The Colonnel’s Daughter

William Nichols – or ‘Will’, as I think of him – is an actor I’d never actually met. It’s odd I’d never met him because a) he’s filthily famous and b) his pic is on the same page as mine in Spotlight. Actually, my pic is above his as I’m fractionally superior to him alphabetwise, but our page goes: Stephen Nias (me), William Nichols (Will), Bob Nickolls (spelt with a k and two l’s and pullulating with his resemblance to Alain Delon), and Ken Nightingale (the less said the better; cast as the eternal traffic warden; should never have had his pic in ‘Leading’).

You may think the question of the Spotlight pics is a bit of a waffle (this writing course is tediously keen on the word relevance), but I don’t think it is. You see, my pic was actually taken in ’79 (hair darker, bags minimal, you know . . .) and in it I look so absolutely dead right for the part of the Duke of Buckingham that I was offered it sight unseen, or virtually. I did have lunch with the producer, Alfie Morton, before contracts went out, but Alfie likes to lunch at The Rasputin, an utterly excruciating Russian restaurant he thinks is de riguer for the famous, and luckily the bloody Rasputin is so dark – and I mean pitch – that you honestly can’t tell whether the cav in your blinis is red or black. So you see, in those conditions I could still make thirty-five; Alfie stares at me like an icon over our red-glassed candle and his only worry is, is my voice, which viewers hear almost nightly extolling the nutrient virtues of a catfood called Tiggo, too domesticated a tool for the cadences of the haughty duke? He decides no, and he’s right. The reason I got the Tiggo VO is that my voice is – and I say this without vanity – my greatest asset as an actor. I’m not a deep person; I know my failings. Life’s a bit of a game to me, a bit of a tap-dance. But my voice is redolent with depth. It’s as if it was engendered in one of those grottes the green Michelin guides keep encouraging you to visit. It reverbs. It has texture. I’d be dead on for Son et Lumière. I’m wasted on frigging catfood – but that’s television for you, and my bank manager isn’t complaining. So I have no difficulty convincing Alfie Morton that he and old ‘Eyelids’ Mordecai, our illustrious director, have made the right choice.

By the time we get to coffee, Alfie’s making his ‘Welcome Aboard’ speech and I know I’ve got the duke. I actually begin to rattle with excitement: a four-month shoot, one month of which will be in Greece. And Will Nichols playing King James. With Will’s name on the picture, it’s certainly going to get coverage. It’s a major movie alright: Jon Markworthy on script, Billy Nettlefold on cameras, the Morton/Mordecai clout with distributors, Will in his first screen role for over two years, and me. After lunch with Alfie (I put my shades on the minute we get anywhere near natural light) I brisk along to Dougie, my agent, and to my utter amazement he produces a bottle of Taylor’s port from a filing cabinet marked ‘Clients SS’. I’m much too surprised by the Taylor’s gesture to ask Dougie what ‘SS’ stands for.

When I got home, I took my trousers off and examined my legs. My bathroom’s all mirrors, so I shot little glances at them from every angle. They’re okay. I’m five eleven. But they’re not the exquisite legs the Duke displays in that picture of him in the Portrait Gallery. Those legs look as if they begin at his armpits, and my thighs seem positively neanderthal by comparison. But then I remembered that Will Nichols is a short man – sturdy and stubby – so that compared to his legs, I thought mine would have a touch of the gazelle about them. Heaven knows why I was so worried about legs. There were far more excruciating things to worry about, had I known it at the time (as the lion said to the unicorn), but I was all breezy innocence and excitement! I got out a pair of ancient bermudas and stuffed them out with a couple of cushions to make them look like hose. Protruding from these, my legs looked plain ridiculous. It’s at times like these, with cushions puffing out my bum, that I’m thankful I live alone. At least, after everything that happened, I haven’t lost my sense of humour!

There was one fact which, from the start of this film, I found slightly odd, but which no one else remarked on: namely, Will Nichols, about to play the most Scottish king since Macbeth, was Welsh. I’d long ago seen Will Nichols grapple with a Scots accent in one of those thunderous war movies that are all about detonating bridges over the Rhine, and he’d done dismally. His voice has what I’d call gusto, but it’s unmistakable Welsh gusto. He can do a passable English baronet, but not (well, I don’t think he can) a Scots king. I felt like saying to Morton: you might as well cast an American, love, and have done with it. But by the time I was offered Buckingham (the juiciest film part I’ve ever had) Will Nichols’s name was on the project and there it would stick. Over the Taylor’s, Dougie told me that at least Will was off the booze.

