'These people,' I told Alison, 'are Greg Compass, who interviews racing people on TV.'
Alison briefly nodded in recognition.
'This family,' I said neutrally, 'are Mr and Mrs Jackson Wells and their daughter, Lucy.'
Alison's mouth opened but no words came out. Jackson Wells, good-looking and smiling, stood between his two wholesome, well-groomed women, waiting for me to complete the introduction.
'Alison Visborough,' I said.
Jackson Wells's sunny face darkened. He said, almost spitting, 'Her daughter!' daughter!'
'You see,' I said to Alison, 'Jackson Wells dislikes your mother as intensely as she dislikes him him. No way in real life would they ever have had a love affair. The people in this film are not them not them.'
Alison remained dumb. I took her arm, wheeling her away.
'Your mother,' I said, 'is making herself ill. Persuade her to turn her back on what we are doing. Make her interested in something else, and don't let her see the completed film. Believe that I mean no disrespect to her or to your father's memory. I am making a movie about fictional people. I have some sympathy with your mother's feelings, but she will not get the film abandoned.'
Alison found her voice. 'You are ruthless,' she said.
'Quite likely. However, I admire you, Miss Visborough, as Howard does. I admire your good sense and your loyalty to your father. I regret your anger but I can't remove its cause. Cibber in the film is not a nice man at all, I have to warn you. All I can say again is, don't identify him with your father.'
'Howard did!'
'Howard wrote Cibber as a good man without powerful emotions. There's no conflict or drama in that. Conflict is the essence of drama... first lesson of film-making. Anyway, I apologise to you and your mother and brother, but until last week I hardly knew you existed.'
'Oh, Roddy!' she said without affection. 'Don't worry about him him. He doesn't care very much. He and Daddy were pretty cold to each other. Too different, I suppose. Rodbury and I call him by his full name because Roddy sounds like a nice little boy, but he would never let me join in his games when we were children, and other girls were so wrong when they said I was lucky lucky having an older brother ' She broke off abruptly. 'I don't know why I said that. I don't talk to people easily. Particularly not to people I disapprove of. Anyway, Rodbury wouldn't care what you said about Daddy as long as having an older brother ' She broke off abruptly. 'I don't know why I said that. I don't talk to people easily. Particularly not to people I disapprove of. Anyway, Rodbury wouldn't care what you said about Daddy as long as he he didn't lose money over it. He only pretends to Mummy that he cares, because he's always conning her into buying things for him.' didn't lose money over it. He only pretends to Mummy that he cares, because he's always conning her into buying things for him.'
'He's not married?'
She shook her head. 'He boasts about girls. More talk than action, I sometimes think.'
I smiled at her forthright opinion and thought of her unfulfilled life: the disappointing brother, the adored but distant father, the mother who'd prevented a perhaps unsuitable match. An admirable woman overall.
'I like you, Miss Visborough,' I said.
She gave me a straight look. 'Stop the film, then.'
I thought of her feelings, and I thought of knives.
'I can't,' I said.
We completed the day's shooting schedule in time to hold the semi-planned good-public-relations final autographing session outside the weighing-room. Nash, Silva and Cibber scribbled there with maximum charm.
Many Huntingdon residents were already wearing their UNSTABLE AT ALL AT ALL TIMES T-shirts. Good humour abounded all around. The envisaged orderly line of autograph hunters dissolved into a friendly scrum. O'Hara signed books and racecards presented to him by people who knew a producer when they saw one, and I, too, signed my share. Howard modestly wrote in proffered copies of his book. TIMES T-shirts. Good humour abounded all around. The envisaged orderly line of autograph hunters dissolved into a friendly scrum. O'Hara signed books and racecards presented to him by people who knew a producer when they saw one, and I, too, signed my share. Howard modestly wrote in proffered copies of his book.
The happy crowd roamed around. Nash's bodyguards were smiling. The lioness tried to stop him being kissed. My black-belt stood at my left hand so that I could sign with my right.
I felt a thud as if someone had cannoned into me, a knock hard enough to send me stumbling forward onto one knee and from there overbalancing to the ground. I fell onto my right side and felt the first pain, sharp and alarming, and I understood with searing clarity that I had a knife blade in my body and that I had fallen onto its hilt, and driven it in further.
CHAPTER 12.
O'Hara, laughing, stretched his hand down to help me up.
I took his hand in my right, and reflexly accepted his assistance, and he saw the strong wince round my eyes and stopped laughing.
'Did you hurt yourself?'
'No.' His pull had lifted me back to my knees. I said, 'Lend me your jacket.' He wore an old flying type of jacket, army-coloured, zip fronts hanging open. 'Jacket,' I repeated.
'What?' He leaned down towards me from his craggy height.
'Lend me your jacket.' I swallowed, making myself calm. 'Lend me your jacket and get my driver to bring my car right up here to the weighing-room.'
'Thomas!' He was progressively concerned, bringing his head lower to hear me better. 'What's the matter?'
Clear-headed beyond normal, I said distinctly, 'There is a knife in my side. Drape your jacket over my right shoulder, to hide it. Don't make a fuss. Don't frighten the moguls. Not a word to the press. Don't tell the police. I am not dead, and the film will go on.'
He listened and understood but could hardly believe it. 'Where's the knife?' he asked as if bewildered. 'You look all right.'
