Their Finest Hour and a Half (26 page)

‘Yes,' said Arthur, uneasily, ‘though I don't think I'd classify myself as an
expert
.'

‘I'm joining the navy myself.'

‘Are you?'

‘The board's allowed me three months' grace to shoot this and then I'm off. Yo ho, heave ho and all that.' He continued to stare unblinkingly from what seemed far too small a distance. Arthur took half a step backwards.

‘I want you to know that I'm a stickler,' said Hadley, smartly closing the gap. ‘It would cause me real pain if people came out of the cinema and said, “That was all very exciting and thrilling but in actual fact the East Surreys always salute with the
left
hand.”'

‘They don't,' said Arthur, relieved to find something about which he could be certain.

‘Just a light-hearted example, Arthur. I'm not like other actors, you see, I'm not simply concerned with how many lines I have. I'd rather have four honest words than fifty pages of bilge.' The unblinking stare continued; Arthur took another, involuntary, step backwards, and fell over his stool.

‘I want you to promise,' said Hadley, as if nothing had happened, as if Arthur hadn't landed arse over tip and wasn't now groping around in the sand for his spectacles, ‘absolutely to promise that you'll tell me if you see or hear something that doesn't ring completely true. Will you promise me?'

‘Yes of course, I'll do my best. The trouble is . . .'

‘Any detail, however small. Any word of the script that sounds a false note. For instance, we're just about to shoot a scene on the beach where Johnnie and a few others are queueing up to their knees in water. Is that something that you actually experienced, Arthur?'

‘Yes.'

‘And then as the darkness drops over the French coast they start to wade back to the shore and one of the other characters turns to Johnnie and says, bitterly, “Another bloody night on the beach.” Does that sound like the kind of phrase that you might have heard?'

‘Yes,' said Arthur, with some feeling.

‘Good. Very good. Cigarette?'

‘No thank you.' The light was beginning to fade. Arthur gave his spectacles a polish, and watched as a man unwound a spool of cable across the dunes, past the remaining spectators, and along the beach towards an enormous lamp a few yards from the water's edge. A corporal was sitting on a canvas stool in the middle of the sand with a towel round his shoulders, while the barber snipped at his hairline. The two young lady actresses were performing leg exercises, using the breakwater as a barre.

‘The trouble is,' said Arthur to Hadley, ‘that this is all very new to me. I hadn't at all realized how much trickery was involved.'

‘Trickery?'

‘Well . . . glass-shots, for instance. If you can add boats to a scene, then I suppose you can add all sorts of things that I don't know about. And noises being put on afterwards, and so on. And someone was telling me that anything white, like the side of the boat, has to be dirtied down because otherwise it's too bright to photograph, so I suppose that the reason that actual dirt isn't being put on things that should really be dirty is because it won't show up. Is that correct?'

‘You've lost me,' said Hadley. ‘What things that should really be dirty?'

‘Well . . .' Arthur eyed him critically. Apart from a light, almost artistic, spatter of mud across the breast pocket, and a small area of scuffing on the left knee (the latter looking as if a pumice stone had been passed gently over the serge), Hadley's uniform was completely pristine.

‘You mean this should be dirtier?' asked Hadley, following his gaze.

‘Dirtier, and also . . .' He fished for an adequate phrase, thinking of the scarecrow army that had arrived at Dover, undershirts used as bandages, jackets as pillows and stretchers, trousers striped with salty tide-marks from successive queueing in the surf. ‘. . . more weathered.'

‘
Weathered
,' repeated Hadley, appreciatively. ‘That's an excellent note, I shall pass it on straight away. I gather the director's keen on a real-life sort of look. Anything else?'

‘Yes,' said Arthur, warming to his role. ‘Your uniform fits much too well. Most of them are too long in the arm – like mine, d'you see? – or too short in the leg, or simply far too big.'

Hadley nodded, but with noticeably less enthusiasm.

‘Honestly,' said Arthur, ‘I'd say that that was as important as the weathering. Our sergeant-major said we looked like a bunch of hunchbacks after we were kitted up for the first time.'

‘Mmm,' said Hadley, turning away.

‘We were known as the baboon platoon,' called Arthur, but Hadley was clearly already out of earshot.

*

Before going to Norfolk, Buckley had given Catrin a typed list of instructions:

Parfitt had been left no such list, and without Buckley's gadfly presence he seemed to sink into torpor, dozing for most of the morning, chin on chest, and staring out of the window with his arms folded for most of the afternoon. Catrin wanted to ask him why he didn't just go home, but she felt oddly constrained; she realized that she'd scarcely ever spoken to him directly – all communication had been via Buckley, as if the latter were the string between two cocoa tins.

Rather than ask Parfitt questions, then, she offered an occasional commentary on what she'd been doing, in the hope of gaining some response.

‘I went to see
Men Against the Sky
last night, it's about a drunken test pilot. They talk so fast, Americans, I kept thinking that we ought to give our American a bit more to say otherwise we'll end up ten minutes short.'

‘Any good?' asked Parfitt, after a pause of several seconds.

‘You mean the picture?'

‘Yep.'

‘Not bad. I could see the ending a mile away, though.'

‘Flagged.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Flagged the ending. That's what we say. They flagged the ending.'

‘Oh I see . . .'

That was one entire afternoon's conversation. On other days, she managed to extract Parfitt's opinion on the director (‘picky'), the war (‘lost unless we get the Russians in'), and Buckley (‘best in the business'), as well as his suggestions for the propeller scene, which mainly seemed to involve cutting most of Rose and Lily's dialogue. She had the feeling that Parfitt didn't have much time for women.

By the second week of Buckley's absence, she had read a bundle of scripts, sat through nine examples of whip-crack American dialogue, obtained a travel chit from a grudging accounts department, and lopped two and a half pages from the scene in question. She handed it to Parfitt late one afternoon and he read it slowly, hunched over the desk, the breath whistling through his nostrils.