So what are you up to today?” Jonathan said, raising his voice to make himself heard over the plaintive sound of a histrionic dog being ignored in a box.
It felt awfully cruel but we were following my (okay, my mother’s) strict instructions to disregard Braveheart’s outrage at being placed in the crate of doom while we ate our breakfast, to teach him firstly that his crate was a fun place to be, and secondly, that only human beings had breakfast on the breakfast table.
Easier said than done, when Braveheart was emoting like Barbra Streisand.
In desperation, I spun round in my chair and tried The Look. The one I gave idiot boys like Jem Wilde when they messed around with mustache bleaching creams in Harvey Nichols’s beauty hall.
To my surprise, and his, Braveheart shut up.
“Hey! Melissa, you haven’t lost your touch!” Jonathan pointed at me and clicked his fingers in delight—an annoying game-show-host tic I thought I’d cured him of when he first moved to London.
I gave him The Look, and he stopped too and stared at his fingers.
“Sorry,” I said. “Force of habit.”
“So, what are you up to today?” Jonathan bit into his whole-grain bagel. “I’m really sorry about missing lunch yesterday,” he added for the ninth time.
“Jonathan! Honestly! I don’t mind,” I replied, also for the ninth time.
He looked at me apologetically across the table. “I thought Lori had canceled, but apparently the Schultzes had flown back to New York specially to make the viewing, so I just had—”
“Forget it,” I insisted. “It’s not your fault you’re in demand.” I tried not to think about what I’d said to Karen about men who kept you waiting. “I met up with one of Bonnie’s friends from the party instead. Blythe? Her niece is planning to go to Europe during her winter vacation, so she wanted my advice about where she should stay, what she should see.” And, more to the point, which shops she should visit.
“Well, I’m glad you’re making friends,” he said, sticking his fingers into his hair. It messed up the neat morning style. “Just wish it could have been me, not Blythe, getting the benefit of your restaurant tips. Anyway, I’ve asked Lori to help you out with any arrangements you’d like to make—you know, if you want to take a boat ride, or go up in a helicopter, or something like that.”
“Oooh, lovely!” It wasn’t the same as him taking me, though. But looking on the bright side, Lori seemed to know quite a lot about sample sales. She’d already e-mailed me links to about ten.
As if he could read my mind, Jonathan added, “You know, I wish I could be showing you around myself, but work is just…insane.” He shrugged helplessly.
“I understand.” His diary in London had always been ridiculous. “Why don’t we go out for dinner tonight?” I suggested. “Let’s make an early reservation, and you’ll have to leave work by seven.”
“Great idea. Where?”
“Somewhere that’s special to you.” I hesitated, not wanting to say but not somewhere you used to go with your ex-wife. “Somewhere with a great view,” I added quickly, before he could say something about getting Lori to check out the Zagat Guide.
“Well, I know just the place.” Jonathan shot me a wicked smile, then checked his watch. “The walker should be here to get Braveheart at half past eight. I’ve asked that he stay there all day, until we get home. Better than being cooped up here in his box, don’t you think?”
I looked over at Braveheart, who had set up a low-level whimpering, with his head on his paws. I’d misjudged him: He had more emotional range than Barbra Streisand. “And what’ll happen to him there?”
“Guess he’ll be in a bigger box there, with some other dogs.” Jonathan started to pack up his papers. He kissed me on the top of my head. “Mmm, Melissa. You smell delicious.”
He swept my hair over one shoulder and kissed the nape of my neck. Little tingles ran up and down my spine.
“Do you smell this nice all the way down?” Jonathan enquired into my neck.
Braveheart started yapping crossly, and Jonathan broke off with a vexed sigh.
“I’ll take him with me today,” I said, impulsively. “He obviously needs more attention, and he really needs to learn who’s boss.”
“Shouldn’t that be me?” asked Jonathan with a wry grin. “Anyway, I’ll leave it up to you—after all, you’re the one with the magic touch when it comes to that mutt. I was telling Kurt about how you’d tamed the beast, and he wants to talk to you about his sister’s dachshund. Keeps mauling her Manolos.” He winked. “Now if you need a job in New York, that might be something to think about?”
Emboldened by this, I decided to come clean about my meeting with Paige and Godric. I was a rotten liar, and I hated the idea of not being up-front with Jonathan.
