Then, on cue, she walked backwards straight into the little girl, causing her to topple over onto the floor.

The actress at once got to her knees to help her back up.

'Oh, sweetheart, I'm terribly sorry. Gosh, aren't I the clumsy one. Are you all right? No bruises?'

When the little girl solemnly shook her head, Leolia on a sudden impulse kissed her on the right cheek.

And it was at that instant that Knight swiftly stepped forward. He too knelt down beside the little girl and, neatly timing his gesture to coincide with Leolia's, kissed her on the left cheek. To anyone who happened to be watching them and if none of the extras were, everybody behind the camera was the effect was exactly as though they were kissing each other through the child.

Then, just like someone speaking into a telephone, Knight whispered into the child's dainty little ear: 'I love you, Margot.'

'Oh, Julian ...' a tremulous Leolia Drake answered into the other ear. 'Please don't. Not here. Someone may hear us.'

'How can anyone hear us,' he countered smoothly, 'when we have our own private 'phone? There's no danger of a crossed line.'

The child's uncomprehending eyes darted from left to right and back again.

'Say it, darling,' said Knight, 'please let me hear you say it.'

'Say what?'

'That you love me too.'

'Oh, I do. I do so love you.'

To and fro went the little girl's eyes, like those of a spectator at the centre-court at Wimbledon.

The novelist and the detective watched in fascination as the camera now began to glide backward along its little section of railway track while at the same time, in a perfectly coordinated movement, it rose up into the dank and powdery studio air on an extensible ladder, a ladder that itself gradually stretched out over the entire set until there wasn't a single one of the dozen revellers who hadn't swum into, then again out of, its ken.

It eventually came to a halt directly in front of Cora herself. She was glaring implacably at the flirtatious couple. Her face contorted by spasms of jealousy, she mumbled a curse under her breath. Then, with perfect timing, her fingers snapped into two equal halves the slender, fine-spun stem of her champagne gla.s.s.

'Cut!' cried Rex Hanway.

Chapter Seven.

Evadne Mount, Eustace Trubshawe and Cora Rutherford were seated at a corner table in the studio cafeteria what in the picture-making business is known as the commissary. In the real world, the word would have been 'canteen'. Notwithstanding the autographed snapshots, aligned along all four of its walls, of several of Elstree's best-loved players David Farrar and Jeanne De Casalis, Guy Rolfe and Beatrice Varley, Joseph Tomelty and Joyce Grenfell a canteen is what it resembled and a canteen is what it was.

Since the room itself was nearly as draughty and cavernous as the sound stage from which they'd repaired for lunch, none of them had felt inclined to remove their heavy outdoor coats. Cora had even kept her gloves on, except that, with her innate stylishness, she contrived to convince everybody else that a gloved canteen lunch was the very latest thing, le dernier cri, as she herself would have put it, and this in spite of the fact that, to protect her elaborately mounted pompadour, she was also forced to sport a set of unsightly rose-pink curlers.

The other tables were monopolised by the same gaudily outfitted extras whom Evadne and Trubshawe had already admired when they first entered the studio. At one table a Ruritanian Hussar was lunching in the company of two ladies-in-waiting from Louis XIV's Versailles. At another an elderly bobby with a nicotiny walrus moustache, his helmet posed upright on the table-top like an outsized salt cellar, chatted amiably to the very last individual with whom his real-life equivalent would ever be caught lunching, a wiry cat-burglar clad in a black body stocking. And, sitting alone at a third, a queer, hatchet-faced woman was furiously knitting away at some monstrosity in purple wool. Paying as little attention to her fellow-lunchers in the commissary as they were paying to her, she laid aside her work-in-progress only to swallow the odd mouthful of semolina pudding.

'Psst, Cora,' Evadne finally whispered.

'H'm?'

'Tell me. Madame Lafarge over there? Do you know her?'

Cora turned her head, unconcerned as to whether she might be observed doing so by the target of the novelist's curiosity.

'Why, that's Hattie, of course,' she said dismissively.

'Hattie?'

'Hattie Farjeon. Farje's wife. Widow, I mean.'

'Farjeon's widow? What on earth is she doing here?'

'Oh, Hattie's always been present on the set during the making of Farje's films. You would see her, in a corner, sitting and knitting all by herself, never addressing a word to a soul, as mousy and uncommunicative as she is now. Officially, she was Farje's script consultant, but the true reason for her presence, as we all knew, was to guarantee there was no hanky-panky between him and his leading ladies. Hanky-panky or, so I've heard, "w.a.n.ky-spanky". I wouldn't know myself,' she concluded virtuously.

