Smokescreen

by Dick Francis

  They mostly asked the personal questions first.

  According to their calculations, I was thirty-three. Was that right?

  It was.

  And married? Yes. Happily? Yes. My first or second marriage? First. And her first? Yes.

  They wanted to know how many children I had, with their names and ages. They asked how many rooms my house had, and what it had cost. How many cars, dogs, horses, yachts I had. How much I earned in a year, how much I had been paid for Rocks.

  How much did I give my wife to buy clothes with? Did I think a woman’s place was in the home?

  ‘In the heart,’ I said flippantly, which pleased the women’s mag girl who had asked, but was slightly sick-making to all the others.

  Why didn’t I go to live in a tax haven? I liked England. An expensive luxury? Very. And was I a millionaire? Perhaps some days, on paper, when share prices went up. If I was as rich as that, why did I work? To pay taxes, I said.

  Clifford Wenkins had summoned up some caterers who brought coffee and cheese biscuits and bottles of Scotch. The Press poured the whiskey into the coffee and sighed contentedly. I kept mine separate, but had great difficulty in explaining to the waiter that I did not like my liquor diluted in nine times as much water. In South Africa, I had already discovered, they tended to fill up the tumblers; and I supposed it made sense as a long drink in a hot climate, but while it was so cold it merely ruined good Scotch.

  Clifford Wenkins eyed my small drink in its large glass.

  ‘Let me get you some water.’

  ‘I’ve got some. I prefer it like this…’

  ‘Oh… really?’

  He scuttled busily away and came back with an earnestly bearded man trailing a hand microphone and a long lead. There was no sense of humour behind the beard, which made, I thought, for a fairly stodgy interview, but he assured me that what I had said was just right, just perfect for a five minute slot in his Saturday evening show. He took back the microphone which I had been holding, shook me earnestly by the hand, and disappeared into a large array of recording equipment in one corner.

  After that I was supposed to do a second interview, this time for a woman’s programme, but some technical hitches had developed in the gear.

  I moved, in time, right round the room, sitting on the floor, on the arms of chairs, leaning on the window-sills, or just plain standing.

  Loosened by the Scotch, they asked the other questions.

  What did I think of South Africa? I liked it.

  What were my opinions of their political scene? I hadn’t any, I said. I had been in their country only one day. One couldn’t form opinions in that time.

  Most people arrived with them already formed, they observed. I said I didn’t think that was sensible.

  Well, what were my views on racial discrimination? I said without heat that I thought any form of discrimination was bound to give rise to some injustice. I said I thought it a pity that various people found it necessary to discriminate against women, Jews, Aborigines, American Indians and a friend of mine in Nairobi who couldn’t get promotion in a job he excelled at because he was white.

  I also said I couldn’t answer any more of that sort of question, and could we please get off politics and civil rights unless they would like me to explain the differences between the economic theories of the Tory and Labour parties.

  They laughed. No, they said. They wouldn’t.

  They reverted to films and asked questions I felt better able to answer.

  Was it true I had started as a stunt man? Sort of, I said. I rode horses across everything from Robin Hood via Bosworth Field to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Until one day when I was doing a bit of solo stuff a director called me over, gave me some words to say, and told me I was in. Good clean romantic stuff, for which I apologised. It did happen sometimes like that though.

  And then? Oh then I got given a better part in his next film. And how old was I at the time? Twenty-two, just married, living on baked beans in a basement flat in Hammersmith, and still attending part-time speech and drama classes, as I had for three years.

  I was standing more or less in the centre of the room when the door opened behind me. Clifford Wenkins turned his head to see who it was, frowned with puzzlement and went busily across to deal with the situation.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t come in here,’ he was saying bossily. ‘This is a private room. Private reception. I’m sorry, but would you mind… I say, you can’t… this is a private room… I say…’

  I gathered Wenkins was losing. Not surprising, really.

  Then I felt the clump on the shoulder and heard the familiar fruity voice.

