18

‘Call in sick today,’ said Dougie.

Julia was exhausted. The row had gone on half the night; the rest of it, they’d spent making up. Be careful what you wish for, she thought, pushing back the bedclothes. Not that she was complaining, although parts of her anatomy were. ‘I was considering it. But I really shouldn’t. I don’t like to let the others down, and I’m going to be late enough as it is.’

‘Someone else can do the filing for once,’ Dougie said. ‘Seriously, I need you to come with me to Denham.’

Denham? Julia had never been to Denham before. ‘Why?’

He was already out of bed and getting dressed. ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’

It was tempting, and she was tempted. She was also intrigued. She called in sick.

Dougie’s powers of description were such that the studio was pretty much how she had imagined it. She could have navigated around it quite easily – there were the sound stages, there was the canteen, over there the water tank. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the sheer physical scale of the place. It was a small city, and busier than most, with traffic of all kinds. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Hugh’s office.’

He steered her over to the main block, once the country house of the original estate. They entertained film stars in the restaurant on the first floor; she wondered if she would meet one. It was all quite strange. She was so tired, as tired as she’d been after a Blitz night, and everything had the dissociated quality of a dream.

That sense of dissociation only intensified when they walked into a bright room on the second floor and there was Hugh, someone she saw most days at supper, sitting behind a desk piled high with scripts and film cans. If Hugh felt the same, he didn’t show it, nor did he indicate by so much as a raised eyebrow that he must have heard a good deal of what had gone on last night in the barn, and afterwards in the annexe. He was perfectly impassive, but, come to think of it, he was generally impassive.

Not so the others. Besides Hugh, there was Basil and a short balding man she recognized as Quentin Cheeseman from the MOI. The pompous ass. The young lad – twenty or so, she guessed – would be Dougie’s new assistant director, Sammy Levin. They all stood when she came into the room, questions on their faces.

‘What is she doing here?’ said Cheeseman. ‘We’re not in need of a title.’

So the pompous ass remembers me, thought Julia.

‘I asked her to come,’ said Dougie. ‘She’s a musician. Hugh and I both agree she might make a useful contribution to this discussion.’

‘I hope you haven’t told her anything.’

‘No, I thought I’d leave that to you,’ said Dougie.

Cheeseman turned to Hugh. ‘Strictly speaking, she ought to sign the Act.’

Hugh said from behind his desk, ‘I think we can waive that formality. I’ll vouch for Miss Sinclair personally, if need be.’

‘Miss Sinclair,’ said Cheeseman, ‘I require your assurances that you will repeat nothing that is said to you today.’

‘Of course not.’ Was she going to be given a job, or parachuted into France?

‘And what type of musician are you, precisely?’

Torch-singer, Julia was strongly tempted to answer. ‘I play the piano,’ she said. ‘I’m a little out of practice at present.’

‘She does herself a disservice,’ said Hugh. ‘She is really very good.’

‘She studied at the Royal College,’ said Dougie.

Cheeseman said to Julia, ‘Then it is possible you may be able to help us.’ His tone became reverent. ‘The Palace has very graciously invited us to film Her Majesty the Queen.’

Basil rolled his eyes, lit a cigarette and twisted his long legs in front of him.

‘What he means,’ said Dougie, ‘is that we asked if we could film her, and they said yes.’

‘I don’t quite understand what this has to do with music,’ said Julia.

‘Well, in a way, it’s all your doing,’ Dougie said.

‘Mine?’

‘The Lunchtime Concerts. You told me about them, remember?’

She hadn’t thought he was listening.

The Lunchtime Concerts were held in the vacated National Gallery; she went along in her lunchtimes as often as she could. The pianist Myra Hess organized them. She remembered sitting with her shilling programme in her lap, her mind tracing the interstices of Bach’s ‘Prelude in G’.

‘Miss Hess will be performing for the Queen,’ said Cheeseman. ‘And we shall be filming her doing so. The question is, what should she play?’

‘You should ask her that, not me,’ said Julia. ‘She will have her own repertoire.’

‘Her repertoire is mostly German, I gather,’ Cheeseman said.

‘Forgive me,’ said Julia, ‘but she’s Jewish. The Nazis have banned Mendelssohn. Do you think we should stoop to their level?’

There followed a general discussion about the merits of German music versus English music, during which some incredibly ill-informed and silly things were said, not all of them by Cheeseman.

‘I vote for Bach,’ said Dougie.

