Their Finest Hour and a Half (13 page)

‘We're not supposed to let no one in,' said the woman, and then giggled, suddenly, hand over her mouth. The giggle was echoed by her sister, standing just behind her. They were identical, dressed in matching grey cardigans and rose-print house-dresses. ‘If Dad comes back,' said the first, ‘we'll have to let you out the yard. There's a gate into the lane.'

‘Are you expecting him?' asked Catrin.

‘No. He's shrimping.'

‘Shrimping,' said her sister, in a tiny voice.

‘He shouldn't be here till dark.' Though it was already dark in the hall, the only source of illumination an open door into a back room, through which an oblong of daylight extended.

‘So can we have a chat?' asked Catrin, tentatively.

The sisters looked at each other. ‘All right,' said the first, with sudden daring.

‘And can I ask – who's who?'

‘She's Lily,' said the first, ‘and I'm Rose.'

They chose the front parlour to sit in, and Catrin, ushered to an upright armchair upholstered in slippery chintz, knew that she should feel honoured. It was, clearly, a room used only for special occasions – for funerals, at a guess, and for Christmas Day, judging by the pair of faded paper stars on the mantelpiece. The grate was empty, and spotless, the room frigid. The sisters sat together on a tiny sofa facing the window, the light on their faces revealing that they were much younger than she'd taken them for – those awful clothes, the old-fashioned hairstyles, had deceived her, they were barely in their thirties. And they weren't identical: Lily's nose had a deep horizontal groove above the tip, like a thumbnail-print scored in clay. They were strapping girls, wide-shouldered, clearly strong. For the first time since seeing them, since hearing those baby voices, Catrin could imagine the sisters handling a boat, setting out across the Channel towards a pall of smoke.

‘So,' she said, realizing from the deepening silence that she should speak first. ‘You went to Dunkirk.'

Rose glanced at Lily and then back at Catrin. ‘No,' she said.

For one wild moment, Catrin thought she'd come to the wrong house: perhaps the Starling sisters, loquacious and cinematic, were next door. ‘You
didn't
go?'

‘No. We meant to go but the engine stopped five miles out and it was a broken bearing, so we couldn't do nothing about it, and we was drifting because there wasn't no wind. And then this steam tug out of Sheerness was coming back from France full of soldiers, so they give us a tow to Dover, and we took some of their soldiers because there was so many on board they was spilling over the rails.' Her sister nodded in mute confirmation. ‘And someone must have seen us get back there,' continued Rose, ‘and thought we'd gone all the way to France, but Dad said we wasn't to talk to no newspapers so we couldn't tell them they was wrong.'

Catrin looked at the blank page of her notepad. She had travelled for five and a half hours for this. ‘Flesh out the newspaper story,' Buckley had said. ‘We're looking for a bit of colour, a few scraps of authenticity to wave at the men from the ministry.'

Scrapless, she groped for another question. ‘What sort of boat was it?'

‘Flat-bottomed thirty-six-foot gaff-cutter Bawley with a Kelvin petrol engine.'

Catrin watched her pen obediently write ‘
36 foot
' and ‘
petrol engine
'. Her brain seemed to have entirely stopped working.

‘And did . . . did anything else happen on the journey?'

‘Well . . .' Rose gave a sudden hiccough of laughter. ‘When we got to Dover, and they was all disembarking, one of the soldiers had a kit bag with him and suddenly it woofed and it give us such a fright, and it turned out there was a dog in it he was trying to smuggle in. And then one of the Frenchies give Lily a kiss.' Her sister smiled shyly, and then whispered something to Rose.

‘Lily wants to know, if you're in films have you met Robert Donat?'

‘No,' said Catrin, ‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Or John Clements?'

‘No.'

‘Lily's favourite's Robert Donat and mine's John Clements, and Lily likes Errol Flynn as well. We always go to the Corona on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Dad goes to Oddfellows, and sometimes we go on Sundays.'

Catrin smiled and nodded. If I leave now, she thought, and I'm lucky with a lift to Southend, I might still get back to London before the evening siren. She closed her notepad; Rose's eyes followed the movement.

