The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  – You might not be.

  Julius laid his hands on her cheeks. He told her that yes, he would be. She embraced him.

  – This will soon be over, she whispered.

  She meant that she would come down from the attic.

  – I know, said Julius.

  Later she gathered the cards she’d written to the other members of the cast, and the presents she would distribute when she got to the theatre, and packed them in a large shopping bag. She had a bath in the little clawfoot bathtub in the attic, then got dressed in a sweater and slacks, and performed her few superstition rituals for First Night. In the hall downstairs she got her coat from the cupboard. Gustl came out of her studio.

  – Are you off now, love?

  – I might as well.

  – Du wirst heute Abend glänzend sein! I just know it.

  The two women kissed. Julius appeared from the back of the house. There was nothing really to say. They would be in her dressing room afterwards, where Vera had left her nice frock, and then all go out to dinner. Julius didn’t say, ‘to celebrate’, nothing but bad luck would come of that. He took her out to the street while Gustl stood in the open front door. Along came a cab and Julius hailed it. He saw Vera into the back of the cab then handed her the shopping bag with the cards and the presents. He stepped onto the pavement and the cab drove off. Julius turned towards the house and he and Gustl went in together. Both were affected by the calm courage Vera displayed, both thinking of what it was that young woman had to accomplish in the next hours.

  The cab driver knew who his passenger was and where she was going without Vera having to say a word. When they reached the theatre he got out and opened the door for her.

  – All good luck tonight, Miss Grice, he said.

  Vera was gracious. She thanked him and made her way round to the stage door, where William Pettifer, who’d looked after that door for half a century, greeted her warmly.

  – Who’s in, Bill? said Vera.

  – You’re the first, miss.

  She stepped into the theatre.

  25

  VERA SITS IN her dressing room listless and alone, and missing her father. When Gricey was present it all mattered, somehow. It became a proper, genuine theatrical event. She remembered coming to this same theatre as a young girl to see him in the Scottish play, and going backstage afterwards with her mother, and being allowed a small glass of champagne, her very first. And Gricey at his mirror, wiping his face clean, the room full of her parents’ friends, and bottles and cards everywhere, laughter—

  Her reverie is shattered by her dresser’s noisy arrival. Vera turns to her and prepares to begin the business. She changes into her dressing gown and then out comes her toolbox, the Leichner sticks, the powders, the kohl, and all thoughts of her father have dispersed for there is so much to be done. Actors will soon stop by with cards and gifts and good wishes, and the theatre like a living organism will gather its various energies and move towards the moment when the audience settles and the lights go down.

  Already at the front of house the doors have been opened and the first members of this first-night audience have divested themselves of their coats and hats and made their way to one of the several theatre bars where over cocktails and champagne they murmur what they remember of the play, and the last time they saw Vera Grice onstage, but whatever topic of conversation arises, all are conscious of the fierce anticipation that will always attend a first night in a big West End theatre. The bars begin to fill and, slowly at first, then more quickly, the volume of talk increases, and the volume of smoke with it, while behind the curtain Jasper Speke hovers over the props table, a dresser rushes along a corridor clutching a wig, and an actor realises he remembers not a single one of his lines, not one, while a carpenter replaces a broken banister in the courtiers’ gallery that might otherwise give way in the last scene of the play.

  Joan is accompanied to the theatre by Julius and Gustl. They have picked her up in the Wolseley, and from Mile End come into the West End by way of Aldgate and the Strand. Julius is of course in evening dress and wearing his white silk scarf. Gustl is in her best frock, the green velvet with the parrot, also an old silver fur with broad shoulders, on which she has spent an hour with a hairbrush, and the dark felt hat with the two feathers that reminds her of the Tyrol. Joan is in black.

