At Freddie's

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘That wouldn’t be what you’re used to, dear.’

  When Hannah had undertaken to take the junior class in all subjects for at least one year, Freddie offered the other post to a Mr Pierce Carroll. Carroll, who must have been about thirty, and came from Castlehen, a short way out of Derry, was a much more doubtful investment, but Freddie detected in him the welcome signs of someone who was never likely to earn much money, or even expect to.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Carroll,’ she said, without looking round, as he came sadly in. And he folded his long thin legs and sat down.

  There was his letter open on the desk, so that he could see, upside down, the pale grey product of his own typewriter.

  ‘Now, let me see, you didn’t go to university, no specialised training, no diploma.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m afraid you don’t look particularly attractive either,’ Freddie went on, glancing at him to see how he took this. He was quite unperturbed, but acknowledged the truth with a nod, almost a slight bow.

  ‘But of course you’ve done some teaching?’

  ‘I’ve taught in the deaf and dumb school at Castlehen. They say that teaching the deaf makes you into a good actor, but it didn’t have any effect of that kind on me. I’ve no ability at all that way.’

  Freddie waited for him to add ‘I’m afraid’, but he did not. Perhaps, indeed, he never was.

  ‘What did you teach to the deaf and dumb?’

  ‘Craft subjects and carpentry, Miss Wentworth, there and at the Church of Ireland Remedial School.’

  ‘What kind of personal response did you get?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I expected any.’

  Freddie shifted her ground a little. ‘Are you interested in the theatre?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say so.’

  ‘But in Shakespeare?’

  ‘I don’t know Shakespeare well. I must disabuse you of that idea from the start.’ He looked up at the faded canvas. ‘Those are some lines from his works that you have written there on your wall.’

  ‘Are you fond of children?’

  ‘I am not, Miss Wentworth.’

  ‘Or of teaching?’

  ‘It seems to me right that they should be taught,’ he said. All the time he remained quite still, sitting there attentively in a suit of the greenish tweed that is produced for those from Northern Ireland visiting London. Long pauses seemed natural when dealing with Carroll. Indeed, his absolute slowness produced an unaccustomed peace. Freddie returned to the subject of crafts and carpentry. That might be quite a good idea for the boys, who grew restless when they didn’t get work. ‘There’s a good deal of materials needed for anything of that kind,’ said Carroll.

  ‘What makes you think that I haven’t got a quantity of material?’

  Carroll looked carefully, but not critically, round the office. ‘I get the impression that there’s not much money to spare here,’ he said. ‘But that’s nothing to me, I’m used to all sorts.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Freddie. ‘You’re sure, are you, dear, that you want to apply for this post? The salary is quite low, and it will stay low. I am offering Miss Graves more, but then she has the diploma.’

  ‘It’s very low, I should describe it as exploitation, but it’s as much as I can expect with my qualifications. I don’t think I shall do any better if I stay in Ireland. When you’ve reached the point, as Wordsworth says, that you can no further go, then you must try something else.’

  ‘I’ve never read any Wordsworth.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Carroll asked politely.

  He had no ability to make himself seem better or other than he was. He could only be himself, and that not very successfully. Meeting Carroll for a second time, even in his green suit, one wouldn’t recall having seen him before.

  He appeared to be musing on what had passed between them. ‘I hope you didn’t think I intended any discourtesy just now in saying that there didn’t seem to be much money in the place. Looked at in a different way, that wouldn’t be impolite at all. There’s nothing discreditable in strict economy, particularly in anyone who’s well advanced into old age.’

  ‘Perhaps you think it’s time I gave up altogether,’ Freddie suggested.

  ‘Not at all, we should never give up. That was the point of my allusion to Wordsworth. And if we find that one difficulty is solved, then we shouldn’t rest, but look round for another one. It’s a great mistake to live with the past victories.’

  ‘You’re telling me this, I suppose, from your own experience.’

