Ancient Images (6 page)

    She caught sight of Roger Stone as she came into Soho Square. He was marching up and down the pavement with his hands in the pockets of his green corduroys, tossing his broad head to throw back an unruly curl of blond hair and whistling snatches of the score of an Errol Flynn movie. He was as tuneless as anyone she'd ever heard. He began to hum a march, occasionally alluding to the melody, as he passed the office of the British Board of Film Censors. She sidled through a gap in a rank of motorcycles under the trees that shaded the grass, and called "Here I am, Roger."

    He choked on whatever note he was about to aim for and clapped a hand over his mouth, and watched her cross the road, his dark keen eyes smiling ruefully. "It isn't every day you hear that kind of overture before a movie," he said.

    "True enough."

    He pushed his lower lip forward in a rueful grin, then looked more solemn. "Listen, today's movie isn't the one I was expecting, may not be the kind you go for. Maybe we can go for coffee or a walk and come back here in time to meet your quarry."

    He was talking like someone rushing to finish a tongue twister. "What kind of film is it?" she said.

    "Some kind of horror comedy. Gross, therefore funny, supposedly. Not Graham's kind of movie at all."

    "We disagreed sometimes. I may like it more than he did, and I want to be sure of catching your colleague."

    "No colleague of mine, let me tell you. Okay, I'll brave the movie if you will. You can hide your face on my shoulder if you need to," he said, and added, "I mean, don't feel you have to," so hastily that she was immediately fond of him and at her ease with him.

    He led her around the square to a film distributor's offices. On the way to the basement he said, "Did you happen to bring Graham's notebook?"

    "Damn, I knew there was something. My cats were acting up this morning. I don't know what's got into them."

    "I can tell you about some of the guys in the notebook. Harry Manners was a character actor, must be in his seventies. Leslie Tomlinson will be even older. He was a stuntman before there was sound. I should have asked you to read out all the names when you phoned me," he said as they stepped into the auditorium.

    Not only the floor but the walls and the dozens of seats were carpeted in dark red. About twenty people, most of them men, lounged here and there on the seats. A few turned from chatting to greet Roger. "Presumably we can start now," someone on the front row grumbled-an old man with a sharp veinous nose, protruding eyes, large ears that reminded Sandy of the handles of a jug. Roger followed her into the second row and nodded at the man's back. "Len Stilwell of the
Daily
Friend,"
he mouthed.

    As soon as the film began, Stilwell stooped forward and fumbled in his lap while peering up at the screen, at an actress with enormous breasts. Sandy thought he was adjusting his penis until she realized he was scribbling notes. A vampire with hair slicked back like Lugosi's sank his teeth into the woman's left breast, which deflated with a hiss that sounded disapproving. A man guffawed, then two more, while Roger showed Sandy his gritted teeth.

    If there was an audience for the film, Sandy wouldn't like to live next door to them. She laughed when a vampire left his false teeth in his victim's neck, but even that made her feel as if something she was nostalgic for were being spoiled.

    A tottery doctor called Alzheimer kept missing the vampires' hearts with his stakes, hammering squelchily though he was blinded by squirts of blood, and she sensed Roger's embarrassment on her behalf. When the film tried to convince her that eye-gouging was comic she looked away and patted Roger's arm to cheer him up. "The End" dripped off the screen at last. "That's a relief," she said.

    Stilwell turned and looked down his nose at her. "Just another bloody horror film."

    "Is that what you'll write?"

    She meant it conversationally, but he seemed insulted. "Who are you, may I ask? Where are you from?"

    "I'm Sandy Allan from Metropolitan, and this is Roger Stone, who's written a shelf of books about cinema."

    "Well, a few," Roger said. "
Shower
Scenes,
you might know."

    Stilwell raised his nose further. "Wasn't
Hitler at the Movies: Portrait of a Clown
by you? Some would say that was in decidedly bad taste."

