by Judy Nunn
‘What does that mean? A closed set?’ he asked Sam the night before the shoot.
‘We’re doing the sex scenes tomorrow. There’re only two in the whole film, and they’re very tasteful.’ Sam had no inhibitions at all about working naked; she’d done so on stage in two previous productions. The scenes were not gratuitous; they were imperative to the script and she had total trust in Simon’s direction.
‘Oh.’ Jason was taken aback.
‘Simon’s quite happy for you to be there, though. So long as Brett and I don’t mind, of course. I’ve checked it out with Brett, and he doesn’t care.’
Brett had actually liked the idea of Jason being on set. ‘Might give him a few ideas about how it’s done,’ he’d said petulantly, ‘the guy’s a loser.’ Sam had ignored the remark.
‘No, no,’ Jason said hastily, ‘I think I’ll give it a miss.’
‘Oh don’t be such a prude.’ She grinned reassuringly; she’d forgotten how new he was to the film business. ‘It’s only acting and I get to keep my knickers on. No simulated sex, I promise you, just a lot of kissing and heavy breathing. It’ll probably be difficult to keep a straight face.’
But he didn’t return her grin. ‘No, I’ll sit this one out, if you don’t mind.’
‘Oh hell.’ The reason for his reluctance suddenly occurred to her. How shockingly crass she’d been. He had always associated the filming with his grandmother – when the cameras were rolling she was Jane Thackeray. ‘I’m sorry, Jason, I wasn’t thinking. I’m really, really sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘Well …’ she said awkwardly. ‘Your grandmother … a sex scene … I’m sorry, how tacky of me.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Samantha, it has nothing whatsoever to do with my grandmother.’
Sam was startled; he sounded quite snappy.
‘Why then? What’s wrong?’
‘I’m a prude, that’s all. You said it, I’m a prude. The others are going into dinner, let’s join them before Brett has some form of fit.’
Jason knew he’d been terse, but he also knew, very suddenly, that the portrayal of his grandmother was no longer of paramount importance. It wasn’t his grandmother he was in love with. It was Samantha Lindsay. His instinctively ‘prudish’ reaction had shocked him with the truth. He simply did not wish to see the woman he loved half naked in bed with another man, and his annoyance, he realised, lay in the fact that she didn’t recognise that.
‘We were great, Sam. The A team.’ Brett gave her the thumbs up. The sex scenes had gone very well, he thought. Pity the doctor hadn’t been there, he’d been looking forward to that. I’m the one who’s in bed with her, buddy, he’d have thought, not you, and you never will be. Doc Thackeray didn’t stand a chance, Sam’s only interest in the guy was research.
‘Yep,’ Sam agreed, ‘the A team.’ The scenes had gone well, she thought, although she was becoming just a little weary of Brett’s constant need for assurance. It was a pity Brett Marsdon had so little real confidence in himself as an actor and a man, she thought. She was glad now that Jason hadn’t been on set. He would have been a distraction, and she supposed that she shouldn’t have asked him in the first place.
Simon Scanlon had coaxed the perfect performance out of Brett, who now trusted him implicitly, just as Sam did.
‘It’s an awakening, Brett,’ he’d said from the outset when he’d realised the standard stud performance was about to take over. ‘A gentle awakening. You love her, you’re tender, and she is sexually awakened. You’re the one who makes this happen.’
It made sense to Brett. He had the power. And he gave every bit of tenderness he could, whilst Simon, unbeknownst to him, kept the camera trained on Sam.
‘So how did it go?’ Jason asked when he met her in the hotel foyer. He’d spent the day playing eighteen holes with Louis Durand at the golf course not far from the Mele Bay film location. The two men got on extremely well, communicating more often than not in Louis’s mother tongue. Jason, brought up in Vanuatu, where English and French remained the two principal languages, was bilingual.
‘It went very well, thank you,’ she said coolly. She hadn’t forgotten how snappy he’d been last night and she wasn’t going to offer any details about the day’s filming. She was going to wait for him to ask.
