Darling Sweetheart (4 page)

‘Two weeks of shootin’ and ya think we’re still feelin’ our way?’ He looked as if he might pounce, like she’d been a bad butterfly.

‘Uhh… what I meant was I’ve been trying to find my own feet…’ The hallway door opened and Talbot returned with a tray bearing a single glass of beer, which she accepted, nodding her thanks.

‘But what d’ya think of Tress?’

Emerson was obviously getting at something, so she chose her next words more carefully. ‘Peter is great. I wish I had the same confidence in myself as I do in him.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘I’ve been rehearsing like mad, trying to get Roselaine.’ She gave a small smile. ‘Actually, I thought maybe you’d invited me up here tonight to fire me.’

‘No way!’ he guffawed. ‘You were great today, kiddo! You don’t
need
to rehearse to get Roselaine!’

‘It’s nice of you to say so, but I’m–’

He pressed on, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘You don’t need to rehearse; all ya gotta do is fall in love with me.’

‘What?’

‘I said, ya gotta fall in love with me.’

She flushed. ‘Oh yes, I see what you mean – Roselaine falls in love with Bernard.’

‘No! Not our characters! I mean you, Annalise Palatine, have gotta fall in love with me, Harry Emerson!’ She felt her face flare up, but there was no escaping those eyes. ‘Who is Bernard?’ he demanded.

‘Sorry?’

‘Who is Bernard?’

‘Bernard is a twelfth-century crusader who realises that–’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ he barked. She flinched. ‘Bernard ain’t no crusader – Bernard is me!’ He smiled like a cartoon wolf with big, perfect teeth. ‘When ya get to my level, kiddo, ya don’t act
any more! It don’t matter who I am – a soldier, a spaceman, a secret agent – the audience pays to see Harry Emerson!’

‘I suppose…’

‘Bruce Willis!’

‘Eh?’

‘Bruce Willis always plays Bruce Willis, right? Clint is always Clint, just like Marilyn was always Marilyn! You follow?’ Dumbly, she nodded. ‘Good! So now ya see why fallin’ in love with Bernard is the same as fallin’ in love with me!’

‘I think so…’

‘Lemme ask ya somethin’ – how would ya like to win an Oscar?’

‘I…’

‘When I said you deserved an Oscar for your last movie, I wasn’t bullshittin’, but since that was just some liddle British indie thing, it ain’t gonna happen. But when
Heresy
opens next year, the studio will spend millions on marketin’ alone and if you and me set that screen on fire, they’ll sink millions more into pushin’ for a few of those little gold statues!’ He suddenly leaped forward, seized her arms and skewered her with those eyes. ‘Annalise! This is what Peter Tress does not understand! To hell with the script – you and me, we gotta set that screen on f
ire!’
He glanced down; in his enthusiasm, he had forgotten she was holding a glass of beer. Her hand and the floor were now beer-soaked. ‘Oh shit… I’m sorry… TALBOT!’ The butler materialised almost instantly. ‘Take Miss Palatine to the john and get me Frost down here, asap!’ Wordlessly, Talbot relieved Annalise of the near-empty glass and led her to a door off the hallway.

She washed her hands. The bathroom was bigger than the kitchen of her apartment. She studied her reflection, but her reflection seemed rather alarmed, so she practised smiling for a while before returning to the library. Emerson had been joined by a woman in her thirties who wore a taupe linen jacket and a black dress on a body that either over-exercised or never ate or
both. The woman’s jet hair had been ironed into a sophisticated bob but her face showed a pain as she watched Emerson bang his knuckles off the false books.

‘Ya see?’ he was explaining. ‘They’re all fake. Just bitsa wood, painted to look like books. Back in the olden days, it’s how they dickied up a room.’

‘Yes, H.E., I can see that now…’

‘Annalise Palatine, I’d like you to meet my chief personal assistant, Judy Frost. Judy – Annalise. It was Annalise who spotted the books, Judy. In fact, she spotted them the second she walked into the room.’ Frost shook Annalise’s hand with a smile, but if her eyes could have spoken, they would have said something like ‘curl up and die, you interfering bitch’. Her mouth said, ‘I can assure you, H.E., that when we took the lease on the property, the owner said nothing about this.’

‘It’s your job to take care of the details, Judy. Where would we be if we didn’t take care of the details?’ Annalise felt embarrassed for the older woman, being ticked off in front of a total stranger over something so trivial.

