eighteen

I DIDN’T ACTUALLY EXPECT TO HEAR FROM RADU, BUT when he rang and told me he’d arranged for my screen test to be done in Wardour Street, I couldn’t refuse. The office was the very one where Johnny worked!

We met in the Intrepid Fox. ‘It’s so kind of you to do this,’ I said as we crossed the road to the big office building, pushed through the swing doors, past the porter who’d refused me entry, and walked along a corridor that smelled of – stone, earth, something familiar yet elusive. Later, Hugh told me it was film cement, to join the film after cutting. Radu took me to a little studio, where it took ages to set up all the lights, the angles and everything. Tedious, but interesting; I had to sit very still, worrying about my hair. I’d made myself up quite elaborately, but my hair was a riot of chaotic curls as usual – I’d expected they’d do my hair and make-up for me, but Radu explained he wanted me to look as natural as possible, and insisted I wiped some of my make-up off. He gave me some lines to read, and when I’d studied them, he said: ‘If you’re ready, we shoot.’

It was all over very quickly. I hadn’t been nervous at all. In fact, it all felt quite unreal.

‘You would like to see the cutting room? I show you – come.’

He led me to a room where a dishevelled technician was poring over a machine, red pencil poised. The film, running back and forth, made a clattering noise against the muted turbulence of martial music, the spatter of distant gunfire, voices from adjacent rooms.

‘This is the cutting room, Dinah.’

He bent over the monitor, peering at the frames and talking to the other man. He became quite absorbed and I was longing to go and look for Johnny – of course he probably wouldn’t be there … ‘Mind if I go to the lavatory while you’re doing that, Radu?’

He barely looked up. ‘At the end of the corridor,’ he said. I began my exploration. In the second room I looked in, three men were sitting talking. I asked them where I could find Johnny. The next room on the left, they said. It was all so easy! I pushed open the door and there he was, holding a can of film. He placed the can on a workbench, turned and saw me. He looked dumbstruck, rooted to the spot.

‘I need to talk to you.’

He shook his head.

‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid. I’m working.’

‘Come outside for a minute then.’

We walked along the corridor. Multiple soundtracks muttered and droned in quiet cacophony beyond closed doors. The chemical smell reminded me of the science lab at school.

I glanced sideways at Johnny. With his chunky bullet head, high cheekbones and protruding teeth he looked excessively masculine. Had Colin – did Colin – really love him? Could that be real love? I couldn’t imagine them … did men kiss? I knew, theoretically, what men did with each other, but I could only imagine some kind of muscular wrestling.

‘I left you several messages at the Fitzroy,’ I said reproachfully. ‘And I came here. Several times. But the porter always said you were out or away.’

‘I told him to say that if anyone came nosing round.’

‘That wasn’t very nice of you.’

‘Look – just keep away from me. Drop it. I can’t help Colin. I had a visit from a bloke – he might have been plain clothes, but I don’t think so. Don’t know what he was. I asked for his card, warrant, but he just laughed. How did he know where I live? He was asking questions about Colin. Did you give him my address? I know Colin wouldn’t.’

‘Of course not.’ I tried to sound bracing. ‘You mustn’t let them intimidate you.’

‘Easy for you to say, isn’t it! But that’s not the point. The point is it wouldn’t help. If I got up in court they’d have me. It would all come out – everything.’

‘What d’you mean – everything?’ I tried to be patient. ‘You don’t have to spell out what kind of relationship … I mean, all you have to say is you spent the evening with Colin. Drinking. Perfectly innocent. A drink and a chat – you knew him in the war, in the film business, any old thing. It’s not beyond the wit of man to embellish things in the right direction, is it.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you,’ he hissed. ‘They know. I wouldn’t have to spell it out. They would. Some clever lawyer tying me up in knots. All that’d happen is I’d end up inside too. Lose my job; everything.’

‘No!’ I cried, desperate. ‘Our lawyer will help you put it so they can’t trip you up. You have to do it for Colin. Nothing as bad can happen to you as what might happen to him. You can’t let them intimidate you! Hitler tried to intimidate us, and we stood up to him!’

He looked at me with utter contempt. ‘Where have you come from! You don’t know you’re born. And don’t bring the bloody war into it.’ He leaned against the wall and let out a great sigh of exhaustion. I waited. After a long silence: ‘I’ll think about it. But I’m scared.’

‘Don’t you think Colin’s scared?’

‘You think I don’t know that?’

‘He could be hanged.’

‘Don’t say that! Don’t say that!’ He stared ahead. ‘Look – I have to go now.’

‘Please – please – say you’ll do it.’

He looked away along the corridor with its queasy pale green painted walls. ‘All right, yes, I’ll do it. All right! Okay?’

‘Speak to his lawyer – here’s the phone number. And the address.’ I pulled out an old envelope from my bag and wrote it all down for him. Johnny crushed it into his pocket without even a glance. We walked towards the swing doors and the room where he’d been working. Outside it he stopped. He was longing to escape, I could tell, but something kept him within my orbit.

‘I did visit him, if you want to know. You think I’m a coward, don’t you, but I did go to the prison. He got me this job; gave me a name, someone I could talk to. But maybe that was my mistake, maybe that’s how they got on to me.’

