Wild Horses Read online

  “Three days,” he said. “OK.”

  Time was very expensive. Three days equalled trust. I said, “Great.”

  “If you hadn't asked,” he said reflectively, “we'd be in trouble.”

  'Don't you think it's going well?” I had anxieties always.

  “It's going professionally,” he said. “But I hired you for something more.”

  I didn't feel flattered so much as increasingly pressured. The days when not much had been expected had been relatively restful: success had brought an upward spiral of awaited miracles, and one of these days, I thought, I would fly off the top of the unsteady tower and crash down in Pisa, and no sane finance department would consider my name again.

  On the doorstep of the hotel, with his chauffeured car waiting, O'Hara said, “You very well know that in the matter of film making there's power and there's money. On big budget productions the money men dictate what the directors may do. On medium budget productions, like this one, the power lies in the director. So use your power. Use it.”

  I gazed at him dumbly. I saw him as the mover behind this film, saw him as the power. He, after all, had made the whole project possible. I saw that chiefly I had been trying to please him, more than myself; and he was telling me that that wasn't what he wanted. “Stand or fall,” he said, “it's your picture.” I thought that if I were shooting this scene, it would be clear, whatever he said, that the real power lay in the older, craggily self-assured, lived-in face atop a wide-shouldered gone-to-overweight but comfortable body, and not in the unremarkable thirty-year-old easily mistaken for an extra.

  “The power is yours,” he said again. “Believe it.” He gave me an uncompromising nod, allowing me no excuses, and went onwards to his car, being driven away without a farewell glance.

  I walked thoughtfully across the drive to my own car and set off along the road to Valentine's house, aware of being at the same time powerful and obscure, an odd mixture. I couldn't deny to myself that I did quite often feel a spurting ability to produce the goods, a soaring satisfaction that could nosedive the next minute into doubt. I needed confidence if I were to give life to anything worthwhile, yet I dreaded arrogance, which could at once mislead into sterile folie de grandeur. Why, I often wondered, hadn't I settled for a useful occupation that didn't regularly lay itself open to public evaluation, like, say, delivering the mail?

  Valentine and Dorothea had bought a four-roomed single-storey house, taking two rooms each as bedroom and sitting-room, constructing an extra bathroom so that they had their privacy, and sharing one large kitchen furnished with a dining table. Living that way had, they had both told me, been an ideal solution to their widowed state, a separate togetherness that gave them both company and retreat.

  Everything looked quiet there when I parked outside on the road and walked up the concrete path to the front door. Dorothea opened it before I could ring the bell, and she'd been crying.

  I said awkwardly, “Valentine ...?”

  She shook her head miserably. “He's still alive, the poor poor old love. Come in, dear. He won't know you, but come and see him.”

  I followed her into Valentine's bedroom, where she said she had been sitting in a wing-chair near the window so that she could see the road and visitors arriving.

  Valentine, yellowly pale, lay unmoving on the bed, his heavy slow breath noisy, regular and implacably terminal.

  “He hasn't woken or said anything since you went yesterday,” Dorothea said. “We don't need to whisper in here, you know, we're not disturbing him. Robbie Gill came at lunchtime, not that I had any lunch, can't eat, somehow. Anyway, Robbie says Valentine is breathing with difficulty because fluid is collecting in his lungs, and he's slipping away now and will go either tonight or tomorrow, and to be ready. How can I be ready?”

  “What does he mean by ready?”

  “Oh, just in my feelings, I think. He said to let him know tomorrow morning how things are. He more or less asked me not to phone him in the middle of the night. He said if Valentine dies, just to phone him at home at seven. He isn't really heartless, you know. He still thinks it would be easier on me if Valentine were in hospital, but I know the old boy's happier here. He's peaceful, you can see it. I just know he is.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She insisted on making me a cup of tea and I didn't dissuade her because I thought she needed one herself. I followed her into the brightly painted blue and yellow kitchen and sat at the table while she set out pretty china cups and a sugar bowl. We could hear Valentine breathing, the slow rasping almost a groan, though Nurse Davies, Dorothea said, had been an absolute brick, injecting painkiller so that her brother couldn't possibly suffer, not even in some deep brain recess below the coma.