    "Maybe, but not mine. Think about the way the movies have portrayed him."

    "I just write consumer reports, I've no time for cleverness. Nor to argue, I may add," he said, and turned away.

    "Don't go," Sandy said. "I wanted to ask you about something you wrote."

    He gazed at her like an indulgent teacher. "What did you want to know?"

    "Why you said what you did about Graham Nolan."

    She could have meant the tribute-her tone was neutral-but at once his ears grew alarmingly red. "Why should that concern you?"

    "I was a very close friend of his."

    "Not another one who thinks he was infallible! He was only a film buff, you know. Good heavens, we can all make mistakes."

    "Except Graham didn't in this case," Roger interrupted. "Sandy described to me what his friend saw, and there's no such scene in any other film."

    "You've seen every film ever made, have you?"

    "I've seen every Karloff movie, and I mean to see this one. I'm researching a book about American performances in foreign films."

    "Make up your mind whether you mean English or foreign." Stilwell lowered his voice as reviewers loitered on the stairs to listen. "Let's just drop the subject, shall we? None of us are going to prove anything, and you wouldn't be allowed to broadcast the thing even if it existed."

    "I'm not a broadcaster," said Sandy. "I'm a film editor, and I mean to prove Graham right."

    "Who let you in? This show was only for the press," Stilwell said for everyone to hear. "If I were you I'd give up before I drew too much attention to myself."

    "Seems like you've already done that," Roger said. "Just tell us the name you left out of your column and we'll leave you alone."

    "I haven't the least notion what you mean," Stilwell said, breathing so hard his nostrils whitened.

    "You wrote that someone owns the rights to
Tower
of
Fear.
Who would that be?"

    "How should I know?" The look he gave Roger to demonstrate his good faith seemed to rebound on him. "Don't you stare at me," he yelled. "Behave yourself while you're in someone else's country. And as for you, Miss Allan, remember we have laws that protect a man's property."

    "But not to stop me proving the film exists."

    Stilwell swung round, his ears crimson, and stalked upstairs. "I needn't have said that," Sandy admitted to Roger.

    "I shouldn't have let him needle me, but Christ, what a son of a bitch. I can't stand these guys who don't give a shit for what they write about and look down on anyone who does. And for someone like that to set himself up as more informed than Graham when Graham can't even answer back…" He slapped his fist with his palm and grinned apologetically at her. "You'll be thinking I care too much."

    "Not at all," Sandy said, though she had been a little disconcerted by the vehemence of his reaction, "and I thought you performed admirably. We can always think of what we should have said, but there's never a retake. Let's have a coffee before I head back to work."

    Leaving Soho Square, they walked past the Pillars of Hercules, under the arch that was thick as a room behind Foyle's, and sat at a table outside Break for the Border. "You were saying on the phone you helped Graham find out about the film," Sandy prompted.

    "In a small way only. I talked to some people."

    "Anyone I've heard of?"

    "Jack Nicholson." He fell silent while their waitress enthused about the actor, and when she moved away he said, "We had a fine time partying, reminded me of my own easy rider days, but he couldn't tell me much. Except when he and Boris were working on
The
Raven
they were talking about how kids would get to see it in America but here nobody younger than sixteen could, and Boris said there was a film he'd made he was quite glad to see suppressed."

    "Meaning
Tower
of
Fear."

    "I guess. Then I talked to Ed Wood. Angora Love."

    "He liked to dress up in women's sweaters."

    "Right, and made a film about it that Lugosi narrated. Maybe you know Lugosi's doctor said Lugosi ended up on morphine because he used to be so anxious. Wood told me Bela once admitted to him that it was a movie he made in England that caused him the most grief. Now, he might just have resented it because it virtually got him barred from England for the rest of his career, but I talked to Peter Bogdanovich about it and he thought that wasn't the whole story."

    "He asked Karloff about it?"

