Frequent Hearses Read online

  She returned the instrument to its cradle. “All’s well,” she said. “Johnny’ll take you across as soon as you want to go, and rout out the Bryant girl for you. I warn you, she’s pretty dumb… Well. Is there anything else?”

  “Let’s see where we’ve arrived.” Ceremoniously Humbleby consulted his notebook. “Gloria Scott had been given this part in the Pope film… Now, how long ago did that happen?”

  “Not more than a fortnight ago,” said Judy definitely. “Perhaps less.”

  “And she was pleased?”

  “Lord, yes—on top of the world. A few days back I met her by chance on the way here, and she told me about it then. It had quite gone to her head, silly infant, and she was so exasperatingly vain about it I could have spanked her.”

  “You get the impression that it was genuinely a fait accompli? That”—Humbleby gestured vaguely—“that things had been signed?”

  “Oh, certainly.”

  “She couldn’t have been making it all up? Have been—um—anticipating the event?”

  Judy shook her head. “She could have been—she was quite capable of counting her chickens before they were hatched—but in this case I’m almost sure she wasn’t. The thing to do would be to go to the Legal Department and look for the contract.”

  “I’ll do that, yes.” Humbleby made a note. “Because if that contract does exist, it makes her suicide somewhat unaccountable.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” said Judy. She got up and began to pace restlessly about the room. “From what I know of her, I shouldn’t have imagined that any motive, however overwhelming, would have been sufficient to offset that contract.”

  “Though, of course”—and here Humbleby shifted uneasily in his chair—“there is the point that if this film were not to be put—um—on the floor for some time to come, the advance of her pregnancy might make it impossible for her to act in it.”

  “I haven’t the least doubt,” said Judy briefly, “that she intended to get rid of the child before it was born. Such things are done. And she wouldn’t have been so cock-a-hoop about the part if she hadn’t envisaged a way out of that difficulty.”

  “Um. Ah,” said Humbleby, embarrassed. “Just so. Well, you’ve been very helpful, Miss Flecker. And from now on we must stand on our own feet.” He got up and did this, presumably by way of illustration. “I think, perhaps, that—”

  “Just one other thing,” said Judy hesitantly. “How—how did it happen?”

  Humbleby told her—while she stood with puckered brows, like one who swallows a disagreeable medicine, and the whining of a mechanical saw in the carpenters’ shop provided a cheerlessly impersonal obbligato to the narrative. When it was over she nodded.

  “That’s very much the way I should have expected Gloria to do it, if she was going to do it at all. No premeditation—just a sudden appreciation of the means, and a sudden uncontrollable impulse. That’s very like her. And it’s very like her, too”—Judy moved her shoulders as if to mitigate an access of grue—“to regret it the instant it was done. Her way of living was to do rash things and then regret them the instant they were done…”

  Judy’s voice dropped suddenly. “Oh, Lord” she said, and steadied herself against the desk.

  For a moment they were all silent. Then the door opened and a middle-aged man, completely bald, looked in at them. With an effort Judy pulled herself together. “Hallo, Frank,” she said.

  “Hello, Judy. L.S.O. here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ireland here?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What stage are we on?”

  “Two.”

  “Ah.” The man nodded and vanished; after a very brief interval he reappeared, said “Good morning” briskly to Humbleby and Fen, and vanished a second time before they had a chance to reply.

  Judy called Johnny in. “Johnny, will you take these two gentlemen to Stage Five and find them a girl called Valerie Bryant? She’s in the chorus.”

  “Oke,” said Johnny inelegantly. “I know her. Leggy girl, dumb.”

  “And on the way,” said Humbleby, “we’d better look in at your Legal Department.”

  “Can do,” said Johnny.

  Miss Flecker shook hands with Humbleby and Fen.

  And Fen, whose attentiveness had latterly alternated with an absence of mind which made him appear slightly halfwitted, said: “Just one other thing. What was the attitude of the Crane family to Gloria Scott?”