  ‘Link, dear boy. Do tell this… er… person, that we are old buddy buddies. He doesn’t seem to want me to come in. Now, I asked you…’

  I turned round. Stared in surprise. Said to Wenkins, ‘Perhaps you would let him stay. I do know him. He’s a cameraman.’

  Conrad raised his eyebrows sharply. ‘Director of Photography, dear boy. A cameraman indeed!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said ironically. ‘Have a Scotch?’

  ‘Now that, dear boy, is more like it.’

  Wenkins gave up the struggle and went off to get Conrad a drink. Conrad surveyed the relaxed atmosphere, the hovering smoke, the empty cups and half empty glasses, and the gentle communicators chatting in seated groups.

  ‘My God,’ he said. ‘My great God. I don’t believe it. I didn’t, in fact, believe it when they told me Edward Lincoln was giving a press conference right here in Johannesburg at this very moment. I bet on it not being true. So they told me where. In that ritzy room at the top of the Randfontein, they said. Go and see for yourself. So I did.’

  A laugh began rumbling somewhere down in his belly and erupted in a coughing guffaw.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said.

  He spread his arms wide, embracing the room. ‘They don’t know, they just don’t know what they’re seeing, do they? They’ve just no idea.’

  ‘Be quiet, Conrad, damn it,’ I said.

  He went on wheezing away in uncontainable chuckles. ‘My dear boy. I didn’t know you could do it. Off the set, that is. Talk about a lot of tame tigers eating out of your hand… Just wait until Evan hears.’

  ‘He isn’t likely to,’ I said comfortably. ‘Not from five thousand or so miles away.’

  He shook with amusement. ‘Oh no, dear boy. He’s right here in Johannesburg. Practically in the next street.’

  ‘He can’t be!’

  ‘We’ve been here since Sunday.’ He choked off the last of his laughter and wiped his eyes with his thumb. ‘Come and have some lunch, dear boy, and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  I looked at my watch. Twelve thirty.

  ‘In a while, then. I’ve still got one more bit of taping to do, when they get hold of a spare microphone.’

  Roderick Hodge detached himself from a group by one of the windows and brought a decorative female over with him, and Clifford Wenkins dead-heated with Conrad’s drink.

  The girl, the would-be interviewer from the woman’s radio programme, had the sort of face that would have been plain on a different personality: but she also had a bushy mop of curly brown hair, enormous yellow-rimmed sunglasses, and a stick-like figure clad in an orange and tan checked trouser suit. The spontaneous friendliness in her manner saved her from any impression of caricature. Conrad took in her colour temperature with an appreciative eye, while explaining he had been engaged on four films with me in the recent past.

  Roderick’s attention sharpened like an adjusted focus.

  ‘What is he like to work with?’ he demanded.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said.

  Neither Roderick nor Conrad paid any attention. Conrad looked at me judiciously, pursed his lips, lifted up a hand, and bent the fingers over one by one as he rolled his tongue lovingly around the words.

  ‘Patient, powerful, punctual, professional, and puritanical.’ And aside to me he stage-whispered, ‘How’s
that?’

  ‘Ham,’ I said.

  Roderick predictably pounced on the last one. ‘Puritanical. How do you mean?’

  Conrad was enjoying himself. ‘All his leading ladies complain that he kisses them with art, not heart.’

  I could see the headlines writing themselves in Roderick’s head. His eye was bright.

  ‘My sons don’t like it,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When the elder one saw me in a film kissing someone who wasn’t his mother, he wouldn’t speak to me for a week.’

  They laughed.

  But at the time it had been far from funny. Peter had also started wetting his bed again at five years old and had cried a lot, and a child psychiatrist had told us it was because he felt insecure: he felt his foundations were slipping away, because Daddy kissed other ladies, and quarrelled with Mummy at home. It had happened so soon after Libby’s accident that we wondered whether he was also worrying about that: but we had never told him Libby had been ill because he had dropped her, and never intended to. One couldn’t burden a child with that sort of knowledge, because a pointless, unnecessary feeling of guilt could have distorted the whole of his development.

