The Swish of the Curtain

by Pamela Brown

Two of his school friends were sauntering along, their hands in their pockets. One of them was John Flanders.

  “Would you like us to leave you, Lyn?” asked Nigel sarcastically.

  This goaded Lyn further. “Yes,” she replied, “all except Jeremy.”

  They all turned and walked off in the opposite direction.

  “Hullo, you,” said Jeremy, with a grin as they met. “Meet my sister, Lynette. Lyn, this is John Flanders and Gregory Macmillan.”

  They shook hands. Jeremy looked at his watch. “Goodness, it’s past eleven. I shan’t get there in time. Cheerio! You don’t mind me leaving you, Lyn, do you?”

  Lyn said she did not.

  “Where are you off to?” Macmillan wanted to know.

  “One of those thingummmy-jig affairs,” said Jeremy vaguely, as he hurried off to find the others.

  Lyn spent the rest of the morning walking round the town with Macmillan and Flanders. She found them congenial company, as they treated her most politely and admiringly, as if she were some fragile piece of Dresden china. John Flanders bought her a little spray of roses from a flower seller and presented them, quoting from Jeremy’s part in Red as the Rose. By the entrance to Woolworth’s they ran into the others, and Lyn said, “Hullo, Nigel. Hullo, Sandra. Hullo, Maddy. Hullo, Vicky. Hullo, Bulldog. Hullo, Jerry,” with a suavity that was most annoying. In Woolworth’s Mrs. Potter-Smith met the greater part of the Blue Door Theatre Company.

  “Oh, my clever darlings,” she cooed, “I want to tell you how I loved your perfectly divine concert. Of course, it’s such a shame you’ve never been trained. I mean, one can always tell the difference. And how sweet of the dear bishop to come; but there, I know he makes an absolute martyr of himself.”

  The “clever darlings” were not in a mood to listen to veiled insults.

  “Of course you didn’t see the beginning part of the programme,” said Nigel smoothly, alluding to her late entrance, “so you didn’t see Vicky’s dance. I know you are interested in dancing.”

  “I thought it was a very lovely show, and even though the person sitting next to me said that she thought that the dancing-class play was rather vulgar, I stuck up for you. Yes, I stuck up for you. ‘They’re very young,’ I said. ‘Too young to quite understand what is what.’ And when she said that the last play about the Wars of the Roses” – here Nigel winced – “when she said that was a bit too full of love-making, I said, ‘But they’re so young, so very young,’ I said, ‘to attempt a play like that.’” The children seethed. Mrs. Potter-Smith went on. “You know, I am thinking of getting up another of my little concerts. People do appreciate them so, and I thought I would ask the dear vicar to lend me the hall you used.”

  “But Mrs. Potter-Smith,” Sandra gasped, “that isn’t his hall; it’s ours.”

  “Yes, dear girlie, but the vicar must have first say in the matter.”

  Nigel said firmly, “I don’t think it would quite meet your requirements.”

  “No,” Maddy backed him up, “the stage is very fragile, it won’t bear too much. Time and again I have gone through, and they’ve had to wait for me to get thin enough to squeeze out! And then there are rats in the dressing-room. They eat the cosmetics; that’s why Nigel’s moustache fell off. You see, he had put the gum all ready on it, and while his back was turned a rat came and licked it off!”

  Mrs. Potter-Smith goggled.

  “And if you really want permission to use it, you have to go and ask the chaplain it belonged to last. His name is Brother Irving, and he’s in prison for murder. We went to see him to get his permission, and it was a good job Vicky had her hockey stick. D’you know, he’s so strong he can bend the bars on the door with his hand; and he stretched out…” Maddy shot out her hand with fingers spread towards Mrs. Potter-Smith’s fleshy throat. She moved a few paces backward. “He stretched out and caught me by the neck, and if Vicky hadn’t banged his hands with her hockey stick” – she shrugged – “it would have been the end of me.”

  The others tried to stop this flow of cheerful lies, but once she was in full swing Maddy went from length to length.

