Their Finest Hour and a Half (49 page)

‘How long have you been here?' she asked.

‘Five minutes. Long enough to marvel yet again at the fact that the best part of a hundred people are getting paid to stand around drinking tea.'

‘The lights are being adjusted, I think.'

Buckley took a bite of cake and grimaced. ‘Rock by name . . .' he said, thickly. ‘Gather I missed a bit of excitement this morning. Attempted assassination of Uncle Frank.'

‘You missed him being sick behind the set as well. I think he's hungover.'

‘Where did he find enough booze? I haven't had a hangover since January 1940.' He sighed gustily, sending a spray of crumbs down his tie. He looked, thought Catrin, he
sounded
like his old self.

‘You don't usually come to studio,' she said, tentatively.

‘And I don't usually go to the office on a Sunday, but I did today.'

‘Oh.' It took her a moment to grasp the significance of the remark.

‘Saw the Scotchman's line you wrote,' he said.

‘Any good?'

‘Middling. Did they shoot it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you know what a “bawbag” is?'

‘No.'

‘Well, let's hope the censor doesn't, either. Saw the other piece of dialogue you left as well.'

‘Mmm.' The breath seemed to leave her. She couldn't look at him; she couldn't quite believe that she'd written it. ‘What did you think?' she asked, staring at her hands.

‘Bit slow.'

‘Really?'

‘And inconclusive. It's the sort of scene that ends with a slow fade.'

‘Is that bad?'

‘Arty. I wasn't wholly clear about what was going to happen next.'

‘I wasn't very clear myself,' she said. She risked a glance at him: brilliantine, moustache, paunch, a currant on his jacket. No oil-painting. But then, she'd had enough of oil-paintings.

‘Little Miss Blush is back, I see,' he said. ‘So if I can rustle up a fiddler and a plate of whelks one evening soon, will you tell me the ending?'

She laughed, and put the back of her hand to her cheek and felt the unexpected heat of it.

‘All right,' she said, and then there was a whistle blast and the usual shout for quiet and Buckley rolled his eyes.

‘Off they go,' he muttered, ‘murdering another one of our scenes. Which one is it?'

‘312. Uncle Frank gets machine-gunned while untangling the propeller.'

Over luncheon, Ambrose had noticed Sophie's eye upon him – she'd been waiting, no doubt, for him to importune her about the promised role; if so, her wait had been in vain. He had sat in silence, indifferent alike to the food, to the prattle of the cast, to his very future. Misuse and derision had been his lot that morning; he had been dangled like a popinjay before the braying multitude, and the pain that lurked behind his eyes, the biliousness that prevented him from eating more than a single forkful of mock-duck in orange-substitute sauce, seemed to stem more from disgust at the world than from any indiscretion of the evening before. And in the afternoon, when filming recommenced, it was professionalism, solely professionalism, that guided his steps back to the sound-stage rather than to the nearest taxi-cab.

He lowered himself, at Kipper's request, into the tank beside the stern of the
Redoubtable
. He stood listening to a ten-minute discussion of the minutiae of the lighting rig while up to his nipples in water that was only just tepid. He submerged himself and mimed dexterous knifework before bobbing to the surface, alive but gravely wounded, and then did so a second time when there was discovered to be a hair in the gate, and a third when a bulb blew, and a fourth when something unspecified went amiss with the sound. He was hauled out of the tank and offered an upturned bucket to sit on. He was asked to climb back into the tank again. He held the knife towards camera for a close-up. Another bulb blew. He was hauled out for a second time and given a towel the texture of a doormat and a cup of cold cocoa and he endured the entire catalogue of ineptitude and negligence with nary a syllable of reproach; indeed, he scarcely noticed it at all.

Detachment. That was the word. It was as if he had never descended from the tower, and were still viewing the business of the studio from a great height. How petty it all seemed, how pointless – the scurrying crew, the gimcrack sets, the posturing and the strutting, the vastness of the enterprise, the vapidity of its purpose. This morning he had stood above it all and had felt the flimsy edifice tremble beneath his feet, and had glimpsed its paste-board heart. What did it matter, this play of shadows? What did any of it matter?

