An Awfully Big Adventure

by Beryl Bainbridge

  She crouched back into the shadows and saw Geoffrey run headlong down the stairs. He came and went so quickly that she might not have known it was him save for the flash of his yellow cravat under the gas-lamp. There was silence for a few seconds and then she heard Meredith’s voice: ‘Not to worry. He’ll get over it by the morning.’ She wondered if Geoffrey had complained about not getting a bigger part.

  The door of Meredith’s office slammed shut and he and John Harbour appeared round the bend of the passage. She was going to call out to them, but something in Meredith’s face stopped her, and the next instant he had swept down the stairs with his arm about John Harbour’s shoulders and was gone.

  The dress rehearsal of Caesar and Cleopatra lasted nine hours. Cleopatra’s barge wouldn’t slide off the stage properly and the sphinx proved difficult to light. There was Cleopatra simpering away in her best Shirley Temple voice, ‘Old gentleman, . . . don’t go, old gentleman’, and the spot couldn’t find her. St Ives shouted, ‘Can you hear me, mother?’, and everyone laughed, and then Meredith pulled the hood of his duffle coat over his eyes and lay full length in the centre aisle and moaned. Everyone laughed again, but it was obviously no joking matter because Bunny flew into a rage, dancing up and down, sending the dust spiralling like fireflies above the footlights as he thundered, ‘Quiet, please.’ He was worn out trying to control the University students who dropped their spears on the stairs and chatted loudly to each other in the wings.

  Bunny wasn’t the only one to lose his temper. Desmond Fairchild and Dotty Blundell were heard arguing in the corridor, though no one could be sure what was at issue. He was supposed to have called her a cow, or something worse, and she had slapped his face, at which, according to George, he had returned the blow.

  Vernon telephoned twice to know what Stella was up to. On the first occasion Bunny was tactful, assuring him she would be sent home in a taxi at any moment. In response to the second enquiry he said tersely, ‘Look here, she’s not working in a bank, you know’, and hung up.

  Stella didn’t know about the telephone calls. When she wasn’t required for her scene in the court room of Alexandria she was fetching and carrying and dabbing calamine lotion on the shoulders of John Harbour who, earlier in the day, had been broiled pink as a lobster by inexpertly using a sun-lamp.

  A small pale woman with a pink bow in her hair sat in Grace Bird’s dressing-room for most of the evening. George told Geoffrey she had been engaged to play Peter Pan in the next production. Babs Osborne was too tall for the part, and besides the woman had played the part before, the time P.L. O’Hara had appeared as Captain Hook. Out front, yawning in the stalls, sat the priests.

  On the first night Rose Lipman came backstage as usual to wish the cast good luck. Bunny complained of a fearful draught coming from the front of the house. ‘There’s nowt wrong,’ she said. ‘It’s just the wind from the gents.’

  Uncle Vernon and Lily were in the audience. They thought Stella was wonderful, though Lily gasped audibly when, in the middle of her speech, she had to be helped out by a man in a white toga. ‘Don’t act soft,’ whispered Vernon. ‘She’s meant to hesitate.’

  During the interval they bumped into Mrs Ackerley in the foyer. She was with a man in plus-fours who, she claimed, was her husband. She pronounced both Stella and the production excellent. ‘I didn’t recognise her at first,’ Lily told her. ‘She looked very haughty, didn’t she?’

  Mrs Ackerley introduced Vernon and Lily to no less a personage than Freddie Reynalde. He wasn’t on the piano in this intermission because in the next act they were using the orchestra pit as part of the scenery. Mr Reynalde, on realising who they were, said that Stella was an interesting child.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Lily asked Vernon, when they were queuing to buy a round of drinks. She would have preferred Stella to have been labelled as ‘nice’ or ‘well-mannered’; ‘interesting’ was a shade ambiguous. ‘Get back and be social,’ hissed Vernon.

  Afterwards they waited outside the stage door to take Stella home. Other people went inside, including the Ackerleys, but Vernon knew Stella would hide in a cupboard or show them up if they were bold enough to enter. Once, the doorkeeper popped his head out and asked if they wanted to hand in autograph books. Lily said, ‘No, we can get Miss Bradshaw’s signature any time we want it’, and Vernon shouted that they had a perfect right to loiter on a public pavement.

