Their Finest Hour and a Half (39 page)

She stayed upright long enough to hang the dress in the wardrobe, and to fold her underwear – the French-style knickers, the matching brassiere, the silk stockings that had been Dolly's wedding present – ‘I've heard that a way to drive a man wild is to take off everything except those and then unroll them, one at a time, ever so slowly,' Dolly had said, and Edith had been unable to meet her eye, though she'd stored the tip away for possible future use – and then she opened the drawer where she'd folded her night things, and instead of the eau de Nil satin slip with parchment piping, she put on her old winceyette pyjama suit and climbed into bed, and closed her eyes.

She barely heard her husband returning, though the cold compress was welcome, and gently applied.

‘I won't disturb you,' said Arthur, quietly, solicitously. ‘I'll spend the night in my old room.'

*

Pinewood, Denham, Shepperton – all had purpose-built projection rooms, the seating raked, the chairs upholstered, space enough for all so that one could choose, say, not to sit directly between a mouth-breathing scene-painter and an electrician who'd lunched on baked cabbage. The projection room at Hammersmith, however, was a boxed-in corner of the canteen and roughly the size of a coal-hole so no such choice was possible. Ambrose, wedged at the centre of the back row, his head tilted at an angle of 45 degrees in order to gain a view of the screen that didn't include the gaffer's right ear, tried to concentrate on the footage.

Watching the rushes was always purgatorial, the unedited scenes painfully raw, the chosen takes inevitably the ones that Ambrose himself would not have picked, since considerations of sound and picture always ranked far above those of nuanced performance. The merest camera assistant had only to inspect the lens and then suck his teeth doubtfully for yards of subtle roleplay to be binned, whilst the most courteous request from an actor that a particular take not be printed because his characterization had yet to achieve its zenith was almost certainly a waste of breath. Nevertheless, one had to attend, one had to know the worst.

Here, then, were the location scenes, strung together in the order in which they'd been shot: here the
Redoubtable
arriving at the coast of France, the sea beyond dotted with other ships; here Uncle Frank stumbling through the twilight from public house to the quayside; here were the girls casting off; here the muddy back-roads of France, thronging with refugees; here was that bloody dog Chopper stealing the bloody show as bloody usual; and here the beach at Dunkirk, black with figures, bullets peppering the sand – all without sound-effects or music, half the shots mute and half played-out far too long, and yet the overall impression . . . and it took Ambrose a while to digest this thought, since it was so unexpected . . . the overall impression was that it was really rather good. One could even feel it from the atmosphere in the room, from the alertness and the odd murmured aside. In each scene the camera seemed to be in the right place, the lighting apposite, the performances rather better than might be expected from the calibre of the actors. As for his own appearance, he was struck by how cleverly the make-up chap had aged and roughened his skin, giving Uncle Frank a gravitas that transcended the comedic element of the role. This was no drunken sailor out of a Crazy Gang romp; this was a man who had lived, who had suffered.

A forest of scratches replaced the final images of Hadley Best wading through waist-high water, and the lights in the room went up again.

‘Marvellous,' said Edwin Baker, rising from his seat on the front row. ‘Blinking marvellous, best work I've seen in a month of Sundays, congratulations to one and all. I'd say that if we carry on in the way we've started then we're looking at a surefire success, an absolute sure-fire success.' And although Ambrose had never been present at a rushes screening where the producer had failed to imply that the film in question was about to break all box-office records and win a shelf-load of Academy Awards to boot, nonetheless he had a feeling that on this occasion there might be more than a little truth in the praise, and by God it had been a long time since he'd had that feeling, a long, cold time. The catalogue of fourth-rate drivel in which he'd been forced to appear over recent years seemed to flutter before his eyes like the pages of a penny dreadful.

‘Mr Hilliard?'

It was the new third AD, a beanpole of a boy with an Adam's apple like a half-swallowed rock bun.

‘You're needed in make-up, Mr Hilliard, and then on set, Scene 42, sound stage one.'

‘Very well.'

‘I thought the rushes were awfully good, Mr Hilliard.'

‘Did you?'

‘I thought they made it all look true, like a newsreel.'

‘Yes indeed.'

‘And I thought you were awfully good in particular, Mr Hilliard.'

‘Thank you.'

‘I laughed like stink when you fell over on the quay. Do you want me to show you the way?'

‘No, that won't be necessary.'

In the make-up room, Cerberus was still sitting on the folded blanket in the corner where Ambrose had left him twenty minutes earlier, but the white patch on his nose was now the same colour as the rest of his coat.

‘Success!' said the nancy-boy with the brush. ‘One part boot polish to two parts So-Bee-Fee gravy browning, with a touch of eyebrow pencil for the darker pattern. We tried cocoa powder at first but it kept making him sneeze. Oh, look how he worships you!'

Cerberus had lumbered across the room and was standing at Ambrose's feet, gazing upward with a convincing facsimile of adoration.

‘Aaah,' said the girl assistant, ‘he lubs oo, don't oo?'

Ambrose bent down to pat Cerberus and the dog licked his hand.

‘Aaah,' said the girl again, with a pretty glance, ‘you've a real way with him, Mr Hilliard,' and Ambrose nodded modestly and slipped a hand into the pocket where he kept a lump of meat wrapped in oilcloth. Black market, of course – obtained nightly from the kitchens of his local French restaurant – and horribly expensive, especially bearing in mind that it had almost certainly been gouged from the rump of a diseased carthorse, but nevertheless worth every penny for the instant devotion it conjured from Cerberus. Christ, the animal would follow him over a cliff just for a sniff of his fingers.

