The Stand-In by Deborah Moggach

Author:Deborah Moggach [Deborah Moggach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Five

YOU START A love affair in the Warwick because it’s so private. And you break it off in the Plaza, because it’s so public you can’t beat each other up. Somebody had told me that, once. The Four Seasons Hotel at teatime seemed about as public as you could get. Who could start a fight amongst dainty cups of Earl Grey? He’d planned it all out, the bastard.

I dressed that morning with great deliberation. My face looked pinched; unhappiness had desexed me; it had aged me alarmingly. I couldn’t bear to hear what he had to say.

I stood in the middle of the carpet. I felt utterly exhausted, and I hadn’t even met him yet. There were ten hours to go. What if he told me that the thing with Lila wasn’t serious, he was just using her to get into the movie business? Could I believe that? What if he told me that this was just a mad fling, and that he’d come back to me in the end?

I felt sick. I pushed some more bangles onto my wrist, and brushed my hair. For the hundredth time I asked myself: what would Lila do if I told her the truth, that Trev and I had been lovers for the past two years? How would she react? Would she be outraged, that he had lied to her and that, by doing so, he had shown himself capable of lying to her again? Would she be sorry for me and break it off? Or would she just say to me, ‘Tough shit, cookie-face. That’s the way it crumbles’? They had both betrayed me terribly.

At seven o’clock I drove to the location. We were shooting a scene on Rodeo Drive. Jane Eyre goes into a jeweller’s shop to get her watch-strap mended. Whilst she is standing at the counter Mr Rochester and Blanche drive up in his Jaguar XJ-S convertible, park outside, enter the shop and choose an engagement ring. You might think it sounds unlikely for a shrink to get her watch-strap repaired in Van Clees & Arpels, but there you go.

It was a complex scene to light, because the shop was an Aladdin’s cave of precious jewels. They winked at me; they hurt my eyes. I stood for hours at the counter, resting my hands on its glass top. Jon, the cinematographer, shouted instructions to Andy, the gaffer, and his scurrying crew. They darted around, pulling clothes-pegs off their t-shirts and pinning up screens and filters.

‘I’m getting a kick off that necklace, move it to the left . . . Lose that piece of white paper, next to the cash register . . .’

I’m losing you, the love of my life.

I stood there, numb as a cow waiting at the slaughter-house.

‘Soyou’re an actress, then?’ Trev, wandering around my living room, picking up books and inspecting them. His jeans were torn at the knee. ‘Should I know you then?’

‘Only if you want to.’

His grin, flashing.

A light-meter was held in front of my face, impertinently close.

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