by Lissa Evans
He ought, he supposed, to reply to Cecy. A brief thanks, perhaps, assuring her that the photograph in question had been labelled erroneously and had, in fact, been a still from a yet-to-be-released short. Or something of that kidney. He gave the picture a valedictory glance, before dropping it over the wall. The breeze took the slip of paper, and spun it like a leaf towards the plains of grey mud, but the image and its caption seemed to hang before him still. It must, he realized, have been taken by the photographer who’d been loitering outside the rest centre on Highbury Corner on the day that he had collected the dog, for it showed the two of them walking along the pavement, Cerberus with his head hanging, Ambrose laden with blanket and shabby carpet bag, the unflattering angle conjuring a wattled jowl from an innocent neck-crease, the harsh contrast painting a series of deep lines and furrows across his face. ‘HOMELESS BUT NOT HOPELESS’ announced the print beneath. ‘His wordly goods in a sack, his tired legs fading beneath him, an old fellow and his only friend find refuge at last.’ Bastards. Was it, he wondered, possible to sue? But then, of course, he’d have to show the photograph as evidence in court. And it could have been worse, he realized suddenly, with a chill of horror. Just imagine if the caption-writer had actually recognized him . . .
*
When, late on the Saturday afternoon, Mr Baker’s secretary shouted ‘wriiiitah!’ up the stairs, it was Catrin who answered, since she was the only person of that description still left in the office. Parfitt had gone home not long after waking from his post-luncheon nap, and Buckley had stayed for an hour or so after that, grimly re-reading his first draft treatment of the ARP film and then throwing down the sheaf of paper with an expression of disgust. The pages had slid off the edge of the desk and fanned elegantly across the floor.
‘Don’t bother,’ he’d muttered, as Catrin had bent to pick them up, ‘they’re not worth it.’ He had jammed on his hat, relit a cigarette stub that he’d extinguished only two minutes before, half-nodded to her, and then stumped along the landing and down the stairs, a thread of smoke trailing behind him. Catrin had gathered up the pages and straightened the edges and stacked them on his desk again. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she had read the whole thing, and it was Buckley’s usual prose, clear and purposeful, but somehow missing its characteristic zest – steak without salt, she thought, chips without vinegar: a story that failed to stick in the mind, and characters who didn’t seem to matter, a lustreless treatment from a master of polish. She had sat for a while, a little shaken, drumming her fingers softly on the desk top. It’s because of me, she’d thought, and the idea was preposterous, unprecedented – imagine Ellis spoiling a single brush-stroke or smudging a line on her account! And she’d nibbled on the thought, and revolved the image of Buckley in her mind, studying him from every viewpoint, wondering if there was an angle from which he might ever make her heart beat faster . . .
And then came the shout of ‘wriiiitah!’, on a rising note, as if a skivvy were being summoned, and Catrin hurried down the stairs to take a phone call from studio.
‘You’ll never guess . . .’ said Phyl, archly.
‘A rewrite?’
‘More of a tweak, actually. Scene 303.’
‘With the dive-bomber? But I thought that was supposed to be all finished this afternoon.’
‘All finished bar a couple of crane shots tomorrow morning, to which the director’s just come up with the tip-top idea of adding artillery.’
‘What?’
‘As a matter of fact, he’s already drafted the new line himself. Do you have a pen? It’s the Scotch soldier’s speech – the one who stands and shouts at the plane, only now he’s not only going to shout, he’s going to fire a rifle as well. And according to the director, he’s going to be saying: “Here’s a Glasgae bullet for ye, ye Nazi bastard. And here’s anither. Tell them in aul’ Jairmany we’ll no give in to ye, ye squeer-heeded bawbag.”’
‘What’s a bawbag?’
‘Dialect, apparently – our director made a documentary about Glaswegian welders the year before last, so he’s rather the expert. What do you think of the line?’
‘Flabby.’
‘Yes, well I’ve heard that the Board of Censors only allows through one “bastard” a year and that’s already been used up, so you have a perfect excuse for rewriting the rewrite, so to speak. Are you coming to the studio tomorrow?’
