An Awfully Big Adventure (12 page)

‘Don’t,’ Vernon admonished. ‘It makes marks.’ He longed to discuss Meredith further, his background, his opinions – on the surface he sounded a sensible enough sort of fellow but he didn’t know how to go about it. One ill-considered word and Stella would be up and running.

‘You know Miss Allenby,’ she said. ‘The one in the gauzes in the fourth act.’

‘The fat one? The one who ends up with her throat cut?’

‘That’s Grace Bird. She’s not fat really, it’s just padding. Her husband struck a mean bargain with her. I mean the one with the long nose.’

‘Oh that one,’ he said, although he hadn’t the faintest idea.

‘Well, she’s in our dressing-room and nobody likes her. She’s just tolerated. She has rows of aspirin bottles on her dressing-table to counteract her headaches.’

‘Leave them alone,’ he said, for now she was fiddling with the crochet mats of green wool, flipping them over like pancakes. She flung the fork down, looking daggers at him, and continued: ‘The house she lived in during the war received a direct hit, and for two days she was buried alive nursing a glass vase belonging to her mother. When they pulled her out the vase hadn’t a crack in it, and then the air-raid warden stumbled . . .’

‘Is that boil bothering you?’ Vernon interrupted, noticing the way she held her arm up against her chest as though it was in a sling.

‘I was trying to tell you something,’ Stella cried out. ‘Something interesting.’ And she rushed from the room.

He could have kicked himself.

Two nights later Stella fainted in the prompt corner. Bunny carried her upstairs to Rose Lipman’s office. Stella had changed into slacks and overall to keep her costume clean for the curtain call, but still wore a heavy gilt bracelet on her arm. Rose thought the girl hadn’t been eating enough until she unclasped the bracelet and discovered the pus-stained square of lint beneath.

She packed Stella off home in a taxi, though not before interrogating her as to what she was doing with a six-inch wooden crucifix wedged down her ankle sock. She had spotted it when Stella was laid out on the sofa.

‘It’s just a symbol,’ Stella said.

‘I’m not soft,’ said Rose.

‘I find it comforting.’

‘You’re never a Catholic.’

‘No,’ admitted Stella, ‘but I’m thinking about it.’

‘While you’re thinking,’ Rose said, ‘it might be worth considering wearing a slightly smaller cross, on a chain round your neck, like normal folk.’

Stella had been told to take the following morning off. It was out of the question. Lily might worm the reason out of her, and then Uncle Vernon would most likely telephone the theatre and accuse anyone who would listen of being nothing less than a slave-driver. She didn’t want Rose Lipman retaliating and telling him what had been found down her sock.

While Vernon and Lily were serving breakfast she sneaked out and hid the crucifix behind a pile of Mr Harcourt’s empty cardboard boxes in the backyard. She hadn’t forgotten going to the pictures with Vernon to see
The Song of Bernadette
. He’d only agreed to go because Lily told him it was a musical and had walked out the moment Bernadette started sinking to her knees in the fields. Afterwards he’d sworn he would prefer to see any child of his six foot under rather than taken for a nun.

She didn’t go straight from the house to the Station Hotel. Instead she took a tram to the Pier Head and walked about until the hands of the Cunard clock stood at half past ten. She was looking forward to making a late entrance – the cast would cluster round her, expressing their admiration at her fortitude. Meredith would be particularly impressed.

It was a windy morning, and mild. She could see clear across the water to the smashed dome of the Pleasure Gardens at New Brighton. When the ferry ploughed in from Seacombe the passengers clung to the rail of the landing-stage as it bucked under the swell of the river. Centuries before, according to Uncle Vernon, the water came right up into the town, and in rough weather people had to be carried ashore. She was just imagining Meredith dressed up as a sailor and herself with her arms round his neck, clinging to him as the wind tried to tear them apart, when a man with a tray hung from his neck asked her to buy bootlaces. He had a patch over one eye and wore a row of medals sewn lopsidedly to the lapels of his ragged jacket. She said she was in the same boat as himself and kept her fist closed tight in the pocket of her overall on the one and ninepence Uncle Vernon had given her earlier.

