the box,’ he reminded her.
There was a cool-box in the foot-well, in which were bottles of water and soft drinks and a couple of rolled hand towels. Connie took out a towel and patted her hands and face with it, although she wasn’t hot. Kadek nodded with satisfaction at having done the right thing.
‘Busy day for you,’ he observed.
‘Yes.’
It was going to be.
After half an hour’s driving, away from the village and following the course of the river to where the valley spread in a series of pale ledges planted with rice, they reached the location.
There were several Toyotas parked in a line, three bigger trucks standing with their doors open, two motor caravans, a trailer-mounted diesel-powered generator, a couple of pickups from which heavy boxes were being unloaded by local labour under the direction of one of the key crew, green awnings set up for shade, groups of people converging on a larger tent, and a general air of purposeful activity. Con looked at her watch. It was seven thirty precisely. The sun was gathering strength, promising a hot day ahead. On the horizon, across the shimmering paddy, the sacred Mount Agung was a pale-blue pyramid.
‘Thanks, Kadek.’
He opened the door for her to step out. ‘Welcome, ma’am. Anything more for you? I have to collect other film people. The young girls, you know, who take part.’
‘Of course you do. Off you go. Thanks for getting me here so punctually.’
As he prepared to reverse away, Kadek permitted himself a wink and a grin that revealed his filed teeth.
Connie shouldered her bags and walked towards the set.
‘Hi,’ Angela called out, and waved her arm in welcome. Angela was Connie’s old friend from London, a producer with the company that was making the commercials.
Connie gave her friend a hug. ‘You all right?’ she murmured in her ear.
Angela had an unusually expressive set of features. With her back to the location, she made her wasps-invade-the-picnic face. ‘Couple of the crew complaining about their hotel. Ran out of beer last night is what it amounts to.’
‘That all?’
Angela shrugged. ‘More or less.’
Connie was relieved to hear it. Usually she worked alone in her studio, either here in Bali or in London, and she rarely came face to face with the agency who commissioned her work, let alone travelled to commercial shoots. But she knew enough about the ad business to be certain that worse things could go wrong on location than the booze being in temporarily short supply. Could, and probably would.
She was anxious, and in Bali that was most unusual. Her life here was calm, pared-down and minimal like the interior of her little house, and in its own uneventful way it was satisfying.
Now, disorientatingly, London had come to her.
She put her arm through Angela’s. She said cheerfully, ‘So let them drink green tea. Or vodka. Or fresh mango and papaya juice. Be different. This is Bali, isn’t it? Come on, Ange, let’s get ourselves some breakfast. How’s Himself this morning, by the way?’
There was no doubt who she was referring to.
‘Fine. In a pretty good mood. Really keen to get rolling.’
Rayner Ingram, the director, was a tall, saturnine man who said little, but when he did speak he made his remarks count. He and Angela worked regularly together as a director– producer team.
Connie had tried to joke mildly, privately, about him to Angela.
‘Rayner? What’s that about? Is his real name Raymond? Do you call him Ray?’
Angela had reproved her, without a glint of a smile. ‘No, of course not. Why d’you say that? His name’s his name.’
It hadn’t taken even this exchange for Connie to conclude that Angela was in love with Rayner Ingram. Producer– director relationships weren’t exactly uncommon in the business. It was just uncommon for them to have happy endings.
Connie half-listened to Angela, but the other half of her attention was on the stacks of metal boxes and lights and cables being unloaded from the trucks, and the way people were rushing about, and the British and Australian colloquialisms shooting across the set.
It was bizarre to contemplate this other world, this self-important capsule of schedules and shots and scripts, given birth to by a line of trucks drawn up beside a half-ruined temple in a rice paddy under the blue cone of a volcano. A few yards away, behind a loose cordon of local men who had been recruited to keep spectators off the set, Connie could see two women squatting at the edge of a green thicket of rice. They had been harvesting, and their hand-scythes lay at their feet. They looked as though they might be mother and daughter. The younger one, perhaps sixteen years old, wore a bright red sarong that made a brilliant slash against the green and the dark earth. She carried a baby bound against her chest. The two women watched the activity on the set with wide eyes and motionless attention.
Connie tried fleetingly to establish which of these places was the more real to her: the silent women and the rice paddy or the ring of people within which a hairy man in shorts and a khaki waistcoat with a dozen pockets across the front was yelling for someone to bring over the genny cables. Both were familiar, she decided, and she could feel at home in either. Whatever home meant. It was the juxtaposition that was disconcerting.
The two women reached the open flap of the tent, which had a fine netting screen across it to keep out the insects. As Angela gathered the netting in one hand she whispered, ‘You haven’t met the clients yet, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Now’s your chance.’
Two men were sitting in canvas chairs at a folding table, surrounded by three others and a woman and a circle of cups and plates and cafetières. Both of them looked up at Connie. She had time to see that they were the kind of men who naturally wore grey worsted, and that now they were dressed in what Angela, using her primitive-tribe-found-in-Papua-jungle face, called ‘clients’ shoot clothes’.
Angela said warmly, ‘Simon, Marcus? This is Constance Thorne. Our musical director, of course.’
The older one half got to his feet and held out a big hand. There were croissant crumbs on his safari jacket.
‘Ah, Boom Girl,’ he shouted. ‘We’re honoured. Simon Sheringham.’
‘Hello,’ she smiled at him.
She hated being called Boom Girl. If it had ever been welcome, it had stopped being so a very long time ago. She had written the Boom music when she was barely twenty. A fluke. A day’s work.
‘Boom, boom, baboom ba ba, bababa ba.’ The younger client sang the few bars as he also stood up. ‘And it was long before my time,’ he asserted, intending a compliment. ‘Hi. Marcus Atkins.’
‘Hello.’ Connie shook hands with him, and smiled some more. From further along the table the ad-agency copywriter and art director