  It did not occur to her not to wear black. She is not conscious of any funereal association, and if asked about it might have said she was attending the performance of a tragedy, but nobody asks. The car makes its slow way to the New Apollo, Julius handling the big Wolseley with aplomb, a cigar between his teeth, and Gustl beside him, who turns to speak to Joan, all in black in the back like an orphan child or a maiden aunt – oh, a figure of pathos, surely, and we were all affected, some of us even experienced foreboding, yes, a touch of dread. Stepping down amid the milling, curious crowd, she sees her daughter’s name in lights over the marquee. She thinks how Gricey would have stood there in the street, gazing up at it, drawing the attention of others to it, and for a second or two she becomes emotional. He’d have wiped a speck of a tear from his eye, she thinks, then he’d have taken her arm, and into the foyer they’d come, himself once more in character: old Gricey.

  But this night she had not Gricey’s arm but Julius’, and on her other arm dear Gustl, and it was just as well, for how else would she have got through the next minutes? It was all a blur of faces, of kisses, of greetings, snatches of talk, bright lights, smoke and laughter. She’d entered such foyers on nights no different from this one a thousand times before. And yet she was dismayed, and a little frightened, distracted and unable to focus, unable to cope with an eruption of disturbing memories.

  Gustl knew her friend was in distress. She guided her through the throng as though she were blind, to a small banquette at the back of the foyer where they could sit removed from the rest.

  – Are you all right? she whispered.

  – I need a drink, dear, said Joan.

  Gustl saw a waiter and they each took a cocktail.

  – I don’t know what’s come over me. That’s better.

  – Such a crowd, said Gustl as she waved her hand in front of her face. Es ist sehr heiß, wir hätten unsere Fächer mitbringen sollen.

  – English, dear.

  – Very hot. We should need fans. It will be more cold inside.

  – I doubt it, said Joan.

  She made rather short work of her cocktail. She laid her hand on Gustl’s arm.

  – One more of those, dear, please, and I’ll be fine.

  So Gustl got her another one.

  Then Julius joined them and suggested they take their seats. Rising from the banquette Joan was unsteady. Julius and Gustl understood the strain she was feeling, so they thought. First time without Gricey.

  Julius had requested seats not in the front stalls but halfway down the house in the middle of the row. Without mishap they found their seats and settled in, Joan sitting between her two friends. She was then able to look around the auditorium and see who was present and what they were wearing. In fact this crowd was showing some elegance. The women’s hats were certainly improving. Others were having a look round too, and Joan, being the mother of the leading lady, and known to many of those present, was a figure of some interest. Few of them had seen her since Gricey’s funeral in January, and some were shocked by her appearance. The gauntness of her face, and oh, to be in deep mourning still, on this of all nights, a night which surely belonged to Vera. And not a few wondered, if she was unable for her daughter’s sake to set aside her grief, at least for this one night, why she had come at all, for this was not how it was done. The brave face, the gay smile, the lifted chin, this is how show people faced misfortune and tragedy, and hadn’t they all been doing exactly that for years now? The show had to go on. But Joan Grice, still beautiful, but thin, stone-faced, more pale than ever and dressed as though for the crematorium, no, this was not the spirit, this was not it at all.


  The auditorium doors have closed. The theatre imperceptibly darkens. The audience is at once quiet. Then comes that long moment when the lights at last die away – the curtain is about to rise – the tension is palpable, both out front and backstage too. A last cough is heard. Jasper Speke glances at his people. Actors stand in readiness in the wings.

  Joan has become absorbed in a memory. She is in an air-raid shelter in the crypt of a church, it is December 1940, one of those nights of noise and fire and danger, and a pervasive sense of physical vulnerability. People feel very close to death at such times, during nights like this, and are afraid of dying and afraid to show they are afraid. Suddenly there is the most tremendous blast – it makes a vacuum in her ears, and when the dust has settled she discovers a child, a small girl, lying before her on the flagstone floor of the crypt. She is very still, this child, in her buttoned coat, and her eyes are open. She is unscathed but for a slight pink puffiness in her cheeks.

  But she is dead. The blast has burst her little lungs. Somewhere her mother is screaming.

