Their Finest Hour and a Half (11 page)

‘Sorry, Clive. Bad night?'

‘Incendiaries,' he said. ‘Don't mind incendiaries, you can do something about them. Feel useful.' He closed his eyes again, and Catrin took her notepad and left the office. There had been incendiaries in her own street, too, a clatter at midnight like a shower of tin cans, and she'd pulled on a coat and grabbed the bucket of sand, and hurried up the steps from the basement to find that one of the silver cylinders had lodged in the guttering above the porch and was burning fiercely. The boy from the first-floor flat had leaned out of the window with a mop handle and flipped the canister on to the pavement, and Catrin had doused the flame with the sand, and in the sudden darkness she had seen a dozen other hurrying silhouettes, a dozen other small, bright fires.

There had been, in addition, the usual disturbances of what she was coming to regard as an average night: the near-continuous drone of the raiders, the distant crumps that would suddenly move nearer, as if a Titan were striding across London, and the thunderous, reassuring noise of the guns firing from the park half a mile away, each rolling discharge followed by the crack of the shell-burst, the plink of shrapnel on pavement and road. The all-clear had sounded at a quarter to four and Catrin had slept after that, but Ellis had snored through the lot, curled like a comma on their mattress under the stairs. He was spending three nights a week now on duty at the ARP post beside Baker Street, and another two sharing a fire-watching rota on the roof of the Paddington studio, and on the evenings that he spent at home he ate hugely, and fell asleep at the table.

Catrin had made him a cup of tea before she left for work, and had kissed him between the eyebrows, the only area of skin visible above the quilt. Outside the flat, she'd paused, yawning, to watch an auxiliary fireman collecting the spent incendiaries in a sack, and the fireman had yawned too, and almost everyone on the bus had been dozing. Sleep, in London, was no longer a nightly staple but a sporadic snack, to be snatched at and savoured during any spare moment.

In the scenario office, the boys were swarming around a desk at one end; at the other, a telephone receiver lay on top of a pile of scripts.

‘Is this for me?' called Catrin. One of the heads looked around and nodded impatiently. She lifted the phone and heard nothing but a low roaring sound, like a distant sea. ‘Catrin Cole,' she said. ‘Hello?' There was no answer. After a moment or two she replaced the receiver on the cradle.

‘Who was it from?' she asked, wandering over to the group. Greville, a boy of twenty with spectacles and an unpleasantly vigorous moustache, looked round at her and shook his head.

‘Haven't the foggiest. Gone dead, has it?'

‘Yes.'

‘There was a landmine on Tottenham Court Road last night, hole the size of a bus outside Heal's. Probably nixed half the cables in the area.' He was already turning back to the object of general interest (not to mention hilarity): a small sheet of paper with a block of typing on it.

‘What are you looking at?' asked Catrin, hovering behind them. ‘May I see?' For a few seconds the wall of shoulders seemed deliberately to exclude her, and then there was a grudging shift, and a narrow gap opened up.

‘It's just a memo,' said one of the sets of shoulders, tetchily.

By the time that Catrin had finished reading the memo, she was standing entirely on her own, the others having reassembled at the far end of the office, where the tea-trolley had made an appearance. She would have liked to ask someone why it was that cinematic bangs and crashes were, indeed, never as loud as the real thing. She would have liked to speculate on what the desired ‘something with George Bernard Shaw in it' might be. (A best beard contest? A display of Irish dancing?) She would have liked to discuss the air of strained urgency that the memo seemed to exude, and the intense seriousness of what was, at least nominally, a note about entertainment. Instead, she was left doing her usual impression of The Last Kipper in the Shop.

It had been like this since she had first started at the Ministry. Once it had been established that she was not the extra stenographer that scenarios had been hoping for (and some of the boys had asked her several times, as if she might have banged her head on the way in and be suffering from temporary amnesia), then the welcoming smiles, the appreciatively raised eyebrows, the race to take her coat and to find her a chair had all stopped. It was universally viewed as unfair, as
insulting
, she gathered, that a woman had been brought in especially to write women's dialogue. ‘If there's a dog in the script then we don't employ a Jack Russell to come up with “woof woof”, do we?', as one of her colleagues had put it, and she'd been allocated an office two hundred yards from everyone else, and largely ignored, her assignments arriving by messenger and being dispatched the same way. At story meetings from which she couldn't be excluded she was invariably the note-taker (‘I'm sure Catrin will type that up for us'), while at lunchtimes her colleagues disappeared to the pub, failing to invite her on every occasion. Sometimes, at the end of a day on which Clive, her desk companion, had been particularly busy or determinedly unconscious, Catrin's throat would ache with the pressure of unuttered speech.

At the tea-trolley, Greville was discussing North Africa with the authority of someone who had both the ear of Winston Churchill and access to the complete military plans of both sides. There were no biscuits left. Unacknowledged, Catrin slid away, and was halfway down the corridor when someone shouted her name. Another phone call. She trudged back and picked up the receiver.

