“I didn’t use you; that’s an awful thing to say…”
“You used me, Grace. It’s perfectly true, and you know it. After six weeks together you cut me off without a word. No wonder I’m not welcoming,” Richard said.
It seemed I had some explaining to do. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” I pointed out. “It wasn’t done lightly. It just seemed to be the fairest thing to do. I only did what I thought best.”
“Best for whom?” Richard enquired. “It certainly wasn’t best for me.”
“Nor for me,” I admitted. “That’s why I’m ringing. I was wrong to say we shouldn’t stay in touch. I miss you.”
There was a silence. Eventually Richard said “Oh yes?” His voice was sceptical.
“I have made the first move, you must allow me that.”
Another silence. “I suppose I must,” he said grudgingly.
“Richard, what I said may have seemed unfair, and I was being selfish in a way, I was thinking about my career, I won’t deny that…”
“How very magnanimous of you to admit it!”
“…but I was also thinking of you! Of how unreasonable it would be to expect you to wait around whilst I was away for months at a time…”
“I have never waited around exactly,” Richard said.
“…and how unfair it would be to expect you to be faithful…”
“I’ve never been faithful.”
“I know!” I cried. “So what would be the use of expecting it! What would be the point!”
“The point is that we have always had an unspoken agreement,” Richard said in a calm voice. “If you choose to go off and pursue an acting career I can’t stop you, but at least you know I’m here, so why stay out of contact? What point is there in that?”
“There doesn’t seem to be any point.”
“So you have changed your mind, and now you are ringing to apologize?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“I’m waiting for you to apologize.”
“I’m sorry,” I said wearily.
“And you think that makes everything all right?”
I sighed. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to expect.”
“I expect too much, Grace. I thought you knew that – you have told me often enough – but I also expect you have another motive for ringing me.”
“Another motive? What other motive could I possibly have?”
“I expect you are miserable,” Richard said in a smug voice. “I expect the riding school does not live up to your expectations. I expect you don’t like it, Grace, and I further expect that far from ringing me to apologize, you rang me for support, for sympathy!”
“Sympathy! From you!” It was laughable. “Why, you haven’t an ounce of sympathy in your body! You are the last person I would ring for sympathy!”
“Not quite the last. Who else could you appeal to? Not your long-suffering mother, because she has never approved of your trying to be an actress…”
I had underestimated Richard. He knew me too well.
“…nor would you ring your decidedly dodgy agent, because he stands to lose his miserable ten per cent if you opt out…”
“How dare you accuse Ziggy of being dodgy!”
“Oh, so there is something going on between you two after all! I’ve often wondered!”
“Don’t judge everyone by your own standards of fidelity!”
“Well, Grace Darling.” Now that he had managed to turn the tables, Richard’s voice sounded amused. “Are you miserable?”
How could I possibly admit it now? “Of course I’m not miserable. As a matter of fact, I’ve just had my first riding lesson.”
“So now you’re an expert.”
“Hardly. I spent half an hour circling round on a lunge rein with no reins and stirrups, doing suppling exercises. The horse didn’t even go out of a walk.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I did, actually.” This was not the untruth it might have been. I might easily have enjoyed it had I not still been haunted by images of the equine carnage wreaked by the chariot racing scenes in Ben Hur.
“What’s the accommodation like?”
I thought of the accommodation; of the hideous farmhouse with its bulging walls and falling plaster. I thought of my room with its sloping floor and musty costumes. I thought of the beastly little bathroom with its lukewarm water and its sills heaped with dead bluebottles. “The accommodation’s fine,” I said. “It isn’t splendid, but it’s quite adequate. My bed is new.”
“Food?”
“I haven’t had any yet.” Nor was I certain that any would be offered. In the brick-floored kitchen next to the untidy office where I had located the telephone, there was nothing remotely evocative of food. The Aga was cold and covered with a layer of dust. There was an electric kettle on an old pine dresser empty of plates, a jar of cheap instant coffee, a packet of white sugar. I had pulled open the refrigerator and seen two bottles of milk, half a packet of bright yellow margarine, and two sausages with an unhealthy pink bloom on their skins.
“What about the people?”
“The people are charming,” I said firmly. I was tired of Richard’s investigations and determined to give nothing away.
“In that case I shall drive over to see you,” he decided.
“What?”
“I said I would drive over to see you. You needn’t sound so astonished. You made the first move. I shall make the second.”
“But Richard, I’m not sure that I… I mean, I don’t know if…”
“You do want to see me again, Grace?”
“Well,” I said, flustered. “I…”
“You told me you missed me. That you were wrong to say we shouldn’t stay in touch. You said it only a few minutes ago.”
“I know, but…”
“I can’t come this week because all my appointments are arranged, so it will have to be next week. It might even be the week after that, but I shall come. I’ll ring first.” Richard was Deputy Managing Director of his father’s company. He had a proper job.
I gave him the telephone number, reading from the grubby dial of the old-fashioned black telephone. I told myself that at least I had time to think up some ploy to put him off; some invented reason to prevent his arrival. Somehow I would be able to stop him coming to Moat Farm.
