Daddy's Girls (66)

“How old are they?” She watched him carefully. He was fascinating to talk to.

“They’re grown up, twenty-five and twenty-eight. I married when I was in diapers myself. Lovely girl, we grew up together. It seemed like a fine idea. It took us three years to come to hate each other. We divorced, she’s been happily married to someone else for twenty years, with masses more children, married to another boy we grew up with. I never remarried, and have been happy ever since. I’m a bit of a renegade. I can manage the crumbling manor house, but not the lady of the manor that goes with it. So I run around the world, making movies and flying and chauffeuring glamorous actresses around. I can hardly wait to see what glorious costumes come out of those suitcases.”

“Mostly blue jeans and insect repellent,” she said, and he laughed.

    “No toilet paper?” he asked, and she looked embarrassed. He had guessed.

“Just a few rolls. The customs man wanted to know if I was opening a store here.”

“He probably wanted you to give him some.”

“I thought so, but I didn’t know if I’d need it. I’ll give it to him on the way back.” They chatted easily with each other, he seemed very relaxed and comfortable with her.

“Where do you live now?” he asked, curious about her.

“That’s an interesting question. I’m homeless at the moment. I just sold my house in L.A., it’s closing this week. And since we’re based in London, I haven’t bought anything to replace it yet. I can stay at a hotel or the ranch when I go back, though it’s a long drive from L.A. I’ll probably buy an apartment in Hollywood or Beverly Hills. The house was a big commitment. I loved it, but I think selling was the right thing.”

“You can buy a flat in London, or rent one.” She nodded. She hadn’t figured that out yet, and was going to look around when they got to London in February. They had rented an apartment for her until they finished shooting for the first season in May, so she had time to decide what she wanted to do. “I have a flat in Notting Hill. It’s a bit chaotic, like the Left Bank in Paris. I like that. I’m not so fond of stuffy neighborhoods. L.A. always looks a bit too grand to me when I get invited to people’s homes. They look so perfect. I always want to mess them up a bit so they look lived in.” She laughed. He was fun to talk to. “I think you’ll enjoy the cast, by the way. They’re a good mix of British types, a bit slutty, a bit naughty, some of the older actors take themselves quite seriously. We have a resident curmudgeon. And Natalie Jones, our star, is a really sweet girl, who loves everyone. She reminds me of my daughter, innocence itself. She works for a fashion magazine. My son is very serious. He’s a biologist. I have no idea what he does. He’s explained it to me a thousand times. It’s all Chinese to me. He’s an assistant professor at Cambridge. I can’t imagine how I wound up with a boy that smart. Must be in his mother’s genes, though she can’t figure out what he does either. Half the time, she says he’s a pharmacist, which drives him insane to have two such ignorant parents. He thinks I’m a terrible Bohemian. He’s engaged to the daughter of an earl, and hides me whenever possible. His mother is a countess now, so she’s considered respectable.” He said it all with good humor, and had Gemma laughing for most of the short trip.

    “You seem very respectable to me,” Gemma said, smiling, as they each ate one of the sandwiches.

“I’m not at all respectable. That’s only because you grew up on a ranch in America. By British standards, I’m a total outlaw. What about your mother? What was she like?”

“I was born in Texas, and she left when I was two, so we moved to California a year later. I never met her until this summer after my father died. He told us that she was dead, and we found out after he died that she wasn’t. So we looked her up on the internet and found her. She’s lovely actually. She lives with an Italian architect. So I didn’t have a mother until I was forty-one.”

“That must have been awkward, when you met her.” He frowned sympathetically, thinking about it, and glanced at her.

“It wasn’t really. Emotional, but not awkward. She’s a very sweet woman. She ran off with another man and my father never forgave her, so he told us she was dead, and we were young enough to believe him. My younger sister was a baby, and my older sister and I were two and three when she left. And when I was three, we moved away. We were all babies really.”

    “Your father just took you and moved to California? Brave man.”

“Yes, and complicated.”

“Of course, who isn’t?” He had a point. “That’s what’s so interesting about what you and I do. I direct actors to express emotion and pull it out of their souls, and imagine it. You try to connect with the material at an emotional level, and apply something you’ve experienced to what you’re doing and channel it for the viewer. It’s magic really.” It was an intriguing way to describe it. “What you do is a pantomime of emotion really for people who want to feel and don’t know how to, or don’t know what they should be feeling, so you show them, and I tell you how to show them. It all fits together rather nicely. Like Kabuki.

“I lived in Japan for a year too. Fascinating people, gorgeous place. A little too foreign for me, though. And very repressed. It’s important there not to show emotion. That doesn’t work for me. Of course the British would like to be like that too. They’re very proud of how cold they are, but they aren’t really. I have them crying like babies with our shows,” he said, looking pleased. She could hardly wait to work with him and see what it was like. “My son is very British. My daughter is more like me. She’s an artist, when she’s not working at the magazine. I thought she’d want to become an actress, but she didn’t.”