'The man has by now frightened you so much that you are almost relieved that it is your wrists he has tied.'
She nodded.
'But suddenly he pulls some slack into the rope leading from the rafter, and he loops the slack round your neck, and does it a second time, and pulls the rope tight until your pearls break and slide down inside your dress, and he leans all his weight on the free end of rope swinging from the rafter, and... er... he lifts you off your feet... and hangs you.'
Big-eyed, she said, 'What do I say? Do I beg? It doesn't say this.'
'You don't say anything,' I said. 'You scream.'
'Scream?'
'Yes. Can you?'
She opened her mouth and screamed up a hair-raising scale, alarming everyone on set and bringing them galloping to her rescue.
She giggled.
'No one rescued Yvonne,' I said regretfully, 'but no one will forget that scream.'
We filmed a brutal hanging, but short of the dreaded 'NC-17' or '18' certificates. We showed no black asphyxiated face, no terrible bloating. I got Yvonne to wriggle frantically while we suspended her from the wrists, but I filmed her only from the roped neck to her feet that frantically stretched down to the out-of-reach floor. We arranged for one of her white shoes to fall off. We turned the camera onto the shoe while the shadow of her last paroxysms fell across the white-washed walls, and we filmed her broken pearls and one twisted earring in the straw with her bare jerking toes just above.
That done, I let her down and hugged her gratefully; and told her she was marvellous, ravishing, brilliant, moving, could play Ophelia in her sleep and would undoubtedly undoubtedly appear on the Today Show (which fortunately, later, she did). appear on the Today Show (which fortunately, later, she did).
I'd planned from the beginning to shoot the hanging separate from the murderer just in case we needed to make a radical plot re-think at a later stage. By filming murder and murderer apart, one could slot in anyone's face behind the rope. That afternoon, however, I'd invited Cibber to learn the murderer's few lines, and he arrived on set with them only vaguely in his mind, while he expansively smoked a large cigar and exercised his fruity larynx on inappropriate jokes.
He patted Yvonne's bottom. Silly old buffoon, I thought, and set about turning him into a lecherous bull.
I positioned him in the manger section, and gave him an ashtray to prevent his setting fire to the straw. We placed Yvonne so that her white dress, on the edge of the frame and out of focus from being too near the camera, nonetheless established her presence.
Moncrieff, concentrating on the lighting, added a sheet of blue gelatine across one of the spots. He looked through the lens and smiled, and I looked also, and there it was, the actor blinking, bored, waiting for us while we fiddled, but with the probability of his guilt revealed by a trick of light.
Cibber, as first written by Howard, had been a pillar of the Jockey Club, an upright, unfortunate victim of events. Reluctantly Howard, bowing to the film company, had agreed to write a (mild!) liaison between Cibber's wife (Silva) and Nash Rourke. Equally reluctantly he had agreed that Cibber should persecute Nash for supposedly having hanged his (Nash's) wife Yvonne. Howard still didn't know that it would be Cibber himself that did the hanging. I would have trouble with Howard. Nothing new.
To me, the character of Cibber lay at the centre of the film's dynamic. The Cibber I saw was a man constrained by his position in society; a man forced by upbringing, by wealth, by the expectations of his peers to mould himself into a righteous puritan, difficult to love, incapable of loving. Cibber couldn't in consequence stand ridicule; couldn't bear to know his wife had rejected him for a lover, couldn't have waiters hearing his wife mock him. Cibber expected people to do his bidding. He was, above all, accustomed to deference.
Yet Cibber, underneath, was a raw and passionate man. Cibber hanged Yvonne in a burst of uncontrollable rage when she laughed at his attempt at rape. Appalled, unable to face his own guilt, Cibber persecuted Nash to the point of paranoia and beyond. Cibber, eventually, would be totally destroyed and mentally wrecked when Nash, after many tries, found that the one way to defeat his persecutor was to trap him into earning pitying sneers. Cibber would, at the end, disintegrate into catatonic schizophrenia.
