The Facts of Life (18 page)

When Edward did work from home, she kept out of his way. Resisting the temptation to sit in the hall and listen, for fear of angering him, she borrowed the car to drive cautiously to market or to her parents, pottered in the garden as best the baby would allow or simply stayed in bed with a book. Despite her mother’s gift of needles and wool, she declined to learn to knit; some principles, she assured Dr Pertwee, remained sacred.

Whether he worked from home or the studios, Edward seemed to be always one step from exhaustion these days. His face began to crease from strain – a little trench appearing on either side of his mouth and a frown between his brows. He fell into a deep sleep often before he had kissed her goodnight, sometimes even before she had come to bed herself. Restless and uncomfortable with her size, she sat up beside his slow-breathing body, reading, stopping occasionally to stare at him. She loved his face when it slept. It acquired an openness, an expression of calm trust it no longer wore in waking hours. Usually he lay there still and silent, but sometimes a dream disturbed the pool of his slumbers and he would twitch and mutter like a hound hunting in its sleep. Once, lost to her in a nightmare, he even wept. He made no sound beyond twitching the bedclothes, but when she turned to him in the moonlight she watched in appalled fascination as three tears welled up, distinct as those in a Disney cartoon, and ran in quick succession down his bony cheek.

As Edward stressed in vain in the face of Sally’s shopgirl curiosity, the studios were anything but glamorous. The initial thrill had lasted a week, maybe two, then he discovered they were actually a factory, perhaps shabbier and more ramshackle than most. Avenues of Nissen huts, cavernous sound stages and ad hoc mobile dressing rooms were linked overhead by a sparse canopy of telephone wires, stout, rusting pipes and haphazard swags of electric cable. The kitsch pomposity of the porter’s lodge – a thatched, Tudorbethan affair designed to summon up the same sense of anticipation as a grand entry to a stately home – raised expectations that were entirely false, for one passed swiftly into a labyrinth of unloved industrial buildings without ever arriving at anything one could truly call a front or main entrance. There was not even a façade. The country house theme was taken up just once elsewhere, in the commissariat. The seventeen-forties’ elegance of this oak-panelled dining room was as bogus as any ballroom or boudoir concocted in the scenery docks around it, its phoneyness heightened by the knowledge that, barely a decade before, it had been an indoor swimming pool where starlets disported for the entertainment of press and producers.

Musical soundtracks were recorded in a room like a cinema with all the seats taken out. The players – a ragged orchestra of hard-boiled professionals one suspected could play anything from Bach to Berlin with studied lack of discrimination – were ranged out across the floor. Edward conducted them from a podium while the relevant scene was projected on to a big screen behind them. They watched his baton, he watched the movie and, in a sound-proof cabin below the screen, a team of sound technicians recorded the noises he drew from them.

An actress’s face loomed, lower lip trembling with desire, eyes glistening with droplets artfully administered seconds before. Edward would time a crescendo to the invisible beating of her heart, synchronise the peak of a ‘cello’s soaring theme to the second when she held her breath and wiped away a sham tear. The timing had to be perfect, as well as the performance. He came to know every magnified inch of Myra Toye’s face, every inflection of her voice – so well that she began regularly to enter his dreams as he lay beside his wife. On some days they might spend an hour providing the melodic background to mere minutes of her latest film.

‘Background?’ Jerry Liebermann protested, waving a hand at the orchestra, ‘This, Teddy, is the icing on the cake. This can make or break us.’

And often it was true. Edward knew that his music masked lamentable deficiencies in the acting.

‘No. Don’t ask me. I can’t, you silly brute. I simply can’t!’ Miss Toye would jabber, shaking her beautifully gloved hands and covering her face, unable to hide the fact that she had been shooting all day, every day, for weeks, and was so tired she could hardly stand, much less emote on demand. Yet once Edward had counterpointed her words with a haunting, ironic echo of
Vronsky’s Theme
, played adagio on an unaccompanied oboe d’amore, her drab performance was burnished to a semblance of glory.

