by Lissa Evans
He almost missed the sign. On the sole poster displayed outside the Granada in Oxford Street, Night Train to Munich was spelled out in letters eight inches high, while the title of the supporting feature was barely visible, half-concealed by the oblique banner that read ‘Continuous Programme’, and he had walked three paces past the entrance before the significance of ‘Inspec . . . ed Rose Mystery’ struck him like a sandbag. He stopped so suddenly that a Polish airman cannoned into him, but not even an elbow in the ribs could dent the pleasure of the moment, a moment akin to an unexpected glimpse of a much-loved and extremely generous old friend.
The only seats still available were the most expensive. Peering down from the front row of the balcony, Ambrose wondered briefly who might be left actually fighting this war, since the entire British army seemed to be jammed into the stalls, together with a fair sprinkling from the other services, each with a girl by his side, none of them watching the screen, the newsreel having been succeeded by a series of badly-scratched advertising slides.
‘Soap Will Go Twice As Far with
MAZO Soap Energizing Tablets.’
The organist was playing ‘Wish Me Luck’, and Ambrose found himself tapping an accompaniment on the balcony rail; how delightfully things could change in a single moment. There really was nothing to compare with seeing one’s face projected across a gigantic screen in front of a packed and eager audience – and this was not vanity speaking, but professional necessity. In other trades it might be possible to judge almost immediately the effects of one’s skills – the patient is cured, the pupil learns to read – but for the film actor such rewards were distant, speculative. One sent one’s performance off on a journey, packed its sandwiches (so to speak), straightened its collar and waved it goodbye, hoping that it would be greeted appreciatively. Months would go by. A letter, in the form of a review, might land on the mat; a friend or acquaintance might report back with a sighting (‘Awfully good, old man’); but ultimately, one had to make the journey oneself, one had to sit in a darkened auditorium with a host of strangers and gauge, with them, all the strength of that performance, all the subtlety, all the ability of the character to toy with the audience as a zephyr with a leaf, to steer the emotions with the skill and elegance of a gondolier.
‘Sanatogen: How to Win Your War of Nerves.’
Of course that sometimes meant having first to sit through hours of torture. Cinema programmes had stretched to quite ridiculous lengths these days, and there was no respect given to the content – patrons wandered in and out, seats banged during key moments of dialogue, people shouted profanities during the newsreel, managers clambered on stage and announced in stentorian tones what should be done in the event of an alert (as if, for God’s sake, Londoners hadn’t caught on by now), matches flared during night scenes, fish-paste sandwiches added their mephitic stench, and over everything sounded the turbid ebb and flow of bronchial clearance.
‘Shelters Protect You from the Germans – Let Vicks Protect You from Germs!’
The woman behind Ambrose greeted the new slide with an explosion of coughs, and the organist began to draw ‘Wish Me Luck’ to an absurdly elaborate conclusion – great swags of arpeggios, and a trill that seemed designed to leave the eardrums bleeding. The screen went blank, the curtains closed briefly, and then re-opened to the sound of a cymbal clash. An animated squiggle was succeeded by the caption ‘Food Flash’. The audience groaned and a fresh wave of coughing began, but Ambrose leaned forward, his attention caught. The words were replaced by the title card:
‘Alterations to Your Ration Book.’
He leaned back again; not one of his.
‘Get comfortable, will you?’ said the soldier next to him, a sharp-faced sliver of a man with his arm round a charmless blonde. Ambrose gave him a look and then turned back to the screen. And saw his own face.
‘That’s right,’ his own face was saying, while his own hands fiddled with an unlit pipe. In the foreground was the back of a woman’s head – Cecy’s, it was obviously Cecy’s head, he recognized the bun – but the female voice issuing from the back of Cecy’s head was not Cecy’s. The strange woman’s voice was remarking that she’d had to fill in the address on page 4 of her ration book in accordance with instructions from the Ministry of Food, and then Ambrose’s own voice, issuing from the image of Ambrose on the screen, uttered the syllables, ‘Uh huh.’ The voice that wasn’t Cecy’s spoke again, the celluloid Ambrose replied, the extraordinary conversation continued, and the real Ambrose, sitting in the audience, struggled to assimilate what he was watching.