I looked at Cibber the actor and wondered how I could ever dig out of him Cibber the man.
I started that afternoon by blowing away his complacency and telling him he didn't understand lust.
He was indignant. 'Of course I do.'
'The lust I want is uncontrollable. It's out of control, frenetic, frantic, raging, berserk. It's murderous.' murderous.'
'And you expect me me to show all that?' to show all that?'
'No, I don't. I don't think you can. I don't think you have the technique. I don't think you're a good enough actor.'
Cibber froze. He stubbed out the cigar: and he produced for the camera that day a conception of lust that made one understand and pity his ungovernable compulsion even while he killed for having it mocked.
He would never be a grandee type-cast actor again.
'I hate you,' he said.
Lucy was busy with the boxes when, on returning to the hotel, I opened the door of my sitting-room and went in, leaving it ajar.
She was on her knees among the boxes and looked up as if guiltily, faintly blushing.
'Sorry for the mess,' she said, flustered. 'I didn't think you'd be back before six o'clock, as usual. I'll just tidy this lot away. And shall I close the door?'
'No, leave it open.'
Books and papers were scattered over much of the floor, and many of them, I was interested to see, had come out of boxes she had already investigated and itemised. The folder of clippings about Sonia's death lay open on the table: the harmless clippings only, as Valentine's totally revealing souvenirs were out of sight in O'Hara's safe.
'You had some messages,' Lucy said jerkily, picking up and reading from a notebook. 'Howard Tyler wants to see you. Someone called Ziggy I think wanted you to know the horses had come without trouble through Immingham and had reached their stable. Does that sound right? Robbie he wouldn't give any other name said to tell you the move had been accomplished. And the film crew you sent to Huntingdon races got some good crowd and bookmaker shots, they said.'
'Thanks.'
I viewed the general clutter on the floor and mildly asked, 'What are you looking for?'
'Oh.' The blush deepened. 'Dad said... I mean, I hope you won't mind, but my Uncle Ridley came in to see me.'
'In here?'
'Yes. I didn't know he was coming. He just knocked on the door and walked straight in when I opened it. I said you might not be pleased, and he said he didn't care a f- I mean, he didn't care what you thought.'
'Did your father send him?'
'I don't know if he sent sent him. He told him where I was and what I was doing.' him. He told him where I was and what I was doing.'
I hid from her my inner satisfaction. I had rather hoped to stir Ridley to action; hoped Jackson would perform the service.
'What did Ridley want?' I asked.
'He said I wasn't to tell you.' She stood up, her blue eyes troubled. 'I don't like it... and I don't know what I should do.'
'Perch on something and relax.' I lowered myself stiffly into an armchair and eased my constricted neck. 'Bad back,' I said, explaining it away. 'Nothing to fuss over. What did Ridley want?'
She sat doubtfully sideways on the edge of the table, swinging a free leg. The ubiquitous jeans were accompanied that day by a big blue sweater across which white lambs gambolled: nothing could possibly have been less threatening.
She made up her mind. 'He wanted that photo of The Gang that you showed Dad yesterday. And he wanted anything Valentine had written about Sonia. He emptied out all this stuff, And,' her forehead wrinkled, 'he wanted the knives.' knives.'
'What knives?'
'He wouldn't tell me. I asked him if he wanted that one a boy asked me to give you at Huntingdon, and he said that one and others.'
'What did you say?'
'I said I hadn't seen any others and anyhow, if you had anything like that you would keep it locked away safely... and... well... he told me to wheedle out of you the combination you're using for the safe here. He tried to open it, you see...' She stopped miserably. 'I know know I should never have let him in. What is it all I should never have let him in. What is it all about?' about?'
'Cheer up,' I said, 'while I think.'
'Shall I tidy the boxes?'
'Yes, do.'
First catch your sprat...
'Lucy,' I said, 'why did you tell me what Ridley wanted?'
