An Awfully Big Adventure (11 page)

It went to Geoffrey’s head that he’d been cast as Mullins, the pirate. Somebody very distinguished had played the part in the last London production. When Meredith asked him to pop out for cigarettes, he replied vulgarly, ‘What did your last servant die of?’ He didn’t raise his voice but he intended to be heard. Meredith frowned, then smirked, and John Harbour, punching Geoffrey playfully on the shoulder, called out, ‘My, my! We are hoity-toity this morning.’

Bunny told Stella that in addition to understudying Michael he wanted her to manage Tinkerbell. ‘What exactly does that entail?’ she asked. He explained she had to stand in the wings directing the beam of a torch at a strategically placed mirror which would send a reflection of light dancing across the back-cloth of Never-Never Land. At the same time she’d need to ring a little hand-bell. She expressed alarm at being in control of such a complicated procedure.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ Bunny assured her. ‘Surely, you were in the Girl Guides.’

‘They wouldn’t have me,’ she said crossly.

‘It’s rather like flashing signals from a convenient hilltop.’

‘I’ve an aversion to flickering lights,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d told you.’

She wanted sympathy from Freddie Reynalde, but he wasn’t concentrating. ‘There’s something in my past,’ she confided, ‘which makes it difficult for me to confront night lights . . . something I can’t go into. Sufficient to say it’s the stuff of nightmares.’

‘You’re a bright girl,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ and he launched into a story concerning himself and P.L. O’Hara on a motorcycle ride to the Brontë sisters’ vicarage at Haworth. As far as she could tell it had no relevance to her own predicament. On the moors O’Hara had endeavoured to summon up Heathcliff, and a gust of wind from beyond the grave had blown the cycle off course and toppled them both into a ditch.

Geoffrey, spying Stella mooning about the prop room, imagined she was upset because she was only an understudy.

‘In this precarious profession,’ he informed her, ‘one is lucky to have a foot in the door. It doesn’t do to get too big for one’s boots.’

‘That’s rich, coming from you,’ she said witheringly. ‘It’s not me that goes round swearing at one’s betters and pelting downstairs like a loony.’ Thinking about it, she didn’t mind in the least not having a proper part. If she couldn’t be Peter she was quite prepared, once she’d mastered the technicalities, to hide behind a reflection.

All the same that evening in the dressing-room she shared with Babs Osborne and Dawn Allenby she apologised for being in the way.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ cried Babs, ‘you’ve as much right to be here as we have.’

‘More, in fact,’ said Dawn, who, as a lowly handmaiden to Cleopatra was conscious that, but for her age and previous experience, she would have been marooned on the top floor with the extras.

Stella hoped Babs would mention her reticence in the Oyster Bar when Meredith was present. ‘She has little or no sense of her own importance,’ she might say. ‘What an asset in one so young.’ And Meredith would perhaps reply, ‘How right you are. Such modesty and lack of bombast is quite remarkable.’ Then at closing time, he would climb Brownlow Hill to the Commercial Hotel, arm in arm with Bunny, thinking of her, of how special she was, pondering on her remarkable reticence.

Not that she spent more than half an hour each night in her own dressing-room. She had her backstage duties to attend to, and when she was wasn’t in front of the footlights she was hunched over the book in the prompt corner. Her make-up was applied, under supervision, in No. 3 dressing-room, occupied by Dotty Blundell and Grace Bird. Dotty said it was as well right from the beginning to learn how to use greasepaint properly. Babs was under too much of a strain trying to memorise her lines to be of help, and as for Dawn – well, unless the poor thing was actually wearing her glasses, the results could be decidedly hit and miss. It was an art knowing which stick to choose and where to place emphasis. Footlights could play havoc with the features. One unconsidered move and too little or too much colour could give the complexion of a rustic the appearance of a corpse and transform the face of an angel into the countenance of a harlot.

As for dressing and undressing, Stella did both in the toilet further along the corridor. She had to squat down to dodge the ancient fly-paper dangling from the light-flex, but it was better than Babs seeing her in her vest and school knickers, or anyone else for that matter; Babs insisted on keeping the dressing-room door open. ‘I must have air,’ she warned. ‘Otherwise I shall faint.’ Though the window on the stairwell was left on the latch there was always a peculiar smell in the room, a mixture of coke fumes from the hot-water pipes, peppermints and that pervasive mist of eau de Cologne sprayed so recklessly by Dawn Allenby.

