by Lissa Evans
After the first card, he had sent another, this time from Coventry, and a third from Sheffield, and she had matched him postcard for postcard, dry fact for terse enquiry, and then, in reply to his three lines from Hull, she had scribbled an excited sentence or two about the new film for which she’d been asked to write and in return there had been nothing, not for weeks and weeks, and a sudden anxiety had led her to telephone the War Artists Committee, to check that he wasn’t lying injured in a hospital in Hull or Swansea or Sunderland. The man in the office had said that as far as he was aware, ‘Mr Cole is progressing satisfactorily with his commission’, and he had kindly put Catrin’s name on the guest-list for the opening of the new exhibition room. ‘But will he be there?’ she’d asked. ‘We would expect all our artists to attend,’ had been the crisp reply.
In Trafalgar Square, a group of African soldiers had clustered around one of the stone lions in order to have a photograph taken, and nearby a tea-van was parked, from which stretched a long queue of green berets. Catrin was wolf-whistled as she hurried towards the steps of the National Gallery, and one of the commandoes shouted, ‘Where are you off to, darling?’ and she called back, ‘The pictures, of course’, and was pleased to get a laugh.
The gallery was all war art now – the gods and goddesses, saints and Madonnas crated up and hidden safely somewhere outside London. She walked through rooms hung with portraits of factory workers and land-girls, the old palette of gold and azure replaced by drabber shades, but further on there were blitz paintings, crimson flame on black, and a canvas the length of one wall, showing shipbuilders at work, a sepia world lit by welders’ torches and the glitter of metal.
She could hear the hubbub of the reception before she reached it, and she gave her name to the attendant, and paid sixpence for a guide booklet. Her heart had begun to beat rather fast, but once inside the room, she looked around the knots of well-dressed people and saw no one that she knew.
‘Powerful,’ someone was saying, ‘awfully powerful.’
Even between the shifting figures she could instantly spot Ellis’s work. ‘A new urban anatomy,’ is how she’d heard him describe it to Perry, ‘flesh, bone and organ exposed,’ and here were the sightless eyes of a row of houses, here a seared and blistered wall, here the skeleton of a factory, its steel girders contorted by the heat – stark images, instantly memorable, the colours raw and vivid. People would still be looking at these paintings in a thousand years, she thought; this is how the night blitz will be remembered, for ever and for ever. She moved closer and stared at the clotted darkness, the brilliant splinters of light.
In the hum of conversation behind her, one voice, emphatic and aggrieved, seemed to detach itself: ‘. . . and the chairman told me that the reason that it had been rejected was because the figures that I’d drawn were looking panic-stricken, and that the committee didn’t want to imply that the raids were causing panic, and if I wanted to show panic then could I do it in some way obliquely or metaphorically. And I said, “Well what would you suggest? A full-length study of Chicken-Licken?” and he—’
‘Hello, Perry’ said Catrin, turning.
He stopped speaking and looked startled – aghast, in fact. His companion, an elderly woman, seized her opportunity to nod, smile and escape.
‘This is a surprise,’ said Perry, regaining his composure, and planting a rubbery kiss on Catrin’s cheek. ‘Good crowd, isn’t it?’
‘Very good. Is Ellis here?’
‘No . . .’ said Perry, with an attempt at casualness, but his eyes darted nervously about the room.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
It was so obviously a lie that for a moment she simply goggled at him. He gave her a bright and unconvincing smile.
‘Perry, I’m not a fool,’ she said. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
‘Well,’ he shrugged, uncomfortably, ‘I don’t think that Ellis was expecting to see you here. Aren’t you supposed to be working in a film studio somewhere?’
‘Writers don’t go to the studio,’ said Catrin. She thought of all the times that she had tried to talk to Ellis about her work. Her heart was racing now. ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she said again, more sharply this time.
‘Er . . .’
‘Perry.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Ellis has brought a guest,’ he said.
It took her only a fraction of a second to grasp his meaning, and then she was rushing towards the door, knocking into elbows, cracking her shoulder against military torsos, whisking booklets to the floor in her haste to get out of the room before Ellis and his guest could come into it, and once in the galleries she walked blindly back towards the main entrance, turning left at a burning church when she should have turned right, and finally reaching a dead end, a doorless wall hung with a picture of a bright blue sky scored by vapour trails.
