by Rosie Thomas
‘Yes, yes,’ said John Douglas from inside the office. ‘Tell me something new, Vera.’
Mattie tiptoed forward and tapped on the open door.
‘I thought you’d bloody gone,’ John Douglas said.
‘She has,’ Mattie answered. ‘I’m Mattie Banner.’
John Douglas looked up from the one chair in the room. There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘Is that supposed to mean anything to me?’
Mattie quailed.
He was a big man with a lion’s head of shaggy grey hair. Mattie saw a rubber-tipped walking stick leaning against his chair.
‘I’m your new stage manager.’
His sudden shout of laughter was even more disconcerting. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.’
It was the same rich voice that she had admired, but how could such a voice belong to this creased, belligerent man?
‘What’s funny about it?’ Mattie asked, stung by his rudeness.
‘Just that Willoughby said he was sending me his own personal assistant, as a great favour.’
‘I am – I was – Francis’s assistant.’
John was still laughing as he looked her up and down. It made Mattie feel hot and angry.
‘Yes, of course. It’s just that I was expecting a lady of a certain age and certain capabilities. Give that we’re talking about Francis I should have known better. I’m sure you’ve got your own talents, love, but I doubt that they’ll be the ones I need for eight shows a week. How old are you?’
Twenty-two.’
John Douglas’s mouth twisted. ‘Of course you are. Kids and cripples, that’s what we are in this company. They should give us special billing.’ He took hold of his stick, and stood up. He was tall, but his body screwed over to one side. ‘I provide the cripple element, in case you were wondering. Usually I tell pretty girls it’s a war wound, but I can’t be bothered tonight. It’s osteoarthritis, and I blame my vile temper on it.’
‘I thought there must be a reason for it,’ Mattie murmured.
He looked at her then, with the corners of his mouth drawn down. ‘What do you know about stage management?’ he snapped at her.
‘Enough.’
‘Oh, that’s very good. You can do the get-out tonight, and I’ll go home to bed.’
Mattie felt her face go stiff. ‘Do the …?
‘This is wonderful.’ He laughed again, without any warmth. ‘Francis may not have explained to you that this is a touring company. This lovely Saturday evening is our last night in Leeds, and on Monday we open a week in Doncaster. We have two shows on this tour, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, and Welcome Home, which is a three-act drawing-room comedy complete with maid, of the sort beloved by mystified northern audiences. After the curtain tonight both sets have to be struck and loaded, with props and costumes, on to lorries. This leaves room for the next company to bring in Rookery Nook, or Ghost Train, or whatever bloody masterpiece the manager imagines will appeal to the citizens of Leeds. On Monday the procedure is reversed, in the next theatre. The get-in, as we theatre folk call it. That’s your job, dear, amongst other things. I’m afraid you’ll have Leonard to help you, too.’
‘Leonard?’
‘Your ASM. One of the kids, and half-witted as well. You’d better come backstage now, in the interval, and I’ll introduce you. You’ve already seen Vera. She’s the deputy manager.’ He was walking away down the dingy corridor, moving awkwardly but surprisingly quickly.
‘What was the matter with her?’
His voice boomed back, amplified by the funnel of the passage. ‘Apart from incompetence? Time of the month, I should think. All women are the same, from our lovely leading lady to yourself, no doubt. No, that’s not quite true. Our lamented Jennifer Edge didn’t seem to suffer, but then she took plenty of exercise.’
She heard him laughing.
Mattie contented herself with making a face at the director’s distorted shadow as she scuttled after him down to the stage.
An hour later the curtain had come down. It was a thin house for a Saturday night, and the audience dispersed quickly. The actors vanished in their wake, heading for the pub or the landlady’s cooking at their digs. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mattie. John Douglas had gone, and she found herself standing in front of the Welcome Home set, frozen by the certainty that she could do nothing with it. She would still be standing there when Rookery Nook arrived on Monday.
‘You’re in charge, then. Where shall we start?’