‘By the way,' said the make-up chap, as Ambrose left the room with the dog at his heel, ‘I heard the rushes were tickety-boo, they're all saying it could be a smash!'

Scene 42 did not feature Uncle Frank – nor, in fact, did the character appear in any other of the scenes being shot on this, the first day of studio, and yet here was Ambrose being treated with all due deference, given his own chair, his own ash tray: ‘Sugar in your tea, Mr Hilliard?', ‘Another garibaldi, Mr Hilliard?', ‘Are you ready, Mr Hilliard?', ‘Take your own cue, Mr Hilliard,' and since one ought really to give credit where it was due, he was fully prepared to admit (if asked) that it had been Sophie who had proposed that he be paid a handler's fee for Cerberus and who had, moreover, wrung a rather decent day-rate out of Baker's. Through her aegis, Ambrose had declined the offer of an extra credit (‘animal trainer'), but had confirmed with the publicity department that he would be willing to speak to any journalists who might be attracted by such a charming story of thespian versatility, though so far only
Dog Breeder Bi-Monthly
had expressed any interest.

In consequence, he no longer felt quite the same urgency about seeking new representation. After all, if the film were a hit, then he would have his pick of agencies; a flop, and Sophie was proving herself at least adequate.

‘Just a close-up of the dog next,' called Kipper. ‘Mr Best also in shot.'

The American actor, Lundback, was on set again, watching from behind the camera. He had been accompanied into the studio that morning by Edwin Baker, who had paraded him around cast and crew like a prize bull. His photograph had been taken with Baker, with the actresses playing Rose and Lily, with two fellows from the Ministry of Information, and with the American Deputy Ambassador, whose gigantic waist circumference seemed to confirm rumours that while Londoners queued for whale-meat, all was steak and doughnuts within the embassy walls. Lundback himself had smiled throughout, a smile that had sent all the women into a frenzy of hair-patting and necklace-adjustment. He looked ludicrously boyish,
freckled
for Christ's sake, a sun-tanned farm-boy who just happened to have talked his way into the RAF and then shot down twenty-four German fighters and been awarded a DFC, and it was clear from the female reaction that even if all the other men in the studio stripped naked and ran around with their privates flapping, they wouldn't be spared a second glance.

Ambrose had noticed Hadley Best looking slightly sick (his leading-man status draining briskly down the plug-hole), and then rallying again as Lundback was introduced to him, and then it had been Ambrose's turn and Lundback had shaken his hand and said, ‘Hi there' – his speech slow, his voice unexpectedly deep and velvety, so that one might almost have expected him to break into a chorus of ‘Old Man Ribber' – ‘Hi there. Good to meetcha, sir,' and it had been the damnedest thing, but there had been something so unaffected about the man, so good-natured, so entirely lacking in the usual actorish caution, that Ambrose had very nearly found himself smiling back.

And now Lundback was in costume, ready for his role as Hannigan, the American newspaper-man caught up in the Dunkirk evacuation. His freckles had been blotted out and a set of crows' feet added, with the result that he was now looking at least twenty-five years old. He seemed at ease, hands in pockets, smile still in place, as he watched Cerberus having his make-up re-touched, and Ambrose was reminded of the time – decades ago, now – that he'd first seen the young Ronald Colman strolling around the floor at Elstree, stardom adhering to him as if applied with the greasepaint. Sometimes one just
knew
, bugger it, and since there was so little room beneath the spotlight, each time that a golden newcomer shouldered his way onstage there was inevitably some poor bastard being shoved off the other side. Hadley, in this case. What a bitter, cruel, profligate profession it was . . .

‘Going again on 42,' said Kipper. ‘Mute close-up of the dog. And
action
.'

Cerberus, sitting in front of a backdrop of French countryside, looked round vaguely, as if puzzled by the number of people staring at him. Superficially, he was a good match for Chopper, but there was an absence of brain that showed in every reaction and pose. For Chopper,
sitting
had been as physical an act as running, the pose held with tension and concentration. For Cerberus, sitting was a rough alignment of arse and floor, performed reluctantly and interrupted by sporadic bouts of scratching.

‘And
now
,' said Kipper, and Hadley Best ran towards Cerberus, slipped a belt through his collar and pulled him out of shot. This was the third time in a row that this had happened, but Cerberus's look of half-witted amazement was as fresh as on the first occasion.

‘And Cut,' shouted Kipper. ‘The director would like to print that one. Moving on to Scene 91.'

The crew began to drift over to the pile of sand in the corner that represented the beach at Dunkirk, and Ambrose checked the page of script he'd been given.

Another page and a half of dialogue between Johnnie and Hannigan followed, but there were no further stage directions that mentioned the dog and Ambrose felt relieved, since
lying down
was something that Cerberus could manage with very little difficulty. During the first few days after bringing the bloody creature back to his house, he'd despaired of getting it to perform a single action to order but then Sophie's note had arrived in the post –
I think I may have omitted to tell you that my brother trained Cerberus to respond to Yiddish commands
– and since she had also omitted to put any of them in the note, and her telephone was once again on the blink, Ambrose had received instruction on how to say ‘sit', ‘stay', ‘come here' and ‘lie down' from ancient Mrs Greenbaum of the tobacconist's on Clipstone Street, who'd laughed so hard when she heard his request that he'd been able to count all five of her teeth.

‘Leyg zikh,' he said to the dog, over at the sand-pile. Gracelessly, Cerberus obeyed, lolling on to his side in a way that would afford the camera a splendid view of his under parts.