Their Finest Hour and a Half (37 page)

In the studio wall behind the pub there was a pair of weighted doors, and beyond them a short corridor with rooms leading off on either side. At the far end another pair of doors led to the second sound-stage, and Catrin entered cautiously, and saw not a jigsaw of sets but an enormous wooden water-tank, its buttressed sides taller than a man. The
Redoubtable
floated within it – a scaled-down version, she judged, a good ten feet shorter than the one on location.

The first sound-stage had smelled of Ellis's studio – of glue for the canvas, of freshly sawn wood and linseed oil – but the second reeked improbably of high summer. Catrin sniffed again, and thought of tarry pavements melting in the heat, and at the same moment spotted a workman holding out a bucket and a dripping black brush towards a hand that was reaching from within the tank. Even on tiptoe she was too short to see who the hand belonged to, but there was a thirty-foot scaffolding tower at one end of the studio, with a ladder lashed to its side and nobody in particular watching it, and she climbed up as far as the first platform and saw that the
Redoubtable
was not floating, but standing on stilts, and that its ‘sides' ended just below the waterline – or just below where the waterline would be once the tank was filled. Currently it was crawling with workmen engaged in applying a coat of pitch to the interior.

Beyond the tank, at the far end of the studio, she could see yet another version of the
Redoubtable
– a truncated one, this time, consisting only of the wheel-cabin and a section of deck, the whole mounted on wooden rockers so that it could be wobbled around in imitation of a heavy sea-swell. Behind it, a giant canvas leaned against the wall, its top half painted a pale grey-blue, the bottom half just a shade or two darker and a misty, indeterminate transition between the two.

Or perhaps the mist had another source – for as she stood there, one hand grasping the ladder, it seemed to Catrin that a ragged veil had begun to drift across the studio, a veil that appeared to be emanating from an enormous door that split the side wall from ceiling to floor. She stared, trying to understand what she was seeing; it was not smoke, but something wispier, more ectoplasmic . . .

‘Fog,' said a man in overalls, standing at the foot of the ladder. ‘It gets in through the scene dock. Now we've a bloody great brute of a lamp to fix up there, so can we have our tower back, or was you wanting to rent it?'

An hour earlier, when she'd walked from Hammersmith tube station, there'd been no more than a trace of haziness in the air, and she'd been able to see the chain of barrage balloons that wallowed over South London like a school of hippos; now as she left the studio, the world outside was a blank. From the river wall, she could hear the slap of water but there was nothing but a shifting sepia curtain where the Thames should be, and she realized, with a rush of relief, that there would be no bombers over London tonight.

Lately, the fear had begun to creep up on her. In the autumn, when the Luftwaffe had scarcely missed a night in three months, she hadn't been nearly so scared, but there had been a kind of grim routine, then: the scramble to buy groceries, to catch the bus, to get through the front door before the siren sounded. One had expected a raid, and a raid had come. Now it was unpredictable, and that was somehow worse, and rather than wait powerlessly in the flat, straining to catch the first popping of the guns, she preferred to be somewhere else in the evenings – rolling bandages at the Red Cross post in Marylebone High Street, or fire-watching in Soho Square, or sitting through a full supporting programme in the stalls of the Odeon – anywhere where there was noise or activity. She was not yet used to the
Mary Celeste
feel of a home with only one occupant, where the door opened each evening on an unaltered scene, where nothing ever changed unless she changed it.

When she'd left the office to go to Hammersmith, Parfitt had been dozing after a lunchtime visit to the White Horse, and Buckley had been reading the
Daily Mirror
while cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick. In the interim, he had switched newspapers and was using what appeared to be the same matchstick for picking his teeth.

‘Been busy?' she asked, innocently.

‘Lull before the storm,' he said. ‘Wait till next week, it'll all start then.' He lifted an imaginary receiver to his ear. ‘“Hello, is that Mr Bewkerley? The director's decided to shoot Scene 327 with Johnnie hanging upside down from the mizzen mast. He says it's visually more striking, but he wants you to cut three-quarters of the lines and add a song.'”

‘There's no mizzen mast on the
Redoubtable
.'

‘Welcome back, Miss Gradgrind. So what did you think of the sets?'

‘They're wonderful.'

‘Accurate?'

‘Not in the slightest.'

‘Good girl.'

‘So what do you say when you're asked to cut three-quarters of the lines and add a song?'

‘What do I say? D'you mean, do I launch into an agonized defence of the original wording, my eyes brimming with the impassioned tears of a thwarted creator?'

‘I don't know. Do you?'

‘Not unless there's a knock-on effect on the storyline that some clot hasn't noticed, and which would mean re-shooting half the film.'

‘And if there isn't?'

‘I grumble a bit, and when that doesn't work I get on with it, and try and minimize potential damage. If
I
don't do the rewrites then you can guarantee that somebody less talented will.'

‘But—'

‘You're still mixing this up with art, aren't you?'

‘I—'

‘This is commerce. Speaking of which—' He closed the paper he was reading and held it out to her. ‘Edwin Baker dropped this by this morning, someone sent it to him from New York. There's a little piece about the film in it, he's as pleased as punch.'

She took the copy of
Variety
over to her desk, and started to look through it, at first quickly, and then with slow fascination. Compared to current British newspapers, with their meagre four sides and cramped print, it seemed an extraordinarily luxurious object, its eighty-odd pages filled with well-spaced and largely impenetrable show-business news.

