The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  He then marched up and down in the bitter chill of the night, and tasted again the simple joy of playing the part of the young fascist he’d been before the war. Back and forth he marched, a happy man. He yearned for applause – and he got it. Two girls a bit the worse for drink were crossing a bridge over the canal. They’d been in town, a pub in Soho. Now they paused, and leaned on the parapet to watch Edgar marching about in his uniform. They were soon helpless with laughter. They fell about, clutching each other. They clapped their hands and cheered, and Edgar had the good grace to come to attention and salute them. Right arm at eye level, rigid from the shoulder, hand straight and heels together, as he’d been taught; thinking, bloody tarts. Then he put his coat on and made his way home, the girls’ laughter growing faint in the night, then dying away. He encountered nobody else. He got into the house and upstairs to his room without incident. He stood before his mirror, panting, exhilarated. He slept soundly that night. It was a performance that deserved to be repeated. He only wished he didn’t have to do it by himself.

  We’re not sure exactly when it was that Joan once more unlocked the doors of Gricey’s great wardrobe. But we believe it was towards the end of March, a Sunday morning, yes, late March or early April. There had been a thaw, but with it had come flooding. Much distress in rural parts of the country, and after the brief flare of optimism as the cold fingers of winter seemed to loose their grip, now came the ghastly sodden aftermath, rising waters flooding homes and drowning livestock, crops ruined, banks broken in great rivers, these new hardships wearing the face not of ice but of water. So, a damp clear Sunday morning, church bells chiming in St Clement’s, and Joan unlocked the wardrobe door and allowed light to flood into the great coffin where Gricey’s mouldering spiritual residue lay.

  There was a trunk in there. She worked steadily, garments emerging, each to be inspected, inventoried, laid out on the bed in one of various piles. All of good quality. Extraordinary how much was in there. He had thrown nothing away.

  She went back to the kitchen to have a sit down and a cup of tea and review her list. Did she suspect even then that there was an odd incompletion, something hidden, an absence; that which ought to be accounted for but was not? So many memories, she may have been deaf to the small voice that told her to look further, or deeper, but whether she heard it or not, when she went back, and pulled out the empty trunk, only then did she see a brown suitcase pushed into the far back corner of the wardrobe.

  She’d been warmed by what she’d found in Gricey’s trunk, and his iniquitous duplicity, only lately discovered, could not spoil it, nor could the memory of the recent rage of his trapped, damned spirit. The nights she’d been on his arm as they moved through the world of the London theatre, yes, the first nights, the dinners, the parties, so many parties at which she’d stood at his side among their friends as he talked, and talked, and talked—

  Then later, back at the flat, as he got undressed, as he unbuttoned his shirt, removed the collar stud and the cufflinks, set them down on the dressing table. Slipped his braces off his shoulders and stood in his white vest with the braces hanging at his thighs, lit only by the glow from Joan’s bedside lamp. He was lean, hard. He’d kept himself trim. He took exercise, he watched what he ate, so no fat on Charlie Grice as he sat on the end of the bed, unlacing his shoes and kicking them off, and then his suspendered socks. Again he stood at the end of the bed, his eyes still upon her, and unbuttoned his trousers, which fell to the floor. He stepped out of them. He hung them over a chair. He was at the side of the bed now, in his underwear, and he slipped in between the sheets. Joan turned towards him.

  – Turn off the light, love, she whispers.

  Turn off the light. But now there was the suitcase. It was scuffed and faded, with two buckled straps and brass studs along the seams. It was locked. She took it into the kitchen and put it on the table. With a small pair of scissors and her heavy shears, the steel ones with the long pointed blades, very sharp indeed, she unpicked the stitching, prised loose the studs and snipped the seam. She sat at the table and stared at the unbound suitcase. Then she stood up and lifted it open. It was as she expected. Every fascist has a uniform somewhere in his wardrobe.

