Waiting for Orders (21 page)

He does not say ‘spill the beans’; but that is what he means. I have been expecting something like this to happen ever since the picture with that tell-tale date on it turned up at Christie’s last year and fetched that huge price. I had been hoping, in the way the old do, that I would be dead before someone started asking questions and that my executors would be left to cope. But the biographer invites me to ‘unburden myself’. Some years ago a publisher asked me to write a piece about Blag’s last days and I refused easily. I am a truth-teller of sorts but the theatre is my medium. Still, there is a need in the old to unburden which can become as urgent as the need to confess guilt.

As a boy I knew Blag as a friend of the family. After my father died Blag became for a few weeks a benefactor.

My parents were actors, Harry and Kitty Blagden, and they spent most of their working lives on tour or in provincial rep. My brother and I lived with Grandma Blagden in Clapham. It was there, when our parents were at home resting, that we heard all the gossip. In the autumn of 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, they were in Birmingham doing a season of rep. One of the plays was Ibsen’s
Ghosts
, still a very daring play then. My mother played Regina and my father Pastor Manders. The local bishop preached against it. It was quite a hit. The theatre was next door to a municipal art gallery and the curator there was stage-struck. It was he who made the connection between Blagden Cole and the production of
Ghosts
with my parents in it. Part of the gallery was devoted at that moment to an exhibition of modern portraits and among them was a portrait of his mother by Cole. The picture was signed but not dated. What only the curator knew was that on the back of the canvas were scrawled the words, ‘Portrait of Mrs Alving by her son Oswald’. That was dated 1912.

That was the year
Ghosts
had its first public performance in a London theatre and audiences had been deeply shocked. The
subject of hereditary disease had until then been strictly taboo. Ibsen used it as a symbol for moral corruption, but the disease he had had in mind was generally assumed to be congenital syphilis. An artist who signed a portrait of his mother as Mrs Alving’s doomed son Oswald was making a harsh statement. My father already knew Blag well. They had met in the dog days of 1917 at the base hospital in Salonika, my father a convalescent subaltern in the Welsh Fusiliers. He had become friendly enough with Blag and one of the doctors there to know that Blag believed himself the potential victim of a disease that ‘ran in the family’.

In Birmingham my parents tried to persuade the rep management to forget the curator’s amusing little discovery, but in vain. Blag was news and they could use the publicity. A London paper picked up the story from the local rag and asked Blag to comment. He denied all knowledge of the
Ghosts
inscription on the portrait and wasn’t too sure that he remembered the portrait itself. He would ask his mother what had happened to it. But he was delighted to hear that his old army pal Harry Blagden had survived the war. No, no relation but the same family name. A fine actor, Harry. He himself meant to go up and see the play.

He went the following week. It wasn’t
Ghosts
he saw, but the Frederick Lonsdale comedy that alternated with it. For that my father was thankful. He had not believed Blag’s denial of the
Ghosts
inscription. He knew that for Blag 1912 had been a bad year in more ways than one. He had heard Blag telling a friendly doctor all about it in the Salonika hospital. During the year ending in the spring of 1912 Blag’s sister Cécile had died in a mental home; and Blag had witnessed the process of her dying. The thought of Blag sitting in the stalls watching the final scene of
Ghosts
, with Oswald centre stage, deserted by Regina and watched only by his mother, crying out for the sun as he sinks into imbecility, would have been unbearable.

My mother liked Blag from the first. ‘They talked about the war, of course, and about amoebic dysentery and malaria being better for an actor than losing an arm or a leg. But Blag knew why your father wasn’t playing leads. He knew that Harry’s illness was worse than serious. He said that us Blagdens ought not to trust army medical boards. He said that the only
medicine they understood was a disability pension table. He was right too. He knew all about the Blagden families and which lot came from where. His came from Lancashire. Your father’s came from Yorkshire via London, as you know.’

‘But Blagden was his mother’s family.’