I squared my shoulders. I hadn’t been head girl for nothing. ‘I know how difficult it is, but it’s your duty,’ I said, with a sudden vision of my headmistress, Miss Pennington-Harborough.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He looked at me with naked dislike and resentment. I wasn’t used to people disliking me. It annoyed me. I didn’t even try to see his point of view; I couldn’t afford to admit he might actually be in danger. Only afterwards did I feel ashamed of having persecuted him; of having lectured him from a moral high ground I had no right to occupy.

‘You lot, you just don’t understand.’ He spoke with concentrated bitterness. ‘I’ll do it, okay? I’ll do it. Now please just get out of here.’

He went back into his work room and slammed the door.

A week later they fished his body out of the Thames.

.........

The inquest was held in an unfamiliar part of South London. I got off the bus and headed along the dusty main road for a while before realising I was walking in the wrong direction. This part of London was a lot drabber than Notting Hill, more like Lavender Hill, where Hugh was living, but further east: Peckham, Camberwell. The plane trees had survived the war and the bombing and brightened the long, winding road, but there was an air of exhaustion about the whole district. Indeed, the whole of London seemed exhausted: a great tired beast, like one of the pale, dispirited lions you saw at the Zoo, reclining in listless resignation in a dusty cage.

Eventually I found the coroner’s court, a battered neo-Georgian building. Due to losing my way I was late and slipped in at the back. I was the only spectator.

A young woman in a checked jacket and hair on top of her head like Betty Grable was in the witness box – at least I suppose that’s what it was. She had a look of Johnny; the same cheekbones and round head. It was quickly obvious from the questions and answers that she was his sister.

Nor was there any doubt that he’d committed suicide. He’d left a note. The coroner read it out: ‘I’m sorry I’ve let you down. I just couldn’t go through with it.’

‘Have you any idea what he was referring to?’

His sister shook her head and started to cry. Through her tears she croaked: ‘He’d had a lot of worries, had a friend what was in a lot of trouble, but I don’t know much about it.’

It didn’t take long for the coroner to reach a verdict.

When it was over I followed his sister out of the court building. She was wearing a floral dress under the checked jacket and instead of stockings she wore socks with her high-heeled shoes. There was something poignant about it, like a little girl dressed in her mother’s clothes – but lots of young working-class women dressed like that – well, so many women, and men, had simply run out of clothes by the end of the war. One felt so shabby all the time. I minded clothes still being rationed even more than food.

I hurried to catch up with her. ‘Are you Johnny’s sister? He was a friend of mine – well, not really a friend, but I knew him. If you’ve time I’d like to talk to you about him. May I buy you a cup of tea somewhere?’

She wouldn’t stop. She flinched away from me and frowned, wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I have to get back to work.’

She walked on, lighting a cigarette as she went. She didn’t offer me one, and anyway I never smoked in the street. ‘Please,’ I begged.

‘Nothing to talk about, is there?’

‘You must be dreadfully upset, and I’m upset too–’

She quickened her pace. ‘Dunno what you got to be upset about. You’re one of that lot, aren’t you, that arty lot he got in with. This is all about that Colin. Well, I suppose you got him to be upset about, now he’s bumped someone off. That’s who the note was for, right? Well, you tell your friend Colin he ruined Johnny. Johnny was never the same after he got in with him. And now he’s bloody killed him.’

‘That’s not fair! They only met recently, they didn’t know each other all that well.’

‘Are you kidding! They was in the war together.’ She was holding back tears.

‘What? I didn’t know that.’

‘You don’t know nothing.’

I flinched, but maybe it was all my fault, I’d made her angry, I’d been tactless and insensitive. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘You couldn’t care less if you upset me or not. Just like Colin. Doesn’t matter now though, does it. Johnny come home. Demobbed. That was it. But then they met up again. P’raps they never stopped meeting. I hadn’t seen much of Johnny, he had a bedsit up Paddington way. I should’ve made more of an effort, but he didn’t seem to want to see me anyway. He had such queer moods.’ She screwed her hankie up into a grimy little ball and dabbed her eyes with it. ‘Too late now. But he was worried, I do know that.’

‘D’you know what he was worried about?’

‘Not really – seemed to go back to the war, but I dunno. There’s more things went on in the war than we’ll ever know about. We ain’t ever going to know … and it don’t really matter now, does it.’

‘Of course it matters! Colin–’

‘I couldn’t care less what happens to your friend Colin. He can hang for all I care.’

‘Don’t say that!’

She stopped on the corner. ‘Look – I’m going that way. Got to get back to work. I took time off. I work at the Peek Freans biscuit factory, I’ll get into trouble, I’ll get my pay docked – but you wouldn’t know about things like that, would you.’

‘Can’t you really tell me anything else about Johnny and Colin in the war?’

‘They was in the Balkans together, that’s all I know. Don’t even know where the Balkans is, to be honest. Johnny did used to boast about Colin sometimes, about how important he was, but …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought that’s all it was; boasting.’

‘Didn’t he say how he was important?’

She glanced at me scornfully. ‘No! He’s your friend, isn’t he. I should’ve thought you’d be the one to know about that.’

.........

Alan raged with frustration. ‘All that work, all that trouble you went to to get him to testify, and now he can’t because he topped himself, the stupid fool.’

‘He must have been desperate. I feel it’s partly my fault.’

‘Oh God, Dinah, it isn’t. Don’t blame yourself. But what a bloody awful mess.’

‘All the things that were meant to end in 1945 just seem to be carrying on after all.’

‘Peacetime’s an undiscovered country, Dinah – I don’t understand any of this.’