She looked uncomfortable. 'Do you mean, why am I not loyal to my uncle?'
'Yes, I do mean that.'
'I didn't like him saying wheedle wheedle. And... well... he's not as nice as he used to be.'
I smiled. 'Good. Well, if I tell you the combination number, will you please tell Ridley? And also tell him how clever you were, the way you wheedled it out of me! And tell him you do think I have knives in the safe.'
She hesitated.
I said, 'Give your allegiance one way or the other, but stick to one.'
She said solemnly, 'I give it to you.'
'Then the combination is seven three five two.'
'Now?' she asked, stretching towards the telephone.
'Now.'
She spoke to her uncle. She blushed deeply while she lied, but she would have convinced me, let alone Ridley.
When she put down the telephone I said, 'When I've finished all the work on this film, which will be in another four and a half months, I should think, would you like to spend a holiday in California? Not,' I went on hastily, 'with any conditions or expectations attached. Just a holiday. You could bring your mother, if you like. I thought you might find it interesting, that's all.'
Her uncertainty over this suggestion was endearing. I was everything she'd been taught to fear, a young healthy male in a position of power, out for any conquest he could make.
'I won't try to seduce you,' I promised lightly. But I might end by marrying her, I thought unexpectedly, when she was older. I'd been forever bombarded by actresses. An Oxfordshire farmer's freckled-nosed blue-eyed daughter who played the piano and lapsed occasionally into sixteen-year-old awkwardness seemed in contrast an unrealistic and unlikely future.
There was no thunderbolt: just an insidious hungry delight that never went away.
Her first response was abrupt and typical. 'I can't afford it.'
'Never mind, then.'
'But... er... yes.'
'Lucy!'
The blush persisted. 'You'll turn out to be a frog.'
'Kermit's not bad,' I said, assessingly.
She giggled. 'What do you want me to do with the boxes?'
Her work on the boxes had been originally my pathway to her father. I might not need her to work on them any longer, but I'd grown to like finding her here in my rooms.
'I hope you'll go on with the cataloguing tomorrow,' I said.
'All right.'
'But this evening I have to work on the film... er, alone.'
She seemed slightly disappointed but mostly relieved. A daring step forward... half a cautious step back. But we would get there one day, I thought, and was content and even reassured by the wait.
We left through the still slightly open doorway and I walked down the passage a little way before waving her down the stairs; and, returning, I stopped to talk to my bodyguard whom O'Hara, for the company, had by now installed in the room opposite my own.
My bodyguard, half Asian, had straight black hair, black shiny eyes and no visible feelings. He might be young, agile, well-trained and fast on his feet, but he was also unimaginative and hadn't saved me from the Armadillo.
When I pushed open his unlocked door to reveal him sitting wide awake in an upright chair facing me, he said at once, 'Your door has all the time been open, Mr Lyon.'
I nodded. I'd arranged with him that if he saw my door closed he was to use my key and enter my rooms immediately. I couldn't think of a clearer or more simple demand for help.
'Have you eaten?' I asked.
'Yes, Mr Lyon.'
I tried a smile. No response.
'Don't go to sleep,' I said tamely.
'No, Mr Lyon.'
O'Hara must have dug him up from central casting, I thought. Bad choice.
I retreated into my sitting-room, left the door six inches open, drank a small amount of brandy and answered a telephone call from Howard.
He was predictably raging.
'Cibber told me you've made him the murderer! It's impossible! You can't do it. I won't allow it! What will the Visboroughs say?'
I pointed out that we could slot in a different murderer, if we wanted to.
'Cibber says you tore him to shreds.' shreds.'
'Cibber gave the performance of his life,' I contradicted: and indeed, of the film's eventual four Oscar nominations, Cibber won the award for Best Supporting Actor graciously forgiving me about a year later.
I promised Howard, 'We'll hold a full script conference tomorrow morning. You, me, Nash and Moncrieff.'