Their Finest Hour and a Half (14 page)

‘Yep,' he said, cryptically, handing it back.

‘We can use the smuggled dog,' said Buckley.

‘Yep.'

‘And the search for the boyfriend. Make him a fiancé.'

‘Yep.'

‘They'll have to actually find him, of course.'

‘Yep.'

‘Injured?'

‘Yep.'

‘Bit of slop.'

‘Yep.'

‘Father?'

‘Don't like him.'

‘Nor me, leaves a nasty taste. The drunken sailor aspect's a nice touch, though.'

There was a moment of brooding silence.

‘Make him an uncle?' suggested Parfitt.

‘That's good, and less chance of the old bastard finding a lawyer. And maybe unc should be on the boat with the girls. Soused. Wakes up with a hangover at Dunkirk.'

‘Yep.'

‘Tells them to turn down the noise.'

‘Yep.'

‘Double-take when he sees the Stukas. See your way to a gag or two?'

‘Maybe.'

‘The stuff on the beaches is fine, needs a story for the way home. Getting a tow's no good.'

‘Uncle mends the engine?'

‘Miserable sod comes good under fire?'

‘Yep.'

‘Takes a bullet, maybe. Honourable death, tears all round.' Buckley turned to Catrin. ‘All right, we'll work on it.'

‘But . . .' She couldn't quite believe the speed with which her carefully constructed story had been first accepted in its entirety, and then torn down and carelessly rebuilt. ‘But they did it all by themselves,' she said.

‘What?'

‘There was no one on board with them. You're giving credit to someone who doesn't even exist.'

Buckley examined his fingertips. ‘It's a film.'

‘But it's supposed to be based on a true story.'

‘All right, let's take a look at this true story.' He picked up the sheet and pretended to re-read it. ‘Two spinsters who hardly talk. They go to Dunkirk. They come back. Nothing else happens.' He glanced at Parfitt. ‘I told you she was keen on those French films.'

Parfitt made a revving sound which might have been a laugh.

‘But . . .' She opened her mouth and then closed it again.
But your version isn't real; but you've made things up; but it won't be the actual truth
. She could say none of these things, she realized. She had momentarily forgotten, in her partisanship, that she herself had invented far more than either of these two men.

‘But what?' asked Buckley, bluntly.

She groped for the nub of her argument. ‘But I wanted to show how awfully brave they were.'

‘Oh, I see.' His tone implied that she might, at last, have said something reasonable. ‘We'll be doing that, all right. That's the whole point of it. Was that all?'

‘Yes. No. What did you mean by “bit of slop”?'

‘“Bit of slop?” It's lovey-dovey stuff, isn't it?'

‘Girl talk,' said Parfitt.

‘Oh Ian, I thought you were dead,' said Buckley, linking his hands behind his head and addressing the light bulb. ‘Oh Jacintha, I couldn't die without seeing the cornflower blue of your eyes a final time.'

‘You're not going to write it like that are you?' asked Catrin, horrified.

‘Why? How would you write it?'

‘Plainer, I suppose. Less flowery. The way that people actually talk.'

‘Oh would you, now?' He caught Parfitt's eye for a second and then resumed his wooing of the light bulb. ‘Oh Ian, with your strong arms around me, I could travel to the ends of the earth and beyond.'

‘I'd better get back.' At the office door, she hesitated. ‘So will it be a film?' she asked.

‘Depends on the Ministry,' said Buckley.

She thought of Rose and Lily, queuing at the Corona. ‘I do hope it happens.'

‘And after that the War Office has to pass the storyline. And the army and the navy and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. But if it does go ahead . . .' There was a long, deliberate pause. ‘. . . we might need someone who can write us a bit of slop.'

It was a moment before she understood him. ‘Me, you mean?'

‘We tend to use a female for the slop side of things. Parfitt, what was the name of the Scotch one we used last year?'

‘Jeannie.'

‘Jeannie. Wrote wireless plays before the war. She wasn't too bad. Just getting the hang of things when Baker's had to let her go.'

