‘Oh, that’s great,’ I say, though in fact I’m not sure a bouquet and muffin basket is what you do in the UK. Plus Cara Hamilton, the much-feted and adored actress playing Anne Hathaway, is an old boot and has made it clear she loathes me, T.T., and most of the US crew. She communicates only with Alec, whom she considers to be at her level. She keeps going on about ‘the first time I was at Stratford, doing the Henrys with Peggy and John’.
I shouldn’t be horrible about Cara. She’s old, and not well, and I know everyone’s worried about her. It’s just she’s one of those people who makes you feel like shit. I’d forgotten what it’s like, being back in the UK. When we met this time (I didn’t remind her I’d auditioned opposite her once) she said, ‘How nice to meet you,’ in that way English people do when they mean totally the opposite. ‘I haven’t seen your work, I’m afraid, but I know you don’t need people like me to watch your films when you’re so … popular.’
‘Can I get you anything else?’ Sara asks. She’s standing there at the end of the bed, all bright-eyed and keen, her ponytail bouncing.
‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s all. Thank you so much, Sara. Why don’t you take a day to yourself. I’ll call you if I need you.’
Her face falls. ‘Oh. You sure? You don’t want me to bring your other shoes over later? In case it stops raining?’
‘Go on,’ I say. ‘Go to Stratford or something. You’d love it.’
‘You really don’t need me to do anything else for you?’ She pats the bed. ‘Hey. It doesn’t feel right, just feeding through your calls and hanging out all day. You never need me. It sucks.’ Then her face freezes. ‘I don’t mean I don’t like being here,’ she says intently. ‘Listen, I’m not trying to be dramatic. I don’t mean that at all, Sophie.’
I pull at my face in the mirror, grimacing at its reflection in the dim room. ‘Oh, my goodness, I know that. I just feel bad, dragging you all the way over to the UK and leaving you hanging around all the time.’ I stop again, feeling my way. It’s sometimes awkward: we know each other, we were young together. Always at the back of my mind with Sara is the line that director said to her. ‘This girl’s just an uglier Sophie Leigh. Next, please.’ Guilt makes me feel responsible.
‘I’m so glad you’re here. I just don’t want you to feel you’re missing out on anything back in LA. Any … opportunities.’
Sara pulls back the curtains. ‘I have plenty to do!’ She smiles. ‘Now we got Wi-Fi we got all we need, am I right? Hey, did you check Deadline this morning? The script William Morris were touting that someone bid ten million dollars for? Starlight?’
I miss the sunshine in LA. I miss my beautiful house, the ocean, the markets, the food trucks, the beach, the people. And I miss California, the dream of a golden land that I fell in love with the moment I arrived. But I don’t miss Hollywood. I’ve totally stopped paying any attention to the business since I got here.
‘No. Is it good?’
Sara nods, biting her lip. ‘It’s amazing apparently. Fox bought it and it’s going straight into production – every actress in town is going nuts for it.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘What kind of thing?’
‘Very dramatic, really meaty.’ She pauses. ‘Should I ask Artie to—’
‘Yes,’ I say without any conviction. We both know I’m not getting that part. ‘Can you get me the script?’
‘He wants to talk to you. He called again last night.’
‘Tell him I’m shooting all day.’
‘No problem,’ says Sara. She types furiously on her BlackBerry, looking pleased to have something to do. ‘Will you let me know if there’s anything else?’ She looks up. ‘I think you’re feeling kinda uneasy about us knowing each other from before, Sophie. It’s not a problem for me. I promise you. I’ll do anything, anything at all. I’ll clean up your toenail clippings if you want.’ I laugh. ‘Gimme something.’
I tie my hair into a stubby ponytail and pin back the famous fringe, which I’m growing out now, so I’m all ready for my make-up and the wig that makes me look dramatically unlike Sophie Leigh. When Tommy saw the early head shots he rang me in a raging panic. ‘No one will recognise you! What’s the point of this film at all?’
‘Just give Artie the message. And have a nice day. Read something, go visit something,’ I say, ushering her towards the door. ‘Shall we have dinner later?’ She looks delighted. ‘Alec lost the bet. He’s buying drinks, so we have to go to the bar tonight.’
‘How come?’
