‘You’re early,’ I remarked.
‘Might as well wait here as anywhere else.’
‘Come upstairs, then, while I change.’
He came up to my room and with unfailing instinct chose the most comfortable chair.
‘Have a naartjie,’ I said.
I’d rather have a Martini, dear boy.’
‘Order one, then.’
He rang for his drink and it came while I was in the shower. I towelled dry and went back into the bedroom in underpants to find him equipped also with a Churchillsized cigar, wreathed in smoke and smelling of London clubs and plutocracy. He was looking through the pile of newspapers which still lay tidily on the table, but in the end left them undisturbed.
‘I’ve seen all those,’ he said. ‘How do you like being a real hero, for a change?’
‘Don’t be nutty. What’s so heroic about first aid?’
He grinned. Changed the subject.
‘What in hell’s name made you come out here for a premiere after all those years of refusing to show your face off the screen?’
‘I came to see some horses,’ I said, and explained about Nerissa.
‘Oh, well, then, dear boy, that does make more sense, I agree. And have you found out what’s wrong?’
I shrugged. ‘Not really. Don’t see how I can.’ I fished out a clean shirt and buttoned it on. ‘I’m going to Germiston races tomorrow, and I’ll keep my eyes open again, but I doubt if anyone could ever prove anything against Greville Arknold.’ I put on some socks and dark blue trousers, and some slip-on shoes. ‘What are you and Evan doing here, anyway?’
‘Film making. What else?’
‘What film?’
‘Some goddam awful story about elephants that Evan took it into his head to do. It was all set up before he got roped in to finish Man in a Car, and since he chose to ponce around in Spain for all that time, we were late getting out here. Should be down in the Kruger Game Park by now.’
I brushed my hair.
‘Who’s playing the lead?’
‘Drix Goddart.’
I glanced at Conrad over my shoulder. He smiled sardonically.
‘Wax in Evan’s hands, dear boy. Laps up direction like a well patted puppy.’
‘Nice for you all.’
‘He’s so neurotic that if someone doesn’t tell him every five minutes that he’s brilliant, he thinks everyone hates him.’
‘Is he here with you?’
‘No, thank God. He was supposed to be, but now he comes out with all the rest of the team after Evan and I have sorted out which locations we want to use.’
I put down the brushes and fastened my watch round my wrist. Keys, change, handkerchief into trouser pockets.
‘Did you see the rushes of the desert scenes while you were in England?’ Conrad asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Evan didn’t invite me.’
‘Just like him.’ He took a long swallow and rolled the Martini round his teeth. He squinted at the long ash on the end of his mini-torpedo. He said, ‘They were good.’
‘So they damn well ought to be. We did them enough times.’
He smiled without looking at me. ‘You won’t like the finished film.’
After a pause, as he didn’t explain, I said, ‘Why not?’
‘There’s something in it besides and beyond acting.’ He paused again, considering his words. ‘Even to a jaundiced eye like mine, dear boy, the quality of suffering is shattering.’
I didn’t say anything. He swivelled his eyes in my direction.
‘Usually you do not reveal much of yourself, do you?
Well, this time, dear boy, this time...’
I compressed my lips. I knew what I’d done. I’d known while I did it. I had just hoped that no one would be perceptive enough to notice.
‘Will the critics see what you saw?’ I asked.
He smiled lop-sidedly. ‘Bound to, aren’t they? The best ones, anyway.’
I stared despondently at the carpet. The trouble with interpreting scenes too well, with taking an emotion and making the audience feel it sharply, was that it meant stripping oneself naked in public. Nothing as simple as naked skin, but letting the whole world peer into one’s mind, one’s beliefs, one’s experience.
To be able to reproduce a feeling so that others could recognise it, and perhaps understand it for the first time, one had to have some idea of what it felt like in reality. To show that one knew, meant revealing what one had felt. Revealing oneself too nakedly did not come easily to a private man, and if one did not reveal oneself, one never became a great actor.
I was not a great actor. I was competent and popular, but unless I whole-heartedly took the step into frightening personal exposure, I would never do anything great. There was always for me, in acting beyond a certain limit, an element of mental distress. But I had thought, when I risked doing it in the car, that my own self would be merged indiscernibly with the trials the fictional character was enduring.
I had done it because of Evan: to spite him, more than to please him. There was a point beyond which no director could claim credit for an actor’s performance, and I had gone a long way beyond that point.
‘What are you thinking?’ Conrad demanded.
‘I was deciding to stick exclusively in future to unreal entertaining escapades, as in the past.’
‘You’re a coward, dear boy.’
‘Yes.’
He tapped the ash off his cigar.
‘No one is going to be satisfied, if you do.’
‘Of course they are.’
‘Uhuh.’ He shook his head. ‘No one will settle for paste after they see they could have the real thing.’
‘Stop drinking Martinis,’ I said. ‘They give you rotten ideas.’
I walked across the room, picked up my jacket, put it on, and stowed wallet and diary inside it.
‘Let’s go down to the bar,’ I said.
He levered himself obediently out of the chair.
‘You can’t run away from yourself for ever, dear boy.’
‘I’m not the man you think I am.’
‘Oh yes,’ Conrad said. ‘Dear boy, you are.’
At Germiston races the next day I found waiting for me at the gate not only the free entrance tickets promised by Greville Arknold, but also a racecourse official with a duplicate set and instructions to take me up to lunch with the Chairman of the Race Club.
I meekly followed where he led, and was presently shown into a large dining-room where about a hundred people were already eating at long tables. The whole van Huren family, including a sulky Jonathan, occupied chairs near the end of the table closest to the door, and when he saw me come in, van Huren himself rose to his feet.
‘Mr Klugvoigt, this is Edward Lincoln,’ he said to the man sitting at the end of the table: and to me added, ‘Mr Klugvoigt is the Chairman.’
Klugvoigt stood up, shook hands, indicated the empty chair on his left, and we all sat down.
Vivi van Huren in a sweeping green hat sat opposite me, on the Chairman’s right, with her husband beside her. Sally van Huren was on my left, with her brother beyond. They all seemed to know Klugvoigt well, and as a personality he had much in common with van Huren: same air of wealth and substance, same self confidence, same bulk of body and acuity of mind.
Once past the preliminaries and the politenesses (how did I like South Africa: nowhere so comfortable as the Iguana Rock: how long was I staying) the conversation veered naturally back to the chief matter in hand.
Horses.
The van Hurens owned a four-year-old which had finished third in the Dunlop Gold Cup a month earlier, but they were giving it a breather during these less important months. Klugvoigt owned two three-year-olds running that afternoon with nothing much expected.
I steered the conversation round to Nerissa’s horses without much difficulty, and from there to Greville Arknold, asking, but not pointedly, how he was in general regarded, both as man and trainer.