In the Still of the Night

Head bent, he muttered, ‘I’m going to, one day, I just never seem to have the spare money to do it, but I will, Annie.’ He barely even bothered to make the lie convincing, and she angrily said, ‘No, Derek! You know you won’t because whenever you get any money you gamble it away! I’m not going to help you dig yourself a deeper hole. I won’t lend you any more. Why are you such a fool?’

‘Born one, darling,’ he said, trying one of his charming, faintly sad now, smiles on her. It had once made women faint. Now it made his haggard face briefly almost young again. But with Annie it didn’t work; it never had. He had once made a pass at her during the year she worked on his TV series; Annie had gone white and staggered away to throw up in her dressing-room. Derek couldn’t fail to hear her. When she came out of the lavatory he had vanished, and he had never tried to lay a hand on her again.

She looked at him levelly now. ‘It isn’t funny! You promised never to gamble again.’

‘I kept away from the clubs for months, for God’s sake,’ he said, becoming petulant. ‘Then last Wednesday it was my birthday, and I suddenly realised I was forty-nine. Annie, I’m going to be fifty next year.’ He shuddered. ‘Fifty! Christ, I might as well be dead.’

She looked at him then with wry sympathy. Fifty seemed a long, long way off to her, but she was already dreading reaching thirty.

He saw her expression and eagerly said, ‘You see what I mean? Fifty. I couldn’t bear thinking about it, I had to have a few drinks, and then … somehow I ended up in a club and even the bloody cards were against me.’

‘How much did you lose?’ she asked in a softer tone.

‘Three hundred,’ he quickly said, and she groaned.

‘Oh, Derek! Another three hundred! Do you think I’m made of money?’

Harriet was a hundred yards away, she couldn’t have heard from that distance, surely – yet at that instant she abruptly swivelled to stare at them, frowning.

Derek caught her glance, too, and hissed out of the corner of his mouth, ‘For God’s sake, keep your voice down! Especially when Harriet’s around – she’s got ears like a bat. And I don’t want the whole bloody world to know.’

Annie turned her back on Harriet discreetly, got her chequebook out of her bag, scribbled down the amount, signed the cheque, held it out without another word.

‘Thanks,’ Derek said, reading the figures before pushing it hurriedly inside his jacket pocket with a little sigh of relief. ‘I won’t ask again. Promise.’

‘I meant what I said, Derek,’ she warned him. ‘Try again, and you’ll regret it.’

‘No need to be nasty, darling,’ he said, buoyant again now he had the money, and walked off.

‘How about that angle?’ Frank asked Harriet, who turned back towar

ds him and looked into the camera.

‘Hmm … better …’ she said, face hidden by a fall of sleek, straight brown hair. ‘I’d like to keep the corner of that street in shot, all those Indian stalls. What do you think, Pete?’

‘Lots of colour,’ agreed Pete.

Harriet stepped back, nodding. Well, it wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. ‘Yes, we’ll have the camera here for this first scene.’

Pete looked up at the sky. ‘Hope it isn’t going to rain; where’s that umbrella?’

‘I’ve got it ready,’ his assistant assured him. If it began to rain they would hurriedly protect the camera without even thinking about themselves; they gave it the loving care a mother gave a delicate child.

A sound man wandered past eating hot, newly cooked doughnuts, crunchy with sugar.

‘Breakfast, Adam?’ teased Harriet and he grinned, winking.

‘They’re brilliant – I watched her cook them. Want one?’ He held out a paper bag with several other doughnuts in it, rustling invitingly.

‘Have to watch my diet,’ Harriet absently said.

‘You?’ he scoffed. ‘Thin as a twig.’

She always had been, but not because she dieted so much as because she burned up every calorie she ate. From the minute she opened her eyes at crack of dawn until the second she finally fell asleep again well after midnight, Harriet never stopped. She needed all that energy, too; she was the powerhouse of the series.

‘Which scene are we starting with if Mike doesn’t get here?’ Annie asked, joining her. She hated the long gaps between actual filming – it sometimes took hours to get two minutes of film in the can.

Harriet looked into her face, trying to read it, but Annie gave nothing away. Whatever had been going on between her and Derek was well and truly hidden. They’d known each other for many years, of course, if there had been an affair neither of them had ever talked about it, and clearly it was long over, but Harriet did not believe in platonic friendships between a man like Derek and a woman as attractive as Annie.