Barbed Wire and Roses

by Peter Yeldham

  Two months later, a film script Patrick had written attracted the interest of Tim Carruthers, the executive in charge of BBC Films who was looking for a co-production. The story was set in Sydney Town when it was still a penal colony in the 1820s, a costume comedy based on a true story of three convicts who robbed a private bank. As the bank was owned by an unpopular autocrat, the event was hailed with jubilation and the robbers achieved hero status. In Patrick’s fictional ending they avoided capture and returned to England where, rich and respectable, they became benefactors.

  He had a phone call followed by emails saying that if he cared to consider a joint venture and could agree to terms, they would approach a major distributor like Miramax. If so, they could have a cinema feature with television and DVD sales to follow. If not, BBC Worldwide could consider it as a telemovie. Either way it seemed highly promising.

  However (there was always a ‘however’, Patrick reflected ruefully), they would not at this time agree to an advance payment. This was followed by a more personal letter from Tim Carruthers, explaining the BBC was enduring yet another cost-cutting crusade. He liked the script but was limited on funds. The best way for Patrick to advance his cause was to get on a plane. Meetings in London were essential, and he assumed Patrick would want to be independent and take a ‘producer position’ at this stage — by paying his own fare and expenses and thus avoiding a servant-and-master relationship.

  Crafty bugger, Patrick thought, but knew he’d have to take the risk. It was a complete gamble, but there was no option. This was a real chance to free himself from ten years of writing television series, and join his wife in working on the big screen. Writer-producer: it was something he’d been struggling to achieve for years. The lack of an advance to defray expenses was a blow, but he’d never get anywhere without grabbing opportunity when it beckoned.

  He settled for the following month, a few days before the 2000 Games began. Cost wise, it was an ideal time to travel. He booked a cheap seat on one of the flights that would be returning half empty after delivering a planeload of Olympic visitors. Able to save on the fare, he decided to take some extra days in France. Make a brief visit to the actual places where Stephen Conway had fought. Perhaps there he could find out something. Or else, using the diary as a guide, at least retrace his grandfather’s footsteps.

  If it led to nothing, he would have done his best.

  EIGHT

  Outside the terminal in the blaze of afternoon Patrick could hear loudspeakers summoning the faithful to prayer. In the overcrowded airport transit lounge mobile phones were ringing like a symphony of protest. His plane was delayed; it was to be an hour, then longer; now it appeared uncertain whether it would leave at all that day. Visions of three hundred passengers bussed to an overnight hotel weighed on everyone’s mind. Some had become enraged, unfairly threatening those at the transit desk: they were going to miss connecting flights and would never use this airline again. The harassed staff, their apologies met with abuse, became unhelpful and terse. Patrick thought that when modern travel was disrupted like this it was akin to the biblical conception of hell.

  Tired and bored, he watched the veiled Arab women, rendered faceless by burquas, all armed with mobile phones on which they held murmured conversations while he wondered to whom they spoke: was it a husband, lover, children or friend? Some in heavy robes looked mediaeval; the tiny handsets they held an odd denial of this illusion. Then his own phone rang, sounding like a badly tuned piano. It was Joanna, calling from Melbourne where she was in the final weeks of shooting studio scenes.

  ‘How was the flight?’

  ‘It’s not over yet,’ Patrick said.

  ‘But you’ve turned your phone on. You must be somewhere on the ground.’

  ‘I am,’ he confirmed grimly, ‘I’m definitely on the ground.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Bahrain. Plane trouble. We’ve been stuck here for five hours.’

  ‘God! Can’t you switch to a Qantas flight? I told you not to take an El Cheapo.’

  ‘You did,’ he admitted reluctantly. It had been the subject of heated words a few days ago when she found out he was on a cut-price ticket. ‘You told me this whole self-financed trip to meet with the BBC was a big gamble and a pretty stupid idea.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ she replied after a prolonged pause. ‘I just thought I’d call to wish you luck.’

