An Awfully Big Adventure (18 page)

It was cold in the street. The chemical clouds curdled above the black top-hats of the chimney stacks. From the dock road came a steady rumble of traffic and the heartbeat of machinery as the sugar-refinery pumped in the fiery darkness. At last the man staggered out, a string of sausages slung about his neck.

She pressed button A and heard Mother’s voice; she felt shy. She had meant to confide that she, too, was a seduced woman; yet when it came to it she couldn’t find the correct words. All the poetry had dribbled out of her. She wished Mother a Happy Christmas, her eyes fixed on the child across the road and that silhouette of Mr Punch who now appeared with raised and menacing fist.

Mother responded in the usual way.

11

At the matinee on Boxing Day O’Hara, dragging a reluctant Nana by the collar, made his exit as Mr Darling and raced upstairs to transform himself into Captain Hook. On his return Geoffrey should have been waiting in the wings to assist him into his pirate coat – the hook attached to the sleeve rendered it cumbersome. He wasn’t there. The child who played Tootles stood on a chair and helped him instead. It was a breach of discipline, Geoffrey being absent.

During the second interval Geoffrey apologised, giving the excuse that one of the battens of the hollow trees had worked itself loose and that at the last moment Bunny had required him to fix it more securely into its brace. But then at the evening performance he again went missing.

This time Stella was there to heave O’Hara into the coat. He said, ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’, and not looking at him she thanked him for asking and replied that it had been quiet but nice.

She was being polite. Uncle Vernon, goaded by the presence of the traveller with the skin grafts, had ruined the festive meal with recollections of his march across France and an encounter in a partially demolished farmhouse outside Lille with a white-haired woman of thirty who as a small child had suffered atrocities in the First World War. German officers – second-line supply men – searching for food and told there was none had wrenched her from her mother’s arms and, dumping her in the washing boiler on the kitchen stove, threatened to cook and eat her.

On hearing the story Lily had retired to bed with a headache leaving Stella to do the washing-up. The traveller had dried the dishes. Tears ran down his cheeks, but that was because his eyes couldn’t blink. Uncle Vernon, wearing a paper crown jerked from a cracker, had nodded off in his armchair listening to a choral mass on the Third Programme.

Stella was in the prompt corner wielding her torch when O’Hara made his second exit. He loitered in the wings, although usually he sat in his dressing-room until the curtain rose on the Mermaid’s Lagoon. He noticed she was wearing a string of cheap pearls about her neck. On stage the First Twin had sighted the white bird and was declaiming, ‘See it comes, the Wendy,’ and Tootles, pointing at the gossamer light sailing across the painted trees, called out, ‘Tink is trying to hurt the Wendy.’ A child in the audience shouted a timid warning. Then Stella, responding to a signal from Bunny, swung her hand-bell.

‘Someone’s been splashing out at Woolworths,’ said O’Hara, tapping with his hook at the pearls. In the half-darkness his face with its rouged lips, its black cross stamped on the cheekbone, was ghastly.

‘Quiet please,’ hissed Bunny.

Frowning, O’Hara inched open the pass door and tiptoed into the prop-room. He was annoyed at being caught in the wrong.

George rolled him a cigarette. ‘Word in your ear,’ he said. ‘Someone should keep a weather eye on young Geoffrey.’

‘He’s let me down twice today,’ O’Hara said. ‘What’s up with him?’

‘No disrespect intended, Captain,’ said George. ‘But you’d best work it out for yourself.’

After the curtain call O’Hara asked Stella if she wanted a lift home on his motor-cycle. ‘If you like,’ she said. She kept him waiting and when she finally emerged from the stage door he had been waylaid by Freddie Reynalde. She walked past without looking at them.

‘What about a drink?’ suggested Freddie.

O’Hara said he couldn’t face Potter.

‘We don’t have to go to the Oyster Bar.’

‘Another time, old chap. I’m bushed.’

‘I can see that,’ Freddie said, and they both watched the girl trudging towards the corner.

O’Hara caught up with Stella at the bottom of the hill. She told him to go on ahead, that she didn’t want a ride.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘I just don’t,’ she said. ‘My uncle wouldn’t like it.’ He thought she meant she was going straight home and drove off with a sulky smile.