“Well, actually, I’m sort of trying to explore that avenue myself,” I said. “With people, obviously, not dogs. Training, sort of.”
Jonathan looked surprised. “I thought we agreed you were on vacation.”
“Yes, I know, but I, er, I’ve sort of got a freelance job.”
Jonathan’s surprise turned to suspicion. “Which is?”
I took a deep breath. “You remember the actor we met at Bonnie’s party?”
He nodded warily. “Hard to forget Ric Spencer.”
“Yes, well, Paige has asked me to pop along to a photo shoot he’s doing today, to keep an eye on him, as it were.”
“In what way, ‘keeping an eye on him’?”
“Just…keeping an eye on him. Making sure he looks okay in the pictures. Trying to get a smile out of him. Stopping him from insulting the photographer so badly he walks out.”
I laughed merrily.
“Melissa, that sounds like a hell of a lot of work,” said Jonathan, less merrily. “The guy is a moron. I mean, I know he’s British and a”—his face twisted up very slightly—“a friend, and you feel some kind of obligation, but come on…this is Paige’s job.”
“No, it’s not!” I said. “It’ll be fun. It’s just for an hour or so this morning, and I’ll get to see Central Park, and maybe get some top gossip for Gabi, and…”
“It’s just a for today?” he demanded, fixing me with a firm look.
“I haven’t agreed to anything,” I hedged. “Exactly.”
“Ding!” went Nelson’s lie detector in my head.
“Well, okay, just do this, then tell Paige to hire him some kind of therapist,” said Jonathan. “I mean it. I don’t want you spending your vacation stressing yourself out with morons. Is Paige paying you for?…”
Before he could go on, his Blackberry bleeped with a message and his brow furrowed as he read it. “Oh, Christ,” he muttered, under his breath. “Not again.”
“Trouble?”
It was his turn to look a little evasive. “Nothing I can’t handle. Listen, honey, I’ve got to make tracks. Call Lori if there’s anything you need,” he said. “She’s more than happy to help. I’m going to be pretty tied up all day, but I’ll let you know about dinner. We’ll work out the logistics later, okay?”
I smiled and gave him a kiss good-bye. Then another one, in the hallway by his antique hat-stand, then another, on the tree-shaded doorstep. Jonathan was the best kisser I’d ever kissed, bar none. It was all in the way he held me, carefully but firmly, as if I were a fragile ornament, then kissed me like I was anything but.
Maybe it was a good thing he was so busy, or else we’d never leave the house.
Braveheart and I set off in the direction of Central Park, with me feeding him snippets of organic chicken breast and heaping him with praise every block or so, as per instructions. I had to admit that when Braveheart was behaving, he looked pretty cute. While I was wearing a simple cotton dress and a large hat to keep the sun off my face, he was sporting an outrageously expensive tartan dog collar and Tiffany dog tag, with his fur gleaming in the sun like fresh ice cream after his wash and brush-up at Karen’s yesterday. Frankly, Braveheart looked more Park Avenue than I did, and he was walking along like he knew it.
We walked twenty blocks, then, in order to preserve my final shreds of composure, we took a taxi.
While we were stuck in traffic, I took the opportunity to call the agency again. If I went onto answering machine again, I told myself, then I’d really have to get tough.
Fortunately, after six rings, the phone was snatched up at the other end.
“…All right, I’ll bloody get it then. What?” barked a clearly peeved voice.
“Allegra!” I gasped. “What if I were a client?”
There was a clunk and a tussle, and then Gabi came on the line. “Hello, Mel!” she said too brightly. “How’s the Big Apple?”
Braveheart growled up at me from the floor of the cab.
“It’s all wonderful,” I said. “But listen, where were you two yesterday?”
“Here?”
“But I called at about half four and got the answering machine.” I tried to keep my voice light.
There was a faint pause, in which I distinctly heard Allegra say, “What is she, the lunch police? Tell her to mind her own bloody business.”
That was too much.
“That’s exactly what I am doing!” I roared down the phone. “Tell her I said that, Gabi!”
“Oh, yesterday? Um, well, Allegra was out most of the afternoon…”
“Doing your shopping!” Allegra yelled in the background.
“And I…must have been in the loo. Did you leave a message?”
“No,” I said. “And you hadn’t checked the messages.”
