A Mysterious Affair of Style Page 4

  ‘No-o-o,’ said Trubshawe. ‘But then, of course, I was sitting in the very first row. I couldn’t really see how they were taking it.

  ‘Anyway,’ he added in a conciliatory tone, ‘no harm done. It was hilariously funny. And, as you say, it was in a Good Cause. And, after all, I am only an ex-policeman. I couldn’t have taken official action even if I’d wanted to.’

  The next several minutes saw them occupied perusing the menu. When their choices had been made and their orders taken, the subject turned at last to the bad news of which Evadne Mount had already advised the Chief-Inspector.

  ‘I say, Cora …’ she began hesitantly.

  Cora was instantly aware of the change in her friend’s voice.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Well … I heard some news – bad news, seriously bad news – just five minutes or so before curtain-up. You’ll forgive me, I know, but I felt I had to hold it back until after you’d done your turn.’

  ‘All right,’ said Cora bluntly, ‘I’ve done my turn. Out with it.’

  ‘It’s Farjeon.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m afraid he –’ she sought to cushion the blow – ‘I’m afraid he’s joined the Great Majority.’

  ‘What!’ cried Cora. ‘You mean he’s gone to Hollywood?’

  Evadne wriggled in a paroxysm of embarrassment.

  ‘No, no, dear. Do try to concentrate. What I mean,’ she frowned gravely, ‘what I mean is that he’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?! Alastair Farjeon?’

  ‘Yes, I fear so. The stage manager heard the news on the wireless and told me, as I say, just five minutes before you were due to make your entrance.’

  It came again, like a belated echo:

  ‘Dead!’

  Horror and incredulity battled it out for supremacy on Cora’s features.

  ‘Good God! Farjeon dead! A heart attack, I suppose?’

  ‘No. I understand why you might think so. As a matter of fact, though, it wasn’t a heart attack. It was something much, much worse.’

  There was a momentary pause during which neither spoke.

  ‘Well?’ Cora eventually said.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Oh, do get on, Evie, for Christ’s sake! By dragging it out like this, you’re only making it a thousand times worse.’

  ‘Well, as you know – as I’m sure you know – Farjeon owned a villa near Cookham – you did know that, didn’t you? – I’ve heard it was the last word in gracious living – he used to host lots of weekend parties there – were you ever invited?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Cora nodded impatiently.

  ‘Well, it seems there was the most ghastly fire in that villa of his and he himself was burnt to death.’

  ‘Oh my Lord, how perfectly awful! Was he alone, do you know?’

  ‘Absolutely no idea. All I know are the basic facts. None of the details. It happened this afternoon – late this afternoon.’

  Trubshawe intervened for the first time.

  ‘Apologies for butting in. This has obviously been a terrific blow to both of you. But would you mind if I asked who exactly you’re talking about?’

  Cora stared at him.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know who Alastair Farjeon is?’

  ‘Well, no, I can’t say I do.’

  ‘Cora, love,’ the novelist gently broke in before her friend could air her astonishment at the policeman’s ignorance. ‘You forget. Not everybody’s horizons are bounded by Wardour Street at one end and Shaftesbury Avenue at the other. You lot who work in the show business often forget how very distant that world is from most people’s ordinary day-to-day preoccupations.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Right as usual, darling,’ Cora replied contritely.

  She turned again to Trubshawe.

  ‘Mea culpa, my dear. I was just so surprised that you’d never heard of Farje – I mean, Farjeon. I quite took it for granted that everyone knew the name, because he’s simply – he was simply,’ she corrected herself – ‘the most brilliantly creative artist we’ve ever had in the British film industry.’

  ‘I don’t get to the Pictures too often,’ the Chief-Inspector apologised. ‘This Farjeon, he was what you call a film producer, is that it?’

  ‘No, he was a film director, and please’ – here she raised the palm of her right hand in front of his face to prevent him from posing what she knew would be his next question (it was a ploy he recalled having seen before but, since on that occasion the hand had been Evadne Mount’s, the actress must have picked it up from the novelist or possibly vice-versa) – ‘please don’t ask me what the difference is between a producer and a director. If I had a silver guinea for the number of times I’ve had that question put to me, I could retire on the spot. Just take my word for it, dearie, there is one.’