  ‘Ah, not at all, Miss Wentworth, I’ve never had any successes of any kind. But I know that victory is a matter not of scale, but of quality.’

  Freddie tried to imagine him instructing Mattie in some craft, but could not. Still, he might pass for a teacher. She suggested a contract, three months’ notice to be given on his side, one month on hers, and renewable the following July.

  ‘I’m doing you down, dear.’

  ‘That’s right, Miss Wentworth.’

  Freddie felt some interest in Carroll, more, perhaps, than in Hannah. She had heard in his remarks the weak, but pure, voice of complete honesty. She was not sure that she had ever heard it before, and thought it would be worth studying as a curiosity.

  3

  FREDDIE’S was in Baddeley Street, in the middle of Covent Garden, which in itself is in the exact middle or heart of London. In the old Garden of the 1960s the market was open every weekday and in consequence the Opera House and the Theatre Royal rose majestically, beset with heavy traffic, above a wash of fruit, flowers, and vegetables. The world’s most celebrated singers had to pick their way to their triumphs through porters’ barrows, and for the great performances, when the queue formed at night for next morning’s tickets, every empty barrow was full of sleeping Londoners. You could find a niche, too, on the piles of netted carrots which were often waiting in the colonnade of the Opera itself. Evangelists of various religions patrolled the queues late into the night, calling on them to repent, and distributing tracts which lay with the other rotting debris about the Garden. When morning came the starlings woke there earlier than in any other part of London.

  This was the world of the Temple children, who had no playground, and no particular place to eat their school dinner. When the midday break came Miss Blewett unlocked the front door and stood back to let them out. The better-off got themselves something to eat at Tito’s Cafe, or at the twenty-four-hour coffee-stall outside St Paul’s, the actors’ church. The others ran, like little half-tame animals on the scavenge, through the alleys of the great market. By that time most of the warehouses had rolled down their shutters, and the ground was littered with straw and cardboard and crushed baskets, of the kind called frails. But round one corner or another there would be a wholesaler who hadn’t locked up yet, or a van loading up for the return journey. Far from wanting to sell cheap, the Garden defended their damaged and unsold fruit, declared they were only allowed by law to sell in six dozens, denounced the children as pests, muckers and bleeders and only grudgingly, on the point of departure, released in exchange for ready money a few misshapen apples or carrots. In this way every dinner-hour was a drama. To cajole the unwilling traders, in fact to Freddie them, was better than bargaining for a stale bacon sandwich from the back of the market public houses, which opened at seven o’clock in the morning and closed at nine. Whatever they got, they ate it at once, sitting on the empty floats. Yet in all those years the police never had to record a complaint against them. Doubtless they were regarded as one of the hazards of the market, like the rats, like the frails.

  The children in their turn were perfectly used to the dilapidation of their school. Maintenance was supposed to be in the hands of Baines, the odd job man, who had once stood in as doorkeeper at the Old Vic, and now called himself a schoolkeeper, but in fact only gave a casual glance twice a week at the boiler and the incinerator. Baines also understood what might be called his dra
matic role, as age and mortality’s emblem, muttering at the kids’ antics and hinting at the heartbreaks of a stage career, which would soon cut them down to size. He was not a skilled handyman and couldn’t have undertaken the repairs in any case; that was why he suited Freddie. Although he would never have admitted it, Baines also did whatever cleaning was allowed to take place. With Miss Blewett he constituted the permanent staff. Others, like those two who’d just been taken on, came and went with the seasons.

  4

  CARROLL and Hannah did not meet until the beginning of term, by which time both of them had found somewhere to live. Hannah had gone straight from her interview with Freddie to the Petrou Shoe Bar at the end of the street. The interior smelled powerfully of feet. Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. She took off her shoes and handed them over the counter, saying that she would like the heels done at once as she had to walk round the district till she found accommodation. The Cypriot glanced at her and after affixing the new Phillips heels he knocked a number of steel brads into them, flattening the heads. ‘You will find somewhere before these wear out,’ he said. The two of them recognised each other as people of determination, not fortunate, but not daunted.

