by P. G. Glynn
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Marie arrived at the theatre with seconds to spare. What a rush it had been, to arrive punctually! After Nell (who was following on later) had interrupted her reading she had run all the way to the bus stop, but her bus had then dawdled. As for the conductor – well, he had seemed almost to know she had just been reading SONS AND LOVERS! He had looked at her as if picturing her beneath her chemise and had spoken familiarly. She might not have minded ordinarily, but so soon after reading about kissing and caressing and passion and … and such in Nottingham, she was conscious of undercurrents here in London. She was conscious, too, of her own body as she had never been previously and of a stickiness between her legs that seemed to have resulted from the goings-on between Paul and Miriam. Marie had cold-shouldered the conductor when he was cheeky to her and in a sense had been relieved to see him take his cheek elsewhere. But she was left feeling curious as to how it would be to have a man undress her with more than his eyes … and to have him kiss her in the way that lovers kissed before they did still more intimate things.
Despite Lawrence’s descriptive skills, Marie was still not altogether clear as to precisely what these things were. She had her suspicions but these seemed too far-fetched to be treated seriously. Mam would never have had Pa do that to her once, never mind three times. So something must be wrong with Marie’s thinking. She just wished she knew what was wrong with it … and what it was that lovers did.
Breathless on reaching the stage door after trotting at an unladylike speed from Charing Cross Road, it occurred to Marie that she could have taken a taxi from Camden Town. Leading ladies did not travel by bus, did they? Marie grinned engagingly at the old stage door keeper, greeting him: “What a lovely evening!”
There was nothing lovely about it that Ben could see. The cold was seeping right through to his bones and it wouldn’t surprise him to know there was snow in the offing. If his chilblains was anything to go by this was as hard a winter as any he had suffered, so why was Miss Howard the second person to remark on tonight’s loveliness? The first person he’d heard remarking on it was Mr Brodie himself. Well, there was no accounting for folk, or so Ben always said. The nobs especially was a law unto themselves.
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“Ah, Miss Howard, you are here – and not before time!”
“Not after time, either, Mr Brodie – sir,” Marie smiled, closing the door behind her. “I made sure I arrived on the dot, although it wasn’t easy getting here from Dalmeny Avenue in less than an hour.”
Against his better judgment he was intrigued. “Dalmeny Avenue is where you live … is it?”
“No, but it’s where Nell Sedgwick lives,” she told him, still breathless from her exertions. “I had lunch with her and one thing led to another, as it does, until suddenly it was five o’clock. So I stopped reading and ran for a bus and … and, here I am.”
“You were reading your script as I suggested?”
“Not exactly.” Marie coloured as she remembered what she was reading.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I wasn’t reading my script, but also that I wasn’t reading my ‘notices’.”
“So you have not read them?”
“Yes, I have,” she admitted, “although that was this morning.”
“So you took none of my advice? I must say that I’m surprised.”
“I think it’d be more surprising if I had taken it, given that today is my first full day as your leading lady. I must be permitted one day, surely, for basking in the glory of it all and for forgetting scripts and … and things.”
“An actor,” he tried to sound stern but was not entirely successful, “must never forget that without a script he is worthless. Where would either of us be without lines to speak, without a part to play on-stage?”
“We’d certainly be in a fix at the Tavistock without Dickens,” Marie agreed. “But I’m speaking about one day, not a permanent state. Have you been working today?”
“Kindly remember that it is you, not me, under discussion. If you’d care to remove your hat and coat we could perhaps do what we are here to do rather than discuss in any greater detail what you have not been doing.”
Her outer garments duly removed and hung with his from a hook on the big hat-stand near the door, Marie asked him: “Don’t you intend commenting on my ‘notices’?”
“Your ‘notices’?” he queried, raising a bushy brow. “Are you claiming exclusiveness for praises bestowed on the whole Company?”
