Hermione was further outraged when Tristan cautiously suggested her make-up was too heavy for outdoors.

‘Which, roughly translated, means it makes the old bat look a hundred,’ whispered Baby to the crew, who he’d got totally on his side.

Hermione’s quailing make-up artist was then ordered by Tristan to take her make-up down, which meant another hour’s delay. Later, Bernard stole off to have a pee behind a holly tree, and only just missed Hermione frantically applying eye-liner.

‘Her next CD will be called “Hermione goes to Hollybush”.’ Baby’s joke was soon whizzing round the set.

Baby proved a complete natural, who only had to glance at his lines in Make Up before going from nothing to regulo ten in thirty seconds. Hermione, on the other hand, was used to having a raised eyebrow seen in the gods, and was defeated by the stillness, subtlety and control of cinema acting. She was soon driving everyone crackers insisting, ‘But I always enter right for this aria,’ and because she, like everyone else, had a monstrous crush on Tristan, wanting to know her motivation for every syllable.

Tristan’s niece, Simone, in charge of continuity, was tiny and elfin with a glossy dark brown urchin cut and mournful Montigny eyes. Her fragility, however, belied a forceful personality. As most of the film was shot out of order, Simone’s main task, apart from timing takes, was to insist that each scene blended into earlier and later ones.

‘Your cigarette was only a quarter smoked last time, Baby,’ she was now shouting, ‘and we agreed you should carry a whip, Dame Hermione.’

‘Oh, sugar, I left it at home.’

‘Wolfgang can go and get it,’ said Rannaldini. ‘That’s what he’s here for.’

Having played in the first rugger team of an English public school, Wolfie was used to being yelled at under pressure. But with Bernard shouting instructions into his earpiece all morning, it was as though the Battle of the Somme had broken out. Now Rannaldini was pitching in.

‘And you can pick up another thermal vest from the Mill while you’re there, Wolfgang,’ Hermione called after him. ‘I cannot afford to catch cold,’ she added, as Tristan’s eyes rose to heaven at the thought of more delay.

By the time they broke for lunch, only Baby’s four lines had been filmed, and everyone had such cold noses they looked like an advertisement for Comic Relief.

Aware she had a French crew, Maria the caterer, a pretty, pregnant Italian, was on her mettle and had produced baked red snapper with aromatic Chinese sauce, steak and kidney pie, sautéed garlic potatoes, a vegetable stir-fry for Lucy, followed by rhubarb crumble or treacle pudding.

Everyone piled up their plates and charged the dining bus, where Tristan, because of the cold and it being the first day, had ordered bottles of wine for every table.

‘How the hell are you going to put up with Hermione?’ asked Oscar, as he tied his napkin round his neck to protect his purple scarf.

‘Divas are not fully balanced human beings,’ said Tristan dropping three Disprins into a glass of Perrier. ‘If they were they wouldn’t be great.’

After lunch the rows escalated.

‘What is my motivation for this scene?’ Hermione asked Tristan for the thousandth time.

‘You are cold, exhausted and lost in a huge forest,’ said Tristan, through gritted teeth. ‘Suddenly Carlos steps out from behind that tree and offers you his protection.’

‘If I’ve just come off a plane, surely I’d offer her a slug of duty-free,’ said Baby helpfully.

‘Will you stop taking the pees?’ Tristan’s voice rose. ‘As I was saying, Hermione, you’re lost in a wood.’

‘“Just a little lamb who’s lost in a wood,”’ sang Hermione, fortissimo, then went into peals of laughter as everyone jumped out of their skins.

‘Don’t you wish that pistol was loaded?’ murmured Baby to Flora.

‘I feel like Agent Scully. At least we’ve got the same-coloured hair,’ whispered back Flora, who was very excited by her gun, which was a Heckler-Koch ‘toy’, as used by the SAS.

She was feeling spooked, however, because Rannaldini had nastily insisted she take off not just her regard ring but also her sapphire engagement ring.

‘It ees almost beeger than the evening star, and much too camp for a detective,’ he sneered. ‘Why not lend it to Baby?’

‘Look mean, Flora, chérie,’ shouted Tristan, ‘and when you see Carlos, shield Hermione and point your gun straight into camera.’

‘Stand by to shoot, please,’ bellowed Bernard.

Everyone moved out of shot.

‘Here we go, let’s turn over.’

And poor Flora was into a rat race. If she sang loud enough to have the right facial movements, the sound was too loud for her to hear the playback and she got out of synch. Alas, the promised voice coach had been sacked even before he’d started. Instead, to help her sing in time, and come in at the right moment, the video of Rannaldini conducting the score was now being relayed on a huge monitor behind the crew. This made her even more nervous.

