The Swish of the Curtain

by Pamela Brown

  “Shall I read it out for you?” asked Robin cheekily. “Prince Charming requests the pleasure of the company of Iodina, Vaselina, and Cinderella at the Castle tonight for his coming-of-age ball. Dress will be worn.”

  “Cinderella can’t go,” snapped Iodina.

  “She’s got nothing to wear,” added Vaselina.

  “And it especially said dress is to be worn,” pursued Iodina, in a satisfied voice. “I shall wear my purple bombazine with the green fal-de-lals.”

  “And I shall wear my new pink undies,” giggled Vaselina coyly. “I’m sure I shall capture the prince. Come on, Cinders, I shall need you to padlock my corsage.”

  They carried her off, leaving Robin and Buttons. Buttons confided in his friend that he meant to propose to Cinderella while the others were at the ball, then, sitting on the settle, with his arms clasping his knees, Buttons sang his solo:

  “Little Cinderella

  She’s the girl for me.

  The name of my sweetheart

  Begins with C.

  She’s very, very small,

  And very, very sweet,

  And I love my little Cinders

  From head to feet.

  She doesn’t know I love her,

  But when I let her know,

  I hope she won’t refuse me,

  I love her so.

  My dream of earthly heaven

  Is a little cottage poor,

  With Cinders there to meet me

  At the door.

  Little Cinderella,

  She’s the girl for me.

  The name of my sweetheart

  Begins with C.”

  He relapsed into thought, and Robin crept sympathetically away. Then there was the sound of laughter, and Cinderella ran in and buried her face in Button’s shoulder to stifle her chuckles.

  “They’re coming, Buttons. They look so funny.”

  Vaselina entered in a terrific dress of purple, a big green bow in her built-up hair.

  “Cinders, go back and help Iodina. She’s got into her backless dress back to front.”

  Cinderella went out, and Vaselina paraded in front of Buttons.

  “Well, boy, how do I look?”

  “Amazing, unique, and outstanding, especially at the back,” for indeed her bustle was a masterpiece.

  Iodina came on in a long, shapeless, yellow dress, carrying an enormous raffia bag.

  “Now, Iodina, have you got everything in your reticule?” Iodina stuck her head in it. “Handkerchief,” she held up a violent red-spotted one, “comb in case, and safety pins in case, and all our cosmetics. Lily lipstick for luscious lips, rose bloom rouge, and Dusky Night mascara.”

  “That’s right,” approved Vaselina, “and remember not to sit down or you’ll split your dress, and if the prince speaks to you, sparkle.”

  “How?” queried Iodina.

  “Like this.” Vaselina smirked, put a hand on her hip, and with the other under her chin cooed, “Oh, Prince, you say the most lovely things.”

  After more fooling Buttons announced that the coach was waiting, and Cinderella ran to the window and watched them drive off. She sat down on the settle, warming her hands by the fire, and Buttons came back and drew up a stool by her feet. They gazed into the fire till Buttons offered a penny for Cinderella’s thoughts.

  “I was thinking of – no one in particular.”

  “But of someone!” pursued Buttons.

  “Yes,” she confessed, “someone of whom I’m always thinking.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Tall.”

  Buttons’ face fell.

  “Handsome.”

  Buttons looked sadder still.

  “And kind,” went on Cinderella. “He dresses in velvets and silks, and has many servants, but he’s not selfish.”

  “You are thinking of the prince!”

  “I know it’s silly.” She laughed. “I do wish I were going to the ball tonight – just to see him. He would never speak to anyone like me, but just to be near him…” She broke off. “Buttons, you said this morning you had something to tell me?”

  Sadly Buttons got up. “It doesn’t matter – now.” He went off.

  Cinderella mused aloud, “He seems as miserable as I am. I wonder why?”