  “And he told us,” she lowered her voice mysteriously, “that there is the body of one of his victims buried in the back-yard of the hall. We had noticed a peculiar smell, certainly, but we thought it was the marigolds that Bulldog had planted. P’r’aps that’s why they’ve grown so well.”

  Mrs. Potter-Smith was green in the face. “Good-bye,” she gulped and tottered off.

  “You little liar,” chuckled Nigel, patting her on the back. “You’ve certainly done the trick.”

  “Whatever made you say all that?” the shocked Sandra wanted to know.

  “It just came. Inspiration, you know. It’s quite easy when you’ve practised a bit.”

  On the way home they met several people who told them how much they enjoyed the concert and how they hoped that another would be forthcoming. As they walked up Goldenwood Avenue they could see Lyn talking to her two new friends.

  “That girl makes me sick,” seethed Nigel.

  “You’re bad-tempered today, that’s what’s the matter with you,” said Sandra, sticking up for her friend.

  “Take an aspirin,” advised Maddy.

  Nigel kicked his gate open. “Oh well, cheerio. I’m going to bed this afternoon.”

  “I’m going out with Mummy,” said Sandra, “and we’re buying Maddy a new hat.”

  “Does that mean I have to come too?” asked Maddy suspiciously.

  “It does. And we’re going to visit Aunty Beth.”

  Maddy groaned. “Life is going to be awful, now that we can’t make rehearsals our excuse for everything.”

  “It’s terrible to have nothing to do,” grumbled Bulldog, who all last term had grumbled that he had too much to do.

  “I can’t see us doing any more plays till next Christmas hols.,” said Nigel, “because I shall be working for School Cert. next year, and so I shan’t be able to rehearse during term time.”

  “And we couldn’t possibly do anything without you,” added Maddy loyally.

  “Things are rather broken up,” sighed Sandra. “We’re going to Bristol to stay with our grandparents next week, and then we’re going to the seaside for a fortnight.”

  “We’re going to Scotland,” Nigel told her.

  “You’re lucky,” Jeremy said; “we’re not going away at all. I shall have a pretty mouldy time if Lyn’s going to play around with those” – he jerked his head up the hill to where Lyn stood with Macmillan and Flanders, and he searched for a word – “those stage-door johnnies.”

  By the end of the holidays Lyn was sick of the sight of the two boys. They haunted her wherever she went, and she soon tired of their excellent manners and pretty speeches. Most mornings they walked in the park and made feeble conversation. Lyn found that the only subject on which they could talk intelligently was themselves. After long doses of Macmillan’s descriptions of his father’s horses, and how he himself had nearly won a point-to-point, Lyn longed to hear Nigel and Bulldog talking their usual nonsense; and when John Flanders told her in minute detail of how he did the hat-trick in last season’s cricket, she felt she would give anything for the light banter and cross-talk of the Blue Door Theatre Company.

  Jeremy spent all his holidays practising his violin, for he had an exam to take in October. In Scotland the Halfords fished and rode and climbed, while the Faynes swam and sun-bathed on the beaches of Bournemouth. Only Lyn was bored and miserable.

  One day, towards the end of the seven weeks’ holiday, John and Gregory received a surprise when they knocked at the door of number seventeen Goldenwood Avenue at the usual time. Instead of Lyn appearing, dainty and smiling, Jeremy, violin in hand, greeted them.

  “Hullo, Lyn’s not coming out this morning; we’re going down to meet the Halfords at the station.”

  The two boys were crestfallen.

  Nigel and the twins, leaning out of the carriage windows as far as they dared,
were surprised to see Lyn waiting eagerly with Jeremy on the platform. From his letters they had gathered that Lyn was quite inseparable from Macmillan and Flanders. She greeted them effusively, kissing Vicky in her excitement.

  “Oh, it’s lovely to have you back!” she sighed contentedly. “You don’t know what an awful time I’ve been having.”

  No one mentioned her two cavaliers, but Nigel treated her with a new coolness that lasted many weeks.

  The next day when Macmillan and Flanders called, Jeremy told them, “She’s not coming out this morning ’cos the Faynes are arriving some time today, and we’re waiting in for them.”

  The morning after that, as they reached the bottom of Goldenwood Avenue they heard a tinkling of many bicycle bells, and the seven swept by with cheerful shouts of greeting.