‘I think so. As it’s the last day. I’ll promise to bite my tongue and stand in the shadows.’
Phyl laughed. ‘Quite right, too. Could you be here by eight, then, with the new line? Unless Buckley says he’s happy with the aul one, of course.’
Unlikely, thought Catrin. Back at her desk, she leafed through the script, and found the original wording: ‘Missed us all, ye boss-eyed Nazi.’ The easiest thing would be to cut ‘Missed us all,’ and substitute ‘Take that!’, but it was a Buckley maxim that no one outside the writing profession understood that even tiny, subtle re-wordings required considerable skill, so it was therefore vital to make any changes look flamingly obvious otherwise no one would ever give you any credit for having done them. On the other hand, he also stated that in the event of a director coming up with a line, it was always best to try and save some of it, however dreadful, ‘because then the cloth-eared twerp will think it’s the one that he wrote, and he’ll probably use it’.
She stared at her notebook. ‘Bloody hell, Buckley,’ she said, out loud, and she was suddenly desperate to speak to him, to hear that rasp of a voice from the corner, badgering, hectoring, prying, making her laugh, infuriating her, offering advice that was occasionally helpful and frequently impossible – her waspish mentor, her daily companion, sorely missed.
There were footsteps on the stairs and she turned quickly but it was only Shipton, the accountant, carrying a bucket of sand and wearing a tin hat. ‘Still here?’ he asked.
‘Yes, for a bit longer.’
‘Well just to warn you,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a full moon tonight. There’s sure to be trouble,’ and he unhooked the ladder that led to the roof, and climbed up. She could hear him shuffling round on the leads, preparing for his stint as fire-watcher.
She wrote, ‘Missed us, ye boss-eyed bawbag, now here’s one from the folks in Glasgae,’ and then, on a separate piece of paper, she wrote, ‘I don’t in the least think that you’re an old fool. Quite the reverse, in fact.’ Though what was the reverse of an old fool? You could guarantee that Buckley would want to know . . .
She tried again. ‘Truly, I don’t in the least think that you’re an old fool.’
Wordy.
‘I don’t think you’re an old fool.’
Bald.
‘You’re no fool, old or otherwise.’
And now it sounded like a line from Duck Soup. Unbidden, another Buckley aphorism swam to mind. ‘For God’s sake, don’t keep hammering away at the same sentence, like a bloody woodpecker. Write the whole damn scene and then go back over it with a pencil.’ The whole damn scene; she took the cover off Buckley’s Remington, and wound a sheet of paper in place, and started to type.
INT. PUBLIC HOUSE CELLAR . EVENING
Distant gunfire is audible, but is being ignored by the drinkers. Most of them are male, but at a table in one corner sits a young woman. She is holding a half-empty glass of beer. The rest of the contents are dripping from the hair and clothes of the man sitting opposite her. He wipes his moustache.
MAN
You think I’m a old fool.
WOMAN
No I don’t. Not in the least. It’s just that it was so . . . unexpected. I didn’t realize until too late that you were serious.
MAN
I should have given more warning?
WOMAN
It might have helped.
MAN
Rung a bell, maybe?
WOMAN
Perhaps a—
MAN
Klaxon? Gong? Foghorn?
WOMAN
Hint, I was thin
king. You could have given me a hint.
MAN
Oh, a hint – you mean six oysters, a candle in a bottle and a gypsy violinist sawing away at ‘Last Rose of Sorrento’. And if you’d had all that, then what would you have done?
WOMAN
I don’t know. But I wouldn’t have smacked you in the chest and said ‘Let’s forget it ever happened.’
MAN
Wouldn’t you indeed? (A beat.) Want another drink?
WOMAN
No thanks. You can have the rest of mine if you’d like. And I just wanted to say . . . (She hesitates.)
MAN
Yes?
WOMAN
I just wanted to say that I . . . (She hesitates again.)
MAN
Hear that noise? It’s your audience getting restive. They’re wishing they’d gone to see that cowboy picture instead.
