Page 67 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
After following that with an acre of buttered toast and jam and gallons of tea and coffee, they were ready for action.
We went down to the workshop so they could film me seeing it for the first time … again. Then it was Carey’s turn.
After that, they decided to take some arty shots of the rusted entrance gates and views of the house looking up at the terraces from the lake. Carey not being required for those, he went off in the buggy to look at his uncle’s car in the stables, while I walked back to the house and spent a quiet couple of hours in the studio next to the kitchen, sorting out my stuff and starting my list of things I’d need for my new workshop. Since I was beginning almost from scratch, it grew longer and longer.
Carey was in by the time the crew straggled back for lunch and Jorge said that a nosy blonde had suddenly appeared and kept getting in the way of the filming.
‘She said you’d told her we were coming, Carey, and since she was an actress she’d be happy to help if we wanted her in some of the shots,’ Sukes added.
‘Yeah, so I said we weren’t making a bloody film so we didn’t need extras,’ Nick said. ‘She was gardening outside the Lodge when we drove past … in full makeup and stilettos. I didn’t think people gardened in January. Isn’t everything dead?’
‘Not dead, only resting,’ said Carey, sounding a bitMonty Python.
‘That was Vicky Parry and she’s staying with her parents at the Lodge,’ I explained. ‘But we certainly didn’t suggest she should help, or appear on film.’
‘No, we didn’t think you had,’ Nelson said. ‘She seemed to be irrelevant.’
Call me mean, but I quite liked hearing the lovely Vicky described as irrelevant!
‘That’s right. Unless she’s got hidden talents in roofing, plumbing, plastering or anything else useful to the programme, I can’t see that we’d want her wandering around in the background,’ said Sukes.
‘She was only a lodge keeper’s daughter …’ murmured Jorge, then got stuck for a second line until, by concerted effort, the crew came up with something amazingly filthy.
‘Doesn’t quite scan,’ Carey said critically, lobbing more rounds of his standby – cheese on toast – on to a plate in the centre of the table.
After lunch, Jorge gave Carey a crash course in the finer arts of filming, since they were loaning him a camera so that he could shoot anything interesting between their visits. Now I’d never know when he was going to suddenly pop up and immortalize me in glorious Technicolor …
Then they quickly packed up and we followed them down to the gates in the buggy, where we stood waving them off.
They weren’t going straight back, but detouring to Liverpool to shoot some tall ship that was moored there. We could hear them getting in the right mood by discordantly belting out, ‘Yo, ho and up she rises!’ as they vanished round the bend.
‘It was fun, all the old gang together, wasn’t it?’ Carey said, draping one long arm across my shoulders.
I turned to look up at him, smiling, and that was when I suddenly noticed the stone ball on the top of the tall gatepost next to us move.
Without conscious thought, but with a strength I didn’t realize I possessed, I gave him an almighty shove, pushing him backwards and then, overbalancing, falling on top of him.
The stone ball missed us by about a foot, landing with a soggy thud that shook the ground, and then rolling into the ditch.
Carey clasped me to his chest and then planted a decidedly un-platonic kiss on my lips.
‘Did the earth move for you, too, darling?’ he said finally, sounding shaken.
‘Oh God, you could have been killed!’ I exclaimed, staring down at him. My heart was still racing.
‘We both could,’ he said, then scrambled up, pulling me with him. Then he stooped with a grimace to rub his bad leg.
I picked his stick up and handed it to him. ‘Did I hurt your leg? I’m sure I landed on it.’
‘A bit, but it was certainly better than a stone ball landing on my head – and I’m sure you just saved my life, Shrimp.’
‘It was instinctive. I just happened to catch sight of the movement out of the corner of my eye.’ I felt a bit shaky suddenly at the thought of what might have happened.
Carey peered down at the stone ball in the ditch. ‘That’ll take a bit of getting out.’
‘I could have sworn I heard something crashing about in the shrubbery afterwards, while we were lying there,’ I said. ‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No, I was too stunned, though birds and squirrels can make a surprising amount of noise if they’re startled. Let’s go round and have a look.’
