20

The Lunchtime Concerts were held in a domed octagonal room to the right of the National Gallery’s central hall; despite its shape, it had proved to have good acoustics. To the left, approximately the same distance away, was the gallery where the Raphaels had once hung; this had been destroyed the previous October by an HE, and was now open to the elements.

Blackout cloth was draped under the skylights. Sandbags were stacked under the boarded-up windows. Alongside bins of sand were ranged fire buckets, while on the far wall hung a large reproduction of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Up front on a carpeted dais was a Steinway facing rows of empty chairs.

‘Your twenty-one-gun salute,’ said Frank. ‘I hope she appreciated it.’

‘What?’

‘Bit late now, but you might want to button your trousers.’

Dougie glanced at his flies. ‘Oh.’

‘Flashing the monarch’s a treasonable offence, so I’m told.’

Filming was over, and the cabling, lights and camera were being dismantled and carted away out of the gallery. They were all giddy with relief, Dougie included. He shouted with laughter.

‘Do you think she noticed?’

‘I expect she’s seen it all before.’

‘She knows her camera angles, I’ll grant you that.’ Dougie checked over his socialist principles the way you might pat down your limbs after a fall and found them more or less intact. This did nothing to dispel his sense of triumph.

Frank tilted his big head and said in a cut-glass falsetto, ‘What would you like me to do, Mr Birdsall? Shall I hand you the keys to the Tower of London, or would a knighthood suffice? I thought your Crown Jewels rather impressive, by the way.’

Sammy Levin came past with a clipboard ‘Wasn’t she tiny?’

‘Well done for getting that carpet,’ said Dougie.

Half an hour later, after the cans had been labelled and dispatched, Dougie made his way down the broad stone stairs to the main entrance, his mind buzzing with impressions and possibilities. Although you could not be entirely certain what you’d got until you viewed the dailies, he felt sure that the sequence would cut together well. There would be a nice ambivalence to it: the Queen as a woman of the people, among her people, the golden thread of continuity that bound all of them together on this small, embattled island. Yet at the same time, Lunch Hour was beginning to feel constrained to him, too limited in its scope, too descriptive. Classical music, the National Gallery, royalty. The country had other voices, other songs. The country could sing its heart out.

He came out on to the portico and stood looking across Trafalgar Square. Cranes lifted the glinting diagonals of steel girders. Autumn sunshine bathed Nelson on his column, then scudding clouds dappled Landseer’s great reclining stone lions with fast-moving patches of shade. Buses rumbled around. Pigeons alighted one minute and flapped off the next. Nothing was still, nothing was quiet. Cries, shouts, footsteps, traffic, the low drone and pulse of the city. An idea itched away at the back of his head: he couldn’t reach it to scratch it.

‘Mr Birdsall?’

He turned, with impatience, and saw that it was the new continuity girl, Ann Wightman. What a sight she was. Those Charlie Chaplin trousers, that bilious yellow jacket, her butchered hair – he had seen more presentable art students. He had never been of the opinion that beauty should dress itself down, make an absurdity of a gift. Neither had he ever been of the opinion that beauty should know itself beautiful – it made for humourlessness.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I wanted to thank you for hiring me.’ The words were at odds with her expression, which was not one of gratitude.

He shrugged and headed down the stairs to street level. ‘I didn’t hire you. Nora did. We were short-handed.’ Nora was the production manager, and she’d taken the girl on because she’d a bit of experience working with Embry at Gaumont – reason enough not to hire her, in his opinion.

‘You sound displeased.’

He was. She had irritated him when they’d first met months ago, and she irritated him now, not least because the sight of her reminded him of Julia’s absurd accusations. ‘Just do your job, and we’ll get along nicely.’

This was meant as a parting comment. However, she failed to take the hint. Instead, to his dismay, her long legs kept pace with him as he walked down the west side of Trafalgar Square, past Canada House, to his stop on Cockspur Street.

A bus came and he got on it. So did she. He went up the stairs; she followed and sat herself next to him. Heads turned in her direction – heads always turned in her direction – and his annoyance grew. At the front, a small girl in a red knitted pixie hat was singing, with hand gestures: ‘Woll the bobbin up, Woll the bobbin up. Pull, pull, pull.’

Pall Mall, St James’s, Piccadilly Circus. From the vantage point of the top deck, you could better make out the abrupt interruptions to the familiar streets. You could see right down into gaping holes, across forlorn levelled sites invaded with buddleia and rosebay willowherb, or what people had begun to call bombweed. Some, like the little girl in the red hat – ‘Wind it back again, wind it back again’ – would grow up knowing only these vacancies. Should, of course, they grow up at all.

The little girl sang, ‘Point to the ceiling, point to the floor, point to the window, point to the door.’

‘All right, Beryl,’ said her mother. ‘That’s enough.’

The cord ding-dinged, the bus stopped and started, and feet tramped up and down the stairs. The conductress issued tickets with a tinny ratchet of her machine.

‘Point to the ceiling . . .’

‘Beryl!’

The country had other voices, thought Dougie. This isle is full of noises. All of a sudden the idea was there – veiled, but there. He could feel it, sense its shape and weight and edges. He reached for it and –

‘You shout a lot, don’t you?’ said Ann Wightman.

