by Jane Gardam
‘Park, dear, and come back for me,’ said Nell and vanished inside the pub where she sat down at an iron table in the corner. It was awash with beer. Her feet did not touch the floor. She swung them.
A man came across to her, very fat. The rolls of fat showed through his tee-shirt like the rolls of a brisket of beef. He wiped the table. He had an old-young baby-face. Pouting, he watched the damp cloth moving. Outside, the traffic made the whole of the Grand Duke vibrate. He had to shout above it and above the clashing of the music.
‘It’s nearly closing time.’
‘I don’t really want—’ said Nell. ‘My friend died here.’
‘Not Miss Dixie?’ The fat man sat down. ‘Oh, my dear! She seemed so comfortable. Such a surprise. It had been her own choice to come you know. You can’t blame Gary. Something to do with Wellington. She scarcely spoke. Oh, she was a real old stager. A lady. We took all her meals up.’
‘Well, she wasn’t really my friend, it was her sister,’ said Nell.
‘She had a very old-fashioned voice,’ said the fat man. ‘A pleasure to hear her.’
‘It was the Army,’ said Nell.
A cheer went up. Somebody had won a fortune. A robot pulsated, spoke from a deep throat. Two young men began to fight on the floor and others to shout and laugh. ‘That’s the Army, too,’ said the fat man. ‘The Marines from down the road. When she was here she was on about some Blues and Greys. There’s always been soldiers here. But she kept her distance. She’d only known officers. It wasn’t what she’d expected.’
‘I could live here,’ said Nell. ‘I could just live here nicely. Could I just get a look at May’s room?’
Outside they went and up the steep stairs and inside. The room seemed all to be covered in delicate grey mole-skin. When you touched it, it moved, for it was dust. ‘We found her just over there,’ said the man. ‘All huddled. Right away from the view. One of the few things she said was that at The Grange you had “the Duke’s view”—whatever that meant.’ He pointed a toe about on the dusty Turkey carpet. On the carpet, some of them stacked up, were a great many little red and gold chairs and a high knobbly bed. There were dried grasses in jars and great windows at each end of the room. The sea boomed. Nell said, ‘I could enjoy it here.’
‘It’s the traffic’s the problem,’ said the fat man. ‘The noise. There’s the terrible noise of the roundabout. You can’t deny it. Accidents all the time. There’s one now. Can you hear it?’
She could and it turned out to have been poor angry Hilda who had gone slap into a tanker and was no more. Nell moved to the pub and became a fixture there in her corner seat, living on for some years. She drank sweet sherry all day long and grew fatter than the landlord, rejoicing in the clamour within and without. The Yorkshire accent was gentle and it flew free. She swung her foot in time to the terrible music.
Sometimes she talked to the soldiers about other soldiers and old wars and of her husband who had never once mentioned the Somme. They asked her what the Somme was, and she was unsure.
‘Who is she?’ new recruits would ask. ‘Her in the corner?’
‘Don’t know. She was one of The Dixie Girls or something.’
‘What’s the Dixie Girls?’
‘Don’t know. Some old song and dance act. Nobody’s ever heard of them.’
GROUNDLINGS
Is she there?’
‘Yes, she’s there.’
First thing you ever do is look to see if she’s there. Bundle of clothes in the dark, pressed up close beside the ticket-office. She’s always the same, lying prone on a length of black macintosh. Nothing much around her, not even a thermos. Never like the rest of us with camp-stool, rugs and books. I’ve never seen her with a book, not in nearly forty years.
I’ve known old Aggie Batt in theatre queues all of thirty-five years, anyway. She looks no different from the 1945 season at The New. Oh my—Olivier, Gielgud, Guinness! Richardson’s Cyrano! The Old Vic—but it was in St Martin’s Lane then. All London was full of theatres that were still part of war-time, turned into offices, or shells with the daylight shining through, or rubble with the daisies growing.
