Their Finest Hour and a Half (16 page)

The only seats still available were the most expensive. Peering down from the front row of the balcony, Ambrose wondered briefly who might be left actually fighting this war, since the entire British army seemed to be jammed into the stalls, together with a fair sprinkling from the other services, each with a girl by his side, none of them watching the screen, the newsreel having been succeeded by a series of badly-scratched advertising slides.

The organist was playing ‘Wish Me Luck', and Ambrose found himself tapping an accompaniment on the balcony rail; how delightfully things could change in a single moment. There really was nothing to compare with seeing one's face projected across a gigantic screen in front of a packed and eager audience – and this was not vanity speaking, but professional necessity. In other trades it might be possible to judge almost immediately the effects of one's skills – the patient is cured, the pupil learns to read – but for the film actor such rewards were distant, speculative. One sent one's performance off on a journey, packed its sandwiches (so to speak), straightened its collar and waved it goodbye, hoping that it would be greeted appreciatively. Months would go by. A letter, in the form of a review, might land on the mat; a friend or acquaintance might report back with a sighting (‘Awfully good, old man'); but ultimately, one had to make the journey oneself, one had to sit in a darkened auditorium with a host of strangers and gauge, with them, all the strength of that performance, all the subtlety, all the ability of the character to toy with the audience as a zephyr with a leaf, to steer the emotions with the skill and elegance of a gondolier.

Of course that sometimes meant having first to sit through hours of torture. Cinema programmes had stretched to quite ridiculous lengths these days, and there was no respect given to the content – patrons wandered in and out, seats banged during key moments of dialogue, people shouted profanities during the newsreel, managers clambered on stage and announced in stentorian tones what should be done in the event of an alert (as if, for God's sake, Londoners hadn't caught on by now), matches flared during night scenes, fish-paste sandwiches added their mephitic stench, and over everything sounded the turbid ebb and flow of bronchial clearance.

The woman behind Ambrose greeted the new slide with an explosion of coughs, and the organist began to draw ‘Wish Me Luck' to an absurdly elaborate conclusion – great swags of arpeggios, and a trill that seemed designed to leave the eardrums bleeding. The screen went blank, the curtains closed briefly, and then re-opened to the sound of a cymbal clash. An animated squiggle was succeeded by the caption ‘Food Flash'. The audience groaned and a fresh wave of coughing began, but Ambrose leaned forward, his attention caught. The words were replaced by the title card:

He leaned back again; not one of his.

‘Get comfortable, will you?' said the soldier next to him, a sharp-faced sliver of a man with his arm round a charmless blonde. Ambrose gave him a look and then turned back to the screen. And saw his own face.

‘
That's right
,' his own face was saying, while his own hands fiddled with an unlit pipe. In the foreground was the back of a woman's head – Cecy's, it was obviously Cecy's head, he recognized the bun – but the female voice issuing from the back of Cecy's head was not Cecy's. The strange woman's voice was remarking that she'd had to fill in the address on page 4 of her ration book in accordance with instructions from the Ministry of Food, and then Ambrose's own voice, issuing from the image of Ambrose on the screen, uttered the syllables, ‘
Uh huh
.' The voice that wasn't Cecy's spoke again, the celluloid Ambrose replied, the extraordinary conversation continued, and the real Ambrose, sitting in the audience, struggled to assimilate what he was watching.

‘Here,' said the sharp-faced soldier in the next seat. ‘That's him.' He gave Ambrose a nudge. ‘That's you, isn't it?'

Ambrose nodded, trying to keep one eye on the screen. The picture jumped suddenly to a front view of Cecy, and in the foreground was the back of his own head. A man's voice – a nasty, thin, reedy, expressionless voice that was
nothing
like his own, and yet was clearly supposed to be issuing from his character – said, ‘
Is there anything else we have to do?
' And Cecy shook her head and picked up her knitting before the picture faded to black. The curtains closed again.

Ambrose sat as if concussed.

‘Are you an actor, then?' asked the soldier's girl, incredulously.

