"A free-for-all?"

"Exactly! A nut orgy. Oh-ow." Kathleen winced as Mish tugged the corset strings in another quarter of an inch.

"Sorry, almost done." Mish double-knotted the string and began rummaging through the rack for the matching petticoat. "How's that going, then?"

Kathleen exhaled to make her rib cage as narrow as possible. "Oh, fine. You know."

Actually Mish didn't. Nor did she bother to say so.

The digital trill from a tiny silver cell phone distracted Swain. She pressed the phone to her ear with one hand and waved the other like a flipper. "Just a second. Where's that remote?"

Mish dropped the laces and began searching the trailer until she found it under a copy of HEAT magazine.

"Oprah," said Swain, and then, directing her attention into the phone, "She's just getting it. What channel again? Twenty-four? Okay. I'll call you after."

Mish turned on the TV and there was the Most Loved Woman in the World. The studio audience applauded hysterically until Winfrey shushed them with four papal sweeps of her arms.

"And on today's show we'll be talking about the issue of late-in-life fertility," Oprah was teleprompted. "Specifically, how late is too late? When should a woman start to worry and when is it too late to try? We'll be talking to a group of women who have succeeded in conceiving later in life-one of our guests had her first baby at the age of fifty-two! Can you believe that, y'all? And a couple of other women who have not succeeded in making their dreams of motherhood come true, despite the best medical efforts. Some of these women felt they waited too long, and they are here to tell other women who want to conceive not to make the same mistake they did by putting things off until it's just too late."

Mish, who had been searching for a needle and thread to repair a hem, fell still. "Do you want me to come back later?" she asked.

"No, no, stay," said Swain. "That was my a.s.sistant calling. My fertility doctor in L.A. is going on maternity leave, so we have to find another specialist and apparently there's this guy on Oprah who's written some book. Can you believe what a coincidence this is? I mean, we were just talking about this and now it's on Oprah-it must be a sign."

Swain motioned for silence as the commercials finished and the Oprah theme music introduced the next segment.

"Our expert today is Dr. Joe Veil, a fertility specialist and the author of Baby Love: The New Battle for Motherhood. He's here to give us the straight goods on what women trying to get pregnant later in life can realistically expect. Now tell us, Dr. Veil, what kind of odds is an average woman facing who's decided she wants to get pregnant at, say, the age of forty? We see it all the time on television, or in the tabloids. Seems every established middle-aged movie star and pop singer is walkin' around with a b.u.mp these days. Is it really as easy as they make it look?"

The camera swiveled over to Dr. Joe Veil. He loosened his collar as he spoke. "Actually, Oprah, it's not as easy as it looks." Dr. Veil launched into a litany of the risks and difficulties involved in late-in-life pregnancies. Swain, however, was too busy swooning to listen.

"He's a dish, isn't he? Did she say he's a practising fertility specialist?"

"I hink ho." Mish's mouth was full of pins.

Swain stabbed a finger into her phone keypad and began talking almost immediately. "I think he could be the one. Yeah-yeah. That's him. Find out for me as soon as you can. I don't care if we have to fly him over here and put him up at the Ritz. Get him yesterday. Me want."

She got off the phone and let out a significant whoosh. Mish was doing up the final b.u.t.tons of her collar.

"Do you have children?" Swain asked.

"I haven't got a maternal bone in my body." Mish grabbed Swain's dress off the rack so fiercely she felt the shoulder seam rip. "We'd better get you on set. You're already late for your call."

"Oh, for Chrissake, where is she?"

Richard was agitated and talking to himself. Meredith, who was sitting in her usual spot to the left, pretended not to hear. Instead, she focused on her notes for the next scene.

The shoot had moved locations to Kewkesbury Park, a sprawling Edwardian country house located at the end of the Northern tube line, and the crew had just finished setting up for one of the film's most complicated and expensive segments-the ballroom dancing scene. Dozens of extras from the London Ballet Academy milled around the set waiting to take their places for the waltz sequence. They held their heads self-consciously high (even for dancers) as a result of the rustling vintage silks they wore, the women in bustles and the men in tails and top hats. The crew members moved among them adjusting lights and lenses in militaristic form.

