Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  Lanny pawed at a mole on her cheek, which sprouted a single hair. ‘I look so old these days.’

  Anna smiled at her in the mirror. ‘I think you look lovely. Like a woman from a Rossetti or a Waterhouse.’

  ‘I don’t know what those are.’

  ‘Rossetti? He was one of the Pre-Raphaelites. Waterhouse as well. They were painters in Victorian times who painted these big romantic pictures of women from literature. All flowing locks and big, bold eyes and lips.’

  ‘It sounds pornographic.’

  ‘Well, it is, in a way. It’s very sexual. But I wanted so much to look like those women when I was younger. My father had a book with plates in it. I wanted to be the Lady of Shalott or Pandora or a mermaid. But you really do … Without make-up …’ Anna shook her head. ‘You look more real somehow.’

  ‘Well, I am more real.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Lanny’s hand sneaked across the dressing table and picked up the mascara. ‘A little something, just for going home,’ she said.

  ‘What’s it like, living at The Savoy?’

  Lanny met Anna’s eyes in the glass and her own eyes wrinkled into a smile. ‘It’s exactly what you’d think, child. Everything is very shiny, the breakfast is excellent and everyone looks terribly, terribly bored.’

  Anna laughed and helped Iolanthe into her dress and coat. A little pile of post lay unopened on the dressing table. Lanny pushed the envelopes into her bulging handbag and then paused in the act of picking up yesterday’s Standard. She glanced down at the headline.

  SNOW ON MOORS HAMPERS SEARCH

  Brady and Hindley remanded

  They’d hardly been off the front pages this past month. First the boy’s body, then the girl’s, now a second boy had been found.

  Anna watched Lanny’s train of thought. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’ve been having nightmares.’

  ‘About the kids?’

  ‘After they found the girl. Under the earth. Who’d leave a child like that?’

  Lanny’s face creased a little in pain. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Anna. ‘Let’s not.’

  They walked in silence down the many flights of stairs. Outside the theatre Lanny belted her coat against the cold and drew on gloves. Anna paused at the corner and watched her walk away. Lanny looked over her shoulder just once and waved a hand.

  ‘See you Monday,’ she called.

  ‘See you Monday,’ Anna called back.

  And then she was gone.

  Walk On and Walk Off

  Monday, 1 November

  At half past five Anna was ready for Lanny’s arrival. A cup of lemon tea sat on the table waiting. Lanny’s clothes were ironed and hung ready for her in neat rows. The play began at seven and the cast were expected to be in place at the very latest by the half-hour call, which came at six twenty-five. Lanny normally liked to arrive early. She had make-up and hair to do. She wanted to drink her tea and go to the toilet. She wanted time so if anything went wrong with her costume it could be fixed.

  Any moment now Lanny would come running in, throw down the newspaper, empty her pockets of sweets, peel herself out of her dress.

  ‘Fucking cold!’ she’d cry. ‘And the cabs! No one knows how to drive in this country!’

  ‘Did you look the wrong way again?’ Anna would ask.

  ‘I looked the right way. But all the assholes just kept driving in the wrong direction!’

  Or perhaps tonight she’d be contemplative, slip into the dressing room without a word. If she was in a quiet mood Anna had learned to come and go without a sound. Fetching and carrying everything that might be needed as Lanny stripped herself. Sometimes Anna would find her standing naked before the mirror, touching her hand to her breasts or her belly or her thighs, lost in thought. Anna would look, too hard to be a human and not look, but then she would look away. She tried to imagine her way into the body of Iolanthe. The mind, she corrected herself. Iolanthe resided in her mind.

  Half past five became six. Anna went downstairs to see Dick but Lanny hadn’t signed in yet. Leonard popped his head in to ask if she thought Lanny had been getting sick.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Anna told him. ‘She just seemed her normal self.’

  Anna waited. Lanny’s tea grew cold. At six twenty-five exactly the call came on the backstage tannoy:

  ‘Field of Stars company. This is your half-hour call. Thirty minutes, please.’

