The Town in Bloom (4 page)

I flung myself towards him saying, ‘Please, please! Just a minute! Will you
please
read this?’

He swung round, looking startled; then said, ‘Good gracious, what is it? A reprieve?’

I suspect my explanation was far from coherent but he got the hang of it quickly and said he remembered my aunt very well and was indeed sorry to hear of her death. He then accepted my letter, saying he would read it later and arrange to see me.

I said, ‘But then it may be too late for this part. Won’t you please let me read it to you now?’

He said that would be unfair to me as I’d had no chance to study the part. I assured him I’d listened to two girls and knew what kind of a part it was. He still shook his head so I added, ‘Then let me do something on my own. Shakespeare, Sheridan – I’ve an enormous repertoire.’

He capitulated. ‘All right. Do anything you like, but keep it short. I’d better hear you at once.’ He went to the front of the stalls and said: ‘I want to slip someone in here,
Brice. She’s coming up now. Sorry, my dear’ – he turned to the girl who was waiting to read – ‘I’ll hear you in a moment.’

I rushed through the pass door and up to the stage. Brice Marton was just coming into the wings. He stared at me and gave a disgusted snort, then said, ‘Someone will have to lend you a script.’

The girl who had come off the stage with him offered hers. I thanked her politely but said I shouldn’t need it. ‘And I shan’t need you, either,’ I said to Brice Marton, not at all politely, and sailed out to the front of the stage.

Feeling that I could not be at my best if trammelled by hat, cloak, handbag, gloves and umbrella, I flung them from me. Then, having decided how I could best show my talent for Society comedy, I smiled into the dark auditorium and announced: ‘
The School for Scandal
by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.’ (Aunt Marion had trained me to let people know what they were in for.) After which, I launched into the first quarrel scene between the Teazles.

I played both of them. First, as Sir Peter, I looked to my right and used a deep, rich voice. Then, looking left, I became Lady Teazle and used a lighter voice than was natural to me. Backwards and forwards from right to left I went, speaking fast because I feared Mr Crossway would stop me. I particularly wanted to reach what was, for me, the high moment of the scene, when Sir Peter tells Lady Teazle she had no taste when she married him. Lady T. then goes off into fits of laughter – that is, she did in my interpretation. And never had I laughed better, louder or longer than I did for Mr Crossway. I checked my laughter with some very amusing gasps and continued the scene.
Still Mr Crossway did not interrupt me. So I went on until Lady Teazle’s exit when I sketched a pert curtsy to Sir Peter – and then made a very deep one to Mr Crossway.

From the dark auditorium came his voice and he certainly sounded impressed. ‘Thank you, thank you. Come down and see me again.’

I dashed off the stage, forgetting all my belongings, and ran down the steps to the pass door. Brice Marton called after me, ‘Come back for your clothes!’ but I took no notice. When I reached the stalls Mr Crossway was coming to meet me.

‘That was really remarkable,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘And you were especially good as Sir Peter. When I play that part – and I’m nearly old enough – I shall come to you for hints.’ Then he probably guessed from my expression that I thought he was making fun of me, because he went on, ‘Seriously, I was impressed by your diction, and you know how to project your voice. And you use your hands prettily, though rather too much even for period comedy. Yes, yes, you undoubtedly have, er …’ He paused to choose the word.

‘Yes, individuality. And I wish with all my heart I had work to offer you—’

I interrupted him. ‘But you have. That part the girls have been reading—’

‘You’re out of the question for it. You’d have to play a scene with me – and you’d make me look a giant. I simply must have a tall girl.’

Just then there was a slight thud: my belongings had been thrown through the pass door.

‘Dear me, that was very rude of my stage manager,’ said
Mr Crossway. ‘We’re in disgrace for interrupting the audition. Now I really must send you away.’

