‘That’s a nice ring,’ said Baby, admiring the row of coloured stones on her left hand.
‘It’s called a regard ring. Victorian men gave it to their sweethearts if they were separated as a token of their regard. George gave it to me before we started rowing last night,’ she added dolefully.
‘You are entering the misnamed Valley of Paradise,’ she intoned half an hour later.
From the south side, they realized the immensity of the operation. Opposite lay the great abbey of Valhalla, as grey and brooding as the clouds hanging over it. Around it, all over Rannaldini’s parkland, like a huge circus, sprawled lorries, caravans, tents, a mobile canteen, Portaloos and vast generators.
‘God, it’s a creepy place.’ Flora shivered. ‘Rannaldini is rumoured to have a torture chamber under the house. It’s safer to walk round Brixton after dark. My parents live there,’ she pointed to a large Georgian house on the right of Valhalla, ‘and that’s Dame Hermione’s shack further down the valley. Golly, the river’s low. And up that little lane to the left is Magpie Cottage, where Isa and Tab clearly aren’t going to fifteen rounds.’
‘Spoilt brat,’ said Baby dismissively.
‘Takes one to know one,’ chided Flora. ‘D’you fancy Tristan?’
‘I certainly do. Don’t you?’
‘One can’t not. He’s so Holy Grailish, and separate. And so sad behind all that charm. D’you think he’s gay?’
‘Hope so, but at least we’ve got three months to find out. Shall we have a quickie in the Pearly Gates?’
‘No,’ said Flora firmly. ‘We’ve got to behave.’
Valhalla swarmed with technicians, everyone obsessed with his own agenda. Meredith, determined to produce the most memorable sets, whisked about trailing comely chippies, who could transform a dog kennel into Aladdin’s cave in twenty-four hours. Not only had they ripped apart the Great Hall and the two drawing rooms, but also the dining room, the entrance hall and Rannaldini’s study and bedroom too.
Tristan was outraged, and having a shouting match with Meredith as Baby and Flora arrived.
‘Those other rooms were not on the budget!’
‘They might just get into shot,’ said Meredith blithely. ‘Rannaldini didn’t want to risk it. I love it when you act masterful.’
Tristan stormed off, as Meredith turned to Baby and Flora.
‘My dears, it’s all too exciting, and wait till you see Tristan’s boys. They’re so glamorous, he
must
be gay.’
Tristan’s boys — the crew, mostly French — were, indeed, a glamorous bunch. They all seemed to have skiing tans and lean jaws, rapidly being hidden by beards so they wouldn’t have to shave when they dragged themselves out of bed at the crack of dawn. Totally professional, they had already checked and tested their equipment for the first shoot day, making sure that lights and sound gear were in working order and camera and lenses properly calibrated.
Poised to grumble at everything
anglais
and to blow Gauloise smoke in the face of any singer who played up, they were also acting bolshie because most of them hadn’t been invited to Rannaldini’s smart dinner party that evening.
Those who had included the wonderfully languid director of photography, known as Oscar because he’d won so many Oscars and because, with his floating scarves, dark hair flopping from a middle parting, and endlessly assessing heavy-lidded eyes, he was a dead ringer for Oscar Wilde. Oscar seldom went near a camera. He appeared to sleep most of the day, but was paid five thousand pounds a week to make sure that the sets and the singers were beautifully lit. Despite his effete appearance, he was a doting family man, who spent his time on location — when he wasn’t asleep — talking to Valentin, his handsome son-in-law, the camera operator, who earned two thousand a week. They had arrived with several crates of claret, and intended to escape home to Paris on every possible occasion.
Sylvestre, Tristan’s sound recordist, who’d already sampled the
Don Carlos
wares during the recording, said little because he was always so busy listening. Sylvestre’s aim on location was to pull the delectable Simone de Montigny, who was in charge of continuity. Much of Simone’s energy would go into proving she had not been booked to work on
Don Carlos
because she was Tristan’s niece. The daughter of Tristan’s eldest brother, Alexandre the judge, she was in fact just two years younger than Tristan. Having caught a glimpse of Wolfgang Rannaldini she knew exactly who she wanted to pull on location.
