sacked her make-up artist and insisted on having Lucy.
Lucy was then summoned to Hermione’s caravan for a glass of very cheap South African sherry as the great diva lay stretched out on a bed, a pad steeped in witch-hazel over her eyes.
‘As I’m playing a beautiful young princess in this film,’ announced Hermione, ‘I thought it fitting at first to employ a beautiful young make-up artist, who would be au fait with the latest trends. While you’re here, Lucy dear, could you peel those grapes, and pop them into my mouth? Now I realize I was wrong.’ Hermione sounded as though she was going over to Rome. ‘Far better to go for a mature, older woman, like yourself, who knows the ropes. You mustn’t be fazed, Lucy. I have every faith in you.’
‘I wanted to ram her bloody grapes down her throat,’ Lucy told Tristan afterwards.
Although he was cross, Tristan was ecstatic Lucy could now feed his ideas into Hermione’s thick skull. But realizing Lucy never finished clearing up and doing her paperwork before midnight, he promised her more help – perhaps Rozzy from Wardrobe.
‘And you need more light in here.’
Lucy was so touched he’d noticed she’d have made up the entire crew. Griselda, however, was livid. Rozzy was the best assistant she’d ever had: she was determined to hang on to her.
Wolfie was also proving a great asset, checking Oscar’s cigars were lit and that Tristan didn’t lose his camera script. And if he found Bernard ugly and uncharming, he didn’t mob him up like the others. Having been brought up with artists, Wolfie was quite used to them losing their head and their nerve several times a day, and somehow managed to get everyone – except Hermione – out of their dressing rooms on time. Outwardly, however, he appeared terribly arrogant.
The crew, resenting this, pinned a notice saying ‘Stalag Studios’ on Wolfie’s door and whistled ‘The Dambusters’ every time he walked past. Ogborne and three of the sparks had too much to drink one lunchtime and proceeded to circle the production office, where Wolfie was wrestling with the next day’s call sheet. Sticking their arms out, they pretended to be Lancasters and lobbed Scotch eggs through the window.
Wolfie ignored them, but later that evening Tristan found him gazing miserably into space. He knew Wolfie’s arrogance was a defence mechanism, and that beneath his reserve he was warm-hearted and thoughtful. It had been Wolfie who had told Tristan Lucy needed more light.
Tristan had also noticed the anguish Wolfie couldn’t hide when an ecstatic Flora, baseball cap tugged over her short back and sides, had flown off to join George that morning.
Tristan was a workaholic but, for once, he abandoned his storyboards and bore Wolfie off to dinner at the Old Bell in Rutminster. Wolfie had always been jealous of Tristan because Rannaldini had such a high regard for him but now, over several bottles, they discussed Schiller, horrendously competitive fathers and, inevitably, the cast.
As they walked back unsteadily from the Valhalla car park, across the valley, a light like a low bright star was shining in Magpie Cottage.
‘You could loosen up with Tabitha,’ said Tristan idly.
‘She’s appalling,’ said Wolfie bleakly. ‘The most awful human being I’ve ever met.’
‘The wicked stepsister.’ Tristan smiled in the darkness. ‘And you could stop bitching up Flora.’
‘I made love to Flora in every inch of this park,’ said Wolfie. His face was in shadow, but his voice was raw with pain. ‘The night I took her to the school dance, my father landed his helicopter on the cricket pitch, and Flora disappeared into it like Close Encounters. I left home the next morning or I’d have murdered him. And how can she live with that thug George Hungerford? He’s knocked down more buildings in Dresden than Winston Churchill.’
As they wandered past the north wing Tristan noticed, with a sinking heart, the curtains moving in Bernard’s still-lit window. If Bernard felt he was being usurped as Tristan’s confidant he would give Wolfie a hard time.
Next day Rannaldini pushed off to New York for a week and, heaving a sigh of relief, Tristan decided to kick off indoor filming with Posa’s moving death scene in the dungeons. This was scuppered by Mikhail missing the plane from Moscow. So Tristan switched to a later scene, in which Carlos and Philip are joined by Eboli and the Grand Inquisitor, with the Spanish rabble outside the dungeons all clamouring for Carlos to be set free. This meant an awful lot of people for Lucy to make up.
