The Right Man (12 page)

One has
to be careful how one suggests things to Barbara. ‘Darling, I’ve got something
which I’m sure you won’t be interested in but I thought I should at least run
it past you’ was how I’d put it to her the week before. She’d been a Rank
starlet in her youth, so the ‘darling’ was appropriate, nay, obligatory. ‘How
would you feel about another Ayckbourn tour, darling?’

‘Darling,
do you even need to ask, darling?’ she’d replied, as I could have predicted.

‘OK
then, darling, I’ll get out the Big Fin,’ I said, meaning I’d ask them for far
too much money, like a proper shark. I got her a grand a week, which is
actually piss these days, but she had accepted it, as I knew she would, because
at least it wasn’t insulting, and films, TV and class theatre had long since
slipped from her grasp, sad old thing.

Barbara
Sterner was my first name client, and as a rookie agent I was proud to get her,
so I’ve sort of hung on to her ever since. Her faded glamour gave trad
credibility to the agency early on. It meant we had the official stamp of
show-biz on us, and it meant I could go to first nights and meet other folk who’d
been around for aeons, and have a forage amongst them. She was my bridge. She
spent her life now doing revivals in the home counties, her recognizable face
on posters from Guildford to Exeter.

Having
her and keeping her meant endless negotiations over holiday entitlements,
dressing rooms and cars to pick her up; also long conversations about the
healing power of crystals and astrological rebirthing, and having to attend one
or two Buddhist chanting sessions in Primrose Hill. But she was worth it. She
was a good stick, was Barbara, with a proper deep actress’s voice, which she’d
got through a combination of diaphragmatic muscularity, vocal cord fatigue and
gin, due to many years of shouting in the evening for a living. Her famous pout
was so exaggerated that by now she had become incapable of saying her s’s. What
came out instead was a sort of soft shushing noise rather like the gentle
trickle from one of the bonsai fountains in her very Japanese garden in Barnes.

But
what to do with Neil, that was the poser. He could have done with some of
Barbara’s old-fashioned thespian resilience, or maybe he should be going to one
of her chigang yoga classes for mind-spirit balance. Something. A visit to West
Hampstead, where he lived, was probably on the cards at some point to see what
he was up against. His partner was a lot older than him, a therapist, but what
kind I don’t know. Maybe this was where the trouble lay.

I see
this business as rather like a massive kindergarten full of all kinds of
children whose feckless parents have abandoned them to go for an extended
skiing holiday in Gstaad. There are sporty kids, team players, loners, bullies,
sensitive, creative ones, but they all need individual care and attention, and
they all have to learn to play with each other. On the whole they get bored
easily, and it’s my job to know when to get out the finger paints and when it’s
time for a nap. When to hug and when to be strict. But no one hugs their agent,
no. One gets accustomed to being ignored and treated like a toilet roll even by
one’s own, it goes with the territory. Doug Handom, for instance, was very
unhappy on that first film, and was ringing me hourly from LA saying, ‘Get me
out of this, I’ve made a mistake, get me out, Guy.’ I said, ‘Look, you signed a
contract, why don’t you see how you feel in a couple of days, if you still hate
it then I’ll see what we can do. Wait until Friday, I’ll speak to you then.’ He
never rang back on Friday. I had to ring him. When I got through, he’d
completely forgotten our earlier talk. ‘Oh, I’m fine now, it’s fine,’ he said
as if I was mad, which was great, of course, that it was fine, but he hadn’t
bothered to let me know of his change of heart and I’d been worrying like a
fruit bat. Mind you, I could worry for England. Not that anyone would know.
Despite the banter, and despite my current nickname, which is Muffin the Mule
for some reason best known to the women in the office, I am actually quite a
fragile petal underneath it all. No, but seriously, I couldn’t look after all
these people if I didn’t care.

Onwards
and upwards. At least staying over at the office cut down on travelling time,
enabling me to get an hour or so in before the women clattered in at half nine.
Trouble was, I’d already had about seven cups of coffee by then and was a bit
hyper.

