‘George will sling me out. Oh, for God’s sake, stop it, Trevor!’ Flora’s voice rose to a scream as the little terrier lunged at a surprised James.
‘You can get away with it, you’ve got such a lovely face.’ Lucy tied a powder-blue overall round Flora’s neck. ‘And it’ll soon grow.’
‘Not for three months, it won’t,’ mocked Baby. ‘That gauleiter Simone from Continuity won’t allow it, and Lucy said I’ve got a beautiful face too. She says it to all the girls.’
‘Oh, go away and annoy Wardrobe,’ said Lucy, throwing a sponge at him.
‘I shall go and inhabit
my
caravan. Look, it’s on the call sheet — “Mr Spinosissimo’s caravan”. It’s eight inches longer than Hermione’s, I measured it — so yah, boo!’
Lucy then had to turn a quaking Flora into Hermione’s private detective, thickening her eyebrows, giving her sideboards and a small moustache, and creating brown stubble with a dry sponge.
‘I’m bored in my caravan. It’s lonely being a mega-star,’ said Baby, half an hour later. He was so turned on by Flora’s new butch look, he couldn’t stop pinching her bottom.
‘You’re wanted in Wardrobe, Mr Spinosissimo.’ Standing in the doorway, his shoulders broadened by a lumber jacket, was a stony-faced Wolfie. ‘Get your ass into gear, the director’s waiting.’
‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen. Heil Hitler.’ Baby goosestepped after Wolfgang. ‘Christ, it’s cold. If March is meant to go out like a lamb, this one’s New Zealand and deep-frozen.’
Over at Wardrobe, Tristan and Lady Griselda, in a floor-length fur-lined red coat and a fake-fur hat like a tsar, had decided that as Carlos had just flown into France incognito, it would be more appropriate for him to lurk at the meet in a covert coat.
‘Wouldn’t a flasher’s mac be more suitable?’ said Baby.
He was still violently opposed to his Prince Charles wig and enraged Tristan by asking the grinning crew whether he looked a prat or not. When they voted by a show of hands that he did, he tore it off and threw it into a bramble bush.
Tristan only gave in because he and Rannaldini, who’d just rolled up in his huge wolf coat, had been sucked into an even worse screaming match with Meredith, who didn’t appear quite so young and boyish out of doors. The point of contention was a hunting lodge, which looked as though it had been exclusively decorated by Colefax & Fowler.
‘We are not making fourth-rate production of
Hansel and Gretel
,’ snarled Rannaldini, whose idea it had actually been because he wanted a free summerhouse, but who hadn’t forgiven Meredith for last night’s bought ancestors.
‘Carlos and Lizzie have a love tryst in it,’ Meredith stamped his little snow boot, ‘so it must look nice.’
‘We should have seen a model first,’ said Tristan reasonably.
‘It look like cuckoo clock,’ hissed Rannaldini.
Meredith flounced off, muttering that his artistic input had been compromised. The cuckoo clock was banished and stood sulking near the car park for the rest of the shoot.
Because Hermione was still squawking in Make Up it was decided quickly to relight and shoot the first four lines of Baby’s aria, when he expresses rapture after catching his first glimpse of Elisabetta.
There was already a crimson blur of new bud on the beeches. Bluebell leaves and green flames of wild garlic were pushing through the leaf mould. But such signs of spring were speedily blotted out by the snow machine scattering white foam everywhere, even between the cracks in the dry ground.
‘Remember not to bang your chest. It sound like Beeg Ben,’ begged Sylvestre as he miked up Baby.
Next moment, everyone jumped out of their skins, as music poured
fortissimo
out of speakers hidden behind two venerable sycamores.
‘Doesn’t it sound gorgeous?’ cried Flora, rushing out of Make Up, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Rannaldini’s overture is simply sensational. You’d never know it wasn’t Verdi.’
‘You always admired him,’ said Wolfie coldly.
Flora flushed. Next moment she had tripped over a sign concealed by the snow saying ‘Beware of Snakes’.
‘Oh, God,’ she wailed. ‘Trevor and I are going to invest in some thigh boots before summer.’
Meanwhile, Hype-along Cassidy, the harassed press officer, who was expecting a reporter and photographer from the
Independent
, was sidling from one bewildered member of the French crew to another, imploring them to charge forward and ask for Dame Hermione’s autograph when she deigned eventually to come out of her caravan.
‘Bruce Willis’s press officer does the same thing,’ he lied.
