An Awfully Big Adventure

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Remember that time we went dancing at the Rialto ballroom,’ she would say. ‘After the second night of Richard II . . . when that fight broke out? There were bottles of stout flying like skittles.’ Or, ‘Wasn’t it a scream that afternoon we went to the matinée at the Court and you got a fit of the hiccoughs.’ And Mou-Mou! . . . How fond he had been of darling Mou-Mou . . . it broke Mummy’s heart to have her put down, but it was the kindest thing to do . . . ‘You must have got my letter,’ she said. ‘It was some years back.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t. It must have been after I moved.’

  ‘But, of course,’ she said. ‘Otherwise you would have replied.’

  He didn’t mind. There was nothing so cosily malicious, once it was mutually accepted, as dead love, and besides it was plain Dotty had a thing going with Fairchild. The man had a faint discoloration under one eye – he couldn’t help speculating whether Dotty hadn’t been giving him a hard time.

  He discovered the girl’s name was Stella and tried to engage her in gossip. She eyed him shrewdly and said Mr Fairchild was very nice, very nice indeed, and so was Miss Blundell. Miss Blundell had been particularly nice to her. ‘It’s nice when people are nice, isn’t it?’ he said, and she snapped back, ‘I do know other words, but usually nobody likes the sound of them.’ She reminded him of someone, or rather he felt he had met her before.

  ‘It’s hardly likely,’ Freddie Reynalde pointed out. ‘You haven’t been in this neck of the woods for years, and I doubt if in all her life she’s been further than Blackpool.’

  The first dress-rehearsal lasted the whole of Saturday. Bunny had taken the precaution of holding separate flying- and lighting-rehearsals on the Friday, with the result that the delays were structural rather than technical – the deck of the Jolly Roger swayed alarmingly during the fight between the pirates and the Lost Boys, and the ticking of the crocodile was found to be inaudible beyond the first three rows of the stalls. When Hook, communing with his ego, murmured, ‘How still the night is; nothing sounds alive . . . split my infinitives, but ‘tis my hour of triumph’, the mast creaked ominously and all but fell against the backcloth.

  In spite of this, those actors who stole into the auditorium between entrances returned full of enthusiasm. John Harbour pronounced the production nothing short of magical. The missed cues, the botching of business, the somewhat lumpy prancings of the Tiger Lily troupe counted for nothing beside the chilling authority of Hook and the strutting Peter, unearthly yet real of Mary Deare. O’Hara, he said, was the terrifying shadow on the wall which every child saw through half-closed lids once the nursery door had shut. Not many of those present had first-hand knowledge of such rarified accommodation, but they took his meaning.

  In Act Five, Father Dooley, who had been sipping Irish whisky from a camouflaged army-issue water-bottle, responded dramatically to the exchange between Hook and Wendy.

  (Wendy is brought up from the hold and sees at a glance that the deck hasn’t been scrubbed for years.)

  Hook: So my beauty, you are to see your children walk the plank.

  Wendy: (with noble calmness): Are they to die?

  Hook: They are. Silence all, for a mother’s last words to her children.

  Wendy: These are my last words. Dear boys, I feel that I have a message for you from your real mothers, and it is this: we hope our sons will die like Englishmen.

  At which Father Dooley rose unsteadily in his seat and denounced the philosophy behind the words. Nobody on stage heard him. Grace, who was purling in the front circle, gathered he was drawing their attention to the war and the number of dead and maimed. Meredith endeavoured to explain that the play had been written long before the carnage of the First World War, let alone the Second. Besides in 1915 Mr Barrie had written to George, his adopted son and one of the original Lost Boys, that he no longer thought of war as glorious. It is just unspeakably monstrous to me now. To clinch matters, a few days later George was killed, shot through the head as his battalion advanced on St Eloi.

  Father Dooley refused to see the connection and continued to protest. Dr Parvin took him home. Meredith, who had served in nothing more bloody than the Catering Corps, called a break and clambered into the orchestra pit to mangle Bach on the piano.