There was vaudeville gossip, and lists of which actors were flying from New York to Los Angeles, and which from Los Angeles to New York, and occasionally – very occasionally – there was a tiny mention of the war taking place on the other side of the Atlantic.

It was as if the blitz were a dreary party only noteworthy for its American guests. Catrin felt a surge of dour patriotism.

‘Got it yet?' asked Buckley.

She started to turn the pages more quickly, and found the Baker's reference ringed in red crayon.

‘What does BO stand for?'

‘Box Office.'

‘Legit?'

‘Theatre.'

‘Headliners?'

‘Famous actors.'

‘Good, eh?' said Buckley.

‘How did Baker's find him in the first place?'

‘Someone at the Ministry saw his picture in the paper, read that he'd done some acting and tipped us off.'

‘And what does he look like?'

Buckley shrugged, and it was Parfitt who answered unexpectedly, lifting his head from the desk.

‘He looks,' he said, ‘like a gen-u-ine hero.'

*

Smart, thought Arthur, as he waited for Edith to sign the register, all the ladies looked awfully smart – but then, of course, they were all dressmakers. Edith's friend Miss Clifford, from Madame Tussaud's, was in blue with a picture hat, and Edith's cousin Verna was wearing a wine-coloured costume with matching daughter, and of course Edith looked especially smart in a dark cream frock with coffee trim, with the pearls that he'd given to her showing at the neckline. He himself, of course, was in khaki, and Mr De Groot, his next-door neighbour, was wearing a tweed suit with a ‘V' for Victory tie-pin and a Home Guard arm-band. Mr De Groot was not exactly a friend – in fact they had exchanged about ten sentences in as many years – but he'd kindly kept an eye on the house while Arthur was away, and had boarded up a couple of broken windows and picked the shrapnel off the front lawn, and Arthur had hoped that asking him to be best man might be construed as a gesture of thanks. It was not an onerous role, after all – there was no transport to organize, no dancing to encourage, and Arthur hoped very much that there would be no speeches. ‘Just a quiet wedding,' he'd explained. He'd not met Dolly Clifford then, of course.

She'd brought a box brownie, and after the ceremony took a photograph of Edith and Arthur on the steps of Wimbledon town hall, under the notice which read, ‘
Due to current Ministry of Food regulations, the throwing of rice is forbidden
' and the sun came out for a moment or two and gilded the pale yellow broom in Edith's bouquet. ‘And what about one with a kiss?' suggested Dolly, just as Myrtle extracted a handful of dried sea-lavender from a paper bag and hurled it at them, and for the next minute or so, Edith was engaged in extracting small bits of salty chaff from the neck of her dress, and then the sun went in again, so there were no more photographs.

‘I was praying the whole time that the siren wouldn't go off,' said Dolly, as the guests formed a loose crocodile and started the ten-minute walk back to Arthur's house. ‘Because you know it's bad luck, don't you?'

‘Is it?' asked Edith, vaguely; there was a piece of lavender stalk working its way into the left cup of her brassiere.

‘My cousin's niece was at a wedding where there was an alert, and the groom's father was hit by a tram on his way home from the reception. Didn't you used to live on this street?'

‘Yes. At Number 40.' It had been disconcerting to find that her old lodgings were so close to her new home. Her marital home. The home where she would shortly be installed as Mrs Edith Frith, a name unpronounceable to all but professional linguists.

‘I wonder if your landlady still lives there,' said Dolly. ‘I know they say that bombs never fall in the same place twice, but Pearl told me that her aunt's had two in her back yard, they were both delayed-action and the second one's still there, it's lodged somewhere under the lavvy. She says the ARP don't believe her but every time she sits down she can hear it ticking . . .'

Thank goodness, thought Edith, for Dolly's chatty litany of death and portent, since no one else in the little procession was saying a word. Myrtle, having spent the last three weeks talking of nothing but her prospective day-trip to London, seemed oddly subdued, Mr De Groot was clearly not a conversationalist, and Verna appeared locked into a disapproving silence. She had decided, from the first, that Arthur was an unscrupulous libertine who had snared Edith with an insincere offer, and who would hurl her aside once his warrior lusts were sated, and nothing – not even meeting him – had dissuaded her of this opinion. She had watched the ceremony with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her lips, as if to stifle involuntary cries of protest.

‘Not much further,' said Edith. ‘It's just round the corner.'

The arrangements had been simple, and quickly accomplished. Arthur had applied for a licence, and Edith had sewn herself a dress and bought new underwear in Cromer and then, just a fortnight after the proposal, she'd left Norfolk for Clapham, where she'd slept on Dolly Clifford's sofa for three nights and spent the days at Arthur's house, trying to turn his dining-room into a suitable place for a wedding breakfast – though it was more of a wedding afternoon-tea, really, the ceremony being at two o'clock. She had washed the curtains and scrubbed the floor, and Arthur had moved furniture and cut the ivy that crawled across the window, and they had worked in pleasant harmony and talked only of practical things, of tea-towels and saucepans and milk deliveries. It was as if neither wanted to discover any more about the other before the wedding, for that might raise doubts, and there could be no going back. It was, Edith thought, a little like the arranged marriages of the Hindoos. A self-arranged marriage.

‘Here we are,' she said. The exterior of Arthur's house looked quite normal; the peculiarities began inside the front door.

‘What are all these rails along the wall?' asked Myrtle as they entered the hall.

Arthur cleared his throat. ‘My father was crippled in the war,' he said. ‘In the last war. I put these up to help him to get about.'