Tish was in the kitchen, reheating yesterday’s kedgeree, when he walked in.
‘Hi there.’
Tish spun around. He’d changed out of the jeans and sweater he’d been wearing earlier into what Tish could only presume was an American’s idea of English country attire: green corduroy trousers, with matching green shirt, waistcoat and sports jacket, all topped off with a green-and-brown tweed flat cap. In one arm he held a Barbour jacket that still had the label attached, and in the other a pair of (green) Hunter wellies.
Kermit the Frog goes stalking
, thought Tish, stifling the urge to giggle.
‘You wouldn’t have a pair of scissors I could borrow, would you?’ Dorian gestured to the label on his coat. ‘Figured I might need this tomorrow. We’ll be doing test shots up at the farm all day. It’s beautiful up there by the way. You have an amazing property.’
‘Thanks.’ Tish opened a drawer and handed him some kitchen scissors. She contemplated explaining that Loxley wasn’t really her property at all, but then decided that a potted history of Jago’s various self-serving disappearing acts would only confuse things.
Dorian snipped off the tag and slipped the jacket on. ‘How do I look?’
Ridiculous
, thought Tish, trying to think of a response she could say out loud. Eventually, she came up with, ‘Warm.’
‘Not really me, huh?’ Dorian smiled sheepishly, taking it off. ‘No offence, but is it supposed to smell like that?’
Tish turned around. ‘Shit!’ She’d forgotten all about the kedgeree on the hob. A mini-mushroom cloud of black, fishy smoke now hovered ominously over the frying pan. Pulling it off the heat with one hand and opening the window with the other, she looked down at the sticky blackened mess. ‘Oh well. Beans on toast, I suppose.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Dorian. ‘Why don’t I take you to that quaint little public house I saw on my way up here? It’s the least I can do after all your hospitality. The Woodmen or something, I think it was called.’
‘The Carpenter’s Arms?’ said Tish. ‘We can’t go there.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the minute anyone hears an American accent and sees you with me, you’ll be mobbed. I don’t think you quite appreciate just how little goes on in Loxley. Your film is the most exciting thing that’s happened here since the Norman invasion.’
‘Well, where then?’ said Dorian. ‘I’m starving. And, no offence, but I’m not sure how much faith I have in your cooking skills.’
Tish frowned but did not defend the indefensible. ‘Fine,’ she said, grabbing her car keys from the hook above the Aga. ‘I’ll ask Mrs D to watch Abel. Follow me.’
The King’s Arms in Fittleton was about ten miles from Loxley, a low-beamed, cosy village pub with squashy dog-eared sofas and a log fire that was constantly burning, even on summer evenings.
‘This is cute,’ said Dorian, nabbing an open table close to the fire. A few of the locals glanced round in mild curiosity when they heard his accent, but they soon resumed their interest in the tense game of darts going on to the left of the bar.
‘I haven’t been here in years,’ said Tish, ‘but the food’s supposed to be good.’ Dorian noticed that she pronounced the word ‘yars’. In movies he’d always found the upper-class British accent grating, but on Tish’s lips it was oddly charming and seemed quite unaffected. She ordered a fish pie from the blackboard. Dorian went for the moules marinières, and insisted on an expensive bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for the two of them. He ought to be exhausted. Starting with Chrissie’s five a.m. rant this morning, it had been a hell of a day. But for some reason he felt excited and revived. Both Loxley and Tish had been a pleasant surprise.
‘So. Tell me about your family,’ he asked. ‘You live in that incredible house on your own?’
‘I’m not on my own,’ said Tish, sipping her wine, which was delicious and tasted of gooseberries. ‘I have Abel and Mrs Drummond. And now all of you lot. It’s a veritable commune up there.’ She explained that she spent most of her time in Romania, and gave him the condensed version of her mother’s bohemian life in Rome and Jago’s latest Tibetan adventure.
‘A cave? He lives in a
cave
?’ Dorian cocked his head to one side.
He’s attractive
, thought Tish.
Not handsome, like Michel, but sort of
joli-laid.
An American Gerard Depardieu.
‘Would you care to elaborate?’
