Their Finest Hour and a Half (42 page)

‘We should do it,' said Arthur, startling her considerably. ‘Of course, we'd have to go to a reliable breeder.'

‘Hens,' said Edith, after a moment.

‘And I could make the coop.' He had seen a plan for one in a copy of
The Woodworker
and after he'd finished his current fretwork project he could give it a go; it wouldn't be easy to find the materials, but there was chicken wire over the windows of the shed that he could re-use, and it was something concrete that he could do for Edith, something husbandly, something manly and useful, and he wanted to please her, he really very much wanted to please her. ‘I could do that for you,' he said, ‘if you'd like.'

She seemed to hesitate before answering. ‘What I'd like . . .' she began. ‘What I'd like is . . .' but the end of the sentence never came and they walked in silence the remainder of the route and waited side-by-side on the crowded northbound platform.

It's impossible, thought Edith, and for the first time she felt a little frightened, for she had married someone who was neat and punctual and efficient and reliable, someone who spoke less than other people, someone unobtrusive, someone wholly used to their own company. And she found herself thinking of science lessons at school, of the identical magnets that, freakishly, could never touch, since their similarity repelled rather than attracted, and then she heard the scrape of the rails as the train approached and she knew
exactly
what was going to happen next, she knew exactly, and she watched with a kind of weariness as Arthur checked his watch and looked up with a tentative smile.

‘That should do it,' he said.

*

Some days of filming felt productive and purposeful, while on others one could sense the schedule slipping backward like a bread-van with a faulty hand-brake. There had been an ever-increasing number of the latter on the current production, and today was a case in point: fourteen set-ups on the shot-list and by midday only four completed, with Kipper appearing to have aged ten years since breakfast. Attempts had been made to blame the inadequacy of the generator, the stiff breeze that poppled the water, the clouds that kept sliding capriciously in front of the sun, but the bulk of the time had been lost in the usual struggle to make Carl Lundback sound like a member of the human race. Nine takes of him shouting, ‘
Over here
', seventeen of ‘
Help me get this feller out
', and it was very nearly time for luncheon, and Ambrose had done little except sit on a slatted bench next to the changing-rooms with Cerberus cringing beside him.

Parliament Hill Lido was doubling as the English Channel for one day only, and the camera had been placed on a small platform built over one corner of the pool. With its lens pointing slightly downward, it was apparently possible to shoot a much wider expanse of water than was achievable in studio, and Hadley Best and Lundback and sundry extras had been immersed up to their armpits for most of the morning. The dog was supposed to be in there too, nobly supporting his injured master until rescue came, but Cerberus had absolutely refused to enter the water, even when bribed with fresh mince from the catering wagon, and Hadley Best was having to make do with a substitute hastily run up by wardrobe and consisting of a stuffed sack with wash-leather ears. It had apparently passed muster in the wide shot; the close-up had been abandoned.

‘Little bit of concentration,' shouted Kipper. ‘Just one more set-up before lunch, Scene 114.'

There must have been (Ambrose surmised) a great deal of shrieking panic behind the scenes after the calamity of the first day in studio. The filming schedule had altered completely. Lundback had scarcely been seen for a fortnight, and when he'd returned, most of his lines had mysteriously disappeared, his witty quips replaced by long takes of the character gazing at the horizon, or smiling quietly to himself, or writing in his reporter's notebook while looking quizzical, or as near to quizzical as Lundback's mastery of facial expression would allow. Other members of the cast had actually gained lines, Ambrose himself acquiring a few nice nuggets of exposition, as well as a page of banter with a rescued Scottish soldier about the potential buoyancy of bagpipes, but there were moments, unfortunately, when it was still deemed necessary for the American to speak, and here, plumb in the middle of Scene 114, was another of them.

‘We'll go again,' said Kipper, after Lundback's pancake rendition on Take 1. ‘And er . . .' he lowered his voice, ‘the director asks me to remind you that it says “jauntily” in the script.'

