At Freddie's
Page 4
‘Pierce, do you know any undertakers?’ she asked him idly now. He began to deliberate. ‘Don’t worry, it was only my mother was on at me.’
After tea Carroll showed her down the stairs, indicating for the second time the worn portions of the carpet. ‘There’s one more thing I’d thought of saying to you, and that is that you have the real Northern Irish complexion. I think we really only see it at home, very radiant, very fair. I consider that it’s produced by the damp prevailing winds, and by the cold draughts inside the houses themselves. I hope it won’t disimprove over here.’
‘You must tell me if it does, Pierce. You must tell me the moment I start going to pieces.’
There was a possibility that he might smile at this, but Hannah felt she couldn’t spare the time to see whether he would or not. She left him standing in the dark hall, piled with other people’s letters, and took the bus back to the Temple School.
There was no need for her to go back, she was off at four-fifteen and the time was long past that. Indeed it was probably a mistake, and might give Freddie the notion that slave-driving encourages slavery. But Hannah wanted to put the next day’s work on the blackboard. This would mean that she needn’t turn her back on the class first thing, which is as unwise in junior teaching as in lion-taming.
She had to give up this idea, however, when she found the lights on, and Jonathan still occupying his dormouse space at his desk. Pale, unfathomable, and compact, he raised heavy blue-veined lids from bluer eyes to watch her. Mattie was also there, messing about with the switches.
‘You’re my teacher,’ Jonathan finally said.
‘That’s love,’ Mattie interrupted with peculiar eagerness. Hannah was about to reproach them both for insincerity, but after only a week she had learned how little the word meant here.
‘Jonathan’s a genius,’ Mattie went on. ‘He’d have been in Dombey before I was, only he was too short. He’s grown one and five-eighth inches this year, though.’
He pointed to a series of ink marks, perhaps measurements, on the wall. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, either of you,’ Hannah said. ‘Mattie, you ought to be getting down to the theatre.’
Both of them listened with keen attention.
‘What are you doin here, young Jonathan,’ said Mattie suddenly. ‘Why don’t you g’wan home?’
Hannah recognised immediately her own Belfast accent.
‘I’m just waitin, mister.’
‘And what are you waitin for, little man?’
‘I’m not waitin for annythin, mister, I’m just waitin.’
‘You have to be waitin for somethin I’m tellin you, what are you fuckin well doin then?’
‘I’m trainin to be a waiter.’
She was not self-conscious and never listened to herself, but surely if she did she wouldn’t sound like that, not as hard as that, not at all like that really.
‘Have we hurt your feelings?’ they asked, delighted.
‘I don’t want your pity,’ she said.
Mattie offered her a cigarette. ‘They’re American. I get given these things. They’re Peter Stuyvesants.’
Hannah did not correct his pronunciation of this word. Mattie took out his little silver lighter.
‘Jonathan isn’t really allowed to do imitations. They’re bad for his acting.’
‘You have your dialect classes,’ said Hannah coldly.
‘Ah, holy smoke, those same dialect classes is no good at all,’ cried Jonathan, ‘you want to see the lines she’s givin us, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph [falling inflection], is it a star you’re wanting to make of me, why I’m thinkin that if I crossed the ocean to Hollywood that does be in America by the time I got there I’d surely be drowned. Talk is it? In the length and breadth of the Old Country, Miss Graves, I’m asking you did you ever hear talk the like of that?’
‘I haven’t been over the length and breadth of Ireland,’ she said, ‘but I’ve certainly never heard anyone talk like that.’
Jonathan nodded serenely. ‘We’ll refuse to do it. We’ll tell her you said she was an old fraud.’
He broke away from Mattie, whose arm was round his neck, and without a single glance behind him, walked backwards out of the room.
‘He’s been practising that,’ Mattie remarked. ‘He’ll go on until he gets it right.’
‘Hasn’t he got it right now?’
‘Not that time, he wasn’t exactly in the middle of the doorway. I can do it, though, I’ll show you some time.’
‘Show me now and then go off home, I’ve had quite enough of you.’
‘No, not now.’
He pulled the door to, and began in a low confidential tone to explain everything. He had no parents alive, or, if he had, he didn’t know them and had never known them. He was run by an agent who had a place the other side of the Garden and there was a room of sorts there for him, this agent collected all his fees and paid the school and he didn’t know if anything was being put aside for him or not. He got one pound ten a week spending money, but the agent, well, anyone could call themselves that, kept putting it to Mattie that he could earn a sight more if he left the Temple and went in for commercials, that is, if he could fix himself up with some freckles. Hannah was given to understand that it was impossible to get work advertising cornflakes without freckles. But there was some stuff you could use to bring freckles on, Mattie said. It was like the stuff blacks used to use in New York in the days when they wanted to look lighter, only in reverse. You had to grease up and let it work through a bit here and there, like acid. They mustn’t be too regular, you wanted more across the nose. The pain screwed you up. Of course some people minded pain more than others. That was called your pain threshold. – Hannah asked how the freckles could be removed when no longer wanted. Mattie rolled up the white of his eyes and spread his hands out; no idea. His whole manner changed as he spoke; he sounded tired to death, close to the gutter.