It was Leonard, a spindly youth in tight trousers, and the theatre’s two stage-hands. They were staring blankly at her, without hostility, but with no hint of friendship either.
Mattie wanted to cry, or to run away, but the three of them were blocking her way, and she hated anyone to see her in tears. She breathed in instead, and said sharply, ‘I’m new here, Leonard, and you know the show. Do what you usually do, and I’ll get started on the hampers.’
To her relief, they turned away and began dismantling the flats. The heavy weights thumped and the metal poles clanked. That, at least, was familiar.
Mattie found the big wicker costume and prop baskets stacked up backstage. She trailed around the deserted dressing rooms collecting discarded costumes and props, praying that she was finding everything, and began packing them up.
It took one and a half back-breaking hours to clear the theatre. Mattie and Leonard heaved the last wicker basket into the waiting lorry, and the two stage-hands melted away. The theatre janitor was locking the doors within five minutes, and Mattie only just retrieved her suitcase. She found herself out in the foggy street again, without even the glow of the theatre lights for reassurance.
‘You got any digs?’ Leonard asked her. He was about Mattie’s own age, an undernourished-looking boy with a bad skin and sparse, greasy hair.
She shook her head, and Leonard sighed.
‘They never think, do they? You’d better come to mine. They’re nothing special because the cast always pinch the best ones. But it’ll be better than nothing.’
He held out his hand for her suitcase, smiling at her Mattie was so tired that she let him take it. Leonard might easily have resented her arrival, she reflected, except that he didn’t seem to have the necessary spirit. He didn’t look like much of an ally as he loped along beside her, but Mattie needed a friend that night. She was grateful to him.
‘Thanks, Leonard,’ she said.
‘You can call me Lenny, if you like.’
His landlady served them a late supper in the front room. Eggs and bacon and fried bread, two bottles of Guinness, and a choice from the bottles of sauce that stood on a wooden tray on the sideboard. Lenny ate in silence, with his mouth open, and Mattie tried to keep her eyes fixed on the Victorian oleograph hung over the chilly grate.
She wanted to talk, to say, This is it. I’m here, but there was no one to share her mystified triumph with. Not Lenny, with his churning mouthfuls of food, and certainly not the brick-jawed landlady.
‘No funny business, is it?’ the landlady had snapped when Lenny presented her.
‘Of course not,’ they murmured.
Mattie thought of Jessie, on their first night in the square. Nothing funny at all, Mattie repeated, as she prepared for bed in the icy back bedroom. I’d give anything for something to laugh at.
Her first night in the professional theatre ended with her shivering between damp sheets, and longing for Julia and Jessie and Felix at home in the cluttered warmth of the flat.
Through the lumpy wallpaper, she could hear Lenny snoring.
It was the hardest week that Mattie had ever lived through, but when the time came round for her second get-out she was beginning to believe that she might survive as stage manager of the Headline number one company.
By sitting up late in her digs, and by working early when the rest of the company were comfortably asleep, she had learned the two scripts. She had mastered the props list and the calls. She knew that she could avoid any more of Sheila Firth’s tant
rums by always calling her at the correct second, and always waiting meekly in her dressing room doorway for her languid acknowledgement. Sheila Firth was the actress playing Raina, and the fiancée in Welcome Home. She was temperamental and sickly, and not at all convincing as Shaw’s heroine, but Mattie watched her with intrigued intensity. She was the Leading F that Mattie had sighed over in the Stage.
Sheila’s technique for dealing with John Douglas was to ignore him. His abuses seemed to roll off her tilted head, and Mattie thought it was a very effective technique indeed. She adopted a mild version of it herself, and it helped her to survive the first week’s exposure to the director-manager’s fury. Mattie also had the comfort of recognising that even a hopeless stage manager was better than no one at all, and if John Douglas threw her out Francis was unlikely to replace her at any great speed.
The company moved from Doncaster to Scarborough, and from Scarborough to Nottingham, and Mattie’s new life began to develop a pattern.
