The Story of the Forest was Harlequin Pictures’ fourth feature and, after a stuttering start, its breakthrough movie internationally. When it was first released it was dismissed in the British press as ‘a joke that the makers don’t quite pull off,’ ‘a romantic fantasy that veers off into obscurity,’ ‘thin, pretentious.’ But by the time it reached America, where the Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was already publishing his fiction, it had acquired an audience of young Jewish intellectuals hungry for stories of the old world, its superstitions and symbolism. A largely admiring review in the New Yorker, making allusions to Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, brought a quick re-release in Britain.
In those months between the first and second releases its young star, ‘Introducing Jennifer Patterson,’ who had played the fourteen-year-old part of ‘Hannah’ with her breasts bound with bandages and hips suppressed by cruel corsetry, had reached her twenty-first birthday and had started to go to Mayfair nightclubs, photographed oozing out of the boned oyster satin bodice of her gown. She had been originally cast for a wavering quality on the cusp between innocence and vampishness. It really depended, Tony Agnew said, on how you looked at her. An innocent mind saw an innocent. But there were other ways of looking. So when she walked into the forest with her basket, you could believe that she was both a fairy-tale innocent and a girl just asking for trouble. The Board of Classification could not put its finger on what was so iffy since there was, as Eric Fulton said, ‘absolutely no monkey business with the boys onscreen’ and awarded it a U certificate, suitable for all ages.
Throughout the making of the picture, Paula told herself that all would be well, that her mother would accept that her story had been turned into an innocent fairy tale (a metaphor, for the more sophisticated): her temporary metamorphosis first into a snowbird, her adventures in the sky, then the return to the forest floor and her second, vulpine transformation, before being restored to human form, setting forth on the ship to the New World, as if it had been a dream.
Mina had conveyed her story to Eric Fulton, as she had told it many times. She expected him to challenge her version of events, to demand more detail, to interrogate its contradictions like a police inspector: ‘How could that have happened? Do you expect me to swallow this? No, the information is of no use to me at all.’ But he seemed to have absorbed the story as if it had happened to himself. Soon he was telling it back to her. ‘It never was like that!’ she said. ‘No, maybe it wasn’t but this way is better.’ ‘Better how?’ ‘A better story.’ The tale, this piece of once-lived first-hand experience, was his now; what she had was scraps and remnants of the original memory. She no longer knew what she believed and it seemed to her that if Eric Fulton thought she had turned into a snowbird then a she-wolf, maybe she had grown feathers and fur after all. Who could contradict him? For he had written her a cheque for £500, and he now possessed world rights in the story of the forest. If she was a wolf, then, God help her, she was a wolf and that was the end of it, she wasn’t going to argue. The man was a gentleman. He was a shayne Yid, a beautiful soul. And his wife was a dreamboat, a lovely lady, such beautiful skin for one thing, and manners from heaven.
Mina did not know what to do with the money. She wanted to divide it between her three children, though maybe Paula should have more, for she had made the introduction.
Louis said, ‘The kids are doing fine. After all these years, why don’t we take a holiday, don’t we deserve it? Why not go to the South of France, stay in a top hotel?’
That is what they did, though Mina said she had nothing to wear. She bought her first bathing costume and, at the chemist, a bottle of tanning oil. Never, she said, had she suspected that when she went out to gather mushrooms it would end up like this, a wicker handbag in the shape of a sunflower.
They spent two weeks in Cannes, where they encountered no Bolsheviks at all but Belgian and French Jews who came down to dinner with wary eyes and a kind of flinching quality to their expressions when greeted by the maître d’. She purchased a gold-capped Helena Rubinstein lipstick and a pearl necklace and Louis bought himself an Omega watch with a tan leather strap. They strolled along the Croisette and Louis said, ‘It was only a few years ago that the Nazi beasts were here, and look, all washed away, as if they never were, the sun is shining for us now.’
‘Is it?’ said Mina. ‘You think?’
Five months after the Christmas Day lunch Paula had her own flat in Chelsea.
Eric Fulton’s wife had fallen pregnant, there had been a stillbirth years earlier, then a miscarriage. On the advice of her doctor she had had her fallopian tubes tied and yet somehow one little wriggler had made it through. ‘I can’t help feeling,’ Diane said, ‘that if it’s made it this far, such a tight squeeze it must have had, and the odds were really so many millions to one, that I should at least give the thing a chance, though it means lying on the sofa like a bloody invalid for months. What a bore.’
