Theatre Shoes

by Noel Streatfeild

  The last act the children thought lovely. Things began to come right just like a fairy story. The act opened where the last one had ended, and there was grandmama searching through the family unable to believe that Letty had the spunk to plan an elopement, and sure enough she presently found that Sylvia was the culprit. Sylvia came down in her dressing-gown escorted by her governess, and that was the first time papa and grandmama were completely in agreement.

  “That child,” said grandmama, “must be whipped.”

  Mark, who was hanging over the edge of the box, bounced on his seat.

  “Goody, goody, goody. I bet she hates that!”

  Aunt Lindsey told him to be quiet, but Mark gave Sorrel a nudge to show that, although he was going to be quiet, he still thought the being beaten was a very good idea.

  The curtain was dropped for a moment in the middle of the act to show the passing of time, and presently grandmama’s boxes were being carried downstairs, and grandmama, all feathers and twinkles, was going to drive away again. Then, even before the last of the horses’ hoofs had clopped out of earshot, you could see papa swelling and going back to his ordinary self, and he was ordering his family about just as he had before grandmama had arrived. Of course, things were not quite the same, because Letty was being married, and there was something to do with debts and money that was not going to happen, and Sylvia had been beaten. Unbelievable though it might seem, papa even forgot that his family now knew what his mother was like, for just as the curtain fell, he said:

  “As my dear Mama …”

  Grandmama held Miranda’s hand when they took the final curtain. All the ladies curtseyed to the ground and the men bowed and the audience clapped and clapped, and the author, who was dressed as an officer in the Air Force, came on and bowed and made a speech, and then the play was over. Aunt Lindsey took the children through the pass door across the stage to see Grandmother. Seeing Grandmother in the theatre was very like seeing her in the drawing-room. Aunt Lindsey knocked on the door and Alice looked out and then went back into the dressing-room.

  “Mrs. Cohen and the children to see you, dear.”

  Aunt Lindsey, when she got inside, behaved, not like herself, but like Aunt Lindsey on Christmas Day. She held one of Grandmother’s hands in both of hers and said, “Wonderful, Mother! Wonderful!”

  Grandmother had taken off her stage dress and was in a dressing-gown. She pretended to be seeing to the frills on it, but really you could see she was attending entirely to Aunt Lindsey.

  “How do you think it went? Was I really all right? They seemed to like it, didn’t they?”

  “Ate it,” said Alice. “I told you from the beginning it was just the sort of sentimental stuff they would eat.”

  Grandmother turned to the children.

  “And how did you like it?”

  “It was super,” said Sorrel.

  Miriam leant against her Grandmother’s chair.

  “I thought it was a lovely play.”

  Grandmother looked at Mark.

  “What about you, grandson?”

  “I liked every single moment of it, but best of all I liked the bit where Miranda was whipped. But I thought it a pity that happened upstairs.”

  “I thought you had such lovely dresses,” Holly broke in. “I would like to have a little hat and muff like Miranda wore.”

  Grandmother was looking severely at Mark.

  “You’re a bad boy.” She turned to Aunt Lindsey. “Miranda’s done very well. The children might go up and see her. She’s on the next floor.”

  A lot of people came in to see Grandmother, and Alice was busy showing them in, so the children went alone to see Miranda. They would have been shy about finding their way if Miriam had not been there, but Miriam was quite used to the back of theatres. She led the way along the passage and up some grey stone steps, and pushed her way through the people who were standing in the passage, and read the names on the different doors until they came to a door marked number nine, which had a card on it, “Miss Miranda Brain.” Miriam thumped on the door.

  “It’s us, Miranda. Can we come in?”

  Aunt Marguerite and Uncle Francis were on tour, so Miranda’s governess had brought her to the theatre. The children had not met her before, and she looked, they thought, rather nice. She had pretty grey hair and a smiling face. Miranda was sitting at her dressing-table taking off her make-up.

  “Hullo! Did you like it?”

  Miriam was prowling round examining Miranda’s clothes, which were hanging on pegs on the walls.