There was good standing-room at St Martin’s Lane. For a shilling you could stand all down the side aisles, leaning your shoulder against the wall. They didn’t let you sit down, even for Anthony and Cleopatra or Hamlet in its entirety. ‘Eternity’ the actors used to call it, but I don’t think we ever did. If you slid down on your haunches, usherettes came along and hissed at you to stand up because of fire regulations. Fire in the loins. And they didn’t let you take your shoes off because of being alongside all the people in the stalls who had paid good money. I don’t know why the stalls didn’t complain anyway, all the students in huge hairy duffles standing down the side-aisles three feet away from them; but they didn’t. It was just after the War when there was still good-temper about. Students were ever so quiet then. Shy. You wouldn’t believe. Ever so thin and grey-looking. Well, it was all the poor food we’d had wasn’t it? Even bread on coupons. But, oh it was a wonderful year that, ’45- ’46, first term at college for me, all the theatres getting going, all the actors coming back, new plays starting and the great big expensive yelling American musicals. After all the bombed indoor years.
I don’t think I was ever so hungry as I was then—much worse than in the war. If you went to an evening performance you missed college-dinner, as well as the last bus, and never a penny over for a sandwich at a Lyons corner house. Two-mile walk back, the last bit through Regent’s Park at midnight, but nobody worried. No muggers. We went dreaming home, stage-struck, Shakespeare-struck, Annie-get-your-Gun-struck. Slaughtering over. We’d won. First things first now. You should have seen Olivier’s Mr. Puff.
Not that she—Aggie Batt, we christened her—ever was to be seen queuing for the American musicals or even for the Sheridan. It was Shakespeare for Aggie Batt, Shakespeare then and Shakespeare now. Shakespeare all the way. There was never a Shakespeare night she wasn’t there.
That’s to say she was there every night that I and my friends were there, and between us all we didn’t miss much. And Aggie B. was always at the head of the queue as she was until this very year.
We laughed at her. She wore a balaclava helmet and men’s socks and grey gloves that looked made out of wire, and shiny brown trousers with flies, and a queer jacket, double-breasted. Her face was sharp and disagreeable with a tight little mouth. She had small hard eyes. She looked a bit mad and she hasn’t changed. She has grown no madder. She is just the same. A little mad. A bit bonkers.
I suppose her face is older now. It must be. It must have more lines on it. It must be more leathery. But I can’t say that I can tell. I mean, you don’t if it’s someone you’re used to seeing year in, year out, like family. My own face strikes me as being no different really, until I see the photographs. I went to an old-students’ reunion once and it was terrible. Embarrassing. Most of us, if we recognised one another, just yattered on with fixed smiles and slunk off home. But that’s by the way.
Aggie Batt is ageless. Ageless as the years roll on and the theatre-queues change and become stream-lined and organised and tickets a matter for scientific pre-plotting. In her way she is a famous figure, a well-known part of the London theatre scene. I mean of course well-known to the groundlings, the queuers, not to the people who only go to the theatre if they can get a good seat. She is there repeatedly, at every production. After a first-night if you don’t see her in the queue for the second night you know there must be something very wrong. A performance at the National or the Old Vic or the Barbican will have to be abysmal if she’s not present then, and many times more. She is a comfort, Aggie Batt, disdaining time. She is a symbol. She is homage. When we see her we grin. We say, ‘There’s Aggie’ but we are really saying, ‘There’s one of us, the best of us.’ Through Aggie Batt we know our tribe.
I’ve often tried to speak to Ag
gie Batt but it’s not easy. For all the notice she’s taken of me all these years I might be invisible. It’s probably because I’m not serious enough. At the beginning, when I was eighteen, I was just one of a gaggle of girls—a first-year student. I’m not that exclusive about Shakespeare you see, and never was. I like to go to everything. As far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to keep going, the theatre. Any theatre. I spend a lot of money but I don’t have time as my husband says to spend money on much else, and I’ve got money now, having married it. I’m a very comfortable theatre-goer. I have a fur-lined mac from Harrods and a huge great tartan coat from Aquascutum. I still get my tickets mostly through the theatre-queue though, because (a) you get good seats (b) you get good company and (c) it’s home.
More home than home. I don’t get the same chance to talk at home. I very much like nattering on. It’s a pity that these days the queue has changed a bit. There are a lot of people now not very talkative or who want to sleep. People are tireder nowadays, especially men. Well, I’m nearly sixty now. They don’t notice me.
Aggie Batt doesn’t sleep much. She lies there on her black macintosh sheet with her eyes open. Whatever I talk about she scarcely blinks.
