Chapter Twenty-Two
Claudia
I can’t visit Tim today, impatient as I am to.
I’ve stayed with Ellen too long and am late getting back to make-up, who I’m with for an hour, having my hair pinned and my face painted so that I can ruin it all for the cameras in the aftermath of Clare’s death.
Iris never actually held Clare in her arms, like I’m about to hold Emma.
She does it in this movie because that’s the way Imogen wrote it in her book: Iris sprinting to the rainswept scene, where she has to be dragged away from her friend’s body by Robbie.
I feel no nerves about whether I’ll be able to pull off her tears.
Frankly, I’m so full of them, it will be a relief to once again let them go.
But I do feel extremely unsettled by Ellen’s revelation, just before I left her, that Imogen’s version of this event is, like her ending, pure fabrication.
Because in this instance, Imogen wasn’t the one who made it up.
Tim was.
He told Imogen that this is what happened, so we all have asterisks covering our scripts reminding us that we’re not allowed to change any of it.
‘It was Tim who had to be prised off Clare,’ Ellen said to me in her living room.
‘Everyone came out of their billets when the firing started, and Robbie made straight for Tim, pulling him away so that the stretcher bearers could get to Clare. Tim thrashed out, sobbing his poor heart out, but Robbie held him fast, quietening him, and got him back to their billet before he could make any more of a scene. I think it was then that he accepted how dangerously frayed Tim had become.’ She frowned sorrowfully.
‘I’d been aware of it for a while. You could always tell in interrogation.
These days of course, someone in his state would be signed off, given understanding and time to heal.
Back then, he just had to keep going, or he’d have been discharged with LMF.
Lack of Moral Fibre.’ Witheringly, she sighed.
‘It was a different time, it cast a very long shadow, and Tim’s still carrying a great deal of shame.
It didn’t surprise me at all that he’s had himself portrayed as such a stoic in the book. ’
He really has. There’s not so much as a hint that he’s struggling to cope with anything in Imogen’s writing.
Of all the crew, it’s only Jacob, the bomb aimer, who’s shown to experience any kind of debilitating fear.
‘But you see that’s wrong too,’ said Ellen.
‘To me, he never seemed scared, so much as pragmatic. A realist who was resigned. He was very much in love actually, with a woman called Beth Twinton, who came to be a dear friend to me. He refused to discuss the future with her. It maddened her, but after he was killed, she discovered he’d left her a great deal of money.
She used it to set up a school near his parents’ home in Barnes, which I’m sure would have made him happy.
He’d been their only child, and Beth lost her parents in the Blitz.
Jacob was doubtless hoping they’d look after each other.
He really never believed he’d survive.’ She sighed. ‘Like poor Clare.’
‘How did Iris find out about her?’ I asked.
‘Robbie told her. I took him up to her and Clare’s room.’
‘He was there?’ I said, and even as I did, pictured him, kneeling on the floor beside the bed I’ve been sleeping on, waking Iris: his face wet from the rain, his eyes looking into hers.
I can picture him now.
Hear his voice.
Iris.
Iris …
‘I was next door,’ Ellen told me. ‘Her sobs came through our wall.’ She pressed her hand to her chest. ‘Like I’ve said, I wept for Clare myself. Wept for them all.’
Within a couple of hours, I’m sobbing too, in the mud beside Emma’s prone body, the rain soaking through my woollen uniform, dripping chillingly down my neck.
Nick is pulling me, not Felix, away.
I fight him, but he keeps a hold of me.
He wraps his arms around me, fast.
‘Iris,’ he says.
Iris …
I hear them both.
I turn to Nick, and I see them both.
Two rain-drenched faces, flickering in and out of my focus.
‘I can’t bear it,’ I say.
I know, that other voice tells me.
‘I know,’ Nick says. ‘It’s all right … ’
‘It’s not.’
We’re here, says Robbie. For now we’re here.
It’s not enough, I think.
And, with a slow blink, it’s only Nick I see.
Only his eyes that I look into: the wrong colour, but full of a love that might well be award-worthy, but which I do also believe is real.
Love isn’t our problem though.
I realise it never has been.
And it’s not enough.
Because it’s everything else that’s destroying us.
It’s always been everything else.
Nick knows that too.
He can’t bear it either.
I feel that in the way he’s holding on to me.
I see it in the pain that’s snapping in his stare.
Neither of us want to be doing what we’re doing, acting out the dying days of this other doomed love story, but we keep going anyway for the cameras, for the crew, until Ana calls, cut, Naomi circles what we’ve done, and, stepping away from Nick, I let him go.
