Spies and Stars

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘She really prefers Fortnum and Mason.’

  ‘Well, tough, then.’

  As soon as Monty – permanent person-of-all-work at the Knightsbridge flat – met Zuzu he fell in love. She was just his sort of person. He called her Mademoiselle, and of course Zuzu loved him, especially the wig that he was in the habit of raising when he was thinking.

  ‘Oh, Monty, your tiny, tiny drop scones would send most people to paradise.’

  ‘Mademoiselle is too kind.’

  Everything about Zuzu had Monty entranced. Her habit of leaving Rollo without petrol, with a notice on the windscreen saying ‘Gone out’. Her love of flowers, which extended to filling the whole flat with blossoms costing an unearthly amount. Her insistence on taking me nightly to shows, even ones she knew were dreadful, teaching me how to go to the gallery, watch for an empty seat in the stalls and then, as the lights were lowered, dash down and sit in it.

  ‘So much nicer for the actors to see the front rows filled, don’t you think?’

  But all the time, both Monty and I knew that Zuzu’s days with us were numbered, for she was once more off to foreign parts, on behalf of the War Office.

  ‘If you see a war has broken out, you will know it’s me,’ she told us as she kissed us goodbye at London Airport.

  Monty and I watched her plane mounting into the skies and Monty raised his wig in au revoir to his dear, glamorous Mademoiselle.

  ‘If only there were more people like Mademoiselle in the world,’ he said sadly as he drove the Rolls back to Knightsbridge. ‘I shall look after Rollo for her as if he was my own,’ he added. ‘Not a day will go by when I don’t polish him.’

  Later on, I met Harry at our usual coffee bar.

  ‘So Zuzu’s gone?’ he said, trying not to look relieved.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not able to keep the sadness out of my voice. I sighed.

  ‘And nothing nice is ever going to happen to you again?’

  ‘Oh, of course it will, but let’s face it, some people do colour the room they are standing in with rather a special aura, don’t they?’

  It was Harry’s turn to look sad. ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘You do,’ I said, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking that neither of us did.

  *

  Happily Arabella came back from Paris able to report it was still there, and was fascinated by everything new I had to tell her about Zuzu. There was so much, and I thought I did rather well, but Arabella had that extra perception some sphinx-like people did.

  ‘You’re missing her and all the excitement,’ she said.

  I nodded. It was true.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You should see Monty,’ she said, shortly. ‘Talk about depressed. He spends all his spare time polishing that old jalopy of hers and mopping his eyes with a duster.’

  I knew how Monty felt. Zuzu was a comet, and now all we could see was the white trail across our lives where she had been.

  ‘You know what,’ Arabella stated, a few days later, ‘you and Harry should get together.’

  ‘We are together,’ I said, and it was my turn to be short.

  ‘No, I mean, you should write together. After all, he is always trying to write things and you are always trying to write things. You should be like those Hollywood couples in the thirties – the Hacketts and all the others. Start scribbling together.’

  The clouds seemed to lift for me at this suggestion, but when I passed it on to Harry he looked less than enthused.

  ‘We don’t write at all the same way. We would be like Thing and Yang.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, happily. ‘That is why it will work. Come on, sit down opposite me.’

  ‘Please, Lottie, it’s a bit early for that.’

  I had bought some Woolworth jumbo pads and some Biros. Harry regarded these with extra suspicion.

  ‘What shall we write about?’

  I looked at him.

  ‘What everyone our age writes about, Harry – ourselves or else about something that has happened to us – you know. Like when you had to sell the Daily Worker outside Ken High Underground to help my father out – that kind of thing.’

  It seemed to make him happy, and that certainly made me happy, and some weeks into our new situation it seemed Arabella noticed how light my step was, and how much more often I smiled and laughed.

  ‘So it’s going all right – you and Harry?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good.’ She put down the book she was reading. ‘Do you know, there’s a chapter for every stage of your life in this,’ she said, with some satisfaction.