He picked up my cloak and put it round me, then handed me the rest of my things, remarking, ‘What a very tall umbrella!’ I told him it had been Aunt Marion’s. His smile faded and he said, ‘That dear, pretty woman. I
am
so sorry she’s dead. Now go up to my offices – you can reach them through the foyer – and give your name and address to my secretary, Miss Lester. And tell her from me that she’s to be very nice to you.’

As he turned to open the swing door for me a young man came hurrying through it. Mr Crossway spoke to him. ‘Everything all right, Tom?’ The young man said, ‘Yes, sir. I chose lilac. They’ll deliver it this afternoon.’ Mr Crossway said, ‘Good. Now get back to Brice. I’m in his bad books for borrowing you.’ Then, turning to me, he said, ‘Goodbye, my dear,’ very kindly, and held the door open. My spirits sank as it swung to behind me. I had been elated at getting into the audition, and by his praise … but I hadn’t got the job.

And there was something else troubling me, something I only realised fully when I got to the foyer. Here, amidst the mirrors, rose-red brocade and cream and gold paint, was an oil painting of Rex Crossway as Charles Surface.
That
was the man with whom, for years, I had been in love. True, the words meant no more to me than when I used them about a character in history or fiction, and I knew one did not really fall in love with men one had not met. But I had never fallen in love with any man I
had met
and Rex Crossway had at least been the most exciting man I had ever seen. The man in the stalls had been kind but
scarcely exciting. There had not been enough time, or light, for me to study his face carefully but my impression had been that, though pleasantly humorous, it was almost ordinary, a shade plump and surmounted by hair barely bright enough to be called fair (a poor substitute for Charles Surface’s gleaming white wig). And whereas I had thought of him as a tall man with a magnificent figure, he was – if certainly tall – a trifle heavy. Worst of all, he seemed to be definitely middle-aged. Well, I knew from reference books that he was forty and, come to think of it, that
was
middle-aged. But I never
had
thought of it before.

I stood in front of the oil painting trying to believe that Rex Crossway in the stalls had at least borne some slight resemblance to Rex Crossway as Charles Surface. It couldn’t be done. So, one way and another, I was depressed as I started to walk up the stairs from the foyer.

At the back of the dress circle was a door marked: ‘To the Crossway Company offices only’. I opened it and found a much narrower staircase and went up and up. It ended at last at a landing, where a door stood open. I could see no bell so I knocked on the door.

A woman’s voice told me to come in and I went into an entrance hall dimly lit by a dirty glass roof. I saw several closed doors and one open onto an office from which the woman’s voice called again: ‘Come in here.’

I went into a long, low room which had four not very large round windows. The parapet of the roof hung out over these a little, cutting off some of the bright morning sunshine. The effect was curiously pleasant, the parapet somehow suggesting sun-blinds protecting the room from high summer heat.

Close to one of the windows a woman was seated in front of a typewriter. I took in that she had light brown hair and was pretty but no longer young; probably in her late thirties. She said, ‘Yes?’ rather vaguely and did not return my smile. I explained how I came to be there, concluding by saying, ‘And Mr Crossway said – he really did, I’m not making it up – he said I was to tell you from him to be nice to me.’

She was smiling by now. ‘Well, I hope I would have been, anyway – though it
is
a busy morning. Now sit down and give me your particulars. And tell me some more about yourself.’

She listened with apparent interest, asking questions until she must have had a pretty clear picture of my background. Then she said, ‘And now I’d like to hear just how you crashed into that audition.’ When I’d told her all I could remember she said, ‘Well, bravo, you! But don’t ever again watch another girl from the prompt corner; that’s against all stage etiquette. Not that I want to inhibit you. Oh, dear, how annoyed Brice Marton must have been with you!’

‘He was indeed. I hated him.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t. A stage manager has to be boss of his stage and Brice has to be a bit extra bossy because he’s so young for the job – only twenty-five. He started here as a call boy. By the way, he comes from your part of the world, but from right in Manchester, not a suburb.’

I said I didn’t know that anyone lived right in Manchester.

‘They do when their mothers are theatrical landladies
,
as Brice’s was,’ said Miss Lester. ‘Listen, that secretarial course you took: how did you get on?’

