Chapter Nine
Rusty, the dog who’s been cast as Piper, is out in the meadows when I cross them, playing ball with her wrangler.
She should be a Border collie, but she’s a groodle, because groodles score higher with audiences in the cuteness stakes.
Imogen isn’t happy about the switch, but hasn’t kicked up a fuss.
(‘It’s not the hill I want to die on,’ she’s told me.) In fairness, Rusty is extremely cute.
I watch her, bounding ecstatically after her ball, and suspect she’d make Stewart feel woefully inadequate.
That bird’s still going, but she isn’t giving it a scrap of attention.
Stewart would have been off by now, chasing it down, in for the kill.
Poor Stewart, doomed to a lifetime of toeing the line on Parliament Hill. I feel quite protective of him, now I’m comparing him to this shaggy A-list beacon of virtue.
Leaving her and her wrangler behind, I press on, not dropping my pace until I reach the treeline. I’ve headed towards the bird’s song, for no better reason than it seems as good a place to start as any, in these woods which absolutely are vast.
The air softens once I’m beneath the trees’ canopy, muffling Rusty’s bark, and the world outside.
The mist clears a little too, caught like cobwebs in the trees’ branches.
I walk across fallen ash and oak leaves, through firs grown tall and lean, and, as I inhale their scent, am dizzied once again by a sense of belonging in this timeless place.
It’s even stronger now that I’m outside, rather than cocooned in Nick’s car.
So perhaps, after all, my grandparents did bring me walking here as a child. They must have, I think.
What other explanation could there be for this nostalgia I feel, tightening around my heart?
I walk on, for what might be miles, listening to the rustling branches, my crunching footsteps, and the sound of my breaths, quickened by the cold. I don’t worry about getting lost. I trust, somehow, that I won’t.
I trust these woods.
The bird’s no longer calling; I’m not sure how long it is since it stopped, but I tilt my head, searching for it in the canopy above, where I sense it’s lurking, looking down.
My face stings, swollen with cold. When I breathe, I make clouds, and, as I watch those clouds rise, morphing with the mist, my whirring head swims with memories: elusive, intangible, impossible to see, but there, whispering to me that I have been here, done this, before.
A breeze blows, making the icy air quiver, and, fleetingly, I hear what sounds like more whispers: of distant shouting; a child’s laughter.
I pause, straining to hear it again.
I don’t.
But, in the lengthening silence, I can’t help but remember those voices I almost believed I heard up in the attic’s corridor, when Ana first took me there.
Those planes, too.
And, still, that face in the mirror.
It’s your imagination, I tell myself, feeling shakier yet, because why does it all seem so real?
I don’t know, and I can’t think about it.
It’s scaring me too much.
So, I walk on, clenching my numbed hands into balls, fighting to keep my fear at bay, and my attention on the trees, waiting, waiting, to spot something in their gaps.
As, eventually, I do: a solidity, all but concealed by foliage, which, the longer I look at it, takes on the shape of a wall.
Impatiently, I pick my way towards it, through a thick, tangled path of roots and branches.
I’ve found it, I’m certain: Iris and Robbie’s cottage of some sort. It’s here, right before me, and, as I push on, wrestling branches aside, I don’t lift my stare from the wall, half-afraid it might disappear.
But it remains just where it is: palest yellow, crumbling on all sides, surrounded by piles of overgrown rubble.
‘Oh,’ I say, a pressure of pure sorrow building in my throat as I take that rubble in. ‘Oh … ’
Never have Iris and Robbie’s deaths felt more personal, or more tragic, to me, than now, in this moment.
They loved this place.
It was theirs.
Theirs.
And it’s in ruins.
I wasn’t expecting it.
I wasn’t expecting to find my way here at all.
But if I did, I’d pictured something whole: a place with lopsided eaves, and a crooked chimney; a hallway with faded floral paper decorating its walls.
I move forward, picking my way around fallen beams and stone, until I come to a gatepost, hidden beneath a shroud of thick ivy. Crouching, I reach out, shakily pushing the ivy apart, revealing the post’s surface beneath.
My eyes find the engraving immediately.
It’s the first thing they go to.
And, as they do, my cheeks work, the mass in my throat builds, and I reach out, running my frozen thumb over the two names I see.
Robbie, reads one.
Clarence, says the other.
I don’t question who Clarence is.
I know.
Imogen has Robbie use the nickname all the time in the novel.
‘Tim said it always made Iris smile,’ she told me.
