Free Sextet by Sally Beauman Page B

the Qantas flight?’ Rowland sighed. ‘Tell me you didn’t do that, Colin…’
    ‘I did, I did . The woman on the plane—I told him the whole story. Twice . I want to die…’
    ‘Never mind…’ Rowland tried to sound encouraging. ‘Things must have improved. What about work? Did you tell him—’
    ‘Work?’ Colin gave a bitter, mirthless cry. ‘I never mentioned work. I meant to, obviously. I was going to tell him my Visconti anecdote. I thought that might go down well. But I didn’t. I just sicked up all this stuff . Feelings—I talked about feelings. I could die of embarrassment. He’ll never use me now. I told him things I didn’t even know until that exact moment. I wasn’t even looking at him; I was too intimidated. I was just staring at those blasted asthma inhalers and spilling out my soul.’
    Colin’s Sophoclean gloom proved unfounded, and his predictions were not fulfilled. Court subsequently offered him the job of this movie’s location manager, but several more weeks, another meeting and innumerable telephone calls later, he still had not seen a script, even a draft script, even an outline, and he still did not know the name of the nineteenth-century novel Court intended to film.
    Others, he discovered, on making delicate enquiries, were similarly in the dark. Court, it seemed, was hard to pin down, but had been flitting in and out of London over the past months and seeing people. He had approached the doyenne of British casting directors; he might have secured the services of a legendary, autocratic and inspirational designer; he had had talks with technicians and SFX specialists; agents had been lunched; certain actors had been wooed—even the name of Nic Hicks had been mentioned—and now gusts of rumour, counter-rumour, expectation and surmise had begun to waft around London’s fashionable watering holes. A tremendous, inchoate energy had been released, but just as, on each of these flitting visits, it swirled up into a dust-storm of excitement and activity, Tomas Court would depart.
    He would depart to a film festival in Berlin, or to Los Angeles for post-production work, then sneak previews of Willow Song . He would swoop off to Reykjavik for two days, or Oslo for three, or Athens for an hour and a half. Alternatively—and as Rowland understood it, this was the present situation—he would be holed up in the ranch he had recently bought in northern Montana, situated near the Glacier National Park, and consisting of 10,000 acres of rock, river and trees—this according to Colin, who had never been there.
    These absences, as far as Rowland could understand, made little difference since, wherever he was, whether in a limousine, or mid-air, or holed up in his wilderness stronghold, Tomas Court communicated . From him, or from one of his numerous aides, assistants and sidekicks, issued a daily, sometimes an hourly, flow of letters, faxes and calls. The tenor of these, Rowland gathered, was terse. In person and on paper, Tomas Court seemed a man of few words. Of the few words employed, his favourite was ‘No’.
    Extracting information from him, Colin had rapidly discovered, was as difficult as finding a vein to extract blood from in a sinewy arm; when the vein was located, the blood refused to flow. Nor was he alone in this difficulty, Colin found, encountering the famous actor Nic Hicks one evening in a theatre bar.
    ‘Don’t ask me ,’ Hicks said languidly, eyeing Colin and affecting indifference—Hicks was currently very hot indeed, and liked to emphasize this; but Colin, who had known him virtually since birth, was not deceived. Neither man liked the other. ‘He’s talked to my agent, obviously,’ Nic Hicks went on. ‘Played his cards very close to his chest. I get so sick of those power games, don’t you? I said to her, Yawn, yawn—just tell him to send the script and I’ll read it. Meantime, darling, he can join the queue.’
    ‘Quite right,’ Colin replied, stoutly