Ghost Song (8 page)

May God forgive me for lying! thought Toby and went up into the flies to make sure the backcloth for his song was in place. He and Rinaldi had explored the under-stage storage rooms the previous day: he had asked Rinaldi to come with him, partly because Rinaldi would know what was to be found down there, but also because Toby always found the underground rooms uncomfortably sinister. He knew, logically, that it was simply that the rooms were dark and dismal and had shadowy corners and odd echoes, but he could never rid himself of the feeling that something menacing stood unseen in the shadows, watching him.

He had been an inquisitive five year old when he first came down here, wanting to explore everywhere about this marvellous place where his mamma somehow belonged and where nothing was quite what it seemed—where people changed themselves into all kinds of exciting beings purely by painting their faces, or playing music, or by standing in a coloured ray of light like the snipped-off piece of a rainbow. In those days he thought the Tarleton was filled with magic—he still thought it now he was grown up, but it was a different kind of magic. But he clearly remembered how he had found the heavy old door at the head of the steps and had gone down them without anyone realizing. At first it had been spookily dark, but Mr Shilling who watched the door for people coming in and out and gave out letters to them, had lit a box lantern inside his own room on account of it being a dark January day. Toby was not really supposed to touch anything to do with burning candles and he was probably not supposed to borrow Mr Shilling's lantern either, but Mr Shilling was not in his room to ask permission, and Toby thought if he was very careful and very quick…

Going down the steps was like going down into a magic cave. He had been taken to see
Aladdin
at Drury Lane at Christmas so he knew about caves that were filled with treasure and it was all very exciting. But the flickering lantern light, instead of making it exciting, made it frightening. Toby began not to like the huddled outlines of scenery and furniture, and he began to wish he had not come down here.

He was found some immeasurable time later, huddled in a corner, his fists crammed into his eyes to stop himself crying, shaking and white-faced. It was a bad old place, he said sobbingly when he was back upstairs and starting to feel safe again. A bad
bad
old place and he had not liked it one bit.

‘It's only because it's dark and dusty,' said Rinaldi—Mr Rinaldi, Toby had called him in those days. ‘We'll take a lot of lanterns down there one day, Master Toby, and light everywhere properly, then you'll see how it's really a very interesting place.'

Toby had not wanted to go back into the cellar ever again, even if Mr Rinaldi took a hundred lanterns, but he said thank you very much and secretly hoped Mr Rinaldi would forget or not have time.

His mamma said afterwards, ‘But Toby, darling, why on earth didn't you just run back up the stairs?' and Toby mumbled that he did not know, but he 'spected he had got a bit lost. He never told his mother or anyone else that he had thought there was someone in the underground rooms with him—someone he could not see but whom he knew was there, like an invisible person in a story. Grown-ups did not believe in invisible people and they would probably pat him on the head and say he was imagining it. Toby did not think he had imagined it at all: he was as sure as sure that someone had been standing at the foot of the steps watching him, stopping him from going back up the steps.

T
OBY DID NOT
precisely forget his experience that day, but he managed to push it to the back of his mind. But something of it stayed with him, and even now, all these years later, he did not like going into the underground rooms.

But yesterday Rinaldi had trundled down there with him, pleased that he could help his beloved Mr Toby, talking about what they might find and happily identifying this bit of scenery or that bit of furniture, as they searched: ‘We used that cottage flat for
Jack and the Beanstalk
in 1910, Mr Toby.' ‘Those were the curtains we had for the old Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations,' and in Rinaldi's company Toby did not mind the rooms at all. And it was a useful trip; they found a scullery backcloth used when the Tarleton put on
Cinderella
many years ago. ‘Mr Prospero Garrick played Baron Hard-up as I recall,' said Rinaldi. ‘Although he'll never admit to it now, for he likes everyone to think he only does Shakespearean roles. Shocking old ham.'

‘I expect he needed the money that year,' said Toby charitably, and because he rather liked old Prospero.

‘It was a long time ago, Mr Toby— My word, I think it might even have been in your mother's day.'

‘I'll ask her if she remembers,' promised Toby before Rinaldi could go off into one of his trips of memory, recalling how Flora the Flowered Fan had dazzled audiences, and how Toby's father had fallen in love with her from the front row of the stalls, so to speak. A great scandal at the time it had been, Rinaldi always said with happy nostalgia, what with Toby's father being Sir Hal Chance, highly respectable and not at all the kind of man you would expect to marry a music-hall performer.

Toby had been pleased to find the
Cinderella
back-cloth which would nicely suggest the kitchens of the big house in which the cook was making tipsy cake. Rinaldi was pleased as well; it had been a nuisance to lug the backcloths all the way down to the cellar rooms after the pantomime, but he had said at the time it would be worth the trouble. The canvas was slightly cracked at the edges but they could repair that this afternoon and put a lick of paint on it. It could be hung from the grid and, even from the front row, it would look as good as new.

‘I remember my old father saying to me you should never waste anything in the theatre, Mr Toby. He used to tell me stories about how he worked his way up. I loved hearing them, those stories. All the memories.'

‘Including the ghost?' said Toby, as they carried the backcloth upstairs. ‘The cloaked man who slinks along Platt's Alley, hiding his face?'

‘I don't recall anything about the ghost,' said Rinaldi rather shortly, and Toby glanced at him in slight surprise because there had been an unusually abrupt note in his voice. He was not normally abrupt about anything to do with the theatre, which was his entire life. Toby's mother had once said the Rinaldis were a theatrical institution all by themselves; they had sawdust and glue-size in their veins instead of blood.

