Free Touched by Joanna Briscoe

Gregory. ‘You are beautiful,’ he said, as though reading her mind. He beckoned the director, who ignored him. ‘Prannet,’ Gregory muttered, then hailed him loudly and called out his name. He came over.
    Gregory held out his hand. ‘Friends of Miss Lyn,’ he said lazily. ‘Mother of the kid actress is here too. Where’s a bloke to get a drink? Ah, thank you.’
    He poured Rowena and himself a large cup of the red wine someone had brought in. He was the perfect gentleman, thought Rowena. He looked after her. He strolled over to the table where the director stood, grabbed a bottle and refilled her cup, and yet, sitting beside her he didn’t touch her and he said nothing further of a flattering nature. He chatted to her and to others around them, discussing the film, his attention equally shared: she did not have to resist him, which perversely made her want him to flirt with her. Lally Lyn arrived in a houndstooth skirt that was so short, Rowena gasped to herself. ‘Miss Lyn has forgotten to attend her wardrobe fitting,’ Gregory announced, and Lally paused, wide-eyed, then laughed loudly.
    There were many delays, much cursing, tension and cynical joking. I am quite, quite gone, thought Rowena, fuzzily, and she wanted to lean against Gregory, but he was talking to the editor. He returned to his seat, grinned at her, and she sat back in delectable anticipation as the film rolled. It was a black-and-white picture, a small British production, and the green seemed barrel shaped and quaint, fringed by over-dark elms. There stood Jennifer, hands held in front of her as she listened and nodded at Lally Lyn’s animated importuning. Rowena tried to deny it to herself, but Jennifer looked puzzlingly ordinary. The camera tightened in on her as she said her one line. In truth, she was a disappointment. The lighting, or the celluloid process itself, somehow failed to capture the breathtaking aspect of her physiognomy. In fact, she looked almost strange, a little disturbing, the eyes that were so glitteringly kingfisher in real life like an empty glare. Rosemary and Bob were just recognisable in the background with other village children.
    â€˜Jolly good,’ whispered Gregory without conviction.
    The camera panned to the cottages alongside the green and Rowena felt the satisfying swoop of familiarity as real life played back to her, and then she thought she saw something. She stared, and blinked. There was a face in a roof window of her house. It had gone. She must have imagined it, she thought; must have put together shadows to make features.
    The minutes of film juddered to a halt.
    â€˜You’ll now see endless takes of the same scene,’ whispered Gregory, and Rowena nodded and concentrated. She couldn’t blink. She didn’t even breathe. And there, as the camera panned swiftly over the cottages beside the green, there was a face in a skylight of The Farings. In its fleetingness she could not be entirely certain – such a tiny detail that no one else would have seen it – but it seemed to her, in a fragment of a second, that the film had caught a face in the shadows of the window, a head in ruffles of lace, in a lace cap, the eyes staring out over the horizon. The crying wrinkled face came back to her, the haunted eyes of homelessness, but of course it was Eva, dressed in her grandmother’s clothes. She looks so like her, Rowena thought miserably, and she leaned against Gregory.
    â€˜What’s this?’ said Gregory, glancing down at her with an amused expression, then he put his arm around her.
    â€˜I – I feel a little faint,’ she said.
    â€˜Just watch the last takes and we can leave,’ he murmured.
    The same scene ran again, Jennifer delivering her line with no more conviction. Rowena stared at the screen. This time, the face wasn’t there. She frowned. She watched the next take, and all that followed, and the face was no