Chapter Two
I was twenty when I met Ana. She was still assisting back then, and we were working together here in England, on an adaptation of The Go-Between.
Felix was with us too – he was Ted Burgess to my Marian Maudsley – and for both of us, it was our big break.
I was a nervous wreck, utterly in awe of the director, as well as most of the cast, and if it hadn’t been for Felix and Ana, I’m not sure I could have got through it.
But Felix and I had hit it off during auditions – one-upping each other with our sorry tales of failed call-backs, and bit-parts in budget advertisements – and, on set, he made me laugh, all the time; even when I was about to vomit with anxiety in the lead-up to our closed-set scenes.
Ana, meanwhile, took me under her wing, sitting with me in make-up, attending my every take, and getting me into rushes each morning so that I could watch the scenes I’d shot the day before and see that I wasn’t, in fact, making an idiot of myself.
Thanks to her, I began to believe in myself.
Trust myself. In the end, I wound up getting nominated for an Oscar for that movie, and winning a BAFTA.
Felix won a BAFTA too, and Ana scooped both awards as part of the Best Picture team.
We had a really good time celebrating.
Nick hasn’t worked with Ana before – he hasn’t worked with me, come to that – and Felix hasn’t been on another project with her either, until now.
But Ana and I have done a ton together; this will be our seventh movie, and I’d love to say I’m instantly at ease, being back in her company, but I feel as vomity as I used to, filming those scenes with Felix.
Because, in all Ana and I have worked on, I’ve never before let her down, and the only thing I can think about as we head into the house, is how badly I’ve been doing that so far with The Bomber Boys.
I follow her through a porch lined with National Trust pamphlets, and on into Doverley’s entrance hall, which has been artfully restored to its Georgian heyday, with a mosaiced floor, and gilt-framed paintings on its walls.
At the far end, a staircase sweeps up to a landing which, I guess, leads to the bedrooms.
Normally, the National Trust let out the rooms here on a bed and breakfast basis, but through November, we’ve taken them over. The website promises 1,000 thread count sheets, underfloor heating, and rolltop baths. According to Nick, reality delivers.
Our characters obviously wouldn’t have been so comfortable, and they definitely wouldn’t have seen the house looking like this.
There’d have been no paintings on the walls for a start.
All of those were sold when Doverley’s owners fell on hard times at the end of the First World War.
A lot of their furniture went then, too, and the family finally moved out in the 1930s, selling the estate to the RAF, who wanted it for its flat grounds, perfect for runways, and remote position.
It was then that most of the house was locked up.
The RAF did make use of some of it, though.
The desk-staff had offices here, and everyone’s meals were cooked in the basement kitchen.
The library was given another lease of life too, as an officers’ mess, and a handful of personnel were billeted inside.
Not the airmen – they were all down at the base – but the women who supported them. The WAAFS.
I think about them, as I follow Ana to the stairs.
I think about Iris.
She walked across this floor, I tell myself. Breathed this air.
I pause, close my eyes, and wait to feel something.
But I’m distracted by a distant banging.
‘What’s that?’ I ask Ana.
‘What’s what?’
‘That hammering.’
‘I can’t hear it.’ She shrugs. ‘It’ll be the rigging crew, probably, getting a jump on lighting the library for tomorrow.’
‘Is that where you’re taking me?’
‘No.’ She throws me another smile. ‘I wouldn’t waste your time with that.’
‘Then … ?’
‘I’m not gonna say. It’ll be better if you see it. Now listen.’ She starts up the stairs. ‘The Sound of Music was showing on my flight … ’
‘Mine too.’
‘You watched it?’
‘No, I was going over the script.’ Again, and again. ‘I didn’t watch anything.’
‘Me either. I was trying to get my head around what the hell we should do about our ending. But I had a flick through the options, and as soon as I saw the thumbnail of Maria dancing her heart out in the Alps, it got me humming that song, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”, only it became, How do I solve a problem like Claude?’
‘Wow, Ana, don’t pull your punches.’
‘You can take them.’
‘Can I?’
‘One hundred per cent.’ We reach the landing and head down a plush corridor lined with numbered doors.
‘The thing I’ve realised about Maria,’ Ana continues, ‘is that as soon as she’s liberated from doing as she thinks she should be doing, she starts nailing life. It’s hit me. I need to liberate you.’
‘You want to marry me off to an Austrian naval captain?’
‘Not quite,’ she says, and talks on, telling me that the fact I spent my entire flight in the weeds with the script rather than do-re-mi-ing is exactly my problem; I’ve had a year from hell, got myself too caught up in my own sense of failure, lost any confidence to act with my instincts, which is only making me fail more.
‘Agree?’ she says, and, miserably, I nod, really hoping that we get to her solution soon, because actually I don’t know if I can take much more of this candour.
‘You could keep doing as you are and we’d get away with it,’ she says, as we come to a halt at the end of the corridor.
She extracts a key card from the waist of her leggings.
‘Your technique’s flawless, so we could shoot this with you all in your head, and it would be …
fine. But you’re better than that. We need you to relocate those instincts. Find Iris.’
‘How, though?’
‘Patience, Claude.’ She taps the card to the fob on the door before us, then clicks it open. ‘Patience.’
Brow creasing, more intrigued than anything now, I follow her into a fluorescently lit service room that holds several luggage trolleys, and a fire-door, which, with the same card, Ana opens.
As she pushes it wide, I feel a punch of cold. Curiosity growing, realising we’re heading into an un-refurbished section of the house, I follow her along another corridor. This time, the floor is stone, and the doors are of old wood. Lead-lined windows rattle in the wind, letting more icy air in.
