Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

She told Paul of her visit the next morning. Rather to her surprise he took the matter anxiously and was extremely solicitous. “Oh my God, Carey —we’ll have to look after you, won’t we? Less work from now on— I’ll watch it—to hell with their schedule—we’re ahead of time, anyhow. No shooting after five o’clock—I’ll make that a rule.”

“It isn’t so much the work, Paul,” she ventured to remonstrate. “It’s trying to pacify everybody you quarrel with, and having to talk Randolph into a good humour, and being nice to newspaper people after you’ve made enemies of them all… if only you’d spare me some of that.”

“I will,” he promised abjectly. “I know I’m to blame in a lot of things. And we just can’t have you getting ill. I know what illness is—I’m not a completely well man myself.” She smiled at that, remembering that whenever anyone else had ever mentioned the slightest ailment of any kind Paul had always been able to match it with some private and hitherto undisclosed martyrdom of his own. But now he said, so calmly that she felt he might be speaking the truth: “One or two things happened in that camp I was in—shocking things that I wouldn’t ever tell anyone about. They made me ill and I started getting headaches. Migraine. They don’t come so often now, except when I have fights.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Then that’s another reason why you shouldn’t have fights.”

“Yes, yes.” He clapped his hand dramatically to his head. “I must take care. I know I must.”

She said, continuing to smile: “Looks as if we’re both getting to be a couple of old crocks.”

“WHAT? Oh, nonsense!”

“I was only joking. My trouble isn’t serious at all, I’m glad to say. The doctor assured me I’d be all right if I take care. Try to get a little rest in the afternoons, he said. I do, don’t I—in between scenes and rehearsals? And don’t let household worries weigh on you. Well, I haven’t any, that’s one blessing… As he took me to the door, he said—‘You know, Mrs. Bond, your face reminds me of someone.’ I thought he was going to say Carey Arundel and I got all prepared to be gracious, but he went on —‘A girl who was a hostess on United Airlines—were you ever one, by any chance?’ I told him no, and he looked quite sad.”

“He DID?” Paul exclaimed with abrupt and cheerful interest. “What sort of a man was he?… No, don’t tell me—I’ve got a concept of him in my mind already—middle-aged, quiet, hard worker, faithful husband, respectable citizen… but all the time he’s carried a vision of a girl he once saw in a plane… he never spoke to her—just watched as she walked about serving meals and checking seat-belts… a short trip, say Dallas to El Paso—two hours out of a whole lifetime. He fell in love with her then, if he’d realized it, but he didn’t, he was shy, he didn’t know his own mind enough to follow it, he wasn’t the type to say ‘Hello, sweetheart’ and ask for a date, he didn’t even remember her name afterwards… but as the years go by he can’t forget her, she becomes a symbol of the unattainable, the pluperfect subjunctive—sometimes he sees people—strangers, new patients—who remind him of her, or he thinks they do… One of these days he’s going to leave his home, his wife, his patients—everything—and search the world for that girl… Ah, that could be a PICTURE, Carey. Not junk like Morning Journey.”

She laughed at the suddenness with which Morning Journey had ceased to be a near-masterpiece; she laughed at his improvisation and at his own mounting enthusiasm for it; she laughed at his growing use of slang and epithets, to which he gave a peculiar emphasis, as of a foreigner waiting to be commended for having picked them up. And she laughed, finally, because in the mood she was in she felt hysterically relieved by doing so.

She said: “Magnificent, Paul. But he’s not middle-aged, he’s quite young, and he’s not married—he told me that—and I think he was just making conversation to get me out of his office.”

The crew and actors were beginning to drift in for the afternoon session. As at the pulling of a mental switch Paul returned to duty, and Morning Journey rose again in his favour.

He often improvised like that—the slightest cue could send him off into the synopsis of an imagined picture. Once Greg said seriously: “Paul, why don’t you get that down in writing and send it up to the front office? It’s so damned good you ought to be able to sell it.”

“SELL it?” Paul exclaimed, incredulously. “Why should I sell it? It’s MINE.”

He made more trouble (it seemed he couldn’t help it, despite all his promises), yet Carey had never admired him so much as during those latter days of making Morning Journey. There was something exquisite in his care for detail, especially when one thought of the mass audience to whom minutiae would not count, even if they were observed; he knew everybody’s business, much to their dismay at times—he seemed to be an expert on everything for which special experts had already been provided. Randolph barely tolerated him, visiting the set more rarely as the picture neared its end, evidently feeling that bad or good, the die was sufficiently cast. Two things should have made Paul popular with the authorities—the fewness of his takes and the fact that he was bringing in the picture several days under schedule; but Paul had an unrivalled capacity for sacrificing credit even where it was due, and Randolph, whose own direction had always been of the laborious sort, found it impossible to believe that so many printed first takes could show good judgment. To him Paul was possibly a genius, but certainly the kind of employee one could not handle; and as the somewhat peculiar packaging of Carey and Paul together in the contract had not been his responsibility, his real hope was that the picture should fail gently enough for the studio to try Carey in another picture and get rid of Paul altogether. Perhaps he, Randolph, might even direct her himself in the next picture—it would be exciting to get on the floor again. He liked Carey. She was a bit old for stardom—no older, though, than Madeleine Carroll and almost as beautiful; she had that indefinable thing called “class”, and with co-stars like Greg Wilson there was no reason why Majestic Pictures should not use her a good deal. But for less money, if Morning Journey failed. Her agent, of course, would hold out for the same, would keep on reminding everyone she was married to a millionaire, but maybe that wouldn’t be true much longer if the rumours one heard were correct. Randolph turned it all over in his mind many times as he sat at his desk after seeing the daily rushes. He and Paul did not see them at the same time now, and Carey and Greg did not now see them at all. That was Paul’s doing too— he had reverted to an old idea of his that watching themselves in the previous day’s scenes was bad for actors. What puzzled Randolph was how Paul could have forced such a ruling on Greg. All Greg had to say was, “You go to hell, Saffron, I’m seeing the rushes just as I’ve always seen ‘em”— but for some reason Greg did not say it. That was disturbing, too, when Randolph thought it over.

The peculiarity of this film environment was that one could live in a large American city week after week without feeling intimate with it, without even feeling that it was part of America. The apartment Carey had was of standardized luxury, the restaurants she patronized catered to people like herself, the morning and evening travel in the studio limousine was through streets that all looked the same, with the same stores and bill-boards, the same shadow and sunshine. Even the ocean was somehow disappointing as an ocean. But she loved the mountains twenty or thirty miles away, and solely to drive to them whenever she had a few hours to spare she rented a rather smart convertible.