‘“Apparently,” he answered. “When I put the English title into Google, nothing was coming up. So I started trying other languages, and slight variations on the title. And finally, this was what I found. It must be the right one,” he said, biting his lip. “It has to be.”
‘But was it the right one? This was Roger’s dilemma, and it turned out to be an agonizing, drawn-out wait before he would find the answer. Already, that day, he’d posted queries about the film on the message boards of every movie website he could think of. He’d asked if anyone, like him, could remember seeing the film on afternoon television back in the 1960s. He asked for any information anyone could provide about Friedrich Güdemann, whose IMDb filmography suggested that he had moved to America in the early 1940s and anglicized his name to Fred Goodman. There was no Wikipedia entry about him, and no further references anywhere online. Having made his enquiries, Roger could only sit back and wait for some answers to come in.’
‘And did they?’ Rachel asked.
Laura shook her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ She sighed. ‘He was crushed by that. Really disappointed. He’d been convinced that in this day and age, the age of universal information, there was no subject so obscure that it didn’t have its own expert online, somewhere or other. But for the time being he seemed to have drawn a blank. He kept checking the message boards, re-posting his questions and bumping the threads, but after a few weeks he seemed more or less resigned to the idea that he wasn’t going to hear anything that way. He didn’t talk about it much, but I knew that he was broken by it. He’d felt that he’d been on the verge of this … momentous discovery, and now he was back where he started.’
Laura sipped her wine again. The fire suddenly gave out a sharp crackle and one of the logs tumbled out of place. Rachel looked down at the fire, and the sounds it was making, the warmth it was giving out, made her think of the infant Roger, sitting in front of his gas fire at home in the school holidays, watching this film with its ancient soundtrack of pops and crackles, his mother next door in the kitchen, preparing the family dinner …
‘Well, life went on. In fact it became pretty busy. That year we had two life-changing events to deal with — moving house, which we did in the spring, and then the birth of Harry, which happened in the summer. Roger was … you know, pretty helpful about all this. He was quite involved, and for the first few months after Harry was born he was a pretty good father. Very hands-on. It seemed to be distracting him from all his other obsessions for a while, I thought, but it turned out I was wrong about that. The memory of that film was still weighing him down. The first I knew about it was when he told me that he’d been asked to contribute to a book of essays that Palgrave Macmillan were bringing out. It was a sort of Festschrift, paying homage to this film writer called Terry Worth, who’d been quite a name to reckon with in the 1990s. He’d also been a bit of a specialist on the subject of lost films, and this was the aspect of his work that Roger had been asked to write about. So of course I asked him if he was going to mention The Crystal Garden and he said probably not — there just wasn’t enough information available to make it worthwhile. He said it in a very offhand way, so I really got the impression that he’d more or less forgotten about it, or at least put it to the back of his mind. He did say that this article was going to involve a lot of research, which didn’t come at an especially good time, for me. There were about two weeks when I didn’t see him at all. I was stuck at home feeding Harry, while Roger was away for days at a time down at the BFI library in London. Or at least, that’s where I thought he was.’ She paused, stared ruefully for a moment into the depths of her wine glass, then looked up again. ‘One day I got an email from a friend, who’d just run into him — not at the BFI at all. He was at the Newspaper Library in Colindale.’ She looked quickly across at Rachel. ‘What’s so funny? What are you smiling at?’
‘Sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just — I thought it might be something a bit … spicier than that. That he’d been having an affair, or something.’
‘That would have been preferable, in a way,’ said Laura. ‘At least that would have been relatively normal behaviour. But there was never anything normal about Roger. Only he could cheat on his wife by working in a different library than the one he was supposed to be working in. Anyway, he wouldn’t have made a very good adulterer, because when he got back from London that night and I mentioned it to him, he confessed everything. Apparently he’d been going to Colindale every day to trawl through the entire TV listings of the Birmingham Post for the mid-1960s. I got pretty angry with him, as you can imagine, and accused him of wasting his time. To which he said: “Ah! But it hasn’t been a waste of time. Not at all. I’ve narrowed it down to two days.”
‘“Narrowed what down?” I said.
‘“The screening date. Here — take a look at these.” And he took two sheets of paper out of his briefcase and threw them down in front of me, like some self-satisfied detective producing his proof of the murderer’s identity at the end of a film. I looked at them and couldn’t see what he was talking about. They were just photocopies of two separate television listings from an old newspaper. No mention of The Crystal Garden anywhere.
‘“Don’t you see?” he said. “Look at this one: 14 December 1966. A Wednesday afternoon. The school holidays would just have started. I’d be five and a half years old. Now look at the listings for ATV. There — look. At ten past two.” I looked at the listing and read out the title. “Against the Wind. What’s that got to do with anything?” He sighed impatiently, as if I was some kind of imbecile. “Don’t you see?” he said. “Look when the next programme started.” I did. It started at four thirty, but again, I couldn’t see the relevance of this. “Against the Wind,” he pointed out, almost breathless with excitement, “is an Ealing film from the 1940s, set in occupied Belgium. And it’s only ninety-six minutes long. And films run even more quickly when broadcast on television. So let’s say ninety minutes. Add in even twenty or twenty-five minutes’ worth of commercials, and you’re still left with a big gap in the schedule. Something that would need to be filled.” He stared at me in triumph, but I just looked down with a frown, not liking the direction this was taking at all. “And this one’s the same,” he continued, “but even better: 16 February 1967. A Thursday. Probably half-term. This time the film is The Man Who Could Work Miracles — an H. G. Wells adaptation, which I know I saw round about that time. I can remember it, quite clearly. And it’s only eighty-two minutes long! Which leaves a gap in the schedule of more than twenty minutes this time. And the weather was right that week, as well — there’d been a snowfall two days before. I’m certain this has to be the one. Ninety-nine per cent certain, anyway. When else could it have been? I’ve been through all the other listings and these were the only real gaps.”
‘“You’ve been through them all?” I said, incredulous. “How long did that take?”
‘“Not long,” he said, defensively. “Just three or four days.”
‘I was pretty shocked when I heard this was how he’d been spending his time, as you might imagine. But it seemed that these things went in cycles. He was all excited about his discovery for a few days, but nothing came of it. He hadn’t managed to prove anything, of course. He wrote to Central TV in Birmingham but they didn’t have any of their archives from the old ATV days. No paperwork or anything like that. Anyway they thought he was some sort of crank, obviously. So once again, after a few more months, he seemed to have got over it.