An Awfully Big Adventure

by Beryl Bainbridge

  She managed to slip three pennies up her sleeve, heart thumping, before she lost her nerve and trailed out into the café to find the two men, coats on, waiting for her by the exit.

  In the street Meredith said they would meet again when the season started. Bunny would be in charge of her. ‘But you’ve not seen me act,’ she said, startled; already she had reconciled herself to a career at Woolworth’s. He raised his eyebrows and said he rather thought he had. He told her the theatre secretary would be in touch in due course. She blushed when he shook her hand.

  ‘I look forward to meeting you again,’ said Bunny gallantly. He kissed her cheek and offered to hail a taxi.

  ‘I’ve some shopping to do,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick one up later. Uncle Vernon never travels by cab because he finds tipping degrading. Isn’t that foolish? Thank you very much for the tea.’

  It was no longer raining, and patches of cold sunlight punctured the clouds. She ran over the road as though she had just spotted someone important to her, and continued to race half way up Bold Street before stopping to look back. A tram, impeded by a coal cart, blocked her view; yet when it had rattled on she imagined she spied Meredith, hood pulled over his head, striding along Hanover Place in the direction of the river. Deep down she knew it wasn’t him. For the rest of my life, she thought, I shall glimpse you in crowds.

  She walked on up the hill towards St Luke’s where she fancied her grandfather had once played the organ. There were purple weeds blowing through the stonework of the smashed tower hanging in giddy steps beneath the sky. Uncle Vernon called it an eyesore; he couldn’t see why the corporation didn’t demolish the whole edifice and finish off what the Luftwaffe had begun. She’d argued that the church was a monument, that the shattered tower was a ladder climbing from the past to the future.

  Now she realised the past didn’t count and that her future had nothing to do with broken masonry. Love, she told herself, would be her staircase to the stars and, moved as she was by the grand ring to the sentiment, tears squeezed into her eyes.

  At the top of the hill, on the corner by the Commercial Hotel, she telephoned mother, using the three pennies pinched from the saucer in Fuller’s Café. The sun was already beginning to set, bruising the sky above the Golden Dragon.

  ‘I don’t feel guilty,’ she confided. ‘There are some actions which are expedient, wouldn’t you agree? Besides, nobody saw me.’

  Mother said the usual things.

  3

  The stage was so poorly lit it was impossible to see into the corners. The fire curtain had been lowered in an attempt to keep the worst of the dust from the auditorium. A solitary man sat astride a paint-bespattered bench sawing a length of wood. When he shoved his arm the shadow of his saw raced ahead and broke off like a blade. Geoffrey and Stella spoke in whispers, as though in church.

  ‘It’s deeper than I expected,’ Geoffrey said.

  ‘And muckier,’ said Stella who, left to herself, might have conjured a blasted heath out of the darkness, an aircraft hangar, an operatic, book-furnished study in which Faustus could sell his soul to the Devil. She was distracted by Geoffrey who was trying to tug a lock of his hair down over his forehead. It was one of his mannerisms. His hair, being coarse and crinkly, sprang back the moment he let go. Almost at once Stella tiptoed to the back of the stage and returned through the sliding door to the prop room. Geoffrey was a thorn in the flesh.

  She had thought when she was summoned to work in the theatre that she was one of a chosen few. Finding Geoffrey included in the roll-call of honour shook her illusions. He was nineteen, three years older than herself. A nephew of Rushworth, chairman of the governing board, he had recently left a military academy after firing a gun at someone he wasn’t supposed to.

  Geoffrey and Stella were both called students. George, the property master, said they were really assistant stage managers, but this way it meant the theatre didn’t have to pay them. Geoffrey wore a paisley cravat and walked with his hands clenched into fists as though he still strutted a parade ground. He kept throwing up words whose meaning Stella more or less understood but would never have had the nerve to thread into a conversation. She was shaky on pronunciation.

  For instance, button-holing Bunny, whose eyelids quivered with boredom, Geoffrey said that in his opinion T.S. Eliot was a poet manqué. He went so far as to recite several obscure lines:

  Declines. On the Rialto once.