  ‘What did you do about that?’ the girl asked sympathetically.

  ‘Took him to some good clean horror films instead.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Conrad said.

  Clifford Wenkins came twittering back from another of his darting foraging expeditions. Sweat still lay in pearl-sized beads in the furrows of his forehead. How did he cope, I vaguely wondered, when summer came.

  He thrust a stick microphone triumphantly into my hands. Its lead ran back to the corner where the radio apparatus stood. ‘There we are… er… all fixed, I mean.’ He looked in unnecessary confusion from me to the girl. ‘There we are, Katya dear. Er… all ready, I think.’

  I looked at Conrad. I said, ‘I learned just one word of Afrikaans at the races yesterday, and you can do it while I tape this interview.’

  Conrad said suspiciously, ‘What word?’

  ‘Voetsek,’ I said conversationally.

  They all split themselves politely. Voetsek meant bugger off.

  Conrad’s chuckles broke out again like a recurring infection, when they explained.

  ‘If only Evan could see this…’ he wheezed.

  ‘Let’s forget Evan,’ I suggested.

  Conrad put his hand on Roderick’s arm and took him away, each of them enjoying a separate joke.

  Katya’s smallish eyes were laughing behind the enormous yellow specs. ‘And to think they said that at the airport you were the chilliest of cold fish…’

  I gave her a sideways smile. ‘Maybe I was tired…’ I eyed the notebook she clutched in one hand. ‘What sort of things are you going to ask?’

  ‘Oh, only the same as the others, I should think.’ But there was a mischievous glint of teeth that boded no good.

  ‘All set, Katya,’ a man called from the row of electronic boxes and dials. ‘Any time you say.’

  ‘Right.’ She looked down at the notebook and then up at me. I was about three feet away from her, holding my glass in one hand and the microphone in the other. She considered this with her curly head on one side, then took a large step closer. Almost touching.

  ‘That’s better, I think. There will be too much background noise if either of us is too far from that microphone. It’s an old one, by the looks of it. Oh, and maybe I’d better hold it. You look a bit awkward…’ She took the microphone and called across the room. ‘O.K., Joe, switch on.’

  Joe switched on.

  Katya jerked appallingly from head to foot, arched backwards through the air and fell to the floor.

  The murmuring peaceful faces turned, gasped, cried out, screwed themselves up in horror.

  ‘Switch off,’ I shouted urgently. ‘Switch everything off. At once.’

  Roderick took two strides and bent over Katya with outstretched hands to help her, and I pulled him back.

  ‘Get Joe to switch that bloody microphone off first, or you will take the shock as well.’

  The Joe in question ran over, looking ill.

  ‘I have,’ he said. ‘It’s off now.’

  I thought that all, that any of them would know what to do, and do it. But they all just stood and knelt around looking at me, as if it were up to me to know, to do, to be the resourceful man in all those films who always took the lead, always…

  Oh God, I thought.

  Just look at them, I thought. And there was no time to waste. No time at all. She was no longer breathing.

  I knelt down beside her and took her glasses off. Pulled open the neck of her shirt. Stretched her head back. Put my mouth on hers, and blew my breath into her lungs.

  ‘Get a doctor,’ Roderick said. ‘And an ambulance… Oh Christ… Hurry. Hurry…’

  I breathed into her. Not too hard. Just with the force of breath. But over and over, heaving her chest up and down.

  A lethal electric voltage stops the heart.

  I tried to feel a pulse beating in her neck, but couldn’t find one. Roderick interpreted my fingers and picked up her wrist, but it was no good there, either. His face was agonised. Katya was a great deal more, it seemed, than just a colleague.

  Two thousand years passed like two more minutes. Roderick put his ear down on Katya’s left breast. I went on breathing air into her, feeling as the seconds passed that it was no good, that she was dead. Her flesh was the colour of death, and very cold.

  He heard the first thud before I felt it. I saw it in his face. Then there were two separate jolts in the blood vessel I had my fingers on under her jaw, and then some uneven, jerky little bumps, and then at last, unbelievably, slow, rhythmic, and strengthening, the life-giving ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom of a heart back in business.