‘Here,’ said the sharp-faced soldier in the next seat. ‘That’s him.’ He gave Ambrose a nudge. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’
Ambrose nodded, trying to keep one eye on the screen. The picture jumped suddenly to a front view of Cecy, and in the foreground was the back of his own head. A man’s voice – a nasty, thin, reedy, expressionless voice that was nothing like his own, and yet was clearly supposed to be issuing from his character – said, ‘Is there anything else we have to do?’ And Cecy shook her head and picked up her knitting before the picture faded to black. The curtains closed again.
Ambrose sat as if concussed.
‘Are you an actor, then?’ asked the soldier’s girl, incredulously.
It was a moment before he could respond, and then he groped for his hat and stood up so suddenly that she recoiled. ‘I thought I was an actor,’ he said, and sensed, rather than saw, the rows of heads turning towards him all across the balcony. ‘I thought I was an actor,’ he repeated, more trenchantly, ‘but now I’ve realized that I’m simply a whore.’ He put on his hat, tipped the brim, edged past the soldier and his girl, and strode up the steps towards the back of the auditorium. And although he was feeling soiled, humiliated, raped, there was still a little part of him that wondered if he’d ever made a finer exit.
‘Canonbury 4541.’
‘Sophie, it’s Ambrose Hilliard. I have to speak to Sammy.’
‘Hello, Mr Hilliard.’ She was softly spoken, her speech more heavily accented than Sammy’s, her tone altogether less buoyant. ‘My brother is walking his dog. Can he return your call?’
‘No, I’m in a telephone box on South Molton Street.’
‘I see.’
There was a pause; Sophie, he’d noticed in the past, never filled in conversational lacunae – that, presumably, was Sammy’s role in the household. In the lengthening silence, Ambrose could feel his dudgeon beginning to slip.
‘Is there anything else?’ asked Sophie.
‘Yes.’ He thought again of the humiliation that he had just sat through and felt a surge of fresh anger. ‘Yes, there is. You can tell that brother of yours—’ Distantly, at the other end of the line, a door slammed.
‘Wait one moment,’ said Sophie, and there was a clunk as the receiver was laid on to a hard surface. Her footsteps receded. For a few seconds nothing was audible and then Ambrose became aware of a clicking sound, a gentle ‘tickety-tackety tickety-tackety’, as if Sophie had slipped on a pair of tap shoes and was tiptoeing back across the hall to the telephone table.
‘Hello?’ he called, warily. ‘Hello?’
The clicking stopped, there was a delicate snuffle at the earpiece and then a noise like a twelve-inch mortar.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ shouted Ambrose, dropping the phone. From the dangling ear-piece he could hear a repetition of the noise and then the tinny yap of his agent’s voice, calling his own name. Cautiously, he lifted the receiver.
‘Sammy?’
‘Oh there you are, Ambrose! Did you hear Cerberus wishing you a shplendid New Year?’
‘Hang Cerberus.’
‘Victory in nineteen forty-woof, he was saying.’
‘Never mind the dog.’
‘Join the WOOFS and win the war!’
‘Sammy, listen to me. I’ve just seen a short film that I did for the MoI chopped to buggery, re-voiced by someone else, and plastered all over the screen. Did yo
u agree to that?’
‘Did I agree to what?’
‘Re-using the footage. Allowing them to show me reacting to a speech that I never heard in the first place. Getting some twerp of an office boy to splutter lines of dialogue over a shot of the back of my head.’
‘I don’t think they asked me shpecifically.’
‘Well they certainly didn’t bloody ask me.’
‘You seem very upset.’
‘Of course I’m upset.’
‘Was it done badly?’
‘It was done, Sammy. Can you not see the insult implicit in that? They’re saying, “We don’t really need an actor for that, let’s get Watkins in accounts, he’ll do a perfectly good job and we don’t have to pay him, either.”’
‘Ah yes. The trouble is, Ambrose, that these Ministry film roles are on a buy-out. The budget’s so tight that—’
‘I don’t need to know about the budget, Sammy.’