I’ll tell you what I knew about Will at that time. (You’ll know most of it already. His life is pretty well public knowledge.) He’d crawled onto a stage bent double from his deprived childhood in a Welsh mine, straightened up enough to do a memorable Hamlet aged twenty, married a then star of the English stage called Myrtle Bridehead, years his senior and opposite whom he played a rather chunky Romeo. (Myrtle Bridehead as Juliet, nudging thirty-seven, was one of the finest embarrassments of my protected youth.) He’d then been whisked off to America. In Hollywood, he began to make a string of romantic movies and by the age of thirty he was a flash name and a millionaire. He should have died then. Or am I being unfair? He’s done one or two respectable things since then – he’s now forty-seven, looks older – but his fame has bred on itself, rather than on additions to itself, if you get my drift. He dumped Myrtle the minute LA swam into vision through the smog and only played a bit-part at her suicide two months later. Rumour has it that since Myrtle, the last scales of Welsh conformism have fallen from his eyes and that from that time he has tangled off-screen only with men and boys. His most faithful companion of recent years has been the whisky bottle. His Welsh lungs have begun to sound as if they’re filling up with coal. Despite all this, he’s still a bankable star.

As to me (virtually unknown Steve Nias), I tried to prepare myself meticulously for Buckingham, and I don’t just mean staring at my legs. Jon Markworthy’s script suggested a relationship between Buckingham and King James which, if it wasn’t a love affair in the understood sense, was as least as passionate as one. Now I loathe ambiguity. So I spent hours in Chelsea Public Library trying to decide for myself precisely what the nature of this friendship was – and failing. History itself is ambiguous on the subject, as I might have guessed. So all I had to go on were Markworthy’s scenes. In one of these, I am summoned in the middle of the night from the bed of my wife, Katherine, to the bedchamber of the king. I arrive breathless, and no wonder. The king stammers on about his role as ‘nurturer of peace in this land’. I, wearing a night robe (that turned out to resemble and to be as heavy as a forty foot drape) start to mutter ominously about the need to take England to war. A verbal scuffle ensues. The King starts to weep. I hold him and he kisses me. Lorks! In the run-up to my first meeting with Will Nichols, I phoned Dougie and asked for a meeting with Markworthy and Eyelids re the persistent ambiguity of this and other scenes. Dougie simply laughed and told me to stop jittering.

I can’t leave lorks in. But this one word conveys precisely what I felt every time I read this scene. One of the commandments of the Eric Neasdale Writing Course is ‘avoid ejaculations where possible.’ Lorks is an undoubted ejaculation. Oh well. Perhaps something else will come to me in the middle of the night, as they say. N.B. I must take this piece of work seriously. I would seriously like to become a writer. But writing about ‘real events’ seems to have its little problems.

I came to acting from dancing. The love of dance hasn’t entirely left me and I sometimes do little dance routines on the flat roof of my Fulham top-floor flat, among my plants. I grow cucumbers on this roof in the summer and shrubs and herbs and roses all the year round, in big tubs and old baths and sinks. I never grow tomatoes because I’m allergic to them. This allergy makes some dinners problematical: you find tomato in almost everything from daube to douglère, from Bolognese to braised oxtail, and the unsightly neck rashes I then have to endure are one of the penances of an otherwise quietly agreeable and civilised life.

I live alone, as I said, but I’m seldom actually lonely. I lived with someone called David for a year and with someone called Donovan for about nine months. Otherwise, I’ve always lived alone since I left school and home. My mother is an elderly person and safely put away in a home for elderly persons near Swindon. My father, who disapproved of me and all my works till his dying day, mercifully reached his dying day in 1976, and since then I’ve felt guilty about nothing and fairly positive about most things.

