The Continuity Girl (12 page)

“Mish.”

“Right. So sorry. I’m awful with names. And faces. But in all my years, I’ve never forgotten an arse!”

Everyone roared.

“So what exactly brings you two to London?” Henry asked, taking a sip of his whisky and looking around the room, probably
to see if any of his colleagues had arrived for dinner.

“Work, actually,” said Meredith. “We’re both on the new Osmond Crouch film.”

“Right, Crouch. How is the old bugger? I haven’t seen him in years. Is he still collecting vintage Fiats?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met him. And he never comes
to set.”

“We hear stories, though,” Mish said, rolling her feathered shoulder and angling her head in a coy way.

“Like what?” Cazalet leaned in.

This was the first Meredith had heard of any “story.”

“Well, I shouldn’t be telling tales out of school, but...” Mish paused and looked around like a secret agent in a spy movie.
“I was talking to one of the stars in the wardrobe trailer today, and she was telling me that apparently Crouch has completely
lost his mind. He hasn’t left his villa in Italy for years and the place is completely falling apart around him, and all the
while he’s making this strange film...”

“You mean the one you’re working on?”

“Oh no, that’s just a money project. Supposedly he’s been directing his own thing. Some sort of monolithic art movie. No one
actually knows anything about it. He’s been shooting it for years and it never gets anywhere closer to being finished. It
must be costing him a fortune. Once a year he has a dinner party and invites people to watch some of the rushes. But that
could be just a rumour. I wasn’t exactly hearing it firsthand, if you know what I mean.”

“Really.” Cazalet’s eyes were wide with interest. He held up a finger indicating they should wait a moment and then turned
to the bar for another round of drinks.

Meredith was continually amazed at Mish’s ability to wander into any social or professional situation and come away with the
most scintillating gossip in record time. It was, she thought, one of the great things about having Mish for a best friend.

“So what do you think?” Irma was upon them.

“It’s good,” said Meredith, who had just begun to realize she felt much more awake and hopeful about the evening than she
had as recently as ten minutes ago. “My chest feels sort of
fluttery.
”

“Not that, silly goose.” Irma waved her hand in front of her face irritably. “What do you think of Henry? He’s very bright
and successful. A Tory MP, you know.”

Meredith shrugged. “Yes, but isn’t he married?” She had noticed the gold band strangling one of his fat fingers when he handed
her a drink.

“Yes, exactly.” Irma smiled, nodded with satisfaction and tossed her silk scarf over her shoulder.

“Exactly...what?”

“Exactly the sort of man you ought to be looking for, darling. I should think a married man would offer far fewer complications
in your situation than an unmarried one.”

“And why is that?” Meredith raised an eyebrow at Mish, who gave a theatrical cough. The drugs made her mother seem amusing.
She wasn’t sure whether this was an actuality or just a perception, but for once she felt she could see what everybody else
saw.

“Well, it just seems quite obvious if you want total independence,” said Irma.

Meredith began to tell her mother that she had absolutely no intention whatsoever of giving birth to the unloved bastard of
a philandering politician, but before she could, a bell was ringing and Henry Cazalet was herding them all toward the dining
room for dinner. It was unfortunate, because suddenly Meredith didn’t feel the least bit hungry, but she supposed it would
be nice to sit down anyway. Her appetite had been replaced by
a lot of things to say,
and a dinner table was a much better
venue for conversation, all things considered.

Dinner was a choice between salmon or pheasant, although the bird, they were informed by a maid in a floppy white lace cap,
had “a fair bit of lead shot in it.” Everyone except Meredith ordered the salmon. She figured it would give her a good excuse
not to eat, and besides, she was curious to see what lead shot actually looked like.

