Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans

  ‘No, I . . .’

  ‘Gerard.’

  ‘I’m Ambrose,’ he said, desperately. ‘Your ex-son-in-law. The one you hate.’

  ‘Mother—’ It was Anthea again, returning. She gently detached the old lady from his arm. ‘You’re looking rather stunned,’ she said. ‘Did mother just call you Gerard?’

  ‘Yes, she did, actually. Who is Gerard?’

  ‘A cousin of hers, I think. My mother no longer recognizes people that she doesn’t see regularly. It happened rather quickly, the doctor says it was probably a type of brain seizure. This isn’t Gerard, mother, it’s Ambrose.’

  Her mother smiled again, took one of Ambrose’s hands, raised it to her mouth and kissed the knuckles.

  ‘She’s pleased to see everyone now,’ said Anthea. ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? When you remember what she used to be like.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘So how are you, Ambrose?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I had an appalling experience this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I went to the cinema—’

  ‘I didn’t think you had a picture out at the moment.’

  ‘It was a re-issue.’

  ‘Oh I see.’

  ‘And I was watching an informational short that came earlier in the programme when I suddenly realized that it was a re-edited version of a piece that I’d shot last June. Someone had taken the film, disassembled it and . . . Anthea?’ She’d been standing with her head cocked, her attention clearly elsewhere.

  ‘Sorry, thought I heard the start of the wobbler. Imagining it. You were saying about the appalling thing that happened.’

  ‘Yes. Someone had re-voiced one of my shots and re-used it in a completely different context. Actually re-voiced it!’

  She nodded, but absently, having clearly missed the import of the story. In the momentary silence his stomach gave an audible moan. ‘Is there really nothing to eat?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. There’s plenty of punch.’

  ‘I’ve had some.’

  ‘Food’s the last thing on my mind these days.’

  ‘You’re thinner, certainly.’

  ‘It’s all the worry.’ She smiled, bleakly. ‘Still, we all have worries.’

  ‘Of course.’ He wondered which of his own troubles he could usefully lay before her. ‘I spotted today that half my bloody roof’s been blown off.’

  ‘Snap.’

  ‘And I can’t get a man to come and mend it.’

  ‘Double snap. I had to send Harris up there last week with a tarpaulin.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was no good, then; he pondered for a moment. ‘I’m stuck for a domestic as well. I don’t suppose your housemaid could stretch to a . . . ?’

  ‘She’s off making shells.’ There was a pause, which Anthea seemed disinclined to fill. Ambrose glanced around the enormous drawing-room, at the heavy curtains, almost theatrical in their dimensions. ‘God, those windows must be the most appalling worry. I can’t see why you and Harris don’t board this place up and get out of London. I couldn’t go, of course, it’s simply impossible in my line of business, I need to be on the spot to . . .’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Ambrose.’ She said the words with such vehemence that her mother started and one or two people looked round, curiously. She lowered her voice. ‘Do you honestly think that I’m worrying myself to a shred about windows? Or roof tiles? Do you think it’s the servant problem that’s running through my mind, day in, day out, every second that I’m awake, and most of the time that I’m asleep?’

  She had always been mistress of the flung question; if one waited, then the answer would follow. Ambrose raised his eyebrows expectantly. Seconds passed. He lifted his punch glass, forgetting that it was empty, and Anthea removed it from his hand and placed it on the table.

  ‘The reason I’m worried, Ambrose,’ she said, leaning towards him and speaking slowly, ‘is because I have three stepsons whom I adore, one of whom is at sea, one of whom is God knows where or in which continent, and one of whom is probably somewhere over Europe as we speak.’

  ‘Oh yes . . . the Pym boys.’

  ‘They’re my boys, too. I’ve been their mother for nearly nine years.’

  ‘Of course.’ He still thought of them as schoolboys, barely out of short trousers. ‘Philip, isn’t it? And Jeffrey, and er . . . Hale . . .’

  ‘Alec, Simeon and Lesley,’ she said, coldly. ‘You’re not even close.’