She turned back and tried to find her way out again, and rounded a corner to see Ellis standing twenty yards away, talking to a man with a notebook. And just beside Ellis, unmistakably, was his guest. She was young, very pretty, dressed in her best, but a best that had been bought cheaply and washed many times, and she was watching Ellis as if he might evaporate if she broke her gaze for just one second.
Catrin took a step back, so that she was almost hidden by the corner, but she kept her eyes on the little scene. The panic that she had felt just a moment ago had gone entirely, replaced by a chilly fascination.
Ellis talked. The journalist nodded. The girl watched. Once, she rested a hand on Ellis’s arm and then rather awkwardly took it away again. She smiled when he smiled, she turned to look at what he looked at, and when the journalist closed his notebook, and Ellis walked away, she pattered after him.
Catrin watched until they were out of sight, and then realized that she’d been holding her breath for far too long. Her vision was filled with sliding pin-pricks, and she closed her eyes for a moment and saw Ellis’s painting of a ruined street, the cobbles empty except for a single figure, too distant for its features to be distinguishable. He rarely peopled his canvasses. The figures that he drew were only ever there to serve a purpose, to convey scale or to add contrast, and one looked much the same as another; if they failed in their function, they could always be painted out.
She walked slowly to the main entrance and down the steps into the twilight. The pavements were full of office girls hurrying homeward, all chatter and vim, and rather than be jostled, Catrin picked up her pace to match theirs and reached Regent Street at a smart clip. Instead of squeezing on to a bus, she carried on walking, faster, as fast as she was able, and she felt gripped by a strange excitement, as if she were charging towards something rather than running away, and at Marylebone High Street she saw a static water-tank ahead of her and without breaking stride, without even really thinking what she was doing, she pulled off the ring that she’d bought for herself in Merthyr Tydfil and she dropped it into the water. It barely made a splash.
*
During the lunch-hour on the penultimate day of filming, Arthur was sitting eating cauliflower cheese in the studio canteen when Phyl came over to his table with a notepad and asked him in what form he would like to see his name on the opening titles of the finished film. He didn’t quite understand her question, and she explained (with her usual disconcerting half-smile, so that he wasn’t sure whether she was pulling his leg or not), that some people were very particular about how they were styled. He might, for instance, after the words ‘Special Military Advisor’, wish to be credited as ‘Lance Corporal A. Frith’ or ‘Lance Corporal Arty Frith’, or – depending on his middle name – ‘Lance Corporal Arthur Z. Frith’ or . . .
‘Arthur Frith’ would do very well, he assured her, and then after she left he sat for a good three minutes with the knife and fork resting on his plate and the pallid sauce beginning to wrinkle, while a sense of guilt slipped over him, for it appeared that his name would be permanently and legibly attached to a f
ilm whose accuracy he had long since ceased to monitor.
His last attempt at intervention had been several weeks ago, at the very beginning of the studio shoot, after Lundback had played his first scene. Arthur had mentioned in a quiet aside to Ambrose Hilliard that he hadn’t been aware of any Americans at the Dunkirk evacuation, and Hilliard had exclaimed, ‘Good heavens! Is that really the case? Then it’s imperative that you make the fact more widely known!’ but in a tone that implied heavy sarcasm rather than genuine surprise. So there hadn’t seemed very much point in keeping a close watch on the proceedings after that. Instead, he had tried to stay near to his wife at all times, just in case she required help, or perhaps a few friendly words between takes. Though on the whole she hadn’t, of course. She really was awfully busy.