But he didn’t. ‘Louis tells me you’re not called tomorrow. Do you want to go for a drive?’
She hesitated. Tomorrow was Louis’s last day on location. They were shooting the confrontation scene and the fight sequence between Wily Halliday and Phillipe Macon. A pivotal scene, it would show the defeat and subsequent downfall of the plantation owner who had pursued Sarah Blackston following the death of her husband. Sam had intended going out to Undine Bay to watch the shoot.
‘All right,’ she said, aware that her hesitation had lasted for all of two seconds. A drive sounded fun, and she could do with a Brett-free day, she decided.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, the following morning. She noticed that he’d loaded flippers and snorkels into the boot of the car, and he’d told her to bring her bathing costume.
‘Have you done any of the tourist stuff?’
‘No, there’s been no time.’
‘Thought not. Cascades first then, in you get.’
Cascades, true to its name, was a stream of freshwater rapids that coursed its way down the mountain in a series of falls. On his advice she donned her bathing costume in the change rooms at the car park before they started their trek, and then they set off in their T-shirts and walking shoes, carrying a towel and a bottle of water each.
It was a laborious climb to the top of the mountain, but the scenery was spectacular. The narrow track wound its way through luxurious rainforest to emerge at regular intervals upon the picturesque falls, each culminating in a clear blue pool, the rapids then pursuing a rocky course to the next fall and the next pool. Nature’s landscape of terraces was laid out, in all its perfection, down the entire side of the mountain.
They arrived at the top, both sweating profusely. The view was magnificent, Sam thought, sucking the air into her lungs as she looked over the endless sweep of forest that surrounded them. But Jason gave her no time to recover.
‘Come on, I need a swim.’
And before she knew it, they were starting the climb down.
The pool was icy and inviting, and Sam swam beneath the waterfall. Holding on to the rock face, she leaned her head back, eyes closed, mouth open, and drank the crystal-clear water.
‘It’s like swimming in champagne,’ she shrieked as she rejoined him.
‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never swum in champagne,’ Jason replied in his usual wry manner.
They had a dip in several of the pools, laughing and splashing each other, larking about like children, and then, disappointingly soon, she thought, they were at the bottom of the mountain.
‘What an incredible place,’ she said, after they’d changed into their clothes and were about to leave. She looked back at the falls and the forest and the first of the rocky pools. ‘Absolutely incredible.’
‘More to come. I told you we were doing the tourist bit.’
They spent an hour or so at the Botanical Gardens, and then he took her to Hideaway Island. It sat just off the sandy spit in the middle of Mele Bay and she’d seen it often from the film location site.
‘It used to be called Mele Island,’ he said as they sat in the little open tin ferry that ran like clockwork every few minutes from the island to the sandy spit and then back again.
‘Where Godfrey’s ashes were scattered.’
‘That’s right.’ He was glad she’d remembered. But he was also glad that, for the first time in his company, she wasn’t plying him with questions about his grandmother, that she appeared to simply be enjoying his company.
‘Hideaway’s about the most popular tourist attraction on Efate these days,’ he said, ‘apart from the game fishing of course. But it’s worth it.’
; It was. They donned their flippers and snorkels and joined the other tourists, of whom there were a dozen or so, despite the fact that it was the off season.
Less than twenty metres from the shore, Sam found herself in a fairyland of coral reef teeming with fish of all shapes, sizes and hues. She was surrounded by every colour of the spectrum. It was an underwater paradise.
She swam out beyond the pontoons, which were moored as resting spots, to where the reef dropped away and the water was deeper. The colours were less vivid now, but the fish were bigger. A huge blue groper followed her inquisitively for a while, and then she decided to head back for the shore.
‘Oh wow!’ she said as she picked her way over the narrow beach of bleached coral to where Jason sat beneath the thatched shade of the restaurant, sipping from a bottle of Tusker. ‘Oh wow!’ It was all she could manage.
‘You’re a very good swimmer,’ he said.
‘I’m Australian.’