  “The Crane family?” Judy was a good deal surprised.

  “Well, as to David, I don’t think she knew him, or he her. Maurice I’ve told you about. I’ve no notion what Nicholas thought of her. And Madge—well, that’s easy: she disliked Gloria very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Stuart North.”

  “Oh? Oh?” Fen raised his eyebrows. “A rivalry?”

  “Madge is promiscuous, but she has her preferences, and Stuart North is the current one. Unfortunately his preference seemed to be for Gloria.”

  “And did Miss Crane relish the prospect of working with Gloria in The Unfortunate Lady, do you think?”

  “That’s a point,” said Judy, interested. “I should imagine she was furious. In fact…”

  “In fact what?”

  “Oh, nothing… But it might be worth your while to enquire just what Madge’s reactions were.”

  “Yes,” said Fen. “We’ll do that, I expect.” He moved towards the door. “Thanks very much, Miss Flecker. We’ll leave you in peace now.”

  “Come and see me any time you feel inclined.”

  Fen smiled. “That would be too often to be convenient. But I’ll let you know what, if anything, we find out.”

  “And, by the way,” said Humbleby, “keep all this to yourself for the time being, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Many thanks, then. And good-bye for the present.”

  It is only in idleness, Fen reflected as he was led away from the relatively humane atmosphere of the Music Department, that men are capable of impressing their personality on their dwelling-places; purposeful activity depersonalises even the best of buildings absolutely, making it seem as negative and meaningless as an empty egg-shell. And the studios were not, certainly, among the best of buildings. They represented, with all the detailed appositeness of a text-book illustration, that point at which the pursuit of the purely functional over-reaches itself and becomes absurd. Even in its primary intention of promoting efficiency, architecture like this was bound to fail, since the psychological effect of these blank, indistinguishable corridors, these vistas of fire-buckets, these monotonously unadorned stone staircases and metal balusters, must to the community moving among them be enervating and discouraging in the extreme. The persons to be encountered did not, it is true, seem visibly afflicted by their ghastly surroundings; but acquiescence in ugliness is even more devastating, spiritually, than the impotent enduring of it, and in an industry which was concerned with making pretty visual patterns, and in which the finer flowers of the imagination blossomed so sparsely, it was a pity that to the uncertain cultural level of its moving spirits should be superadded the additional disadvantage of a grotesquely depressing mise-en-scene…

  It became clear, as time went on, that the Legal Department was quite a considerable distance away. Led by Johnny—who, perhaps by way of encouragement, unintermittently whistled a personal redaction of La Donna e Mobile—Fen and Humbleby negotiated a long recession of halls and passages which in the upshot brought them, quite implausibly, to French windows giving on to a small, sinister, overgrown courtyard, tentatively Arabic in style and with a patently unworkable fountain at its centre; with its pitted walls it looked, Fen thought, like a place of execution left over from the Spanish Civil War. At its far side a flight of steps impelled them underground, and they traversed a short, dimly lit tunnel which inexplicably debouched, through a rickety wooden door, on to the roof of a box-like single-storey building; and from this,
having achieved ground level by means of a spiral staircase, they emerged, disconcertingly enough, in front of a genuine greystone Victorian villa nestling amid laurestinus and rhododendrons. By this kaleidoscopic sequence of incongruities Humbleby was provoked to a muffled imprecation; and Johnny, who clearly took pride in the studios and who equally clearly interpreted this noise as a deprecatory comment on the relic confronting them, desisted from whistling for long enough to explain apologetically that the villa was already there when the studios were built and that in consequence it had been permitted to remain—-on sufferance, like a sort of Red Indian Reservation—amid the modernistic splendours put up by the Leiper organisation.

  “And it’s only the Legal Department that uses it,” he added—much, Fen thought, as a man might justify his possession of a cheap cotton handkerchief by saying that he kept it only to blow his nose on. “There’s the door.”