He was surprised when she rapped on the basement window. Entering, she circled the room, her expression hostile. He lit the gas-fire and made her kneel in front of it to warm herself. ‘I’m not stopping,’ she said, teeth chattering. ‘You ought to wrap up more,’ he advised. ‘Now that it’s winter. You’ve a terrible cough.’ She protested she’d rather freeze than wear the coat Lily had bought her. It was too big and it had a fur collar.

‘It sounds rather glamorous,’ he said.

‘That’s as maybe,’ she retorted. ‘It’s too much trouble. You have to paint your face if you wear a fur. It draws attention.’

He found himself involved in an argument about silver wrapping-paper only serving to accentuate the paltriness of a gift. It was best, she said, to encase cheap goods in brown paper. Shaken, he imagined she was feeling guilty at having given herself so easily. He heard himself saying it was surely the thought that counted, and was astonished at the banal words that hurtled from his mouth. She crouched on the lino, her face flushed from the fire, fingering that string of Christmas cracker beads.

He asked who had given her them, and she said they were a present from her mother. He apologised for having suggested they were bought at Woolworths. She looked at him without blinking and said they probably had been. That was why her mother hadn’t wrapped them up but had left them on her pillow twined around a single rose.

‘What a lovely thing to do,’ he remarked and, appalled at his patronising tone, told her that her ears should have been burning on Christmas Day. Several of the company had dined at the Adelphi Hotel and during the meal Dotty Blundell had sung her praises. Dotty considered her performance as Ptolemy exceptional for someone so inexperienced. ‘I’m devastated I missed it,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy doing it?’

‘Was Mr Potter with you?’ she asked.

‘He and Bunny went to an aunt in Hoylake. You should have played Cleopatra, you know. You’re the right age. By all accounts Babs was miscast.’

‘Has Bunny got an auntie in Hoylake?’

‘Bunny’s from the South,’ he said. ‘Potter’s the local boy.’

She stared at him in disbelief, as though suspecting him of flattery. ‘You could have played it,’ he insisted. ‘Dotty isn’t the only one who thinks you’re talented. But you have to look after yourself a bit more, take a little more trouble with your appearance.’

‘Mr Potter’s never from Liverpool.’

‘Of course he is,’ he said. ‘His mother attended the same elementary school as Rose.’

Still she stared at him, hugging her knees. ‘Acting,’ he continued, ‘is an extremely physical profession. It’s not enough to know how to speak the lines. There’s breathing and stamina and control of the body. One has to stand properly, take care of one’s eyes, one’s skin. Even a painting by Rubens can be enhanced by the correct frame.’

‘Did Dotty tell you about my boil?’ she said.

Exasperated, he took her into his arms to shut her up. She was so near to him that he had to close his eyes.

Afterwards she was more friendly. He put a record on the gramophone and she sat on his lap, wrapped in a blanket, and lolled affectionately against his shoulder. She said she thought she was beginning to get the hang of it. It was no different from learning the piano or the ukulele; it just needed practice.

He rocked her in time to the music, tugging sleepily at the pearls about her throat. As if reciting endearments, she whispered into his ear, ‘You don’t want to take too much notice of anything I tell you. Sometimes I say whatever comes into my head. It’s why Uncle Vernon wanted me to go on the stage.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, not really bothered.

‘I play-act,’ she said. ‘I always have. I mourn people in my head. I go to funerals and chuck earth. Sometimes I have to choose who I’m going to bury. I like to rehearse the bad things so that I’ll know how to behave when they really happen.’

‘Silly goose,’ he murmured fondly, scarcely listening.

‘It’s on account of my background,’ she said, and shivered.

He offered to buy her a coat. She could choose it for herself – money was no object. She jumped from his lap and struggled into her clothes. In her haste to be gone she stuffed Dotty Blundell’s brassière into the pocket of her overalls.

‘For God’s sake,’ he cried. ‘What did I say?’

She wouldn’t speak to him and was out of the door in an instant. He thought of following her and then changed his mind; he was too old for that sort of gesture.

Rattled, he fell back onto the truckle-bed in a welter of trousers.

Vernon went on the tram to the football match. He’d decided it was best to keep out of Stella’s way until he was actually at the field. With any luck she mightn’t even spot him. There was an awkward moment at the breakfast-table when she asked him why he was wearing his Sunday suit.