I could tell we were now nearing Central Park, so I grabbed my notebook out of my bag. “Listen, this is what I want you to do. Tell Julian Hervey I know where to get his socks but remind him to use that special foot spray I found for him, then tell Arlo Donaldson that if he wants to go to that shoot, he’ll just have to find himself a dog collar and pretend to have joined some obscure religious sect that allows him to carry on an apparently normal life.”
There was a pause at the other end. “You might want to listen to the messages first,” I said.
“Okay,” said Gabi contritely. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” I added, “almost forgot—ring Roger and tell him it’s definitely not on about the Hunt Ball. He wants me to go with him as Honey and he won’t take no for an answer. If he won’t take it from you, get Allegra to tell him.”
“Right,” said Gabi. “Socks, dog collar, no to Roger. Anything else?”
“Not at the moment,” I said. “But, Gabi—”
“Byeeee!” said Gabi and hung up.
I found Godric lurking by the entrance nearest the John Lennon Strawberry Fields garden, as prearranged by Paige so we’d “feel at home!” He was smoking a cigarette furtively and wearing dark glasses, a dark cotton turtleneck, and a dark pair of trousers, despite the heat. He looked like a cartoon Frenchman.
Even as I was waving at him and he was shuffling in response, my mobile rang, and a wave of guilt hit me because I assumed it was Jonathan. But it wasn’t. It was Paige.
“Are you there? You’re with him, right?” she demanded without preamble.
“Yes, I’m here,” I said.
“Good, because he cannot be on his own.”
“Why?” I asked, regarding Godric curiously. “Is he liable to run off?”
Paige laughed as if I were being deliberately obtuse. “Oh, you’re funny! No, he’s liable to be mobbed by fans, Melissa. He needs someone with him to make sure there are no incidents.”
Absolutely no one was clamoring to mob Godric, as far as I could see.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said. “There’s no sign of the photographer, though.”
Godric looked as if he was about to slope off into the park, so I raised a warning finger at him. To my surprise, he stayed put. While it was working, I raised another finger at Braveheart, who obediently sat down and eyed my handbag.
“Now, Ric’s had lots of pictures done before, and we just can’t get them right. I told him to bring them with him so you can get an idea.” She clicked something in the background—her pen? Her knuckles? I couldn’t tell. “I keep telling him, I’m okay with a bit of smoldering, but I need some smiles! I need charm! He just does this…face. I don’t know how to describe it. You’ll see. He never does it when he’s working, for some reason. Just when he’s in an expensive photo session. He’s costing us, so I’d appreciate it if you could control things a little.”
“Um, but what do you mean by that? Roughly?”
Paige clicked again.
“Just…talk to him. So he knows what to project. These pictures, they’re going to go out to casting agents, for all sorts of different jobs. So I wanna see Hugh Grant, but I need Hugh Jackman as well. Know what I’m saying? I need Ralph Fiennes, but also the young Richard Burton. I need some range.”
I looked at Godric, who was indeed toting a leather portfolio under one scrawny arm. The raw material didn’t look promising. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Great,” said Paige, over the sound of the phone ringing again. “Should only take an hour or two! Tiffany! Tiffany! Don’t mumble at me!”
I rang off to save her the bother of hanging up on me.
“Morning, Godric!” I said, walking over to him. “How are you today?”
“Is that your dog?” he demanded. “I can’t stand yappy little dogs.” He bent down to Braveheart’s level. “They should be put on spits and eaten!”
Braveheart paused then snapped at his nose with precision timing, and Godric leaped back with a yelp.
“Godric, this is Braveheart. Braveheart, this is Ric Spencer. Right, well, now you two have got to know each other,” I said, tugging at the leash. “Is that your portfolio?”
“Yes. It’s shit.” Godric handed it over and I flipped through the photographs inside.
Paige was right: They all bore the hallmarks of very expensive lighting and artistry, but Godric was projecting variations on the same emotion in every single one of them. Acute awkwardness.
Admittedly he’d really gotten “awkward” nailed—even in black Armani, leaning against a glass wall, he looked like a teenager waiting outside an STD clinic. I carried on flipping through the glossy photographs. Then, right at the end, were some photos of him on stage, in the sort of frilly white shirt that even Allegra would have rejected as too attention-seeking. It could have been a different person.
“Wow!” I exclaimed, pulling them out. “What’s this?”
