Their Finest Hour and a Half (27 page)

Parfitt paused at this point, and tapped the page.

‘Needs a gag.'

‘Where?'

‘Just before they take Uncle Frank out of the water.'

‘But he's mortally wounded.'

Parfitt shook his head in irritation, as if she were a fly buzzing around his ears. ‘Needs
something
,' he said. ‘Something about Yanks. Leave it to me.'

Catrin sat down again, and watched him pick at the skin around his nails, his eyes fixed on the script. He was still staring at it when she left for the evening.

She opened the door of the flat and to her surprise heard the distinctive sound of Perry in mid-anecdote. He was sitting at the kitchen table together with Ellis and a nervy little painter called Conroy and a trio of beer bottles.

‘I wasn't expecting—' she began, and Perry raised a warning finger so that she wouldn't leap in and ruin his story, and she took off her coat and put on the kettle and began to unpack the shopping that she'd bought on the way home. As she passed Ellis he caught one of her hands and gave it a fierce squeeze.

‘. . . and then he informed me that what he was looking for was something in the Burne-Jones mode . . .' continued Perry.

Ellis was leaning back in his chair, smiling slightly, more at ease than she had seen him for months, and she could tell that he wasn't really listening to Perry, and she could see that Perry was aware of this fact and was upping the vigour of his narrative in order to attract Ellis's attention. Conroy, too, was looking at Ellis rather than at the story-teller, apparently wanting to gauge the former's reactions before deciding how to react himself.

It was strange, thought Catrin; they were like courtiers, bidding for attention.

‘Has something happened?' she asked, interrupting Perry.

He threw her an irritated glance ‘. . . and I
suggested
,' he continued, managing to inject reproof into the word. ‘I suggested to the fellow that if he really wanted a more figurative approach then he should buy a camera. At which point he left rather suddenly.' He laughed loudly, and Catrin contributed a smile and Conroy bobbed his head non-committally.

‘I've had a letter,' said Ellis. He fished into his pocket and took out an envelope and handed it to Catrin. She unfolded the single sheet of paper.

‘Oh Ellis . . .' she said, and he took the letter back from her and looked at it calmly, and it struck her that he'd been expecting this moment to come – had been expecting it ever since she'd known him. He had worked like the devil and never doubted his own worth.

‘And did you speak to this man?' she asked, sitting down beside him.

He nodded. ‘They want me to go to Coventry next week and then Bristol after that, and then other places – they're still deciding where, exactly.'

‘So you'll go away to sketch and then come back to London and paint?'

He shook his head. ‘Too much travelling. That's what we've just been discussing. We'll have to give up the studio.'

‘This,' said Perry, raising his bottle, ‘is both a celebration and a wake. Conroy had a letter last week informing him that his services are required in a camouflage unit, and today's summons means the tipping-point has been reached – as a group we can no longer maintain an adequate fire-watch at the garage. No point in seeing genius consumed by the flames.' He chinked his bottle formally against the other two. ‘Au revoir to Paddington for the duration.'

Catrin looked from Perry to Ellis and then back again. ‘So where . . . ?'

‘Perry has a place in Worcestershire,' said Ellis.

‘I'm drawing on filial connections,' said Perry, ‘
not
, I hasten to add, something that comes easily to me, given that my family only considers a painting to be art if there's a mangled stag in it somewhere, but I have a fat old aunt with a summer cottage outside Malvern, and I think she may be prevailed upon to offer it up for the war effort. It has a garden room and it's dry, at least, and it's quite near a railway station. I'll probably join you there unless the army gets me first.'

‘So . . .' Catrin tried to organize her thoughts. ‘So do you think they have Sunday trains?'

‘What d'you say?' Ellis was looking at the letter again.

‘Because I could travel up on Saturday nights after work, I suppose, but I'd have to get back here for Monday morning. I wonder how long the journey takes?'

He raised his eyes and she saw that familiar look of puzzled impatience. ‘What are you talking about?' he asked.

‘About visiting you while you're in the country.'

‘No, no. You'll come with me to Worcestershire,' he said, as if she'd slightly misheard a simple statement. ‘You don't want to stay in London on your own.'

The kettle began to whistle, a rising shriek like a cartoon parody of the All-Clear. Catrin rose to turn off the gas. She was feeling oddly short of breath, her mouth as dry as chalk.

‘Tea?' she asked, over her shoulder as she rinsed the pot. ‘Tea, everyone?'

‘Aren't there supposed to be nine hundred and ninety-nine people working in the Ministry of Information?' asked Perry. ‘I'm sure they could find someone else to do what you've been doing.'

‘I'm not at the MoI,' said Catrin, and she found that she could barely keep her voice steady. ‘I haven't been for months. I'm writing dialogue for a feature film.'

