Distant Music

by Charlotte Bingham

  And once off the rehearsal room floor, Oliver noted, Elsie would wander off to the tea urn, pick up a magazine and start reading as unconcernedly as any window shopper in the street outside.

  ‘You’re such a lucky little devil, being able to memorise like that.’

  ‘Yup, I know.’

  ‘Have you always been like that?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Then you are, you are a lucky little devil, Popeye,’ Oliver said again, speaking from the bottom of his heart, because he himself had hell learning a part, however small. He always seemed to need to understand the person he was playing first, long before he could possibly learn his lines.

  ‘Don’t worry. Once the play is over, I can’t remember a word.’

  ‘Oh, get on.’

  ‘No, it’s true. A fortnight after we finish this, I won’t be able to remember a single speech.’

  ‘What? Not one?’

  ‘Nope.’ Elsie kissed the top of Oliver’s nose. ‘Make you feel any better?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it does, it makes me feel much better. What about when you go back, when you have to play something again?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I see what you mean. Oh, that’s all right. I just pick up the play, read it, and it seems to come back straight away. It’s nothing special. It’s just how it is, or rather how I am.’

  Oliver stared at Elsie in some awe. She was something else.

  On stage she was Mrs Hitler, Miss Hard Heart, Blad the Impaleress, the lot, and he was always telling her so. On stage she did not give an inch, not even a quarter of an inch. She knew what she had to do, and she got on and did it, leaving Oliver for dead, and the audience in raptures.

  Offstage was quite different. Offstage she was his precious angel, Mrs Temptress, Popeye, Loopy Lu, and whatever else sprang into his mind.

  Acting against Elsie had made Oliver realise that if he was to survive in the theatre he had to avoid confrontation. There was a very good reason for this; he would always lose. Elsie herself seemed quite unconcerned by her own hardness. It was her childhood, she kept explaining to Oliver whenever he remarked on it. She had been born and brought up steeped in the hard-hearted ways of the theatre. She had acquired not just a veneer or a varnish but an impenetrable coating, more like something that would be put on a warship rather than a piece of furniture.

  So Oliver gave way. He stepped back and let her take the audience with her from the first moment she put her slim, elegant foot on stage, and then he waited, and sure enough after a while he found that he could edge his way in too. But that was only after he had given his all, while all the time he had the feeling that Elsie was giving very little, that she was, deep down, almost bored by acting, so easy did she find it. The truth was that Elsie could do no wrong with audiences. She was a star. Not in the making, either, but already made. It was an established fact.

  When, Oliver wondered, would he acquire what she had?

  Night after night, despite the fact that he was wildly in love with her, he struggled against the knowledge that he lacked what they both knew she already had. Star quality.

  For some reason that Oliver could not quite fathom, since the play had opened and daily rehearsals had stopped, shopping had become one of their lunchtime rituals. Not ordinary shopping either, but madly serious shopping for some item that assumed a tremendous importance as soon as they realised they wanted it.

  After their usual routine – breakfast, making love, bathing – they would scramble into their clothes and bolt off down Tadcaster’s main street, intent on buying the most extraordinarily unnecessary things, in which they took an equally extraordinary and quite unnecessary interest. Nail clippers, or black handkerchiefs, ribbons for a dress or a hat, the perfect pair of dark socks for Oliver, a small book of poetry – whatever took their fancy after the first spate of their morning rituals. All these commissions could take hours and hours of strangely satisfying time.

  Sometimes, as he walked after Elsie into yet another shop, Oliver would find himself wondering why this pastime had become such an obsession, eventually coming to the conclusion that, like so much that an actor found to do between performances, it was a way of not being part of real life. Actors could not take control of their own lives in any major way, because in a very few hours they would have to slip into character and take control of the lives of those other people, the characters they were playing, and there simply was not room for both. So for the few hours that they were actually themselves, there was no alternative except to tread water, become entirely frivolous, in their case, spending hour after hour in small shops and boutiques searching for items such as the perfect nose scissors, or a comb that could be guaranteed not to scratch.