‘Will it be a film?' she asked, and there was such raw hope in her voice that Catrin almost flinched. She opened her mouth to attempt an answer.

‘Because they change things in films, don't they?' said Rose. ‘And they—' she broke off and both sisters turned their heads in synchrony. There was a tiny noise from the street, a scuff of feet on the doorstep.

‘
Dad
,' said Lily, and she was on her feet and pushing Catrin towards the parlour door and along the passageway to the kitchen, and Catrin, infected by the panic that imbued the air like gas, had run halfway across the yard, and was struggling to find a gap in the vast damp barrier of pegged sheets, when there was a call from the house.

‘It's not. It's not him.'

She looked back, and saw Lily and Rose holding hands in the kitchen doorway.

‘It's not him,' said Rose. She was still a little breathless. ‘It was the Street Savings Committee woman, Mrs Gerraghty. She usually comes tomorrow.'

‘Oh . . .' Catrin, feeling idiotic, let drop a section of sheet.

‘She's collecting for a Spitfire.'

‘I thought it was Dad,' said Lily. Red circles stood out on her cheeks, like stage make-up.

‘It's all right, Lily,' said Rose. ‘It's all right.'

Catrin looked from one to the other. ‘What's the matter? What would happen if he found me here?'

It was Lily who answered with an unconscious gesture, her hand lifting towards her damaged nose. Catrin found herself echoing the movement, and clamped her fingers together.

‘When did he do that? Was that when you got back from Dover?'

Lily shook her head. ‘No, it was last year.'

‘But—'

‘We shouldn't stay out here,' said Rose. ‘The neighbours might see you.'

In the kitchen, beside the unlit range, they formed a little huddle, Lily a step away from the others, keeping one ear cocked for the front door.

‘He won't be back until dark,' Rose repeated, but there was a pervasive feeling of urgency, as if the sisters were correspondents under fire, relaying news between shell-bursts. Catrin looked at Rose's face, a foot from her own, at the mild grey eyes, at the white line, like a diagonal parting, that ran through one of her eyebrows.

‘Why does he do it?' asked Catrin.

‘Well, he's got a temper on him,' said Rose, in the same tone with which she might have complained of smelly feet, or a tendency to snore. ‘If he gets angry then you have to watch out.'

‘What makes him angry?'

‘Burnt bits in food,' said Lily, pulling at a button on her cardigan.

‘And singers on the wireless,' said Rose. ‘And talking at table. And he won't have strangers in the house.'

‘But you let me in,' said Catrin.

‘We oughtn't to have, really.'

Lily let out a little sigh, like a kettle taken off the hob. ‘But you're in the pictures,' she said.

‘I'm only . . .' Catrin looked at Lily's expression and couldn't bring herself to admit the tenuousness of her connection.

‘And whistling indoors,' added Rose. ‘And feeding crumbs to birds because that's like throwing food away. And opening the windows at night.'

‘Hair curlers,' said her sister, in a voice barely audible.

‘Hair curlers, that's right. And he won't take the smell of cabbage cooking, and we can't have . . .'

Item after item, suffocatingly, the list uncoiled; Catrin felt her throat constrict. ‘But however in the world did you come to take the boat?' she asked. It was a feat that suddenly seemed to her more courageous than a dash through gunfire.

‘Oh . . . well, the navy at Southend told all the cocklers they wanted boats with crews that could work the beaches, and our dad said he couldn't go to France because the engine wouldn't take it, and the other cocklers give him a bit of stick for that, so he went off and got a bottle.'

‘He got tight?'

‘Yes, and we knew he'd be asleep for most of the day, so we thought we could get there and back before he woke, but we was sure they wouldn't want women to go, so we went separate from the other cocklers. We thought we'd follow them from a mile back, but then dad was right, he wasn't just saying that about the engine, because we broke down, didn't we?'

‘And what happened when you got back?'

‘Dad chucked a boot at me, but it missed and went through the front door. And then he chucked the other boot.' She hesitated before touching her eyebrow, lightly.