  Carroll asked Hannah to come and have tea with him after their first week at work, so that she saw his room before he saw hers. She wished then that she’d been able to go with him and help him look and then they might surely have been able to find somewhere a little less neglected.

  ‘Come on up,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about all those letters in the hall. They’re all for people who used to be here last year.’ His room was exceedingly cold. Everything was in order – more than I can say for mine, Hannah thought – except for an open umbrella put to dry before the gas-fire, which, however, he did not turn on. ‘We were never allowed an open umbrella in the house at home,’ she said. ‘One of the aunts thought it would bring bad luck. But I don’t expect you’re superstitious.’

  He reflected. ‘I think perhaps I am. It’s an article of faith with me that whatever I do is bound to turn out unsuccessfully. I’m sometimes driven, therefore, to do the opposite of what I really want.’ Perhaps that was why he put things to dry and didn’t light the fire. ‘You’re too much alone, Pierce,’ she said.

  He created around him his own atmosphere of sad acceptance. Under the window stood a formerly polished wooden table, and on it was laid out his dictionary and paper and a biro with three refills attached to a card. Carroll told her that he hoped now he’d got to London that he’d be able to commit some of his thoughts to writing.

  ‘So that’s where you sit and work.’

  ‘When I sit there I feel as if I’m working.’

  Something in Carroll made Hannah feel less innocent, but more compassionate. He eventually made a cup of tea with evaporated milk, and unfolding a copy of The Times, began to read to her aloud. The snow had held up work on the National Theatre site on the South Bank. A small crowd had gathered to see Mr Macmillan … ‘? read through the paper myself this morning,’ he said, ‘and I just marked one or two of the more amusing paragraphs, as I knew you’d be coming this afternoon.’

  God in heaven, does he think I can’t read the paper for myself, Hannah thought. And it was not exactly that he lacked confidence. He showed no more hesitation than a sleepwalker. ‘Do you think you’ll stay long in this job?’ she asked.

  He put down The Times and looked at her bright puzzled face. ‘At first I’d had it in mind to give notice at the end of the first term,’ he said. ‘But now I haven’t.’ Then, perceiving that he had made things awkward, he asked her what she thought of the place herself.

  Hannah cast her mind back. The children did a half day’s education only. If they went to their music, dancing and dramatic classes in the morning, they spent the afternoon in a kind of torpor; if they weren’t to go till the afternoon, they were almost uncontrollable all morning. Feverishly competitive, like birds in a stubblefield, twitching looks over their shoulder to make sure they were still ahead, they all of them lied as fast as they could speak. Whether they had any kind of a part in a show or not, they wrote Working against their names in the register and claimed that they were only in school because there wasn’t a rehearsal that day. The first professional secret they learned was an insane optimism. Still, all children tell lies. But not all of them, if reproached, well up at once with unshed crystal tears, or strike their foreheads in self-reproach, like the prince in Swan Lake.

  At least their names weren’t difficult to learn. They pressed them upon Hannah. That was Gianni, the school’s best dancer, faintly moustached at eleven years old, then Mattie leaning back with arms folded in the back row, one finger against his cheek, miming concentration, next to him a very small preoccupied boy who did not speak, but was indicated as Jonathan, then, as near to Gianni as possible, the terrifying Joybelle Morgan. Mattie, Gianni, and Joybelle, whose very curls seemed to tinkle like brass filings, should none of them have been in Hannah’s junior form, but they were used apparently to going unchecked from one shabby classroom to another. They wanted to see the new teacher. They were aching and sick with anxiety to show her what they could do. – I’m not a theatrical agent, she told them – I’m here to teach you conversational French. – We know French, Miss, said Gianni. All of them could produce a stream of words and intonations which sounded precisely like French, if meaning was not required. Give them half an hour, indeed, and they could imitate anything. Fortunately they were also able to imitate silence, or, rather, that impressive moment of stillness when a player knows he has carried the whole audience. Even for thirty seconds, which was all they could manage, the hush was welcome.