The money I make from Tiggo and other VOs I do for ITV have brought me a high standard of living, even though I don’t get as much acting work as I’d like. Between you and me, I’m not that fantastic an actor. I’ve got my following because, as you’ve guessed from the Buckingham thing, I’m still fairly morbidly handsome. Sexually, I’m what they call alert and I honestly don’t have any difficulty in that département. My West Indian cleaner, Mrs Baali (I call her Pearl Barley. That’s the kind of joke that’s typical me) is allowed to tease me about my boyfriends, but I keep them low profile. ‘Sex = love’ is pure romanticism, pure bunkum, in my view. Jon Markworthy at least understood this in his famous script, if nothing else. I’m a very meticulous person, day to day. I like clean things. Lately, I’ve been a slut, though. I’ve had weekends when I didn’t wash or shave or go out or wash up. Pearl Barley’s been dying to comment. She’s like a huge, wobbling brown fruit, my Pearl Barley, and comment on my sluttishness has been on the brink of bursting out of her for several weeks, I can tell. But she hasn’t cracked yet. She’s a loyal woman. I’m not all that loyal myself, but I value it in others.

I was forty-one the day I met Will Nichols for the first time face to face. An odd coincidence that this project should kick off on my birthday, 6 May. In fact, it had kicked off months before of course, but old Eyelids actually sat down with his lead actors on 6 May in what appeared to be the boardroom of his Wardour Street offices, flanked by Markworthy and Morton and Nettlefold and legions of PAs, and over a rather troppo minceur lunch of smoked salmon mould he began to talk about ‘my great new royal baby, King James I’.

‘Eyelids’ Mordecai is seventy-eight years old. My allergy to tomatoes (uncomfortable enough, God knows) is but a shade compared to the ghostly army of allergies haunting Mordecai. Mordecai rightly belongs in a Swiss sanitorium, muffled to the neck in polyanimide, breathing cloudless air. Here, he would die calmly, snow would settle on his globally famous eyelids and that would be that. As it is, his quaking body is carried on and off aeroplanes, wheeled around scorching Spanish locations in the modern equivalent of a Bath chair. Some days, even his voice has a quake to it and his brain has patches of blank, like sunspots, and all his instructions fall out of his drooling mouth in slow motion, like elephants’ feet. It makes you wonder, when you consider what Mordecai earns per annum, about the film business.

The first thing Will told me about Mordecai – on that first day we met, my birthday – was ‘don’t expect him to direct.’ I stared at Will. Our bedroom scenes were still some weeks distant, but prior to them I had been banking on a little ‘guidance’ from Eyelids. Will then related how, in 1975, Eyelids had cast him as Ulrick Voss in a film he proposed to make of Patrick White’s justly famous (but in my view dead difficult) novel, Voss. Will invoked his education-deprived childhood to explain his confusion with this man (the casting was moronic, of course. Will Nichols is far too gross a person to play Voss, even in a weightless after-life) and went grovelling to Mordecai for a bit of direction. Mordecai was having one of his quivering and quaking days. They were in southern Australia in temps of 100° fahrenheit (I can’t do this centigrade thing; I’m much too old to learn) and Mordecai’s brain was blank white. He told poor old Will to read the book five more times (448pp. in my King Penguin edition and Will had one week), went off to have his morning enema and would not brook the subject again. Luckily – or perhaps in consequence of this sad scene – the film was so excruciatingly bad and so catastrophically over-budget, it was put into turnaround half way through and never re-started. Will caught sunstroke that year and in his fever believed he was getting nearer to understanding the hauntings of Ulrick Voss. Will’s life is full of little such ironies.

I’m a bit off track, I see. The course says: ‘Imagine your subject as a Roman Road (sic caps). Its foundation must be your understanding and, except where absolutely necessary, you must try not to veer from it.’ I don’t know if information about Will and Mordecai is ‘absolutely necessary’, but I think it might be. (I hate the word ‘veer’. There was a boy at school called Vere Pickersgill, whom I loathed.) Pearl Barley’s just arrived to do me out. She says all this writing I’m closeted with is making me deadly pale. Better phone Dougie and see if there’s a little role-ette for me in a hot clime.

I had expected to dislike Will Nichols. The fame and success of other actors can bring on neck rashes as badly as the virulent tomato. And who was Steve Nias compared to Golden Will, the lad from the Rhonda turned superstar? A nothing. An ‘SS’ in Dougie’s vocab. (I’ll explain ‘SS’ later.) But then – and this is the key to the events which followed – who was George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham, compared to the king himself? A bit of trumped-up gentry with elongated calves. A hitherto also-ran at the court. Until, that is, the king singled him out. Until the king made him his confidant, his favourite, his own Saint John. With his stubborn Scottish hand, King James parted the sea of court bathers and gave Buckingham the Navy. Henceforth he was dressed, metaphorically anyway, in sapphires.