This news created a vacancy for a continuity girl, a repository for all the tedious detail of the picture, a vigilant memory bank with a sharp eye for hats and shoes and trees and cups and saucers and the ability to type it all up and keep immaculate records.
‘It would save us an awful lot of trouble if you’d step in,’ said Tony Agnew. ‘Easier to find a secretary at the last minute. Diane will show you the ropes, you’ll soon pick it up.’
He liked continuity in his continuity girls, said Bobby Orr, the key grip. Seamlessly, the show went on.
The flat in Chelsea had been taken in a hurry. She had not accounted for how far it was along the King’s Road, a long way from Sloane Square tube. Shepperton Studios were even further out, not in London at all, Paula had not understood that. Every day the train took an hour to pass through Clapham, Wimbledon, Kingston, Hampton Wick, Teddington. Sometimes Eric Fulton picked her up and drove her out in his car but most days she was alone, gazing out of the window at unfamiliar Home Counties scenery, bucolic, quiet, picture-book vistas she had only seen in the films. The gap between London and the studio was a green and gold backdrop behind glass, punctuated by old villages. She could not imagine life carrying on there in any way she would recognise. What did people do all day when there was hardly anywhere to shop, no cinemas or restaurants? There were farms, thatched cottages, inns, and between, bulky cows, heads down, eating, mooing. She passed a field of pinkish pigs let out to go mad amid the clover.
The studio was a mile from the station. Sometimes she walked, sometimes a studio car would meet her. The day was very long and film sets were not glamorous. It was mostly waiting around, waiting for the right light, waiting for the rain-machine to be fixed, waiting for scenery to be built, waiting for costume changes, waiting for make-up to be applied, waiting for actors to recover from hangovers and tantrums, everyone playing cards, playing practical jokes. Where was the forest? Oh, we’ll paint it in later, Agnew said, as a papier mâché tree was wheeled into place. The wolves were dogs in costumes, the birds came in cages with a trained handler. Jennifer Patterson was having an affair with Tony Agnew. Dressed up in her childish forest clothes, it seemed obscene when she came up behind him and nuzzled his ear, taking the lobe between her teeth and nibbling, as if he were a biscuit. He shuddered, ‘Do it again! Harder.’ Closer, through the Max Factor, you could see she did not have a child’s skin. Pimples erupted around her hairline. She was dark and sulky and petulant and gave off whiffs of expensive scent.
Behind a cardboard tree shedding paper leaves due to poor glue adhesion, Eric Fulton grabbed Paula’s wrist. ‘Stop, I have something to say to you.’
‘I’m listening.’
There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead, she smelled ripe, like a pear in the fruit bowl. She smelled to him as someone who had had sex recently and had not washed. Beads of perspiration dotted her upper lip. Tony had already taken Jennifer, he was entitled to something for himself.
He kissed her.
‘That was what I wanted to say. What is your answer?’
‘I’m not sure what the question is.’
‘I think you do.’
‘But what about your wife?’
‘She does not require my attention at the moment, she is resting. It would be unkind to bother her, and also, I believe, unsafe, too much agitation of the womb. These are medical considerations, I put my wife’s health above all else.’
It was strange to her to have his tongue, which had just been in her mouth, saying these words. Men were crazy, that’s all there was to it. They were selfish beasts, one could never understand them, but one wanted them. He smelled of cigars and a masculine skin preparation, woody, boxy, arousing. He had a gold signet ring on his pinkie, it had brushed her face. He was twice her age.
‘What arrangement do you have in mind?’
‘Do you want a contract? Is that it, do you expect me to put something in writing?’
‘No.’
‘Well, suppose we say that for the duration of this picture we have a little fun together. Would you mind?’
‘I have a boyfriend.’
‘Then now you have a boyfriend and a lover. I’m not asking you to be my mistress. That’s another thing altogether, my wife would not approve of such an arrangement.’
Eric Fulton smelled sexily of wealth, it came from the starched collars of his shirts and the careful way he combed back his hair and put a preparation on it. Above all, she thought, there was plenty of amusement, a lightness about him, and God knows you got none of that from Roland. She knew that the sex would not be so charged, so intense, but he might be a laugh in bed. He would come to the flat in Chelsea, she would make him delightful little suppers, she could manage an omelette, at the very least. And a glass of wine. It seemed harmless and, as he said, temporary. So why not? She kissed him back.
‘Excellent! Now just don’t say a word to your wonderful parents.’
‘As if.’