Godric leaned over. “Oh, that. I was in a production of Dracula up in Edinburgh, couple of years ago. I was Jonathan Harker. Got some good reviews, actually.”
“I bet.” In these photos, Godric looked rather foxy, with his dark hair flopping into his eyes and his face animated with terror. I think it was terror, anyway. There was a seven-foot bat behind him.
“So how come you can’t do that in these?” I asked, shaking the other photos. “Eh?”
Surliness returned to his face like a cloud. “Not an effing model, am I? Can’t stand all that poncing around. It’s a waste of time.”
Before I could give him a brisk lecture about how making an effort for an hour could help his career no end, a large man with two shouldersful of bags hoved into view.
“Ric Spencer?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Godric without removing his shades.
“Dwight Kramer. First up, let me tell you—I loved you in Grey’s Anatomy,” said the photographer, unpacking one of his bags. “When you gave up your kidney? My wife cried so much I thought she was ill. No, I gotta be honest”—he clapped a hand over his chest to demonstrate manly emotion—“we both cried, man.”
“Jesus,” muttered Godric, staring at his feet. “I didn’t think anyone with a brain still watched it.”
Dwight boggled.
I nudged Godric hard and spoke quickly to cover the man’s confusion. “Hello, Dwight, I’m Melissa. I’m, er, a friend of Ric’s. From home. In London.”
“Pleased to meet you, Melissa!” We shook hands warmly. “Do you have any particular ideas for this shoot?” asked Dwight. “Any special angles? I’m very open to direction.”
“Don’t make me look like a prick,” Godric mumbled. “If you can manage that. It’s about me, right, not about what a great artist you are.”
I swallowed. I’d only been in New York a few days, but it had really struck me how much more accommodating people were here, even when they didn’t necessarily mean it. I kept reading how New Yorkers were meant to be fearsomely rude, but compared to London, where you could literally go into labor on the Tube only to have people tut about you for not moving down the carriage, the general air of friendliness was noticeable. It might have been something to do with the tipping culture, but even so, I liked being wished a nice day.
So, although I knew by London standards that Godric was just being a bit grumpy, by American standards, he was edging toward sectionable rudeness.
“Why don’t we have a walk farther into the park?” I suggested, hoping that moving out of the sun might sweeten Godric up a bit.
“I’m cool with that,” said Dwight agreeably, and we set off.
I hung back a bit to let Godric shuffle along ahead, with his hands in his pockets.
Braveheart was trotting at my heels now, nosing my bag and looking cute. I felt a surge of warmth toward him. If Jonathan couldn’t be with me during the day, then Braveheart was the next best thing. We were sharing him.
“Ric always like that?” asked Dwight.
“Oh, God, no. Sorry about that. He’s rather tired,” I confided. “You know what these actors are like. Up all night rehearsing, learning lines…”
“Drinking,” added Dwight, with a wink.
“Goodness, certainly not!” I protested, Paige’s words about polishing Godric up into a Ye Olde English Gentleman Actor ringing in my head. “He’s really not like that at all. Ric’s terribly serious about his acting. He reads and reads and…he’s just jet-lagged.”
As I said this, two lady joggers swerved to avoid Ric, who was shuffling like a Dementor down the middle of the path.
“Did you see that?” Dwight asked. “Did you see who that was?”
I craned my neck round, but they’d gone.
“No?”
“That was Reese Witherspoon. With a trainer, I guess. You never know who you’ll run into, walking their dogs or what have you.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, you got all the stars in those apartments over there.” And Dwight proceeded to reel off a list of famous people who lived nearby, and then another list of what his photographer friends had caught them doing on camera.
After a while, Dwight found a nice quiet corner of the park where the light was falling beautifully through the trees. I sat down on a bench and watched while he set up the shot, moving Godric backward and forward, trying to coax him into showing some of his famous dramatic sensitivity.
But as soon as Dwight raised his camera to his eye, Godric’s face instinctively rearranged itself into the awkward photograph face much beloved of self-conscious men all over Britain: eyebrows aloft, strange, apologetic smile that suggested some gastric indiscretion, coupled with a gentle hunching of the shoulders. He did it every time: Dwight would talk, Godric would listen, stare into the distance, then look back with exactly the same expression. It was like trying to make a teddy bear sit up: Things looked hopeful until you moved your hands, then it slumped down again into the same lifeless hunch.
