Seven Dials

by Claire Rayner

  And she set her head to one side as pert as a robin on a spade handle in a winter garden and as certain of her welcome, and smiled enchantingly.

  Letty looked at her, nonplussed, very aware of the sudden hush behind her as the rest of the company waited for her response. All week she had been regretfully but firmly refusing requests to bring special people to the party, not even accepting wives or husbands, for Rules, fashionable and popular restaurant though it was, was far from roomy. They had already overflowed the section that had been set aside for the party, and other diners, she knew, were muttering darkly about damned pushy theatricals making such a nuisance of themselves. And now here was Katy looking as delicious and as appealing as only Katy could, and challenging her.

  Letty lifted her chin to look beyond Katy to Brin who was standing quietly behind her, seeming unaware of the tension that was surrounding him and looking round with an interested expression on his face. The scar that crawled across his cheek was livid in the soft light that came from the brackets on the walls between the clustered caricatures of the many notables who used the place and his eyes above it reflected the lamps’ glitter. He was wearing an old but impeccably cut dinner jacket and soft shirt with a wider than usual black tie, and was standing in a relaxed and comfortable way with his raincoat hooked across his hands which were clasped in front of him.

  Damn you, Katy, Letty was thinking. Damn you, painting me into a corner like this. Bringing someone with an injury like that, so that if I stick to my guns and turn him away I’m the biggest bitch in the world - but if I yield and let him stay, then I’m an even bigger bitch for giving my own nephew preference when I’ve turned away other people’s equally valued relations. Damn you, damn you, damn you -

  ‘Hello, Aunt Letty,’ Brin said in a low voice, but it was a clear, well-modulated one and carried easily to the far side of the bar. There was no doubt now that everyone could hear him, especially as no one was any longer making any pretence of conversing, all listening avidly to the exchange. ‘I haven’t seen you since I can’t remember when. You look just as I recall you, though, only better. Success suits you down to the ground. I do hope Katy was right, and that you don’t mind me tagging along like this? I’ve been up in Haworth you know, with Father and Sophie - they send you their best love of course - and to tell you the truth, I’m bored out of my skull. I ache for a little theatrical gossip. It’s as though I’ve been deprived of my life blood!’

  He looked around at the people crowded around and smiled amiably, and they stared uneasily back - though some of the girls tossed their heads like startled and interested ponies as he caught their glances.

  And then, suddenly, Letty felt as she had on her way to Rules, when she had stood on the corner and felt the pattern of London round her, seen herself as part of a great scheme in which she had a role to play, but over which she exerted no sort of control. It was as though there were other forces organizing her, and organizing life around her, using her for their own ends as the pieces fell satisfyingly into place, smoothed out and made a beautifully shapely design of the tangle in which she had found herself.

  ‘No job, did you say, Katy?’ she said clearly, letting her drawling voice lift so that she too could be clearly heard by everyone. ‘My dear chap, how disagreeable! And a man of the theatre, as I recall -’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘An actor.’ And then he lifted one hand and touched the scar on his cheek with one long forefinger, a fleeting regretful little gesture that made more than one of the watching girls catch their breaths as pity sent a sharp little dart into them. ‘Heaven knows what hope I have of ever getting another job of course, but - well, to be with actors again would be like a transfusion, Aunt Letty. I’m sure you’ll know what it’s like to be away from all the things you most enjoy -’ And his hand drifted away back to his raincoat.

  ‘Can’t give you a part,’ Letty said brusquely. ‘Not casting anything at the moment.’ Very deliberately she didn’t look at his scarred face, keeping her gaze fixed on his eyes. ‘But I can give you a job. Had to send the stage manager off tonight with a flea in his ear. Disgustingly drunk and revolting with it. Won’t have him anywhere near any show of mine, that’s for certain, so I need a senior stage manager to take over. Can you cope with that? There are two ASMS to help you, but you’ll have to help Peter too - our director. He’s overworked, needs a lot of running around and dogsbodying for him. No pay of course - only expenses - it’s a charity job. But after this show’s over, I’ll be back doing something commercial again, and people I’ve worked with happily in this show are obviously going to be well at the front of my mind when I come to set up future companies. So what do you say?’