‘Buckley,' said the voice, dry as chaff. ‘I'm heading in on one of my special advisory visits. Unpaid of course. Where are you having lunch?'

*

‘What's the ‘V' stand for?' asked Buckley.

‘Victory,' said Catrin, picking up a tray. ‘We're supposed to have at least one item off the victory menu every day. They're made from ingredients that don't have to be imported.'

‘Yes, I'd heard talk of the Kentish mock-chocolate harvest.' He looked around the Ministry canteen and shook his head. ‘Put that back,' he said, indicating the tray. ‘We're going elsewhere.'

‘I'm sorry, but I can't afford to go to a restaurant.'

‘Elsewhere's not a restaurant.'

Elsewhere was a pub, very dark and somewhere near Charlotte Street. Catrin, ravenous, sipped a gin and orange and felt instantly drunk.

‘I'm working for Baker's at the moment,' said Buckley.

Catrin nodded.

‘You don't know what that is, do you?'

‘No,' she said, blushing.

‘They make variety films, and comedies – did you see
The Beaux and the Belles?
'

‘No.'

‘
Mr Harper's Hat?
'

‘No.'

‘
Just Around the Corner?
'

‘No.'

‘I bet you watch French films, don't you?'

‘I don't,' she found herself saying, defensively, as if accused of an impropriety. ‘Well yes, sometimes. Did you see
La Grande Illusion
?'

‘No.'

There was a pause, while Buckley drank the whole of his pint and a brandy chaser. ‘They've got quite a bit of clout, Baker's,' he said, carrying on as if he'd only taken a breath since his last sentence. ‘You might not know who they are, but they make a lot of money, pay a lot of taxes to the Treasury. Entertainment for the masses. Know any?'

‘Any what?'

‘Any of the masses.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Just wondering.'

‘Do you—' Infuriatingly, she could feel herself beginning to blush again. ‘Do you think I'm a . . . a nob or something?'

‘I don't know. Are you?'

‘
No
. I'm Welsh.'

‘Plenty of Welsh nobs.'

‘Not in Ebbw Vale. My father's a joiner.'

‘And what about your husband?'

‘He's an artist.'

‘Plenty of swanky artists.'

‘He's not swanky, he's part of the Paddington Group. It's a collective.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It's a group of artists who share the same aims and principles. They don't work for the commercial sector.'

‘How do they eat, then?'

‘They undertake commissions for organizations with sympathetic beliefs.'

‘Can't be too many of those.'

‘And they hold exhibitions.'

‘Oh, they're allowed to sell their paintings?'

‘Of course they are.'

‘But not to capitalists, presumably. So this set of painters, The Battersea Bunch—'

‘The Paddington Group.'

‘Are they all starving for art or do some of them come from money?'

‘I think one or two of them have a private income.'

‘Does your husband?'

‘No, he doesn't. He was an apprentice engineer before he went to art college.'

‘So does he have
any
income?'

‘He used to—'

‘Beside yours, I mean.'

‘. . . he used to teach,' she continued, determinedly. ‘And he's curated exhibitions, and written catalogues. And he works all the time. He hardly ever stops.'

‘And does he paint proper pictures or is he a member of the upside-down brigade?'

‘He's . . .' But she couldn't do it, she couldn't offer the phrase, ‘the perceived domination of man by the artefactual landscape', to that coarse, sarcastic face, it would be like handing a trembling faun to a man with a club. ‘If you saw his pictures, you'd know they were good,' she said, simply.

He nodded and picked up his beer glass. ‘Another drink?'

‘No, thank you. Can I ask what this is all about? Only, I should really get back to work.'

‘This is work.'

She waited while he bought another pint and another chaser. ‘Baker's,' he said, sitting down again, ‘was founded by Edwin Baker who was actually a butcher, in Hornchurch, who wanted to make films. And he did, just after the Great War, he bought a camera and hired some actors and made one about Vikings in a wood by his house. And then he made another one, about cavemen, and then he stopped making films himself and just ran the company. He's still running it. Him and his brother.' Buckley took a long swallow and eyed the ceiling for a moment or two. ‘I write for them sometimes. Usually with a man called Parfitt. Usually comedies. I do structure, Parfitt does jokes.
The Ladder Gang
was the last one, about firemen. Graham Moffatt was in it, made a packet. You won't have seen it, of course.'

Catrin folded her arms.

‘Sure you won't have another drink?' asked Buckley.

‘No, thank you.'

‘So what's happened now is that Edwin Baker, being a patriotic sort of chap, three grandsons in the army, wants to break the Baker's mould and make a war film, the whole she-bang, main feature, bombs and bullets and so on, not a good idea, in my opinion—'

‘Why not?'

‘Because people want to go to the cinema to get away from all that, but never mind. So Baker's very wisely got me and Parfitt on board, since we've spent four months throwing ideas at the Film Division trying to get one to stick. You know their criteria?'