  ‘Thanks. I might need it.’

  ‘Fingers crossed, darling. What’s that babble I can hear in the background?’

  ‘An announcement of another flight, taking off for somewhere else with a lucky load of happy smiling passengers.’

  ‘My, we are stressed.’

  ‘Pissed off is the word. The latest rumour is the flight could be cancelled, and we’ll be shoved into a hotel for the night. I’ve run out of clean clothes and security says all luggage stays on the plane until we reach Paris.’

  ‘Paris? So you’re still determined on that mad pilgrimage to go looking for Grandfather Stephen?’

  ‘Hardly looking for him. I’ve budgeted for time in France, that’s all. I want to follow the places he mentions in his diary.’

  ‘What’s the point? After so many years, Patrick, what really is the point?’

  He was silent for a moment. If you have to ask that question, Patrick thought, I don’t think I can give you a coherent answer. He’d tried but failed to make her understand how deeply Stephen’s diary with its cramped writing and poignant words had affected him — how it was like a voice that bridged two generations — but before he could even make another attempt to explain this there was a loud cheer as the flight indicator shuffled its lettering from delayed to boarding. He heard the perfect English tones of the Arabian hostess announce Flight 01 to Paris was now resuming, and to kindly switch off all computers, PlayStations and mobile phones. An instant queue formed, the relieved passengers quickly forgiving the airline at the prospect of reaching their destination today after all.

  ‘Gotta go, Jo,’ he said hastily. ‘At long last it seems we’re taking off. Talk to you in a day or two.’

  ‘But what is the point?’ she persisted.

  ‘I tried to tell you once or twice. You weren’t listening.’

  ‘Okay, I’m listening now.’

  In the transit lounge people were streaming past. The place was rapidly emptying. At the departure gate, ground staff were looking in his direction.

  ‘Now I’ve got to go. I’m out of here.’

  ‘Then send me a postcard from one of the war memorials — if you have the time,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Don’t be like that.’ He changed the subject, not wanting to leave on an acerbic note. ‘Good luck with the rest of the filming. You’ll be finished shooting before I’m back.’

  ‘Two more weeks. When will I see you?’

  ‘Depends. I have to stick around to try and sew up this deal, even if it takes me a month.’

  ‘Be positive, darling. Don’t let the Brits push you around. And don’t waste too much time in La Belle France.’

  ‘A few days is all I can afford.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is you think you’re looking for, I hope you find it.’

  It was cramped in economy. The man in front farted repeatedly, and what drifted back was virulent with garlic. The woman in the seat beside Patrick slept, while her child who had claimed the aisle had a head cold and a running nose. It was going to be a long last leg of the journey. He looked wistfully towards the sharp end as flight attendants carrying trays bustled through the curtains, and he glimpsed the luxury of business class and the distant opulence of first.

  It had been a simple choice. Save money on the fare and be able to stay at a modest hotel in central London. Since this was a trip at his own expense, economy was vital, if not very comfortable. The delay in Bahrain had not helped, nor had the inopportune timing of Joanna’s phone call.

  He’d been edgy with her. It had been happening too frequently of lat
e. There were tensions since their lives had been transformed by the acclaim that followed her award. Even before then the relationship had been a delicate balancing act; that was inevitable with her a major film director and he a working writer for television. In their industry these were two quite different levels of achievement. Now she’d moved up in the world to where the press speculated on the size of her salary, and if they ever thought of him it was probably as the house husband. This made things awkward, particularly when she wanted to transform their lives with her good fortune: a more up-market car, a prestigious apartment when she found the perfect one, as well as wanting to finance his trip, which they’d rowed about. He knew she’d rung to express regret for that spat, because it was their custom not to let rows fester. Like their other private rule: never go to sleep after a major quarrel — make love first. They’d had too many quarrels and tried to compensate with a great deal of love in the past six months.