He’s a
good boy, Doug. Well, actually, he’s a very bad boy. He took that first feature
role when Denise was pregnant with their first child and then stayed out there
among the Candyfloss Cowboys. I was very careful not to influence his decision
at the time, of course, just let him know that the offer was on the table and
left him alone to talk with his conscience. Unfortunately for Denise and the
baby, Doug’s conscience was obviously not very articulate that weekend because
he was on the plane to La-La-Land by Sunday night. It all worked out all right
in the end for Denise, though. She now lives in Crouch End with a much kinder
and more reliable guy, Charlie Bennett, another one of my clients, as it
happens. Not that I was instrumental in that. They just happened to both be
working in the same production at the National, directed by Stephen Cranham,
another of mine. The women in the office go wobbly in anticipation of Doug’s
twice-yearly visits now.

I know
I refer to those on the other side of the Atlantic too much and in too
unfavourable a light. You will have to allow me that, it is pure envy. In the
States, the entertainment industry is second only in revenue terms to the arms
industry. It’s huge. One of the reasons we see so many American films over
here, almost to the exclusion of everything else, is that the Yanks bought all
our cinemas, so nowadays we have a home audience who understand the dialects,
mores and myths of American culture better than they do their own.

I wish
I was like Doug Handom. I wish I was like Jeremy Planter. I wish I was Bob
Henderson. Ruthless. Not a ruth between them. That’s what impresses the girls,
they’re not attracted to losers. Liz wouldn’t have given me a second look if I
hadn’t had some air of potential success about me. And powerful women seek out
more powerful men, not pushovers. I know, I get an earful of it every day. The
women in the office are fascinated by men who win, in the same way that boys
ogle boobs. Today, though, would be a day away from the quadraphonic sound of
women talking into telephones; I had to go to Birmingham.

Working
out the railway pricing system these days requires advanced qualifications in
statistics and the laws of probability.

The man
in the ticket booth at King’s Cross patiently explained to me that if I bought
a ticket for the 3.50 train as opposed to the 3.32, it would cost me £60 more.
If I returned within three days, a return would be cheaper than a single,
provided I stayed over a Thursday night, and I could travel first class for an
extra
£5
as long as I was going north-east and not westwards. He kindly
advised me to get a Weekend Saver as opposed to a Supersaver Weekend.

On the
platform I asked another man, this one in a uniform, whether the train was
going to Birmingham and whether I could travel on it with a Supersaver ticket.
He told me he had no idea because he worked for a different rail company.
Still, at least the shareholders have holiday homes.

The
journey itself was pleasant enough, except for a man three seats away who
called his wife on his mobile to report the train’s progress every twenty
minutes: ‘Yes, we’re leaving Watford now and it’s 15.58, so I might be five or
ten minutes late, darling.’ Then, ‘Hello, it’s me. Look, we’re already at
Milton Keynes, so I may be three or four minutes early after all.’

Jeremy
Planter was shooting a summer special sketch in a hospital on the outskirts of
Birmingham and it was time I saw him face to face, preferably with Harry, his
producer, there and, probably unavoidably, with this Bella Santorini woman. I
had ascertained her name by now from a shooting schedule. The sketch was not a
hospital sketch, one would use a studio for that. It was a sketch set in a
police station which required some offices and a long corridor.

Defunct
or half-defunct hospitals are used all the time nowadays as film locations.
They are the cheapest big buildings available since health authorities are so
starved of resources. Sometimes they still have a few patients knocking around
in them, sometimes just old fluttering noticeboards and medical debris.
Semi-derelict institutions are perfect for film crews and the art department
can easily bung up a few false walls to turn them into schools, police stations,
government buildings or even, in one BBC drama serial last year, airport
departure lounges. The location in Birmingham — St Mary’s Infirmary for Mental
Care — must have been still in use as some kind of home for patients, because
as I walked down the vast Victorian corridors following the ‘Film Unit’ signs,
folk in cardigans with mad eye-contact greeted me with that over familiarity of
the institutionalized. Unless they were crew members breaking for lunch.