‘We’d be nowhere, H.E. I’ll call the owner immediately and inform him of our displeasure in the matter.’

‘Inform the fuckin’ asshole that we don’t want his crappy house then find me somewhere better.’

Frost blanched. ‘But… this is the best château within thirty miles of Beynac. It took months to organise.’

Emerson’s reply was a masterpiece of curbed menace. ‘Judy–I want a castle with real books. Do you think you could do that for me, please?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’ll get on to it right away.’

‘We need to take care of the details, Judy. Another example–I inspected the kitchens this mornin’ and I noticed that some of the condiment jars had been placed on the storage shelves with their labels turned inwards.’

‘Condiment… jars?’

‘Yeah, can you believe that? I asked Stefan about it and he said one of the house staff musta done it. So I said to him, how in the hell are we supposed to know which condiment is which if the labels aren’t positioned outways so we can read them?’ Annalise almost giggled but stopped herself when she saw the utter seriousness of Emerson’s expression.

‘I agree, H.E., that that is a completely unacceptable situation.’

‘How was anyone supposed to find the right condiment, Judy?’

‘Really, H.E., you shouldn’t trouble yourself with–’

‘It’s okay, I fixed it already. I personally turned all those jars so their labels faced outways. But I shouldna hadda do that – should I, Judy?’

Frost whispered, ‘No, H.E., you should not.’

He sighed. ‘Fake books, disorganised storage – things are sure are gettin’ sloppy round here.’

Now, the woman looked frightened. ‘I’ll arrange new accommodation straight away. And I’ll sack the housemaid.’

He sighed absently. ‘Yeah, you do that. One more thing: call Peter Tress and tell him I wanna talk to him.’ he consulted his watch, ‘say twenty minutes from now. I’ll take it in here. And tell Talbot we’re ready to chow down.’

‘Of course.’ Frost backed out the door, closing it gently. Emerson shook his head.

‘Goddamn incredible, ain’t it – no matter how rich or famous you are, you gotta do everythin’ yourself!’

‘Harry,’ Annalise tried to hide the astonishment in her voice, ‘you’re not really going to move from this beautiful house just because of those silly books? I was only trying to make conversation.’

He sat down at the table, without holding her chair out, much less waiting for her. ‘This is why you and me are gonna be so great together. You got taste – you were born into this.’

‘Not really.’ She seated herself opposite. ‘It’s true that I grew up in a big house, but it was an awful wreck and we never had any money.’

‘You say that, but you got pedigree.’

‘Like a dog?’

‘Professional pedigree. Lemme tell you somethin’,’ now his voice turned soft and pseudo-confessional, ‘lemme tell you somethin’ about me. Until I discovered the movies, everythin’ about me was ordinary. I was an ordinary kid, with an ordinary life, in ordinary New Jersey. And the neighbourhood kids were mean to me, so, every day, I hid out in the movie-house. All through the late seventies and the early eighties, I saw every movie that was ever made. But one movie changed my life, because it made me wanna act. Now I reckon you know what I’m talkin’ about here – don’tcha?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

He smiled. ‘Go on, you first.’

‘We didn’t live near a cinema, but when I was little, I had a video copy of
Bugsy Malone
. I wanted to be Jodie Foster so badly that I cut my hair with nail scissors and tried to dye it blonde with lemon juice. My mother nearly beat me to death with a hairbrush.’

He laughed. ‘There ya go! Age twelve, I saw this guy in a movie and boom! That was it! I knew what I hadda do with my life!’

‘What was the film?’

‘It was
Fanshawe, Grovel and the Valley of Fear.’

‘No!’

‘And the guy who made me wanna act was–’

‘No!’

‘…David Palatine!’

‘Really?’

‘Cross my heart.’ And he launched into a fair impersonation of her father’s upper-class idiot voice.
‘“I say, Grovel, prostrate
yourself across yonder puddle, so I don’t get me galoshes wet.’”
She laughed, but from nerves, not amusement. ‘He played both parts, right? The crazy English aristo and his French sidekick?’

‘Yes, Grovel was my father in heavy make-up.’

Emerson chuckled to himself and Talbot burst through the door followed by a waiter pushing a trolley.

‘The hors d’oeuvre, Sir.’

He served them plates with silver covers which he lifted with great ceremony to reveal nothing more than a handful of prawns, criss-crossed with a trickle of scarlet sauce and a single purple lettuce leaf.

‘Spiffing.’ Emerson resumed his Fanshawe accent. ‘Tell Stefan that he’s a spiffing chap!’

