A Mysterious Affair of Style (6 page)

‘And so, Miss Rutherford,’ he asked her, ‘Exactly what sort of new film is this?’

‘Call me Cora, darling,’ she answered airily, and the Scotland Yard man was struck anew by how miraculously rejuvenated she appeared now that, by an unforeseen reversal of fortune, her career seemed to be back on track. He was also, however, a trifle embarrassed, since he was uncertain whether she meant him to call her ‘Cora’ or ‘Cora darling’.

But she gave him no time to call her anything, instantly launching into a description of the film.

‘Its title is
If Ever They Find Me Dead.
Good, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, definitely,’ he approved. ‘Very enticing.
If Ever They Find Me Dead,
eh? Yes, that’s a picture I feel confident I’d want to see. Sounds to me like a jolly exciting thriller. And may I ask what it’s about? Or would that be giving too much away?’

‘I’m afraid it just might … It’s Farjeon’s own screenplay, you understand, and, where other directors’ thrillers often have twist endings, his have always had twist beginnings.’

The concept was a novel one to Trubshawe.

‘Twist beginnings?’

‘You never saw his
Semi-Coma
?’

‘Sorry. You know, I don’t –’

‘– go to the Pictures. Yes, you told us already.’

‘Then, my dear Miss Rutherford,’ he remarked tartly, ‘if I told you already, why ask me again? And, while I seem to have the upper hand for once, may I ask you something?’

The actress blinked.

‘Why – why, yes,’ she replied. ‘Please do.’

‘
Hocus-Focus. Semi-Coma. An American in Plaster-of-Paris.
Didn’t this Farjeon fellow ever give one of his pictures some ordinary, everyday title that actually deigned to tell you a little bit about what was in it?’

‘Trubbers, my dear,’ said Cora, who had never yielded the last word to anyone, and certainly wasn’t about to change the habit of a lifetime, ‘I seem to recall, when we first met, that you had a dog, no?’

‘That’s right. A Labrador.’

‘And his name was?’

‘Tobermory.’

‘What!’ she exclaimed satirically. ‘Not Fido?’

Trubshawe gracefully accepted defeat.

‘You win,’ he said with a smile. ‘Please go on.’

‘Well, in
Semi-Coma
Robert Donat plays a meek, mild-mannered bank teller who, in the film’s opening scene, goes to bed in his dingy little flat in Clerkenwell. But when he wakes up next morning – the very next morning, mind you – he finds himself, still clad in the same striped jammies he went to bed in, stretched out in a leafy clearing in the Canadian Rockies, of all places, with a solitary stag – a wonderful touch! – a solitary stag placidly grazing just a few yards away. And, of course, it takes him the whole film to figure out how – and why – he crossed the Atlantic overnight.

‘That’s pure Farje. At the press screenings of his films, the critics would be handed out little slips of paper advising them not to give away the beginning, which meant, in effect, that the films were critic-proof. The critics couldn’t give away the beginning, they couldn’t give away the ending, and they certainly couldn’t give away the middle. They couldn’t give anything away at all.

‘Dear, dear Farje,’ she sighed. ‘Such a genius.’

Trubshawe was on the point of expressing his astonishment at hearing her speak so warmly of an individual whom, only a month before, she had called a verminous, arachnoid pig. But then, he told himself, the poor man himself
was dead, and Cora in such high spirits. Why cast a shadow over her euphoria by even bringing up the subject?

‘So what,’ he asked instead, ‘happens at the beginning of your picture?’

‘Yes, you old trout,’ Evadne Mount piped up, ‘don’t keep us in suspense. That’s the job of the film.’

Cora inserted a new cigarette into its holder and lowered her already husky voice to a conspiratorial level.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it all starts with these two chums, both of them women in their early twenties, at Drury Lane. They’ve done some shopping up West, just had lunch, and have a couple of tickets for a matinée – some sort of musical-comedy, I think it’s supposed to be. And there they are, in the seventh or eighth row of the stalls, browsing through their programmes, chattering away about this and that – the stars of the show, whether it’s had a good or bad press, you know, the sort of thing we all talk about when settling down in a theatre.

‘Then, suddenly, one of them starts.’

