Chaplin & Company
Page 8
‘Hello,’ he said, keeping his eye on the mirror as he drew the razor down his cheek. She stopped, felt pinned to the spot. He turned his head. His deep-set eyes were looking directly into hers. The half-face of white soap made his lips seem very red, clownlike. ‘Hope you haven’t had any more trouble.’ His voice was quiet but definite. She remembered it from last night: relaxed, almost sleepy, but authoritative as it dispatched John Kettle. Maybe this man was a hypnotist, who controlled people by talking to them!
‘Hello,’ she said, confused, and broke away, walking quickly to the far end of her boat. She stepped on, shooing the pigeons who flapped down on to the towpath. She cracked open the padlock, unhooked it, opened the doors and ducked inside, then kept the latches shut for the rest of the morning. It was hot. Sunshine streamed through the portholes, but she didn’t open them. She wanted to be watertight, all hatches plugged to the outside world.
It was rehearsal time, but she’d decided not to do any harmonica practice. She was worried someone would hear. She had heard her neighbour playing violin music early this morning – it was as clear as if he had been playing it just outside her cabin doors. Instead she flossed and brushed and then ran through her repertoire for the evening whilst envisaging her audience. They were cultured, quiet, appreciative, and applauded sincerely at the end of each set piece. She practised a series of bows. The rehearsal went well and afterwards she did a prop check to make sure she had everything for the job. She did.
For lunch: six cheese slices on crackerbread. And then she made her way into the city. It was only half past three. But she wanted to get to Covent Garden in good time, to look around. One of the oldest books in her collection is a pictorial history called Great London Theatres. She has had this book since she was ten and knows all the descriptions by heart. (It was one of the books she took to the playground to fill lunchbreaks.) The illustrations and photographs are in black-and-white and she has coloured them in her imagination, gilding the outsides and filling their auditoriums with rich red velvet. The Globe is not featured in the book, so she had deduced that it must be one of the great modern theatres of London. All of the theatres in Great London Theatres were built before 1900.
And so her prop box trundled once again along the bumpy slabs of the towpath. She was dressed in full performance outfit: brogues, black trousers held up by red braces, white collarless shirt, black bowtie and waistcoat, minus her tailcoat, which she hooked with a finger over her shoulder. There was no room for her bowler to go in with the other props so it sat on her head, at a bit of an angle. There was no sign of her neighbour now, and John Kettle was safely occupied with another pack of children. As she left the canal and went up to street level to find the bus stop she felt jaunty, full of promise. Off to seek her fortune.
In the ladies’ toilets of the Globe, Odeline unscrews the easel legs and folds them back on themselves, using a pair of braces to keep them together. She slots the easel down the left-hand side of the box, next to a theatrically broken umbrella, on top of the small blackboard which goes flat across the base. She pushes in the tiers of the plastic make-up box and shuts the lid. There are dirty tissues all around the sink – she has tried to scrub her make-up off as quickly as possible. She can still hear the brawling outside. She felt like just flinging in the easel legs, any which way. She feels like ripping open the box of chalk and writing ‘WHO CARES?’ on the blackboard.
When she’d followed her A–Z from the bus stop to Covent Garden she couldn’t believe how many people there were. She thought it must be a political protest, of the type she’d heard could happen in London. Taxes. Redundancies. Anti-war. But then she realised the crowds weren’t heading anywhere; people were wandering aimlessly. They all looked so scruffy. Londoners ought to be several degrees smarter than Arundel folk. But old-looking shirts, jeans ripped and baggy, big black boots – all these people looked like tramps! She kept an eye out for punk rockers. There were pictures of them in her Visitor’s Guide to London and she hadn’t seen one yet. Which was a relief.
Her plan was to tour the theatres, but first she decided to have a more general look around and joined a wave of people heading towards the centre of the Piazza. This, said the Visitor’s Guide, was the site of the old fruit and vegetable market. She kept one hand on her moneybelt as she walked, remembering that other line in the Guide – this was an area awash with pickpockets. The prop box was hard to manoeuvre in a throng and she kept it close behind her. But still people tripped on it and pushed into her. They didn’t seem to notice, though. Nobody said anything. She felt dizzy with how close the people were.