  “Kind,” I said.

  “She's fond of Valentine.”

  I drank the hot weak liquid, not liking it much.

  “It's an extraordinary thing,” Dorothea said, sitting opposite me and sipping, “you know what you said about Valentine wanting a priest?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I told you he couldn't have meant it, but then, I would never have believed it, this morning a neighbour of ours - Betty from across the road, you've met her, dear - she came to see how he was and she said, did he get his priest all right? Well! I just stared at her, and she said, didn't I know that Valentine had been rambling on about some priest our mother had had to give her absolution before she died, and she said he'd asked her to fetch that priest. She said, what priest? I mean, she told me she never knew either of us ever saw a priest and I told her of course we hadn't, hardly even with our mother, but she said Valentine was talking as if he were very young indeed and he was saying he liked to listen to bells in church. Delirious, she said he was. She couldn't make sense of it. What do you think?”

  I said slowly, “People often go back to their child­hood, don't they, when they're very old.”

  “I mean, do you think I should get Valentine a priest? I don't know any. What should I do?”

  I looked at her tired lined face, at the worry and the grief. I felt the exhaustion that had brought her to this indecision as if it had been my own.

  I said, “The doctor will know of a priest, if you want one.”

  “But it wouldn't be any good! Valentine wouldn't know. He can't hear anything.”

  “I don't think it matters that Valentine can't hear. I think that if you don't get a priest you'll wonder for the rest of your life whether you should have done. So yes, either the doctor or I will find one for you at once, if you like.”

  Tears ran weakly down her cheeks as she nodded agreement. She was clearly grateful not to have had to make the decision herself. I went into Valentine's sitting-room and used the phone there, and went back to report to Dorothea that a man from a local church would arrive quite soon.

  “Stay with me?” she begged. “I mean ... he may not be pleased to be called out by a lapsed non-practising Catholic.”

  He hadn't been, as it happened. I'd exhorted him as persuasively as I knew how; so without hesitation I agreed to stay with Dorothea, if only to see properly done what I'd done improperly.

  We waited barely half an hour, long enough only for evening to draw in, with Dorothea switching on the lights. Then the real priest, a tubby, slightly grubby-looking middle-aged man hopelessly lacking in charisma, parked his car behind my own and walked up the concrete path unenthusiastically.

  Dorothea let him in and brought him into Valentine's bedroom where he wasted little time or emotion. From a bag reminiscent of the doctor's he produced a purple stole which he hung round his neck, a rich colour against the faded black of his coat and the white band round his throat. He produced a small container, opened it, dipped in his thumb and then made a small cross on Valentine's forehead, saying, “By this holy anointing oil...”

  “Oh!” Dorothea protested impulsively, as he began. “Can you say it in Latin? I mean, with our mother it was always in Latin. Valentine would want it in Latin.” />
  He looked as if he might refuse, but instead shrugged his shoulders, found a small book in his bag and read from that instead.

  Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus, et dimissis peccatis tuis, perducat te ad vitam aeternam. Amen.”

  May almighty God have mercy upon you, forgive you your sins, and bring you to everlasting life.

  Dominus nosier Jesus Christus te absolvat...”

  Our Lord Jesus Christ absolves you ...

  He said the words without passion, a task undertaken for strangers, giving blanket absolution for he knew not what sins. He droned on and on, finally repeating, more or less, the words I'd used, the real thing now but without the commitment I'd felt.

  Ego te absolve ab omnibus censuris, et peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

  He made the sign of the cross over Valentine, who went on breathing without tremor, then he paused briefly before removing the purple stole and replacing it, with the book and the oil, in his bag.

  “Is that all?” asked Dorothea blankly.

