An Awfully Big Adventure

by Beryl Bainbridge

  The talk in the dressing-room was often about Mary Deare. She hadn’t paid her round in the Oyster Bar the night before. At lunchtime Desmond hadn’t been able to place his usual bets because she’d sent him haring back to the digs to see if an urgent letter had arrived. It hadn’t, and the horse he would have put money on had won by a length, and he was twelve-and-six out of pocket. Grace Bird said it was typical, and that dressing with Dawn was moonlight and roses compared to sharing with Mary. She herself, praise be, had never been in a run with her . . . one night’s charity performance of Private Lives at the Arts Theatre had been quite enough, thank you. ‘I can’t tell you, darling, how many times she sent the character juvenile out to buy cheroots. She has a positive knack of getting one to fetch and carry. She doesn’t even have to ask . . . people just feel obliged to run her errands . . . as though they were atoning for something. Not me, I hasten to add. I’m too old. But she’ll try it on with you Dotty, you mark my words.’

  Dotty protested it would never happen, never, and couldn’t help smiling. She was flattered that Grace considered her young enough to be ordered about.

  Stella was seated in front of Dotty’s mirror, a towel draped across her shoulders, when St Ives burst into the room without knocking. ‘I shall go crazy,’ he announced. He wore a hair-net and was brandishing on his fist his Caesar wig with the laurel wreath.

  ‘Shall I go?’ Stella asked, half-rising from the stool. She hated anybody seeing her hair dragged back from her forehead, even St Ives.

  He restrained her by laying his hand paternally on her shoulder. ‘Heavens, no, my dear. You’re one of us.’ Sometimes he put his pipe away while it was still smouldering and the breast pocket of his dressing-gown was burnt full of holes. ‘Where the hell were you this afternoon?’ he demanded, turning on Dotty.

  ‘None of your business,’ she said mildly.

  ‘The dawn chorus was on the doorstep when I got back, clutching a bloody great bunch of half-dead daffodils.’

  ‘At the digs?’ asked Dotty, shocked.

  ‘She said she didn’t want to disturb me but she needed my advice. I had to let her in. Do you know she had the sauce to pick up my socks and start smoothing down the eiderdown.’

  ‘A womanly attitude when all’s said and done,’ observed Grace charitably. She was speaking blindly into the mirror, concentrating on smudging violet shadows onto her closed and bulging eyelids.

  ‘I had to offer her a round of toasted cheese and a cup of tea. Not her usual tipple, you’ll agree. She was cracking those damn peppermints in her back teeth to disguise the fact she’d called in at the Oyster Bar on her way up.’ St Ives began to pace backwards and forwards, watching himself in the mirror and pulling in his stomach. He held the wig in front of him like a withered bouquet. ‘Then she told me she’d been offered a part in Jane Eyre at Warrington rep and did I think she ought to accept. Well, I couldn’t jump on her and shout, “Take it, take it, here’s the train fare”, could I? Did I think it would be a wise move or should she try to persuade Meredith to keep her on for Christmas? She said she didn’t mind playing a redskin at a reduced salary and wouldn’t six weeks here be better than one week in Warrington? Of course, she’s right about the money.’ He sat down heavily in Dotty’s chair.

  ‘It’s always the money,’ murmured Grace. Stella thought she was probably thinking about her treacherous husband.

  ‘It rather depends on the part, doesn’t it?’ said Dotty. She drew a line down the centre of Stella’s nose with a stick of No.5 and gestured she should rub it in.

  ‘Exactly what I told her,’ cried St Ives. ‘She said it was the lead and I said, “What, Jane?” I mean, I was surprised, though I dare say she’d be adequate in the part . . . she’s plain enough . . . and she said “No, the governess.”’

  ‘Poor soul,’ Grace said briskly.

  ‘What am I going to do if Potter tells her she can stay? You know what he’s like . . . I wouldn’t put it past him to say yes just to spite me. And I can’t depend on Dotty keeping guard on me. Certainly not now she’s otherwise engaged.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Dotty, and winked at Grace in the mirror.

  ‘My life won’t be worth living,’ St Ives prophesied dejectedly. Catching Stella watching him he flashed her an extravagant smile. Under his hair-net he had the defiant air of a faded beauty.