‘Some bet about pulling Eloise.’
‘You’re joking me. That crazy set-designer lady?’ Sara laughs. ‘She’s intense. Way intense. She told me she’s looking to get married by the end of the year.’
My eyes widen. ‘Oh, my goodness. Poor Alec.’
‘Hm,’ says Sara. ‘This should be fun. OK, I’ll see you later! And – thanks, Sophie!’
I wave and as I’m shutting the door I see Angie outside in the corridor. I wave to her too. She raises her hand. She doesn’t smile. She never does.
I jump in the shower and get dressed quickly. I sip some tea, skimming the script just one more time. I feel suddenly nervous as I reread what we’re filming today; Alec and I have a couple of big scenes. I’m usually well prepared, but this movie is testing me. I want to say Tammy’s lines like they make sense. I want to be good, to make a film you’ll want to watch in fifty years’ time. I have to be good.
When I get downstairs it’s still only 6.30, so hardly anyone’s about, though to be honest the other patrons at the Oak Hotel and Carvery never recognise me anyway. I pretend to be relieved about this but am secretly annoyed. Wouldn’t you be? They always recognise Alec. He’s costume drama central. When I made Jack and Jenny, in a tiny town 5 miles from the middle of nowhere in Wyoming, I couldn’t leave the hotel without ten people waiting outside to get my autograph, and at the diner we all ate in most nights people would smile and come over, shake my hand – Americans are much politer than Brits. ‘It’s a real honour to have you here in Dead Dog Ridge,’ they’d say. ‘Old Tom here, he wants to shake you by the hand.’ And some grizzled old war veteran would stump into view and stiffly have his picture taken with you and then stump off into the night with a hearty farewell. Here: blank, annoyed incomprehension, and some subtle social signals I can’t interpret. I’ve been away too long.
‘Morning, Sophie. I hear Alec’s buying tonight,’ Bill Claremont, the cinematographer, calls from the alcove where he’s working his way through a hearty breakfast. Bill is a living legend, nominated for an Academy Award, actually worked with David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock. I don’t know how we got him for this film, to be honest, but people say Tony Lees-Miller, the famous producer of this whole thing, whom I’ve yet to meet, pulled him out of his bag of tricks. They’ve been doing it for years, this band of mild-looking British guys, and they have Ealing, Rank and Gainsborough in their blood. Bill can drink Alec under the table, which is pretty easy, but he can drink me under the table too, which is not bad going – as I told him after a night at the bar when I woke up the next morning fully clothed hanging off a corner of the bed and immediately fell off it, causing Angie to rush in from the adjoining room with a chair above her head ready to knock out any assailant, like we’re in an old Ealing comedy. In fact the whole thing, now I come to think of it, is a little like an Ealing comedy.
‘Morning, Bill,’ I say. ‘You off now?’
‘Just finishing my breakfast. I don’t need the make-up you do. I’m all natural.’ He slaps his jaw and smiles. ‘Big day today. You ready?’
I nod, chewing the inside of my mouth. ‘Sure!’
The car’s outside. Jimmy, the driver, is having a cigarette, sheltering under the porch.
‘Morning, Soph,’ he says, stamping the cigarette on the ground. ‘You ready?’ He nods at Angie, who climbs in the car
‘Sure,’ I say again. He comes round and opens the door for me.
‘Ready to make some more magic today?’ he says as we
drive away, down the long verdant drive, out towards the cottage where Shakespeare’s wife grew up, through the yellow fields and green hedgerows. A swift darts out in front of us, under and up into the trees, and I sink back into the leather seats and smile, because he says this every day, and it’s sweet.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be, Jimmy.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ACTUALLY, IT TURNS out it’s a bad day on set today. You have them, sometimes – nothing goes right. When the budget’s $80 million you can afford a few upsets. But if you’re shooting on a shoestring and you’ve only paid the crew for eight weeks, a bad day is a disaster. They’re only short scenes, right at the end of the movie, but they are crucial. I am Annie, back working in Anne Hathaway’s cottage after the whole knock-on-head-wake-up-in-dream-world scenario, wondering if it was all in my imagination. I see a guy walking through the gardens with his mother, out for a nice day trip. He comes into the house, smiles at her and tells her he‘s the new manager, and you realise it’s Shakespeare, in the modern day, and the elderly lady who’s his mother is the same actress who’s played Anne Hathaway in the later scenes. After the first couple of takes I’m sure it’s not as good as it could have been. I’m not bringing the warmth to Annie that I want and I’ve fluffed my lines, nerves I think. And now filming has totally stopped.
