Their Finest Hour and a Half (45 page)

He held up an envelope, and Ambrose's brief, hopeful supposition that it might contain a cheque dwindled on sight, for the envelope was pale mauve, a vehicle for correspondence rather than cash, the handwriting floridly feminine.

‘Fan mail?' asked the manager, ingratiatingly.

‘Oh, I expect so,' said Ambrose. ‘It usually is.' He took the envelope; there was a large, damp, managerial thumbprint smudging the post-mark, and no return address. He felt a slight stir of anticipation; it had been a very long time since he'd received such a missive, though somewhere, still, within his house was a cabin trunk full of the things.

He slipped a thumb underneath the gummed flap, and had partly withdrawn the single sheet of folded paper within before he realized that the envelope contained another item, a photograph clipped from a magazine. He was looking at it upside-down, and it took him a moment to recognize the subject.

‘Anything wrong, Mr Hilliard?' asked the manager.

‘No, no, nothing at all. If the third AD comes looking for me, just tell him I'm taking a breath of fresh air, would you? I'll only be five minutes.'

Though there was nothing very fresh about the air outside today. It stank of mud. Ambrose had never seen the tide so low – the narrow ribbon of water running beneath Hammersmith Bridge looked like a village stream. He leaned against the river wall and studied the photograph for an outraged moment or two before reading the letter that had accompanied it.

It was, thought Ambrose with an effort, kind of Cecy. It was a kind letter, a kind offer, devoid, it appeared, of ulterior motive. A kind offer to move to . . . he checked the address. Thames
Ditton
– for Christ's sake! It would take considerably more than a direct hit (had that actually happened) to lure him to Thames Ditton. And the house was called The Ducklings. He could just picture it – one of those frightful, leaky shacks thrown up in the twenties as weekend cottages, and now occupied all year round by impoverished theatricals, trying to pretend that the bi-annual floods, the Arctic winds howling through the cracks in the clapboard, were part of its charm. Not to mention the drunken trippers gesturing lewdly through the sitting-room window as they floated by in their hired rowing-boats.

He ought, he supposed, to reply to Cecy. A brief thanks, perhaps, assuring her that the photograph in question had been labelled erroneously and had, in fact, been a still from a yet-to-be-released short. Or something of that kidney. He gave the picture a valedictory glance, before dropping it over the wall. The breeze took the slip of paper, and spun it like a leaf towards the plains of grey mud, but the image and its caption seemed to hang before him still. It must, he realized, have been taken by the photographer who'd been loitering outside the rest centre on Highbury Corner on the day that he had collected the dog, for it showed the two of them walking along the pavement, Cerberus with his head hanging, Ambrose laden with blanket and shabby carpet bag, the unflattering angle conjuring a wattled jowl from an innocent neck-crease, the harsh contrast painting a series of deep lines and furrows across his face. ‘
HOMELESS BUT NOT HOPELESS
' announced the print beneath. ‘
His wordly goods in a sack, his tired legs fading beneath him, an old fellow and his only friend find refuge at last
.' Bastards. Was it, he wondered, possible to sue? But then, of course, he'd have to show the photograph as evidence in court. And it could have been worse, he realized suddenly, with a chill of horror. Just imagine if the caption-writer had actually recognized him . . .

*

When, late on the Saturday afternoon, Mr Baker's secretary shouted ‘wriiii
tah
!' up the stairs, it was Catrin who answered, since she was the only person of that description still left in the office. Parfitt had gone home not long after waking from his post-luncheon nap, and Buckley had stayed for an hour or so after that, grimly re-reading his first draft treatment of the ARP film and then throwing down the sheaf of paper with an expression of disgust. The pages had slid off the edge of the desk and fanned elegantly across the floor.

‘Don't bother,' he'd muttered, as Catrin had bent to pick them up, ‘they're not worth it.' He had jammed on his hat, relit a cigarette stub that he'd extinguished only two minutes before, half-nodded to her, and then stumped along the landing and down the stairs, a thread of smoke trailing behind him. Catrin had gathered up the pages and straightened the edges and stacked them on his desk again. Then, after a moment's hesitation, she had read the whole thing, and it was Buckley's usual prose, clear and purposeful, but somehow missing its characteristic zest – steak without salt, she thought, chips without vinegar: a story that failed to stick in the mind, and characters who didn't seem to matter, a lustreless treatment from a master of polish. She had sat for a while, a little shaken, drumming her fingers softly on the desk top.
It's because of me
, she'd thought, and the idea was preposterous, unprecedented – imagine Ellis spoiling a single brush-stroke or smudging a line on her account! And she'd nibbled on the thought, and revolved the image of Buckley in her mind, studying him from every viewpoint, wondering if there was an angle from which he might ever make her heart beat faster . . .