  Leonard burst in again. ‘We can’t raise her at The Savoy. She isn’t there. Agatha is dressing to cover Lanny. Minnie is dressing to cover Agatha. Can you go and cast an eye over what she’s doing?’

  Anna helped the young understudy to get into her clothes. Minnie was talking all the time. Running the lines at high speed over and over again. Anna gave her a hug.

  ‘It isn’t Shakespeare,’ she told her. ‘No one knows the words. You can say anything at all and they’ll still think it’s part of the play. Walk on, walk off and try to look like you know what you’re doing. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. I’ll see you later for the quick change.’

  She walked back to Lanny’s dressing room. The cup of tea sat on the table untouched. Was Iolanthe ill?

  Of course, everyone expected Lanny to arrive by the interval. She must have gone off for the day and got stuck in traffic. That’s what made most sense. But the interval came and went and there was no Iolanthe.

  Leonard phoned round the hospitals in case there had been an accident. He phoned The Savoy again and spoke to the desk clerk. Iolanthe hadn’t been in her room since Friday night.

  The show came down at ten to ten. The audience cheered Agatha, though many had left at the interval since catching sight of Iolanthe Green had been their main reason for buying the tickets. Leonard called a meeting on the stage. The cast sat on chairs in a circle. Anna sat with the other dressers and the crew on the floor. Leonard told everyone about his call to The Savoy.

  ‘Iolanthe has to be considered a missing person. I’ve already called the police. If she hasn’t turned up by tomorrow morning they’ll be coming down to interview us here. The show will keep running but management are going to keep an eye on cancellations. If we’re not playing to at least forty per cent attendance they may take us off in another week. Don’t worry about that now, but I need to give you that warning so you’re prepared. No one of Iolanthe’s description has been admitted to any of the big hospitals. I’m going to see that as a good thing. You all did well tonight. Go home. Get some sleep. Company meeting at four tomorrow followed by a line run if it’s understudies again. Okay. Off you go!’

  ***

  On Tuesday the papers were full of Iolanthe’s disappearance. The Mirror asked if Brady and Hindley had inspired a copycat murder in London. The Sun wanted to know if Iolanthe had fallen prey to a gang of Soho people smugglers. The Daily Express asked its readers to join police in hunting for the glamorous starlet. The Daily Telegraph wondered if fragile, unmarried Miss Green had run away from the pressures of fame.

  On Wednesday afternoon, as the company of understudies gathered for yet another line run, BBC Radio News arrived to interview Leonard about Lanny’s disappearance. Anna stood in the green room beside the transistor radio and listened to Leonard intoning his worries and incomprehension at six o’clock and then again at ten. Each time she heard someone familiar speak, or read someone she knew quoted in the paper, they – the people involved, the events – became less familiar. She was starting to see it as a story herself. The story of how Lanny disappeared.

  On Thursday The Times wanted to know why women weren’t safe to walk the streets of Theatreland and the Guardian wanted to know why so much attention was being paid to one wealthy actress when in the past week alone two hundred ordinary people had gone missing without any great fanfare at all.

  On Friday, as Londoners gathered to burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, police were called to a disturbance at a flat in Golden Square. When they arrived they found a young m
ale prostitute called Vincent Mar lying on the front steps having sustained a terrible head wound. The police arrested a middle-aged man who was the tenant of the flat they’d been called to attend. The man’s name was Richard Wallis and he happened to be a Junior Minister of State for Justice in Her Majesty’s Government. By the time Wallis had been released – without charge – late on Saturday night, the papers had got hold of the scandal and Iolanthe was about to be knocked quite definitively off the front pages.

  Monday, 8 November

  In West End Central police station, up on Savile Row, Inspector Knight had been co-ordinating a well-resourced search effort for Iolanthe but now he was running out of ideas. Statements had been taken and double-checked, posters had been mounted in prime locations, hospitals had been phoned and visited. Nobody, it seemed, absolutely nobody, had seen Miss Green.