A brief
whispered conversation with Harry to the side of the set in which he told me —
as producers always do — that the rushes were looking especially good, that
this series really was looking to be the best yet, established my right to be
there, so I hung about for half an hour or so watching Jeremy go through a
routine which involved a plumber’s-mate plunger getting stuck on his forehead.
In a tea break we made contact whilst Jeremy was being fussed over by the
make-up artists and I arranged that we would meet at the hotel and have supper
together. I checked in at the hotel and got on the phone in the last office
hour available.

At half
six, when I was showering, the hotel phone rang and I padded across the floor,
dripping, to answer it. A beautiful and steady female voice came out of the
earpiece.

‘Hello,
Guy. It’s Bella. Bella Santorini? I’m just calling to let you know they’re
running late. Jeremy won’t be able to get back for another hour or so but I
thought it would be nice if you and I met up for a drink? It would be great to
get a chance to talk to you. You must feel a bit out at sea and I know Jer won’t
have explained anything about what’s been going on. You know what he’s like.’

‘Erm,
yes, I do.’ I laughed gormlessly.

I was a
little thrown, not just by the directness of what she was saying and the
consideration she was showing but subliminally and more powerfully by the
calming tone in her voice, like a slow-bowed cello.

It was
hard to imagine that I was speaking to the hostess of a TV game show. I’m very
affected by the timbre of someone’s voice, very vocally aware, especially of
women, and it always surprises me that the voice is never listed in those
monthly magazines’ ‘What Turns You On?’ round-ups, in which men and women both
lie by putting ‘sense of humour’ top of the list. I dressed and went down to
the lobby.

‘I know
it must look awful what we’ve done, Guy, but please believe me, we have
agonized over it a lot, thought about it, talked it through, and honestly, it’s
not what it seems. I don’t want you to think I’ve taken this lightly. I’m not
the sort of person who goes around breaking up homes and families for a
pastime.

She was
drinking a camomile tea. I had a vodka and orange to calm my nerves. Her skin
was naturally iridescent, her teeth perfectly placed, her hair was clean and
simply brushed. No make-up on, and a plain cotton frock covered her small,
healthy body. Her posture was good but not overly self-conscious. Nevertheless,
definitely an ex-dancer. She could not have looked more different from the
picture of her draped over Jeremy’s arm on the front of last week’s papers. She
quietly exuded confidence, I was stumped. There was nothing about her which
might cause the word ‘bimbo’ to come to mind.

She
continued in her assessment of the situation whilst I nodded or shook my head
where appropriate, like a back-seat puppy. Also, she was not that young, only a
bit younger than Susan I would say, mid-thirties. Her dancing career must be
reaching its close. She was looking for something more stable. I guessed and
she told me that the Bella was short for Arabella, the Santorini merely an
invention; her real surname was something double-barrelled. A home-counties
girl with an education and ponies and a doting father who was a surgeon in
Surrey, no doubt. Classically trained but too wise to stay in the ballet beyond
the age of twenty-five..

‘We
have tried to explain it to Susan, believe me, but in the end it just seemed
the best thing to make a decisive break. I know she’s very upset at the moment
and I hope things calm down in time. It’s too early for me to meet the children
yet but it’s important that they stay in touch with their father. Maybe you can
help there, Guy. Susan can’t keep them away from him forever.’

According
to Arabella, the situation had been going on for a lot longer than I had been
led to believe by Susan. Jeremy and she had told Susan about their affair over
a year ago. So, uncharacteristically for Jeremy, the whole thing had been
discreet, considered.

Susan
Planter was also behaving uncharacteristically. As well as savaging his clothes
as I had seen, she was evidently threatening to deny him all access to Dave and
Polly, she was talking to the papers and now she had been committing various
acts of petty revenge, like ordering alarm calls through the night on his new
phone number. Worst of all, she had evidently put an ad in the massage section
of a local paper with Arabella’s phone number in it, the wording of which went
something like ‘Domination and golden shower my speciality. Call Bella if you
dare.’