  After the national anthem, and before the curtain went up, Rose made a speech expressing her mixed emotions at the unfortunate accident which had befallen Richard St Ives. Mixed, she said, because it had given the theatre the opportunity to invite P.L. O’Hara to step into the breach. She drew the audience’s attention to the injured leading man, who, leg propped on a cushioned trestle arrangement protruding into the centre aisle, sat under a red blanket in the third row of the stalls. He was given an ovation, and Rushworth’s grand-daughter, a stout girl with ringlets, ran forward and, leaning heavily against his broken leg, presented him with a bouquet. It was this same child who later screamed piercingly when Hook made his first entrance, clawing the misty air above the frozen river.

  After the final curtain-call Bunny came into the prop-room and invited Stella to a little party at the Commercial Hotel. The play had overrun the licensing hours and the Oyster Bar was already closed. ‘It might amuse you,’ he said, and added gallantly, ‘You aquitted yourself excellently with the torch.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. She longed to go, and yet she couldn’t bear the idea.

  ‘You too, George,’ said Bunny.

  George wriggled out of it. His missus would go on a vinegar trip if he was late home again.

  Stella ran upstairs and combed her hair in the extras’ dressing-room. She thought of taking off her overall – she was wearing one of Lily’s blouses underneath – only when it was unbuttoned and she looked in the mirror her chest poked out in a most peculiar way. She imagined it might settle down if she removed her brassière, but what if Dotty noticed and made some personal remark about her growth?

  She couldn’t think how she was going to enter the Commercial Hotel, not unless accompanied or pushed. No doubt Babs and Grace would travel up the hill by taxi. Trouble was, if she appeared downstairs too soon it would look as if she was cadging a lift, and if she arrived too late they would have gone without her – and then how would she summon up the courage to go at all?

  She went to find Geoffrey. The stage doorkeeper said he had already left. At last, emerging into the street, she found herself a hundred yards behind John Harbour and Meredith. Squatting, she pretended to tie a non-existent shoe-lace and waited until the two men had crossed Clayton Square and turned the corner in the direction of Bold Street.

  I can’t go, she thought. Who needs parties? And she began to walk home the long way round so as not to bump into anybody. She felt annoyed with herself, made miserable with so little cause. If she had been the offspring of drunken parents in Scotland Road, or born with a hair-lip like Ma Tang’s daughter, there might be some excuse for feeling as she did. Why couldn’t she slide out of herself and be someone else, if only for the ten seconds it would take to push open the door of the hotel and step across the threshold?

  She was making for the telephone box outside the Broken Dolls Hospital when she heard the puttering of a motorcycle engine as it reduced speed in the gutter behind her. Turning, she recognised O’Hara. He wore the flying helmet he had affected on the morning of his arrival and those goggles which, when removed, had left him looking like a barn owl, white-ringed eyes blinking in a smut-flecked face.

  ‘Hop on,’ he said, patting the pillion.

  She clung to the waist of his crackling leather overcoat as they thundered up the hill and roared along Hope Street, past the Mission Hall and the Institute and the ruined silhouette of the Methodist church. The headlamp picked out a cat streaking towards a wall, and a child without shoes between the shafts of a wooden cart, straining to pull it into an alleyway, and both images were gone in an instant, drowned in darkness as the bike sped past, the road a triangle of bright water as they rode the glittering bre
akers of the tramlines and swerved to the kerb of the Commercial Hotel.

  Meredith’s landlord had put the back parlour at their disposal. There was a fire in the hearth and sandwiches on the sideboard. One of the pirates gave Stella a glass half-full of gin. She swallowed it in one gulp and started to cough.

  Toasts were drunk to Mary Deare and O’Hara. It had been a wonderful night, absolutely marvellous. It couldn’t have gone better. Seven curtain calls, and they would have taken more if Rose, concerned at the overtime the stagehands were in danger of earning, hadn’t signalled Freddie Reynalde to play the audience out.

  What about that child who had screamed in Act Two, and the hissing that had followed . . . and the outbreak of sobbing when Tinkerbell drank the poison and Peter announced she was dying . . . and the sigh that had rippled . . . yes, rippled through the theatre when Peter, alone on the rock in the lagoon, heard the mermaid’s melancholy cry as the moon began to rise over Never-Never Land.

