Darling Sweetheart (2 page)

Roselaine de Trenceval hitched her skirt and forced her tired legs to climb the last few steps up the cliff path. Her dress was torn and her hair wild about her shoulders from her flight through the forest. Just ahead, Bernard de Vaux hacked at the undergrowth with his sword, his tunic stained with sweat.

‘This way, lady! We must reach your father’s castle before de Montfort’s army arrives! We must warn him of the fate awaiting all who resist!’ He extended his free hand to help her, but she proudly stepped past him, holding her skirt.

‘I thank you, Sir, but I can look after myself. And I think you’ll find my father more than capable of resisting.’ Bernard smiled, sheathing his sword as she mounted the ridge.

She stopped abruptly. ‘Oh…’

He scrambled up to join her.

Before them on the wide hilltop, a great honey-coloured castle rose into the sky. Its ramparts were thick with men, shooting arrows and throwing stones down upon the army that heaved around its walls. Swords flashed and pennants flapped; mounted knights urged hundreds of yelling foot-soldiers forward, some carrying ladders, others launching arrows upward in reply. Roselaine watched in horror as first one and then several of the castle defenders clutched their chests and tumbled into the maelstrom below. Then, off to their left, a fearsome wooden catapult launched a boulder which sailed through the air and, in an explosion of noise and dust, destroyed a section of wall. A lusty roar arose from the attacking hordes. Roselaine sank to her knees and seized fistfuls of dirt.

Bernard turned his back to her, scratching his head.

‘Peter!’ he called. ‘Hey, Peter! I think it would be better if she threw herself at me insteada fallin’ down like that! Peter? Can ya hear me? Get over here!’

‘No! I don’t believe it! What is he doing? I nearly had it! It was so beautiful!’

An aluminium basket hung in the trees. A chubby, brown-skinned man pulled his face from the viewfinder of the enormous camera. Another taller man perched on the basket rail. He wore his long, blond hair tied in a ponytail. He looked tired.

‘What is he doing?’ the chubby man repeated, in a Spanish-accented shriek. ‘We lose the entire shot! All he had to do was kneel beside her and let me focus on the castillo again! I nearly had it! Why do he not kneel?’

‘Well that’s my point, Peter.’ Bernard also addressed the blond man, ignoring the angry cameraman. Roselaine still clutched the ground; beyond her, the battle raged. ‘ I think she should grab me, insteada fallin’ down. I think it would look a lot better.’

The blond man tweaked a joystick. Above his head, the arm of the crane from which the basket hung moved him to where Bernard de Vaux stood and Roselaine de Trenceval knelt.

‘Harry,’ he sighed, ‘do you have any idea how much money you’ve just wasted?’

‘I nearly had the shot!’ his companion trilled. ‘It was perfecto, until thees…
hijo de puta…’
he gestured furiously.

‘Hey, I live in LA,’ Bernard snarled, ‘so I speak la lengua, okay?’

‘Harry,’ the blond man rubbed his forehead, ‘it has taken since six o’clock this morning to set up this shot. We had you tracked all the way up the path, then we rise to reveal the spectacle of the castle with the army attacking it. The trebuchet worked like a dream; this is the first time today it worked properly. All we needed was for you to kneel down and put your arm around Roselaine’s shoulders, like the script says. Sergio is right – the shot was perfect until you broke character. It will take until tomorrow to rebuild that wall.’

‘Goddamn, Peter! The wall is just fibreglass! We’re makin’ a
movie here – I just wanna get it right is all!’

‘Fibreglass or not, we must reset everything, so we pay eleven hundred extras to do nothing for half a day.’ He raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. ‘David, that is a cut. Stand everyone down.’

The handset crackled. ‘Back to their positions?’

‘Negative. Send them home – we try again tomorrow. Repeat, that is a cut and a wrap for the extras. You can spend the rest of today shooting fights with the stuntmen, but the extras are finished. Maria, can you hear me?’

Now the crackle was nasal, New York.

‘I’m listening.’

‘Tell the extras a five o’clock start for make-up, same as this morning. And tell Mike to rebuild the set, we try again tomorrow.’

‘Okay everybody, you heard the director.’ The invisible New Yorker did not hide her exasperation. ‘Stop the action.’ The blond man turned his radio off with a click and hooked it on his belt. Emerson stamped a foot.

‘There’s no need to be like that!’

