Distant Music

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘And don’t you forget to write too, Master Oliver.’ Clifton cleared his throat and nodded curtly, after which he stood watching the train pulling out. Always such an excitement, a train pulling out of a station: all the muck and the cinders flying about, all the passengers pretending that they couldn’t care less whom they were leaving behind, but everyone, in reality, wondering if this might, by some awful chance, be the last sight of their loved one.

  Clifton turned away, determined not to become sentimental. Master Oliver was going to have a few rude shocks when he reached the famous acting academy, and of course he would eventually forget to write to Clifton. After the first few weeks of loneliness, the letters would inevitably dwindle, until they stopped altogether. Clifton knew that, and it did not bother him, not for a second.

  What did bother him – and this was the big ‘but’ in Clifton’s mind – was that much as he hoped he had prepared Master Oliver for the theatre and all its pitfalls, he was afraid there would be a great many more shocks for which he had not prepared him. It was not just the implicit dangers from both sexes in a raffish profession, as far as a handsome young man such as Master Oliver was concerned; it was the humiliations. He could never be prepared for those; it just was not possible. The missed opportunities would be bad enough, but the endless battering of his young ego would be worse. It was the conniving, the plotting, the subterfuge; these would be the difficulties.

  But still, if he was strong enough, he would survive, and if he was not, well, he could always come back to Yorkshire. Although, and here Clifton as he drove slowly back to the old house somehow knew that he had hit upon the truth as far as Master Oliver was concerned, he would never, ever do that.

  The Master Oliver that Clifton knew would choose the theatre over everywhere, but most especially over life at the Hall. The sickly young boy escaping from his illness into other people, and now the tall handsome young man, was set to hide behind other characters for the rest of his life, if only to escape from the ruthless mockery of older brothers.

  Clifton parked the pre-war Riley in one of the old, now hen-clustered stables and started to walk towards the house. He would miss Master Oliver, and never more than during the long, long Yorkshire winter that lay ahead. It was a fact, as much a fact as that he would not miss the older brothers if he never, ever saw them again. No, with Master Oliver gone there was now no one with whom to share his Plays and Players, no one with whom to talk over their collection of plays in the old French’s acting editions, no one with whom to declaim the big speeches, no one, most of all, with whom to feel different, one of a separate tribe, recognisable only to each other in their solitary reality, making the rest of the household feel vaguely uneasy in their presence.

  ‘Clifton!’

  ‘Yes, Master Richard?’

  In the hall, with its stags’ heads over the fireplace and its long oak settles placed for feasts that were never held, Clifton stared up the staircase to the eldest of the Plunkett boys. Here before him was one of the other kind of human being, one of the kind for whom the lowering or raising of the curtain meant no more than the opening of their own bedroom curtains in the morning.

  ‘Where the hell are my evening shoes, Clifton?’

  ‘Your evening shoes, Master Richard?’

  ‘Yes, Clifton, my evening shoes. Brand new, you know. And a pair of my walking shoes, both gone.’

  ‘I expect the new boots’ and gardener’s boy put them in the wrong room. He’s only just started, Master Richard. I will see to it.’

  ‘Yes, do.’

  Clifton walked along to Master Newell’s room, and having duly searched his cupboard he bumped into him on the way out.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Cliffie. Seen my new black shoes? Spanking new they are! But not in my cupboard where I left them.’

  ‘No, Master Newell, I am afraid I haven’t. I expect the boy put them in the wrong cupboard. I will see to it in a moment.’

  ‘Yes, do, Cliffie. I want to wear them, d’you see – in about ten minutes, once I’ve changed.’

  ‘I will do what I can, Master Newell.’

  Adopting his most sphinx-like public smile Clifton disappeared up to his rooms on the third floor, and having taken off his outdoor coat and hung it in his cupboard he proceeded to put on his butler’s uniform once again. Having put off the moment, just fractionally, he then went to his own shoe cupboard and slowly opened the door. He would not have been human had he not experienced a feeling of relief that all his own shoes were still neatly present and correct.