At the end of that first afternoon in Mordecai’s boardroom, just as I was about to sally home to water my cucumbers, Welsh Will invited me to tea. Mumbling something about needing to get to know each other better ‘before the schedules start to bite’, he shepherded me into his chauffeur-driven Jag and I was whisked off to Claridge’s. (Will is a tax exile now and has no home in England other than Claridge’s, which he treats exactly as if he owned it all.)

In his sumptuous suite, decorated in remarkably subtle shades of pale lemon and oyster grey, he ordered iced tea (a Californian fad I utterly loathe; it reminds me of my two years at Ipswich rep), then sent his secretary and other minions away and began to talk. He talked about exile. My eye wandered to an Indian rug which totally complemented the shades of the room, adding blue and a hint of white. I sort of waded in the lovely symmetries of the rug’s pattern while Will’s coal-silted voice rasped on about the loneliness of LA and Monaco. I was dying to ask Will where he’d found the rug (grey and yellow with blue and white are dead unusual colours in Indian wool work) but he was embarked on a monologue and I couldn’t get my question in.

Gradually, over the field of the rug, Will’s talking began to hang like a nearing thunderstorm. I stared up at him, sensing in his gaelic heart gigantic rain clouds. And lo, over the cragged hillsides of his cheeks, rivulets of tears began to beat down! I felt livid. Honestly, I did. Used. Acted upon in more ways than one. ‘God,’ I felt like saying, ‘if you understood the sacrifices us lesser mortals have to make for our so-called art (and the frigging Tiggo VOs aren’t the only ones) you wouldn’t be blubbing about fame’s adverbial negatives and qualifying clauses. You’d be admiring the management’s superlative flower arrangements and saying to yourself, fortunate me! Life had me marked out for rickets and TB and all I got was success.’

We were shooting the interiors at Pinewood. Designer, Geoff Hamm, had done a great job on the Theobalds sets and on Day One old Eyelids’ pearly veins were rippling with expectation. Dougie’s assistant, an intelligent, pretty person called Victoria, had sent flowers to my dressing room. I’d never had the flower treatment before and they put me in a lovely mood. Jon Markworthy, reputedly sulking in his tent like Achilles over script changes commanded by Eyelids, turned out not to be sulking at all and had done a nice new scene between me and Jimmie Henraes, the very dear actor playing Charles (later Charles I), the King’s son. So all seemed set fair. I was feeling just the right amount of mingled fear and excitement. Makeup did a super job on my bags and this and my black wig took five years off me, or more. Ready, steady, go, I thought. But then Will appeared. Eyes like fried eggs, capilliaries popping like a coral forest, tongue like old pipes. Terror and self-pity had led him back to demon drink, the whole process begun, I later learned, by the single brandy I had poured him at the Claridge.

I poured myself a glass of his Château Something and sat myself down in his idiotic rocking chair. (Will Nichols has this sentimental stick of furniture flown and carted to every dressing room and every caravan he’s ever worked from. It’s his ‘trademark’. You could have gone on a world cruise with the travelling money that rocking chair has consumed.) I said something reasonably lame about not intending to ‘funk it’, but he cut me off. ‘I,’ he said majestorily, ‘shall fail because I no longer have the courage or the voice a talent like mine requires, and you, Steve, will fail because this part has come to you ten years too late.’

I don’t know, but I think I’m in my stride a bit now. I think my writing’s got a bit better as this story’s gone on. That’s because I’m worrying less about Neasdale’s rules and just trying to remember what happened and put it down. There are still words I’ll have to alter, though, like ‘frigging’. Dougie phoned. The VO Clinic (as I call it) want me to do Buffi-pads nappy liners. Have I reached my nadir, prostitutionwise?

For as long as we were in England, I was able to steer clear of Will, except actually on set. The schedule (and the script) were redrafted to enable Will to ‘get into’ King James rather better than he appeared to be doing before the big key emotional scenes were asked of him. In Mordecai’s age-yellowed eyes, you could visibly see thoughts about replacing him doing battle with dollar signs. Cut his losses now and re-start the movie in a year’s time with a new star? Keep Will on, stay more or less inside budget, take the risk he’d pull something out in the big scenes? Some mornings Eyelids would look used up, poor old thing, as if he’d died in the night, but then out would come some quavery instruction and the hopeless day would start.

