Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans

  Thank you for a delightful day.

  I enjoyed it.

  Yes, so did I.

  Good evening.

  Yes, good evening.

  They plodded on. The crew was still on the headland, smoking, packing equipment into boxes, winding cables, their voices carrying clearly in the chilly twilight.

  ‘They’ll just have to get a stuffed one, won’t they?’

  ‘What, a stuffed one that swims and barks?’

  ‘They could do it in long shot.’

  ‘They’d have to do it on wireless before that worked.’

  ‘We lost a donkey once.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Irish comedy, O’Hoolihan’s Treasure. We was shooting on Ealing Common, and the bugger ran off, last seen heading for Acton.’

  ‘Did you get a stuffed one?’

  ‘No we just put ears on the director.’

  Laughter followed, and then all heads turned as Edith and Arthur emerged, self-consciously, from the gloaming.

  ‘Oy oy,’ said one of the men, grinning, ‘and what have you two been up to?’ There were sniggers from his colleagues.

  ‘Now stop it,’ said Phyl, ‘I’m sure they’ve just been for a nice walk.’ But there was amusement in her narrow grey eyes, and Edith felt suddenly indignant, for was it really so funny, the idea that she and Arthur might have been ‘up to’ something? They were not a joke, the pair of them, they were not coconuts in a shy – and besides, they had most certainly done more than just go for a nice walk. Defiantly, she took Arthur’s arm.

  ‘Oy oy,’ said the man with the cable, again, ‘so when’s the wedding?’

  Edith and Arthur exchanged a swift, involuntary glance – a double flinch, almost – and Arthur turned crimson.

  ‘Oy oy!’ said the man, in quite a different tone, and Phyl exclaimed, ‘You’re a dark horse, Arthur, and did she say yes?’ and when Arthur nodded, she said, ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ and the chap with the headphones walked over and shook Edith’s hand and clapped Arthur on the back, and said, ‘come for a drink,’ and that was just the start of it, the very start of a great surge of sentimental goodwill that bore them up and carried them off, and within minutes the bar of the Crown and Anchor began to fill with other crew members who’d heard the news, and a makeshift banner appeared between the beams, bearing a picture of intertwined hearts and the legend:

  CONGRALUTIONS ON YOUR ENGAGMENT

  and a man with a Ronald Colman moustache leaned beerily over Edith’s shoulder and said ‘None of the scenic artists can spell, that’s why they draw for a living,’ and the actor Hadley Best kissed Edith’s hand and called for a toast and everyone raised their glasses and shouted, ‘To Edith and Arthur!’ as if they’d known them for years, and then the costume lady (‘Call me Glenys’) took Edith aside and asked her if she fancied a job as a standby wardrobe assistant, since the studio was sure to be a nightmare, they’d be using a water-tank and it would be wet, dry, wet, dry the whole blessed time, and the only girls she could get nowadays were a pack of silly gigglers, and then a bottle of champagne – actual champagne! – appeared from somewhere and Edith, who never drank, found herself taking a great gulp, and became a silly giggler herself, and the man with the Ronald Colman moustache leaned over her shoulder again and said that he was the NATKE rep and that if she was going to work in wardrobe then she’d have to join, and he needed a word about the dues, and then Glenys returned with a pink gin and said, ‘Oh unions, they’re such a nuisance,’ and the chap with the moustache countered that that was a fine thing to call the greatest advance for the working man since the end of slavery and if she didn’t agree with the principles of social justice then why didn’t she just move to Berlin where he was sure they’d be happy to have her, and Kipper appeared suddenly and led the man with the moustache away, and Glenys put one heavily ringed hand on Edith’s arm and said, ‘A word of advice, my dear, don’t have a long engagement, not during a war,’ and held up the fourth finger of her left hand in order to demonstrate that there was a diamond ring beneath the swollen knuckle, but no wedding band, and then one of the actresses climbed on to a stool and sang the whole of ‘Apple Blossom Time’ although no one appeared to be listening, and Hadley called upon Arthur to make a speech, and there was a great assenting roar, and Arthur, who was on his second glass of champagne and beginning to look rather tight, got to his feet and said, ‘Thank you, everybody, on behalf of my intended and myself, for your good wishes,’ and sat down to prolonged applause before standing up again and adding, ‘I would also like to thank Mr Hilliard for his kind and useful advice,’ and Ambrose Hilliard, over by the window, inclined his head and smiled graciously, and then Arthur, who had just resumed his seat, stood up for a third time and said, ‘Oh, I’ve just remembered something – Mr Hilliard, didn’t you mention on that first morning at breakfast that you knew a dog who looked exactly like Chopper?’ and there was a sudden hopeful movement from the corner where Kipper was standing with the director, and then all heads swung back towards Ambrose Hilliard.