“No. Only for those bestowed on me personally – or, rather, on Nancy. I know we’re all part of a team,” Marie paused before finishing, “but I think you’ll agree that my name was mentioned more than most.”
He could hardly disagree, so admitted: “It did feature … quite strongly. Don’t let that go to your head, though. It is always the next performance rather than the last that should be of concern, which reminds me that we are here to rehearse.”
They were soon immersed in their work. Marie learned how Irving had advised Ellen Terry to make her exits ardent – advice that had helped her see the merits of moving off-stage swiftly – and how Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson had said that nervousness was a necessary attribute for an actor, adding that he who did not suffer from it was rarely of much account to his art. Marie Wilton, she heard, had been told by Macready not to play Lady Macbeth too soon – to begin slowly or risk ending quickly – and by Charles Kemble in the same vein ‘climb not the ladder too fast or you might come suddenly to the ground again’. Mr Brodie had worked with Ellen Terry and with Sir Henry, who had in turn worked with veterans from the Macready and Edmund Kean eras. He had been born in time to fraternise with the greatest of the great, whereas Marie had been born too late. So he was in a very real sense her link with them and as he talked she was awed to have him as her mentor.
“Take it from ‘I have an awful fear’,” Charles told her.
“‘I have an awful fear and dread in me,’” began Nancy, clasping her arms around herself to expel cold uncertainty. “‘I can’t shake it off. Horrible thoughts of death and shrouds with blood upon them, and a fear that has made me burn as if I was on fire, have been upon me all day. I was reading a book tonight to while the time away, and the same things came in to the print. I’ll swear I saw ‘coffin’ written in every page of the book in large letters – aye, and they carried one close to me, in the streets tonight. But it was not a real coffin … ’”
Charles could not fault her. Her interpretation was flawless because she was Nancy. She was a ‘natural’ – a rare phenomenon in their profession. He must thank Laurence Beckett for his recommendation. Fresh from a season playing the lead with the resident stock company at the Royalty, Bath, Charles’s old friend Laurence had spoken glowingly of Marie Howard’s exceptional gifts and had been uncharacteristically insistent that if the Tavistock did not snap her up and bring her to London she would soon be lost to some rival West End management. Laurence was right to insist! In this young actress Charles had acquired a prize.
Would that he could keep his mind wholly attuned to Bill Sikes! While Miss Howard was Nancy through to her fingertips, he could not claim to be Bill similarly. Why not? Why was his mind wandering free when it should be harnessed to the matter in hand and to the part that complemented Marie’s? Try though he might, he could not seem to concentrate on the role he was playing. He was too conscious of …
“‘Bill, Bill,’” Nancy gasped.
His script directed him to cover her mouth with his hand. But he had thirsted too long in the desert he inhabited and must now drink at the font offered him. Her mouth was soft and would taste of eternal spring. It shimmered temptingly close to his … and was willing. He brought his mouth to hers in a searching kiss.
Nancy clung to Bill, believing yet disbelieving. She had known she was his but had had no inkling of such a sense of belonging. She melted into him, holding, stroking, surrendering to the bliss of his probing tongue, his eager lips. He n
o longer need kill her: she would die, right now, for sheer love of him. She surely was dying – or dead already and gone to heaven!
He was in heaven with her, but was older, wiser. He was at least trying to be wise – to remember who he was, who she was and why he should not be indulging in this … this madness.
They belonged but could never belong. Whatever was he thinking of?
With a supreme effort of will Charles held Marie from him. “I’m sorry,” he said dazedly, “so sorry. That was very wrong of me.”
“If it was wrong of you, then it was wrong of me too. The kiss wasn’t all your doing.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“You must know it wasn’t! I wanted to kiss as much as you did.”
He was unaccustomed to such openness and had certainly not expected so candid an admission. “You mean,” he coughed, “that Nancy wanted to kiss Bill.”
“Perhaps I meant that,” she conceded, feeling as if she were floating, “and perhaps I didn’t. What was wrong with us kissing?”