‘Starts what?’

‘Oh really, Evie, what an idiotic question. She doesn’t start anything. She just starts. She goes stiff and tense. It’s called starting. If I remember aright, your cardboard characters do it all the time.

‘Anyhow, noticing her start, her friend naturally asks her what the matter is. Nothing, says the woman, nothing at all. But, as she’s turned quite pale, the friend insists and the
woman finally says, “You see that man sitting four rows down, alone at the end of row C?” The other woman takes a gander, locates the man her friend has just mentioned and says yes, what about him? The first woman doesn’t speak for a few seconds. Then she replies, in a deathly quiet voice, “If ever they find me dead” – the film’s title, remember? – “if ever they find me dead, that’s the man who did it.”

‘Now, as you can imagine, her friend is well and truly hooked, but all she can see of the chap, unfortunately, is the back of his head. And, just as she cranes for a better view, the lights dim, the orchestra strikes up, the curtain rises, a leggy line of high-stepping chorines comes tripping onto the stage and, of course, in her subsequent enjoyment of the show, she forgets all about him.’

Cora had nothing to complain of in the attention paid her by her two listeners. They were literally hanging on her every word.

‘At which point,’ she continued, after what Evadne Mount herself, in one of her whodunits, would unreflectingly have described as a ‘pregnant’ pause, ‘we at once cut to the following scene – in which, as I’m sure you’ve both already guessed, the police are examining the woman’s dead body in her mews flat in Belgravia.’

‘H’m,’ said Evadne Mount thoughtfully, ‘I must confess I’m slightly envious of that idea. What happens next?’

‘Well, I really don’t think I ought to reveal any more.’

‘Now, now, don’t be coy. Doesn’t suit you.’

‘Oh, all right. Suffice to say that the friend naturally decides to do a bit of sleuthing on her own account and eventually, at a dinner party, she finds herself sitting opposite the man in row C –
or so she believes
. Except, you see, she just can’t be sure. So she ingratiates herself with him, starts flirting madly and, still not knowing if he really is the murderer she believes he might be, falls for him in the biggest way.

‘Which, I think,’ she ended grandly, ‘is all you need to know for the nonce. If you want to learn more, you’ll just have to wait till the film comes out at your local picture palace.’

‘And you, dear lady,’ said Trubshawe, ‘you play the glamorous young sleuth, I suppose?’

Cora, uncertain for the moment whether or not her leg was being gently pulled, cast him a penetrating glance.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, Trubshawe, I believe I told you when we last met that my role was not – no, I’d be lying if I said it was the lead.’

‘Which role
do
you play?’ asked Evadne.

‘The mur-’ – she hastily bit off the tail of the word – ‘I mean, the man’s long-suffering wife, long-suffering because, as she’s become all too aware, hubby has been conducting a whole string of casual affairs behind her back.

‘It was a smallish role to start with, insultingly small – but, only the other day, I managed to get it bumped up quite
a considerable bit. Now I have two or three really very juicy scenes where I not only get to chew up the furniture but spit it out.

‘Oh yes,’ she said in a voice of faintly chilling self-satisfaction, ‘if I play my cards right, which I fully intend to do, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t turn out to be the first stage of my comeback.’

The novelist looked at her sharply.

‘Cora?’

‘Yes?’

‘Just how did you manage to do that?’

‘What?’

‘Bump up the role?’

‘Ask me no questions, dearie, and I’ll tell you no lies. Let’s just say, little Cora has never been backward coming forward. Whenever a windfall drops into her lap, she knows how to exploit it.’

She turned to Trubshawe.

‘The first of these big scenes of mine is being shot tomorrow, which is why I thought you and Evie might like to spend the day at Elstree and watch it from behind the camera.’

‘I’d like that very much,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘Things going smoothly so far, are they?’

Cora suddenly turned rather pensive.

‘Well,’ she replied, ‘they are now, thank goodness. For a while there, it was touch-and-go.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You understand, I haven’t done any filming myself yet. But, naturally, I’ve had to be at the studio every day. Hair tests, complexion tests, clothes tests, make-up tests, you know the kind of thing. Well, you don’t, but I’m sure you get what I mean. And from what I could gather from the back-room boys, in addition to what I myself happened to witness, Hanway was an absolute disaster to start with.’