Will was dead right about him not directing. I came to rely on Markworthy (and thank God he was around) to help me step by step through Buckingham. Markworthy is a very plain (I don’t mean ugly) and honest and kind man – a far cry indeed from the petulant Marxists masquerading as dramaturges I’ve had the misfortune to meet at play rehearsals in condemned warehouses. Markworthy seems to handle success as if it were Health Food. It’s made him extremely calm and sensible and you sense that his bowel movements are exquisite. I rather envy him. And we’ve stayed in touch. He and his wife, Jane, grow cucumbers in Barnes (a great bond, the growing of things) and I’ve entertained them on my rooftop.

But on. Markworthy didn’t come with us to Greece. (Let me just mention that the bit of the film we were to make in Greece was, in the script, meant to be made in Spain. Now, in most filmscripts, if the writer has been foolish enough to suggest Africa, India, Australia, Ceylon, Mexico, or anywhere parched-seeming, these bits are invariably made in Spain. In our case, we had a bonafide reason for shooting in Spain – namely that Buckingham and Prince Charles did actually go to Spain to woo the Infanta Donna Maria and are visited there (in the film, but not in the history books) by the king. But such is the pachydermic stupidity of this business that we lugged ourselves and our hardware an extra thousand miles, to dress one country up as another far closer to home. Perhaps we were getting money from the Greek Film Foundation, or whatever. I honestly have no idea. I didn’t even feel it was worth mentioning to Dougie, let alone to Alfie or Eyelids. Play the part, Nias, and shut up.)

So, no, Jon Markworthy couldn’t come with us to Greece, which was a blow for me. He was off on a talking tour of seventeen American cities, and we were flown to an arrid bit of Olympian hinterland we immediately christened Poxos. Poxos had one verdant edge – palms and cypress and yuccas and hibiscus and the sound of a bird or two, and hidden in the verdure a sublimely beautiful seventeenth-century palazzo, undergoing conversion to a 5-star hotel. It was called the Palladium Hotel, which gave rise to a series of panto gags among our irreverent group, brought on not merely by the name, but also by the fact that we weren’t actually staying at the Palladium; the Palladium was our location – the King of Spain’s alleged summer palace, the setting for our scenes with the infanta. (According to history, all these scenes took place in Madrid itself. Someone suggested Eyelids would pass on if forced to consume the oily paellas of that city.)

We were billeted – and this included our star, Will and his rocking chair – in a modern motel called the Eleusis, upon whose low-fashioned concrete walls the summer meltimi wind remorselessly blew, from six in the morning till dusk. At dusk, having boiled your mind to leaden grey meat all day, it died. You began to hear the birds and the crickets. You relaxed. The terrace of your favourite taverna would be bathed in last light. You began to drink.

Jimmie Henraes drank to forget Mary Powell (the actress playing Katherine, who wasn’t in the Spanisho-Greek sequences) and with whom he had fallen in love that day in Eyelids’ boardroom. (A love consummated so many times during the Pinewood days, poor old Jimmie could hardly stagger through a scene without having a lie-down.) Morton and Mordecai drank with some rotund Greek businessmen who had appeared in suits on Day One. Nettlefold and the crew drank Greek beer and spent a lot of time scorching the sparse local flora with untreated urine. Geoff Hamm developed piles and drank in solitary pain. And I, well I drank because I was there and because, by that time, I had fallen under the spell of Will Nichols.

I was so balanced, I thought. I knew what Will Nichols was – a failed genius, a lush, an egomaniac. But what he still had, and this I suppose was why he was still a star, was a terrible and irresistible charm. I say terrible because honestly I thought at forty-one I was immune to anything so peripheral as charm. I’m a wicked flirt, but I’m jolly hard to ensnare. I actually think my ensnarement stemmed from what Will had said about the two of us funking our roles. I’d become determined to prove him wrong – not only as far as I was concerned, but also as far as he was concerned. Can you understand this? I wanted to be a marvellous Buckingham, but I knew I could only do this if I helped Will (yes, helped him) to be a marvellous King James. And he sensed this in me. He sensed, right after the tea in Claridge’s, that I wanted to help him, to nanny him, to love him through it, if you like. And don’t forget, he was a lonely, exiled man, terrified out of his skull. He knew he’d get sweet nothing from Mordecai. He didn’t get on with Jon Markworthy, as I did. So he plonked himself on me. James’s obsessive need of Buckingham somehow became utterly mixed and mingled with Will’s need of me. Will’s psyche was just as plagued by imaginary enemies as the king’s. He saw enemies all around him. He had dreams of terrible persecutions and woundings. He needed a shrink, I suppose, and instead he found a soft heart – yours truly, Steve.

