He spread his arms wide, embracing the room. ‘They don’t know, they just don’t know what they’re seeing, do they? They’ve just no idea.’
‘Be quiet, Conrad, damn it,’ I said.
He went on wheezing away in uncontainable chuckles. ‘My dear boy. I didn’t know you could do it. Off the set, that is. Talk about a lot of tame tigers eating out of your hand... Just wait until Evan hears.’
‘He isn’t likely to,’ I said comfortably. ‘Not from five thousand or so miles away.’
He shook with amusement. ‘Oh no, dear boy. He’s right here in Johannesburg. Practically in the next street.’
‘He can’t be!’
‘We’ve been here since Sunday.’ He choked off the last of his laughter and wiped his eyes with his thumb. ‘Come and have some lunch, dear boy, and I’ll tell you all about it.’
I looked at my watch. Twelve thirty.
‘In a while, then. I’ve still got one more bit of taping to do, when they get hold of a spare microphone.’
Roderick Hodge detached himself from a group by one of the windows and brought a decorative female over with him, and Clifford Wenkins dead-heated with Conrad’s drink.
The girl, the would-be interviewer from the woman’s radio programme, had the sort of face that would have been plain on a different personality: but she also had a bushy mop of curly brown hair, enormous yellow-rimmed sunglasses, and a stick-like figure clad in an orange and tan checked trouser suit. The spontaneous friendliness in her manner saved her from any impression of caricature. Conrad took in her colour temperature with an appreciative eye, while explaining he had been engaged on four films with me in the recent past.
Roderick’s attention sharpened like an adjusted focus.
‘What is he like to work with?’ he demanded.
‘That’s not fair,’ I said.
Neither Roderick nor Conrad paid any attention. Conrad looked at me judiciously, pursed his lips, lifted up a hand, and bent the fingers over one by one as he rolled his tongue lovingly around the words.
‘Patient, powerful, punctual, professional, and puritanical.’ And aside to me he stage-whispered, ‘How’s that?’
‘Ham,’ I said.
Roderick predictably pounced on the last one. ‘Puritanical. How do you mean?’
Conrad was enjoying himself. ‘All his leading ladies complain that he kisses them with art, not heart.’
I could see the headlines writing themselves in Roderick’s head. His eye was bright.
‘My sons don’t like it,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘When the elder one saw me in a film kissing someone who wasn’t his mother, he wouldn’t speak to me for a week.’
They laughed.
But at the time it had been far from funny. Peter had also started wetting his bed again at five years old and had cried a lot, and a child psychiatrist had told us it was because he felt insecure: he felt his foundations were slipping away, because Daddy kissed other ladies, and quarrelled with Mummy at home. It had happened so soon after Libby’s accident that we wondered whether he was also worrying about that: but we had never told him Libby had been ill because he had dropped her, and never intended to. One couldn’t burden a child with that sort of knowledge, because a pointless, unnecessary feeling of guilt could have distorted the whole of his development.
‘What did you do about that?’ the girl asked sympathetically.
‘Took him to some good clean horror films instead.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Conrad said.
Clifford Wenkins came twittering back from another of his darting foraging expeditions. Sweat still lay in pearl-sized beads in the furrows of his forehead. How did he cope, I vaguely wondered, when summer came.
He thrust a stick microphone triumphantly into my hands. Its lead ran back to the corner where the radio apparatus stood. ‘There we are... er... all fixed, I mean.’ He looked in unnecessary confusion from me to the girl. ‘There we are, Katya dear. Er... all ready, I think.’
I looked at Conrad. I said, ‘I learned just one word of Afrikaans at the races yesterday, and you can do it while I tape this interview.’
Conrad said suspiciously, ‘What word?’
‘Voetsek,’ I said conversationally.
They all split themselves politely. Voetsek meant bugger off.
Conrad’s chuckles broke out again like a recurring infection, when they explained.
‘If only Evan could see this...’ he wheezed.
‘Let’s forget Evan,’ I suggested.
Conrad put his hand on Roderick’s arm and took him away, each of them enjoying a separate joke.
Katya’s smallish eyes were laughing behind the enormous yellow specs. ‘And to think they said that at the airport you were the chilliest of cold fish...’
I gave her a sideways smile. ‘Maybe I was tired...’ I eyed the notebook she clutched in one hand. ‘What sort of things are you going to ask?’
‘Oh, only the same as the others, I should think.’ But there was a mischievous glint of teeth that boded no good.
‘All set, Katya,’ a man called from the row of electronic boxes and dials. ‘Any time you say.’
‘Right.’ She looked down at the notebook and then up at me. I was about three feet away from her, holding my glass in one hand and the microphone in the other. She considered this with her curly head on one side, then took a large step closer. Almost touching.
‘That’s better, I think. There will be too much background noise if either of us is too far from that microphone. It’s an old one, by the looks of it. Oh, and maybe I’d better hold it. You look a bit awkward...’ She took the microphone and called across the room. ‘O.K., Joe, switch on.’
Joe switched on.
Katya jerked appallingly from head to foot, arched backwards through the air and fell to the floor.
The murmuring peaceful faces turned, gasped, cried out, screwed themselves up in horror.
‘Switch off,’ I shouted urgently. ‘Switch everything off. At once.’
Roderick took two strides and bent over Katya with outstretched hands to help her, and I pulled him back.
‘Get Joe to switch that bloody microphone off first, or you will take the shock as well.’
The Joe in question ran over, looking ill.
‘I have,’ he said. ‘It’s off now.’
I thought that all, that any of them would know what to do, and do it. But they all just stood and knelt around looking at me, as if it were up to me to know, to do, to be the resourceful man in all those films who always took the lead, always...
Oh God, I thought.
Just look at them, I thought. And there was no time to waste. No time at all. She was no longer breathing.
I knelt down beside her and took her glasses off. Pulled open the neck of her shirt. Stretched her head back. Put my mouth on hers, and blew my breath into her lungs.
‘Get a doctor,’ Roderick said. ‘And an ambulance... Oh Christ... Hurry. Hurry...’
I breathed into her. Not too hard. Just with the force of breath. But over and over, heaving her chest up and down.
A lethal electric voltage stops the heart.
I tried to feel a pulse beating in her neck, but couldn’t find one. Roderick interpreted my fingers and picked up her wrist, but it was no good there, either. His face was agonised. Katya was a great deal more, it seemed, than just a colleague.
Two thousand years passed like two more minutes. Roderick put his ear down on Katya’s left breast. I went on breathing air into her, feeling as the seconds passed that it was no good, that she was dead. Her flesh was the colour of death, and very cold.
He heard the first thud before I felt it. I saw it in his face. Then there were two separate jolts in the blood vessel I had my fingers on under her jaw, and then some uneven, jerky little bumps, and then at last, unbelievably, slow, rhythmic, and strengthening, the life-giving ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom of a heart back in business.