by Nicola Upson
People seemed determined to shelter from life these days, she thought, to resist its joys and its pain in favour of a bland contentment. There was certainly no place in the West End for any play with a soul. She despised the romantic nonsense that everyone seemed so taken with. If she were only given the chance, she knew she could make them understand what they were missing. But, as things stood, Daviot – and others like her – sat smugly in the auditorium, revelling in a success which was undeserved and planning another pointless fairy-tale to sedate the crowds, while she was taken for granted backstage, working long hours just to ensure that fame ran smoothly.
The harsh roar of a motorcycle cut through the air beneath her window as she got up to switch on the light. The gloom of the morning made the bulb’s efforts to illuminate the room less feeble than usual, but there was still precious little cheer to be had.
Shivering, she took the blanket off the bed and draped it round her shoulders before picking her way across a carpet of discarded paper and returning to the battered trunk that functioned as a makeshift desk. Her typewriter – a Good Companion, bought for twelve precious guineas – looked out of place in that tawdry room, but it was more real to her than anything else there and it had served her well: she was finally ready. Looking up from the page, she smiled bitterly at the sight of Bernard Aubrey, strolling into view as if in response to one of her perfectly timed cues. It amused her to think that he should take the trouble to notice her here, in this anonymous room, when at the theatre he passed her every day without even bothering to remember her name. It had always 56
seemed her fate to go through life unnoticed or easily forgotten, but he would recognise her soon enough. She sealed the envelope and picked up her coat, slamming the door on her way out.
Rafe Swinburne slid quickly and silently from tangled sheets with the ease born of long practice, and saw with relief that the slender young redhead whom he left behind – Sybille, he thought she had called herself, or Sylvia – remained fast asleep. In bed and out, she had proved to be more entertaining than most of the young women who hung around Wyndham’s stage door at the end of every performance, waiting for young actors like him to emerge, but he had no wish to continue the relationship into a second day.
There was, he had discovered, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sweet young things who expected him to live up to his stage role as caddish young lover, and he was more than happy to oblige.
Acting had many more advantages than a salary of thirty pounds a week and he had always been the ambitious type, as greedy for adoration off stage as on. Last night, he had been adored until well into the early hours.
He dressed quietly in the bathroom, examining his mirror-image over a shelf crammed with creams and powders. Mercifully, his reflection confirmed that he needed nothing more than a splash of cold water to make himself presentable. He was, as he well knew, a strikingly handsome young man, tall and dark with lean features that were softened to just the right degree by hair worn slightly longer than was considered fashionable. Had his eyes held something warmer than their habitual cynical indifference, Swinburne would have been beautiful; nevertheless, he had about him an unmistakable air of self-possession that caught the eye of both sexes.
Carrying his shoes until it was safe to make a noise, he took a pre-written postcard from the pocket of his coat and left it on the hall table – a nice touch, he always thought, and one guaranteed to ease the disappointment of an early departure. Gently, he opened the front door and, with his exit assured, slipped down the stairs.
Ignoring the rain and kneeling to tie his laces, he glanced around 57
to get his bearings and was surprised to find himself in Hammersmith. The journey from the West End to these rented rooms had not seemed very far last night, but then he had been racing through London with a pretty girl’s arms around his waist and his mind on little else but a craving for sex which did not distinguish between postal districts. In the cold light of day, he wished fate had coupled him with someone a little closer to home.
It was already gone noon and there was nowhere near enough time before the matinee to go back to his own rooms on the south side of the river and change, let alone to drop in on John Terry as he had hoped – no, as he needed – to do before this afternoon’s meeting. Swinburne rather enjoyed the reputation he had for being late, but he was not prepared to push his last-minute appearances to impossible limits and risk missing his first entrance. He would have to make do with a telephone call en route to the theatre.
He had found to his great relief that his prized motorcycle – a 1932 Ariel Square Four – was still at the end of the passage where he had hurriedly left it just after midnight. Long before it became such a fashionable leisure activity, Swinburne had loved motorcycling with a passion. As a child, his father had driven him all over the countryside on the sturdy Scott model that he had kept when he was invalided out of the war, perching his young son on the special stand at the front which once sported a machine gun but which had been cleverly adapted into the most thrilling of vantage points for a tiny boy. His earliest memories were of the excitement he felt as he swung round with the handlebars, confident in his father’s deft handling of the machine. Never again had he felt so close to danger, and yet so safe. By then, it was just the two of them – he had lost his mother during the war and had to rely on his father’s stories for most of what he knew of her – and the bond was unbreakable. Many years later, when his father died, he had ridden the Ariel for hours, not caring where he went but desperate to escape the most powerful grief he had ever known. It proved to be unshakeable, though, and it had travelled with him ever since.
Several kicks were needed to fire the reluctant engine into life in 58
such unpleasant weather, but he felt the pressures of the day lift as soon as he moved out into the traffic, weaving effortlessly between the cars and making better time than he could have hoped. When he reached the King’s Road, he slackened his pace and pulled over by Chelsea Town Hall, leaving the motorcycle where he could keep an eye on it and waiting impatiently outside the telephone box while a lanky man with a ruddy face and an enormous raincoat finished his call. An unpleasant odour of rain mixed with sweat and tobacco bore down on him in the confined space, offending his natural fastidiousness, and he was relieved when a voice at the other end of the line demanded his attention.