Pearly Barley has an amazing son, who calls himself T-Bone Jack. He wants to be a rock star, she says with a groan. He just arrived to collect her in a borrowed Cortina. Pearl B. insisted on showing him my roof garden, so I went up with them. T-Bone Jack has the hardest eyes and the tightest buttocks I’ve ever seen on any man, ethnic or no. Yet, surprisingly, his handshake was rather soft and moist. N.B. Must remember to expunge all random jottings (i.e. about T-Bone’s buttocks) when I commit this piece to my stone-age Olympia portable.

On the fifth day at Poxos, we reached one of our key scenes. Finding Buckingham’s absence from England unbearable, King James has crossed the treacherous water and arrives in Spain. Paying scant respect to the King of Spain (an excellent Mexican actor, Leoncio Iagos – known of course to us as ‘Iago’) or to the infanta (an American actress, Jane Bellamy, doing ineffectual battle with Spanish consonants), he strides in to Buckingham’s lavish suite of rooms and tells him he ‘cares not a jot for England, nor for any man on this earth’ if he is to be deprived of his ‘Sweet Steenie’s presence’. (‘Steenie’, as you probably know, was James’s pet name for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, derived from the angelic St Stephen. The fact that my name is Steve seems to have been, in Will Nichols’s confused subconscious, additional vindication of his need of me.) An exceedingly emotional duet is then played out: Steenie refuses to return to England until he’s nabbed the infanta for Prince Charles; James says he will die if he returns alone. Cut, meanwhile, to a posse of wily Spaniards, who start to mumble into their ruffs in the following vein: ‘Willst you not remark, my dear assembled lords, that James of England hath, by his untimely passage, vouchsafed to us a timely royal hostage?’ (This entire scene is historical bunkum. As I have previously noted, I learned in Chelsea Library that James never went to Spain. However, it thickens the plot nicely and gives to Will and me another challenging scene.)

I was dreading these scenes. I’d begun to have dreams of London and soothing wet weather. The meltimi and the retsina and Will’s talk of his infancy and the dust of Poxos were starting to get up my nostrils. I still wanted to help Will, but fear of my big scenes with him weren’t allayed by his ongoing drink situation (as I heard Alfie Morton describe Will’s attachment to the flagellating local wine).

But then Will pulls it off, as they say. On the first take, there he is, line-perfect, his Welsh-cum-Scottish voice at last singing with absolutely convincing pain, his hands pawing me in perfectly convincing Jamesian little futile gestures, his eyes starting to brim with the jewel in the brave actor’s crown – on-camera tears. The floor is hushed. Mordecai signals to Nettlefold to keep turning over. And as Will at last pulls me to him and breaks down, sobbing out his months of loneliness and fear, I feel my heart start to pound with the thrill, the utter euphoria of being in the arms of a great actor.

Well, I’m not that young, as I’ve told you (my bags were brutal that day, what with the wind and the early starts), but I am a very over-sensitive man. There’s a lot of the child in me. I’ve never quite got over my love of excitement and fame. And although you’ll be thinking I should have known better at my age, I can only tell you that then and there, in the fly-blown Palladium, with a battery of zKs masquerading as sunlight and Eyelids Mordecai staring at me like an anorexic iguana, in the mingled smells of the Robin starch on Will’s ruff and his Pour la Vie aftershave on his bearded neck, I was caught with my rib cage down and my unprotected heart fell suddenly and hopelessly in love.

I went back to Wardrobe quaking and shaking from the triumph of our scene. It’s all turned, I thought. From now on, the film will start to work. In fact it will be a good movie. And the high spots will be my scenes with Will. I longed for the rest of these scenes now. Playing opposite Will, I knew I could be superb. There might even be a ‘Best Supporting’ Oscar in it, or at least a BAFTA nomination, who could say? I took off my costume with trembling hands, felt my lips quiver as my wig was hung on its friendly buff wigstand. So, out into the night, I thought! Have a shower, then on with the white seersucker blouson and down to the taverna to start the hot night’s revels with Will!

