What They Do in the Dark (25 page)

I wait for the tank to refill and give the toilet an extra flush, to be on the safe side. This is risking Mum telling me off for mucking about with the toilet and wasting paper, but she’s on the phone. Even though I’ve just got rid of the evidence, I’m terrified she’s talking to the police. I listen when I come out of the bathroom, pressed close against the corner of the landing wall so she won’t look up and see me. She’s using her phone voice, talking about herself as though she’s her own secretary, so I know it’s a call to someone important. My heart beats in my ears and throat.

‘My husband and I wondered if one of your agents is available to come and value the property …’

I don’t need to hear any more. It isn’t the police she’s talking to at all. Despite the lie of her pretending she and Ian are married, the relief is huge.

Call sheet: ‘That Summer’

August 14th 1975.

Director: Michael Keys

DOP: Anthony Williams, BSC.

First AD: Derek Powell.

6.30 a.m. call.

CAST: Dirk Bogarde [COLIN], Lallie Paluza

[JUNE], Sally Moss [MRS GREAVES], Vera Wyngate

[WOMAN IN CAR].

Scenes 74, 75, 76:

LOCATION: Town Fields, Town Moor Avenue,

Doncaster.

74.
EXT. SCHOOL PLAYING FIELDS. DAY.

JUNE is playing rounders with her school class.

COLIN watches.

CUT TO:

75.
EXT. SCHOOL PLAYING FIELDS. DAY.

JUNE, at one of the rounders posts, spots COLIN.

She carries on playing, but from now on she’s aware of him watching her.

CUT TO:

76.
EXT. SCHOOL PLAYING FIELDS. DAY.

The rounders match is dispersing. Children, including JUNE, gather the posts and other equipment. COLIN goes to approach JUNE but the TEACHER [MRS GREAVES] intervenes.

TEACHER

Can I help you?

COLIN

I just wanted a word –

TEACHER

What about?

COLIN

It’s none of your business –

TEACHER

During school hours it certainly is – do you know this man?

JUNE

No, Miss.

COLIN

June – she’s having you on.

JUNE

I don’t know him, Miss.

COLIN

What are you playing at?

TEACHER

I think you’d better leave her alone, don’t you?

She starts to lead JUNE back towards the school, with the other children.

COLIN

June!

The children and TEACHER walk on.

COLIN

June! [HOPELESS] How do I know her name then, eh?

Vera’s appearance wasn’t even scripted – it had come to this. But Mike had decided, at the very end of the third scene, that he’d like a look from her, a connected passer-by, at Colin’s impotent rage, and they’d summoned her from London. Since they had now had to stump up for a third week (her agent always negotiated for a weekly, not a daily rate, commercials apart, bless him), Vera was more than happy to get back into her headscarf and mac and settle down for the day.

It was always strange, leaving a set and coming back, like missing school and having to find your feet again. One of the make-up girls was different; Vera’s favourite had already left to start on a Hammer shooting in Wales. Hugh wasn’t about, and the American girl had gone off to Italy, apparently promising to be back for the wrap party. The remaining familiar make-up girl, Julie, had told Vera that before Quentin left she had approached the grip, whose name Vera had now forgotten, for downers or uppers – pills of some sort. Apparently he’d put her on to the boom operator, as a joke, because the boom (whose name she also couldn’t presently recall) was the steadiest man in the business, as he had to be occupationally, and wouldn’t take so much as an aspirin in case it interfered with his professional capacities.

Vera felt sad on Quentin’s behalf, hearing about all this, but hadn’t she said – if only to herself – that the girl was too heart-on-sleeve? She had probably been on drugs all along. It explained her clothes, for a start.

Vera established herself with her ciggie and cup of tea in a good spot, out of the way of the crew but with a view of the action. The school playing fields were part of a larger public space, the haunt of dog walkers and idlers, and, now that it was the school holidays, children. Some of their classmates were being employed to play rounders with Lallie, and word was bound to get out. But while the shadows were long, the fields remained almost empty.

It was a shame there was no one to natter to; the girl playing the teacher had been talkative in make-up but she was needed now, and Dirk of course couldn’t be relied upon for conversation. Anyway, Mike had buttonholed him and was talking over something to do with the scene, Dirk nodding judiciously. Everyone felt a tiny bit off the leash, Mike included, she thought. His stammer had relaxed, for one thing. The absence of producers may have accounted for the change in atmosphere, or it might just have been the demob-happy rush of the last day.

Lallie’s mother – what was her bloody name? – dragged a chair next to Vera and plonked herself down in it, juggling her own tea and fag with all the ostentation of a music-hall turn.

‘That’s better. You don’t mind, do you?’

Vera smiled warmly and told the woman to be her guest.

‘Can’t believe it, me. Last day.’

Vera agreed that it was impossible to believe. The mother huddled up to her tea, as though it was cold. Perhaps there was the faintest undertow of autumn in the air compared to the previous weeks.

‘Lallie said when I got her up, Mummy, what are we going to do tomorrow? I said, have a lie-in for a start, hen!’

