The Beast Must Die (5 page)

NO LUCK THIS
morning. The anonymous ill-wisher failed to put in an appearance. A good day in London, though. I told Holt I wanted to lay my new detective novel in a film studio. He gave me an introduction to a chap called Callaghan, who is something or other in British Regal Films Inc – the company that Lena Lawson works for. Holt was mildly facetious about my beard, which is now at the awkward age – a kind of raw and gawkish stubble. Told him, equivocally, that it was for purposes of disguise. Since I should be looking over the studio in the character of Felix Lane, and might have to hang about there quite a lot for material, I didn’t want to risk being recognised as Frank Cairnes. I might, after all, run into some acquaintance of my Oxford or civil service days. Holt lapped it all up, looking at me in the slightly worried, proprietary way that publishers do look at their more successful authors – as though one were a temperamental performing animal which might any moment begin to sulk or try to escape from their circus.

I’ll get a bit of sleep now. The alarm is set for 4 a.m. again. I wonder what I’ll find in the net.

8 July

NO LUCK YESTERDAY
. But this morning the stinging fly walked into the parlour. And what a fly! – grey, draggled, winter-sleepy. Ugh. I’d speculated quite a lot, off and on, who could be the author of those letters. They’re usually written either by subnormal illiterates (which mine obviously weren’t) or by respected, ‘respectable’ people with a hidden kink. I’d thought of the vicar, the schoolmaster, the post mistress – even Peters and General Shrivenham; that’s the detective writer’s mentality – choose the most unlikely person. Of course, quite rightly and properly, it turned out to be the most obvious one.

The latch of the garden gate clicked faintly just after four thirty this morning. In the dim, shabby light I saw a figure coming up the path. It moved slowly at first, indecisively, as though plucking up courage or fearful of discovery, then it broke into a curious little sort of rapid, consequential trot, like the gait of a kitten carrying a mouse.

I could see now it was a woman, and it looked remarkably like Mrs Teague.

I hurried downstairs. I’d left the front door unlocked, and as the envelope dropped into the letter box I flung the door open. It was not Mrs Teague at all. It was Mrs Anderson. I might have guessed. That day she avoided me in the street, her widowhood and lonely life, her starved maternal instinct that had
been
poured out upon Martie. She was such a quiet, harmless, nondescript old thing – I’d never thought about her at all.

There was a very painful scene. I said some wounding things, I’m afraid. She’d made me lose a lot of sleep, so she might have expected me to be a bit irritable. But the sting of her letters must have gone deeper than I’d thought. I felt cold and furious, and I stabbed back very hard. There was a kind of bedraggled, stuffy air about her, like you get in a railway compartment full of women after a long night-journey, which filled me with angry disgust. She said nothing. She stood there blinking, as if she’d just woken up from an unrefreshing sleep. After a bit she began to cry – a thin, hopeless drizzle. You know how that kind of thing unleashes all the bully in oneself – one piles on cruelty on cruelty to bury the struggling reproach and self-disgust. I had no mercy at all. I am not proud of myself. In the end, she turned and crept away, without a word. I shouted after her that, if anything more happened, I’d turn her over to the police. I must have been beside myself. A very, very nasty exhibition. But she shouldn’t have written that about me and Martie. Oh God, I wish I was dead.

9 July

TOMORROW I PACK
up and leave this place. Frank Cairnes will disappear. Felix Lane will move into the furnished flat I’ve taken in Maida Vale. There will be nothing (I hope) to connect the two except Martie’s one-eyed teddybear, which I’m taking with me – a gentle reminder. I think I’ve arranged for everything. Money. Accommodation address for Mrs Teague to send on my letters to. I’ve told her I shall probably be in London for some time, or else travelling. She’ll look after the cottage while I’m away. I wonder, shall I ever come back? I suppose I ought to sell the place, but somehow don’t like to; a place where Martie was happy. But what shall I do – afterwards? What does a murderer do when his occupation’s gone? Does he start writing detective novels again? It sounds rather an anticlimax. Well, sufficient unto the day.

