Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans

  ‘No,’ said a woman’s voice behind him, above the rising wail of a child. ‘Get away, get away,’ and Ambrose turned to see Cerberus dancing along the sward with half a biscuit in his mouth, the other half still in the hand of a toddler.

  ‘Whose dog is that?’ shouted the woman, an Irish type with a jaw like a bottle-opener and an air of barely repressed violence. ‘Is that your dog?’ she added, staring at Ambrose.

  ‘No it isn’t,’ he said coldly. He turned away again and found himself looking directly at Carl Lundback. The man was walking up the path towards him, looking – as usual – like an artist’s projection of the adult Tom Sawyer.

  ‘Mind if I join you, sir?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Ambrose. ‘I was just stretching my legs.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. They told me I could see the whole way to the Tower of London from here. Cigarette?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Lundback reached into his breast pocket and took out a packet of Players, and Ambrose almost did a double-take. Players! Unobtainable for the past bloody year. So where had they come from? Stockpiled in a warehouse for the sole use of visiting Yanks? And would they taste as good as they always . . . ? Yes. Yes, they would. He inhaled with a mixture of pleasure and pique.

  ‘It’s quite a view,’ said Lundback.

  ‘Yes, I think you’ll find that earth hath not anything to show more fair.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So which one’s the Tower of London?’ asked Lundback. ‘Because I promised my—’

  There was a roar from the sky that momentarily drowned all speech. Three silhouettes passed swiftly overhead, travelling east.

  ‘Hurricanes,’ said Lundback. He stayed with his face tipped to the empty sky. ‘Sure wish I was up there now.’

  ‘Really? You’d rather be flying than making the film?’

  ‘Sure I would.’ He sounded utterly sincere. ‘That’s why I came here,’ he added, looking at Ambrose with blue-eyed candour. ‘To fly. To fight for Finland.’

  ‘For Finland?’

  ‘My mom and dad are from Oulu. My mom cried for a week when Finland was invaded.’

  ‘But Finland was invaded by Russia. We’re not at war with Russia.’

  Lundback acknowledged this with a duck of the head. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I only found that out when I got here. And then I spent a night in London and I saw what Hitler was putting you guys through, and I figured that maybe you could do with a little help as well.’ He gave a smile of such disconcerting sweetness that Ambrose had to fight the urge to start thanking him. Though, of course, it would come to that eventually. America would enter the war at some point, and then for the next fifty years would expect unceasing gratitude.

  ‘Maybe I’ll get to fight Russia later on,’ added Lundback, almost wistfully.

  ‘So I don’t understand,’ said Ambrose, ‘if you’d rather be flying, then why are you in this film?’

  ‘I’m under orders, sir.’

  ‘The RAF ordered you to do it?’

  ‘Yes sir. They said they hoped it’d be good for Eagle Squadron recruitment. They said to regard it as a temporary posting, sir.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, I’m not your squadron leader, there’s no need to call me sir.’

  ‘Yes sir, I mean no. OK.’ Lundback grinned and was instantly a publicity department’s dream, the sunlight bouncing off his teeth – ‘He’s looping the loop in the hearts of a million girls’ – and as long as henceforward he stuck to playing deaf-mutes and wordless loners then his future in Hollywood was assured, though it was a pity that he’d had to begin his film career by ruining a perfectly good feature.

  ‘So tell me,’ said Ambrose, ‘what acting experience have you actually had?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Lundback looked all at once rather sheepish. ‘I wouldn’t call it acting. Like I tried to tell the guy from the newspaper, it was just fooling around, you know, for fun and all.’

  ‘What was just fooling around?’

  ‘Well, me and the fellers from the airfield back home, we’re in a – well, I think you call it a concert party over here, doncha?’

  ‘So, singing?’

  ‘Yeah, singing. And impersonations.’

  ‘Impersonations of whom?’

  ‘Jolson.’

  ‘Jolson?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Al Jolson?’