“There was nothing wrong with … the kiss,” he found himself admitting. “I was in the wrong, losing control. The parts we are playing … they must not be played that way.”
“Were we playing parts?” Lit from within, Marie smiled shyly up at him. “Supposing … ?”
“We must avoid supposition,” he interrupted, “and must forget that anything happened.”
“Can you forget that it did?”
“I can try,” he said, knowing that he would never forget.
“I can’t. I shall always remember being held in your arms.”
Charles wanted more than anything to hold her there again. He said: “We are … who we are: actors who play parts. That is all we are … and I must insist that in future we stick rigidly to the script.”
“If we can stick to it,” Marie modified for him.
7
Marie’s nightly coaching sessions with Mr Brodie were the talk of the Tavistock and Nell was worried sick. She had been worrying ever since winter turned into spring and the sap had started rising. It would have been obvious to a blind man that Marie was madly in love with Charles Brodie but it was also patently obvious that unless a halt was called to the ‘coaching’ this whole sorry business would end in grief.
Nell blamed D.H. Lawrence – and herself for lending SONS AND LOVERS to Marie. Had she only not lent it to her, Marie would have been less ripe for a love affair when she dashed off to the theatre for her first private rehearsal – and would not have emerged looking as if she had learned rather more than she was ever in there to learn. Marie was such a one for acting on impulse that she needed saving from herself and who was there to save her, except Nell?
Of course Mr Brodie – and him a married man! – should know better than to compromise an innocent young girl, but men were different from women as Nell knew well. Besides, was there a man alive who could resist Marie if she so much as smiled at him? Nell doubted it. She also doubted her ability to make Marie see sense. Yesterday they had talked yet again, up in the den, but talking seemed to make no difference. Marie was deaf to warnings and simply chided Nell for being so cautious. Nothing bad could happen, she said, when she was so happy … and the play was going so well … and the sun was shining over London. She seemed oblivious to the fact that sunshine could quickly turn to rain … and that there would dawn a day of reckoning, given that there was a Mrs Brodie behind the scenes.
Marie disliked Nell mentioning Charles’s wife. But Nell would be a poor sort of friend unless she pointed out pertinent facts. It was all very well for Marie to maintain that Charles’s marriage was empty and loveless. Married men said such things to get what they wanted but they were no less married for the saying and Marie was in no less danger than if they remained unsaid. Nell did not know whether Charles had had his way with Marie yet. Somehow she did not think he had, but that was delicate ground and she had not risked a direct question. Marie volunteered little, although it was clear that Mr Brodie often kissed her. Imagine kissing him! Nell simply could not imagine it. She had always found him so forbidding, so … so remote, as if he inhabited a world of his own. Trust Marie to enter his world and make it hers!
But Marie could have had any man in the universe. It was lunacy for a girl like her to settle for one like Mr Brodie. Why, besides being married, he must surely be pushing forty – and, as well as his wife, there was Guy to consider. There were so many considerations: so many reasons for Marie to call a halt before this madness went too far. Nell had mentioned all the Green Room gossip, only to be told to shut her ears to it. Why couldn’t she make Marie see that gossip was just the beginning and that if the ‘coaching’ continued there would soon be a full-blown scandal to contend with?
Tonight the Green Room was buzzing much as it did on the day Dolly Martin went missing and Nell suspected that Clive Swindall was up to something. He was certainly up to his usual tricks, conniving and insinuating, but she sensed some addition and had a horrid feeling that Dolly was involved in it. Dolly had not worked since Marie took over from her and it was rumoured that as well as hard up she was increasingly bitter. It was also rumoured that she and Clive met regularly to discuss ‘old times’ over a drink. As Marie’s friend, Nell was only ever on the fringe of things - often a lonely state since she was never included in conversations - but she felt it her duty to monitor developments for Marie’s sake, so she braved the Green Room even when she wished herself a thousand miles away.
