Fame

Tish shook her head. ‘She saved us, Mrs D. She saved Loxley. It’s going to be all right after all.’

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE

‘I’m not asking for directions again, OK? I am not doing it.’

Chuck MacNamee folded his bulging arms across his broad chest with an air of finality. A fifty-seven-year-old ex-marine, Chuck did not, as he was fond of telling his fellow crew members, ‘take any shit.’ He’d worked in the film business for fifteen years as a driver/set builder/security guard/jack of all trades, ever since he got out of prison (a small matter of a credit fraud and a particularly humourless judge), and Dorian Rasmirez had given him the chance that no one else would, hiring him as a runner on Love and Regrets. Fanatically loyal to Dorian, and generally beloved on set as a good-natured practical joker, even Chuck had his limits.

He’d spent the last four hours trying to drive an articulated lorry through country lanes so narrow they’d have been hard pressed to accommodate an overweight donkey. He’d already stopped twice to ask directions from old men with impenetrable accents, and each time he’d been sent still deeper into the wilds of rural Derbyshire. And, throughout this wild goose chase, he’d been harangued every five minutes by Deborah Raynham, a twenty-two-year-old ‘cameraperson’, Christ preserve us, who kept sighing and mumbling, ‘If you’d only look at the map…’ under her breath.

They had now reached a T-junction in a ridiculously pretty village, tantalizingly called ‘Loxley’. But was there a sign to Loxley Hall? Was there a sign to anywhere? Was there fuck.

‘Fine,’ said Deborah, flinging the crumpled Ordnance Survey map on the floor of the cab in a fit of temper. ‘I’ll ask then. You stay here and sulk like a five-year-old.’

Deborah was not especially pretty in Chuck’s opinion: too short and pale with a snub nose and mousy brown hair that she wore scraped back in a tight bun. But when she got angry there was a certain fieriness to her that seemed to animate her features in a not-unattractive way. Chuck thought how irritated Deborah would be if she knew what he was thinking, and smiled.

‘I’m glad you find this funny,’ Deborah snapped, opening the passenger door and jumping down onto the wet grass of the village green. ‘Let’s hope Mr Rasmirez shares your wacky sense of humour.’

Unlike the rest of the crew, Deborah was not a fan of Chuck MacNamee. He’d sat next to her on the flight from LA, fallen instantly asleep and proceeded to snore like a fat fucking walrus for ten straight hours. No one in that cabin had got a wink of sleep. Then, once they’d arrived in England, red-eyed with exhaustion, Chuck had immediately appointed himself head of operations, ordering the camera crew around like a tyrannical ship’s captain, but always saving his most patronizing asides for Deborah. Every other sentence began with: ‘When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, missy …’ Missy? The guy was a total dinosaur. And, to top it all off, he had the navigational skills of a deaf bat after one too many Jack Daniel’s.

Wuthering Heights was the first feature film Deborah had ever worked on. She was wildly excited about meeting Dorian Rasmirez, and hopefully impressing him with her work, her professionalism. But now, thanks to Cap’n Chuck, she and her crew were going to arrive so late they would almost certainly lose the first day’s shooting. Directors rarely took kindly to this sort of mishap.

On the plus side, Deborah had never been to England before. She’d actually never been out of the States, although she had no intention of admitting this to Chuck MacNamasshole. It was a delight to discover that the British countryside really was like something out of a Beatrix Potter book. Loxley village was enchanting, with its stream and its little bridge and a brightly painted maypole with ribbons standing proud in the middle of the green. As she stepped out of the cab, Deborah heard the ancient church clock strike three. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the intoxicating smell of newly mown grass and fresh, floral summer air, and said a silent prayer of thanks that she’d landed this job. It was hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago she’d woken up in smog-ridden Culver City.

‘Afternoon, my love. What can I get for you?’

The old woman behind the counter at the village shop was fat and friendly. Her hair was blue – literally blue, as bright and bold as an M&M, which was a little disconcerting – but her accent was intelligible, to Deborah’s great relief.

‘I’m looking for Loxley Hall. I wondered if you might be able to direct me?’

The old woman’s face lit up. Marjorie Johns had run Loxley Village Stores for the last thirty-five years, and the most exciting thing to happen in all that time was when Des Lynam had popped in one Sunday morning for his paper, back in 1987. But this? This was something else. An American accent in Loxley could only mean one thing: this girl must be one of the film people. From Hollywood! Word that Tish Crewe was hiring out Loxley as a film set had inevitably got out in the village. For the last three weeks the talk in The Carpenter’s Arms had been of little else.

