Let me get this out of the way now. In case you didn’t know, Lemongingas are ginger biscuits, crisp on the outside but with a kind of lemony goo inside them. They taste quite nice the first time you have one, but they cloy very quickly.
‘But that’s not our main talking point,’ he went on. ‘Let me stress that what I say goes no further than these four walls. Arses are on the line here; it’s crunch time. It seems that our hunch was correct: this character Tony White has a unique ability to sell product. At the moment only we know this, and that puts us ahead of the game with our competitors, but if it gets out they’ll all be after him and our arses will be toast. Now we have been in discussions with Realfoods and they want us to get Tony to sign an exclusive contract to sell their product. Obviously we get him for as low a fee as possible, but Realfoods want him at any cost, and we’re cut in on the deal. There is one wasp in the ointment. Tony’s agent, as you know, is Dinah Shuckwell, the biggest
über
-bitch in the business. Now we want to separate Tony from the Shuckwell ASAP, and get him to sign to us exclusively. The obvious solution is to approach him independently from the Wicked Witch of Bolton Mansions. The only problem is we know nothing about him — absolutely nothing. We don’t even know where he lives.’
I said, ‘Surely the car that picked him up for the shoots must have known his home address.’
‘Yes, Lucy love, believe it or not we are not completely stupid,’ said Selwyn. ‘Of course we checked with the car firm. That was the first thing we did. But apparently he arranged to be picked up outside Dinah Shuckwell’s flat in Bolton Mansions.’
‘Perhaps he lives with Dinah Shuckwell then.’
‘Lucy dear! I never knew you had such a filthy mind.’
‘Perhaps he’s her son. I don’t know.’
‘Well then find out, lovey. That’s your little job. This Tony White is a bloody walking gold mine for some reason. We want him out of the Shuckwell’s clutches and in ours. You find out everything you can about him: what drugs he takes, what his shit looks like, the lot. You do everything it takes. We have a window of opportunity because he has already been signed up for the Lemongingas. I want you, Lucy, my pussy cat, to devote all your waking hours to getting Tony White for us. He is the proverbial goose with the golden eggs up his fundament, and we want them for breakfast. Got it?’
After delivering this typical rhetorical flourish, Selwyn left the room rapidly. Someone even gave his exit a round of applause. I felt sick.
I tried all the obvious methods — and drew a blank. Equity had his address listed as Flat 5B, Bolton Mansions, Dinah’s address, as did the
Spotlight
actor’s directory. I got my boyfriend Doug to ask around his actor mates to see if anyone knew him. None of them had even heard of him. I even contacted the Cliff Richard fan club to see if he was on their mailing list. He might have been, but the fans appeared to be an oddly secretive bunch.
My only chance of finding out about him was during the shoot for the Lemongingas commercial. The idea that some idiot, probably Selwyn, had come up with was as follows. We would put Tony in a sunlit lemon grove and surround him with scantily clad, ginger-haired girls, who would prance round him singing a version of Cole Porter’s ‘It’s De-lovely’. You have probably guessed by now that the word (or words) ‘mmm-delicious’ had been inserted into Porter’s butchered lyrics. I’d rather not say any more about that.
There are no lemon groves in England and, as our budget did not run to foreign travel, the idea was to use a Kentish apple orchard, strip the trees of its fruit and hang plastic lemons from the branches. It was now August, so we were reasonably confident of the weather. I organised the accommodation for the three day shoot. We would be staying at the Red Lion in Caversham, and I arranged that my room was next to Tony White’s.
Everybody arrived at the hotel on the evening before the first day’s shoot. At dinner time, I first made sure that Tony was safely settled in the dining room, where he had chosen to eat alone at a single table. I then slipped upstairs with the pass-key I had secured from the hotel management on some pretext, and entered his room.
His bag had been unpacked, and clean clothes were stacked in neat piles on one of the twin beds. Two pairs of shoes stood smartly to attention on the floor facing the wall, and there was an orderly row of bottles containing herbal remedies lined along the dressing table. On the bedside table were Tony’s Walkman and Cliff Richard cassettes, and a neat pile of pornographic magazines. I felt compelled to examine their titles: they were a varied lot, catering for all tastes from the mildest and softest to the hardest and most brutal. I could find no distinct orientation: it was not even exclusively heterosexual, or, for that matter, exclusively human. A quick look in drawers and cupboards revealed nothing further. I did my job very rapidly, as every second in that hotel room was torture to me.
I took the stairs down to the dining room so that I could have time to compose myself. The question of why I was doing all this had occurred to me more than once, but I kept putting it away, along with a lot of other issues in my life that I did not want to think about.
In the dining room Tony was methodically eating an omelette. I looked round, as if searching for friends and acquaintances, then went over and asked Tony if I might join him at his table. There was a hint of suspicion in his look, but he made a little gesture of consent. I sat down opposite him.
‘What are you eating?’ I asked.
‘Omelette.’
‘What kind of omelette?’
‘Mushroom omelette.’
‘Are you vegetarian, then?’
‘Not really.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘All right.’
I could tell that this was not going to be a sparkling evening, but I am good at chatter, or so my friends tell me. I nattered away, occasionally throwing in a question to him, casually, so as not to appear inquisitive, but I got nowhere. When he was not eating he looked at me with a detached interest, like someone watching an early evening news programme on a dull day. Once I thought I had a breakthrough.