  24

  WHATEVER THE PLAY, whoever’s in the cast, it will have its opening night, and it will be a night to remember, if only with chagrin. The 1947 production of The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, starring Vera Grice, Harry Catermole, Edmund Colefax and David Jekyll, directed by Elizabeth Morton-Stanley, and produced by Julius Glass and Partners, at the New Apollo Theatre on the Charing Cross Road, was no exception. For Joan, it was a night which, in her anticipation of it, had little of the old glamour and excitement she’d felt when Vera last opened in a play, when Gricey was still alive. Was it As You Like It? Surely not. It seemed an age. Could so much really have changed in a winter? But what a winter. The discoveries she’d made in the wake of Gricey’s death, and now, just the last in what seemed an endless string of nightmares, the uniform in the suitcase. She’d lifted out the folded shirt and breeches, the belt, the boots and the cap, carried them from the kitchen and into his bedroom and laid them on the bed as she had laid out his other clothes. They were all of a piece. The sum of his parts.

  She had unbuttoned her blouse, and then her skirt, then she had kicked off her shoes and shuffled out of her slip until she stood before the mirror on the back of the door, in her corset and underwear only. She stood with one arm at her side, the other clutching her gathered hair to the back of her skull, mindful, painfully so, of what had changed since first she’d stood naked before her husband, when with delicate fingers he’d spread the hair from her face, held it as she did now, gathered behind her head, and called her his Venus de Mile End. No, she was a hard, thin woman now, a long winter of grief and poor diet had seen to that. There was no flesh on her hips or thighs, and the bicycle had seen to that; she was more boy than woman, she thought: gaunt. She lifted the black shirt, shook it out and, tentative now, eyes still on the mirror on the back of the door, inserted an arm in a sleeve—

  Frank Stone was at this time preoccupied with Count Malateste. He’d thought at first he had only thirteen lines, forgetting the eight in Act III. Willy Ogilvie also has more lines than he first thought: in Act I, in his new role, that of Grisolan, he has three. True, they are not expansive lines, and will not significantly add to Willy’s lustre. The first he shares with Roderigo in scene i: Ha ha ha! A little later he says: They are, my lord. And in scene ii: I shall, instantly. Willy is not much assuaged, and in the shallows of his heart has resolved to have his revenge on Frank Stone.

  Frank has been greatly encouraged by Vera telling him he is the best actor in the company, and by the success of his Oh sad disaster. He is determined that his Malateste will not go unnoticed. Alterations have been made to the costume for which Willy was first fitted. Frank is pleased with it. There is black silk in the tunic, also in the floppy cap, and he’s decided to make his face a thing of ghostly pallor, with black around the eyes and lips. Malateste will thus, he believes, be both a count at the court and something more: a pale figure unmoved by the tragedies that befall the House of Malfi and those it supports. He will at the same time be both a player in the drama, and a commentator upon it. His will be the voice of what he believes to be the black humour of irony that colours this sustained piece of horror.

  It is in the assumed posture of lofty, sneering disdain, then, that he leaves the theatre after the second dress rehearsal, his first time playing the character of Count Malateste. Nobody has suggested that his black-and-white make-up is overdone, and when he returns to his mirror afterwards he wipes much of it off but not all. In fact from his make-up box he gets out the black pencil and touches in his lips and eyes, leaving enough pallor high on the cheeks and brow to suggest the shadow, merely, of the persona that is becoming more himself than himself in these fraught last days. He has not far to go to reach the alley off Seven Dials and the two small rooms he shares with
Rosza and the boy, but he cannot go home yet. He is too full of the work. His brain is on fire. Like Vera, he is impatient for an audience.

  He thinks of Vera now. When at last they’re in performance he will see more of her, but to think of Vera is to think of her mother. Frank Stone is not altogether without conscience. He is clear enough to know that he bears responsibility for the hurt she has suffered, and that he’s made it worse by failing to go to her. He tells himself this is a difficult time for him but he’s lying and he knows it.

  He stands among the lights of Cambridge Circus pondering the enormity of his cruelty to a woman who took him in when he felt himself friendless. He succeeds then in delivering to himself a small shock of moral dismay. Without properly realising it, he has turned his steps towards Piccadilly Circus, and the Beaumont, where Joan of course runs the wardrobe. It’s only nine in the evening. The play will be in progress, he thinks, unaware that it came down ten days earlier and the theatre is dark. So Frank Stone, fierce now in his determination to make amends to the woman he’s wronged, turns his steps again, this time towards Mile End.

