with disastrous consequences. Miles cast a genuine brother and sister team in these parts, Jose and Roxanne Benali. Roxanne was pretty tempting, I have to admit. We had a couple of scenes where there was a lot of skin involved, and she didn't hold anything back in either of them. That made it difficult, because it meant that I could not allow myself to appear any less enthusiastic than her. In the end I just imagined that she was Susie, and gave her my best simulated shot, thanking my stars that it was a closed set, with only Miles and essential crew around. (A couple of years earlier and… given Roxanne's 'commitment to her part', as she put it, and under the duvet her interest in mine… it might not have been simulated.) We shot the thing, start to finish, in a total often weeks. Most of the schedule was in Edinburgh, but we had a couple of trips south to a big sound stage for disaster scenes which could not have been filmed in their actual locations… it would have meant blowing them up.
Normally, once we were finished I would have looked forward to my usual lazy month between projects, but Susie had my dance-card well filled.
Right at the top of our list of things to do was moving house.
We liked where we lived in Glasgow, our city centre apartment in an award-winning conversion, but now that I was becoming a bit famous, it was less and less practical. Our neighbours were nice people, and they never once complained about the punters hanging around the place, or the photographers who never seemed to be too far away. After a while, though, we decided that we couldn't inflict the inconvenience on them any longer. So we looked around Scotland and found a country house set in a small estate within sight of Loch Lomond, with plenty of room for us, for Janet, for any more Janets who might come along, for Ethel Reid, our nanny, and with a small lodge house to accommodate Jay Yuille, our chauffeur.
Actually, Jay was a bit more than a chauffeur, although driving Susie to the office and me to the airport was in his job description. He was our minder, an ex-soldier recruited by my eventually trusted friend Ricky Ross, whose consultancy handles nearly all the security work for Miles Gray son's UK movie projects. As my star began to get bigger, Miles had taken pains to impress upon me that famous people with children can't be too careful. He and Dawn employed a children's nurse for Brucie; she was ex-LAPD, and she took it ill out when they came to the UK and she couldn't pack her.38 S amp;W special. Our guy Jay had fought in Afghanistan and was formidable enough without firearms.
The house move went off with barely a hitch… not that we were moving much. Susie had hired an interior designer who had charged us a fee, then compounded the cost by furnishing almost all of the place from scratch. The only things we took with us were Janet's familiar things from the nursery and our big partners' desk, where we used to sit and work while looking down on the City of Glasgow, its traffic flowing beneath us. We found a spot for that in our new home, setting up our shared office in one of the big conservatories built on either side of the house, each having a panoramic view of the loch below. The other one enclosed a heated swimming pool, but its door was always locked; our Janet was into everything and in no time at all she would be big enough to reach the handle. Even though she's a water-baby, she wasn't to be trusted on her own.
The old apartment was sold, after a little soul-searching. We had considered keeping it as a pied-a-terre, but decided eventually to give the neighbours a complete break by moving it on. Barney Farmer, the Gantry Group lawyer, put it on the market at an exorbitant figure and had an unconditional offer next day. The buyer, he said, was a company, not an individual; slightly strange in Scotland, but in fact, so was the seller, and for the money that was offered Susie and I weren't bothered. The deal was signed off and we waved it a fond goodbye.
Life was idyllic again; there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and even my career was conspiring to keep it that way. We enjoyed Christmas with the family at home: my nephews, Jonny and his brother Colin, dry-nosed for once, and showing signs of becoming sensible, took to the new place, and especially to the pool.
I had to marvel at the change in Jonathan. To me it seemed to have happened overnight, but actually it had taken place when I was away on one of my projects. When I got home I'd called Ellie to catch up.
Everyone was out, so the answer machine cut in. 'Hello,' I heard myself say. 'You've reached the Sinclair residence. I'm afraid we can't take your call just now, but if you leave a message we'll call you back.' I left a message, but I was seriously puzzled. I couldn't remember ever recording an answer message for my sister. I knew that my Dad hadn't done it. He and I sound almost identical on the phone, but not quite.
She laughed when I asked her about it. 'Time moves on, young brother,' she said.
I let my mouth fall open. 'You don't mean…'
'I do. That was our Jonny.'
I'd been curiously disturbed by that. Since Ellen and her husband split up, the boys have seen very little of their father, an irredeemable workaholic. My Dad's always been close, but he's their grandfather, and that's different. In search of a father substitute, Jonathan in particular has always drifted to me. I felt that I'd missed an important part of his life, and I was sorry.
After our family Christmas we brought in the New Year in Florida, taking Janet to Disney World; Susie had decided that she had gone long enough without sunshine. Once the festivities were over, I had to endure the hardship of a three-month film shoot in the Caribbean, and on the horizon after that, Roscoe Brown's finest achievement to date, my first top billing part.
I was to play the title role in Mathew s Tale, a drama set in pre-Victorian Scotland, and directed by the eminent Frenchman Paul Girone, about the adventures of a Napoleonic War veteran who returns home to discover that he has been given up for dead and that his intended has married someone else. I was to co-star, my name headlining, with Louise Golding, an American hot ticket, and with the formidable Ewan Capperauld, who had been cast originally as Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner in my first Miles Grayson cop movie, only for personal problems to force his late withdrawal. I was glad that Ewan had decided to come out of his self-imposed exile. For all that he could be a bit of a lovey, I had found myself liking the guy.
Scott Steele was in it too, of course. These days you can't cast a movie in Scotland without finding a part for old Scott. He gets pissed off when reviewers call him 'the Finlay Currie of his generation', but it's easy to see what they mean. If they still made movies with Moses in the cast, he'd be the guy parting the Red Sea every time.
The added bonus about this project, apart from the incredible money that Roscoe had screwed out of the producers, was the location. Much of it was being shot in Scotland, in a scenic life village, in Edinburgh's Old and New Towns, and in a countryside setting not far from our house in Loch Lomond.
It couldn't have been better, it really couldn't. It was just too bad that, in the immortal words of a Polish guy of my acquaintance, it all went to rat-shit.
Three.
The Caribbean thing, a remake of Island in the Sun, was pretty good, and so, they all said, was I. Weekend trips back to Scotland weren't practical, but I had written a couple of visits for Susie and Janet into my contract, so the homesickness wasn't too bad.
It was wrapped on time. We had a Bacardi party to celebrate, then I headed back to Scotland at the beginning of an unusually pleasant spring.
Almost the first thing Susie and I did on my return was to take Janet up to Anstruther for a couple of days, to visit my Dad and Mary, my stepmother. On Saturday afternoon, with no patients to be seen, it was decided that the ladies would visit Ellen and Colin in St. Andrews, to allow us guys… Jonny is a good enough golfer now to hold his end up with us… an afternoon on the links at Elie.
I've played some of the finest and most famous courses in the world..
. Pebble Beach, Valderrama, Wentworth, Kiawah Island, where alligators count as a hazard… yet I've never enjoyed any of them more than Elie on a nice day. The Old Course at St. Andrews may be the most famous in life, but it's not the most distinctive. It doesn't have an old submarine periscope sticking through the roof of the starter's hut.
It's true, I swear, and since it was installed thousands of players have thanked the retired sea dog who gifted it to the club. Since the landing area for the first drive can't be seen from the tee, and has a tight out-of-bounds on the right, the opening hole was a confusing and dangerous place in the old days. It was before my time, but my Dad assured me that on the club-house roof there were mirrors through which the starter had to do his best to judge whether the fairway was clear.
However, once this obstacle has been overcome, players are released on to a pleasant undulating course that
