Читать книгу Fame and Wuthering Heights - Эмили Бронте, Emily Bronte - Страница 19

‘I’m not asking for directions again, OK? I am not doing it.’

Chuck MacNamee folded his bulging arms across his broad chest with an air of finality. A fifty-seven-year-old ex-marine, Chuck did not, as he was fond of telling his fellow crew members, ‘take any shit.’ He’d worked in the film business for fifteen years as a driver/set builder/security guard/jack of all trades, ever since he got out of prison (a small matter of a credit fraud and a particularly humourless judge), and Dorian Rasmirez had given him the chance that no one else would, hiring him as a runner on Love and Regrets. Fanatically loyal to Dorian, and generally beloved on set as a good-natured practical joker, even Chuck had his limits.

He’d spent the last four hours trying to drive an articulated lorry through country lanes so narrow they’d have been hard pressed to accommodate an overweight donkey. He’d already stopped twice to ask directions from old men with impenetrable accents, and each time he’d been sent still deeper into the wilds of rural Derbyshire. And, throughout this wild goose chase, he’d been harangued every five minutes by Deborah Raynham, a twenty-two-year-old ‘cameraperson’, Christ preserve us, who kept sighing and mumbling, ‘If you’d only look at the map…’ under her breath.

They had now reached a T-junction in a ridiculously pretty village, tantalizingly called ‘Loxley’. But was there a sign to Loxley Hall? Was there a sign to anywhere? Was there fuck.

‘Fine,’ said Deborah, flinging the crumpled Ordnance Survey map on the floor of the cab in a fit of temper. ‘I’ll ask then. You stay here and sulk like a five-year-old.’

Deborah was not especially pretty in Chuck’s opinion: too short and pale with a snub nose and mousy brown hair that she wore scraped back in a tight bun. But when she got angry there was a certain fieriness to her that seemed to animate her features in a not-unattractive way. Chuck thought how irritated Deborah would be if she knew what he was thinking, and smiled.

‘I’m glad you find this funny,’ Deborah snapped, opening the passenger door and jumping down onto the wet grass of the village green. ‘Let’s hope Mr Rasmirez shares your wacky sense of humour.’

Unlike the rest of the crew, Deborah was not a fan of Chuck MacNamee. He’d sat next to her on the flight from LA, fallen instantly asleep and proceeded to snore like a fat fucking walrus for ten straight hours. No one in that cabin had got a wink of sleep. Then, once they’d arrived in England, red-eyed with exhaustion, Chuck had immediately appointed himself head of operations, ordering the camera crew around like a tyrannical ship’s captain, but always saving his most patronizing asides for Deborah. Every other sentence began with: ‘When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, missy …’ Missy? The guy was a total dinosaur. And, to top it all off, he had the navigational skills of a deaf bat after one too many Jack Daniel’s.

Wuthering Heights was the first feature film Deborah had ever worked on. She was wildly excited about meeting Dorian Rasmirez, and hopefully impressing him with her work, her professionalism. But now, thanks to Cap’n Chuck, she and her crew were going to arrive so late they would almost certainly lose the first day’s shooting. Directors rarely took kindly to this sort of mishap.

On the plus side, Deborah had never been to England before. She’d actually never been out of the States, although she had no intention of admitting this to Chuck MacNamasshole. It was a delight to discover that the British countryside really was like something out of a Beatrix Potter book. Loxley village was enchanting, with its stream and its little bridge and a brightly painted maypole with ribbons standing proud in the middle of the green. As she stepped out of the cab, Deborah heard the ancient church clock strike three. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the intoxicating smell of newly mown grass and fresh, floral summer air, and said a silent prayer of thanks that she’d landed this job. It was hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago she’d woken up in smog-ridden Culver City.

‘Afternoon, my love. What can I get for you?’

The old woman behind the counter at the village shop was fat and friendly. Her hair was blue – literally blue, as bright and bold as an M&M, which was a little disconcerting – but her accent was intelligible, to Deborah’s great relief.

‘I’m looking for Loxley Hall. I wondered if you might be able to direct me?’

