Their Finest Hour and a Half

by Lissa Evans

  When she’d left the office to go to Hammersmith, Parfitt had been dozing after a lunchtime visit to the White Horse, and Buckley had been reading the Daily Mirror while cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick. In the interim, he had switched newspapers and was using what appeared to be the same matchstick for picking his teeth.

  ‘Been busy?’ she asked, innocently.

  ‘Lull before the storm,’ he said. ‘Wait till next week, it’ll all start then.’ He lifted an imaginary receiver to his ear. ‘“Hello, is that Mr Bewkerley? The director’s decided to shoot Scene 327 with Johnnie hanging upside down from the mizzen mast. He says it’s visually more striking, but he wants you to cut three-quarters of the lines and add a song.’”

  ‘There’s no mizzen mast on the Redoubtable.’

  ‘Welcome back, Miss Gradgrind. So what did you think of the sets?’

  ‘They’re wonderful.’

  ‘Accurate?’

  ‘Not in the slightest.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘So what do you say when you’re asked to cut three-quarters of the lines and add a song?’

  ‘What do I say? D’you mean, do I launch into an agonized defence of the original wording, my eyes brimming with the impassioned tears of a thwarted creator?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you?’

  ‘Not unless there’s a knock-on effect on the storyline that some clot hasn’t noticed, and which would mean re-shooting half the film.’

  ‘And if there isn’t?’

  ‘I grumble a bit, and when that doesn’t work I get on with it, and try and minimize potential damage. If I don’t do the rewrites then you can guarantee that somebody less talented will.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’re still mixing this up with art, aren’t you?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘This is commerce. Speaking of which—’ He closed the paper he was reading and held it out to her. ‘Edwin Baker dropped this by this morning, someone sent it to him from New York. There’s a little piece about the film in it, he’s as pleased as punch.’

  She took the copy of Variety over to her desk, and started to look through it, at first quickly, and then with slow fascination. Compared to current British newspapers, with their meagre four sides and cramped print, it seemed an extraordinarily luxurious object, its eighty-odd pages filled with well-spaced and largely impenetrable show-business news.

  Arnaz Cancels Roxy, NY To Accomp Bride West

  Citizen Kane Release Still Indef. as Hearst Blasts RKO

  There was vaudeville gossip, and lists of which actors were flying from New York to Los Angeles, and which from Los Angeles to New York, and occasionally – very occasionally – there was a tiny mention of the war taking place on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Show Biz Names on 6 London Ambulances.

  Show business is well represented by the ambulances that clang through London streets during air raids to give succor to the injured. First six of them bought by contributions to the American Artists Ambulance Association are now on the street and have been christened with the names of show biz personalities. They are Fred Astaire, Laura and Irving Asher, Gilbert Miller, Phoebe Foster, Sam Eckman Jr, and Lou and Bernie Hyman.

  It was as if the blitz were a dreary party only noteworthy for its American guests. Catrin felt a surge of dour patriotism.

  ‘Got it yet?’ asked Buckley.

  She started to turn the pages more quickly, and found the Baker’s reference ringed in red crayon.

  Eng. Sea Epic enlists US Flyboy

  British war films may be BO poison to US femmes –

  ‘What does BO stand for?’

  ‘Box Office.’

  – but clever casting may tip the balance in a true-life story by Baker’s of London for potential UA distrib.

  Carl Lundback debuts as a US reporter trapped in France and rescued by twin fisher gals. The Eagle Squadron flyer, who volunteered for the RAF after steering crop dusters back home in Illinois, and bagged a Brit medal to boot, is non-profesh but is said to have acted plenty in legit. Pic offers no headliners –

  ‘Legit?’

  ‘Theatre.’

  ‘Headliners?’

  ‘Famous actors.’

  – but with a genuine hero aboard, it could be heading for real coin.

  ‘Good, eh?’ said Buckley.

  ‘How did Baker’s find him in the first place?’

  ‘Someone at the Ministry saw his picture in the paper, read that he’d done some acting and tipped us off.’

  ‘And what does he look like?’

  Buckley shrugged, and it was Parfitt who answered unexpectedly, lifting his head from the desk.

  ‘He looks,’ he said, ‘like a gen-u-ine hero.’