  The priest said, “My daughter, in the authority vested in me I have absolved him from all blame, from all his sins. He has received absolution. I can do no more.”

  I went with him to the front door and gave him a generous donation for his church funds. He thanked me tiredly, and he'd gone before I thought of asking him about a funeral service - a requiem mass - within a week.

  Dorothea had found no comfort in his visit.

  “He didn't care about Valentine,” she said.

  “He doesn't know him.”

  “I wish he hadn't come.”

  “Don't feel like that,” I said. “Valentine has truly received what he wanted.”

  “But he doesn't know.”

  “I'm absolutely certain,” I told her with conviction, “that Valentine is at peace.”

  She nodded relievedly. She thought so herself, with or without benefit of religion. I gave her the phone number of the Bedford Lodge Hotel, and my room number, and told her I would return at any time if she couldn't cope...

  She smiled ruefully. “Valentine says you were a real little devil when you were a boy. He said you ran wild.”

  “Only sometimes.”

  She stretched up to kiss my cheek in farewell, and I gave her a sympathetic hug. She hadn't lived in Newmarket when I'd been young and I hadn't known her before coming back for the film, but she seemed already like a cosy old aunt I'd had for ever.

  “I'm always awake by six,” I said.

  She sighed. “I'll let you know.”

  I nodded and drove away, waving to her as she stood in Valentine's window, watching forlornly in her sorrowful vigil.

  I drove to the stable yard we were using in the film and stood in the dark there, deeply breathing cool March evening air and looking up at the night sky. The bright clear day had carried into darkness, the stars now in such brilliant 3D that one could actually perceive the infinite depths and distances of space.

  Making a film about muddy passions on earth seemed frivolous in eternity's context, yet, as we were bodies, not spirits, we could do no more than reveal our souls to ourselves.

  Spiritus sanctus. Spiritus meant 'breath' in Latin. Holy breath. In nomine Spiritus Sancti. In the name of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breath, the Holy Ghost. As a schoolboy I'd liked the logic and discipline of Latin. As a man, I found in it mystery and majesty. As a film director I'd used it to instil terror. For Valentine, I'd usurped its power. God forgive me, I thought ... if there is a God.

  The mega-star's Roller whispered gently into the yard and out he popped, door opened for him as always by his attentive chauffeur. Male mega-stars came equipped normally with a driver, a valet, a secretary/ assistant and occasionally a bodyguard, a masseur or a butler. For female mega-stars, add a hairdresser. Either could require a personal make-up artist. These retinues all had to be housed, fed and provided with rented transport, which was one reason why wasted days painfully escalated the costs.

  “Thomas?” he asked, catching sight of me in the shadows. “I suppose I'm late.”

  “No,” I assured him. Mega-stars were never late, however overdue. Mega-stars were walking green lights, the term that in the film world denoted the capacity to bring finance and credence to a project, allied with the inability to do wrong. What green lights desired, they got.

  This particular green light had so far belied his pernickety reputation and had delivered such goods that he'd been asked for in good humour and with sufficient panache to please his fans.

  He was fifty, looked forty, and stood eye to eye with me at a shade over six feet. Though his features offscreen were good but unremarkable, he had the priceless ability of being able to switch on inside and act with his eyes. With tiny shifts of muscle he achieved huge messages in close-up, and the smile he constructed with his lower eyelids had earned him the tag of 'the sexiest man in films', though to my mind that smile was simply where his talents began.

  I'd never before been appointed to direct such an actor, which he knew and made allowances for: yet he'd told me, much as O'Hara had, to get on with things and use my authority.

  The mega-star, Nash Rourke, had himself asked for this night's meeting.

  “A bit of quiet, Thomas, that's what I want. And I need to get the feel of the Jockey Club room you've had built in the trainer's house.”

  Accordingly we walked together to the house's rear entrance, where the night-watchman let us in and logged our arrival.

  “All quiet, Mr Lyon,” he reported.

