“Mystery becomes you. But come on. A teacher.” She was an unlikely teacher; but then so was I. “Where?”
She mentioned the name of a famous girls’ grammar school in North London.
“That’s not very plausible.”
“Why not?”
“Not enough cachet.”
“I didn’t want cachet. I wanted to be in London.” A germander light in her eyes, blue and unflinching.
“I see. And Maurice was one of your pupils.”
Though she laughed then, it was against her mood. She apparently made up her mind that questions were not helping; that what she had to say was too serious for any more banter.
“We, June and I, were in a London amateur company called the Tavistock Rep. They have a little theatre in Canonbury.”
“Yes. I went there once. Seriously.”
“Well, last summer they put on Lysistrata.” She looked at me as if I might have heard about it. “There’s a rather clever producer there called Tony Hill, and he put us both into the main part. I stood in front of the stage and spoke the lines and June did all the acting. In mime. You didn’t read about this? It was in some of the papers… quite a lot of real theatre people came to see it. The production. Not us.”
“When was this?”
“Almost exactly this time last year.” We remained leaning close together. She began putting the books and letters back. “One day a man came backstage, told us, June and me, he was a theatrical agent and he had someone who wanted to meet us. A film producer.” She smiled impatiently at me. “Of course. And he was so secretive about who it was that it seemed too clumsy and obvious for words. But two days later we both got a formal invitation to have lunch at Claridge’s from someone who signed himself…”
“Maurice Conchis.”
“We hesitated, then—just for fun, really—went along.” She paused. “And Maurice… dazzled us. Lunch alone with him in his private suite. We were expecting one of those dreadful pseudo-Hollywood types who starts feeling you after the first ten minutes. Instead there was this charming, impeccably correct man. Then after lunch, when we were duly enchanted, he got down to business.”
“Didn’t he tell you anything about himself?”
She tossed her hair back. Serious and practical. I began to believe she might be a schoolmistress.
“Oh yes. But all rather vague. A kind of lonely rich man, with houses in France and Greece. A bit of a scholar. We got that impression. And a lot about Bourani. He described everything here. Exactly as it is… as a place. And he told us about this film company he owned in Beirut.” She silenced me. “And then—it was so amazing—he suddenly sprang this offer on us. To star in a film he was going to make this summer.”
“What film?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. At first we were terribly suspicious again. The Lebanon. But then he said the salary.” She sat up, turned her still amazed face to me. “Five thousand between us—plus a hundred pounds a month each for expenses.”
“But you must still have smelt a rat?”
“Of course we did.” She smiled. “You were funny that day… 'a rat five feet eight inches long'…” she looked shyly at me, picked at the nap of the rug, went on. “Well, we were driven home—in a Rolls-Royce—to think it over. You know, to a top flat in Belsize Park. Like Cinderellas. That’s where he was so clever, he put so little direct pressure on us. Never the shadow of the shadow of a false move on his part. We saw him several times more. He took us out. Theatre. Opera. Never an attempt to get either of us on our own. And… well, I don’t know what you really feel about him, but he is rather a marvelous old man. And even though he frightens us now, I still… anyway.”
“What did everybody think? I mean, your friends—this producer man?”
“They thought we ought to make inquiries. So we went to an agent and he found this film company does exist. It makes films mainly for the Arab market. Egypt.”
“What’s it called?”
“Polymus Films.” She spelt it. “It’s in whatever they list film companies in—the trade directory. Perfectly respectable.”
“And you said yes.”
“And in the end we said yes.” She looked tentatively at me, as if she did not expect me to believe her; such gullibility. “We had got to know him better by then. So we thought.”
“Your mother?”
“Oh Maurice saw to that. He insisted on having her up to London and bowled her over with his gentlemanliness.” She added ruefully, “And his money.”
“This film?”
“The story was taken from a demotic Greek novel that’s never been translated. By a writer called Theodorakis—have you ever heard of him? Three Hearts?” I shook my head. “It was written in the nineteen twenties. It’s about two English girls, they’re supposed to be the ambassador’s daughters, who go for a holiday on a Greek island during the First World War and meet a Greek poet there—a dying genius—and they both fall in love with him and he falls in love with them and at the end everyone’s terribly miserable and they all renounce each other… exactly.” She answered my grimace. “But actually when Maurice told it it had a sort of Dame aux Camélias charm.”
“You’ve read it?”
“Bits of it.”
I spoke in Greek. “Xerete kale ta nea ellenika?”
She answered, in a more fluent and much better accented demotic than my own, “If one knows ancient Greek it is a help, but the two languages are very different.” She gave me a steady look, and I touched my forehead.
“In London he showed us a long typewritten synopsis. And told us the script was being written in Athens. Our agent thought it was all perfectly normal.” She tore a loose thread from the side of her skirt. “Only we even suspect him now. We think Maurice may have bribed him. To make us less suspicious.”
“An agent would hardly—”
“Wouldn’t he? Do you know the slang word for them? Flesh peddlers .”
“Maurice did pay you?”
“As soon as we signed the contracts.”
She delved in the bag, then swiveled round so that we were sitting facing in opposite directions. She came out with a wallet; produced two cuttings from it. One showed the two sisters standing in a London street, in overcoats and woolen hats, laughing. I knew the paper by the print but it was in any case gummed on to a gray cuttings agency tag: Evening Standard, January 8, 1953. The paragraph underneath ran:
AND BRAINS AS WELL!
Two lucky twins, June and Julie (on right) Holmes, who will star in a film this summer to be shot in Greece. The twins both have Cambridge degrees, acted a lot at varsity, speak eight languages between them. Unfair note for bachelors: neither wants to marry yet.
“We didn’t write the caption.”
“So I guessed.”
The other cutting was from the Cinema Trade News. It repeated, in Americanese, what she had just told me.
“Oh and this. My mother.” She showed me a snapshot from the wallet; a woman with fluffy hair in a deckchair in a garden, a dumber spaniel beside her. I could see another photo and I made her let me look at it: a man in a sports shirt, a nervous and intelligent face; he seemed about thirty-five.
“Who’s this?”
“Someone.”
“Are you engaged?”
She shook her head, very vehemently; and took the photo back.
“We had screen tests. Some woman Maurice knew gave us lessons in deportment. Fittings.” She flicked her dress. “All this. Then in March we came out. Maurice met us in Athens and said the rest of the company wouldn’t assemble for a fortnight. We didn’t come here. He took us on a cruise with him. Mykonos, Crete, and so on. He’s got a beautiful yacht.”
“Ah. I was right.”
“No honestly. He never brings it here.” Her look was too quick, too open for me not to believe.