Frequent Hearses (7 page)

Fen and Humbleby stood irresolute as they watched her go.

“You ought to set up as a psychiatrist,” said Humbleby sardonically. “
Spécialité de la maison,
the sublimating of unhealthy adolescent crushes. You seem to be a great deal more serious than I remembered.”

Fen’s brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up in disaffected spikes at the crown of his head; his lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face was thoughtful.

“As I get older,” he explained, “I get less resilient and more predictable. It depresses me sometimes.” He sighed and looked at his watch. “Five to eleven. I must find my conference. What are your plans?”

“Maurice and Nicholas Crane are my plans.”

“I shall be seeing them, you know: they’re both involved in this film. Come along with me.”

“Thanks, but I must telephone Charles first, and in any case I can’t very well disrupt your conference with my—um—inquisitions. How long will it last?”

“Heaven knows. Not very long, I imagine, since Leiper isn’t going to be there.”

“Well, will you tell Maurice and Nicholas that I want to see them as soon as it’s over?”

Fen looked dubious. “I’ll tell them,” he said. “I’ll
tell
them all right. But people of that sort haven’t the instinct of obedience, even where the police are concerned, and they’ll probably drift away pretending to have forgotten about it. You’d better come yourself and try to put the fear of God into them.”

“But surely they’d not be so irresponsible as to—”

“The films are a religion,” Fen interrupted. “Even Government departments—Petroleum Boards, Tax Inspectors and so forth—kowtow to them to some extent. And that fact induces in the more important film people a sense of immunity—not altogether an illusory sense, either. If you want to talk to the brothers Crane you ought to tackle them about it in person.”

To this proposition Humbleby, after some further argument, agreed, and they set off for room CC, discovering it, somewhat to their surprise, only a short distance away. Though larger, it bore a disheartening resemblance to the room they had just left. Its parquet flooring was coming apart, with the result that there were treacherous projecting edges on which people tripped. The green paint was peeling from its radiators. Someone—possibly reacting after the manner of Martin Luther to an apparition of the Devil—had apparently hurled a bottle of ink at the wall. A table at the centre was provisioned, as for a board meeting, with ash-trays, scribbling paper and inkpots, and had chairs of padded red leather and chromium tubing set about it. There were, however, two more or less humane influences present—one of them a framed photograph of the 1937 Studio Hockey Team, and the other a trolley with rubber wheels which contained cups of steaming coffee.

To this Fen addressed himself immediately on arrival—having previously, however, identified for Humbleby the brothers Crane. No official proceedings, he noted, had as yet begun. The company stood about sipping coffee and talking desultorily—a various assembly representing, as Fen knew, the personal enthusiasms, in a number of different spheres, of Giles Leiper. For the most part they were not people who in the ordinary way would have elected to work together, but in the present instance circumstances had been altogether too strong for them, and they had achieved a compromise solution of their social problem by coagulating into uneasy cliques. The atmosphere was not improved by the fact that at least half of them could be of no possible service on such an occasion as this, and were there only because Giles Leiper, who conceived films to be Corporate Works of Art, had insisted that all of the artists chiefly concerned should contribute to the planning of this one. Leiper was not—as Stuart North had prognosticated—himself present, but his influence impended over the gathering like a malediction in a fairytale, and an aura of gloom inevitably resulted… But perhaps (Fen told himself) the mood of this particular conference—its mistrustful mutterings and its air of obscure apprehension—had some more potent and immediate cause than the whims of Leiper; persons eminent in the film industry do not, in pursuing their avocations, commonly exhibit any very marked symptoms of gaiety—but at the moment the sullenness of such of them as were present seemed extreme, and it was reasonable to suppose that there lay behind it some undivulged issue of a gravity sufficient to enhance even a melancholy so pervasive as that engendered by
The Unfortunate Lady:
the death, perhaps, of Gloria Scott… Out of the corner of his eye Fen watched Maurice and Nicholas Crane while Humbleby spoke to them, and received the impression that both of them were discomposed by his request for an interview—and more specially (which was odd) Nicholas…