It was a moment before he could respond, and then he groped for his hat and stood up so suddenly that she recoiled. ‘I thought I was an actor,' he said, and sensed, rather than saw, the rows of heads turning towards him all across the balcony. ‘I thought I was an actor,' he repeated, more trenchantly, ‘but now I've realized that I'm simply a
whore
.' He put on his hat, tipped the brim, edged past the soldier and his girl, and strode up the steps towards the back of the auditorium. And although he was feeling soiled, humiliated,
raped
, there was still a little part of him that wondered if he'd ever made a finer exit.

‘Canonbury 4541.'

‘Sophie, it's Ambrose Hilliard. I have to speak to Sammy.'

‘Hello, Mr Hilliard.' She was softly spoken, her speech more heavily accented than Sammy's, her tone altogether less buoyant. ‘My brother is walking his dog. Can he return your call?'

‘No, I'm in a telephone box on South Molton Street.'

‘I see.'

There was a pause; Sophie, he'd noticed in the past, never filled in conversational lacunae – that, presumably, was Sammy's role in the household. In the lengthening silence, Ambrose could feel his dudgeon beginning to slip.

‘Is there anything else?' asked Sophie.

‘Yes.' He thought again of the humiliation that he had just sat through and felt a surge of fresh anger. ‘Yes, there is. You can tell that brother of yours—' Distantly, at the other end of the line, a door slammed.

‘Wait one moment,' said Sophie, and there was a clunk as the receiver was laid on to a hard surface. Her footsteps receded. For a few seconds nothing was audible and then Ambrose became aware of a clicking sound, a gentle ‘tickety-tackety tickety-tackety', as if Sophie had slipped on a pair of tap shoes and was tiptoeing back across the hall to the telephone table.

‘Hello?' he called, warily. ‘Hello?'

The clicking stopped, there was a delicate snuffle at the earpiece and then a noise like a twelve-inch mortar.

‘For Christ's
sake
,' shouted Ambrose, dropping the phone. From the dangling ear-piece he could hear a repetition of the noise and then the tinny yap of his agent's voice, calling his own name. Cautiously, he lifted the receiver.

‘Sammy?'

‘Oh there you are, Ambrose! Did you hear Cerberus wishing you a shplendid New Year?'

‘Hang Cerberus.'

‘Victory in nineteen forty-woof, he was saying.'

‘Never mind the dog.'

‘Join the WOOFS and win the war!'

‘Sammy,
listen
to me. I've just seen a short film that I did for the MoI chopped to buggery, re-voiced by someone else, and plastered all over the screen. Did you agree to that?'

‘Did I agree to what?'

‘Re-using the footage. Allowing them to show me reacting to a speech that I never heard in the first place. Getting some twerp of an office boy to splutter lines of dialogue over a shot of the back of my head.'

‘I don't think they asked me shpecifically.'

‘Well they certainly didn't bloody ask
me
.'

‘You seem very upset.'

‘Of course I'm upset.'

‘Was it done badly?'

‘It was
done
, Sammy. Can you not see the insult implicit in that? They're saying, “We don't really need an actor for that, let's get Watkins in accounts, he'll do a perfectly good job and we don't have to pay him, either.”'

‘Ah yes. The trouble is, Ambrose, that these Ministry film roles are on a buy-out. The budget's so tight that—'

‘I don't need to know about the budget, Sammy.'

‘But there's a clause in the contract that—'

‘I don't need to know about clauses. Anything to do with the word “clause” is your bag, not mine. My job is to go out there and act, yours is to make sure that I'm offered decent jobs, that I'm paid adequately and that my skills are neither exploited nor abused, and it increasingly seems to me that you're doing none of those things.'

‘Ambrose, old fellow—'

‘If I were a painter, I suppose you'd be happy for my canvasses to be cut up with a pair of pinking shears and stuck on greeting cards?'

‘Ambrose, please—'

‘Or perhaps you'd give me a bucket of whitewash and point me towards the nearest wall?'

‘Please be calm, Ambrose.'

‘I am calm.'

‘No, you're angry.'

‘It's a controlled anger, Sammy, tempered with an icy detachment. It's one of the many subtle emotions of which a good actor is capable.'