  I glanced down at the book. She was re-reading The Wind in the Willows, which she did every few months. It was her Bible.

  I saw her smiling with some complacency as she closed it. ‘Zuzu is very like the wayfarer rat, isn’t she?’

  I nodded again. The wayfarer rat, as we both knew, had made Ratty restless for his friend’s life of adventure with his talk of faraway lands and strange peoples, for the sights and sounds of a different world. Zuzu had made Monty and me restless. Mole’s solution for Ratty had been to get him writing.

  ‘All better now then,’ Arabella stated, and as I hurried off to catch the number nine bus and start work that evening with Harry, I could not but agree.

  SUNDAY LUNCH

  I had just taken a chunk of leave from the War Office to allow Harry and me to spend more time on our mutual writing career. This meant we were working day and night together, and getting to know each other better too.

  There is nothing like staring across a small table at someone else who is stuck to realise what intimacy truly is. When stuck we also went for long walks – to get air into our brains, we said.

  We were coming back from just such a walk in the Park before going on to Dingley Dell for lunch when Harry had a thought.

  ‘If I was an alien sitting on my planet looking at this planet we inhabit, I think I know just when I would invade.’

  I glanced at Harry. He was wearing his Sketchley’s suit and a tie and shirt that looked newly pressed, but I knew from my father’s point of view Harry might as well be from another planet on account of the length of his hair. Harry had short hair, but he did not have my father’s generation’s idea of short hair, which was short back and sides, primed and ready to join the services – although not the RAF.

  My father and I had talked about this.

  ‘He’s a nice enough young man, Lottie. Just wish he would get his hair cut. I mean any minute now it could touch his collar.’

  ‘That is short for nowadays, how he has it.’

  ‘Never let him into the Regimental Mess.’

  ‘He can’t go around looking like you,’ I said with sudden asperity. ‘If he did no one would let him into rehearsal.’

  My father looked at me in astonishment. I did not always sound so short, but I certainly felt short at that moment, and obviously sounded it.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ he said, eventually. ‘You mean horses for courses?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, trying not to imagine Harry turning up at rehearsals looking like my father. Everyone would think he had climbed into costume too early. ‘As it is,’ I continued, still feeling short on this issue, ‘having his hair cut for that film he did with Melville and Hal has put him out of the running for a whole range of other parts. He has to let it grow again.’

  ‘Not too long, I hope,’ my father murmured, heading off for the garden, but before he did he turned back to me. ‘I’ve learned something today,’ he murmured, before he lit a pipe and started to stare at his favourite shrub, which judging from his expression also needed a haircut.

  Back to Harry, still musing about planets and aliens, neither of which, I am afraid, held the slightest interest for me because I found catching a bus, or trying to understand how the telephone worked quite enough.

  ‘The time to invade …’ he said, eyes dreamy with inspiration. ‘The perfect time to invade is when they a
re eating their Sunday lunch. Think about it, Lottie. At some time or another, people are sitting down to Sunday lunch. The Italians preparing their ragùs, the French their casseroles, the British their roasts – all these people with their thoughts fixed on nothing but food, so that is the time to invade a country – when they’re enjoying Sunday lunch!’

  I might have been lost in admiration but after a long walk and talking playwriting in the Park, all I could think of was Mrs Graham at Dingley Dell busy cooking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and her special roast potatoes done till crispy with lashings of dripping.

  ‘Come on, Shakespeare, time to face others of your profession.’

  Sunday lunch at Dingley Dell might well be a prime target for invading aliens, but for me it was just as life should be, what with the cooking smells drifting up, and Melville playing the old songs my father so liked, and my mother engaged in a heated defence of the proscenium arch in theatre and Hal booming on about the glories of the apron stage.

  For some reason Hal’s booms always started with ‘my dear lady’, which my mother had complained to him made her feel as if she were wearing a crinoline. But her pleading always fell on deaf ears, so perhaps that was how Hal thought of her.

