Darling Sweetheart Read Online Free PDF Page B

that I grew up in a big house, but it was an awful wreck and we never had any money.’
    ‘You say that, but you got pedigree.’
    ‘Like a dog?’
    ‘Professional pedigree. Lemme tell you somethin’,’ now his voice turned soft and pseudo-confessional, ‘lemme tell you somethin’ about me. Until I discovered the movies, everythin’ about me was ordinary. I was an ordinary kid, with an ordinary life, in ordinary New Jersey. And the neighbourhood kids were mean to me, so, every day, I hid out in the movie-house. All through the late seventies and the early eighties, I saw every movie that was ever made. But one movie changed my life, because it made me wanna act. Now I reckon you know what I’m talkin’ about here – don’tcha?’
    ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
    He smiled. ‘Go on, you first.’
    ‘We didn’t live near a cinema, but when I was little, I had a video copy of
Bugsy Malone
. I wanted to be Jodie Foster so badly that I cut my hair with nail scissors and tried to dye it blonde with lemon juice. My mother nearly beat me to death with a hairbrush.’
    He laughed. ‘There ya go! Age twelve, I saw this guy in a movie and boom! That was it! I knew what I hadda do with my life!’
    ‘What was the film?’
    ‘It was
Fanshawe, Grovel and the Valley of Fear.’
    ‘No!’
    ‘And the guy who made me wanna act was–’
    ‘No!’
    ‘…David Palatine!’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Cross my heart.’ And he launched into a fair impersonation of her father’s upper-class idiot voice.
‘“I say, Grovel, prostrateyourself across yonder puddle, so I don’t get me galoshes wet.’”
She laughed, but from nerves, not amusement. ‘He played both parts, right? The crazy English aristo and his French sidekick?’
    ‘Yes, Grovel was my father in heavy make-up.’
    Emerson chuckled to himself and Talbot burst through the door followed by a waiter pushing a trolley.
    ‘The hors d’oeuvre, Sir.’
    He served them plates with silver covers which he lifted with great ceremony to reveal nothing more than a handful of prawns, criss-crossed with a trickle of scarlet sauce and a single purple lettuce leaf.
    ‘Spiffing.’ Emerson resumed his Fanshawe accent. ‘Tell Stefan that he’s a spiffing chap!’
    ‘I will, Sir.’
    ‘Best chef in the British Empire, what?’
    ‘Will that be all, Sir?’
    Annalise piped up. ‘I’m sorry, but could I trouble you for another beer? I didn’t get much of the last one.’
    ‘Right away, Miss.’ Waiter and trolley followed Talbot smartly out the door.
    ‘The poor man!’ she remonstrated. ‘He thought you were mocking him!’
    Emerson reverted to his normal drawl. ‘Honey, I pay that guy so much money, he’s lucky I don’t paint him blue and make him work in a tutu.’
    Still, it was the waiter, not Talbot, who returned with Annalise’s beer. She took a swallow, still conscious of Emerson’s eyes on her, as if she were the hors d’oeuvre, not the prawns.
    ‘So,’ she toyed with her purple lettuce leaf, ‘you seem to know a thing or two about my family.’
    ‘I’ve done my homework. I think your father was one of the greatest actors who ever lived.’
    ‘Well then,’ she met his gaze, ‘you ought to know that he hated that whole Fanshawe and Grovel thing. He said it was acliché that became a franchise. He made thirteen of them–’
    ‘I’ve seen them all, many times.’
    ‘–and he was utterly fed up by the time he finished the second. Can you imagine how he felt after twenty years of making pretty much the same film, over and over again? He complained that it wasn’t proper acting, just clowning around.’
    ‘But you could tell there was a great actor underneath, because only a great actor coulda made those guys so goddamn funny.’
    ‘I don’t think those films have dated well.’
    ‘They gotta huge followin’.’
    ‘So why don’t you do comedy?’
    ‘Because I ain’t funny.’
    ‘My father felt Fanshawe and Grovel were beneath him. “That Victorian poof