‘But there’s a clause in the contract that—’
‘I don’t need to know about clauses. Anything to do with the word “clause” is your bag, not mine. My job is to go out there and act, yours is to make sure that I’m offered decent jobs, that I’m paid adequately and that my skills are neither exploited nor abused, and it increasingly seems to me that you’re doing none of those things.’
‘Ambrose, old fellow—’
‘If I were a painter, I suppose you’d be happy for my canvasses to be cut up with a pair of pinking shears and stuck on greeting cards?’
‘Ambrose, please—’
‘Or perhaps you’d give me a bucket of whitewash and point me towards the nearest wall?’
‘Please be calm, Ambrose.’
‘I am calm.’
‘No, you’re angry.’
‘It’s a controlled anger, Sammy, tempered with an icy detachment. It’s one of the many subtle emotions of which a good actor is capable.’
‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow.’
‘Why tomorrow? I want to discuss it now. You don’t realize quite what a—’
‘Tomorrow when you come for luncheon. You haven’t forgotten you’re coming here?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’ Of course he had.
‘Two o’clock. We’ll have a lovely meal – lokshen, you know – and we’ll take Cerberus for a turn around the Shquare, and then I’ll tell you all about the new Baker’s feature with that nice little role I was mentioning at the . . .’
‘For Christ’s sake, Sammy, how many times do I have to say it?’
‘Say what?’
‘That I don’t want nice, little roles.’
‘But that’s just—’
‘I don’t want them.’
‘That’s just a shlang phrase, it’s a—’
‘If you can only get me nice, little roles then I can see very little point in continuing our association.’
‘But if you could just read the treatment—’
‘In fact, I can see no point at all.’
‘I’ll fetch it for—’
‘Goodbye, Sammy.’
Ambrose downed the receiver and took a long, gratified breath. It was more than a year since he’d concluded a Sammy conversation in this precise way, with the slam of a telephone, and he’d forgotten the deep satisfactions of the gesture. Nice, little. How ironic that Sammy had swallowed whole the mealy-mouthed parsimony of the English language, where every word was qualified and diminished, where all was nicely and fairly and slightly and quite, when what an agent really needed was a hefty slug of Teutonic ambition and the ability to bark orders. It was a pity about tomorrow’s meal – Sophie was a superb cook, as her brother’s figure testified – but accepting Sammy’s hospitality so soon after an argument smacked of capitulation. A few days of deliberate silence was needed, a chance for Sammy to reflect on his client’s needs, to pledge a better class of service in the future. Besides, tonight’s beano would counterbalance any deficiency on the morrow. He could smell that ham. He could almost taste it.
He checked his watch. It occurred to him that there was still time to go back into the cinema and see Inspector Charnforth and the Red Rose Mystery. Of course, he’d have to see if a vacancy had arisen in the stalls – he couldn’t return to his balcony seat; an exit was an exit, after all, a reappearance could only be bathetic.
The light was already dropping from the sky. He joined the short queue at the box-office, and thought how strangely cheerful, all of a sudden, Oxford Street was looking. In the brief spell of twilight, before blackout hour arrived and the shutters were dragged across, the lights in the shops could twinkle just as they had before the war. The vacant lots and burnt-out husks of buildings became invisible, and all was bustle and shine.
‘How kin I help yew?’ asked the girl in the booth, her accent a muddy emulsion of East End and elocution lessons.
‘One for the stalls. Ah—’
He could hear, seeping through the foyer, the looping, rather sinister clarinet theme that accompanied the Charnforth films. It drew him, like a snake-charmer’s melody. He paid his money and took the ticket and walked through the dark tunnel that led to the stalls.
The skies above St John’s Wood were quiet, but over to the east there were searchlights prodding the cloud cover, and the flicker of shells. The occasional aircraft engine sounded above the gunfire, and as Ambrose followed the feeble light of his torch along the pavement, he heard the unmistakable sound of a power-dive. It was impossible not to duck, and he found himself cringing beside the overhang of a neglected hedge, his hand shading the beam of the torch as if the Hun might spot its glow-worm dribble and send a stream of bullets straight through the bulb. He waited for the dive to flatten out, and then straightened and continued his walk; the houses that lined the route were vast, five storeys of ostentation, their detail lost in shadow.