They sat amongst the holiday-makers eating poulet fish and drinking Tusker as the clouds gathered and a gentle rain started to fall.
She insisted they have another swim before they left.
‘In the rain?’ he queried.
‘Why not? Frightened you’ll get wet?’
The crowd had just returned from filming when Sam and Jason arrived back at the resort in the late afternoon, and Brett was obviously miffed that Sam hadn’t come out to the Undine Bay location.
‘Where did you get to?’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to watch the confrontation scene. Hell, it’s Louis’s last day.’
‘We’ve been to Hideaway Island,’ she said with an apologetic glance to Louis.
‘You went snorkelling?’ Louis asked, his face lighting up. ‘It is extraordinary, is it not? So close to the shore! Amazing!’ Louis wasn’t at all offended. He always took advantage of his days off and he’d visited every tourist spot on the island.
‘And we went to the Botanical Gardens and Cascades.’
‘Marvellous,’ the Frenchman beamed. ‘Did you walk to the top?’
‘Oh yes, and swam in the pools on the way back down.’
Brett scowled as they chattered on; it was unheard of that they weren’t discussing the day’s filming, and it was all because of Thackeray. It appeared that Jason Thackeray was more to Sam now than just a source of research, and Brett didn’t like it one little bit.
But at dinner that night, as always, the conversation revolved around film, particularly the scenes they’d shot that day, and everyone was very complimentary. There was a series of impromptu speeches, being Louis’s last night, and Simon Scanlon announced that the denouement between Wily Halliday and Phillipe Macon had been a triumph. The crew applauded their agreement and Brett, seated beside Louis, basked in the praise.
As soon as Simon sat down, Brett jumped to his feet, eyes bright from the line of coke he’d snorted earlier, and made his own announcement.
Louis Durand, he said, had been his hero for years, and he deemed it a privilege to work with an actor of such stature.
He said it in French, and it went over the heads of most, but when Louis stood and embraced him, there was another round of applause.
The evening continued with much back-slapping and ‘au revoir’ toasts to Louis, who was leaving Vanuatu the following morning.
Simon Scanlon retired early, as he always did, and Sam said her goodnights not long afterwards. The schedule the following day would be a gruelling one. They would be filming the scenes between Wily and Sarah prior to Wily Halliday’s departure on the bombing mission from which he would not return. But she could see that Brett was in full party mode, and decided to give him a gentle reminder.
‘Big day tomorrow, Brett,’ she whispered, after she’d hugged Louis and wished him a fond farewell.
‘Each to their own, babe, each to their own,’ he said with an enigmatic sneer. He could see Jason Thackeray nearby shaking the Frenchman’s hand. So he was leaving too. Brett wondered if they were doing it yet. They probably were, and they’d probably be shagging away half the night. What right did she have to lecture him!
Each to their own? She had no idea what he meant, but he’d obviously snorted a line or popped a pill. He really was his own worst enemy, she thought. Poor Maz would have her work cut out in the morning.
‘I didn’t know Brett spoke French,’ Jason said as he walked her back to her bungalow.
‘He’s a bit more complicated than he appears,’ she said. She had the feeling Jason didn’t like Brett much, which was understandable, most of the others didn’t either, particularly the crew, but she felt the need to defend the American. ‘He’s actually insecure underneath all that Hollywood bullshit. What exactly was it that he said about Louis?’
‘That Louis Durand was his hero and it was a privilege to work with him.’
‘Good on him, he would have meant it too.’ They’d arrived at the bungalow. ‘He’s not a bad bloke really.’
‘You’re a very nice person, Sam, you know that?’
‘Why? Because I stick up for Brett when the others can’t stand him?’
‘That’s part of it.’
She wondered what the other part was, but she didn’t ask.
‘Gosh, that was a fantastic day, Jason. A really, really fantastic day. I loved every bit of it.’
‘So did I.’
He kissed her. Very gently, without their bodies touching, just his lips on hers, and for only a moment. So fleeting she hardly had time to register her surprise.
‘Good night, Samantha.’
