Free Debutantes by Cora Harrison

film.’
    ‘You’re quite right,’ said Sir Guy. ‘What you want in a film is action – something that can be conveyed by the expressions on the faces and then just summarized in the storyboards. One of these days someone will invent a camera that can record sound at the same time as filming but until that happens, you have to work inside the limitations of your medium. Do you understand what I mean by that?’
    Daisy nodded. ‘That’s the way I think,’ she said. ‘I find myself reading books like that these days – often you could do a chapter with just one shot and a caption. I was reading Wuthering Heights the other day and I was thinking of how I could film it. The trouble is that I have no actors! Violet looks good, but she can’t act.’
    ‘Use what you’ve got,’ advised Sir Guy. ‘If I were you I would film people doing what they do naturally, then pick out good shots and try to fit a story around them. Use the house, the lake, the woods – everything. This party now – if you film that, you will probably come up with a story to fit it. And remember, no one worries about having an original plot. Good heavens, the number of versions of “Anna the Adventuress” that I’ve seen during the last three years!’

Chapter Seven

    Poppy and Daisy shared one of the biggest bedrooms in the house. When they were babies, the yellow room, as it was called, had been turned into a night nursery with a bed for the nurse as well as cots for the two little girls. It was a lovely room with five big windows, three of them facing south and the other two catching the early morning sun from the east. The wallpaper was a design of soft yellow primroses and the curtains matched in colour. Both were now faded but the place was still pretty with a yellow-painted dressing room attached to the main room, attractive white-painted storage cupboards and wardrobes, and a white marble fireplace.
    Normally the room was stone cold, but tonight the four sisters were determined to be warm and a huge fire of beech logs burned brightly. The luxury was so great that Daisy had earlier decided to spend part of each day picking up twigs and fallen branches from the woods around the house and saving them for a fire – at least for an hour or so in the evenings.
    But now she could think of little other than the four dresses.
    ‘If ever this mysterious Elaine turns up there are plenty of bits of material from her dresses left over. Look – I’ve filled the sewing basket with them just in case we need any last-minute touches.’ Violet was in an excited, giggly mood. The relief of having the four dresses ready on time overwhelmed her. ‘I’ve just done the hems on the sewing machine,’ she added, holding up Rose’s dress. ‘Great-Aunt Lizzie will have a fit when she sees them – she thinks a hem should be invisibly slip-stitched, but I saw a dress in one of the fashion magazines where the hems were tiny and you could see the stitching on them.’
    Poppy was already getting into her dress. She was the one who had shown the least interest during the making of them, but now her face was flushed with excitement.
    ‘Thank you, dear Elaine, for the stockings!’ She addressed the eastern windows and then pulled on the white silk stockings. None of the sisters had ever possessed a pair of silk stockings before. Rose had dabbed their sensible tan-coloured shoes with a tennis shoe whitening liquid so at least they would not look too bad early on in the evening.
    Poppy’s dress was the simplest of all. It was very straight and short, with a high neckline in front and cut low at the back, right down to her shoulder blades, But the sheen and gloss of the white satin, coupled with Poppy’s extraordinarily beautiful flame-coloured hair, made her look like a society beauty. She stared at herself in the mirror and nodded her head firmly.
    ‘Daisy, you will just have to bob my hair. The dress is good, but with that hair streaming around my