Constance Read Online Free PDF Page A

as a signal to leave. Connie went with them to the bus.
    ‘We play again on Tuesday? You can come?’ Ketut asked her.
    Tuesday was their regular evening for music.
    ‘Yes, please,’ Connie said. It was one of the best times of her week.
    She stood and waved as the bus bumped down the ricepaddy track. The mother and daughter who were working in the paddy straightened their backs to watch too. They had been joined by several more women.
    In the service tent Angela was asking Tara, the pretty agency producer, what she thought they might do about theBritish actress who was playing the bride. She had spent the morning confined to her bathroom at the hotel. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her, Marcus Atkins remarked. The creative team sniggered.
    ‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ Tara sighed.
    On their way out later, Angela said to Connie through clenched teeth, ‘If that damned woman says she has no idea once more about what is supposed to be her bloody job , I’m going to hit her.’
    ‘She’s getting a great tan, though,’ Connie laughed.
    In the absence of any bride, the afternoon was given over to the bridegroom and his friends. They marched out of wardrobe splendid in starched white jackets with red head-cloths knotted over their foreheads. Tara sat up in her chair at the sight of them and slipped her sunglasses down over her nose.
    It was a complicated reaction shot. The men were supposed to be waiting in profile in a proud, anticipatory little group for the big moment, the first sight of the bride following behind her petal-strewing attendants. Then, as they caught sight of her, the men were to register a sequence of surprise, disbelief and then dismay.
    Once the camera had captured all this the view then shifted to the other perspective.
    The bride’s father – an approximate Prince Charles look-alike – was to be kitted out in full morning dress. On his arm would come the bride, dressed in white meringue wedding dress with a bouquet of pink rosebuds and a dangling silver horseshoe, blonde ringlets framing her face within a froth of veil.
    With the establishing shot Connie’s music was to segue into a suggestion of ‘Here Comes the Bride’, then dip into a minor key to match the surprise and dismay, and end in a clatter of discordant notes. Then, on the screen wouldappear the bank’s logo and the words ‘The Right Time and the Right Place. Every Time. Always.’ To the accompaniment of a long, reverberating gong-note.
    ‘It’s advertising,’ Angela said drily.
    The day wore on. After five or six takes, Rayner Ingram declared that he was satisfied with the shot. The tropical dusk was beginning to collect at the margins of the paddy, and Mount Agung was a conical smudge of shadow on the far horizon.
    ‘That’s it for today, folks,’ announced the first assistant.
    The crew began dismantling the lights, and Simon Sheringham stood up and yawned. ‘Time for a drink, boys and girls,’ he said.
    ‘You are so completely right,’ Tara drawled.
    Angela murmured to Connie, ‘Are you joining us for dinner?’
    Angela’s duties would now shift to hostess and leisure facilitator for agency and clients, but her eyes were on Rayner Ingram who was stalking away towards the waiting Toyotas.
    ‘Do you need me?’
    Connie was thinking of tomorrow’s music – a reprise of the main theme for the closing shot of the bride’s father, the worse for wear, smoochily clinking his champagne coupe with a second glass crooked in the elbow of a grinning stone dragon.
    And she was also thinking of her secluded veranda and the frog chorus, which would sound like a lullaby tonight.
    ‘Well…not really,’ Angela said.
    ‘Then I think I might just quietly go home.’
    ‘Doesn’t anyone else want a drink?’ Simon bellowed.
    An hour later, Connie sat on the veranda in her rattan chair and watched the darkness. It came with dramatic speed,filling up the gorge and flooding over the palms on the ridge. Packs