The charade went on for another twenty minutes, with similar results. Or rather, lack of results. It was interesting for me, though: Sitting comfortably in the shade, I could watch the stream of New Yorkers walking their dogs, Rollerblading, jogging, arguing, eating their lunch, sunbathing, with the Manhattan skyline rising above the trees behind them like a film set. Some of the passersby, I noticed, even glanced at Ric as if they recognized him. But then again, they might just have been wondering who the grumpy bloke being photographed was.
Eventually, I could see that Dwight was struggling, while Ric’s face reddened in the sun. “Shall we go and get a drink?” I called over.
Gratefully, they followed me back onto the main path, and we wandered further into the park, where I insisted we stop at an ice-cream cart. Godric initially refused, then succumbed to a Good Humor bar, which he ate with incongruous enthusiasm for a man dressed head to toe in black.
“You take the little fella to one of the Central Park dog runs?” asked Dwight, nodding at Braveheart, who had now grown tired of being obedient and cute and was charging at passersby.
“I don’t, no,” I said. According to Cindy’s notes, Braveheart was a member of no fewer than three private dog runs, one of which even offered single-sex walking hours.
He laughed. “Gotta get on the right dog run, hey?”
I started to say that he wasn’t mine, but as I looked down, I realized that Braveheart’s extending leash had extended so far that I couldn’t actually see him. There were bushes in the way and only his red leash vanishing into them.
My heart sank. “Braveheart!” I called, quietly at first, trying to ravel the leash back in. “Come! Come here!”
I turned to Dwight. “Sorry about this. He’s frightfully stubborn.”
“Can’t you control that thing?” demanded Godric loftily. “I mean, how hard is it to control an animal you could easily stick on a barbecue? Surely he weighs less than your ludicrous handbag?”
Godric was really starting to get on my nerves. He had absolutely no reason to be so rude, especially to people who were trying to help him.
I got up to wind in the leash before I could succumb and tell Godric just where to get off. It went round a waste-bin, through a bush, and at last I spotted him.
“Braveheart!” I yelled furiously. He was over by a tree, enthusiastically mounting a spaniel who didn’t seem to know quite what was going on.
Her owner, however, did, and he seemed pretty livid.
“What the hell are you doing?” he screamed, flapping his hands at the dogs. “What the hell? Get off! Get off! Oh, my God! Call the police!”
Braveheart flashed him an “oh, do just leave us to it” look that my father would have been proud of and carried on thrashing away.
Well, that was it. It was one thing being shown up by the rudeness of a recalcitrant semi-client, but to be shown up by my own dog?
“Braveheart!” I thundered, bright red with nine different types of embarrassment. “Braveheart! This behavior is utterly unacceptable! Come here right now! Right now!”
Dwight and Godric flinched at the steel in my voice.
“Christ,” I heard Godric mumble. “Maggie effing Thatcher or what?”
With one final thrust, Braveheart dismounted and trotted over to me, leaving the spaniel swaying slightly. I bent down to his level and gave him my Grade One Look of Severe Displeasure, complete with the Strict Finger of Disappointment. “Never, never do that again,” I hissed, “or I will tan your sorry Scottish hide from here to Aberdeen, pedigree or no pedigree!”
I was pleased to see him quail and lie down in groveling supplication.
I stood up and prepared to grovel myself to the owner. Never actually having owned a dog myself, I wasn’t sure what the correct procedure was. Did I offer to pay for the morning-after pill, or something? Should I insist that Braveheart marry her?
“Hello. Gosh, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. If it’s any consolation,” I said, trying to be wry, “he does have an excellent pedigree. And wonderful taste in bitches too! What a lovely dog you have. What’s she called?”
The man looked outraged. “His name is King Charles.”
I blanched. “Oh, heavens, I do apologize. Um…”
“Your freakin’ dog has just assaulted my show champion, in broad daylight, and you’re sayin’ sorry?” His voice was getting higher and higher, and I wondered if he was maybe taking this a little too personally. “How do I know what kind of filthy diseases—”
“Now, hang on a moment,” I said. “Braveheart’s a pedigree terrier—he has a sheaf of papers from the American Kennel Club!”
But the man was pointing and stepping nearer. Invading my space, as Gabi would have said.
I kind of wished Gabi was here now. She had no problems about settling disputes in public.