‘Let's talk about this tomorrow.'

‘Why tomorrow? I want to discuss it now. You don't realize quite what a—'

‘Tomorrow when you come for luncheon. You haven't forgotten you're coming here?'

‘Of course I haven't.' Of course he had.

‘Two o'clock. We'll have a lovely meal – lokshen, you know – and we'll take Cerberus for a turn around the Shquare, and then I'll tell you all about the new Baker's feature with that nice little role I was mentioning at the . . .'

‘For Christ's sake, Sammy, how many times do I have to say it?'

‘Say what?'

‘That I don't want
nice
,
little
roles.'

‘But that's just—'

‘I don't want them.'

‘That's just a shlang phrase, it's a—'

‘If you can only get me
nice
,
little
roles then I can see very little point in continuing our association.'

‘But if you could just read the treatment—'

‘In fact, I can see no point at all.'

‘I'll fetch it for—'

‘Goodbye, Sammy.'

Ambrose downed the receiver and took a long, gratified breath. It was more than a year since he'd concluded a Sammy conversation in this precise way, with the slam of a telephone, and he'd forgotten the deep satisfactions of the gesture.
Nice
,
little
. How ironic that Sammy had swallowed whole the mealy-mouthed parsimony of the English language, where every word was qualified and diminished, where all was
nicely
and
fairly
and
slightly
and
quite
, when what an agent really needed was a hefty slug of Teutonic ambition and the ability to bark orders. It was a pity about tomorrow's meal – Sophie was a superb cook, as her brother's figure testified – but accepting Sammy's hospitality so soon after an argument smacked of capitulation. A few days of deliberate silence was needed, a chance for Sammy to reflect on his client's needs, to pledge a better class of service in the future. Besides, tonight's beano would counterbalance any deficiency on the morrow. He could smell that ham. He could almost taste it.

He checked his watch. It occurred to him that there was still time to go back into the cinema and see
Inspector Charnforth and the Red Rose Mystery
. Of course, he'd have to see if a vacancy had arisen in the stalls – he couldn't return to his balcony seat; an exit was an exit, after all, a reappearance could only be bathetic.

The light was already dropping from the sky. He joined the short queue at the box-office, and thought how strangely cheerful, all of a sudden, Oxford Street was looking. In the brief spell of twilight, before blackout hour arrived and the shutters were dragged across, the lights in the shops could twinkle just as they had before the war. The vacant lots and burnt-out husks of buildings became invisible, and all was bustle and shine.

‘How kin I help yew?' asked the girl in the booth, her accent a muddy emulsion of East End and elocution lessons.

‘One for the stalls. Ah—'

He could hear, seeping through the foyer, the looping, rather sinister clarinet theme that accompanied the Charnforth films. It drew him, like a snake-charmer's melody. He paid his money and took the ticket and walked through the dark tunnel that led to the stalls.

The skies above St John's Wood were quiet, but over to the east there were searchlights prodding the cloud cover, and the flicker of shells. The occasional aircraft engine sounded above the gunfire, and as Ambrose followed the feeble light of his torch along the pavement, he heard the unmistakable sound of a power-dive. It was impossible not to duck, and he found himself cringing beside the overhang of a neglected hedge, his hand shading the beam of the torch as if the Hun might spot its glow-worm dribble and send a stream of bullets straight through the bulb. He waited for the dive to flatten out, and then straightened and continued his walk; the houses that lined the route were vast, five storeys of ostentation, their detail lost in shadow.

People spoke of ‘Jerry' now, of course, and not the Hun – he knew that, just as he knew not to talk of Blighty, or of Tommy Atkins; one had to move with the times, to keep abreast, especially in the acting profession, where at the slightest opportunity one might be pigeon-holed, filed and forgotten. It was only the sounds of war – the changeless thump of the batteries, the whizz of shells, that immeasurable beat of silence before the explosion – that sometimes catapulted him back to the old words; even the bray of a donkey, heard as he'd stepped off the bus beside the zoo, had made him think instantly of mules, protesting drearily as they'd hauled the guns through belly-high mud.