– And the idea was gone. ‘What?’

She took a slim silver case out of the pocket of her horrible jacket, flicked it open, placed a cigarette in her perfect mouth and lit it without offering him one. ‘Is it because you don’t know what you’re doing? Or are you simply bad-tempered by nature?’

‘I feel obliged to warn you,’ he said, ‘that while I might have not hired you, I could quite easily have you sacked.’

‘I’m not frightened of you.’

There was no prospect of recovering his train of thought now. Even the Queen took a back seat as the bus wound its way through central London. Routes were no longer diverted through side streets to avoid the cordons and craters; even so, it seemed to take ages to reach Marylebone. With a wearying predictability, this proved to be her destination too.

Marylebone was crowded. All the stations were these days, necessary journeys vastly outnumbering unnecessary ones. If he had hoped to lose her among the servicemen and women with their kit bags, returning from leave, going on leave, transferring from one camp or base to another, or the throngs of office workers commuting to and from their wartime occupations, the hope was a vain one. She would have found a way of accompanying him to the Gents, he felt certain.

There was a long queue at the ticket office. ‘Denham?’ he said, when they reached the head of it.

Ann Wightman nodded.

‘Single to Denham, please,’ he said to the clerk. ‘And a single to Chorleywood.’

He handed her the ticket as they came away from the office. There was a clanging sound and a long hissing escape of steam. A guard blew a whistle. The tannoy blared.

‘I thought you were going back to the studio.’

‘What gave you that idea?’

‘They say you practically live there.’

‘I give you full marks for persistence, Miss Wightman,’ said Dougie. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to labour under any misapprehension.’

She gave him a long look. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

It was no small consolation, then, to find the idea waiting for him on the train. They had barely left the station when it came to greet him and sat opposite, as recognizable as a friend. (The train was crowded, so it had to sit on the lap of an elderly vicar.)

Documentary film-making had a bit of a problem with words, in Dougie’s view. Cutting down on them, giving images room to breathe, was all well and good. Yet take this approach to its logical conclusion and you were back in the silent era.

Unless, said the idea, sitting opposite him, what accompanied the pictures was not simply music but the music of sound. Sound in its most everyday form, orchestrated to a pitch and rhythm that married one type of montage with another, that asked people to watch and to listen.

The train clanked, clanked, clanked past a row of terraces, their untidy yards running up to the track, flapping lines of washing collecting soot, Andersons mushrooming out of the ground, all the vulnerability of these pinched times laid bare in the shabby back views. A child shrieked. He opened his notebook on his knee.

‘Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been played.’ The phrase wasn’t his. It was Ford Maddox Ford’s. Parade’s End. Not a book whose thesis he entirely embraced, much as he admired its modernism. But the mood of the whole film, as he conceived it, was right there in those few words.

A portrait of the country in sound.

Dougie came out of the station and walked down the rustling lane. Sharp, thin bonfire air announced the coming of winter. A moist fungal chill came up from the ground. Nature shifted faster in the country than in the town.

If he could have been sure of his reception, he would have looked forward to discussing this new idea with Julia – not least because it was an idea that had its origins in their conversations. But they rowed so often now and to so little effect – it was Barbara all over again.

Back in the summer, he’d gone to a screening of a film Travis had directed about Bomber Command. Travis was never less than competent, yet Dougie had come away from the screening thinking it a little cold. What had impressed him most about it was the editing, which Basil had done. There was one particular sequence of a Wellington in flight in which a number of rapid, straight cuts reinforced the realism of the filming. Basil later explained that he’d popped a few flash frames in there. ‘You don’t want it too smooth. You don’t want to dissolve. They’d think they were watching a feature.’

Someone, Dougie thought, had popped a few flash frames into his own life. Like that plane in the film, jerking up and down in the sky, losing height and gaining it, he and Julia were no longer continuous, no longer smooth.

The house was quiet. There were no cooking smells, no voices, no childish pelting feet. Only the dog barked somewhere out in the yard.

For a moment he allowed himself to hope that he had the place to himself, or that Julia might be waiting for him alone in their room, as she used to wait for him in Primrose Hill, the flat a tip, the cooking comic, the laundry missing, her hair loose, her face an eager leap of desire. The last time he had seen her, some days ago, she had been ironing. Competently. Once, her complete lack of domesticity had surprised him, annoyed him, even infuriated him; in retrospect, it seemed rather touching and he missed it. In no way did he think this inconsistent. Nor did he pause to reflect that they were only living here at his insistence.

Then he went into the kitchen and found Netta putting up the blackout, her jumper riding up over the waistband of her skirt, revealing a soft roll of flesh. Julia was huddled by the range, clutching an enamelled mug, her face bleak and white. The table was littered with tea things, ashtrays, children’s drawings. The airer, let down from the ceiling, was strewn with wet laundry.

What a greeting, he thought. It was like having two wives. Or a wife and a mother. Or, worse, two mothers. ‘Hello?’

‘They gave you my message,’ said Julia, not asking but telling.

‘What message?’

‘I rang the studio.’

‘I wasn’t at the studio. I was filming the Queen.’

Her expression did not change.

‘Didn’t they say?’

Netta came away from the window, seated herself and took Julia’s hands. ‘Peter’s missing.’