Halfway through the morning we get the message that Cara is definitely out of the picture. She’ll be in hospital for at least another week and then recovering, and the insurance company is saying we have to find someone else. There’s an idiot producer from LA, Carl, who’s just arrived and who knows nothing; he’s yelling into his phone and slicking his hair back. T.T.’s jumping up and down, waving his arms and screaming. He can’t cope in a crisis. ‘Where’s Tony?’ he keeps screaming. ‘Where’s fucking Tony? What are we gonna do? I can’t take this any more! I can’t!’ Carl stares at him and looks even more panicked, and the assistant director, Paula, keeps wiping her brow in stress, and pushing her baseball cap so far back on her head it slides to the ground, so she picks it up and then hits her head on a piece of equipment. It’s turning into a farce.
I sit there, watching this all unfold. I know what I’d do if they asked me for my advice. Find Eve Noel. Re-jig the schedule so we shoot the scenes without Cara that don’t mention her in any way so we can reshape the script if we have to go ahead using Cara’s already-filmed stuff and a swift rewrite if we can’t get anyone. Luckily her scenes are mostly ones that lift right out of the action. She’s almost like the narrator of the story. I know that script backwards, I could do it in my sleep. But it’s not my position to jump in, some star giving her opinion is the last thing you want here. And I wrote to Eve already anyway, and got the briefest brush-off from her UK agent, Melanie something. ‘Miss Noel is not contactable’ was the line I loved best. What does that even mean? I emailed back asking for more information, but she never replied, not to me or Tina, or to Sara either.
When I can’t hack the cold any longer, I stand up and stretch, then climb the steps to the long, low thatched house – it’s not a bloody cottage, that Anne Hathaway must have been minted – and slip inside.
‘Do you know where these beams came from?’ comes a voice from the next room, an old lady’s voice.
‘No,’ comes the reply, that voice that always used to send a shiver up my spine all those years ago. ‘Ships? Do tell me. They’re beautiful.’
‘The Forest of Arden,’ says the old lady. I can see her now, a stern figure just inside the door, staring beadily up at someone. ‘And do you want to know something very interesting about the Forest of Arden?’
‘Oh, absolutely I do,’ says the silken voice, and she makes a gruff, pleased sort of grunt.
I gently open the door. ‘Hello, Alec,’ I say.
Alec Mitford eases himself away from the old window-seat. He’s in modern dress for this scene: chinos, a navy polo shirt, a casual jacket. His black hair is close-cropped; usually it flops a bit. His eyes are dark blue too, and his mouth pouts, just a little, when it’s in repose. The summer we were sleeping together, his beautiful Notting Hill flat was on the corner of two main roads and the traffic would wake me up. I’d lie there, one arm propped up on its elbow, and watch him sleep, then snuggle against him, trying to get him to have sex again, and make him think it was his idea. He wasn’t ever as keen as I was, especially on the sex part. Thankfully I realised, before I was told, that it wasn’t going to last.
‘Ah, Soph,’ he says. ‘Escaping the sturm und drang outside, are you? Great minds.’ He kisses me on the cheek. ‘Margaret, this is Sophie Leigh. She’s the star of the film. Soph, Margaret helps out at the house.’
‘Nice to meet you.’ Margaret glances at me, then goes back to staring up at Alec.
People like Margaret are like the patrons of the Oak. They have no idea who I am. Unless Margaret’s seen Wedding of the Year, which I doubt. ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ I say.
‘Just telling Alec about the Forest of Arden,’ Margaret says.
‘Yes, how interesting. Where is it now, what’s left of it?’ Alec says.
‘All gone,’ Margaret tells him, slapping her thighs in pleasure at being able to impart this information. ‘None of it left, not a single tree.’
‘Why?’ Alec says. ‘What happened to it?’