Ana heads to the closest door, creaking it open onto what I recognise immediately as a servants’ staircase.
I’ve acted on enough locations to know one.
And I don’t question any more where we’re headed.
It’s certainly not to any set, which are confined to Doverley’s ground and first floors, where there’s easy access for the rigs.
An old drawing room has been repurposed as Iris’s billet, which she shared with Clare – who poor Emma is playing – but their room wasn’t in the main part of the house.
No, it was as far away as could be got from the men in their offices.
It was up in Doverley’s attics.
‘I’ve worked it out,’ I say to Ana, as she lights her phone’s torch.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes.’ Then, so there’s no doubt, ‘We’re going to my room.’
‘Oh, I love that you just said, my room. Too bad you guessed though.’ She sighs. Then, grins. ‘No matter. It’s still gonna knock your socks off.’
She sets off at a jog, and, lighting my own phone, I follow, more slowly, distracted by the strange echoes our footsteps throw, and a tightening in my chest that takes me back to how I felt driving through the woods earlier.
Just as then, I’m disorientated by the oddest sense of somehow having been here before.
‘Be careful now,’ Ana says, as I join her on the attic’s landing. ‘I doubt our insurance will cover any accidents. I probably should’ve got you to sign a waiver.’
‘How did you even find your way up here?’
‘Imogen gave me the route.’
I nod, making sense. Imogen’s relayed her explorations of Doverley in interviews, thanking Tim Hobbs for showing her around, back when he was in better health.
My very own navigator. I haven’t yet met Imogen, but we’ve spoken on the phone quite a bit – mainly so I could pick her brain about Iris.
Apparently, Imogen drew all her inspiration for her from Tim.
‘He’d talk and talk about her when we used to meet,’ she’s told me. ‘I’m certain he was in love with her, too. The way he spoke about her, I think he loved her very much.’
I felt no surprise, hearing her say that.
She infers as much in her novel. She describes too how close Tim, Iris, and Robbie were growing up, all attending the same village primary school.
It wasn’t far from here. Not far at all.
Just like me, the three of them were children in this vast, rugged place, and even though I’ve known that a while now, it still makes my spine lengthen, thinking about the coincidence of it.
‘Come on,’ says Ana, swivelling her phone to light our path down a narrow hallway.
As we walk, I glance at the closed doors running either side of us, and find myself imagining the bustle that must have once filled this silent space. The air shifts in a whispering draft, and, for a disorientating second, it’s as though I hear it, still going on now.
Ana comes to a halt, opening a door midway down the hallway, and stands back to let me through.
Wordlessly, I go.
Then, I stop.
I stare.
The room before me is nothing like what I was expecting.
I’d expected it to be an empty shell.
But this room is furnished. Not extravagantly.
Enough though for it to feel instantly like a home.
Slowly, my hand trembling with the now almost choking proximity of the past, I move my torch, illuminating a pair of metal-framed beds wedged beneath sloping eaves.
Both of them, unbelievably, still have their pillows on top of them.
At their feet are two storage trunks, open and empty, but very easy to picture bursting with stockings and fair isle jumpers.
To their right stands a chest of drawers with a mirror above it, and a dark dash of what might be nail polish staining the wood.
I turn back to Ana. ‘It’s as though they just left.’
‘I know, right?’
‘And you found it like this? You didn’t have the furniture moved up here?’
She laughs. ‘I knew you were gonna ask that. And no, I swear it. Jeff’s been finding loads of stuff around the place. I guess the RAF had more than they knew what to do with, once it was all over. Props are like kids at Christmas.’
‘You won’t let them touch this, though?’ The rush of possessiveness that comes over me, shocks me. I’m not sure why I feel so strongly about it being left as it is. Maybe because it has been, for all these years.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ana says, ‘no one’s gonna touch anything.’
I nod, relieved, and edge further into the room.
Gravitating to the left bed, I sit, feeling the mattress give.
I’m so tired, I’m tempted to lie down, but I can hardly do that with Ana here.
Instead, I bend over the bed’s edge, looking beneath it, to see what, I have no idea, and there’s nothing there anyway.
Ana crosses to the dormer window, beyond which night is rapidly falling – the clouds no longer violet, but deep grey – and I get up, moving to the chest of drawers, where I peer into my reflection in the mirror.
I frown. My face doesn’t seem to belong in this old, mottled glass.
I’m too twenty-first century, with my messy ponytail, mascaraed lashes, and hooped earrings.
I should be in costume: a tie around my collared neck; a WAAF cap on my hair.
Looking down, I pull at the chest’s top drawer.
It sticks, then gives, jolting open. On first glance, it appears empty.
But then I spot a strip of metal wedged into the back seam.
Reaching for it, I yank it free, and, seeing that it’s a hair grip, feel a tingling in my skin.
I turn the grip over, running my thumb across the grooves, and the tingling grows.
She breathed this air, I had to tell myself about Iris, back in the entrance hall.
I really don’t need to tell myself anything up here.
‘Come look at this,’ says Ana from the window.
Setting the hairgrip down, I go. She gestures downwards, towards the set. It’s much harder to make out now that it’s getting so dark. The huts, tower and planes are all cloaked in shadows. Somehow, they seem more believable for it.
‘Eerie, isn’t it?’ Ana says.
I nod in agreement.
And, from the direction of the woods, that bird calls again.
It’s a distinctive sound, more a screech, than a song. Instinctively, I’m drawn to it. Yet it unsettles me too.
‘Come up whenever you need,’ says Ana. ‘You’ll work things out here.’ She hands me her key. ‘I know it.’