  Brin stared at her, his eyes a little narrowed and then slowly he smiled, and his scar puckered as his lips lifted.

  ‘Dear Aunt Letty, that’s the best offer I’ve had this side of last Christmas! To work for you for no pay’d be better than working for the whole Moss Empire at a hundred a week. Yes, please, I’d love to.’

  Letty grinned with delight and moving past Katy as though she weren’t there, set her hand into the crook of Brin’s elbow and pulled him into the middle of the room.

  ‘Listen, everyone! I want to introduce you to the newest member of the Rising High company - Brin Lackland, taking the place of the singularly repellent Portland, who had the brass neck to get stewed in the middle of my party, on my booze, and make a disgusting nuisance of himself. But someone up there loves us, because now we’ve got a much better chap. Now everyone, fill your glasses, and have fun. We’ll be eating soon - and I’m going to have a rather personal and embarrassing announcement to make. No - shan’t tell you yet! Right now it’s drinking time, and Hello-to-Brin time -’

  And she beamed round as people moved forwards to speak to Brin and shot a glance over her shoulder at Katy who was standing at the door still, with no one paying any attention to her at all. It was such an unusual sight that Letty couldn’t help laughing and Katy saw her amusement and reddened furiously. But Letty didn’t mind that at all.

  15

  January blew itself out petulantly and gave way to a sulky, freezing sodden February during which everyone shivered and grumbled at the bitter cold because of the fuel crisis that had emptied all the coal stores. The cast of Rising High came to rehearsals so wrapped in scarves and mittens and heavy overcoats that they could only just walk through their paces; offering the director any sort of vivacity in performance was, clearly, out of the question. Tempers weren’t helped either by the fact that many of them found themselves out of paid work, as shows closed because paying customers found no pleasure in sitting shivering in unheated auditoria, and managements held back from launching new productions until they could be sure of bringing in the necessary bottoms to fill the seats. Altogether it was a miserable way to start the New Year of 1947.

  But as the weeks wore on and a few brave snowdrops started to appear in grimy parks and squares, through the palls of sooty snow that lingered everywhere, and sparrows began to scold each other furiously over nesting-places, moods lifted. The cold weather gave way to a more blustery cloud-scudding freshness and spirits rose as London came to life again. Every other street seemed to be partially blocked by builders’ vans and lorries, and piles of bricks and cement mixers starred the gaping holes where buildings had used to be, promising newer streetscapes for the future. The city felt like a game old woman who had been sick almost to death, but who was at last getting better and stirring in her bed, shifting the covers, sitting up and taking notice and even putting some makeup on her sagging old cheeks. Or so Charlie thought as she went hurrying along Shaftesbury Avenue towards Letty’s rehearsal rooms down at the Cambridge Circus end, almost in Seven Dials.

  Not that there was any need to hurry. She could have taken the later train from East Grinstead and a bus from Victoria and still been punctual, but somehow she found it easier to kill time at this end, loitering along the Charing Cross Road and peering into musty old booksho
ps, trickling the minutes through her fingers to make them into hours, waiting till the exact moment when it would be permissible to climb the dusty cat-scented stairs that led to the big bare room where Brin was spending his days with Peter and those of the cast of the show who had been called to rehearsal and who could get there.

  Silly to be so excited, she thought now, as at last she reached the Circus and her pace perforce slowed to a loiter. We see each other quite often now, after all. I ought to be used to it. But she wasn’t, and she doubted she ever would be. Ever since he had returned to London from Haworth and pushed his way back into her life her obsession with him had grown, and she was embarrassed by it as much as anything. There was something so childish about being in love, she thought. It marched so uneasily with her vision of herself as a cool professional and practical woman. Surgeons intent on building themselves careers as plastic surgeons - as she now was - shouldn’t dream and droop over a man like a character in a story in a woman’s magazine. In-love-ness was for shopgirls and factory hands or for silly little junior nurses, not for serious thoughtful women like Charlotte Hankin Lucas.

