Their Finest Hour and a Half (50 page)

‘Let me just say,' he said, ‘before we move on to the subject of this particular meeting, that I've taken a look at the initial report on the accident and whilst, obviously, it was a frightful tragedy, it seems to me a matter of extreme luck that it wasn't a great deal worse. Any number of people could have been standing at that end of the tank when the wall collapsed. Any number . . .' There was a pause; he looked towards the open window. ‘Dreadful, all the same, an absolutely dreadful loss. Anyway, to the subject of the hour. Mr Baker?'

‘I've just come from the cutting-room,' said Edwin Baker, grim but business-like, ‘and they say they can't get around it, there's a hole in the story and at the moment there's nothing to fill it with – that propeller's got to get mended somehow.'

‘Yes,' said Swain. ‘The words “ha'p'orth of tar” do rather spring to mind. And have any ideas been forthcoming?'

‘Not yet, no,' said Baker bluntly. He glanced at his writers, without reproach but without much expectation. Somewhere within the icy sludge of Catrin's brain, a half-thought stirred.

‘And do we know the director's opinion?' asked Swain.

‘I've been to the hospital . . .' Baker hesitated, his jaw moving from side-to-side in visible dissatisfaction. ‘He's not making a great deal of sense at the moment. Bang on the head and all that, it's only been a few days . . . said he wants to re-shoot the whole thing with a different cast.'

One of the Ministry officials gave a huff of laughter, and Swain looked at him pointedly, before turning to Baker again.

‘And you can't, for instance, shoot the missing scene in the lido with doubles of the characters?'

‘We can't double both of them. Not at the same time. Lundback won't be off crutches for a month.'

‘And the . . . what's his name? The old actor?'

‘Hilliard. Another six weeks in plaster.'

Roger Swain sighed. ‘I know that our chief's awfully keen about getting this picture ready for release. And of course, it's received a quite extraordinary amount of advance publicity over the last week. I know that may sound callous but it can't be gainsaid . . . Could you make use of the narrator again, perhaps?'

Baker nodded unenthusiastically. ‘It'll probably come to that. Not an ideal ending to a thrilling picture though, is it? Distant shot of a boat and someone telling us what happened. Can't see punters queuing down the street for that.'

‘Would it be . . . excuse me just a moment.' Swain stood and walked swiftly across to the window and clapped his hands, and the pigeon flew off with a clatter. ‘Can't bear the creatures,' he said, returning to his seat. ‘And it's very strange, there seem to be even more about than there used to be. God knows what they're eating.'

‘Lime,' said Parfitt, loudly and unexpectedly. ‘Lime in the exposed mortar.'

‘Ah . . .' Swain paused, as if further pigeon lore might be forthcoming, but Parfitt's face had closed again.

‘You were saying,' said Baker.

Swain shrugged. ‘Oh, I was just wondering if we should bring a few more heads into the meeting. There's always a writer chappie or two hanging around the offices. Horribly ironic, isn't it, that the one person that we really need here is the one person we definitively can't have?'

And everyone except the naval officer looked at Catrin and Parfitt, or, rather, at the small gap between their chairs, as if the shade of Buckley might be hovering there, and if he
were
, thought Catrin – and she felt as if she'd been given a sudden sharp shove or an elbow in the ribs – if he
were
, then she could just imagine how he would react to the idea of Swain dragging a couple of random hacks into the discussion, a brace of weak-chinned varsity boys interfering with his script. She felt another jab of the elbow; go
on
, Mrs Taff. The half-thought thawed. She found that she'd raised her hand.

‘Mrs Cole?' said Baker.

‘I do have an idea.'

‘Go on.'

‘Rose could do it. Rose Starling could mend the propeller.'

Baker narrowed his eyes, as if perusing a balance sheet. ‘Rose . . .' he said, doubtfully.