    "While they were filming
Targets,
yes. Bogdanovich interviewing Karloff sounds like a contest for who would be more of a gentleman, and he didn't get much out of him about this film except that he really didn't want to talk about it at all or even about the director, Giles Spence. I don't know if you realize Spence died the week they finished shooting, in a car accident somewhere up north."

    A breeze chased through the passage outside the restaurant, bearing a smell of bread rolls from the kitchen, and made Sandy shiver. "I'm beginning to realize how little I do know about the film. What do you think it was about it that upset so many people?"

    "It may just have come at the wrong time. There was some kind of a debate in your Houses of Parliament that I keep meaning to check out. That's me, Slow and Steady Stone, except forget the steady part, more like easily diverted. Christ, I wish I'd gone to Graham's that night when he invited me. I might have been there in time."

    "I know how you feel."

    "Not that I'd have been able to do any better than you," he said, so hastily that she leaned over the table and gave him a kiss. "Uh, thanks," he stammered.

    "That was just to let you know you needn't be afraid I won't know what you mean."

    "Well, good. Me too. I mean," he said, and gave up when she smiled at him.

    "I'll have to be heading back in a few minutes. I wanted to ask if you've any idea what the film was about."

    "According to Graham, Karloff plays an aristocrat who owns some kind of haunted land, and Lugosi comes to England after his brother-in-law has been killed on the land. Usually it's the monster which is foreign, some kind of invader-think of Dracula. Spence may have stirred up some hostility by making the monster English, especially just before the war."

    "Was that what the original story was about?"

    " 'The Lofty Place'? Maybe. I understand it's almost as rare as the movie."

    A chilly breeze nuzzled her ankles, and she stood up. "I must go."

    He accompanied her along Oxford Street and hesitated in the midst of the crowd at Oxford Circus. "Did you want to dictate Graham's notes to me or maybe bring them round to my place?"

    "Best offer I've had for weeks. How does Thursday evening sound?"

    "Great."

    "I'll call you before then," she said, and watched him down the steps into the Underground.

    

    

    When Lezli told her she looked pleased with herself, she wondered why she didn't feel calmer. It must be that she felt pursued by a pack of unanswered questions. Even walking home through Queen's Wood, Sandy felt tense, especially when she heard a child wailing in the gloom. The sound stayed ahead of her, and when she reached the house she realized she had been hearing the accountants' little girl. "Home now," the girl's mother said as she wheeled her into the hall.

    "He wasn't ill, pet," her father reassured her. "He was just an old gentleman having a lie down on the grass."

    His wink at Sandy presumably meant the man had been a tramp. She squatted by the stroller and tickled the little girl under the chin until she had to smile, then she went upstairs, thinking that she wouldn't have expected the child to be so easily upset. That was children for you, she supposed, and she had enough to ponder. Whatever the child had seen, it had nothing to do with her or with the film.

    

    

    He would feel safer once he drove through the wood. The only figures he could see in the fields around him were scarecrows, and there wasn't even a bird in the vast indifferent sky, yet he felt watched. If anyone were following him along the road, from the town or the great house beyond it, he would be able to spot them several hundred yards away. It was just his imagination that was troubling him, his damned imagination which had brought him here in the first place and which he was beginning to feel was almost more trouble than it was worth.

    He'd thought last time he had got the better of his enemies when he'd sneaked down under the chapel, but could that have done himself and his collaborators some harm? He didn't understand how, especially since today his enemies had seemed genuinely unaware of what he had been suffering. Could he have worsened his situation by coming back here by himself?

    He couldn't have brought anyone with him. However nervous and persecuted he felt, he didn't want anyone to realize what he'd done until it was out in the open, incapable of being suppressed. Nor could his feelings trap him here, he vowed, striking the horn to scare away his fears and proclaim that he was coming. Nothing but the byproducts of his imagination could be waiting in the wood to head him off. As he heeled the accelerator he felt unexpectedly brave, as though he were spurring a steed into danger.