People spoke of ‘Jerry’ now, of course, and not the Hun – he knew that, just as he knew not to talk of Blighty, or of Tommy Atkins; one had to move with the times, to keep abreast, especially in the acting profession, where at the slightest opportunity one might be pigeon-holed, filed and forgotten. It was only the sounds of war – the changeless thump of the batteries, the whizz of shells, that immeasurable beat of silence before the explosion – that sometimes catapulted him back to the old words; even the bray of a donkey, heard as he’d stepped off the bus beside the zoo, had made him think instantly of mules, protesting drearily as they’d hauled the guns through belly-high mud.
His torch started to fail as he turned the corner into Anthea’s street, the beam imploding into a lemony wash, too diffuse for picking out the numbers on the doors. Walking slowly, he traced a hand along the stucco garden walls, counting the front gates, and stopped when his fingers caught on a series of soft spikes protruding over the brickwork; he plucked at one of them and the air filled with the astringent odour of rosemary. The Pyms’ house. He pushed open the gate and climbed the steps.
Behind the glass of their front door (still miraculously intact) someone had cut a stencil of the word ‘welcome’ into the blackout material and filled the gap with violet gauze. The result was friendly, pubbish. Ambrose straightened his coat, tilted his hat and gave the bell-pull a yank.
Anthea had lost weight. She had always possessed a fine figure, firm yet curved, like a ship’s figurehead, but now she’d acquired corners and edges. Above the neckline of the slate-grey dress, her collarbones protruded like chisel blades.
‘Ambrose,’ she said, spotting him beside the supper-table. ‘I thought I might find you here. Do help yourself.’
‘Very funny. Whose idea was this?’
‘Mine, actually. I thought there was something rather dreadful about a houseful of guzzlers when the whole future of our country is in jeopardy, and of course I run the local Savings Group and we’re on a Weapons Drive so I came up with a novelty idea. I call it the Battle Buffet.’ She glanced towards the array of dishes, each containing a scattering of coins rather than food, and sporting a ha
nd-written flag on a spike. ‘We’re doing quite nicely, I see. Have you contributed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Towards the . . . ?’
‘Spitfire.’
‘Half a crown – very generous. Still, this chap here looks awfully empty, doesn’t he . . . ?’ She nudged the salver labelled ‘Wellington bomber: 5/-’ towards Ambrose and, after a bitter pause, he reached for his wallet. As he did so, Anthea caught sight of someone on the other side of the room, exclaimed ‘Binnie!’ at a volume that would have reached the length of a hockey pitch and hurried away, and Ambrose relaxed his grip on a florin and instead took out two threepenny bits and dropped them into the ‘Hand-grenade: 6d’ tureen. He looked up to see that Anthea’s mother had silently arrived at the other end of the table and was watching him with the intensity of a Russian border guard.
‘Oh,’ he said, both displeased and startled. ‘Hello, Mrs Whartley.’
Without replying, she dropped her gaze to his wallet and he found himself, as if hexed, once again raking through the change purse, this time extracting five shillings. The money tinkled into the dish and he reflected that so far this evening he had expended the price of a half-decent restaurant meal without actually eating a single thing. Glumly, he finished his glass of insipid punch (the only drink on offer) and saw that the old bitch was still staring at him. She looked much the same as ever – four foot ten of gristle and malevolence. ‘So how are you?’ he asked, not even attempting to inject a note of interest into his voice.
She looked at him with sharpened interest. ‘Gerard?’
‘No, I—’ He actually glanced over his shoulder in case she was addressing someone else, but there was no one behind him apart from a group of girls. He turned back. ‘I’m not Ge—’
‘Gerard!’ She scuttled the length of the table and fastened herself to one of his arms, her face upturned to his with an expression of girlish delight, hideously at odds with her appearance. ‘Gerard,’ she repeated with a happy exhalation, her teeth slipping.
