Their Finest Hour and a Half (51 page)

‘He broke my elbow in two places,' he said to Sophie.

‘He jumped to your rescue. Don't forget that he is a dog who is afraid of water.' She stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘I cannot pretend, Mr Hilliard, that I have any understanding of how this could have occurred, but the fact is that Cerberus loved my brother, and now he has transferred that love to you. He is, we could say, your legacy from Sammy, and of course it is extremely bad luck to refuse a legacy.'

She rested her gaze upon him, steady and implacable, and he understood, instantly, the nature of the bad luck in question: a dogless future was an agentless future. A tricky decision. He took a deep breath.

‘I shall have to think about it,' he said. Sophie smiled.

All the men on the ward turned to watch her leave.

Cecy arrived a minute or two later. ‘You will
never
guess why I'm late,' she said. ‘I was passing a greengrocer's on the way to the station and what should I see but a—' She stopped speaking, her gaze fixed on the bunch of grapes on the bedside locker. ‘Oh,' she said, in quite a different tone. ‘Goodness. Don't those look nice.'

‘My agent brought them, and as a matter of fact they're not.'

‘No?'

‘Bitter.'

‘Oh, really?' Cecy looked slightly mollified. ‘Well, I don't know if these are any better,' she said, taking another, smaller bunch from her bag. ‘I had to queue for three-quarters of an hour to buy them. And I've brought the cuttings I promised you. Oh, and some marsh marigolds from the bottom of the garden, only a wild flower of course, but rather gay. Let me see if I can find a vase . . .' And she swept off again, exchanging little waves with the other occupants of the ward, smiling her toothy smile at the nurses.

‘Next of kin?' they'd asked Ambrose, when he'd arrived at the hospital, and he'd tried, rather fuzzily, to recollect the location of his second cousin in Reigate, and had given them, instead, Cecy's address: The Ducklings, Thames Ditton. Peculiar thing, concussion.

He sifted through the cuttings she'd placed on the counterpane.
STUDIO HORROR: WRITER CRUSHED TO DEATH
. A photograph of Lundback on crutches surrounded by pretty nurses.
DUNKIRK EPIC WILL BE FINISHED, VOWS PRODUCER
. Another photograph of Lundback on crutches surrounded by pretty nurses.
DOG SAVES ACTOR
.

He pushed the pile of paper aside.

‘Another lovely quiet night,' said Cecy, returning with a jug. ‘Wouldn't it be marvellous if Mr Hitler has decided to go and bother another country instead? And don't these look madly cheerful?' She gave the flowers an admiring tweak.

‘Very pleasant,' said Ambrose.

‘So what did your agent say?' she asked, settling herself on the chair, and taking a piece of knitting out of her bag.

‘Oh this and that. Spot of post-synchronization work for the current feature.'

‘Anything coming up after that?'

‘Not that I've heard of. You?'

‘Ipswich hinting about a summer season. I've told them very firmly that it'll depend on whether or not my house guest is sufficiently recovered. No, really—' she said, as Ambrose began to protest. ‘You may not be homeless, but you certainly can't manage to look after yourself in your current state, now can you? Besides, I'd rather hang on and see whether anything more interesting comes my way. I hear that British National are going to be adapting a novel by Mr Priestley, and, of course, I've just been in a play of his at Windsor . . .'

She paused, appearing to take a mesmerized interest in the ball of wool she was winding.

‘Didn't you get a good notice?' asked Ambrose, taking his cue.

‘Oh, just a little mention . . . you think it might be worth sending it to the casting director?'

‘Undoubtedly.'

She nodded, pleased. For a while there was only the clack of her needles.

‘Incidentally,' said Ambrose, scratching his knuckles, ‘I may have to impose a second house guest upon you. I've managed to persuade my agent that Cerberus's place is by my side. As we've been through so much together.'

‘Oh but that's
splendid
.'

‘Yes.'

‘And what a difficult conversation that must have been.'

He looked at her sharply but her expression was bland.

‘Yes it was, rather,' he said.

He reached for the bunch of grapes she'd brought, and broke off one of them. It had a dimpled, senile look and a brown mark or two. He hesitated, turning it over between his fingers.