  *

  Smart, thought Arthur, as he waited for Edith to sign the register, all the ladies looked awfully smart – but then, of course, they were all dressmakers. Edith’s friend Miss Clifford, from Madame Tussaud’s, was in blue with a picture hat, and Edith’s cousin Verna was wearing a wine-coloured costume with matching daughter, and of course Edith looked especially smart in a dark cream frock with coffee trim, with the pearls that he’d given to her showing at the neckline. He himself, of course, was in khaki, and Mr De Groot, his next-door neighbour, was wearing a tweed suit with a ‘V’ for Victory tie-pin and a Home Guard arm-band. Mr De Groot was not exactly a friend – in fact they had exchanged about ten sentences in as many years – but he’d kindly kept an eye on the house while Arthur was away, and had boarded up a couple of broken windows and picked the shrapnel off the front lawn, and Arthur had hoped that asking him to be best man might be construed as a gesture of thanks. It was not an onerous role, after all – there was no transport to organize, no dancing to encourage, and Arthur hoped very much that there would be no speeches. ‘Just a quiet wedding,’ he’d explained. He’d not met Dolly Clifford then, of course.

  She’d brought a box brownie, and after the ceremony took a photograph of Edith and Arthur on the steps of Wimbledon town hall, under the notice which read, ‘Due to current Ministry of Food regulations, the throwing of rice is forbidden’ and the sun came out for a moment or two and gilded the pale yellow broom in Edith’s bouquet. ‘And what about one with a kiss?’ suggested Dolly, just as Myrtle extracted a handful of dried sea-lavender from a paper bag and hurled it at them, and for the next minute or so, Edith was engaged in extracting small bits of salty chaff from the neck of her dress, and then the sun went in again, so there were no more photographs.

  ‘I was praying the whole time that the siren wouldn’t go off,’ said Dolly, as the guests formed a loose crocodile and started the ten-minute walk back to Arthur’s house. ‘Because you know it’s bad luck, don’t you?’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Edith, vaguely; there was a piece of lavender stalk working its way into the left cup of her brassiere.

  ‘My cousin’s niece was at a wedding where there was an alert, and the groom’s father was hit by a tram on his way home from the reception. Didn’t you used to live on this street?’

  ‘Yes. At Number 40.’ It had been disconcerting to find that her old lodgings were so close to her new home. Her marital home. The home where she would shortly be installed as Mrs Edith Frith, a name unpronounceable to all but professional linguists.

  ‘I wonder if your landlady still lives there,’ said Dolly. ‘I know they say that bombs never fall in the same place twice, but Pearl told me that her aunt’s had two in her back yard, they were both delayed-action and the second one’s still there, it’s lodged somewhere under the lavvy. She says the ARP don’t believe her but every time she sits down she can hear it ticking . . .’

  Thank goodness, thought Edith, for Dolly’s chatty litany of death and portent, since no one else in the little procession was saying a word. Myrtle, having spent the last three weeks talking of nothing but her prospective day-trip to London, seemed oddly subdued, Mr De Groot was clearly not a conversationalist, and Verna appeared locked into a
disapproving silence. She had decided, from the first, that Arthur was an unscrupulous libertine who had snared Edith with an insincere offer, and who would hurl her aside once his warrior lusts were sated, and nothing – not even meeting him – had dissuaded her of this opinion. She had watched the ceremony with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her lips, as if to stifle involuntary cries of protest.

  ‘Not much further,’ said Edith. ‘It’s just round the corner.’

  The arrangements had been simple, and quickly accomplished. Arthur had applied for a licence, and Edith had sewn herself a dress and bought new underwear in Cromer and then, just a fortnight after the proposal, she’d left Norfolk for Clapham, where she’d slept on Dolly Clifford’s sofa for three nights and spent the days at Arthur’s house, trying to turn his dining-room into a suitable place for a wedding breakfast – though it was more of a wedding afternoon-tea, really, the ceremony being at two o’clock. She had washed the curtains and scrubbed the floor, and Arthur had moved furniture and cut the ivy that crawled across the window, and they had worked in pleasant harmony and talked only of practical things, of tea-towels and saucepans and milk deliveries. It was as if neither wanted to discover any more about the other before the wedding, for that might raise doubts, and there could be no going back. It was, Edith thought, a little like the arranged marriages of the Hindoos. A self-arranged marriage.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said. The exterior of Arthur’s house looked quite normal; the peculiarities began inside the front door.

