Wild Horses Read online

  He spent time answering me, chiefly, I thought, for Dorothea's sake, but also from a teacher's pleasure in imparting technical information.

  “Old people,” he said, “very often stay alive if there's something they particularly want to do, and then after they've done it they die quite quickly. This week I've lost a patient who wanted to see her grandson married. She went to the wedding and enjoyed it, and was dead two days later. Common occurrence. If Valentine has no unfinished business, he may slip away very soon. If he were looking forward to receiving another award, something like that, it might be different. He's a strong-willed man, and amazing things can happen even with cancer as advanced as this.”

  Dorothea shook her head sadly. “No awards.”

  “Then let's get him settled. I've arranged for Nurse Davies to pop in late this evening. She'll give him another injection, which will keep him free from any pain he might feel in the night, and I'll come back first thing in the morning. The old codger's beaten me, dammit. He's got his way. I'll not move him now. He can die here at home.”

  Dorothea's tears thanked him.

  “It's lucky he has you,” the doctor told her, “and don't make yourself ill.” He looked from her to my height assessingly, and said, “You look bigger than both of us. Can you carry him? Nurse Davies would help Dorothea move him, as she always does, but usually he's conscious and doing his best to walk. Can you manage him on your own?”

  I nodded. He weighed pathetically little for a man once as strong as horses. I lifted the tall sleeping figure in my arms and carried him from his armchair, through the small hallway and into his bedroom, putting him down gently on the white sheet, revealed by Dorothea peeling back the bed covers. Her brother's breathing rasped. I straightened his pyjamas and helped Dorothea cover him. He didn't wake. He had died inside, I thought, from the moment he'd believed in his absolution.

  I didn't bring up the subject of a priest again with Dorothea, nor mention it to the doctor. I was convinced they would both disapprove of what I'd done, even though Valentine was now dying in peace because of it. Leave things as they are, I decided. Don't add to Dorothea's distress.

  I kissed the old lady, shook hands with the doctor and, offering vague but willing future help, drove back to my job.

  Life, both real and imaginary, was loud and vigorous along in Newmarket, where the company I was working for had rented an empty racing stable for three months, paying the bankrupt owner-trainer enough to keep him in multiple child-support for ever.

  Although a good hour late for the script conference I'd called for five-thirty, I did not apologise, having found that the bunch I was working with took regrets for weakness, chiefly because of their own personal insecurities. It was essential, I understood, for them to regard me as rock, even if to myself sometimes the rock was no more durable than compressed sand.

  They were gathered in what had earlier been the dining-room of the trainer's cavernous house (all the furniture having passed under the bankruptcy hammer, satiny green and gold striped paper still adhering richly to the walls) and were variously draped round a basic trestle table, sitting on collapsible white plastic garden chairs on the bare boards of the floor. The drinks provided by the catering unit had barely lasted the hour: no one on the production was wasting money on excess comfort.

  “Right,” I said, ousting Ed from the seat I wanted, halfway along one side of the table, “have you all read the alterations and additions?”

  They had. Three were character actors, one a cinematographer, one a production manager, one a note-taker, one an assistant director - Ed - and one a scriptwriter that I would like to have done without. He had made the current changes at my reasonable insistence, but felt aggrieved. He believed I was intent on giving a slant to the story that departed at ninety degrees from his original vision.

  He was right.

  It was disastrously easy to make bad horseracing pictures and only possible to do it at bankable level, in my view, if racing became the framing background to human drama. I'd been given the present job for three reasons that I knew of, the third being that I'd previously stood two animal stories on their heads with profitable results, the second being that I'd been trained in my work in Hollywood, the source of finance for the present epic, and - first - that I'd spent my childhood and teens in racing stables and might be considered to know the industrial terrain.