The old woman’s face lit up. Marjorie Johns had run Loxley Village Stores for the last thirty-five years, and the most exciting thing to happen in all that time was when Des Lynam had popped in one Sunday morning for his paper, back in 1987. But this? This was something else. An American accent in Loxley could only mean one thing: this girl must be one of the film people. From Hollywood! Word that Tish Crewe was hiring out Loxley as a film set had inevitably got out in the village. For the last three weeks the talk in The Carpenter’s Arms had been of little else.

‘I can do better than that, my darling.’ Bustling out from behind the counter, Marjorie shooed her one other customer out of the shop with a brusque, ‘Not now, Wilf’, turned the sign on the door to ‘CLOSED’ and positively beamed at Deborah. ‘I can take you up there myself.’

Deborah Raynham would probably have been relieved to know that, less than three miles away, Dorian Rasmirez was having an equally trying time locating his location.

‘Fuck!’ Slamming his fist down on the dashboard of his rented Volkswagen Golf, Dorian cursed the British for their obsession with gear sticks. Was the whole country stuck in the fucking Dark Ages? ‘Fuck, fuck and double fucking FUCK.’

The Hertz office at Manchester Airport had had no budget or mid-range automatic cars available when Dorian showed up this morning. His choice had been to pay fifteen hundred a week for a luxury automatic sports car he didn’t need, or two hundred for a ‘reliable’ dark green manual Golf GTI. He’d taken the Golf, smugly congratulating himself for his thriftiness, and proceeded to stall the damn thing approximately every five minutes on the apparently endless drive out to Loxley Hall. No one had thought fit to warn him that rural Derbyshire could only be navigated by means of single-lane roads about the width of your average drinking straw, many of them set at gradients at which one would usually expect to use crampons. Nor had he been prepared for the baffling lack of signposts (one sign per five junctions seemed to be the policy), or the thick accents of the two locals from whom he had misguidedly asked directions.

Leaning back in the driver’s seat, he took a deep breath and willed himself to calm down. OK, so he was hours late, on his way to a location he’d paid well over the odds for, despite having only seen it in photographs. Why? I must have been mad! But at least the scenery was beautiful. This time his car had spluttered to a halt at the top of a rise, right where the narrow lane opened onto a gloriously wide vista. Below Dorian, the Hope Valley spread out like an emerald carpet, criss-crossed with the glinting silver threads of the river Derwent and its myriad tiny tributaries. The landscape was an intoxicating mixture of the bleak and wild, up on the fells themselves, and the rich, pastoral milk-and-honey beauty of the valley floor, with its gold stone villages, lush farmland and pockets of ancient woodland, a tapestry of old England.

Dorian had arrived in England two days ago, and spent most of his waking hours since then meeting with his London bankers, Coutts, trying to get them to increase the already very substantial loan they’d made him a few months ago. He’d been booked on the early flight to Manchester this morning but, thanks to a fraught dawn phone call with Chrissie in Romania, he’d missed the plane. Saskia had a low-grade fever, apparently, and Chrissie was demanding that Dorian fly home to join her at their daughter’s bedside.

‘But honey,’ Dorian protested, ‘you just told me the doctor said it wasn’t dangerous.’

‘Not yet,’ said Chrissie darkly. ‘What if she takes a turn for the worse?’

Dorian bit his lip and counted to ten. ‘By the time I land she’ll probably be over it. I’ll have to turn around and come right back again. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Oh, I see.’ He could hear the resentment in Chrissie’s voice. ‘So what you’re saying is your work is more important to you than your child.’

‘No! Of course not. Saskia’s far more important—’

‘So come home.’

‘Honey, be reasonable. Today’s the first day of set-up on location. I have twenty crew arriving. My cast’ll be here in a week, and you know how much there is to get done before we can start rolling. I can’t just come home on a whim every time there’s a problem.’

In retrospect, his use of the word ‘whim’ had probably been a mistake. In any event, he was already exhausted by the time he finally landed in Manchester, with Chrissie’s screams still ringing in his ears. The subsequent three hours spent chasing his tail round the Derbyshire countryside had done little to improve his temper.

Pulling up on the handbrake, he looked again at the crumpled map on the passenger seat. According to this, he was practically on top of Loxley Hall. He prayed that when he finally got there the owner wouldn’t want to chew his ear off about taking care of the place, or lecture him about his crew remembering to take their boots off when they came inside. They were saving money by staying at the house, rather than pitching camp in local hotels, an arrangement that would also make it easier to keep a lid on the inevitable production gossip. Even the actors would be sleeping on site. Unfortunately, however, the owner had made it a condition of the deal that she too be allowed to remain on the property throughout the shoot, a proviso that made Dorian’s heart sink.