  “This,” said Flanders, “is the end.”

  “She’s jilted us,” agreed Gregory.

  But they were not destitute for long, as the next day John’s cousin, a pretty, aristocratic-looking little blonde, came to stay with him. When she was sitting in the milk bar with them one day she asked, “Who are those people over there, with that dark girl dressed in red?”

  “Those,” replied John scornfully, “are not fit people for you to know, Clarys; they’re the scum of Fenchester.”

  Lyn, draining a raspberry shake, and giggling over a particularly ridiculous sally of Bulldog’s, did not notice her acquaintances in the corner.

  The summer holidays drew to a close, and the Blue Door Company returned to school. As the evenings became darker they took to staying in and doing their homework together in the dining-room of the Corner House. Most of the work done was the result of communal efforts, but as they were already together there was no need to skimp it to gain each other’s company.

  When they finished, generally about eight o’clock, they would go down to the fried fish shop, and Maddy would be sent in to ask for “Sevenpenn’orth of chips, salt, and vinegar, and in separate bags, please,” and they would dawdle back through the cold darkness eating the hot savoury chips straight from their paper bags.

  During this, their second term, the Halfords settled down well at their new school. Bulldog, on account of his skill in imitating and mimicking, became very popular, and was also chosen for the second rugger team. Nigel worked hard, and put in quite a lot of time in the Art Room, where he was studying poster designing. Vicky’s parents allowed her to start her dancing-lessons again, and Jeremy passed his violin exam with honours.

  “I feel,” said Sandra one day, a week before they broke up for Christmas, “as if I’ve done a good term’s work.”

  The girls were walking home through the darkening afternoon; shops were already lit in the town.

  “I’m not going to think any more about school,” Maddy announced. “I’m just going to wallow in the Christmas spirit.”

  “Here comes Mrs. Bell,” broke in Vicky.

  The vicar’s wife was laden with parcels of varying shapes and sizes, and her face was flushed with the bustle of Christmas shopping.

  “Hallo, dears. Just look at all my parcels. Bother, that’s the fourth I’ve dropped.”

  Maddy picked them up, and they offered to help her home with them. On the way Mrs. Bell said, “I wonder if you’d like a little job for the holidays?”

  “We’d love it!” they told her.

  “Well, then, would you like to entertain the children at the Kindergarten Sunday School Party?”

  “That would be fun. When is it?” asked Lyn.

  “On Christmas Eve. I know there’s only just a fortnight before then, but it needn’t be anything elaborate; the simpler the better.”

  “Where is the party to be held?” Sandra wanted to know.

  “That’s just the trouble,” Mrs. Bell frowned. “The roof of the Sunday School has been leaking, so lately we’ve been having the babies’ classes in the vicarage, but—”

  “Why not have the party at the Blue Door?” suggested Lyn. “We’ve plenty of chairs, and one large table and two little ones, and one wash basin.”

  “And a gas ring and a lavatory,” put in Sandra.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” agreed Mrs. Bell; “then you wouldn’t have the trouble of moving all your things. I’ll talk to my husband about it. Meanwhile you can decide on something to act. Remember they’re only from four years old to ten.”

  That evening they told the boys that once more they would take to the stage, and they all went down to the theatre. It had not been used since the concert, but once every few weeks the girls had popped in to see that everything was all right, and to give it a clean. They sat round the table in the dressing-room shivering.

  “I never thought it could be as cold as this,” remarked Jeremy. “Remember how hot we were on July 28th?”

  The date of the concert was a fixture in everyone’s mind.

  “We shall have to have fires for the party,” said Sandra, “and there won’t be any funds to draw the expenses from.”

  “That’s a blow. Whatever shall we do?”

  “We’ll have to put it down as expenses for the party, I suppose.”

  “The teachers are going to do all the decorating and the food, but we’ll help, I expect.”

  “Anyhow, we’ll have to be on the spot, as it’s our theatre.”

  “Now what,” said Nigel desperately, “whatever, for the love of Mike, are we going to act for these infants? I can’t think of a single possibility.”