  And yet the names Philip and Jeffrey (and Hale) seemed strangely familiar to him; he dug around in his memory. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, unearthing them, ‘this’ll amuse you. I know where I got those names from, they’re from a character in one of the Inspector Charnforth Mysteries, Philip Jeffrey-Hale. I was thinking about him earlier. He’s a traitor and jewel thief who’s eventually shot after selling . . .’ Anthea was shaking her head. ‘. . . after selling military secrets to the . . .’ She was still shaking her head. ‘. . . to the Russians via the House of Lords. What on earth’s the matter?’

  She looked at him queerly. ‘I’ve had enough, Ambrose.’

  ‘Enough of what?’

  ‘Of you. The joke’s lost its savour.’

  ‘What joke?’

  ‘The joke of . . . of . . .’ Uncharacteristically, she broke eye-contact and started fiddling with the platefuls of coins. ‘. . . having a little bit of glamour in my history. Having an ex-film-star ex-husband who comes along to my parties and talks about his pictures as if he’s Clark Gable and Errol Flynn rolled into one, as if there’s nothing that’s more important in the entire world than the tiniest, most fiddling detail of his own career, or what’s left of it. I used to think it was funny that there was no topic that didn’t somehow lead back to one of your films, that someone could mention anything at all – could mention, I don’t know . . . the word spoon – and we’d find ourselves listening to how Louise Brooks stirred your tea on the back lot at Denham when you were rehearsing Just Another Springtime in 1925, and I’d laugh about it with my friends, and now I don’t find it funny any more. I don’t. There truly are more important things going on, Ambrose, awful things, terrifying things, and no one gives a fig about whether one of your silly little films has been played upside down or at the wrong speed or whatever it was—’

  ‘Re-voiced. It was re-voiced.’

  ‘I don’t care, Ambrose. No one cares. Why on earth should they care when you don’t show the slightest reciprocal interest? I used to think that it was a case of pure selfishness but since mother’s little do I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t a tiny bit of your brain missing. You’ve read that Mr Forster book – you know, “only connect” – well, I think there must be a bundle of wires somewhere in your head that’s . . . oh blast.’ There was no mistaking it this time, the dreary swoop of the siren slicing through the chatter. ‘Into the basement!’ called Anthea. ‘Everyone into the basement! Someone help me with the buffet, please, we can’t leave all this lovely money lying here. Ambrose, please take mother. Into the basement, come along now!’

  A bottleneck formed at the door. Beyond the mêlée, Ambrose caught a glimpse of Harris Pym clapping on a white warden’s helmet. It had been at another party – a film industry party, as a matter of fact, held at the Rock Studios in Elstree in 1930, to celebrate the release of Forever Gay (Ambrose had played Ivor Novello’s suicidal brother: ‘Ambrose Hilliard gives a performance of great intensity’ Daily Mail) – that Harris and Anthea had first met. ‘Harris Pym, Pym’s Cooked Meats,’ the little man had said, shaking hands with Ambrose. ‘We’ve just won the supply contract for the new refectories.’ He’d been an ugly little bugger then, too.

  ‘Come on, everybody,’ called Anthea, from the doorway. Ambrose looked around for his ex-mother-in-law, and found her standing directly behind him.

  ‘Mrs Whartley?’

  She looked up at him with a start of pleasure. ‘Dear man,’ she said.

  He felt an odd internal dislocation,
a spasm of recollection that seemed to heave within him, momentarily, like a mole beneath a lawn. When was it that he’d last seen precisely that expression? He tried, and failed, to pinpoint the memory.

  ‘Dear, dear man,’ she repeated.

  The siren wound down, and in the sudden quiet he could hear the insistent, broken beat of the Heinkel engines approaching; he took the old besom’s arm and hurried her towards the stairs.

  That night he dreamed of food – of bortsch, piquant and ruby-red, of leg of lamb, of potato cakes with a sweet onion sauce, of noodle pudding, cinnamon-scented and studded with raisins. ‘Eat, please, eat,’ urged Sophie, piling a second helping of lokshen into his bowl, but as he reached for his spoon he heard a great gurgling roar that dragged him away from the table and flung him into the darkness of his bedroom. He lay where he’d landed, listening to the yodel of his empty stomach, watching, through half-closed eyes, the progress of a thin band of light that poked from behind the shutters and crept gradually along the wall like an extendable ruler.