Letitia Crewe. That was her name. It sounded like something out of an Agatha Christie novel. Dorian could picture Loxley’s chatelaine now: a meddling old bag in twinset and pearls, bossing everybody about like the Queen while her hunting dogs chewed up his expensive equipment.

He turned dejectedly back to his map. One problem at a time.

Back at the house, Tish was having a difficult morning. Rainbow, the sweet girl from the location company, had told her not to worry about the film crew’s arrival.

‘You won’t know we’re there,’ she assured her. ‘Two reps from my firm will be on site, plus another two from Dracula Productions. We’ll do everything: set up the catering vans and portable washrooms, inspect the trailers, plumb in the showers …’

‘You’re bringing your own showers?’ said Tish.

Rainbow laughed. ‘Of course. And laundry facilities. This is a sixteen-man crew, plus nine live-in cast. Trust me, a private house cannot deal with that amount of laundry.’

Tish was to provide beds in the house for Dorian Rasmirez and four of the film’s main stars, including Viorel Hudson and the infamous Sabrina Leon. Everyone else would sleep, eat, bathe and generally exist in a makeshift gypsy camp in the grounds. Apparently, half the crew were still lost somewhere in the Derbyshire countryside but, true to her word, Rainbow had shown up at Loxley at the crack of dawn with the other half, hammering and drilling and installing like a troupe of whirling dervishes. Unless one were deaf, or blind, or ideally both, it was hard to see how exactly one was supposed not to notice them. Or how one was supposed to relax, when an important and no doubt irascible Hollywood director one had never met was about to turn up on one’s doorstep, there were no clean towels anywhere in the house, and one’s son was tearing down the hallways shrieking with excitement and yelling, ‘Ben Ten Alien Force! Jet Ray!’ at anyone who came within ten feet of him. Thank God it was only Mr Rasmirez arriving today, thought Tish. Abel would need a shot of horse tranquillizer before the actors turned up.

‘Oh my goodness. I think it’s him. Is it him?’

Tish was upstairs in the blue bedroom, one of Loxley’s less shabby, vaguely more presentable guest suites, plumping up the pillows for the third time in as many minutes and driving Mrs D mad with last-minute requests – wouldn’t a Hollywood director expect a soap dish without chips on it? Did Mrs D think it wise to leave a dyptique Figuier candle by the bed, or was that a blatant fire hazard? Through the open window, she saw a dark green Golf pulling up, its gears screaming for mercy before the engine finally cut out with an unhealthy sounding ‘pop’.

‘Whoever it is, they’re a rotten driver,’ said Mrs D, smoothing down the Liberty bedspread and shooing Tish out of the room. Mrs Drummond had come to terms with Tish’s decision to allow Loxley to be ‘invaded’, as she put it, by a swarm of ghastly Americans. She understood the economic rationale. But she didn’t have to like it.

‘Would he drive a hatchback, do you think?’ asked Tish. ‘I’d rather imagined a red Ferrari.’

The doorbell rang. Embarrassed at herself for being so flustered, Tish patted down her flyaway hair and hurried downstairs to answer it.

Standing outside the door, on flagstones that looked as old as the surrounding hills, Dorian gazed up in wonder at the house. It was even better close up than it had been from the end of the drive, and a thousand times better than it had looked in Rainbow’s pictures. It was grander than the Thrushcross Grange of his imagination, with its picture windows and turrets and exquisite, sweeping expanse of oak-dotted parkland but. from a cinematographer’s point of view, it was utter perfection. He couldn’t have asked for a more romantic house, a more English house. As you drove into the garden proper, you crossed a wide, dancing silver river by means of a positively Shakespearean stone bridge (what scenes could I shoot there, I wonder?). Even the yew hedges were a gift: dark and brooding and so thick they must have been planted when the house was built. From the second he saw Loxley, Dorian was in love. Suddenly last night’s row with Chrissie and the frustrations of his journey seemed to melt away, like stubborn pockets of snow in the spring sunshine.