‘Hanway?’

‘Rex Hanway. Farjeon’s former assistant, now the film’s director. And, oh God, was he nervous when he first walked onto the set. Positively quaking in his brogues, he was. Didn’t have a clue. Couldn’t decide where to place the camera, couldn’t give directions to the actors, had no idea what the cameraman was referring to when he asked him about lenses and filters.

‘To be fair to him, it’s a bloody terrifying job making a film for the first time. All those people on the set, all of them old hands, far older hands than you are, firing a hundred-and-one different questions at you and expecting a hundred-and-one correct answers. Not to mention the constant thought of the cinema audiences who are going to be watching it one day. All those hungry eyes waiting to be fed!

‘I studied Hanway myself whenever I had some free time. Oh, he looked perfect, with his dungarees creased just so and his Turnbull and Asser shirt and his Charvet silk tie and his viewfinder dangling on his chest as elegantly as a monocle. But when it came to the nuts and bolts of getting the picture
made, he didn’t know whether he was on his head or his heels. He just couldn’t handle all the decisions and indecisions of film production, all the meddling and the muddling you have to cope with.

‘It got so bad by the end of the first three days that there was talk all over again of closing down the picture.’

‘What happened?’ asked Evadne.

‘What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. On the fourth day – that would have been Thursday – he was a new man. You could almost see the confidence ooze out of his pores. How he overcame his stage fright or screen fright or whatever you care to call it, I have no idea, but that he
had
overcome it there wasn’t the slightest doubt at all. Drink? Dope? Medication? Whichever it was, he suddenly seemed to know not only what he wanted but how he’d be able to obtain it.

‘The transformation was uncanny. He would bark orders at gaffers and grips, he knew how to talk shop with the technical crew and, as for the actors, he had them eating out of his hand. The studio bosses are delighted with the rushes – don’t ask what those are, Trubshawe, I’ll tell you some sunny day – the money men never stop rubbing their sweaty palms together, everything is running on rails.’

‘You know, Cora,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘what you’ve just been describing, I actually don’t find so hard to explain. Matter of fact, I’ve often had exactly the same experience myself.’

‘You?’

‘Absolutely. I sit at my old Oliver typewriter and I sit and I sit and nothing happens. Then, who knows how or why, all of a sudden I find myself merrily typing away. It’s as though my fingers have started to have ideas of their own, ideas they don’t even bother consulting me about. And the oddest part of it all is that it usually turns out to be my best stuff.’

None too interested in the metaphysics of literary creation, Cora shrugged her shoulders.

‘What can I say? As I remarked to Orson only the other day, that’s the business we call show.’

Extracting from her handbag two or three delicate little tools of her trade, she rapidly adjusted her face, a face that had begun to bear an increasingly distant acquaintance with her age, and said:

‘
Voilà
. Evie will be waiting for you, Trubbers, to pick her up at her Albany flat – at, shall we say, nine o’clock tomorrow morning? You’ll drive down to Elstree, where I’ll meet you, show you round, introduce you to some of the cast and crew, the usual drill. Then I’ll do my big scene in the afternoon. Right?’

Trubshawe had only to nod his head.

The next morning he rang Evadne Mount’s doorbell at exactly quarter-to-nine.

‘Unpunctual,’ she scowled, ushering him in. ‘I might have known.’

‘Unpunctual?’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, really! What
will
you say next?’ He consulted his watch. ‘It’s just 8.45. I’m fifteen minutes early.’

‘Precisely. Being early is also a form of unpunctuality, you know. Now, because I’m obliged to keep you waiting for fifteen minutes, you’ve made me feel guilty. No, my dear Eustace, if we’re to continue seeing one another, you must learn to be on time. And I do mean on time.’

Before he could take umbrage at her Jesuitical logic, she rushed past him onto the landing. Her ancient Sealyham terrier Gilbert (named after Chesterton, as she explained to the Chief-Inspector) had waddled out of the flat as soon as he noticed its open front door and, for the sake of the Albany’s lush carpeting, immediately had to be coaxed back in again.