“That will be lovely,” I told him, “I shall look forward to it.”
“Me too.” He was about to say something more, but his attention was diverted by the urgent shrilling of another telephone.
I put down the telephone receiver. Angel was sitting on the kitchen table, swinging her legs. As there was no connecting door, she had obviously been listening to every word. The cobalt eyes were speculative and also vaguely anxious. “Boyfriend?” she wanted to know.
I nodded briefly. I was not about to embark upon a discussion of my most private affairs with Angel.
“Is he good-looking?”
I thought of Richard’s smoothly handsome face, his natural and somewhat infuriating elegance, and the way his fair hair fell into his beautiful blue eyes fringed with thick lashes. “No,” I said, “he’s rather ugly actually.”
Angel shrugged. “Looks aren’t everything though, are they? Are you in love with him?”
Her curiosity was boundless. “Certainly not. If you must know, not only is he ugly, he’s also conceited and totally insensitive, and I just wish he would stop pestering me.” None of this was true, but it seemed to satisfy Angel.
“Good,” she said. “It makes things easier if you’re unattached. You will pay for the call?” she added cheerfully as I made my escape. “Long-distance before six costs a bomb these days.”
Climbing the wormy stairs, feeling the top of my thighs stiffening after my lunge lesson, I wondered what had put her in such a good humour. Then I remembered my description of the farmhouse and its occupants and decided it was
probably the first time in her life that Angel had heard herself and Anthony described as charming.
Sustenance came from an unexpected source. The evening meal arrived in a van, delivered by one of the catering staff from the local hostelry, The Hare and Hounds.
“I never cook,” Angel said, throwing cutlery around the scarred kitchen table, plopping down petrol station tumblers, and filling a plastic jug with water from the tap. “I don’t have the time. I mean, if you cook, you also have to shop. How could I possibly fit it all in? How would I cope?” She flopped down into a chair and stared at her meal – boiled-in-the-bag coq au vin, overcooked frozen peas, and a generous portion of limp French fries – in a circumspect manner.
“That isn’t exactly true.” Anthony, who had been sitting at the table for some time, put aside his copy of Horse and Hound. “Angel used to cook, but then there was the little episode of the casserole.”
“The casserole?”
“I made a casserole,” Angel explained, “a large one. I thought it would last a few days. Then we were called out to do some filming because Hender Copper’s faller went lame…”
“Hender Copper’s faller?”
“Hender Copper could be regarded as the enemy,” Anthony said in a grim tone. “He’s the opposition. And a faller is a horse trained to fall without trip wires.”
“I see,” I said hastily, “Quite.” I hoped he would not ask me to remember Ben Hur, not just as I was about to begin my supper. As the others were already eating, I picked up my fork and speared a chip in a half-hearted manner. I was tired. All my bones ached from the lunge lesson, and I had spent the latter part of the afternoon scrubbing out water buckets.
“All the buckets need cleaning out,” Angel had sighed. “If I found you a scrubbing brush, I don’t suppose you could…?” Well, there had been little else to occupy my time.
“Anyway,” Angel continued, “we were away for three days and when we got back it was late at night and we were absolutely starving. So I warmed up the casserole.”
“But not too much,” Anthony added, “only enough to wake up the salmonella bacteria.”
“The results were rather dire,” Angel admitted.
“Yes, I expect they were.” I looked unhappily at my plate. The coq au vin glowed with an unwholesome brilliance which owed more to cochineal than to vin. The French fries sprawled in the watery sauce, luke-warm, flaccid and glistening. I have never liked frozen peas.
“Still,” Angel said, brightening, “as we shall be filming tomorrow, I expect we shall be quite decently fed.”
“We?” I remembered Mr Goldstein.
“We would hardly leave you behind. It wouldn’t be fair, would it? So we’ve included you in our plans. You can come with us.” Angel then countered this philanthropic speech by adding, “As a matter of fact we need another person, so you will be doing us a favour really.”
I put down my fork. “I don’t do favours,” I said.
Both Anthony and Angel stopped eating. They stared at me.
“What did you say?” Anthony’s face stiffened.
“I said I don’t do favours. That isn’t what I’m here for. ATC sent me here to learn to ride, and if you two are going filming, what happens about my riding lesson?”
Clearly this was not the response Angel was expecting. She frowned.
“There won’t be a riding lesson, that’s what happens,” Anthony said. “Riding lessons take second place when there is filming to be done. Filming is our livelihood.”
“And acting is mine,” I snapped. “That’s why I’m here. Not to perform favours for you, but to have riding lessons.”
“You will get your lessons,” Angel said in a reassuring tone. “It isn’t as if we are trying to cheat you out of them. I shall give you extra time afterwards to make up. And as we have to go tomorrow in any case, you may as well come along. Otherwise what will you do all day?”
“I shall learn my part.”
The cobalt eyes narrowed. “You haven’t got a script.”
“It will probably arrive in tomorrow’s post.”
“It won’t.”
I glared. “How do you know it won’t?”
Angel dropped her eyes to her plate. “I just wouldn’t expect it to arrive that soon, that’s all. ATC are sure to give you time to settle in,” she said in a careful voice.