‘Oh, I forgot,' said Cecy. ‘I had a brainwave.' She reached into her bag and took out another knitting needle. ‘An anti-itching solution. You should be able to reach almost anywhere with this,' and she mimed inserting it under the plaster cast and giving a vigorous scratch.

‘Thank you,' said Ambrose. ‘Very thoughtful.' Almost absently, he lifted the grape to his mouth.

‘What's it like?' asked Cecy.

He bit into it, chewed, swallowed. Took another one.

‘Surprisingly good,' he said.

*

August 1941

Dolly Clifford spotted Edith coming through the door of the Lyons Corner House, and waved her hand and shouted ‘Cooeee! Over here! Long time no see!' and kept on waving her hand in a very deliberate fashion, so that there was no possible chance of Edith missing the engagement ring that glinted on her fourth finger.

‘Canadian military policeman,' she said, as soon as Edith was within earshot. ‘A sergeant!'

‘And where did you meet him?' asked Edith, taking off her head-scarf.

‘At a dance. Ooh, is your hair different?'

‘I don't think so,' said Edith. ‘It's started raining outside, maybe the ends have curled a bit.'

‘Perhaps it's your lipstick, then. I've ordered tea and scones.'

‘Thank you. So when did you get engaged?'

‘Last month. He's called Robert but all his pals call him “Tiny”.' She held up her finger so that Edith could admire the ring more closely. ‘He wanted to get me a ruby but I told him that rubies were unlucky. My aunt had a ruby engagement ring and she'd only been married a week when her husband ran off with the next-door neighbour's daughter. They say sapphires are even worse.'

‘It's very nice,' said Edith, peering at the diamond mote. ‘And when are you getting married?'

‘We haven't fixed a date yet. He always promised his mother he'd tell her in person if he ever met someone, so it'll all depend on when he next gets home leave. Here—' She took a snapshot out of her handbag and Edith looked at the doughy, uncertain-looking man, his arm pinioned firmly in Dolly's. ‘He owns a petrol station in Saskatchewan,' added Dolly. ‘Well, his mother owns it really, but it'll be his one day.' She smiled with determined brightness. ‘And how's your husband?'

‘Arthur's very well.'

‘Has he been sent abroad yet?'

‘No. He was transferred. The army's setting up a catering corps, and they're taking men who've worked at that type of thing in civilian life,' and even saying the words was a pleasure, for they meant that rather than being torpedoed or sniped at or shelled or imprisoned or stung by mosquitoes, Arthur (at least for the time being) was in Aldershot debating tinned-meat requirements and the standardization of milk-to-cornflour proportions in the provision of custard to the forces, and these were things that he really and truly knew about, and the last time she'd seen him, nearly three weeks ago, she had detected about him a slight but definite air of assurance. The other men had nicknamed him ‘Custard King', he'd told her. He'd seemed rather pleased by the soubriquet.

‘And that must make you the Custard Queen,' he'd pointed out, and he'd bought her (by way of a crown) a maize-yellow Maltese cotton headscarf in La Mode in Acton High Street, just round the corner from her digs. She'd worn it to work the next day. It wasn't her usual choice of colour – it was rather startling, in fact – but the costume designer at Ealing had given her a long appraising look and said, ‘Yes. It suits you', before shooing her off to the crowd room where thirty-five extras were waiting to be measured for Nazi uniforms for the new Will Hay picture. She'd worn the scarf every day since.

‘And what's happened about the house?' asked Dolly, as the tea arrived.

Edith shook her head. ‘Not very much, really. The site's being cleared and Arthur's had to fill in an awfully long form. They've said he'll get government compensation, but not until after the war ends. Whenever that will be.'

‘Next year,' said Dolly, with absolute conviction. ‘My brother-in-law's neighbour's a barber and he was shaving a man who works in the – well, I shouldn't say, really, it's a hush-hush government place – but anyway he was telling my brother-in-law's neighbour that they're developing a new deadly weapon, a kind of glue that they'll drop on to the German forces. They're still working on it, but once it's ready, the whole war will be over in a weekend.'

‘Well . . . good,' said Edith, somewhat inadequately.