I told her I had done fairly well.

She got up and went to a smaller desk than her own, where there was a second typewriter. I noticed that she was tall, and well-dressed in a casual way that came near to being untidy. Putting some paper in the machine she said, ‘Let me see what you can do.’

‘But why? I don’t mean to be a secretary.’

‘I know that. Still – come on.’

I sat down at the typewriter. She dictated a letter addressed to me, regretting that Mr Crossway had no work to offer me. I made no mistakes.

‘And you’ve set it out nicely,’ she said, ‘Now we’ll try some shorthand.’

She dictated again, so slowly that I had no difficulty in keeping pace with her. When I read the words back to her she said, ‘Now don’t jump down my throat. I’m badly in need of help here. I’ve been keeping the job open for a girl who’s been ill and has now decided she doesn’t want to come back. Why don’t you join me, while you’re looking for stage work?’

I stared at her. ‘But how could I look for it if I was working here?’

‘Quite easily. I want someone who’ll come in the afternoons and evenings. You could have the mornings off – well, most of them. And if you’d any special afternoon appointment I’d let you off for that, too.’

She went on talking persuasively, pointing out that the money she could pay me would help me to keep going until I got a job on the stage. I could see that, but I had an
almost superstitious fear that if I once became a secretary I should go on being a secretary. Then she said something which completely changed my feelings – ‘And perhaps Mr Crossway would let you understudy something in the new play; from what you’ve told me, he must think you’re promising. Or he might – not that you must count on it – give you some introductions.’

I said, ‘Oh, goodness, do you think he would? In that case, of course I’ll take the job.’

‘Splendid. And I think you’ll enjoy it. This is a fascinating theatre, for anyone who’s really interested in the stage. But I daresay you’re only interested in your own career.’ She said it quite nicely.

I assured her I was particularly interested in the Crossway Theatre and its history and had once seen Sir Roy Crossway act. She told me she had worked as his secretary for many years and had thought the world of him – ‘Of course his temper could be frightening but he seldom lost it with me. And he was a wonderful man – the last of the great actor-managers.’

‘But surely Mr Crossway’s an actor-manager?’

‘Oh, yes, but he’s not interested in the managerial side. Acting has always come first with him. Now you’d better leave me to get on with my work. Could you start this afternoon? No, I shall be too busy with Mr Crossway to show you the ropes. How about this evening at six-thirty? We’ll have a meal together. That is, if you really want to join me here. I don’t want to over-persuade you.’

‘Oh, I’ll come. And it’s kind of you to want me.’ I added with belated modesty, ‘I can’t think why you should. I’m not really efficient.’

She smiled. ‘The truth is that I rather like you. And I can’t work with people I don’t like, however efficient they are. Now off you go.’

I went down the stairs feeling cheerful; with the prospect of understudying I could think of myself as an actress, not a secretary. Perhaps I could understudy the part I had heard read at the audition. I opened one of the doors into the dress circle hoping to do some more listening, then decided this might be against stage etiquette like watching from the prompt corner. Just before I reluctantly withdrew, a cleaner who was quietly polishing brass whispered, ‘If you’re looking for Miss Lester, she’s up the stairs, right at the top.’

‘Yes, I know, thanks,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘I work here.’

Back at the Club, I found Molly and Lilian in the lounge and told them about my morning.

‘It’s simply staggering,’ said Lilian. ‘Getting a job the first day you’ve looked for one! I can’t believe it.’

‘But you told me you had a feeling I would.’

‘Oh, that was just to encourage you – or did I really know?’

This was my introduction to those ‘feelings’ of Lilian’s which it was never safe to count on or discount.

Molly said, ‘Personally, I’m not one bit surprised, Mouse.’

‘Fancy him remembering your aunt,’ said Lilian. ‘Do you think he had an affair with her?’

I said he only came to tea.

Lilian giggled. ‘Well, he’s said to be a fast worker.’