The patterns and checks of their clothes made her vision quiver.
She looked up as she walked between the giant pillars of the Market building, and was calmed by doing that. She fixed her eyes on the huge plain slabs of stone, silent above the bustle of the people. Their blankness helped. But then she couldn’t look away. She found a way to push herself into the corner of the building and kept on looking up. There was something about the building’s wall, the colour and flatness of the stone, that gave her a feeling she knew. She leant against it. In a world that vibrated and wobbled and barged, it was still. Unspeaking. She found herself thinking of her mother, and she didn’t know why, and soon found she wanted to move on.
At one of the market stalls she saw some Buster Keaton prints and pushed her way to the front. They had a whole series from Steamboat Bill Jr. She picked out five. But when she checked the price she was horrified. £15 each! They could never be justified in her accounts, even if filed under ‘Inspiration’. She put them back and got away from the stall. Other stalls were equally expensive. On one sat a leather notebook that cost more than her coach ticket to London. The only things reasonably priced were postcards. She bought one of a pair of punk rockers, both with green spiked hair and nose rings. The message said ‘WELCOME TO LONDON’.
She heard operatic singing now and followed it to some railings looking over a courtyard where two ladies were standing next to a speaker. They were dressed in baggy sweatshirts and tights with big boots, but the sound they made was beautiful. They sang to each other and to the people sitting at tables down there, and their voices intertwined then stretched away from each other and then came back together quite perfectly. Odeline closed her eyes and her heart split into two swallows that flew with the music, dipping and soaring then changing direction. When the singing stopped she was still soaring. Only at the buzz of the speaker did she open her eyes. The singers had picked up baskets and were going round the crowd, asking for money. She walked away quickly.
Outside the market, in the large paved square, were a pair of stiltwalkers, one dressed as St George, in chainmail and a sword, the other in a suit of green scales and a flame stick. They were fighting in slow motion, St George wielding his sword and then ducking as the dragon raised the flame stick to its mouth and bellowed fire. It was very impressive and there was a crowd gathered around them. Odeline would have liked to get closer but then saw a man in a damsel-in-distress outfit rattling a donation pot around the crowd. Everyone was after her money in this place.
There were other attractions in the Piazza: a juggler; a still and very fat man painted gold like a statue; a gorilla standing on a box in King Kong pose, frozen with a blonde doll upside down in its fist. The sun pushed down on all these things, and the air was close with heat. Most people were sitting or lying on the cobbles to watch, half absorbed in ice creams, drinks, cigarettes. Odeline thought that she would never allow an audience to eat, drink or smoke during a performance. It was disrespectful. Also, it made it impossible for them to applaud.
The huge clock in the Piazza chimed five o’clock. Time to start her tour. She would go first to the Theatre Royal. She has read much about the career of Mrs Jordan, the great actress who made her name here. She has been enraged by the tale of Mrs Jordan’s mistreatment at the hands of men. She can remember by heart the paragraph on page 14 of Great London Theatres, below the picture o
f a young Mrs Jordan in her London stage debut:
Abandoned by her father in Ireland, Dora Bland was forced on to the stage as a child to support herself and her mother. She was abducted and impregnated by the tyrannical stage manager of the Cork theatre, and fled to London to escape him. In 1786 she appeared in A Country Girl at the Theatre Royal and was immediately adored for her great talent and charisma. She adopted the stage name Mrs Jordan, in reference to her escape across the Irish Sea, her River Jordan.
Odeline has always found this final line particularly romantic. She likes the thought of having a dramatic stage name. ‘Odeline’ is good but she has always felt the surname ‘Milk’ lets her down – she has never liked drinking milk and the word makes her think of the grotty newsagent’s in Arundel with its humming freezer of dairy goods and racks of trashy magazines. Perhaps, like Mrs Jordan, she could change it to something referring to her escape from provincial entrapment? Redwing, after the coach company that carried her to London?
