6

There were tea chests on the landing, suitcases by the front door and everywhere in the flat that strange dislocation that occurs when objects vacate their places and thereby leach their meaning: when you take a look at something you have spent years not seeing and think, what’s that for? Do I need it? Do I want it? And because familiar objects need their familiar places to make sense of themselves, often the answer is no.

The war was a month old. Barbara and the children were taking the train to Liverpool tomorrow, from where they would sail to Canada. Dougie was sitting in the bay window at the dining table he used as a desk between mealtimes, staring at the blackout. Wind shivered and rattled the sashes, which didn’t fit properly. He could smell bonfires and drains.

‘What are you doing?’ said Nell, coming into the room. Nell was five.

He put down his pen and turned. ‘Writing a letter.’

Nell stood on one foot and picked her nose. ‘Who to?’

‘A friend.’

The letter was to Julia. He remembered telling her they hadn’t long to wait. Yet every day felt like a year. Being apart from her was driving him mad.

‘Is your friend a dog?’ said Nell.

‘No,’ said Dougie.

‘Because dogs are good friends. Mummy says so. Mummy says we can have a dog in Canada.’

‘Does she?’ said Dougie. ‘Actually, I am writing to a cat.’

‘Are you?’ said Nell.

‘Yes, I am writing to George.’ George, a large tortoiseshell, was lying on the table with his paws tucked under him. He looked like a tea cosy.

‘You don’t have to write to George, Daddy,’ said Nell. ‘He’s right next to you.’

‘Oh, so he is,’ said Dougie. ‘Hello, George. Well, then, I am writing to a bat.’

Nell shook her head. ‘You are silly, Daddy. Bats can’t read.’

‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘I shall write to George when I’m in Canada,’ said Nell, who couldn’t read or write. ‘Because he might get lon-er-ly. I won’t tell him about the dog, though.’

‘Best not,’ said Dougie.

Barbara appeared in the doorway. ‘Come along, Nell. We’ve an early start tomorrow. Have you done your teeth?’

‘Daddy is writing to a bat,’ said Nell.

Barbara gave him a long look. ‘Yes, I expect he is.’

‘Who is she?’ asked Barbara.

‘I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.’

‘No. Of course you don’t.’

‘Please, Barbara. Not now. Not on the last night.’

‘Quite,’ said Barbara. ‘You could have waited.’

She wore clothes well, his wife. Even on the little housekeeping money he was able to give her, she made herself as elegant as it was possible to be in the shabby environs of Primrose Hill. After all this time he still didn’t know how she did it, although he knew her mother paid for the West End hairdresser.

Barbara went round the room, mechanically tidying. She picked up a jersey of Alice’s, a pair of Kitty’s tiny socks, and gathered them into her arms, hugging them close. ‘I feel sorry for you. I don’t think you have the capacity for happiness.’

It was odd, thought Dougie, because he could have said the same about her. He lit a cigarette. ‘You might have a shipboard romance, you know,’ he said. ‘Think of it. See if you can get yourself invited to the captain’s table. You’ll find yourself among a better class of person.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘I’ve had a drink.’

The flat was too small for them. The kitchen was off the half-landing, the two bedrooms were upstairs and the bathroom was shared. This room was a catch-all. Here they ate and rowed and Dougie worked in the bay window when there was sufficient peace and quiet, which was rarely. The alcoves beside the chimney breast were stuffed with his books, double shelved. On the walls they’d painted ochre when they were first married were his paintings, hot little oils, vivid little gouaches, singing out of their background. Over the mantelpiece was a paler ochre circle with blurred edges.

‘Where’s the Arnolfini mirror?’

‘I’ve packed it,’ said Barbara. ‘It’s in one of the tea chests.’ The tea chests were full of those possessions – hers and the children’s – which they weren’t taking to Canada but didn’t want to get rid of. She had arranged to store them at her parents’ house.

‘I like that mirror.’ Similar to the one in the Van Eyck marriage portrait, it was the eye of the room. Fish eye, banker’s eye, sorcerer’s eye. He didn’t remember how he knew such terms for convex mirrors, but he did know them. Once facts stuck themselves to the flypaper in his head, they tended to stay there.

‘My brother gave it to me.’

‘Your brother gave it to you as a wedding present,’ said Dougie. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume that means it belongs to both of us.’

‘Well, unpack it then, I don’t care,’ she said. ‘The movers aren’t coming until next week. That leaves plenty of time to retrieve it, even for you.’ Barbara often complained that he was slow at getting round to things, which was true up to a point. He was slow at getting round to things that she wanted him to do.

Two thoughts crossed his mind. The first was that he wondered what they had ever seen in each other or, rather, he wondered why they now saw each other so differently. The second, which followed on from the first, was sadness that their marriage had come to this relentless picking of scabs and point-scoring. (He chose at that moment to forget Spain, some of the women who had followed Spain and, more particularly, the one to whom he had been writing earlier.) ‘I’m sorry, Ba.’

‘For what?’

‘For everything.’

‘Everything?’ said Barbara, heading for the door. ‘Well, I suppose that just about covers it. I’m going to bed. You’ll arrange a cab?’