  Over the course of a fraught weekend, in which he had seen nothing of his wife or children, Knight had been instructed firmly by the Home Office that he was to scour Soho for other possible assailants of young Mr Mar who had – to the relief of many – failed to regain consciousness after the attack. But the majority of Knight’s men were assigned to the hunt for the missing actress.

  The Sunday papers had attempted to try and convict Mr Wallis right there on the newsstands and pressure from the offices of government was increasing. So at 9 a.m. on Monday, Inspector Knight called into his office a detective sergeant by the name of Barnaby Hayes.

  ‘The government is defecating in its collective knickers, Hayes.’

  ‘I’m sure it is, sir.’

  ‘I have until next Sunday to find at least one fully fashioned scumbag who might have tried to kill, rob or bugger Vincent Mar. I also have to hope the bloody man’s about to die, because if he wakes up and recounts a night of ecstasy with Mr Wallis we’re all fucked.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘The worst of it is I still have to pretend to care about Iolanthe Green when any fool can see that the woman’s obviously done herself in and hasn’t had the decency to leave her body somewhere handy.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’re the closest thing I have to competent in my department, Hayes. Don’t fuck up and don’t talk to any press.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Find the body. Close the case. We have better things to be doing.’

  Barnaby Hayes picked up the small pile of manila files and carried them out of the office to his desk. He was a meticulous and careful officer, a player by the rules. He had distinguished himself in the eyes of Knight by working long hours and never once trying to cut corners or claim he’d done work when he hadn’t. His name – as it happened – was not Barnaby at all, but Brennan. He had cast this particular mark of Irishness away from him when he joined CID.

  He opened the files and rearranged their contents. He knew from bitter experience that not everyone in the department was as assiduous as he was and he could see no other way ahead but to start from scratch and re-interview everyone connected to Iolanthe. He cast his eyes down the list of eyewitnesses from the Saturday she had disappeared. The name at the top of the list was Anna Treadway. He dialled her number.

  Miss Treadway

  Anna Treadway lived on Neal Street in a tiny two-bed flat above a Turkish cafe. She went to bed each night smelling cumin, lamb and lemons, listening to the jazz refrain from Ottmar’s radio below. She woke to the rumble and cry of the market men surging below her window and to the sharp, pungent smell of vegetables beginning to decay.

  At seven o’clock most mornings of the week she would make the walk to buy a small bag of fruit for her breakfast. Past the Punjab India restaurant, where the smell of flatbread was just starting to escape the ovens. Past the vegetable warehouses with their arching, pale stone frontages. Past the emerald green face of Ellen Keeley the barrow maker. Past the dirty oxblood tiles of the tube station where Neal Street ended and James Street began. Past Floral Street where the market boys drank away their wages and down, down, down to the Garden. Covent Garden: once the convent garden. Now so full of sin and earth and humanity. Still a garden really, after all these years.

  The roads around it were virtually impassable most mornings, a deadly tangle of horses, dogs, cars and old men whose thick woollen cardigans padded out their frames until they looked like overstuffed rag dolls with pale, needle-pricked faces. Men who pulled great barrows – like floats from a medieval carnival – piled with sweetcorn and plums, leeks and potatoes and fat red cabbages that gleamed and glistened like blood-coloured gems. Men who balanced on their heads thirty crates of lavender that swayed and bowed as they walked and left the perfume trail of distant fields everywhere they went. Covent Garden, so sensual and unkempt: a temple to something, though no one could tell you quite what. Money. Nature. London. Anna sometimes thought that it acted like a city gate, announcing London’s size and grandiosity to all who visited there. Look at us, it said, look what it takes to feed us all. How mighty we must be when roused. How indomitable.

  Through the garden and into the house she went. Into the vaulted space of the indoor market and through the crush of tweed jackets and donkey jackets and macs.

  ‘Sorry, love.’ ‘Mind yourself.’ ‘MUSTARD GREENS!’