Her biggest challenge was to turn the silver-haired, noble-browed, patrician Granville Hastings into Gordon Dillon, the Neanderthal thug who edited the Scorpion and whose hairline rested on his straight-across brows. Lucy was terrified of letting Tristan down, but Granny promptly cheered her up by bitching about Hermione. ‘My dear, the only reason Madam is so addicted to playing the pink oboe is that she’s read that seminal fluid rejuvenates the vocal cords.’
Lucy giggled, then added charitably that it seemed to work.
‘She showed me the marvellous reviews she had for Rinaldo.’
‘Her mother must have written them,’ said Granny waspishly.
‘Oh, you do cheer me up.’ Lucy was sticking on a long line of beetling black eyebrow.
‘Don’t take any truck from her, Lucy Lockett,’ said Granny, ‘or from Alpheus, who’s such a wooden actor he makes that table look like Anthony Hopkins, and you’re going to have dreadful trouble with his hooter.’ Granny smirked admiringly at his own beautifully aquiline nose. ‘Alpheus has a bigger conk than Rudolph the Reindeer.’
Lucy had just grabbed a pair of scissors to trim the ends of Granny’s brows when Meredith bustled in in great excitement.
‘You can down tools, Lucy darling. Hi, Granville dear. Repairing a dungeon wall, one of the set-builders has unearthed a skeleton with a rosary round its neck.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Lucy nearly dropped her scissors.
‘Anyone we know?’ asked Granny, retrieving a dropped stitch.
‘Probably the planning officer,’ said Meredith gleefully. ‘He’s been so dire.’
The dungeons at Valhalla had always been damp and chill. Now none of the crew would go in there, even after Percy the Parson was summoned and sprinkled holy water from a Smirnoff bottle.
Ever conscious of a spiralling budget, Tristan gritted his teeth. He’d have to reschedule. Mikhail had now rung in from Moscow claiming to be laid low with bronchitis, so Baby could shove off for a few days and stop making a nuisance of himself and they could switch to the Great Hall, which had been transformed by Meredith, with the help of a massive white and gold silk four-poster, into King Philip’s bedroom.
Meredith’s minions were already busy dusting the arctic white marble chimneypiece, and touching up gilt cherubs, who were getting up to no good in the frieze running round the white walls. The prop table groaned with priceless ornaments, which Rannaldini intended to keep after filming and which Meredith kept rearranging, driving tiny Simone crackers.
Griselda had agonized long and loudly over what a king should wear in bed and settled for a magnificent Turnbull & Asser dressing-gown in pink and purple stripes, which Alpheus was equally determined to hang on to after filming. Having spent a duty fortnight in the Caribbean with his wife, Cheryl, he was also frantic to screw Chloe.
Filming began with the insomniac Philip’s great soliloquy. Even though he had played the part twenty times, Alpheus was avid to know his motivation.
‘The candles are guttering,’ said Tristan. ‘It is the heure de loup just before dawn, when man’s resistance is at its lowest. You feel old and threatened because your ravishing young wife and your sexy, demanding mistress are both madly in
love with your son. You are also deeply hurt and raging with jealousy.’
‘Too right,’ agreed Sylvestre, dropping a cold microphone down Alpheus’s hairy chest, which had just been greyed up by Lucy. ‘I would be peesed off with scenario like that.’
‘No-one asked your opinion,’ snapped Bernard. ‘All right. Quiet, please, we’re going for a take.’
‘How d’you get a pompous ass like Alpheus to act devastated?’ muttered Meredith.
‘Show him a seven-figure tax bill,’ muttered back Granny.
‘Quiet!’ thundered Bernard.
In the heartbreakingly beautiful cello solo, which sets the mood of the aria, Alpheus wandered dazedly round the room, then plundered Elisabetta’s desk, which was rumoured once to have belonged to Louis XIV. As he riffled through her diary, scrutinized her itemized telephone and Amex bills, and finally rooted under the mattress of the big double bed for love letters, Rozzy Pringle gave a groan. How often had she done that at home, praying she wouldn’t stumble on more evidence of her feckless husband Glyn’s infidelities?
Alpheus then sang the first part of the aria so beautifully, and with such an air of nobility and resignation, that the crew gave him a rare round of applause.
