Distant Music

by Charlotte Bingham

  Relatively speaking it was still quite a new medium which had not, as yet, been used in all the ways in which it perhaps could be used. Of a sudden, as she read on, Elsie realised that the possibilities for this new type of playwriting and acting could be endless.

  The ability of the camera to get in so close to an actor that it could see what he was thinking meant that an actor’s technique had to look as natural as a person in the seat next to you on a bus or a train. That was how intimate it was.

  And yet it was live, so that, unlike film, it was not completely in the hands of the technicians. It was, Elsie suddenly saw, a new and better form of theatre for the actor, since the smallest gesture could suggest everything, the least expression convey a million thoughts. On stage the same gestures and expressions would have to be magnified at least three or four times to be as effective, and yet might fail to be so.

  For some reason Elsie had never brought any of these thoughts to bear upon her art, probably because all the time that she was growing up in the boarding house Dottie had never had a television, and refused to consider the new medium as having any possible artistic merit.

  ‘I would never keep a television,’ she would announce every now and then, as if Mr Logie Baird’s invention was a tiger or a rhinoceros, needing a cage and exercise, not to mention vast quantities of food.

  However, despite never watching it, Dottie nevertheless felt quite able to heartily despise the medium. She thought both television and film were rubbish, and said so, often and loudly. Theatre, theatre, theatre, was all that had mattered to Dottie, and indeed to Elsie, until now. Now it was quite different. Now she wanted nothing better than to try it.

  Now, seeing how television could be, how daring its drama could be, just how innovative, made theatre seem old-fashioned and out of date, not to mention almost hopelessly amateur. Theatre, by its nature, had to be large of gesture, loud of voice, all the time striving to make its effects. Live television on the other hand could produce a form of drama that could be as light or as dark as it wished, using only the lightest of strokes; and yet at the same time, in terms of storytelling, it could be just as effective as a film.

  As she stared ahead of her Elsie realised more and more the advantages of this new medium. For a start, from the actor or actress’s point of view, working in television would be so much more comfortable. No more endless and often pointless tours, playing to fifteen people on a snowbound, foggy night. No tatty digs, or flats, and no endless repetition. In television all the time would be spent on rehearsals, on getting your performance polished and right – to play for just one first night to millions of people in the comfort of their own homes.

  Elsie picked up the telephone and dialled Portly’s number.

  ‘I want to do it.’

  Portly, busy as usual in his kitchen, quickly turned off his radio.

  ‘You want to do which, Elsie?’

  ‘All of them, any of the scripts, I don’t really care, I just want to do television.’

  ‘Good. Leave it all to me. If I have anything to do with it, you will be in a series within weeks. More than that, you will be in a hit series.’

  ‘Which one?’ ‘The Edwardian one, of course! Playing the maid.’

  ‘That’s a series, the one with the maids and butler and things, that’s a series?’

  ‘Yes, Elsie darling, didn’t I tell you? That is just the opening episode. The scripts are all being written as plays in their own right, but it is nevertheless a series, and you are going to play the maid who is in love with the son of the house, and no more to be said.’

  Elsie put down the telephone. She had seldom heard Portly so buoyant. She picked up the receiver again.

  ‘Who else is going to be in the series, Porters old thing?’

  ‘I am putting Juliet Tatami up for the other maid.’

  ‘I thought you might be.’

  ‘And rumour has it that Howard Grey has already been cast as the butler. That the part was written with him in mind.’

  ‘Oh yes – Howard. He used to stay with – he used to stay with us. Even Dottie liked Howard Grey, which is saying something.’

  ‘Don’t know what else is happening, but I will keep you up to date, darling, don’t worry.’

  They put down their telephones without saying goodbye, their newest affectation with each other, which they both found vaguely amusing. Then Portly danced round his kitchen for a few seconds. If he could get Elsie Lancaster and Juliet Tatami on television, then the world would be at his feet, because all the others would soon see the sense in it, conquer their nerves, and follow suit. And what Elsie did not know, and Portly would not tell her, was that Portly had a contact in the producer’s office, so he knew that the director was aching for Elsie to be signed for the part of the maid, that he would do anything to get both Elsie and Juliet signed up for the series.

  ‘We live in exciting times,’ Portly told himself and his small, fashionably neat kitchen, because at that moment there was no one else to tell.

  Elsie on the other hand was not in quite such a joyful frame of mind. She wanted the series all right, and she wanted to play the part of Cosette the little English maid with ambitions to be a music hall star as much as she wanted to go on breathing, but she did not want Juliet Tatami playing the Cockney scrubber with the heart of gold. Juliet might steal some much needed thunder from Elsie, and that would never do. No, she would have to talk Juliet out of doing the part, and into doing something else, and the way to do that was not to talk to her directly, but to get through to her none the less. She thought for a few minutes, and then she picked up the telephone, knowing exactly how to go about putting Miss Tatami off the scent.

  ‘David, darling, Elsie here.’

  ‘Elsie. Darling.’

