by Rosie Thomas
Mattie despaired of her. ‘No man is worth loving to distraction,’ she insisted.
‘Josh is,’ Julia said simply.
‘So what will happen?’
Julia shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I don’t know. But something will. It must do.’
The flat was quiet without Mattie.
Julia finished picking up the discarded clothes and went through into Jessie’s room. The old bed had been exchanged for a third-hand plush-covered sofa, but everything else was almost the same. Julia walked slowly round, picking up the framed photographs and looking down into the mysterious faces, running her fingers over Felix’s eclectic arrangements of bits and pieces. Dust-collectors, Jessie had always called them. They were certainly thick with dust now. The paisley shawl on the sofa back was wrinkled and creased and the water in a vase of long-dead flowers brought by one of Julia’s friends smelt stagnant. The room was stale and neglected. Mattie and Julia hardly ever touched down for long enough to sit in it. Felix would be disgusted, Julia thought, smiling a little.
Felix had completed his National Service. He had seemed even more self-contained afterwards, restrained and economical in his relationship with Mattie and even with Julia. But they had had little enough time to judge. He had gone almost straight to Florence. ‘I always wanted to,’ he told them. ‘Before Ma got ill.’
He supported himself by working as a hotel cleaner, and studied art history. Thinking about him, Julia found a sudden focus for her restlessness. She would fill the afternoon by restoring the murky flat to the pristine condition that Felix would have approved of. She was whistling as she tied her hair up in a scarf and wrapped herself in a faded overall that must have belonged to Jessie. The kitchen sink was full of dishes, and Julia set to work.
When she finished it had been dark outside for more than an hour. The rooms smelt of polish and fresh air, and there was no more dust or washing-up. Julia’s back ached but she was satisfied as she emptied her bucket of water and wrung out her cloths. Felix would approve. She was just putting the kettle on the gas when the doorbell rang. Julia ran downstairs past the locked offices to the front door.
A man was standing on the step. He had thick grey hair and a lined face, and he leaned heavily on a stick. Julia had no idea who he was. He looked at her without interest, and then peered past her.
‘I’m looking for Mattie Banner,’ he announced.
His voice told Julia what his appearance had failed to.
‘Umm. I’m afraid Mattie isn’t here. She’s working this evening.’
‘In the theatre?’
‘Not … not exactly.’
The man frowned irritably at her. ‘What?’
It just finished, Mattie had said. We ran out of things to need from each other. Or just didn’t find enough of them. That was all she would say.
Julia held the door open wider. ‘You’d better come in.’
‘Thank you. My name’s John Douglas.’
Upstairs, Julia turned on the lamp in Jessie’s newly glowing room. John Douglas was breathing hard after the long climb up the stairs, but he looked around in clear surprise.
‘Hmm. Not what I imagined.’
Julia smiled innocently. ‘What did you imagine?’
‘Less domestic order, knowing Mattie as well as I do.’
‘Ah.’ Julia untied her scarf and shook out her hair, then untied Jessie’s baggy overall. John Douglas stared again, but this time Julia hid her smile.
‘I’m Mattie’s friend, Julia.’
‘I’m sorry, I thought you were the bloody cleaning woman.’
‘I’m both, today. Why do you want to see Mattie?’
John Douglas reached inside his overcoat and took out a big, thick brown envelope. He laid it carefully on the table.
‘I want her to do something. Don’t look at me like that. Not for me, for once. For herself. Where is she?’
Julia sighed. ‘Let me make us both a cup of tea. Then I’ll tell you.’
Mattie leaned against the grimy wall in the tiny changing cubicle behind the stage at the Showbox. It was eleven-thirty p.m. and she was waiting to do her last spot of the night. It would be her fifteenth of the day. The music playing for the girl onstage stabbed monotonously through her skull.