  ‘Not your size, and not to your taste, eh, Master Ollie?’ he asked his favourite photograph of Oliver, bequeathed to Clifton long ago by a departing nanny. The butler shook his head and laughed at the handsome young boy in the photograph. ‘You always did have the last word, didn’t you, you rascal, and doubtless – knowing you – you always will!’

  Dear Cliffie,

  Well, here I am in London. The landlady is a dear, and I am having a fine time getting used to her cocoa (worse than old Nanny’s actually). The train journey was long and boring, really, so I learned Prospero (ha, ha)! Want to hear my interpretation? Well, I think he was as naughty as Lear in his way, but of course much, much more charming. I would say that he would have to be played with more than a touch of naughty magic. I feel bursting with new-boyness and full of the joys of autumn, and only one day left until enrolment day. Can’t wait, in a way, and in another way I am dreading it. All that acting at the start, I mean, about not being me, and etc. – you know, what you keep on about. Not being me! Will I bring it off? I draw the line at too much modesty; it has never suited me, as you know. Do hope the Brothers Grimm found their best shoes missing. What a boon that nature gave us the same size feet – but different sized hats. If my head was quite as small as theirs both are I would not be able to learn lines!!!

  A jolly manly cheerio for now, Cliffie, and give Mrs Piglet a pat and don’t let Cook take her for cutlets, will you?

  OLIVER LOWELL

  (I say, lookes quite good, doesn’t it, Cliffie?)

  Clifton stared at Master Oliver’s new name, neatly underlined. It did look quite good, as he said, although not as good as the family name, in Clifton’s view.

  Still, it was better, nowadays, not to have a name that sounded too snobby. It was all changing out there; even people as far away as Yorkshire knew that, and could feel it. All the free health services and the free schooling, and the free school milk that had happened after the war was over, it was all going to change everything for the future. Most of all it was going to change everything for the generation that had grown up during the war, battling their way through the rationing and the bombs, and all that. They were exploding on to the scene, wanting to change things, in the same way that young people always did want to change things, but more so. The beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom was as nothing compared with the jungle beat of the new generation of actors and writers, marching towards London from the provinces, determined to have their time, now.

  Where all this would put OLIVER LOWELL, Clifton did not know. His saving would not be his background, that would already be a handicap, as they both knew. His saving would be his intelligence, his quick thinking. It could, if he survived the first onslaught, put him ahead of the game, but the first test was the acting academy.

  Could Oliver Lowell really keep Oliver Plunkett under cover, as he had promised Clifton?

  Oliver had been so worried about not being late the first day that he had actually walked to the Academy and back again, timing the walk, determined to arrive not just on the dot, but five minutes beforehand.

  As he walked along now he was glad that he had taken this particular precaution, but strangely it did nothing for his nerves, as well it might not, for, all through the previous days as he crouched in his digs, he had worried about one thing and one thing alone: how did he dress as Oliver Lowell?

  It was all very well for Clifton to command him to keep his background under wraps, bu
t how, he wondered, should he dress? He could not wear winkle-pickers and arrive on a motorbike, as some students, he thought enviously, would be doing. He would be arriving on shanks’ pony and trying not to look posh, which in his father’s old British warm, and a pair of cord trousers – albeit teamed with a navy blue polo neck sweater – was just laughable, but not in the right way.

  The realisation of all this had led him to dash to the shops and buy himself a navy blue duffel coat, and then to spend the rest of the time trying to age it so that it did not look too new.

  This procedure involved alternating between stamping on it in his brother’s new shoes and rolling it up into a little ball, and, for some peculiar reason best known to himself, slinging it into the corner of his room. At last, satisfied that it no longer looked pristine and quite evidently fresh from Selfridges, he walked about Oxford Street in it, attempting to try out different characters.

  Eventually he settled for ‘lower middle class and shy from somewhere near York’ which was a little like a secret wartime address.