  As Harry and I went into the drawing room there was the sound of a definite boom coming from Hal and as usual it was about the theatre, with my mother complaining that there was nothing on in the West End to tempt people like her to buy a seat in the stalls.

  ‘Well now, there is a solution – get more people like you to write suitable plays, my dear lady.’

  Hal’s expression was one of settled contentment, what with the music and the smell of the beef cooking, until he saw Harry, and then his face fell. Well, I say ‘fell’, to explain how his expression changed to something very close, I imagine, to the expression of someone who had just been told he had lost all his money in a Stock Exchange crash.

  ‘Enter the Fallen Hero,’ Hal boomed at Harry.

  Fallen Hero was a reference to Harry’s part in the film they had all just been shooting, a small but showy role that might have been a great opportunity for him, and indeed for Hal and Melville had the film not run into post-production difficulties, which meant none of them could benefit from it until it was shown.

  ‘Hallo, Hal,’ Harry muttered, and I could see that he was making a terribly big effort not to scowl, because, as I remembered yet again, he knew Hal and Melville resented his being cast in the picture mainly because Harry died a glorious death in it and they didn’t. Also he was seen at the front of the film in a dream sequence which meant that he could rush about without bandages, which was great for Harry, at any rate we thought so. Even though the film had not yet been shown we had great hopes for it, and Harry’s part in it. However just at that moment both Hal and Melville turned and frowned at Harry, making it quite plain that they hoped he would get through Sunday lunch with my father and mother without opening his mouth except to post roast beef in it.

  Now if there was one thing Harry found difficult it was obfuscating. He had always felt it his public duty to make a case for something – well, anything really. I had warned him not to make any of his statements at lunch, it was just not done at Dingley Dell, and I have to say for Harry that from the moment we sat down to lunch, his behaviour was beyond reproach. He smiled and passed things, and nodded, and was altogether angelic until my father turned to ask him what he was working on.

  Harry looked vague, which was the right tactic, but then he looked trapped in the headlights of my father’s penetrating ‘you had better tell me the truth, young man’ gaze.

  ‘How do you mean, sir? I have no acting work at the moment, not until the film comes out.’

  Harry had paled a little round the edges, though until that moment he had been flushed from the impact of a pre-lunch sherry.

  ‘Yes, everyone’s in the same boat, I gather.’ My father’s penetrating gaze momentarily embraced the other two actors at the table. ‘I was interested in what you and Lottie might be writing about? The subject of all the feverish meetings at your Earls Court flat.’

  Oh, dear, I always hated my father being interested in anything to do with me; it made my toes scrunch because he could never avoid that slight tone of menace. It seemed if you used menace and implied threat in your day-to-day work, some of it still lingered, even over Sunday lunch.

  ‘Well, sir, Lottie and myself – you know Lottie, don’t you, sir?’

  ‘We have met – from time to time.’

  For some reason at that moment everyone else stopped talking. There was a ripple of laughter at my father’s little joke.

  ‘Lottie and I are working on a comedy together.’

  ‘A comedy forsooth?’ boomed Hal. ‘You are brave souls indeed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry agreed, nodding.

  My toes quickly undoubled as I attempted to kick Harry under the table. I realised too late that I had missed Melville saying ‘ow’ very loudly, at the same time as Harry had announced the title of our comedy – The Happy Communist.

  ‘The Happy Communist, you say?’ My father lingered over the words as if it was a secret message sent during the war to SOE. He then repeated the title several times, looking from me to Harry and back again as if he had just discovered we were double agents.

  ‘Now there’s a notion,’ boomed Hal, laughing. ‘So you’re busy writing fantasy fiction, eh?’

  My mother stared across the table at me, and I could see her thinking that she was right: it was high time I stopped going out with this unsuitable person called Harry.

  ‘And this is a comedy, you say?’

