Their Finest Hour and a Half (17 page)

His torch started to fail as he turned the corner into Anthea's street, the beam imploding into a lemony wash, too diffuse for picking out the numbers on the doors. Walking slowly, he traced a hand along the stucco garden walls, counting the front gates, and stopped when his fingers caught on a series of soft spikes protruding over the brickwork; he plucked at one of them and the air filled with the astringent odour of rosemary. The Pyms' house. He pushed open the gate and climbed the steps.

Behind the glass of their front door (still miraculously intact) someone had cut a stencil of the word ‘welcome' into the blackout material and filled the gap with violet gauze. The result was friendly, pubbish. Ambrose straightened his coat, tilted his hat and gave the bell-pull a yank.

Anthea had lost weight. She had always possessed a fine figure, firm yet curved, like a ship's figurehead, but now she'd acquired corners and edges. Above the neckline of the slate-grey dress, her collarbones protruded like chisel blades.

‘Ambrose,' she said, spotting him beside the supper-table. ‘I thought I might find you here. Do help yourself.'

‘Very funny. Whose idea was this?'

‘Mine, actually. I thought there was something rather dreadful about a houseful of guzzlers when the whole future of our country is in jeopardy, and of course I run the local Savings Group and we're on a Weapons Drive so I came up with a novelty idea. I call it the Battle Buffet.' She glanced towards the array of dishes, each containing a scattering of coins rather than food, and sporting a hand-written flag on a spike. ‘We're doing quite nicely, I see. Have you contributed?'

‘Yes.'

‘Towards the . . . ?'

‘Spitfire.'

‘Half a crown – very generous. Still, this chap here looks awfully empty, doesn't he . . . ?' She nudged the salver labelled ‘Wellington bomber: 5/-' towards Ambrose and, after a bitter pause, he reached for his wallet. As he did so, Anthea caught sight of someone on the other side of the room, exclaimed ‘Binnie!' at a volume that would have reached the length of a hockey pitch and hurried away, and Ambrose relaxed his grip on a florin and instead took out two threepenny bits and dropped them into the ‘Hand-grenade: 6d' tureen. He looked up to see that Anthea's mother had silently arrived at the other end of the table and was watching him with the intensity of a Russian border guard.

‘Oh,' he said, both displeased and startled. ‘Hello, Mrs Whartley.'

Without replying, she dropped her gaze to his wallet and he found himself, as if hexed, once again raking through the change purse, this time extracting five shillings. The money tinkled into the dish and he reflected that so far this evening he had expended the price of a half-decent restaurant meal without actually eating a single thing. Glumly, he finished his glass of insipid punch (the only drink on offer) and saw that the old bitch was still staring at him. She looked much the same as ever – four foot ten of gristle and malevolence. ‘So how are you?' he asked, not even attempting to inject a note of interest into his voice.

She looked at him with sharpened interest. ‘Gerard?'

‘No, I—' He actually glanced over his shoulder in case she was addressing someone else, but there was no one behind him apart from a group of girls. He turned back. ‘I'm not Ge—'

‘Gerard!' She scuttled the length of the table and fastened herself to one of his arms, her face upturned to his with an expression of girlish delight, hideously at odds with her appearance. ‘Gerard,' she repeated with a happy exhalation, her teeth slipping.

‘No, I . . .'

‘Gerard.'

‘I'm
Ambrose
,' he said, desperately. ‘Your ex-son-in-law. The one you hate.'

‘Mother—' It was Anthea again, returning. She gently detached the old lady from his arm. ‘You're looking rather stunned,' she said. ‘Did mother just call you Gerard?'

‘Yes, she did, actually. Who is Gerard?'

‘A cousin of hers, I think. My mother no longer recognizes people that she doesn't see regularly. It happened rather quickly, the doctor says it was probably a type of brain seizure. This isn't Gerard, mother, it's Ambrose.'

Her mother smiled again, took one of Ambrose's hands, raised it to her mouth and kissed the knuckles.

‘She's pleased to see everyone now,' said Anthea. ‘Extraordinary, isn't it? When you remember what she used to be like.'

‘Indeed.'

‘So how are you, Ambrose?'