  So it was in this character, which he felt he had fairly moulded to himself in a pretty secure fashion, that he rolled up with all the other students on his first day at what his father and Clifton insisted on calling arr aye em aye dee – in the precise same way that they pronounced AA or RAC.

  So there he was, a totally new character, in his own mind anyway, and wearing his carefully roughed up duffel coat, when a girl’s voice behind him muttered, ‘What’s a snob like you need to come to a place like this for?’

  He turned round in horror, knowing at once to whom the voice belonged. His best friend in the whole world, Coco.

  ‘I am sorry, I don’t think we have met?’ Despite the shock of seeing Coco of all people, Oliver stuck determinedly to his new character, using Clifton’s slight Yorkshire accent: lightly smoked, but not heavily flavoured.

  For perhaps a split second Coco’s large brown eyes registered what Oliver was saying, taking in his soft Yorkshire accent, his nearly new duffel coat (although she definitely felt that no one could or would be deceived by it until it was at least a little more faded), before she said, laconically, ‘I say, I am sorry. I thought you were someone else.’

  ‘Oliver Lowell.’ Oliver extended his hand to her, and smiled.

  Coco took the hand and she too smiled. ‘Coco Hampton, as in Court. I say, would you care to walk down this corridor a little?’ She indicated the way. ‘I mistook you for a friend of mine, from somewhere quite other, and perhaps it might be just as well to straighten everything out. I mean, the mistaken identity and so on, and so on, could lead to confusion.’

  They made sure they were both standing well down the corridor, away from the rest, before they resumed their dialogue.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ they both hissed at each other at once.

  ‘I got a scholarship—’ Oliver boasted quickly, because years of growing up with Coco had taught him to get in first.

  ‘Everyone here gets a scholarship, that’s nothing to go on about,’ Coco told him dismissively. ‘Just about everyone you’ve ever heard about has won some sort of prize from here. The Bourneton Cocoa Best New Actor’s Feet prize, the Alderborough Ham Prize for the Crossing of Verbal Tees and Hissing of Esses, the—’

  ‘I don’t think we should be talking like this, not on our first day anyway,’ Oliver said reprovingly, interrupting Coco and already shocked, if unsurprised, by her irreverence. For him, with his ardent attitude towards acting and the theatre, it was as if she had remained seated during the National Anthem. ‘We have to at least give the place a try.’

  ‘Yes, a try, but wise up, Ollie. People like you and me …’ Coco looked around them with a cynical expression on her face and lit a cigarette. ‘We, people like us, don’t have a chance, not now, not with the way theatre is going. We come from the wrong side of the tracks, darling. Quite the wrong side, so you’re right to put on the Yorkie accent, but you’ll have to age the old duffel coat just a wee bit more, or someone will smoke you out, for sure.’

  Coco shook out her thick, shining dark hair, and her large amber earrings rattled as she did so. She had always been incredibly assured and arrogant, and always, like Oliver, theatre mad – but never ever prepared to call anything but a spade a spade, for which, until now, Oliver had always adored her.

  Their families had been friends when they were small – at least, they had both gathered, quite separately, that they had been friends, until Oliver’s mother had bolted, when the parents’ friendship had necessarily been put on ice. Somehow, because the guardians with whom Coco lived, possessed a large, comfortable flat in London, and Oliver was nothing if not totally ruthless, Oliver had, with Clifton’s active encouragement, kept the childhood friendship going.

  As far as Oliver was concerned, this was solely so that he could spend some of his Christmas and Easter holidays with Coco in the only way that made either of them happy. In their letters to each other from their dark grey, spartan boarding schools, they called it ‘seeing the plays’.

  It was unbridled bliss, total happiness to both of them, to scramble up to the Upper Circle early early on, long before the rest of the fashionable audience arrived, and stare down at the Dress Circle, never letting their eyes leave the row upon row of seats below.

