An Awfully Big Adventure

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘I’m not allowed in the prop-room when I’m in costume,’ Stella said. ‘I might get messed up.’ Grace Bird winked at her.

  Mary Deare was still there after the curtain had risen on Act Four, and frantic because she’d run out of matches. None of the men had any. ‘Be a sweetie,’ she pleaded, ‘find me a match.’

  Stella went bad-temperedly downstairs to borrow a box from the doorkeeper. On the bend of the lower landing she had to struggle past a Centurion lounging against the wall eating from a bag of chips. ‘You shouldn’t leave your spear there,’ she said, ‘it’s obstructing the passage.’ He ignored her.

  The doorkeeper didn’t have any matches either. She went through to the prop-room to see if there were some on the mantelpiece, but there weren’t; and then she remembered the lighter in the vase in the cabinet. On her way back up the stairs she struck it to make sure it had petrol.

  Meredith was drinking alone in the Oyster Bar, thinking of Hilary, when a small man with sideburns and an anxious expression approached him. ‘Sorry to intrude,’ the man said, ‘but I’m impelled to speak. My name is Bradshaw. Vernon Bradshaw.’

  It meant nothing to Meredith. Still, he shook hands with the stranger as though they were old aquaintances. He was glad of the distraction, having earlier received a wire from Hilary who, at the last minute and in spite of cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die promises, found it impossible, after all, to come down from London for the first night of Peter Pan. Something had cropped up, something wildly important.

  ‘I recognised you from your photograph in front of the theatre,’ the man said. ‘I don’t mind admitting I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.’

  ‘Excellent,’ cried Meredith. ‘What will you have?’

  ‘It’s civil of you. A shandy would be acceptable.’

  ‘Come now,’ Meredith protested, and ordered a whisky.

  ‘I enjoyed the play. So did Lily . . .’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ said Meredith. He had a picture in his head of Hilary floundering in quicksand while he stood by, watching.

  ‘We thought our Stella acquitted herself very well. But then that’s natural, isn’t it?’

  ‘Good Heavens,’ said Meredith, ‘you must be Uncle Vernon.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Vernon said, ‘she’s very young, very impressionable. I’d be failing in my duty if I didn’t make it my business to know who she’s consorting with.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Meredith.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting that sometimes she’s a little hard to understand. She’s got her head screwed on, I can’t deny that, but she’s complicated . . . in herself. There’s reasons for it, of course . . . there always are . . . but she could take the wrong step . . . out of cussedness.’

  Meredith looked thoughtfully down at his glass.

  ‘I suppose you see her differently,’ said Vernon hopefully.

  ‘No,’ Meredith said. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

  ‘Lately she seems a little low in spirits.’

  ‘Does she?’ said Meredith. He looked surprised.

  ‘It’s nothing you could put your finger on . . . nothing definite . . . little things . . . the way she looks at the photographs on the mantelpiece. She’s turned one or two of them round, you know; to face the wall. And she gets up in the night and sits by the telephone in the hall in the dark. Well, it’s not entirely dark . . . there’s a lamp outside that shines through the fanlight. Mind you, she’s done this sort of thing before. She was always one for secrets . . . we never got to meet any of her school-friends. I had to make enquiries behind her back, so to speak. I think you’ll agree I was within my rights . . .’

  ‘You were indeed,’ Meredith assured him.

  ‘Lily thought you might be able to enlighten us . . . as to why she’s feeling so glum . . . she might have mentioned something . . . you being the one she spends most time with.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t be of much help,’ Meredith said. ‘There was that little upset with one of the actresses, but I don’t believe they were particularly close. I suppose finding her like that could have been disturbing, but then again Stella isn’t easily disturbed, is she?’

  ‘Finding her like what?’ asked Vernon, but at that moment a young man rushed in from the street. He was wearing some sort of outlandish costume and his lips were rouged.

  ‘Come quick,’ he cried, and tugging at Meredith’s arm he toppled him from his stool and ran him out of the door.