  “There are tons,” said Lyn confidently.

  “For instance?”

  “Well, there must be all sorts of things,” hedged Lyn.

  “It mustn’t be a murder or crime play; it mustn’t be a love story; and it mustn’t be funny because they wouldn’t understand our kind of humour.”

  “Or ought not to,” amended Jeremy.

  “It can’t be a fairy story, because we can’t do pantomime on a big enough scale, and whatever we do, the clothes must be simple.”

  “Little kids like stories they know,” remarked Maddy.

  “Maddy ought to know what they’d like,” Jeremy teased her.

  “Personally, when I was eight, a really juicy murder appealed to me as much as anything,” Maddy told them.

  “The teachers wouldn’t approve,” demurred Sandra.

  They sat and thought.

  “It’s quite like old times to be racking our brains for plays,” Vicky remarked.

  10

  AWAY IN A MANGER

  “It would be rather nice,” said Miss Tiffley, superintendent of the Kindergarten Sunday School, “if they did a Nativity play.”

  “Miss Tiffley thought it would be rather nice if they were to do a Nativity play,” said Mr. Bell to Mrs. Bell, and Mrs. Bell told the children, “My husband thought it would be rather nice if you were to do a Nativity play.” They were in the hall at the vicarage, where they had gone to deliver some Christmas cards. Much as they hated being advised as to what they should act, they considered this carefully, and finally came to the conclusion that it would be nice to act a Nativity play. They discussed it on the way home.

  “But it must not be made up of a little acting and a lot of overworked carols,” said Nigel.

  “Jeremy can make some up,” Sandra suggested.

  “Oh, I can, can I?”

  “Of course, if you only set your mind to it.”

  “Who’s going to be who?” Bulldog asked.

  “If you think you’re going to play an angel you’re greatly mistaken,” Nigel told him.

  “Of course, it’s obvious that Lyn must be the Madonna, and Sandra an angel.”

  “And you Joseph,” added Lyn.

  “That leaves Vicky, Jeremy, and Bulldog for shepherds and kings.”

  “Shepherds I bags, because they’re easier to dress,” said the wardrobe mistress.

  “And I play ‘odd people’, I suppose?” asked Maddy bitterly.

  “You can be the ox and the ass. Noises off,” Jeremy told her.r />
  Lyn was looking thoughtful. “Unplait your stumps, Maddy,” she ordered.

  Wonderingly Maddy pulled off the blue ribbons and shook out her yellow hair, which, when free, hung to her shoulders.

  “Now look soulful.” Maddy tried to look like Greta Garbo. “No, don’t pop out your eyes. Look up as if you’ve seen a star.” Maddy looked up at the cobwebs on the ceiling. “Not bad. Do you think she could be the innkeeper’s little daughter?”

  “That’s an idea.” Jeremy’s eyes shone with an inspiration. “We could have the whole thing from her point of view. First act – the doorway of an inn in Bethlehem. Joseph and Mary come on and ask the innkeeper’s wife for lodgings. Vicky is the wife. She says no room and goes back to her other guests, but her daughter directs Joseph and Mary to the stable. Then the stable, with the baby in the manger, and the shepherds, and Maddy comes in to see if they are all right, and then a tableau while we all sing a carol with the kids joining in.”

  “It could be called No Room in the Inn.”

  “Ought to be O.K. Will you write it? Simple language, remember.”

  It only took him two days to write it, and as it was so very simple they learned their parts in one evening. The music was more difficult. They were to sing “Oh, little Town of Bethlehem” before the rise of the curtain, and Nigel was preparing an immense sheet of brown paper with a clever pastel drawing of a village amongst mountains. This was to be pinned on the front of the curtains, and was therefore in two pieces. Then came Maddy’s song about the star:

  I see a star on high,

  Silver in the sky.

  The star is large and bright,

  It sheds a holy light.

  I wonder why it’s there?

  People stand and stare,

  And say the star they see,

  Means strange things will be,

  A Baby will be born

  Before the break of dawn,

  And he will be a King.

  Oh, what a lovely thing

  To see this prince so small,

  The Lord and King of all.

  I see a star on high

  Silver in the sky.