No one had answered the doorbell. He pressed it again, picturing Loxley’s cantankerous elderly owner hobbling to the front door, a curse on her pursed, cat’s-arse lips. Moments later the door flew open. Dorian found himself face to face with a ravishingly pretty girl.

‘Hello,’ the girl smiled. ‘You must be Mr Rasmirez.’

‘That’s right.’ Dorian smiled back. He was glad to see the maids here were not expected to wear uniform. All that stuffy British upper-class posturing made him break out in hives. Indeed, if this girl’s clothes were anything to go by, Loxley Hall’s dress code made California look formal. In her late twenties, slim and petite, with a natural, tomboyish beauty that effortlessly outshone the surgically perfected look of LA girls, she was wearing cut-off jeans and espadrilles, and a faded pink T-shirt with some charity logo on it that reflected the pink of her cheeks and her incredible, wide, palest pink mouth. She wore no make-up, and her wild blonde hair was tied back with what looked suspiciously like a scrunched-up pair of panties. Tendrils kept escaping across her face, so that she was constantly blowing and swatting them away as she spoke.

‘Is Mrs Crewe at home? Letitia Crewe? I’m afraid I’m a little later than I anticipated. I—’

‘I’m Tish Crewe,’ said the girl, cheerfully extending an unmanicured hand.

Dorian was so surprised, he half expected to hear the anvil-like clang of his jaw hitting the floor, in true cartoon style. This girl owns this house? It took a good ten seconds for the WI battleaxe of his imagination to fade to black, and for him to regain the power of speech.

‘Hi,’ he stammered, dropping his battered suitcase and shaking Tish’s hand. ‘I’m Dorian Rasmirez.’

Trish looked at him curiously, and he realized he must have been staring. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘You’re not exactly what I expected.’

‘Nor are you,’ said Tish, grinning. ‘I thought you’d be driving a Ferrari.’

Just then, a battered-looking lorry rumbled through the gates, clattering its way over the bridge and pulling up behind Dorian.

‘Hey, boss, sorry we’re late.’ A burly-looking man jumped out of the cab, followed by an exhausted-looking young girl and … wasn’t that Mrs Johns from the village shop? ‘Our sat-nav lost the will to live somewhere north of Manchester.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Dorian. ‘So did mine. Miss Crewe, I’d like you to meet Chuck MacNamee, my crew director.’

Tish extended a hand. As she did so a small human missile appeared out of nowhere in the hallway behind her and flew directly into Dorian’s stomach, winding him and almost knocking him off his feet.

‘Oh my God,’ Tish gasped, ‘I am so sorry! Abel! Apologize to Mr Rasmirez this instant.’

The missile looked up sheepishly. For the second time in as many minutes, Dorian did a double take. Jesus. It’s Heathcliff. The little boy had jet-black hair and wary, watchful blue eyes.

‘Sorry,’ Abel said, a tad unconvincingly given his broad, cheeky smile. ‘I was being Ben Ten and you were the Alien Force.’

‘I do apologize.’ Tish blushed, as the boy spun around and ran off down the hall.

‘That’s quite all right,’ said Dorian. ‘We invading aliens are tougher than we look, you know.’

After Chuck, Deborah and the others had been introduced and driven round to the back of the house to join the rest of the crew, Tish took Dorian inside.

‘Sorry again about my son. He’s been terribly overexcited about all this,’ Tish explained. ‘I think the whole village is, to be honest. Heaven knows how Marjorie Johns managed to hijack your lorry already. Come on in.’

Dorian followed her into the hallway. It was considerably less grand inside than the façade of the house suggested. The floors were of the same, rough-hewn stone, more appropriate to a farmhouse than a stately home, and the staircase, though broad and sweeping, was visibly scratched and its runner stained. Kid-related detritus was everywhere: a three-wheeled scooter propped against an antique chest, a pair of muddy Wellington boots kicked off in a hurry into opposite corners, diecast trains lined up carefully at the foot of the stairs then abandoned for a more interesting game. Dorian thought of Saskia’s neatly ordered playroom at the Schloss. Chrissie had colour-coded every toy to within an inch of its life, no mean feat when everything was in varying shades of pink.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Tish, reading his mind.

‘Not at all,’ said Dorian, adding truthfully, ‘you don’t look old enough to have a son.’

