Chapter 3
Finn
Finn felt like a fraud. He had a perfectly serviceable Ford sitting outside his house that he could have used to get to work. It was sixteen years old, had one window that didn’t open and another one that slowly rolled itself down on long drives, but it drove fine.
But no. This was the big leagues. He had a driver now, whose name was Geoff, and Geoff had picked him up in a shiny black SUV that looked like it cost more than Finn had earned in the past two years as a jobbing actor.
It smelled strongly of leather and a newly opened pine air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror.
‘How you feeling?’ Geoff called from the front seat.
Finn felt silly sitting in the back and being chauffeured, but Geoff had held open the back door for him when he had come outside, so he had just got in. He leaned forward now, so as not to shout down the cavernous car.
‘Okay, I think,’ he replied. ‘It’s my first big job. I’ve done mainly bit parts until now.’
Finn didn’t really want to chat. As well as being very early in the morning for someone whose working day often began with arriving at the stage door at about six pm, already five coffees down, he was nervous.
‘It’s my first big job too,’ Geoff said, easing the huge car out of Finn’s quiet street. ‘Was on the taxis for years, and then some commercial driving. My mate got me on this. Hours are long, but the money’s good.’
Finn saw Geoff’s ears rise and caught his grin in the rearview mirror. Geoff was wearing a crisp white shirt, a dark tie and jacket. A whiff of Old Spice aftershave mingled with the leather and pine as he changed gears.
‘Do you have to wear a suit and tie for this job?’ Finn asked. ‘Can’t be that comfortable to drive in all day.’
‘My mate said dress smart, so I thought this was what he meant. I’ll find out when we get there.’ Geoff snorted and paused. ‘Not going to be as bad as what they get you wearing, I’m sure.’
Finn let out a belly laugh. His nerves dissipated for a split second. He had been so caught up in his head, worried about remembering lines, making a good first impression, and getting along with the rest of the cast. Geoff’s remark put things into perspective.
This was a period drama with a heavy romance storyline for his character, Nathanial. He would undoubtedly have some interesting costumes in the weeks to come.
‘So you’ve done some TV before then?’ Geoff asked over his shoulder. ‘Anything I would have seen you in?’
Finn loosened his seatbelt and leant forward, resting his forearm on the back of the passenger seat. ‘Did you see They Rise at Dawn? I played a soldier in that.’
‘Was that on BBC?’ Geoff asked.
‘No, it was on Prime,’ Finn replied.
‘We don’t have that,’ Geoff shrugged. ‘Got Sky and all that, but not .’
‘I was in Bodies Tell, that show about forensics. I was in an episode playing a doctor who worked for the mob and who wanted to take over the department so I could control the results about the upcoming criminal cases.’
From his position half behind Geoff, Finn saw his eyebrows raise and his thinning hairline slide back.
‘Wow, not seen that but might give it a watch. The wife never got over The Sopranos ending, so we watch anything about the mafia and organised crime and the like.’
Finn chuckled and sat back.
‘And you played a baddie?’ Geoff’s eyes met Finn’s in the rearview mirror once more. ‘But you seem so nice.’
Finn laughed again. ‘I’m an okay actor, so I think I convinced them.’
‘And this time then? Are you a bad guy this time?’
Pulled back to the present by Geoff’s question, Finn felt the nerves crawl over his skin again.
‘No.’ He flexed his hands and then folded his fingers into his palms as he took a deep breath.
‘This time I play the eldest son of a poor farming family in the village of Huxton Bridge in nineteenth-century Yorkshire. It’s a real village, about an hour from here.
The daughter of the rich landowner falls for me and pursues me.
I fall in love with her too, but we can’t be together.
If the affair was found out, my family would be evicted and thrown out to starve. ’
‘That’d be no good,’ Geoff said, with classic Yorkshire understatement.
Finn smiled to himself. ‘No. It wouldn’t be.’
‘So what happens?’
‘Don’t know for sure yet. We’ve got scripts for the first two episodes, but it’s an eight-part series, and they are still working on the rest.’
‘I’m sure you’ll get the girl,’ Geoff said, with a gruff laugh as he swung them off the motorway and onto a smaller road. ‘Good-looking boy like you.’ Finn grabbed for the headrest to keep himself from lurching across the car as they took the sharp bend.
Huxton Bridge was a show inspired by the diaries of a local vicar spanning some thirty years in the mid-1800s.
They documented the lives and loves of the people of the parish, the fortunes of local families and landowners, and the impact of national and international events at the local level.
Historically, they were invaluable for insights into life in the 1850s.
Dramatically, they were rich sources from which to draw some larger-than-life characters and somewhat scandalous stories, including that of his own character, Nathanial.
The diaries didn’t conclude that a relationship took place, but there was a lot of speculation and rumour.
However, he knew the writers were taking inspiration from the diaries, not following them faithfully, and the love story between Nathanial Crake and Beatrice Hawarden was central to the first season.
First season. There were high hopes all round for this drama series, but there was no guarantee of a second season until the first had proved itself. Which meant him, too.
Geoff was asking him something.
‘Do you know anyone else on the cast? Reckon you’ll all get along?’
‘I met the main cast at the read-through. They seem nice. There are a lot of us,’ he laughed. ‘Nathanial is the eldest of twelve children, though some of the others have left to get married, so there are only seven of us that you see in the show. Plus our mum and dad, who I work with on the farm.’
‘Only seven, eh?’ Geoff chortled.