  O’Hara, on behalf of the company, spoke a few words in appreciation of Meredith. He said he’d done a wonderful job in very difficult circumstances. The lighting had been quite brilliant.

  Meredith, wearing his duffle-coat and sitting cross-legged on the floor, raised his glass in response. ‘How very kind,’ he murmured. ‘Such praise, coming from you.’

  Stella asked John Harbour if he had seen Geoffrey.

  ‘He’s off sulking most likely,’ said Harbour, and started to tell her his reasons for believing O’Hara’s performance that evening had been the equal of any of the great Shakespearian roles as portrayed by the likes of Ralphie or Larry. ‘He had the audience in the palm of his hand,’ he cried. ‘How they hated him. Those flourishes, those poses, that diabolical smile . . . the appalling courtesy of his gestures . . .’ He broke off in mid-sentence, as if suddenly realising who he was talking to, and abruptly left her for Mary Deare. Sitting at her feet he gazed up into her withered child’s face and began again. ‘You had the audience in the palm of your hand. How they loved you.’

  O’Hara had been buttonholed by Babs Osborne. She was reading him parts of a letter from some fellow with a foreign name. ‘Listen to this bit,’ she urged, ‘“I do not wish to treat you like a good-time girl. Were my feelings not so strong I could not bring myself to say goodbye.” You can tell the torment he’s in, can’t you? It’s obvious isn’t it, that he still loves me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said O’Hara. ‘It couldn’t be more obvious.’ He was watching Stella who stood at the fireplace, leaning against the armchair in which Potter now sat holding court. She had black eyebrows despite the colour of her hair, and a little Roman nose.

  ‘Why can’t he treat me like a good-time girl,’ wailed Babs. ‘It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’

  Stella was feeling decidedly confident. I’ve cut the ropes that bind me to the shore, she thought, and sinking down onto the arm of Meredith’s chair she listened, smiling, to one of the pirates confiding that when he was in town he consulted the same dentist as dear Johnny. He’d once had a drink with him in the Shaftesbury – Johnny, not the dentist – and really, he’d couldn’t have been sweeter. There was no side to him, absolutely none. Of course, there had been lots of other people present. He couldn’t pretend there’d been just the two of them.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Meredith, and yawned.

  Someone put a dance record on the gramophone and presently Desmond Fairchild and Dotty swayed together in a corner of the room. She had bought him a new trilby with the tiniest of blue feathers tucked into the band at the crown. He was clinging to her as though she was his mother, his head resting sleepily on her shoulder, buckling the brim of his hat. Often she glanced across the room to where O’Hara stood with his arm about Babs Osborne.

  Bunny brought Meredith a plate of sandwiches; he waved them aside. Stella said she wasn’t hungry either. ‘I can’t eat when I’m with you,’ she told Meredith. ‘I’d be sick. It’s a compliment really.’

  ‘I’ve known better ones,’ he said. He seemed amused.

  ‘I don’t want anything to get in the way. Not sausage rolls or cheesy buiscuits or anything. I want to listen.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got anything to say,’ he said, and closed his eyes, his foot jogging up and down in time to the beat of the dance band on the gramophone. She studied the reflections on the wall as the lights of the Golden Dragon flashed blue and pink across the street.

  ‘I knew it would be like this,’ she said. ‘I just knew.’ She wasn’t really talking to him; she thought he had dozed off.

  He said, ‘This isn’t my room. I live at the back, overlooking the side of the church.’

  ‘My grandfather played the organ there,’ she told him. ‘When Clara Butt gave song recitals.’ She looked up and saw O’Hara staring at her over Babs Osborne’s heaving shoulders. ‘Miss Osborne is crying again,’ she said, and asked, aggrieved, ‘Why did you stop talking to me? Why didn’t you want me to take notes anymore?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Meredith said, opening his eyes. ‘That was Rose, not me. You put the wind up her with that crucifix down your sock. She felt I was an undesirable influence, you coming from Methodist stock.’

  She thought she had never seen anything so delicate as his left eyelid quivering above the green ball of his eye, nor anything so vivid as the scarlet spots spattering the bow of his tie. On the wall behind him there was a picture of a stag lowering its antlers on a rocky promontory beneath puffy clouds. She lost concentration for a moment and the stag slipped from its frame and glided along the picture rail.