  They cancelled the rest of the performance. There was no other alternative. Desmond Fairchild flatly refused to go on in St Ives’s place, with or without the book. He said he would be a laughing-stock; he hadn’t the legs for it.

  The girl who worked the front of house had already gone home and Rose had to take the money out of the safe and open up the box office to give the patrons their money back.

  Nothing as terrible had ever happened in all her years in the theatre. Neither miscarriages nor broken hearts, feuds or fainting fits, had ever managed to extinguish the footlights. Not even the inebriated actor who, in the middle of Strife, taking exception to a coughing woman in the third row had leapt from the stage and wrestled her into the aisle, had succeeded in stopping the show – three cups of black coffee and a front-of-curtain apology and the play had resumed.

  It was obvious they would have to abandon the run of Caesar and Cleopatra and close the theatre until an actor could be found to portray Hook. St Ives’s leg was fractured in two places. It would be at least six weeks before he was out of plaster. They had four days in which to find a replacement. It was a catastrophe.

  The recriminations were heated. Caesar had no business to be coming downstairs three minutes after the commencement of Act Four. Why hadn’t he been called earlier? St Ives freely admitted his nerves were in fragments, what with Dawn Allenby’s recent caper and the tragic death earlier that morning of the boy who had severed an artery on Haggerty’s steps, but why had nobody reprimanded the stage-door keeper for listening to the wireless during a performance? St Ives swore he distinctly heard the strains of Come Back to Sorrento as he came round the bend of the stairs. Who was supposed to be responsible for the university students? Why hadn’t somebody checked that they hadn’t left their spears for all and sundry to trip over?

  Bunny was so choked at what he termed veiled inferences and an unfair proportioning of blame that he stalked out of Rose’s office. He fled to the prop-room, where he found John Harbour and Babs, huddled whispering round the fire with Freddie Reynalde. Dotty and Grace had gone in the ambulance with St Ives and Desmond Fairchild was in the Oyster Bar making the most of the unexpected drinking time.

  Harbour had been in the middle of telling Freddie that in his opinion it was almost a blessing that the theatre would have to close. It was ghastly for poor Richard, breaking his leg and all that, but at least it meant there would be an extension of rehearsals for Peter Pan. The production was a shambles at the moment. Babs said it was all very well but had he forgotten their leading man was flat on his back in Sefton General?

  They stopped talking when Bunny came in, shocked into silence at the expression on his face. He was pressing his fists against his stomach as though he had suffered an internal injury. ‘I’ve given the best years of my life,’ he faltered, and was unable to say more. He turned away from them and struggled for control. Discomfited, they stared at his heaving shoulders.

  He was tracked down almost immediately by Meredith, sent by Rose to fetch him back.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ he replied, his voice wobbling with emotion. ‘I’m thinking of handing in my resignation.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot,’ said Meredith and, taking him by the arm, frog-marched him along the corridor.

  Five minutes later John Harbour was dispatched to the Oyster Bar to tell Desmond Fairchild he was wanted in Rose’s office.

  Desmond took his time, and when he finally arrived and the proposition was put to him, he shook his head. He had no ambitions to play Hook and cer
tainly not at four days’ notice. He hadn’t been offered the part in the first place and was more than content in the role of Smee.

  He stood there in his camel-hair coat, tapping a cigarette on his thumbnail. ‘Sorry, Squire,’ he said, ‘but I know my limitations.’ He smiled spitefully.

  Meredith telephoned several numbers without success. George Rudd was on tour; Michael Lamonte, according to his lady friend, was filming at Pinewood; Berenson had left the business for school-teaching and wasn’t about to throw it up, thank you, for all the tea in China, and did Meredith realise it was gone midnight?

  An actor who had written to Meredith on many occasions – always enclosing, as his wife was at pains to point out, his page number in Spotlight and a stamped addressed envelope, without ever once receiving so much as an acknowledgement in return – was unfortunately dead. Bunny remembered Cyril Someone-or-other who had been fearfully good in a revival of ‘Sheppy’ at Watford before the war. Meredith reminded him that Cyril thingumajig had lost both legs in a skirmish in North Africa.