‘Like all of us, I’m afraid,’ she sighed, ‘poor Gilbert has become a teensy bit leaky in his declining years.’

When they were finally off, Gilbert having been safely retrieved, it took Trubshawe less than an hour to motor down to Elstree. The studio itself, however, proved a cruel disappointment to both of them. Imposing as it was, it resembled less the popular conception of a Factory of Dreams than it did some commonplace industrial plant, a tannery, perhaps, or a large brickyard. Architecturally without distinction, being all rain-streaked concrete walls and crude corrugated roofing, it was, as Trubshawe scornfully remarked, a warehouse, neither more nor less. Glamour there was none. No more was there the faintest hint of Romance.

At the main entrance, moreover, an obstreperous gate-keeper, a typical petty tyrant of the
genus
bureaucratum
, immediately barred their way.

‘Can’t let you in,’ he said, ‘if you don’t have an appointment.’

Evadne Mount, naturally, would have none of this.

‘An appointment!’ she barked at him. ‘Good heavens, you silly juggins, do you suppose, do you
really
suppose, that we would have travelled all the way down here from Town if we didn’t have an appointment?’

‘Show us it, then,’ said the gate-keeper suspiciously.

‘The appointment was made in person. How can I show you what was never committed to print?’

‘In that case, I can’t allow you through. It would be more than my job’s worth.’

‘Nonsense! I tell you, my good man, we’ve come to pay a call on Miss Cora Rutherford – at her own request. I repeat, Cora Rutherford. If you don’t open up these gates at once, I shall make it my business to see that you’re replaced by someone who will. You’ll find out then just how much your job is worth.’

For a few seconds he nervously agonised over what to do.

‘P’raps if I was to phone …’

Evadne subjected him to her patented ‘How like a man!’ expression.

‘You’ll do nothing of the kind. My fear is that Miss Rutherford is already in a state of anxiety, perhaps wondering if we’ve been involved in some frightful accident. She’ll be furious – no, no, no, if I know Cora, she’ll be incandescent! – when she learns that we aren’t at her side because you were just too bloody-minded to let us in. Permit us to pass, will you, if you know what’s good for you.’

Still hesitant, conscious of setting a precedent he was likely to regret, he finally raised the barrier and granted the two visitors access to the hallowed inner sanctum. When the car entered the studio grounds, Evadne had to chuckle as she peered through its rear-view mirror and observed, decreasing in size as they themselves advanced, the poor gate-keeper now quite visibly appalled at the liberty he’d been gulled into letting them take.

A few minutes later, Trubshawe having parked the Rover, the question arose of locating Studio 3, in which, as Cora had told them,
If Ever They Find Me Dead
was being filmed. An obvious solution would have been to ask their way of some passer-by. There was, though, a problem. Practically all the passers-by who crossed their path seemed to be decked out in extravagant fancy-dress costume. They met Roundheads and Cavaliers, Gypsies and Musketeers, Regency Fops and Pearly Queens, from none of whom they would have felt at ease soliciting so mundane a direction.

As often happens, however, wandering among the prefabricated hangars of which the studio complex seemed to be almost wholly composed, they suddenly and providentially found themselves standing in front of the largest of all. Inscribed on its tall metal door was the legend:
Studio 3.
They were there.

Now literary legend has it that, once he had been interrupted by a ‘person from Porlock’, the poet Coleridge found himself ever after incapable of recapturing the rapturous inspiration which had produced the first few indelible stanzas of
Kubla Khan.
Heaven knows (was the thought running through Evadne Mount’s mind as she contemplated the spectacle which confronted them when she opened the door) how anything of enduring value could be created inside a studio that appeared to be home to Porlock’s entire population.

There were technicians unfurling railway tracks, or what resembled railway tracks, over the cable-strewn floor. Others,
so high overhead as to be almost invisible, were fixing wires to poles, and poles to wires, and screwing gigantic and, after they had been switched on, eye-dazzling arc-lights onto both. Because of the ubiquitous dust, and the equally ubiquitous cigarette-smoke caught in the criss-crossing shafts of light – for every single crew member had, in defiance of various
No Smoking
signs, a wet Woodbine wedged between his teeth – the air was literally tangible.