‘Hilly, are you OK?' asked Lundback, when he too was summoned to the floor, and Ambrose, instead of objecting to the over-familiar contraction of his name, simply nodded.

‘Rehearsal shortly, end of Scene 312,' called Kipper. ‘Mr Hilliard, could we have you in the tank, please?'

Once again, he obeyed without demur. The camera was being lowered on its mechanical arm so that it hung just a yard or so above the water. Ambrose looked across at his reflection in the lens. A probable close-up, then, for Uncle Frank's final scene. Not that he cared two hoots.

‘Say Hilly, can we practise the lines again?' asked Lundback, looking down at Ambrose from the rail of the
Redoubtable
. The deck behind him was packed with bodies: the sound-recordist; the woman from wardrobe; Cerberus curled on a piece of sacking, one anxious brown eye fixed on Ambrose; the continuity girl with her stool and clip-board and stop watch; the second and third ADs holding Uncle Frank's safety rope; Kipper in muttered conference with the director.

‘Oh, very well,' said Ambrose. ‘On “action” you'll climb down into the tank and support my head above the water, and then I'll say, “
I've dropped the knife
.”'

Lundback nodded. ‘And I'll say “
You've done a FINE job, old timer.
” Only I'll say it real quiet, because I'll be close beside you.'

‘Yes indeed,' said Ambrose. The loudest sound, by all the laws of drama, should be the rasp of Uncle Frank's breathing, the painful staccato of his next words: ‘
But I've not
 . . .' He could put a wince in there, he thought, the merest tautening of the features; not that he gave the smallest fig about the scene. ‘
But I've not finished yet
.'

‘OK,' said Lundback. ‘And then I'll say “
You'll just have to leave it to ME
.” Only faster than that. And not saying the “
me
” so loud. And then there's only your lines left.'

‘
Forgot you were an expert
,' supplied Ambrose – and perhaps at this point, for the transition from tragedy into humour which provided the climax of the scene, he could lift a hand above the surface and grasp, with feeble determination, Lundback's shoulder. ‘
Typical
 . . .' a shuddering breath, maybe, and then just the hint of a wry smile, possibly captured in extreme close-up, though of course they could film the whole thing on a box brownie from the canteen for all he cared, ‘. . .
typical Yank
.' And then the bowline would tighten under his arms and he would be lifted out of the water, and that would be the end of the shoot for him, and he could walk away, he could shake the dust of artifice from his garments and learn to breathe a freer, truer air.

‘Quiet, everyone,' shouted Kipper. ‘Quiet. The director wants a script change, just a little tighten. We'll be cutting the last three lines, so after Hannigan says, “
You've done a fine job, old timer
”, Uncle Frank will be pulled straight out of the water and Hannigan will start on his repairs of the propeller. All right? Everyone happy?'

And Ambrose felt suddenly winded, as if he'd received a blow to the solar plexus. He stared upward at the continuity girl, who was calmly crossing-out almost half a page of script, and he heard himself say ‘No', and again, more loudly ‘
No
.'

Kipper peered over the rail, and Cerberus's nose appeared between his ankles. ‘Sorry, Mr Hilliard, did you say something?'

And the distance between Ambrose and the studio seemed to telescope, and he was no longer an impassive observer but a participant, and he understood his task, he understood that he couldn't simply walk away from a quarter-century of knowledge and skill, he couldn't allow the wanton destruction of a well-shaped scene. He had to speak – he had to speak for the good of the film, for the cinema, for audiences everywhere. Effortlessly, he raised his voice to theatrical levels.

‘I said no, it is not “all right”. And no, I am not happy. And I demand to speak to the director about the proposed script changes.'

Catrin watched the third AD, half the age and a head taller than most of the crew, make a hesitant circuit of the studio floor, apparently looking for someone. It wasn't until he started heading straight towards her that she realized that the ‘someone' was herself.

‘You're the writer,' he said, his voice an uncertain waver, barely broken.

‘I'm
a
writer,' she amended.