  David Miller was Juliet’s best friend, but not her lover. That particular position, Elsie suspected, was being currently occupied by Portly. She had nothing to go on, of course, and she knew that if she tried to wheedle confirmation about this particular affair out of Portly, it would get her precisely nowhere. Portly was always the soul of discretion. Unfortunately.

  On the other hand, David, Juliet’s best friend, was the opposite. David could be relied upon to be completely indiscreet. Within five minutes of Elsie’s telling him that she was going to turn the series down, because she had heard the rest of the scripts were rubbish, he would be ringing Juliet and urging her to do the same, because he had heard that the rest of the series was a complete let-down. Meanwhile Elsie herself would ring Portly and suggest that he put David up for the part of the footman, which if he was offered it David would immediately accept, because he, unlike Juliet, was not in demand, and grateful for any offer that came his way.

  Having effected all this, Elsie picked up the script and started to read it once again. Her part needed to be larger, of that there was no doubt.

  But just before she began to pick the play to pieces, looking for sections where the role of Cosette could be enlarged and made more effective, she could not help reflecting that, whatever she liked to think to the contrary, she was still very much the young Elsie Lancaster – the survivor. More than that, she was still very much Dottie’s granddaughter.

  Dottie’s wheeling and dealing had been something that Elsie had grown up with. She knew how to do it. She had learned at Dottie’s knee that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and that it was everyone’s duty to go for what they wanted and expect everyone else to do the same. Earning your living in and out of the theatre was all about endurance, and nothing to do with goodness, and if her up-bringing had not taught her that it had taught her nothing. Besides, she was only doing to Juliet Tatami what she would do to Elsie. And then some.

  * * *

  Following his first call from Australia, Coco had been rung by Aeneas Mayo almost the moment that his aeroplane touched down. He sounded as excited at meeting her again as she felt at hearing his voice. In fact just listening to him brought the pre-Holly days back to Coco, those day
s of long ago when there was no one for whom she had to get up, no one about whom she needed to worry, no one whose slightest sound in the night would wake her as if it was the loudest alarm bell in the universe.

  Those other days, the pre-Holly days, had been the saving for the Austin Healey days, the days of total immersion in her own personality, in her appearance, in her presentation to the world, and they seemed to have gone for ever, never to return, until she started to dress to go out to meet Aeneas Mayo. Standing in front of her mirror, of a sudden, Coco felt as she had done then. And certainly to look at her figure you would never really have guessed, she told herself, that she had had a baby. She was as trim as she had ever been, and in a blue velvet suit with frogging on the jacket and wearing a pair of long, black leather boots she felt not just young again, but herself again. The person who had been missing for so long, Coco Hampton, was back – perhaps, she suddenly thought, never to disappear again?

  The Italian restaurant where they had agreed to meet was as full as all Italian restaurants in London at that moment seemed to be, so full that just at first Coco felt giddy at the sight of all those people, all fully engaged in the growing politics of swinging Sixties London. As she stood waiting for the head waiter to indicate the correct table, girls passed her wearing startling new geometric hair cuts, and gymslips with blouses with long pointed collars and elaborately cuffed sleeves. Men in dark silk Italianate suits and shirts with gold pins pulling the collars together swung past, all too confident and seemingly rich, everyone smoking, laughing, drinking. For Coco, coming as she had from the nursery quiet of her day-to-day existence, it was as if she had been dropped into a strangely exuberant foreign land. She felt out of place, old-fashioned, wrong-footed. Her long hair brushed into a bow at the nape of her neck, her velvet suit, seemed strangely out of place among so many gymslips, as if she had, for that evening, stepped down from a painting for a few hours – to visit the future.

  ‘Coco!’

  ‘Aeneas!’

  He was so late that she had begun to think that he had forgotten all about their date, and had actually been contemplating going back to the flat, when, of a sudden, he emerged from the crowded floor, and arrived at the table.

  ‘I am so sorry! God, that director! He just adores to keep everyone waiting, won’t let anyone go. And the last scene – he made me do twelve takes. Imagine? Twelve takes, and what for? Nothing! It will be sure to end up on the cutting room floor, as well as making me late to meet you.’

  Unimaginably Aeneas was just the same. Living and working in Australia had given him, if anything, an even more easy-going manner, not to mention a tanned skin, and hair that was streaked by the sun.

  ‘You look wonderful, Coco.’

  ‘So do you, Aeneas.’

  Of a sudden Coco was an actress again, unselfconsciously complimenting Aeneas on his appearance the way that actors and actresses who are friends so often do, and much as the proud owners of motor cars inspect each other’s vehicles they now openly looked over each other’s chassis with interest and appreciation.

  Coco had been in dread that everything would have changed between them, that the casual banter that shared experiences on a film set promote would no longer be possible, but it was far from being so. No sooner had they sat down together than everything started up again. The jokes, the exaggerated stories, the non-stop chatter about everything and nothing, it was all there once more, as was the old Coco. She was well and truly back, thank heavens. It was just as if nothing at all had happened to her since she last had dinner with Aeneas.

  ‘Listen, I’m called all week, but free Saturday. Have lunch?’

  ‘Can’t Saturday—’

  ‘Because?’ Aeneas managed to look droll, hurt and curious, all at the same time.