‘You don’t want Bach,’ said Julia.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a little too cerebral. You want to engage people. You want to appeal to their emotions. I would suggest Mozart.’

‘German again,’ said Cheeseman, raising himself up on the balls of his feet.

‘Austrian,’ said Dougie.

‘Same difference.’

‘Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 17 in G”,’ said Julia, ‘would be my recommendation. It’s a beautiful piece.’

‘Why don’t you play us a bit?’ said Hugh, clicking his jaw.

Julia looked round the room. There was no piano.

‘Sammy,’ said Dougie, ‘go and see if they’ve got it in the sound library, will you?’

Sammy shot off. In the meantime, they had tea.

‘The way it will work,’ said Cheeseman, dipping his digestive, ‘is that you’ll film Miss Hess first, then, on a separate occasion, you’ll film Her Majesty listening to the same piece of music in the same location.’

‘That’s going to be a nightmare for continuity,’ said Hugh.

‘Are you saying it can’t be done technically?’

‘Technically, it can be done,’ said Dougie. ‘But it won’t have anything like the same ring of truth.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Cheeseman, ‘that there is such a thing as protocol.’

Sammy came back with a case of records and a portable gramophone player.

They listened. Towards the end, there was the little tune Julia recalled, the little starling tune, the song sung by Mozart’s pet starling. Who could fail to be moved by it?

Afterwards a silence fell. Cheeseman was the first to break it. ‘Tell me, Miss Sinclair, how long do you think it would take for Miss Hess to learn the piece? If, that is, she doesn’t know it already?’

Julia shrugged. ‘Three weeks, possibly a month. You’ll also need two oboes, two horns, two bassoons, a flute and some strings, if I remember rightly.’

‘I see.’ He set down his teacup. ‘Do excuse me. I’ve a meeting with the minister at thirteen hundred.’ He left the room.

Sammy put the records back into their sleeves. Basil got up and stretched.

‘You know she’s asked for a dais and a carpet,’ said Hugh.

‘Well, she’s a queen,’ said Dougie, ‘what do you expect?’

‘No, it’s Miss Hess who’s asked for a dais and a carpet,’ Hugh said.

‘Oh, Sammy will sort it,’ Dougie said. ‘Won’t you, Sammy?’

‘If you can tell me how I’m going to lay my hands on that much wood, I’d be glad to,’ said Sammy. ‘Most of it’s going to coffins. As for the carpet, forget it.’

They walked down the stairs. ‘That was a bit of a surprise,’ said Julia.

‘You did brilliantly, Sinclair,’ said Dougie. ‘I knew you would.’

‘So tell me’ – she leant into him – ‘do I get the job?’

He laughed.

A smell of cooking, rich cooking, reached her nose from the restaurant. She could hear the clatter of serving dishes. ‘Well, do I?’

‘What are you talking about? You’ve got a job.’

So that was how it was, she thought. ‘I think you owe me lunch,’ she said.

‘I don’t usually have any,’ said Dougie. ‘The canteen’s quite good if you fancy a sandwich.’

They went and had a sandwich. The canteen could seat fifteen hundred and there were almost that many there today, the greater portion extras – ‘crowd artists’ – sweating in a diverse range of costumes from every notable era of British history. Full-bottomed wigs, crinolines, farthingales, kilts. It was like some mad fancy-dress party.

They squeezed in at the end of a bench. ‘I see Cheeseman has lost none of his charm,’ said Julia, peeling back the top of her sandwich and recoiling from its pinkish contents.

‘Do you remember telling him that a film might not need a commentary?’

‘Vaguely,’ she said, over the general din of trays, cutlery and chitchat.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about that.’

‘It would be hard to get him to part with his blessed commentaries, I should have thought,’ said Julia.

‘What I’m wondering is whether you could make the same sort of links with sound as you do with images.’

‘Perfectly possible. Composers do it all the time. And, of course, to play music properly you need to hear these things too.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, themes, obviously. Leitmotifs. But a lot of it’s to do with the intervals, the pauses. In great music the pauses are always right.’

‘You mean the tempo?’

‘Not just that.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not certain I can really put it into words. It’s something to do with the underlying structure. You just feel it.’

A group of child actors in Dickensian dress came and sat at the next table, accompanied by a middle-aged woman. One boy looked so much like Peter it was as if she’d taken a blow to the solar plexus. Their row the previous evening had resolved nothing, she thought. Which meant they were doomed to have it again.