  Joan is still in Gricey’s uniform. She hasn’t troubled to make herself a hot supper. She could have done. She has an egg. She has half a loaf. She even has a pat of butter although it might have gone off by now. Instead she opens a tin of corned beef and spoons a little into the cat’s bowl, and then forks out a mouthful for herself. She washes it down with a teacup of gin. Dear Uncle Comfort has come down from the top shelf and lives behind the dinner plates now. Joan sits at the kitchen table gazing at the night through the window by the stove. It is always at about this time that she drifts across the passage and unlocks the door of Gricey’s room, just to be sure, of – what? – she can’t rightly say. That he hasn’t returned, she supposes. She turns the light on. It sheds but a dimness on a room containing a bed with its mattress rolled up, and piled on the exposed springs the cardboard boxes she has filled with shoes and hats, and in the trunk the clothes that remain, wrapped in tissue paper and mothballed.

  Across the few bare boards, against the wall opposite, stands the wardrobe with its doors wide open as though in welcome to the unwary; as though to say, we have nothing to hide.

  Joan has brought her kitchen chair with her. She sets it down between bed and wardrobe where she can stare into what she’s now come to think of as his coffin, and to indulge feelings that grow more confused and, inevitably, more maudlin with every teacup of gin. A moment will arrive when she’ll start to address the wardrobe. But when she hears a familiar cry from the street below, that moment has not yet arrived.

  She goes to the window. It’s him. That wretched man. And then she thinks: he’s back. She turns off the light and stands at the window and her face is deep in shadow now, for the lamp at the top of the street is the sole source of light. Frank Stone gazes up at her and can see almost nothing for she is like a jade statue, all in black, the fascist black, still and silent behind the dark window, and he calls again. He can’t know the struggle that’s occurring in this woman’s heart, nor the havoc he is causing her, even now. She cannot open the door to him. Frank Stone can’t see the tears coursing down her cheeks, but he opens his arms, and with his pale upturned face, eyes blackened and lips like coal, he implores her to let him in, but she turns her head away.

  But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

  It is my lady, O, it is my love.

  O, that she knew she were!

  But no light through yonder window breaks tonight, and Frank stands there for a while then turns away and walks off towards St Clement’s and the cemetery.

  Ten minutes later the front door is flung open and the distraught Joan runs out into the street, still in Gricey’s fascist black, looking about wildly, this way and that. But there is no one in sight. The street is deserted.

  Later she folded the uniform and put it back in the suitcase, as it had been before. She had further need of Uncle’s comfort. What she would do with the suitcase she didn’t yet know, but that it had to go, about this there could be no question. Steadied by gin she was horribly fascinated by what had occurred, by how she had felt herself shiver into nothing, and the sheer panic that then ensued. Is that what happened to Gricey, she thought, that he tried the thing on, and was lost?

  See her now on her black bicycle, a quiet London Sunday morning as she pedals with sedate purpose towards the docks, and down to Wapping Stairs she comes, high in the saddle, yes, and determined, with her face to the wind off the river. Strapped to the rack behind the saddle is the suitcase. She turns down by the warehouses, what few are still standing. She is alert for a quiet place where she can dispose of the damn thing unobserved. She doesn’t have far to go. A lonely stretch of river wall and some pebbled strand beyond, she thinks, lifting her head to smell the air, large clouds scudding high in the sky, the wind freshening as she dismounts by the wall and lowers the kickstand. She unfastens the suitcase and carries it to the slimy, weedy steps cut into the stones of the old river wall. The Thames is high today, roiling and bucking in great tumult as new waters come streaming in from the melting snows of Gloucestershire and Berkshire and Surrey and the rest.