‘Yes?’ The musical quality for which Terry’s delivery was so lauded by the critics could not have been more absent from this clipped greeting. It was obviously a bad moment, but beggars could not be choosers and a beggar was essentially what Swinburne was about to become.
‘It’s Swinburne. I wanted to talk to you before this afternoon.
Do you have any idea which way Aubrey’s going to jump?’
Although not yet thirty, John Terry was beginning to wonder if he had already enjoyed the greatest success of his career. He had known as soon as he opened the manuscript of Richard of Bordeaux, with its neat pages carefully typed in blue ink, that he was looking at a gift from heaven. Reading it in his dressing room during a matinee of The Good Companions, he had almost missed his cue, so taken was he with its charm and humour, with the modern dialogue which turned a king into a man of the people. He learned later that the play had been inspired by his performance as Richard II at the Old Vic a number of years ago, but he knew nothing of the author at the time. He had not needed to, because the script spoke for itself. Aubrey had required no persuading to back a commercial run and their instincts had soon been rewarded. A clash with another opening night had meant a sub-dued first performance but, at ten minutes past one on the following day, the telephone began to ring at the box office and had not stopped since. For fourteen months, there had rarely been an 59
empty seat in the house, and some people had seen the play thirty or forty times.
At first, he had been pleased by the adulation. Supper at the Savoy was a novelty which he had never before been able to afford, and he enjoye
d being recognised in the street. But pleasure turned to embarrassment, embarrassment to boredom, and now he was utterly sick of Richard. He had been photographed, carica-tured and painted, and had had everything from dolls to bronze sculptures fashioned in his image. White harts – the King’s emblem
– rained upon him in every conceivable form, embroidered on handkerchiefs and stamped on cigarette boxes. Young girls followed him from the theatre to his flat; others turned up unan-nounced in the middle of the night; and he had lost count of the times he answered the telephone only to be greeted by adolescent giggles and the click of the receiver as the callers lost their nerve before speaking.
But worse than all of that was the knowledge that his performances had lost their sincerity, that he was becoming mannered and exaggerated in an attempt to keep alive his interest in the role. A year ago, exhaustion had forced him to take a short holiday but, unable to keep away, he had returned early from the west country for the pleasure of slipping into a box and watching his understudy on stage. Back then, the play had moved him to tears; now, he often asked someone else to stand in simply because he could not face going through it all again himself. He bitterly regretted the early enthusiasm that had contracted him to the role both in London and on tour, but he could see no way out other than to make Aubrey change his mind, and he knew hell would freeze over before that happened.
He looked around the small, unpretentiously furnished flat in the hope that the familiar surroundings might outmanoeuvre a new emotion which he recognised as despair. His gaze rested on the toy theatre that his mother had given him for Christmas when he was just seven years old: its cream and gold pillars had become chipped and scratched over the years, the plush red velvet curtains were now faded and worn, but he still saw in it the endless possi-60
bilities that had absorbed him throughout his childhood. As a boy, he had existed in an intense fantasy world, unaware of all that went on around him, and this miniature stage was at its centre.
When he was introduced to the real thing he knew he was lost completely, less to the carefree attractions of make-believe than to what he revelled in as a complete sensual experience: the colour and the lights, the textures of the spoken word, the physical presence of the crowds, the exhilarating taste of success and, as its understudy, the pungent whiff of failure. He had become the biggest star of his day, but recently he had found himself hanker-ing after that toy theatre and a world which had also seemed to be of a more manageable scale. It had to stop. He needed a new challenge before his ambition and his desire faded away into comfortable certainties. He had to hold his nerve with Aubrey and get out of this rut once and for all.
A tall, gauntly handsome young man appeared at the bedroom door, rubbing his eyes and running his fingers through thinning fair hair. ‘Who was that on the telephone?’ he asked, and the soft, Irish inflection made the question seem more casual than it really was. ‘Let me guess: there’s a problem with a play and only you can sort it out. Am I right or am I right?’
Without much hope of success, Terry attempted to defuse another fruitless round of bickering before it started. ‘It was only Rafe Swinburne adding one more demand to the list for this afternoon. If Aubrey’s not in the right mood, we’ll all find ourselves carrying spears in Morecambe before the month’s out.’ It was a feeble effort at lightness, he knew, and the only response it brought was a wearily raised eyebrow.
‘Would that be such a bad thing? At least you might come home occasionally.’
‘Don’t be so fucking sanctimonious – it doesn’t suit you,’ said Terry, his frustration quickly getting the better of him. ‘I’m not sleeping with him, if that’s what this is about, so you can stop worrying.’
‘You really don’t understand, do you? If it were about sex I’d almost be relieved, but it’s more than that. I might stand a chance 61
against another man, but I can’t take on the whole of the West End. You’re obsessed.’
