by Lissa Evans
‘All right then, last one.’ She lifted her own glass. ‘To the success of Just an Ordinary Wednesday.’
Buckley shook his head. ‘Distributors want to change the title.’
‘They don’t!’
‘They do.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because nothing’s ever allowed to be ordinary in America. It’ll have to be a whoop-de-do yee-hah astounding Wednesday that’s more than twice the size and three times as shiny as the Wednesdays we have in England, and never mind the irony in the original title. No – don’t drink to that,’ he added, shooting a hand across the table and trapping her glass. ‘Don’t drink to that, drink to something better. Drink to the new Baker’s writing team – you, me and Parfitt.’
‘All right, then.’
She tugged at the glass, but he held fast, his fingers pinning her own.
‘No, scrub that.’ He paused, and took a sharp breath. ‘Just drink to you and me,’ he said, so quickly that she barely heard him.
‘What?’
‘To you and me.’ He tightened his grip, his eyes fixed on hers. ‘Catrin . . .’ he said, and he was on his feet and leaning across the table towards her, smelling of brilliantine and beer. He was going to kiss her on the lips, she realized, and she reached out her other hand towards his chest and gave him a good-humoured shove.
‘Don’t,’ she said. He sat back on the stool with a thump, his grip jerking the glass towards him so that a sheet of beer hit him in the face, and Catrin heard herself starting to laugh – an involuntary noise, feathery with nerves – and Buckley looked away, his sallow skin slowly darkening, a fringe of droplets hanging from his moustache.
‘That’ll teach me,’ he said.
‘Do you want a hanky?’
He took it from her and slowly wiped his face. ‘You think I’m an old fool,’ he said.
‘No, I don’t.’ Other drinkers were staring.
‘I’m just a bloody old fool to you.’
‘No. Honestly. Let’s forget it ever happened. It doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t.’
‘It matters to me,’ said Buckley. ‘It matters like hell to me.’ He looked at her for a moment, and then down at the sodden handkerchief, his expression heavy, the usual wolfishness gone, and Catrin suddenly understood. A drunken lunge, she’d thought – a drunken lunge, quickly dealt with and then back to the usual cross-talk, intrusive but ephemeral, that striped their days. But though she was drunk, Buckley was sober, or as near as dammit, and this hadn’t been his usual bottom-pinching, chase-around-the-desk brand of shallow flirtation, but something from the depths, a kraken with a rose in its beak.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, and then wanted to cross the words out again, to run a pencil through the whole bloody scene, but they’d shot it now, it was in the can.
*
‘All ready?’ asked Arthur, door-key in hand. The question was redundant, since Edith was standing just beside him in the hall, headscarf tied, gas-mask over her shoulder, handbag in the crook of her elbow, but the asking of the question had become part of their routine, as had the reply.
‘All ready,’ said Edith, knowing precisely what would come next.
‘I’ll just double-check that the gas is off,’ said Arthur. She watched him open the door of the cupboard under the stairs, disappear briefly from view and then re-emerge. ‘Yes, it’s off. All set then?’
This time she nodded, and Arthur opened the door for her, paused on the step in order to clean his spectacles, and then looked up at the sky; it was clear, and as blue as a harebell. ‘It might be a mistake, though, not to bring the umbrella,’ he said, reflectively. ‘What do you think?’
‘Oh, I think we could risk it,’ said Edith.
He pulled the door shut, and it closed with a solid click and a little after-snap from the letter-box, and then it was five steps up the path, and the rattle of the gate latch and out on to the pavement of Cressy Avenue. ‘We’re in good time,’ said Arthur, checking his watch. ‘Off we go. Edith.’
He still tended to enunciate her name, she thought, as if it were a code-word that had to be inserted into an otherwise ordinary sentence. ‘I used to be called “Edie” at school,’ she said, as they turned left along Agincourt Road. ‘I quite liked it. Did you ever have a nickname at school?’
‘A nickname?’ The long list sagged in his memory: Farty-Artie, Gig-lamps, Four Eyes, Sissy-boy, Specky, Bottle-tops, Milksop, Goggles, Nursey – Nursey had been coined by the one boy in whom he’d confided about his duties at home, and it was Nursey that had stuck. Nursey Frith. ‘. . . no, not really. Nothing to speak of,’ said Arthur.