‘But . . .' There was, she realized, a part of the story still missing. ‘. . . what made you actually decide to go to France? You must have known that it would be terribly dangerous – in all sorts of ways.'

The sisters exchanged the look that Catrin had come to recognize as a simultaneous asking and granting of consent. As usual, it was Rose who answered.

‘Eric Lumb, what used to be Dad's first mate, is over there.'

‘In France? With the BEF?'

Rose nodded.

‘And he's a friend of yours?'

A pause and then another nod.

‘And did he get back safely?'

A smile, this time. ‘His nan got a postcard. From in Scotland somewhere.'

Lily leaned across and whispered something in her sister's ear.

‘Go on, then,' said Rose. ‘You get it.' They both watched her disappear into the gloom of the hall.

In the silence, Catrin met Rose's eyes. She didn't ask the question aloud, but Rose answered. ‘We promised Mum, see, that we'd look after Dad.'

‘But . . .'

‘And he don't lay a finger on Lily no more.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because after she burned that chop I told him it wasn't fair, because she's not as quick as other people. And I said if he did ever chuck a plate at her again I'd push him over the rail next time we was out. He can't swim,' she added.

It took a couple of attempts before Catrin could speak. ‘What did he say, then?'

‘He didn't say nothing,' said Rose in that little Toytown voice. It was, almost, an admission of triumph.

Lily came back down the stairs with an envelope in her hand. She gave it to Catrin, and watched her face as Catrin extracted two tissue-wrapped publicity photographs.

‘Eric got them us for our birthday before he went to France,' said Rose. ‘That's Robert Donat in
The Citadel
and that's John Clements in
The Four Feathers
. John Clements's is signed.'

‘
Signed
,' repeated Lily, her voice a sigh.

Catrin exclaimed, and admired, and exclaimed again, and held the photographs between her fingertips, as if they were beyond price.

*

In his room on the third floor at Baker Productions, Buckley read her report in silence, holding the paper in his left hand, and scraping his teeth with the nail on the little finger of the right, an activity that seemed to help him to concentrate. Catrin stood with her hands clasped, her shoulders taut with nerves.

She had sweated over the account, aiming for utter verisimilitude, taking as much of the sisters' actual story as was fair and tactful, recounting something of the narrowness of their lives, of their parental burden, keeping their diffidence and their reason for going to Dunkirk, and then filling the thirty-mile gap between engine failure and the French coast with a few understated and plausible phrases, adapted from newspaper reports
(‘the beach was covered with soldiers and long queues led into the sea . . . As the troops climbed on board the
Redoubtable
, they came under fire from a German plane . . . After ferrying soldiers several times from the beach to one of the larger ships, the sisters were told to pick up a final load and head for home . . . Five miles from the British coast, the boat developed engine problems, and was towed to Dover by a passing steam tug . . .' ).
All she had done was to give an account of what
should
have happened, of the story that Rose and Lily deserved.

Buckley reached the end, and gave his incisors a valedictory wipe. ‘You haven't described what they look like,' he said.

‘Oh . . . they're tall. Light brown hair. Identical. Well, almost identical.'

‘Almost?'

‘One has a scar on her nose.'

‘Can't have that . . . And they're shy?'

‘Yes. One's shyer than the other.'

‘One shy, one chatty.'

‘No, they're both shy.'

‘If they're both shy, there's no dialogue. Did you meet the father?'

‘No.'

‘Sounds a bit of a sod.'

‘Yes.'

‘What about the boat? Did you see the boat?'

‘No.'

‘Pity. Still, there's a few useable nuggets to bounce off the MoI. Have a look at this, Parfitt.' He reached across and slid the paper in front of his co-writer, a man with sparse grey hair and a marbled complexion the colour of brawn. Apart from a monosyllabic greeting when Catrin entered the room, he had neither spoken to nor looked at her, but had sat twirling an unlit cigarette between his fingers and staring out at Soho Square, where a platoon of shirt-sleeved firemen was digging allotments beneath the leafless trees. Now he obediently turned his attention to the report, scanning it rapidly and jabbing a pencil at the odd line.