  ‘Yes sir. We called ourselves The Burnt Cork Barnstormers.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ambrose. The peculiarities of Lundback’s technique were suddenly explained – the illustrative hand-movements, the vocal projection sufficient to reach to the back of a barn full of plaid-shirted hayseeds, the inability to understand any piece of direction more complex than ‘speak softly’ or ‘move to your left’.

  ‘So when did you speak to this member of the press?’

  ‘When I went to get my, uh . . .’ Lundback glanced bashfully down at his chest.

  ‘Your medal,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And a reporter interviewed you about your background and interests?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And – let me hazard a wild guess, here – when the article came out it bore little or no relation to the information that you had conveyed to him?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Lundback seemed impressed by Ambrose’s perspicacity. ‘It said a whole bunch of things that weren’t true. And then a coupla weeks later I find I’m under orders to go for a screen test, and there’s all these important guys and the US Ambassador’s there and he shakes my hand and says that the President’s real proud of me, and I couldn’t . . . you know . . . I didn’t want to—’

  The end of his sentence was curtailed by a series of feminine bellows, among which the words ‘bloody’ and ‘dog’ were audible.

  This time, Ambrose didn’t turn around, but Lundback glanced over his shoulder, and said, ‘Hey, will you look at that?’ just as Cerberus ran past them, a whole packet of rusks in his mouth. The harpy with the jaw was not far behind, toddler on hip.

  ‘If that’s your dog—’ she began, rounding on Ambrose, standing so close to him that the infant was able to reach out and make a grab at his tie.

  ‘I can assure you that it’s not my dog.’

  ‘Well, it seems blooming funny that he got here when you got here, and he’s stayed here the whole time that you’ve been here, and now when he’s run off, he’s run off right in your direction.’

  ‘Madam,’ said Ambrose with calm gravity, fending off the child’s filthy little fingers with one hand, ‘I can only say in all honesty that I have never seen that dog before in my life.’

  There was a tiny pause. ‘Well, whose dog is it?’ she asked, suspiciously.

  ‘I wish I could help you, but I really don’t have any idea.’

  ‘Well then you’re a fat lot of good.’ Glumly, the fight draining out of her, she looked towards the thicket into which Cerberus had disappeared. ‘They were on points, those rusks,’ she said. ‘I had the last packet on the shelf.’

  Ambrose felt Lundback’s gaze upon him, like a moral spotlight.

  ‘Here,’ he said to the woman, reaching into his pocket and unluckily finding a half-crown rather than the sixpence he was hoping for. ‘Buy the little chap something else. And now we really should be going.’

  Cerberus re-joined them when they were halfway down the path to the lido, veering nose-first towards the pocket in which Ambrose usually kept a meaty treat, and then swerving away again upon finding it devoid of interest.

  ‘So it was your dog,’ said Lundback, sounding amazed.

  ‘Yes, of course it was.’

  The American shook his head in apparent wonderment. ‘So how did you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Well, I sure as hell believed you when you told her you’d never seen him before. I thought it was some other mutt.’

  Ambrose cast his eyes heavenwards.

  ‘It’s called acting. I acted.’<
br />
  ‘Yeah, but if I’d tried that, she’d have . . .’ Lundback mimed a right-and-a-left, and then chuckled and shook his head again. ‘That beats all,’ he said. ‘Can you teach me to do that?’

  Ambrose heard a kind of choking noise and realized that it was coming from his own throat. Can you teach me to do that? As if acting were a species of parlour-trick performed with three coins and a banana. ‘Perhaps I could,’ he said, distantly, ‘if you had thirty years to spare.’

  ‘Thirty years?’

  ‘Or possibly less in the presence of innate ability. It is certainly not something that one can pass on over the course of a lunch-hour.’

  ‘You can’t just teach me a little bit of it?’

  ‘Which little bit of it?’

  ‘Well . . . how to say things the way I’m supposed to. So I don’t keep having to do every line twenty times.’