‘He destroy my shot!’ The fat man fiddled with his camera.

‘Hey, Palmiro, who’s directin’ this picture, you or Peter Tress?’

‘I think you are,’ he growled.

From the trees all around, film crew emerged, wearing communications headsets and T-shirts, incongruous amongst the medieval warriors. Some carried cameras, some held microphones on boom poles and others walked into the battle, waving their arms.

‘Annalise,’ Tress addressed the kneeling Roselaine. ‘You can get up now.’

She raised her face. It was streaked with tears. Emerson snapped his fingers. A female runner ran over and handed him a bottle of cold water.

‘Annalise – you agree with me, don’t cha?’ He slugged the water, without offering her any. ‘It would be better if you sorta threw yourself on me, insteada the dirt. I mean, who’s better, me or the dirt?’

She did not answer or stand up. A knight on horseback approached. He opened his visor and flashed a smile at Annalise.

‘Peter!’ he enquired of the director, who had stepped out of the basket. ‘Are we done here? Maria said we’re done already!’

Tress sighed. ‘If Maria says you are done, then you are done.’ The knight whooped and galloped back towards his friends, waving his lance.

‘Beer time, dudes!’

The noise level subsided as the battle quelled and the extras gelled into groups, talking and shrugging their shoulders. Already, charge hands wearing shorts and heavy boots had started to roll the big fake boulder back towards the catapult.

‘You can get up now, Annalise,’ Tress repeated. He took her arm and helped her to her feet. Harry Emerson unstrapped his sword and tossed it at the runner. He stepped off the discreet mound of earth that had been specially positioned for him and instantly shrank by a head. The aluminium basket swung away, with the unhappy cameraman at the controls.

‘You shouldn’t let him talk to me like that,’ Emerson admonished Tress. He waved across the clearing. Two black Range Rovers lumbered out of the trees, doubly incongruous on the historic battlefield.

‘Sergio Palmiro is the best cinematographer working today.’

‘He’s the goddamn rudest. I dunno how you do things back in Denmark, but no Hollywood director worth a shit would tolerate that.’ Shielding his eyes, he watched the progress of the vehicles.

‘I am Swedish, Harry, not Danish, and we are in Europe, not Hollywood. I do not think of Sergio as my employee: we collaborate. That is the way I prefer to work, everyone together.
And I like to follow the script.’

Emerson snorted. ‘That so, huh?’

The cars pulled up. Two men jumped out of the first and no fewer than four from the second; they were ethnically mixed, but oddly uniform as they all wore sunglasses and black blazers which looked too heavy in the heat.

‘H.E.,’ one of them said in a bass voice, while the rest formed a cordon, as if expecting trouble. ‘Everything okay?’

‘We’re done here, Levine. Time to go home.’

The giant called Levine opened the lead vehicle and Emerson climbed up into the passenger seat. The door closed and for a few seconds he was invisible behind smoked glass. When this whirred open, he had donned a pair of sunglasses.

‘Annalise! I almost forgot! Come to dinner tonight, okay?’

‘Pardon?’

‘My place. Say, eight-thirty.’

She shook her head. There was still something of Roselaine in her voice.

‘Thank you, but I prefer to be alone. To ready myself for tomorrow.’

He wagged a finger. ‘Hey kiddo – if you and me are gonna be lovers then we gotta get acquainted! I’ll have my chef cook somethin’ special – Levine will pick you up at eight.’

‘I don’t think–’ she began, but his window hummed shut and the cars revved away. However, the mini-convoy did not travel far before having to halt again, the only road off the hilltop being clogged with extras. Emerson’s car sounded its horn, causing a horse to rear and its rider to make a very twenty-first-century gesture. Tress watched the chaos.

‘You know, you should accept his invitation.’

‘I don’t want to. I need to concentrate on Roselaine.’

‘Yes. But you should.’

‘He won’t rehearse, he hasn’t spoken to me since he arrived, he ruins our first scene together and now he summons me for
dinner like I’m a takeaway pizza!’

Tress smiled. ‘We should try to keep the gods happy, should we not? And he is right – you two should smash the ice.’

‘It’s
break
the ice.’

‘Yes. Hey, you there!’ He beckoned the runner, who still carried Emerson’s sword. ‘Call a driver to take Miss Palatine home from wardrobe.’

‘No, I’ll walk.’ She set off towards the castle.