In fact, when the novelist sought to communicate her first impression of the cinema world, even she was required to raise her voice’s already elevated decibel level.

‘You know,’ she thundered, ‘what all this reminds me of?’

‘No, what?’ the Chief-Inspector shouted back at her.

‘A ship!’

‘A what?’

‘A ship! A nineteenth-century schooner. Look for yourself. Look at all those decks and sails and masts and rigging. I tell you, it’s exactly like a ship that’s just about to quit the dockside.’

‘Why, you’re right at that. Yes, I see exactly what you mean. And you and I are like a couple of well-wishers on the quay waving goodbye to the passengers.’

‘For Cora’s sake,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘let’s hope it isn’t the
Mary Celeste
. Speaking of Cora,’ she added, ‘I wonder how we ought to go about finding her.’

She didn’t have long to wonder. Holding a clipboard in her hand and a script rolled up into a narrow cylinder under her
arm, owlish horn-rimmed spectacles propped up on her forehead like a spare pair of eyes, an oddly elfin young woman at once swept up to them.

‘Excuse me,’ she said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, ‘but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave at once. No outsiders are permitted on the set while filming is underway.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Evadne Mount, inspecting her with interest, ‘but,
primo
, we aren’t precisely outsiders and,
secundo
, as far as I can make out, no filming is underway yet.’

‘Why, of course it is,’ answered the young woman. ‘Don’t be misled by the fact that the camera isn’t turning and the actors aren’t acting. That’s merely the tip of the iceberg. This is what making a film is all about – preparation. Though why I should be wasting my time explaining the ins-and-outs of the business to you I really don’t know.’

Lowering her spectacles down onto her eyes, she gazed inquisitively at them.

‘Just who are you, anyway? How did you get into the studio?’

‘Well, you see, we’re both friends –’ Trubshawe began.

‘You aren’t extras on the Agatha Christie picture which René Clair is shooting on Stage 5, are you? What’s it called again?
Ten Little Whatnots
?’

The novelist almost blew a fuse.

‘Extras on the …?!’ she bridled, incapable of pronouncing the name of the rival in whose shadow it would seem she
was eternally condemned to languish. ‘Certainly not!’ she cried. ‘Why, the very idea!’

‘Then will you please leave at once. I don’t want to have to call security.’

‘This,’ declared the novelist, drawing up the battle lines, ‘is Chief-Inspector Trubshawe of Scotland Yard and I, my dear,
I
am Evadne Mount.’

A
soupçon
of interest ruffled the young woman’s creepy poise.

‘Evadne Mount?
The
Evadne Mount?’

‘The same – currently President of the Detection Club and oldest friend of Cora Rutherford, one of the stars of your picture, who, I might add, invited both of us down here today and is, at this moment, no doubt wondering where the Hell we’ve got to.’

The young woman hastily consulted her clipboard.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ she finally replied, giving her scalp a vigorous poke with the sharp end of her pencil. ‘Forgive me, we
were
advised to expect you. It’s just that, as you can see, everything is so frantic at the moment and I’ve had so many different things to think about. I do apologise. Let me introduce myself. Lettice Morley, Rex Hanway’s personal assistant.’

‘Rex Hanway?’ said Trubshawe. ‘He’s the producer of the picture, right?’

‘Lord, no!’ she fluttered. ‘Please never let him hear you call him that. He’s the director. He took over after Mr Farjeon –
well, I’m sure you heard about Mr Farjeon’s untimely demise.’

‘And Cora?’ enquired Evadne Mount. ‘Has she started filming yet?’

At the actress’s name, what had never been more than a polite and perfunctory smile was altogether wiped off Lettice Morley’s face.

‘Miss Rutherford? Ah well, she is, I suppose, a great artist but I’m afraid, like not a few great artists, she – now how shall I express this? – she can sometimes be a touch inconsiderate of her colleagues’ needs. The picture business is, you must know, a collective activity and some of our leading stars, our leading ladies in particular, unfortunately lack what might be called the collective spirit. Films are like trains. If they run at all, they have to run on schedule.’

‘You mean,’ said Evadne Mount, ‘she’s late.’