  ‘What are all these rails along the wall?’ asked Myrtle as they entered the hall.

  Arthur cleared his throat. ‘My father was crippled in the war,’ he said. ‘In the last war. I put these up to help him to get about.’

  There were no mats or rugs, either, as his father had tended to trip on them. The guests’ footsteps clattered on the bare floorboards.

  ‘You’ll hear any burglars coming,’ said Dolly, ‘and that’s a blessing. I knew a man, once, he had a big win on the dogs, and his wife had the whole house done out in Turkish carpeting – she’d always dreamed of it – and it was as thick as this,’ she held out a finger and thumb, an inch apart, ‘and the very next night they were robbed while they were asleep. Four men with sacks, trampling all over the place, and they didn’t hear a thing!’

  ‘Just through here,’ said Edith.

  The dining-room smelled of floor-polish and bay leaves, for she had collected every jug and vase she could find, and filled them with evergreen cuttings from the garden. She had draped the makeshift table with a starched cloth and tied the curtains back with ribbon and just before leaving for the town hall she and Arthur had brought in the food from the kitchen and covered the dishes with tea-towels. There was salad and spam, and rolls and new potatoes and jellied chicken, and a fruit-cream for dessert, and a wedding cake that was a plain sponge but with real chocolate icing, made from their pooled ration, and decorated with crystallized violets, and even Verna looked faintly pleased by the largesse on offer, though she refused a glass of madeira with the expression of someone offered arsenic.

  It was Dolly who proposed a toast to the happy couple, which was kind, given that the shelter warden she’d been seeing since Christmas had recently turned out to have a wife in Swindon, but it was also Dolly who rapped on the top of the table with her knuckles, and then lifted the cloth to reveal the subterfuge beneath.

  ‘Ooh, it’s a Morrison shelter,’ she said.

  ‘It’s Mr De Groot’s,’ said Arthur. ‘He loaned it to us because I don’t have a dining-room table.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ asked Myrtle, her mouth full of chicken.

  ‘Because this was my father’s bedroom,’ said Arthur. ‘He was very ill for the last few years of his life and he couldn’t climb the stairs.’

  For a minute or so, the breath of the sick-room seemed to thicken the air, and the only sound was the clink of cutlery on plate. It was Dolly who broke the silence.

  ‘A man I know who’s in the fire service says he wouldn’t get into a Morrison if you paid him a thousand pounds, he says if the house came down and then there was a fire, you’d be trapped in there like a roast in an oven, there’d be nothing but charred bones the morning after and he says he’d rather take his chances and die in his own bed.’

  Edith risked a glance at Mr De Groot. He had stopped eating.

  ‘Did I mention that we’ll be starting in studio on Monday?’ she said, hurriedly, to no one in particular. ‘In fact, I’ve been asked to go in tomorrow, the wardrobe mistress is measuring the London extras.’

  ‘I didn’t realize that you’d be going out to work,’ said Verna, managing to imply, in a single word, that Arthur was unable to provide for his new wife and was therefore forcing her to take employment, possibly of a dubious nature.

  ‘I did say,’ said Edith, mildly. ‘It’s only for five weeks and then I’m sure Arthur and I will have a talk about what to do next.’

  ‘Everyone works now,’ said Dolly. ‘Tussaud’s never used to employ married women, but even they’re thinking about changing their mind.’

  ‘You work, Mum,’ said Myrtle.

  ‘I work inside the home,’ replied Verna, with a modest lowering of the eyes. ‘It’s more in the nature of a little hobby. I certainly don’t have to go out in the blackout. Or on a Sunday,’ she added, pointedly.

  ‘Well, I think it’s smashing,’ said Dolly. ‘Husband and wife going off to work together. After all, Arthur’ll go back to war when the film’s finished, won’t he, and who knows if they’ll see each other again?’ There was a tiny silence. ‘When they’ll see each other again, I mean. Obviously.’