‘But he’s married, Lilian.’ I had noted it, with regret, in a reference book.

‘Oh, that doesn’t stand in his way,’ said Lilian.

‘Well, it would have stood in Aunt Marion’s. And I’m sure she wouldn’t have had an affair with anyone. She went on caring for her fiancé, who was killed in the war.’ The very thought of an affair for my aunt seemed
shocking, so I dropped the subject by saying, ‘Of course, I haven’t got a job on the stage.’

Molly said it was sure to lead to one.

‘And think what fun you’ll have, being in the know,’ said Lilian. ‘Perhaps you can get
us
jobs – our show may not run through the summer and I’d quite like to be in a straight play.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Molly. ‘All I want is to find a marvellous man, so that I can marry him and have dozens of children. Until then, the chorus will do nicely.’

Lilian glared at her. ‘Don’t keep saying we’re in the chorus.’

We went down to an early lunch; it was Wednesday and the girls had a matinée. Lilian pointed out that the Crossway midweek matinées were on Thursdays, so they could go to one if I could get some complimentary seats. She said it was usual to paper the house when a show was coming off.

‘The child probably thinks you mean they get the decorators in,’ said Molly. ‘Paper means free seats, Mouse.’

Later I got quite a number to scatter around the Club – or, rather, for Lilian to scatter; she enjoyed doling them out.

After lunch I wrote to Aunt Marion’s solicitor. He was legally my guardian but my aunt had told him I was to be free to try for work on the stage. He had done what he could to help me, finding out about the Club (which was for actresses, musicians and artists) and arranging for my membership; but he took a poor view of the stage as a career for me and would be relieved to know I had a secretarial job. I also wrote to several friends, taking
pleasure in describing my adventures and saying I should be sending further instalments – which never got written; from that day on I lost interest in everyone connected with my old life, because my new life was so all-absorbing.

When I had finished my letters I went up to my cubicle and studied my dresses. I had already decided they must be shortened; I doubt if many young women can be happy in dresses longer than other women are wearing. But I still did not hanker for shapeless tubes; I much preferred my tight bodices and full skirts. Lilian had told me the attendant in the Ladies’ Room would do alterations for me so I took down an armful of dresses. An American girl who came in said they were the cutest things she’d ever seen.

After tea, with stimulating watercress sandwiches, I started for the theatre in time to get off the bus at Piccadilly Circus and walk up Shaftesbury Avenue, looking at playbills and photo graphs. Then I got lost in the small streets surrounding the Crossway, but I still got there well before six-thirty.

Miss Lester looked pleased to see me. ‘Good child. I’ve lots for you to do. But first we’re going out to dinner. There’s a pub round the corner where they do quite good meals.’

She put on a small felt hat and slung a fox fur over her shoulder. I always remember Eve Lester’s clothes as elegant, rather than smart or fashionable. She usually wore plain, dark suits which, while comforming to fashion, seemed somehow dateless. And she wore them, and all her clothes, as if she never gave them a thought; she seldom looked in a glass when putting on her hat. She used little make-up. On first sight she had seemed to me pretty but what she really
had was a faded beauty; or perhaps only a dimmed beauty which might have shone had she helped it to.

I had never been in a pub and did not much fancy a meal there. But I found there was a pleasant old upstairs dining-room, where outsize cruets stood on white
tablecloths
. As we sat down Miss Lester said, ‘By the way, we charge our dinners here to the theatre. That’s been a rule ever since Sir Roy’s day – when the office staff works on in the evenings.’

I mentioned that I hadn’t worked during the day.

‘Doesn’t matter. When you work at night, you get fed.’

I asked if she worked mornings, afternoons and
evenings
. She said, ‘Usually, and sometimes even on Sunday. Thank God I don’t have far to come. I’ve a barely sanitary old maisonette just along in Covent Garden. My work at the theatre’s my whole life – has been almost since I first came to it, twenty years ago. I was just your age then. Do you smoke?’ She offered me a cigarette. ‘And how about a drink?’

