101 Pieces of Me (9 page)

Setting down his cutlery, he sipped his drink and look at me with amusement. “Very well. She is an actress, like you.” He put down his glass and held it between his hands, his gaze still on my face. “Though not very like you, actually. She is unscrupulous, vain and grasping.” He mused for a moment. “But striking, I’m sure you will agree.”

I did not consider Marjorie Cunningham particularly striking. I had seen only a fashionably willowy frame, artificially gilded hair and a pricey fur. “Men’s appreciation of what is striking must be different from women’s,” I said. I put some chicken in my mouth and chewed while Aidan watched me, the amused look still in his eyes. “She is certainly
glamorous
,” I added, “but that is not the same thing.”

Aidan turned his attention once more to his plate. I noticed that his hair had too much oil in it and that he had not removed all of his make-up: a pale line of it ran round his hairline and chin like the beach at the edge of the land. For an actor, he took little care of his appearance. “She is one of David’s set. They are always at his parties, drinking and dancing and making fools of themselves. You know he has a house on an island in the river, not far from here?”

I did not know this. And to my knowledge, David had not given any parties since I had been working on the film. If he had, I had not been invited. My heartbeat stuttered.

“Marjorie’s been in America trying to get a part in a picture,” continued Aidan. “I think she has been in a play on Broadway or something. In any case, she must have failed to get into ‘the movies’, as they call them there, or she would not be back here in Old England.”

An unwelcome thought came to me. “Do you think she is hoping for a part in our film?”

He laughed loudly. The waiter looked round again. “
Our
film? Oh, Clara, you are sweet! Marjorie has not come to David for a
part
! And this film is not ours at all. It belongs to that band of scroungers David is in thrall to. His so-called backers. A worse pack of villains you could not wish to find. Now eat up your food like a good girl and let’s not talk about Marjorie any more.”

W
e did not mention Marjorie again, but she remained in my thoughts. When the waiter offered pudding and coffee I refused, thanked Aidan for dinner and bade him good night. He stood politely when I rose from the table. As I left the dining room I could feel him looking at me. Once in my room I threw my fur onto the bed, took off my hat and studied my reflection.

Striking. What did Aidan mean by the word? And when he used it to describe Marjorie, did he mean that I was
not
striking? I had called her glamorous, which I was sure I was not. So what
was
I?

David had said I was beautiful, though neither Aidan nor I had used this word to describe Marjorie. Was being beautiful different from being striking or glamorous? Marjorie and I were both young women – I estimated her age at twenty-three or -four – who took care of our appearance. We had both abandoned the long hair of our childhood for the “bob”, though Marjorie’s was a sleeker, shorter cut than mine and heavily bleached. I turned my head from side to side. Did
glamour
lie in bleached hair? She and I both wore cosmetics on our faces, though I had not gone as far as to pluck my eyebrows and paint them on in a more fashionable position, as I had noticed she had done. Did that make her
striking
?

I leaned on the dressing-table, cupping my chin in my hands. My hair could perhaps do with a tidy-up: as it was curlier than Marjorie’s and more liable to unruliness. But I could not see any further improvement I could make to my appearance. I could not change the colour of my eyes or the darkness of my lashes and brows, or the shape of my lips. My nose, which I now considered more carefully than I had ever done before, was exactly like Mam’s: short and unobtrusive, with small nostrils. It looked all right on her. Did it look all right on me? And would it look all right on a big screen, high above the audience’s heads?

Exposure, ridicule, censure. I looked away from the mirror.

All actresses must feel like this, I reasoned. Marjorie Cunningham must feel like this. Even Lilian Hall-Davis must feel like this. I put my hand over my heart, feeling it beating under my breast. The thought of Marjorie’s heart beating under
her
breast made me feel uncertain. She might be striking and glamorous, and maybe even beautiful, but she did not seem
real
. She was like something inanimate, designed by another hand.

David’s, perhaps?

I stole another glance at my reflection. My face was its usual pale self, but there was resolve in its expression. I would not allow David to prefer Marjorie, or any other woman, to me.
Ignore her
, I told myself.
Show David that you scarcely noticed that he left with her without even introducing us
.

I would not be so childish as to have a moment’s anxiety. David had taken
me
to the Ritz; he had kissed
me
beside the car; he had told
me
I was beautiful. In his company I felt grown-up, alive and sophisticated. Aidan, who made me feel like the eighteen-year-old I was, was just jealous. He had asked me to dinner because he was trying to get me to become his … I hesitated even to think of the word he had used about Marjorie and David …
lover
. It was not a word used at home. There, you could be a man’s “lady friend” or, less approvingly, his “fancy woman”. “Lover” conjured up connotations of illicit affairs. But David was the only man I wanted to be my “gentleman friend”. And surely – even in Aidan’s cynical estimation – beautiful trumped striking and glamorous every time.

