by Lissa Evans
The word ‘serious’, though, was another matter. In a way Ellis was right: her current fretting about the script couldn’t really be defined as ‘serious’, and yet, in this strange new existence, the word seemed to have acquired a host of meanings. Every night was serious: you crouched in the dark and the engines stuttered overhead, and then along came morning, and you were still alive, and once you’d got over that surprise you prepared the breakfast and accidentally dropped the only egg on the floor, and for a moment or two that was serious, or you discovered that the gas was off when all you had in the house was sausages, or you were halfway to work when your heel broke, and even though you were passing a bomb-site at the time, even though there were ambulances standing by and Heavy Rescue men lying listening for noises in the rubble, it still felt quite serious that you were standing on one leg, half a mile from the Ministry, with the roads all strewn with glass and not a spare minute in the day ahead with which to find a cobbler. It was as if the load were too heavy, the horror too horrible to keep in the head for long, so that the mind kept bobbing back to more manageable degrees of misery, to the Plimsoll line of the ordinary.
And perhaps it was different for Ellis – perhaps that was what people meant by artistic sensibility. Perhaps because eggs and heels and queues and dust and dropped half-crowns meant nothing to him, he could retain that feeling of horror and transmit it on to canvas, but that didn’t stop eggs and heels and queues and dust and dropped half-crowns being awfully important in their own way.
‘I should get to work,’ she said.
She dozed off on the tube, and dropped the biscuit tin, and woke with a start, reaching for the handle of an imaginary bucket.
FOOD FLASH
December 1940
Next door’s char, a woman who spent more time arranging things in attractive patterns than actually cleaning them, had lined up the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece in order of size, starting at the austerity end with a two by three inch festive greeting from Ambrose’s tailor, and ending at the other with a vast fake-snow-and-glitter affair from ‘Cecy and Tommy’, which on closer examination turned out to be the front of an old card glued on to a fresh backing. Under her signature, Cecy had written, ‘Am treading the boards again – season at the Ipswich Grand, starting with small but delicious part in The Wild Duck. Do drop by!!’ Ambrose had amused himself for a moment or two by trying to imagine a less enticing prospect than travelling nearly two hundred miles in order to see Cecy Clyde-Cameron clamp her chops around a morsel of Ibsen: the only rival he could think of was the prospective ‘Yule-Tide entertainment’ in the basement of Selfridges, the highlight of which – according to the solitary poster he had seen – was to be a demonstration by Camden boy scouts of how to disable a German parachutist.
The only card that had filled Ambrose with an approximation of Christmas cheer was the one at the centre of the mantelpiece. The picture, of course, was execrable: his ex-wife had always favoured the ‘Dignity and Impudence’ school of sentiment, and the card bore an illustration of a wide-eyed kitten nestling in a warden’s helmet. The true seasonal jollity was all on the inside:
Anthea and Harris Pym invite you to see in the New Year with as much good spirit (and good spirits!) as can be mustered. In the event of unwelcome visitations, we shall reconvene in the basement . . .
Beneath these lines, the powerful diagonals of Anthea’s signature leaned menacingly over Harris’s little scrawl. So with the signature, thus with her marriage. If only as an annual reminder of the joys of divorce, Ambrose welcomed the Pym party – but there were reasons beyond this, reasons that sustained him through an otherwise austere Christmas.
It had been blessedly quiet, of course – at least, until the night of the 29th when the City had caught it – but also unrelievedly dull. There had been none of the usual West End after-show parties or studio thrashes, only a tiny get-together at Sammy’s cramped offices on St Martin’s Lane, to which not only all the clients had been invited, but also the administrative staff. Ambrose, attending purely as a matter of business, had found himself jammed into a corner with a pimply tea-boy and a middle-aged stenographer whose gigantic bust had pummelled him every time she’d reached past his shoulder for a mince pie. ‘The filling’s made with grated parsnip,’ she’d kept saying, as if that were in some way a recommendation. Sammy had made a speech, boasting what an unexpectedly busy year it had been for the agency, and Ambrose had forbore to heckle, although ‘unexpectedly busy’ seemed a bizarre definition of his own experience: eight short propaganda films, one feature and an offer of rep at Colchester (declined). The feature had promised well – A Bad Business for the Duke with Ambrose as the eponymous duke – until he had read the script and found that after three pages his character was found on the floor of the library with a halberd in the back of his skull. It had taken two hours to shoot his dialogue – ‘Bring me a whisky, Berners.’ ‘A small one, sir?’ ‘A large one, damn you, and make it quick’ – and an entire half day lying face-down on a moulting carpet to nail the reveal shot. He had sneezed for hours afterwards.