  ‘I was, of course, fully intending to mention it,’ he said, rather stiffly.

  *

  Ensconced in a corner of the snug, Buckley drank the last of his pint and set the empty glass on the table. ‘Norfolk piss,’ he said, judicially. ‘It should be a crime to serve ale of this quality at any public celebration other than a hanging.’

  ‘Do you want another?’ asked Catrin.

  ‘Might as well. No – as you were, we’re getting a visitor.’

  Kipper was making his way between the tables towards them.

  ‘His first words,’ said Buckley, under his breath, ‘will be “the director wants . . .” How are you doing?’ he added, with false jollity.

  ‘The director wants to speak to you,’ said Kipper.

  ‘Don’t tell me, he’s cancelled my fitting for the dog costume.’

  The corners of Kipper’s mouth stretched briefly, as if responding to a gastric spasm.

  ‘Joking aside,’ he said, ‘the producer’s sent a telegram.’

  ‘Bad news? Rushes gone up in smoke?’

  ‘It’s about casting. They’ve found a Hannigan, some American who’s been flying with the RAF.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Buckley glanced at Catrin. ‘Get us a pint while I’m gone,’ he said, ‘there’s a good girl.’ He followed Kipper, and Catrin entered the roaring bonhomie of the bar-room.

  ‘No spirits left,’ shouted the landlady, moving like an automaton between till and beer-pumps, ‘and half-pints only or we’ll be dry in twenty minutes.’

  There was a jeer from those waiting, and a fresh wave of importunates at the bar, and Catrin found herself overtaken and pushed aside.

  ‘Would you like a gin?’ asked a voice behind her, and she turned to see Edith – transformed, in the seven hours or so since Catrin had shaken hands with her in the Copper Kettle, from a neat, pale figure to someone who looked as if they’d just been thrown off the Waltzers for riding without a ticket. She was holding a full glass in each hand. ‘People keep giving them to me,’ she said, ‘and I’ve had enough, I think. You work on the film, don’t you? I’m sure that I shook hands with you at some point. Would you like one?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Catrin.

  ‘Would you like the other?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Catrin again, feeling sure that Buckley would drink it. ‘And congratulations.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Edith, uncertainly. Her hands free for the first time in what felt like hours, she patted her hair and straightened the yoke of her blouse, trying to impose a little order on the proceedings. At some ill-defined point, her evening had stopped hurtling forward in a continuous fashion, and had become, instead, a jerky series of encounters with one semi-recognized crew-member after another, each offering congratulations, expressing surprise, and then disappearing again, leaving Edith with yet another drink in front of her and the impression that there were more people in the room who knew
her Christian name than she had met in total in the whole of her previous life. It was all so peculiar, so extraordinarily public, and it was only the occasional glimpse of Arthur in the crowd, his expression an entirely plausible one of vaguely-pleased bewilderment, that convinced her that what was happening was real, and not a dream of the sort in which one suddenly looks down to discover that one has left the house wearing only a pair of knickers. It was real, it was true, and she hadn’t even told Verna yet.

  ‘Who’s Verna?’ asked Catrin, and Edith realized that she’d voiced the thought aloud.

  ‘My cousin,’ she said. ‘She’s never met Arthur. Well, I’ve only met him three times,’ and she waited for the shriek of disbelief that the statement deserved.