  Unlike Oliver, Elsie did not seem to question why they spent their free time as they did. She had grown up in theatrical circles, and real life, as other people lived it, had not been something that she had either actively pursued or even been vaguely encouraged to take much interest in.

  For Oliver the routine of life in the theatre, so new as it was to him, gave him a glorious feeling of at last having joined bohemia, while for Elsie, on the other hand, it was just life. She had never really known what it was like to get up and go to bed at normal times, to have a regular job that paid you regular wages.

  ‘Except for Fullers.’ She always said that. ‘Don’t forget I had a proper job at Fullers, Ollie. I was a waitress and eventually assistant manageress. So you see, I have had a proper job, at Fullers. I have known real life, bien sûr.’

  Of course Oliver had done his share of being a waiter, and salad chef, and all that. He had done more than Elsie, but because his childhood had not been spent acting, none of these part-time jobs had assumed any great significance for him. They had just been a way of earning money. He did not think of them as a slice of real life, something of which he should be in awe, like working in an armaments factory during the war, which was rather the way Elsie seemed to view her single experience at Fullers.

  ‘Ah, yes, your proper job at Fullers, where you made so many friends.’

  ‘I certainly did.’

  Elsie stared down at the bead bracelet that the girls in her branch of Fullers had given her for a good luck leaving present. She would never ever take it off, she had told them, and she never had yet. She played with the beads for a second, thinking back to that time, which seemed so very long ago, but was not at all, to the friendship and the camaraderie, both of which she had never, ever known before. Girls of her own age, married girls, normal girls who had never had a Dottie in their lives pushing them forward, again and again, audition after audition, failure a constant reality – never thinking, for a moment, that there was anything else to life except the theatre. Those girls at Fullers had all seemed so kind and so warm-hearted, so wholesome, and most of all so sincere. So much so that for ever after, for Elsie, they would always remain enveloped in a sort of golden glow. She would never be able to see them as normal human beings with faults and virtues. It was pathetic, but it was true: so much had their honesty and kindness touched Elsie that in her mind they would always remain a kind of brilliant troupe of angels, a touchstone to which she could look back from her tougher, more brittle world.

  ‘You always wear that bracelet, don’t you? Was it given to you by someone special?’

  Oliver looked momentarily jealous, but Elsie, finding any kind of jealousy, either professional or personal, immensely boring, immediately stood up, pushing aside the cup of coffee that she had been drinking. After performing a long and dramatic stretch, she said, ‘Come on, Ollie. I want to look for some old-fashioned buckles for my evening shoes.’

  ‘Not buckles for your shoes again!’

  ‘And what are you going to be looking for today, may I ask?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on. Nothing is very hard to find.’

  Oliver thought for a little while, and having decided he said carefully, and to his own surprise, ‘I’m going to be looking f
or one of those old-fashioned ink wells. You know, with a kind of quill pen that goes with it. I want one of those.’

  Elsie packed her cigarettes and lighter smartly into her stylish shoulder bag.

  ‘What do you want a quill for, Ollie?’

  ‘To write, perhaps?’

  ‘Logical.’ She nodded, and began to walk ahead of Oliver, preparing to leave the café. As she did so, she turned back and said, ‘Don’t tell me you are planning to take up writing as a profession, Ollie?’

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘Why?’ Elsie stood still suddenly and frowned at him, while other customers pushed by them. ‘Why do you want to write? You’re such a fine actor.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Oliver agreed, ‘but you see, Popeye love, a terrible thought occurred to me, and only the other day.’

  ‘Which was?’

  Elsie flicked back her long, curly hair, shaking her head to encourage her great mane to drop down her back in ringlets, just as she knew Oliver liked it, and indeed his eyes did rest for a second, most appreciatively, on her hair before he could tell her his all-important revelation.

