The Stand-In Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Deborah Moggach

  Dedication

  Title Page

  London

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  New York

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Los Angeles

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  New York

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Los Angeles – New York

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Here

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Acknowledgements

  Read on for an extract from Something to Hide

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Jules is an unknown English actress with a precarious career and a wayward but irresistible boyfriend. But then she gets the break of a lifetime – a stand-in part for Lila Dune, American sex-symbol and movie-star – and her world begins to transform...

  About the Author

  Deborah Moggach is the author of many successful novels including the bestseller The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Her screenplays include The Diary of Anne Frank and the film of Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.

  ALSO BY DEBORAH MOGGACH

  You Must Be Sisters

  Close to Home

  A Quiet Drink

  Hot Water Man

  Porky

  To Have and to Hold

  Driving in the Dark

  Smile and Other Stories

  Stolen

  The Ex-Wives

  Changing Babies

  Seesaw

  Close Relations

  Tulip Fever

  Final Demand

  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

  In the Dark

  To Mel

  The Stand-In

  Deborah Moggach

  LONDON

  One

  I’M WRITING THIS in upstate New York. Outside, the sky is such a solid blue I could touch it. In here it’s sweltering; my hair feels heavy as a helmet. Down the end of the corridor they’re watching the afternoon movie. I can hear whoops, and the smattering of gunfire.

  When Mark Chapman shot John Lennon he said it was like a movie. He said: ‘I thought he would just drop. I thought he was going to fall down like in the movies, fall down dead. The guy had five bullets in him.’

  Spoken like an actor! When you act you are both within a person and outside them, watching. You slide into a character, like fingers into a glove; you are both concealed and exposed by the person you have become. You watch your fingers and your face move; you’re watching the words come out of your mouth. I used to light matches and watch them burn down, until I yelped with pain.

  Inhuman, isn’t it? At the moment of death, people part from their body, as if they are suspended above it. They look down quite calmly at the throes they are going through. Actors do this all the time.

  You hold your wriggling self out on tongs. You hold other people too.

  Trev, wriggling.

  Lila, wriggling.

  Sometimes it frightens me out of my wits. Next time you watch an actress, I bet you get frightened too.

  If I shot myself, would it hurt? Or would I just watch myself, taking notes on how convincingly I die?

  I can look at myself, nearly two years ago, as if she isn’t me. She’s acting in a movie. It opens in a north London street, on a grey day in August. She is thirty-eight. She usually wears t-shirts and jeans but as she’s an actress she’s wearing silver today. She’s mousy-blonde. Slimmish. Goodish-looking. Not enough to stop the cars when she’s waiting at a pedestrian crossing; not that sort. Not like Lila.

  I see it like a movie; I suppose that’s part of the trouble. And only I know how it will end.

  I’d had a humiliating night with Trev, and my thighbones ached. They ached from the making-up part of it, which had gone on till dawn. Down in the street a car alarm had suddenly wailed; we had fallen apart, damply, like two opposing teams giving up when the umpire blows his whistle.

  Trev was my inflammation; he was my illness. Him and his smug smile. I was prodding him about his past.

  ‘Just some bird I once knew,’ he had said.

  ‘Hasn’t she got a name?’ I demanded – suddenly, ludicrously righteous on behalf of some long-ago female. He was so cocky. Him and his smug cock, that wept when I touched it. That could make me weep.

  We had been together for eighteen months and I was getting worse. I was jealous of everything he had handled. I could be jealous of an old kettle he hadn’t got any more, how’s that for insanity? I didn’t tell him, of course. Not the extent of it. Alone, I could work myself up to fever-pitch – I could even be jealous, in anticipation, of all the women he might sleep with after me. He was only twenty-seven; one day he was going to slip through my fingers.

  Him and his stubble. My face felt sore; in the mirror my mouth looked blurred. Flinching, I sponged Number Five over my chin. I was performing in Gertie and the Giants, a kids’ show about the disappearing rainforests. Most of the others were students from the Central. We were dressing up as multinational companies – property, timber, McDonalds which felled the forests for grazing land. Martin, who was unhappily in love with Adrian, was climbing into an adapted oil drum; he was appearing as Toxic Waste.

  We were called First Aid Theatre because we drove around in an old ambulance. Once, after a party, I had caught Trev kissing Natalie in it, but he just said he was giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  They were more Trev’s age, really. I was thirty-eight; the oldest. I was playing the Fairy Godmother who guides Gertie through the forest. I give her three wishes and together we save the trees. It was all a bit worthy but I believed in those sort of things then.

  Outside it was a grey, still morning. Through the window I could see the amputated arms of a plane tree; the council had lopped it. I zipped up my silver, fairy godmother’s dress from the Oxfam shop. If only I could give myself three wishes, I would keep them all a secret.