  She sang her solo to Jeremy’s careful accompaniment, and the lights gradually grew dim. Vicky entered, a typical pantomime fairy in an ankle-length ballet frock that she had worn in the dancing display. There were bands of tinsel round it, and in her hair shone a star, to match the one on the tip of her wand. As she danced, all the lights went off, and Bulldog followed her floating figure with the spotlight, over which was a piece of cardboard with circles of various coloured cellophane let into it; as it was revolved the fairy was lit with different colours. Meanwhile Cinderella had slipped into the wings, where Lyn helped her on with the ball dress. Poised on tiptoe at the end of the dance, the fairy, purple-lit, declaimed, “Cinderella, your wish is granted. You shall go to the ball!” The spotlight swung on to Cinderella, standing ready in her billowy silk dress. The audience clapped and clapped, and for quite a minute Sandra had to be busy registering surprise at her transformation. The glass slippers, silver in reality, were produced, and she saw the carriage and horses from the window. The curtain fell on the fairy’s injunction to be home by midnight.

  During the interval all the friends and relations of the Blue Doors were telling each other how good they thought it was, and in the dressing-rooms the actors drank water and patted themselves on the back.

  “Aren’t we getting blasé?” remarked Lyn. “I’ve not felt a single twinge of stage fright.”

  “I have,” Sandra said. “Did you hear my voice shaking in ‘I wonder why’?”

  “All the more poignant,” called Jeremy, from the other side of the curtain. “I found the piano keys swimming with my tears.”

  The first scene of the second act took place in front of the first curtain, while the kitchen scenery was changed to the ballroom scenery. The Ugly Sisters did some fooling in what was supposed to be the Ladies’ Room, which greatly amused the audience, and then the curtains were drawn on to a corner of the ballroom. The backcloth showed marble pillars, and there were real ferns in pots at the bottom of them. The sisters went and sat on a seat and waited to be asked for a dance. The prince, resplendent in green and gold, came on, dancing with Maddy, who had changed into a Court Lady, wearing her new long party frock and her hair swept up on to the top of her head.

  “How sophisticated she looks!” murmured her mother to Mr. Fayne.

  Down-stage the couple stopped, and the prince began to speak.

  “Lady Rose, I have something important to ask you. As you know, tonight I have to make my choice of a wife. Will you” – at this moment Cinderella entered and sat beside her unrecognizing sisters – “will you…” the prince faltered, gazing at the new-comer. “Will you come to my wedding?”

  Maddy heaved angrily, stamped her foot, and ran off. The prince went up to the seat where the three sat. The sisters nudged each other.

  “Oh, dear Prince,” began Vaselina, but the prince said cuttingly:

  “I don’t think I have ever had the misfortune to be introduced to you.”

  “Oh, Prince,” cooed Iodina, “what lovely things you say!”

  Her sister pushed her off the end of the bench.

  “May I have the pleasure…”

  Vicky, who was working the gramophone off-stage, put the needle on to the silently whirling record of a Strauss waltz, and the prince and Cinderella danced round the stage. The Ugly Sisters sniffed disapprovingly, as the dancers’ faces got closer and closer together, and finally they walked off, heads in the air. The prince embraced Cinderella and kissed her.

  “I don’t know your name,” he confessed, “but will you marry me? It is love at first sight.”

  Jeremy, at the piano, struck up his latest composition, and they sang together:

  “The first time I saw you I
knew

  You were a dream come true.

  I know that my instinct is right,

  It must be love at first sight.

  There’s something about you, my sweet,

  And, tho’ it’s the first time we meet,

  You must tell me ‘Yes’ tonight,

  Because it’s love at first sight.

  I love you now,

  And have no fear,

  I’ll love you as much

  This time next year.

  So say you’ll be mine evermore.

  I won’t eat or sleep till I’m sure.

  I know that my instinct is right,

  It must be love at first sight.”

  The prince turned, and, cupping his hands, shouted off-stage, “Guests, friends, courtiers, I have a proclamation to make. I have chosen a wife.”

  The clock struck twelve and Cinderella slipped away, leaving a shoe on the floor. The prince, not noticing her exit, continued to speak. “Here, as the clock strikes twelve, I present to you the lady…” He turned round, and the curtains were drawn on his surprise and consternation.

  The next scene was in front of the middle curtain, and represented the prince’s room next morning, where he was ordering Maddy, as Robin, to take the shoe to every house in the realm to find its owner. The back curtains parted, showing the kitchen once more; where Buttons was tap-dancing with a breakfast-tray in his hands. He was applauded heartily at the end of it, and Lyn thought to herself, “P’r’aps tap-dancing is not too bad.”