  In this world of men a woman’s voice could become lost, clambering high and low to find its place between the layers of bass and tenor sound. ‘Black— Goose— App—.’ The syllables of the woman in the dark red pinafore were eaten by the whole, swallowed down like soup in this dark, confusing dragon’s belly of a place. Anna handed the woman her pennies and the woman gave her a paper bag of blackberries in return. How strange, Anna thought it was, to pay for blackberries when she had gone every September as a child to the railway cutting at the bottom of town to fill her skirt for free.

  ‘Everything can be given a price if someone chooses,’ her mother said. ‘It doesn’t have to make sense to us, Anna. So little of the world makes sense.’

  Back home in the little flat, she shared her early-morning rituals with an improbably blonde American called Kelly Gollman who worked as a dancer in a revue bar in Soho and who rented the better of the two bedrooms from Leonard Fleet, Anna’s boss who lived in the flat above.

  Anna had never seen Kelly dance and Kelly was careful never to ask her if she might one day come into the club. Both had the uneasy feeling that they were not on the same level as the other: Kelly taking her clothes off for boozy businessmen and Anna carrying clothes and cups of lemon tea for proper actresses in a theatre with dark gold cupids above the door. Anna had the kind of job that one could tell one’s parents about and she was English and she had a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare on her bedside table.

  Sometimes, if Anna was home late or Kelly early, they would meet in the little kitchen and make toast together at midnight. Anna would compliment Kelly on her clothes and her hair and her tiny waist and Kelly would laugh and demur and enjoy it all immensely. In the early days of living together Kelly had gone out of her way to compliment Anna in return, but since she found Anna’s way of dressing rather severe all she could find to talk about was books.

  ‘You must have read so many books. I see those library copies coming and going off the table and I … I can’t imagine.’

  And Anna would smile modestly and nod. ‘I’m easily bored.’

  ‘I’m sure I haven’t read a book since school. I just can’t get through twenty pages without wanting to throw it out the window and do something more fun.’

  Anna would shrug and smile. ‘It’s not for everyone.’

  Kelly stopped mentioning the books. She stopped commenting on Anna’s cleverness. She smiled and nodded but often her eyes were cold and still. She did not trust Anna – quiet, bookish Anna – and she did not want to be friends with someone she didn’t trust.

  Anna was not overly sorry when Kelly withdrew from her attempts at friendship. She had dreaded having to share a flat with someone who would try and drag her out at all hours of the day and night, try to
feed her drinks or marijuana and suggest they double-date with this man or that, his friend and his other friend. Men were obstacles to progress, the murderers of time and intellect. Anna did not do men, not in the romantic way at least.

  The Turkish cafe two floors below their flat was the same cafe that Anna had waitressed in from the ages of twenty-three to twenty-six. She had, when she first arrived in London, worked as a receptionist in Forest Hill and before that she had lived in Birmingham while she trained as a secretary. Before that had been school somewhere, though no one was ever quite sure where. Anna’s accent was obstinately RP. Ottmar Alabora, the manager of the coffee shop, had always meant to pin Anna down on where exactly it was that she came from, but somehow the moment always eluded him, or he would get her on to the subject and then she’d be called away to service and he didn’t like to seem insistent. He tried not to pay too much attention to any of his waitresses, but particularly not to Anna.

  ‘We don’t need another waitress,’ his wife Ekin had told him when she caught him, in Anna’s first week, ordering a new uniform from Denny’s.

  ‘We’re struggling in the evenings. You’re not there. And then I was thinking of putting more tables outside in summer. If you don’t serve people they walk away. Or leave without paying.’

  ‘But it’s November. Who’s going to sit outside our cafe now?’

  ‘She’s a nice girl. She’s starting on evenings. You’ll like her. If you don’t like her we’ll let her go.’

  So Ekin came and sat in the corner of the restaurant and watched Anna work. She had a nice way with people – Ekin could see that. She was attractive but not in a blousy way. She wore her skirt at the knee and her sleeves below her elbows. Her long hair hung in pigtails and she wore no make-up. When she served Ekin her coffee and cake she smiled and thanked her for the position. Ekin turned to look through the hatch at Ottmar, who raised his eyebrows at her. Ekin made a face, but only to let him know she wasn’t angry. Anna was nice enough; she could stay.