  ‘How did you get rid of her?’ Dotty asked. ‘I hope you weren’t unkind.’

  He reminded her that it was kindness, as she well knew, that had got him into his present pickle. ‘When I said I was tired she glanced sideways at the bed and hinted she was fairly tired herself. A rest in the right surroundings, she implied, would have her tickety-boo in no time. You’ve no idea how awkward it was.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Dotty, who had served in Bomber Command during the war. ‘What a tactical dilemma for you.’

  ‘I’ll have to tell Meredith he can’t keep her on,’ St Ives decided. ‘It’s either her or me.’

  ‘Perhaps prayer might be the answer,’ said Grace. ‘I shall burn an extra-large candle for you on Sunday.’

  ‘She kept fiddling with that blasted lighter,’ moaned St Ives. ‘Every time we got to the dying fall of Come Back to Sorrento she wound the damn thing up again. I tell you, I was hard put not to snatch it from her hand and throw it and her out of the window.’

  Both Dotty and Grace began to laugh. Stella did too – after all, she was one of them – until a picture grew in her head of Dawn Allenby in St Ives’s bed-sitter, cheeks hollowed as she sucked on her peppermints, the gas fire burning blue, those unwrapped, unwanted flowers lying on the table. She said, ‘She’s quite reasonable really. It’s just that no one ever tells her the truth, so she feels confused. She doesn’t know where she stands.’

  ‘No, sweetie,’ said Dotty, snatching up a twist of cotton wool and wiping the carmine from Stella’s cheeks. ‘If you must add more colour, dab it a little lower down, on a line with your ear lobes.’

  Afterwards Stella was convinced she had been rebuked. She began to wonder whether St Ives’s abrupt departure hadn’t been occasioned by her ill-judged remark rather than by Geoffrey’s calling out of the quarter hour. And had perhaps Grace Bird’s goddammit of irritation been directed at her and not at the ball of beige knitting wool which had just then rolled off the shelf of the dressing-table?

  Certainly Dotty was less effusive in her thanks when Stella brought her up a tray of tea in the interval. And half way through the second act, when Ptolemy accused Caesar of driving him from his palace and Caesar said, ‘Go, my boy, I will not harm you; but you will be safer away, among your friends, here you are in the lion’s mouth’, Stella imagined St Ives spoke more severely than usual. His sky-blue eyes, ringed with black liner, were hard as coloured beads. ‘It’s not the lion I fear,’ she cried, ‘but the jackal’, and although she was referring to Rufio, not Caesar, it was St Ives she confronted. Glancing at those muscular knees, ruddy beneath the hem of his pleated tunic, she made up her mind that if he ever attempted to spank her again she would scream blue murder.

  He caught the drift of her thoughts, she could tell. A conqueror’s laugh should have accompanied his following line of ‘Brave boy’, but all he could manage was a smile.

  She left the theatre ten minutes after the curtain fell, running up the hill with her elbows pumping up and down, watching the clouds spreading behind the ruined tower of the church. She felt unwell.

  Vernon knew something was up; the droop to her mouth, the expression in her eyes. She didn’t snap his head off when he suggested she gave him a hand with the laying of the tables for the morning. Dog-tired, Lily had gone to bed a good hour before.

  ‘How did the play go?’ he asked.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said.

  ‘Are you happy,’ he prodded, wiping the damp neck of a salt-cellar on the cuff of his sleeve.

  ‘Happy enough,’ she replied.

  ‘What about the new play, the one with the principal boy. Are yo
u featuring?’

  ‘I keep telling you,’ Stella said, ‘it’s not a pantomine.’ She was biting on her lip, distressed, frowning at him under her fringe of red hair.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I stand corrected.’ And he rattled a cornflake packet before setting it on the table nearest the door.

  Presently she said grudgingly, ‘I don’t have a proper part. Mr Potter says it’s as well not to rush things, not this early in my career. Better a steady flame than one that flares up and burns itself out.’ She sat down at the table reserved for the traveller with the skin grafts and began to score the cloth with a fork.

  ‘Don’t,’ Vernon admonished. ‘It makes marks.’ He longed to discuss Meredith further, his background, his opinions – on the surface he sounded a sensible enough sort of fellow but he didn’t know how to go about it. One ill-considered word and Stella would be up and running.