‘Who looks after you when you get back, Mattie?’
‘What looking after, Miss?’
She had meant his dinner, of course, and his clothes, though he always looked as smart as a child could.
‘That’s part of the job, that’s all part of the agent’s put-on, Miss. He’s got a Hoffmann presser in the basement.’
Hannah would not ask what or who this was.
‘We have to go out looking okay,’ Mattie pursued, ‘I don’t know what he’d do to us if we didn’t go out looking okay.’ Perhaps a Hoffmann presser was an instrument of torture. ‘I’m really in his hands, you see, Miss. Until I get a bit older, I’m helpless.’
Hannah, feeling the tears of indignation rise, turned away to clean the blackboard. She wondered how Mattie had dared to let himself get into trouble at the Alexandra. All his freaks, and in particular his extravagant affection for Jonathan, were excusable from a waif. Something might be said to that effect. However, when she looked round he was gone.
5
THERE was something uneasy in the friendship between Mattie and Jonathan, which was not a childish matter, and indeed not exactly a friendship. Hannah soon came to know how they were likely to behave, but not why. Anxious though she was to do nothing of the sort, she went to consult Freddie, who said, ‘I’m glad you’ve turned to me, dear, very glad.’
Hannah explained that she was distressed at the thought of Mattie’s home life, if it could be called that, and hardly knew whether he ought to be encouraged or kept under.
‘It’s not that he’s deprived, exactly. He gets one pound ten a week to spend on himself.’
‘Considerably more than that, in fact,’ said Freddie. ‘That’s one of his troubles, yes. Wealth produces its fantasies, like poverty.’
‘Well, what fantasies does he have?’
‘They take various forms. Unfortunately he has noticed that there are more important things than money. I may have taught him that myself. I’ll have to have a word with his father.’
‘What father?’ Hannah asked.
‘But he’s only nine,’ said Hannah.
‘A little bit of anxiety there too, dear. He seems to be growing rather slowly. They’ve been paying for him for two years, and they wonder when they’ll get a return on their money.’
‘What do you say to them, Miss Wentworth?’
‘Shakespeare, dear, Shakespeare or nothing. I remind them that you only get a great actor once every fifty years, or, indeed, a great man of any kind. And without a great theatre you never have a great nation … Of course, you want your actors tall enough to be visible from the back of the stalls. They’ve paid to see them, dear. But they’ll only have to wait a little longer for Jonathan.’
Casual and lordly in his attitude to everyone about him, unless he hoped to get something out of them, Mattie was none the less obsessed by Jonathan. Constantly he tried to manoeuvre himself into what should have been his natural position of patron. But Jonathan was self-contained. Undemanding by temperament, he made do with very little. Mattie himself needed a number of rapidly changing items – sharp jackets, a new trannie, cigarettes in fifties, and so on. Jonathan gravely admired these things, indeed appeared to be impressed by them, but did not covet them. What is the use of admiration without envy? But Jonathan, secreting himself and watching the world as a passing show, appeared to have learned something so important that his whole time was taken up in considering it. Mattie would have liked to knock him black and blue and bend his little finger back to make him tell what it was. Only at rare intervals would Jonathan join in with him, as a kind of double act, as on the evening when they teased Hannah. Then Mattie became dangerously exalted.
In almost every observable way he was Jonathan’s superior – older, better looking, more intelligent, born to success in the profession – not a good voice, it’s true, it was light and rusty, but a wonderfully expressive dark-browed face which would carry across any theatre, and, young as he was, a completely finished personality, exactly the same on stage and off. Under his affectations he was as hard as iron. That was his chief asset, and assets are there to earn interest. Mattie looked you straight in the face, and then turned away with a caressing sidelong glance which in middle age would doubtless become horrible to see, but what triumphs, in the meantime, it would bring him!
He showed off perpetually. Jonathan, on the other hand, was silent for long periods, and was the only child at Freddie’s who had no audition piece. He could no more be tempted into a display than a hibernating animal. Then, when he emerged, apparently knowing his own times and seasons, he would become something quite other, doing a speech or two, or dividing himself in order to turn into (for example) two elderly men he had seen through an office window, one short, one tall, getting ready to go home, and helping each other on with their coats. They dusted each other off, the short one stretched, the tall one discreetly bent down. All this was not so hard to imitate, but Jonathan suggested also their tenderness for each other’s infirmities and a certain anxiety, about which he could have known nothing. After a bit the scene disappeared as he subsided, sticking his chewing gum back into his circular cheek.