Here she was, then, below the towering columns and white stucco facade of the Theatre Royal. She tipped her head to the side to look at it. The illustration in Great London Theatres shows a gleaming temple sitting stately and solitary at the top of a street. But it sat there today grey and dull, squeezed between two buildings covered in scaffolding. Up close the columns were scuffed and cracked. She marched under the portico and pushed a door. It stuck and wouldn’t open. She tried another. Through the glass she saw an old man hoovering the foyer. He wagged a finger. ‘Closed,’ he mouthed, and tapped his watch. She didn’t like his manner and gave the door a kick. His face blinked in surprise and she turned away. Regulations are mediocrity’s means of suffocating the gifted, she thought.
She walked round to the Royal Opera House and gazed up at the glass arc of the Floral Hall next door. This was not a disappointing sight. It was a great fan of white and refracted light. Inside she could see the painted top of an enormous set background, huge treetops with light coming through the canopy. She thought of that afternoon under the tree on her twelfth birthday, and then of her hours in the darkness of Arundel church. This was more of a church to her now, this flower market building – this filled her with real exultation. A church of the arts. Impassioned, she went to see inside the Opera House, but the entrance was cordoned off for a private function. One day, she swore, she would return as a guest of honour. With seats in the Royal Box.
She walked back into the Piazza and round to what her Visitor’s Guide told her was St Paul’s Church, the ‘Actors’ Church’. It had tall black windows and to Odeline looked like a big tomb. There was a sandwich board outside saying ‘CLOSED’. She stopped and put her tailcoat on, tired of carrying it. Suddenly tired of everything, she pulled the prop box handle to the ground and sat down on top of it, leaning an elbow on one knee and sinking her chin into her hand. She felt glum for some reason.
She heard a metallic clink and looked down to see a coin had been flipped down at her brogues. It was a 50p, which wobbled then dropped flat on the cobbles. She looked around but couldn’t tell who had thrown it. ‘Nice outfit,’ a spotty boy in a tracksuit said. ‘Can you do the Chaplin walk for us?’ She got up quickly and pulled her prop box after her. ‘That’s not it,’ she heard him shout, and then heard laughter. She couldn’t tell if it was at her or at something completely different.
The Globe took some time to find. Odeline had been looking for a theatre. Not a pub. There was just one customer at the bar, a white-haired, crumpled figure, who for a second she thought was the canal warden come to accost her, then realised was just another drunkard. This one was older, red-nosed, spine curved in a collapse against the back of the bar stool. He mumbled into a pint of something. Seated in the window was a family with knapsacks out on the table, speaking what might have been German. She waited for the barman to come to her and asked where the venue was for tonight’s performance. Obviously there was a theatre of the same name, or a bijou space attached to the pub – she’d read that was fashionable these days. The barman was also German-sounding and seemed to have some trouble understanding her question, but then directed her upstairs. She followed him up, hauling her box one step at a time. On the staircase wall were theatre posters, pasted on top of one another. Odeline saw old posters for ballets at the Opera House, Shakespeare at the Old Vic, and countless comedy shows which looked, frankly, quite tacky. She imagined her own poster; perhaps she would be in Art Nouveau silhouette, juggling signature props: a rose, cane, handkerchief, umbrella.
Upstairs was no theatre. To the right of a small bar was a raised and carpeted platform which, according to the barman, was the stage. He presented it with a bored flourish which irritated Odeline. She sniffed to show her disdain. Either side were heavy red curtains which, he pointed out, didn’t close. He seemed to think this was funny. At the top was a tasselled safety curtain, which, he pointed out, didn’t lower. This amused him too. It looked like a Punch and Judy box. She imagined the barman up there as Judy, herself as Punch, hitting him repeatedly over the head. Facing the stage was a single table with a few empty chairs scattered around it. She asked when the audience’s seating would be set up. He told her this was it. She told him the stage was too small. He agreed. She asked where her dressing room was. He said she could change in the toilets. She told him this was not good enough. He shrugged, said she could have one free drink on the house. She didn’t thank him and he went back downstairs, still shrugging to himself.