And that afternoon on ‘B’ Stage, as he watched Edith go about her work, consulting her notes and then adjusting collars and buttons and hats and belts so that they would look exactly as they had looked in the very next scene, which had actually been filmed a fortnight previously – and as he listened to the shouts of the electricians, and the murmured consultation between director and cameraman, and the muttered rehearsals behind him, where Ambrose Hilliard was teaching Pilot Officer Lundback how to say ‘Steady there, old timer’, in a way that seemed to put a great deal of emphasis on the word ‘steady’ and none at all on the word ‘old’ – Arthur couldn’t help thinking (and not for the first time) that he himself was a useless sort of stick, hanging around on full pay while others laboured, and he tried to think of a pertinent point that he could offer, a helpful note that might finally justify not only his presence but his grandiose title. After all, the next scene was one in which the boat was strafed, and that was – it truly was – something he knew about, something he still saw, still heard every night when he closed his eyes: the shrilling plunge of the aircraft, men diving to the ground, hands clasped over heads, as helpless as worms under a spade. And afterwards, the lucky ones cautiously standing again, the unlucky ones scattered like stepping stones across the sand. And always, always a hot-head (or two) who had stayed on his feet and fired a gun at the plane and swore that he’d clipped a wing with the second bullet.
‘Need to get the brute up, then,’ said the cameraman, cryptically, and went off towards the scaffolding tower at the far side of the water-tank, and the director glanced around with his usual distracted frown and caught Arthur’s eye and gave a minute nod of acknowledgement.
‘I wonder,’ said Arthur, straightening his spectacles, ‘if you have just a moment . . .’
‘Steady there, old timer,’ said Lundback, sticking out his jaw at the end of the sentence so that he looked like Tom Mix confronting an outlaw, but otherwise giving a reading that was at least 80 per cent better than his first effort, if still a good 20 per cent below professional standards.
‘And I think we should move on to the next line,’ said Ambrose. ‘It’s a short one.’
‘Propeller’s FOULED,’ supplied Lundback, who at least had a decent memory.
‘Try the emphasis on the second syllable.’ Ambrose tuned his own voice to a mid-west baritone. “Propeller’s fouled.” And more quietly, of course.’
‘Mr Hilliard, do you have a moment? There’s a telephone call for you.’
Ambrose followed the weedy figure of the third assistant director along the corridor and into the studio manager’s office. It was an afterthought of a room, not much larger than a broom-cupboard, with one tiny window overlooking the river and a desk covered with files. The studio manager, a man who seemed to sweat with a facility that would have had Phineas T. Barnum reaching for a contract, smiled moistly and passed across the receiver.
‘Hello? Ambrose Hilliard speaking.’
‘Ah, Mr Hilliard.’ Sophie Smith, her voice clear but very distant. ‘I have tried several times to telephone you at your residence.’
‘My line’s been down since mid-April.’
‘While my own has at last been repaired. However I’m sure that if all were not as it should be with my brother’s dog, you would have found means to inform me.’
‘Cerberus is extremely well,’ said Ambrose stiffly.
‘Is he with you now?’
‘He’s in make-up.’
There was a tiny noise from Sophie, a kind of squeak, possibly nasal in origin. ‘And you yourself, Mr Hilliard?’
‘Also well.’
‘And proving indispensable, I understand. Only yesterday I was speaking to Mr Baker’s casting director about the range of your talents.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘He has suggested an interesting role that I would like to talk to you about in person.’
‘A role in a feature?’
‘As I say—’
‘A leading role?’
‘As I say, I would like to talk to you about it in person.’
‘It’s character again, isn’t it?’
‘And of course,’ continued Sophie, inexorably, ‘I have been so very busy that I have not yet visited the studio, so it occurred to me that tomorrow I could kill the two birds with a single stone. So to speak. I would like to see a little of the film being made.’
‘Oh, but really, the last day of shooting is always so piecemeal, and besides, wouldn’t it be better if we had our talk at a restau—’
He was interrupted by a series of hollow clicks, followed by a burst of speech from a crossed line (‘. . . honestly, Beattie, I was livid, I said “that’s never four ounces, you’re leaning on the scales, you are . . .”), and then nothing but a faint whizzing noise. Ambrose glared at the receiver. Bloody hell. What on earth was the point of seeing one’s agent if one didn’t even get a decent meal out of it? And the phrase ‘interesting role’ had a nasty smell; fourteen lines and a false beard, no doubt. And to top it all, he would be spending half of tomorrow up to his shoulders in water and there was something deeply emasculating about being hauled, dripping, out of a tank in front of gaping females. It was the sort of thing that one had nightmares about.