'It's somewhere under my arm, above my elbow. Do lend me your jacket.'
'I'll get our doctor.'
'No, O'Hara. No No. Just the jacket.'
I put, I suppose, every scrap of the authority he'd given me into the words that were half plea, half order. In any case, without further objection, he took off his windproof jacket and draped it over my shoulder, revealing the heavy-knit army-coloured sweater he wore underneath.
Other eyes looked curiously our way. I put my left hand on O'Hara's arm, as he was facing me, and managed the endless inches to my feet. I concentrated on his eyes, at the same height as my own.
'The bastard,' I said carefully with obvious anger, 'is not going to succeed.'
'Right,' O'Hara said.
I relaxed infinitesimally, but in fact bloody-mindedness was the best anaesthetic invented, and too much sympathy would defeat me quicker than any pain from invaded ribs.
O'Hara sent one of Ed's assistants to bring my car and reassuringly told a few enquirers that I'd fallen and wrenched my shoulder but that it was nothing to worry about.
I saw a jumbled panorama of familiar faces and couldn't remember any of them having been near enough for attack. But crowd movement had been non-stop. Anyone I knew in England, or anyone they had employed and professionals were for hire and invisible everywhere could have stood among the autograph hunters and seized the moment. I concentrated mostly on remaining upright while rather wildly wondering what vital oigans lay inwards from just above one's right elbow, and realising that though my skin might feel clammy from the shock waves of an outraged organism, I was not visibly leaking blood in any large quantities.
'Your forehead's sweating,' O'Hara observed.
'Never mind.'
'Let me get the doctor.'
'You'll get Greg Compass and television coverage, if you do.'
He was silent.
'I know a different doctor,' I promised. 'Where's the car?'
Ed returned with it pretty soon, though it seemed an age to me. I asked him to thank everyone and see to general security, and said we would complete the close-ups the next day.
He nodded merely and took over, and I edged gingerly into the rear seat of the car.
O'Hara climbed in on the other side. 'You don't need to,' I said.
'Yes, I do.'
I was glad enough of his company, and I gave him a number to call on his telephone, taking the mobile from him after he'd pressed buttons.
'Robbie?' I said, grateful not to get his message service. 'Thomas Lyon. Where are you?'
'Newmarket.'
'Um... could you come to the hotel in an hour? Fairly urgent.'
'What sort of urgent?'
'Can't say, right now.'
O'Hara looked surprised, but I nodded towards our driver, who might be economical with words, but was far from deaf.
O'Hara looked understanding, but also worried. 'One of the moguls from LA has arrived at the hotel and will be waiting for us.'
'Oh.' I hesitated, then said, 'Robbie, can you make it Dorothea's house instead? It's for a Dorothea sort of job, though not so radical.'
'You've got someone with you, listening, that you don't want to know what you're talking about? And it's a knife wound?'
'Right,' I said, grateful for his quickness.
'Who's the patient?'
'I am.'
'Dear God... have you got a key to Dorothea's house?'
'I'm sure her friend Betty must have one. She lives nearly opposite.'
'I know her,' he said briefly. 'One hour. Dorothea's house. How bad is it?'
'I don't know the internal geography well enough, but not too bad, I don't think.'
'Abdomen?' he asked worriedly.
'No. Higher, and to one side.'
'See you,' he said. 'Don't cough.'
I gave the phone back to O'Hara, who stifled all his questions with worry and difficulty. I sat sideways, propping myself as firmly as possible against the motion of the car, but all the same it was a long thirty-eight miles that time from Huntingdon to Newmarket.
I gave the driver directions to Dorothea's house. Robbie Gill's car was there already, Robbie himself opening the front door from inside when we pulled up, and coming down the path to meet us. O'Hara arranged with the driver to return for us in half an hour while I uncurled out of the car and steadied myself unobtrusively by holding Robbie's arm.
I said, 'We're not keen for publicity over this.'
'So I gathered. I haven't told anyone.'
He watched O'Hara get out of the car and give the driver a signal to depart, and I said briefly, 'O'Hara... Robbie Gill,' which seemed enough for them both.
We walked up the path slowly and into the empty but still ravaged house. Dorothea, Robbie said, had told him of my offer to start tidying up. We went into the kitchen where I sat on one of the chairs.
'Did you see the knife?' Robbie asked. 'How long was the blade?'
'It's still in me.'
He looked shocked. O'Hara said, 'This is some crazy boy.'
'O'Hara's producing the film,' I said. 'He would like me stitched up and back on set tomorrow morning.'
Robbie took O'Hara's jacket off my shoulder and knelt on the floor to take a closer look at the problem.
'This is like no knife I ever saw,' he pronounced.
'Like the one of the Heath?' I asked.
'Different.'
'Pull it out,' I said, it hurts.'
Instead he stood up and said something to O'Hara about anaesthetics.
'For Christ's sake,' I said impatiently, 'Just... pull... it... out.'
Robbie said, 'Let's take an inside look at the damage, then.'
He unzipped my dark blue windcheater and cut open my sweater with Dorothea's kitchen scissors, and came to the body protectors underneath.
'What on earth ?'
'We had death threats,' I explained, 'so I thought...' I closed my eyes briefly and opened them again. 'I borrowed two of the jockeys' body protectors. In case of kicks.'
'Death threats?'