Tristan was taking Baby through a quick rehearsal. Valentin, Oscar’s handsome son-in-law, perched on a little chair behind the camera, was following them, as Ogborne, a red knitted flower-pot covering his shaved head, pushed the camera along the silver rail tracks.
As the head of Props pressed a button, and the smoke-machine enveloped Baby in swirling grey mist, Lucy shot forward with her brushes to take the shine off his nose, and a hairdresser rearranged his curls.
‘More smoke,’ shouted Tristan.
‘That brown velvet collar needs straightening,’ yelled Griselda.
‘Quiet, please, we’re going for a take,’ brayed Bernard, the first assistant director.
An incredible tension gripped everyone — even the birds were silent, the breeze still.
‘Sound rolling,’ said Sylvestre.
‘Camera rolling,’ called Valentin.
‘Mark it,’ said Tristan, and the clapper-loader jumped in front of the camera, saying, ‘Slate one, take one,’ and snapped his clapper.
‘Action,’ shouted Tristan.
Out strolled Baby into the sunlight.
‘“Fontainebleau. Immense and solitary forest”,’ he sang exactly in time to his own exquisite voice. ‘“What rose-filled gardens, what Eden of loveliness could equal in Carlos’s eyes this wood through which his smiling Elisabetta passed?”’
‘And cut!’ shouted Tristan. ‘That was great.’ Then, loping over to Baby, ‘Could you make it a little more ecstatic? You are expecting hideous future wife and suddenly you discover you are to marry most stunning girl in world — you could even clutch yourself with joy.’
‘Anything’s better than clutching Dame Hermione.’
‘
Tais-toi!
You’re miked up! OK, we go again.’
The mournful clarinet began once more, the smoke-machine fired another swirl of mist. As Tristan called, ‘Action,’ glamorous Valentin, riding his camera like a jockey, reminded Baby of Isa.
‘Fontainebleau,’ he sang rapturously.
After three takes, each more miraculous than the one before, Tristan said, ‘Fantastic! Check the gate.’
Once the clapper-loader had shone his torch into the camera to check there were no hairs or dust to ruin the picture, Tristan shouted: ‘Cut and print.’ Everyone cheered, because the first shot was in the can.
The rest of the aria was going to be used as voiceover as Baby smuggled himself into France and the Spanish ambassador’s entourage. It was now time for Hermione. Having borrowed a tape-measure from Griselda and discovered Baby had the longer caravan, she was now screeching at Bernard Guérin, the first assistant director. ‘I answer only to Tristan de Montigny or Sir Roberto, and no-one, absolutely no-one, orders me to hurry up. And in future ensure that my caravan is not parked next to the honeywagon.’
Bernard, who’d been unable to make last night’s party, acted as Tristan’s sergeant major. His job was to see everything ran smoothly on the floor. Any hold-up cost thousands.
Bernard also did the bellowing and bossing around, which enabled Tristan to drift about, inspiring, charming, manipulating, and still appearing as Mr Nice Guy, even when he pushed people to the limit. Bernard, who’d been in the army with Tristan’s brother Laurent and held him dying in his arms in Africa, hero-worshipped the Montigny family. He also got wildly jealous and sulked if anyone got too close to Tristan.
Sadly, one of the reasons Hermione was being so gratuitously rude to him was because he had a brick-red face, the rolling eyes and big teeth of a rocking-horse, an ebony moustache covering a huge upper lip and the bray of a choleric donkey.
‘When Frogs are ugly, there’s no competition,’ whispered Baby, as Bernard emerged from Hermione’s mauling, his red face darkened to maroon and enlivened by a delta of purple veins on his forehead.
With a sigh, Rannaldini vanished into Hermione’s caravan and came down the steps a minute or so later, ostentatiously tucking his shirt into his trousers. ‘Dame Hermione is now on her way,’ he called out smugly, so the crew could hear. ‘You must learn tact, Bernard.’
Nemesis, however, was hovering: almost on cue, Hermione’s young, hopelessly harassed but adorably pretty make-up artist wandered down the steps of the honeywagon next door. In her clinging orange cardigan above knitted red and white trousers, she looked every inch a star. To the rapture of the
Independent
photographer, she was then stampeded by crew members, crying ‘’Ermione, ’Ermione!’ and begging for her autograph.
Hype-along Cassidy, the Press Officer, whose brown velvet hat was knocked off in the rush, only just managed to beat them off as Hermione herself emerged in the red riding coat Tristan had vetoed last night.