  She descends a few steps to where the river surges against the stones, then all at once she lifts the suitcase in both hands high over her head. Thinking this is the last of him, surely, she hesitates – then hurls it with all her strength and out it sails on the wind, the lid tumbling open, garments drifting out like so many black flags, flapping and turning, then settling briefly on the river before being swept away. The suitcase bobs on the swells then sinks from sight. A seagull nearby lifts screaming from the river and shears away in the breeze.

  A sudden fit of shivering seizes Joan and she turns and climbs back up to the cobbled alley between the warehouses. Then she’s on her bicycle and away.

  Meanwhile, in Pimlico, Julius and Gustl are having a serious discussion about Joan. In German. They are in his study. Gustl is upright in the armchair and her pale eyes are on her friend as she points a finger at him. She’s told him she’s worried Joan isn’t strong enough for what he wants her to do: speak at a public meeting, in a voice not her own but that of a fascist. Or the wife of a fascist – the widow of a fascist. She’s only skin and bones, she says, Haut und Knochen! Julius tells her that Joan is one of the strongest women he knows. Gustl remains unconvinced. She hopes he’s right.

  – Ich hoffe du hast Recht, Julius.

  He says he is.

  – Ich habe Recht, nicht wahr.

  Gustl was no materialist. She was German. Deep strains of Germanic thought and feeling coursed through her allegedly impure veins. She’d read Kant and Schiller as a child, she believed in the progressive ideals of Romanticism, and at times, when she was a very young woman, had thought she walked in beauty like the night. Then had come the doctrine of the Superior Man and his illimitable Will. The destruction of the institutions soon followed, then more destruction, and worse, a dizzying spiral, horror piled upon horror, and there had to be a better way, she thought, but barely had she started to articulate the alternative than the gates were closing and she was trapped in the city of her birth, which wished now only to destroy her. She no longer understood what had happened to Germany.

  Gustl doesn’t say this, but now she thinks that while Julius believes he knows Joan’s strength, he doesn’t see her as she, Gustl, does. He didn’t survive two years a step ahead of the Gestapo. He didn’t have to fear that every person who helped him might be an informer, eager to betray him so as to secure their own safety. Oh, and she’d made mistakes, and every one of them almost cost her her life. When she stayed with a family, always the father came to her in the night, and she couldn’t say no. In the daylight, on some streets, she would tear off her star. Other streets she’d slip into a doorway and stitch it back on again. Would she have trusted the grieving Joan, when Joan behaved not with her usual steady iron control, but with recklessness, with hysteria—? No she would not.

>   – Ich habe Recht, nicht wahr, said Julius again.

  Gustl said nothing.

  Later she lies on her bed unable to sleep. It wasn’t so strange, that winter, to see one’s neighbours grow thin, thinner even than they were in the war years, these sad Londoners. But Gustl has observed a more marked difference in Joan, and it’s not the effects of short rations only, but a sort of wasting. And there are other changes, at times a kind of darting quickness in her movements, a feverish quality, and a new light in her eyes, a fixedness of stare. She’s drinking, thinks Gustl, and failing to eat properly, as much as anyone can eat properly these days. This is no ordinary grief, she thinks, although she is all too aware that grief can wear a thousand faces, and last as long as it has to. But something else is happening to Joan and she’s never seen it before. Would she trust her with what it is they’re asking her to do? At this time, no, she would not.

  Oh but it was late. The house was quiet now. Vera was exhausted and had gone up to the attic. Julius too had retired. In her scarlet dressing gown Gustl quietly descended the dark stairs to her studio. She turned on the light and sat before the unfinished portrait on her easel. She stares at the face of her friend, and at last she sees the ghost. Sie war besessen. Haunted.

  In the morning Vera arose early and came downstairs as calm as Julius had ever seen her. For this he had been hoping, and seeing it now, was greatly relieved.

  – Sit down, my darling, let me give you breakfast. Will you eat an egg? I have kippers.

  Vera gazed at her husband with tender eyes. It was so very curious when it happened, thought Julius. He would never understand her. She came to him where he stood at the stove in his apron and put her arms around him, pressing herself close to him and kissing his neck.

  – You are so good to me.

  – I am so proud of you.