Ancient Images Read Free Page A

and Toby reached the nearest entrance to the car park that extended under the whole of Hyde Park. As Graham stepped out of the sunlight he glanced back sharply, but she didn't think he was looking at her. She was squinting in case she could see what he'd seen when Lezli came out of Metropolitan to find her. "Help," Lezli said.
        At first Sandy thought Lezli was editing an old musical, brushing her green hair behind her ear whenever she stooped to the bench. Astaire was dancing on the moviola screen, and it wasn't until Cagney joined him that she realized this was something new. It was The Light Fantastic, a television film where the players in an end-of-the-pier show found themselves fading into monochrome and dancing with the best of Hollywood. "Only their rhythm's wrong, and the film's already over budget, and the dancers have gone to America themselves now," Lezli wailed.
        "Any chance of using some other vintage clips?"
        "It took us months to clear these. I did tell the producer he should try, and he used words I didn't know existed. The worst of it is these aren't the clips we thought we'd be using, the ones the dancers were told to match."
        The point of the film was that the ghosts of Cagney and Astaire allowed the dancers to forget their bickering and their failures and realize their ambitions for a night, if only in fantasy, but now it looked as if the encounter turned them into clowns. Sandy examined the outtakes, which proved to be useless. She ran the completed scenes again, and then she hugged Lezli. "Couldn't see for looking," she said, and separated the main routine into three segments. "Now how do we get them all to dance in the same tempo?"
        Lezli peered and brushed her hair back and saw it. "Slow our people down."
        "That's what I thought. Let's see." She watched Lezli run the tape back and forth, trying to match tempi, until the dancers joined the ghosts, not imitating them so much as interpolating syncopated variations in a slight slow motion that seemed magical. The producer of the film came storming in to find Lezli, then clapped his hand over his mouth. "Light and fantastic. Thanks, Sandy. I thought we were up cripple creek."
        "Thank Lezli, she's the one who put the idea into words. Soon I'll be coming to her for advice," Sandy said and went to the vending machine for a coffee, feeling even happier than she would have if she'd edited the film herself.
        She enjoyed the urgency of editing news footage, but equally she enjoyed helping shape fictions, improving the timing, discovering new meanings through juxtapositions, tuning the pace. She'd learned these skills in Liverpool; she'd spent her first two years out of school working with children at the Blackie, a deconsecrated church with a rainbow in place of a cross, helping them make videos about their own fears. She'd moved to London to attend film school, she'd lived with a fellow student for almost a year and had nursed him through a nervous breakdown before they'd split up. She'd been a member of a collective that had made a film confronting rapists with their victims, and the film had been shown at Edinburgh and Cannes. When a second film that would have let people who had been abused as children confront their seducers had failed to attract finance, Sandy had gone for the job of assistant editor at Metropolitan. Later she'd learned that Graham had put in a good word for her, having seen the collective's film in Edinburgh and admired the editing. He'd introduced himself once she had begun work at the station, and they had taken an immediate liking to each other. He'd steered her toward jobs he'd thought would stretch her talents; he'd supported her when, infrequently, she'd thought a task was too much for her, and had been the first to applaud when she solved it; he'd given her the confidence when she needed it and asked for nothing but her friendship in return. In less than a year she was