  It was then that Rose, distractedly rearranging the framed photographs on her desk top, thought of O’Hara.

  ‘No,’ shouted Meredith. Bringing his voice under control he suggested it was unlikely that a man of O’Hara’s established reputation would want to appear in the provinces.

  ‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Rose, ‘if he’s not working he’ll jump at it, for old time’s sake.’ She couldn’t think why it hadn’t occurred to her sooner.

  Bunny stood at the window and stared wearily down into the lamp-lit street. A figure in a raincoat was preparing for sleep in the doorway of George Henry Lee’s, treading round and round on a heap of old newspapers like a dog at the hearth.

  Bunny felt in his pocket, fiddling for loose change.

  9

  O’Hara’s landlady called up the stairs that he was wanted on the telephone. ‘Long distance,’ she said.

  When he heard Potter’s voice he was taken aback. ‘How are you?’ he asked, and was annoyed with himself for sounding so effusive.

  ‘I must apologise for disturbing you at such a late hour,’ Potter said. There was that familiar intake of breath as he drew on a cigarette. ‘Rose felt we couldn’t leave it until the morning. Reynalde gave me your number.’

  He explained, briefly, the difficulties they were in. ‘I don’t expect you’ll want to come up here . . . even if you’re available.’

  O’Hara reminded him that Jung had considered Liverpool the centre of the Universe.

  ‘How interesting,’ said Potter. ‘I take it he didn’t live here. It’ll be a six-week run, two matinées a week, from Tuesday.’

  ‘I presume I’ll be doubling up on both parts,’ O’Hara said.

  ‘But of course. It’s traditional.’

  ‘Not invariably,’ said O’Hara. ‘Laughton only played Hook.’

  Afterwards he telephoned Lizzie to ask what she thought.

  ‘Christmas in the provinces,’ she said. ‘It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, is it? Still, you’ve always wanted to go back, and I dare say you can demand the earth in salary.’

  ‘But think about it . . . Potter of all people.’

  ‘I am thinking,’ she said. ‘It was donkey’s years ago.’

  ‘We can never measure the effect we have on other people,’ he said, although he, more than most, had a fair idea. ‘Time has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Who else will be up there,’ she enquired, ‘besides Mary Deare?’

  ‘Dotty probably. I didn’t ask.’

  ‘And when are you off?’

  ‘As soon as I’ve packed. I shall ride up on the Norton,’ he told her, and there was a difficult pause in which she waited for him to suggest she should come up to Liverpool in the New Year.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, at last. ‘Don’t forget to send a postcard.’

  Frowning, he rang Mona Gage and hung up when her husband answered.

  Rose booked O’Hara into the Adelphi Hotel at the theatre’s expense. It was an empty gesture – she knew he wouldn’t stay there. He had always, even as a young man, hankered for the past.

  After only one night he went out and rented his old room in the front basement of a house in Percy Street. He sought, self-consciously, now that he once again walked those familiar streets, to catch up with that other, vanished self who, at this distance, seemed more real than the person he had become.

  The room hadn’t changed. The fire still smoked, the damp still grew vegetable growths the colour of peaches on the wall between the grimy windows. Even the table that Keeley, the painter, had used as a palette was in its place beneath the sink. He didn’t dare inspect the mattress in case that too was the same.

  When he dragged out the table and the lamplight spilled onto the splodges of cadmium yellow and scarlet lake, he thought of the girl who had shown him to his dressing-room on the morning of his arrival. She was dressed as a munitions worker, and when he switched on the light her hair had blazed under the dim bulb. ‘I know this is your old dressing-room,’ she said. ‘George told me.’

  ‘Ah, George,’ he repeated. ‘Salt of the earth.’

  ‘You still have to kick the pipes before the water comes out of the tap,’ she said.

  Outside, the gate had gone from the basement steps, and the slanting roof of the coal hole had fallen in, but when he looked he could see the chafed paint, those marks on the rusted railings, where once he had padlocked his motorcycle.

  Keeley, of course, had long since departed. A biology student with a stutter now occupied the back room. He was lonely and broke and had already barged in for the loan of a cupful of Quaker oats.