His furtive scrutiny was interrupted by Gresson, a diminutive, futile Cambridge don whose task it was to advise on the history and sociological background of Pope’s period. In an access of nervousness Gresson had failed, at the first script conference, to be able to recollect the date of Queen Anne’s death, and this had so lowered him in the general esteem that he had scarcely been consulted since. He was not, however, much cast down by this unlucky circumstance, since his motive in accepting the post of historical adviser had been less a desire to ensure the accuracy of the film under consideration than a dream of fair women. Like Humbleby—though in Gresson’s case to a degree so extreme as to border on actual hallucination—he conceived the studios to be a sort of stalking-ground or game reservation for the male devotees of the pandemic Venus, where young and beautiful girls, intent upon fame and fortune, were to be found in immense numbers lining up for the purpose of surrendering their bodies to whomever of the opposite sex they supposed capable of obtaining a screen test for them. With any man less immitigably ensnared by lubricious fancies than Gresson, this preposterous notion would not have stood the test of observation for a single day. He, however, clung to it even yet, and it was in a satyr-like tone of voice that he said to Fen, after the conventional greetings had been perfunctorily accomplished:

“Those girls—they’re wearing engagement rings.”

Fen was aware of Gresson’s delusion and could not summon up much interest in it. He followed his gaze to where two indistinguishable blonde secretaries, belonging to Jocelyn Stafford and to Nicholas Crane, sat murmuring together, their notebooks balanced on their thighs, while they waited for the conference to begin.

“Yes,” he agreed. “So they are.”

“Now, do you think,” Gresson pursued, “that they really are engaged? Or do they just wear the rings as—as a protection?”

“The rings are nothing but camouflage,” Fen replied firmly. He disliked Gresson and had just remembered that the
fiancé
of one of the girls was a heavyweight boxing champion. “As far as that’s concerned, I should say that either of them was yours for the taking. And in particular, perhaps, the one on the left.”

Gresson laughed nervously; he was not altogether pleased at having the impulses which underlay his question thus ruthlessly illuminated.

“Oh, come,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking of anything like
that.
I was just curious, that’s all… I suppose,” he went on casually, “that a girl like that would be very keen to break into films, wouldn’t she? I mean, a lot of them take these secretarial jobs just for the sake of a foothold in the studios, don’t they?”

“You’ve only got to talk to them to find out how keen they are,” said Fen with malice. “I believe some of them would willingly murder their own mothers for the sake of a test.”

“Ah. You really think so?”

“There’s not a doubt about it.”

Gresson drew a deep, contented breath. “Well, well,” he said. “Human nature’s a queer thing, isn’t it?”

“Very queer.”

“I think”—Gresson put a finger judicially to his lip—“I think I’ll just go and ask them about trains back to London. That’s the sort of thing they’d know, I expect.”

“Be careful,” said Fen waggishly, “that you don’t get yourself seduced.”

“Aha!” At this delightful suggestion Gresson’s
idée fixe
came leaping uncontrollably to the surface, like a salmon in a weir. “Seduced! Well, it mightn’t be so very unpleasant, at that. Which of them would you say had the better legs, now?” The penultimate word emerged as a libidinous gurgle. “Which would you say—”

“The one on the left,” Fen answered rather shortly; being volatile in temperament, he was by now tired both of the topic and of Gresson. “You have a good look at their legs while you ask them about the trains, and then come back and tell me if you agree.”

“Unmannerly,” said Gresson. “I’m afraid that might be unmannerly.” His nervousness was reasserting itself, and since it was clear that he would never, however complaisant the girl to whom he addressed himself, get in practice even to first base, Fen abandoned him, immured to all eternity in the priapean imaginings of his own mind, and went to intercept Humbleby, who had disengaged himself from the Cranes and was making his way towards the door.

“All settled,” said Humbleby in an undertone. “They’re meeting me in what they call the Club here, at midday or shortly after.”

“Did you tell them what it was about?”

“Yes. Will you be coming along?”

“Since I have no official standing,” said Fen, “they may not want me there. But I may as well make the attempt; and if I’m shooed off I can arrange to meet you for lunch. You don’t mind my hanging about?”

