Chapter Twenty-Five
Claudia
When you buy a ticket and see the movie.
That was pure Blake.
All of it was him.
He gave Felix those words he took to The Screen.
Felix was waiting for me yesterday when I arrived back at Doverley from Tim’s.
It was midday already. Not wanting to leave Tim alone, I’d called Ellen from his room, telling her everything – quietly, since Tim really had fallen asleep by then – and hadn’t set off myself until she’d arrived in a taxi, ready to be with him when he woke.
‘So now we know,’ she said, as I greeted her at Tim’s door. ‘I do see it.’ She looked into my eyes, her head to one side. ‘You have nothing of Robbie, though. Nothing at all.’ Her cheeks moved in a smile. ‘He really must be somewhere else.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
With a sigh, she looked across at Tim. ‘How peaceful he seems. I fear he won’t stay with us much longer now. He’s done what he’s been waiting to.’
I hated leaving them.
But I’d had things to do too.
I telephoned Imogen on my way back to Doverley, filling her in on Tim’s revelations, getting her on board with the rewrites (‘Oh my god, of course,’ she said, ‘of course we’ll change it for him’); then, I called Ana, briefing her as well (‘Yes, Claude, yes,’ she said.
‘I love this. I love you’); and, that done, I disintegrated, sobbing so uncontrollably that I had to pull over, my head on Nick’s steering wheel, overwhelmed with pain at all of it, and for myself too; the complete disarray of my stage that I need to somehow wrestle into order if I’m ever going to have a hope of functioning, let alone living on it again.
‘I see Tim got his own back,’ said Felix, opening the door of Nick’s car, pulling me into a hug.
It felt good.
So good, I cried more, just at the relief of it.
He’d been on his way to the library when he’d spotted me approaching, and came down to see me instead. Blake and Nick were in the library waiting for him. It turns out another of The Screen’s journalists had followed him and Nick to Tim’s home yesterday, and contacted Blake for comment.
That’s what Blake’s meeting request had been about.
‘We’d better go up,’ I said.
Which we did.
‘What’s happened?’ said Nick, catching sight of my face, getting to his feet.
‘Has anyone seen you?’ asked Blake, worriedly.
‘Only Felix,’ I said. ‘Now, listen … ’
And I brought him and Nick up to speed too.
I left nothing out.
Not even about my father.
I trusted them not to take it any further than that room.
I wanted to trust them.
Pain, I’m finally learning, loses some of its power once shared.
‘You’ve had a big morning,’ said Blake, with a long exhale.
‘What do you need?’ asked Nick.
‘A lot,’ I said.
Then it all moved really quickly. The meeting grew; Ana, Naomi, Jeff and several others arriving, Ana dialling in Imogen, and waking a whole heap of people in LA, who forged a plan for the rewrites.
Blake, meanwhile, called The Screen, offering them Felix’s exclusive on the news of our revised ending, in return for them not digging any further into Nick and Felix’s visit to Tim.
‘They just wanted to say hi,’ he told the journalist. ‘So leave the guy be, hey? Hasn’t he given enough?’
‘You’re not going to make it Tim’s fault, are you?’ Nick said to Imogen, when she arrived last night. ‘Surely we can save him from that, second time around?’
‘Absolutely we can,’ she agreed. ‘We will.’
The other writers arrived from LA first thing, and have been hard at it all day while the rest of us have been tying up our last scene in The Heaton Arms, on the eve of Mabel’s Fury’s final flight.
I’ve been reshooting some other takes too, laying the ground for Iris’s tear-filled admission to Robbie that she’s pregnant: a hand to my stomach; a moment of nausea.
‘How you doing, Claude?’ Ana’s kept asking me.
‘Fine,’ I’ve told her.
‘You’re not fine,’ Nick said, our mics off between takes. ‘And you don’t need to be. No one expects that.’
‘What about you?’ I asked him, looking into his dark, bloodshot eyes. ‘Are you ok?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘This whole thing’s killing me.’
He’s still staying in Mum’s old room.
Give him a break, Felix told me.
I want to.
I really, really want to.
But every time I think about doing it, I remember how painful it’s all got, and I’m still trying to get my head around how to change that story for us.
But this story at least has now been fixed, the writing team have hammered it out, and we on the cast have been given our new pages.
Over the next five days, the boys will stage their flight to Berlin.
They’ll make it all the way there, just like in the novel, and will be hit by flak.
Tim will still be injured, and the plane’s electrics will be damaged, preventing Jacob from discharging their bombs, so Robbie will turn back to England with them stuck in the bay’s doors.