  ‘And now he’s dead. Such a tragic death, too,’ said Trubshawe. ‘I’m truly sorry. He was a close friend of yours, I gather?’

  ‘Close friend?’ Cora ejaculated. ‘Close friend?? That’s a good one.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘I couldn’t stand Alastair Farjeon. No one could.’

  The Chief-Inspector was utterly befuddled. He knew the immemorial reputation of theatricals for being fickle, flighty creatures, capricious to a fault, but this was ridiculous.

  ‘Then there really must be something I’m not getting here,’ he said. ‘I had the impression you were devastated by his death.’

  ‘Oh, I am. But for purely professional reasons, you understand. The man himself I abominated. He was a verminous, arachnoid pig, if I may be permitted to mix my animal metaphors, a pompous, puffed-up little swine, a toad to his inferiors and a toady to his superiors. He also had, if you can believe this, the unmitigated brass to flatter himself that he was God’s gift to womanhood,’ she added, unexpectedly assuming a maidenly archness that would have been comical if the circumstances were other.

  ‘A good-looking man, was he?’

  ‘Good-looking? Farje?!’

  Cora gave a harsh, mirthless laugh.

  ‘Farje, you must know, was fat. Not ordinarily, forgivably, lovably fat. He was outlandishly fat, monstrously so. Which is why, when Evadne announced the news of his death, I at once assumed it must have been from a heart attack, for he’d had more than one already.

  ‘He was also the vainest, most egocentric man I ever met. A complete narcissist.’

  ‘A fat narcissist?’ said Trubshawe. ‘H’m, that couldn’t have been easy.’

  Cora was now talking compulsively, almost convulsively.

  ‘I’ve always believed it was out of narcissism that he became a film director in the first place. He had this very special trick – a unique trick, you might say. In every one of his films, right at the start, before the plot had got underway, he would have a double, some extra who looked exactly like him, make a brief appearance in the corner of the screen. It became in a way his trademark, like the Guinness pelican, you know, or the golliwog on the marmalade jar.’

  ‘I see …’ said Trubshawe, though, in truth, he didn’t quite.

  ‘Poor Farje. He was famous for falling helplessly and hopelessly in love with his leading ladies. But because he invariably lusted after the sort of frosty blonde, cool and aloof on the outside, scalding hot on the inside, who couldn’t possibly have lusted after him, he found himself obliged to pay them vicarious – is that the word I’m looking for? – to pay them vicarious court via the various debonair young actors he tended to cast opposite them in his films. He was like Cyrano de Bergerac, except that it was Farje’s belly not his nose that was oversized.’

  She allowed herself the ghost of a smile at her own wit.

  ‘Then, when he finally screwed up what little courage he possessed to make a pass at one of them and, inevitably, was repulsed, he’d take his revenge by tormenting, by practically torturing, her on the set.

  ‘He got himself into trouble with the odd husband or boyfriend, I can tell you. I seem to remember he
was once seriously duffed up in the lobby of the Dorchester.’

  ‘So he was an unmarried man?’

  ‘Not at all. He’s been – I mean, he was – married to the same woman for Heaven knows how many years. Hattie. Everyone in the industry knows Hattie Farjeon. She’s one of those unthreatening little wifies insecure men attach themselves to by the proverbial ball-and-chain.

  ‘It’s curious. Whenever Farje wasn’t around, Hattie was Miss Bossy-Boots incarnate, a whinging fussbudget, a real besom, as my dear old mum used to say, a meddling, scheming know-it-all, physically unprepossessing, to put it mildly, very mildly, and given to stamping her two little flat feet if crossed. When they were together, though, it was obvious just how terrified she was of him.’

  ‘And you say,’ Trubshawe enquired, ‘that your reasons for regretting his death were purely professional?’

  ‘I had just signed up for a part in his new picture,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Ah … I see. The leading role, I assume?’