  And then she would castigate herself for her snobbery, for wasn’t it a perfectly normal feminine thing to do, to seek a mate? It was high time she satisfied her biological urges, she would tell herself sternly, for she was approaching thirty, after all, and this obsession with Brin was Nature’s way of prodding her into action. And then she would shake her head at her own silliness and set her mind to concentrating on her practice with the specimens of muscle and skin that McIndoe obtained for her, bending her head over her busy fingers in the circle of light on the work-bench in the histological laboratory.

  That usually helped, because she was enjoying developing her manual skills. She knew that it was possible to be a deft and delicate surgeon even with fingers like bananas; she had already noticed that McIndoe’s were stubby and far from the long-fingered supple image that so many people had of the surgeon’s hands, but all the same it was useful to have small neat fingers like her own, and she was becoming quietly proud of the work they were capable of doing. Stitches of the finest cobweb silk put in with a needle so whippy and delicate that it could only be seen when the light hit it and sent reflections back, created repaired incisions that were a delight to behold and which would, she knew, have healed to a perfect hairline scar in living tissue. She had started by suturing clean cuts and then had moved on to the jagged tears that were so often presented to plastic surgeons, and then to the painstaking patchwork restructurings that were needed where burned tissue had to be replaced with grafts of different thicknesses from different parts of the patient’s body.

  And it was not only in her practice that she was beginning to excel; more and more McIndoe - a generous teacher - encouraged her to operate on her own cases, taking on increasingly difficult ones until she was sometimes being positively heroic in the range of work she was doing. She made big pedicle grafts and also learned to handle tiny Thiersch grafts; she remodelled burned-off noses and destroyed eyelids, reshaped torn lips and tattered ears, often having to do several such operations on one injured man. She would see her cases anxiously through the immediate postoperative days and supervise the crucial early dressings and then see them on their way to convalescence, their faces - and therefore their view of themselves and their world - quite transformed. And that would make her glow with contentment, an experience powerful enough to push Brin Lackland well to the back of her mind.

  But not completely. His welfare and her developing skills had become inextricably woven in her mind, so that she knew that her training would only be complete when she had operated on him and dealt with that wide scar that puckered his face and wrinkled his eye so interestingly. When she had smoothed out that pucker and disposed of that wrinkling then and only then would she be ready to leave McIndoe’s side and start out on her own career as a mender of hurt faces.

  That was her new ambition, the plan on which all her previous training and experience now seemed to be focused, so that in a very real sense Brin mattered to her not only personally but professionally too. His welfare was hers - and that made her feel both exhilarated and uneasy. To be so dependent on another person for fulfilment can’t be healthy, her inner voice would murmur, and she would try to ignore it. But the anxiety was always there.

  Today it sharpened her eagerness to see him, and after the hour had at last passed by - some of it occupied in buying a quaint old medical book published in 1890, from Foyle’s bookshop - she made her way with a bouncy step to the door that led around the corner from the rehearsal room feeling everything about her with extra sensitivity; the icy wind slapping rubbish around the frosted gutters, and whipping her own cheeks to a glowing red, the smell of petrol and gas in the street from the nearby building site where a main had, as usual, been fractured - London seemed to smell of gas almost everywhere these days - and the rattle of traffic in Cambridge Circus, all battered at her senses. But she was content, for what better way could there be to spend one of her few days off than with Brin?

  And today, happily, he seemed as pleased to see her as she was to see him. Sometimes he was sulky and almost offhand when they met, only gradually becoming more cheerful as their time together went by, but she put this down to the way he felt about what he was doing.