  A screen on the bulkhead was showing news from around the world, including highlights on the eve of the Olympic Games in Sydney. The opening ceremony was just two days away. There were impressive views of the Olympic venues; thousands of volunteers had enrolled and the city was en fete with anticipation. Joanna could not comprehend how he could bear to be out of the country for the Millennium Olympiad. Easily, he’d told her, and argued that she’d have had no real interest in the Games if she had not been shooting a movie that was using it as a background.

  They’d met six years ago at a film premiere. Patrick had heard of Joanna Lugarno and her talent, had even seen her photographs, but was unprepared to find himself so instantly smitten. The previous year she’d been the star graduate from the Film and Television School’s directors’ course, and was considered to have it all: the talent as well as brains and beauty. Magazines competed for her presence in their pages; her slim figure, Italian good looks with exotic almond-shaped eyes and a sensuous mouth made many think back to the beauty of the young Sophia Loren.

  The attraction had been mutual. The following day they met for dinner, and went back to his apartment where they spent an ecstatic weekend together, most of it in bed. On the Monday morning, hoping he could persuade her to move in, he was startled by the news she was leaving for Hollywood that week. Her American agent had insisted she must make the quantum leap; only by arriving there and becoming visible could she hope to succeed. The agent claimed this would lead to interviews with the right people, and he was certain that with her status, plus her more-than-useful looks, offers to direct a movie would be bound to follow.

  It led to their first quarrel, Patrick remembered ironically. He’d tried to warn her Los Angeles — although he preferred to call it Toxic City — was a hard, tough place, and many of the fringe agents there were shysters. It was one thing to be invited with airfare paid and an offer on the table; quite another to arrive and expect things to happen. Some of his friends had done that and returned with nothing to show for it but busted bank accounts and disillusion.

  Joanna had thanked him nicely for the warning, but said her Italian father hadn’t listened to sound advice when he migrated to Australia in the 1960s, and he was now on the local council and owned half a street of houses in Leichhardt. At the youthful age of twenty-three, she felt caution was not an option. It had been a truly lovely weekend, and she admitted she hadn’t told him until now because she did not want to spoil it. And if he was ever in LA, she hoped to return the hospitality by offering him bed and breakfast.

  It was nine months before she had come home and admitted he was right: it had been awful, bleak; an ugly nightmare. She had spent most of the time alone, sitting in coffee shops reading the trades as no one there seemed to read anything else. A mobile phone was her companion. Like the phone in the apartment she’d rented, it rarely rang. Hollywood — she used the word like a malediction — was full of people she’d thought were friends, but few had bothered to call her. In the City of the Angels it was not considered a smart career move to be seen with someone who might be headed for failure.

  Six weeks after she returned, they were married. They wanted a quiet ceremony, but her father the councillor had a few hundred close Italian friends who would feel insulted not to be invited, so it was a nuptial mass in the cathedral, then a wedding breakfast that was more like a pageant. Joanna was twenty-four, Patrick just three years older. Friends predicted a successful showbiz marriage: a rarity. Or, as his best man confided, it was bound to last because any man would be crazy to split with a chick who looked like her. And if he did, her dad might put the Mafia onto him.

  If Patrick thought the LA experience would stall her career, he was mistaken. Her ambition after it seemed relentless, as though fuelled by that failure. She directed several television dramas, and her first feature film a year later was a production made on a shoe-string. The critics loved it. One called it ‘a low-budget movie that makes all the high-budget films we’re turning out look third rate. Joanna Lugarno is a big talent, very much in the style and mode of Jane Campion.’

  When they talked of the future it was about work, sometimes Patrick’s TV scripts, but more often her films; they put the idea of children on hold. Her widowed father was impatient for them to start a family. Joanna was his only child, and while proud of her accomplishments, he had a Latin longing for grandchildren and a large dynasty.