‘Did I tell you we're opening a Gallery of the Boffins at Tussaud's to celebrate scientific achievements of the Empire? I've been ironing an actual pair of R. J. Mitchell's trousers.'

Something about the phrase made Edith laugh, and Dolly stopped speaking and looked at her carefully.

‘Now don't get offended,' she said, ‘but do you think that your terrible experience in the Morrison shelter might have affected you in some way?'

‘I suppose it might have done,' said Edith.

‘Only you don't seem quite as . . . as
serious
as you used to be.'

‘No?'

‘No. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.' She smiled at Edith, and Edith smiled back, and half-listened as Dolly related an anecdote about the Head of Moulds, and half-thought about the coming weekend, when Arthur would have two days' leave. She had designed and made herself a nightdress out of a remnant of plum-coloured sateen. She thought that he might rather like the result.

*

That summer it felt to Catrin as if time had slowed down. The raids had ceased, and with them the sirens, and now there was nothing to distinguish one week from another. London seemed half-empty, half-demolished, as shabby as its inhabitants. The war news was enervating; there was no progress or drama. She worked long hours, sometimes at Baker's, sometimes at the Ministry, and at night she slept badly. When she dreamed she often heard Buckley speaking, but she could never remember the sound of his voice when she awoke.

She tried to imagine what would have happened if he hadn't died. She saw the banter turning to friction, she saw them living and working together, she saw them arguing and quickly parting, she saw them talking for thirty years. She saw all the possible futures lined up alongside each other, untouched, sardines in a keyless tin.

Summer became autumn and there were still no raids. The treatment for the ARP film was rejected, rewritten, accepted and then placed in a pending tray somewhere in the Ministry of Information. Parfitt went to Gainsborough for six weeks to write jokes for the Crazy Gang, and then came back and slept through most of a month. Catrin ground out dialogue for a series of dull shorts about War Bonds. It rained incessantly. On a sodden September day, the gutter outside Baker's overflowed and an unexploded bomb was found lodged in the road gulley; that afternoon Catrin helped to carry a hundred and thirty-five boxes of paperwork around the corner to a temporary billet in Beak Street.

She was allocated half a table in a tiny basement room that was bathed in greenish light from a double row of glass bricks set in the pavement above her head. She tried to concentrate on a list of rewrites requested by the Ministry of Economic Warfare, but the door was opening and closing every five minutes as the office boy hauled more boxes into the room, and she gave up, eventually, and stared upwards instead at the shoes of passers-by as they slapped wetly across the glass ceiling. They seemed to have such purpose, such a sense of urgency. They knew where they were going.

‘Last one,' said the office boy, plumping a stack of pasteboard files on to the table beside her and then exiting again. A sheaf of photographs slid from the top one, and Catrin caught at them before they could fall to the floor – glossy six-by-fours of Carl Lundback in his role as Hannigan, his signature, neat and rather schoolboyish, written across one corner. She looked through the other files in the stack and found signed portraits of Hadley Best, of Doris Cleavely and Angela Ralli-Thomas and of the dog, the latter stamped with a smudged paw-print.

She picked up the photograph of the twins again and studied it. They were wearing their sea-faring costume – knitted jumpers, trousers tucked into rubber boots, woollen hats, from which the odd curl escaped. They looked fresh and pretty and carefree, and she thought, for the first time in months, of the real twins, of Rose whispering fearfully behind a closed door, of Lily darting upstairs to fetch her treasured, tissue-wrapped, film-star photographs.

They should, of course – of
course
– be sent souvenirs of their very own (and pleasingly successful) film, as many souvenirs as she could muster, and she had begun to search through the chaos of boxes for an envelope when, quite suddenly, she thought of Lily's face and of what might happen if the twins' father were in the house when the postman came. She stood, hesitating, in the watery light, uncertain of what to do, and the uncertainty seemed to expand, to fill every nerve and hollow of her, so that she could no longer think beyond the next hour, or even the next minute, because every frame of the future seemed to require a decision of one sort or another, and she'd have to make those decisions on her own, and she didn't know whether she could, she didn't know if she were capable. And then Parfitt opened the door of the office, gave the jumbled interior a blood-shot stare and muttered, ‘Ruddy coal-hole', and the uncertainty shrank again to a portable size.