  ‘I ran away with someone that I’d only known for a fortnight,’ said Catrin, and Edith, who hadn’t really been looking at her – had noted only that she was pretty and that one of the shoulder-seams of her primrose jumper was missing a stitch or two – turned to her hungrily.

  ‘You ran away with him?’

  ‘Yes. And it wasn’t even a fortnight, really – I spoke to him for the first time on a Tuesday, and ten days later I packed a suitcase and met him at the station.’

  ‘But why did you?’

  ‘Oh God . . .’ Catrin coloured, and laughed in a rather forced way. ‘I was madly in love. I was in love with him and I was in love with the whole idea of him – I thought I was doing the most romantic thing in the world. I would have run after that train in my stockinged feet, I would have hung from the carriage by my fingernails.’ She took a swallow of gin, and then another. ‘And what about you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Edith. ‘I’m not in love. And neither is he.’ And she knew with utter certainty that that was true, and she found the thought strangely reassuring, for it meant that there had been nothing feverish about Arthur’s proposal, and therefore no shame attached to the expediency of her own reply.

  ‘So . . .’ Catrin looked at her, a little baffled. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  Edith thought for a long moment.

  ‘Because I need a change,’ she said.

  MAIN FEATURE

  April 1941

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said the taxi-cab-driver, triumphantly, as he waited for the lights on Regent’s Street to change. ‘I’ve been trying to work you out since Trafalgar Square, you’re in pictures, you was in the one about the rich Yankee feller who comes over and builds a house for the orphans in the East End. What was it called?’

  ‘A New Leaf,’ supplied Ambrose. Associated Metropolitan 1931. Not one of his better-known films, and not the happiest of shoots, either. The angel-faced child who’d played ‘Sonny’ (‘I don’t know whose son I am, mister, so I might as well be yours . . .’ ) had not only fleeced the entire cast at poker, but had turned out to be playing with a marked pack, supplied to him by his mother.

  ‘A New Leaf,’ repeated the cab-driver, ‘that’s it, and I saw it with me missis in March 1932. You know why I can put me finger right on the date?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because in April of that year I brought the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart, and I didn’t never go to the pictures no more after that . . .’

  Even without the subsequent eschatological lecture, the journey seemed interminable. There was a time bomb on the Euston Road, and another on Drummond Street, and a fractured gas main somewhere behind St Pancras, necessitating so many diversions along so many shattered streets made identical by ruin that Ambrose entirely lost his sense of direction, and found himself gazing out as if at a foreign city, or at one newly excavated, Pompeii under a leaden sky. It wasn’t until the taxi-cab passed the stone fretwork of St David’s, grimy but intact, and turned on to the Holloway Road that the map of Islington righted itself in his head, like a needle swinging to true north. There were rows of cabbages on Highbury Fields, and a pig in a sty.

  ‘This the place?’ asked the cabbie, pulling in beside Sammy’s mansion block. ‘Been knocked about a bit, ain’t it?’ he added, eyeing the timber flying-buttresses bolted to the brick of the side wall, their bulk partially concealing a crack that stretched from pavement to guttering.

  ‘Could you wait?’ asked Ambrose. ‘I shouldn’t be very long.’

  Sophie answered the door of the flat herself. She was dressed in black, with a beaded brooch at her throat. Her dark hair was drawn back into a chignon. ‘Do come in,’ she said, turning away as she spoke, and leaving Ambrose to close the door and follow her into the drawing-room. The window there was boarded-up and the only light came from an oil lamp, the smell a heady leap into the past.

  ‘We lost the windows last month, and the electricity four nights ago,’ said Sophie. ‘Strangely, there is still gas. Thank you, Elena,’ she said, to the woman who placed a tray in front of her. There were two glasses of tea on it. ‘No lemon, I’m afraid. Sugar?’

  ‘Two please,’ said Ambrose. No noise intruded through the shutter from the world outside, and the tinkle of the spoon seemed very loud.

  ‘I’ll just mention that I have a taxi waiting,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘How fortunate. They’re not easy to find these days.’ Sophie put down the spoon and folded her hands. ‘And how are you enjoying playing this role of the uncle?’