‘Unexpectedly busy?’ he said acidly to Sammy after the speech.
‘Ah, now . . .’ Sammy, sozzled on three-quarters of a pink gin, wagged a finger. ‘I was waiting to see you, Ambrose, things are starting to happen.’
‘What things?’
‘Shtudios re-opening. The industry re-awakening after its long shleep. I’ve just this week put you forward for a good little role which . . .’
‘Little?’
‘Good. A good role. By ‘little’ I meant, you know . . .’ He waved his stump, vaguely.
‘Large?’ suggested Ambrose.
‘Supporting. But good supporting.’
‘Senior?’
‘Your own age.’
‘Character role?’
‘In a manner of shpeaking, but—’
‘Still alive at the end of the film?’
There was a nasty pause.
‘For God’s sake,’ said Ambrose. ‘Not another corpse role.’
‘No, no, no. It’s a very good part. Memorable. You’d be excellent in it, trust me.’
‘What is it?’
‘No, we’ll talk all about it over lunch. You’re coming for New Year’s Day, of course, with Sophie and me?’
‘What is it?’
‘No,’ said Sammy, imbuing the word with an awful arch primness. ‘We’ll talk about it in 1941. But you should trust me on this, you know, Ambrose, because I’m a very good agent.’ He placed a moist palm on Ambrose’s shoulder. ‘You should take my advice because I always have your very, very best interests at heart.’
Ten per cent of them, thought Ambrose, taking a step backwards. Something collapsed softly beneath his heel and he looked down to see the remains of a mince pie.
‘Ooh,’ said Sammy, ‘give it to me, give it to me! I know a little doggie who’ll just shnap that up.’
The parsnip mince pies, as it turned out, had been just the start of a thoroughly ersatz Christmas. Next door’s char (clearly angling for a tip) had brought him a slice of her home-made plum-cake, and had watched him actually bite into it before informing him that the icing was made from dehydrated potato flavoured with vanilla essence, while Gaston’s, the tiny, failing restaurant at the end of the road, where Ambrose ate the occasional meal, had come up with a Christmas lunch of mock foie gras (ingredients unvouchsafed), and a wedge of leather masquerading as ‘chateaubriand’. An attempt at decoration had been made – strips of newspaper cut into fringes and patterned in purple ink – but the overall effect had been grim. Ambrose had refused a pirate hat, drunk a bottle of indifferent red, and spent the afternoon asleep in front of the wireless.
Throughout this, he had been succoured by thoughts of New Year’s Eve, of the largesse which that awful little spiv Harris Pym, with his so-called ‘industrial connections’, always managed to provide, and which Ambrose had sorely missed the previous year when ‘owing to the international situation�
�� (and how he wished he had a pound for every time he’d heard that phrase) there’d been no party. The food! Oh God, the food! There’d been a ham three years ago whose treacle rind and melting coral flesh he could still taste in dreams. There’d been pheasant sandwiches and raised pies, and in 1938 there’d been a vast pink salmon which had lain across the table like a naked naiad. And then there was the wine. And the brandy. And the liqueurs. And the glorious trifles that were always the centrepiece of the buffet, and the rum jellies, and the delicate little langue de chat biscuits that crunched prettily in the mouth. Of course, one had to put up with Anthea’s braying friends and their banal conversation, and the terrible swank of the house, and the three brainless Pym boys who looked like replicas of their pop-eyed, slope-shouldered father, and their friends (galumphing girls covered in yards of chiffon), and Anthea’s mother (pure poison) who always fixed him with eyes like twin bayonets and said, ‘How extraordinary! Why on earth did Anthea invite you?’ To which the correct answer was, undoubtedly, to demonstrate to Ambrose the fabulous and vulgar wealth into which she’d re-married. In some ways he saw his attendance at the party as a favour to Anthea: ostentation needs witnesses, and if he received a little alimentary reward for his kindness, then so much the better.