'But why is she here today? With Farjeon dead and all?'

Cora toyed with her corned beef.

'Who knows? Maybe Levey Benjamin Levey, the producer of the picture regards her as a good-luck fetish. It was Farje's series of hits, you know, that made him a millionaire. Or maybe she still has a financial involvement in the project and is keeping a watch over her own interests. Or maybe she just wants to be sure that Hanway is faithful to her husband's script.'

'But that's just it,' said Evadne.

'What's just it?'

'Hanway hasn't been faithful to the script. Just this morning he introduced the idea of using a child's ears as pair of telephone receivers. I must say, I thought it rather wonderful of him to come up with such a clever new piece of business right there on the set.'

'Oh, I do so agree!' the actress replied. 'You don't suppose Farje's genius could somehow be flowing through him? Emanations, you know,' she said vaguely. 'Or do I mean ectoplasm?'

In disgust she shoved away the aforementioned viands.

'G.o.d, this is foul muck. Even the bread-and-marge is stale.'

Lighting up a cigarette, she returned to the subject at hand.

'Yes, if he keeps it up, Hanway may well become the new Farjeon. Farje also used to have these brilliant last-minute intuitions. I remember when I popped in to visit dear Ty Tyrone Power to you yokels when he was filming An American in Plaster-of-Paris Oh, crumbs!'

Without completing the reminiscence, she picked up her knife and fork again, bent low over her plate and addressed her undivided attention to the meal that she had only just rejected.

'For G.o.d's sake, whatever you do,' she whispered, 'please, please don't look round! Don't make eye contact!'

'Who is it we shouldn't make eye contact with?' asked Evadne, as, to the actress's dismay, she did proceed to look round, at once finding herself face to face, indeed eye to eye, with an earnest, sallow-complexioned young man who, with his shaven head, rimless dark gla.s.ses, neatly trimmed goatee and black high-necked polo jersey, would have seemed more at home in some smoke-infested jazz cellar in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Bearing a tray of food, he was clearly on his way to join them.

'Now you've done it,' hissed Cora.

The young man coolly returned the novelist's gaze, stepped up to the table and nodded to Cora. Conjuring an impromptu smile as adroitly as though inserting a set of new false teeth between her lips, she extended her right hand towards him. He held it for a moment, raised it to his own lips and lightly kissed the b.u.t.ton of her suede glove.

('How very Continental!' Evadne Mount mouthed to the Chief-Inspector.) 'Ah, Mademoiselle Ruzzerford,' he said in a near-impenetrable French accent, 'you are looking as charmante as evair.'

'Why, thank you so much, Philippe,' Cora replied. 'Perhaps you'd care to join us for lunch? As you see, we have a free fourth place.'

'Oh, but that would be most kind,' said the Frenchman, who had in fact already begun circling the table towards the unoccupied seat.

'I don't believe you've met my friends,' said Cora. 'This is Evadne Mount, the mystery novelist. And Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, formerly of Scotland Yard. And this,' she explained to both of them, indicating their new lunch companion, 'is Philippe Francaix. He's a critic,' she added grimly.

Once hands had been shaken and how-d'ye-does exchanged, Evadne turned to Francaix.

'So you're a critic? A film critic?'

'Mais oui how you say in English? but yes. I am a film critic.'

'How interesting. Tell me, though, isn't it rather unusual for a critic actually to watch a film being made? I don't think I ever heard of such a thing before.'

Francaix shook his head.

'See you, it is quite usual in France, where many unusual things are usual. In your country, no, you have reason, it does not 'appen much. But this is a special case a long story.'

Cora was quick to intercede.

'That's right, darling. Philippe has been writing a book on Farjeon. A book of interviews, isn't it? The French admire Farje enormously. They don't just regard him as an entertainer, a confectioner of stylish thrillers, but as a a do tell me yet again, Philippe, what the French regard him as.'

'Where to begin?' he sighed. Then, having always known where, he duly expatiated: 'For us, the French, Alastair Farjeon is not just the Master of Tension, as you call him here. He is above all a profoundly religious artist, a moralist but also a metaphysician, the illegitimate offspring, if you like, of Pascal and Descartes. He is how you say? a chess master who plays blindfold against himself. A poet who decodes the messages which he himself has sent. A detective who solves the crimes which he himself has committed. In brief, he is mille pardons, he was a supremely great cineste, one who has been cruelly how do you say? sous-estime?'