‘I feel old enough, believe me.’ Tish rolled her eyes.

‘I noticed his accent,’ said Dorian. ‘Your husband …?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Tish. ‘I’m not married.’ Unbidden, an image of Michel and Fleur skipping down the aisle together hand in hand popped into her mind. She forced it aside.

‘Is he adopted?’

It was a very direct question from a total stranger, but, for some reason, Tish found it didn’t bother her. Something about Dorian’s manner, so respectful and gentle and not at all what she’d expected, put her at ease.

‘He is, yes.’

‘From Romania?’

Tish looked taken aback. ‘I’m impressed you could tell. Most people say he sounds Italian.’

Dorian shrugged. ‘I spend a lot of time in Romania, so I know the accent well.’

‘You’re joking?’ Few Americans outside the charity world had even heard of Romania, let alone spent time there. ‘How come?’

Dorian grimaced. ‘It’s kind of a long story.’

‘Sorry,’ said Tish, misinterpreting his facial expression as boredom. ‘Listen to me, wittering on about nothing when you’ve travelled halfway across the world to get here. Please, follow me. I’ll show you to your room.’

The rest of the afternoon passed in a whirlwind of activity. Tish struggled to get through Abel’s normal routine of weekend homework, supper and bath, while all through the house and grounds strange men and women tramped around with cameras and light meters and sound machines, politely but completely disrupting everything. Occasionally, Rainbow’s apologetic face would pop up at a window, assuring Tish that they were ‘nearly done’ and should be out of her hair ‘momentarily’, only to be distracted by Chuck MacNamee and Deborah Raynham arguing loudly behind her. Meanwhile, Mrs Johns from the village shop was still hanging around as dusk fell, in the hope of bumping into Viorel Hudson or Sabrina Leon, despite being told repeatedly by both Mrs Drummond and the crew that no actors were expected till the following Tuesday. It wasn’t until after Abel was in bed at eight, and Mrs Drummond had finished complaining for the umpteenth time about the house being like ‘Piccadilly Circus’ that Dorian Rasmirez reappeared, having not been seen since lunchtime.

Tish was in the kitchen, reheating yesterday’s kedgeree, when he walked in.

‘Hi there.’

Tish spun around. He’d changed out of the jeans and sweater he’d been wearing earlier into what Tish could only presume was an American’s idea of English country attire: green corduroy trousers, with matching green shirt, waistcoat and sports jacket, all topped off with a green-and-brown tweed flat cap. In one arm he held a Barbour jacket that still had the label attached, and in the other a pair of (green) Hunter wellies. Kermit the Frog goes stalking, thought Tish, stifling the urge to giggle.

‘You wouldn’t have a pair of scissors I could borrow, would you?’ Dorian gestured to the label on his coat. ‘Figured I might need this tomorrow. We’ll be doing test shots up at the farm all day. It’s beautiful up there by the way. You have an amazing property.’

‘Thanks.’ Tish opened a drawer and handed him some kitchen scissors. She contemplated explaining that Loxley wasn’t really her property at all, but then decided that a potted history of Jago’s various self-serving disappearing acts would only confuse things.

Dorian snipped off the tag and slipped the jacket on. ‘How do I look?’

Ridiculous, thought Tish, trying to think of a response she could say out loud. Eventually, she came up with, ‘Warm.’

‘Not really me, huh?’ Dorian smiled sheepishly, taking it off. ‘No offence, but is it supposed to smell like that?’

Tish turned around. ‘Shit!’ She’d forgotten all about the kedgeree on the hob. A mini-mushroom cloud of black, fishy smoke now hovered ominously over the frying pan. Pulling it off the heat with one hand and opening the window with the other, she looked down at the sticky blackened mess. ‘Oh well. Beans on toast, I suppose.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Dorian. ‘Why don’t I take you to that quaint little public house I saw on my way up here? It’s the least I can do after all your hospitality. The Woodmen or something, I think it was called.’

‘The Carpenter’s Arms?’ said Tish. ‘We can’t go there.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the minute anyone hears an American accent and sees you with me, you’ll be mobbed. I don’t think you quite appreciate just how little goes on in Loxley. Your film is the most exciting thing that’s happened here since the Norman invasion.’