‘Why?' asked Catrin.

‘Bun in the oven.' His eyes drifted across to Catrin's. ‘Wouldn't want that to happen again.'

She blushed on cue and Buckley grinned, apparently gratified. ‘You'd like to work on this film, then?'

‘Yes. Very much.'

‘You wouldn't get a screen credit.'

‘I don't mind.'

‘Temporary secondment to this office.'

She nodded.

‘Ministry pay.'

‘That's all right.'

‘Fire-watching rota.'

‘Fine.'

‘Toilet-cleaning duties.'

‘
What?
'

Buckley smiled carnivorously. ‘She has her limits, Parfitt.'

Parfitt made the revving sound again. ‘We'll test 'em,' he said.

Ellis's studio was flooded with winter sunlight, and full of tiny, early-morning noises: rustles and chirrups from sparrows in the rafters, a pan of size bubbling softly on the gas burner, the scrape of Ellis's spoon as he devoured the cold macaroni cheese that Catrin had brought him in a biscuit tin from home.

‘And I've made you some sandwiches,' said Catrin, setting the packet on the table. ‘Only meat paste, I'm afraid.'

He nodded, ate the last mouthful and set the tin down. He looked exhausted. There was soot in the lines around his eyes.

‘Bad night?' asked Catrin.

‘Mmm.' He never told her anything – kept it, she supposed, for the paintings.

‘Oh, and I've brought you an apple.' She took it out of her bag and polished it carefully on her skirt.

At the far end of the garage, Perry folded back the doors of the pit, and hopped inside, emerging a few seconds later with a canvas. There was no one else about. Call-up had almost emptied the studio.

‘Is there anything else you need? I can come back this evening.'

Ellis shook his head, ran a hand through his hair and shut his eyes for a moment or two, blinking as he re-emerged.

‘I'm tired,' he said.

‘I know.'

‘I'll be better after a coffee.' He brushed her cheek with a finger. ‘You're all right?'

‘Yes, I'm fine.'

‘Anything worrying you?'

‘The new job, a bit. I keep thinking that Rose and Lily must have—'

He shook his head. ‘Anything serious, I meant.'

‘Oh. No.'

‘And you always sleep under the stairs even when I'm not there?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good. Damn sight safer than that public death-trap they've flung up at the end of the road. One skin of bricks and a cement roof . . .' He was turning from her as he spoke, swinging round towards the canvas he'd been working on when she arrived.

The composition was very nearly symmetrical, as if he'd set his easel in the middle of the cobbles. Ahead stretched a terraced street, empty but for a single, distant figure, the perspective forced so that the end of the road was a lurid dot in the middle distance. The long brick facade on either side was intact, but there was no roof above, and nothing behind the front doors but ochre rubble and a low black sky. It was like a vision from a nightmare, the colours heightened, the proportions distorted, and yet it was also, in another way, utterly real. Catrin dabbed at the thought, as if with a fingertip, and then shied away; she had been present at too many heated discussions on the nature of truth in art to feel confident about her own thoughts on the subject.

The word ‘serious', though, was another matter. In a way Ellis was right: her current fretting about the script couldn't really be defined as ‘serious', and yet, in this strange new existence, the word seemed to have acquired a host of meanings. Every night was serious: you crouched in the dark and the engines stuttered overhead, and then along came morning, and you were still alive, and once you'd got over that surprise you prepared the breakfast and accidentally dropped the only egg on the floor, and for a moment or two
that
was serious, or you discovered that the gas was off when all you had in the house was sausages, or you were halfway to work when your heel broke, and even though you were passing a bomb-site at the time, even though there were ambulances standing by and Heavy Rescue men lying listening for noises in the rubble, it still felt quite serious that you were standing on one leg, half a mile from the Ministry, with the roads all strewn with glass and not a spare minute in the day ahead with which to find a cobbler. It was as if the load were too heavy, the horror too horrible to keep in the head for long, so that the mind kept bobbing back to more manageable degrees of misery, to the Plimsoll line of the ordinary.