'Underrated?' ventured Evadne Mount.

'Underrated, mais oui. He has been supremely underrated by you English.'

'But, darling, I keep telling you, we English actually like ' Cora began to say, before being interrupted.

'Like! Like! It is not a question of "like".' He held the verb up as distastefully as though he were handling somebody else's stained underwear. 'The man was a genius. You do not "like" geniuses. Do you "like" Einstein? Do you "like" Pica.s.so? Do you "like" Poe? No, no, no! You worship them. You idolise them. Just as we French idolise Farjeon.

'Of course,' he ended with startling abruptness, 'he was a c.r.a.pule a cochon a peeg of a man. Ah, but there you are. Bad manners, the infallible sign of genius.'

'If you say so,' the novelist politely demurred. 'But still, Monsieur Francaix, considering that Farjeon is dead and the picture is being directed by Rex Hanway, there's surely no longer any point in your hanging on?'

Was it a trick of the light or did an almost imperceptible shadow cast itself across Francaix's face?

'I 'ave my reasons,' was all he replied.

Perhaps afraid of saying something he might regret, he continued in a more equable tone: 'D'ailleurs, this picture, it was Farjeon's project. It will 'ave his fingerprints on it, no? It is Hanway who directs, but the result will be totalement Farjeonien. And because I nearly finish my book, I will add the shooting of this last alas, posthume work of his as an appendix.'

'It certainly does seem,' said Evadne, 'that young Hanway has learned from his mentor. The scene we watched this morning, with the two leads exchanging kisses through the little girl? I'm told it wasn't planned at all, yet everybody felt that it was as brilliant as anything in the original script. Worthy of Farjeon himself.'

'That is true. It was definitely not in the original script,' said Francaix, laying an audible stress on the adverb.

An awkward moment followed. Then the novelist, whose hatred of a vacuum was possibly even greater than nature's, remarked for want of anything more pertinent to say: 'So you're a French film critic, are you? How amusing. We don't see too many French pictures in this country. Not too many foreign pictures altogether.'

'Ah no, Mademoiselle, there you are wrong, very wrong. In my experience, you English, you like to watch nothing but foreign films.'

'Why, Monsieur Francaix,' she protested, 'only a very few foreign films open in London, mostly at a cinema called the Academy. And what a G.o.dsend it is for us devotees of the Seventh Art.'

'Mademoiselle, I was making allusion to the films of 'Ollywood.'

'Hollywood films? But those are American.'

'Precis.e.m.e.nt. They are not British. So they are foreign films, no?'

'We-ll, yes,' she said uncertainly. 'It's a funny thing, though. We somehow don't really think of them as foreign.'

'Perhaps you should, as we do,' replied the Frenchman with a brusqueness which succeeded in remaining just this side of insolence.

There followed another awkward pause, before Trubshawe, who hadn't said anything up to that point, finally spoke.

'I saw a French film once.'

Francaix stared at him, nakedly, offensively disbelieving.

'You? You saw a French film? I confess you surprise me.'

'I happened to go with a few of my former colleagues from the Yard. After our reunion dinner last November.'

'Really? And which film was it?'

'Bit of a letdown, I'm afraid. It was called The Dames of the Bois de Boulogne.'

'Ah yes. That one, it is a cla.s.sic. A pure chef-d'oeuvre.'

'A cla.s.sic? Is that a fact?' said Trubshawe ruminatively. And he repeated, 'A cla.s.sic? Well, well, well.'

'You are not in accord?'

'Well, for me and my chums and, I must confess, the dinner had been a little too bibulous, a little over-lubricated, if you know what I mean it did seem awfully tame.'

'Tame? What is "tame"?'

'We were expecting something a bit ruder, a bit naughtier you know, ladies of the night and all that. Of course, it's ironic, if that's what it actually had been like, we might have been obliged to have the cinema closed down, all of us being ex-coppers. But no, under the circ.u.mstances, we did feel like asking for our money back.'

After a few seconds spent wondering whether to take umbrage, Francaix threw his head back and convulsed with laughter.

'You English! Your wonderful hypocrisy! I think I like it even more than your famous sense of humour.'

Not quite knowing what to make of this, Evadne turned to Cora.

'Well, dear, it's your big scene this afternoon. Do tell us something about it.'

Cora stubbed her cigarette out in a cheap tin ashtray.