  Otherwise they were in constant agitation. They were flexing their fragile toes and fingers, or trying out their unmarked faces. Mattie’s kid-glove features stretched into shapes of incomprehension and joy. He had to keep flexible, he said. Happy are those who can be sure that what they are doing at the moment is the most important thing on earth. That, surely, is a child’s privilege. Reality is his game. But what becomes of him if the game he is playing is work?

  All they needed was to be noticed, and to be seen not to care whether they were noticed or not. In the lunch break Gianni was rattling about the lockers. He had a top-hat-and-cane class at two o’clock, now his hat was missing out of his locker, also his cane. ‘Robbery!’ he sang, dancing rapidly, for Hannah’s benefit, between the desks. He hoped before too long to start in Dombey & Son. His feet prattled and flashed in elaborate practice steps.

  ‘I can do all my pick-ups,’ he called, gyrating.

  Joybelle appeared and remarked, quite automatically, that Gianni was a pick-up himself, only she’d been told he came expensive.

  ‘She can’t help talking double,’ Gianni explained. ‘Her parents are in the licensed trade, they have to drum up custom.’

  Joybelle gave Hannah a smile, as between two understanding women. ‘I’m everything to my mother. She would have loved me to have a little sister.’

  ‘Called off by popular request,’ said Gianni.

  Joybelle came close and leaned her brightly crisp head against Hannah’s breast.

  ‘When he heard my mother was carrying again my father got something to terminate it. He made mum swallow it out of a spoon. She showed me the spoon afterwards in case I had to come to court and swear to something. The metal had gone all black. It was black, Miss.’

  Joybelle had little talent, and although she would not reach the age of ten for another few weeks, it was not difficult to predict her future. She had, as it turned out, concealed Gianni’s hat and cane in order to offer them to him later, because she wanted to feel like his slave maiden. Hannah called the afternoon class together and gave out some outline maps which she had brought with her, and on which the children were to fill in the capitals of Europe. She felt indignation come over her, because when they were bent down, with the round tops of their shining heads
towards her, they looked like any other class.

  Rightly or wrongly, she saw them at that moment as taking their place in the whole world’s history of squandered childhood, got rid of for fashion or convenience sake, worked into apathy, pressed into service as adults, or lost in some total loss, photographed as expendable and staring up with saucer eyes at the unstarved reporter. All that she managed to say to Carroll was that it might in some ways be a pity for the children to turn professional so young. He was mildly surprised, and reminded her that she had only taken the post, wasn’t that so, because she was fond of the theatre.

  True for you, she thought, although she might have managed to suppress the fondness if her mother hadn’t suggested so often that she ought to do so. It was hard to explain, a matter perhaps of the senses. One of her younger sisters felt the same way about hospitals and had said that at the first breath of disinfected air she’d known she wanted to work there. Yes, the scent of Dettol had worked powerfully on Bridie. The convent, too, came at those with a vocation through its fragrance of furniture polish. In the same way Hannah felt native to the theatre, and yet she had never been backstage. She had only lingered outside and wondered in passing. It was all guesswork for her.

  Her mother had phoned to ask about her new appointment. What sort of a place was it, a stage school sounded more like a half and half to her, and was this Miss Wentworth anything to the Wentworths of Ballymoyle whom her mother had known quite well as a girl, and if the school was privately run what kind of arrangements were being made about Hannah’s annual increment and pension, also were there any men at all on the staff, men teachers of course she meant, well, Carroll was a common enough name, he might be something to Mrs Carroll over at Mullen who had three sons two grown, one an undertaker one in the bank, but of course there was no need to settle anything in a hurry and she took it Hannah was only having a look round her before she got placed in a decent grammar school.