  ‘Thank you, Trubbers, thank you for being so galant,’ replied the actress. ‘No, it wasn’t the leading role. Oh, small as it was, it was a showy part all right, with one big scene where I positively chew up the furniture, but the lead? No. In fact, I wouldn’t normally have accepted such a – well, such a petite role. If I did so in this case, it was only because it was Farje.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Trubshawe, ‘but I still don’t follow. You claim you abominated the man. You also said that he was famous for tormenting his actresses. You even went so far as to use the word “torture”. And you’ve just admitted that the part you signed up for wasn’t even the lead. Why were you so eager to play it?’

  Even though the tragic gaze that Cora now trained on him had done stellar service, as the policeman was well aware, in a dozen West End melodramas, it was one in which, on this occasion, real pain was nevertheless detectable. There was the barnstorming actress on stage. Waiting in the wings, however, there was also the bruised human being.

  ‘Listen, my dear,’ she said, ‘in your long and doubtless varied career you must have had to deal with crooks who were as villainous as they come, except that you just couldn’t help grudgingly admiring their professional panache. Am I right or am I right?’

  ‘Yes – yes, you are,’ replied the detective. ‘Yes, I see what you’re getting at.’

  ‘That’s how we all felt about Farje. He may have been a rat, but he was also a genius, the nearest thing the British film industry has ever had to a Wyler or a Duvivier or a Lubitsch. For him the cinema was not just a job of work, it was a challenge, a perpetual challenge. Haven’t you seen any of his films?’

  ‘Ah well, there you have me, I’m afraid. I may well have done. The thing is, I used just to go to the Pictures, not to any one particular Picture. Most of the time, I didn’t actually know in advance what it was I was going to see. I didn’t go to Casablanca, I went to the Tivoli – and if Casablanca happened to be showing at the Tivoli that night, then Casablanca is what I’d end up watching. This whole complicated business of, you know, directors and producers and suchlike is something of a closed book to me.’

  ‘Well, I can only say that, if you’re unfamiliar with Farje’s work, you’ve been denying yourself a great deal of pleasure.’

  ‘There was that wonderful thriller of his, Remains to be Seen, about a party of English archaeologists working on a dig in Egypt. The “remains to be seen” are the ruins they’re excavating – already an awfully clever conceit, don’t you think? – but they’re also the remains of the victim, whose freshly murdered body is discovered inside an underground tomb which has lain undisturbed for three thousand years! And it all ends with a glorious shoot-out in and around the Sphinx.

  ‘Or The Perfect Criminal. You remember, Evie, that was one of his films you and I saw together? Charles Laughton plays a burglar who never, ever robs his victims the same way twice, never helps himself to leftovers in the pantry, never leaves a half-smoked Turkish cigarette smouldering in an ashtray. And that’s why he’s eventually caught. Because, as you have good cause to know, Trubshawe, there doesn’t exist the criminal who hasn’t got his own little set of quirks and idiosyncrasies, quirks and idiosyncrasies which you coppers gradually come to identify and actually look out for. So, in the film, when one perfect burglary after another is committed, none of them with the least trace of any known criminal’s tics and tropes, the police eventually realise that it must have been committed by him.

  ‘Or Hocus-Focus, which takes place entirely inside a jam-packed hotel lift which has stalled between two floors. The whole film, mind you! And not only is a murder committed in the lift itself but the camera never stops panning and tracking in and around that cramped space. Only Farje would have attempted such a folly.’

  ‘I say, hold on there,’ Trubshawe interrupted her. ‘How in Heaven’s name did he succeed in squeezing one of his doubles into that one?’

  ‘Oh, that was typical of him – all part of the fun, all part of the challenge, the devising of new ways to insert himself into his own films. You see, one of the guests trapped in the lift is a slinky vamp of a Eurasian spy who wears a small cameo brooch pinned to the lapel of her Schiaparelli suit. Well, on the cameo, if you looked hard enough, you could just about make out a tiny portrait of Farje himself. It’s a visual pun,’ she explained. ‘Neat, no?’

  Trubshawe’s perplexed eyebrows mounted his forehead.

  ‘A visual pun?’

  ‘Darling, that kind of fleeting appearance in a film is what we in the trade call a cameo. In Hocus-Focus Farje’s cameo literally was a cameo – a cameo brooch. Now do you understand?’

