Score!

And then there was Lucy Latimer, who’d been working in Brussels on Villette, which had overrun by several days so she had had a mad scramble to get to Valhalla on time. She was cheered that Sexton had provided her with a beautiful caravan in which to work. She had already unpacked her make-up brushes and sponges for the first day’s filming. Her main problem would be in persuading the cast that the camera, four feet away, saw different things from an audience up in the gods.

In the fridge were three bottles of white, plenty of veggie snacks, and a garlic-flavoured cooked chicken, for her russet shaggy-coated lurcher, James, who ate much more expensively than she did and now, in a smart new green leather collar, lay replete and snoring on one of the bench seats. Above him in the window, Lucy had already put stickers saying: ‘Lurchers Do it Languidly’, ‘A Dog is for Life not just for Christmas’, and ‘Passports for Pets’.

Round the big mirror, semi-circled with lightbulbs, beside snapshots of her little nieces, Lucy had stuck photographs of the cast and the members of the Royal Family, or Gordon Dillon, the editor of the Scorpion, they were supposed to represent.

Over the door was pinned her prize possession, nicked from the BBC, which said: ‘Please ensure that all spirits are returned to the spirit tank in this room.’

It was creepily appropriate in Valhalla, where every shadow appeared inhabited, and the dark cliff of wood behind the row of caravans and tents, known rather grandiosely as ‘the facilities unit’, seemed determined to obscure the stars. Who knew what ghosts might creep out of the cloisters or, on this bitterly cold night, the identities of the mufflered and overcoated figures scuttling by.

Also on Lucy’s walls were thank-you cards from the cast she’d just been looking after. As usual there had been tears and promises to keep in touch. But for once she wasn’t mourning the end of yet another location affaire. Her thoughts had been too full of Tristan.

She had been overjoyed to find a big bunch of bluebells in her caravan, but slightly deflated that every woman in the cast and crew had also received flowers. But at least he’d remembered she liked bluebells, and she kept his good-luck card, which she would certainly need. Tomorrow she had to make up Baby and Flora, who would each require at least an hour and a half, and if things moved swiftly, she might even have to do the ancient tenor playing the Spanish ambassador. Thank God Dame Hermione had insisted on her own make-up artist at vast extra expense.

Fifty yards from Make Up, Hermione’s squawks could be heard issuing from the dairy, which had been turned over to Wardrobe. Lady Griselda, the wardrobe mistress, big, deep-voiced, kind, vulnerable and a bit dippy, looked like Julius Caesar in drag, and had a small mouth like the slit in the charity tins she so often jangled on street corners.

As a deb Griselda had played the double bass in a pop group called the Alice Band, and had briefly been in waiting to a lesser member of the Royal Family. She now lived with a lot of cats in a thatched cottage in North Dorset, where she knew ‘absolutely everybody’. The cottage was called Wobbly Bottom. Griselda tended to send herself up, before anyone else could, by dressing outlandishly. Today she was wearing a floor-length red-embroidered tunic and a purple turban.

She was also having a nervous breakdown, because Rannaldini (who’d employed her because he felt she’d know how the upper classes dressed) was being absolutely beastly.

Riding coats and breeches littered a large sea-blue damask sofa, which had recently and peremptorily been ejected from Helen’s Blue Living Room, as Flora, Baby and Hermione tried on their clothes for tomorrow’s shoot.

Tristan was pacing about. There were a million technical demands on him, a potentially disruptive crew, production pressures, worry that the cast would gel even less in a strange environment.

Rannaldini’s beautifully manicured fingers were drumming on the table. Sexton was massaging his big face with his hand, always a sign that all was not well.

Hermione, in white breeches, black boots and a waisted red coat with black velvet facings, cut long to hide her large bottom, was preening in the mirror.

‘You look lovely, Hermsie,’ boomed Griselda, whose social and sartorial instincts were rapidly being sabotaged by her thumping great crush on Hermione.

‘Women don’t hunt in red coats in England,’ snapped Tristan. ‘It looks vulgar. Please try the dark blue one again, Hermione.’

‘The dark blue won’t show up against the trees,’ argued Rannaldini.

‘I want to add a cheery note to the winter gloom,’ pouted Hermione.