  ‘This was my thought, Popeye.’ He paused, touching her on the arm to make sure that he had her complete attention. ‘Someone might never, ever write a part that would be suitable for me again, ever. Don’t you see? Or there might not be another one for – say – ten years, by which time I will be too old. So, as I see it, the only solution is for me to try and write one for myself—’

  ‘Good gracious! I don’t believe it! My God!’

  Elsie had suddenly turned back to the last table before the door.

  ‘It’s not that amazing, Elsie love,’ Oliver protested. ‘After all a lot of actors take up the old quill and start writing to help out with the old acting—’

  But Elsie, which was really quite galling, was not being amazed by Oliver’s professed determination to try to write parts for himself. She was too busy being amazed by something quite different.

  Oliver turned back with her to where a man was sitting at a table just before the door. Tall and shabby, the man was staring at Elsie, white-faced and shocked, just as Elsie was staring back at him, also white-faced and shocked. Seconds later they were in each other’s arms, and Oliver was feeling jealous for the second time that day.

  Coco had been taken into the nursing home early due to the tiny size of her baby. She had to rest up, the gynaecologist who helped look after the mothers informed her and the nursing sisters. She had to lie back and wait for her baby to catch up, because if she did not the baby would not grow, and that would never do.

  Coco had now passed out of the early stages of pregnancy when she would wonder at her own courage at going ahead, facing a future not only without a father for her child, but as far as she could gather without friends or family. Now she no longer cared about herself, but only about the baby and his or her welfare. And so she lay for day after day, surrounded by other young mothers in precisely the same state, staring at nothing in particular, hardly able to read, or concentrate on anything, only willing the baby to grow a little more, for her sake and its own.

  Of course as soon as he knew from his cousins that she had been taken into hospital, Oliver wrote to her, ostensibly to cheer her up.

  Dear old Coco,

  I was very sorry to hear from my cousin Theresa that you are hors de combat on account of my future godchild’s being determinedly on a diet at the moment. What a beeswax! Oh Gahd! I mean to say. Still, I expect, knowing you, you are passing the time making hideously beautiful drawings of costumes you are going to inflict on thespians such as myself. Well anyway, enough of that. I am hoping that you will be able to come up and see the Stephens Theatre at Tadcaster as soon as your little bundle is delivered. I say, Coco, it is quite something to be here in the provinces doing the old thesping, and I am very lucky in my new Best Friend and Leading Lady.

  Of a sudden Coco stopped reading and put the letter down.

  She stared ahead of her, her eyes not taking in anything, her whole being filled with a deep sense of longing. The cheerful tone that Oliver had deliberately adopted to make her feel better was making her feel much worse, because she knew that, old friend that he was, he was worried about her, and had written all their old slang expressions to cheer her up. Things that Oliver had written like Oh Gahd! made her homesick for that other world, the theatre, that world from which she had been so suddenly removed by her pregnancy.

  She went back to Oliver’s letter.

  She is a fantastic actress, Coco. Really brilliant. There is nothing she can’t do, and she has taught me so much, which I needed, to be taught, I mean. I am enclosing the programme and some of the notices for the new musical we did together last week. It is by Jolion Stephens, the son of the man who owns the theatre. He never stops composing. Quite something. I am the one in the tweed suit smoking the pipe. Elsie is on the left! Ha ha! this is a very dull letter.

  Write soon and tell me how you are feeling. Meanwhile, back to rehearsal for me. Acting, acting, acting. That is all I have done since I got to Tadcaster, and honestly, Coco, I have never been happier. Anyway, enough of that, this is a very dull letter. Lots of love to you, Oliver.

  ‘Damn you for sending this letter, Oliver. It has made me more mizzy than ever.’

  Around and about her Coco could hear the click, click, click of the nuns’ low-heeled metal-capped shoes as she lay staring at the ceiling above her. She could hear a young mother in the bed next to her quietly crying because, she had previously told Coco, she missed her little boy at home. She could hear ambulance bells ringing, or was it a fire engine? She could hear all of these things and they were real, but most real of all was the awful ache she was feeling, an ache brought on because of missing everything, because of missing Oliver and the theatre, but most of all because of missing Coco.