  ‘You know Miss Allenby,’ she said. ‘The one in the gauzes in the fourth act.’

  ‘The fat one? The one who ends up with her throat cut?’

  ‘That’s Grace Bird. She’s not fat really, it’s just padding. Her husband struck a mean bargain with her. I mean the one with the long nose.’

  ‘Oh that one,’ he said, although he hadn’t the faintest idea.

  ‘Well, she’s in our dressing-room and nobody likes her. She’s just tolerated. She has rows of aspirin bottles on her dressing-table to counteract her headaches.’

  ‘Leave them alone,’ he said, for now she was fiddling with the crochet mats of green wool, flipping them over like pancakes. She flung the fork down, looking daggers at him, and continued: ‘The house she lived in during the war received a direct hit, and for two days she was buried alive nursing a glass vase belonging to her mother. When they pulled her out the vase hadn’t a crack in it, and then the air-raid warden stumbled . . .’

  ‘Is that boil bothering you?’ Vernon interrupted, noticing the way she held her arm up against her chest as though it was in a sling.

  ‘I was trying to tell you something,’ Stella cried out. ‘Something interesting.’ And she rushed from the room.

  He could have kicked himself.

  Two nights later Stella fainted in the prompt corner. Bunny carried her upstairs to Rose Lipman’s office. Stella had changed into slacks and overall to keep her costume clean for the curtain call, but still wore a heavy gilt bracelet on her arm. Rose thought the girl hadn’t been eating enough until she unclasped the bracelet and discovered the pus-stained square of lint beneath.

  She packed Stella off home in a taxi, though not before interrogating her as to what she was doing with a six-inch wooden crucifix wedged down her ankle sock. She had spotted it when Stella was laid out on the sofa.

  ‘It’s just a symbol,’ Stella said.

  ‘I’m not soft,’ said Rose.

  ‘I find it comforting.’

  ‘You’re never a Catholic.’

  ‘No,’ admitted Stella, ‘but I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘While you’re thinking,’ Rose said, ‘it might be worth considering wearing a slightly smaller cross, on a chain round your neck, like normal folk.’

  Stella had been told to take the following morning off. It was out of the question. Lily might worm the reason out of her, and then Uncle Vernon would most likely telephone the theatre and accuse anyone who would listen of being nothing less than a slave-driver. She didn’t want Rose Lipman retaliating and telling him what had been found down her sock.

  While Vernon and Lily were serving breakfast she sneaked out and hid the crucifix behind a pile of Mr Harcourt’s empty cardboard boxes in the backyard. She hadn’t forgotten going to the pictures with Vernon to see The Song of Bernadette. He’d only agreed to go because Lily told him it was a musical and had walked out the moment Bernadette started sinking to her knees in the fields. Afterwards he’d sworn he would prefer to see any child of his six foot under rather than taken for a nun.

  She didn’t go straight from the house to the Station Hotel. Instead she took a tram to the Pier Head and walked about until the hands of the Cunard clock stood at half past ten. She was looking forward to making a late entrance – the cast would cluster round her, expressing their admiration at her fortitude. Meredith would be particularly impressed.

  It was a windy morning, and mild. She could see clear across the water to the smashed dome of the Pleasure Gardens at New Brighton. When the ferry ploughed in from Seacombe the passengers clung to the rail of the landing-stage as it bucked under the swell of the river. Centuries before, according to Uncle Vernon, the water came right up into the town, and in rough weather people had to be carried ashore. She was just imagining Meredith dressed up as a sailor and herself with her arms round his neck, clinging to him as the wind tried to tear them apart, when a man with a tray hung from his neck asked her to buy bootlaces. He had a patch over one eye and wore a row of medals sewn lopsidedly to the lapels of his ragged jacket. She said she was in the same boat as himself and kept her fist closed tight in the pocket of her overall on the one and ninepence Uncle Vernon had given her earlier.

  The man swore at her before turning away, the seagulls screeching above his battered hat. She felt bad and ran after him to part with twopence, and he swore at her again. He was selling, not begging.