  Vaselina, in a bathrobe negligée, entered to tell Buttons to take Iodina her breakfast, as she was suffering from a relapsed liver on account of the ball last night. She called out to Cinderella, but, getting no reply, stamped out to find her, and came back dragging her by the shoulder. Cinderella wore a becoming dressing-gown of quilted blue silk. Vaselina lectured her for not being down in time, then sent her off to dress. Just as Vaselina was singing a rather vulgar but amusing song about the complaints of “the morning after the night before”, there was heard the page’s trumpet off-stage, and the prince and his retinue walked on. The retinue was Robin, who carried the shoe on one of Mrs. Fayne’s best drawing-room cushions. Vaselina tried to fit the shoe in vain, and Iodina, entering in a flannel nightgown with frills at neck and wrist, also made an effort, but it was no good. At this moment Cinderella entered in her rags with a green handkerchief over her head, and begged to be allowed to try it. The shoe fitted. She took off her handkerchief and the prince recognized her. The final curtain fell on the entire company singing “Happy ever After”, another chorus of Jeremy’s composition. Vicky stepped in front of the curtains and spoke the epilogue, then the bishop handed up a bunch of flowers for Sandra and boxes of chocolates for the others.

  In the dressing-room Maddy stretched herself out and sighed happily as she munched a chocolate with truffle in the middle, “Who wouldn’t be a babe in a pantomime!”

  16

  THE BISHOP TO THE RESCUE

  With the coming of spring the thoughts of the Blue Doors were turned again to the stage, and the ides of March found them once more in consultation over the dressing-room table.

  “It may be the last concert we shall give,” sighed Sandra, “so it must be a good one.”

  “The last?” echoed Maddy, horrified. “Why?”

  “Nigel leaves at the end of next term, presumably; Jeremy takes School Cert., and he’ll leave school and go into the—”

  “Shut up,” cut in Jeremy. “Don’t remind me about my fate. Anyhow, I shan’t pass.”

  “Then you’ll take it next year, when Lyn and the twins and I do. We shan’t be able to have concerts without Nigel, and I fully intend to swot next year, no matter what anyone else does.” Sandra delivered her ultimatum in decided tones.

  “The future’s pretty blank and undecided,” remarked Nigel.

  “I intend telling Mummy and Daddy that the only thing I’m going to work at is the stage,” Lyn informed them. “But I’ll wait until the Easter concert is over, because there’ll be a pretty big row, I expect, and they might stop me appearing in it.”

  “They’re going to have a pretty bad time of it,” groaned Jeremy, “because I take my last exam before L.R.A.M. in July, a week after School Cert., and I can’t work for both, so you know which one I’ll choose.”

  Bulldog, as usual, was complacent.

  “Thank goodness I’m not aching to work at anything,” he remarked.

  “But, Bulldog, what are you going to do?” asked Lyn seriously.

  “You must decide sooner or later.”

  “I’d like to be something to do with electricity,” he told them vaguely. “Or an actor,” he added.

  “The old, old story again!” sighed Nigel. We must all go to a dramatic school! Who can we get to help us persuade our parents?”

  “The bishop,” said Maddy promptly. “He’s on our side, very definitely.”

  “But would it be quite the thing to ask him?” queried Sandra.

  “The thing!” flared up Lyn angrily. “Seven careers at stake, and you wonder if it’s the thing!” Sandra bit her lip. “Sandra, you have a soul of the Mrs. Potter-Smith variety.” Lyn had a way of saying things that hurt.

  On the day of the dress rehearsal, exactly two years after he had revealed his ambition during the morning at Browcliffe, Bulldog realized it. He invented something. He invented the elusive swish of the curtain. It was merely a matter of curtain rings and cords. He sewed the rings diagonally across each stage curtain, threaded cord through them in a complicated fashion, fixed one end, leaving free the end near the dressing-room. He pulled the cord, the curtains slid apart and up, hanging in heavy festoons in each of the top corners of the stage. The “swish” was sweetest music in his ears. The rest of the company were in the dressing-rooms, and he did not tell them of his invention. When they came out he suddenly raised the curtain.