The backcloth was in place tonight, waiting to be winched down from the gridiron framework under the roof. Having checked this, Toby retreated to his own small dressing room. Performing a quick change into the slightly raffish evening clothes he normally wore for his act, he heard music flooding the theatre and hoped that meant the flute player had dried out his music. Now Bunstable was on from the sound of it—there was a roar of appreciation from the audience who liked Bunstable because he came from Hoxton and was regarded as one of their own. It's going all right, thought Toby.

He surveyed himself one last time in the fly-blown mirror. Loosened evening tie, coat unbuttoned, silk hat tilted at a disreputable angle, hands stuck in trouser pockets… Not precisely drunk-looking, but a bit the worse for wear. ‘Mr Chance looks like a toff after a night on the tiles,' one critic had said, which had pleased Toby immensely.

One last check—which was, in the words of the old Victorian turns, a question of, ‘All right behind?' He twisted his head over one shoulder to look backwards in the mirror. Yes, he was all right from all angles. He went out to the side of the stage to wait for his cue, and panic welled up. I'm not getting the surge of power, thought Toby. I'm not filling up with that thousand-candle-power energy and I should be; in fact, I should be crackling like a cat's fur in a thunderstorm by now—
Bloody
Alicia Darke and her sinister alluring secret societies…

Rinaldi was winching the backcloth down. From here Toby could see the repairs he had made to its edge. They looked very good and they would certainly not show from the front.

Sheer terror had him by the throat now and he knew he would not be able to sing a note. And even if I do, they won't hear me for the thunder, he thought. Oh God, this is the night I always knew would come—it's the night I'm going to fail. They'll boo me, they'll hate the song, they'll give me the bird, I'll die the death. I'll have to live out the rest of my life in squalid obscurity, busking outside the theatres. And if they write any histories of music halls in the future, and if they include the Tarleton, they'll say, ‘During a night in May 1914, Mr Toby Chance was jeered from the stage during a thunderstorm and disappeared into obscurity…'

Oh, for pity's sake, he said sharply to himself, you're not Irving or Garrick—you're not even that shocking old ham Prospero Garrick who does monologues on Monday nights if we can't get anyone else, and is always threatening to write his memoirs. You're just here to sing a couple of tunes and cheer people up, and if you're letting a bloody thunderstorm and a deliberately mysterious female get to you, then busking in the street's about what you deserve.

‘Mr Toby, you're
on
,' said Rinaldi's frantic voice, and Toby realized that Frank had reached the end of the opening bars and was looking across to the wings.

He took a deep breath and walked forward into the lighted well of the stage. The footlights flared, hissing slightly, and the heat and lights and scents of the theatre closed round him. There was a delighted cheer from the stalls and whistles from the gallery, and the sizzling energy he had sought was suddenly there, pouring into his whole body. In that moment he loved everyone inside the Tarleton, extravagantly and indiscriminately. It was going to be all right—the song really was going to be the best thing he had ever written, and Frank's music was already tripping slyly across the keys exactly as they had rehearsed, and the audience was already shouting in time to it.

We're almost there, thought Toby. Look at the audience now—look at
all
the audience. That was his mother's dictum, of course: use your eyes, Flora always said. Stalls, dress circle, gallery, and don't forget the poor so-and-sos behind that pillar on the far left, because they've paid as well…

I'm not forgetting a single one of them, thought Toby. Here we go…

‘In the Maida Vale kitchens of the house

The maids were stirring soup and roasting grouse.

They were baking bread and cakes and boiling ham.

And the cook was feeling merry, just a-tasting of the sherry.

Making tipsy cake with sheets of sponge and sweetest strawberry jam…'

Pause. Let Frank play the four bars of footstep stumbling music. Now the orchestra was coming in as they had rehearsed, and this was the verse about the butler getting frisky, having drunk the master's whisky, and the confusion about the sheets of sponge cake and the sheets on the cook's bed. Had the audience picked that up? Yes, of course they had, trust a Tarleton audience for that. Toby grinned and took off his silk hat in a mock bow to the house, who shouted their appreciation, and when he sang the chorus for the second time, they roared it with him.

‘She'd just tipped up the bottle for the smallest taster

When the butler said, “Let's have another glass.” '

The cheers were still ringing in Toby's ears and the music was still running in his mind when he finally left the theatre. He thanked Rinaldi, looked in on Bob Shilling to see if there were any messages in his pigeon-hole, and then went out, walking briskly down Platt's Alley.

He was delighted with the response to the song; he thought the errand boys would undoubtedly be whistling it tomorrow morning. He might come down here early and walk along Southwark Street just to listen to them. Was that being vain? Who cared if it was, he would do it anyway.

It was a little after eleven o'clock, and the storm had blown itself out. It had not cleared the air though: the night was still hot and close. Toby would have preferred to go straight home and take a cool bath and eat whatever Minnie Bean would have left out for him by way of supper, but there was the hansom at the end of Platt's Alley as Alicia had promised, and Alicia herself would be tucked sinuously inside it. No escape, thought Toby. But I'm not sure I want to escape, because whatever this is, it sounds quite adventurous. Even a bit risky, maybe. Shall I bet my virtue (ha!) on it being a plot to topple the house of Saxe Coburg Gotha in favour of some bizarre claimant? After all this anticipation, it would be an anticlimax if it was just another outré drinking club.

As the cab rattled through the streets, he said, ‘You still haven't told me what this is all about or where we're going.'

‘It's in Bloomsbury,' said Alicia. ‘That's where we're going.'

Then it was unlikely to involve Hellfire Clubs or Jacobite Pretenders. It would more likely be earnest writers and painters, which might be deeply interesting or stultifyingly dull.

‘A group of like-minded people,' Alicia was saying. ‘We meet to discuss the situation in the world.'

‘A political meeting?' said Toby sharply, suddenly seeing several different and slightly worrying possibilities.