  She missed herself as she had used to be, only a few months ago. She missed madcap Coco who kept everyone else amused. Kooky Coco who liked to wear crazy clothes, who had more opinions to the inch than Oliver had brains in his head, who took up acting because art school was a bore. That was the person she missed most of all.

  ‘No, no tea, thank you, Sister.’

  She lay back against her pillows, Oliver’s letter still in her hand. She would never now be young again, she knew that. Never feel carefree, not for the rest of her life. There would always be someone else to worry about, miss, or think about. Having a baby meant that you were never going to be alone again, that there would always be someone else in your life, that you could never be properly selfish. Meanwhile Oliver was having the best sort of time, acting, acting, acting, as he had put it in his blasted letter. Coco realised that she would do anything to be with him, on stage, or on location, anywhere except where she was, alone in a grim, out of town nursing home with the goodly nuns swaying past at regular intervals, and other girls in other beds nursing their unwanted babies.

  ‘There is a visitor for you, Miss Hampton.’

  Coco looked up from the programme Oliver had sent her, and to her horror saw her guardian, looking outrageously smart in a navy blue suit, sailor boy hat complete with petersham ribbon banding, and matching accessories, sashaying down the ward, while a flock of nuns, suddenly looking strangely like black and white doves, flew ahead of her, or moved behind her, their wimples providing a somehow equally chic backdrop to Gladys’s fashionable façade.

  ‘Darling.’ Gladys bent down and kissed Coco on her cheek.

  ‘Gladys.’

  ‘I knew about you, but not from whom you might think.’ Gladys, quite composed and smelling beautifully of Miss Dior, sat down on the small bentwood chair provided by the nuns for the single visitor and crossed her elegant legs.

  ‘Who did you know about me from, or from whom do you know about me, in other words?’

  Coco, as was her way in conversation, started straight in. She had no time for shilly-shallying. Besides, she knew from Gladys’s composed expression that she must have known
for years and years – well, months anyway.

  ‘Quite by chance, darling, met your gynaecologist at a cocktail party in Norfolk. What a dish! Anyway, you don’t think, I mean, you didn’t think we hadn’t guessed? Silly old thing, of course we had guessed, ages ago. All that not coming home, what do you think that is always, always about? Well, nearly always, especially with single girls. It’s always about being preggers, darling. Just a fact. With single girls.’

  ‘Well, it would hardly be with married ones.’

  ‘I’ve brought you some magazines, to cheer you up. Locked up in here I suppose you only get given the Lives of the Saints, or the Bible, don’t you?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Coco snatched up Vogue and started to turn the pages of the magazine as if she was a starving woman let loose in a food shop. ‘Oh, look at that.’ She turned the magazine back towards Gladys, a look of fainting ecstasy on her face. ‘Look, Glad!’

  ‘I know, darling, I already looked. Too divine. It would look wonderful worn at a spring ball, don’t you think? I always say that Victor’s clothes are to die for.’

  Victor? Oh God, Victor, not the man whose child she was expecting. Coco shook her head and turned another page. Anything to get away from someone called Victor, even if it was the great fashion designer Victor Stiebel.

  ‘I thought it would cheer you up, to bring you some magazines, and, you know, let you know that we know, and it is fine by us, all that sort of thing. Your life, do as you wish. I am sure your mother and stepfather, and your father, when anyone can find him, will feel just the same as we do, darling. Your life is your own, of course it is.’

  ‘No, no. Please don’t tell them—’

  Coco looked horrified, and Gladys noted this with some pleasure. It had always worked, ever since she was a small child; a little mention of her parents and Coco would quickly come into line.

  ‘Oh, very well, darling. Might be as well not to,’ she now conceded. ‘I mean I know your step-pa and your ma are in India at the moment, visiting a great many maharajahs, and after that they are to go to South America, to that frightfully ‘in’ place – I can never remember its name – and then on to buy polo ponies, and so home. Or at least home to France, not to England, because as you know your stepfather loathes England.’