  She was astonished after riding the lift to the top floor of the hotel to find the room deserted, save for Meredith asleep in an armchair behind the door. She walked round him, whistling, but he didn’t stir. A quarter of an hour later three pirates arrived, and then Desmond Fairchild, hatless and with a bruise under one eye. ‘By the look of things,’ he told the pirates, ‘we might as well go downstairs and order coffee.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we wake Mr Potter?’ Stella asked. She couldn’t bear the way he was slumped there, his bow tie askew. There was a stain on his suede shoe and another on the leg of his trouser. Worse, a sour smell hung about his duffle coat.

  ‘Give him a few more minutes,’ Desmond advised. ‘We had a bit of a knees-up last night. Potter thought he was Peter Pan and flew out of the window of the Commercial Hotel. Fortunately it was from the Bar Parlour. The landlord refused to let him back in.’ He took the pirates downstairs to the lounge.

  Shortly afterwards Bunny came in and hit Meredith quite sharply on the shoulder with his umbrella. He woke stupefied, flicking his tongue over his parched lips like a reptile.

  ‘Go to the kitchens,’ Bunny ordered Stella. ‘Ask the waiter with the dent in his forehead to give you a bucketful of ice cubes and three or four napkins. Tell him to send up black coffee and aspirins. And when you’ve done that go home and stay there until it’s time for the evening performance.’

  She protested that she couldn’t go home, that she wasn’t allowed to hang around the house during the day, and Bunny said he didn’t care where the hell she went as long as it was out of his sight.

  She sulked all the way to the theatre, darting up the corridor to the prop-room in case Rose Lipman should spot her. There was no sign of Geoffrey. She found George in the carpenter’s shop constructing a crocodile out of papier mâché. He was off-hand with her, even when she recounted the gossip about Meredith being thrown out of his lodgings.

  ‘Desmond Fairchild’s lost his hat,’ she said. ‘And he’s got a black eye.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ George said. ‘You were told not to come in.’

  She spent the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the municipal gardens opposite the art gallery. It turned chilly in the afternoon, and a man in a bowler hat came and sat beside her and rubbed the side of his shoe up and down her leg.

  At five o’clock she returned to the theatre and crept up the stairs to the dressing-room. Dawn Allenby was standing in her coat and headscarf staring at herself in the mirror. There was the remains of a quart of cider in front of the aspirin bottles on the shelf. ‘What would you do?’ she asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Stella.

  ‘If you were me? But th
en you can’t imagine that, can you? Nobody can imagine what it’s like to be me.’

  ‘I can,’ said Stella. ‘None of us are all that different from one another. We all have the same feelings.’

  ‘Feelings,’ cried Dawn, and she jerked back her head and made a funny sort of noise halfway between a laugh and a howl. Stella couldn’t tell whether she was acting or not – she looked dreadful, as if she was suffering from the worst sort of headache, and yet she kept watching herself in the glass, turning her face this way and that, peering forward to follow the track of a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘Feelings,’ she cried again. ‘That filthy bastard hasn’t any.’ She collapsed onto a stool and laid her head down among the bits of cotton wool and the sticks of greasepaint. She wept and spoke at the same time – uttering fragments of sentences, half completed threats, pieces of swear words, repeating the name Richard over and over with the intonation of a child calling for its mother.

  Stella attempted to comfort her, patting her shoulder, trying not to smile; she was embarrassed because although it was fearfully sad it was also ridiculous. It wasn’t Dawn’s fault. It was surely the most difficult thing in the world to appear sincere when one’s heart was breaking.

  Presently Dawn stopped sobbing and raised her head. Her nose was blobbed with talcum powder; she gulped for air as if suffocating. Recovering, she said briskly, ‘I’ve been asked to leave. I expect you’ve heard. Heaven knows how I’m going to tell Richard. He begged me not to take that job at Warrington. We were going dancing, you know. He’d invited me to a supper dance after the show on Christmas Eve.’ She wept again, talking through her snuffles of things done behind her back, of stabbings. It would have meant nothing to that pervert to let her stay . . . he had wielded the knife, the cruel swine . . . telling her he regretted there was nothing for her when all the time he was still hiring people . . . examining her through that monocle as though he was God . . .

  ‘Mr Potter!’ said Stella, indignantly. ‘He’s not to blame. It was St Ives who wanted you to leave. He told Mr Potter it was either him or you.’