And then there was Lucy Latimer, who’d been working in Brussels on
Villette
, which had overrun by several days so she had had a mad scramble to get to Valhalla on time. She was cheered that Sexton had provided her with a beautiful caravan in which to work. She had already unpacked her make-up brushes and sponges for the first day’s filming. Her main problem would be in persuading the cast that the camera, four feet away, saw different things from an audience up in the gods.
In the fridge were three bottles of white, plenty of veggie snacks, and a garlic-flavoured cooked chicken, for her russet shaggy-coated lurcher, James, who ate much more expensively than she did and now, in a smart new green leather collar, lay replete and snoring on one of the bench seats. Above him in the window, Lucy had already put stickers saying: ‘Lurchers Do it Languidly’, ‘A Dog is for Life not just for Christmas’, and ‘Passports for Pets’.
Round the big mirror, semi-circled with lightbulbs, beside snapshots of her little nieces, Lucy had stuck photographs of the cast and the members of the Royal Family, or Gordon Dillon, the editor of the
Scorpion
, they were supposed to represent.
Over the door was pinned her prize possession, nicked from the BBC, which said: ‘Please ensure that all spirits are returned to the spirit tank in this room.’
It was creepily appropriate in Valhalla, where every shadow appeared inhabited, and the dark cliff of wood behind the row of caravans and tents, known rather grandiosely as ‘the facilities unit’, seemed determined to obscure the stars. Who knew what ghosts might creep out of the cloisters or, on this bitterly cold night, the identities of the mufflered and overcoated figures scuttling by.
Also on Lucy’s walls were thank-you cards from the cast she’d just been looking after. As usual there had been tears and promises to keep in touch. But for once she wasn’t mourning the end of yet another location
affaire
. Her thoughts had been too full of Tristan.
She had been overjoyed to find a big bunch of bluebells in her caravan, but slightly deflated that every woman in the cast and crew had also received flowers. But at least he’d remembered she liked bluebells, and she kept his good-luck card, which she would certainly need. Tomorrow she had to make up Baby and Flora, who would each require at least an hour and a half, and if things moved swiftly, she might even have to do the ancient tenor playing the Spanish ambassador. Thank God Dame Hermione had insisted on her own make-up artist at vast extra expense.
Fifty yards from Make Up, Hermione’s squawks could be heard issuing from the dairy, which had been turned over to Wardrobe. Lady Griselda, the wardrobe mistress, big, deep-voiced, kind, vulnerable and a bit dippy, looked like Julius Caesar in drag, and had a small mouth like the slit in the charity tins she so often jangled on street corners.
As a deb Griselda had played the double bass in a pop group called the Alice Band, and had briefly been in waiting to a lesser member of the Royal Family. She now lived with a lot of cats in a thatched cottage in North Dorset, where she knew ‘absolutely everybody’. The cottage was called Wobbly Bottom. Griselda tended to send herself up, before anyone else could, by dressing outlandishly. Today she was wearing a floor-length red-embroidered tunic and a purple turban.
She was also having a nervous breakdown, because Rannaldini (who’d employed her because he felt she’d know how the upper classes dressed) was being absolutely beastly.
Riding coats and breeches littered a large sea-blue damask sofa, which had recently and peremptorily been ejected from Helen’s Blue Living Room, as Flora, Baby and Hermione tried on their clothes for tomorrow’s shoot.
Tristan was pacing about. There were a million technical demands on him, a potentially disruptive crew, production pressures, worry that the cast would gel even less in a strange environment.
Rannaldini’s beautifully manicured fingers were drumming on the table. Sexton was massaging his big face with his hand, always a sign that all was not well.
Hermione, in white breeches, black boots and a waisted red coat with black velvet facings, cut long to hide her large bottom, was preening in the mirror.
‘You look lovely, Hermsie,’ boomed Griselda, whose social and sartorial instincts were rapidly being sabotaged by her thumping great crush on Hermione.
‘Women don’t hunt in red coats in England,’ snapped Tristan. ‘It looks vulgar. Please try the dark blue one again, Hermione.’
‘The dark blue won’t show up against the trees,’ argued Rannaldini.
‘I want to add a cheery note to the winter gloom,’ pouted Hermione.
Baby, who was supposed to have hurtled across country to join the hunt incognito, was wearing a brown herringbone tweed jacket and, having lost so much weight at Champney’s, was marvelling at himself in buff stretch breeches. As Elisabetta’s bodyguard, Flora was wearing a less fitted brown riding coat to accommodate the bulge of her gun.