  ‘Look,’ she heard him say, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made you unhappy, but I’m not for you.’

  ‘Do you mean you think you’re too religious?’ she asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said, and she fell sideways onto his lap and shut her eyes against the whirling room, her cheek stuck to the little glass circle of the monocle balanced on his chest.

  She woke in a strange room, facing a dressing-table with a scarf just like Geoffrey’s draped over the mirror. There was a tin ashtray on the bedside table and a framed photograph of two men in bathing costumes, linking arms on a pebbled beach. One of them was Meredith. She jumped up in a panic, terrified at being late home.

  Meredith was still in the parlour, and Bunny. They were sitting on either side of a dying fire. Bunny said he would see her home.

  ‘I don’t need seeing,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of walking round the corner on my own.’ She was already moving towards the door. She didn’t say goodnight to Meredith. He had upset her although she couldn’t remember in what way.

  She had never been out alone at such an hour. The trams had stopped running and the sodium lights burned in the empty streets. She fully expected the basement door to be bolted.

  Bunny followed at a discreet distance. He had telephoned Uncle Vernon before midnight to explain that Rose Lipman had insisted on Stella being present at a small celebration given by the Board of Governors.

  10

  Three days before Christmas Vernon was brushing down the front steps when he saw Meredith crossing the end of the street. He would have ducked inside – he was in his working clothes with not even a stud to his shirt – but Meredith was already calling out a greeting and advancing towards him.

  They shook hands. ‘My dear man,’ said Meredith. ‘Not bad news, I hope.’

  ‘Just the wireless,’ Vernon said, taking a polishing cloth from his pocket and dabbing at his eyes. They listened as from the cellar below came the strains of a deep male voice singing a sentimental ballad. ‘It’s to do with the low notes. They always set me off. I first noticed it in the army when music was compulsory.’

  Meredith nodded in sympathy. They both gazed thoughtfully along the wide, grey street lined with blackened houses to where the unfinished transept of the rose-pink cathedral smudged the high white sky. ‘Over the dark still silence,’ quavered Vernon, singing along with the wireless, and was seized with a bout of coughing. />
  ‘That reminds me,’ said Meredith. ‘Is young Stella bronchial by any chance?’

  ‘She is and she isn’t,’ Vernon said. ‘I mean she’s got the usual amount of congestion, but in her case its aggravated by temperament, if you follow me.’

  ‘I merely ask because last night she was unable to hold the torch steady. It was just before Peter enters and the night lights blow out. I take it you’ve seen the play?’

  ‘What night lights?’ asked Vernon.

  ‘In the nursery scene. Fortunately the coughing didn’t really matter so far as Tinkerbell was concerned . . . the light is supposed to flash erratically . . . but the noise was rather off-putting. Bunny’s put a supply of cough drops in the prompt corner. I just wondered if there was anything radically wrong . . .’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with her lungs, if that’s what you mean,’ Vernon said. ‘We’ve had her X-rayed and she’s sound as a bell.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ said Meredith.

  ‘I’d better reimburse you for the sweets,’ Vernon insisted, in a tight unfriendly voice. Clearly something other than the bass notes on the wireless niggled him.

  In the end Meredith was forced to accept the threepence thrust into his palm. Taken aback, he mentioned the football match to be fought on New Year’s Day between the Repertory company and the pantomime cast of Treasure Island appearing at the Empire.

  ‘I haven’t got the wind,’ said Vernon. ‘My kicking days are over.’ Meredith explained it was touch-line supporters they were after rather than players. A charabanc would be leaving from Williamson Square at ten o’clock. ‘Do come,’ he urged. ‘It would be lovely to have you with us.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Vernon, and he stumped up the steps with his polishing cloth and rubbed vigorously at the lion’s-head knocker of the door.

  He waited until Meredith had turned the corner before going downstairs to put on his Sunday overcoat. Though all but one of the travellers had decamped for Christmas, he didn’t care to be seen improperly dressed in the hall. He ran back upstairs to telephone Harcourt.