WOMAN
I just wanted to say that if we ever stopped having these conversations I’d miss them so dreadfully. I’d miss talking to you – I’d miss it more than I can possibly say.
MAN
Is that a fact? (He takes a long and thoughtful pull at his beer, and then looks at the glass.) You know, they’ve got a bloody nerve charging for this. I’ve seen stronger eyewash.
‘If you’re staying can you do your blackouts?’ called Shipton, from the roof-hatch, and Catrin realized that the dusk was creeping in, and she was sitting with her nose six inches from the paper, and she rose – a little stiff – and went over to the window. The sky was a deep violet, and cloudless. She drew the blinds, and pulled the heavy curtains across, and switched on the light and looked again at what she’d written. She took a pencil and altered a word or two, and then rubbed out the alterations and left the pages on Buckley’s desk, together with the Scotchman’s new line. The siren sounded before she had even reached Oxford Street.
Edith was rubbing almond oil into her cuticles, and thinking about how bony the backs of her hands were looking. The skin was white and smooth, but the sinews protruded like the ribs of an umbrella – old hands; they seemed to have aged overnight when she wasn’t looking. And she had found a white hair in her comb the other week. So that was the pattern from now on, she supposed: one white hair after another and then the slow creep of liver spots across her knuckles. She replaced the stopper on the bottle of oil, and reached for her cold cream. From somewhere outside she could hear the odd pop of distant shell-fire – not near enough, yet, to worry about. Inside the house, Arthur had been busy in his hobbies room for most of the evening; she’d heard the tap of a hammer and there was a strong smell of varnish permeating the upper floor. She had called to ask what he was making, but his reply had been rather vague.
She applied a dab of TCP to a pimple on her forehead, tucked her hair into a stockinette cap, put on her night-gloves, and was just about to switch off the light when there was a tentative knock on the door.
‘Edith, dear . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re not asleep?’
‘I was just about to go to bed.’
‘Oh, were you?’
‘Is anything the matter?’
‘No, no. I just wondered if I could come in to see you.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at herself in the mirror, her head resembling a boiled egg in a cosy, her face as shiny as a plate, every inch of her body covered with sensible, hard-wearing fabrics, and she thought of the nights that she’d put on lipstick and brushed her hair and smelled of French Lilac as opposed to antiseptic. ‘Yes, if you want,’ she said, reluctantly.
Arthur poked his head around the door. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘Mind what?’
‘Being disturbed?’
‘No, of course not.’ There was no hint from his expression that she was looking in any way different from usual, a fact that she found exasperating. He was fully dressed and had a smear of varnish across his nose; this did not appear to be the long-awaited conjugal visit.
‘I’ve got a present for you,’ he said.
‘A present?’
‘A surprise. I’ve been working on it for quite a few weeks. Would you like to see it?’
‘All right,’ she said, ungraciously.
He opened the door more widely and disappeared back into the hall for a moment before re-entering the room with an object in his arms. It was a plywood box, about a foot and a half tall and a foot wide, with a solid top, and a shallow arch cut into the bottom of each of the four sides.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I’ll show you.’ He placed it on the floor and plugged it in and turned off the bedroom light. In the sudden darkness, the guns seemed louder, and then there was the snap of a switch, and a dim blue light appeared around the base of the object, illuminating a yard or so of floorboard on each side.
‘It’s a safety-lamp,’ said Arthur. ‘You can leave it plugged in in the downstairs hall, you see, and then if you get back after dark when I’m not here, you’ll have a source of light even before you put up the blackouts.’
But I carry a torch, she thought, and was seized by the urge to laugh hysterically, for it appeared that while she’d been waiting (evening after evening) for her husband to come and make love to her, he had been engaged in the manufacture of something that looked like a sentry-box designed for a gnome, and then she felt her throat contract and found that she wasn’t laughing at all.
‘Edith?’ said Arthur. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’
She took off her night-gloves and wiped her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said and sat down on the bed because she was suddenly crying so hard that she could hardly breathe. The main light went on again and there was Arthur, his kind, round face lengthened by worry, and she wanted to strike him for failing to understand, for thinking that she might want a fretwork lamp instead of a husband.