On Saturday night, after the last curtain, there was the get-out. When it was done, two lorries took the flats and the props and the hampers of costumes away. The people were all gone, and the two-dimensional bric-à-brac that created the illusions, and the stage was left. Mattie liked it best then. It was easier to recapture some of her illusions about it in the absence of Francis Willoughby’s touring productions.
When the theatre was finally dark, Mattie could limp home to her digs for the last evening’s supper and bed. The digs improved after the first week. Vera took her under her wing, and introduced her to the network of theatrical landladies. They were there, in all the foggy northern towns that the company visited. Some of them were ex-professionals themselves; all of them were in love with the theatre. They always saw all the shows, and the actors waited politely for their verdicts. They treated their weekly regulars like members of the family, feeding them huge, fatty, late meals in gas-fire-heated parlours, and sitting with them afterwards for long sessions of gossip and discreet tippling.
Mattie suspected that the digs patronised by company members less genteel than Vera must be even livelier. There were two middle-aged actors in particular, who had been working the circuit for years and years and who always stayed in the same place in each town. At the end of the week they would murmur something like, ‘Old Nellie’s still got the stamina, dear, but I don’t know that I have. Just look at my skin. Early bed for me every night in Middlesbrough, whatever Phyllis says.’
Their names were Fergus and Alan, but they always referred to each other as Ada and Doris. They were the first homosexuals that Mattie had ever seen at close quarters, and her first introduction to theatrical camp. Doris and Ada convinced her that Felix couldn’t be queer. The thought of Felix pursing his lips and whispering, ‘She’s nice, and she knows it’ behind the back of some stage-hand made her laugh, and long for Julia.
On Sundays they did the transfer. Usually that meant a long, cold train journey with awkward connections. John Douglas drove himself in his filthy black Standard Vanguard, but the rest of the company huddled into the train with thermos flasks and sandwiches and the Sunday papers. The actors read the reviews of the West End productions aloud to each other. Mattie enjoyed the acrimony of that, listening in her corner. Most of the company was too old or too defeated for anything more challenging than Francis’s seedy productions and one or two of them were grateful to be working at all. But the younger ones like Sheila Firth believed that they deserved better, and used the close captivity of the train to tell everyone else. There were uninhibited rows, and shouting, and tears. Mattie watched everything, from behind the shelter of the News of the World.
In the Sunday twilight of the new town, smelling of fish and chips, and canal water, and coal-smoke, there would be the new digs, perhaps a cinema with Vera or Lenny or Alan and Fergus, and then bed in another back bedroom with a brass bedstead, and a china bowl and ewer on the washstand.
Monday was a hard day. There was the physical struggle with recalcitrant flats as they came off the lorries, unpacking the costumes in various dressing rooms, and then a long trail of visits to unsympathetic shopkeepers to beg for the loan of furniture or supplies in exchange for a mention in a programme slip. The cast hated Mondays too, and they complained about their dressing rooms, the lack of their pet props, their unmended or uncleaned costumes, and Mattie had to try to soothe them all. At the end of the day there was the show itself, with the calls to be made, the backstage business to handle, and her turn to be taken with Lenny in the prompt box.
Mattie had promised that she would write down everything she was seeing and doing, like a diary, and send it to Julia. It was Julia herself, greedy even for someone else’s experience, who had begged her to do it. But by the end of the day Mattie was too bleary with exhaustion and suppertime Guinness to do anything but roll into bed.
Julia wrote two or three letters, thin little notes with news of Jessie and Felix, but none of herself. Josh has been here, she told Mattie dully. Nothing happened. Mattie sighed over the letters in her backstage corner, not even needing to read between the lines.
After Mondays, the week grew easier. Even Mattie could he in bed late and take time over her breakfast before scurrying back to the theatre and her day’s work. Before the early evening preparations she mended scenery, repaired costumes or sewed curtains, developing talents she had never dreamed she possessed. On Wednesdays there was a matinee, Treasury call on Friday, and then it was Saturday once more, and everything was ready to begin all over again. She watched every performance, from the wings or from the shelter of the prompt box, thinking, I could do that. She listened to Sheila Firth’s high, consciously musical voice and mouthed her lines. If it was me, Mattie thought.