‘These commercials are rather a gas, aren’t they?’ I had said inanely. ‘Do you enjoy doing them?’
‘It pays the rent,’ he said.
‘You rent a place, do you? Whereabouts?’
‘I move around a bit.’
‘Where are you at the moment?’
‘I’m here,’ he said, ‘opposite you.’ And he just scraped my ankle with his shoe. His expression did not change, the same almost unblinking stare, the same half smile. I could not speak for a while after that.
When we had had dinner I went off to the bar and downed four large vodkas with the camera crew. I don’t know what Tony did. I assumed he had gone to his room, but, when I eventually got into the lift to go up to my room, he was in it.
‘Hello again,’ I said. ‘We always seem to meet in lifts.’ He said nothing, but as soon as the doors were closed he started to paw me. It took all my will-power not to recoil, because I had a plan. The vodkas helped; the vodkas had probably made the plan.
When the lift doors opened and we got out I said, ‘Come on. There’s something I want to show you.’ I took his cold, sweaty little hand and pulled him to the door of my room which was almost opposite the lift.
I opened the door and beckoned him inside. He stood half in, half out of the door. I told him to shut it. He did, but slowly. I took my top off.
‘Is this what you want?’ I said. ‘Would you like to take my bra off for me?’ I even managed a smile. ‘Come on.’
His complacent stare turned to a look of still, cold horror and loathing. Very deliberately he spat at me, then he left rapidly, slamming the door behind him.
I did not sleep that night.
Tony avoided me the following day. Filming went as well as could be expected with such a complex scenario. The sun shone in the fake lemon grove and the ginger-haired girls danced around Tony to a pre-recorded tape. During a tea break I overheard two of the dancers talking. They were sitting on the grass, their ginger wigs resting on polystyrene wig blocks on the table above them. One of them actually had real ginger hair under her ginger wig.
‘Do you know what he said to me?’ said the Real Ginger.
‘No. What?’
There was some whispering from Real Ginger and a pause. Then the other very deliberately said, ‘That’s disgusting,’ and, after a further pause for thought, ‘that is absolutely disgusting.’
‘And he meant it,’ said Real Ginger. ‘I could tell.’ I felt guilty that I had not warned them about Tony.
I had already made my plan for after the shoot. It was my last chance to uncover Tony White. I had taken my own car to the location, so that I could follow the car that was driving him back to London. The original idea had been to offer to drive him back myself, but that was obviously out of the question.
I had told Tony’s driver of my intentions, so the following was no problem. The driver dropped Tony at the door of Bolton Mansions, a giant brick building the colour of dried blood, slathered in opulent Edwardian decorative features, its black, wrought iron balconies, Art Nouveau in feel, twisting like snakes across its façade. It was seven-thirty and still light. I watched Tony ring a bell and go in.
I parked round the corner and found a vantage point from which I could watch the building. I had checked that the door by which Tony had gone in did indeed give access to Dinah Shuckwell’s flat. There were several times during the two hours I waited that I told myself that this was idiotic, I must give up. But I didn’t; rage prevented me.
It was nearly ten o’clock and the street lamps were on by the time Tony emerged. I was puzzled that he was not carrying his overnight bag. He zipped his leather jacket up to his chin, dug his hands into the pockets, hunched himself, and began to walk. I set out to follow him.
If I thought he knew I was following him it might have consoled me. His actions would have been less baffling, but I really don’t think he did. He rarely paused; he never looked round; he never stopped to look into the reflective glass of a shop window, as they do in the films; he just tramped. I followed him down the Brompton Road, into South Kensington and through Knightsbridge into the West End. He walked on at his unwearied, dogged pace, looking neither to left and right. He kept to the middle of the pavement and never gave way to anyone coming in the opposite direction. Sometimes he elicited strange looks from people who had had their group divided by his relentless onward march. Once or twice passers-by commented loudly on his inconsiderate progress, but he did not respond; he showed no sign of even noticing.
The pace was deliberate, but the itinerary seemed haphazard. He turned up side streets and threaded his way through an intricate series of byways until he returned almost to the place from which we had started. It was close on midnight when we reached Soho. There the exhausting, patternless pattern of his wanderings changed. He began to enter every sex shop that remained open. After a few minutes he would emerge with a magazine or two. Once he saw a woman in a short leather skirt leaning against a doorway, half in shadow. He went up and stared at her. I saw her speak some words to him, but it was clear that he did not respond. He did not move; he continued to stare. I now saw a look of fear in the woman’s eyes. She turned and looked at me, but I backed into a doorway, turning my head away in case Tony saw me. I heard the panicky clatter of platform heels on the pavement as she passed me. When I looked round the woman was gone and Tony White was on his travels again.
I followed him through London all that lonely night, rage and determination battling against exhaustion. After Soho he made no further stops, he merely walked, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, a wad of pornography under one arm. My memories of that journey are vague. I know that at two o’clock a light rain fell, making the streets glisten, dampening my clothes and my thoughts still further. It was about this time, I think, that I began to be aware that Tony was retracing his steps. By devious byways and detours we were gradually heading back towards South Kensington.
It was nearly five o’clock and a greyness in the sky was suggesting the arrival of a new day, when Tony stopped again. He was standing in front of a pair of wrought iron gates, the entrance to what looked in the dimness like a park. He pushed at the gates and they swung open. I saw him go in.