Whatever happened to Rannaldini’s dominance ending at the recording? thought Flora in alarm.
Hermione was further outraged when Tristan cautiously suggested her make-up was too heavy for outdoors.
‘Which, roughly translated, means it makes the old bat look a hundred,’ whispered Baby to the crew, who he’d got totally on his side.
Hermione’s quailing make-up artist was then ordered by Tristan to take her make-up down, which meant another hour’s delay. Later, Bernard stole off to have a pee behind a holly tree, and only just missed Hermione frantically applying eye-liner.
‘Her next CD will be called “Hermione goes to Hollybush”.’ Baby’s joke was soon whizzing round the set.
Baby proved a complete natural, who only had to glance at his lines in Make Up before going from nothing to regulo ten in thirty seconds. Hermione, on the other hand, was used to having a raised eyebrow seen in the gods, and was defeated by the stillness, subtlety and control of cinema acting. She was soon driving everyone crackers insisting, ‘But I always enter right for this aria,’ and because she, like everyone else, had a monstrous crush on Tristan, wanting to know her motivation for every syllable.
Tristan’s niece, Simone, in charge of continuity, was tiny and elfin with a glossy dark brown urchin cut and mournful Montigny eyes. Her fragility, however, belied a forceful personality. As most of the film was shot out of order, Simone’s main task, apart from timing takes, was to insist that each scene blended into earlier and later ones.
‘Your cigarette was only a quarter smoked last time, Baby,’ she was now shouting, ‘and we agreed you should carry a whip, Dame Hermione.’
‘Oh, sugar, I left it at home.’
‘Wolfgang can go and get it,’ said Rannaldini. ‘That’s what he’s here for.’
Having played in the first rugger team of an English public school, Wolfie was used to being yelled at under pressure. But with Bernard shouting instructions into his earpiece all morning, it was as though the Battle of the Somme had broken out. Now Rannaldini was pitching in.
‘And you can pick up another thermal vest from the Mill while you’re there, Wolfgang,’ Hermione called after him. ‘I cannot afford to catch cold,’ she added, as Tristan’s eyes rose to heaven at the thought of more delay.
By the time they broke for lunch, only Baby’s four lines had been filmed, and everyone had such cold noses they looked like an advertisement for Comic Relief.
Aware she had a French crew, Maria the caterer, a pretty, pregnant Italian, was on her mettle and had produced baked red snapper with aromatic Chinese sauce, steak and kidney pie, sautéed garlic potatoes, a vegetable stir-fry for Lucy, followed by rhubarb crumble or treacle pudding.
Everyone piled up their plates and charged the dining bus, where Tristan, because of the cold and it being the first day, had ordered bottles of wine for every table.
‘How the hell are you going to put up with Hermione?’ asked Oscar, as he tied his napkin round his neck to protect his purple scarf.
‘Divas are not fully balanced human beings,’ said Tristan dropping three Disprins into a glass of Perrier. ‘If they were they wouldn’t be great.’
After lunch the rows escalated.
‘What is my motivation for this scene?’ Hermione asked Tristan for the thousandth time.
‘You are cold, exhausted and lost in a huge forest,’ said Tristan, through gritted teeth. ‘Suddenly Carlos steps out from behind that tree and offers you his protection.’
‘If I’ve just come off a plane, surely I’d offer her a slug of duty-free,’ said Baby helpfully.
‘Will you stop taking the pees?’ Tristan’s voice rose. ‘As I was saying, Hermione, you’re lost in a wood.’
‘“Just a little lamb who’s lost in a wood,”’ sang Hermione,
fortissimo
, then went into peals of laughter as everyone jumped out of their skins.
‘Don’t you wish that pistol was loaded?’ murmured Baby to Flora.
‘I feel like Agent Scully. At least we’ve got the same-coloured hair,’ whispered back Flora, who was very excited by her gun, which was a Heckler-Koch ‘toy’, as used by the SAS.
She was feeling spooked, however, because Rannaldini had nastily insisted she take off not just her regard ring but also her sapphire engagement ring.
‘It ees almost beeger than the evening star, and much too camp for a detective,’ he sneered. ‘Why not lend it to Baby?’
‘Look mean, Flora,
chérie
,’ shouted Tristan, ‘and when you see Carlos, shield Hermione and point your gun straight into camera.’
‘Stand by to shoot, please,’ bellowed Bernard.
Everyone moved out of shot.
‘Here we go, let’s turn over.’