The Birthday Party (29 page)

She picked up the file. And the good luck card she had bought him in Paperchase, which now seemed a little bit silly.

If she found him now, she could rush straight off to the post office with that day’s mail, before she made a fool of herself
and started crying. Which she could well do.

Raf was in the hall. He’d just come in from packing his stuff in the car.

She handed him the file.

‘This is everything important that you need,’ she told him. ‘Shooting schedules, maps, travel arrangements, contact details.
And the script.’

‘Thanks, Polly. What would I do without you?’

‘And here.’ She handed him the card with a shy smile.

He opened it and read it. She hadn’t been sure how many kisses to put. If any. In the end she had put two.

‘That’s lovely,’ he told her, tucking it into his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll put it up in my bedroom.’

He held out his arms and she gave him a huge hug, breathing in his smell for the last time.

Not for the last time, she told herself. Don’t be so melodramatic.

‘Look after everyone for me, Poll,’ he told her, and she nodded. That was what she was here for, after all. To look after
everyone.

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ she croaked, thinking that wouldn’t restrict him in the least. After all, what mischief
did podgy, plain old dumpling Polly Fry ever get up to?

Delilah was hiding in the downstairs cloakroom. Where else could she go in her own home and have a good howl? She couldn’t
go back up to the bedroom, because Raf was running in and out for things he had forgotten. She couldn’t go into the office
– Polly and Tony would wonder what on earth the matter was. She could hear the housekeeper clattering about in the kitchen.
The gardener was jet-washing the terrace. She put her head down, tears plopping onto the black and white tiles. She had the
world at her feet and nowhere to cry.

‘Dee!’ Raf was shouting from the hall. ‘Delilah – I’m almost ready to go. Where are you?’

She looked in the mirror over the sink. She didn’t think she looked much different to the day she had met him twenty-five
years ago. A few lines around the eyes, the skin slightly less luminous. But inside, she felt totally changed. She felt as
if a light had been turned off. As if it was all over, somehow. Nothing to look forward to. Everything had been achieved.
The lustre had gone from her life. It was all her heart could do to keep beating, it felt so heavy. It was as though it was
asking what was the point of pushing her blood round her body any longer. She’d served her purpose.

She picked up the lipstick she kept on the shelf and painted on a smile. Fluffed up her hair. Straightened her shoulders.
She better make an effort for Raf, or he might not come back.

R
af felt his heart soar as he drove from the motorway towards Bath, looking down into the deep green bowl studded with pale
ginger houses. If you were going to be stranded anywhere for three months, Bath was as good a place as any, he reckoned. As
the steep, winding hill dropped down into the city, and he began to negotiate the traffic-filled streets, he marvelled at
the architecture, the splendour, the grandeur of the place. It must have been breath-taking in the days before cars, when
all the stone was mellow yellow and not stained grey by pollution. It still looked magnificent even now, the handsome Georgian
facçades and the more ornate Victorian villas interspersed with the necessities of modern life – garage forecourts, blocks
of flats, traffic lights. He spied interesting shops he would take time to visit, little restaurants that looked inviting,
and he felt a flutter of excitement – the same feeling he got on the first day of a holiday, with the prospect of so many
places to discover and get to know.

The sat-nav guided him calmly through the streets and up a steep hill, then past the magnificent splendour of the Royal Crescent,
the curved row of four-storey houses facing the immaculate green. For a moment Raf wondered if he was mad to turn down Delilah’s
offer. It would be wonderful to live there, if only for a short time, to be part of the history of this architectural masterpiece.
No, he told himself. The decision he had made had been the right one. He was part of a team. They were all going to pull together
to make this movie a resounding success.

Eventually he was told he had reached his destination. It might not be as grand as the Royal Crescent, but Collingwood was
still pleasing to the eye. Set squarely in its own grounds, Raf warmed to the house at once. He drove in through the sturdy
stone pillars, crunched over the pale yellow chippings and parked.

A pleasant woman of around thirty came out and introduced herself as the housekeeper.