‘I’m not sure I can, much,’ said Tish. ‘My brother’s choices have never made a lot of sense to me. But you know, running an estate is hard work. I’m afraid that “incredible house” I live in has an incredible appetite for money. You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to run.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ said Dorian, biting a chunk out of the warm bread the waitress had left on the table. He gave Tish a brief potted history of his own Romanian background, and how he’d come to inherit the long-lost family Schloss. Tish noticed the way his eyes lit up when he spoke about the castle and its treasures, and the way the light faded when he mentioned his wife, and how hard Chrissie had found the transition to life in Transylvania.
‘She’s an actress, you know, so she has that temperament.’
Tish didn’t know, but nodded understandingly anyway.
‘There’s a part of her that still craves excitement and adventure,’ explained Dorian. ‘The Schloss is indescribably beautiful, but it can be lonely, especially when I’m away and Chrissie’s on her own with Saskia.’
‘Saskia?’
‘Our daughter.’ Dorian picked up the last remaining mussel from his bowl and sucked it out of its shell. ‘She’s three.’
Tish thought it odd that they’d been talking about his family life in Romania for fifteen minutes, and this was the first time he’d mentioned a child. ‘You must miss her.’
‘Sure,’ he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Reaching in his wallet, he pulled out a photograph and handed it to Tish. She expected to see a little girl’s picture, but instead it was a professional headshot of an attractive blonde woman with tough, slightly angular features. To Tish’s eyes, the woman in the photograph looked cold as ice, but maybe it was just a bad picture.
‘Chrissie,’ said Dorian proudly. ‘Stunning, isn’t she?’
‘Gorgeous,’ lied Tish, wondering if Michel carried Fleur’s picture around in his wallet and showed it to every stranger he encountered.
I have to stop thinking about Michel.
‘Tell me about Curcubeu,’ said Dorian, abruptly changing the subject. ‘What exactly is your work there?’
‘Anything and everything,’ said Tish. ‘There’s so much need.’ And she was off, waxing lyrical about the failings of the Romanian government and the shameful neglect of the country’s abandoned children.
‘That’s incredibly impressive,’ said Dorian when she’d finished, ordering a sticky toffee pudding to share and a second bottle of wine, despite Tish’s protests. ‘Not many girls your age would give up a life of privilege back home to go and do something like that.’
Tish frowned. ‘You mustn’t think me some sort of saint. I like the work. Oradea’s a dump, but Romania’s got some strange magic to it, something that keeps drawing you back there – despite the corruption and the bureaucracy and the godawful winters. But I imagine I don’t need to tell you that.’
‘No.’ Dorian smiled.
‘Strange, isn’t it, our paths crossing like this?’ said Tish. ‘And both of us having a Romanian connection?’
They talked solidly for another hour and a half, about Romania, life and literature – Tish had almost as encyclopaedic a knowledge of the Brontë sisters’ work as Dorian did, and could practically recite
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
– and about Viorel Hudson and Sabrina Leon, Dorian’s Heathcliff and Cathy.
‘Viorel has a Romanian connection too, doesn’t he?’ asked Tish.
‘You might not want to bring that up when you meet him,’ warned Dorian. ‘I tried, but Hudson has a low opinion of the motherland.’
Tish, who spent her life in Romanian orphanages like the one she assumed Viorel Hudson had been dumped in, didn’t blame him.
‘I’ll say this for him, though: he’s a terrific actor,’ said Dorian. ‘The minute I thought about doing this movie, I knew I wanted to cast Viorel. He was born for the role.’
‘And Sabrina?’ asked Tish. ‘I’ve only ever seen her in gossip magazines, so I don’t know if she’s a good actress or not, but she doesn’t look like an obvious choice for Cathy.’
‘Not looks-wise, perhaps. But if you want someone as wilful and spoiled and frankly insane as Catherine Earnshaw, Sabrina’s your girl.’
‘Catherine wasn’t insane,’ protested Tish. ‘She was sensible. She chose a decent man over a wicked one.’
Dorian looked at Tish quizzically. ‘You admire that, do you? Being sensible rather than passionate?’
Tish blushed. ‘I think passion can be overrated.’ Suddenly the conversation seemed to have taken a rather personal turn. ‘But I suppose, in an ideal world, one wouldn’t have to choose.’
There was an awkward silence. Tish changed the subject.
‘Is she as pretty as she looks in the pictures?’