‘I said I would.’

The next morning there was no room for him in the cab, which was stuffed to the gills with luggage. They said their goodbyes on the pavement. Alice, eldest, grave and tam-o’-shantered, climbed into the back seat with three-year-old Kitty, who had her thumb in her mouth. ‘Be good,’ he said to Nell.

‘I will try,’ said Nell. ‘But I am only five. It may be easier when I am six.’

Dougie lifted her over the kerb and handed her in alongside her sisters. You weren’t supposed to have a favourite child, but he did. Kitty was too young to notice this. Alice wasn’t.

‘Well,’ said Barbara. She was wearing a fox fur whose smell of mothballs warred with her usual scent and won.

‘Safe journey.’ When he kissed her cheek she flinched. ‘Send me a wire when you arrive.’

‘Of course.’

‘Captain’s table, remember,’ he said.

‘Goodbye, Doug.’

The cab rattled away, coughing exhaust. He looked back at the house and could see Mrs Tooley, their downstairs neighbour, staring at him out of the window. She hadn’t put her teeth in yet. It was that early. He crossed the street and went into the park.

From Primrose Hill on a fine, clear day you could see all of London laid out at your feet, or most of it that mattered. The panorama stretched from the docks in the east well beyond the Houses of Parliament by way of St Paul’s, across a descending swathe of green dotted with trees and lamp posts, a domesticated urban countryside that was hedged round by terraced streets and criss-crossed by paved paths. This morning, mist was clinging to the lower slopes and hollows and the sky hadn’t yet decided which colour it wanted to be. Leaves were falling.

Dougie often walked through the park to work. Prosaically, it saved Tube and bus fares. Creatively, it cleared his head and put other ideas in there, along with the possibilities – or the delusions of grandeur – that all good views inspire. Today, he came down the hill blind, as if in flight from himself.

Last night he’d woken in the small hours, gasping in the stranglehold of a ‘Franco’. A year or so ago, the nightmares had been more common; the year before that they had come by day without warning, slipstreamed him into a hideous parallel world tasting of cordite and dust. This was the first Franco for months and it was a bad one.

He never slept afterwards and had learned it was pointless to try. So he’d got up, gone downstairs and smoked two cigarettes in the claustrophobia of the blackout, staring at the pale ochre circle over the fireplace. Then he went to look for the Arnolfini mirror.

He found it in the second tea chest, loosely wrapped in newspaper under a packet of letters and a canteen of silverware which had also been a wedding present. (He had never liked the cutlery; it was falsely ornate.) These past days there had been something fevered and careless about Barbara’s packing and he saw at once that the mirror was broken, not shattered, but sufficiently damaged to spoil it. It was with a wry kind of disgust, or a sense of irony, that he wrapped it up again and put it back in the wooden crate.

The letters he flicked through in the weak hall light. They were all from him and dated from the period immediately before their marriage. Some of the phrases he remembered; evidently, he had remembered them well, because he had repeated a few in the letter he had written that evening, which bothered him less than perhaps it ought to have done. He replaced the packet, resting the canteen on top to weigh it down. Then he had gone upstairs, climbed into bed beside his wife, who had her back turned, and lay unsleeping, unseeing, until the birds began their rusty chorus of unoiled wheels.

Now in the park his memories of the Spanish war threaded through the purposeful ugliness of the present one. Waterlogged trenches, dug before Munich and half fallen-in, ran this way and that, an anti-aircraft gun emplacement crowned the top of the hill and the slow, drifting blimp of a silvery barrage balloon bobbed cartoonish over their road.

At the bottom of the hill, nestled among shrubbery, was what his children called the Squirrel’s Postbox, its top now daubed with yellow gas-detection paint. Into it he threw the letter he had written to Julia, suggesting they should meet (and describing what they might do when they did), and heard it make some sort of hollow connection with the interior of the cast-iron drum.

No bombs had fallen. No enemy troops had landed on the beaches or parachuted down from the skies. The war was happening a long way off in unpronounceable Polish places. You didn’t hear gunfire on Oxford Street. What you did hear was a clumsy, clanking sound as bureaucracy ground into gear. This was the British way. All the clerks in Whitehall ordered new stationery in green, buff and plain and set about devising acronyms.

When Dougie arrived at Soho Square, people were huddled round the noticeboard, on which was pinned the latest directive from the recently formed Ministry of Information (MOI).

‘What’s a PO235?’ said someone.

‘I don’t know, but apparently it replaces the CN507.’

‘That’s all right then.’

Dougie brushed past.

‘McGod’s in a mood, just to warn you,’ the post boy said.

Macleod had been in a mood ever since they’d shut the cinemas at the outbreak of war, when they’d also shut the theatres, the concert halls, the football grounds and the zoo.

‘Makes a change,’ said Dougie, going up the stairs.