They crossed into Cherry Grove; two houses were missing along the row, one site recent and raw, clay lumped on splintered rafters, the other softened by a haze of green. There were boarded windows and chipped bricks and missing slates on other houses along their route and, in addition to the war damage, Edith had noticed since her return an encroaching shabbiness – neglected paths whiskery with weeds, hedges topped by a frill of unchecked growth, peeling paint on gates and doors – evidence of absent husbands and fathers, of families who had fled London for the duration. Those who had stayed were more concerned with growing onions than pulling dandelions. A cockerel crowed from a back garden somewhere.
‘I’d rather like to keep hens,’ said Edith.
‘Hmm?’ He was checking his watch. Arthur always checked his watch at the end of Cherry Grove. He would check it again, Edith knew, just as they arrived at the station, and again as the train was announced, looking up at her with a smile and saying, ‘That should do it,’ or ‘Plenty of time, still.’
It was a nice smile, albeit diffident, at one with a manner that seemed unfailingly equable and polite. Edith had been Mrs Frith for over two weeks now, and she had encountered no unpleasant surprises, no locked room à la Bluebeard, no flashes of temper or temperament. There had been no surprises at all, in fact, unpleasant or otherwise, and each day served only to reinforce the routine into which they’d quickly fallen, and Edith (though she could hardly bear to admit it to herself) was beginning to feel awfully flat. It wasn’t that she’d imagined a life of wild, free spontaneity, it’s just that she hadn’t thought that there would be so very little to discover about marriage, about her husband. It was like jumping into an opaque pond and finding it ankle-deep.
It might have helped if they’d seen rather less of each other – a daily separation of some kind, so that they had news to exchange, experiences to recount – but not only did they travel to the studio together, but once there, Arthur stuck to her like a piece of lint on a cardigan, which in one way was flattering and extraordinary and wonderful (for who would have thought that she, Edith Frith née Beadmore, would ever meet a man who didn’t want to let her out of his sight), but in all other ways was completely maddening, for she was enjoying the work enormously, but it was work that took concentration and care, and since she couldn’t actually ignore the fixed presence of a husband at her elbow, she found her attention constantly split. And she could hardly ask him to go away, could she, since in only four weeks’ time he’d be doing exactly that . . .
‘I said that I rather fancied keeping hens,’ repeated Edith. ‘It would be lovely to have eggs more often.’
‘Yes it would,’ said Arthur. ‘I like an omelette.’ It had been such a long time since he’d made one. He thought with sudden yearning of the hiss of the butter, the plateful of airy gold that emerged like a conjuring trick from the pan. ‘And they’re awfully nutritious,’ he added. ‘At Waring’s we used to serve an egg savoury twice a week.’
A salvage truck passed them, bins rattling in the back, and then the road was empty again and they crossed into Willow Walk and Edith glanced at Number 40, wondering if she’d see her old landlady Mrs Bailey, or Mrs Bailey’s daughter Pamela, but as usual the door was shut, the windows blank.
‘I wonder if they’ve moved away,’ she said, and saw, as she spoke, a couple standing in the middle of th
e pavement twenty yards ahead, the man with one arm extended, bracing himself against a cherry tree, and the other wrapped around his girl, lifting her so that only the toes of her shoes were touching the pavement, leaning her over backward so that his face was above hers, his mouth pressed on her mouth, and Edith saw with no particular surprise that the girl was Pamela, her early promise fulfilled, school hat halfway down the back of her head, eyes closed in apparent ecstasy as she kissed a Polish airman. And kissed him. And kissed him. There was no sign of an end to the embrace.
‘Perhaps we should cross over,’ said Edith to Arthur.
‘Yes.’
And that was the other thing, of course. She couldn’t ignore it or pretend that it wasn’t happening – or, rather, that it was happening. Her wedding-night migraine had lasted for twenty-four hours, and as usual she had felt like a chewed string for a day or two afterwards, and Arthur had been kindness itself, and had continued to sleep in his old room, just in case (as he’d said) his snoring disturbed her. And then, just as she’d begun to feel better, her monthly had started, so that yet again, the eau de Nil satin slip with parchment piping had stayed in the drawer and Arthur, on being informed of her condition, had disappeared downstairs for ten minutes before returning with a filled hot-water-bottle for her cramps, which was a thoughtful gesture, and one that made her feel like an elderly maiden aunt, lumpen and chaste in tartan dressing-gown and sanitary belt. After which he had gone back to his own room again.