‘If you’re talking about this morning, forty minutes late. It really is most trying for Mr Hanway. Especially as Miss Rutherford’s role is by no means crucial.’

The novelist laughed.

‘Cora, I’m afraid, is one of those people who are
always
unpunctual and yet who
always
have an excuse, a different one for every occasion.’

‘Yes, well, that’s all very charming, I dare say, but on a film set unpunctuality is the cardinal sin, one that’s forgiven – and then very grudgingly – only if it’s been committed by a major star, a Margaret Lockwood, you know, or a Linden Travers. Whereas Cora Rutherford …’

She left the remainder of her comment unaired, not just because she had perhaps realised she was at risk of overstepping the bounds of professional propriety but also because, at that very moment, wearing a trim little cocktail dress, black with mauve linings, and brandishing her inevitable cigarette-holder, the actress herself finally wafted into view.

Evadne and Trubshawe watched from a distance as Cora approached someone seated on a folding canvas chair on whose back was printed, as they now noticed, the words
Mr Hanway
. As with the male character in the opening scene of the film itself, however, such as it had been recounted to them by Cora, no more than his own back, along with a mere pinch of his profile, was visible to them; and it was only when he turned his head to hear what the actress’s excuse might be for holding up the proceedings that they were granted a more complete view of his facial features. His age, difficult to judge, could have been anywhere between thirty and forty. His face was somehow both intense and expressionless, with eyes of an unnervingly glassy inscrutability. He was wearing, of all improbable items of attire, a labourer’s boiler-suit, but a boiler-suit so flawlessly fashioned that his elegant silk tie seemed not at all a mismatch. And on his lap sat an exquisitely bony Siamese cat, washing its face with those nervy little paw-flicks that are irresistibly reminiscent of the hapless flailings of a punch-drunk prizefighter.

‘Rex darling!’ cried the actress. ‘I know, I know, late
again. But I swear to you, it wasn’t my fault. When I’m late, it’s always for my art, and surely any artist, especially the kind of perfectionist I am, may be forgiven for that.’

After a brief silence, while starting to caress the cat with such vigour he risked wearing it out, Hanway replied, ‘My dear Cora, what I want from you isn’t perfectionism but perfection. What was the problem this time?’

Cora tugged heartlessly at her cocktail dress.

‘This was the problem. I had to ask Vi to take the waist in again. It was so unbecoming it made me look, well, can you imagine, blowsy. Blowsy,
me
? Wouldn’t do at all.’

She leaned over to stroke the silky, sulky cat, now all the sulkier at having her ablutions disturbed.

‘Nice pussy,’ she cooed nervously. ‘Who’s a pretty pussy?’

Hanway donned a mask of heroic patience.

‘Let me remind you, Cora, you
are
supposed to be playing the dowdy neglected wife. We can’t have you looking too alluring.’

The director suddenly snapped out of his languor. Lifting the cat up off his lap, he disengaged its claws from the hem of his boiler-suit as cautiously as a hiker untangling a strand of his jumper from a barbed-wire fence and plumped it down on a canvas chair that was next to his own and on the back of which was printed the name
Cato
. Then, leaping to his feet, he clapped his hands together.

‘All right, everybody in place! We’re going to rehearse the scene!’

Turning to Lettice, who had been diligently hovering over him throughout his brief exchange with Cora, he said, ‘I want all the extras on set.’

Cora, meanwhile, aware of her friends’ presence, mouthed a flighty ‘Yoo-hoo!’ and waved over to them. Raising her kohl-rimmed eyes as though to say ‘No rest for the weary!’, she then huddled together with Hanway while he presumably gave her a few final instructions on how the scene was to be played. At the same time, the extras had begun to position themselves as ordered. There were a dozen of them, half male, half female, all in smart evening dress. And, bringing up the rear, chaperoned by a spinsterish, stern-faced nanny, were two children, a cherubic boy of about ten, the picture of brattish disgruntlement in his starchy sailor-suit, and a shy little girl less than half his age who, in her beribboned white party frock and miniature ballet pumps, was a Mabel Lucie Atwell postcard teased into dimpled, pink-cheeked life.