There were just over two dozen people at the dinner table including Mish, Meredith and Irma. Meredith, of course, was made
to sit beside Henry Cazalet, who bored her all through the soup with his theory on how the Tories could take the country if
they were able to grab the inner-city single-mother vote. Meredith thought this sounded about as likely as Labour taking the
rural retired-colonel vote. She was feeling restless and full of mischief and in order to amuse herself, she began asking
Cazalet all about his wife. What was her name? (Margaret.) How had he met her? (At a cricket luncheon in Chichester.) How
old were they when they married? (Twenty-five and nineteen, respectively.) How many children did they have? (Four: two girls
and two boys.) Was she beautiful? (She had been very pretty, but people do change, you know.) Were they still in love? (In
what sense of the word?) And on and on until Cazalet, after the soup bowls were cleared, announced he was “terribly sorry,”
but one of his constituents was at the other end of the table and he must go over and say hello. And off he buggered, to Meredith’s
considerable relief.

Mish, by this point, was deeply entrenched in conversation with Irma. She demanded (between honking fits of laughter) one
story after another about Meredith’s mother’s days as wandering hippie poetess. Meredith listened to the one about the time
her mother had snuck into an orgy at a San Francisco men’s bathhouse by pretending she’d had a sex-change operation. It was
a decent yarn, but one Meredith had heard about five dozen times. She swiveled around and assessed the room. Across the table
was a famous interior designer Meredith recognized from TV. The woman was wearing the most amazing jewelry—dangling diamond
chandelier earrings and a great aquamarine dinner ring on her right hand. Meredith remembered (from reading it in the “Wicked
Whispers” column of the
Daily Mail
around the tea trolley on set) that this was the woman who had left her husband on his
sickbed for a married Saudi billionaire oil tycoon. The husband eventually died of colon cancer and the billionaire ditched
his long-suffering wife and three children in favor of shacking up with the interior designer and her twin boys. The designer
was now flanked by two pearl-laden blond women friends with identical layered hairstyles that Meredith always thought of as
the “mummy-cut.” They were hanging on the designer’s every word, and kept touching her arms and shoulders in a competitive
show of sisterly support. Although she couldn’t hear the words, Meredith could tell from the designer’s brow that she was
telling a story that centered around her own unjust persecution at the hands of some faceless Goliath.

Just then, the designer arrived at some salient point in her story and looked up at Meredith. The flat, almost challenging
expression in her eyes conveyed that the woman had known she was being watched. Meredith looked away, embarrassed at having
been caught gawking. Terribly uncool. Fiddling in her handbag, she reflected, as she often had while discreetly observing
famous actors on set, how strange it must be for celebrities to go about their lives being recognized by complete strangers—a
constant reminder that they existed for people who did not exist for them.

Meredith was lost in this thought when she felt a lukewarm splash across her left shoulder and lap. She jumped up, but too
late. Her outfit—a white dress shirt and camel trousers—was completely soaked with red wine.

“Oh God. How stupid of me. How utterly, unforgivably rude. You must think I’m awful. And here I was, trying to come to your
rescue. Not that you needed rescuing, I mean, but just that, what I mean to say is—” The young man searched for a cocktail
napkin as he spoke. The longer he searched, the more rapid his babbling became. “What I was going to say to you was, well,
I hadn’t actually thought of an opening chat-up line. I’m afraid I’m rather bad at those. And then I end up spilling a drink
on you instead. How typical.”

He pulled a napkin out of a glass from an empty place setting two seats down and, in his flustered state, pressed it against
the wet red blotch on Meredith’s left breast. She gasped and pulled away. And then laughed.

“Oh God, I’ve done it again, haven’t I.” The man dropped his face into his hands. “You must think I’m such an idiot.”

“No, just a klutz and a lech.” Meredith smiled to show she wasn’t angry, and his face lit up like that of a little boy presented
with a puppy.

“Barnaby Shakespeare.” He offered his hand and Meredith shook it.

“Meredith Moore.”

“More wine?” He had already reached for the bottle of Côtes du Rhône and was refilling his glass.

Meredith shook her head. She wasn’t sure how alcohol mixed with drugs, and besides, she felt so perfectly relaxed and confident,
she didn’t really crave any. The waiter placed their main courses in front of them. Meredith looked down at her pheasant and
saw that it still had a bit of unplucked down sprouting from its tiny breastbone. Barnaby, like everyone else at the table,
was having salmon. He picked up his fish knife and began to eat.

“You probably get asked this all the time, but are you any relation to
the
Shakespeare?”