  We were ten days into production: that is to say we had shot about one-sixth of the picture, or, putting it another way, roughly twenty minutes a day of usable footage, whole cloth from which the final film would be cut. We'd been scheduled to finish in sixty working days; a span of under ten weeks, as rest days were precious and rare. I, as director, decided which scenes would actually be shot on which days, though I'd made and distributed in advance a programme to which we mostly adhered.

  “As you've seen,” I said generally, “these changes mean that tomorrow we'll be shooting on the railed forecourt in front of the Jockey Club's headquarters in the High Street. Cars arrive and leave through the gates. The local police will help with the town's regular traffic from eleven to twelve only, so all of our arrivals and departures will be condensed into that time. The Jockey Club has agreed to our using their front door for entering and leaving shots. The internal sets have, of course, been built here in this house. You three ...” I said to the actors, “... can put some useful poison into your various encounters. George, be sly. lago stuff. You are now secretly engineering Gibber's downfall.”

  The script-writer moaned, “That's not the right interpretation. I don't like what you've made me do. Those two are very good friends.”

  “Only up to the point of opportunist betrayal,” I said.

  Howard Tyler, the writer, had already complained about small earlier changes to the producer, to the accountant and to the film company's top brass, all without getting me fired. I could put up with his animosity in the same way as I stifled irritation at his round granny glasses, his relentlessly prim little mouth and his determination to insert long pointless silences where only movement and action would fill cinema seats. He adored convoluted unspoken subtleties that were beyond most actors' powers. He should have stuck to the voluminous moody novels whence he came.

  His book that he'd adapted for the present film was loosely based on a real-life story, a twenty-six-year-old Newmarket racing scandal very successfully hushed up. Howard's fictional version purported to be the truth, but almost certainly wasn't, as none of the still living real participants had shown the slightest sign of indignant rebuttal.

  “You'll find you each have a plan of the Jockey Club forecourt,” I said to the meeting. They nodded, flicking over pages. “Also,” I went on, “you've a list of the order of shooting, with approximate times. The three cars involved will be driven to the forecourt first thing in the morning. Get all the crews alerted so that lights and cameras can be set up where shown on the plan. If everyone's willing and ready, we should finish well before the daylight yellows. Any questions?”

  There were always questions. To ask a question meant attention had been paid and, as often happened, it was actors with the smallest parts who asked most. George, in this case, wanted to know how his character would develop from the extra scene. Only, I enlightened him, as just one more factor in Gibber's troubles. Gibber, eventually, would crack. Bang. Fireworks. Gibber said “Hallelujah” gratefully. George compressed his mouth.

  “But they were friends,” Howard repeated stubbornly.

  “As we discussed,” I said mildly, “if Gibber cracks, your motivation makes better sense.”

  He opened his little mouth, saw everyone else nodding, folded his lips and began to act as if Gibber's cracking was all his own idea.

  “If it rains tomorrow,” I said, “we'll shoot the internal Jockey Club scenes instead and trust it will be fine on Thursday. We are due to complete the first Newmarket segment on Saturday. On Sunday, as I think you know, we're shifting the horses forty miles west to Huntingdon
racecourse, to the stable block there. Actors and technicians will travel early on Monday morning. Rehearsals, Monday, from noon onwards. Shooting Tuesday to Friday, return here the following weekend. Ed will distribute times and running order to everyone concerned. OK? Oh, and by the way, the rushes from yesterday are fine. Thought you'd like to know. It was a lot of hard work, but worth it.”

  The resulting sighs round the table came from relief. We'd spent the whole day in the stable yard, the human action in the foreground taking place against a background of routine equine life. Never could rows of horses have been mucked out, fed, watered and groomed more times in any twelve hours before: but we had enough shots in the can to give the fictional stable unending life.

  The script meeting over, everyone dispersed except a tall thin, disjointed-looking man in an untidy beard and unkempt clothes whose unimpressive appearance hid an artistic confidence as unassailable as granite. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded. He slouched in his seat and waited until all backs but our own had passed through the door.