  Those first evenings O’Hara avoided going to the Oyster Bar. Grace Bird, whom he had worked with before and of whom he was fond, spent most nights up at the hospital knitting in the waiting-room while Dotty ministered to poor old Dickie St Ives, and although he respected Mary Deare as a performer – she was possibly the best Peter since Nina Boucicault – she had never been a chum. He rather took to Bunny, but it was obvious the stage-manager was a crony of Potter’s and it was advisable, this early on, to leave well alone. To be fair, Potter was behaving better than would have been expected – cold yet civil.

  It was no hardship isolating himself. He had no wish for company nor wanted to be anywhere else than in that room with the paint-flecked table. He lay on the narrow bed and waited for the basement gate to bang in the windswept night, until he remembered it was no longer there.

  Dotty had once gone out with a piece of string to stop its clanging. Dotty had pinned a photograph of Charles Laughton, torn from a movie magazine, on the wall above the fireplace. If he got up and peered closely enough he would still see the prick of that vanished drawing-pin in the plaster.

  The girl behind the beauty-counter at Lewis’s had scrawled her name in pencil on the window frame. Then you won’t forget me, she had said. But he had, long before the condensation, dribbling, like Dotty’s tears, had smeared the name away.

  Dotty had cried a lot. He had only to go for a spin with Freddie Reynalde or spend half an hour too long in the pub for her shoulders to slump and her eyes to fill. Once, she’d taken a hammer to the headlamp of his motorcycle. She’d done it because she cared. It was no good repressing her feelings. It struck him as convenient the way women placed such reliance on their emotions.

  She’d offered to lend him the money to have the bike fixed, and when he accepted she said, ‘I’ve broken something precious, haven’t I?’ and knelt in the street among the bits of glass, looking up at him as if she understood it was more than a lamp she had smashed.

  He forgave her, and then a week later he and Keeley came home from the Beaux Arts Club to find her sitting on the basement steps, smiling nice as pie. Fooled, he let her in, and she ran straight to his jazz records and whipping off her court shoe brought the heel down on his favourite Blossom Dearie.

  This time it was because her feelings told her he didn’t love her. She dragged
up that other business he’d been foolish enough to confide in her, that lost girl with the golden voice. No wonder she’d disappeared into the wide blue yonder. He was a monster. Why, in all the time she’d known him he had never said the words.

  ‘What words?’ he asked, and she said, ‘Exactly. You don’t begin to know what I mean.’ And then Keeley had nudged him and he’d found the words she wanted, and still it wasn’t enough – she called him a liar and wept even louder.

  He’d thought he did love her, until she went on worrying at it, thrashing it to and fro, churning up feelings like a dog digging up a bone. By the time she was through he didn’t know what he felt.

  He’d had no such doubts when embracing that model Keeley had brought home from the Art School. She had tufts of hair in her armpits like clumps of grass. A man couldn’t slide into the abyss when she was around.

  He’d told Dotty she wouldn’t always feel so unhappy, that one day she’d look at him and his face would seem quite ordinary, and she’d flown at him, pummelling his chest with her fists, sobbing that the day would never come.

  They were both young, of course, and neither of them knew what they were talking about. Keeley said girls were unreasonable because they weren’t any good at sport – they hadn’t learnt any rules.

  At his first rehearsal of Peter Pan, almost before Bunny had finished introducing him to the rest of the cast, Dotty had taken him proprietorially by the arm and strolled him into the wings. There was no need for her to be present. She was playing Mrs Darling and she and Hook were never on stage together.

  He thought, how changed she is, how nearly old she has become. She wore a smart blue costume with a tiny hat tilted over one eye. She whispered, ‘How strange it is, you and I here together . . . after all these years.’ Then he thought, how little she has altered. She chided him for not responding to her Christmas cards. ‘One every year,’ she cried reproachfully. ‘Without fail. But then, you were never one to dwell on the past, were you?’

  In spite of this, she never lost an opportunity to jog his memory, mostly during the coffee breaks when Desmond Fairchild and the girl with red hair were within earshot.