I said I didn’t drink or smoke. ‘But perhaps I should. Most people on the stage do, don’t they?’

She laughed. ‘Well, you’ll get no encouragement from me. I withdraw both offers. Incidentally, if you take to swigging double whiskies here, don’t charge those to the management – not that Mr Crossway would mind, really; he’s as generous as his father was. I have a drink if I’m dead tired but it doesn’t help me much, which is just as well; if I depended on drink as I do on cigarettes I’d be dead by now. Where’s that waitress? I haven’t too much time.’

We had a good, solid meal of steak-and-kidney pie and
apple tart. ‘No coffee, unless you pine for it,’ said Miss Lester. ‘It’s poor stuff here, and I always make some during the evening. Now we ought to hurry.’

When we got back to the theatre there were quite long queues waiting for the pit and gallery. This surprised me, as the play was coming off.

‘Oh, we shall fill our cheap seats until the end of the run,’ said Miss Lester, ‘but the stalls and circles have dropped off badly. And now it’s going to rain – that’s bad for the doors.’ Seeing my puzzled expression she added, ‘That means people who haven’t booked seats but decide to come at the last minute. Not that we get much passing trade here, as they do in Shaftesbury Avenue and the Strand. There’s hardly anyone about here after the shops close; one might be in some little country town.’

The Crossway, with its four narrow streets, certainly looked unlike my idea of London. Some of the shops still had their old wooden shutters, and the street lamps gave only a dim light. But the theatre was brilliantly lit and there was an electric sign giving the name of the play, with ‘Rex Crossway in’ above it. As I looked upwards, Miss Lester said, ‘Sir Roy wouldn’t like that sign and it does rather spoil the facade, but one must move with the times; not that we do in all ways and I can’t say I’m sorry, but we probably need to if the Crossway’s to go on paying.’

‘Surely it does very well?’

‘Well, we haven’t done too badly with this last show, though it’s a pretty weak play. You must see it before it comes off. Now I’m going my rounds. You can tag along with me and learn your way about the theatre; it’s a rabbit warren of passages and staircases.’

First we went to the box-office and one of the two elderly men inside unlocked the door for her. She went in and closed it after her. When she came out she said there would be a better house than she had expected. ‘And it’s going to
look
nice, anyway. I hate seeing empty seats.’

‘I suppose it’ll be papered?’ I said knowledgeably.

‘And with good-looking paper. It’s quite a job to paper houses tactfully. I’ll let you have some seats for your Club if you’ll give them to people who’ll dress.’

An old, white-haired man came through a door marked ‘Private’. She introduced him. ‘This is Mr Fortescue, our front of the house manager. Someday you must get him to tell you about the old days here.’

He said he would be delighted to, then asked her to spare him a few minutes. She went into his office with him; and when she came out she looked back to say, ‘Now don’t you worry. I can easily sort that out for you.’ As we started towards the stalls she said, ‘He’s such a darling but he’s always forgetting things. Well, what can you expect? He’s nearly eighty.’

‘Oughtn’t he to retire?’

‘People here never retire of their own accord. And Mr Crossway never has the heart to ask them to. Many of them date from his father’s early days.’

We went down to the stalls bar, which looked rather like a rose and gold drawing-room. The two barmaids seemed little younger than Mr Fortescue. They were eager to see Miss Lester and indignant about some supplies which they said had been deflected to the dress-circle bar. She promised to do something about it and eventually we went off to the pit bar, then to the dress-circle bar – where there
was counter indignation to the stalls bar indignation – and then to the bars at the back of the upper circle and the gallery. Almost always there was some problem to iron out.

I said I’d never realised a theatre had so many bars.

‘God bless them all,’ said Miss Lester. ‘We’ve always kept control of them and their takings often mean the difference between profit and loss on a week. Now I’ll show you how to get from the gallery to the offices; it’s complicated.’