‘Oh . . .' He shrugged. ‘I had an appalling experience this afternoon.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘I went to the cinema—'

‘I didn't think you had a picture out at the moment.'

‘It was a re-issue.'

‘Oh I see.'

‘And I was watching an informational short that came earlier in the programme when I suddenly realized that it was a re-edited version of a piece that I'd shot last June. Someone had taken the film, disassembled it and . . . Anthea?' She'd been standing with her head cocked, her attention clearly elsewhere.

‘Sorry, thought I heard the start of the wobbler. Imagining it. You were saying about the appalling thing that happened.'

‘Yes. Someone had re-voiced one of my shots and re-used it in a completely different context. Actually re-voiced it!'

She nodded, but absently, having clearly missed the import of the story. In the momentary silence his stomach gave an audible moan. ‘Is there really nothing to eat?'

‘I'm afraid not. There's plenty of punch.'

‘I've had some.'

‘Food's the last thing on my mind these days.'

‘You're thinner, certainly.'

‘It's all the worry.' She smiled, bleakly. ‘Still, we all have worries.'

‘Of course.' He wondered which of his own troubles he could usefully lay before her. ‘I spotted today that half my bloody roof's been blown off.'

‘Snap.'

‘And I can't get a man to come and mend it.'

‘Double snap. I had to send Harris up there last week with a tarpaulin.'

‘Oh.' That was no good, then; he pondered for a moment. ‘I'm stuck for a domestic as well. I don't suppose your housemaid could stretch to a . . . ?'

‘She's off making shells.' There was a pause, which Anthea seemed disinclined to fill. Ambrose glanced around the enormous drawing-room, at the heavy curtains, almost theatrical in their dimensions. ‘God, those windows must be the most appalling worry. I can't see why you and Harris don't board this place up and get out of London. I couldn't go, of course, it's simply impossible in my line of business, I need to be on the spot to . . .'

‘For heaven's
sake
, Ambrose.' She said the words with such vehemence that her mother started and one or two people looked round, curiously. She lowered her voice. ‘Do you honestly think that I'm worrying myself to a shred about windows? Or roof tiles? Do you think it's the
servant problem
that's running through my mind, day in, day out, every second that I'm awake, and most of the time that I'm asleep?'

She had always been mistress of the flung question; if one waited, then the answer would follow. Ambrose raised his eyebrows expectantly. Seconds passed. He lifted his punch glass, forgetting that it was empty, and Anthea removed it from his hand and placed it on the table.

‘The reason I'm worried, Ambrose,' she said, leaning towards him and speaking slowly, ‘is because I have three stepsons whom I adore, one of whom is at sea, one of whom is God knows where or in which continent, and one of whom is probably somewhere over Europe as we speak.'

‘Oh yes . . . the Pym boys.'

‘They're my boys, too. I've been their mother for nearly nine years.'

‘Of course.' He still thought of them as schoolboys, barely out of short trousers. ‘Philip, isn't it? And Jeffrey, and er . . . Hale . . .'

‘Alec, Simeon and Lesley,' she said, coldly. ‘You're not even close.'

And yet the names Philip and Jeffrey (and Hale) seemed strangely familiar to him; he dug around in his memory. ‘Good Lord,' he said, unearthing them, ‘this'll amuse you. I know where I got those names from, they're from a character in one of the Inspector Charnforth Mysteries, Philip Jeffrey-Hale. I was thinking about him earlier. He's a traitor and jewel thief who's eventually shot after selling . . .' Anthea was shaking her head. ‘. . . after selling military secrets to the . . .' She was still shaking her head. ‘. . . to the Russians via the House of Lords. What on earth's the matter?'

She looked at him queerly. ‘I've had enough, Ambrose.'

‘Enough of what?'

‘Of you. The joke's lost its savour.'

‘What joke?'