  ‘Cake, anyone?’ asked Edith. It was several months since she had had a headache, but she was getting one now.

  Her cousins were the first to leave, the long train journey back to Norfolk ahead of them.

  On the doorstep, Verna took Edith’s hand. ‘Of course, I hope that you’ll be happy,’ she said. ‘Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder, not that it was a religious ceremony. And I won’t say “marry in haste, repent in leisure”, but if you do find that you’re . . .’ she paused, significantly.

  ‘Repenting?’ suggested Edith.

  Verna nodded. ‘. . . then remember that we’re your family and there’s always a place for you with us.’

  Edith squeezed her cousin’s hand, touched in spite of herself.

  ‘Mum still can’t find anybody else for the shop,’ said Myrtle, trampling the moment. ‘I want you to come back, as well. I miss you.’

  ‘And I miss you, too.’ She kissed Myrtle’s round cheek and wished she could have designed the child’s outfit herself; the burgundy dress and coat made her look middle-aged – a dumpy, plain version of her mother. A sugar-almond colour would have been prettier, and a full skirt with a swing to it . . .

  ‘Is this really London?’ whispered Myrtle, suddenly, desperately.

  ‘It’s a suburb of London.’

  ‘But it’s just houses.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Just house after house after house. I thought there’d be things to look at. I thought it would be exciting. I told everybody at school I was going to see film-stars. I even brought my autograph book, but it just looks like anywhere.’

  ‘I know,’ said Edith, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Dolly was the next to go, giving Arthur a great smacker of a kiss, and hissing ‘enjoy the honeymoon!’ in Edith’s ear, and then Mr De Groot shook hands with them both, and said that they could keep the Morrison shelter as a wedding gift. He disappeared along the side alley, and Arthur closed the front door.

  ‘Well . . .’ he said, taking off his spectacles and giving them a polish. ‘My goodness. Goodness me.’ When he replaced them, he could still see Edith standing in the hall with a wedding ring on her finger, so it seemed likely, now, that this was all real and that he wouldn’t wake up in hospital with a lump on his head. ‘Well, I thought it went very . . .’ He paused to con
sider how it had gone. Everything had been eaten, which was always reassuring.

  ‘Dolly’s good-hearted,’ said Edith. ‘She means well, even if she sometimes puts her foot in it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I’m very fond of Myrtle.’

  ‘Yes. Do you think we should start clearing up?’

  ‘We could have a cup of tea first,’ said Edith. She felt exhausted, as if she’d spent the afternoon digging trenches instead of handing out cake.

  ‘I think,’ said Arthur, ‘I ought to begin on the blackouts. It’ll be dark soon.’

  Edith waited for the kettle to boil, and listened to Arthur’s footsteps as they moved through the house, from the bare boards of the ground floor to the carpeted rooms upstairs – the box-room where he slept, the sunny spare room overlooking the back garden that he used for his hobbies, the square bedroom at the front that had been his parents’. There were twin beds in the latter, and pretty, faded, old-fashioned decor – matching rose-pink quilts, a dressing-table runner with cross-stitched flowers and tatted edging, a rag rug in shades of blue. She’d seen it for the first time only this morning, when Arthur had carried her suitcase up the stairs. ‘I expect you have things to do,’ he’d said vaguely, edging out of the room again, and she had hung her clothes in the empty wardrobe, and changed into her wedding outfit, and tilted the cheval glass, so that she could see herself, head to toe. Smart, she’d thought, with a slight feeling of disappointment. Not bridal, nor blushing, nor a heart-stopping vision of nuptial loveliness, but Edith Beadmore in a smart dress, and wearing lipstick. Dolly had offered her a choice between Crimson Dawn and Sunset Glow and she was glad that she had chosen the paler shade.

  Arthur had been standing in the hall when, self-consciously, she’d walked down the stairs, and he’d said, ‘You look very nice,’ and then diffidently asked whether she’d like to wear his mother’s pearls, and of course, she’d accepted, and whilst he was getting them she had braced herself for salmon-pink misshapes, or a rope that hung down to her navel, and when she’d opened the mauve quilted box, and pulled aside the tissue to reveal a double strand of ivory perfection, she’d been speechless. The necklace felt warm against her skin; she’d never owned anything as beautiful.