  With this unnecessary information—apparently he feared that left to their own devices Fen and Humbleby would never succeed in making an entry—he beckoned them forward and into the presence, inside the villa, of another youth, with a pencil behind his ear, who greeted them mistrustfully and on learning Humbleby’s identity retired, with enhanced suspicion, to consult with some person of more consequence than himself. Presently he returned—faintly complacent, like one who has contrived in the face of great odds to introduce a mountain into the presence of a prophet—with an exhausted-looking, grey-haired man; and with this individual Humbleby went into conference on the subject of Gloria Scott’s contract for The Unfortunate Lady, learning that it did, in fact, exist, that it had been signed nine days previously, and that the remuneration and conditions were normal for that type of agreement.

  “Responsibility for assigning the part?” the grey-haired man said in answer to a question. “Oh, that rests with the producer, though of course there are other people he consults about it.”

  “Ah,” said Humbleby. “I think that’s all I want to know, then. Thank you very much.”

  They retrieved Johnny, who by now had exchanged La Donna e Mobile for O Star of Eve, and set off in search of Valerie Bryant. The box-like building, the underground tunnel and the Arabic courtyard marked the stages of their return to the main body of the studios, but thereafter they struck out into hitherto unexplored territory, and it was only after a lengthy and bewildering journey that they came at last to the barnlike vastness of Stage Five. The end at which they entered it was in virtual darkness (there were, of course, no windows), but in the middle distance a moderate degree of activity was discernible, and across the tangle of ropes and cables on the floor they plodded cautiously towards this. The facade of a London public-house—of the rococo type distinguished by Mr. Osbert Lancaster as Public-house Classic—met their gaze; opposite it, on a frame covered with black cloth, the rudiments of shops were sketched in white chalk; in front of it was a pavement; inside it, and partly visible through the painted-glass windows, a number of extras in Victorian costume stood about waiting for something to happen. On the pavement were two young women in bustles and bonnets. A camera confronted them, with a microphone suspended above it on a boom like a carrot in front of a donkey, and a man in shirt-sleeves was measuring with a tape-measure the distance between its lens and their noses. Periodically other men would climb on to the camera, peer through its view-finder, and go silently away again. Overhead, on platforms hanging by chains from the high and invisible roof, electricians pottered with numbered spotlights, while on the floor their overseer, an irascible man with a cigarette adhering precariously to his lower lip, shouted at them: “Kill ten and twenty-three, Bert,” or “You can save your number nine, Bill,” or, more simply: “What the bloody hell do you think you’re up to now?” The continuity girl clattered assiduously away at a typewriter; the director, a gentlemanly person of some thirty years, sat slumped in a canvas chair fingering a tattered script and gloomily contemplating the scene; a wind-machine, painted a minatory pillar-box red, crouched in the offing like some gigantic insect; and all about, people drifted aimlessly to and fro, muttered together in corners, or merely stood gaping. Scattered among them were a few scantily clad girls, and Johnny, having briefly interviewed one of these, returned to inform Fen and Humbleby that they were in luck, since the film was behind schedule and the chorus, dutifully present and changed, would not be required for an hour or two.

  “Hang on,” he said, “and I’ll find the Bryant girl for you.”

  They hung on obediently, and after about two minutes of this the director, tiring abruptly of preparatory measures, called for a take. At once all was agitation: lights flashed on and off, technicians ran hither and thither, the camera crew coalesced round its machine, fresh powder was dabbed on the already thickly coated faces of the two young women on the pavement, the continuity girl gave over typing and rushed with a notebook to the director’s side, and Fen, who had wandered round behind the pub’s facade and was waving at Humbleby from a window, was unceremoniously removed to a safe place. A hush fell.

  “Yes,” said the director, wearily surveying the results of all this. “Yes, O.K.”

  “Absolute quiet, please,” called someone.

  “Roll it,” said someone else, and a clapper-boy self-consciously clapped his instrument together in front of the lens.

  “Background action,” said the director, and the extras inside the pub swayed about in tipsy animation.