  “You were awfully good. Everybody thought so.”

  Miranda seemed much easier to talk to than usual. She swung round in her chair.

  “I was dreadfully nervous at the beginning. Did it show? Do you like my clothes? Grandmother said she was pleased. Did she say anything about me to you? Did …”

  Miranda’s governess gently patted her shoulder.

  “Come along, dear, get your make-up off. The car will be here and I want to get you home for your supper.” She turned to the children. “Her father has hired a car for to-night as it’s her first night, and I don’t want her to be late because we’ve got two shows to-morrow.”

  Sorrel awfully wanted to have a real look at Miranda’s clothes, and to read all the telegrams she had got pinned up on the wall, but she could see the governess did not really want them in the room.

  “Well, we just came to tell you how good you were, Miranda, and, anyway, I think we ought to be going, we left our coats in the cloakroom when we came in.” She hesitated by Miranda. It seemed rude just to walk out, and yet she was not the sort of person you kissed.

  Miranda surprised them all. She jumped up and kissed each of them.

  “Good-night. I’m glad you came round. Hold your thumbs for me; I am so terribly fussed what the papers will say to-morrow. It’s sickening Daddy and Mummy can’t be here. It’s so flat just going home.”

  Grandmother was being taken out to supper, so Alice took the children home. It took ages to get a taxi, and when they had got into it safely, what with the excitement and one thing and another, they were all half-asleep. Alice put Holly on her knee and Mark leant on her one side, and Sorrel on the other.

  “That’s right,” said Alice. “You make yourselves at home. That’s what shoulders are for. Make very comfortable weeping willows.”

  CHAPTER XV

  HOLLY

  Miranda had made an immense success. The notices said such things as “the evening really belonged to little Miss Brain.” “This latest shoot from the Warren tree seems to hold promise of bearing a crop of talent unusual even from a branch from this parent stem.” The other type of paper, which did not write in that grand way, said such things as “Miranda romps home” and “Child star born in a night.” One paper was tactless enough to say that Miranda acted everybody, including her Grandmother, off the stage. The children did not see these notices themselves, but they heard Alice telling Hannah about them at meals.

  “We’ve taken it very well; I must say that. No one can say that we grudge the child her success, but we’re afraid of early success, and quite right, too. A child star born in a night, indeed! One cloud no bigger than an acorn and that star will be out. We know; we’ve seen it.”

  “But if Miranda takes her part so nicely,” said Hannah, “that’s not to say she couldn’t do another, is it?”

  Alice spoke with the weight of one who knew.

  “It isn’t that they mean any harm, these critics, nor the public don’t either, but they rocket somebody into the sky and there they sit sparkling and twinkling with no more to keep them there than one of these tracer bullets. Then everybody’s surprised when they drop. You see, the next part may be more difficult or wrong for their personality or that, and they haven’t the technique to put it over, then what happens? Screams from the papers: ‘Mr. or Miss So-and-so doesn’t fulfil early promise.’ ‘I was disappointed in the performance of Miss So-and-so.’ No, there’s just one way
for sure success and that’s building up your knowledge and your reputation together, and when you do that you can’t topple off, it’s like having a concrete house under you.”

  Sorrel broke into the conversation.

  “Don’t you think that perhaps Miranda’s different, that she just has to be good?”

  Alice nodded.

  “Shouldn’t wonder at all; clever as a cartload of monkeys. But that won’t stop her having her ups and downs like the rest; the higher she climbs the harder the bump when she falls. There isn’t such a thing, from what I’ve seen, as an easy road to success.”

  Oddly enough, success did not seem to have done Miranda any harm, but neither had it done her any good. She went on being very much herself. Because of her theatre work she no longer came to the Academy for lessons, but did them at home with her governess. She came to the Academy only for special dancing. Two ballet classes a week and two tap and all in the mornings. Sorrel only met her at one of these classes. The work was really too advanced for her, but it so happened that there was no other dancing class on that particular day which could fit in with her school work, and so she attended the dancing class with her lesson form. As the work was too advanced for Sorrel, she sat down and watched a lot of it, and this brought her in contact with Miranda’s governess, Miss Smith. Miss Smith had, in a long career of governessing, been used to houses in which, at suitable intervals, cousins came to stay, and it worried her that the Forbes children never came to the house, or Miriam either, if it came to that.