‘Well, where then?’ said Dorian. ‘I’m starving. And, no offence, but I’m not sure how much faith I have in your cooking skills.’

Tish frowned but did not defend the indefensible. ‘Fine,’ she said, grabbing her car keys from the hook above the Aga. ‘I’ll ask Mrs D to watch Abel. Follow me.’

The King’s Arms in Fittleton was about ten miles from Loxley, a low-beamed, cosy village pub with squashy dog-eared sofas and a log fire that was constantly burning, even on summer evenings.

‘This is cute,’ said Dorian, nabbing an open table close to the fire. A few of the locals glanced round in mild curiosity when they heard his accent, but they soon resumed their interest in the tense game of darts going on to the left of the bar.

‘I haven’t been here in years,’ said Tish, ‘but the food’s supposed to be good.’ Dorian noticed that she pronounced the word ‘yars’. In movies he’d always found the upper-class British accent grating, but on Tish’s lips it was oddly charming and seemed quite unaffected. She ordered a fish pie from the blackboard. Dorian went for the moules marinières, and insisted on an expensive bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for the two of them. He ought to be exhausted. Starting with Chrissie’s five a.m. rant this morning, it had been a hell of a day. But for some reason he felt excited and revived. Both Loxley and Tish had been a pleasant surprise.

‘So. Tell me about your family,’ he asked. ‘You live in that incredible house on your own?’

‘I’m not on my own,’ said Tish, sipping her wine, which was delicious and tasted of gooseberries. ‘I have Abel and Mrs Drummond. And now all of you lot. It’s a veritable commune up there.’ She explained that she spent most of her time in Romania, and gave him the condensed version of her mother’s bohemian life in Rome and Jago’s latest Tibetan adventure.

‘A cave? He lives in a cave?’ Dorian cocked his head to one side.

He’s attractive, thought Tish. Not handsome, like Michel, but sort of joli-laid. An American Gerard Depardieu.

‘Would you care to elaborate?’

‘I’m not sure I can, much,’ said Tish. ‘My brother’s choices have never made a lot of sense to me. But you know, running an estate is hard work. I’m afraid that “incredible house” I live in has an incredible appetite for money. You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to run.’

‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ said Dorian, biting a chunk out of the warm bread the waitress had left on the table. He gave Tish a brief potted history of his own Romanian background, and how he’d come to inherit the long-lost family Schloss. Tish noticed the way his eyes lit up when he spoke about the castle and its treasures, and the way the light faded when he mentioned his wife, and how hard Chrissie had found the transition to life in Transylvania.

‘She’s an actress, you know, so she has that temperament.’

Tish didn’t know, but nodded understandingly anyway.

‘There’s a part of her that still craves excitement and adventure,’ explained Dorian. ‘The Schloss is indescribably beautiful, but it can be lonely, especially when I’m away and Chrissie’s on her own with Saskia.’

‘Saskia?’

‘Our daughter.’ Dorian picked up the last remaining mussel from his bowl and sucked it out of its shell. ‘She’s three.’

Tish thought it odd that they’d been talking about his family life in Romania for fifteen minutes, and this was the first time he’d mentioned a child. ‘You must miss her.’

‘Sure,’ he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Reaching in his wallet, he pulled out a photograph and handed it to Tish. She expected to see a little girl’s picture, but instead it was a professional headshot of an attractive blonde woman with tough, slightly angular features. To Tish’s eyes, the woman in the photograph looked cold as ice, but maybe it was just a bad picture.

‘Chrissie,’ said Dorian proudly. ‘Stunning, isn’t she?’

‘Gorgeous,’ lied Tish, wondering if Michel carried Fleur’s picture around in his wallet and showed it to every stranger he encountered. I have to stop thinking about Michel.

‘Tell me about Curcubeu,’ said Dorian, abruptly changing the subject. ‘What exactly is your work there?’

‘Anything and everything,’ said Tish. ‘There’s so much need.’ And she was off, waxing lyrical about the failings of the Romanian government and the shameful neglect of the country’s abandoned children.

‘That’s incredibly impressive,’ said Dorian when she’d finished, ordering a sticky toffee pudding to share and a second bottle of wine, despite Tish’s protests. ‘Not many girls your age would give up a life of privilege back home to go and do something like that.’