  That even an unpaid job was better than no job at all was undoubted. He needed to be occupied and he was well aware of that fact, and to give him his full due, he was not a man who cared a great deal for money as money. He wanted to be a highly paid actor if he could, but only because the level of his cash reward would be an indication of the level of the esteem in which he was held by the public. All he needed now, however, was enough to live on and he had that. His little flat in Earlham Street, which he had rented for a number of years, was cheap and he was lucky to have it in these times of chronic housing shortages; his small income, drawn from the modest fortune his mother had left him, and supplemented by an allowance from his father, was enough to feed him. There were no costs to be met for clothes, for who could buy clothes when rationing was so severe that one was lucky if one’s meagre allotment of coupons kept one in essentials like socks and underwear? So that was not a problem.

  But the longueurs of the job he had were. Letty, he would tell Charlie furiously, had allowed far too much time for the production of this Benefit show. She had said it was because she had to fit in with the performers, all of whom were giving their services free and needed to earn their livings as well as to work at raising money for Nellie’s, but as far as Brin was concerned, this was all nonsense.

  ‘It’s all so damned tedious,’ he’d said the last time they had met, sitting hunched over the interminable cups of coffee or tea they would share in shabby Lyons’ teashops whenever Charlie came to London. ‘Peter sits there as silent as the bloody grave and only manages to dredge up some conversation when Letty comes in - I could die of boredom.’

  ‘Not enough work to do?’ Charlie said sympathetically, knowing how miserable she would be without her hours well filled.

  ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ Brin said. ‘They keep me belting around like a lunatic. There’s plenty of work - it’s just that there’s no one to talk to as much as I’d like - though some of the dancers are rather delicious.’ He had chuckled then, his mood improving suddenly. ‘They don’t talk much, or when they do it’s just babble, but then, it’s not talking I want to share with them.’

  And Charlie had managed to say nothing and not to show that she minded these casual references he would make to flirting with the girls. She knew he did, that casual kisses and caresses in dark corners of the rehearsal room were an integral part of his life and was glad he talked to her so freely about it, seeing it as an indication of intimacy they shared. If they weren’t close friends, rather than patient and doctor, he would be more discreet, surely? His free and easy chatter about girls was really a compliment, she would tell herself fiercely and it was silly to get these stabs of jealous
y. The dancers meant nothing to him; they were just silly girls he played with and then forgot and she knew it. But all the same the jealousy did flare, often, and she hated it.

  But on this bright and blustery morning it was different, and her belly tightened with pleasure when she walked into the rehearsal room and saw the wide and welcoming grin with which he greeted her. Today his mood was a good one and they’d have a lovely time, and she grinned back delightedly, not knowing how pretty her relief made her look.

  ‘Charlie, I’ve got a treat for you today!’ he said gaily. ‘I managed to scrounge some chicken off the ration, would you believe, from that funny little shop in Short’s Gardens, and this morning, before I came here, I put it with great reverence into Mrs Burroughs’ hands with strict instructions to make something magic out of it. She mayn’t be much of a cleaner of the flat, but she’s a fantastic cook, I’ll tell you, so come on. We’ll have a super lunch chez moi and gossip.’ And he waved a casual hand at the others and they went clattering happily away down the stairs.

  Katy watched them go and then said easily to Peter, ‘Chicken! Lucky devil - but he’s not the only one. Peter, dear heart, I have been making the most outrageous sheep’s eyes at the old man at Ley On’s, and I’ve got a table! He’s promised me all sorts of wondrous Chinese goodies if we turn up there in good time. What do you say? Noodles and the like should set you up for the afternoon, and you’ve got that big flower sellers’ number to do, haven’t you? And Rollo said he’d be in too, to do ours - and high time too, the lazy wretch - so we need a bit of sustenance.’

  Peter looked up vaguely from the set designs he had been studying and Letty, sitting beside him, looked sharply at Katy too and considered for a moment opting herself into the planned lunch. The waiter at Ley On’s restaurant wasn’t the only recipient of Katy’s outrageous sheep’s eyeing, she thought; maybe Peter needed a little protection. There was no way, as Letty well knew, that Katy was doing anything but playing a game of flirtation with him to pass the time until she could go thankfully back to Hollywood when her contract was ended and promptly forget him, and Peter had been hurt enough.