‘Sabrina? About a hundred times prettier,’ said Dorian truthfully. ‘That’s part of the problem. For Sabrina and Cathy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that when you look like that, no one ever says no to you.’
By the time they left it was almost midnight.
‘I’ll drive if you like,’ said Dorian.
Remembering the sound of his gear-changing when he’d arrived this morning, not to mention the fact that the drive from Manchester had taken him three and a half hours, Tish declined the offer.
‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘You drank all that second bottle so you’re definitely over the limit.’
They made it back to Loxley without incident. Tish took them home the back way, via Home Farm, which looked even dourer, bleaker and more soul-wrenching by moonlight. Dorian’s heart leapt at the sight of it.
That’s my Wuthering Heights
. He’d been dreaming this movie for two years now. Today, he’d felt as though he was walking into his own dream. Tomorrow, he would spend all day up at the farm, measuring light and distance and planning the exterior long-shots with Chuck and the camera crew. He couldn’t wait.
‘I’m sorry about all the disruption,’ he said to Tish once they got back to the house. ‘There’ll be a few days of craziness, but once the cast get here next week and we start shooting on a regular schedule, everything should calm down. We’ll try not to get under your feet too much.’
‘You mustn’t worry about me,’ said Tish. ‘Abel and I are quite used to chaos, believe me. Besides, you’ve paid for the house. For the next eight weeks you must consider it yours.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dorian, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Good night.’
Ten minutes later, tucked up in her own bed, Tish reflected on how strange life could be. The very fact of someone coming to Loxley Hall to shoot a film in the first place was unlikely enough. But that that person should turn out to be a Romanian … how small-worldy was that? She didn’t really believe in fate. And yet it did seem uncanny that Dorian Rasmirez should have found his way to Loxley and, in a very real sense, saved them from falling into the abyss.
My knight in shining armour.
Wriggling her toes under the blankets, luxuriating in the warmth of her bed, she thought about Dorian’s kind, animated face, the odd mixture of anxiety and love with which he’d spoken about his wife, and his strange detachment from his daughter. After weeks of worrying what he’d be like, she was relieved and surprised to find that she liked him.
Perhaps this summer wasn’t going to be such an ordeal after all?
Sabrina Leon adjusted her new Prada aviators and arranged her hair into tousled, rock-chick perfection. Heathrow was Sabrina’s second favourite airport in the world after LAX. There was always a scrum of paparazzi waiting for her when she walked through the electric double doors at terminal three, reminding her that she was still famous, still relevant, still alive. If anything, the Brits worshipped celebrity even more than the Americans, although they certainly delighted in seeing the mighty fallen. Sabrina was prepared for the inevitable heckles, and the pasting she was certain to get at the hands of the British tabloid press. In fact, she was looking forward to it. After three weeks of ‘lying low’, as her agent called it (
playing dead, more like it
), immersing herself in Sacha Gervasi’s brilliantly written screenplay till she was so gorged on Cathy Earnshaw she could have barfed out her lines, Sabrina was ready for some attention. At Heathrow she knew she would get it, and she wasn’t about to walk through customs till she was sure she looked like a total fucking vixen.
Write what you want about me, you bastards, but you’re not getting a bad picture.
‘You got everything?’
Billy, Sabrina’s Irish bodyguard of the past tumultuous four years, nodded from behind a trolley piled high with Louis Vuitton suitcases. Sabrina had brought two bodyguards with her to England: Billy, who was really more of a friend and had been a total rock since her life turned to shit earlier this year; and Enrique, an enormous hunk of Hispanic muscle who had the brain power of a special-needs rabbit and the quick reactions to match, but who looked good in photos and could always be relied upon to act as an impromptu human dildo should Sabrina find herself in need of one. She usually travelled with at least four guards, as well as Camille and Sean, her two closest hangers-on (officially her ‘stylist’ and ‘personal advisor’), but she knew Rasmirez would have a fit if she brought anything resembling an entourage onto his set. The guy was so tediously holier-than-thou about keeping things low-key, not to mention obsessed with secrecy and having as few bodies as possible on the production. ‘Fewer people means less chance of leaks,’ he’d told Sabrina endlessly, like the world’s preachiest parrot. He’d only divulged the movie’s location to his actors forty-eight hours ago, expecting them to drop everything and get on a plane like a bunch of lemmings.