Vera laughed with her, easily. ‘What are you going to be doing next?’

The woman’s face jumped. ‘Now you’re asking.’

‘She’ll be rolling in offers after this. Everyone’s full of how marvellous she is. Anyway, I thought they wanted her in America.’

‘Aye. Well.’ The mother took a furtive drag of her cigarette and leaned into Vera, lowering her voice. ‘That’s what the producer was talking to us about, Quentin …’

It wasn’t that much of a shocker, given the vagaries of the business. Apparently, after Quentin had given the child and her mother some flim-flam about flying them over for screen tests, the mother had forked out for flights herself. Then Quentin had turned a bit elusive, and taken off for Italy before Katrina
managed to pin her down about it. Katrina had heard people thought she’d started drinking.

‘You don’t know what’s going on,’ Vera reassured her. ‘Anything could happen. She could lose her job if she’s got a drink problem.’ Unable to resist, she added, ‘I heard it was drugs.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’ Katrina sizzled her fag end into her last inch of tea. ‘I can’t be bothered with it, to be honest. Our kid’s got a contract with LWT, they want her to start shooting a Christmas special in October. I just thought we could fit it in, since she’s been so mad about the States. I mean, you do it for them, don’t you?’

Vera agreed that you did.

‘We can’t get the money back, for the plane. I asked. Looks like we’ll just go on holiday, like.’

Vera accompanied Katrina’s bleak gaze to where Lallie was running about with her stand-in, both of them dressed in aertex shirts and gym skirts.

‘Won’t get her dad’s ticket back, though. Have to ask me mam to come with us instead.’

Vera saw, as the twin figures swooped and chased, that Lallie was now very slightly taller than the adult pretending to be her.

‘Doesn’t your husband like flying?’

‘Oh, no, he’s fine with flying.’ Katrina toed the polystyrene cup further under her chair. ‘It’s me he’s not keen on.’

74.
EXT. SCHOOL PLAYING FIELDS. DAY.

JUNE is playing rounders with her school class. COLIN watches.

The rounders match was incidental to Dirk watching in tortured fashion, so they went close in on the girls, pick-up shots really of them running, hitting the ball, calling to each other; Lallie found and then lost among the melee. Mike left it to Tony. And then it was the reverse close on Dirk. During all this, Katrina confided that her husband, Lallie’s dad, liked to put it about a
bit. Katrina admitted that she’d gone right off sex after having Lallie, and gave graphic details of her episiotomy scarring. She didn’t feel right, down there. And she knew how squeamish he, Graham, was; he’d told her it would have finished him off to watch her give birth, not that she was asking him to. Anyway, she knew what went on when she was away with Lallie. She put on a brave face, for her. You had to, didn’t you?

75.
EXT. SCHOOL PLAYING FIELDS. DAY.

JUNE, at one of the rounders posts, spots COLIN. She carries on playing, but from now on she’s aware of him watching her.

Mike wanted a little track laid hugging the rounders pitch, so the camera could mimic Colin’s circling while Lallie ran, post by post, to home. It was always a fiddle, laying tracks, but the ground was flat and the grass negligible, so it was no more than an ordinary fiddle. During this, Lallie came over and asked Katrina for a drink, so Katrina resumed her brave face and Vera got on a bit with the crossword. The stand-in walked the posts so that Tony could assess timings for the camera’s movement along the track. Vera looked up from a bugger of a clue and was surprised by a clutch to her gut of strong feeling for Tony, so intent on getting it right. There was no one quite like him, after all.

Lallie came back from drinking a glass of squash with an orange clown-grin at the edges of her mouth, and had to be taken to make-up to remove it, with Katrina shouting at her. Once the child was back on set, mouth restored, Katrina confided that lately, things with Graham had changed. She’d had wind that there was someone in particular, if you got her drift. No one would blame him for looking elsewhere, Katrina didn’t, it was as much her fault as his, with her away so much for Lallie’s sake; but there was a bit on the side and there was something more serious.

‘If he’s moved her in, that’s that,’ said Katrina. ‘I’m not having it. If the papers get hold of it, it’ll be all over.’

‘Awful,’ Vera agreed.

76.
EXT. SCHOOL PLAYING FIELDS. DAY.

The rounders match is dispersing. Children, including JUNE, gather the posts and other equipment. COLIN goes to approach JUNE but the TEACHER [MRS GREAVES] intervenes.

TEACHER

Can I help you?

COLIN

I just wanted a word –

TEACHER:

What about?

COLIN

It’s none of your business –

TEACHER

During school hours it certainly is – do you know this man?

JUNE

No, Miss.

COLIN

June – she’s having you on.

JUNE

I don’t know him, Miss.

COLIN

What are you playing at?

TEACHER

I think you’d better leave her alone, don’t you?

She starts to lead JUNE back towards the school, with the other children.

After a run-through where Mike made a few adjustments, they went quickly into a take. There was a momentum now: everyone could scent the end of the day, the end of the job. On take one, the first AD spotted one of the rounders-playing children looking straight at the camera. He was castigated, and they moved swiftly on to take two.