Monty owned four other little clubs in the surrounding streets, and like all his other girls Mattie spent her day working a circuit of them. When one act was over she would pull her clothes on again backstage and haul her holdall with her costume in it through the streets to the next club, and the next invisible audience hunched in the dark beyond the footlights. When her music started, a crackly version of ‘Teach Me Tonight’ that had dinned itself sickeningly into her head, it was time to bundle her hair up under the tasselled mortar-board and sweep through the curtains and on to the stage. Into the cubicle afterwards and dress again. Round and round. Sometimes Monty’s schedule gave her enough time to down a gin in one of the pubs, or to share a sandwich with the other girls. There was a camaraderie between them that was nothing to do with friendship, everything to do with mutually surviving the physical demands and mental stultification of the job. Mattie’s way of getting through the day was to treat each spot as a theatrical performance. She concentrated on injecting fresh nuances into the process of stripping down to her G-string and flinging it triumphantly offstage in the second before the lights went down.
The punters appreciated her work, and Monty loved it.
‘You’re a natural, pet. Born to it.’
He even paid her a pound or two more than the other girls, swearing her to secrecy first.
The music stopped and the girl before Mattie came offstage and slouched into the cubicle. She had big, blue-veined breasts. Neither the girl nor Mattie even glanced round when the boy who worked as backstage factotum dumped her discarded stage costume inside after her. Mattie had told Julia the truth when she said that stripping didn’t bother her. It simply numbed her, somewhere inside herself where she already felt cold. She yawned now, and wished there was somewhere to sit down and wait that wasn’t on the floor.
‘One more tonight,’ she muttered. ‘I’m half dead.’
The other girl was wriggling into her tight skirt. The zipper dragged at her flesh as she pulled it up. She glanced at Mattie and reached for her handbag.
‘Here. Have a blue.’
She held out a crumpled paper cone, just like the ones Mattie used to buy pennyworth’s of sweets in. Mattie dipped into it. She cupped the amphetamine in the palm of her hand and gulped it straight down.
‘Thanks, Vee. Saved my life.’
There had been some shuffling beyond the stage that meant new customers had arrived, but it had settled now into impatient creaking. The audience didn’t like to be kept waiting for too long between turns.
The first bars of Mattie’s music suddenly blared out and the backstage boy jerked his thumb at her. Mattie picked up her cane, made a resigned face at Vee, and pushed through the dusty curtains and on to the stage.
Julia sat between Flowers and John Douglas. The wooden chairs were very small, very hard and upright. She couldn’t see much of the room because it was so dark, but she had the impression that she was the only woman. She folded her hands in her lap, aware of the laughable primness of her posture, and waited. She had never thought of coming to one of Mattie’s performances before this, and Mattie had never suggested it. She wondered now if Mattie would mind.
The music was very loud and distorted. A black-gowned figure materialised on the stage. It was wearing a teacher’s mortar-board and heavy spectacles with no glass in the frames, and it was just recognisably Mattie.
At first Julia wanted to laugh. The pantomime strictness, frowning and cane-waving, was almost irresistibly funny. But then Mattie reached up and swept off her cap. Her wonderful hair fell over her face and down over her shoulders. There was a sigh of indrawn breath, and every man in the stuffy basement room leaned forward on his upright chair. Mattie smiled. She sw
ung the point of her cane down to the stage and balanced it with the tip of one finger. With the other hand, lazily, she opened the front of her gown. Red satin flashed underneath it. With one movement Mattie slid the black stuff off her shoulders and let it fall at her feet. Her skin was so white that it looked blue under the lights.
She took her spectacles off, touching them to her mouth before letting them drop. Miss Matilda was completely gone and it was Mattie on the stage, the shape of her only just veiled by her red slip. Mattie danced, moving as gracefully as she always did. Julia could hear John Douglas’s breathing. Johnny Flowers was leaning forward too, motionlessly watching. The straps of the flimsy thing eased off her shoulders. Under the red slip was the sequined bra and G-string that Julia had made fun of. The dance went on, and the lights caught on the sequins, twinkling points under the bald lights. Mattie took the bra off. She stood still for a moment, her back half turned, black shadows emphasising her curves and hollows. The horrible music reached a crescendo.
