by Rosie Thomas
Mattie looked at her watch, preparing to decline the invitation. It was four o’clock. Three and a half hours to curtain up. Too late to go back to her hotel, too early to go to the theatre.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Tea’s a good idea.’
The man held out his hand. ‘Mitchell Howorth. Mitch.’ They shook. His grip was firm, unlingering.
‘That sounds American. Are you from the States?’
‘Nope. Lived there, for a long time. But my mother was a Mitchell, my father was a Howorth. Both from Whitby.’
Well here goes, Mattie thought. ‘I’m Mattie Banner.’
Mitch’s face didn’t flicker. ‘Hello, Mattie.’
He doesn’t know, she thought. She was just a woman, caught in the rain. The notion delighted her.
They reached the teashop after a stiff walk. It was just like the ones Mattie used to sit in with Lenny and Vera, on rainy afternoons identical to this one. There was a plastic OPEN sign hanging on a chain between the glass door and a frilled nylon curtain caught in a double V-shape. Inside there were red gingham tablecloths and plastic cruets, and a bored waitress in a sauce-spotted apron. It smelt, rather too strongly for Mattie, of lunchtime fried egg.
Mattie undid the headscarf that she had knotted under her chin. Mitch looked at her hair, and at her face. The frankness of his sudden admiration was endearing. For the first time, Mattie smiled at him. They were standing too close together in the narrow entrance, they realised. Mitch stepped backwards to help her off with her coat.
They sat at a table in the window, cut off from the rainy street by more net curtaining. They were the only customers.
Briskly summoning the waitress, Mitch ordered tea for two and toasted teacakes. Evidently he had clear ideas about what tea constituted.
The teacakes came, very quickly. They were thickly spread with butter, yellow clots of it swimming in its own melted halo. The smell of fried egg seemed to thicken around Mattie, and her stomach heaved. She stood up at once.
‘Excuse me,’ she muttered.
She made for the door at the back of the tearoom. In the pink-distempered cubicle of the Ladies she was very neatly sick. Afterwards she washed her face and combed her damp hair, staring briefly at herself in the mirror. Then she made her way back to Mitch. He stood up at once. To her relief, she saw that the teacakes had been removed. He held out her chair for her, settled her into it, touched her shoulder briefly.
‘Have some tea,’ he ordered her. ‘Weak, no milk.’
‘Thank you,’ Mattie took it, thinking that what she really needed was whisky, strong, no water. But she sipped the tea anyway, and it warmed her.
‘Are you ill?’ Mitch asked. She liked him for not fussing her.
‘No. Just frightened. But I’ll be all right now.’
He looked at her, over the top of his glasses, a mock-quizzical expression that made her want to laugh. ‘What can someone like you possibly be frightened of?’
To her surprise, Mattie told him.
She told him about the well-made tragedy of manners that was trying out for the West End. She told him about her own starring role in it, and her agent and her publicist and the director and the theatre management, about the critics who would at this moment be irritably en route for Chichester, and the writer who thought she was too tainted with Hollywood for his precious play. She told him about the telegrams and the flowers and the witty little presents that would be waiting for her in the star’s dressing room, and about the painful clutches of her stage fright.
At the end of the recital she sighed. ‘Now you’ll think I’m a self-obsessed hysterical actress.’
Mitch Howorth poured her another cup of tea. ‘Does it matter what I think?’
Mattie blushed, like a schoolgirl, all the way up into her scalp. ‘Not a bit,’ she answered.
‘I’ll tell you, anyway. I don’t know anything about plays, or about movies. But I don’t believe, from looking at you and listening to you, that you would be capable of doing anything badly. That’s what I think. You’re frightened for nothing, Mattie.’
It isn’t nothing, she was going to snap back at him. Do you think it’s nothing, going out in front of all those people?
Then their eyes met.
His mild, level gaze disarmed her. It wasn’t nothing, she knew that, but it wasn’t everything, either.
Mattie laughed. ‘If you say so.’ She noticed that behind Mitch Howorth’s glasses, and the neutrality of his rounded, unremarkable face, there was sympathy and intelligence. She leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘That’s enough about that. Now you tell me who you are,’ she ordered flatly.