  He’d reached home by half-past midnight. The raid had been a short one, but he’d felt disinclined to stay at the party after the all-clear. He’d seen in the New Year at the bus stop, where a group of sailors had slurred their way through an obscenity-laden version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, the opening lyric, ‘Fuck Auld Acquaintance up the Arse’, striking Ambrose as a distinctly apposite comment on the whole evening.

  Strain was a peculiar thing, of course – it could sharpen the mind but it could also blunt it, it could turn ants into lions, and lions into kittens, and, in Anthea’s case, it had clearly sent her round the bend. It was fortunate, really, that a lifetime in the industry had inured him to such petty personal attack. Thus when the missiles of bile and jealousy were hurtling across the set, he could quietly don the breastplate of professionalism and the shield of feigned deafness and continue unscathed. As a result, he bore neither scars nor grudges. Speaking of which, he could really see no reason not to take up Sammy’s offer of lunch; it was a crime to waste food, and, after all, one had to placate as well as chastise . . .

  A foreign-looking woman in a headscarf answered the door of Sammy’s flat. She stared at the bunch of anemones he was holding, and then glanced sharply at his gardenia buttonhole.

  ‘Miss Smith don’t want to see nobody,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been invited for luncheon.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sammy has invited me for New Year’s Day luncheon.’

  The woman moved her jaw very slightly, as if chewing on his statement.

  ‘He ask you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait.’ She closed the door, leaving him alone in the communal hallway. It smelled of beeswax. There was no aroma of roasting meat issuing from the flat, no rattle of pans. Disconcerted, he lit a cigarette. He had smoked half of it by the time the door opened again.

  ‘Mr Hillier, you are?’ said the woman.

  ‘Hilliard. Yes.’

  ‘Miss Smith say to tell you that Mr Smith dead in bomb.’

  ‘What? Nonsense . . .’ Stupid woman. ‘I spoke to him yesterday afternoon.’

  She looked at him silently. The whites of her eyes were very red.

  ‘What bomb?’ he asked. ‘Where was there a bomb?’

  ‘His office.’

  ‘He wasn’t in the office, I spoke to him here. It was New Year’s Eve, why would he go to his office?’

  Behind the woman, somewhere off the dark corridor that ran the length of the flat, a door smacked against the wall. There was a bursting rush along the parquet, and Sammy’s brindled dog hurtled past the coat rack and came to a scrabbling halt between the door frame and the foreign woman’s legs. It looked up at Ambrose, panting, and then looked past him, into the empty hallway. The thumping tail slowed a little.

  ‘He went into his office especially, Mr Hilliard. To collect something for you.’ It was Sophie’s voice, issuing from the doorway of an unlit room. Ambrose could see nothing of her but a shoulder, the crook of an elbow.

  ‘For me? What do you mean, “for me”?’

  ‘He wanted to fetch a film treatment for you to read. He expected that you’d turn up for lunch today. Even though you were so rude to him.’

  The cigarette was burning his fingers. He dropped it hastily. ‘Are you sure that he’s . . . ? I mean, how do you know that he’s . . . ?’

  ‘They sent a policeman to tell me.’

  The dog yawned, a noise like the squeal of an unoiled hinge. It seemed to Ambrose that time had passed and yet the scene remained static – the visitor at the door, the foreign woman with the accusatory stare, the voice from the shadows. It was as if one of the characters had dried on their next line; he searched through his own script. ‘Dreadful,’ he said. ‘That’s dreadful news. Of course, if there’s anything I can do . . .’

  There was another gap without dialogue. Cerberus sighed gustily and ambled back into the flat, toenails clicking.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘They’ve asked for someone to go and identify him. Will you do that for me, please?’