Kathleen Swain was late for her call and things were behind schedule as usual. Meredith had spent much of the morning wandering from room to room, exploring the corridors and back stairwells, each one leading to another set of rooms that opened onto another set of rooms. The place was damp and drafty, the ancient plaster striped with water marks from the rain that had seeped its way indoors over the years. Everything reeked of mold. And yet, to Meredith (who had a fondness for the ancient and austere), the place was beautiful.

The house, after all, was very nearly a celebrity in and of itself. In the past couple of years alone it had appeared in dozens of BBC Agatha Christie dramas, and a reality TV series in which middle-cla.s.s Brits reenacted the life of Edwardian aristocrats and their servants, as well as doubling as the interior of Windsor Castle in the TV version of Diana: Her True Story. So much production went on here, in fact, that the owner, an impoverished duke who bred dorgis (a demented-looking cross between dachshunds and corgis), had confined his living quarters to three rooms above the garage at the end of the lane. While production companies and tourists overran the grand house of his ancestors, the duke lived the cramped, frugal existence of an inner-city welfare recipient.

The crew had been waiting for Swain for most of the morning, and now Richard was becoming visibly agitated. He had already sent the first a.s.sistant around to her trailer twice, to no avail. Meredith pulled a chair over to a corner of the room, not far from the monitor where Richard was pacing and tossing out commands to his crew, and began to scribble down the complicated set of shot descriptions they had discussed the day before in rehearsal. Start MS angle toward ballroom door. Inspector enters. Pan his walk X-L-R across room past waltzing dancers. Hold Full 4/should over Inspector to Miss Celia seated on the sidelines...And so on, describing the entire scene through the unblinking eye of the camera in her secret continuity girl language. Meredith spent so much time at work translating, in cryptic point-form and code, what things looked like from the outside, that she often amused herself by doing the same thing in real life. Bored on the subway or over dinner, she would find herself making shot descriptions of scenes as they were playing themselves out.

t.i.te to Continuity Girl scribbling notes in a binder. RL angle toward door of room. The Movie Star enters. Pan her walk across the room toward the Director's chair. Hold Full 4/shot over Movie Star's R-should to Director seated on chair.

DIRECTOR.

Kathleen, how sweet of you to show up for work. And looking ravishing as usual.

MOVIE STAR (HUSHED).

Thank you for being patient, darling. So sorry about the delay. I'm afraid I was having a bit of a woman's problem.

DIRECTOR.

A nasty affliction, that. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, we were in the middle of making a movie.

Wide shot of the room. The crew and extras wait for the Director's command.

DIRECTOR.

Places!

FIRST A.D.

Let's have a bell!

Angle on the Sound Mixer pressing a b.u.t.ton on his panel. A buzz is heard. New angle on the red light outside the stage door.

FIRST A.D.

Quiet!

Silence engulfs the room.

CONTINUITY GIRL.

Scene 26, Take 1.

FIRST A.D.

Roll sound.

A beat as the Sound Mixer waits for the recorder to stabilize at the correct speed. t.i.te of the Sound Mixer whispering the slate number into the recorder.

SOUND MIXER.

Scene 26, Take 1. (Beat of silence.) Speed.

t.i.te on the Camera Operator peering through the lens to make sure the picture is in perfect frame and focus. Angle over R-should of Operator as he snaps the camera switch on. P.O.V. camera. A slate appears in front of the lens.

CAMERA OPERATOR.

Mark it.

t.i.te on the clapsticks snapping shut. Timecode on slate freezes, indicating the picture and sound are now in sync. Angle on the Slate Operator dashing out of set.

CAMERA OPERATOR.

Rolling.

Pan across the room, the dancers stand in pairs, poised to begin.

t.i.te on Director.

DIRECTOR.

Action!

When Meredith got home that night, her mother was reclined on the living room sofa smoking a pipe and listening to a vinyl recording of Leonard Cohen reciting a poem about a girl on a beach. Meredith came up the stairs, dropped her knapsack and exhaled. Her mother, who was wrapped in a black satin dressing gown, acknowledged her with a nod.