  “Shut up, we’re not ready,” snapped Lyn, then stopped, open-mouthed, staring up at the bunches of curtain.

  Bulldog let go of the cord, and they gasped with delight at the definite, satisfactory rustle as the folds of the curtain swung into place.

  “Bulldog’s beaten us all!” cried Jeremy. “He’s realized his ambition!”

  “What is it now? You must have another,” urged Lyn.

  “To be an actor.”

  They smiled their approval on him.

  All through the Easter concert the curtains swished dutifully, to round after round of applause, from a wildly enthusiastic audience. At the end Nigel stepped forward.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot thank you enough for the splendid reception we have had tonight. It has made happy what is really a very sad occasion for us. Tonight, owing to circumstances and people,” his eyes swept the parents in the front row, “sees the last performance of the Blue Door Theatre Company in this theatre as amateurs. But we hope and pray that one day you may see us back on this stage as professionals.”

  They bowed and smiled with heavy hearts as the last curtain fell at their last concert.

  Lyn tried to speak, then burst into miserable tears.

  * * *

  One Wednesday evening in May, a month after the Easter show, the seven sat in a row along a pew in St. Michael’s, listening to the throb and swell of the new organ. Their new organ, for they had helped to buy it. Tonight was merely a recital by the organist; it was not to be dedicated until the following Sunday. The music only formed a background for their thoughts.

  “This is the first peaceful moment I have had for weeks,” thought Nigel, staring at the stained-glass window that was mottled with sunset rays.

  Ever since Easter the Corner House had been a den of raging lions, rather than the happy home that it had been up till now. Three weeks ago Nigel had interviewed his father and begged to be allowed to have a year at a dramatic school when he left school at the end of the term. If at the end of the year he did not show promise, or if at the end of two or three years he could not ge
t a job, then he would give it up and be a private secretary. Mr. Halford refused point-blank, and would not argue. Nigel, swallowed up in helpless fury, set his teeth undaunted.

  Meanwhile Vicky had tackled her mother on the subject of the stage as a career, and found her an enthusiastic ally. They decided that as soon as she had passed School Certificate she should go to a dramatic school to study dancing and drama. Against the sound of the organ Vicky remembered the ecstasy in which she had lived until her mother had discussed it with her father; the result was a domestic upheaval. Meal-times were silent and gloomy, and at any minute of the day when Mr. Halford was at home quarrels sprang up like toadstools. Bulldog thought fit to put his oar in. At dinner he said one day, “Father, while your thoughts are on the subject, please include me in the dramatic-school idea.” Mr. Halford looked like a drowning man from whom a straw had been snatched.

  Matters in the Darwin household were worse, for both parents objected to the idea. Jeremy, with his long legs tucked uncomfortably under the pew, remembered the long rambling arguments with his father and the angry interludes with his mother. Gosh, how his head ached! At tea that evening Lyn and her mother had been going on at each other until he thought his head would burst.

  Mr. and Mrs. Fayne were treating the matter most sensibly. They discussed it in their usual placid manner, and did not treat it as if it were some outlandish plan not worth considering. Certainly, it did not affect them so immediately, for their daughters were not ready to leave school.

  Maddy was twiddling her thumbs, and Lyn nudged her short-temperedly.

  Sandra, noticing it, thought, “We shall all have nervous breakdowns if we go on like this, not acting anything and believing that we never shall again.”

  Mr. Bell, from his seat in the chancel, pondered the melancholy appearance of the Blue Doors. They all looked pale and miserable, and Lyn had definitely been crying. He hoped it was not a quarrel. This ought to be a great night for them, the first appearance of the organ, which they had helped to buy. He had expected them to bear their usual alert intelligent expressions, and to whisper amongst themselves, and possibly to giggle, but here they were, looking as if it were a funeral they were attending. At the end of the recital he pronounced the benediction, and the Blue Doors walked out into the evening sunshine, answering mechanically to the remarks made to them by the other members of the congregation.