‘I can do better than that, my darling.’ Bustling out from behind the counter, Marjorie shooed her one other customer out of the shop with a brusque, ‘Not now, Wilf’, turned the sign on the door to ‘CLOSED’ and positively beamed at Deborah. ‘I can take you up there myself.’

Deborah Raynham would probably have been relieved to know that, less than three miles away, Dorian Rasmirez was having an equally trying time locating his location.

‘Fuck!’ Slamming his fist down on the dashboard of his rented Volkswagen Golf, Dorian cursed the British for their obsession with gear sticks. Was the whole country stuck in the fucking Dark Ages? ‘Fuck, fuck and double fucking FUCK.’

The Hertz office at Manchester Airport had had no budget or mid-range automatic cars available when Dorian showed up this morning. His choice had been to pay fifteen hundred a week for a luxury automatic sports car he didn’t need, or two hundred for a ‘reliable’ dark green manual Golf GTI. He’d taken the Golf, smugly congratulating himself for his thriftiness, and proceeded to stall the damn thing approximately every five minutes on the apparently endless drive out to Loxley Hall. No one had thought fit to warn him that rural Derbyshire could only be navigated by means of single-lane roads about the width of your average drinking straw, many of them set at gradients at which one would usually expect to use crampons. Nor had he been prepared for the baffling lack of signposts (one sign per five junctions seemed to be the policy), or the thick accents of the two locals from whom he had misguidedly asked directions.

Leaning back in the driver’s seat, he took a deep breath and willed himself to calm down. OK, so he was hours late, on his way to a location he’d paid well over the odds for, despite having only seen it in photographs. Why? I must have been mad! But at least the scenery was beautiful. This time his car had spluttered to a halt at the top of a rise, right where the narrow lane opened onto a gloriously wide vista. Below Dorian, the Hope Valley spread out like an emerald carpet, criss-crossed with the glinting silver threads of the river Derwent and its myriad tiny tributaries. The landscape was an intoxicating mixture of the bleak and wild, up on the fells themselves, and the rich, pastoral milk-and-honey beauty of the valley floor, with its gold stone villages, lush farmland and pockets of ancient woodland, a tapestry of old England.

Dorian had arrived in England two days ago, and spent most of his waking hours since then meeting with his London bankers, Coutts, trying to get them to increase the already very substantial loan they’d made him a few months ago. He’d been booked on the early flight to Manchester this morning but, thanks to a fraught dawn phone call with Chrissie in Romania, he’d missed the plane. Saskia had a low-grade fever, apparently, and Chrissie was demanding that Dorian fly home to join her at their daughter’s bedside.

‘But honey,’ Dorian protested, ‘you just told me the doctor said it wasn’t dangerous.’

‘Not yet,’ said Chrissie darkly. ‘What if she takes a turn for the worse?’

Dorian bit his lip and counted to ten. ‘By the time I land she’ll probably be over it. I’ll have to turn around and come right back again. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Oh, I see.’ He could hear the resentment in Chrissie’s voice. ‘So what you’re saying is your work is more important to you than your child.’

‘No! Of course not. Saskia’s far more important—’

‘So come home.’

‘Honey, be reasonable. Today’s the first day of set-up on location. I have twenty crew arriving. My cast’ll be here in a week, and you know how much there is to get done before we can start rolling. I can’t just come home on a whim every time there’s a problem.’

In retrospect, his use of the word ‘whim’ had probably been a mistake. In any event, he was already exhausted by the time he finally landed in Manchester, with Chrissie’s screams still ringing in his ears. The subsequent three hours spent chasing his tail round the Derbyshire countryside had done little to improve his temper.

Pulling up on the handbrake, he looked again at the crumpled map on the passenger seat. According to this, he was practically on top of Loxley Hall. He prayed that when he finally got there the owner wouldn’t want to chew his ear off about taking care of the place, or lecture him about his crew remembering to take their boots off when they came inside. They were saving money by staying at the house, rather than pitching camp in local hotels, an arrangement that would also make it easier to keep a lid on the inevitable production gossip. Even the actors would be sleeping on site. Unfortunately, however, the owner had made it a condition of the deal that she too be allowed to remain on the property throughout the shoot, a proviso that made Dorian’s heart sink.

Letitia Crewe. That was her name. It sounded like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. Dorian could picture Loxley’s chatelaine now: a meddling old bag in twinset and pearls, bossing everybody about like the Queen while her hunting dogs chewed up his expensive equipment.