“A rough what?”
He gestured energetically with a right hand that was so stained with nicotine that it looked as if it had been dipped in ochre paint.
“It’s just scraps of film we’ve assembled.” He frowned, seeking an image I might understand. “We’ve hammered it together instead of dovetailing it.” Matthew, a nervous man in his mid-thirties, was a film director sent to visit me by Anthony Bannister. He had chain-smoked ever since he’d walked into the house.
“And the film isn’t dubbed,” Angela Westmacott said flatly.
“Dubbed?” I asked.
“The sound isn’t polished,” Matthew answered for her, “and there’s only ten minutes. The final film will probably run at sixty.”
“Or ninety,” Angela Westmacott said, “but it’s a risk.” She did not look at me as she spoke, which gave me the chance to look at her. Bannister, when he had telephoned me from London to tell me that Matthew was coming, had not mentioned this girl. If he had I might have looked forward to the meeting with more enthusiasm.
Angela was a tall, ethereal blonde, so slender and seemingly fragile that my protective instincts had been immediately roused when she had walked in. Her hair was gathered by combs and pins from which it escaped in cirrus wisps of lightest gold. Her jacket was a shapeless white and pink padded confection from which loops and belts and fasteners stuck like burrs, while her trousers were baggy white and stuffed into pink ankle-length boots. She was fashionably unkempt and devastatingly, even disturbingly, beautiful.
Two years in hospital had sharpened that particular appetite into a ravenous hunger. I could not resist watching her, thinking how vulnerable and delicate her face was in its cloud of gold untidiness.
She wore, I noted, neither wedding nor engagement ring. Her clothes, so deliberately casual, were clearly expensive and I had decided, when she first came into the house, that she must have been a television presenter. I had said as much and she had shaken her head dismissively. I now wondered whether Anthony Bannister’s television company had sent her as bait. She made good bait.
“It’s a risk,” she said again, “because without your agreement then the footage we’ve already shot is wasted.”
“Already shot?” I was puzzled.
“The rough cut,” Matthew explained. “Tony thought you would feel happier if you could see what we had in mind.”
We were in the new front room of Bannister’s house. The house had all changed, and how my father would have loved it. This new room must have been seventy-five feet long and every foot of it offered a splendid panoramic view of the river which curled about the garden beneath. Three carpeted steps climbed to the top half of the room where, rippling gently, there was now sixty feet of indoor swimming pool. Between the steps and the windows was a raised fireplace built as an island in the centre and topped with a massive copper hood. White leather sofas were scattered to either side of the fire while at the northern end of the room there was a space-age array of sound and vision equipment. There were radios, cassette players, CDs, record-players, speakers, video-disc players, VCRs and a massive television; the largest TV in a house filled with TVs.
On to which television screens Anthony Bannister now planned to put me. He wanted to make a film of my life, my injury and my recovery, and he had sent Matthew and Angela to seek my co-operation. Matthew Cooper took the video cassette from his briefcase.
“Shall we watch it now?” he asked.
I had gone to stand at the window and was gazing at an aluminium-hulled yacht which was running under main and jib to the moorings in the upper pool. The only person on deck was a man in a black woollen hat and I admired the exquisite skill with which he picked up his mooring buoy. It looked easy from up here, but there was a deceptively gusting wind blowing against a flooding spring tide and I knew I had just witnessed a marvellous piece of seamanship. I watched the boat rather than betray my self-torturing interest in Angela Westmacott. It was unfair, I thought, to be tantalized by such careless beauty.
“Are you ready?” Matthew insisted.
“That’s a French boat.” I spoke as if I had not heard his question.
“First I’ve seen this year. He’s probably run over from Cherbourg.
He’s good, very good.”
“The video tape?” Angela said. I assumed now that she was Matthew’s assistant, and I wondered if she was also his lover. That thought made me jealous.
Matthew pushed the video tape into the slot. “It’s a very rough cut indeed,” he said apologetically.
“Fine.” I spoke as if I was content, but in truth I was struggling not to show my annoyance. I’d spent months avoiding the press, and now Bannister was trying to make me the subject of a television film, and I could only blame myself. Bannister, coming to the hospital, had offered me everything I wanted. A refuge, security and the means to repair Sycorax. No legal tangles, no unpleasantness, just peace and forgiveness. I should have known what the price would be when, the next day, the papers trumpeted Bannister’s generosity.
‘TV Tony Rescues VC Hero’. There had been no mention of Fanny Mulder. One paper claimed I had been attacked by vandals who had been damaging my boat, while the others blandly reported that my attackers were unknown.
None of the papers had connected the attacker with Anthony Bannister. Bannister had come out of the stories like driven snow; odourless and white. Something nasty had happened in his boathouse while he was in London, and he was now putting it right. I’d left the hospital to come to Bannister’s house where, in these last three weeks, I had mended fast. I was attended by Bannister’s doctors, swam in Bannister’s pool and was fed by Bannister’s housekeeper. Sycorax had been lifted out of the trees and stood in cradles on Bannister’s lawn. The materials for her repair were on order, and they were nothing but the best; mahogany, teak, mature oak, copper, spruce and Oregon pine. TV Tony had worked his magic, but now the price for all that kindness was being exacted.
“Here it is,” Angela said sharply, chiding me for being insufficiently attentive to the television screen on which numbers counted down, then the picture changed to show a wild and bleak landscape darkened by dusk and edged by a pink-washed sky. Plangent music played as the title appeared: ‘ A Soldier’s Story, a film by Angela Westmacott’. I glanced at her with surprise. Clearly I had appraised my visitors wrongly, imagining Matthew to be in charge.
“It’s only a working title.” Matthew seemed to think my glance was critical.
“It’s just to give you an idea.” Angela was irritated by Matthew’s interruption.
The titles went and the picture changed to a night skyline. Tracer bullets flicked left to right, arcing in their distinctive and deceptive slowness. There was an explosion in the far distance and I recognized the sudden flare of white phosphorus. Our 105s, I remembered, firing from Mount Vernet. Or was it a cocktail round? High explosive and phosphorus lobbed through a mortar. They were nasty bloody things.
I looked away.
“The Falklands”—Anthony Bannister’s distinctive and warm voice was redolent with a grave sincerity—“fourteenth of June, 1982.
British troops were closing on Stanley, the battles of Goose Green and the mountains were behind them, and there was a sense of imminent victory in the cold South Atlantic air. Captain Nick Sandman was one of the men who—”
I stood up. “Do you mind if I don’t watch this?” There was not much they could say. I limped to the window and stared down at the cradled Sycorax. She’d been drained of water, cleaned out, and the patches of rot had been cut out of her hull. The old copper sheathing, oxidised to the thickness of rice-paper, had been stripped off and the nail holes plugged with pine. The stumps of her masts had been lifted out like rotten teeth and her coachroof stripped off. Now she lay swathed in a tarpaulin and waiting for the new timber that would be patched and scarfed into her old hull.