She kept fluffing her lines, let alone remembering to look mean and shoot into the camera. Nor was she helped by planes going over, Griselda charging up to smooth her riding coat over the bulge of her gun, Lucy racing in to tone down her red nose with green face powder, Simone telling her to do up her top button, or Rannaldini continually shouting.

‘I don’t like hecklers, even if they do have cocks,’ she muttered dolefully. Then, just as she got things right, her mobile rang.

‘Oh, George,’ Flora burst into tears, ‘I’m a lousy actress, but I can’t talk now. I’ll ring you back. I’m sorry, everyone.’

Rannaldini went berserk. ‘Are you going to take this thing seriously?’ he yelled, grabbing her mobile. ‘Because eef not Gloria knows Tebaldo’s words and is only too ’appy to take over.’

‘Leave her alone,’ shouted Baby, who’d been crunching clove after clove of garlic in anticipation of his clinch with Dame Hermione.

There was a red glow on the horizon. The third lot of snow needed topping up, the day was running away. Blown like a dry leaf by everyone’s arguments, Flora leant against a tree, got lichen on her breeches and bollocked by Griselda.

‘Everyone hates me,’ she muttered miserably.

‘I don’t,’ said Sylvestre, who could hear her through the mike.

‘I don’t,’ said Rozzy Pringle, the former singer of Flora’s part, whose voice had broken down in the recording, and who’d just arrived to help in Wardrobe. Putting a little stone hot-water bottle into one of Flora’s blue frozen hands and a mug of hot Ribena into the other, she whispered, ‘You look chilled to the marrow, poor little duck.’

‘Oh, Rozzy, how lovely to see you.’

‘And you. Don’t cry, darling, your make-up will run.’

‘Ooh, that looks nice,’ called Hermione. ‘I’d like some hot Ribena too. Go and fetch me some, Wolfgang.’

Which made Wolfie hate Flora more than ever, particularly when he met Helen panting up the hill going the other way. ‘George Hungerford’s just called the house. He can’t get through. Can you tell Flora to switch on her mobile? He says it’s urgent.’

‘I’m not having any of those thoogs bullying you,’ were George’s first words, as Flora rang him on Bernard’s mobile.

‘Flora,’ snarled Wolfie, ‘are you going to hold us up all night?’

He wants to kill me, thought Flora. Even with a hundred people milling around, he terrified her.

The next day went much better. In the afternoon, they even filmed Carlos and Elisabetta’s first kiss. Baby’s attempts only to kiss Hermione between her jutting lower lip and her chin came to nothing: she sucked in his tongue like a Hoover.

‘Cut,’ shouted Tristan then took her aside. ‘As this is the first kiss of an innocent young virgin, chérie, I think it should be more tentative.’

‘That woman could suck Tasmania back to the mainland,’ Baby regaled an hysterical crew. ‘God knows how Rock Hudson did it for years.’

‘It’s called a Fontaineblow-job,’ giggled Flora, who’d regained her high spirits. ‘When the weather improves you’ve got to bonk her.’

‘That’ll be a piece of piss,’ drawled Baby. ‘When I was a little kid in Oz my parents were always sending me up chimneys. Hermione’s fanny holds no fears for me.’


23


The first weeks of filming were very traumatic for Tristan, and his good nature, particularly when large crowds, horses and hounds were introduced, was severely tested.

Extras, as Sexton was fond of saying, are more expensive than lawyers. Tristan planned to use much of the chorus’s already recorded singing as voiceover, and when he employed actual crowds, to keep down the budget by packing as many of their scenes as possible into the same day.

One of his problems was that Sexton had advertised for extras in the Rutminster Echo, and the same lot rolled up for every crowd scene, whether as poverty-stricken woodmen and their wives or glamorous French courtiers and ladies-in-waiting or suave dark-eyed diplomats from the Spanish delegation.

This was particularly apparent because Pushy Galore, one of the few trained singers used as an extra, pushed her way to the front in every crowd scene.

If any of the extras managed to have a word with Tristan, they could claim they had ‘taken direction’ and charge for extra pay. If they were filmed beside any of the stars, this could be categorized as a ‘cameo appearance’ and they received double pay.

One of Wolfie’s most important jobs, therefore, was to keep the extras away from the cast, which was particularly difficult the day Hype-along invited down a reporter from The Times and was bunging anyone he could see to ask for Dame Hermione’s autograph.