More than a week had passed since then. Each evening, Arthur would formally kiss her goodnight, one hand on her shoulder, his body at least six inches from hers, and they would retire to their separate rooms. It was as if they’d somehow skipped forty years of marriage, leap-frogging early fervency and arriving directly at Darby and Joan, all passion spent, and Edith hadn’t yet summoned up the – the what? the courage? the vocabulary? – needed to raise the subject. I’m a modern woman, she wanted to say. I took life-drawing classes at art college, I am fully au fait with the anatomy of the masculine form, I will not be shocked, I shall not be a shrinking virgin. But the trouble was that she had always assumed that if the time ever came, then she wouldn’t be the one taking the lead. And now it seemed that there were two of them jostling for second place.
‘We should do it,’ said Arthur, startling her considerably. ‘Of course, we’d have to go to a reliable breeder.’
‘Hens,’ said Edith, after a moment.
‘And I could make the coop.’ He had seen a plan for one in a copy of The Woodworker and after he’d finished his current fretwork project he could give it a go; it wouldn’t be easy to find the materials, but there was chicken wire over the windows of the shed that he could re-use, and it was something concrete that he could do for Edith, something husbandly, something manly and useful, and he wanted to please her, he really very much wanted to please her. ‘I could do that for you,’ he said, ‘if you’d like.’
She seemed to hesitate before answering. ‘What I’d like . . .’ she began. ‘What I’d like is . . .’ but the end of the sentence never came and they walked in silence the remainder of the route and waited side-by-side on the crowded northbound platform.
It’s impossible, thought Edith, and for the first time she felt a little frightened, for she had married someone who was neat and punctual and efficient and reliable, someone who spoke less than other people, someone unobtrusive, someone wholly used to their own company. And she found herself thinking of science lessons at school, of the identical magnets that, freakishly, could never touch, since their similarity repelled rather than attracted, and then she heard the scrape of the rails as the train approached and she knew exactly what was going to happen next, she knew exactly, and she watched with a kind of weariness as Arthur checked his watch and looked up with a tentative smile.
‘That should do it,’ he said.
*
Some days of filming felt productive and purposeful, while on others one could sense the schedule slipping backward like a bread-van with a faulty hand-brake. There had been an ever-increasing number of the latter on the current production, and today was a case in point: fourteen set-ups on the shot-list and by midday only four completed, with Kipper appearing to have aged ten years since breakfast. Attempts had been made to blame the inadequacy of the generator, the stiff breeze that poppled the water, the clouds that kept sliding capriciously in front of the sun, but the bulk of the time had been lost in the usual struggle to make Carl Lundback sound like a member of the human race. Nine takes of him shouting, ‘Over here’, seventeen of ‘Help me get this feller out’, and it was very nearly time for luncheon, and Ambrose had done little except sit on a slatted bench next to the changing-rooms with Cerberus cringing beside him.
Parliament Hill Lido was doubling as the English Channel for one day only, and the camera had been placed on a small platform built over one corner of the pool. With its lens pointing slightly downward, it was apparently possible to shoot a much wider expanse of water than was achievable in studio, and Hadley Best and Lundback and sundry extras had been immersed up to their armpits for most of the morning. The dog was supposed to be in there too, nobly supporting his injured master until rescue came, but Cerberus had absolutely refused to enter the water, even when bribed with fresh mince from the catering wagon, and Hadley Best was having to make do with a substitute hastily run up by wardrobe and consisting of a stuffed sack with wash-leather ears. It had apparently passed muster in the wide shot; the close-up had been abandoned.
‘Little bit of concentration,’ shouted Kipper. ‘Just one more set-up before lunch, Scene 114.’