  The leading man came out arm in arm with a girl with corkscrew curls, followed by a chap in a duffle coat, who wore a monocle and flashed a sardonic smile as though he was a member of the SS.

  Stella kept them waiting a long time, and when she did appear she sprinted off down the street ahead of them. They caught up with her in Cases Street, crouching on her haunches outside the tobacconist’s.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ cried Lily, ‘stop making an exhibition of us.’ Stella compromised by walking behind them. Every time Vernon looked back she was striding with her chin tilted theatrically, her eyes fixed on the smoky heavens. ‘I can’t take much more of this,’ he confided to Lily, and she told him to shush. ‘It’s not as if she’s ever been any different,’ she said.

  Though it was late when they reached home, he felt compelled to ring Harcourt.

  ‘You must be pleased,’ Harcourt said, ‘her playing Cleopatra’s brother.’

  ‘Husband,’ corrected Vernon. ‘Even if he is ten years old.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he’s also her brother.’

  ‘I’m not all that familiar with the play myself,’ Vernon admitted. ‘Naturally it’s set in foreign parts. You will go and see it, I trust?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it for worlds,’ Harcourt enthused.

  ‘She’s lost weight,’ said Vernon. A sparrow eats more. Leastways when she’s home. Consequently she’s got the beginnings of a nasty boil on her arm.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Harcourt said. ‘That should be nipped in the bud.’

  ‘It’s in hand, rest assured,’ said Vernon. He cleared his throat. ‘There’s a picture appeared in her room, the size of a postcard, of a fellow with a crown of thorns. You know the sort of thing.’

  ‘Jesus, you mean?’ said Harcourt.

  ‘He’s holding a lantern.’

  ‘That’ll be him,’ Harcourt said.

  ‘One of her lines . . . as the king . . . goes on about the Gods not suffering the unpiety of his sister to go unpunished. They’re heathen gods, you understand.’ He cleared his throat again.

  ‘It’s all part of the play,’ soothed Harcourt. ‘I shouldn’t attach too much importance to it. She’s at an impressionable age and she’s mixing with some very odd people.’

  ‘Odd?’ said Vernon.

  ‘Not exactly odd,’ amended Harcourt. ‘I just mean they’re not exactly the sort of people she’d be rubbing shoulders with if she was working in a bank. And there’s been a resurgence of interest in religion, you know. It’s a reaction to the war. People are looking for guidance.’

  ‘There’s no call to go looking in that direction,’ Vernon said.

  ‘Go along with it,’ urged Harcourt. ‘Put yourself in her place.’

  Vernon couldn’t. There was nothing in the girl’s present that remotely matched up to his past. He ordered some carbolic soap and abruptly hung up.

  Lily asked him what was wrong; he had a face on him.

  ‘I’ve just got off on the wrong foot with Harcourt. I meant to be open with him but when it came to it I beat about the bush. It had something to do with his tone. I often think he regards me as a fool.

  ‘I thought he was the cat’s whiskers in your books,’ Lily said. She was secretly pleased at this sudden spark of criticism leaping towards the almighty Harcourt.

  ‘I’m worried,’ fretted Vernon. ‘I can’t get over how different things are to the way it was when we were young. I can’t keep pace. Can you imagine what it must feel like to our Stella?’

  Lily remembered being cold, being hungry; how before she went t
o bed her mother had scorched the skirting board with the flame of a kerosene lamp to make the bugs jump out of the walls.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t. I’d never even been on a train until I was past thirty and if you recall that was no joyride, simply a mercy dash to get Renée out of one of her scrapes.’

  ‘Does it count for nothing?’ Vernon said. ‘Was it in vain? All that misery!’

  Lily felt uncomfortable. If she hadn’t known better she’d have thought he’d been drinking. ‘I’m thinking of giving them rabbit tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a different world, isn’t it,’ he pondered. ‘She takes pocket money for granted. Likewise baths.’

  ‘Not to mention telephones,’ Lily said.