‘I will, Sir.’

‘Best chef in the British Empire, what?’

‘Will that be all, Sir?’

Annalise piped up. ‘I’m sorry, but could I trouble you for another beer? I didn’t get much of the last one.’

‘Right away, Miss.’ Waiter and trolley followed Talbot smartly out the door.

‘The poor man!’ she remonstrated. ‘He thought you were mocking him!’

Emerson reverted to his normal drawl. ‘Honey, I pay that guy so much money, he’s lucky I don’t paint him blue and make him work in a tutu.’

Still, it was the waiter, not Talbot, who returned with Annalise’s beer. She took a swallow, still conscious of Emerson’s eyes on her, as if she were the hors d’oeuvre, not the prawns.

‘So,’ she toyed with her purple lettuce leaf, ‘you seem to know a thing or two about my family.’

‘I’ve done my homework. I think your father was one of the greatest actors who ever lived.’

‘Well then,’ she met his gaze, ‘you ought to know that he hated that whole Fanshawe and Grovel thing. He said it was a
cliché that became a franchise. He made thirteen of them–’

‘I’ve seen them all, many times.’

‘–and he was utterly fed up by the time he finished the second. Can you imagine how he felt after twenty years of making pretty much the same film, over and over again? He complained that it wasn’t proper acting, just clowning around.’

‘But you could tell there was a great actor underneath, because only a great actor coulda made those guys so goddamn funny.’

‘I don’t think those films have dated well.’

‘They gotta huge followin’.’

‘So why don’t you do comedy?’

‘Because I ain’t funny.’

‘My father felt Fanshawe and Grovel were beneath him. “That Victorian poof and his retarded sidekick,” he used to call them.’

‘What’s a poof?’

‘Oh, a gay man. Not a nice word.’

‘Still, that poof made him rich.’

‘I think that’s one of the reasons he hated the whole thing. He was typecast; no one took him seriously in other roles. Every time he thought he’d made his last, some studio would come back waving a bigger pay cheque.’

‘Yet you said you never had any money.’

‘Harry, my father was… an odd person. I loved him very much, but he could be a terrible shit. He left my mother when I was nine, although, in reality, he’d left her long before that. I only saw him sporadically through my teens. Then his plane flew into the sea and that was that. As for money, often we wouldn’t hear from him for months. Then I’d come home from school and find a Palomino pony tethered outside my bedroom window. A bloody Palomino, when my mother couldn’t afford to buy me clothes. He sent me a sports car when I was thirteen–’

‘Cool.’

‘–four years before I was legally allowed to drive. My mother sold it. The house was falling down around us and he sends me a sports car.’

‘But what was he like as a person? I mean, really?’

‘Da–,’ and she nearly said ‘Darling Sweetheart’ but caught herself just in time, ‘Da-David was one of the most marvellous people you could ever hope to meet.’ Her eyes stung, but she forbade them to moisten. ‘He was also one of the most horrendous. Actually, I have a policy of not really talking about him very much, if you don’t mind.’

Emerson smiled benignly. ‘I saw the interview you did with that British paper before you started filmin’. I have it on file.’

‘You have
a file
on me?’

‘Frost keeps a file on everyone I work with; you got your policies, I got mine. We were always gonna work together, you and me. I just needed the right project.’

‘You cast me for this film because you’re a fan of my father?’

‘I cast you,’ his smile widened, ‘because I respect you as an actress!’ He made an expansive gesture. ‘I mean, here we are in France, eatin’ supper in a beautiful château…’ he frowned, ‘apart from those goddamn phoney books.’ Then he brightened again, ‘And the script says we gotta fall in love! What’s not to like?’

‘If you read that interview, then you’ll know I have a boyfriend back in England.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘Excuse
me?’

‘I said, “Do you love him?”’

‘That’s a very personal sort of question!’

‘I’m a personal sorta guy.’

‘What if I asked you questions about your love life, eh?’

Suddenly, he looked like a solemn little boy. ‘I don’t have anyone right now.’

‘Rubbish – you could have your pick of all the women in the world!’

‘Do you include yourself in that category?’ She blushed again. He laughed uproariously and wagged his finger as if he’d been joking, but as the butler returned with the trolley and the waiter, she noticed that his eyes never left her. Talbot served them both mineral water.

‘No wine,’ Emerson wagged his finger some more, ‘because it doesn’t agree with you, right?’