“Women like you are what spoil these parks for proper dog lovers,” he spat. “Coming here with your stupid little dogs and your attitude—oh, I’m too busy to train him! That’s for someone else to do.” He stopped flapping his hands around in imitation of some Park Avenue dog owner and stepped even nearer, the better to jab his finger at me. “Maybe if you spent less time sitting on your fat ass, which, may I add, is about to bust out of that dress. Don’t you have stairmasters in Britain? Maybe if you spent more time running in the park with your dog instead of sitting there eating ice cream…”
I flinched at that. I mean, criticize the dog, by all means, but—
“What did you say?”
I turned round. Out of nowhere, Godric was now standing right next to the angry man. I suddenly realized how tall Godric was—he stood a good head over Angry Dog Man and, as if to emphasize his outrage, he’d even removed his shades. And he looked surprisingly tough.
Not that Angry Dog Man seemed worried. “Who’re you?”
“What did you say to this lady?” demanded Godric. Somewhat distractedly, I noticed that his diction was absolutely crystal clear. No sign of a mumble whatsoever.
“That your little doggie?” the man sneered. “Well, now it all makes sense.”
“Godric, just leave it,” I quailed, aware of a crowd gathering a safe distance away. I hate being shouted at. “I’m sure once we’ve all calmed down, we can—”
“I am freakin’ calm, lady!” shrieked Angry Dog Man. “You’re the one with the problem!”
“Don’t speak to her like that,” said Godric ominously.
“What?”
“I said, don’t speak to her like that.” Honestly, you could have heard him on the other side of the park. “Are you stupid, or just ill-mannered? Don’t you know how to behave toward a lady?”
“Godric, listen, please don’t—”
“Will you can it, you fat bitch?” Angry Dog Man snapped, and then he seemed to hurtle sideways as Godric’s fist connected with his jaw and sent him reeling.
The crowd gasped. To my horror, I heard the rattle of camera shutters. Spinning round to tell Dwight that this wasn’t really the time, I realized that it wasn’t just him taking pictures—there was another photographer there too, and they were jostling each other for position as Godric and Angry Dog Man rolled around, punching each other.
Oh, God, this was dreadful! A whole range of horrors ran through my head—Godric’s famous face maimed, Godric in court, Paige suing me…
I racked my brains for what celebrities were meant to do in this situation but all I could think of were pictures of Sean Penn brawling with the paparazzi while Madonna put a bag over her head. Clearly that wasn’t going to cut it here, so I yanked the top off the bottle of tepid mineral water in my handbag, hurled it over the pair of them to shock them into breaking it up, then turned to put my hands over the camera lenses.
“Quick, quick!” I shouted, in a desperate attempt to distract them. “The dogs are getting away!”
That, at least, was true—the spaniel was making a break for it, with Braveheart in hot pursuit. Angry Dog Man struggled to his feet, glaring furiously between Godric, who had the classic public school slap-and-roll fight technique down pat, and his vanishing show champion. With a fearsome growl, he set off after the dog, jabbing his fist.
“I’m coming back!” he yelled, pointing at us. “Don’t think this is over! I know who you are! I’m coming back!”
I dragged Godric to his feet and brushed the grass off his shirt. My heart was still pounding with shock, and I was glad to have some briskness to hide behind. Manners are the corset of the soul, I find.
“That was terribly chivalrous of you, Godric, but next time you want to defend a lady’s honor,” I said, brushing hard, “can you please check for paparazzi?”
“I don’t care how fat your arse is,” muttered Godric, returning to his usual semi-intelligible mumble. “He had no right to talk to you like that. It was out of line. Can’t stand it when people are rude. Makes me…mad. Effing American yob.”
But he looked quietly pleased with himself, and I couldn’t help feeling flattered, in an uncommonly medieval way, even though I was really very angry with him about behaving like that.
Still, no one had ever defended my honor before. I mean, apart from Nelson. And never with fists.
“Oh, my God,” said Dwight. “You want to see these.”
We spun round. He proffered his camera, showing us the images on the digital screen: close-ups of Godric’s face, doing enraged, surprised, defensive, and, finally, quite chuffed.
“Aren’t they great?” he enthused. “I mean, yeah, extreme way to get them, but hey! It worked. There’s got to be five, six great shots there.”
But it wasn’t those photographs I was worried about. I was more concerned about the ones in the camera of the photographer who was now heading off at high speed toward the nearest exit.