  Outside the door, children were waiting in the community centre hall. I ought to be pausing, and thinking myself into my role. Pulling on my tights, I hopped on one leg and knocked against the washbasin. At my age I ought to be in a TV series, shot entirely on film, with a plangent oboe soundtrack. Adapted from a forgotten feminist novel of the thirties, it had fetching period costumes, dove-greys and plums, and a row of BAFTA awards. I should be in the West End, appearing in a new play Tom Stoppard wrote especially for me, rather than for Felicity Kendal. I should be playing Viola before it was too late. I should be having a baby.

  ‘Seen my leaves?’ asked a tree.

  ‘Seen my plaits?’ asked Gertie.

  Rob, who
played a Big Mac, paused and said: ‘They seem strangely quiet.’

  We looked out of the door. The children had gone.

  Earlier, I had not noticed anything unusual. It was a terraced street in north London, one of thousands. Why it had been chosen, I never knew. Months later I remembered that moment when I stepped out on to the pavement, in my silver dress. It seemed unnaturally quiet; the air was still, as it is when you are a child and everyone is hiding.

  The street had been closed off. I looked up. The houses had eyes; there were faces at the windows. People leaned out, watching. The end of the street was blocked with vans, and lights flared on the last few houses. They looked freshly painted, and I thought for a moment that the council must have restored them.

  Then, of course, I realised that they had just been smartened up for some filming. Fat black cables snaked across the street; I stepped over them. Watching the filming was a crowd of people; among them was my lost audience, the children.

  Filming is ridiculously alluring. People had been drawn towards the magnet of those bright façades. Temporarily their street had a new identity, as if they had dreamed it. Yesterday the corner shop had been an ordinary newsagent’s, one window boarded up and the other filled with cardboard boxes of disposable nappies. Now it had been transformed into a proper corner shop, the sort you don’t see any more. It had a freshly painted sign and sweet jars in the window. It looked lurid and yet nostalgic, like the memories of a boozy uncle.

  Beside me a small girl picked her nose. A man moved us all back, like cattle.

  ‘What’re you filming?’ I asked. I wanted to add: I’m in the business too.

  But the man was muttering into a walkie-talkie. A woman with a pram whispered: ‘It’s called Sexbusters.’ She looked at her watch. ‘And I’ve got a chicken in the oven.’

  Minutes passed. Somebody bumped into me; the children were fidgety, but I knew I had lost them. It was the summer holidays, after all. Nobody was forcing them to see Gertie and the Giants. I thought of Rob, pinioned between his buns; he would be prising himself out of his Big Mac costume by now. So much for the rain forests.

  And then somebody told us all to keep quiet. ‘When you’re ready!’ came a far voice. A hush fell.

  The corner shop door opened; a bell tinkled, and out came a couple.

  They dazzled in the light. They were laughing, soundlessly, in the glare. The man held a toffee apple. Outside the shop, they paused. He tenderly passed it to the woman. She took a bite. And then they walked along the pavement, arm-in-arm, and out of shot.

  ‘She’s smaller than I thought,’ whispered somebody.

  ‘Who is she?’ asked somebody else.

  ‘Lila Dune, dickhead! I told you.’

  More minutes passed. A smell of curry drifted from the unit canteen; it was nearly lunchtime.

  The next take was ruined by a plane passing overhead. The next one by a scuffle which broke out among some boys. ‘Get those kids away!’ shouted the man with the walkie-talkie.

  Vaguely bored, I shifted my weight on to the other foot. My thighs still ached; it was the same ache I had had as a child, when I had been riding a horse for hours.

  I didn’t recognise the actor, but Lila Dune was famous. Well, recognisable. She specialised in daffy, slightly tacky blondes. I had only seen her in a few films; one was a romantic comedy with Nick Nolte, another was something with Burt Reynolds and a lot of cars. She had a supporting role in that one. They were instantly forgettable. They were the sort of movies I only watched when they happened to be repeated on TV.

  In the months to follow I re-ran that moment, my own personal re-take, over and over in my head. It was the moment I first saw Lila Dune. A blonde, very pretty woman, dressed in a white suit, came out of a corner shop. Shapely. Surprisingly small, but then weren’t they all? A frisson, yes. But everybody, even another actress, feels a frisson when they see somebody famous, in the flesh, in a street roped off as if there had been an accident. Besides, Lila Dune was American, and this made her more of a star.

  I felt nothing else, I’m sure. And nothing else would have happened if I hadn’t recognised Eric.

  The unit was breaking for lunch, and I was about to leave. Just then a stocky man, dressed in a white coat, came out of the corner shop and lit a cheroot. He was playing the shop-keeper and I knew him because, years before, he had played a dentist in a sit-com for Anglia TV and I’d had a tiny part. Besides, we shared the same agent and had met once or twice at her Christmas drinks.

  He was chatting to the walkie-talkie man when he saw me and waved. I threaded my way through the crowd.

  He pointed to my dress. ‘Where’s the ball, Cinders?’

  I told him about Gertie, and turned to the other man. ‘You stole my audience.’