Meredith looked around for somewhere to sit, but as usual every surface was piled high with rubbish. Not the same rubbish, however, as everything seemed to have been shifted around as the result of some invisible tidal pull since she'd last surveyed the room. She lifted a long-dead potted fern and discovered a perfectly serviceable footstool beneath it. Pulling her cardigan sleeve over her hand, she dusted it off and sat down.

"Brilliant!" Irma said, opening her eyes. "I've been looking for that footstool since the eighties. I remember the night it went missing. I had a very large dinner party. Full of journalists. Everyone got frightfully p.i.s.sed and a few of them stayed over. In the morning the footstool had vanished. Naturally I always a.s.sumed one of them had filched it. Don't ever date a journalist, darling. They're dreadful people. Cheap. Unhygienic."

Meredith said nothing. She placed her chin in her upturned palms and rested one elbow on each knee. Leonard Cohen continued his droning description of a nude girl's bottom. If you tuned out the words, he sounded like a man delivering a eulogy for a person he didn't particularly like.

"Care for a nip?" Irma indicated the bottle of Limoncello balanced on the sofa near her gnarled and naked feet.

"I'll have water." Meredith rose and wove her way around the stacks of magazines and books toward the kitchenette sink. "Want some?"

Irma's eyes fluttered open again. "Ucch. Silly Moo, you know I loathe water."

Irma was always reminding Meredith of things she supposedly knew, but didn't actually know at all. Had no way of knowing.

Meredith searched for a gla.s.s (there were mugs, but she had an aversion to drinking anything cold out of an opaque vessel) and eventually found one at the back of the oven. She rinsed it out with the last bit of dish soap and dried it with a tea towel. Filling it took ages. When the water from the faucet finally did pour steadily, it came out warm and full of suspicious-looking white clouds, which her mother a.s.sured her was only gas. Unconvinced, Meredith poured the water down the sink. The drain belched in protest. Tomorrow she would have to go buy some Evian.

"You know, he was the reason why I sent you to boarding school in Canada," Irma said.

"Who?"

"Leonard, of course." Irma seemed suddenly exasperated. "I met him in Montreal at a reading in the early seventies. You were just a wee thing. He was so charming, just like the young Dustin Hoffman, only with more s.e.xual confidence. He had a son about your age and the two of you played together. Don't you remember?"

"No."

"Anyway, we had such a nice time, I thought it would be lovely for you to grow up Canadian. Icicles, s...o...b..ll fights, that sort of thing."

"You sent me to school in Canada because you flirted with Leonard Cohen?"

"I did a great deal more than flirt with him, my duck."

Meredith pushed her hands through her hair and tugged on the ends. "Please-don't. I really don't want to hear about it. Just, why Toronto?"

"Fewer French people. You know I detest the French. Completely humourless."

Meredith picked up the bottle of Limoncello and poured some into her empty water gla.s.s.

"That's an awful lot, darling. Are you sure you need that much?"

Meredith brought the drink to her lips. It was almost unbearably sweet but somehow tart at the same time, like those sour gobstoppers you bought as a kid that were meant to give you a funny face from sucking them.

Meredith sat down on the footstool again and balanced her drink on her knee.

"Listen, I have something to ask you. Remember when we used to go and feed the rabbits in Holland Park?"

"Of course! You named the black one Peter, and you thought there was only one-of course there were probably thousands, but I didn't have the heart to tell you. It was terribly cute."

"What I was wondering was, did you ever let anyone else take me? To feed the rabbits, I mean? Like maybe a boyfriend of yours, or another man?"

Irma raised herself up on a throw cushion and turned her head toward Meredith. "Why would you ask such a thing?"

"It's just that I have this memory of a man. He's holding my hand, in the park. It's not a bad memory or anything. That's the thing. It's actually quite a nice memory. The only problem is, I can't remember who the man is, and I was wondering..."

"No."

"What do you mean, 'no'?"

"I mean, I told you-your father is dead. If you choose not to believe me, that's your problem. But don't expect me to reinforce your delusions."

"Who was he, then?"

"I told you. He was a dashing American film director. We had a drunken s.h.a.g in his pool house during a party. I left around three a.m. and the next thing I heard he was found floating facedown in his pool. b.l.o.o.d.y idiot."