In the eighteenth century, 21 Soho Square, where the Unit was based, had been a brothel catering to the gentry, infamous for sensational tableaux involving candles that lit and extinguished themselves, dancing skeletons and chairs that tipped their unwary occupants through concealed trap doors, frissons which all added to the pleasures of the flesh. Nowadays, such mechanical trickery was long gone, along with most of the interior detailing, the building partitioned, altered and refashioned to suit a line of work that depended on creating other illusions. The exception was Macleod’s office, a light and pleasantly proportioned room on the first floor with a view of the leafy square. Here, if you could not precisely imagine aristocratic shenanigans, you could at least imagine aristocrats. Macleod had done his best to democratize his surroundings with a regulation steel desk and filing cabinets.

‘Douglas,’ said Macleod as he entered the room. ‘Take a pew.’

Dougie took a pew. He’d thought he was early, but Harold Travis and Basil Meers were already there. Travis was Macleod’s latest protégé. Basil Meers, a tall, thin, stooping man who looked like a heron, was the Unit editor. They nodded hello.

‘I see there’s been another directive from the Ministry,’ said Dougie.

‘The Ministry,’ said Macleod, ‘couldn’t direct its way out of a paper bag.’ He crossed the room and shut the door. ‘Which brings me neatly to the reason I convened this meeting. I cannot disguise the fact, gentlemen, that we’re at risk of closure.’

‘They’ll open the cinemas soon. They’ll have to,’ said Basil Meers.

‘That’s not the point,’ said Macleod, resuming his seat. ‘The point is, when they do, what will they show?’

‘Propaganda,’ said Dougie, lighting a cigarette.

‘You want to give up those filthy things.’ Macleod reached round to open a window. The noise of London blared in. ‘But you’re quite right. It’s hard to make the case for our kind of film-making in present circumstances. And Christ knows I’ve tried.’

‘Our’ kind of film-making was very much Macleod’s kind, which they all understood, as did everyone who worked for him. Filming real people in real places doing real things: briefly put.

‘Truth is the first casualty of war, is that what you mean?’ Dougie picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue. ‘Surely you don’t think we should take a leaf out of Goebbels’ book.’

Macleod permitted himself a smile. It sat uneasily on his face, which was built to be pugnacious. ‘Far from it. Truth is the best weapon we have. The question is whether they’ll let us tell it. But first we need to make them sit up and take notice. As things stand, I’ve thirty-seven on the payroll, not counting Blackheath, and most of them idle. That’s years of expertise going to waste.’

Macleod hated waste almost as much as he hated pen-pushing.

‘What are you suggesting?’ said Travis. He had an open boyish expression that made him appear younger than he was.

‘I’m suggesting you make a suggestion.’

Dougie said, ‘How about something along the lines of common purpose?’

‘Explain.’ Macleod adjusted the yellow woollen tie that poked out over the top of his Fair Isle jumper.

‘Nothing like war to show you how dependent we all are on each other.’

‘Factories? Filling sandbags?’ said Travis. ‘That kind of thing?’

You didn’t want to underestimate Travis, thought Dougie. He cottoned on fast. ‘It won’t be just the services who win this.’

‘Glad you think we’re going to win,’ said Basil Meers.

‘We have to,’ said Dougie. ‘So we will.’

Macleod sat pulling at his lower lip. ‘All right. Put it down on paper and get it to me by the end of the week. No dilettantish, artsy-fartsy Cambridge nonsense. I want a simple breakdown. Something we can bang out quickly. Preferably without involving the War Office.’

The meeting was over. Dougie was halfway out of the room when Macleod gave him a nod. ‘I saw the rough cut of the fishing film yesterday.’

‘It needs more polish.’

‘It’s absolute shite. You didn’t get the shots.’

‘You’re talking about Grimsby. We had a bit of bad weather up there.’

‘I’m talking about the footage of the trawler,’ said Macleod. ‘I don’t know where the hell you filmed it. What I do know is that one minute fish are swimming around somewhere in the sea and the next they’re in the boat. We don’t see the nets hauling them up. We don’t see them caught, which some might say is the point of fishing. Without that shot you haven’t got a sequence. It doesn’t hang together.’

The judgement rankled, because it was true and Dougie knew it.

‘You want to sit in with Meers, watch him cut. That’ll show you what you can and can’t do in the edit.’

Basil Meers was the last person Dougie would have asked for advice. ‘I don’t think he cares for my work.’

‘Precisely,’ said Macleod.

For the rest of the week Dougie fizzed with frustration, his least favourite frame of mind. In his cubbyhole on the second floor, a tangle of pipes and peeling paintwork for a view, he sat in front of a blank piece of paper and felt like punching a wall.

Time pressed heavily on him. He told himself he didn’t want to let the side down. The truth was he didn’t want to let himself down.

Home was no better. Having the flat to himself and all the peace and quiet he wanted of an evening ought to have made things easier. Instead, there was something dispiriting about the place with the children gone and perversely he began to think that their noise was the counter-irritant he needed in order to concentrate. A brief note came from Barbara to say they had safely embarked, along with a number of bills that she normally dealt with. Not a word from Julia. He tried to remember what he’d written in his letter. Perhaps he’d come on too strong – or left it too late.

Friday morning, he arrived early at the Unit and went up to the third floor.

‘Dougie,’ said Basil, when he came through the door of the cutting room. ‘What can I do for you?’

The telegram arrived around eleven.