  The rats are underneath the piles.

  The Jew is underneath the lot.

  Money in furs. The boatman smiles . . .

  It was a rum quotation. Of course Stella knew he wasn’t referring to the Rialto cinema on Upper Parliament Street, but she couldn’t help smiling. Uncle Vernon had piles.

  Geoffrey went even further and said that any man who squandered his energies on behalf of a Bank was incapable, a priori, of speaking with authority. Stella wondered whether Geoffrey was anti-Semitic. No one but a bigot, after what had happened, would lump rats and Jews together.

  It was odd Geoffrey sounding clever on account of words when in other respects he was clearly pig-ignorant. If George addressed him directly, face to face, Geoffrey stepped backwards with his chin in the air like a girl taking umbrage. When George brewed up the tea and handed it round, Geoffrey wiped the rim of the mug with his handkerchief, and sometimes the handle. He didn’t care if George saw him. Nor had he an ounce of curiosity. Stella had coughed on and off for half an hour in the snack-bar of the News Theatre in Clayton Square and he hadn’t once asked her if she was in line for consumption.

  All the same he threw her off balance. Uncle Vernon had always given her to understand she was brighter than most. His business acquaintance, Mr Harcourt, an old boy of the Liverpool Collegiate in spite of landing up in toilet rolls, had backed his assumption. But for George she might have sunk under the weight of her new-found ignorance.

  It was George rather than Bunny who took charge of her. Bunny was there, padding up and down the stone passages in his galoshes, but he was too occupied to pay her and Geoffrey much attention. It was left to George to explain that Meredith was away in London with the set designer, choosing costumes for the opening production. Until then, in the hope that Meredith would stumble across her, Stella had wasted the best part of three days hunched on the stairs turning over the pages of a library edition of Shakespeare’s tragedies. She had combed her hair so often in anticipation she imagined it had grown thinner.

  It was George who informed her that the actors wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days. One or two of the junior members might sidle in to enquire about digs, but she needn’t expect to spot Richard St Ives, the leading man, or Dorothy Blundell, his opposite number, until the very last moment. St Ives and Miss Blundell, along with Babs Osborne, the character juvenile, had been in last season’s company. It was unusual in repertory to be engaged for a second term, although before the war P.L. O’Hara, by public demand, had returned three years running. Not that St Ives could hold a candle to P.L. O’Hara. Had he wanted, and the hostilities not intervened, O’Hara might have come back for a fourth season.

  ‘What’s a character juvenile?’ asked Stella, and George said it was any girl not handsome enough to be a straight juvenile. He didn’t look her in the eye, but she wasn’t offended; she had always known to which category she belonged.

  St Ives and Dorothy Blundell shared the same digs, though there was nothing going on between them. Since playing the Queen to his King in the 1938 production of Richard II, Miss Blundell had carried a torch for P.L. O’Hara. She was wasting her time. In life, as in the play, she had never been more than an appendage. According to George, Dotty Blundell was an unrequited woman.

  St Ives preferred to woo touring actresses appearing at the Royal Court or the Empire. Having loved them, it was convenient the way they left him. Last year he’d clicked with the lead in Rose Marie, a soprano with legs that wouldn’t have disgraced a piano stool and twin infants being bottle-fed by her Mum in Bl
ackburn.

  ‘I saw it,’ cried Stella, greatly excited, remembering Lily’s birthday treat, and Uncle Vernon turning queasy in the second interval following high tea in the Golden Dragon.

  ‘Rose Marie’ had misunderstood St Ives’s intentions. Her tour had moved on to the Hippodrome in Leeds and on the Sunday, starting at dawn and driven by a trombonist in the orchestra who was sweet on her, she had motored all the way back to Liverpool. The trombone player, thinking they’d returned to collect a ration book left with the landlady, had remained outside in Faulkner Square, puffing on a cigar. He’d wound up the window when the bells of the Anglican cathedral began to ring for morning service and missed altogether the commotion inside the boarding-house. The penny having dropped – St Ives and a woman he swore was his Auntie from Cardiff were discovered in matching pyjamas, he in the top and she in the bottoms – ‘Rose Marie’ took a screwdriver, normally used to poke the fat from the gas jets on the cooker, and attempted to stab him in the groin. St Ives had got into hot water over it with Rose Lipman; she’d said he could have gone down with blood poisoning and jeopardised the season. Babs Osborne was the paramour of a Polish ex-fighter pilot who was now big in scrap metal.