‘Mr Hilliard . . .’
Ambrose dragged his gaze round to the manager. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr Hilliard, I’ve just remembered something.’ The man pawed through a wire tray stacked with post. ‘Baker’s sent it on last week, I think,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid that I’ve only just remembered, what with one thing and another . . .’
He held up an envelope, and Ambrose’s brief, hopeful supposition that it might contain a cheque dwindled on sight, for the envelope was pale mauve, a vehicle for correspondence rather than cash, the handwriting floridly feminine.
‘Fan mail?’ asked the manager, ingratiatingly.
‘Oh, I expect so,’ said Ambrose. ‘It usually is.’ He took the envelope; there was a large, damp, managerial thumbprint smudging the post-mark, and no return address. He felt a slight stir of anticipation; it had been a very long time since he’d received such a missive, though somewhere, still, within his house was a cabin trunk full of the things.
Dear Mr Hilliard, I have seen The Eye of Flame five times and I think you are simply wonderful, so thrilling and handsome . . .
Dear Mr Hilliard are you maried becuase if you arnt maried then will you mary me . . .
Dear Ambrose, if I may be so bold as to call you that. Oft within my chamber in the shadows of the night have I whispered your name, and . . .
He slipped a thumb underneath the gummed flap, and had partly withdrawn the single sheet of folded paper within before he realized that the envelope contained another item, a photograph clipped from a magazine. He was looking at it upside-down, and it took him a moment to recognize the subject.
‘Anything wrong, Mr Hilliard?’ asked the manager.
‘No, no, nothing at all. If the third AD comes looking for me, just tell him I’m taking a breath of fresh air, would you? I’ll only be five minutes.’
Though there was nothing very fresh about the air outside today. It stank of mud. Ambrose had ne
ver seen the tide so low – the narrow ribbon of water running beneath Hammersmith Bridge looked like a village stream. He leaned against the river wall and studied the photograph for an outraged moment or two before reading the letter that had accompanied it.
My dear Ambrose,
How I hope that this reaches you. I am writing in haste, having only an hour or so ago chanced upon the enclosed in Picture Post, quite accidentally, while I was waiting to see my dental surgeon (only a crown replacement!). What a dreadful time of it you must have had – and yet what a blessing that both you and your dear pal survived unharmed. Of course, I’ve no idea when the photograph was taken. By now, perhaps, you’re living somewhere comfortable, and among friends, but I’ve heard so much about the horrors of finding decent accommodation for those who’ve been bombed-out, that I wanted to extend an immediate invitation to you both, should you still be in need. My little house is not very large, but it’s sufficient to offer a cosy refuge to a fellow thespian, not to mention an old friend. Our mutual profession is already perilous enough, without abandoning those in true difficulty.
My telephone line is rather temperamental at present, but until the end of April I may be contacted at the Theatre Royal, Windsor (playing Annie Parker in When We Are Married. Nice little review in the local rag, and marvellous audiences, despite everything that That Man throws at us!!!) Hoping that I hear from you, if only to be reassured of your safety.
With heartfelt good wishes,
Cecy Clyde-Cameron
PS My darling Tommy departed peacefully for happier hunting grounds just after we came home from Ipswich, so you need have no worries about a little pussy-cat’s objection to my offer.
PPS I hope that all is ‘ship-shape’ with the film!
It was, thought Ambrose with an effort, kind of Cecy. It was a kind letter, a kind offer, devoid, it appeared, of ulterior motive. A kind offer to move to . . . he checked the address. Thames Ditton – for Christ’s sake! It would take considerably more than a direct hit (had that actually happened) to lure him to Thames Ditton. And the house was called The Ducklings. He could just picture it – one of those frightful, leaky shacks thrown up in the twenties as weekend cottages, and now occupied all year round by impoverished theatricals, trying to pretend that the bi-annual floods, the Arctic winds howling through the cracks in the clapboard, were part of its charm. Not to mention the drunken trippers gesturing lewdly through the sitting-room window as they floated by in their hired rowing-boats.