And perhaps it was different for Ellis – perhaps that was what people meant by artistic sensibility. Perhaps because eggs and heels and queues and dust and dropped half-crowns meant nothing to him, he could retain that feeling of horror and transmit it on to canvas, but that didn't stop eggs and heels and queues and dust and dropped half-crowns being awfully important in their own way.

‘I should get to work,' she said.

She dozed off on the tube, and dropped the biscuit tin, and woke with a start, reaching for the handle of an imaginary bucket.

FOOD FLASH

December 1940

Next door's char, a woman who spent more time arranging things in attractive patterns than actually cleaning them, had lined up the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece in order of size, starting at the austerity end with a two by three inch festive greeting from Ambrose's tailor, and ending at the other with a vast fake-snow-and-glitter affair from ‘Cecy and Tommy', which on closer examination turned out to be the front of an old card glued on to a fresh backing. Under her signature, Cecy had written, ‘
Am treading the boards again – season at the Ipswich Grand, starting with small but delicious part in
The Wild Duck.
Do drop by!!
' Ambrose had amused himself for a moment or two by trying to imagine a less enticing prospect than travelling nearly two hundred miles in order to see Cecy Clyde-Cameron clamp her chops around a morsel of Ibsen: the only rival he could think of was the prospective ‘Yule-Tide entertainment' in the basement of Selfridges, the highlight of which – according to the solitary poster he had seen – was to be a demonstration by Camden boy scouts of how to disable a German parachutist.

The only card that had filled Ambrose with an approximation of Christmas cheer was the one at the centre of the mantelpiece. The picture, of course, was execrable: his ex-wife had always favoured the ‘Dignity and Impudence' school of sentiment, and the card bore an illustration of a wide-eyed kitten nestling in a warden's helmet. The true seasonal jollity was all on the inside:

Beneath these lines, the powerful diagonals of Anthea's signature leaned menacingly over Harris's little scrawl. So with the signature, thus with her marriage. If only as an annual reminder of the joys of divorce, Ambrose welcomed the Pym party – but there were reasons beyond this, reasons that sustained him through an otherwise austere Christmas.

It had been blessedly quiet, of course – at least, until the night of the 29th when the City had caught it – but also unrelievedly dull. There had been none of the usual West End after-show parties or studio thrashes, only a tiny get-together at Sammy's cramped offices on St Martin's Lane, to which not only all the clients had been invited, but also the administrative staff. Ambrose, attending purely as a matter of business, had found himself jammed into a corner with a pimply tea-boy and a middle-aged stenographer whose gigantic bust had pummelled him every time she'd reached past his shoulder for a mince pie. ‘The filling's made with
grated parsnip
,' she'd kept saying, as if that were in some way a recommendation. Sammy had made a speech, boasting what an unexpectedly busy year it had been for the agency, and Ambrose had forbore to heckle, although ‘unexpectedly busy' seemed a bizarre definition of his own experience: eight short propaganda films, one feature and an offer of rep at Colchester (declined). The feature had promised well –
A Bad Business for the Duke
with Ambrose as the eponymous duke – until he had read the script and found that after three pages his character was found on the floor of the library with a halberd in the back of his skull. It had taken two hours to shoot his dialogue – ‘
Bring me a whisky, Berners
.' ‘
A small one, sir?' ‘A large one, damn you, and make it quick
' – and an entire half day lying face-down on a moulting carpet to nail the reveal shot. He had sneezed for hours afterwards.

‘Unexpectedly busy?' he said acidly to Sammy after the speech.

‘Ah, now . . .' Sammy, sozzled on three-quarters of a pink gin, wagged a finger. ‘I was waiting to see you, Ambrose, things are starting to happen.'

‘What things?'

‘Shtudios re-opening. The industry re-awakening after its long shleep. I've just this week put you forward for a good little role which . . .'