Her real position was much humbler. By the end of her first month on tour Mattie had found her niche in the company. Vera mothered her, and Lenny was her regular companion. Mattie was relieved that he at least didn’t try to be more than that. The younger men in the company regarded her as one of the props, and were surprised when she refused to let them try her on like a new costume. She joked with them and fended them off, secretly not liking any of them very much. She enjoyed the company of Alan and Fergus because they made her laugh, and they clearly preferred her to Miss Edge.
Fergus’s sandy eyebrows would go up. ‘Some of the things I could tell you about that one,’ he whispered.
‘Do tell me.’
‘I wouldn’t dream. You’re too innocent, love.’
The actresses mostly ignored her, except to complain about each other. Mattie particularly disliked Sheila’s breathless girlishness, but she did try to copy her posh-sounding elocuted accent. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ John Douglas asked her. ‘Got a gumboil?’
Mattie watched him, too. She was intrigued by his theatrical standards, and by the way he cajoled or insulted his lack-lustre company into meeting them. He must have been a good director, once, she thought. He was also realistic. He couldn’t give much stature to Raina and her Bluntschli, played by a hollow-chested, languidly poetic young actor called Hugh, so he made them tender instead. And he sent the hackneyed drawing-room comedy humming along at a snappy pace that disguised its predictability. The audiences always enjoyed it much more than the Shaw classic. John didn’t ask too much of his actors, but he expected a certain amount and he made certain that they delivered it. Most of the company hated him, but they were careful enough to be civil to his face. Vera lived in terror of him. Mattie didn’t know what she thought. There was still the potent appeal of his voice. Sometimes when she heard it she would turn around and look covertly at him.
Mattie had suffered from his temper more than any of the others at the beginning. On her third night she had failed to deliver a tray of glasses to the wings for the maid to walk on with. The actors on stage had been forced to drink the engaged couple’s health in thin air, and John Douglas had rounded on Mattie in the interval as if he wanted to tear her arms off.
‘I won’t tolerat
e incompetence,’ the voice boomed at her. ‘You can’t help your ignorance or your crassness, and the rest of us must put up with you. But you do have a marked script in your hands and it tells you in plain English what to do, and when.
None of it is very difficult, even for you. Don’t make another fucking mess-up like that.’
‘I won’t,’ Mattie made the mistake of saying.
The voice attacked her all over again. ‘Don’t assure me of that as though you’re giving me a fucking present. Just remember what I say.’
How could I forget? Mattie retorted silently as she backed away. It was after that that she learned to listen and say nothing, like Sheila Firth did. Wisely she didn’t copy Sheila’s pained, innocent, I-will-forgive-you expression. She was only the stage manager, not Leading F.
Gradually, as she grew more confident and more capable, John Douglas turned his attention elsewhere.
One Friday evening John and Vera were sitting in the office before the six o’clock Treasury call. In very poor weeks the box-office receipts didn’t even cover the company’s wages, and those were the times when John had to telephone Francis Willoughby. This time, however, the takings were good and John and Vera were working on the wage packets. It was a complicated process because some actors received a percentage of the take above a certain figure, so their cuts had to be calculated and deducted from the total before the profits could be grudgingly sent off to Francis. It was Mattie’s job to keep Vera supplied with tea and John with whisky while they worked.
She was filling the kettle in the grubby kitchen cubby-hole when Sheila Firth brushed past. Sheila was wearing her street clothes, complete with a soft black felt hat pulled down over her eyes. That was unusual, because Sheila liked to be in her dressing room in good time so that she could drift soulfully around in her robe, dabbing at her wig and make-up. Mattie heard her stop at the office door. Sheila opened it, and when John and Vera looked up she half-fell against the frame.
‘I can’t go on tonight,’ she said. Her voice quivered with emotion.
