In Flickering Light
It was Alan Sandford who got me my first job with Purslane.
He mentioned my name down the pub one night and Mick Delaney happened to be at their table.
When Purslane’s editor walked out of the studio the following Monday, Delaney remembered me.
That afternoon I received a call, asking if I was free to start work the next day.
The pay was almost twice my usual fee, and when he told me I would be working for Will Purslane, I dropped everything.
The man was a legend, his reputation built on the claustrophobic Brit noir of his debut, Fallen Rain , but also the upbeat social comedy of Brothers in Arms and Felicity .
The rumors painted him as a private but generous man, his home life largely a secret, his charitable donations the stuff of headlines.
Of our group, only Janet Lane disagreed.
She would sit in silence whenever his name was mentioned, and I could tell she was uncomfortable with the topic of conversation.
I assumed at the time that she and Purslane had a history.
Mind the Gap would turn out to be Purslane’s biggest flop to date, but none of the responsibility for that could be placed at my door.
The production was a shambles before I arrived—I suspect my predecessor had simply had enough of the infighting and the childish antics of our star, who you know well enough for me not to name him here—and the result was a clumsy mishmash of Ealing comedy and Swinging Sixties London thriller.
If you’ve seen it, you probably wish you hadn’t.
Purslane was notable only for his absence during the later days of the shoot, and while I occasionally had meetings with him in the sound suite, they rarely lasted more than five minutes.
He was shorter than I’d expected, standing only an inch or so higher than my shoulders, his dark blond hair in a perpetual tangle that made him look as if he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed.
I always assumed he came from a family that was comfortably well-off, if not actively wealthy.
There was an ease of manner and confidence about him that suggested he’d never had to fight too hard for what he wanted.
After the shambles of Mind the Gap I was unsure whether I’d be hired again, but in October that year I received a second call from Delaney, asking if I’d like to come back to the studio to work on Will’s new project, a heist movie called The Long Game .
You’ll know it for its BAFTA nominations, even if it failed to win Best Picture; but for me there was a more personal resonance.
It was in the studio working on The Long Game that I first met Maggie, who was to become my girlfriend for six years and then my wife for twenty.
She was working in Wardrobe at the time, which would later turn into her own small-scale fashion line, and we met on my second or third day on the job.
I remember seeing her standing with a friend in the on-site cafe, waiting in line for tea.
If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was certainly romantic interest.
The friend she was with that day was Barbara Stanhurst, ‘Barb’ to her friends, and she became part of our circle for the next six months as we brought The Long Game to completion.
Barb wasn’t really my type, not in the way Maggie was, but she was visually striking: just over six feet tall, wavy red hair, pale skin.
When we’d go out to one of the local pubs, often just the three of us, all heads at the bar would turn to look at Barb.
Maggie and I liked it that way, if I’m honest. It gave us an excuse to disappear into a corner together on more than one occasion.
I’m not sure when Purslane first showed an interest in Barb.
It’s almost certain that he approached her on set one day, as she was fixing someone’s makeup.
He must have barely come up to her shoulders, but I’m told he had a way with women despite his stature.
I can see how that would be the case. The Long Game was filmed in ’71, and the rules were different then; there would have been a hand laid on her back, drifting lower if she allowed.
Maggie never received those sorts of attentions, so she tells me, but she saw a lot of it in the industry.
So many powerful men, so many pretty girls.
It was around Christmastime that Barb began to talk about Purslane as if something was happening between them.
She took to calling him “Will,” and would recount compliments she’d received from him, about both her work and her appearance.
I remember her calling him her “little boss man” one lunchtime, and Maggie raising an eyebrow at that.
“Does he play the boss outside of work hours too, then?” she’d asked, her hand finding my knee under the table.
Barb had blushed and shrugged, her eyes conspicuously avoiding ours. “He doesn’t like me to speak too much about his private life. I’d best not. It’s not like that between us, though. Nothing…sexy.” She’d giggled at that, girlishly, trying to hide her blushes.
I don’t know whether she was already his lover at this point or was simply gratified by a director’s attentions, but her attitude toward him changed.
A couple of times on set I saw her lift her fingers to her throat when Purslane passed by, and for some reason that wasn’t clear to me at the time, I imagined she was remembering his kiss.
I certainly can’t vouch for whether they’d become intimate at all; Barb refused to share the details of her love life.
It may have been part of what made her so attractive to him.
What I do know is that from January onward she started meeting him after shooting, often in the on-site projection room.
Purslane was known as a collector as well as a director, and there were mutterings that he’d managed to acquire a revolutionary new projector from a private dealer in Germany.
What made it special was as varied as the people who spread the rumor, but what seemed certain was that he had paid an extraordinary amount of money for it, more than most of us made in a year.
Even more remarkable was the fact that he kept it entirely to himself—if Purslane was enjoying his new toy, then he did it behind closed doors.
Until Barb. Every Wednesday or Thursday, depending on his availability, she’d stay behind after shooting finished, whiling away an hour or two touching up her makeup before his “special screening.” You can imagine the rumors.
The community was large but close-knit, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.
Barb’s name was sometimes whispered around the lunch table as Purslane’s current infatuation, his new project .
It was in the second week of March, as post-production was coming to a close, that I received an answer to my questions.
I’d been working late, finishing the mixes on the predubs, and most of the studio had emptied while my head was buried in the work.
Maggie had interrupted me briefly to say they were going to the Horse I pushed it open and stepped inside.
It was dark, and for a few seconds I wondered whether they’d already moved on.
Then I rounded a pillar and saw the flickering light of a film being projected onto the screen.
Stood within that light was Barb, a few rows back in the aisle, her hands hanging limp by her sides.
There was no sign of Purslane, but Barb was mesmerized by whatever she was watching, failing to register my entrance.
She swayed on her feet, as if struggling to keep her balance on the deck of a ship. Otherwise, she didn’t move.
At first, I thought the screen was showing nothing but static.
Then, as I stared, the little white dots grew sharper, and I saw that each one was a face, deathly pale, mouth open and eyes wide as it screamed.
And there were hundreds—no, thousands of them.
Between Barb and the screen silvery tendrils hung in the air, as light as silk but fluid, moving, reaching out from that horrific image and piercing every part of her body.
I’ve thought back to that moment many times over the intervening years, and I’ve often wondered if I imagined it, if the effect was caused by the light from the projection booth hitting motes of dust. Maybe it was; I can’t say for sure.
At the time, I was convinced that the image itself was somehow bleeding into her through a hundred webbed capillaries, infecting her with a sickness.
I also felt sure, beyond all doubt, that those strands were the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the carpet.
It took only a few seconds for all this to sink in, then something snapped within me and I rushed outside.
When I reached the parking lot, I bent double and vomited what remained of my lunch onto the tarmac.
Wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I caught a whiff of something that smelled like bleach, but rancid, rotten.