  ‘Um … yes,’ came the uncertain reply.

  ‘You haven’t seen his very latest?’ she went on. ‘An American in Plaster-of-Paris? It opened only last month.’

  Trubshawe shook his head.

  ‘Vintage Farjeon. Another absolutely brilliant thriller. The spectator never once catches so much as a glimpse of the murderer, who’s brought to book by the hero, a young G.I. in London whose left leg is in a plaster cast from the first scene to the last. He’s recuperating in a not terribly well sound-proofed flat in Bayswater and he figures out, from no more than the sounds he hears filter down through the ceiling, that his unseen upstairs neighbour has just bludgeoned his wife to death.

  ‘I tell you, Trubshawe, there’s not an actor, not an actress, in this country who wouldn’t sacrifice their own left leg to appear in one of his films. I had the chance – and now I’ve lost it.’

  She shivered, even though the room was, if anything, overheated. It was as though the import of the calamity that had befallen her had only just penetrated the fragile carapace of her sophistication. An actress through and through, on-stage and off, she was so intimately at one with her craft that, like a congenital liar, she was no longer capable of judging where make-believe ended and reality began. Yet there had always been moments in her life when the mask would slip and what was revealed underneath was the anguished face of a woman who had just begun to wonder where her next role, like a pauper his next meal, was coming from. This, it had been evident to Trubshawe for some little time, was one of those moments.

  Evadne clucked her tongue sympathetically.

  ‘You really, really wanted the part, didn’t you, precious?’

  The mask was now slipping off altogether. The tears that glittered in her eyes – even when, as on the present occasion, there was nothing affected or simulated about her distress, Cora remained a star to her fingertips, and a star’s tears don’t just glisten, they glitter – were as distressing to behold as a woman’s, as any woman’s, tears always are.

  ‘Oh, Evie, you can’t know what I was willing to do to get it. You can’t know how I pleaded, how I grovelled. I had my agent ring Farje’s office every single day, morning and afternoon. He turned me down twenty times. Said I was too old, too old-fashioned, mutton dressed as lamb, jumped-up trash.’

  ‘Jumped-up trash? He actu
ally said that?’

  ‘To my face, Evie, to my face!’

  ‘Oh, my poor darling,’ murmured the novelist, swiftly glancing around the restaurant to check whether anybody had chanced to catch Cora in her moment of panic. Needless to say, everybody was watching her, for the Ivy itself had already begun to buzz with the news of Farjeon’s death.

  ‘And we weren’t even alone.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He was with his latest discovery, Patsy Sloots. Patsy Sloots! What a name! He apparently plucked her from the chorus line in the new Crazy Gang revue.

  ‘Now that is jumped-up trash. You remember Dorothy Parker’s quip? “Let’s go watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut from A to B.” From what I hear, little Patsy’s gamut doesn’t even stretch to B. Her speciality is bottoming bills rather than topping them. But she’s just the sort of skinny blonde ninny Farje always did fall for. And there she was, draped over his desk at Elstree, looking as though her whole body, not only her face, had been lifted, while he was telling me that my number was up. I couldn’t believe how he enjoyed humiliating me!’

  Evadne had more than once been witness to her friend’s vulnerability, but it had always been when they were tête-à-tête, in the privacy and intimacy of either woman’s flat. That Cora should be on the point of breaking down here, the cynosure of the Ivy, was a vivid indication of what losing out on such an opportunity meant to her.

  ‘And yet,’ she said softly, ‘you did let yourself be humiliated.’

  ‘It was my very last chance. Such a role – I know I could have been superb in it, I just know! That’s why I was ready to grovel before him. And the horrible irony of it all,’ she said, the words choking in her throat, ‘is that I believe, I truly believe, he always did mean to give the part to me. My agent assured me that no other actress had been tested. Farje simply couldn’t resist torturing me anyway, just for his own perverted amusement. And, yes,’ – she turned to an embarrassed Trubshawe, who had tried during her tirade to render himself as inconspicuous as was possible for the large, hulking man that he was – ‘actors will do anything to land a halfway decent part, anything.’