‘The joke of . . . of . . .' Uncharacteristically, she broke eye-contact and started fiddling with the platefuls of coins. ‘. . . having a little bit of glamour in my history. Having an ex-film-star ex-husband who comes along to my parties and talks about his pictures as if he's Clark Gable and Errol Flynn rolled into one, as if there's nothing that's more important in the entire world than the tiniest, most fiddling detail of his own career, or what's left of it. I used to think it was funny that there was no topic that didn't somehow lead back to one of your films, that someone could mention anything at all – could mention, I don't know . . . the word
spoon
– and we'd find ourselves listening to how Louise Brooks stirred your tea on the back lot at Denham when you were rehearsing
Just Another Springtime
in 1925, and I'd laugh about it with my friends, and now I don't find it funny any more. I don't. There truly are more important things going on, Ambrose, awful things, terrifying things, and no one gives a fig about whether one of your silly little films has been played upside down or at the wrong speed or whatever it was—'

‘
Re-voiced
. It was re-voiced.'

‘I don't care, Ambrose. No one cares. Why on earth should they care when you don't show the slightest reciprocal interest? I used to think that it was a case of pure selfishness but since mother's little do I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a tiny bit of your brain missing. You've read that Mr Forster book – you know, “only connect” – well, I think there must be a bundle of wires somewhere in your head that's . . . oh
blast
.' There was no mistaking it this time, the dreary swoop of the siren slicing through the chatter. ‘Into the basement!' called Anthea. ‘Everyone into the basement! Someone help me with the buffet, please, we can't leave all this lovely money lying here. Ambrose, please take mother. Into the basement, come along now!'

A bottleneck formed at the door. Beyond the mêlée, Ambrose caught a glimpse of Harris Pym clapping on a white warden's helmet. It had been at another party – a film industry party, as a matter of fact, held at the Rock Studios in Elstree in 1930, to celebrate the release of
Forever Gay
(Ambrose had played Ivor Novello's suicidal brother: ‘Ambrose Hilliard gives a performance of great intensity'
Daily Mail
) – that Harris and Anthea had first met. ‘Harris Pym, Pym's Cooked Meats,' the little man had said, shaking hands with Ambrose. ‘We've just won the supply contract for the new refectories.' He'd been an ugly little bugger then, too.

‘Come on, everybody,' called Anthea, from the doorway. Ambrose looked around for his ex-mother-in-law, and found her standing directly behind him.

‘Mrs Whartley?'

She looked up at him with a start of pleasure. ‘
Dear
man,' she said.

He felt an odd internal dislocation, a spasm of recollection that seemed to heave within him, momentarily, like a mole beneath a lawn. When was it that he'd last seen precisely that expression? He tried, and failed, to pinpoint the memory.

‘Dear, dear man,' she repeated.

The siren wound down, and in the sudden quiet he could hear the insistent, broken beat of the Heinkel engines approaching; he took the old besom's arm and hurried her towards the stairs.

That night he dreamed of food – of bortsch, piquant and ruby-red, of leg of lamb, of potato cakes with a sweet onion sauce, of noodle pudding, cinnamon-scented and studded with raisins. ‘Eat, please, eat,' urged Sophie, piling a second helping of lokshen into his bowl, but as he reached for his spoon he heard a great gurgling roar that dragged him away from the table and flung him into the darkness of his bedroom. He lay where he'd landed, listening to the yodel of his empty stomach, watching, through half-closed eyes, the progress of a thin band of light that poked from behind the shutters and crept gradually along the wall like an extendable ruler.

He'd reached home by half-past midnight. The raid had been a short one, but he'd felt disinclined to stay at the party after the all-clear. He'd seen in the New Year at the bus stop, where a group of sailors had slurred their way through an obscenity-laden version of ‘Auld Lang Syne', the opening lyric, ‘Fuck Auld Acquaintance up the Arse', striking Ambrose as a distinctly apposite comment on the whole evening.

Strain was a peculiar thing, of course – it could sharpen the mind but it could also blunt it, it could turn ants into lions, and lions into kittens, and, in Anthea's case, it had clearly sent her round the bend. It was fortunate, really, that a lifetime in the industry had inured him to such petty personal attack. Thus when the missiles of bile and jealousy were hurtling across the set, he could quietly don the breastplate of professionalism and the shield of feigned deafness and continue unscathed. As a result, he bore neither scars nor grudges. Speaking of which, he could really see no reason not to take up Sammy's offer of lunch; it was a crime to waste food, and, after all, one had to placate as well as chastise . . .