  ‘He’s romancing,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ve met his sort before. He’s just trying to make out he’s pally with them all.’

  ‘The cooker bit sounds authentic,’ argued Stella. ‘You don’t mention fat for nothing.’

  She felt at ease with George. He had lent her a dark blue overall to guard her clothes from the dust. It covered almost completely the mustard-coloured slacks and jumper that Lily had bought her. Once, running back across the square from Brown’s café with a fried-egg sandwich for Bunny, she had bumped into Uncle Vernon. He had been to St John’s market to buy a lump of pork and looked beaten.

  ‘What are you got up like that for?’ he had demanded, outraged at her appearance.

  ‘It’s a sort of uniform,’ she said. ‘It’s obligatory.’

  The next day, seeing her dressed in such workmanlike attire, Bunny had disconcertingly handed her a measuring rule and a stub of chalk and instructed her to work out the dimensions of a door, stage right, which would feature on the set of Dangerous Corner. He had talked mysteriously of an angle of forty-five degrees. Half an hour later, returning to the wings and finding the boards unmarked, he had sought Stella out in the prop room. She was making a great show of sand-papering the wheels of the bicycle perched on the sofa. ‘Anything wrong?’ he said. He was very pale and his lips looked swollen.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean about dimensions,’ she said.

  ‘What particular bit defeats you?’ he asked patiently.

  ‘All of it,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never got the hang of feet and inches.’ She knew by his expression, the clamp of his dry mouth, that he was annoyed. ‘I’m not being awkward,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I had a disturbed schooling.’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ he retorted, and sent her upstairs to fetch Geoffrey down from the paint-frame. Geoffrey laid a newspaper on the stage to protect the knees of his cavalry-twill trousers and finished the task in two minutes flat.

  ‘It’s not that I thought the job demeaning,’ Stella assured George. ‘Uncle Vernon says I haven’t the humility to find anything beneath me.’

  There and then George made her measure the rail of the fire-guard. Twice the rule snapped back and drew blood. ‘There must be a better way of learning something,’ whined Stella, sucking her fingers. ‘Get away,’ said George, whose own knowledge of such things had been acquired through pain.

  At fourteen he had gone straight from St Aloysius’s school to shift scenery at the Royal Court. If he slopped whitewash onto the floor the stage manager clouted him over the ear with the brush and, if he forgot to grease the rag in which the tools were rolled, at curtain fall he had sixpence docked from his wages. When he cut short a length of timber the master carpenter brought the saw down on his knuckles.

  Having learnt all he could, George had given in his notice and applied up the road to the Repertory Company. His very first job had been in that celebrated production of Richard II in which P.L. O’Hara had performed the King. The designer, who was later blown to smithereens at Tripoli, had wanted the deposed Richard ranting and roaming beneath the underground arches of a palace ‘. . . I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I dwell unto the world . . .’ and George, a man accustomed to sleeping eight to a room, the condensation weeping down the cellar walls, the baby coughing itself into the Infirmary, had sketched out a confined space, a simple box-like structure just roomy enough for a man to stand up in.

  The local newspaper had commented in its review: ‘The King’s face, petulant, wilful, caught in a noose of light from the number one flood, floated in darkness . . . when Exton entered and struck weak Richard down, such was the power of the set, the shadow of the prison bars rearing like spears against the backcloth, there was not a woman in the stalls worthy of her sex who could refrain from weeping.’

  Then the war came, and George joined the Merchant Navy. Two years later his ship was torpedoed twenty-four hours out of Trinidad. He spent nine days adrift in an open boat, croaking out Christmas carols and spitting up oil.