And then came the shout of ‘wriiii
tah
!', on a rising note, as if a skivvy were being summoned, and Catrin hurried down the stairs to take a phone call from studio.

‘You'll never guess . . .' said Phyl, archly.

‘A rewrite?'

‘More of a tweak, actually. Scene 303.'

‘With the dive-bomber? But I thought that was supposed to be all finished this afternoon.'

‘All finished bar a couple of crane shots tomorrow morning, to which the director's just come up with the tip-top idea of adding artillery.'

‘What?'

‘As a matter of fact, he's already drafted the new line himself. Do you have a pen? It's the Scotch soldier's speech – the one who stands and shouts at the plane, only now he's not only going to shout, he's going to fire a rifle as well. And according to the director, he's going to be saying: “
Here's a Glasgae bullet for ye, ye Nazi bastard. And here's anither. Tell them in aul' Jairmany we'll no give in to ye, ye squeer-heeded bawbag
.”'

‘What's a bawbag?'

‘Dialect, apparently – our director made a documentary about Glaswegian welders the year before last, so he's rather the expert. What do you think of the line?'

‘Flabby.'

‘Yes, well I've heard that the Board of Censors only allows through one “bastard” a year and that's already been used up, so you have a perfect excuse for rewriting the rewrite, so to speak. Are you coming to the studio tomorrow?'

‘I think so. As it's the last day. I'll promise to bite my tongue and stand in the shadows.'

Phyl laughed. ‘Quite right, too. Could you be here by eight, then, with the new line? Unless Buckley says he's happy with the
aul
one, of course.'

Unlikely, thought Catrin. Back at her desk, she leafed through the script, and found the original wording: ‘
Missed us all, ye boss-eyed Nazi
.' The easiest thing would be to cut ‘
Missed us all
,' and substitute ‘
Take that!
', but it was a Buckley maxim that no one outside the writing profession understood that even tiny, subtle re-wordings required considerable skill, so it was therefore vital to make any changes look flamingly obvious otherwise no one would ever give you any credit for having done them. On the other hand, he also stated that in the event of a director coming up with a line, it was always best to try and save some of it, however dreadful, ‘because then the cloth-eared twerp will think it's the one that he wrote, and he'll probably use it'.

She stared at her notebook. ‘Bloody hell, Buckley,' she said, out loud, and she was suddenly desperate to speak to him, to hear that rasp of a voice from the corner, badgering, hectoring, prying, making her laugh, infuriating her, offering advice that was occasionally helpful and frequently impossible – her waspish mentor, her daily companion, sorely missed.

There were footsteps on the stairs and she turned quickly but it was only Shipton, the accountant, carrying a bucket of sand and wearing a tin hat. ‘Still here?' he asked.

‘Yes, for a bit longer.'

‘Well just to warn you,' he said. ‘It's going to be a full moon tonight. There's sure to be trouble,' and he unhooked the ladder that led to the roof, and climbed up. She could hear him shuffling round on the leads, preparing for his stint as fire-watcher.

She wrote, ‘
Missed us, ye boss-eyed bawbag, now here's one from the folks in Glasgae
,' and then, on a separate piece of paper, she wrote, ‘
I don't in the least think that you're an old fool. Quite the reverse, in fact
.' Though what was the reverse of an old fool? You could guarantee that Buckley would want to know . . .

She tried again. ‘
Truly, I don't in the least think that you're an old fool
.'

Wordy.

‘
I don't think you're an old fool
.'

Bald.

‘
You're no fool, old or otherwise
.'

And now it sounded like a line from
Duck Soup
. Unbidden, another Buckley aphorism swam to mind. ‘For God's sake, don't keep hammering away at the same sentence, like a bloody woodpecker. Write the whole damn scene and then go back over it with a pencil.' The whole damn scene; she took the cover off Buckley's Remington, and wound a sheet of paper in place, and started to type.