Alpheus can act and his nose looks fine. Naughty Granny, thought Lucy indignantly.
If only it were me singing that aria, thought Granny.
Tristan was going to use the rest of the aria as voiceover when he filmed Philip forcing himself on a young, unresponsive bride.
Suddenly at the prospect of watching Alpheus and Hermione in the sack, the number of people on the set seemed to have quadrupled. Mr Brimscombe, Rannaldini’s gardener, who was always leering into the female extras’ changing room, was pretending to trim back the famous Paradise Pearl wisteria so that he could peer in through a high stained-glass window depicting St Cecilia at her organ.
The weather was still bitterly cold and the cost of heating the hall alone was putting Liberty Productions over budget. There was no way, however, that Hermione was going to risk turning blue in a shove-and-grunt scene.
Howie Denston hadn’t quite screwed up enough courage to tell Sexton and Tristan that she wouldn’t be filming in the mornings any more, but she made him ring in now to say that she had a cold. Everyone was less than amused when she promptly whizzed off to sing in an arena concert in New York, except Rannaldini who was already there and was taking a fat percentage of her hundred-thousand-pound fee. Far from chiding her, he sent the Gulf to collect her.
A demented Tristan was forced once more to reschedule. Granny, who’d been planning to go to Sense and Sensibility with Chloe, was livid to be dragged into filming the blind Inquisitor’s great dialogue with Philip and insisted on upstaging Alpheus by feeding Bonios to his guide dog, who was being played quite excellently by Sharon the Labrador.
Granny’s make-up, beetle-browed above black glasses, made him look so menacingly like Gordon Dillon that, after crossing themselves, the crew also gave Lucy a round of applause. Sexton, who’d rushed down from London to have a butcher’s at a naked Hermione, felt Granny’s makeover was so realistic that they’d better watch out for an injunction from the Scorpion.
The power struggle between Granny and Alpheus was so crucial to the plot that it took four days to film, by which time Sharon, egged on by Granny, had chewed up both of Alpheus’s blue velvet crested slippers.
Alpheus had not endeared himself to the crew. Regally bidding them all to drinks in the Pearly Gates, leading the stampede, he would grind to a halt just outside the pub to admire the mullioned windows and the variegated skyline of turrets.
‘You Brits are so lucky, your history is so old.’
By which time the first round would have been bought, and Alpheus, who had read somewhere that the Royal Family never carry money, would get away with not buying a drink all evening.
‘The least often heard words in the English language’, grumbled Ogborne, ‘are “Thank you, Alpheus.”’
‘The next least heard words are Alpheus saying, “It’s my round,”’ said Sylvestre.
Next day, Dame Hermione flew back from New York, but wanting to rest, and refusing to film in the morning, she made Howie ring in to say her throat was still playing up. Rather than waste a tropically heated hall, Tristan therefore shot a little shove-and-grunt scene between Alpheus and Chloe, which, having had plenty of practice, they did quite beautifully.
Once again in seconds, as Oscar ordered his team to rearrange their lights to cast a more diffused, romantic glow, the Great Hall was absolutely packed out. Sexton materialized from nowhere. Meredith was whisking around rearranging pieces of Sèvres on a table beside the bed on which Chloe was now lying on her back, the picture of abandonment. The fact that she had to wear an eye-patch to play the traditionally one-eyed Princess Eboli, somehow made her look even more sexy.
‘Don’t feedle with those ornaments, please, Meredith,’ begged Simone, consulting her Polaroids. ‘There were only two vases last time, not that anyone’s going to notice.’ She sighed.
The trouble with such a hot room was flat nipples. Lucy had to keep darting forward with ice-cubes.
‘Sometimes we use Blu-tack,’ she told Chloe.
‘Do you think my penis is too large?’ asked Alpheus seriously.
‘Not when Howie’s taken off his twenty per cent,’ replied Tristan.
Wolfie got the giggles.
‘Chloe’s chewed off all her lippy,’ bellowed an excited Griselda.
‘No-one’s going to notice that either,’ said Oscar, who for once had stayed awake. ‘God, look at the light on those pubes.’
‘She’s like a little Bonnard,’ sighed Simone.
‘I’ve certainly got a Bonnard-on,’ confessed Sexton, whose red-rimmed spectacles had quite steamed up.