  “You wanted me to stay?” he asked. “Ed said.”

  Every film with any hope of acclaimed success needed an eye that saw all life as through a camera lens. Someone to whom focus and light intensities were extrasensory dimensions taken for granted. His title on the credits might variously be “cinematographer” or “director of photography”. I'd had a mathematical friend once who said he thought in algebra: Moncrieff, director of photography, thought in moving light and shadows.

  We were used to each other. This was our third film together. I'd been disconcerted the first time by his surrealist sense of humour, then seen that it was the aquifer of his geysers of visual genius, then felt that to work without him would leave me nakedly exposed in the realm of translating my own perceptions into revelations on the screen. When I told Moncrieff what I wanted an audience to understand, he could instinctively slant a lens to achieve it.

  We had once staged a 'last rites' scene for a man about to be murdered by terrorists: the ultimate cruelty of that wicked blasphemy had been underscored by Moncrieff's lighting of the faces; the petrified victim, the sweating priest and the hard men's absence of mercy. Ego te absolve ... it had brought me death threats by post.

  On that Tuesday in Newmarket I asked Moncrieff, “Have you seen the railings outside the Jockey Club? The ones enclosing the private parking forecourt?”

  “Tall and black? Yes.”

  “I want a shot that emphasises the barrier qualities. I want to establish the way the railings shut out everyone but the elite. Inside can be mandarins of racing. Outside, hoipolloi.”

  Moncrieff nodded.

  I said, “I also want to give an impression that the people inside, Gibber and George, the Jockey Club members, are themselves prisoners in their own conventions. Behind bars, one might say.”

  Moncrieff nodded.

  “And,” I said, “take a five-second shot of the hinges of the gates as they open, also as they close.”

  “The scene between Gibber and George is shot to begin with from outside the bars. I'd like the zoo aspect made clear. Then track the lens forward between the railings to establish where they're standing. The rest of that conversation is in close-ups.” Moncrieff nodded. He seldom made notes while we talked, but he would write a meticulous worksheet before bedtime.

  “We're not being judgmental,” I said. “Not heavy handed. No great social stance. Just a fleeting impression.”

  “A feather touch,” Moncrieff said. “Got you.”

  “Contributing to Gibber's crack-up,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I'll get Howard to write that crack-up tomorrow,” I said. “It's mainly a matter of a shift in intensity from the calm scene already in the script. Howard just needs to put some juice into it.”

  “Howard's juice is watered cranberry.” Moncrieff picked up a vodka bottle from among the drinks clutter, and squinted at it against the light. “Empty,” he commented morosely. “Have you tried vodka and cranberry juice? It's disgusting.”

  Howard drank it all the time.

  “Howard,” Moncrieff said, “is radioactive waste. You can't get rid of it safely.”

  He knew as well as I did that Howard Tyler's name on the billboards would bring to the film both the lending library audience and attention from upmarket critics. Howard Tyler won prestigious prizes and had received honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic. Moncrieff and I were considered lucky to be working with such a luminous figure.

  Few authors could, or even wanted to, write screenplays of their own novels: Howard Tyler had been nominated for an Oscar at his first attempt and subsequently refused to sell his film rights unless the package included himself. Moncrieff and I were stuck with Howard, to put it briefly, as fast as it seemed he was stuck with me.

  Our producer, bald, sixty, a heavily-framed American, had put a canny deal together for the company. Big-name author (Howard), proven camera wizard (Moncrieff), vastly successful producer (himself) and young but experienced director (T. Lyon), all allied to one mega-star (male) and one deliciously pretty new actress; money spent on the big names and saved on the actress and me. He, producer O'Hara, had told me once that in the matter of acting talent it was a waste of resources employing five big stars in any one picture. One great star would bring in the customers and maybe two could be afforded. Get more and the costs would run away with the gross.