She’d been about to ask him in for a nightcap or a coffee, but he was already walking briskly down the path, and she felt a bewildering sense of disappointment. Had the kiss meant anything? It had been so brief, so polite, as if he’d simply shaken her hand in bidding her good night. Had their relationship just taken on a new significance, or was she imagining it? Was she perhaps hoping that it had? Sam was very confused as she closed the bungalow door.
Sam didn’t see Jason the following day, and she had no time to ponder the subject further. His absence on set was, however, commented upon.
‘The good doctor’s not fronting up today, I take it?’ Brett said when he emerged from the makeup van to join her. She’d been waiting for half an hour whilst Maz did the repair job.
‘It would appear not.’ She refused to respond to the edge in his voice.
‘Goddamn it, how the hell will we cope?’
‘Don’t be bitchy, Brett,’ she said pleasantly.
He took the hint. It wasn’t productive to start the day off on a sour note. He gave her one of his special grins.
‘Missed you at the party,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know there was one, but you obviously created your own.’ She didn’t make it a dig and she smiled as she said it.
‘Don’t I always?’ Then he dropped the grin and asked anxiously, ‘It doesn’t show, does it?’
‘No, Brett,’ she laughed, ‘it doesn’t show, you’re looking good, really good.’ It was amazing, she thought, but he did. Maz, the miracle worker again.
The second assistant director arrived. ‘Miss Lindsay, Mr Marsdon, you’re required on set.’ And the long day began.
Sam was exhausted during the drive back from location. She sat in the front of the Landcruiser with Bob Crawley who chatted on nineteen to the dozen, whilst Brett slept in the back. In the mornings, Bob was very considerate when driving the actors to location; he always kept quiet, knowing they were preparing for their day’s work, going over their lines, getting into character. Bob was proud of the way he understood actors. But on the way back, he liked a good chat. Sam, drained, wanted to sit quietly and she wished he’d shut up.
Jason was nowhere in sight when they pulled up at the Crowne Plaza and she made her apologies to Simon and the gang. She wouldn’t join them for dinner, she said, she was knackered.
She had a hot shower and ordered room service in her bungalow, half expecting a tap at the door. T
hen she went to bed early, but, tired as she was, she lay for some time, unable to sleep.
Sam felt a bit down, and she knew why. The feelings Jason evoked in her were unsettling. Was it a relationship she was seeking? After all these years? She’d had the odd affair now and then, but she’d avoided any heavy involvement: her career had always been her first priority.
She chastised herself for overreacting. It was just fatigue, she thought, as she urged herself to go to sleep. Jason was intriguing, certainly, but she had no idea where she stood with the man, he was an enigma. She must stop over-dramatising the situation, she told herself.
The following day, the main unit was relocating to Quoin Hill on the opposite side of the island to shoot the scenes in the POW camp, and they would remain there for a week. The location manager, having decided that the original plan to commute daily from the Crowne Plaza would prove a logistical nightmare, had come up with the perfect solution. On the wild northern coast of Efate, the only accommodation available was the remote and rundown Beachcomber Resort, and he’d booked the entire place out for the week. It would suffice, he said. The film unit would supply their own caterers; all they needed was a roof over their heads, clean beds and decent toilet facilities.
The lonely Australian who ran the Beachcomber had ordered in dozens of crates of Tusker and was eagerly awaiting the film unit’s arrival.
The supporting actors, who were to play the prisoners of war befriended by Wily Halliday, arrived from Brisbane that morning, and there was a buzz in the air. It was a lay-off day, the unit wasn’t to depart for Quoin Hill until mid-afternoon, and even the tired crew felt a renewed boost of energy, as if they were about to embark upon a new adventure.
The crew of the second unit, who had been busily filming background shots, the ships in Mele Harbour and aerial stunt sequences, were to remain in Port Vila and shoot a montage involving Sam, Elizabeth and the islander extras. The filming was scheduled for two days only, and Brett tried to persuade Sam to come out to Quoin Hill when she was free.