‘Can I get you a hot-water-bottle?’ he asked. ‘A cold compress? A . . . a . . . a cup of cocoa?’
She could only shake her head.
‘A glass of water?’ He reached for the tumbler on her bedside table, and as he did so it seemed to shiver away from his grasp, and the curtains bulged inward and barked glass across the floor, and it was only then that they heard the tremendous smash of the bomb that seemed loud enough to have landed on their doorstep and yet which must have been a good quarter-mile away, since only the windows had gone, and the whole sky was full of engine noises, and Arthur shouted ‘downstairs’ and made a grab at her arm. He turned off the bedroom light as they left the room, and Edith glanced back and saw the blue glow of the gnome’s watchtower, and beyond it the gaping hole of the window and the moon like a dish of milk above the rooftops.
As Catrin hurried up the steps from the tube, three fire-engines tore past, one after another, and the AA guns were hammering full pelt, and she hesitated and almost turned back, except that she hated being underground during a raid. If she couldn’t hear any noise at all then she was always half-afraid that when she re-emerged there would be nothing left – a smouldering plain. Instead, she ran for the sandbagged entrance of the Odeon, and handed over one and ninepence without even asking for the name of the main feature, and was ushered to a place in the packed stalls between a girl who was knitting and a sailor who squeezed her thigh as soon as she sat down, apparently by way of greeting. He said, ‘Oh, don’t be like that’ when Catrin shoved his hand away, and then he offered her a cigarette, and she took it and looked up at the screen and saw James Stewart stepping out of a stagecoach holding a canary cage in one hand and a parasol in the other. There was a shout of laughter from the audience, and the girl who was knitting said, ‘Oh I love him, honestly I do’, and then turned and kissed her boyfriend, as if to assure him of her fidelity.
‘What’s the picture called?’ whispered Catrin to the sailor.
‘It’s called “Are you doing anything afterwards, darling?”’
‘It’s called Destry Rides Again,’ supplied someone behind her, and Catrin swivelled to mutter her thanks
and realized that people were still drifting into the auditorium, filling every seat – standing, even, at the back – and that each time the heavy doors were pushed open, they admitted a burst of noise from the streets. Something colossal was happening out there, a night to rival the worst of nights, and she kept staring at the doors, unable to break her gaze until a roar from the screen pulled her round again, a roar that was taken up by the audience and spiced with wolf-whistles as Marlene Dietrich rolled across the floor of a saloon engaged in a cat-fight of fantastic length and vigour.
‘Oh, that’s the biz,’ said Catrin’s neighbour, slapping his own leg this time. ‘That’s the biz, that is,’ and someone shouted, ‘It’s Gert and Daisy!’ and the new Sheriff of Tombstone, mild but determined, waded through the chaos and tipped a bucket of water over the brawling women, and the fight was over, and a voice from the balcony called ‘Shame!’ And the audience erupted again, and Catrin felt herself being pulled along by the crowd, caught up in a vast and vocal caravan determinedly heading Westward for the evening, and for an hour or two there was enough applause, there were enough celluloid gunshots and gusts of laughter and galloping music, enough songs and fist-fights, enough glamour and wit and plot and spectacle to blot out the real barrage, and for a short while, the theatre seemed safer than any shelter, and the noise inside was like a shield, keeping the night at bay.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Ambrose. He upended the carpet bag over the kitchen table and picked through the repulsive contents – a tangle of doggie necessities all coated in a slippery mixture of hair and flea powder – but there were no loose pills sifting between the litter, and no spare bottle of Bob Martin’s Tablets for Canine Fits and Hysteria, and since there was nothing remaining in the first bottle but a plug of cotton wool, it signalled an absolute bloody disaster, as the only way of getting Cerberus through a raid was to administer two tablets hidden in a piece of sausage, and thus render him unconscious until the following morning. Without this medicinal cosh he was an utter liability, squeezing into one hiding place after another and disgracing himself on the lino.