There was no way he meant what he was saying when he yelled out: “How’s it going, buddy-boy?” No way at all. He may have smiled, but the superiority was always there. An arrogance which took pride from being the bloke in charge, the biggest man on set. He liked that he could have everyone around him fired, even as he pretended to be their friends.
I couldn’t help myself, I just watched him. Openly, without attempting to hide my interest.
As the days went on and the shoot became gradually more stressful, he’d slap the backs harder and harder. More of a clout now than anything friendly. Him knowing all the time that no one was going to object. I saw him squeeze the cheek of the new script girl and any pretty make-up girl who came his way. Again that little bit too hard, holding on too long.
I tried to find out what had happened to the original script girl, but no one seemed to know; they looked away if I questioned the accident story. All I heard was that she wasn’t ever going to come back to work. I didn’t know if that meant she was unable or unwilling.
After some flat shots that Thomas Newson seemed to think were okay, I watched Wachtel’s face as he struggled not to publicly yell at the hapless director he’d hired. That friendly façade nearly slipping, rage bubbling away.
They were only moments, but right then I saw the man who had beaten Eden on his doorstep. I saw the bastard who, once he’d beaten her and scarred her, had stood back and calmly ordered his chauffeur to drive her home. He’d got the staff to pick her up and get her out of his sight, like she was a piece of rubbish to be disposed of.
The bastard might be fooling some people that he was really their friend, that he had their best interests at heart, but really he was a thug. Someone who badly needed to be taught a lesson. He might – because he was big and rich and a Yank – have fooled the world into thinking he had some kind of greatness, but he wasn’t fooling me. Even before Eden told me her story, I was smart enough to keep my distance. Now to glimpse him across the studio brought a horrible fascination.
Once or twice, our eyes met. Him circling the set, me on horseback and decked out in a Cavalier uniform, our eyes meeting and him turning away uneasy. Like he could recognise something in my glare which upset him.
I doubt he realised I was coming for him. I didn’t realise it myself then, or at least I told myself it wasn’t the case. But he must have known that there was something amiss between us. Probably, if it had been more than just a passing thought, he’d have had me fired from the film. But for those brief moments when it was him staring at me and me staring at him, I could see his nervousness and how much he strained to disguise it.
Eden’s story ran through my mind again and again. The image of his belt buckle wedged into her flesh was so locked into my brain, it was as if I’d seen it myself.
Another man in my position might have just walked across the film set and popped him one. Not cared whether they got fired, or what Eden would say. Just done it because it badly needed to be done.
Given what did happen, I wish I’d been that man.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was about a week after she told me her story that Eden and I next talked about it.
Her revelation hadn’t removed the tension between us, it had increased it. There was suddenly this large, jagged object sunk deep into our relationship.
It was me who was distant now. My mind – even though I didn’t want it to – regularly spun with anger about how unfair it was that Boris Wachtel could just walk around as if he’d done nothing wrong in life.
Undoubtedly she must have seen how tenderly I stared at that scar on her hip, and how that tenderness could slip to a barely concealed fury if I looked at it too long.
Without me saying anything, she knew exactly what I was thinking. On which track my mind had set itself and how it was becoming impossible for me to turn it around.
“Listen to me, Joe. Please listen to me. Whatever you’re planning, whatever you’re going to do, I don’t want this.”
I’d never seen her so animated. A cigarette shaking in her left hand, she paced back and forth across the living room floor. Her shoulders were hunched with emotion, her right hand reaching up and grabbing her hair with her fingers fluttering in front of her face.
“I’m sorry.” I shook my head, knowing I’d been caught out – and yet not feeling ashamed of it. “I just can’t help myself. The more I bloody see him, the more I think that he has to get what he deserves.”
“I didn’t ask you for this!”
“I know.”
She stood directly in front of where I sat slumped on the sofa. “I want to be absolutely clear that I haven’t asked you to do this. Do you hear me? I’m not sending you to do this, I don’t even want you to do this. I told you what happened so that there’d be no secrets, so there’d be nothing hanging between us. You told me before that I just wanted you for a thug. That wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. I promise you that, absolutely and truly. I don’t want this!”
Gently I reached my hand up to hers, to calm her, to pull her to sit on the cushion next to me. But she shrugged me off and backed away a step, putting herself out of reach.
“I know all that,” I told her. “I understand what you’re saying.”
“So, why are you thinking that way? Please don’t try to deny it. I can see it on your face. I know what you’re like now. I can see the signs. I know when the brooding gets the better of you.”
Again I shook my head. “It’s wrong, I know that. But I can’t help myself.”
“Why do you want to do it?” she yelled, her voice sounding instantly strained. “What could it possibly achieve? I don’t understand, tell me why!”