‘Nothing remotely as impressive.’
Mitch told her that he had left Whitby after his discharge from the Royal Navy. He had spent time as an engineer in the merchant marine, working routes to the Far East, and to Central and Northern America. ‘A drifter, not a mover,’ he said. But then, in Baltimore, he had met and struck up a friendship with a young American, another engineer.
‘We liked each other. And I liked the States a whole lot better than Britain in 1950. We went into partnership together, in Baltimore.’
Mattie blinked at him. ‘Doing what?’
‘Manufacturing metal casings.’
‘Oh.’ Mattie knew that she wasn’t equipped to pursue a conversation about metal casings.
‘I stayed put,’ Mitch continued. ‘Applied for citizenship. I’ve been a Yankee for seventeen years.’
‘Was your manufacturing successful?’ she asked, mostly because she couldn’t think of anything else to ask about it. Mitch grinned at her. He shrugged his shoulders and the corners of his eyes and mouth turned up. From a solid middle-aged man he was suddenly transformed into an impish schoolboy. It was very attractive.
‘You could say that.’
And that was it, Mattie thought. There had been something about him that she had been unable quite to define, and now she had it. Mr Howorth from Whitby via Baltimore was a successful man. She glanced at his watch. It was a Rolex, a not too ostentatiously gold one. He was wealthy, and he was used to people doing what he told them to. Not just tearoom waitresses. He probably had a chain of metal casings plants or factories or units, or whatever they were, stretching halfway across North America. Mattie decided that she had the complete picture now.
Her new friend was over here on his vacation, touring round little England, chuckling and reminiscing, and looking up fading Mitchells and Howorths in their retirement flats and council semis. His wife, bored to tears, was at this minute back at the Holiday Inn having her hair seen to. Where, Mattie wondered, was the nearest Holiday Inn to Chichester? But Mitch surprised her.
‘I’d had enough. I retired early, and handed over to a bunch of kids with letters after their names. I’ve no management control, although I’m still a stockholder. My partner died a couple of years back.’ He tapped his green anorak, superstitiously, over his own heart. ‘And now I’m free. I came home. I started at Whitby, and I’ve travelled right around the coast to here. I like seaside towns.’
‘So do I,’ Mattie said. She turned her head away and stared through the drooping swathes of net curtains. ‘What about your wife? Does she like them too?’
There was the briefest of pauses. Mattie watched the rain.
‘I’m divorced. Evie was a mover, and she moved on.’
‘Children?’
‘No. Never happened. How about you?’
‘Neither. I’ve already told you all there is to know about me. I’m an actress.’
Why have I? Mattie wondered. To a manufacturer of metal casings, in a teashop? Belatedly, her defences rose again. She became aware of the waitress ostentatiously rattling and locking up in the background. The bill on its saucer had been slapped down in front of Mitch ages ago.
They had been sitting in the teashop window for a long time.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Mattie said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve run off to.’
Mitch stood up, held her chair again. ‘May I come and see the performance?’ His faintly formal manners reminded her of Alexander. Mattie headed off the thought. ‘Oh no, for God’s sake.’
They laughed, and the waitress scowled at them.
Outside, to forestall any further approaches, Mattie held out her hand. She shook Mitch’s like a fellow metal casings trader.
‘Thank you for tea. You stopped me thinking about tonight, and I’m very grateful. Enjoy the rest of your holiday.’
In his mild way, Mitch studied her. ‘It’s raining very hard. Wouldn’t you like …’
‘Oh, no thanks. It’s no distance. Goodbye, and thank you.’
Mattie turned, and almost ran. Cold water oozed into her shoes, and splashed up the backs of her legs. She was glad to reach the theatre, even with what it held in store for her.
Her dresser was waiting for her, with more tea when what she really wanted was whisky. Mattie tried, not always successfully, never to drink before a performance. The flowers and messages were there too, and she tried to concentrate on the good wishes. Julia’s first night greetings were usually the best, but this time there were none. Julia was abroad, of course.