The man swore at her before turning away, the seagulls screeching above his battered hat. She felt bad and ran after him to part with twopence, and he swore at her again. He was selling, not begging.

She was astonished after riding the lift to the top floor of the hotel to find the room deserted, save for Meredith asleep in an armchair behind the door. She walked round him, whistling, but he didn’t stir. A quarter of an hour later three pirates arrived, and then Desmond Fairchild, hatless and with a bruise under one eye. ‘By the look of things,’ he told the pirates, ‘we might as well go downstairs and order coffee.’

‘Shouldn’t we wake Mr Potter?’ Stella asked. She couldn’t bear the way he was slumped there, his bow tie askew. There was a stain on his suede shoe and another on the leg of his trouser. Worse, a sour smell hung about his duffle coat.

‘Give him a few more minutes,’ Desmond advised. ‘We had a bit of a knees-up last night. Potter thought he was Peter Pan and flew out of the window of the Commercial Hotel. Fortunately it was from the Bar Parlour. The landlord refused to let him back in.’ He took the pirates downstairs to the lounge.

Shortly afterwards Bunny came in and hit Meredith quite sharply on the shoulder with his umbrella. He woke stupefied, flicking his tongue over his parched lips like a reptile.

‘Go to the kitchens,’ Bunny ordered Stella. ‘Ask the waiter with the dent in his forehead to give you a bucketful of ice cubes and three or four napkins. Tell him to send up black coffee and aspirins. And when you’ve done that go home and stay there until it’s time for the evening performance.’

She protested that she couldn’t go home, that she wasn’t allowed to hang around the house during the day, and Bunny said he didn’t care where the hell she went as long as it was out of his sight.

She sulked all the way to the theatre, darting up the corridor to the prop-room in case Rose Lipman should spot her. There was no sign of Geoffrey. She found George in the carpenter’s shop constructing a crocodile out of
papier mâché
. He was off-hand with her, even when she recounted the gossip about Meredith being thrown out of his lodgings.

‘Desmond Fairchild’s lost his hat,’ she said. ‘And he’s got a black eye.’

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ George said. ‘You were told not to come in.’

She spent the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the municipal gardens opposite the art gallery. It turned chilly in the afternoon, and a man in a bowler hat came and sat beside her and rubbed the side of his shoe up and down her leg.

At five o’clock she returned to the theatre and crept up the stairs to the dressing-room. Dawn Allenby was standing in her coat and headscarf staring at herself in the mirror. There was the remains of a quart of cider in front of the aspirin bottles on the shelf. ‘What would you do?’ she asked.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Stella.

‘If you were me? But then you can’t imagine that, can you? Nobody can imagine what it’s like to be me.’

‘I can,’ said Stella. ‘None of us are all that different from one another. We all have the same feelings.’

‘Feelings,’ cried Dawn, and she jerked back her head and made a funny sort of noise halfway between a laugh and a howl. Stella couldn’t tell whether she was acting or not – she looked dreadful, as if she was suffering from the worst sort of headache, and yet she kept watching herself in the glass, turning her face this way and that, peering forward to follow the track of a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘Feelings,’ she cried again. ‘That filthy bastard hasn’t any.’ She collapsed onto a stool and laid her head down among the bits of cotton wool and the sticks of greasepaint. She wept and spoke at the same time – uttering fragments of sentences, half completed threats, pieces of swear words, repeating the name Richard over and over with the intonation of a child calling for its mother.

Stella attempted to comfort her, patting her shoulder, trying not to smile; she was embarrassed because although it was fearfully sad it was also ridiculous. It wasn’t Dawn’s fault. It was surely the most difficult thing in the world to appear sincere when one’s heart was breaking.

Presently Dawn stopped sobbing and raised her head. Her nose was blobbed with talcum powder; she gulped for air as if suffocating. Recovering, she said briskly, ‘I’ve been asked to leave. I expect you’ve heard. Heaven knows how I’m going to tell Richard. He begged me not to take that job at Warrington. We were going dancing, you know. He’d invited me to a supper dance after the show on Christmas Eve.’ She wept again, talking through her snuffles of things done behind her back, of stabbings. It would have meant nothing to that pervert to let her stay . . . he had wielded the knife, the cruel swine . . . telling her he regretted there was nothing for her when all the time he was still hiring people . . . examining her through that monocle as though he was God . . .

