Volcano Street (30 page)

Roger Dansie does not repine. He is jubilant. From here, he ventures each day on rattling tube trains (Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square, Northern Line to Waterloo) to the theatre on the south bank that gives its name to Olivier’s company. Damaged in the Blitz, the Old Vic in 1948 remains closed as a playhouse; the company performs in the New Theatre over the river, leaving its shabby home to the students. Rubble, some of it fallen bricks and beams, some of it scenery from past productions, clutters the auditorium; classes take place in the foyer, the bars, and a big rehearsal room upstairs. Nobody minds. Students are proud to be here. Contained in this building is the spirit of British theatre; simply to walk in from the street is to feel the rush of a classic tradition. But the Old Vic is not all about tradition. The theatre school is radical in style, no stuffy bastion of anyone-for-tennis traditionalism like the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the Old Vic, teachers speak excitedly of Stanislavsky. There are improvisation exercises, movement classes. Outside, the city lies in ruins; here, a glorious new era seems about to dawn: Roger Dansie’s era. For Roger is a promising pupil – more than promising. This is
no story of a puffed-up rube who comes to the metropolis only to be laughed at; from the first, there are murmurs of greatness. And Quentin Phelps, is he filled with regret? No. Postwar England shocks him, it is true – a drab place of ruins and ration cards, of pasty-faced shopgirls and spotty clerks hurrying by in threadbare raincoats – but what, he urges, is apocalypse but the start of something new?

Eagerly, Phelps shows his protégé the sights. Picture them, master and pupil, on a red London bus, or at the railings of Buckingham Palace, or walking on the Embankment as the dirty river rushes past, saved from reeking only by the cold. Australia – for all its blinding sunshine the truly grey place, the place of oppressive shame – is as far away as another country can be. Many evenings find our friends in a certain establishment in Soho, one Phelps remembers fondly from his visit years ago. Let the city gape with bomb sites like a mouth with carious teeth; here, time is suspended, as queens with cigarette holders cackle through skeins of smoke about Bette and Joan and the new young barman and close shaves in the gents’ at Piccadilly Circus Underground, and eye up Roger and say, exchanging glances, ‘
She’s
nice, isn’t she?’

Winter seems endless, but then it ends. White evaporates from the streets and green returns to the trees outside their window. Grey skies turn blue. Warmth fills the air; there are irises in the overgrown garden. And Quentin Phelps thinks: My season has passed. The changes have come slowly: Roger is bored when Quentin proposes a visit to the Wallace Collection or the Strangers’ Gallery at the Palace of Westminster. Roger has lines to learn: ‘Quentin, let me read this.’ Roger must practise his animal improvisation: ‘I’m a lion. Let me be a lion.’ (Quentin scoffs. Has he ever heard such nonsense? For days Roger has repaired to London Zoo, studying the lions, imitating their movements. Quentin never taught drama like this.) Roger stays out late, carousing with fellow students. Young men, and one young woman, call for Roger and seem puzzled, even alarmed, by
the ‘Australian friend’ who shares their classmate’s room: so shabby (for Quentin is shabby now), so old-maidish, so
old
. ‘And what, Mr Phelps, do you
do
?’ they ask. Do? Nothing! For the first month or so, he wrote to public schools: Eton, Harrow, Winchester. Only Harrow replied, and that was to decline his services.

Roger crosses less often to Quentin’s bed; then not at all.

The quarrels began soon enough. Roger, to the envy of his fellow students, landed a part in an Old Vic production that would open early in his second year: Tony Lumpkin, Jack-the-lad troublemaker in
She Stoops to Conquer
. More than once, Quentin turned up at rehearsals; sitting far back in the New Theatre auditorium, he would sup on a bottle of whisky, applaud Roger’s entrances, and rush up to his protégé between scenes and critique his performance. The director frowned. Fellow cast members laughed uneasily. The guiding light of the Crater Lakes Players was not wanted here. Gently, Roger tried to tell him so, to no avail. Next day, Quentin was there again, and this time he was belligerent, interrupting the dialogue, calling the director a blind fool. Three burly stagehands were needed to throw him out.

‘Why did you do it?’ Roger asked later.

‘You really need to ask that? You’ve changed, Roger.’

And Phelps had not. In England he was an embarrassment, a provincial boor. Roger had swiftly eradicated his own accent; Phelps, by contrast, sounded ever more Australian. His slurring whine set teeth on edge. His pretensions to art and culture were pathetic: they might have impressed a boy in Crater Lakes, but hardly the worldly young man he had become.