The first hour of queuing, if it’s a popular production—say a Hopkins Lear or a new Hamlet—Piggot-Smith or Roger Rees—the queue will start to collect while it’s still dark. If it’s winter it will be still the deep dark. For the first hour’s queueing she’ll be lying back to the road, her face up against the plate-glass (if it’s the National) like an Arab in a Gulf airport in a sandstorm. In winter all the lights are out along the river—only the occasional window shining high up in the Shell building and the odd street-lamp on the bridge. As the dawn comes up somebody, somewhere switches on long necklaces of light-bulbs, pink and gold, all along the riverside terraces. They come on as it gets light. An eccentric idea. You’ll notice then, suddenly—Aggie Batt moves very quietly—that she’s sitting with her knees drawn up in front of her, eating biscuits out of a bag and staring straight ahead. She’ll get up then and pace about a bit, flexing her fingers in the wire gloves, her nose sticking out sharp from the balaclava if it’s that sort of day. In summer it’s a scarf. She’ll go off somewhere—I suppose to the Ladies at Waterloo Station—and come back and stand in profile to the river. It’s a tense, fierce profile. Richard III. The Scottish King. Nothing very friendly about it. She’ll stand maybe half an hour like this. Then she’ll turn toward the bridge and watch The Great Procession.
I’ve rather stopped watching the Procession now, after so many years. It is the procession of the people of South London that takes place Monday to Friday with as great punctuality as the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. It is the procession that floods across Waterloo Bridge from the Station, across the river to work. It is a very fine sight. It is an army of silently tramping, non-conversing, face-forward, jerking, walking, trotting, running ants, heads held tense, hands hard-gripping on cases, umbrellas, newspapers, the coming day. It continues, a steady flow, for the best part of two hours, dwindling off at just after ten o’clock. It is the march of the disciplined, the bread-winners, the money-grubbers, the money-needers, often the dead. Over the Bridge they tramp, south to north, into the stomach of London. They don’t look over their shoulder and down or they would see us, their opposites, as in a mediaeval diptych of heaven and hell—or hell and heaven: the motley bundles of the theatre-queuers looking upwards and over at them as we blink with sleep. Us, the pleasure-lovers, the pleasure-seekers, the unrepentant from across the wide world, the creatures of high holiday. Gazing and munching and blinking we sit—big loose Australians, intellectual Indians, serious Americans, antiseptic Japanese and all the mongrel English, including me in fur or plaid, the fastidious Yorkshire lad with the walk-way (another regular) and the lady with the diamond earrings and the New York accent and the Harrods deck-chair, reading a famous critic on The Scottish Play. Once there was even the critic himself. He drove right up beside us in a Rolls-Royce. He got out and locked it—you can park right down on the river-side if it’s before eight o’clock in the morning—and joined the queue. He didn’t speak (like Aggie Batt) even when I offered him a sandwich. He just smiled politely. He was deep in something to do with a First Folio.
I remember that I wanted to tell someone that there was someone famous and he was reading about First Folios and I went back to my place again—I’d been stretching my legs—near the top of the queue. Then I went actually to the very top of the queue and I said to Aggie Batt, ‘Look who’s there. He’s reading about First Folios,’ and—it’s one of the very few times in all these years I’ve heard her speak—she said, ‘Very fragmented.’
What can you say to that? Did she mean that the FF (it was Ant. and Cle.) was very fragmented? Did she mean that this critic was very fragmented? Or what I said was not cogent? That’s what the remark used to be at the end of many of my Shakespeare essays—‘Not cogent.’ Maybe she did think that the play was very fragmented—I know I do. I’ve often thought you could cut a lot of those little bitty scenes at the end. Everyone—actors, audience—are too tired for them by then. Everybody knows, even if they haven’t read the play they know, that everyone’s having to reserve strength for the death scenes, especially Anthony. Cleopatra—well, after the asp it’s all quite quiet for her. She just has to sit dead and be carried out. The asp must be rather a relief. I’d forgotten all the notes I had on it once but I think they were on this Aggie Batt line of argument, and I was grateful to her, for when I’d bought my ticket at ten o’clock—I always stand to one side while I check my seat-number and so on, even if the rest of the queue behind me has to step over my blankets—the great man looked at me, and I was able to say, ‘I see you are reading from the First Folio, Sir. It’s very fragmented isn’t it?’ He seemed to be quite surprised.
