Cinema: Least Likely to Succeed

(9 of 9)

Quiet Evenings. There, about 40 miles from London, he lives with his wife and son, two dogs (Tilda and Vesta), a cat (Clover) and a teen-aged parrot (Percy) in a pleasant "Westport modern" house that is the architectural scandal of Hampshire. Mornings at 7 the Bentley pulls up. "Good morning, Fred." "Good morning, sir." Evenings at 7 it brings him back. Occasionally there are guests—the close friends. Merula does her own cooking, and Alec is an expansive host. "I say, that plate's cracked!" "Oh dear, Guinness has boiled the wine again!"

But generally evenings are quiet and bedtime is 11. Alec works on his sides for the next day, reads a little Dickens, has a go at mah-jongg with Merula—he is "mad for the game." Weekends he stuffs his pockets with patented French fuzees and stalks about the Guinness acres (there are ten of them) waging chemical warfare on the moles. Last week, as he jabbed a poison capsule into the ground with the point of a stout stick, he cocked a fiendish eyebrow and remarked: "I feel beastly, but one of us has to go." And then back to the house to work on a script about Father Damien's leper colony—he wrote most of the scenario for The Horse's Mouth too. After The Horse's Mouth he is scheduled to make a film version of The Scapegoat, by Daphne du Maurier. And after that? "Just keep going on, I guess."