  *

  He had done it before. In Looking-Glass (1928) he had been shown the body of his young wife, killed when her circus act was sabotaged by a jealous knife-thrower. The script had said, ‘Langley Austen, his face a mask of anguish, embraces Thecla’s lifeless form and swears to the gods that he will be avenged’ but Ambrose had argued, successfully, for a less exaggerated approach – the bereaved man’s head drooping brokenly, his shoulders hunched with pain, one hand reaching out hopelessly towards the lifeless form and then withdrawing, like a wounded animal, and then a slow, almost imperceptible forging of the inner will, a whitening of the knuckles, the gradual lifting of the face to show eyes that glowed with determination and burned with molten hatred. In the event, the first thirty seconds of subtle emotional play had been hacked off in the cutting room, leaving a brief glimpse of his character looking utterly demented, followed by the caption, ‘I Will Have my Revenge on that Beast from Hell!’, a fine example of the crass technique of those who claimed to have artistic control of the kinematic industry. He’d also had occasion to enter a mortuary in the role of Professor Gough (Inspector Charnforth and the China Clay Mystery), although the camera in that case had remained tastefully on the threshold, panning from the closing door to the sign on the exterior wall.

  There was no sign on the wall of the temporary mortuary in the warehouse on Floral Street, and no door either. A piece of sacking hung from the frame, and as Ambrose paid the taxi-cab driver, the hessian was pushed aside by two ambulance-women carrying an empty stretcher between them. They paused to light cigarettes, and the taller of the two girls flicked the spent match in his direction. She had a round face, as plain and unadorned as a turnip.

  ‘You here for an identification?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not this entrance. You reely don’t want this entrance.’

  Her companion emitted a little squeak of agreement.

  ‘Where, then?’ asked Ambrose.

  ‘Through the alley and round to the right.’ She stood casually, booted feet at ease; her overalls were bunched around her torso, unsexing her. She reminded Ambrose of a stage hand, brawny and unbiddable. He walked past her, not letting his eyes stray towards the sodden canvas of the stretcher.

  It seemed sunnier at the front of the building. The other entrance had a red cross painted on the wall beside it, and a pretty little nurse so crisp and clean in her uniform, so delicate in her enquiries, that he felt like congratulating the casting director.

  ‘In here,’ she said, and, ‘Please wait’, and ‘Do you need a chair?’ And then she hurried away and returned after a short time, and led him along a corridor and into a starkly-lit room where sheeted bodies lay on tables, and bowed figures stood in tableaux beside them.

  ‘I need to warn you,’ she said, ‘that Mr Smith may not look quite as you remember . . .’

  The sheet th
at covered Sammy was not a bed-sheet, but a length of unbleached cotton, like the material of a flour sack. Pure white was supposed to be difficult to light, of course – cameramen were always complaining about the brightness of white shirts, and requiring that white walls were ‘dirtied down’. If he had earned a guinea for every time that he’d been forced to wait in full make-up under baking lights while some junior member of the art department idly daubed a wall with—

  ‘Really – if you don’t feel that you can do this, Mr Hiller . . .’

  ‘Hilliard. Of course I can do it. Take the sheet away.’

  Carefully, she folded back the top section. Something quite fundamental had happened to Sammy’s face. The convexity had been lost, the nose split from bridge to nostrils, a dark pulp filling the fissure, and though an effort had been made to wash him, the remaining features were outlined in black, as if with a grease pen. Shake a London building and there was filth, centuries of it. The neck was webbed in grime; even the fingertips, just visible under the edge of sheet, looked like those of a navvy, dirt rammed beneath the nails.

  The nurse touched Ambrose lightly on the sleeve. ‘Mr Hillyer?’

  ‘Hilliard.’ Dirt rammed beneath the nails . . .

  Dirt rammed beneath the nails . . .

  It was the cryptic sign that hung in plain sight, the clue too obvious to be deemed a clue, except in the oblique vision of an academic seen by some as eccentric but by others as a focused beam of pure thought. Professor Gough smiled at the nurse.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, looking confused, ‘but can you confirm that this is Mr Smith?’

  ‘I’m afraid I cannot.’

  ‘Oh. You mean—’

  ‘I mean, my dear,’ he spoke gently, almost absent-mindedly, ‘that this is not Mr Smith. Someone has obviously made a mistake – a very, very simple mistake, but one that might possibly fool the less vigilant. But perhaps I should explain . . .’

  He held the look – wry, a little melancholy – and waited for the cut. They’d possibly need another take for sound; one of the background extras had sniffed loudly during the last speech.