‘Annalise!’ he called after her. ‘Break that ice! For the film’s sake, if not for yours!’

She made her way through the remaining extras. A wolf-whistle sounded behind her, then a burst of laughter. She pretended not to hear. Stuntmen lounged around the castle walls, where enormous mattresses had cushioned their falls. Some stared after her but, again, she ignored them as she strode under an arch and into an enclosed keep, where several sizeable trailers and a marquee hid from the cameras. The largest trailer and the marquee housed make-up and wardrobe for the principal cast – the legion of extras was handled at a warehouse near the bottom of the hill. The next-largest trailer was Emerson’s. She stomped up the steps of her own trailer, a much smaller one at the back of the lot. She slammed the door, dived headlong onto the sofa and let out a muffled roar. She had worried herself sick about her first scene with Emerson for nearly three months… for him to wreck it so casually! She lay for a moment, until she felt her anger ebb. It was only when she finally raised her head that she noticed her trailer was full of white roses.

They were everywhere – an arrangement on the table, a cluster beside the TV, another bunch by the window and, when she checked, even beside her bed. The white roses had not been there that morning; in spite of the heat, her skin came up in goose bumps. She fumbled to remove her costume, tore a seam and swore. She ran to the bathroom, wiped her make-up off too quickly, pulled on a light summer dress and a pair of sandals,
grabbed her purse from a drawer, gathered the costume and fled.

‘Are you okay? You’re ever so pale.’ A wardrobe assistant called Olivia took the costume from her arms.

‘I’m sorry – I think I ripped it.’

‘Oh, I can fix that. But can I make you a cup of tea or something?’

‘I’m fine, it’s just… you know, time of the month.’ She turned to leave the marquee then hesitated. ‘By the way – you didn’t happen to notice anyone hanging around my trailer, did you?’

‘Gosh, is something missing?’

‘No, it’s probably nothing. See you in the morning.’

She walked across the keep, but instead of leaving through the arch, she entered a side door in the castle, where she instantly traded the afternoon heat for a miraculously cool darkness. As if sneaking through a cathedral, she padded along a corridor then climbed a spiral staircase into a great hall. Stained-glass windows cast a yellow gauze across the bare planks of the floor. She slipped into an annexe then up another spiral staircase, narrower than the first. This ended in a door, which she opened onto a huge blue sky.

The world fell away from the turret-top balcony, five hundred feet into the village of Beynac-et-Cazenac, a strip of brown rooftops squeezed between the foot of the cliff on which the castle perched and a lazy bend in the river Dordogne. Specks that were swallows flew far below as she tried to identify the roof of ‘her’ apartment. Then her eye followed the river as, silver with sun, it uncoiled across the valley to where another honey-stone fortress, Castlenaud, hovered in the haze. It was a view from legend.

From her research, she knew that the two castles had often been at war. She also knew that she was in completely the wrong place. The Cathars had lived closer to the Pyrenees; theirs was a drier, more forbidding land, but to any film audience in the
world, the Dordogne would say France, so she understood the choice of location. But, being utterly honest with herself, she did not understand the choice of leading actress. Because just like the vista, this film made her feel tiny. She had been shooting for two weeks already but could not find her way into Roselaine. Then, to much fuss and fawning from the production team, Emerson had arrived, but he had barely acknowledged her until today, swelling her sense of insecurity. That’s what dinner would be about, she decided. He was going to tell her there had been a mistake, that Scarlett Johansson was taking over her role. She flopped against a parapet and closed her eyes. She felt a forward motion, as if the castle were collapsing into the gorge. She wished it would.

‘They said you were up here.’

She started, and the drop nearly did swallow her. She swung around. A young woman with straw-blonde hair and a cheerleader’s body posed in the doorway behind her, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a pair of expensively ripped jeans.

‘Err… Holly. Hi.’

Holly Spader was nineteen, from San Diego and had a minor part. Her scenes were not scheduled for at least another month, but, like a feral cat, Holly had been watching from the sidelines since day one. The make-up girls said that her father was a senior studio executive, which probably explained her ubiquitous presence.

‘I hear you got yourself a red-hot date. Word is, a real biggie.’

‘News travels fast…’

‘Movie sets, honey.’ Spader studied her nails. Emerson’s runner, Annalise thought – that’s who told her.

‘Well, it’s not a “biggie”. He wants me to go to dinner, but I can’t.’