‘Yes, from Nathanial, who is twenty-nine,’ he glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror, glad that at thirty-four he could pass for a twenty-nine-year-old, just. ‘All the way down to little Euphemia, who is only four.’
Geoff let out a whistle. ‘Euphemia! What a name! And your poor mother. I mean, Nathanial’s poor mother. Thank goodness we now have birth control.’
Finn laughed. ‘Yes, thank God.’
He dug into his bag and pulled out his script.
It was dog-eared and curled up, the pages lined with different coloured highlighter ink, and he sat back and tried to smooth it out on his knee.
One of the things that was always tricky about filming, rather than theatre, was that things were shot out of order.
In theatre, you had ninety minutes or so to build up to the emotional climax of the play.
In film, you could be shooting a scene from halfway through episode two on the first morning, where the characters are all mourning the death of a character you haven’t even met yet—you just have to get right into it, wherever you are in the story.
But with over a decade of theatre under his belt, Finn liked to focus on the bigger picture of the story and his character’s journey before homing in on the scene at hand.
Luckily, today there was no heavy start. The first scene they were shooting was a simple interior scene with his father.
He smoothed out the script. Letters jumped and shifted before his eyes, and he pulled out a black guide sheet from his bag so he could see one line at a time. Taking a breath, he went back over his lines for the day.
As he was rolling up his script and putting it away, the quiet tick-tick of the indicator sounded, and a moment later, the car turned onto the road leading to the studios.
Finn gazed out of the window at the vast grey sound stages, huge windowless metal boxes, separated from the road by chain-link fencing.
The studios, which he had been to a few times before for costume fittings and read-throughs for the show, sat on the edge of an industrial estate just outside Leeds.
The warehouse-like buildings looked like giant storage units or aircraft hangars.
At the entrance, a huge archway with lettering across the top welcomed you to Marpleford Studios.
The barrier lifted as they approached, Geoff waved at a guy in a little security hut, and then they were coasting slowly into the site, past the faceless sound stages, past office buildings, and past the huge multi-storey car park that served the studios.
It was barely seven a.m., and it was still dark out, but the studio was already buzzing with activity.
Crew hurried along the marked pedestrian walkways at either side of the car, lanyards swinging.
A young woman steered a rail full of costumes that veered about like a wonky shopping trolley and occasionally lurched towards the passing cars that crawled along.
A catering truck was stationed on a lawned area between two sound stages, and a small gaggle of crew queued for breakfast. An intense-looking guy was ripping a bite out of a breakfast sandwich and talking rapid-fire into a radio out of the other side of his mouth, while balancing a coffee in the crook of his arm.
Finn recognised him as the Third Assistant Director, Jake.
The car glided slowly along, and Jake and the other crew disappeared from view. His stomach turned over. He was glad he hadn’t eaten yet.
There was a vibration in his pocket, and he drew his phone out to see a message.
Break a leg! It read. I know you’ll be fab and I am sure this is just the start of many seasons and a stellar screen career! Love you. Xxx
He grinned at the message from his sister. Break a leg is what you say in theatre, he wrote back. But I’ll take all the good wishes I can get. You should see this place. It’s bigger than Waketon, he added, in reference to the village they grew up in.
Like that’s hard, Suzy replied. At least it sounds big enough to fit your ego.
Before he could think of a suitably tart retort, another message popped up.
Mum will be proud.
A lump built in his throat, and his fingers hovered over the little keys as the screen dipped out of focus for a second.
After a moment, he typed, I’m doing it for her, hit send, then shoved his phone back in his pocket. He cleared his throat and sat up straighter in the back of the car. He didn’t need any distractions now, however well-intended.
He wanted—needed—this to be the big kick-start to his screen career.
Ideally, this season of Huxton Bridge would be the first of many.
And for there to be a season two, he needed to be first class, on screen and off.
He needed to convince as Nathanial—the smart eldest son, sharp as a tack and capable of many things, but who stayed at the farm for his parents’ sake and for his siblings.
A man in pain because the woman he loved could never be his.
If he could convey all that, and if he and his co-star, Jennifer, could find chemistry on screen, then he might be on his way.
He also needed to be the consummate professional offscreen—on time, courteous, rehearsed, line-perfect.
The car made one last turn around the corner of the furthest sound stage, and suddenly, there they were at unit base.
Uniform rows of white movie trucks filled the area: costume trucks, makeup trailers, production trucks, and cast trailers.
Finn’s early-morning coffee momentarily threatened a reappearance and sweat broke out on his forehead.
The car inched forward and then stopped.
Finn didn’t move.
‘This is it,’ Geoff said, turning in his seat to look at Finn.
‘Yep,’ Finn said, a hitch in his voice.
‘Break a leg,’ Geoff said cheerily.
‘Thanks,’ Finn muttered, managing a half-smile. He reached across the seat and felt for his bag, pulling it towards him and slipping his well-worn, carefully annotated script inside.
He swung the car door open, stretching out one long leg, feeling all of a sudden as if he were stepping into a movie all of his own. It felt unreal to be here, as one of the stars of a brand-new show.
Then he heard a voice.
‘Finn?’
He lifted his head and looked in the direction the voice had come from. It was still dark, and the lights at the car drop-off point were faint. He straightened, pushed the car door closed, and blinked at the person-shaped outline in front of him.
‘Finn?’ Came the voice again.
It felt at once familiar and yet unknowable. It itched at something deep in his brain, but he couldn’t immediately place it. The person stepped closer, out of the shadow. The faint lights from the side of the trucks illuminated her face.
Not her.
Not here.
‘Not you,’ he said.