Stella was afraid Babs might tell Dotty that she didn’t wear a slip and that Dotty would rush out and buy her one, just as she had bought her a brassière after catching her in the wardrobe with her arms above her head about to be fitted for her Ptolemy costume. ‘You’re quite a big girl,’ Dotty had said. ‘It’s detrimental to go without support while still in growth.’

Stella wore the brassière day and night in case Lily should see it; she would have been mortified at Stella accepting underwear from strangers.

The talk in the dressing-room was often about Mary Deare. She hadn’t paid her round in the Oyster Bar the night before. At lunchtime Desmond hadn’t been able to place his usual bets because she’d sent him haring back to the digs to see if an urgent letter had arrived. It hadn’t, and the horse he would have put money on had won by a length, and he was twelve-and-six out of pocket. Grace Bird said it was typical, and that dressing with Dawn was moonlight and roses compared to sharing with Mary. She herself, praise be, had never been in a run with her . . . one night’s charity performance of
Private Lives
at the Arts Theatre had been quite enough, thank you. ‘I can’t tell you, darling, how many times she sent the character juvenile out to buy cheroots. She has a positive knack of getting one to fetch and carry. She doesn’t even have to ask . . . people just feel obliged to run her errands . . . as though they were atoning for something. Not me, I hasten to add. I’m too old. But she’ll try it on with you Dotty, you mark my words.’

Dotty protested it would never happen, never, and couldn’t help smiling. She was flattered that Grace considered her young enough to be ordered about.

Stella was seated in front of Dotty’s mirror, a towel draped across her shoulders, when St Ives burst into the room without knocking. ‘I shall go crazy,’ he announced. He wore a hair-net and was brandishing on his fist his Caesar wig with the laurel wreath.

‘Shall I go?’ Stella asked, half-rising from the stool. She hated anybody seeing her hair dragged back from her forehead, even St Ives.

He restrained her by laying his hand paternally on her shoulder. ‘Heavens, no, my dear. You’re one of us.’ Sometimes he put his pipe away while it was still smouldering and the breast pocket of his dressing-gown was burnt full of holes. ‘Where the hell were you this afternoon?’ he demanded, turning on Dotty.

‘None of your business,’ she said mildly.

‘The dawn chorus was on the doorstep when I got back, clutching a bloody great bunch of half-dead daffodils.’

‘At the digs?’ asked Dotty, shocked.

‘She said she didn’t want to disturb me but she needed my advice. I had to let her in. Do you know she had the sauce to pick up my socks and start smoothing down the eiderdown.’

‘A womanly attitude when all’s said and done,’ observed Grace charitably. She was speaking blindly into the mirror, concentrating on smudging violet shadows onto her closed and bulging eyelids.

‘I had to offer her a round of toasted cheese and a cup of tea. Not her usual tipple, you’ll agree. She was cracking those damn peppermints in her back teeth to disguise the fact she’d called in at the Oyster Bar on her way up.’ St Ives began to pace backwards and forwards, watching himself in the mirror and pulling in his stomach. He held the wig in front of him like a withered bouquet. ‘Then she told me she’d been offered a part in
Jane Eyre
at Warrington rep and did I think she ought to accept. Well, I couldn’t jump on her and shout, “Take it, take it, here’s the train fare”, could I? Did I think it would be a wise move or should she try to persuade Meredith to keep her on for Christmas? She said she didn’t mind playing a redskin at a reduced salary and wouldn’t six weeks here be better than one week in Warrington? Of course, she’s right about the money.’ He sat down heavily in Dotty’s chair.

‘It’s always the money,’ murmured Grace. Stella thought she was probably thinking about her treacherous husband.

‘It rather depends on the part, doesn’t it?’ said Dotty. She drew a line down the centre of Stella’s nose with a stick of No.5 and gestured she should rub it in.

‘Exactly what I told her,’ cried St Ives. ‘She said it was the lead and I said, “What, Jane?” I mean, I was surprised, though I dare say she’d be adequate in the part . . . she’s plain enough . . . and she said “No, the governess.”’

‘Poor soul,’ Grace said briskly.

‘What am I going to do if Potter tells her she can stay? You know what he’s like . . . I wouldn’t put it past him to say yes just to spite me. And I can’t depend on Dotty keeping guard on me. Certainly not now she’s otherwise engaged.’