Emma stays with us for one more night.
We don’t have a big send-off.
‘Who in hell feels like that?’ she says, when, wet to our bones, we head back to our trailers together for the final time.
But later, after I’ve finished my other scene for the day – packing away Clare’s belongings on the set of our bedroom – we do have a farewell just the two of us, up in Iris and Clare’s actual room, dressed in our pyjamas, dressing gowns and thick socks, eating dinners we’ve carried up from downstairs, drinking from miniature bottles of medicinal brandy.
It’s not the first time we’ve eaten together this week.
I haven’t braved the dining room since Saturday, and Emma’s been keeping me company – always in my room, up until now.
We’ve talked a lot, including about our plans for after this.
Mine’s to finally have a break, while she’s looking at taking the lead in a fantasy, shooting in New Zealand, with Felix again.
Her new agent, at my agency, is handling the negotiations.
‘I just hope Felix doesn’t try to get me fired again,’ she says – not coldly, not unkindly, but with a wry smile, a lot more magnanimous than I, to my prevailing shame, managed to be about what he did.
You need to tell them, I snapped at him, back on Sunday. Don’t take too long.
He did it this morning, while I was with Ellen, and the rest of them were together, about to start shooting.
‘I found myself hugging him,’ Emma told me, when she and Ana caught me up on it all before our scene earlier.
‘So did I,’ said Ana. ‘After I ate him for my second breakfast, obviously.’ She raised a brow. ‘But he was so woeful about it, and we all know there’s not a malicious beat in his heart. Blake’s actually thrilled. He wants to use Felix now.’
‘What about Nick?’ I asked, feeling even more like crap in the face of their generosity, and selfishly hoping Nick would make me feel better by having been even more unforgiving. ‘How did he react?’
‘He hugged him too,’ said Emma, with an apologetic pout. ‘Said he appreciated him. I think they were both trying not to cry. There was a lot of back slapping.’
‘You gotta throw him a bone, Claude,’ said Ana. ‘He won’t be ok with himself until you do.’
‘I’m looking forward to NZ,’ Emma says now. ‘It’ll do me good not to be in a part that breaks my heart. And I know you need to give yourself this rest.’
I don’t disagree.
She’s right, of course.
I’ve found myself opening up to her more, these past nights.
I haven’t told her everything I’ve discussed with Ellen and Mum – it’s too much – but I have spoken about my dad, my grief over what he did for me, and Nick as well: all the pain I feel for us.
She’s been great, not trying to fix anything, just listening, and it’s finally dawned on me that I should have leant on her much more than I have, long before now.
But instead, I spent all my time in the woods, and up in this attic. Alone.
That’s why I wanted to bring Emma here tonight. Everything today has made me confront how idiotic I’ve been, cutting myself off from friends, when so many others had theirs taken away.
And I think Clare would enjoy the idea of us together in this room, drinking brandy in her honour.
Do you believe you’re all carrying parts of them? Ellen asked me before I left her this morning. Does Nick hold the essence of Robbie in him? Does Emma hold Clare? Felix, Tim?
Tim’s still alive, I pointed out.
Does that matter? Perhaps you’re all living their new stories, and have found your way to each other for them, as well as yourselves.
Perhaps, I said. I honestly have no idea.
I have considered it though.
I’ve thought about Felix’s adamance that he won’t repeat Tim’s triangle.
My own growing friendship with Emma.
And, most of all, Nick, who was drawn back here long before we started shooting, using it as his escape from the pain of now that he just couldn’t tolerate.
I’ve turned over the ease with which he’s taken to flying, and how at home he’s become in this place, finding his way to the village through Doverley’s old gateway, opening it with a knack that made me spin when I watched him do it.
I’ve observed him everywhere else too – around the sets, the base, my attention caught constantly by the pull of his eyes, windows to his soul – and found myself wondering plenty.
What I am certain of is that he hasn’t pondered these possibilities himself.
The lanterns on his stage are alight, and he is purely now.
Purely here.
So is Felix.
So is Emma.
And maybe Ellen’s right.
Maybe they don’t need to be anywhere else.
Or maybe, maybe, they’re not needed anywhere else.
By anyone else.
Emma sits on Clare’s bed, ducking to avoid the eaves, and raises her bottle to mine.
‘To Clare,’ she says.
‘To Clare,’ I echo. ‘To both of them.’
‘May they be drinking better brandy than this, wherever they are.’
Smiling, I clink my bottle to hers, and we down them; swallowing, gasping, laughing.