There was a knock at the door and the director stuck his head round it. He was followed a few minutes later by the orotund Shakespearean actor who was playing opposite Mattie. She went through the rituals, obligingly, because she was so used to them. Fear churned inside her and she thought of Mitch, probably driving his rented Ford back to wherever he had sprung from.
Mattie sat down at the mirror and made up her face. Her dresser brought her costume, and then she spent the last minutes sitting in silence, letting the scenes of the play flick through her head.
Then it was time. ‘Miss Banner? Five minutes, please.’ She was being called, just as she herself had called Sheila Firth and the others, years ago. Mattie went down to the wings and waited, the murmur from the audience beyond the curtain like thunder in her ears.
The first night performance was no worse than any of the week’s previews, perhaps even a little better. Everyone claimed to be thrilled with its reception. There were kisses and congratulations afterwards, the formalities no less familiar although she had been away from them for two years. Mattie didn’t go to the party that followed. She excused herself, saying that she was getting a migraine. She took a sleeping pill, and went to bed.
The reviews were good enough.
One critic implied that Mattie’s performance was muted, another wrote snippily that over-exposure to the camera lens and the dictates of commercialism had coarsened her technique.
‘Bollocks,’ Mattie said to that one, and tore the review in half.
‘That’s right, dear,’ her dresser agreed.
The company settled down into the run, and as it did so Mattie’s fear evaporated. She was working, burrowing inside the part, and the process engaged her, as it always had done. The houses were good, and there began to be optimistic talk about the West End transfer.
A week passed. Mattie wondered what had become of Mitch Howorth. After all he might have come to see the show, regardless of the fact that she had begged him not to. She was admitting to herself now that she would have liked to see him again and had to accept, with exasperation, that it was her own fault she wasn’t going to. By this time he must have moved on to Gosport, or Lymington, or to Weymouth where she had picnicked on the beach with Lily and Alexander. He would have forgotten the bilious actress and her first night nerves.
Two weeks after the opening night, a bunch of roses was delivered to her dressing room. They were shaggy, golden-yellow and richly scented, like the ones Julia grew in her garden overlooking the canal. Where could he have found such flowers in October? The card attached read simply, With best wishes, Mitchell Howorth.
Mattie spun round, holding the card aloft. Then she tore down the telegrams and tucked it into the mirror frame in their place. Before she left the room to go onstage, she buried her face in the depths of the golden petals.
When she came back, after her curtain call, the dressing room was full of the heady scent. She knew that he would come, even before she heard the knock.
He came in, bulky and solid in the small space. Even so she wanted to touch his arm, to make sure that he was real.
‘I told you you weren’t capable of doing anything badly,’ he said.
‘Mitch, where did you get roses like these?’ she asked him.
He had been staring at her, trying to marry the image of this Mattie, wrapped in a Japanese kimono with her hair loose over her shoulders, with the stage image that still filled his head.
‘By magic,’ he said.
In that minute, looking back at him and seeing a square-set man in a raincoat, and seeing much more because her skin burned under the Japanese silk, Mattie believed in magic.
‘May I take you out for dinner?’ Mitch asked.
Mattie’s smile was luminous. ‘I’ll be hurt if you don’t.’
He looked surprised, and pleased, as if he had prepared himself for her refusal and hadn’t dared to hope for the opposite.
When she had changed and pinned up her hair and gazed in mystification at her reflection in the mirror before turning her back on it, Mattie followed him.
His car, parked at the theatre doors, was not the rented Ford she had pictured. It was a pale grey Bentley, with aristocratic lines and creased leather seats. Mattie supposed, without reluctance, that she had better stop imagining him at the Holiday Inn. Mitch Howorth was not predictable at all. Or perhaps, more seriously, it was her own reaction to him that was unpredictable.
He drove her, without consultation, to a country restaurant. Mattie liked the way he took it for granted that he would deal with the arrangements for their evening. After her years with Chris, when the motivation behind every choice was minutely examined, choosing anything at all bored Mattie. And she had been alone for long enough to make pleasing herself seem less than a luxury.