  Harry nodded miserably. He could do miserable nods better than most. ‘Yes, sir. You see, Lottie and I … that is, Lottie and myself … we thought it would be fun to show that you could be a communist and have a sense of humour too.’

  ‘It’s a satire actually,’ I said, quickly.

  ‘Satire closes Satire-days,’ Hal and Melville chortled together.

  ‘The English never understand satire anyway,’ my mother said, weighing in. ‘They like their comedy broad.’

  ‘We haven’t got very far,’ Harry said. ‘Just early days, making our way. Probably won’t finish it.’

  ‘Probably just as well, probably time for the script to hit the wastepaper basket,’ my father said shortly. ‘Communism is not a funny subject.’

  Lunch continued but everyone knew that a clanger had been dropped. Afterwards Harry and I walked round to his flat in silence.

  ‘You might have said something else. You might have lied,’ I said, at last.

  ‘Oh, yes, so what could I have said?’

  ‘You could have said The Happy Commander, or The Happy Commodore, or The Happy – well, anything.’

  ‘I could,’ Harry conceded, ‘but I didn’t.’ He stared ahead miserably as we walked. ‘I ruined lunch, didn’t I?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I told him. ‘It gave them all something to talk about.’

  ‘Your father didn’t look at me after that. You can’t blame him; he thinks we’re making fun of his work – that at least was evident.’

  ‘We’re not, we’re just writing about when you worked for him and all that – using your experiences selling the Daily Worker. I think we should go on with it, I do really.’

  Harry took his front door key out of his pocket.

  ‘I don’t think we can. I mean, did you see your father’s face? He didn’t shake my hand when we left, just walked off into the garden.’

  ‘Oh, he gets like that about communism, but he soon gets over it once he sees greenfly on his roses or a slug on his hostas. Besides, if we sell the script, he might be pleased. He might like it. He might enjoy us satirising communists, laughing at them because they’re such a bunch of humourless Stalinist toadies.’

  ‘And he might not, and we might both end up somewhere we might not want to end up – on an exchange visit to Siberia.’

  The trouble was we had very few other i
deas at that time. After casting around for somewhere to start, The Happy Communist had seemed like a gift, because we were writing about what had actually happened to Harry, and writing from experience is always the best course.

  At my insistence we continued with The Happy Communist, and what is more we finished it and showed it to Harry’s agent, Gus, who showed it to his partner who handled scripts, and when I say handled, he really did handle them – after Dewi had read them, or rather mauled them, they looked as if they had been rescued from a litter bin.

  ‘It reeks,’ Dewi announced, happily.

  ‘That’s only because you keep smoking over it,’ Harry protested.

  ‘No, dear boy, it reeks of talent.’ He beamed at us across the table in the restaurant he’d invited us to. ‘Dewi can sell this anywhere. I can. I haven’t been so excited since I read – anything.’

  ‘Or maybe something?’

  ‘Quite right, since I last read something. With this in my hand I can walk in anywhere and have them reverberating with excitement.’

  ‘I think we should get you a clean copy, without cigarette marks,’ I ventured. ‘If you are serious.’

  ‘I have never been so serious since I first became an agent and there was a script waiting for me from Trevor Duncan. I was hardly out of my demob suit and there was the first Duncan on my desk … and look what happened to him.’

  ‘What did happen to him, this Trevor Duncan person?’ I asked on the way home on the number nine bus.

  ‘He went on to write all those films,’ Harry said, at his most vague. ‘That series, you know, about a window cleaner. Up the Ladder, Down the Ladder, Crazy Ladder – you know, all those.’

  ‘They’re not what we would want to do.’

  ‘No, but they sold, and that is what we have to do. We have to sell this, Lottie.’

  When Harry and I reached the flat Dermot was waiting for us on the other side of the front door, and his expression was less than welcoming. I saw at once that he had a copy of The Happy Communist in his hand. He smote it, there was no other word for it. He struck his hand across its rather impoverished exterior – no shiny cover, no special gold printing – and frowned at Harry.