  ‘If only we knew the sort of people she was mixing with. They may be educated but that doesn’t mean they have standards. I don’t want her made unhappy. I don’t want her to get out of her depth. I know she’ll learn in time but I want her to avoid the pitfalls.’

  ‘I’ll need carrots,’ said Lily.

  ‘I’d just like to bump into that Potter fellow she’s always on about.’

  ‘Some hopes,’ Lily said. ‘She’d die first.’

  Vernon went upstairs with the intention of ringing Harcourt again, but the lounge door was ajar and he was seen by the soap salesman who was playing gin rummy with the traveller in miscellaneous stationery. They asked him if they were making too much noise and he said no, not at all, he was just checking that everything was in order.

  He opened the front door and stood for a moment on the step looking at the glimmer of light touching the pale dome of the church and the glow of the city thrown up against the sky. In the opposite direction the street sloped downhill in darkness. Someone had chucked a brick through the gas-mantle on the corner by the Cathedral railings and it hadn’t been replaced. There was fog rolling in across the river. Out in the bay sounded the distant boom of a buoy warning of danger.

  7

  The read-through of Peter Pan took place in the foyer beneath the back stalls. Decorated in lime-green and pink, its columns twined with formal festoons and palm trees of plaster in low relief, it smelt of coffee and cigars. Once, in the days when the building was known as Kelly’s Star Music Hall, the space had served as a beer cellar.

  ‘There are numerous books on the meaning behind this particular play,’ Meredith said. ‘I’ve read most of them and am of the opinion they do the author a disservice. I’m not qualified to judge whether the grief his mother felt on the death of his elder brother had an adverse effect on Mr Barrie’s emotional development, nor do I care one way or the other. We all have our crosses to bear. Sufficient to say that I regard the play as pure make-believe. I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations.’

  Bunny was frowning; the woman, who the night before had worn a bow in her hair, stared obliquely at Meredith. Her eyes were nearer black than brown and she wore woollen knee stockings; from a distance she could have been mistaken for a child, of either sex. Her name was Mary Deare and she had played the title role twice before; once in 1922 at the Scala Theatre, London, and again, fifteen years later, for the repertory company.

  She radiated a peculiar authority – they all felt it – yet when she spoke it was in a small, flat voice hardly above a whisper. Within a moment of her arrival St Ives put on the rimless spectacles he detested, though usually he preferred to squint blindly down at the book rather than be seen in them. Desmond Fairchild was the only one who addressed her directly, and even he removed his hat for the occasion, standing deferentially in front of her, head unaccustomedly bowed as she stood, pigeon-toed in ballet slippers, sipping her coffee at the foyer bar. According to Dotty, Fairchild, while still in short trousers, had played Slightly in the Scala production of 1922.

  George, who was to be in charge of the wires, having earlier walked round her as if he were the hangman measuring her for the drop, said Mary Deare would come into her own when she flew. She was built like a swallow. Secretly Stella thought Mary Deare resembled a monkey rather than a bird; it was those opaque, unblinking eyes.

  The read-through finished at midday to give St Ives a rest before the evening performance of Caesar and Cleopatra. Stella and Geoffrey stood in for the ‘lost boys’. In compliance with the licensing laws the children’s rehearsal wasn’t to be held until later in the afternoon. Not for another ten days would the Tiger Lily girls, recruited from Miss Thelma Broadbent’s school of tap-dancing at Crane Hall, put in an appearance.

  It went to Geoffrey’s head that he’d been cast as Mullins, the pirate. Somebody very distinguished had played the part in the last London production. When Meredith asked him to pop out for cigarettes, he replied vulgarly, ‘What did your last servant die of?’ He didn’t raise his voice but he intended to be heard. Meredith frowned, then smirked, and John Harbour, punching Geoffrey playfully on the shoulder, called out, ‘My, my! We are hoity-toity this morning.’

  Bunny told Stella that in addition to understudying Michael he wanted her to manage Tinkerbell. ‘What exactly does that entail?’ she asked. He explained she had to stand in the wings directing the beam of a torch at a strategically placed mirror which would send a reflection of light dancing across the back-cloth of Never-Never Land. At the same time she’d need to ring a little hand-bell. She expressed alarm at being in control of such a complicated procedure.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ Bunny assured her. ‘Surely, you were in the Girl Guides.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have me,’ she said crossly.