As an actor, he needed an audience, but did not mind who it was or what they said. This drove Mattie into a fury of activity. Indifference is an unfair defence, and amiable indifference – because the little boy liked him and was always glad to see him – is the most unfair of all. He could not be satisfied until Jonathan had got into some sort of trouble. Then would be the moment to rush luxuriously to his assistance. But there were so few opportunities, one must be continually on the watch. Prompting, for instance, was never needed. If Jonathan didn’t know his lines (and he was not a quick study) he smiled, and read them from the book. If he had no dinner money, the girls gave him Fruity Snacks. Once or twice, however, he complained of a stomach ache, although in a detached way, as though the pain was the responsibility of someone else. Then Mattie was in his glory. Lay him down near the radiator, Miss, and keep him warm, I know just what he has to have, I’ll go down to Miss Blewett for the Bisodol, you want to be careful, he might get a lot worse quite suddenly, we had to get a stomach pump to one of the cast on Saturday. – He was thanked of course, but it was never enough. He could not master the half-sleepy mysterious gum-chewing little rat of a Jonathan, or exact the word of approval he wanted. Later he rolled him over on the washroom floor and banged his round head on the concrete as though cracking a nut. ‘Has that cured your bellyache?’ – Jonathan considered, and said he would tell him later. Mattie was outraged. And yet his dissatisfaction showed that he was not quite lost. It was the tribute of a human being to the changeling, or talent to genius.
All this was indoors. In the street, it became nothing. Mattie, at twelve, could not associate there with a nine-year-old. The illusion, which was the most genuine thing in his life, vanished. His glittering bike carried him away, while Jonathan was left kicking a can along the gutter.
Freddie was also obliged to court Jonathan, whose round gaze met hers with unblinking politeness, but no more than that. When distinguished visitors arrived at the school (and this happened quite often, opening up yet further the mystery of Freddie’s past, for all these people came because they had once known her well, and therefore couldn’t say no to her now) the children were usually called upon for a display. Jonathan was never anxious to be produced. He brought neither his joys nor his sorrows to Freddie. More woundingly still, he took them to the Bluebell. Only she could soothe his anxiety over the matter of growing tall and starting work. They would sit together and play a gambling game with liquorice allsorts. Miss Blewett handled the lurid sweeties with a certain air, having worked, she said, in younger days at a casino at Knocke-le-Zoute. When the game had got quietly under way, she would make kindly suggestions. Perhaps Jonathan might be auditioned for this year’s Peter Pan. Christmas threatened, the Peter Pan season would start soon. Mattie and Gianni had both got started as Lost Boys.
Peter Pan himself, of course, was obliged never to grow up, so that he could always have fun. The problem at a stage school is not to grow up, in order to earn money. Jonathan was well aware of the threatening years ahead. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen it is very hard to find work in the profession.
‘But you ought to talk to Miss Wentworth more,’ Miss Blewett told him. ‘After all, we expect great things of you, and it’s great things that she’s always stood out for. You ought to be with her now, really.’
‘You wouldn’t like it if he was,’ said Mattie, hovering.
One late afternoon, however, when Freddie was approaching the rehearsal room, Jonathan stood in front of her, faintly troubled, and said: ‘I don’t think you ought to go in there, Miss Wentworth.’
‘For what reason?’
He only repeated, ‘I would rather you didn’t go in there. On the whole, I think you’d better not go in there.’
‘Did you ever know me to change my mind, Jonathan?’
He tugged at her shapeless sleeve.
The door opened and seemed to cast forth Mattie, feverishly excited, surrounded by admirers. He was in drag. The grey wig and spectacles and drooping cardigan were a hateful miniature of Freddie; she was faced by her shrunken self.
‘Shakespeare would have been pleased, dear,’ shouted Mattie, wound up to his highest pitch.
The light gleamed on large brooches and semi-precious stones, pinned to his padded breasts. He saw her look at them and his coarse confidence ebbed.
‘I found them, Miss Wentworth.’
‘So have I,’ said Freddie.
But she was not really attending to him. What interested her was that Jonathan should have tried to warn her off. It was not like him, he must have wanted to spare her a shock. Possibly, however, he had been trying to spare Mattie.
6
PIERCE Carroll’s experience of teaching at Freddie’s was not much like Hannah’s. She couldn’t help being aware of this, because they had such a very thin wall between the classrooms.
It might have been anticipated that among these unruly children of artifice and real and contrived emotion, Carroll would be unable to keep order, and he couldn’t; but neither, in the end, did he create disorder. Entering the room in his sedge-green suit, with his case in hand, he was greeted, at first, by silence. The Temple children, quivering like a nerve to every change in fashion, could hardly believe that they were to be taught by a being in such trousers, and with a tie held back by a metal clip, and with such a haircut, which might have been the work of a hedger and ditcher. When he laid out his books and announced a course on the history of the British Commonwealth, uproar was poised, then broke in waves from the back row to the front, where the desk-lids slammed and clashed like the teeth of trolls. After about five minutes, which seemed much longer, the noise died down, seeming to circle, more and more gently, round the unperturbed Carroll. He said nothing and did nothing. Gradually the class returned to their preoccupations, exactly as they had before he came into the room. Almost entirely ignored, he began to read a newspaper which, warned by previous experience, he had brought with him. He confronted children talking to each other, with a little music, one of the boys having furtively plugged his electric guitar into the skirting. This last Carroll found soothing. He liked to listen to an air. He was teaching them nothing. But there was no violent disturbance and every human being in the room seemed content.