“My dear fellow!”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

In the doorway Humbleby almost collided with Madge Crane. He stood aside to let her pass, and she thanked him brightly and unaffectedly. Her lack of affectation had been much publicised in the newspapers, and when strangers were about she lived up to it very resolutely. Fen had just time to note that as a consequence of his exchange with Humbleby the brothers Crane were eyeing him warily before Jocelyn Stafford, the producer, raised his voice to suggest that the conference should begin. Abandoning coffee-cups, it settled itself obediently at the table.

Fen found himself between Gresson on the one hand and Aubrey Medesco on the other. Medesco, an elderly man of formidable height and displacement, was the scenic designer, and like everyone else there he had a particular grudge against
The Unfortunate Lady
and everything to do with it. On hearing that he was to be employed on a film about Pope he had not unnaturally jumped to the conclusion that the villa at Twickenham, with its grotto, would be amply represented in it, and to the successful accomplishing of this
mise-en-scene
he had devoted, prior to the first script conference, a great deal of careful thought. Unluckily, however, the date chosen for the film’s occurrences had been 1716, when Pope was still living at Binfield; and the discovery that Twickenham did not, therefore, come into the picture at all had so soured Medesco that even in the face of Leiper his co-operation had thenceforth been non-existent. Now, as on previous occasions, he was sitting with an air of massive disapproval, rapidly though with delicacy conveying the fragments of a two-ounce bar of milk chocolate from the table in front of him to his mouth. And the only person who had so far been able to elicit any cordiality from him was Fen, whose capacity for unobtrusive slumber had early on awoken in him a connoisseur’s interest and devotion.

With grace and efficiency the indistinguishable blondes went about placing a copy of the revised script in front of each person present—a massive typewritten affair, this, neatly bound in green pasteboard and red ribbon. Some at once rummaged in it with an appearance of curiosity and good will, while others, Fen and Medesco among them, ignored it. The blondes thereupon settled down with pencils and notebooks at the ready, and under the chairmanship of Jocelyn Stafford the conference went cumbrously into action.

Stafford was a well-covered man of middle age, with diminishing brown hair and slightly protruding eyes. Fingering the revised script, he paid it a number of very civil compliments. And to these its author, on his right, somewhat wanly responded. The wanness, Fen thought, was on the whole to be expected. Evan George, a successful popular novelist who had made his name with a succession of those solid, comfortable books about ordinary-people-like-you-and-me to which the female middle classes are so unswervingly loyal, had reacted to his first film job (thrust upon him by Leiper) very much as was to be expected: first with a tempered enthusiasm and confidence; then—since in spite of the lavish praise accorded to his initial draft of the script a great deal of it apparently needed to be altered—with misgiving; and finally, as he surveyed the poor flinders which were all that remained of his original cherished conception, with despair. He was a small, wiry man of some fifty years, with a creased brown face, clothes which looked as if he had contracted the habit of sleeping in them, and a tendency to dyspepsia which he tried to alleviate by the frequent swallowing of magnesium trisilicate in capsules. At his right hand Stuart North monotonously coughed and spluttered, while Madge Crane watched him with a concern which she clearly intended him to observe. Beside her, and eyeing this byplay with sardonic amusement, sat Caroline Cecil, an actress noted in pathetic roles who was destined for the part of Mrs. Weston. And beside
her
was Griswold’s second in command at the Music Department, surreptitiously reading a novel.

But of all these people it was the Cranes who were receiving most of Fen’s attention: Madge, black-haired, smooth-complexioned, unconvincingly helpful and bright; Nicholas, reserved, quiet, thirtyish, an assistant director on leaving his public school, a camera-man at twenty-three, a director at twenty-seven: and Maurice, raffish, narrow-eyed, complacent and looking—it occurred to Fen—rather unwell. There was little of family resemblance between them, unless perhaps in the impeccable shape of the nose; but they were united, it seemed, in an uneasiness which betrayed itself by an occasional wordless message delivered from eye to eye. And the reason for that, Fen thought, was scarcely obscure: the motive for Gloria Scott’s suicide had suggested itself to him some time ago, and he was tolerably certain his guess was correct.