  Roderick’s mouth tightened and twisted as he raised his head, and the cords in his neck stood out with the effort he was putting into not weeping. But the tears of relief ran for all that down his cheeks, and he tried to get rid of them with his fingers.

  I pretended not to see, if that was what he wanted. But I knew, Heaven forgive me, that one day I would put that face, that reaction, into a film. Whatever one learned, whatever one saw, and however private it was, in the end, if one were an actor, one used it.

  She breathed in, convulsively, on her own, while I was still breathing in myself, through my nose. It felt extraordinary, as if she were sucking the air out of me.

  I took my mouth away from hers, and stopped holding her jaws open with my hands. She went on breathing: a bit sketchily at first, but then quite regularly, in shallow, body-shaking, audible gasps.

  ‘She ought to be warmer,’ I said to Roderick. ‘She needs blankets.’

  He looked at me dazedly. ‘Yes. Blankets.’

  ‘I’ll get some,’ someone said, and the breath-held quietness in the room erupted with sudden bustle. Frozen shock turned to worried shock, and that to relieved shock, and from that to revival via the whiskey bottle.

  I saw Clifford Wenkins looking down at Katya’s still unconscious form. His face was grey and looked like putty oozing, as the sweat had not had time to dry. For once, however, he had been reduced to speechlessness.

  Conrad, too, seemed temporarily to have run out of ‘dear boys’. But I guessed sharply that the blankness in his face as he watched the proceedings was not the result of shock. He was at his business, as I had been at mine, seeing an electrocution in terms of camera angles, atmospheric shadows, impact-making colours. And at what point, I wondered, did making use of other people’s agonies become a spiritual sin.

  Someone reappeared with some blankets, and with shaking hands Roderick wrapped Katya up in them, and put a cushion under her head.

  I said to him, ‘Don’t expect too much when she wakes up. She’ll be confused, I think.’

  He nodded. Colour was coming back to her cheeks. She seemed securely alive. The time of fiercest anxiety was over.

  He looked sudde
nly up at me, then down at her, then up at me again. The first thought that was not raw emotion was taking root.

  As if it were a sudden discovery, he slowly said, ‘You’re Edward Lincoln.’

  For him too the dilemma of conscience arose: whether or not to make professional copy out of the near-death of his girl friend.

  I looked round the room, and so did he. There had been a noticeable thinning of the ranks. I met Roderick’s eyes and knew what he was thinking: the Press had made for the telephones, and he was the only one there from the Rand Daily Star.

  He looked down again at the girl. ‘She’ll be all right, now, won’t she?’ he said.

  I made an inconclusive gesture with my hands and didn’t directly answer. I didn’t know whether or not she would be all right. I thought her heart had probably not been stopped for much over three minutes, so with a bit of luck her brain would not be irreparably damaged. But my knowledge was only the sketchy remains of a long past first-aid course.

  The journalist in Roderick won the day. He stood up abruptly and said, ‘Do me a favour…? Don’t let them take her to hospital or anywhere before I get back.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said; and he made a highly rapid exit.

  Joe, the radio equipment man, was coiling up the lead of the faulty microphone, having disconnected it gingerly from its power socket. He looked at it dubiously and said, ‘It’s such an old one I didn’t know we had it. It was just there, in the box… I wish to God I hadn’t decided to use it. It just seemed quicker than waiting any longer for the replacement from the studio. I’ll make sure it’ll do no more damage, anyway. I’ll dismantle it and throw it away.’

  Conrad returned to my side and stood looking down at Katya, who began showing signs of returning consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered. She moved under the blankets.

  Conrad said, ‘You do realise, dear boy, that until very shortly before the accident you were holding that microphone yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said neutrally. ‘I do.’

  ‘And,’ said Conrad, ‘just how many people in this room showed the slightest sign of knowing that the only hope for the electrocuted is artificial respiration, instantly applied?’