  Stella was used to such stories. Every man she had ever met told tales of escape and heroism and immersion. They had gone down in submarines, stolen through frontiers disguised as postmen, limped home across the Channel on a wing and a prayer. The commercial travellers pushed back sleeves and rolled up trouser legs to point at scars; they tapped their skulls to show where the shrapnel still lodged.

  George’s chief officer had collapsed in the boat. They tried to lay him flat, but he was so badly burnt he was trapped upright with his fingers stuck to the gunnel. George had scraped the skin free with his teeth. The cobweb of a hand, like a woman’s lace glove, clung to the wood until the salt spray dashed it away.

  ‘How awful,’ said Stella dutifully. George was rocking over the fireguard and smiling. It was astonishing to Stella how fondly men remembered their darkest hours.

  P.L. O’Hara had risen to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. In 1944 he’d sent George a postcard of an old man tapping his way up a village street somewhere in the Cotswolds. The card was pinned to the wall beneath the moose, alongside the yellowing cutting of the review of Richard II.

  ‘I wish I’d seen the play,’ said Stella, kindly.

  Geoffrey said it was absurd to think the designer had taken the slightest heed of any suggestion put forward by the likes of George. And furthermore, if Captain Bee’s Knees O’Hara was the great actor he was cracked up to be, why hadn’t he been snapped up by Hollywood instead of returning year after year to the provinces?

  ‘Why don’t you like George?’ asked Stella, when they were upstairs, on the third floor, cleaning out the extra’s dressing room.

  ‘But I do,’ he protested. ‘He has considerable native intelligence.’

  ‘He’s not a nigger,’ she said, and noticed how he winced. He was wearing a pair of woollen mittens discovered in a cupboard; he was afraid of dirt. He was washing the long mirror with a scrunched-up page of the Evening Echo dunked under the running tap of the basin and his mittens were sopping wet.

  ‘You’d be better off without them,’ she advised. Her own hands were black with newsprint. She couldn’t quite reach the corners of the glass and was stretching on tiptoe across the dressing-table when Geoffrey put his arm round her shoulders. It wasn’t an accident; he was breathing too hard. She was about to shrug him away when she thought of Meredith. Rehearsing with Geoffrey would make it easier when the time came for Meredith to claim her. Penetration, from what she had gathered from library books, was inescapably painful unless one had played a lot of tennis or ridden stallions, and she hadn’t done either. Despite his Gestapo monocle, Meredith, as a man of the world, might be put off if she screamed. Hastily swallowing the liquorice George had given her earlier that morning, she swivelled round, eyes shu
t, and waited.

  Ignoring her lips, Geoffrey nuzzled her ear. Even if it had been Meredith she didn’t think she would have found it very exciting. She was reminded of the time she’d taken part in Children’s Hour and they’d showed her how to simulate a rising storm by panting sideways into the microphone.

  She began to stroke Geoffrey’s harsh hair. It was a womanly gesture witnessed often enough on the screen at the cinema. She supposed it was maternal rather than sensual; it was what women did for babies, to make them feel secure and stop their heads from wobbling.

  She was glad her ears were clean. Every fortnight, on bath night, Lily probed them with a kirby-grip. Uncle Vernon said it was a dangerous thing to do. Stella could be perforated. Squirming, she left off cradling Geoffrey’s head and brought her hand down to separate her stomach from his. It was disgusting really, linking men with babies.

  Something with the texture of an orange, peeled and sticky, bumped against her wrist. She couldn’t suppress crying out her distaste, any more than she could help envying Geoffrey his lack of inhibition. On occasions, when visiting the doctor for some minor ailment, she had even felt it immodest to stick out her tongue. She didn’t dare look down in case she glimpsed that object bobbing against her overall.

  It’s no use, she thought. I’ll have to practise on someone else. It would be fearful enough to be up against something as dreadful as that belonging to a beloved, let alone attached to a person one despised. Punching Geoffrey in the chest she broke free from his arms and leapt upwards to swipe a cobweb from the ceiling. She was shaking all over and yet she felt much fonder of him now that he’d behaved so rudely. Even his hair looked different, less annoying.