  Lifting her head, blinking at the memory of the dead child, and the screaming mother, it’s then Joan sees him – he’s here! She’s outraged. Rising to her feet in the darkened auditorium, and with her arm outstretched and trembling, she points a finger at a figure at the end of the front row stalls even as an usher melts into the gloom near the exit beyond.

  – Gricey! she cries.

  There is a murmuring all around her.

  – Oh what do you want, Gricey? Why now?

  Her voice is loud in the silent theatre and none can miss the tremor of hysteria in it. Another second of silence. Jasper Speke barks a quiet command – Hold the rag! – and the curtain does not rise. The house lights come up. The murmuring swells as those in the front stalls crane around to see who it is who’s shouting – is it part of the play? – and the back stalls all lean forward, and Joan stands there in the middle of the row staring at someone only she can see, both arms outstretched now, palms open, imploring him like a bereft lover—

  Actors in the wings peer at each other in perplexity while ushers come swiftly down the aisle. Then Gustl is helping Joan, confused, but becoming aware that she has been shouting in a dark theatre, and unsure why, and eager in her distress to leave at once. She stumbles with her head down, shuddering, towards the exit, Gustl beside her, taking her arm, and the ushers in close attendance. The lights again go down, and now at last the curtain rises. The courtier, Delio, speaks the first line of the play, as later in the evening he will speak the last.

  – You are welcome to your country, dear Antonio –

  Even as the words ring out clear and strong, Gustl helps Joan from the auditorium. The company manager hovers but Gustl waves him away. She mutters at Joan, but in German.

  – What?

  – I think you’ve seen a ghost, Liebste.

  Into the bar they go, and sit on the same banquette as before.

  – Is that what happened? Joan whispers.

  – You grieve for him and you have not finished.

  – I haven’t started.

  Gustl sees the truth in this.

  – I can’t go back in there.

  – What shall we do, love?

  Joan again turns to face her friend and, taking Gustl’s hands in her own, tells her that she, Gustl, has to see the play even if she, Joan, does not. Gustl won’t hear of it. She suggests they go back to Julius’ house but oh no, Joan wants to go home. Gustl insists on coming with her.

  Out on the Charing Cross Road it’s raining. They have no umbrella. It’s a few minutes before they see a taxi. Joan climbs in and before Gustl can stop her she slams the door. Gustl is tapping at the window, but Joan sits staring straight ahead, telling the cabbie to drive on, leaving Gustl in her damp fur with no choice but to go back into the theatre.

  The play is, after all, and despite the curious incident at the start, a success. A dark thing, but these are dark times. A world has been overturned but there is a promise of renewal, of political hope, of a continuing collective life, and Elizabeth Morton-Stanley has seen to it that this comes through with volume and clarity. With the appearance of Antonio’s son in the last moments a flame of hope is lit in the Court of Malfi, and it’s shared by all those in the theatre who’ve survived the war years and emerged in one piece. Then, too, it is exhilarating theatre, and on this they are all agreed, for the cast is superb, in particular Vera Grice.

  Yes, our Vera. She dominates the drama when she’s onstage, and her absence from the stage only sharpens the audience’s eagerness to see her again. She is by turns playful, seductive, haughty and tender, and fearless in the face of death: the terror is there, as Vera had realised, but so is serenity. She is a lover, a mother, a tragic sister to a twin brother bent on her destruction. She is impatient of authority, most pointedly the authority of those who would tell her who to love. She is a war hero to an audience weary of war.

  When hope has gone they see in her a kind of courage the idea of which they’ve lived with since September 1939 but been unwilling to call as such, for that’s not the British way. But here, now, on a London stage, in a play written more than three hundred years earlier, by an Englishman, they see it on display, and in the inarticulate depths of their weary souls they exult. What other country in Europe has stood firm against the Nazis? What other has given not an inch, collaborated not at all, been never occupied, has fought on to the bitter end and from the ruins emerged victorious? The Duchess of Malfi is the defiant antagonist of a demented megalomaniac with absolute power over life and death. In her they see themselves.