It makes me smile now, through the tears rolling down my cold face.
I’m really crying.
It stuns me, this overwhelming emotion I feel.
I have no idea how long I sit with it, my trembling hand pressed to these names, letting my sobs free.
But when I do finally rise again, my legs are stiff, my heart feels emptied, and I know what we need to do.
We reshoot that same night.
It didn’t take me long to convince Ana and Nick that we should go yet again when – once I’d returned to my room, washed my face, and wrestled myself under some degree of control – I carried on down to the Mabel’s Fury set, catching them on a break from filming.
We all want to get the scene right, and, when I put the change I want to them, they both agreed with it immediately.
I was still very shaken, reeling from my onslaught of feeling in the woods.
Your barriers come up and you close yourself off, Felix said to me yesterday.
But I hadn’t closed myself off.
I hadn’t been able to.
Felix was in the hangar too, over with all the other bomber boys at the refreshment stand. He hadn’t yet replied to my message – he still hasn’t – but when I caught his eye, he gave me the first smile I’ve had from him in months, which was far from easy, but nonetheless made me feel a bit better.
It helped, actually, to be back in the thick of everyone. It was a relief not to be alone any more, and to have the distraction, however short-lived, of a purpose.
‘This could really work,’ said Ana, finally dropping her pretence that last night’s attempts were anything approaching ok.
‘Check you out –’ she shot me a wink – ‘all Maria von Trapp. Hey Naomi, Jeff –’ she raised her arm, summoning them over – ‘I got another curve ball for you guys. I know how much you love them.’
They don’t love them, obviously, but they’re also among the best in the business at handling them and so got right down to setting everything up.
There at least wasn’t a huge amount for them to do logistically; we’re shooting in the control tower breakroom again, so nothing’s changed there.
I didn’t consider proposing that we shift filming to Doverley’s woods, even though those woods will, for me, always now be where Iris and Robbie’s reunion belongs.
I knew no one would agree to something so major.
And besides, how could I have asked them to without giving away that I’d discovered Iris and Robbie’s cottage?
I couldn’t, and, as Imogen herself said, all Tim Hobbs wants is for that cottage to remain hidden.
Sacred.
I want that too. Now that I’ve seen it, I couldn’t bear for it to be descended on, even if it is in ruins. All these years, it’s belonged to Iris and Robbie: theirs, just theirs.
I won’t rob them of that.
So, the line I’ve taken is that it was purely down to my call with Imogen that I’ve dreamt up the change we’re about to run with. I don’t feel great about deceiving everyone. I feel awful. Especially about lying to Nick.
‘Why did Ana call you Maria von Trapp?’ he asked me, once Ana, Jeff and Naomi had left us on the soundstage floor.
‘It’s just this thing she came up with on her flight,’ I said. ‘She thinks that to stop failing, I need to be more Maria.’
He frowned. ‘That makes no sense.’
‘It did the way she said it. And I have been failing.’ My voice faltered as I thought not about work, or this movie, only us, and our son, who we never named, because it hurt too much, only now I wish we had. I really wish we had. ‘I’ve been failing at everything.’
‘You’ve failed at nothing,’ he told me, his own voice softening. ‘And you don’t need to be Maria. You need to be you.’
‘On recent evidence, I’d say I need to be more.’
‘You need to be you, Claude,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t be any more than that.’
And I don’t know what it was about those words, coming from him, but they took a hold of me, deep in my chest, with an intensity that I’ve carried ever since.
I’m carrying it still now as I stand here in my WAAF uniform, looking across at Nick on the opposite side of the set, feeling worse than ever for not having trusted him with the truth about the cottage.
It already feels too late, though, to do anything about it.
Oblivious to my stare, he tips his head back, using the eyedrops that Ines from make-up has brought him.
‘Better?’ he asks her, tossing the bottle back.
‘Better,’ she pronounces, even though his eyes don’t look any different to me.
They’re still very red, and very puffy.
He’s exhausted. I don’t think he can have had more than an hour’s sleep last night, if he got any at all, and has, like everyone else, already worked twelve-hours straight today, getting three minutes and twenty-two seconds of air footage successfully in the can.
But he’s here.
He’s present.
‘Ready?’ he says, turning to me.
‘Ready,’ I say.
‘Reckon we can do it in a take?’
‘Just the one?’ It feels such an implausible suggestion after the debacle of last night.
‘Just the one.’ He clicks his fingers. ‘Bam. No looking down.’
‘All right,’ I agree. ‘No looking down.’