  ‘I can’t say that I’m enjoying it, exactly. Until studio begins one doesn’t get the chance to approach the part in any depth – location filming’s awfully disjointed.’

  ‘I see.’ She picked up her glass and took a sip. ‘I am still quite new to this, of course. I shall have to come to Hammersmith and watch you in a scene. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Though it wasn’t a comfortable prospect.

  ‘My brother liked to go on set, I seem to remember, though I think that was because he found the administrative side of things rather dull. Oh, before I forget, I ought to tell you that I’m having to raise my fee to 12 per cent. Finding suitable new premises is time-consuming, and I shall have to pay office staff more than Sammy used to, since they can make double the previous wage in any munitions factory.’

  Ambrose opened his mouth to protest.

  ‘And I have had to let a few of the old clientele go, I’m afraid,’ continued Sophie, ‘I think the English phrase is “dead wood”.’

  Ambrose closed his mouth again.

  ‘And now to Cerberus,’ said Sophie. ‘I have considered your request very carefully.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that it was my request – I’m asking on behalf of the production.’

  ‘But it was you who pointed out the resemblance between Cerberus and the other dog?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, but . . .’ He broke off. It was manifestly too complicated to explain about Arthur Frith’s drunken bellow across the bar-room of the Crown and Anchor. It had been heard by everyone, from the director down to the most simian of the sparks, and Ambrose had been forced to agree in public that, yes, it was a most marvellous coincidence, and that he would certainly act upon it. He’d known immediately that asking a favour of Sophie would be a sticky task.

  ‘And what would be his duties?’ she enquired, as if Cerberus were applying for the post of under-housemaid.

  Ambrose tried to page through the script from the dog’s point of view. ‘I think there’s a scene in which he’s rescued with the injured fiancé, and then he’s on deck, of course, and he has to bark at one point, supposedly at the dive-bombers. That sort of thing . . .’

  Sophie took another sip of tea, setting the glass back on the tray before speaking again. ‘It has not been easy trying to feed and protect a dog in the current climate,’ she said. ‘You know that most other people in London, who have pets, have taken quite a different course.’

  Ambrose nodded, soberly.

  ‘But my brother had great affection for Cerberus so I feel it is my obligation. If I were to lend him to this production, I would want him to be well taken care of. Suitable food, shelter during raids and so forth.’

  �
��Of course, of course.’

  ‘And it would be unreasonable to expect him to be dragged between the studio and this flat every morning and evening, it’s a very great distance. He would have to stay with you.’

  For a moment, Ambrose was unsure whether he had heard the sentence right – it was the closeness of the room, the oil fumes affecting his concentration. ‘With me?’ he repeated, cautiously.

  ‘I assumed that was the proposed arrangement.’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no. The first assistant director would be arranging for the dog’s accommodation. I expect one of the props boys will take him.’

  There was silence. Sophie moved her head slightly, and the soft wash of lamp-light caught the brooch at her neck so that it glittered like mica. ‘Were you always so very casual with the lives of others?’ she asked.

  An answer or two fluttered and expired on Ambrose’s lips, before he could find his voice again.

  ‘I really couldn’t look after a dog.’

  ‘I fear that may be true,’ said Sophie.

  ‘No, what I meant was that I don’t have time to . . . to . . .’

  She looked sibylline in the shadows. ‘To do what, Mr Hilliard? Cerberus is quite a small dog, his needs are few and simple.’

  ‘Nevertheless—’

  ‘And, besides, while there are so many actors and so few roles, I think it would be foolish to miss an opportunity of this sort. Baker’s need a very particular dog, and I imagine they will be grateful to you for providing one, and when another film is made then they may remember you.’

  ‘I would hope that they would remember me for my acting,’ said Ambrose, coldly.

  ‘Yes, I would hope that, too.’ Her inflexion was ambiguous. ‘May I offer you more tea?’

  ‘No thank you.’ He remembered, suddenly, the taxi-cab waiting outside. ‘I really must be going.’