‘You used to say that was sexy.’
‘That was before I lived with you. Then you had to make an effort to see me; now I’m just an inconvenient interruption to the working day. The actors, the writers, the boy that sweeps the stage
– they always come first, whether you want to sleep with them or not. How do you think that makes me feel?’
There was no answer to that. Acting was his life, his work and his play and, if he were honest, his only love; without it, he cared about nothing. Aware of the sadness his silence was causing but too selfishly honest to lie, Terry walked past his lover to dress for the theatre.
By the time Lewis Fleming arrived, the nursing home was almost always in darkness. He walked quietly down sour-smelling corridors which opened onto uniform rooms, nodding to nurses who tip-toed across polished floors and conscious of sleepless eyes watching him pass, glad of any focus to distract them from the darkness and loneliness to which evening abandoned them. For the ill and the desperate – and this plain red-brick building on Gray’s Inn Road was the last haven of hope for both – night was the hardest time and sleep the most elusive companion, so he went to cushion her from that hell, sitting wide awake by her bed and letting her sleep safely in the knowledge that, for a few hours at least, she was not alone. Resting on the stark white sheets, her hand felt cool in his.
Surrounded by the murmurs and the restlessness which reached him through paper-thin walls, Fleming had plenty of time to worry about what would happen if he could not manage to support his wife through her illness. Acting was a precarious way to make a living; he had been lucky to land a part in a play which had run for over a year, but it was coming to an end now and his future was uncertain. As the clock across the road struck the hour and then the half, he felt as though his life were passing twice as slowly as everybody else’s, while hers threatened to be over so soon. Pain 62
had begun to leave lines around her eyes that even sleep could not entirely smooth away, but she still looked young compared to the home’s other inhabitants, who had at least reached the vulnerable middle-age on which this unforgiving disease fed. Her face still held its beauty and its strength, and the blankets did much to belie the wasting of her body but, as he looked at her arms which were the colour of unbleached wax and tellingly thin, he was overwhelmed by the bitter sense of injustice that had been with him since the day the cancer was diagnosed. He remembered the mixture of courage and terror with which she had told him the news, and the stubborn disbelief with which he had received it. Could that really have been only three months ago?
At the first grey streak of dawn, when the rooms began to stir into life, he would kiss her gently awake as she had made him promise to do and slip away from her bed, past the seared faces and broken lives and down the steps into the street. A twenty-minute walk took him home, where he would fall exhausted into their bed and sleep until early afternoon; by three o’clock, he was back for the more conventional visiting period, and took his place among the ranks of husbands and wives armed with flowers, practised cheerfulness and carefully rehearsed homecoming plans, and with a resolve which crumpled the moment the visitor was out of reach of the searching eyes in the bed. On matinee days, he was spared this collective ritual and dared not go home, either, for fear that he would sleep through the afternoon and on into the night. He knew that his exhaustion was affecting his performance – Aubrey had already made that clear – but he had told no one of his situation, terrified that his livelihood would be taken away from him, and with it that thin sliver of hope that he could get them through this, that money could buy time, perhaps even a cure. The doctors had said it was not out of the question: that small chance and his wife’s constant faith in him were the only things that kept him on his feet.
On Thursdays and Saturdays, he crawled gratefully into an eating-house near the theatre, using its smoky fug to shake off the scent of flowers and drugs and pity that hung perpetually around him. He drank endless mugs of strong, hot coffee in the 63
hope that it would s
ee him through two performances on stage and a third at his wife’s bedside, but ate little, conscious that every penny had to be saved. Today, as usual, the room was full of people for whom every shilling counted, but a woman at the next table stood out from the crowd, not least because she looked as tired and as worried as he felt. She was familiar to him from the theatre, and he had noticed her in particular because she reminded him of his wife. She looked up as the waitress removed an empty cup from her table and glanced in his direction, offering a half-smile of recognition. Embarrassed at having been caught watching her so intently, he returned the greeting in kind and quickly finished his coffee.
It was still raining when he left the eating-house to make his way to the theatre. During the lunch-time period on a Saturday, the area between Charing Cross and St Martin’s Lane was invariably full of itinerant young actors heading towards performances in which they enjoyed varying degrees of success, and he nodded to a few of the usual faces as he passed. Then, across the street, he saw Terry emerge from the saddlery shop which occupied the same building as his flat and walk quickly off in the direction of the New. A few seconds later another man, whom Lewis recognised as the actor’s latest lover, followed in his footsteps, catching him easily with just a few long strides. He grabbed Terry by the arm and the two seemed to argue for a minute before, in a display of affection which was foolhardy in such a public place, the taller man grabbed a flower from a stall and thrust it melodramatically towards Terry, who could not help but laugh. The tension between them fell away instantly, and Terry continued his journey alone, the flower now adorning his buttonhole.
Fleming felt a sudden stab of anger that God should allow these people to parade their filthy, fickle love in the street while seeming to punish him and his wife for their devotion. If he were to lose the only woman he had ever spoken to of love, the only woman he had taken to his bed, he knew he could never replace her with another.