The restaurant was not unlike the one John Douglas had taken her to long ago. The waiters were French with equal ostentation, and as many flambé pans flared and sizzled beside the diners. Mattie remembered how hungry she had been, and how impressed by the grandeur. Now her eyes met Mitch’s, and they smiled at each other.
‘The teashop is closed at this time of night,’ he said.
Before their food came Mattie curled her fingers around the drink he had ordered for her, but she didn’t lift it. It was odd to realise that she wanted to talk to Mitch more than she wanted to reassure herself with the woolly detachment that whisky brought.
Watch it, she warned herself. Mattie was wary now. Since Alexander, warier still. But she asked, just the same, ‘It’s two weeks since we had tea together. Why didn’t you come to see me before this? I thought you’d gone. To Swanage, or Weymouth, or somewhere.’
Mitch shook his head. ‘No. I passed the theatre every day. Looked at your pictures outside. I found out how famous you are. I felt like a fool, for not knowing you in the first place, I guess. And I supposed you’d be busy. Why should you have the time to see some middle-aged retired manufacturer of metal casings? Even though you’d let him accost you on the harbour.’
‘Mitch,’ Mattie said softly, ‘don’t talk like an idiot. I know you’re not one. I hoped you’d come. If I’d known where to begin looking for you, I’d have been out searching. I can’t bear to think of you being outside the theatre every day, and me not knowing.’ I’ve been lonely, she thought, without needing to be. It was extraordinary how unlonely she felt now.
He took her hand, then. They both knew that they were missing out the proper stages, galloping past the milestones, and neither of them cared. He took her untouched glass away and folded her hand between both of his own.
‘I’ve been to see your play three times,’ he said. Mattie stared at him. ‘Tonight was the third. I couldn’t stop looking at you. What you did made me cry. You were that man’s wife, and I believed ev
erything you said and did. And yet you were you, too. The girl in the teashop. I thought you were magnificent.’
‘It’s my job,’ Mattie said, lamely, touched and shaken by the sincerity of his praise. ‘Being another person. Pretending. Not pretending, that’s not true. Creating. All falsehoods, I suppose, but as true as I can make them.’
‘Are you pretending now? Creating?’
There were no straight lines in Mitch’s face, Mattie saw. His mouth curled, bracketed by lines, and his eyes were softened by folds of skin that drew them down at the corners. She wanted to reach out and follow the curves with her fingertips. Mattie shook her head. ‘No. What you see is what I am.’
His hands tightened on hers. ‘Talk to me,’ he ordered.
There seemed, suddenly, so much to tell.
Their food and wine came and they ate and drank, not noticing it. The room glowed around them, and then emptied slowly and became quiet. They were the last diners, and the waiters yawned and muttered in the corners. Mattie and Mitch blinked and looked round. They had focused on nothing but each other’s faces, the tiny movements of muscles and the flickers of feeling, and it was disconcerting to remember that they were part of a bigger world.
Mitch laughed. ‘We’ve overstayed our welcome again.’ He paid the bill, and they went out together into the night. It smelt of the sea meeting the land, of salt and rain together.
They leaned back in the Bentley’s leather arms, not looking at each other. Mitch’s fingers rested on the ignition keys. ‘Shall I take you home?’ he asked. ‘You’ll have to direct me to your hotel.’
Mattie was thinking about pretending and creating again, and about falsehoods. Don’t pretend now, she warned herself. She wanted Mitch to decide this, too, but she also wanted to go half of the way to meet him.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘It isn’t home. It’s a hotel room. It’s square and empty and there’s a grey television eye in the corner.’
‘Then come with me,’ Mitch Howorth said.
The Bentley slid forward. Mattie let her head fall back against the leather cushion. They drove for a little way, Mattie didn’t try to distinguish where. She watched the steady glow of the lights on the walnut fascia, and the shadows making hollows in Mitch’s face. She felt happy and dreamy in the car’s opulent cocoon. She could have driven on, all night, anywhere he chose to take her. But they turned and drove up a steep hill, swung round and came to a standstill. As she stepped out of the car Mattie had a brief impression of gardens on a slope, and a tall house with a lighted porch. Mitch took her hand and led her.