Mattie unhooked the G-string and threw it aside. She turned full on, her pretty body fully revealed.
Her expression was defiant, almost taunting.
Julia didn’t feel the remotest desire to laugh now. Mattie’s striptease had touched her, and she shivered. She also thought that it was painfully erotic.
A second later Mattie had disappeared. There was a wave of clapping, some foot-stamping and catcalling.
Beside Julia John Douglas murmured, ‘Sweet Jesus Christ.’ Flowers took Julia’s hand and held it tightly. They stood up in unison and pushed their way out through the darkness.
They waited for Mattie beside the row of dustbins outside the back door of the club. She emerged hardly a minute later, her hair wound up in a knot, ordinary Mattie again in her stovepipe trousers, except for a teacher’s cane gripped in one fist.
She stared blankly at John Douglas.
Then she pointed back over her shoulder. ‘Were you in there tonight? All of you?’ It was Julia who nodded.
Mattie suddenly grinned, surprisingly child-like. ‘It wasn’t much cop, was it? I usually put more effort into it than that. I was too tired tonight.’ Her eyes looked very bright in the dingy light. ‘But I’m livening up now. Are we all going to the Rocket? You too, John, whatever you’re doing here?’
His hand shot out and snatched at her wrist. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? In that place?’
Mattie stared at him for a second and then she shrugged wearily. ‘Don’t you start. It isn’t all that different from the theatre, is it? One way or another?’
There was a silence. They stood there, in an awkward circle, until John Douglas said, ‘I want you to come home now. I want you to read something.’
‘To read? It’s Saturday night. I want to go dancing. Julia?’ She looked round to her for support and the girls’ eyes met.
‘Go on,’ Julia said softly. ‘Go with him.’ So that Mattie couldn’t protest any more she turned and let Johnny Flowers lead her away down the alley. She rested her head for a second against his black-leather shoulder.
‘Come on, baby,’ he murmured. ‘You’re big girls now. Both of you.’
They came out into Wardour Street and began to walk northwards towards the Rocket.
‘Are we? Yes, I suppose we are.’ It was cold and the few other shadowy figures in the street looked menacing. Julia shivered again. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Johnny.’
Cheerfully he said, ‘I’m always here when I’m wanted.’
Mattie turned the light on and glanced disparagingly around the room. ‘Julia’s been at the polish again. Well, where is it? Whatever it is you want me to read?’
John Douglas picked the envelope up from its place on the table. Mattie opened it and took out a script in a blue binding.
‘This?’ The title was set in a little window cut out of the blue paper and Mattie read it aloud. ‘One More Day. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Why should you have done?’ John Douglas said sharply. ‘I more or less stole it, and I’ve left the company to bring it down here to you. Now sit down in that chair and bloody well read it. Have you got any whisky?’
Mattie opened the blue cover. ‘There’s a bottle of gin in the kitchen.’
‘I never drink gin.’
Mattie didn’t answer. She was sitting in Jessie’s old armchair with her legs drawn up underneath her, reading the play.
It took her an hour, and the only movement she made was to turn the pages.
When she did look up again she couldn’t speak for a minute. When she did manage to ask the question breathlessness caught at her words.
‘Have they cast it yet?’
John Douglas shook his heavy grey head. ‘Auditions on Monday.’
Mattie could hardly bear to look at him. ‘Can you get me in?’
‘You’re on the list, love. I’ve managed to do that much for you.’
She got up then and went to him. She laid her cheek against his hair. ‘Why?’
‘Because I think you can play the part. It might have been written for you.’
Mattie waited, and then rubbed her cheek sadly against his head. Of course John Douglas wouldn’t say, Because I love you. A little. Even if he felt it, he wouldn’t say it. He hadn’t ever said anything of the kind. He had kept his irascible distance, and Mattie understood that there wouldn’t be anything more between them. But he had come down here to give her this wonderful, terrifying play, and he had secured her an audition, He must believe, after all, that she could act. That was as good as being loved, wasn’t it? Sometimes Mattie despised her own needs.