It was an hour before she was due to perform. She went over and stood on the stage – it was an even narrower space than the cabin of her boat. She tried reducing some of her movements, whilst keeping the mime as expressive as possible. It was hard. She put her props in position and then went to the ladies’ toilets to begin her preparation.
Her disappointment at the venue was nothing compared to what she felt on seeing her audience. Her first thought on emerging from the toilet was that they were insane, they were shouting so loudly. And then she looked around for a television showing some kind of sport – why else would they cheer like that? But quickly she understood that they were just drunk. So this was her audience: twelve men sitting around a pub table, brightly dressed in Hawaiian shirts and garlands. They yelled and stamped their feet as one man in the middle of them, who, to Odeline’s horror, appeared to have been stripped and put into a coconut bikini and grass skirt, was forced to drink from a line of drinks on the table in front of him. He grinned desperately, raised his glass and looked around his companions before taking a sip. They all pounded the table and in corresponding gulps he finished the rest of the drink. ‘Next!’ someone shouted and the man in the middle laughed loudly. To Odeline the laugh sounded hollow. It sounded like the laugh she would make if forced to laugh just at that moment.
An instant later, she was taken to the stage and introduced by the barman.
‘Gentlemen, your evening’s entertainment!’
No one heard; they carried on forcing the man to drink. A pack of wild animals, thought Odeline, mad with the scent of blood. She pictured them around a carcass, tearing it apart.
She began her repertoire and was grateful, so grateful, for the low and tiny platform she stood on, though she wished she could lower the faux safety curtain and disappear. Her movements were minuscule, so eager was she not to be noticed. She raced through the rose illusion at double speed, producing it from the cuff of her coat almost as soon as she’d hidden it there, and didn’t bother with any of her accompanying facial expressions.
But during the next trick her audience began to pay attention. A bald-headed man in the seat closest to the stage stood up and made some lewd Hawaiian dance moves towards her. They all laughed and she pretended not to see, looking down as if to check her watch.
She wasn’t wearing a watch.
‘Time to get your kit off?’ shouted the bald man, with an exaggerated opening of his top button. The men gave a pantomime jeer.
‘I can’t hear you!’ said the bald man.
‘Come on, Charlie!’ she heard a voice shout. She looked around: the barman was nowhere to be seen. A Hawaiian garland landed at her feet.
‘Kit off!’ another one shouted.
They started a slow clap. She stood still as a statue looking round the table of faces, and it was as if the sound had been turned off, so loud was the throbbing in her ears. Puce, manic, they leered forth at her and at each other.
For a second her eyes caught the gaze of the man in the middle, the one in the coconut bikini who’d downed the drink. He was not clapping or shouting but looking back with a deadened expression. He nodded at her slowly. Then stood up swaying, raised his hand and picked up the next glass from the long line in front of him. He drank this, then the next, and the next, three in a row, then sank back into his seat. The men turned back to him and began to cheer again. More glasses were slid up the table in front of him. He made as if to push them away and was chanted at to drink. As if underwater, his eyes half closed, he focused on the glass closest to him, taking it slowly and tipping it down his throat. As the glass dropped back to the table he blinked, and shunted further down in his seat. The men roared.
Odeline picked up all the props she could in both arms and ran off into the toilets.
Her props are now packed. She flips shut the fasteners on the box and picks up her bowler hat and umbrella. Outside the heat has cracked and there is a release of rain – huge hot drops hit the windowsill of the ladies’ toilets. She pushes through the swing door and makes it through the top bar quickly without anyone seeing her, then thumps down the stairs with her case. People from the downstairs bar are blocking the way and she says excuse me a few times without being heard and so squeezes herself against the wall to pass. She doesn’t want to be seen – she feels she has been excessively looked at this evening, obscenely looked at and assessed. The people in the bar all seem to be shouting over the sound of each other. When she looks up she sees only hairstyles, sweaty foreheads, open mouths. She accidentally clips a glass off the top of the cigarette machine with her umbrella handle and feels the contents splash over the bottom of her trousers. She feels a pinch of fear that the glass’s owner might come after her and squeezes on along the wall, keeping her head down. She feels any moment they might all turn round to point at her, and there she will be, scurrying like a rat towards the door.