  ‘This is Jules Sampson,’ said Eric. ‘Terrific actress. We have the same agent, Maggie Fitch.’

  The man shook my hand, and apologised for stealing my children.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It was our last show, anyway. The council’s been rate-capped; they’ve cancelled our grant.’

  ‘So much for the British theatre,’ said Eric. ‘So what’re you going to do, sweetheart?’

  I shrugged. ‘Re-paint my flat.’ Trouble was, I had just repainted it.

  ‘How can you tell if somebody’s an actor?’ asked Eric. ‘When they go for a crap they take the phone off the hook.’

  ‘In case Columbia Pictures calls,’ I said.

  ‘Or even a dogfood commercial . . .’

  ‘Or even an Allied Carpets commercial . . .’

  ‘Or even a voice-over for dogfood,’ I said.

  Eric barked. Then he looked solemn. ‘Let us not denigrate the humble voice-over. Repeat-repeat-repeat . . .’

  The man, whose name I hadn’t caught, was gazing at me. ‘Anyone told you something?’ he asked.

  What could I reply to that? ‘What?’

  ‘You look amazingly like Lila.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘So I could be a film star too?’

  ‘Same build,’ he said. He looked me up and down, as if inspecting a piece of masonry. ‘Similar bone-structure.’

  I should have felt more flattered. After all, Lila Dune was gorgeous. In darkened cinemas all over the world, men throbbed for her. She was the archetypal bleached blonde, who looked as if she had just got out of bed. She had the snub, kittenish face that is both helpless and seductive.

  But any comparison is a form of theft. For some reason, I felt more diluted, as if he had stolen from me my mousier hair, my heavier features, the Jules-ness which didn’t match up to Lila Dune.

  Perhaps I was more flattered than that. Probably. By now I can’t tell; hindsight has confused my memory of that moment. Standing there in my fairy godmother’s dress that sultry August day, I had no idea of the wishes that would be granted not to Gertie but to myself, and how powerless I would be to resist them. Nor did I realise that the granting itself would be a form of theft, for nothing is given without something else being extracted. All human beings deal in more-or-less disguised exchange, and we only realise that we are both the robbers and the robbed when the most important thing of all is stolen from us.

  I didn’t think of any of that then. Two summers ago I wasn’t a simpler creature, just a less aware one. I went to the pub with First Aid, and the pram woman must have gone home to her roast chicken, and all the children dispessed and I never saw any of them again. And in a hundred homes that evening somebody told somebody else that they had seen Lila Dune, and nobody told anybody that they had seen me.

  That sounds egocentric. It is. But when I say me, I also mean you.

  Two

  OF COURSE I should never have got involved with Trevor. Nor, as it turned out, should he have got involved with me. Funnily enough I can picture him quite clearly now, but for months I kept his face a blur, on purpose, so our eyes couldn’t meet. It still helps, slightly.

  He was utterly, and devastatingly, charming. It was as s
imple as that. I bet he would have charmed you, too, unless he was knocking off your wife, and even then you might have eventually forgiven him because somewhere, underneath it all, you both knew that he was one of the boys. A man’s man. A bloke. One of the lads.

  He could sell anybody anything. In fact that was how we met, when he sold me some chimney pots. I put them on my balcony, for plants. I later discovered they were double the price I would have paid anywhere else, but by then it was too late.

  He wasn’t tall – hardly taller than me. He was slim and wiry and twice as alive as anyone I’d ever met. That might be a strange word to use now but it’s the nearest I can get. As if, within him, wires stretched tight, tingling. Dark hair, bright eyes, wicked grin. Impish. And always restless – jangling his van keys, fidgety, alert. Like many attractive people, one knew exactly what he’d been like as a child. Graceful, elusive, utterly unselfconscious. And when suddenly he fixed his eyes on you, it was such high voltage that your bones melted.

  Oh, I don’t know; it doesn’t really capture him. I’d simply say that, wherever he was, that was the place things happened. Once, on a motorway, I followed a beautiful sports car just because I wanted to be near it. I felt it knew, better than the rest of us, just where it was going.

  In many ways we weren’t suited at all. For a start, he was hardly an intellectual. My father was a deputy headmaster. His father was a builder. He worked for his local council, modernising old properties in north London. He would tear out Victorian fireplaces and install central heating. Trev, still in his teens, realised that half a mile away the middle classes were gentrifying their homes, so he would load the fireplaces into his Dad’s van and flog them to the Laura Ashley crowd. He was a wood-stripper and a wife-stripper; he was streetwise and skip-smart. Once he sold a woman some panelling her next-door neighbour had thrown into a skip right outside her own front door. And, as he so charmingly put it, got his leg over into the bargain.

  When I met him he was twenty-six, and moved in a swarthy netherworld of junk shops, men with vans, men with dogs, men with mates who could get you anything. Dealers, fixers, men who lived as instinctively as foxes. He disappeared for days with them on mega-piss-ups. Brought up on Blue Peter and piano lessons, I found it all irresistibly dodgy.