‘Mr Potter!’ said Stella, indignantly. ‘
He
’s not to blame. It was St Ives who wanted you to leave. He told Mr Potter it was either him or you.’

George heard the screaming and ran upstairs and slapped Dawn Allenby hard across the cheek. Then he bathed her eyes and made her a cup of tea. By the half hour, when Dotty and Babs arrived, she was sitting quietly in front of the mirror making up her face.

It was during Act Four, Scene One that she went missing. She was there to answer when Cleopatra asked her who she was laughing at, and gone by the time she was supposed to say, ‘Heigho! I wish Caesar was back in Rome.’ One of the university students said she had brushed past him in the corridor and gone out into the street. He was sure it was her because he had smelt the peppermints. The doorkeeper said nobody in costume had left the theatre.

As soon as Stella had finished on stage Bunny told her to go home. For the time being she was excused from her prop-room duties and she needn’t wait for the curtain call. She must take it easy for the next few days. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she grumbled. ‘It was only a rotten old boil.’ But he said they were Miss Lipman’s orders. She was upset at missing all the excitement.

When she was dressed she went out into the square to ring Mother. She thought at first somebody had left a bundle of washing in the telephone box. The door wouldn’t open, no matter how hard she shoved. She squatted down to peer through the glass and saw a head-scarf printed with Scottie dogs and a hand clutching a potted plant with its leaves torn off.

8

Bunny escorted Dawn Allenby to the station. She was going to Birmingham to stay with her sister who had just had a baby girl. It would be a nice rest and such a joy to hold the child. Professional women, women of the theatre, missed out on that sort of thing, didn’t they? Still, sacrifices had to be made, though sometimes one couldn’t help wondering whether it was all worth while.

She looked rather well after her night in the hospital and spoke complacently of the bother she had caused. What confusion! She’d had one of her headaches, taken three aspirins and popped out to telephone her sister. She remembered nothing more until she woke up in the ambulance. Such an absurd misunderstanding.

Bunny didn’t feel it was either the time or the place to mention the half-dozen empty aspirin bottles strewn about the floor of the phone box – their contents were later found heaped like so many loose sweets in the bottom of her handbag – or that she had ‘popped out’ in the middle of the scene in Cleopatra’s
boudoir
. Nor did he think it would serve any purpose to refer to the lipstick-smeared card, originally written by Dotty and still wired to the stem of the mutilated plant, which, in the heat of the moment and the fitful light of the streetlamps was mistakenly thought to have been dipped in blood.

He bought Dawn a newspaper for the journey and carried her suitcase along the platform to the compartment. She ran in front of him, head high, as though someone important was waiting for her. When they reached the carriage he swung her luggage up onto the rack and said, ‘We had a little whip-round’, and thrust seven one-pound-notes into her hand. It was a lie; it was his own money.

She thanked him without warmth and stuffed the notes casually into her bag. Rose had already given her two weeks’ salary. ‘That girl,’ she said. ‘Her mother left her alone in an empty house. You want to keep an eye on her. She’s trouble.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be off.’ And he escaped onto the platform, praying for the whistle to blow. At the last moment, when the engine blew steam, she let down the window and handed him an envelope addressed to St Ives; she looked at him with the eyes of one waking from a dangerous dream. ‘God speed,’ he cried, and ran a few steps alongside the departing train to show it wasn’t just a question of out of sight out of mind. She stared straight ahead as she slid away.

He opened the envelope on his way back to the theatre. The scrap of paper it contained, torn from a telephone pad, was wrapped round the musical lighter.

He read the letter not out of curiosity but to spare St Ives further embarrassment – the last thing he needed in his present introspective state was a love letter from Dawn Allenby.

St Ives blamed himself for what had happened. In the interval she had apparently asked him to have supper with her, and he’d mumbled something about wanting an early night. He couldn’t recall his exact words – he suspected they were cutting – but he did remember holding his fingers against one nostril to blot out the stench of her Cologne. The memory of that gesture would never cease to haunt him. How could he have been capable of such cruelty?