‘Deny everything,' said Buckley, looking up from his
Daily Mirror
. He was sitting on a coil of rope, cup of tea beside him. ‘Who's asking for writers?'

The youth glanced back at the water-tank, and lowered his voice confidentially. ‘There's a bit of a row going on between Mr Hilliard and the director. Mr Hilliard is getting awfully worked up about line changes, and he's threatening not to do the scene at all unless something's done about it, and the continuity girl said that seeing as how one of the writers was actually in the studio for once, then perhaps we should make use of the fact, and Kipper told me to hurry off and fetch you.'

‘What's the row about?' asked Catrin.

‘Well, the director wanted to take out some dialogue because he says it interferes with the visual tension of the scene, and Mr Hilliard says if he does that, it'll affect the integrity of the story and—' He looked enquiringly at Buckley, who had given a snort.

‘I shall translate,' said Buckley. ‘The only time an actor ever uses a phrase like “integrity of the story” is when his own lines are being cut, and the words “visual tension” are a director's term for “you're spoiling my lovely pictures by overacting all over them”. All we need now is for the cameraman to chip in about “the texture of the image” which means that he wants all the characters to blunder around in semi-darkness, and we'll have the full deck.'

‘Well, anyway . . .' said the youth, rather desperately, turning to Catrin. ‘. . . I was told to see if I could get a writer to come up with a compromise.'

‘I see.' She nodded, trying to appear willing; lodged in her memory was the previous ghastly occasion on which she'd spoken to Ambrose Hilliard about a script change. ‘I'll do it.'

‘No, I'll do it,' said Buckley. He waved a hand at her half-hearted protest. ‘
I'll
do it' he repeated, more firmly. ‘This type of situation needs a bit of quick thinking – which you're perfectly capable of delivering – and a lorry-load of brazen, filthy, deceitful flattery, which you're not. You're a clever girl, but you can't tell a lie to save your life.'

‘That's what you think,' said Catrin.

‘So you fancy giving it a go?'

She grinned and shook her head. ‘Not really. Thank you, Buckley.'

He gave her a wink, affectionate and more than a touch filthy, and ambled off, pausing beside the high wall of the tank in order to pat his pockets.

‘Did I leave my Woodbines?' he called back to her, and she looked around towards the spot where he'd been sitting. There was no sign of his cigarettes. She turned back again, and as she did so, a movement caught her eye, and for a fraction of a second she thought that someone was diving from the very top of the scaffolding tower, and then she saw it was the lamp, the huge carbon lamp on its metal stalk, and it was gently, elegantly keeling over, the vast head swooning forward, the stalk leaving its socket, the whole of it dropping like a swollen rosebud on a stem, and it was so quiet, so quick, so graceful, that Catrin had hardly opened her mouth, had hardly begun to understand what she was seeing when the lamp hit the starboard bow of the
Redoubtable
with a noise like a bus exploding, and there was the groan of wood and a cracking sound, and the whole deck lurched forward and sideways and all the occupants, apart from the dog, fell off into the water, and a wave bounced across the width of the tank and slapped at the wooden wall and suddenly there was no wall on that side and a river was pouring through the breach and where Buckley had been standing there was nothing, there was no one, there was no one there at all . . .

FORTHCOMING ATTRACTIONS

The day was so warm that someone had prised away the boards that blocked one of the glassless windows of the twelfth-floor room. There was nothing to be seen through the narrow gap but the blue sky above Bloomsbury, and a pigeon who settled on the sill, keeping up a loud and persistent cooing.

Beside the contingent from Baker's, there were three Ministry of Information officials around the table, and a stenographer, and a tired-looking naval officer, the skin under his eyes like crumpled paper.

‘Take no notice of me,' he said, when introductions were being made. ‘I haven't the foggiest idea why I'm here,' and he gave Catrin a vague smile.

Rather than have to return it, she looked down at her hands. They were cold; they'd been cold all week, despite the weather. Her whole body felt chilled. She looked up again at Roger Swain, who had interviewed her nearly a year ago and whose hairline had retreated an inch or so since then.