‘His father had no family to speak of. Anyway he was no good. When Blag was only six Mr Cole ran off to America without a word and died there. Old Mrs Cole made a living of sorts teaching music but it was the Blagden drapery business that paid most of the bills. That’s how Blag started as an artist you know. He went to a Manchester art school to learn textile design.’

‘Was his father an artist, the one who ran away?’

‘Not him. He was a piano tuner by trade. I think he sold insurance too, as a sideline. Blag doesn’t like talking about him.’

That was just after my own father died in 1922. It was the undiagnosed diabetes that killed him, not the ailments they had been treating him for. Not that it would have made any difference. Insulin was discovered just too late to help him. It was a terrible year but it became a year of decision. Granny couldn’t keep house for all of us with no money coming in. Mother had marvellous legs and could move beautifully on a big stage. She had been asked to go into panto before but couldn’t because of my father. Now she accepted.

Her first principal boy was Prince Charming in the Moss Empire production of
Cinderella
at the Grand, Leeds. And that was when we discovered what a good friend Blag could be. The show was rehearsed in London but dress-rehearsed in Leeds. Blag talked to the London management publicity people and arranged to attend the Leeds lighting and dress rehearsals. There he did croquis and drawings of all the principal actors. They were the sorts of drawings and sketches that Lautrec might have done – simple, sad and wonderfully elegant. The drawing of Kitty Blagden as Prince Charming was particularly fine. It was published with a page to itself in the
Bystander
, a London magazine that reported the doings of the smart set and the bright young things. Her agent always said that it was his astute use of the Prince Charming drawing that promoted her from the provinces to the West End stage. Agent or no agent, she began to get flattering work in musical comedy and then in a series of Charlot revues.

Blag lived in the country just outside London and for a year or two we saw quite a lot of him. It was my younger brother who had the temerity to ask one evening, after Blag had taken my mother to lunch at the Savoy, if they were going one day to get married.

If I had dared to ask such a question I would have been damned for my impudence. My brother was only told not to be silly and to go and do his homework. My grandmother had gone to her Thursday whist drive. We were sitting at the kitchen table where I had supper and my mother had tea and a sandwich before leaving for the theatre. When my brother had gone she gave me a look.

‘Did you put him up to that, Charlie? No? Then what’s he been reading?
Peg’s Paper
?’

‘He asked me, I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.’

‘Well, I suppose I’d better tell you. The answer is no. Blag would like to get married but not to his old friend’s widow even if she was willing. What he needs is a young wife who’ll give him a good time. He could have that, but that’s not what he wants. What he wants is a young wife who’ll give him children. And that he can’t have – mustn’t have.’

‘Sins of the fathers? Ghosts?’

‘Not the sins that you mean. There are other things beside VD that people can inherit. Things that run in a family for generations, like red hair or blue blood. Only some of them are killers. The one waiting for Blag is called Huntington’s chorea and I’d rather not talk about it at table.’

‘You said that it’s waiting for him. Does he know?’

‘He can’t know for certain. It got his father when he was in his forties. The father’s mother died of it while he was still an infant in arms. Blag’s sister was just thirty. He’s lasted the longest. If it was only syphilis he could have a blood test and know. But there’s no test for Huntington’s and he could still be a carrier. There’s no need to tell your brother all this, of course. Heaven knows what fairy tales he’d invent. Your father told me most of it.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Which reminds me. About a year ago Blag sent your father the synopsis of an idea for a play. If it survived the nursing home tidy-up he’d like it back. But I’m not going to go through your father’s papers. You’re the man of the house now. You
find it. It’ll be in one of the big suitcases. I must be off, I’m late already.’

I found it eventually, between his army papers and a war diary. It was written on two pieces of Elm Park Farm letter paper. The provisional title of Blag’s play was
A Respectable Woman’s Guide to Murder
and it was based on the life of Madeleine Smith. She was tried in 1857 for poisoning her lover, escaped the gallows by looking invincibly respectable and lived happily ever after, with a succession of legal husbands, until well into the nineteen twenties. What caught my eye first, however, was the folded paper to which the synopsis had been pinned. When unpinned and unfolded this turned out to be an art gallery reproduction of Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster portrait of the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant. In the margin there was a scribbled note in Blag’s writing.