I feel that things have now been taken out of my hands. It’s the only possible course for a vacillating sensitive like myself – to arrange circumstances in such a way that they compel him into action. That must be the truth behind the good old phrases like ‘burning one’s boats’ and ‘crossing the Rubicon’. I imagine J. Caesar was something of a neurotic too – the Hamlet streak – most of the really great men of action had it – look at T. E. Lawrence.

I just refuse to envisage the possibility that the Lena–George tie-up is a dead end. I couldn’t face
having
to start all over again from the beginning. In the meanwhile, there’s plenty to be done. I’ve got to create the character of Felix Lane for myself – his parents, his characteristics, his life history. I must
be
Felix Lane, otherwise Lena or George may smell a rat. By the time Felix Lane is word perfect, my beard should have reached years of discretion. Then I’ll pay my first visit to British Regal Films Inc. No more of this diary till then. I think I’ve worked out the right line to take with Lena. I wonder will she fall for my beard – one of Huxley’s characters advertises the aphrodisiac virtues of beards – I’ll see if he’s correct.

20 July

WHAT A DAY
! Went down to the film studio for the first time. I’d rather work in hell, or even in an asylum, than in a film studio. The heat, the pandemonium, the fantastic artificiality of it all – everything is like a two-dimensional nightmare – the people no more solid or real than the sets. And one is perpetually tripping over things: if it’s not an electric cable, it’s the legs of one of a horde of extras, who sit about all day twiddling their fingers like the wretched creatures in Dante’s Limbo.

But I’d better start at the beginning. I was met by Callaghan, the chap Holt gave me an introduction to – very pale, thin, almost emaciated face, and a curiously
fanatical
glitter in his eyes, horn-rim spectacles, grey roll-collar jumper, flannel bags, all very dirty, untidy and high-tension – just like a stage caricature of a film executive. Obviously efficient to the fingertips (which were stained bright yellow – he rolls his own cigarettes, and while he’s smoking one he’s starting to roll the next – the most restless fingers I’ve ever seen).

‘Well, old man,’ he said, ‘anything particular you want to see, or shall we tour the whole dump?’

I indicated a preference for the whole dump. In my innocence. It seemed to take hours and hours and hours. Callaghan prattled technicalities without cessation all the time, till my mind was like a piece of post office blotting paper. I only hope my beard concealed the absolute incomprehension of my mind. They’ll find ‘camera angles’ and ‘montage’ (whatever that is) written on my heart when I’m dead. Callaghan is certainly nothing if not thorough. What little receptive power I started with was soon exhausted after half an hour of being tripped up by electric cable, blinded by arc lights, and mown down by bustling operatives. Incidentally, the language in this place would make a bargee or a sergeant major sound like a representative of the Purity League. All the time, I was looking out for Lena Lawson, and finding it more and more difficult to mention her name in an innocent, conversational manner.

However, Callaghan gave me an opening when we stopped to have a bit of lunch. We talked about
detective
novels and the impossibility of making films out of the best ones. He had read two of mine but was completely incurious about their author; I’d expected to have to stave off some awkward questions. Callaghan, however, was only interested in technique (which, typically, he pronounces ‘technic’). Holt had told him, of course, that I was on the lookout for the setting and detail of a new thriller. After a bit he asked how I’d happened to light on British Regal for my investigations. I saw my opportunity and said that the last English film I’d seen was one of theirs,
Housemaid’s Knees
.

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘I should have thought you’d run a mile from any company which produced that sort of tripe.’

‘Where’s your
esprit de corps?
’ I said.

‘Damn it all – underclothes and stockbrokers’ humour? Why it isn’t even tolerable cinema.’

‘That girl – what’s her name? – Lawson. She wasn’t bad, I thought. Plenty of go.’

‘Oh, Weinberg’s building her up,’ Callaghan said somberly. ‘From the legs upwards, you know. Up and up and up. She’s all right as a peg to hang lingerie on. Thinks herself a second Harlow, of course. They all do.’

‘Temperamental?’

‘No, just dumb.’

‘I thought all these film stars were perpetually going into tantrums,’ I said, casting – I flatter myself – a very delicate fly indeed.

