Casting Off (10 page)

‘Sounds boring.’

‘Yes, but the other parts of the job are all right.’

‘You mean going to houses to see clients?’

‘Yes. The clients are usually awful, but sometimes the houses are terrific.’ She fell silent and her dark blue eyes became dull and slate-coloured, which Clary knew meant some kind of sadness.

‘Poll?’

‘I don’t know. The state of the world, I suppose. I mean, we so looked forward to the end of the war as though life would be quite different and marvellous and it isn’t, is it? We so wanted the peace but it doesn’t seem to have made anyone happier. And it isn’t just us. Our fathers don’t seem to be happy – at least I know mine isn’t, and you’ve said you’re worried about yours, and Simon is loathing the idea of doing National Service. Everything seems to be so drab and difficult and nothing wonderful that one thought might happen is going to happen now.’

She picked up her sewing and stared blindly at it before letting it drop again. ‘The thing is,’ she said unsteadily, ‘that I can’t seem
not
to love Archie. It somehow was the point of my life. It doesn’t seem to
stop
. Before I told him I used to imagine things – you know, the rest of my life with him, but afterwards when I told him and it was no good, I lost the imagining part. Or I can’t bear to. Yes, I think that’s what it is – that I can’t bear to.’

She was confounded. Polly had not said a word about Archie since she had said that she never wanted to talk about it, and somehow she had thought that although Poll was still, as she had put it to herself, a bit shaky, she had no idea that she was actually miserable. She longed to comfort her, to distract her from pain, to produce some wise and kindly maxim that would shed a new, more hopeful light on the matter, but she could think of nothing.

‘I don’t know about being in love,’ she said at last. ‘I’m no help to you. I wish I was.’

‘It’s a relief just to tell you. I thought it might stop if I never talked about it, but it doesn’t seem to.’

Much later she said, ‘You don’t think that I’ll feel like this for the rest of my life, do you? It will stop some time, won’t it?’

‘I’m sure it will,’ she answered, but she didn’t feel at all sure. ‘You’ll tell me when it does, won’t you?’

‘Course I will.’

She felt a kind of respectful anxiety for Polly after that – respect because she was so good about it, going through every day feeling so sad, and anxiety because she had a secret fear that once you were possessed by some strong feeling you would have it for life.

Louise sat under the blasting roar of a hair-dryer. It was six thirty in the morning, and her second day at Ealing Film Studios where she was being an extra in a film about Ancient Rome – a comedy with Tommy Trinder and Frances Day. Of course she would have liked a proper part, but she felt pretty lucky to be in a film at all. The metal rollers in which they had wound her long hair had become so hot that in places they seemed to burn the skin on her head. They washed everyone’s hair every morning: she had discovered this second day. When they decided that your hair was dry, you queued for Make-up – an amazingly elaborate process that made everybody look older but far less distinguishable in other ways. When her turn came, she lay back in a chair in front of a wall of mirrors bordered by strong, naked lightbulbs while Patsy or Beryl sponged and rubbed the foundation (entitled Caramel Peach) all over her face and neck. Eyebrows were arched and darkened and then eye-shadow the colour of carbon paper followed. Then she had to shut her eyes to be thoroughly powdered. After this they painted her mouth – a huge Cupid’s bow with a dark outline, filled in with vermilion lipstick applied with a brush. The last, and to her most alarming, part was when they stuck the false eyelashes to her upper lids, covered the gummed strip with eye-liner and then brushed on coats of blue mascara. This made her feel like a moth whose wings were too heavy for flying – it was an effort to open her eyes.

‘Lick your lips. There you are. If you’d like to pop along to Wardrobe.’

The first morning she had looked in the mirror: below the rollers and hairnet was this flawless expanse of Caramel Peach in which she recognized her own eyes that seemed now to be surrounded with barbed wire. Her mouth – improbably voluptuous – gleamed like a pair of satiny cushions. Glamour, she thought, she had never felt so glamorous in her life.

In Wardrobe they strapped her into a brassière top, so hugely padded that she could not see her feet. A minute skirt – split on one side – completed the costume, which was made of yellow velvet edged with a gold fringe. Her midriff was daringly bare, but she and eleven others, identically dressed, were supposed to be slave girls and she imagined that scanty clothing was meant to denote their abject status.

Finally, it was back to Hairdressing where the rollers were undone and her hair dressed high on her head to one side with a great switch of artificial ringlets that were draped tastefully over her right shoulder. Then she repaired to her dressing room, shared with five other girls, to wait until called. Yesterday they hadn’t been called: had sat all day with flimsy dressing gowns round their shoulders smoking, drinking cups of tea and talking about the jobs they had nearly got instead of this one. The only moment of excitement had been when someone called Gordon had turned up to inspect them and said what about their feet? Wardrobe was sent for and said that nobody had mentioned feet to
her
. Thereafter an assortment of people were called in for their views. The Period Adviser sent to say that sandals were the thing; the Art Director said they were slave girls so why not bare feet? The Assistant Producer, who arrived last, said nonsense this wasn’t an Art film it was a comedy fit for all the family and all girls’ legs looked better in high heels. ‘I don’t mind what colour they are so long as they’re nice high courts.’ The Art Director said that high-heeled courts really didn’t seem to him
right
with the rest of the costume. The Period Adviser said wearily that
nothing
would be right with that and what he was doing on this picture he really didn’t know. Wardrobe suggested that if the girls were to wear courts, they really should be white satin dyed to match. Gordon said that the best thing would be to take some of the girls on to the set to see what Cyril thought. Louise was delighted to be one of them: she was longing to see a real film set.