‘You’ve got to move out,’ said Roger’s newest friend.

Roger shook his head. ‘I can’t abandon Quentin.’

Quentin felt abandoned all the same. His jealousy over this new friend precipitated the crisis. Colin Manning-Symes was a personable young fellow with thick, extravagantly pink lips and floppy blond hair that he flung back frequently in a rousing laugh. When he invited
Roger for a weekend at his parents’ place in Buckinghamshire, Phelps raged. He drank. And kept drinking. In due course he propelled himself through the streets, muttering under his breath, and hovered at last in public lavatories. How long had it been? Too long. Anyone would do. This drivelling old man with piss-stained flies. This spotty adolescent who cried, ‘You’re hurting me!’ as Quentin fucked him against the wall. This drunken sailor (how Quentin had wanted him!) who knocked him to the floor, kicked him, took his wallet, and called him a dirty ponce.

Late on Sunday afternoon, Quentin waited for Roger’s return. He sat in one of the armchairs, a hand on each fraying arm. Light came only from a pink tasselled lamp he had found in a junk shop the week before. Several times he heard noise on the stairs, and turned his head slowly; his neck hurt. He wore a grey silver-threaded smoking jacket and red spotted cravat that Roger had always, in the past, claimed to like. He had borrowed some powder, to cover a black eye, and pungent cologne from the old tart upstairs. An ashtray rested on one of the chair arms.

Night had fallen and Quentin had almost worked his way through a whole pack of Capstans when Roger finally opened the door. ‘What are you sitting in the dark for?’ he asked, and flipped on the overhead light.

Quentin winced. ‘Nice weekend with Manning-Symes?’

‘Hmm.’ Roger leaned an umbrella in a corner. He flung down his suitcase, stripped off his coat.

‘Get on well with the mater and pater?’

‘Hmm.’ He went to the window, flung it wide. ‘The fug in here! I don’t know how you stand it. Have you been sitting here smoking since I left?’

How late was it? Rain pattered on the unweeded garden. Quentin ground out another cigarette. The ashtray brimmed; his fingers were grey. ‘Explored the estate, did we? Bit of motoring, what-what?’

‘What are you talking about? They’re not that sort.’

‘Spot of shooting, perhaps? Bam!’ Quentin stood now. With unsteady, pained steps, he made it to the wall. ‘Go in for fox hunting, do they, down in Fuckinghamshire? Tally-ho, old bean! Or did he just suck your cock?’

‘Quentin, I’m not listening. Stop it.’

‘Don’t want to tell me? Not like you to be a shy boy.’

Roger remained by the window, staring into wet darkness. Quentin plunged towards him, grabbed him, forced him to turn. ‘That’s right, recoil. You never used to, Rog.’

‘You stink! And what have you done to your eye?’

‘Oh! I stink, do I? You jumped-up little bastard.’ Ashy fingers grabbed Roger’s crotch. ‘Christ, you’re so green you can’t even see through a mater-and-pater piece of shit like Manning-Symes. Does he say “actually” all the time? I’ll bet he does. “Actually, I think the lavatory bowl is
ideal
for depositing a turd in, don’t you, Mater?” He’s only middle-class, you know! You probably think he’s the royal family. Come on’ – the fist tightened painfully – ‘when do I get what little Actually gets?’

Roger pushed Phelps, who crumpled to the floor.

Despairingly, Roger surveyed the squalid room, the gas fire with its meter, the rickety single beds, the mouldering wallpaper, the brown stain that crept across the ceiling, and knew he could never stay. Long ago, in another world, his secret life with Phelps had filled him with welling power. No more. It disgusted him. But it was over. He would break away.

In that moment, for the last time in his life, Roger Dansie felt a marvellous lightness, as if he could fly through the open window, escape into the velvety dark and never return. It was time. For all his success, for all his new friends, Crater Lakes still reached out long tentacles, lashing him down. Now, at least, those tentacles must be cut. He had no more need of Quentin Phelps.

‘Where are you going?’ whined the stinking trembling thing as Roger grabbed coat, suitcase and umbrella, and marched, footsteps thudding, towards the door.

‘Colin’s digs are round the corner.’

‘No!’ Phelps flung himself after Roger. What happened next would always be a blur to Roger; it was the subject of much discussion in the trial that followed, and he could never describe exactly the sequence of events. But it was simple, it must have been: Phelps interspersing himself between Roger and the stairs, crying, pleading (others in the house claimed to have heard a commotion); the two men grappling; Phelps tumbling down the stairs and cracking his head; Roger thundering after him, calling, ‘Quentin! Quentin!’ with grief that gripped him so tightly he knew it would never let him go.