Well, I sat in the taverna for two hours. I toyed with the goatsmeat kebabs, swished down a couple of carafes of red. Jimmie Henraes came and sat with me and we talked about England and Mary Powell. The meltimi dropped and the lovely evening quiet came on. At the next table, Nettlefold and some of the crew were talking excitedly (for a camera squad) about the day. But Will didn’t show. At ten thirty, I went back to the Eleusis. Will was in his room, but his light was out. Someone said he’d gone to bed straight after we’d finished shooting. I went to my room and tried to sleep. I tried to stop it, but under the thin covers, I knew my whole body was shaking.

One of the instructions in the Eric Neasdale Writing Course is ‘Always write about what you know. Unless you actually are a blind philatelist, do not try to write about this.’ Well I disagree on two counts with this instruction. Firstly, I think, if you’re going to bother to be a writer, which isn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute kind of life, you might as well also bother to see how far your putrid imagination can travel – even (sorry, E.N.) into blindness or philately or both, because why not? Secondly, the question of what one knows is much more complex than what is suggested here. I think so, anyway. For instance, do I, through my recent experience, actually know a jot more about the following: James I, George Villiers, Will Nichols, the psyche of actors, the price of success, seventeenth-century English civilisation, twentieth-century Greek civilisation, love, infatuation, envy, childhood, Welsh miners and so on? I’m not sure. But all these are vital ingredients in the knowing of something I can only fully understand by writing about it. (This last sentence is very confused. I know what I mean, however!)

Will had complained, since arriving in Greece, that his Mogadon had stopped working and that sleep was a fiasco, hardly worth bothering with. On previous nights, he’d kept me up till two or three, talking and talking, yet on this night – when I felt we at last had something to say to each other – he’d gone to sleep at eight and stuck his ne déranger svp sign on his door. I felt, and I admit this is childish, cheated. I mean, willingly that night would I have stayed carousing with Will. I can be terribly charming when I want and I felt pretty sure of my terrain that extraordinary evening. Instead, I went miserably to bed and shivered and shook till I heard the bloody wind get up, and in the mournfulness of the meltimi cried myself to brief sleep.

Because by then I’d understood. It’s not complex. I’d read all the signs right and a more intelligent man than me would have understood right away, but it took me most of the night. In the run up to his first big scene (with me, as it happened, but this is neither here nor there) Will had used me, as I’ve already explained, to help him conquer fear. And today? When the first big scene was safely over? Well, quite simply, I’d done too good a job. I’d played nurse to Will’s terror for five weeks and, through me, he had managed to stumble through self-loathing, alcoholic fog and sheer funk out into a mood reminiscent of his younger self, when he was sober, energetic, imaginative and as an actor extremely fine. Today, as he’d held me against his hot, tear-stained face, he knew he’d done it. The king is himself again! Let the resurrection of Will Nichols begin! Really, it’s terribly simple. I’m just the ninny who didn’t see what was happening till it was too late. (‘Write about what you know’, says Neasdale. If only I’d known what Will was doing to me!)

I expect I sound dreadfully self-pitying, don’t I? I mustn’t whinge, because life goes on, as they say, and actually, now that I’m getting over all my feelings about Will and settling back into what I call ‘my little Fulham routine’ – my plants, the odd dance to Berlioz on the roof, civilised meals with old friends, visits to the NT and the Barbican (Jimmie Henraes, who married Mary Powell, is currently doing a lovely Benedick in Much Ado) and of course sessions at the VO Clinic to pay the housekeeping etc – now that I’m becoming myself again (I’ve decided I will do Buffi-pads), I can at least laugh about my own gullibility, and I know this is a sign there’s been no permanent damage.

The bloody old film, now entitled The Wisest Fool, comes out next spring and there’s rumour of a Royal Gala Performance. If forced to go (and Dougie will force me, because I’m one of his ‘SS’ clients, the senza soldi boys, the ones who haven’t quite got there and who need to be ‘seen’ therefore), I think I’ll dress my Pearl Barley up in quivering sequins and take her along on my arm. She, at least, will know where to stick such a piece of artifice.