Tish frowned. ‘You mustn’t think me some sort of saint. I like the work. Oradea’s a dump, but Romania’s got some strange magic to it, something that keeps drawing you back there – despite the corruption and the bureaucracy and the godawful winters. But I imagine I don’t need to tell you that.’

‘No.’ Dorian smiled.

‘Strange, isn’t it, our paths crossing like this?’ said Tish. ‘And both of us having a Romanian connection?’

They talked solidly for another hour and a half, about Romania, life and literature – Tish had almost as encyclopaedic a knowledge of the Brontë sisters’ work as Dorian did, and could practically recite Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre – and about Viorel Hudson and Sabrina Leon, Dorian’s Heathcliff and Cathy.

‘Viorel has a Romanian connection too, doesn’t he?’ asked Tish.

‘You might not want to bring that up when you meet him,’ warned Dorian. ‘I tried, but Hudson has a low opinion of the motherland.’

Tish, who spent her life in Romanian orphanages like the one she assumed Viorel Hudson had been dumped in, didn’t blame him.

‘I’ll say this for him, though: he’s a terrific actor,’ said Dorian. ‘The minute I thought about doing this movie, I knew I wanted to cast Viorel. He was born for the role.’

‘And Sabrina?’ asked Tish. ‘I’ve only ever seen her in gossip magazines, so I don’t know if she’s a good actress or not, but she doesn’t look like an obvious choice for Cathy.’

‘Not looks-wise, perhaps. But if you want someone as wilful and spoiled and frankly insane as Catherine Earnshaw, Sabrina’s your girl.’

‘Catherine wasn’t insane,’ protested Tish. ‘She was sensible. She chose a decent man over a wicked one.’

Dorian looked at Tish quizzically. ‘You admire that, do you? Being sensible rather than passionate?’

Tish blushed. ‘I think passion can be overrated.’ Suddenly the conversation seemed to have taken a rather personal turn. ‘But I suppose, in an ideal world, one wouldn’t have to choose.’

There was an awkward silence. Tish changed the subject.

‘Is she as pretty as she looks in the pictures?’

‘Sabrina? About a hundred times prettier,’ said Dorian truthfully. ‘That’s part of the problem. For Sabrina and Cathy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that when you look like that, no one ever says no to you.’

By the time they left it was almost midnight.

‘I’ll drive if you like,’ said Dorian.

Remembering the sound of his gear-changing when he’d arrived this morning, not to mention the fact that the drive from Manchester had taken him three and a half hours, Tish declined the offer.

‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘You drank all that second bottle so you’re definitely over the limit.’

They made it back to Loxley without incident. Tish took them home the back way, via Home Farm, which looked even dourer, bleaker and more soul-wrenching by moonlight. Dorian’s heart leapt at the sight of it. That’s my Wuthering Heights. He’d been dreaming this movie for two years now. Today, he’d felt as though he was walking into his own dream. Tomorrow, he would spend all day up at the farm, measuring light and distance and planning the exterior long-shots with Chuck and the camera crew. He couldn’t wait.

‘I’m sorry about all the disruption,’ he said to Tish once they got back to the house. ‘There’ll be a few days of craziness, but once the cast get here next week and we start shooting on a regular schedule, everything should calm down. We’ll try not to get under your feet too much.’

‘You mustn’t worry about me,’ said Tish. ‘Abel and I are quite used to chaos, believe me. Besides, you’ve paid for the house. For the next eight weeks you must consider it yours.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dorian, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Good night.’

Ten minutes later, tucked up in her own bed, Tish reflected on how strange life could be. The very fact of someone coming to Loxley Hall to shoot a film in the first place was unlikely enough. But that that person should turn out to be a Romanian … how small-worldy was that? She didn’t really believe in fate. And yet it did seem uncanny that Dorian Rasmirez should have found his way to Loxley and, in a very real sense, saved them from falling into the abyss. My knight in shining armour.

Wriggling her toes under the blankets, luxuriating in the warmth of her bed, she thought about Dorian’s kind, animated face, the odd mixture of anxiety and love with which he’d spoken about his wife, and his strange detachment from his daughter. After weeks of worrying what he’d be like, she was relieved and surprised to find that she liked him.

Perhaps this summer wasn’t going to be such an ordeal after all?