‘After all, it's the Starling sisters' story, isn't it?' said Catrin. ‘And she's on the stern already. She could call her uncle's name and climb into the water and – we could use a double for the uncle if he kept his head down, couldn't we? And he could be hauled out and then she could do the repair. And she's wearing a hat and dark clothes, isn't she, so it might not be too noticeable that she's not wet in the next scene . . . and maybe in another shot you could see the back of Hannigan's head too, maybe you could see her looking up at him and saying something.'

Beside her, Parfitt stirred. ‘A gag?' he suggested. ‘It'll need a gag.'

Baker looked at Swain, and then back at Catrin.

‘We should go and talk it through with the cutter,' he said. ‘See what he thinks.'

The naval officer remained at the table as everybody else got up to leave, and he caught Catrin's eye as she lit a cigarette.

‘I'm afraid I wasn't very much help,' he said. ‘I think I was supposed to be the maritime advisor.'

‘It doesn't matter.' She held out the packet to him and he took one absently and let it droop between his fingers.

‘So there was an accident, was there? In a film studio?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘There was a lamp up near the roof, and it got loosened. It dropped on to a boat and one of the legs gave way.'

‘The legs of the lamp?'

‘The legs of the boat. It wasn't floating, you see, it was on stilts. And then one of the sides of the tank fell down.'

‘A German tank?'

‘A water-tank.'

He examined the cigarette, turning it over between his fingers as if he'd never seen one before. ‘I thought the boat wasn't floating,' he said.

‘It wasn't. But it looked as though it was floating.'

He nodded without comprehension.

‘And someone was killed?' he asked.

She found that she couldn't answer that one.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘A friend of yours, then?'

And she couldn't answer that either – couldn't frame the words, couldn't think of how to define Buckley. She'd received no especial commiseration at his death, had merited no particular status in the mourning; what status could she have claimed? ‘Buckley and Parfitt' had been an entity for twenty-odd years, and would last as long as their pictures were shown; ‘Buckley and Catrin' had almost existed for twenty-odd minutes and had gone, now, for ever. Parfitt – poor Parfitt – had wept when he'd heard about the accident. Catrin had studied her own face and seen only bewilderment and a kind of outrage. She'd thought that her life had begun to follow a plot, but it had only been another incident in a series of incidents, one thing happening and then another, a romantic prologue jammed randomly between farce and tragedy.

‘Are you coming, Mrs Cole?' called Edwin Baker from the corridor.

‘I'm coming.' She nodded awkwardly at the naval officer.

‘What's the title of your film?' he asked. ‘So I can go and see it.'

‘It doesn't have a title yet.'

‘But is it a comedy? Or an action picture? Or a romance?'

She thought for a moment before she replied.

‘It's a true story,' she said.

*

When he'd turned his ankle during the jousting sequence of
My Lady's Favour
(1924) Ambrose had been given his own room in a convalescent home beside Richmond Park. The bay window opposite his bed had afforded a view of rolling greensward, of groups of watchful deer among the spinneys.

From his current bed in men's orthopaedic, he could see Horace Crike, who'd tripped in the blackout and broken his ankle, Vic Shineman, who'd lost a leg when a parachute mine exploded opposite his shop, and Salvatore Cipriano, who was overspill from men's surgical, and who was awaiting the repair of a large hernia in his groin. Ambrose knew it was large, because Salvatore had showed it to him, flinging aside the covers one tedious afternoon to reveal a scrotum the size and shape of a boxing glove. ‘Is agony,' he'd said, unnecessarily.

Five days on from the accident, Ambrose himself was in very little pain, unless one counted the mental anguish caused by his surroundings. What was driving him to utter distraction, however, was the incessant itching. The plaster cast extended in a rigid right-angle from his armpit down to his knuckles, and as it dried, a myriad tiny particles had started to shift and prick within it. Using his other hand, it was only possible to reach under the cast to scratch an inch or so of skin at either end. Unbearable. It was absolutely bloody unbearable.

Cecy had promised to bring in something that might help, and when visiting hour crawled round at last, he'd hoped that she'd be first into the ward as usual, but it was Vic Shineman's wife who led the charge, followed, surprisingly, by Sophie Smith.

