‘More smoke,’ shouted Tristan.
‘That brown velvet collar needs straightening,’ yelled Griselda.
‘Quiet, please, we’re going for a take,’ brayed Bernard, the first assistant director.
An incredible tension gripped everyone — even the birds were silent, the breeze still.
‘Sound rolling,’ said Sylvestre.
‘Camera rolling,’ called Valentin.
‘Mark it,’ said Tristan, and the clapper-loader jumped in front of the camera, saying, ‘Slate one, take one,’ and snapped his clapper.
‘Action,’ shouted Tristan.
Out strolled Baby into the sunlight.
‘“Fontainebleau. Immense and solitary forest”,’ he sang exactly in time to his own exquisite voice. ‘“What rose-filled gardens, what Eden of loveliness could equal in Carlos’s eyes this wood through which his smiling Elisabetta passed?”’
‘And cut!’ shouted Tristan. ‘That was great.’ Then, loping over to Baby, ‘Could you make it a little more ecstatic? You are expecting hideous future wife and suddenly you discover you are to marry most stunning girl in world — you could even clutch yourself with joy.’
‘Anything’s better than clutching Dame Hermione.’
‘
The mournful clarinet began once more, the smoke-machine fired another swirl of mist. As Tristan called, ‘Action,’ glamorous Valentin, riding his camera like a jockey, reminded Baby of Isa.
‘Fontainebleau,’ he sang rapturously.
After three takes, each more miraculous than the one before, Tristan said, ‘Fantastic! Check the gate.’
Once the clapper-loader had shone his torch into the camera to check there were no hairs or dust to ruin the picture, Tristan shouted: ‘Cut and print.’ Everyone cheered, because the first shot was in the can.
The rest of the aria was going to be used as voiceover as Baby smuggled himself into France and the Spanish ambassador’s entourage. It was now time for Hermione. Having borrowed a tape-measure from Griselda and discovered Baby had the longer caravan, she was now screeching at Bernard Guerin, the first assistant director. ‘I answer only to Tristan de Montigny or Sir Roberto, and no-one, absolutely no-one, orders me to hurry up. And in future ensure that my caravan is not parked next to the honeywagon.’
Bernard, who’d been unable to make last night’s party, acted as Tristan’s sergeant major. His job was to see everything ran smoothly on the floor. Any hold-up cost thousands.
Bernard also did the bellowing and bossing around, which enabled Tristan to drift about, inspiring, charming, manipulating, and still appearing as Mr Nice Guy, even when he pushed people to the limit. Bernard, who’d been in the army with Tristan’s brother Laurent and held him dying in his arms in Africa, hero-worshipped the Montigny family. He also got wildly jealous and sulked if anyone got too close to Tristan.
Sadly, one of the reasons Hermione was being so gratuitously rude to him was because he had a brick-red face, the rolling eyes and big teeth of a rocking-horse, an ebony moustache covering a huge upper lip and the bray of a choleric donkey.
‘When Frogs are ugly, there’s no competition,’ whispered Baby, as Bernard emerged from Hermione’s mauling, his red face darkened to maroon and enlivened by a delta of purple veins on his forehead.
With a sigh, Rannaldini vanished into Hermione’s caravan and came down the steps a minute or so later, ostentatiously tucking his shirt into his trousers. ‘Dame Hermione is now on her way,’ he called out smugly, so the crew could hear. ‘You must learn tact, Bernard.’
Nemesis, however, was hovering: almost on cue, Hermione’s young, hopelessly harassed but adorably pretty make-up artist wandered down the steps of the honeywagon next door. In her clinging orange cardigan above knitted red and white trousers, she looked every inch a star. To the rapture of the
Hype-along Cassidy, the Press Officer, whose brown velvet hat was knocked off in the rush, only just managed to beat them off as Hermione herself emerged in the red riding coat Tristan had vetoed last night.
Whatever happened to Rannaldini’s dominance ending at the recording? thought Flora in alarm.
Hermione was further outraged when Tristan cautiously suggested her make-up was too heavy for outdoors.
‘Which, roughly translated, means it makes the old bat look a hundred,’ whispered Baby to the crew, who he’d got totally on his side.
Hermione’s quailing make-up artist was then ordered by Tristan to take her make-up down, which meant another hour’s delay. Later, Bernard stole off to have a pee behind a holly tree, and only just missed Hermione frantically applying eye-liner.
‘Her next CD will be called “Hermione goes to Hollybush”.’ Baby’s joke was soon whizzing round the set.
Baby proved a complete natural, who only had to glance at his lines in Make Up before going from nothing to regulo ten in thirty seconds. Hermione, on the other hand, was used to having a raised eyebrow seen in the gods, and was defeated by the stillness, subtlety and control of cinema acting. She was soon driving everyone crackers insisting, ‘But I always enter right for this aria,’ and because she, like everyone else, had a monstrous crush on Tristan, wanting to know her motivation for every syllable.
Tristan’s niece, Simone, in charge of continuity, was tiny and elfin with a glossy dark brown urchin cut and mournful Montigny eyes. Her fragility, however, belied a forceful personality. As most of the film was shot out of order, Simone’s main task, apart from timing takes, was to insist that each scene blended into earlier and later ones.
‘Your cigarette was only a quarter smoked last time, Baby,’ she was now shouting, ‘and we agreed you should carry a whip, Dame Hermione.’
‘Oh, sugar, I left it at home.’
‘Wolfgang can go and get it,’ said Rannaldini. ‘That’s what he’s here for.’
Having played in the first rugger team of an English public school, Wolfie was used to being yelled at under pressure. But with Bernard shouting instructions into his earpiece all morning, it was as though the Battle of the Somme had broken out. Now Rannaldini was pitching in.
‘And you can pick up another thermal vest from the Mill while you’re there, Wolfgang,’ Hermione called after him. ‘I cannot afford to catch cold,’ she added, as Tristan’s eyes rose to heaven at the thought of more delay.
By the time they broke for lunch, only Baby’s four lines had been filmed, and everyone had such cold noses they looked like an advertisement for Comic Relief.
Aware she had a French crew, Maria the caterer, a pretty, pregnant Italian, was on her mettle and had produced baked red snapper with aromatic Chinese sauce, steak and kidney pie, sauteed garlic potatoes, a vegetable stir-fry for Lucy, followed by rhubarb crumble or treacle pudding.
Everyone piled up their plates and charged the dining bus, where Tristan, because of the cold and it being the first day, had ordered bottles of wine for every table.
‘How the hell are you going to put up with Hermione?’ asked Oscar, as he tied his napkin round his neck to protect his purple scarf.
‘Divas are not fully balanced human beings,’ said Tristan dropping three Disprins into a glass of Perrier. ‘If they were they wouldn’t be great.’
After lunch the rows escalated.
‘What is my motivation for this scene?’ Hermione asked Tristan for the thousandth time.
‘You are cold, exhausted and lost in a huge forest,’ said Tristan, through gritted teeth. ‘Suddenly Carlos steps out from behind that tree and offers you his protection.’
‘If I’ve just come off a plane, surely I’d offer her a slug of duty-free,’ said Baby helpfully.
‘Will you stop taking the pees?’ Tristan’s voice rose. ‘As I was saying, Hermione, you’re lost in a wood.’
‘“Just a little lamb who’s lost in a wood,”’ sang Hermione,
‘Don’t you wish that pistol was loaded?’ murmured Baby to Flora.
‘I feel like Agent Scully. At least we’ve got the same-coloured hair,’ whispered back Flora, who was very excited by her gun, which was a Heckler-Koch ‘toy’, as used by the SAS.