‘Oh really? I didn't know.'

‘Ellis,' she said, ‘I don't want to leave London yet, not until the picture's finished. Not until the end of May.'

He was looking slightly past her, rubbing his top lip with a finger, his face expressionless.

‘Ellis . . .'

‘Hmmm?' He met her gaze. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘tea for me.'

She realized that she had started to tremble, not with fear but with frustration. ‘No. No, I wasn't talking about
tea
,' she said, and the banal words must have held a note of derangement, some promise of hysteria, because there was the sudden scrape of chairs, and she turned to see Perry steering Conroy towards the door.

‘We're off to the Malt Shovel,' said Perry. ‘Join us when you're ready.'

‘I thought we were having tea,' said Conroy, rather plaintively.

The door closed.

Ellis tipped his chair back and stared at her. ‘Whatever's the matter?' he asked.

She drew a deep breath and then another, shocked at how panicked she felt at the thought of leaving the job prematurely, and when she spoke again her voice was more measured.

‘I'd like to stay here until the picture's finished,' she said. ‘It'll only be till the end of May.'

‘Which picture's this?'

‘The one that I've been working on since November. About the twins going to Dunkirk. I've told you about it lots of times.'

Did he nod or simply move his head irritably? She wasn't sure.

‘I'll take good care of myself,' she said, ‘I promise I will, I'll even go and sleep in the Underground if you think I ought to, but I don't want to leave before the end. I've been working on this from the very start, and if I'd told the truth about Rose and Lily it might never have happened at all, and they've hardly even started the filming yet, and Buckley says they sometimes do script amendments all the way through studio . . .' She was watching Ellis's face as she spoke, trying, as ever, to work out what he was thinking, trying to interpret every blink and twitch, and she thought suddenly and yearningly of the office at Baker's, where if she wanted to know something then she could ask a question, and the answer might well be rude or infuriating or just plain silly, but at least it would be an answer.

Ellis leaned forward again and rested his arms on the table. ‘Well
I
have to leave London,' he said. ‘You do understand that?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘And I'd assumed that you'd want to come with me. I'd assumed that that would be the most important thing to you, but it seems that I was wrong.'

There was a short, horrid silence.

‘It would only be till the end of May,' said Catrin, for the third time, and it seemed to her that her voice sounded oddly hollow, as if repetition had scooped all sincerity from the promise.

Ellis's face was very still. She had never seen him lose his temper, and she wasn't sure whether he was angry now, but all at once she felt afraid.

‘Ellis?'

‘It's all right,' he said. ‘You needn't worry that I'm going to drag you away by force if you really don't want to go. I'm not the type.'

‘No, I know, but—'

‘Stay in London if you want,' he said, and stood up and put on his jacket, and Catrin, standing beside the table, thought of the phrase that he'd used in Ebbw Vale three years ago. ‘
Come with me if you want
' – your choice, he'd meant, your choice and I make no promises. And she'd left Wales like a burr stuck to his sleeve, and now, three years later, she had somehow worked herself loose, and the choice was hers once again. And she looked at Ellis, handsome and foreign-looking, an
artist
, and her heart seemed to creak.

‘I'll stay, then,' she said.

*

What spinach, thought Ambrose, laying down his copy of the
Eastern Daily Press
and taking a mouthful of criminally weak tea – what utter spinach. And it wasn't even the misspelling of his own name that gave him the greatest offence, it was the use of that careless, clichéd phrase ‘. . .
whom some of our readers may remember from that more innocent era when pictures were unsullied by sound
 . . .' Innocent? It had been the most hedonistic, extravagant, promiscuous, thrillingly
overripe
era imaginable. A bletted peach of an era, all the tastier for being so close to corruption. Did people honestly think that all those dark-eyed little houris had wiped off their make-up at the end of the day and gone home on the tram to a nice slice of seed-cake and a cup of cocoa? Did they truly suppose that the feverish demeanour that the medium demanded of its exponents, the twitchy cow-eyed gaze, the shuddering emotion that spilled over the edge of the screen and into the aisles like a roiling flood of incense, had been achieved without a soupçon of chemical help? Did they imagine that the sawdust-dry austerity of the current era, the tomboy actresses with their curls and big buttocks, the men who were afraid that the slightest facial movement would label them irredeemably queer, the awful wholesomeness of what currently passed for biographical notes (‘Bunty loves her bicycle to bits, and when she's not out cycling you'll find her behind the counter of the local WVS canteen'), was in some way superior to the furs and running-boards and glamour – no, he wasn't ashamed of the word – the utter glamour of those days. People had forgotten, presumably, or else they were too young to remember. Which reminded him . . . he turned the page to see Doris Cleavely beaming at him from beneath a six-point caption.