You’ll probably have seen Aggie Batt in the audience many a time. She doesn’t look at all as she does in the queue in the morning. Oh dear me no. She wears a black dress up to the neck, long in the arms, and her hair that is invisible under the balaclava turns out to be long and fine. From the morning appearance you’d expect what used to be called The Eton Crop—very mannish and coarse, like metal, the kind that ought to clatter when you run your hand through it. Julius Caesar hair. Nothing of the sort. It is light and downy and thin so that you can almost see the scalp through and it’s not so much white as the colour of light, though I’m not putting this very well.
Oh and dear me, she is thin. Through the black dress you can see her old shoulder-blades sticking out at the back and her collar-bones at the front. She has a long shawl affair that floats about—ancient—and when she lets it go loose you can see her hip bones and her stomach a hollow below them. She could be Pavlova in extremis except for oh dear, her legs! Her legs are old bits of twig. She wears very old, cracked, shoes with broad black ribbons tied in bows, stockings with ladders, and often a pair of socks.
She’s nearly always in the same seat—G25. You’ve seen her. Every time you’ve been to a London Shakespeare. You’ve sat next to her perhaps. It’s an old joke in the queue, G25: someone saying that they’ll get to the queue twenty-four hours early so they can get G25 to see what she’d do without it: see if she’d drop dead. I didn’t think anything of him for saying it.
She never buys a programme, that’s another thing. She doesn’t seem to need one. There’s a number of people don’t, of course. I remember when I was young I didn’t. It was a snob thing. I used to take the text instead, and a torch, and follow with my finger. It was very helpful for exams, though if there was a row of us doing it people round about got tetchy. We were like glow-worms. In those days I didn’t need a programme anyway because I knew who everyone was and which was playing what. I know most of them now, but not like Aggie Batt, who I suppose breathes them all in by osmosis. As I say, she never has a book with her, she’s not one for a text. It’s the performance for her. It’s him. Himsel
f. William the Man she comes for. The play she wants. The living thing in action. That’s what the walk-way boy says. He seldom speaks either, but he sits near her often and seems to have picked things up from her.
He says she lives in North London behind Kings Cross and walks everywhere. She even walks there and back to the Barbican—five miles each way. She walks there and back in the morning for the ticket and there and back in the evening for the performance. Isn’t she afraid of walking about the empty Kings Cross streets so late at night? No. She carries in her purse the exact money for her ticket plus thirty-five p. for a cup of tea; and her pension book.
But she can’t be utterly poor. Walk-way boy says she’s travelled. Seen Hamlet in Denmark. Been to Shakespeare Festivals in Berlin. I asked her what she thought of Berlin and it was one of her answering days and she said, ‘Professors of Shakespeare look like steel rats.’ One day I bought her a pie. She seemed pleased. It was just a pie from the stall under the station arches but she ate it with hunger and nodded at me and even answered the question I asked her while I was gathering up her rubbish. This I have to keep doing for she surrounds herself with quite a lot of it. I asked her who was her favourite character in Shakespeare and she said Enobarbus. I asked her which was her favourite play and she said ‘The Winter’s Tale, but it’s getting late for it now.’
I’ve seen her in a Winter’s Tale queue several times so I didn’t know what she meant. I thought that maybe her memory was slipping and she was forgetting what she had seen. Not that that has ever seemed to me such a great deprivation. If you lose your memory you can experience things again as if they were new, like when you were young.
Well no. Never really like that.
Next Winter’s Tale I told myself I’d take her a bunch of flowers. I don’t suppose anyone ever gave Aggie Batt flowers. Years and years ago there was a young man used to be in the queue. Oh, he was about nineteen I’d think and she must then have been nearly forty. They used to go off together after an hour or two’s queueing, leaving the black mac. They used to sit side by side on the black mac. He I remember used to leave a pair of yellow leather gloves on it to keep their places. He had that ripply, goldielocks hair you see sometimes on young men and a very soft mouth and gently moving hips. You didn’t comment in those days but you sniggered. Somehow though I never sniggered.