Clearly ‘jauntily' in the United States was a synonym for ‘leaden', since moribund reading followed moribund reading, with Kipper issuing a prissy little director's note after each, like someone trying to revive an unconscious elephant by fanning it with a lace handkerchief. Eventually, Alex Frayle knelt at the side of pool and engaged in a long whispered conversation with the American during which Ambrose distinctly heard the words ‘transatlantic brio' and then – surely by coincidence – Lundback gave a performance fractionally less dreadful than before and luncheon was called.

‘Dry clothes and hot-air heaters in the boiler room,' said Kipper. ‘Back on camera at one thirty.'

Behind the lido, a path meandered across Hampstead Heath and around a thicket of hawthorn before heading rather more purposefully towards the crest of Parliament Hill. Cerberus trotted briskly along the grass, urinating on every third clump, and Ambrose walked some distance behind, his stomach churning uneasily.

Rather than face his umpteenth plate of mince of the war so far, he had plumped instead for fish in parsley sauce. ‘It's cod,' the fat woman with the ladle had said when he'd asked, an obvious lie given the cheapness of the catering, and confirmed when Ambrose had scraped away the sauce to reveal what looked like a section of black mackintosh. Beneath this integument lay the grey flesh, clinging to a giant vertebra of a type more usually seen in a case in the Natural History Museum. It had tasted predictably vile and it had taken a bowl of fruit jelly with custard to wash away the lingering tang, and there, in a nutshell, was the damage that rationing had wrought – scouring clean a palate attuned to the silky piquancy of foie gras and replacing it with one that slavered at the thought of strawberry-flavoured gelatine. One might as well play jigs on a Stradavarius.

‘
Kim aher
,' he called as Cerberus began to drift away from the path, nose to a scent trail that led him zig-zagging through a clump of thistles. It was a true spring day, the new leaves on the hawthorn a brilliant green, the sun (when it appeared from behind the clouds) truly warm for the first time that year, and there were soldiers everywhere, sleeping their leave away on the grass, kicking a ball around, sitting on benches watching for a girl to walk by. The boredom was almost palpable. Near the top of the hill, there was even a Welsh Guardsman flying a home-made kite, the newsprint still visible through a coat of black paint, and Ambrose paused to watch for a moment or two, before tackling the last, steep, thirty yards and turning to look at the view.

And he was shocked. He had expected devastation, but what amazed him was that London appeared so little changed. Half a year of bombing, of fires that had lit up the night and burned for days, and yet the most noticeable difference was the presence of the barrage balloons, their wires rendered invisible by distance so that they seemed to have chosen their berths high above the city. And
what
a city! A sprawl that reached almost to the far horizon, a blind-man's mosaic of grime-edged grey and pinkish buff, broken only by the grassy tump of Greenwich and the treetops that marked the Royal parks; and it seemed to Ambrose suddenly obvious that the blitz simply wouldn't work, that Goering had underestimated the sheer size of the place, and that the Luftwaffe could pepper London till Doomsday and not make a dent in the vastness. Though as he scanned the rooftops he began to see sign after sign of the barrage – cranes tilting above open rafters, the oddly uncluttered view of St Paul's, the charred skeleton of a warehouse behind St Pancras, glints of water from static tanks, raw red splashes of powdered brick interspersed among the duller hues, concavity where there should have been profile, an absence of spires where spires had soared before. Changed, then, but not changed utterly.

‘No,' said a woman's voice behind him, above the rising wail of a child. ‘Get
away
, get
away
,' and Ambrose turned to see Cerberus dancing along the sward with half a biscuit in his mouth, the other half still in the hand of a toddler.

‘Whose dog is that?' shouted the woman, an Irish type with a jaw like a bottle-opener and an air of barely repressed violence. ‘Is that
your
dog?' she added, staring at Ambrose.

‘No it isn't,' he said coldly. He turned away again and found himself looking directly at Carl Lundback. The man was walking up the path towards him, looking – as usual – like an artist's projection of the adult Tom Sawyer.