‘All of them are same colour as countryside.’ Rannaldini’s voice was rising. ‘They’ll get lost.’
Meredith, oblivious of the storm breaking over his airborne curls, was trying on the diamond tiara Hermione was supposed to wear for Philip II’s coronation.
‘Put on your hats for the total look,’ urged Griselda.
The row escalated because neither Hermione nor Baby were prepared to wear hard hats with black chin straps to resemble Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince Charles.
‘How could anyone fall in love with anyone at first sight wearing that?’ protested Baby. ‘D’you want Hermione to smoke a fag as well?’
‘Those hats are authentic,’ protested Griselda, getting up with a rattle of Valium to tap Hermione’s brim further down over her eyes. ‘We must set a good example to the Pony Club.’
‘Fuck the Pony Club,’ snapped Baby.
‘Rannaldini would quite like to,’ murmured Meredith.
‘You can take off your hats the moment you dismount,’ pleaded Griselda. ‘And Hermione’s blonde wig will then tumble beautifully down her back.’
‘My hair won’t tumble anywhere,’ snarled Baby. He loathed his Prince Charles wig, complete with incipient bald patch, even more than his hat.
Meredith, who was now trying on a flower-trimmed straw bonnet, suggested that Baby’s and Hermione’s hard hats might look better if they were dressed up with long earrings.
‘Only if I can wear my scarlet coat,’ said Hermione mulishly.
‘English women don’t wear—’ began Tristan.
‘But I’m not English,’ said Hermione, with a peal of merry laughter, as though she’d made a frightfully good joke. ‘I’m South African.’
‘Reimpose sanctions,’ muttered Baby.
Valhalla, like many ancient ecclesiastical buildings, was H-shaped with the north and south wings forming the verticals of the H. Rannaldini and his family lived in the south wing overlooking the valley.
Meanwhile, in the north wing, other members of the cast and the upper echelons of the crew were bagging their bedrooms, which in contrast to the lavishness of the south wing consisted rather creepily of ex-monks’ cells reached by badly lit uncarpeted staircases and long, narrow corridors.
‘Bit scary,’ quavered Lucy, pushing a reluctant James into a darkly panelled rabbit warren, almost entirely occupied by a big mahogany double bed.
‘I don’t mind sharing,’ said Ogborne, Tristan’s cocky and Cockney chief grip, who had a shaved head, an earring, and looked like a self-confident pig. Employed to hump equipment around and shove heavy cameras along tracks, Ogborne had had no difficulty in carrying all of Lucy’s cases upstairs.
‘Plenty of room for you, me and Fido in here,’ he said, patting the bed.
‘I talk dreadfully in my sleep, and James snores,’ said Lucy hastily.
Down the corridor, Alpheus Shaw, psyching himself into the part of Philip II, was getting more regal by the second, referring to himself as ‘one’, and striding around with his hands behind his back. He had also demanded the biggest bedroom, which had the biggest four-poster and small leaded windows looking north into the woods and east up the valley.
However, he was deeply displeased that, unlike Tristan, he had not been put in the lush south wing, which he had admired loudly on a previous visit.
Only half the principals were
in situ
: neither Mikhail, Granny, his wayward boyfriend Giuseppe, Alpheus nor Chloe would be needed for a couple of weeks. Alpheus had come down ostensibly to show solidarity and to inspire the cast. After all, he was the principal male singer now Fat Franco had been fired. In reality he wanted to screw Chloe without having to fork out for a hotel — particularly as his wife Cheryl always went through the Amex receipts.
Looking down, he could see Tristan and Rannaldini walking towards the house, their arms waving as they yelled at one another, their shadows long and black behind them.
Inside the dairy, Meredith, like a small child comforting his mother, was patting the vast shoulders of a sobbing Lady Griselda.
‘It’s just first-night nerves, don’t take it personally.’
Griselda gave a sniff.
‘Try not to get lippy on that hunting tie, Hermsie,’ she called out, ‘and I’d be grateful if you’d all put your clothes back on the hangers.’
‘What time’s dinner?’ asked Baby.
‘Seven thirty for eight,’ said Flora, as she wriggled back into her old grey jersey and scruffy black jeans. ‘I can’t be bothered to go home and tart up.’