  They rise to their feet as one when the play is over and they bring the actors back out, not once, not twice but time and again, and there might have been more had they not all been so eager to get a glass in their hands and tell each other what they thought of it. None who was there that night will forget Vera Grice, damp, exhausted, exhilarated, her black hair tumbling over the diaphanous white gown in which she was murdered in Act IV, holding the hands of Harry Catermole on her right, and Ed Colefax on her left, and each of them clutching the next one’s hand, the actors in a line that stretches from one side of the stage all the way to the other, and a second rank behind them. They look to Vera for the bow and as her head drops, so do theirs.

  Later, in Vera’s dressing room, the mood is giddy. The place is crowded. Elizabeth Morton-Stanley dispenses glasses of champagne and on her face there’s an expression rarely seen before even by Sidney Temple, who has been crying. Julius and Gustl stand together at the far end of the dressing room enjoying Vera in her glory and determined that she know nothing yet of her mother’s wild lament. As for Frank Stone, he is similarly committed to silence in this matter. His guilt about Joan is the mere shadow of a blemish on what is, for him, otherwise a night of accomplishment, for his Malateste was warmly received, in particular his Oh sad disaster.

  Later still this glorious night, in Congreve’s Grill in Covent Garden, Vera asks Julius where her mother is and he tells her that she’s tired and sends her love, and will speak to her in the morning. It is a big, happy table, and the restaurant had risen to its collective feet when the company first swept in. Vera is oddly calm, and Julius, watching her, sees something in his wife that he hasn’t seen before, a mood, an attitude, signalled in her temperate demeanour amid the raucous good cheer of the actors around her, and he believes that for the first time she is taking responsibility for her genius. Frank Stone sees it and never forgets it. He will in his own time know it too.

  When Gustl rings the doorbell in Archibald Street the next morning, Joan comes down to let her in. The question she wants answered at once is whether or not Vera knows.

  – No, says Gustl, she does not.

  – Thank Christ for that.

  She leads her friend upstairs and into the kitchen. Now she wants to know how it went, for she hasn’t been out for the newspapers. Gustl tells her how many curtain calls they had and Joan’s hands fly to
her mouth.

  – It can’t be—

  – Sieben, she says, showing seven fingers.

  Joan sinks onto her chair.

  – Then it’s going to be all right.

  – Now you have to tell me, love, says Gustl, what happened last night.

  Joan busies herself with the kettle. Gustl, who has seen the ghost behind Joan’s eyes, now wonders why her discovery of Gricey’s involvement with the fascists did not destroy her illusions, why it didn’t expose him to her as someone other than the man she’d loved all those years, and not the man whose spirit, in the wild delusion of her grief, she’d tried so very hard to sustain in the world. Why did the whole rickety structure not fall down? Why the haunting?

  Ah, but in the end, Gustl then thought, watching her friend make the tea, and catching the odour of grief, oh, such a very desperate grief – we smelled it, didn’t we, ladies? – Gustl thought: what did it matter, in the end? Couldn’t she love a fascist? Many women loved a fascist. She herself had loved a fascist once, briefly, in 1937. Who is to tell us who we can love? Which is what The Duchess is all about, in the end.

  She left Joan an hour later, troubled that what seemed most to concern Joan now was Vera finding out what happened in the theatre, what she’d done.

  – She will think I’m mad.

  – Für einige Zeit macht der Tod Wahnsinnige aus uns allen.

  – English! Dear god, Auntie!

  – Death makes us all for a time mad, said Gustl.

  They’d sat across the kitchen table and Joan had then seized her friend’s hands and told her it changed nothing, that she would come to the meeting, she would speak from the platform; they must go on. Gustl was surprised. This she hadn’t been expecting. She didn’t understand why their conversation had produced this sudden insistence on keeping her promise to Julius and speaking at the meeting, but was glad of it all the same.

  Vera in fact did hear a whisper about there being a disturbance in the theatre on the first night. She paid no attention to it. But three days later her dresser let slip the truth, saying she hoped her mother was feeling better.