  Somewhere below, they passionately hoped, there was going to be an empty seat, perhaps even two empty seats – and sometimes, alas for the management, there were many, many more – and long before the curtain rose young Oliver and Coco determined that those seats were going to be theirs from the first interval onwards.

  So as the lights were lowered, and just before the curtain rose, both of them hung out of their seats and duly marked out the vacancies below for their own future use, once the lights in the auditorium went up on the first interval.

  Coco, being Coco, small, slender and determined to be outrageous, had always made sure to bring with her a pair of her guardian’s mother-of-pearl opera glasses. As she said, ‘It makes bagging the seats below ever so much easier.’

  Once of course, and inevitably, they had most unfortunately bagged the seats of the sort of people who saw no harm in arriving at an interval. Being a born coward Oliver had immediately fled, embarrassed to saturation by having been found out, but not so Coco. She had – at the expense admittedly of a very dull drawing room comedy – set about arguing vociferously with the late, and shamefully drunk, arrivals, finally sending them back to the box office with a flea in their ear, not just for not checking their tickets, but for having arrived disgracefully late for the performance, which, Coco had maintained grandly, was an insult to both the author and the actors.

  After which, with a curt, and despising nod to Oliver to reseat himself, Coco had gone back to disenjoying the dull little play, but revelling in their nice comfortable seats, the thick carpet below their feet, and the fact that, unlike the so-called ‘gods’, the Dress Circle smelt only of Chanel No. 5, and not of Jeyes disinfectant.

  ‘Don’t you think you went too far?’ Oliver had asked Coco afterwards, shocked, but totally admiring of her brilliant dismissal of the quite legitimate holders of the seats.

  ‘People like that should be shot!’ was what Oliver suddenly remembered Coco saying, in just the same way as she was saying exactly that now, as they both watched a handsome young man arriving in a brand new sports car. ‘No one going into the theatre should start off rich. What a twit, arriving in that way. Everyone will hate him. We all should start off poor and equal. What does he need to earn his living for? He obviously has one already!’ Coco continued in withering tones.

  ‘By the way, Coco, I didn’t know that you were going to put yourself up for all this. I mean, I thought you wanted to be a designer. I thought that was what you wanted to be – a designer, not an actress.’

  Oliver stared down at Coco, who jangled her amber bead bracelets on her slender wrists for a second, in the manner of a percussionist who has quite suddenly and unexpectedly been
asked to play the bells.

  ‘I still am going to be a designer, Ollie,’ she told him in her most sophisticated and tired voice, which implied that despite their having not seen each other for at least three months, he really should have known. ‘I still am going to be a designer, but I so hated art school, I just could not stay. All those humourless teachers with their grandiose notions. Really, you would honestly think that not even the Impressionists had happened! Oh dear me, Miss Hampton, not finished your drawing already? A bit scrambled, isn’t it? Just as if facility is a dirty word. Do you know, Ollie, it is a little-known fact that Michelangelo did the Sistine Chapel not in months and years but in days and weeks, but they have to tell everyone that he spent practically his whole life on his back, because speed and facility are frowned on in art? So pathetic! As if labouring over something ever made it better!’

  Coco took out a large silver compact from her strange-looking handbag and stared at her mouth in its mirror, but instead of redrawing her mouth with a lipstick she took out a small, red handkerchief and wiped the lipstick off.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’

  Oliver stared at her, as always fascinated, mesmerised, and adoring. Coco was in so many ways like an artistic elder sister to him, always a little ahead of the game, and always a little despising. And yet they had everything in common, their reactions to everything having always been identical, almost as if they shared one voice.

  ‘Doing this for?’ Coco demanded, her tone rising slightly. ‘I am doing this so that I can appear younger, Ollie, that is why. I don’t want to be given all the old ladies’ parts, which, with my looks, I know I will be, and lipstick in case you have never noticed, which knowing you, you probably haven’t – lipstick and jewellery ages one intolerably, dahling.’

  She peeled off her earrings and her matching bracelet and put them with the compact in the strange-looking hold-all.

  ‘Why did you wear them here, then?’