‘You’re the first to arrive,’ she beamed, ‘so you get first dibs.’

Raf explored the house with a childlike excitement so he could choose his room. It was an easy decision to make in the end,
and it didn’t make him look as if he had bagged the best. He didn’t want the biggest, or either of the ones with their own
en-suite. He wanted the attic room at the top of the house, the one with a tiny castellated balcony that looked out over the
garden and the roofs of the city beyond, so he could sit there at night and wonder what people were doing under those roofs,
and what the people who had lived there before had done. He put his suitcases on the bed, threw open the window and breathed
in, as the housekeeper brought him a cup of tea and two shortbread biscuits on a tray.

‘You won’t be getting this every day, I’m afraid,’ she told him. ‘I’ll just be in twice a week to clear up after you.’

Raf took the tea gratefully, thinking that actually it would be wonderful not to have people underfoot all the time. You couldn’t
put a cup down in The Bower without it being whisked away and put in the dishwasher – only at the weekends, when the staff
didn’t come in unless there was a special occasion. He’d always relished the peace and quiet and the reassuring clutter that
built up over those two days. He liked finding yesterday’s newspaper where he had left it, not folded away and put in the
recycling before he’d had a chance to finish it.

He put his tea down on the bedside table, stretched out on the bed with his arms behind his head.

The peace and quiet was wonderful. He supposed the
housekeeper was somewhere about, but he couldn’t hear her. There were no phones ringing, no hoovers, no dog barking, no chatter.
He could actually hear himself think.

He took out his copy of the script. It was well thumbed and tattered by now. He had scrawled notes all over it. On the back,
he had drawn the arc of Hugo’s journey throughout the story – his high points and low points. He’d written down ideas about
what books and films he might like, what hobbies he might have, a little biography of his past – stuff that might never actually
be seen on screen, but helped him get a broader picture of who this man was.

He’d been shopping with the wardrobe girl the week before, to assemble Hugo’s wardrobe, and had enjoyed arguing with her over
the finer points. Raf was a perfectionist who believed that the devil was in the detail – everything, down to the last button,
had to be right. He was adamant that Hugo was the sort of man who would always get things slightly wrong – as a result he
knew that he wouldn’t be taking home any of the clothes they ended up buying after the shoot was over. They’d had a real laugh,
collapsing into giggles in various shops in Covent Garden as Raf emerged from the changing rooms looking like a middle-aged
raver – trousers slightly too tight, shirts a bit too garish. By the end of the day Raf felt confident that he had nailed
the character down sartorially – though the hardest bit was yet to come. The day before they started actual filming, he was
going to have to have his hair cut in a suitably Hugo-esque style. He’d been growing out his trademark crop in anticipation,
but wasn’t relishing three months looking like an idiot. Such was the price of fame, he thought to himself.

Mind you, it was going to be worth it. He couldn’t believe how much he was looking forward to working again. At last his life
would have some momentum. He would have satisfaction at the end of the day, and anticipation at the beginning, neither of
which he had really felt for years. He had been existing in a vacuum. There had been times when he couldn’t see the point
of getting up in the morning. The world certainly
wouldn’t have stopped turning if he hadn’t. Only through a monumental effort of will, and the realisation that he had already
put Delilah and the girls through enough hell, did he manage to drag himself out from between the sheets.

This time around, he was going to be fully aware of what he was doing. In the past, he hadn’t bothered with researching his
characters, and looking back now he couldn’t believe how arrogant he had been, just winging it, and how lucky he had been
to get away with it. He must have been a nightmare to work with. He remembered resolutely refusing to discuss motivation with
the directors. ‘I’ll just do it,’ he used to say, and he did, and to be fair his performances had always been right on the
button, but it had been a huge risk.

The thought of doing it that way now made him shudder. This film was going to be all about teamwork, he decided, as if in
some way he could atone for his previous neglect.