‘You asked why I never did self-portraits. Here’s one reason. I never saw Bruant or heard him sing and I never wore a big black cape with a red scarf like this. Far too actory. But I must admit to finding that somewhat Napoleonic profile an astonishing likeness. More so as I grow older.’

And it was indeed an astonishing likeness. No doubt the cape was a prop designed to conceal short legs and a pot belly. Blag didn’t need it. He was tall and lanky. The Bruant profile, though, was just right. I went back to the play synopsis. On a space at the foot of the second page my father had pencilled a note.

‘Madeleine Smith is an interesting subject and there have been several attempts to dramatize her. At the moment, I hear, a Hollywood producer wants to make a film about her. She objects. She now lives in America, is over ninety, still highly respectable and will have the law on anyone who says different. Better wait a bit. The theme will keep.’

I put the synopsis in an envelope, addressed it to Blag at Elm Park Farm, near Pinner, Middlesex and wondered if I could find some inexpensive way of delivering it in person instead of sending it by post. I had always been curious about Elm Park Farm. My mother had spent weekends there and had been very enthusiastic. ‘It’s neither a park nor a farm,’ she had explained once; ‘but it used to be both. Now, it just shows you what a good architect can do with a walled garden, a Victorian stable yard
and a fire-gutted Regency house.’ For guests it was ‘deliciously comfortable’, though she didn’t much care for old Mrs Cole, the ‘eternal music teacher’. However, Aunt Alice, her sister, wasn’t a bad sort. ‘Tweedy. Plays golf.’

Luckily, I remembered something else my mother had said. ‘It’s easy to get to. You take the Metropolitan line to Pinner and Blag has a hire car waiting at the station to pick you up. Or you can go to Rickmansworth and get a country bus.’ I posted the synopsis with the Lautrec repro to Blag and consoled myself with the diary.

It wasn’t really about the war; it was about the efforts of a professional actor with a ‘hostilities-only’ commission in the Fusiliers to run an army divisional concert party in northern Greece. This was between courses of treatment at a military field hospital. There were long lists of names taken at auditions with comments on the participants – mostly
nbg.
There were the occasional discoveries – ‘Cpl Hughes R. fair baritone, better pianist, can sight-read and transpose.’ The times he spent in hospital seemed, on the whole, more enjoyable. The doctors had a mess tent to themselves which he was allowed to use; an actor who can tell funny stories well is always good company. It was there that he got to know Blag who had done a lot of sketching in the hospital. Blag was popular in the mess because he brought the high command gossip he picked up from the Italians and the French. He also liked talking medical ‘shop’. The doctors didn’t mind this because, for a layman, he was well informed, particularly about diseases of the central nervous system. On the subject of child-birth, however, he could make a fool of himself. My father recorded a boozy Burns night dialogue between Blag and the Scottish senior surgeon.

Blag’s reply was to get up from the dinner table and leave the mess without another word. My father noted that this was the only time he saw Blag behave less than well. As it was Burns night none of the Scots there took any notice. On Burns night anyone was likely to behave badly. ‘Poor Blag,’ had been my father’s comment; ‘he must have known the date of his parents’ wedding day.’

Why poor? In the end I asked my mother. She sighed. ‘Really Charlie, I should have thought it was obvious. When there’s something that runs in the family, even little things, everyone wants to know what he or she was like as a baby. Even in normal families there’s a lot of lies and careful talk about such things. If he was born a nine-pound baby boy, the doctor says, he wasn’t premature. So, mother Cole was nine months pregnant with him. She had been pregnant on her wedding day. These things happen all the time. It was a wicked world, Charlie, even in good Queen Victoria’s day, God rest her soul. What are you grinning at? It’s not funny. Young Emma Blagden, the sprightly little music teacher, had a romp before she was supposed to with person or persons unknown.’