As if I should ever settle in! As if I wanted to! I stared at her in exasperation. “I expect I shall find some way to occupy my time,” I said crossly, “even if I’m reduced to mucking out stables.”
“A quaint idea, but not possible, I’m afraid,” Anthony said in a cold voice. “You will have to come with us. You have no choice.”
Did he imagine that left alone in the stable yard I would run amok amongst the horses – fix up a few trip wires perhaps or stage chariot races to break their legs? “What do you mean, I have no choice?” I demanded.
“I mean that I shall take you by force if you won’t come willingly.”
He couldn’t be serious. I looked at his face and decided he was perfectly serious. “You can’t do that!”
“You think I can’t?” Anthony leaned back in his chair and surveyed me with steely amusement. “As I said before, it’s part of your education Grace Darling, and lesson number one is that learning about horses isn’t just about sitting on top, looking like a rider, it’s about familiarization. It’s about handling horses, getting a feel for them, getting to know how they react to things; it’s about trying to understand how…”
“I know all that!” I was not going to listen to another lecture. “But…”
“You don’t know!” Anthony said sharply. “That’s just your problem! You imagine you know a lot of things, but actually you know nothing!”
Of course he was prejudiced. Because of what happened at the film test he had formed a completely false opinion of me and nothing I could say would change his mind, but I was not going to allow him to infer that I was an idiot. “I’m used to people assuming that I’m stupid,” I flared. “I’ve managed to come to terms with the fact that most people assume that any actress not plain enough to be classified as serious, is just a decorative nitwit, but I am not prepared…”
“If you are trying to tell me you have a brain,” Anthony interrupted in a malicious tone, “then I suggest you use it. I am in charge of your training schedule, and if I say a day or two with the horses spent filming is part of that schedule, there is not a lot you can do about it.”
“I don’t need to do a lot,” I said. “All I need to do is complain to ATC.”
If I had imagined that this would trounce Anthony, I was mistaken. He gave me one of his thin smiles.
“You could,” he agreed, “but then so could I. And I could tell them how uncooperative you are, and how inept you appear in the saddle. I could explain to ATC that due to physical and psychological problems which are entirely out of my control, there is no possible way I can turn you into a competent rider in four weeks, and that, unfortunate though it may be, I strongly recommend that they recast the part.”
“You wouldn’t do that!”
“You think I wouldn’t?”
I knew he would.
“You could try looking at it in a different way.” Angel had filled my glass with water in a solicitous manner. “Being a black widow will be good practice for when they start shooting the serial.”
“A black widow!”
“We thought you would make a very fetching black widow,” Anthony said, impassively detaching the last remaining threads of chicken flesh and pushing the bones to the side of his plate. “The hair plaited into a knot at the nape of the delicate little neck, the oh-so-pretty face pale beneath the spotted veil…”
This was just too much to take. “The face certainly will not be pale beneath the spotted veil,” I burst out furiously. “The face won’t even be there! You are not hiring me out as an extra! I won’t do it!”
I shot my chair back on the bricks and would have
left the table but, as before, Anthony was too quick for me. Once again I felt my upper arm taken in a lock of iron.
“You may as well give in, you know,” Angel said in an exhausted tone. “You’ll have to in the end, so why fight? Anthony won’t take no for an answer. He doesn’t even recognize the word.” Although her plate was by no means empty, she laid down her knife and fork as if the argument had drained her of the strength necessary to continue eating.
“But it’s coercion,” I spluttered angrily. “Worse than that, it’s blackmail!” I tried, without success, to wrench my arm free. I glowered at Anthony.
“I would prefer you to regard it as part of your training schedule,” he said. “I would advise you to think of it as a unique and valuable experience. You will possibly even manage to enjoy it. Think of the glamour attached to the making of a film. Imagine yourself watching the top directors at work; meeting the stars…” He smiled to himself, as if at a private joke. He released my arm.
I slumped back in my chair, defeated. “It isn’t just that I object to doing you a favour, to being made a convenience of, or even missing my riding lesson,” I said in despair. “It’s being hired out as an extra that I really object to.”
“But why?” Over the grisly remains of her supper, Angel regarded me with mild irritation. “Isn’t it quite a good way to gain experience? At least extras get work.”
“But it isn’t the right kind of work. Actresses don’t take work as extras or non-speaking parts, not ever; not if they’re serious.” I did not really expect Angel to understand, but it was the truth. Ziggy had once warned me about it. “Don’t let anybody talk you into doing crowd scenes, Grace Darling. Nobody ever got lifted out of the ruck to be a star. The only thing an extra ever gets recognition for is being an extra; a piece of human scenery that can’t talk, that can’t take direction. Extras are a different breed, Kiddo, and don’t you forget it.” I had not forgotten it, and much good was it about to do me now.
“I wouldn’t worry about being recognized,” Angel said. “You’ll just be a black widow with a veil. There won’t be any close-ups.”
It was clear that further argument would be fruitless, but I was not going to be exploited for financial gain as well.
Stars Don't Cry (The Silver Bridle Book 2) Page 3