Epilogue
Two Years Later
‘And next up to introduce their brand-new film to the sixty-sixth annual New York Film Festival: Beatrice and Arthur Norton.’ The announcement floods the Lincoln Center, New York, New York. The ‘proper’ New York.
The couple walk together across the stage, Arthur always making sure to let his wife go first. It’s his own little thing that he has done the whole way around the film festival circuit.
He hasn’t told Beatrice why, but in his head it’s as though with her going first, she absorbs the majority of the applause.
She deserves it most, he tells himself as he hangs back a little, taking in her smiles and waves as though he too is one of her adoring fans.
The loudest of their fans aren’t cheering them on in the United States, however. No, they’re three and a half thousand miles away, and five hours ahead in the Big Apple, in the other New York, Lincolnshire. Though it isn’t called that any more.
To avoid any more confusion with their transatlantic cousins, and now they have something a little more exciting happening than an overgrown apple, the single pub, in the village of a single road, is renamed ‘The Farmer and Filmmaker’. After their pride and joy.
Tracy watches the chaos erupt in her pub, not bothering that her wallpaper is drenched in her beer, or that Bill has broken a table leg by climbing on it.
She just watches quietly as the woman she’d come to think of as her eldest daughter and her husband walk the stage, their names in lights behind them, smiling a satisfied smile as if she had faith all along that this would be their happily ever after.
Arthur never left New York with his father.
Everyone knew he was never going to leave, not when he looked at that barmaid like she was made of stardust, or when he started to take tea at Barbara’s every Tuesday afternoon, or when he finally realised that you don’t have to travel far to figure out who you are; you just need a normal pub, in a normal village, in a tiny corner of England.
But staying in that tiny village didn’t mean giving up a dream, it just meant the dream had to come to them.
So, with Mr Cavendish Senior on board, they set up ‘Tommy Productions’.
First in his grandmother’s cattle shed, then they bought the old chapel on the corner of that one road and called it their home and their dream.
After her visit, Lizzie never left either.
She stays with her grandmother in that big farmhouse that once felt so empty, but they fill it now with photos high and low, so they both remember.
‘Thank you all for coming.’ Beatrice addresses the crowd.
She’s strong, powerful. You’d have no idea that just moments before she was clinging to Arthur’s lapels and shaking like a leaf.
Cerys had made a bet that she would chicken out, or do a nervous fart in front of the crowd, so, if only out of spite, she kept her nerves, and her gas, well and truly under wraps.
‘And I hope you all stay behind to help clear up afterwards.’ She smiles down the lens of the camera, only her and the patrons of her pub knowing what she means.
Helena Cavendish is now one of those patrons, sat beside her daughter and mother-in-law, nursing a pint of Batemans and getting to experience awards night from the opposite end of the broadcast. ‘Auntie Babs’ chitters away at her, but she still wouldn’t trade it in for front-row seats at the Oscars.
Eddie Cavendish isn’t with her though. Well, his portrait still hangs proudly behind the bar – alongside the entire cast and crew of Two Roads (the unreleased film that is extraordinarily famous amongst the handful of people who live in and around the village).
No, Eddie Cavendish is right there in New York, with his best friend Jimmy at his side, in the crowd, incognito, supporting his son with a look of pride that the world never saw, even when it was him who was centre stage.
‘This is a film that means so much to me, to us. It took me a while, but I’m finally ready.’ Arthur finds Jimmy’s gaze in the crowd of hundreds, and the old veteran winks. ‘We are delighted to present, for your viewing pleasure, our debut feature film: Elizabeth.’