  O'Hara had taught me a lot about finance and Moncrieff a lot about illusion. I'd begun to feel recently that I finally understood my trade - but was realistic enough to know that at any minute I could judge everything wrong and come an artistic cropper. If public reaction could be reliably foretold, there would be no flops. No one could ever be sure about public taste: it was as fickle as horseracing luck.

  O'Hara, that Tuesday, was already in the Bedford Lodge Hotel dining-room when I joined him for dinner. The studio bosses liked him to keep an eye on what I was doing, and report back. He marched into operations accordingly week by week, sometimes from London, sometimes from California, spending a couple of days watching the shooting and an evening with me going over the state of the budget and the time schedule.

  Owing to his sensible planning in the first place, I hoped we would come in under budget and with a couple of days to spare, which would encourage any future employers to believe I had organisational talents.

  “Yesterday's rushes were good, and this morning went well,” O'Hara said objectively. “Where did you get to this afternoon? Ed couldn't find you.”

  I paused with a glass of studio-impressing Perrier halfway to my mouth, remembering vividly the rasping of Valentine's breath.

  “I was here in Newmarket,” I said, putting down the water. “I've a friend who's dying. I called to see him.”

  “Oh.” O'Hara showed no censure, registering the explanation as a reason, not an excuse. He knew anyway - and took it for granted - that I'd started work at six that morning and would put in eighteen hours most days until we'd completed the shooting.

  “Is he a film man?” O'Hara asked.

  “No. Racing ... a racing writer.”

  “Oh. Nothing to do with us, then.”

  “No,” I said.

  Ah, well. One can get things wrong.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fortunately, Wednesday morning dawned bright and clear, and Moncrieff, his camera crew and I attended sunrise beside the Jockey Club's railings, filming atmospheric barred shadows without interruption.

  Rehearsals with Gibber and George went fine later on the forecourt, with Moncrieff opening his floods easily to supplement the sun, and with me peering through the camera eyepiece to be sure the angles brought out the spite developing in the erstwhile 'best friends'. By eleven we were ready for the cars-inward, cars-outward sequences, the police cooperating efficiently in the spirit of things.

  Our male mega-star, laconic as always, patiently made three arrivals behind the wheel of a car, and four times uncomplainingly repe
ated a marching-to-execution type entrance through the hallowed front door, switching his fictional persona on and off with the confidence and expertise of a consummate pro. As if absentmindedly, he finally gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder and left in his personal Rolls-Royce for the rest of the day.

  At midday we broke for a well-earned hour for lunch.

  O'Hara came in the afternoon to watch George's lago touch (which basically needed only an inoffensive 'cool it just a bit' comment from myself) and sat smiling in a director's chair for most of the afternoon. O'Hara's hovering smile, though I was never sure he knew it, acted like oil on the actors and technical crews, getting things smoothly done: under his occasional slit-eyed disapproval, problems geometrically increased.

  After wrapping things up on the forecourt O'Hara and I went together to Bedford Lodge for an early beverage (light on alcohol, following the film company's overall puritanical ethos), discussing progress and plans before he left fantasy land en route for marketing and advertisement in offices in London. Making the film was never enough; one had to sell the product as well.

  “I see you've booked our chief stuntman for Monday,” he said casually, standing to leave. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Untamed horses on a beach.”

  I answered him lightly, giving him the option of believing me or not.

  “Do you mean it?” he asked. “It's not in the script.”

  I said, “I can fit in the beach reconnaissance with the stuntman very early on Monday morning. Dawn, in fact. I'll be back in good tune for rehearsals. But ...” I paused indecisively.

  “But what?”

  “In the past you've given me an extra day here or there,” I said. “What if I could use one this time? What if I get an idea?”

  Twice in the past, granted latitude, I'd slanted his productions into a dimension the public had liked. Without demanding to know details in advance of a process I found came only from spur-of-the-moment inspiration in myself, he gave me merely a five-second considering stare, then a brief nod, and then a virtual carte blanche.