  “You see, all the autumn your uncle and aunt were rehearsing as well as working,” she apologised, “and now they’re away on tour and, of course, Miranda and I live very simply. You’ve no idea how hard it is now term has begun to fit in her lessons as well as eight performances a week, and her dancing classes. She gets very tired, poor child.”

  Sorrel looked at Miss Smith’s nice face and thought that it looked tired, and she was not surprised, for she could imagine that Miranda tired would make anybody who had to look after her very tired indeed.

  “One day,” said Sorrel, “Alice is going to take me behind for a Saturday matinée. She’s going to get Grandmother to ask the stage manager if I could stand on the side of the stage. Perhaps that day I could come up and see Miranda.”

  Miss Smith looked pleased.

  “Of course. You’ll come and have tea in the dressing-room. I’ll ask Alice to let me know in plenty of time that you’re coming, and I’ll run out in the morning and see if I can get something nice. There’s a shop near us where, if you’re early enough, you can get a sandwich with a kind of cream spread. Of course, it isn’t cream spread really, but I think you’ll like it.”

  Sorrel, though she knew that she would like the cream spread, felt Miss Smith had too much to do to go trotting about buying cakes for her.

  “Please don’t bother to get anything extra. We hardly ever do have cake, so I wouldn’t miss it.”

  Miss Smith looked at her with fondness.

  “That’s nice of you.” She lowered her voice. “But as a matter of fact, it will be nice for Mary. She’s the understudy, such a dear little girl. She sits in our room because, as of course you know, somebody has to be with her, and I can save her poor mother. There are four other children at home and her father’s in the Army, so I’m glad to help. It isn’t much fun understudying, I’m afraid, and one way and another she has a hard time.”

  Sorrel thought about Mary. That must be a very nasty job understudying Miranda. She could just imagine how it would be. Miranda very much owning the dressing-room and expecting you to sit in the corner and be humble.

  Miss Smith was looking at Sorrel’s shoes.

  “How worn your dancing sandals are getting.”

  Sorrel sighed.

  “Everything about me is getting worn. I’m still wearing my school uniform because it lets down, but it’s getting pretty shabby and there’s something about wearing the uniform of a school that you don’t any more belong to that is humiliating. The only thing I’ve got that’s really good is that simply lovely frock Aunt Lindsey made for the first night, but I shouldn’t think I’d ever put that on again, because we never go to any parties, and Hannah says it’s too smart for church. I’ve got enough coupons for a dress if I absolutely had to have one, but, as a matter of fact, I don’t absolutely have to have one, so I expect they’ll go on shoes and underclothes.”

  Miss Smith laughed.

  “What a dreary picture! But I can tell you one occasion when you’ll be able to wear a frock. Your uncle and aunt are going to do ‘The Tempest’ for a season in London, in about May or June, and you can wear the frock for the first night then, and if the worst comes to the worst we must give a party for Miranda’s fourteenth birthday. It couldn’t be a very big party, of course, because of the food, but we could mark the invitations ‘party frocks will be worn.’” She looked back again at Sorrel’s shoes. “Miranda had to have some new shoes lately; she’s still wearing her old sandals and tap shoes, but I was thinking the other day she ought not, they’re pinching her toes, and she’s got a lot of pairs of socks that have shrunk in the wash. You’re so much smaller than she is, so they will either fit you right away or you can grow into them. I’ll bring the things to her class to-morrow and put them in her locker, and you can fetch them from there. We’ve got an old attaché case I’ll put them in; it’ll make it easy for you to carry them home.”