I had found the geography of the whole theatre
complicated
. There were wide public staircases and narrow private ones – or semi-private ones; the public could use them if it could find them, which seemed unlikely in most cases. Their decor corresponded to the part of the house they served: rose carpet and brocaded walls for the stalls and dress circle; linoleum and wallpaper for the upper circle; stone steps and drably painted walls for the gallery. It was that tour of the theatre which first made me notice the deliberate impoverishing of surroundings in proportion to the decrease in the price of seats. As we walked along the back of the gallery I looked down and said, ‘Couldn’t there be backs to the seats – even a railing? Surely that wouldn’t cost much?’

‘But if we make the gallery seats more comfortable, people won’t pay for the pit. And if we make the pit more comfortable then heaven help the upper circle. Still, I do feel sorry for galleryites. But at least this gallery has a good sight line.’

She took a key out of her handbag, unlocked a door, led the way along a narrow passage and up a few steps, then through another door into the entrance hall of the offices.

She now had to dole out programmes and chocolates to the waiting programme girls – not that they could, with truth, be described as ‘girls’. One of them was complaining bitterly about her feet. ‘You girls from the cheap seats don’t know how lucky you are, walking on nice lino. Carpets are hell.’

I was so astonished at this that I butted in and said I’d have thought carpets would be soft to walk on.

‘Oh, they’re soft all right, but they burn the soles off your shoes.’

(Years later I noticed that chambermaids, walking the long passages of hotels, avoid the strips of carpets and walk on the lino.)

Soon after the ‘girls’ went down, I heard a rumbling noise.

‘That’s the gallery coming in,’ said Miss Lester. ‘One wall of the Throne Room backs on to it.’

‘The Throne Room?’

‘Mr Crossway once called it that, satirically, and the name stuck. I want you to work in there tonight.’

She took me into a room which, like the office, had four round windows; but it was larger than the office, L-shaped, with the short part of the L jutting out towards the back of the gallery. On the long wall facing the windows were three oil paintings. Switching on the lights over them, she said: ‘Behold the Crossway dynasty.’

The largest painting was of an actor playing Hamlet. Miss Lester told me it was Mr Crossway’s grandfather, King Crossway. I asked if that had been his real name.

‘King was, believe it or not, but his surname was really Crossthwaite. He changed it when he managed to get hold
of the Crossway Theatre. It’s a shocking painting – and one gathers he was a shocking actor; just a barnstormer with a flair for business.’ Her eyes travelled to another of the paintings. ‘That’s Sir Roy, much as he was when I first knew him.’

I asked if Rex Crossway had children to carry on the dynasty. She said, ‘No, unfortunately. That portrait of him was done when he was a young man, by a very mediocre painter. The one of Sir Roy is a Sargent.’

I could find no resemblance between the painting and the old man I had seen playing Sir Peter Teazle. In middle age, Sir Roy had been darkly handsome, with a slightly satanic expression which I thought attractive. Mr Crossway was nothing like as interesting, either in the painting here or as his present-day self seen by me that morning – though in the painting he certainly had brighter hair and more of it.

Miss Lester was now pointing out a genealogical tree of the Crossway family. ‘It takes them back to an actor of Shakespeare’s time. Sir Roy was very proud of it, but Mr Crossway says nothing further back than the early eighteen hundreds is authentic. There are all sorts of things in here that will interest you. Letters, souvenirs….’

I was looking at an old print of the Crossway. ‘How marvellous it must be to own a theatre and to hand it on from generation to generation!’

‘I regret to say the Crossway family have never actually owned the theatre,’ said Miss Lester. ‘The barnstormer just had a very long lease at a fantastically low rent. Since then the lease has had to be renewed four times and the rent has soared higher and higher. But at least Mr Crossway’s
still the direct lessee. So often managements have to rent from a sub-lessee and then rents really do go sky-high. Well, now: tonight I want you to work on press-cuttings; they’re terribly in arrears. Just sort them into date order and paste them in.’

She had set everything out for me on the very long table in the front part of the room. I said, ‘I suppose I mustn’t take time to read the cuttings?’