It was, perhaps, the prospect of a well-filled evening that made the earlier part of New Year’s Eve hang rather heavily. It rained all morning, and by lunchtime Ambrose had traced an indefinable ticking sound to the box-room, where a long crack in the ceiling, legacy of a thousand-pounder five streets away, was oozing a bead of water every couple of seconds. He stared glumly at the dark circle on the rug. More bloody expense. He’d already had to replace all the windows, and now it looked as if the builder (a shifty-eyed profiteer straight out of Central Casting) had been right, and the roof actually did need looking at. And now it was too late because the entire bloody world needed a new roof, and he was going to have to spend the rest of the war with a zinc bucket in his spare room, and the smell of sodden plaster permeating the house. He put on his coat and hat and went out into the mews. Crossing to Number 8, opposite his own front door, he turned and looked up, and saw a gap in the profile of the gable where a line of ridge tiles had been blown away, the specific moment unnoticed amidst the usual night-time cacophony. The entire front of the house looked assaulted: the new window frames drear with grey undercoat, three panes cracked already, a deep pock-mark above the front door where a chunk of brick had been scooped out by shrapnel. It was not alone in its shame; the previous paintbox prettiness of the mews had gone completely, and shabbiness abounded. Half the houses were actually boarded up, the owners having fled to funk-holes in the country, there presumably to play bridge and leaf through old copies of the Tatler until the final All-Clear.
‘And are you not leaving London, Mr Hilliard?’ his elderly neighbour had asked him, inserting her pugs into a taxi early in the summer.
The idea had barely occurred to him. An actor had to remain visible – if he left London then who would look after his interests? Technically, of course, that was Sammy’s job, but Sammy had other clients to deflect him from his duty – and his duty was to remind people (continually, eloquently, forcefully) of Ambrose’s existence, because God knows there was no loyalty in the industry any longer. Directors, casting directors, heads of studio; none had the memory of a goldfish, none had a thought beyond ‘That actor fellow I saw in that movie yesterday – yes, he’ll do, I’m sure he’d be perfect as the lead’ and never mind that ‘that actor fellow’ possessed hands with all the expressivity of a bunch of bananas and a voice like a piccolo, if he were this month’s pin-up (or, for that matter, the nephew of the producer) then the job would go to him. Depth, versatility, experience, all counted for nothing. And now, to make matters even worse, those clowns in interest films (or ‘documentaries’ as one was supposed to call them) had started giving roles to non-actors – actually giving lines of dialogue to people who had been dragged away from their usual jobs in order to re-enact their usual jobs, people who moved like library ladders, spoke like somnambulists and had to be reminded not to stare with cretinous fascination at the camera. Of course, the end result was awful, unbearable, but the party line in the critical press was that it was marvellous, fresh, thrilling etc., and, presumably, if this continued, airmen and firemen and wardens would be spending all their time making films, and actors would be forced to step into the breach and actually fly aircraft and put out fires. It was a vision of anarchy. He had said as much to Sammy at their most recent luncheon at Veeraswamy’s and Sammy had agreed, albeit while covertly stuffing an entire Indian bread into a bag for his dog, and simultaneously trying to catch the eye of a producer on the next table, who was rumoured to be casting a film about the WAAFs with a lead role that was apparently perfect for some little tart on Sammy’s books. That was the root cause of Sammy’s problem, of course – too many distractions, too many other clients.
New Year’s Eve dawdled onward, the rain continuing, and at three o’clock, maddened by the hypnotic ‘plink . . . plink . . .’ emanating from the box-room, Ambrose took his umbrella and set out along Wigmore Street with no aim in mind other than escape. From Portland Mews to the Serpentine was a vigorous forty-minute walk, and one that he often used when trying to fix dialogue in his memory. Certain, cherished lines had become immoveably attached to particular localities. Cavendish Square, for instance, was a tongue-twisting speech from The Mysterious Maharajah (a nice little supernatural thriller, badly photographed, in which he’d played a counterfeit fakir), beginning ‘From all the seven seas and the sunsets beyond the seas, and the sirens who serenade in the sands beyond the strand . . .’, while the quarter mile from the back of Bourne & Hollingsworth to Marylebone High Road was the marvellous scene from The Two Doctors (1931), in which Dr McFarlane had comforted his dying mentor, Dr Frome: ‘My dearest friend, you’ve taught me not only wisdom, but compassion, not only skill but kindness, you’ve taught me to use more than my brain – you’ve taught me to use my heart . . .’ Ambrose had played McFarlane as a Scot, each ‘r’ rolled to perfection; he’d always had a gift for accents.