‘Mind if I join you, sir?'

‘No, no,' said Ambrose. ‘I was just stretching my legs.'

‘Yeah, me too. They told me I could see the whole way to the Tower of London from here. Cigarette?'

‘Thank you.'

Lundback reached into his breast pocket and took out a packet of Players, and Ambrose almost did a double-take.
Players! Unobtainable
for the past bloody year. So where had they come from? Stockpiled in a warehouse for the sole use of visiting Yanks? And would they taste as good as they always . . . ? Yes. Yes, they would. He inhaled with a mixture of pleasure and pique.

‘It's quite a view,' said Lundback.

‘Yes, I think you'll find that earth hath not anything to show more fair.'

There was a pause.

‘So which one's the Tower of London?' asked Lundback. ‘Because I promised my—'

There was a roar from the sky that momentarily drowned all speech. Three silhouettes passed swiftly overhead, travelling east.

‘Hurricanes,' said Lundback. He stayed with his face tipped to the empty sky. ‘Sure wish I was up there now.'

‘Really? You'd rather be flying than making the film?'

‘
Sure
I would.' He sounded utterly sincere. ‘That's why I came here,' he added, looking at Ambrose with blue-eyed candour. ‘To fly. To fight for Finland.'

‘For
Finland
?'

‘My mom and dad are from Oulu. My mom cried for a week when Finland was invaded.'

‘But Finland was invaded by Russia. We're not at war with Russia.'

Lundback acknowledged this with a duck of the head. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I only found that out when I got here. And then I spent a night in London and I saw what Hitler was putting you guys through, and I figured that maybe you could do with a little help as well.' He gave a smile of such disconcerting sweetness that Ambrose had to fight the urge to start thanking him. Though, of course, it would come to that eventually. America would enter the war at some point, and then for the next fifty years would expect unceasing gratitude.

‘Maybe I'll get to fight Russia later on,' added Lundback, almost wistfully.

‘So I don't understand,' said Ambrose, ‘if you'd rather be flying, then why are you in this film?'

‘I'm under orders, sir.'

‘The RAF ordered you to do it?'

‘Yes sir. They said they hoped it'd be good for Eagle Squadron recruitment. They said to regard it as a temporary posting, sir.'

‘For heaven's sake, I'm not your squadron leader, there's no need to call me sir.'

‘Yes sir, I mean no. OK.' Lundback grinned and was instantly a publicity department's dream, the sunlight bouncing off his teeth – ‘
He's looping the loop in the hearts of a million girls
' – and as long as henceforward he stuck to playing deaf-mutes and wordless loners then his future in Hollywood was assured, though it was a pity that he'd had to begin his film career by ruining a perfectly good feature.

‘So tell me,' said Ambrose, ‘what acting experience have you actually had?'

‘Well . . .' Lundback looked all at once rather sheepish. ‘I wouldn't call it
acting
. Like I tried to tell the guy from the newspaper, it was just fooling around, you know, for fun and all.'

‘What was just fooling around?'

‘Well, me and the fellers from the airfield back home, we're in a – well, I think you call it a concert party over here, doncha?'

‘So, singing?'

‘Yeah, singing. And impersonations.'

‘Impersonations of whom?'

‘Jolson.'

‘
Jolson?
'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘
Al
Jolson?'

‘Yes sir. We called ourselves The Burnt Cork Barnstormers.'

‘I see,' said Ambrose. The peculiarities of Lundback's technique were suddenly explained – the illustrative hand-movements, the vocal projection sufficient to reach to the back of a barn full of plaid-shirted hayseeds, the inability to understand any piece of direction more complex than ‘speak softly' or ‘move to your left'.

‘So when did you speak to this member of the press?'

‘When I went to get my, uh . . .' Lundback glanced bashfully down at his chest.

‘Your medal,' said Ambrose.

‘Yeah.'

‘And a reporter interviewed you about your background and interests?'