Roger lived through the trial as if through a dream. There wasn’t evidence enough for murder, though the strong suspicion persisted that the death of Quentin Phelps had been more than mere accident. Endlessly, both prosecution and defence trawled through the facts, including the schoolteacher’s prior convictions in Australia (a good half-dozen) for soliciting. ‘Mr Phelps forced himself upon you. Naturally you defended yourself,’ insisted Roger’s counsel, but Roger’s acting skills appeared to have deserted him.

Witnesses were no help. The Irish landlady expressed amazement, even horror, that she had let out a room to a pair of nancy boys (‘I runs a respectable house, I do’); the old tart, who described her occupation as ‘gentlewoman’, said she had always thought those two fellows not quite-quite. The Australian writer and his mistress complained about the noise. Colin Manning-Symes blushingly denied all knowledge of the ‘true nature’ of the friendship between Mr Dansie and Mr Phelps. The verdict was manslaughter.

The case, of course, was in all the papers. Sir Laurence Olivier declined to comment.

Roger Dansie spent five years in Holloway Prison. Upon release he attempted fitfully to begin a new life. He was not penniless: the remnants of the Dansie fortune brought him a small income. For a time he travelled: France, Italy, Greece. For some years he lived in Tangier, plunging into a life of Arab boys and hashish. Later he drifted to New York, where he moved on the fringes of experimental theatre, but the heart had gone out of his acting. It was as if a spring inside him had snapped. Filling his mind was the old Dansie house: his home, his bitter heritage. The world lay all before him, but only one obscure provincial place called to Roger Dansie. He was not yet old; he was, when he made his decision, a man of barely thirty, but weary of the world. As a boy, he had dreamed of fame. He had not seen that he was famous already: famous in Crater Lakes. That was his portion; life had no more to offer. Let him return to the town where he had been born.

And so he went back to his tumbledown house, where Jack, all this time, had been awaiting him patiently.

Chapter Sixteen

‘What now, miss?’

Must the boy sound so belligerent? Marlo eyed him with a sad wonderment. He was Skip’s age. How could so young a child get so fat? He had red swollen cheeks, no neck, and pendulous breasts visible beneath his school jumper; his buttocks and thighs might have burst at any moment from the brown polyester that barely contained them. She had heard that the boy had got into some sort of trouble; his mother, hoping to reform him, had inveigled Auntie Noreen into giving him an after-school job.

‘Did you shift that potting mix?’ said Marlo.

Brenton breathed. ‘Them big sacks?’

‘Out the back.’ Marlo jerked a thumb. The boy grunted and mooched away. Skip said he had no friends. Once (Skip was vague on details) he had run his own gang; now, for some reason, all the kids laughed at him.

Marlo looked at the clock on the wall. Still half an hour! Wearily she applied herself to the big Remington she had never liked so much as Olly Olivetti.

Clack. Clack-clack. Now payable.

Tab. Tab. Dollar sign.

Heat beat on the tin roof. Summer here would be stifling. More than once Marlo had thought she would quit. But for what? She needed money. Better Puce Hardware than a Coles New World checkout.

‘Bloke here to see you.’ Uncle Doug stood in the doorway.

‘What bloke?’ said Marlo, too late, and had half risen from her desk when Howard Brooker stepped past her uncle. Colouring, she sank behind the Remington again; Uncle Doug slipped away as Howard, with a smile, planted himself in the easy chair and crossed one long leg over the other. Bemusedly he looked around at the Mobil calendar, the
Pix
, the Alistair MacLeans. He lit a Silk Cut and offered the pack to Marlo, who waved it away.

He blew out smoke. ‘Saw young Brenton on my way in.’

‘One of your more promising pupils?’ Restless feelings churned in Marlo. Howard wore a wide tie, fire-engine red, and a canary-yellow shirt made of synthetic fibres. ‘I’m worried he’ll turn violent one day. Upend half the stock, sling gasoline around, strike a match.’

‘He’s a mummy’s boy. We miss you, Marlo.’

‘Who’s we?’ Marlo stuffed papers into a file. Uncle Doug had written on the battered cardboard in big slanting letters:
CALTEX SERVO
.

She stood abruptly, making for the filing cabinet. Damn Howard. Her hair was a mess.