  Coco pulled a face. ‘Getting married.’

  Now Aeneas managed to look not just hurt, but amazed.

  ‘Not married married, just married.’

  ‘There’s a difference?’ His expression had gone back to being both droll and curious.

  ‘Yup.’ Coco leaned towards him. ‘An old friend of mine, remember? Oliver Lowell—’

  ‘Lover Lowell?’

  ‘Yup. Him. He has to be married or the Kass Organisation won’t cast him as the Messiah.’

  Aeneas did not shout with laughter at that, he exploded with it. ‘My God! Can you credit it?’

  ‘I can believe anything to do with Oliver,’ Coco grumbled, raising her eyes to heaven.

  ‘So will you be free after you’re married, Mrs Lowell?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Dinner, Saturday night?’

  ‘Love to, really. I’ll book a babysitter.’

  ‘That part of the Kass Organisation plans for you, too?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Some long term thing?’

  ‘No. A very, very short term thing, filming, after you went to Australia. I was missing you.’

  There, it was out. She looked at Aeneas, who merely nodded.

  ‘I know. Happened to my sister, but she’s happy now.’

  ‘Really? What happened?’

  Aeneas smiled. ‘Oh, nothing. She remet someone she had once been in love with, and they lived happily ever after.’

  Coco’s eyes dropped, and she looked away. Aeneas touched her hand.

  ‘Cigarette, Miss Hampton?’

  ‘Love one.’

  ‘I’ve never forgotten you, Coco Hampton.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve both been through a lot really, haven’t we?’

  ‘But, somehow stayed the same.’

  ‘Yes, we have, haven’t we?’

  The truth of this suddenly dawned on Coco, and seconds later on Aeneas. It was as if they were both looking at an old photograph, from that time long ago, when Aeneas had somehow got her through filming, and all that. She remembered his suede jacket and his boots, he remembered her amber bracelets and their mutually madly glamorous aura.

  ‘Meet you after the marriage, because it certainly is not going to be a wedding.’

  ‘That has to be one of the best lines ever.’ They kissed in the doorway of the flats, and Coco thought how funny it was that when they were kissing as themselves they didn’t have to fake it. She started to laugh as they broke.

  ‘What?’ ‘Nothing really. I’m just so astonished we’re not kissing each other’s chins!’

  * * *

  There was a long silence in the dining room of the Plunkett manor house. To say it was long in normal terms would be an understatement, because this particular silence was actually more than long, even in terms of that particular household. It was a marathon of a silence, a silence that to someone coming fresh upon the scene might have appealed as a solemn silence, a silence to mark a national remembrance, or the passing of a loved one – which in the minds of those intent on reading their newspapers it might as well have been, since all those concerned were at that moment reading an account of Oliver Plunkett’s marriage to his childhood sweetheart, one Coco Hampton. A wedding to which, as it happened, none of them had been invited.

  John Plunkett was the first to raise his head, lower his newspaper and speak.

  ‘I see that the Tories lost the by-election at Brimfield.’

  From this mild remark Richard and Newell knew at once that their father was firmly marking their cards as to how he expected them to treat the front page news about their brother and his new wife, ‘Lover Lowell’s Lover’ or the ‘Messiah’s Missus’, depending on which newspaper they were concentrating upon.

  ‘They should never have fielded Dandy Holbroke. He is simply not Yorkshire, far too London. He was just not right, was he?’ Richard asked the still sepulchral dining room.

  Another long silence, during which neither a cup nor a fork, neither a spoon nor a piece of toast, was taken up or laid down, until, finally, from John Plunkett, in answer to Richard’s open question, came a very heavy-sounding no. It was a final no, a no to e
nd all nos, a no which to all those in the dining room, his butler included, sounded ominously like a door shutting firmly, and for ever.

  After clearing breakfast Clifton hurried off to telephone Master Oliver as soon as he could. It took him some time to get hold of his former charge, who sounded surprised and somewhat put out that Clifton wanted to know why he had been photographed getting married, and not told anyone of this fairly major event in his life.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Cliffie, I meant to send you all a telegram, but it happened so fast. Tell everyone that it’s not a real marriage, would you? Nothing like that. It’s the Kass Organisation, they won’t let me play the Messiah if I’m not married, you know? Ridiculous, but there you are anyway. You understand, Cliffie, so you explain. It’s just a reggie office marriage, in name only, no um – consummation or anything, and all that, just to keep the Kass Organisation quiet. Nothing more to it, really, and when I come back from filming in Israel we’ll just wait a bit and then get an amicable divorce, all very friendly, and all that.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Good I got the part, don’t you think, though, Cliffie? I got it over all the rest of the usual mob. They all went up for it. And I say, Cliffie, you’ll like this, I only got it because I am working class! You know, father was a carpenter, and all that. I thought you would like that. I’m playing it deep, deep Yorkshire, because the director is convinced that the Messiah would have had a rural accent. So, wish me luck, Cliffie, and send all the rest of them my best, and I’ll be back in about two months. No, six weeks. Well, you know films. It all depends on the weather.’