‘Quite,’ said Dotty, and winked at Grace in the mirror.

‘My life won’t be worth living,’ St Ives prophesied dejectedly. Catching Stella watching him he flashed her an extravagant smile. Under his hair-net he had the defiant air of a faded beauty.

‘How did you get rid of her?’ Dotty asked. ‘I hope you weren’t unkind.’

He reminded her that it was kindness, as she well knew, that had got him into his present pickle. ‘When I said I was tired she glanced sideways at the bed and hinted she was fairly tired herself. A rest in the right surroundings, she implied, would have her tickety-boo in no time. You’ve no idea how awkward it was.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Dotty, who had served in Bomber Command during the war. ‘What a tactical dilemma for you.’

‘I’ll have to tell Meredith he can’t keep her on,’ St Ives decided. ‘It’s either her or me.’

‘Perhaps prayer might be the answer,’ said Grace. ‘I shall burn an extra-large candle for you on Sunday.’

‘She kept fiddling with that blasted lighter,’ moaned St Ives. ‘Every time we got to the dying fall of
Come Back to Sorrento
she wound the damn thing up again. I tell you, I was hard put not to snatch it from her hand and throw it and her out of the window.’

Both Dotty and Grace began to laugh. Stella did too – after all, she was one of them – until a picture grew in her head of Dawn Allenby in St Ives’s bed-sitter, cheeks hollowed as she sucked on her peppermints, the gas fire burning blue, those unwrapped, unwanted flowers lying on the table. She said, ‘She’s quite reasonable really. It’s just that no one ever tells her the truth, so she feels confused. She doesn’t know where she stands.’

‘No, sweetie,’ said Dotty, snatching up a twist of cotton wool and wiping the carmine from Stella’s cheeks. ‘If you must add more colour, dab it a little lower down, on a line with your ear lobes.’

Afterwards Stella was convinced she had been rebuked. She began to wonder whether St Ives’s abrupt departure hadn’t been occasioned by her ill-judged remark rather than by Geoffrey’s calling out of the quarter hour. And had perhaps Grace Bird’s goddammit of irritation been directed at her and not at the ball of beige knitting wool which had just then rolled off the shelf of the dressing-table?

Certainly Dotty was less effusive in her thanks when Stella brought her up a tray of tea in the interval. And half way through the second act, when Ptolemy accused Caesar of driving him from his palace and Caesar said, ‘Go, my boy, I will not harm you; but you will be safer away, among your friends, here you are in the lion’s mouth’, Stella imagined St Ives spoke more severely than usual. His sky-blue eyes, ringed with black liner, were hard as coloured beads. ‘It’s not the lion I fear,’ she cried, ‘but the jackal’, and although she was referring to Rufio, not Caesar, it was St Ives she confronted. Glancing at those muscular knees, ruddy beneath the hem of his pleated tunic, she made up her mind that if he ever attempted to spank her again she would scream blue murder.

He caught the drift of her thoughts, she could tell. A conqueror’s laugh should have accompanied his following line of ‘Brave boy’, but all he could manage was a smile.

She left the theatre ten minutes after the curtain fell, running up the hill with her elbows pumping up and down, watching the clouds spreading behind the ruined tower of the church. She felt unwell.

Vernon knew something was up; the droop to her mouth, the expression in her eyes. She didn’t snap his head off when he suggested she gave him a hand with the laying of the tables for the morning. Dog-tired, Lily had gone to bed a good hour before.

‘How did the play go?’ he asked.

‘Not bad,’ she said.

‘Are you happy,’ he prodded, wiping the damp neck of a salt-cellar on the cuff of his sleeve.

‘Happy enough,’ she replied.

‘What about the new play, the one with the principal boy. Are you featuring?’

‘I keep telling you,’ Stella said, ‘it’s not a pantomine.’ She was biting on her lip, distressed, frowning at him under her fringe of red hair.

‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I stand corrected.’ And he rattled a cornflake packet before setting it on the table nearest the door.

Presently she said grudgingly, ‘I don’t have a proper part. Mr Potter says it’s as well not to rush things, not this early in my career. Better a steady flame than one that flares up and burns itself out.’ She sat down at the table reserved for the traveller with the skin grafts and began to score the cloth with a fork.