Raf felt his toes starting to curl, as they always did when he burrowed about in the past. He leapt up off the bed. He wasn’t
going to look back. He was going to look forward. He had even, momentarily, toyed with the idea of changing his name for his
on-screen credit, dropping the Raf and going with his real name, Richard, the name no one ever called him, just to make it
clear to both himself and the world that he and that other despicable person were poles apart. Miriam had persuaded him otherwise
– it looked cowardly, and although he might harbour strong feelings of resentment towards the old Raf, he still had a lot
of admirers out there.

‘Don’t turn your back on who you were,’ she told him. ‘That person has made you who you are today.’

He remembered with distaste his ritual on arriving for a shoot in the old days. By now he would have been propping up the
bar, or stocking up on vodka to stash in his digs. He would have worked out where the nearest pub was, and sniffed out the
fellow cast members whom he could lead astray so he wouldn’t feel alone, feeding on their weakness to mask his own.

Today, by contrast, he was going to take a stroll into Bath, get the feel of the place where his character lived, see if he
could work out where he shopped, where he took his wife for their anniversary meal. And it was a far, far better feeling than
the drunken oblivion he would have been heading for in the past.

Dickie Rushe was throwing a first-night dinner for the cast and crew at Bablake House. He was paying for it himself, because
the budget they were on didn’t run to luxuries like dinner in five-star establishments, but he felt it was important to make
his team feel important. And there was nothing like getting drunk together for bonding.

Not that they were all going to get drunk. He was very conscious of protecting Raf’s sensibilities, and had rung him before
booking it.

‘Look, I want to give everyone the chance to let their hair down and get to know each other. But if it’s going to make you
feel uncomfortable …’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘There will be drinking involved.’

Raf just laughed.

‘Dickie, I’m used to it. And I actually enjoy watching everyone fall apart on these occasions. It’s great people-watching.
You go for it. And I’d like to cover the bar bill. Anonymously, of course.’

Dickie hung up the phone, relieved and touched by Raf’s generous gesture. He was going to be wonderful to work with. He couldn’t
wait.

Bablake House was a Palladian mansion set in the Somerset countryside five miles outside Bath. It had established itself as
an out-of-town playground for the city’s elite, with a country club atmosphere that was decidedly unstuffy. It was going to
be used as one of the locations in the film so they gave Dickie a great rate on their ballroom, and worked him out a menu
that was delicious but wasn’t going to break the bank – huge platters of antipasti (mozzarella, figs, prosciutto, char-grilled
peppers and olives), herby roast chicken and baked peaches with amaretti. The barman created a special ‘
Something for the Weekend
’ cocktail, with elderflower and prosecco. It was far more important, Dickie always thought, to have a great kickoff than
a wrap party. Once you had wrapped, the damage had been done, but a memorable morale-booster at the beginning worked wonders.

At seven o’clock that evening, he was standing in the room he had booked for himself. As the director he had to stay until
the bitter end, and he wanted to be able to crawl upstairs, not wait for a taxi to take him back to their digs. His stomach
was churning. He went into the bathroom, threw up neatly into the gleaming white porcelain of the state-of-the-art toilet,
flushed and did his teeth. This was it – this was really it. His film was about to start taking shape.

For a moment he wished he had someone to share his anxiety with. There had been a girl once, a very special girl, but he had
blown it, with his obsession, his introspection, his inability to think about anything much apart from work. He had paid a
high price all right. He thought back to that face he had loved, and the last time he had seen it, streaked with tears, as
she had walked away.

He put the lid back on his toothpaste and squared his shoulders. Of course he had regrets, but he had made his choice. For
the time being,
Something for the Weekend
was the love of his life.

He pulled a white shirt out of his suitcase. He’d actually made the effort to go and buy something new. He owed his team that
much at least. He took it out of his cellophane wrapping, shook out the creases as best he could and slipped it over his head,
tucking it into the waistband of his jeans. He ruffled his hair with his fingers, slipped on his glasses and headed for the
door. Then stopped. He needed to be sick again. Once tonight was over, he’d be fine. It was just first-night nerves.