  Within the barn of a house the production manager, with my and O'Hara's approval and input, had reconstructed a fictional drawing-room within the original drawing-room space, and also re-created the former trainer's office as it had been, looking out to the stable yard.

  Upstairs, removing a wall or two and using old photographs as well as a sight of the real thing, we had built a reproduction of the imposing room still to be found within the Jockey Club headquarters in the High Street, the room where, in the historic past, enquiries had been held, with reputations and livelihoods at stake.

  Real official enquiries had for forty years or more been conducted in the racing industry's main offices in London, but in Howard Tyler's book, and in our film, a kangaroo court, an unofficial and totally dramatic and damning enquiry, was taking place within the old forbidding ambiance.

  I switched on the few available lights, which gave only a deadened view of a richly-polished wood floor, Stubbs and Herring on the walls and luxurious studded leather armchairs ranged round the outer side of a large horseshoe-shaped table.

  The constructed replica room, to allow space for cameras, was a good deal larger than the real thing. Also, complete with cornices and paintings, the solid-seeming walls could obligingly roll aside. Bulbs on ceiling tracks, dark now, waited with a tangle of floods, spots and cables for the life to come in the morning.

  Nash Rourke crossed to one side of the table, pulled out a green leather armchair and sat on it, and I joined him. He had brought with him several pages of newly rewritten script which he slapped down on the polished wood, saying, “This scene we're doing tomorrow is the big one, right?”

  “One of them,” I nodded.

  “The man is accused, baffled, angry and innocent.”

  “Yeah. Well, our friend, Howard Tyler, is driving me crazy.”

  Nash Rourke's accent, educated American, Boston overtones, didn't sit exactly with the British upper-class racehorse trainer he was purporting to be, a minor detail in almost everyone's eyes, including my own but excluding (unsurprisingly) Howard's.

  “Howard wants to change the way I say things, and for me to play the whole scene in a throttled whisper.”

  “Is that what he said?” I asked.

  Nash shrugged a partial negative. “He wants what he called "a stiff upper lip".”

  “And you?”

  “This guy would yell, for Christ's sake. He's a big powerful man accused of murdering his wife,
right?”

  “Which he didn't do. And he's faced with a lot of stick-in-the-muds bent on ruining him one way or the other, right?”

  “And the chairman is married to his dead wife's sister, right?”

  I nodded. “The chairman, Gibber, eventually goes to pieces. We established that today.”

  “Which Howard is spitting blue murder about.”

  “Tomorrow, here,” I waved a hand around the make-believe courtroom, “you yell.”

  Nash smiled.

  “Also you put a great deal of menace into the way you talk back to Chairman Gibber. You convince the Jockey Club members, and the audience, that you do have enough force of personality to kill. Sow a seed or two. Don't be long-suffering and passive.”

  Nash leaned back in his chair, relaxing. “Howard will bust a gut. He's mad as hell with what you're doing.”

  “I'll soothe him.”

  Nash wore, as I did, unpressed trousers, an open-necked shirt and a thick loose sweater. He picked up the sheets of script, shuffled them a bit, and asked a question.

  “How different is the whole script than the one I saw originally?”

  “There's more action, more bitterness and a lot more suspense.”

  “But my character - this guy - he still doesn't kill his wife, does he?”

  “No. But there's doubt about it right to the end, now.”

  Nash looked philosophical. “O'Hara sweet-talked me into this,” he said. “I had three months free between projects. Fill them, he said. Nice little movie about horseracing. O'Hara knows I'm a sucker for the horses. An old real-life scandal, he tells me, written by our world-famous Howard, who of course I've heard of. Prestige movie, not a sink-without-trace, O'Hara says. Director? I ask. He's young, O'Hara says. You won't have worked with him before. Too damn right, I haven't. Trust me, O'Hara says.”

  “Trust me,” I said.

  Nash gave me one of the smiles an alligator would be proud of, the sort that in his Westerns had the baddies flinging themselves sideways in shoot-outs.