  ‘When will you have bambino?’ was Carlo Lugarno’s constant question, and becoming impatient, he once reproached Patrick. ‘You and she only want to make films, not babies!’

  Joanna did not dispute this, saying she loved her dad, but had no intention of becoming an incubator in order to make him a patriarch. Later on, she promised, they’d have a child, but this was the best creative time of her life and she did not want to stop the clock, not yet anyway.

  She directed three more films in the ensuing five years, all on location so they became used to separations. Time spent apart made them amoroso, she always said, and that was why it would be good to be together again. If there were to be quarrels, so what? Some lusty amoroso was the best way to solve everything.

  Patrick left his hotel near the Quai Voltaire soon after dawn, while the roads out of Paris were free of traffic. By the time he passed Compeigne the sun was rising, lighting the farmlands and hillsides greened by recent rain. He detoured from the motorway and drove along quiet roads through the countryside. This sector of France once known as Picardy, the scene of so many ferocious battles, was now unmarked by war. Wheat and corn grew; cattle grazed in peaceful fields. At the next village that Patrick reached shops were opening, and people were leaving the bakery with fresh loaves of bread.

  It felt unreal. The only photographs he had seen of this place, Villers-Bretonneux, were those of mutilated streets and bombed houses and, worst of all, a park where soldiers lay choking after a gas attack. Cruel pictures tarnished by time, kept in the back of the diary of a man he had never known: Stephen Conway, who had gone to war at the age of nineteen and never returned. Long ago, his father had told him that Stephen was apparently killed somewhere near this village. But like so many others interred in mass burials or blown to pieces, there was no grave.

  A cafe was open. He ordered coffee and croissants at a table outside. As he waited a number of children entered a large building opposite. The proprietor brought his breakfast, and indicated the house as if he might be interested.

  ‘Salle Victoria,’ he said. ‘Jeune elementaire I’ecole.’

  Patrick smiled his thanks, unsure why his attention had been directed to it, but divined from the age of the pupils that it was an infants’ school. Moments later he heard a piano inside the building play an introductory bar, then followed by the massed voices of the children. He almost spilt his coffee. The tune was unmistakable, but he had never heard Waltzing Matilda sung with such animation. Their soaring young voices, the words cogent even if unfamiliar in French, gave the song a special eloquence.

  ‘Bravo, oui? Le Waltz Matilda.’ The owner returned to join P
atrick, smiling as he nodded his head in time to the music. He was a rotund, amiable man, eager to share in Patrick’s surprised enjoyment.

  ‘Who on earth taught them to sing it?’

  ‘Their papas, mamas. Parents, is that the English word?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the parents of the parents. Each parent teach their child, since the school was rebuilt after 1918.’

  ‘And how often do the children sing it?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘Every day,’ the cafe owner said. ‘When I was there at school we sing to remember the Australians who save this town. Not only Villers-Bretonneux, they save Amiens, perhaps even Paris itself.’

  ‘Did they really do that?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘More than that. Much more. After your coffee, you should go and see for yourself what it says on le plaque.’

  He crossed the street where it was quiet now. He glimpsed attentive children through a classroom window where an elderly male teacher was busy writing sums on a blackboard. To Patrick it seemed his visit might be an intrusion, but the friendly cafe proprietor had been insistent. It was a school day, but he would be welcome. Australians always were. That was why his country’s flag flew here on official days, and a painting of kangaroos was displayed on their civic building.

  The plaque was framed by a garland of flowers. The inscription was kept brightly polished and from it Patrick learnt rebuilding the school had been a gift from children in Victoria who had raised the funds for it. There was a glowing tribute paid to the Australian soldiers who had given their lives in the heroic recapture of the town and were buried in local graves. The engraving ended with the words:

  MAY THE MEMORY OF GREAT SACRIFICES IN A COMMON CAUSE KEEP AUSTRALIA AND FRANCE TOGETHER IN BONDS OF FRIENDSHIP AND MUTUAL ESTEEM.