The Austen Playbook (London Celebrities #4)(6)
The estate had been passed down through generations of Fords since the sixteenth century, and with every handover, it grew more expensive to maintain. His grandfather had left the property to Griff in his will, because he’d anticipated the financial struggle and correctly assumed that Griff’s father would just exacerbate the problem. Griff clearly recalled Sir George sitting him down on his twelfth birthday, to start preparing him to take over the reins.
Right now, he felt more like he was trying to steer a sinking ship.
The executive fired a query down the line about the “human interest” side of the film. The inevitable sex angle.
“Yes, we will be focusing on the relationship between Henrietta and George. Audiences grasp on to a love story.” He couldn’t totally suppress the ironic twist to his words. Love. An adulterous affair between two self-centred hedonists, which had ended abruptly after a couple of years, when his grandfather seemed to have dropped Henrietta like a hot potato for reasons unknown.
Griff was still trying to get to the bottom of that one. His grandmother’s existence already cast a bad light on the relationship, so it would be better for the plot if the affair had at least ended for a more sympathetic reason than fading lust.
As he went into detail about shoot locations, his brother stood restlessly and paced in front of the library windows. Coming over to the desk, Charlie picked up a book, put it down, accidentally knocked three more to the floor, and lifted onto the balls of his feet to stretch.
It was like trying to work with a bloody toddler in the room.
The call finally ended, with noncommittal noises from the studio. As usual. Every time there was an encouraging sign, it was dashed by further procrastination. Tossing his phone down on the desk, Griff rubbed his forehead and forced himself to focus on the more immediate problem in the room.
He turned to his brother and steeled himself. “Yes?”
In the pause that followed, he heard the distant sound of a plane flying overhead.
Now that he had the floor, Charlie seemed to be debating the best way to launch into his own pitch. Maybe that plane was his. Perhaps he’d progressed from hot-air balloons to commercial liners.
“Any advances on the film front?” Charlie asked. Ah. His favourite ploy of small talk first, horrifying scheme second.
“Some.”
“Is Rupert Carlton still trying to throw a spanner in the works?”
Griff grunted. Henrietta’s son was like the fucking mole in that arcade game, constantly popping out of the woodwork with ways to delay the final green light on the film. Family members were often precious about the way their relatives were represented onscreen, but in Rupert Carlton’s case, Griff suspected his objections centred on the fact that he hadn’t yet found a way to cash in on the project.
“Trying being the operative word.” Looking down, he shoved aside a pile of accounts, all of which were adding up to a bleak total. The stress was a bone-deep fog, a roiling grey weight. He was tired. It was a kinetic sort of exhaustion, one setback fuelling another, each irritant turning like a cog in the mechanism.
Life was so flat-out in London right now that coming home to the country for a few days ought to be a reprieve, but the financial situation with Highbrook was rapidly becoming dire. If they wanted to avoid a forced selling-up, they had to make shrewd, long-sighted choices.
Not indulge in reckless, irresponsible flights of fantasy.
He cut short any further hedging around the point. “What are you up to?” He leaned his hip against the desk, letting it take some of his weight. He suspected he’d need the support.
Charlie cleared his throat. “I want to open The Henry.” He rocked back and forth on his heels, emitting hopeful vibes.
“You want to open The Henry,” Griff repeated in the most neutral tone he could muster. He rarely bothered to sugar-coat his opinions. Pandering bullshit just wasted everybody’s time, but it was impossible to be too brutally blunt with Charlie. For one thing, it just bounced off his cheerful, resilient exterior.
“To the public,” Charlie clarified, and Griff’s gaze sliced from his eager expression to the view out the window. Beyond a wide expanse of snow-scattered grass, a turret peeked out above the trees. A leaking turret. The Henry, their boutique theatre on the far grounds, was overdue for repairs, but hardly the priority when half the estate was either dripping, squeaking, draughty, or at actual risk of falling down. The theatre was a vanity project their otherwise practical grandfather had built for Henrietta, during the period when he’d obviously been thinking with his dick, and it had never actually housed a production. At this point, it was an oversized garden shed.
“It would cost a fortune to repair it to a standard where we’d be allowed to pack two hundred people into it.” Reaching for the half-empty glass on the desktop, Griff knocked back a mouthful of cognac. It felt like he’d scraped up his intestines with sandpaper. He should probably be reaching for antacids, not spirits. “Which is what you’d need to even approach breaking even on production costs. A full house. Every performance. You’re not going to get two hundred people to drive all the way to rural Surrey every night. And where would they park? Flattening the south lawn with cars will just piss off the kids who ride the electric mower.”
He turned around, and Charlie was grinning at him with totally unimpaired enthusiasm. Human rubber.
“Is the lecture over?” The enquiry was amiable.