So she followed Jeanette and Marlene, who were following Gordon, down a long passage and out through a door that opened upon a narrow concrete path to what looked like an enormously high shed with a door over which a red light shone.

‘Why are we waiting?’ she asked Marlene, after they had stood outside the door for a bit.

‘They’re shooting, dear.’

‘Oh.’

Two very small men staggered up the path with what looked like a vast shallow stone urn thickly ornamented with dolphins and a small naked boy standing in the middle playing some sort of pipe. It smelt strongly of fresh paint. They set it down and one of them searched for and found a cigarette butt behind his ear which he lit.

Gordon looked at the urn with distaste. ‘What you been doing with that, then?’

‘It had to go back – wasn’t sufficiently distressed.’

The red light went off, and Gordon opened the door. ‘Right, girls, follow me.’

They walked through the comparative gloom, over the concrete floor that was intermittently beset with thick cables, upright canvas chairs, a make-up trolley, men standing at the bottom of ladders saying, ‘Are you all right, Bill?’ or nothing, men with earphones standing over large black machines, into the blazing light of the set which consisted of an oval pool filled with some milky liquid, a marbled surround and at one end a marble seat or throne, on which a lady with ash-blond hair, wearing a pleated pink chiffon dress bare on one shoulder, a dia-manté strap on the other, was sitting while a thin man in his shirt-sleeves crouched on his haunches at her feet agreeing with everything she said.

‘I
know
you ain’t, darling. That’s the problem,’ he was saying, as they got within earshot.

‘I mean, she wouldn’t, would she? Not in this dress.’

‘You couldn’t be more right. She wouldn’t.’

‘
I
don’t see why I have to get into the pool.’

‘Darling, asses’ milk!’

‘Sod the asses’ milk. It’ll be freezing.’

‘Darling, it won’t be. Brian has promised.’

‘It was absolutely
icy
just now.’

‘That was only a rehearsal. When we come to shoot I promise you it’ll be
warm
.’

He became aware of Gordon. ‘What now?’ he said, in an entirely different voice.

Gordon explained.

Louise watched as his eyes swept casually over her body; he did not look at her face.

‘Camera won’t be close on her feet,’ he said. ‘We’re way over budget anyhow. Just paint their toenails – gold, or something.’

So that was that. Nothing else happened that day.

In the evening, after most of her make-up had been removed – she was given some cold cream and cotton wool, but it took her ages – she had gone home on the Underground to Notting Hill Gate and then taken a taxi back to Edwardes Square where she now lived with Michael (on leave before joining a new destroyer which he was to command in the Pacific) and Sebastian and Nannie and someone whom Mrs Lines had described as a cook-general – a Mrs Alsop – and her small boy. Mrs Alsop and Nannie did not get on: Nannie had somehow discovered that Mrs Alsop was not Mrs at all, but simply and disgracefully the mother of David, who was small, white-faced and terrified of her. The feud was kept in check by both ladies wishing to make a good impression on Michael, who was blithely unaware of any tension, but Louise dreaded the future when, for an unknown amount of time, she was going to have to cope on her own with it.

Michael had come out of the Navy in order to stand as a Conservative candidate in the election, and he had been assigned what was thought to be a fairly safe seat in a suburb of London. Every day for three weeks Louise had accompanied him: sat beside him on platforms while he made rousing speeches about education and housing and small businesses, and then separated from him for the afternoon while the chairman of the local Conservative Party’s wife took her round to meet other wives. Often she would have to have three or four elaborate teas with cakes from cake baskets with ladies in hats with gloves and handbags to match who asked her about her baby and said how relieved she must be to have her husband home. She managed by pretending she was in a play: for three weeks she threw herself into the part of devoted wife of war-hero and young mother. Zee got several high-ranking Conservatives – including two members of the Cabinet – to come and speak for Michael, and they must have been favourably impressed by her performance, as Michael told her that they had passed on to Zee how well she was doing. This pleased a small part of her, but only a part. She seemed to herself to be made up of small pieces that bore very little relation to one another – as though, she once thought in a rare, clearer moment, she was a sheet of glass that had been hit with a hammer or bombed leaving jagged fragments that did not fit together because so many bits had been shivered to smithereens. Every time she looked at a piece and saw some reflection of herself she felt uncomfortable and sometimes actually ashamed. She wanted approval, for instance, even from people she did not like. She wanted people to find her quite different from how she knew that she was. The acting of parts came in here and even this capacity divided her. She was astounded at how easy she found it, and appalled at her dishonesty. She supposed it was so easy because she did not feel anything very much – beyond mild discomforts, irritation at domestic strife or boredom if she had to do something that she knew was going to be dull. She managed hardly ever to go to bed with Michael, who had sulked for a bit, and now, she was fairly sure, had found consolation elsewhere since he had more or less stopped saying anything about another baby or the means to one.

She did not mind this very much, and when Michael lost his election by three hundred and forty-two votes to the Labour candidate, he immediately took steps to go back to the Navy, who seemed prepared to have him. This would mean the destroyer and the Pacific. ‘For how long?’ she had asked. ‘Not more than two years,’ he had said. The thought of this absence was a kind of relief. She felt that she could not make any decision about her marriage until he was really home and out of the war, and the thought of having to consider such a step as leaving him frightened her so much that she was glad to have what seemed to be a right reason for not having to think about it. She told him that she was going to try to get back to acting, and he had not objected. ‘I should love a famous wife,’ he had said, only half jokingly. But after strenuous efforts all she had managed to get was this part as an extra in what promised to be a pretty awful film. Then on the first evening that she had returned from the studios she found that everything had changed again.

‘The Americans have dropped an atomic bomb on Japan.’