  The next evening Mark and Holly saw the attaché case in Sorrel’s hand. They asked so many questions about it that they fell out on top of each other.

  “Whose is it?”

  “How did you get it?”

  “Is it your very own?”

  “Could I, oh, could I carry it?”

  Sorrel explained the sad truth that it was Miranda’s, but she was very fair about it. She agreed that each of them in turn should carry it. Holly as far as Russell Square station, Mark on the Tube, and she from Knightsbridge home, and the next morning the system would be reversed. Holly would carry it from home to Knightsbridge, and she would carry it on the Tube, and Mark from Russell Square to the Academy. Holly was so shocked at this arrangement that she stood still, as if her legs were refusing to walk any more.

  “But, Sorrel, Mark’s doing the one bit that matters. He’s carrying it where all the Academy can see him; couldn’t, oh, couldn’t I have that bit?”

  As a matter of fact the moment Sorrel had divided up the carrying arrangements for the attaché case she had realised that she had given Mark the one bit that mattered, but even as she had made the arrangement she had seen his face, and it would be impossible for anyone to look more pleased, so she gave Holly a little push to hurry her along.

  “No, I’ve said that’s what’s going to happen, so that’s what is going to happen, and it’s no good arguing.” Then she turned to Mark, “But at the bottom of the Academy steps you’ll hand it to me, for I’ve got to put it back in Miranda’s locker.” She passed the attaché case to Holly. “There you are. Make the best of it, you’ve only got it as far as Russell Square.”

  They walked along in silence for a bit, eyeing the case, and then Mark said what was in all their minds.

  “To think there could be a person in the world with an attaché case like that that was only their second best.”

  For Mark, Miranda’s attaché case was eclipsed the next day by a letter from Petrova.

  DEAR MARK,

  I’ve heard from Pauline about you and I have written to Madame to say that I will give you the same as Pauline gives Sorrel and Posy gives Holly. This will, of course, include a shilling pocket-money. I have also sent two pounds for your Christmas present. I would have written before, but I have been posted to a different place for a week or two, and Gum (my Great-Uncle Matthew) never can remember to forward letters.

  I hope you like the Academy. I simply hated it myself, but then I had no talent.

  Yours,

  PETROVA.

  P.S. Let me know if you
want anything special—a spanner or anything like that.

  Madame sent for Mark and told him she had got his two pounds and he could have it whenever he liked, and that she would give him his shilling every week as she did Sorrel and Holly. She said that she was going to make a formal announcement about the scholarships and she had only been waiting for this letter from Petrova to do it, and would he find Holly and send her to her.

  Holly was devoted to Madame. She came skipping along the corridor and only collected herself at the door of the study. However devoted you were to Madame she was not the sort of person that even the most careless child would burst in on. She pulled her black tunic straight, pulled up her socks, felt her hair-ribbon to be sure it was holding back her curls properly, and tapped on the door. In answer to Madame’s “Come in,” she opened the door and made a really beautiful curtsey before saying “Madame.”

  Madame was sitting at her desk. She held out her hand.

  “Come here, my child.” When Holly came to her she put an arm round her. Holly wanted to play with the fringe of Madame’s cerise shawl, but Madame took hold of her hands and held them. “I want to talk to you about Posy’s scholarship. As you’ve heard from Posy, she’s making another scholarship especially for you. What she means by that is that she would like to pay for the training of somebody at the Academy, but that her scholarship and all her interest and her letters are to go to a dancer if I can find one. Posy was always like that. She eats and sleeps and lives dancing. I was afraid that I wouldn’t find her the sort of dancer she wanted, as we haven’t had one since she was here, but now I think I can say I’ve found a dancer, and you know who that is, don’t you?”

  Holly nodded. All the children in the Academy knew that.

  “Miriam.”

  Madame held her tight.

  “Yes, Miriam. Would you mind very much if you only just had the money? You’ll get your pocket-money every week and birthday and Christmas presents, but it is only fair to tell you that when it comes to writing letters, at which Posy was always very bad, I think they’ll go to Miriam.”