‘You’re telling me? Oh yes, la Lawson used to throw her weight about all right. But she’s sobered down a hell of a lot lately. Quite subdued and biddable.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Dunno. Maybe Love has come into her life. She had a sort of breakdown – when was it? – last January. Held up the film we were making for nearly a fortnight. Believe me, old man, when the leading lady gets to sitting about in corners, just weeping quietly away to herself, it’s a menace.’

‘Bad as that, was it?’ I said, trying to keep my voice normal. January. ‘A sort of breakdown.’ Another piece of circumstantial evidence! Callaghan stared at me, with that febrile glitter in his eyes which makes him look like a minor prophet working up to some outsize piece of denunciation, but in actual fact – I should think – is just part of the stock-in-trade of the high tension, 100 per cent efficiency fiend.

He said, ‘I’ll say it was. Gave us all the jim-jams. Weinberg told her to take a week off in the end. She’s got over it now, of course.’

‘Is she here today?’

‘No. Out on location. Thinking of making a pass at her, old man?’ Callaghan leered at me amiably. I told him that my intentions were relatively honourable: I wanted to study a typical film actress for my new thriller, also I’d got plans about making it the kind of story which could be turned into a film – the Hitchcock type – and Lena Lawson might be the right person to play the heroine. I don’t know whether this carried
much
conviction with Callaghan, he looked at me a bit sceptically, but it doesn’t much matter whether he believes my motives to be professional or erotic. I’m visiting the studio again tomorrow, and he’s going to introduce me to the girl then. I feel absurdly nervous about it – I’ve never had anything to do with her sort before.

21 July

WELL, I’VE GOT
that over. What an ordeal! I didn’t know what to say to the girl at first. Not that there was any need to. She gave me a perfunctory hand, shot a rather neutral sort of look at my beard, as though reserving judgement, and instantly launched forth into a long rigmarole to Callaghan and me about someone called Platanov. ‘That fiend, Platanov!’ she said. ‘Do you know my dears he rang me up four times last night well I ask you what is a girl to do of course I don’t mind attentions but when it comes to having one’s footsteps dogged and being persecuted on the telephone well as I told Weinberg it’ll drive me crackers. The man’s a fiend incarnate my dears he actually had the nerve to turn up at the station this morning luckily I’d told him the train left at nine ten when it really goes out five minutes earlier so I saw him chasing it down the platform just like the Scissors’ Man definitely a fiendish turn of speed and you know
what
he looks like my dears a positive nightmare and it’s not as if I could have anything more to say to him is it?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Callaghan soothingly.

‘I keep on telling Weinberg he must ring up the Embassy and have the man deported the country’s not big enough to hold both of us either he goes or I but of course all these Jews are in league I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here though I do rather bar rubber truncheons and sterilisation. Well now, as I was saying …’

She went on and on for some time longer. There was something engaging about the way she assumed that I knew the context of her speech. I’ve no idea – probably never shall –whether the fiend Platanov is a white slaver, a talent scout, and agent of the GPU, or just an infatuated admirer. It’s all of a piece with this incredibly unreal world – there’s simply no knowing where film leaves off and real life begins. However, Lena’s monologue gave me an opportunity to study her in some detail. She certainly had got a not unattractive, vulgar, vivacity; if she’s now ‘quite subdued and biddable’, as Callaghan said, she must have been a proper handful before. I was rather surprised that she should be so like the film Polly in appearance, but obviously the chap at the ford would not have recognised her otherwise. Tip-tilted nose, wide mouth, very thick white-gold hair rising in a sort of wave or tiara above her forehead, blue eyes. Her features, except for the mouth, are quite delicate,
which
contrasts oddly with her gamine expression. But these inventories are useless – I’ve never seen a physical description of anyone in a book which gave a clear mental pictue. To look at her, you’d never think she had anything on her mind. Maybe she hasn’t. No, I refuse to admit that possibility.

I stared at her while she was talking, thinking, This is one of the last two people to see Martie alive. I didn’t feel any horror or rancour against her – only a burning curiosity and impatience to know more, to know everything. After a bit she turned to me and said:

‘Now you must tell me all about yourself, Mr Vane.’

‘Lane,’ said Callaghan.

‘You’re an author, aren’t you? I love authors. Do you know Hugh Walpole? I think he’s a lovely author. But of course you look much more like my idea of an author than he does.’