  ‘Again, that’s acting. You’re talking about the fundamental interpolation of skill and experience.’

  ‘But . . .’ Lundback looked up at the sky again with an expression of pained concentration, like someone engaged in teasing out a grape-pip from between two teeth.

  ‘OK,’ he said at last, ‘say I took you up in a Miles Master. That’s a trainer, handles kind of like a Hurricane. Say we just had three minutes up there. I couldn’t teach you how to do a slow roll or a stall turn and I couldn’t teach you how to pull out of a spin or what to do when a Messerschmitt’s on your tail, but I could teach you to fly level. And I wouldn’t do it by reading you an instruction book, I’d just show you how to do it, and then you’d do it yourself. And then you’d be flying level. You wouldn’t be a pilot, but you’d know that much. D’you see what I mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Well, could you do that for me when I have a line? Show me how to do it?’

  ‘You’re asking me for a line reading?’

  ‘Does that mean that you’d say the line just the way they wanted me to say it and then I’d say the line so I sounded just like you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. Then I’m asking you for a line reading. Sir? If you wouldn’t mind?’

  It seemed politic to appear to ponder the question for a few moments, although Ambrose knew instantly what his answer would be. Acceding to Lundback’s request would be, of course, an utter prostitution of the thespian art, but on the other hand it promised rich interior rewards, for on how many occasions during his career had etiquette forced him to sit dumbly in the shadows while some cloddish ‘friend’ of the producer ruined yet another scene? On how many occasions had he longed to stand up and bellow, ‘Oh for God’s sake, man, don’t say it like that, say it like this’? And now to be asked, to be begged to do precisely that, to be given the chance personally to winch this film back from the edge of disaster; it was an opportunity that simply couldn’t be missed. And besides – it occurred to him, still tasting the mellow smoke on his tongue – there might well be other, more tangible rewards.

  ‘Sir? If you wouldn’t mind?’ repeated Lundback.

  Ambrose smiled magnanimously. ‘Let me think about it,’ he said.

  *

  Sitting at her card-table in the corner of the office, Catrin listened to the rattle of Buckley’s typewriter.

  ‘Just to remind you,’ she said, ‘I was hoping to leave a little early this afternoon.’

  Buckley nodded, and then cursed under his breath as the keys jammed.

  ‘So you don’t mind if I go in about ten minutes?’ asked Catrin.

  ‘No.’ He separated the clot of keys, wiped his finger on the desk top and then carried on typing.

  ‘All right,’ said Catrin, after a moment. ‘Thank you.’

  Until it ceased, she hadn’t realized how much she’d grown used to the rigours of conversation with Buckley, the expectation that every passing remark would be pounced upon, prodded, buffed and analysed. Now when she spoke, the words seemed to hang suspended, like pebbles dropped into treacle.

  ‘I’ve almost finished reading that article,’ she said, raising her voice above the hammer of the keys. ‘It’s not half bad.’

  There was no response beyond a distracted nod. She picked up her pencil and turned again to ‘A Night in the Life of a Warden’, and underlined the passage about an old lady refusing to go to the shelter without first putting on her corsets.

  She would have liked to have read it out loud. She might have said, then, ‘Is that the sort of thing we’re looking for?’ to which Buckley would almost certainly have replied ‘Corset is.’ Or ‘Keep boning up on the subject’, or ‘As long as it stays in the mind.’ Strange how one could crave terrible jokes.

  It was hard to tell what Parfitt thought about the silence in the office, or even if he’d noticed it. As before, he spent much of his day asleep, or staring out of the window at Soho Square, and if he missed the acrid comments, the endless questions, the chains of dreadful puns to whose length he’d so often contributed, then he gave no hint. Perhaps when he and Buckley went to the pub together at lunch-time they resumed their usual form of conversation, an invigorating round of parry and thrust to go with the mild and bitter. Catrin herself had taken to eating lunch in a café in Dean Street filled with Free French, where everybody talked all the time and the coffee machine hissed like an incendiary.