  “Action,” he said, and the two young women came along the pavement and halted at the pub door, where one of them, nudging the other, said: “‘Ow about a quick one, Gert?”

  “Cut,” said the director.

  The tension dissolved. “That’s fine,” the director said. “Very, very good indeed. Miss Morris, I think I’d like a fraction longer pause before you give us your line, just a fraction. All right, everybody. We’ll do another take straight away.”

  Fen, prowling restlessly, had come to the wind-machine, and was regarding it with dawning interest. He had already stretched out a hand to it when fortunately he was distracted by the return of Johnny, who was propelling in front of him, with a finger in the small of her back, a tall, dazed-looking blonde. She wore black, high-heeled shoes, black stockings with garters and a black-and-white frilly corset affair which permitted—not to say encouraged—an ample display of bosom and thigh. Her face, made up, was like a mask; her liberal expanse of bare flesh was painted a golden brown; and the total effect was peculiarly anaphrodisiac. Before this pseudo-ninetyish apparition Fen and Humbleby somewhat abruptly converged.

  “Ah, Miss Bryant,” said Humbleby cordially. “I’m glad they were able to find you. If you can spare a few minutes I should like to have a talk with you.”

  Miss Bryant put out her tongue at him. It was plain to everyone that she had extruded it in order to lick her lips and at the last moment had recollected their lacquered and unlickable condition, but the effect was none the less discomposing; and particularly, it seemed, to the girl herself, for tears started into her eyes and she began to tremble at the knees. Humbleby, unused to such adverse reactions to his mild and reassuring presence, said: “Come, come, Miss Byrant, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Fen said: “My name is Gervase Fen.” And Johnny, smacking her heartily on her lightly clad bottom, said: “Don’t be so daft, girl.” Of these various prophylactics it was the last which proved most efficacious. Miss Bryant seemed, indeed, to be almost cheered by it—perhaps because it belonged to an order of things with which she was more or less at home. She rubbed herself unselfconsciously and in a timorous little Cockney voice said: “I’m all right, thank you, sir.”

  “Good, good,” said Humbleby expansively. Diffident, sensitive chorus-girls were obviously outside his experience, and he appeared to be at a loss what to say next. This problem, however, was solved for him by the cry of “Absolute quiet, please” which heralded the second take, and since it was evident that if they wanted to talk they must go elsewhere, he signalled to the others to follow him and
tip-toed towards the door. Once outside, he demanded to be shown to a vacant room; and Johnny, after one false attempt which tactlessly disrupted the embraces of a canteen waitress and a sound engineer, soon found one for him—a square, under-furnished, unimaginative place whose windows, commanding a part of the estate, displayed a group of workmen with wheelbarrows lethargically digging a small hole in the ground.

  “Anything else?” Johnny asked. “Because if there isn’t I ought to be getting back. Mind you behave yourself, Miss Sex Appeal,” he said to Valerie Bryant, “or they’ll put you in the lock-up. I’ll say cheerio, then. John Wilberforce Mornington signing off, at your service now as always.” With this, mercifully, he went. And Humbleby, clearing his throat in an embarrassed fashion, said “Do please sit down, Miss Bryant.”

  Miss Bryant sat down—with extreme caution, on the edge of a chair—and gazed upon them out of wide, pathetic eyes. “I ’as to be careful,” she ventured, “not to get the make-up rubbed on me legs and arms.”

  “Yes,” said Humbleby. “Yes, I’m sure you do.”

  Miss Bryant evidently did not find this ready acquiescence at all consoling, for she began to tremble again, though less violently than before. “I—is it true, sir,” she stammered, “that you’re from the p’lice?”

  “Yes, it’s true enough,” said Humbleby, “but you’ve absolutely no cause to be alarmed, Miss Bryant. All I want is to ask you a few questions about Gloria Scott.”

  “Gloria?” Miss Bryant was startled. “She ain’t in no trouble, sir, is she?”

  Humbleby shook his head soberly. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Miss Bryant, that she has—um—committed suicide.”