There must have been (Ambrose surmised) a great deal of shrieking panic behind the scenes after the calamity of the first day in studio. The filming schedule had altered completely. Lundback had scarcely been seen for a fortnight, and when he’d returned, most of his lines had mysteriously disappeared, his witty quips replaced by long takes of the character gazing at the horizon, or smiling quietly to himself, or writing in his reporter’s notebook while looking quizzical, or as near to quizzical as Lundback’s mastery of facial expression would allow. Other members of the cast had actually gained lines, Ambrose himself acquiring a few nice nuggets of exposition, as well as a page of banter with a rescued Scottish soldier about the potential buoyancy of bagpipes, but there were moments, unfortunately, when it was still deemed necessary for the American to speak, and here, plumb in the middle of Scene 114, was another of them.
HANNIGAN
(calling jauntily to Rose and Lily) Morning, ladies – you wouldn’t happen to be heading for England by any chance?
‘We’ll go again,’ said Kipper, after Lundback’s pancake rendition on Take 1. ‘And er . . .’ he lowered his voice, ‘the director asks me to remind you that it says “jauntily” in the script.’
Clearly ‘jauntily’ in the United States was a synonym for ‘leaden’, since moribund reading followed moribund reading, with Kipper issuing a prissy little director’s note after each, like someone trying to revive an unconscious elephant by fanning it with a lace handkerchief. Eventually, Alex Frayle knelt at the side of pool and engaged in a long whispered conversation with the American during which Ambrose distinctly heard the words ‘transatlantic brio’ and then – surely by coincidence – Lundback gave a performance fractionally less dreadful than before and luncheon was called.
‘Dry clothes and hot-air heaters in the boiler room,’ said Kipper. ‘Back on camera at one thirty.’
Behind the lido, a path meandered across Hampstead Heath and around a thicket of hawthorn before heading rather more purposefully towards the crest of Parliament Hill. Cerberus trotted briskly along the grass, urinating on every third clump, and Ambrose walked some distance behind, his stomach churning uneasily.
Rather than face his umpteenth plate of mince of the war so far, he had plumped instead for fish in parsley sauce. ‘It’s cod,’ the fat woman with the ladle had said when he’d asked, an obvious lie given the cheapne
ss of the catering, and confirmed when Ambrose had scraped away the sauce to reveal what looked like a section of black mackintosh. Beneath this integument lay the grey flesh, clinging to a giant vertebra of a type more usually seen in a case in the Natural History Museum. It had tasted predictably vile and it had taken a bowl of fruit jelly with custard to wash away the lingering tang, and there, in a nutshell, was the damage that rationing had wrought – scouring clean a palate attuned to the silky piquancy of foie gras and replacing it with one that slavered at the thought of strawberry-flavoured gelatine. One might as well play jigs on a Stradavarius.
‘Kim aher,’ he called as Cerberus began to drift away from the path, nose to a scent trail that led him zig-zagging through a clump of thistles. It was a true spring day, the new leaves on the hawthorn a brilliant green, the sun (when it appeared from behind the clouds) truly warm for the first time that year, and there were soldiers everywhere, sleeping their leave away on the grass, kicking a ball around, sitting on benches watching for a girl to walk by. The boredom was almost palpable. Near the top of the hill, there was even a Welsh Guardsman flying a home-made kite, the newsprint still visible through a coat of black paint, and Ambrose paused to watch for a moment or two, before tackling the last, steep, thirty yards and turning to look at the view.
And he was shocked. He had expected devastation, but what amazed him was that London appeared so little changed. Half a year of bombing, of fires that had lit up the night and burned for days, and yet the most noticeable difference was the presence of the barrage balloons, their wires rendered invisible by distance so that they seemed to have chosen their berths high above the city. And what a city! A sprawl that reached almost to the far horizon, a blind-man’s mosaic of grime-edged grey and pinkish buff, broken only by the grassy tump of Greenwich and the treetops that marked the Royal parks; and it seemed to Ambrose suddenly obvious that the blitz simply wouldn’t work, that Goering had underestimated the sheer size of the place, and that the Luftwaffe could pepper London till Doomsday and not make a dent in the vastness. Though as he scanned the rooftops he began to see sign after sign of the barrage – cranes tilting above open rafters, the oddly uncluttered view of St Paul’s, the charred skeleton of a warehouse behind St Pancras, glints of water from static tanks, raw red splashes of powdered brick interspersed among the duller hues, concavity where there should have been profile, an absence of spires where spires had soared before. Changed, then, but not changed utterly.