It was the Inspector Charnforth Mysteries, however, that had fastened themselves to the final long Hyde Park section of the walk – those complex speeches in which Ambrose’s character, Professor Gough, had ruminated upon the case in question, gradually teasing the truth from the web of deceit and presenting it, like a specimen on a plate, to that rough-hewn man of action, Inspector Charnforth. ‘Let me see . . .’ the speeches had always begun. ‘Let me see if I understand this correctly . . .’ And then, after a series of observations, startling in their perspicacity, the inevitable line, ‘But perhaps I should explain . . .’ The director had decided that all academics were strangers to the hairbrush, so Ambrose had been landed with a hideous Einsteinian sunburst of a wig, unflattering in the extreme, but the role itself had been a joy, making up in importance for what it lacked in screen time, each revelatory speech providing the very core of the story.
There had been four films, four nice little box-office successes, and then that rough-hewn man of action Reeve Callaghan, the actor playing the Inspector, had been caught with his arm down a chorus boy’s trousers, and the fifth of the series (Inspector Charnforth and the Mystery of the Yellow Topaz) had been shelved two weeks into shooting. Reeve had fled to Tangiers, and Ambrose had suggested a series entitled ‘The Professor Gough Mysteries’, but there had been the usual failure of imagination on the part of the studios, and one of the best roles of his career had been mothballed. And people like Sammy told him that he shouldn’t be bitter!
He could still remember the unfilmed speech: ‘. . . but perhaps I should explain, for there are as many angles to this mystery as there are facets on the tawny stone at its centre. Each one, in turn, can capture the light and guide it towards our eyes . . .’ It was supposed to have been uttered in the Fellows garden at an unnamed Cambridge College, and by the time the picture was cancelled, the set had
already been built in a corner of Stage 4 at Pinewood, a painted Eden of greensward and roses, hollyhocks and lilies. ‘. . . for imagine how simple it was for Philip Jeffrye-Hale, every inch the lord, to hide himself in the company of other aristocrats – as if, in this lawn on which we stroll, one had concealed a single blade of grass amidst other blades of grass.’ It would have been a bloody sight harder for him to conceal himself in Hyde Park, thought Ambrose, skirting the row of trench shelters that had been gouged into the turf. The Serpentine was half-drained, a puddle in a collar of mud, and beyond the lake, beside Rotten Row, stretched a towering ridge of rubble, several hundred yards long – a lorry was at one end, tipping last week’s broken buildings on to the pile. The noise filtered through the hiss of the rain like distant thunder.
Well, that was the walk. The rest of the afternoon, and the early part of the evening, stretched ahead of him like a length of grey linoleum. He lit a cigarette and watched a boy try to rescue the remains of a sunken toy boat, marooned in the mud.
He’d never thought of boredom as a permanent state before; it had been an occasional visitor, like a head cold, or a bee trapped in the house. Now, it seemed, the only time that he wasn’t bored was when he was lying in bed waiting to see whether one of the droning bastards overhead was going to drop a bomb on him. What on earth had he done on winter afternoons before the war? Taken the motor for a spin? Started early on the whisky? Dozed in a deep and scalding bath? Well he’d had those. He looked savagely at the tasteless cigarette and tossed it into the mud. Half a dozen ducks, alerted by the gesture, flew across and fought noisily over the butt – it was reminiscent of the type of supposedly symbolic scene that appeared in ‘significant’ foreign films, usually intercut with a rioting bread-queue and bearing portentous subtitles: ‘Like Animals They Struggled, and for What? Nothing.’ The victorious duck, by contrast, swallowed the fag-end with evident satisfaction and then went off to harass a woman who was waving around a delicious-looking lipstick. Ambrose turned back along the path towards Marble Arch. There had to be somewhere where he could spend the afternoon.