play the leading female role in the producer’s (as the obituarist also insisted on describing him) new project,
If Ever They Find Me Dead
, alongside Gareth Knight, Patricia Roc, Mary Clare, Raymond Lovell, Felix Aylmer and – ‘At last!’ muttered Trubshawe – Cora Rutherford.
He laid the newspaper down and began to mull over what he had just read. Burnt to death! What a ghastly way to go! Puts you on a par with Joan of Arc and – what was the name of the Italian scientist condemned to death for heresy? – Giordano somebody? – Bruno! – Giordano Bruno! We all shudder inwardly whenever we read of how these martyrs were roped to the stake and the faggots piled up around their bare feet and everything set alight and how long did it take before they were asphyxiated and surely the fact itself of asphyxiation couldn’t quite mean that they wouldn’t have started to feel the flames creeping up their legs? It didn’t bear thinking of …
Yet, after all, both Joan of Arc and Giordano Bruno were long dead, centuries long dead, ghosts who belonged to a dim, unknowable past and who have survived into the present as not much more than musty illustrations in a schoolboy’s history-book. What about all those ordinary what’s-their-names who simply had the misfortune to be caught inside a blazing building? Not Alastair Farjeon, of course, who certainly wasn’t a what’s-his-name and, from all accounts, couldn’t have been further from ordinary. No, think instead of those decent, hard-working, God-fearingEast End folk who, bombed out of their beds in the Blitz, some of them at least, suffered no less hideous a fate than Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno, except that
their
names will never ring gloriously down the ages. Yes, it did make you think …
He thought, as well, of the news, the slightly startling news, that the case had been assigned to Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D. Well, well, well. Young Tom Calvert, already an Inspector. And in Richmond, too – a pip of a posting, if he wasn’t mistaken. He had known Tom’s father well and had followed the son’s progress when he was just a policeman on the beat, down Bermondsey way, he seemed to recall. He had been the kind of fair and friendly bobby everybody warmed to. Always had a gobstopper or a digestive biscuit for the poorer kiddies, always greeted the regulars at the Horse and Groom with a cheery ‘Evening all!’, never laid too heavy a hand on the shoulder of some bedraggled old biddy who’d had a tawny port or three over the limit. And now he’s an Inspector, if you please.
His reflections turned next to Cora Rutherford. It was a queer experience meeting up with her again after the passage of so many years – years, he couldn’t help feeling, that had taken their toll on her once flawless façade. She was still, to be sure, the epitome of sheen and self-assurance, still enhaloed by that lustrous aura of the ethereal and the unapproachable that, against all the odds, theatricals and – what would you call them? cinematicals? – somehow manage topreserve, more or less intact, into their dotage, their anecdotage, as the old joke has it. There could be no doubt, though, that she no longer possessed the bubbly vivaciousness of old, quite that potent mixture of film-star poise and spoilt-child petulance that had made her, a decade before, so distinctive a personality. And the fact that she was the very last to be cited among the players who had been cast in Farjeon’s new picture, coupled with the equally telling fact that, when she realised that it was no longer going to be made, she had let herself go to pieces so rashly and recklessly – and in the swankiest restaurant in London, too – only confirmed that she wasn’t nearly as confident now of her – what’s the word? magnetism? – as when they had first met. It was sad, of course, it was really dreadfully sad. But, after all, just what was the woman’s age? Fifty? Sixty?
Trubshawe
If Ever They Find Me Dead
, alongside Gareth Knight, Patricia Roc, Mary Clare, Raymond Lovell, Felix Aylmer and – ‘At last!’ muttered Trubshawe – Cora Rutherford.
He laid the newspaper down and began to mull over what he had just read. Burnt to death! What a ghastly way to go! Puts you on a par with Joan of Arc and – what was the name of the Italian scientist condemned to death for heresy? – Giordano somebody? – Bruno! – Giordano Bruno! We all shudder inwardly whenever we read of how these martyrs were roped to the stake and the faggots piled up around their bare feet and everything set alight and how long did it take before they were asphyxiated and surely the fact itself of asphyxiation couldn’t quite mean that they wouldn’t have started to feel the flames creeping up their legs? It didn’t bear thinking of …
Yet, after all, both Joan of Arc and Giordano Bruno were long dead, centuries long dead, ghosts who belonged to a dim, unknowable past and who have survived into the present as not much more than musty illustrations in a schoolboy’s history-book. What about all those ordinary what’s-their-names who simply had the misfortune to be caught inside a blazing building? Not Alastair Farjeon, of course, who certainly wasn’t a what’s-his-name and, from all accounts, couldn’t have been further from ordinary. No, think instead of those decent, hard-working, God-fearingEast End folk who, bombed out of their beds in the Blitz, some of them at least, suffered no less hideous a fate than Joan of Arc or Giordano Bruno, except that
their
names will never ring gloriously down the ages. Yes, it did make you think …
He thought, as well, of the news, the slightly startling news, that the case had been assigned to Inspector Thomas Calvert of Richmond C.I.D. Well, well, well. Young Tom Calvert, already an Inspector. And in Richmond, too – a pip of a posting, if he wasn’t mistaken. He had known Tom’s father well and had followed the son’s progress when he was just a policeman on the beat, down Bermondsey way, he seemed to recall. He had been the kind of fair and friendly bobby everybody warmed to. Always had a gobstopper or a digestive biscuit for the poorer kiddies, always greeted the regulars at the Horse and Groom with a cheery ‘Evening all!’, never laid too heavy a hand on the shoulder of some bedraggled old biddy who’d had a tawny port or three over the limit. And now he’s an Inspector, if you please.
His reflections turned next to Cora Rutherford. It was a queer experience meeting up with her again after the passage of so many years – years, he couldn’t help feeling, that had taken their toll on her once flawless façade. She was still, to be sure, the epitome of sheen and self-assurance, still enhaloed by that lustrous aura of the ethereal and the unapproachable that, against all the odds, theatricals and – what would you call them? cinematicals? – somehow manage topreserve, more or less intact, into their dotage, their anecdotage, as the old joke has it. There could be no doubt, though, that she no longer possessed the bubbly vivaciousness of old, quite that potent mixture of film-star poise and spoilt-child petulance that had made her, a decade before, so distinctive a personality. And the fact that she was the very last to be cited among the players who had been cast in Farjeon’s new picture, coupled with the equally telling fact that, when she realised that it was no longer going to be made, she had let herself go to pieces so rashly and recklessly – and in the swankiest restaurant in London, too – only confirmed that she wasn’t nearly as confident now of her – what’s the word? magnetism? – as when they had first met. It was sad, of course, it was really dreadfully sad. But, after all, just what was the woman’s age? Fifty? Sixty?
Trubshawe
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