Very softly she said, ‘I can play it. I know I can.’
‘Good girl. And now, if there isn’t anything else except bloody gin, perhaps we could have a cup of tea?’
Mattie went into the kitchen and came back after a few moments with a tray. She put it down on a low table in front of the hissing gas fire. The red glow of it shone through the tips of her hair, lending her a bronze halo. John Douglas was irresistibly reminded of the Showbox. Mattie up on the tiny, tawdry stage, with her hair spilling out from under the black cap. The worthless glitter of sequins and then her body, taunting and innocent at the same time.
Of all the ways she might have chosen to support herself. He was angry with her, and touched, and titillated. Yet if Mattie could do that, he thought, she had the toughness he had doubted in her. And she would need to be tough, if she was to go the way she wanted. There might well be times when she would have to go further than stripping.
He stood up, ignoring his cup of tea, balancing awkwardly without the aid of his stick. He put his arm round her and pulled her body against his.’ ‘Do you remember the night in Yarmouth?’
‘I remember.’
He started kissing her and then rubbed his hands over her breasts, grunting softly. Mattie stood very still until he lifted his head again.
He saw her face, but he asked, ‘Shall we go to bed, then?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mattie said, as gently as she could. She was surprised to find that she had acquired a kind of resolve. ‘It didn’t have very much value when we did it before. It seems a … meaningless transaction now.’
He looked sharply at her, and then he thought of the men in the darkness at the Showbox, leaning forward to peer at her white skin. ‘I’m not surprised,’ was all John Douglas said.
Mattie exhaled with relief and immediately insisted, ‘But you must stay here tonight, there’s Felix’s room. You will, won’t you?’
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely. His arms had dropped to his sides and Mattie went away mumbling about sheets and blankets.
For a long time after John Douglas had gone to sleep in his room across the hallway, Mattie lay wide-eyed in her own bed. She was thinking about the audition. There was already a knot of longing and fear and determination in the pit of her stomach. The time when the Rocket would be closing came and went, but Julia didn’t come home. Mattie guessed that
she must have gone back to Bayswater, or Paddington, or wherever Flowers was currently living, tactfully leaving her on her own with John Douglas. Mattie’s mouth twisted in the darkness, but the thought slipped away as quickly as it had come. She didn’t sleep, or even close her eyes. She was thinking about One More Day. Her play. Her part.
‘Name?’
‘Mattie Banner.’
The man in the middle of the row of chairs nodded, and drew a line through an item on a list in front of him. There were two other middle-aged men in the cold, bare rehearsal room, a woman with grey hair and a much younger girl who looked like someone’s assistant. She had just brought coffee in mugs for everyone, except Mattie, of course. A young man with tufty-black hair and a hungry, hollow face sat a little apart from them. Mattie thought he must be the playwright, Jimmy Proffitt. She stared covertly at him, wondering how someone she wouldn’t have glanced at in the Rocket might have written such a play. He felt her eyes on him and looked up. Mattie stared at the room instead. It was in the Angel Theatre, a Victorian building of faded grandeur that had once been a music hall. It was in an unfashionable inner suburb, and it looked much the same as any of the northern theatres that Mattie had trailed through with Francis Willoughby’s company. It existed just as precariously on the brink of financial collapse, but the Angel Company was distinguished by its willingness to stage new and experimental plays, to displease the Lord Chamberlain, and to give directors a free rein. Mattie recognised two of the men facing her by sight and by reputation. She swallowed and rolled the blue-covered script in damp hands.
‘And you’re going to read for the part of Mary?’
‘Yes.’
I want this part.
She had read it so many times since John Douglas had given it to her on Saturday night that she almost knew the lines already. The play was a tragedy, so raw and strident that it hurt Mattie’s throat to whisper some of the words. But when she thought of other new pieces, three-act pieces of fluff that dealt with engagements and tea parties and family misunderstandings, as two-dimensional as the painted flat behind the French windows, Mattie wanted to laugh in the same harsh voice as Jimmy Proffitt’s play.