‘And how are you, Mr Hilliard?' she asked, arranging herself carefully on the visitor's chair.

‘Beginning to feel very slightly better,' he said, ‘thank you.'

‘I am so glad. I telephoned the hospital yesterday and they said that you were doing as well as might be expected given your age and condition, so I was a little worried.'

‘I see.'

‘I won't stay very long, I don't want to tire you, but I needed to have a word about one or two rather important things.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Before I forget—' She reached into her bag and took out a tissue-wrapped bunch of purple grapes and placed it on the bedside locker.
Grapes!
A gush of saliva filled his mouth; Good God, she must have gone to Harrods and paid a guinea at least for those. Almost involuntarily, he reached out and took one, felt the tug of the stalk, placed the fruit in his mouth, held the wonderful turgid weight of it on his tongue. He bit down, and was immediately disappointed: sour and full of pips.

‘. . . rather fortunate,' Sophie was saying.

Ambrose ejected the pips into his hand. ‘I'm afraid I missed that,' he said.

‘The role that you were offered.'

‘Which role?'

‘The role that I was going to speak to you about on the last day of the studio. I wasn't sure, then, how you might respond, but now it all seems rather fortunate. Bearing in mind your indisposition.'

‘And why's that?' he asked, warily. What part had she dredged up for him now? A buffoon in a bath chair? A crippled mute?

‘Because you would be using your voice,' said Sophie. ‘And only your voice.'

‘You mean wireless?'

‘No. I mean you would be providing the narration for the current film.'

‘But I thought that the American character was going to be the . . .'

Sophie tilted her head very slightly.

‘Oh Christ,' said Ambrose, revelation dawning. ‘They want me to be Lundback.'

‘Apparently you've been helping him with his lines, and your voices are a very good match.'

‘They want me to do Lundback's acting for him.'

‘And I have seen the script for the narration, and it's most eloquent and witty. They say it should be a notable feature of the film.'

‘For which Lundback will get the credit.'

‘And to compensate for that I shall be insisting that you be paid really rather well. I will also be ensuring that a taxi is provided for all your journeys to and from the dubbing suite, and that food considerably more substantial than a sandwich should be available for your luncheon.'

There was a long pause.

‘Where's it being dubbed?' asked Ambrose.

‘I believe in Dean Street.'

‘The Maison Basque is in Dean Street.'

‘I shall make a note of the fact.'

She sat with her gloved hands in her lap, very elegant and upright, the expression in her fine dark eyes faintly sardonic. She was clever, he realized with a jolt; far cleverer than her poor old brother –
dangerously
clever, the sort of cleverness that it would be best to keep in with. The old agency, with its wood-wormed offices, was gone; Sophie would be re-building in steel.

‘Thank you,' he said, rather mechanically. ‘Those terms may be acceptable to me.' His arm, which he had forgotten about for a blessed minute or so, began to itch again.

‘If you're not too tired,' she said, ‘there is one other subject I'd like to discuss.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘It is Cerberus.'

‘Is he well?'

‘No, not very. He has stopped eating and he whines a great deal.'

‘Have you taken him to a veterinary surgeon?'

‘I believe he is pining for you, Mr Hilliard.'

Ambrose closed his eyes, heard again the crash of the lamp, felt the boat lurch, saw the others fall into the water, and a second later saw them whirl away as the far side of the tank disappeared and the pond became a mill-race. And the sole reason that he hadn't been dragged after the others, hadn't been tumbled and buffeted across the studio floor and through the scene-dock doors, was because he'd grabbed the propeller shaft with his right hand. He would thus have been the only one entirely uninjured had Cerberus not then jumped from the stern of the
Redoubtable
, all three stone of him landing squarely on Ambrose's extended arm. The pain had been so excruciating that he'd passed out and hit his head, and had come to ten minutes later to find the dog licking his face. The ambulance-woman had talked about nothing else – ‘the little fellow brought you round, he did' – as if canine spittle were a famous restorative.