  It would have been easier if she could have convinced herself that Buckley was sulking, but there was no petulance in his behaviour. He talked when necessary. He was no ruder than usual. He was . . . muffled. The snap and fizz of his company had gone, and he looked older, the contours of his face less-defined, as if the pungency of his usual manner had acted as a preservative.

  You think I’m an old fool.

  And she found herself constantly re-playing the scene in the cellar in Hammersmith, checking each exchange to see if there had been a point at which she should have realized what was happening, and finding each time that the sequence rattled so quickly from inconsequence to farce that there was never a moment for reflection. Buckley had opened his heart and she had mistaken it for his liver. She could think of no way to return to the time before.

  ‘By golly it’s quiet in here,’ said Phyl, walking in with an armful of paper.

  ‘Finished in studio?’ asked Catrin.

  ‘Very late lunch, I’m going straight back. Mr Baker wanted the progress reports, or lack-of-any-discernible-progress reports as we’re coming to call them.’

  ‘Slow?’

  ‘Deadly. Kipper’s just pushed the schedule back again – thought you might like to know that on the final week we’ll be working straight through from Monday to Sunday. Everyone’s absolutely thrilled, as you can imagine. And the director asked me to enquire if the Scene 145 rewrites are finished.’

  Wordlessly, Buckley held up a typed sheet, and after a moment’s hesitation Phyl reached forward and took it.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said drily, and turned to leave the office.

  ‘Hang on, I’ll come with you—’ Catrin grabbed her coat and bag and followed her down the stairs.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ asked Phyl. ‘Buckley’s very subdued. Does he have toothache?’

  Catrin shook her head. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that.’

  ‘He’s a man. Food, sex and someone to nod admiringly when they’re gassing on, that’s all they require.’

  Catrin gaped and then laughed. ‘You’re speaking from experience?’

  Phyl gave her the briefest of sideways looks. ‘Observation only, since you happen to ask. My interests lie elsewhere.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh!’ said Catrin, catching on rather slowly.

  ‘Not, I’m sure, that you’ll feel the need to repeat that last remark to anyone.’

  ‘No, no of course not. No, I never would.’

  ‘And where are you off to so early?’

  ‘The National Gallery,’ said Catrin. ‘The War Artists Exhibition. They’re opening a new room
and my husband’s one of the exhibitors. He’s . . .’ She looked at Phyl’s candid grey eyes, and then down at her own hand, at the ring that she’d bought from the jewellery counter in Merthyr Tydfil. ‘As a matter of fact he’s not actually my husband,’ she said. ‘We’re not married.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your choice?’

  ‘Well . . . not really. But then I decided that it was even more romantic, running away with a lover. And then I was too shy ever to admit it to anyone. Too chapel.’

  Phyl laughed. ‘Well, you’re not quite so chapel these days, are you?’

  ‘No. No, I suppose I’m not.’ She twisted the ring a couple of times.

  ‘And you’re going to meet him there?’ asked Phyl.

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  Though in truth she had no idea. Not long after he’d left London, Ellis had sent her a postcard, brief and factual, giving the address of the cottage in Worcestershire, and she had sent one in reply and had scarcely known what to write. ‘I hope that your work is going well, I am keeping safe, the gas was off for most of last week but is back on again now, the studio filming starts in a fortnight, the news from Greece is horrible, isn’t it . . .’ She had almost put I miss you and then had checked herself. She missed his physical presence, an arm around her, the distinctive smell of his skin, the warmth and weight of his body on hers, she missed having someone of her own in London, someone to look after, but him, did she miss him? There had been a time when he had filled her thoughts to the exclusion of all else, when every fresh topic had been a path that looped straight back to Ellis, but now her head was packed with all manner of things, and he was only an item that she delved for now and again, and took out and puzzled over. She thought of their juddering conversations, she saw herself running along behind him, longing to be included, forever straining to be heard.