A film buff from boyhood, he was fascinated to be gaining an insider’s view of the film-maker’s craft. For all his self-disgust, he could not restrain a certain proud excitement. Yet every week he received fresh evidence that what he had taken for artistry was rank manipulation. He saw now that the men and women whose art he had worshipped were actually artless performers, blessed with a certain voice or physiognomy. Invariably shorter and less glamorous than they appeared on screen. They were recreated in an image worthy of their public’s fond delusions by a small army of gifted technical specialists. These would never be famous – no laudatory retrospective seasons awaited make-up artists and costumiers – yet all would still be working long after implication in a child rape case or a doomed sortie to Hollywood had rendered one of the stars yesterday’s face.

The performers who endured were the grotesque and self-mocking, the buck-toothed and overly tall, content to degrade themselves playing shrewish wives in preposterous hats, alcoholic spies and back-street abortionists with shaking hands and broken reading glasses. Fame, it seemed, always assigned the godlike a shorter contact with the public’s devotion. Edward did not always recognise film stars in the commissariat, so deflated did they seem in the flesh. The men, in particular, seemed less than heroic, even downright seedy, when not shot from below with the right lighting. But there were some who were so determined to maintain their screen persona and be always instantly recognisable – spinning manically from a joke with canteen staff, to cadging cigarettes from cameramen, to a touching recollection of the names of wives and children they would never meet – that he could almost
smell
their time burning out. Occasionally he spotted a former star whose face was still known to him. The lucky ones, who had married well and escaped, were usually seen stepping from a producer’s Daimler, lapped in shielding furs. The commoner, less fortunate, appeared gamely in thankless supporting roles or, sadder still, were found haunting the sound stages, stricken shadows of their former selves, with memories for the names of wives and children intact, bravely hiding the fact that they were there to audition alongside newcomers.

While many of the scene-builders and technicians were cockney, an extraordinary number of the behind-camera staff were former refugees from Germany, Russia and eastern Europe, some Jewish, some political. If one added to that the mongrel background of most of the performers, the upper-middle-class drawing-room scenes the collaborators so meticulously fashioned were small teamwork masterpieces of socio-economic guesswork. Some of the emigrés had merely transferred from one studio to another, hastily translating technical vocabulary as they went along, but many had adapted their skills as well as their unpronounceable names. Tables at the commissariat in lunch breaks could assume the air of smoky academic common rooms. At least two of the men now called upon to direct forgettable froth on celluloid had been prominent theatre directors in their former countries. A lecturer in chemistry from Prague now headed the film processing laboratory, one set designer was a highly qualified Viennese art historian and the dwarfish woman regularly credited as
Gowns by Sylvia
was rumoured to have held a chair in fine arts somewhere in the Balkans. When the time first came for Edward’s name to appear in a film’s credits – a quota quickie called
Angela and the Men
– Jerry Liebermann took him on one side.

‘Edward Pepper,’ he murmured. ‘Forgive me if I say so, Teddy, but it sounds too English, even if that
was
the idea all along. Now Teddy Pepper would be fine for a band leader, but we need something with more class. What did your mother call you?’

So it was that, writing with a full orchestra, a massive public and a sizeable salary at his disposal, Edward was once more known as Eli Pfefferberg. Meanwhile, he continued to work at his opera with no commission and no audience, under an anglicised name that was meant to win him friends and influence in his xenophobic adoptive country.

In the last week of his labours on
Desire
, Miss Toye singled Edward out as he walked along a corridor with the percussionists who were helping him approximate the sound of St Petersburg church bells. She was already working on something else and seemed to be dressed as Amelia Earhart, the chin straps of her flying helmet flapping against her luminous, heart-shaped face. Thickly made-up for the cameras, her expression was bright as a poster.