“Because he hit you, Eden, he beat you into the ground. I can handle you having a past, I can handle you having other men before me, but I can’t handle that. The thought of it burns me inside and I can’t stop it.” I leant forward and wished I had a cigarette too, but her silver case was empty. “I know it was before we met, but I can’t let him get away with it. I just can’t let him wander around like he’s the visiting king of Hollywood on a bloody regal tour, and pretend that it didn’t happen. And what about that script girl? Does he get away with that? What about any other girls he has lined up?”
“Like you said, it was before we met!” She tried to calm her voice again, but it was trembling too much. “What happened to me is none of your business. I told you because I couldn’t bear hearing his name in a friendly tone of voice coming from you. I told you because you thinking anything nice of him felt like a betrayal of me.”
“And the script girl?” I asked.
“Did you know her? Did you ever speak to her? Did you even know her name before all this happened? Look –” She bent down to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “I know what I think happened – what we think happened – but we don’t know that’s really the case. Don’t you see that? You can’t get yourself into deep water for either me or her. I don’t want you to do anything and so you shouldn’t do anything.”
Leaning forward, I reached out for her hand again. This time she let me enclose her fingers in mine.
“All I want to do is speak to him,” I told her.
“Speak to him?” The disbelief was right through her voice.
“Yes.”
“And say what precisely, Joe? Give him a stern talking-to?”
“Say that I know what he did to you. That I bloody know he’s scum of the first order. I want to tell him that if I ever hear of him doing the same thing to another woman, he’ll have me to answer to.”
“You’re working for him. You’ll lose your job!”
“Sod that job! There’s other films out there. Television too, I’m not proud.”
The tears were still running down her face, but her fingers were now squeezing mine tight. “You’ll lose your temper, though, won’t you? You’ll go to speak to him, but you’ll lose your temper and it will all end up much worse than you can
imagine. I know you.”
“And I promise you,” I said, staring up at her, “that I will keep my temper in check, that I will not lose control. I promise you that.”
She took a step towards me and dropped herself next to me on the sofa. Her eyes darted to the cigarette case and she no doubt felt the same irritation I did at its emptiness. Then she rested her head on my shoulder and I put my arm around her.
“Do you really believe that?” she asked.
“Believe what?”
“That you can hang on to your temper? That you have that much control?”
My lips kissed her forehead. “I’ve taken my lesson,” I assured her. “My fingers were burnt and I’ve learnt from that.”
“So, what are you going to do?” she asked. “Just march up to him on set and ask for a quiet word?”
I shook my head. “There are too many people about for that. I don’t know how he’d react if his public persona was pricked in any way.”
“What, then?”
Probably she heard the nervous gulp my throat involuntarily gave. “I’ve thought of something, but I might need a bit of help from you.”
It was like my arm suddenly had alternating current coursing through it. She jumped from it, jumped from me, was on her feet in an instant.
“What do you mean, ‘help’? I don’t want any part of this, Joe! I don’t want to go near that man again!”
“I know, I know.” I was trying to reassure her even as I readied myself to ask for a favour that she really wouldn’t want to give. “But I have to find a way to get him alone.”
“So?” Her eyes widened. “You can’t seriously expect me to be bait for him. Please tell me you’re not hoping for that! I can’t, I just can’t!”
“I know, I know. You won’t have to go near him. But you can help me get near him.”
We stared at each other for a good minute. Her breathing was fast and upset as her eyes filled with absolute terror. Her arms were crossed and her shoulders knotted. The anguish on her face had carved in new wrinkles which had never been there before.
I waited until she had taken a long deep breath before I said anything more.
“Jean Simmons has dropped out of the lead role,” I told her. “It’s some kind of last-minute injury and they need a new actress fast to replace her. You get your agent to put your name forward. You’ve got nothing on right now, so it won’t seem that unusual. Get your agent to put your name forward and I’ll bet you Wachtel will be so curious that he’ll want to see you. Maybe he won’t, but I’m betting he will. That he’ll want to see you and he’ll want to do it somewhere private, as who knows what you might say.”
Again she shook her head forcefully. “I don’t want to see that bastard again. I can’t see him again!”
“And you won’t have to,” I reassured her. “This is just to get me through his front door. Just so I can be alone with him. So I can whisper what has to be said, nice and private like. I guarantee you, I’ll be in and out and you won’t see him or be anywhere near him. And I guarantee you I won’t lose my temper. I’ll stay calm, but make sure that Boris bloody Wachtel doesn’t do anything like it to another woman again for as long as he lives.”
“But why, Joe?” she asked, tearfully. “Why do you have to do any of this?”
I clutched both her hands and pulled her slowly towards me.
“Because I love you, Eden. I love you and I want to spend every day of the rest of my life with you. And you have that scar on your hip, a scar that’s never going to fade. I know that every day I’m going to see it and I’m going to think of what he did to you and how, so far, he has got away with it. That he’s done the same to others. He’s a man who gets away with stuff and that has to be stopped. He can’t get away with what he did to you. There can’t be no consequence, there just can’t. And I have to make him understand that.”
From the audio recordings of Eden St. Michel
“I don’t know what I was thinking when I gave the nod to Joe’s ludicrous plan.