‘Humans,’ Margaret tells him grimly. ‘Most beautiful forest in all of England for thousands of years. Beech, rosewood, oak. Taller and thicker they are, the better, see? Then we start cutting it down, for houses like this.’ She pats one of the ancient beams. ‘And for the navy. The Hundred Years War, the Armada. You know, most of the ships built to fight the Armada came from the Forest of Arden. The Mary Rose, she was too. By the eighteenth century – phut. All bloody gone.’
It’s moments like this I start to feel very far from home. Alec is shaking his head. ‘That’s awful. Just awful,’ he murmurs. ‘And now they want to privatise our woodlands. What next.’
Margaret rolls her eyes at him. ‘Well, I know. Sometimes I think, you know, running this place here, it’s the last piece of really old England we’ve got left?’
Alec puts a fist to his solar plexus, and intones quietly, ‘“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”’
‘Aah,’ Margaret says, gruffly thrilled. ‘Marvellous stuff.’
I hide a smile and turn away, looking out of the window at the rain, my mind wandering. Alec will always be in work. He’s like one of those actors in Upstairs, Downstairs or The Jewel in the Crown; there will always be an Alan Ayckbourn or a Noël Coward revival in Bath or Richmond that’ll be glad to have him. His female co-stars, however, won’t be so lucky. When I try to think about what parts I’ll have in five, ten years’ time, I can’t see it at all. I’ve got no successful template, unless you count Jennifer Aniston, and I’m not sure I want to be like that, to be honest. All that yoga must be exhausting and the tan – her skin’ll be worse than Deena’s when she’s older.
I wonder how Deena is, with a start. I keep thinking about her, and our last meeting, her face as she held the car keys in her hand, ready to drive off and have sex in costume with some disgusting guy in a motel. Does she feel like this, when she comes back to England? Not fitting in. Does Mum know how she’s making a living, these days? I smile though it’s not funny. Of course Mum doesn’t know.
It occurs to me then that Deena might want to stay in the house. That place is like Fort Knox now plus I don’t fancy anyone else’s chances against my godmother. I take out my BlackBerry and email Sara:
Hi. Can you find Deena Grayson please and ask her if she wants to stay at my house while I’m in the UK?
Tell her I’d really like her to if she wants. Check with the cops and the security guys that’s ok.
Then, as an afterthought:
In fact, find out what the situation is overall with the cops. Ask them not Artie. Have they found who it is yet?
I know the answer to that one. But it doesn’t hurt
to ask.
And then, because I tell myself I want to give her something to do:
Can you also contact Patrick Drew’s office and send him over a Celine Dion Live in Las Vegas DVD and a note from me: Hope to take that trip to Vegas one day. If not to Big Sur. Thanks again for understanding about the movie. Sophie
It’s just my way of apologising again, I tell myself. My heart thumps as I do it. I reason with myself that I’m only trying to make sure he doesn’t bad-mouth me all round town, though I’ve taken no similar action with George. Rather, I hope to slide out of George’s life as easily as I came into it. Anyway, Sara told me yesterday the project was back on. They found some actress from 90210 to take my part. Good luck to all of them. Patrick can take her to Big Sur for Thanksgiving.
I’m behaving like a Taylor Swift song. I shake my head and put the phone away. Alec is nodding sympathetically at Margaret. ‘Listen, Margaret, will you excuse us? I need to talk to Sophie.’ He pulls me by the elbow. ‘OK if we go upstairs?’
‘Of course.’ Margaret clenches her jaw and looks straight at him, then nods. ‘Jolly good to talk to you,’ she says. ‘Think you’re – damn good news. Anything I can do, let me know. Hm?’
‘How kind you are.’ Alec smiles graciously and almost bows at Margaret, while I try not to be sick. He leads me up the oak stairs, varnished into blackness over the centuries, and into a large room, the roof sloping up on both sides. ‘Is this Anne Hathaway’s room?’ I ask. ‘Did Shakespeare … sleep here?’
‘Fuck knows,’ says Alec, looking around cautiously. ‘Thank God, we’re alone.’ He stares at me. ‘You all right? You look tired.’
‘Oh, I was rubbish this morning,’ I say.
‘It’s nerves. You’re doing damn well, especially considering you were parachuted in at the last minute.’
‘But I want to be brilliant,’ I say. ‘And it’s really hard.’
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