‘Teddy!’ she cried. ‘It is Teddy, isn’t it? Darling, the music for Anna’s first waltz! I had it whirling round and round my head for days since I heard it. I dance like a pregnant mare but you had me positively floating. You’re a perfect genius. It’s not your real work, is it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You can do this stuff standing on your head,’ she said gesturing at the industry around them, ‘So it probably doesn’t make you very proud. Not like a proper string quartet. But plebs like me think it’s perfect.’

‘Well. I …’ he stammered.

‘And how’s your clever wife?’

Astonished that she had divined so swiftly what Sally apparently could not, much less that she had troubled to find out that he was married, he shyly told her that Sally was expecting a baby very soon. For days afterwards she would throw him a sporty grin if they passed or call out across the lunch tables.

‘Not long to D-Day now, Teddy!’

She never expected a reply, turning away before he could have given one. As a newcomer, keen to pass unnoticed until he was sure of his status, Edward found her public show of interest faintly alarming but succumbed in spite of himself to the enviable caress of her patronage. Newcomer or no, he was shrewd enough to sense that she was the current studio queen, she was young enough to last and her favour could only work to his advantage.

Sure enough, he was hired for her Amelia Earhart film,
Reach for the Stars
, and then for a cheap, unexpectedly triumphant quota quickie she was contractually obliged to make after that – a screw-ball comedy called
She Lied
. In common with many of the men at the studio, he came to find that regular proximity dulled her glamour, but it was soon replaced with a touching sense of her vulnerability, whose charm was infinitely longer lasting. It was known throughout the lots, though nowhere else, that she was involved with Jerry Liebermann, who had a hold over her that was a greater source of conjecture than the liaison itself – producer-actress affairs being almost institutionalised.

Edward did not find her especially attractive, at least not when she was being her public self, painted, bright and effortlessly energetic. She had another side, however, a haunting, bruised quality, so far invisible in her performances. It showed only occasionally, when she was exhausted by retakes of the same inane snatch of dialogue, for instance, and turned aside from cameras, lights and make-up crew for a few moments to regather her forces.

There was a dog in
She Lied
, a highly trained mongrel bitch, stage name of Bunny, who accompanied her character throughout the film, even into bed and bath, the gimmick being that this dog was the only living being to whom the heroine always told the truth. Apparently viewing the mutt as unfair competition, Miss Toye complained about it and its handler at every opportunity. It soiled her clothes, she said, and made her sneeze. It stole her best moments and was unpredictable as a child. In an effort at least to form a workable bond with the creature, she insisted on taking it with her everywhere for the few weeks of shooting, surly as an impatient young mother. Returning from lunch one day, Edward saw her walking the animal ahead of him along a pathway past the carpentry shops. The dog began to limp then let out a whine and sat firmly down, raising a front leg from the ground. Myra snorted with impatience at first and tugged on its lead then, seeing it was genuinely hurt, she knelt on the dirty, shaving-strewn path, heedless of the damage she might be doing her slacks, and set about teasing a splinter from its paw. It growled with the pain and yelped a couple of times. She soothed it, caressing its ears, then carried on. The splinter was clearly deeply driven for, as Edward approached, she was still working at it. He was astonished to see how little she reacted when the animal sank its teeth into her left wrist. She barely glanced around as he reached her side, saying only, ‘Take the lead, will you, in case she tries to run.’

Edward did as she asked, watching in appalled fascination. The dog gave one more growl as she pulled the splinter free, then it sniffed suspiciously at the evidence she offered it. There was blood on the back of her wrists, welling from clearly visible toothmarks.

‘Your wrist …’ he began.

‘I know,’ she muttered, rubbing it carelessly. ‘Continuity will murder me. Got a hanky?’

‘Of course.’

He passed her the handkerchief from his breast pocket from which she improvised a bandage.

‘If they give me any trouble, Bunny, you’re cat food,’ she muttered, taking back the lead.

‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ he asked.

‘Not really. I – I broke it rather badly when I was a girl and some of the nerves were damaged. Thanks, Teddy. Christ! Now we’re late.’