“I was scared, certainly. I never got over my first impression that it was a terrible idea, but…
“When I was younger I met the American author William Faulkner at a party. He was just a shabby old drunk and I had no idea, really, who he was. Indeed I probably made a fool of myself, as somebody told me he wrote a Humphrey Bogart picture and I asked him question after question about Bogie. But he was just this old man with lascivious eyes and too much scotch in his stomach, so what did it matter?
“It was only later that someone told me what an acclaimed writer he was. Then I saw in the papers that he’d won the Noble Prize for Literature. I couldn’t believe that that dipso had won the same prize as Sir Winston. But that time I met Churchill, he was drunk too, so what do I know?
“Anyway, I tried to read some of this Faulkner’s stuff, but it was impenetrable to me. But one of my friends – the same friend who’d informed me of who the hell he was, actually – told me about some of the things he’d written.
“One of the quotes my friend mentioned was something like: ‘The past isn’t gone, it’s not even the past.’
“It’s a phrase which struck a chord with me. A phrase that I think of a lot even now.
“Particularly when it comes to Joe and what happened with that man whose name I still find hard to mention.
“The thing is, I’d shut myself off from what happened for so long, just stopped thinking about it, stopped feeling about it. But of course you can’t stop thinking and feeling about something. The emotions would always find a way to burst through and I’d have to force them back down. Suppress them in a way that physically hurt me. Stung my insides.
“But now I had someone who loved me so much, he was prepared to put himself out there. He was prepared to go out of his way and avenge me.
“Even though I said I didn’t want revenge, told him again and again, it still secretly felt so good to have a man I loved take it all on his shoulders. It was like I wasn’t dealing with the memory of it alone any more.
“Joe wanted to do this for me and if I’d really wanted to stop him, I could have argued more passionately, threatened to throw him out if he went anywhere near that man.
“But I didn’t.
“It sounds vain and it sounds stupid, but I was flattered.
“I argued with Joe, even as Joe convinced me. Even as the voice chirped in my head, asking: ‘Why shouldn’t the bastard feel some pain?’
“The amount of mornings I’d woken up with my hip aching. The amount of times I’d stared down at it and hated myself for charging over there impetuously and putting myself in that position. Hated him for making me love him and then doing that to me. Hated him because, as Joe put it, he beat me into the dirt.
“Why shouldn’t he have some comeuppance? Why shouldn’t he feel some fear?
“I just had to hope that when the moment came, Joe didn’t lose his temper.
“Or if he did lose his temper, he didn’t beat the bastard too badly.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Somehow I got her to say yes, but when the moment came, she didn’t have the stomach to call her agent and say out loud that she wanted to meet with that American bastard.
So I did it.
Morty and I had been briefly introduced at the premiere of Stranger at St. Paul’s, so I’m sure he thought it was odd, but he accepted the call when his secretary told him who it was. The excuse we came up with was that Eden was preserving her voice for singing lessons. She may have claimed that she was never a singer, but he was always on at her about beefing up her voice – like he had dreams of increasing his ten percent by getting her a contract at Parlophone.
When I spoke to him, I was nervous and probably rambling, but I managed to convince him that I was speaking on behalf of Eden. I told him that the two of us had been talking and how she liked the sound of the female lead, but was worried whether she’d get a shot given she and Wachtel had a little romantic history.
&
nbsp; Morty knew about them as a couple, but he didn’t know how it had ended.
On the phone he was his normal high-pitched, enthusiastic self. He said the idea had crossed his mind as well, but he hadn’t known whether to mention it because of their shared past. However, if Eden was fine with it, then he’d happily put her forward. (And how was Eden, by the way?) We chatted a bit more, but since he’d only met me the once, it was clear that he didn’t really recall who I was, even as he let me speak for his client.
It was half an hour later that he called back. He’d floated the idea up to Wachtel’s people and they’d been more than receptive. It had only taken them fifteen minutes to call back and get something set in the diary. It was even better than I could have hoped. He wanted to see her at the house he was renting in Richmond at ten o’clock that evening.
The same house she’d gone to the last time she saw him.
I was going to have the bastard all to myself in the most fitting of locations.
As I told Eden, I clutched her – but still I watched her go pale at the news. She’d hoped my gambit would fail. That Wachtel wouldn’t want to see her. That – I don’t know – maybe Audrey Hepburn had been brought over expensively from Hollywood and she now had the part.
But I reassured her, held her close to me. Told her I’d just speak to him, that I’d be there ten minutes and that would be more than enough to put true fear into him.
My voice calm, I told her she had nothing to worry about. That it was all going to be fine.
At first she nodded, but then her eyes widened. When the words came, they were little more than a squeak. “I’ll have to come with you,” she said.
“What? No you don’t. You don’t want to come with me and I don’t want you to come with me. I can handle this all by myself.”
“I have to come with you.” she repeated, firmly.
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