Score!

shoot.

Tristan was pacing about. There were a million technical demands on him, a potentially disruptive crew, production pressures, worry that the cast would gel even less in a strange environment.

Rannaldini’s beautifully manicured fingers were drumming on the table. Sexton was massaging his big face with his hand, always a sign that all was not well.

Hermione, in white breeches, black boots and a waisted red coat with black velvet facings, cut long to hide her large bottom, was preening in the mirror.

‘You look lovely, Hermsie,’ boomed Griselda, whose social and sartorial instincts were rapidly being sabotaged by her thumping great crush on Hermione.

‘Women don’t hunt in red coats in England,’ snapped Tristan. ‘It looks vulgar. Please try the dark blue one again, Hermione.’

‘The dark blue won’t show up against the trees,’ argued Rannaldini.

‘I want to add a cheery note to the winter gloom,’ pouted Hermione.

Baby, who was supposed to have hurtled across country to join the hunt incognito, was wearing a brown herringbone tweed jacket and, having lost so much weight at Champney’s, was marvelling at himself in buff stretch breeches. As Elisabetta’s bodyguard, Flora was wearing a less fitted brown riding coat to accommodate the bulge of her gun.

‘All of them are same colour as countryside.’ Rannaldini’s voice was rising. ‘They’ll get lost.’

Meredith, oblivious of the storm breaking over his airborne curls, was trying on the diamond tiara Hermione was supposed to wear for Philip II’s coronation.

‘Put on your hats for the total look,’ urged Griselda.

The row escalated because neither Hermione nor Baby were prepared to wear hard hats with black chin straps to resemble Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince Charles.

‘How could anyone fall in love with anyone at first sight wearing that?’ protested Baby. ‘D’you want Hermione to smoke a fag as well?’

‘Those hats are authentic,’ protested Griselda, getting up with a rattle of Valium to tap Hermione’s brim further down over her eyes. ‘We must set a good example to the Pony Club.’

‘Fuck the Pony Club,’ snapped Baby.

‘Rannaldini would quite like to,’ murmured Meredith.

‘You can take off your hats the moment you dismount,’ pleaded Griselda. ‘And Hermione’s blonde wig will then tumble beautifully down her back.’

‘My hair won’t tumble anywhere,’ snarled Baby. He loathed his Prince Charles wig, complete with incipient bald patch, even more than his hat.

Meredith, who was now trying on a flower-trimmed straw bonnet, suggested that Baby’s and Hermione’s hard hats might look better if they were dressed up with long earrings.

‘Only if I can wear my scarlet coat,’ said Hermione mulishly.

‘English women don’t wear—’ began Tristan.

‘But I’m not English,’ said Hermione, with a peal of merry laughter, as though she’d made a frightfully good joke. ‘I’m South African.’

‘Reimpose sanctions,’ muttered Baby.

Valhalla, like many ancient ecclesiastical buildings, was H-shaped with the north and south wings forming the verticals of the H. Rannaldini and his family lived in the south wing overlooking the valley.

Meanwhile, in the north wing, other members of the cast and the upper echelons of the crew were bagging their bedrooms, which in contrast to the lavishness of the south wing consisted rather creepily of ex-monks’ cells reached by badly lit uncarpeted staircases and long, narrow corridors.

‘Bit scary,’ quavered Lucy, pushing a reluctant James into a darkly panelled rabbit warren, almost entirely occupied by a big mahogany double bed.

‘I don’t mind sharing,’ said Ogborne, Tristan’s cocky and Cockney chief grip, who had a shaved head, an earring, and looked like a self-confident pig. Employed to hump equipment around and shove heavy cameras along tracks, Ogborne had had no difficulty in carrying all of Lucy’s cases upstairs.

‘Plenty of room for you, me and Fido in here,’ he said, patting the bed.

‘I talk dreadfully in my sleep, and James snores,’ said Lucy hastily.

Down the corridor, Alpheus Shaw, psyching himself into the part of Philip II, was getting more regal by the second, referring to himself as ‘one’, and striding around with his hands behind his back. He had also demanded the biggest bedroom, which had the biggest four-poster and small leaded windows looking north into the woods and east up the valley.

However, he was deeply displeased that, unlike Tristan, he had not been put in the lush south wing, which he had admired loudly on a previous visit.

Only half the principals were in situ: neither Mikhail, Granny, his wayward boyfriend Giuseppe, Alpheus nor Chloe would be needed for a couple of weeks. Alpheus had come down ostensibly to show solidarity and to inspire the cast. After all, he was the principal male singer now Fat Franco had been fired. In reality he wanted to screw Chloe without having to fork out for a hotel — particularly as his wife Cheryl always went through the Amex receipts.

Looking down, he could see Tristan and Rannaldini walking towards the house, their arms waving as they yelled at one another, their shadows long and black behind them.

Inside the dairy, Meredith, like a small child comforting his mother, was patting the vast shoulders of a sobbing Lady Griselda.

‘It’s just first-night nerves, don’t take it personally.’

Griselda gave a sniff.

‘Try not to get lippy on that hunting tie, Hermsie,’ she called out, ‘and I’d be grateful if you’d all put your clothes back on the hangers.’

‘What time’s dinner?’ asked Baby.

‘Seven thirty for eight,’ said Flora, as she wriggled back into her old grey jersey and scruffy black jeans. ‘I can’t be bothered to go home and tart up.’

20

Dinner began scratchily. Helen, a lousy hostess at the best of times because she never refilled glasses or introduced anyone, was clearly livid at being invaded by so much mess and so many strangers. As a final insult, drinks were being served in the old red morning room, which she had spent two years of her excruciatingly unhappy marriage transforming into an exquisite symphony of faded blues and rusts. Almost overnight, it had been reduced to a gaudy riot of cherry-red walls, gilded ceilings, floor-length mirrors framed with gold leaf, and two crimson thrones initialled E and PII at the end of the room. Worst of all, three huge glittering chandeliers, hovering overhead like Spielberg spaceships, highlighted every bag and wrinkle — an unkind contrast to the ludicrously flattering painting of herself over the fireplace in which she was portrayed as Athene, goddess of wisdom, with an owl perched on her head.

Having flown in from a wildly successful Mahler’s Resurrection in Berlin, to ensure Valhalla’s cuisine exceeded anything French, Rannaldini had unearthed the Krug and was welcoming guests, and accepting compliments on the room. ‘It ees, of course, based on Throne Room at Buckingham Palace,’ he told anyone who would listen.

As the crew gathered in one corner puffing Gauloise smoke, and the cast retreated to another trying not to breathe it in, gossip whizzed back and forth in all languages. Everyone was also assessing talent.

‘How can I tell Tristan’s boys apart when they’ve all got beards?’ said Baby fretfully.

‘Jesus must have had the same trouble with his disciples,’ said Meredith, ‘except this lot have got gorgeous names like best-boy and focus-puller. Valentin the camera operator’s heaven, but he’s just back from his