‘Hush, or I’ll put ice down your trousers,’ chided a returning Lucy.
‘My mum wouldn’t let me do nudes,’ pouted Pushy Galore, who was dying to take her clothes off.
‘Quiet, please, everyone,’ brayed Bernard, whose face had gone an even darker shade of magenta.
‘God, this is sensational, Oscar. Dramatize the neck un peu, chérie,’ murmured Tristan, as Philip’s aria poured out of the speakers.
As Chloe raised her head, thrusting out her breasts so that the light caught her rouged, now upright nipples, an approaching Alpheus whipped off his pink and purple dressing-gown.
‘Action,’ shouted Tristan.
Claiming that his bronchitis had turned into pneumonia, Mikhail finally arrived and was overwhelmed by the beauty of Valhalla. A touch of rain had sent the green flames of the wild garlic sweeping over the woodland floor like a forest fire. Even Rannaldini’s lowering maze of dark yew had a blond rinse of lemon-yellow flowers.
‘You pay me for vorking in such vonderful place?’ Mikhail asked in amazement.
No-one, however, could quite work out whether he really had been ill or just moonlighting. He had turned up wearing a black Pavarotti smock, with large pockets for amassing loot. Maria, in the canteen, soon found her cutlery disappearing.
Then Mikhail started complaining that he missed Baby. Alpheus was no fun and far too expensive to drink with, and he missed his wife, Lara, even more, and kept hinting that Liberty Productions might pay for a plane ticket so she, too, could admire the ‘vonders’ of Valhalla. From New York, Rannaldini put his foot down. There was no way he was having Lara and Mikhail stripping Valhalla of his lovely new pickings.
Less welcome an arrival was Granny’s hunky black-haired boyfriend, Giuseppe, who wasn’t needed to play the ghost of Charles V for several weeks but who’d rocked up to ogle Tristan’s boys and enjoy free booze on the budget.
‘His mausoleum’s going to smell worse than the Pearly Gates,’ grumbled Ogborne.
Meanwhile, the digging up of the skeletons seemed to have disrupted the household ghosts. The night after Mikhail and Giuseppe arrived, the occupants of the north wing were woken by bloodcurdling shrieks.
When a terrified Lucy, a for once quite pale-in-the-face Bernard and an unfazed Ogborne, who was eating a banana, emerged from their cell-like rooms, they found hunky Giuseppe in hysterics. Having slipped Granny a Mogadon, he was just returning from an unspecified location, when he’d seen his own part, the ghost of Charles V, stealing out of a bedroom and creeping away down the corridor.
‘He was all in white, weeth a hood over ’ees face,’ gibbered Giuseppe.
As Giuseppe’s breath rivalled Bacchus’s after an all-night bash, everyone assumed he was plastered. Having calmed him down, Lucy tucked him up in bed beside a snoring Granny.
But the following night, as she was wearily drawing her curtains, the windows suddenly rattled, the wind shrieked in the chimney and a ghostly hooded white figure came flitting along the parapets. She had never known such fear – not even a strangled croak would come out of her throat. James the lurcher was no help at all, and only growled if you tried to shove him off the bed.
More sightings followed. Everyone grew increasingly terrified – except Alpheus, who pooh-poohed any suggestion of spooks.
‘I’m sure these apparitions would disappear if you guys went to bed sober for a change,’ he added pompously.
The weather, although nearly May, was still freezing. After supper the following night Alpheus, mindful of colds, locked his bedroom windows and drew his curtains against draughts. He had just mounted his exercise bike, with the Don Carlos score on a nearby music stand so he could study tomorrow’s scene, when a chill breeze ruffled the pages. Spinning round Alpheus found the windows still firmly locked.
Suddenly the room felt clammily damp and cold as if he were in an underground cave. Next moment a window behind him had blown open and the heavy dark green velvet curtains were billowing into the room. Outside Alpheus could see the cliff of wood disintegrating, thrashing and writhing as if caught up in the frenzy of a mighty gale. But jumping off his bike and rushing to the other window, he found the moonlit valley all stillness and serenity. The wispy white clouds were only crawling past the shining stars. Not a silver leaf was moving. Far below, the lake lay as still as the blacked-out window of a limousine.