T
he filming went on. When it was sunny, scenes were done outside on one of the “stages”, as they were called, though they were not stages at all. They were huge areas of empty ground pretending to be somewhere in France. Sometimes it would be a hayfield, for which hay was brought from somewhere, and sometimes a Paris square, with tricolours draped on the flimsy balconies and wooden cobbles underfoot. One of the stages even pretended to be the English Channel, with an enormous pool of water over which was rigged up the front part of an eighteenth-century sailing ship. A wind machine blew the sail, but it also blew my hair across my face, prompting an infuriated “Get it right or get off my picture, you fool!” from David in the direction of poor Alfie and the need to redo the whole scene.

During those days, everyone spoke to me except the one person whose company I desired. My mood veered from desperation when David turned away from me to excitement when he looked at me, from isolation within my own bleak thoughts to loud conversation and laughter in a group of people vying for my attention, all trying to outdo one another to entertain me. I was the star, the centre of attention; I was someone new, someone ignorant of film-making; someone they could impress.

Simona Vincenza, however, resented me. She was only a little older than I was, and her Italian professional name disguised an Irishwoman from Liverpool, but the airs she gave herself were astonishing. My friends back in Haverth would have been merciless. One evening, Godfrey, the Scot, took everyone out to a nightclub in London to celebrate his birthday, and Simona and I found ourselves in the same car.

“So you’re from Wales, I understand?” she said in her languid way. Everything about her was slow: the way she dipped and raised her head or her eyelids; the way she spoke; the way she drifted about the studios, trailing a wrap or a fur coat if she considered it too cold, though it was only September.

“Yes, from a place called Haverth.”

Her look was questioning.

“Near Aberaeron.”

Her eyes closed and opened again, slowly. They remained questioning.

“Which is quite near Aberystwyth.”

“All these Abers!” She began to smile a little. She always lipsticked a bow shape onto her real lips, and when she smiled her mouth looked to me like the fleshy open mouth of a chimpanzee.

“I wonder you don’t get mixed up!”

“Oh, we manage.”

“And what does your father do?”

I was tempted to ask her why she could possibly wish to know this, but prudence stopped me. This woman and I had to work together for the foreseeable future. If she could not be civil to me, I must at all costs remain civil to her. “He is a farmer,” I said. “We have cows, and we also grow grain and vegetables.”

The chimpanzee smile widened. “Leeks, I suppose?”

I did not grace this with an answer but turned to look out of the car window. After a short silence, Simona began again. “My ancestors were farmers too, in Ireland. Though of course that was long ago. My grandfather sailed to England and became a very successful businessman, and my father runs the business now.”

“Fancy,” was all I said. I had no wish to play her game of “my family’s better than yours, so why are you the star and not me?”. She could resent me all she wished, it would not reverse our roles. Jealousy, I had learned by now, was as great a part of an actor’s existence as learning lines or having their face powdered. And how delicious it felt to be the object of it, instead of the victim!

A
t the end of that uneasy drive with Simona I found myself in the intoxicated company of my fellow actors in a dark, smoky cellar full of noisy people and moody waiters. I ate and drank little; I had no appetite for food, alcohol or company. The thoughts in my head were alien from them, and from the place, as if my surroundings moved in a dream around the real, conscious me. I did not want champagne and dancing; I wanted only David, who was not there.

Where was he tonight? He had not spoken to me except as director and actress for weeks. Had he avoided Godfrey’s birthday party because he knew I would be here? Was he now regretting having been so nice to me that night? Was he at his house on the island? Was Marjorie there too, or had she gone back to New York?

I looked around me. Aidan, who was seated at the other end of the table, ignored me. Robert was at his elbow, and Godfrey at mine, while Simona, opposite Aidan, made eyes at him, which he also ignored. The woman who played Simona’s maid no longer appeared on the call list; she must have finished her scenes with Simona and gone. Having no scenes of my own with her, I had never even met her.

Toying with my glass, I pondered on the haphazard nature of filming. There was something called a “shooting schedule”, but it was often disrupted by someone not appearing punctually or David changing his mind about what he wanted to do that day. Scenes were done again several times or filmed in sections, days or weeks apart. Kitty’s job of photographing the film set and the actors at the end of every scene was vital. Each evening David looked at the “rushes”, the bits of filming done that day. Each morning he wanted something done again.

I found it baffling. The beheading scene had been filmed in the second week because the sun was out. As Eloise, I naturally would be in despair at Charles de Montfort’s death. But this scene had not been filmed yet, all these weeks later. It would probably be done indoors in the studio, with artificial light shining on me instead of the sun, and I would have nothing to show my despair to but the unblinking eye of the camera. The close-ups would be filmed separately, after a long session in the make-up room. Then the bits of film from the outdoor guillotining scene would be “spliced”, as they called it, onto the bits of film of me despairing, and the audience would think it was all happening at the same time. A film, I reflected despondently, was all lies.