“I might be,” said Barnaby, cocking his head as though this was the first time he had ever considered such a possibility.
“There was a rumour he was a distant cousin on my father’s side. Mind you, there are a lot of Shakespeares in Britain, and
I suppose we’re all related to one another somehow.”

“Neat,” Meredith said, and elbowed Mish, who failed to turn around. Irma was halfway through the story of how she had given
a reading at the original Woodstock.

“The problem of course is that everyone thinks I ought to be a good writer, and the truth is, I don’t have a literary bone
in my body.”

“What do you do instead?”

“Do?” Barnaby looked bewildered as a forkful of peas tumbled into his lap. “You mean with my time or for money?”

“For most people it’s both, isn’t it?”

Barnaby frowned. His hair, which was fine and golden brown, hung in his eyes like a schoolboy’s at the end of a summer holiday
of growth. He adjusted his spectacles, which were sliding down his nose. “I suppose it is. The fact is, though, I don’t do
much of anything. I mean, obviously I have a few things I
like
to do, but as for a job, the truth is, I don’t really have
one. I guess you could say I’m unemployed.”

“Where I come from we call that being ‘between jobs,’” said Meredith. She noticed there was a cigarette burn through his lapel
and felt a funny urge to stick her finger through it.

“Really?” He had an endearing amazement at everyday banalities. “So what is it you do, then, Miss Moore?”

“I’m a continuity supervisor. On a film set.”

“And what exactly does a continuity supervisor do on a film set?”

“I’m glad you asked—most people just pretend they know all about it and then try to change the subject. In fact, it’s pretty
boring. I sit by the monitor during shooting and check the script for errors and inconsistencies.”

“And do you ever find them?”

“All the time.”

“And what sort of errors do you find?”

“Well, for instance, sometimes an actor might be doing a scene in which he’s drinking wine and eating salmon. In that case,
each time you do a take it’s important that the actor takes a bite of his salmon and a sip from his glass of wine at exactly
the same moment he did in the take before—otherwise it won’t match with previous takes. If he starts sipping and biting all
over the place, the scene will look strange in the final cut—with the portion of the level of the liquid in the glass going
up and down indiscriminately and the actor sipping too often or not at all. Do you see what I mean? It’s my job to make sure
the director tells the actor to sip and bite at the right times.”

“Fascinating,” Barnaby said, taking a bite of his salmon and dribbling a bit of dressing on his chin. “And how do you make
sure they’re getting it right?”

“I take notes.”

“Is that all?”

“And I keep track of other things, like the axis the camera is shooting from, which is a complicated way of saying ‘angle.’
For instance, if you shoot a conversation between two people, you have to place the camera looking over one person’s shoulder,
then the other person’s shoulder. It has to be the same shoulder consistently. If you switched from left to right, you’d be
changing the axis, which doesn’t sound like much but is actually very disorienting to the viewer. Directors do it all the
time. It’s my job to tell them not to cross over.”

“So you keep them in line?”

“That’s right.”

“And—and so, they actually pay you to do this?”

“It’s not like I’d do it for free.” The dressing glob was now threatening to drip onto his tie. Meredith rubbed her napkin
all over the lower half of her face, hoping the gesture would be contagious.

“And do you find it helps you in your own life?”

“Being paid? Well, obviously—”

“No, no.” Barnaby narrowed his eyes and leaned in slightly. “I mean, moving the story forward smoothly. Without flipping back
and forth or making mistakes. Does your job help you do that in your own life?”

Meredith licked her thumb and gently wiped the drip off Barnaby’s chin. He didn’t pull away the way most men would have done.
Instead he smiled.

“Not so far,” she said, “but I’m hoping to change all that.”

They were locked in a sort of moment, one that Mish interrupted by turning around and extending her hand.

“Why, darling, you haven’t even introduced your friend.”

“Mish, this is Barnaby Shakespeare.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Barnaby extended his hand for a shake, but Mish raised the back of her hand to be kissed, smacking
Barnaby in the face and causing his glasses to fall to the floor. He bent down, searching with one arm under his chair and
apologizing profusely, as Mish collapsed into giggles.