She had braved it today with a tight knot of anxiety where her stomach should be. On arrival she had immediately seen Clive and Michael whispering, thick as thieves, and she was fairly sure she had heard Dolly’s name on their lips. Or had she imagined it? It was all too easy, when agitated, to let one’s imagination play silly tricks.
Nell just wished that Marie and Mr Brodie were less blind and deaf to the effects of their little trysts …
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Madeleine Brodie was irritated at having to deliver Guy to the theatre. Not, strictly speaking, that she did have to but she could hardly ignore Dolly’s letter.
Madeleine had liked Dolly and been sorry to see her go so suddenly. Charles had naturally seen no need, let alone obligation, to explain her going. He was a man who believed that wives should concern themselves solely with domesticity. He expected her to tolerate his mood swings, his tightfistedness, his preoccupation with all things theatrical to the exclusion of his family, his self-absorption, his … oh, it was an endless list! Yes, he expected all this yet never confided in her, never made her feel necessary to him or his precious theatre. He kept her on the outside and she felt no particular pleasure or pride in being his wife.
Perhaps things would have been better had she been English – or had he been French! There might then at least have been more understanding between them: less coldness. Madeleine could not recall quite when things first turned so cold; it was too long ago. There had been warmth, of course, initially. She would never have married Charles had she seen him from the beginning as a cold-blooded Englishman. It was well known in France that the British were reserved and their cuisine calamitous but she had married him despite these drawbacks. Young as she was back then, she had been too blinded by love to heed her parents’ advice to marry her own kind. And now she was paying the price!
Madeleine had tied herself for life to a man who was married to the Tavistock. She had learned too late that she could never compete with the stage. The theatre was in Charles’s blood and there it would remain. She had come to accept that – or, more accurately, had become resigned to it. And she had often told herself ‘better the theatre than a woman as his mistress …’
So Dolly’s hand-delivered letter, filled as it was with innuendo, had come as a shock. Dolly had written:
‘I pen this as a friend to suggest it might be in your interests to deliver Guy personally to the theatre. His governess just drops him at the stage door, whereas you might be well advised to step inside while your husband
is ‘coaching’ my successor. There seems no end in sight to these ‘coaching’ sessions, which - if needed - point to the youthful Marie Howard being an excessively dim pupil. One is led to wonder why he chose someone so dim – unless of course he had an ulterior motive in sacking me so that she could reign as leading lady. Since you were kind to me on the few occasions we met in happier days, I saw it as my duty to spare you the risk of humiliation via the newspapers.
Your well-intentioned friend,
Dolly Martin’
The letter had been delivered after Charles’s departure for the theatre. Madeleine’s housekeeper had then seen the retreating rear-view of a man answering Michael Wickenden’s description. So did the whole Company know Charles’s ‘secret’? Probably! It was common knowledge what a hotbed of gossip the Green Room was. In that environment no secret stayed so for long. Charles was a lunatic if he thought that it did … or if he thought he would get away with this.
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He was not thinking about getting away with anything. He was simply not thinking. When holding Marie he abandoned all logic, all common sense. He just revelled in her nearness – in her willingness to be kissed and caressed.
She was not merely willing: she was feverishly eager to kiss and caress him in return. Charles had heard that the Welsh were a hot-blooded race and now he knew they were. How he had – to date – stopped short of bedding her he could not imagine, since without question she would have gone to bed with him. But she was a virgin! She had not said so, in words, but there was no need for her to say it. A man knew these things. Charles knew that Marie had come intact to him, knowing too that he could not live with the guilt of plucking her maidenhood from her when he had nothing to offer. He might have lost his reason, lost all sense of right and wrong, but he had not altogether lost his conscience. So he must somehow hold off from taking her for himself when he had no right to take her. Some day another man would come to claim Charles’s beloved Marie and when that happened she must have no regrets at having given herself prematurely to him outside marriage. She must not have a single regret because of him. He could not bear it if she did.