  ‘It’s rather like flashing signals from a convenient hilltop.’

  ‘I’ve an aversion to flickering lights,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d told you.’

  She wanted sympathy from Freddie Reynalde, but he wasn’t concentrating. ‘There’s something in my past,’ she confided, ‘which makes it difficult for me to confront night lights . . . something I can’t go into. Sufficient to say it’s the stuff of nightmares.’

  ‘You’re a bright girl,’ he said. ‘You’ll soon get the hang of it,’ and he launched into a story concerning himself and P.L. O’Hara on a motorcycle ride to the Brontë sisters’ vicarage at Haworth. As far as she could tell it had no relevance to her own predicament. On the moors O’Hara had endeavoured to summon up Heathcliff, and a gust of wind from beyond the grave had blown the cycle off course and toppled them both into a ditch.

  Geoffrey, spying Stella mooning about the prop room, imagined she was upset because she was only an understudy.

  ‘In this precarious profession,’ he informed her, ‘one is lucky to have a foot in the door. It doesn’t do to get too big for one’s boots.’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from you,’ she said witheringly. ‘It’s not me that goes round swearing at one’s betters and pelting downstairs like a loony.’ Thinking about it, she didn’t mind in the least not having a proper part. If she couldn’t be Peter she was quite prepared, once she’d mastered the technicalities, to hide behind a reflection.

  All the same that evening in the dressing-room she shared with Babs Osborne and Dawn Allenby she apologised for being in the way.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ cried Babs, ‘you’ve as much right to be here as we have.’

  ‘More, in fact,’ said Dawn, who, as a lowly handmaiden to Cleopatra was conscious that, but for her age and previous experience, she would have been marooned on the top floor with the extras.

  Stella hoped Babs would mention her reticence in the Oyster Bar when Meredith was present. ‘She has little or no sense of her own importance,’ she might say. ‘What an asset in one so young.’ And Meredith would perhaps reply, ‘How right you are. Such modesty and lack of bombast is quite remarkable.’ Then at closing time, he would climb Brownlow Hill to the Commercial Hotel, arm in arm with Bunny, thinking of her, of how special she was, pondering on her remarkable reticence.

  Not that she spent more than half an hour each night in her own dressing-room. She had her backstage duties to attend to, an
d when she was wasn’t in front of the footlights she was hunched over the book in the prompt corner. Her make-up was applied, under supervision, in No. 3 dressing-room, occupied by Dotty Blundell and Grace Bird. Dotty said it was as well right from the beginning to learn how to use greasepaint properly. Babs was under too much of a strain trying to memorise her lines to be of help, and as for Dawn – well, unless the poor thing was actually wearing her glasses, the results could be decidedly hit and miss. It was an art knowing which stick to choose and where to place emphasis. Footlights could play havoc with the features. One unconsidered move and too little or too much colour could give the complexion of a rustic the appearance of a corpse and transform the face of an angel into the countenance of a harlot.

  As for dressing and undressing, Stella did both in the toilet further along the corridor. She had to squat down to dodge the ancient fly-paper dangling from the light-flex, but it was better than Babs seeing her in her vest and school knickers, or anyone else for that matter; Babs insisted on keeping the dressing-room door open. ‘I must have air,’ she warned. ‘Otherwise I shall faint.’ Though the window on the stairwell was left on the latch there was always a peculiar smell in the room, a mixture of coke fumes from the hot-water pipes, peppermints and that pervasive mist of eau de Cologne sprayed so recklessly by Dawn Allenby.

  Stella was afraid Babs might tell Dotty that she didn’t wear a slip and that Dotty would rush out and buy her one, just as she had bought her a brassière after catching her in the wardrobe with her arms above her head about to be fitted for her Ptolemy costume. ‘You’re quite a big girl,’ Dotty had said. ‘It’s detrimental to go without support while still in growth.’

  Stella wore the brassière day and night in case Lily should see it; she would have been mortified at Stella accepting underwear from strangers.