‘None of your business,’ he told her and, gritting his teeth, refrained from commenting on her own mode of dress.

‘And
she’s
ashamed of me,’ he fumed to Lily, when Stella had at last left the house. ‘It’s a wonder she’s not mistaken for a boilerman. If I had my way I’d set fire to those blasted overalls.’

‘It’s a phase,’ soothed Lily. ‘She’s trying to hide herself.’

O’Hara waited for Stella outside the theatre. A procession of
Treasure Island
pirates carrying cardboard boxes bulging with beer bottles were already noisily boarding the coach. Bunny, unshaven, stood at the kerb with the stage manager of the Empire. He said worriedly, ‘I hope you’re going to keep an eye on that lot. We don’t want any injuries.’

‘Don’t talk soft,’ said the manager. ‘They’re mostly chorus boys.’

The celebrated comedian who was playing Long John Silver made a brief appearance in a chauffeur-driven car.

‘I’m on my way, playmates,’ he called, winding down the window to show his melancholy face. He was eating a bacon sandwich and hurled the crusts into the gutter as the car drove off.

Stella came up the street with Geoffrey and walked straight past O’Hara. She hung on to Geoffrey’s coat as he hauled himself onto the coach. Just then Dotty turned the corner arm in arm with Desmond Fairchild. She stopped and jabbed at O’Hara’s machine with her umbrella. ‘That bloody bike,’ she said, although she knew it wasn’t the same one.

Ignoring her O’Hara ran up and down the pavement waving his arms, trying to attract Stella’s attention. He was fairly certain she had seen him. Humiliated, he returned to his motor-cycle and, mounting the saddle, stabbed the toe of his flying boot furiously against the starter pedal. Trailed by a cloud of exhaust fumes, he accelerated up the road.

All the way to the football ground he thought about her. Every evening since Boxing Night she had come to his basement-room and allowed him to make love to her.

‘You’re sure you like doing this, aren’t you?’ he had asked her in the darkness. ‘I’m not making you do something you don’t want to do?’

‘Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do,’ she assured him. Yet when he saw her the next day and attempted to speak to her she told him to leave her alone and ran off into the prop-room.

She had confided she was in love with someone else, but he didn’t believe her. It wasn’t possible she was attached to young Geoffrey – whenever she mentioned him her voice had an edge of contempt. He couldn’t fathom why she was so anxious that no one else should know of his interest in her. All the women he had ever known had wanted to flaunt their possession of him, however fleeting.

He had let slip he was married. He’d begun to tell her an anecdote about the time he’d been trying out some play in Brighton when he’d very nearly missed the curtain because he’d accidently locked himself in his hotel-room, and how if it hadn’t been for his wife – realising his blunder he broke off and wanted to know if she minded his being married. ‘Why should I?’ Stella had answered. ‘People of your age usually are.’

He had laughed, and felt unreasonably hurt. A short time later he couldn’t prevent himself from asking whether she didn’t love him just a little. ‘I’ve told you,’ she said. ‘I love someone else.’

‘But you don’t do this with him, do you?’ he demanded, straddling her on the lumpy bed and thrusting into her.

‘What’s that got to do with it,’ she had said, screwing up her face in concentration.

For all his worldliness he was shocked. He was afraid she was becoming corrupted. He had only to suggest she lift her hips a fraction higher or arch her back rather more sharply for her to comply at once. She began to add certain embellishments of her own. On their third night she ordered him quite roughly to bring his legs closer together and found a way of rubbing herself against his knee while sucking at his neck that made him shudder.

The following day he bought her a bunch of violets and dropped them on her lap as she sat in the prompt corner. She turned on him and hissed that Bunny was watching. When he came off stage the violets had been kicked into the wings, stamped on by Tiger Lily’s Redskins.

He couldn’t make her out, or himself for that matter. What had started as an unimportant if rather shameful seduction had become something altogether more painful. He had lost his heart and was in danger of losing his head.

The football ground was at the back of a churchyard in the suburbs. There was a ramshackle club-house with its roof falling in and a rickety stand which rocked in the wind. Already fifty or more spectators, mostly old men and young lads, stood on the touchline stamping their feet to keep warm.