On the control tower set, I’ll receive Robbie’s call, and tell him he’s going to be a father.
The boys will circle back to the coast.
Six of them will jump.
Back in LA, a team in special effects will create the moment the bombs fall too, sending Mabel’s Fury leaping upwards, high enough that Tim glides back to England, crashing into land.
Then, this coming weekend, after we’re packed up here, all the crew except Felix will take a swim in the North Sea, and find their way to that German boat, and its kind officer.
The movie’s final scene, just Nick and me, won’t happen until well into the new year.
And it won’t take place at Iris and Robbie’s ruined cottage in the woods, because I still haven’t told anyone about it.
Tim and I agreed that I shouldn’t.
‘It belongs to them,’ he said, ‘and you now, too.’
Instead, a location team has already been tasked with finding us another cottage of some sort, with a sloping thatched roof, winding front path, and pretty, bloom-filled garden.
That’s going to take them a while.
Even when they do find it, we won’t be able to shoot immediately.
Not whilst it’s winter, and the trees are so bare, the days so dark.
No, that last scene, sun-kissed and full of light, life and hope, needs to wait for spring.
No one expects these last days to be easy, and they’re not.
The revised scenes, unrehearsed, packed with new lines and new blocking, take relentless hours to get right, and making them perfect becomes an all-consuming task.
We split – me in the control tower, the boys on the cutaway – practising, filming, practising, filming again.
Every day, we work longer, pushing deep into the night, drained from lack of sleep and the emotion we’re expending, but continuing regardless, propelled by the sense that this is something special we’re doing. Something not true, but right.
As it should have been.
And, to my mind at least, maybe, maybe, one day, will.
I barely see Nick, except for an unbearably tense session on Tuesday morning when we finally shoot Iris and Robbie’s passionate encounter in the billiards room.
It’s a closed set. We don’t have to stage these stolen moments of intimacy in front of a lot of people, but we still do enact them under the scrutiny of Ana, the camera operator, and sound recorder.
I never like doing these scenes (‘Does anyone?’ says Nick), and the way I’ve always got through them in the past is by viewing them emotionlessly.
Or, with the help of Felix making light.
But Nick doesn’t make light.
And I can’t view any of it emotionlessly.
‘That’s what’s made it so good,’ says Ana to me afterwards, with a big hug.
But it is only Nick I see as I kiss him, and say Robbie’s name.
Only his touch I feel.
Only his voice I hear, telling me he loves me.
And I cling to him, knowing that I’m really clinging to us, wishing so many things, and most of all that I knew how to stop it all feeling so much like a last, hopeless goodbye.
He doesn’t say goodbye to me when, first thing on the final Friday of November, with everything we need to have done at Doverley somehow suddenly done – all in the can, along with our blood, sweat and tears – he leaves the estate, speeding up the driveway along with everyone else heading to the coast for the weekend’s shooting.
Felix has gone too.
‘For moral support,’ he said.
‘Fine,’ Ana told him. ‘But you’re not billing anything.’
I’m all alone at Doverley. The trailers have gone, all the sets inside have been taken down too, the rigs and props removed. Even the base has been dismantled and towed away: another episode of this estate’s history consigned to invisibility.
I watch Nick’s car disappear into the drizzle from Doverley’s uneven front step. I’m breathless. I saw him heading out from our room and raced down to catch him. Now that I haven’t, I don’t consider calling him to say what I need to.
It hurts too much that he’s left like this, without saying anything.
I’ll be glad to leave Doverley myself now. It feels empty without him here any more.
Hollow and very lonely.
Phil’s on his way to collect me though. He insisted on taking the day off to come, and has just given me an updated ETA that’s two hours away.
We’re going to stop in Cambridge on our way home, for lunch with his mum and dad.
It will be lovely. It always is with them.
I’d be looking forward to it a lot more if I wasn’t feeling so poleaxed by Nick having given up on us, just as I’ve realised that I can’t let myself do any such thing.
Turning from the bleak morning, I head back into the house, and upstairs to finish packing.
It doesn’t take me long; I collect my last bits from the bathroom, keeping that shower cap, and stow it all in my case, along with my copy of The Bomber Boys – pausing, as I always have and always will, to look at Robbie’s smile.
You’re only worried because you’re going to have to finally give me an answer tomorrow, Tim told me he was about to say.
I have no memory of it.
Or of Iris’s laughter in response.
Oh, do be quiet, Robbie.