At Freddie's

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘Pierce, the classes. There’s very few left in them, could you take them all together? I’m going down to the Nonesuch to see to Mattie’s education.’

  ‘All day, Hannah?’

  ‘You’re free to laugh at me, if my sisters were here they’d feel the same, but it’s a great thing for me to be going backstage. I came to London only for that, really.’

  Carroll did not comment on this, but simply repeated:

  ‘You’ll be gone all day?’

  He held out the bright coat for her to put it on, venturing: ‘You look grand in that coat, Hannah.’ She wore it every day and that was really his point, although he hardly expected her to grasp it. From the window he saw her running off in the direction of the Strand, almost running, anyway.

  The Nonesuch is just off the Strand, on the site of a medieval royal palace. The stage door is in Wellington Street, the pit and gallery entrance at the bottom of Catherine Street, and the theatre covers part of the triangular site between them. Built, or rather rebuilt for the third time in 1869, just in time for Charles Dickens to visit it and to think well of a couple of farces there, it has an attractive, frowsty facade, painted in plum-red, white and gold, somewhere betweerra Victorian public house and a Victorian Venetian church. It has never had a famous or even a very prosperous period, no great managements, not even a great fire, but in spite of this and in spite of the cramped conditions, most actors have a kind word for the Nonesuch.

  Hannah had been there only once, with the Bluebell, to see a comedy which had just come off. Now, turning out of the Strand into Wellington Street to find the stage door, she felt in a different and inferior position, like a governess at the family dinner party. This wouldn’t do. She took herself to task. She had been looking forward ever since she came to London to the experience of going backstage.

  ‘I’d like to see whoever is in charge of the children, that is, the child here, that’s to say, Matthew Stewart.’

  ‘Are you his education?’ the doorman asked.

  Hannah nodded. She had with her a card identifying herself as employed by the Temple Theatrical School, but was not asked to show it. The truth is, she told herself, you’d be known as a teacher if you were standing naked in the middle of the Gobi desert. If a human being came along he’d recognise you at once for a teacher and know you were harmless. In the case of us females, it’s perhaps something to do with the kind of capacious bag we have to carry. Naked or not, we’d never give that up.

  The doorkeeper returned to his Racing Standard. It was flattering, however, that he expected her to know where to go and what to do next.

  At last she was inside a stage door. Sick of reproving herself, didn’t her mother do enough of that, she allowed herself to feel admitted to a secret society. She stood between the firebuckets and a pile of boxes which might have told her, even on their own, that she was backstage, for no one could remember who had brought them or what for and it was no one’s business to take them away. And it was here that the profession planned and conducted its loving war with the public, the friendly aliens on the other side of the curtain. She was behind the lines, where she’d always wanted to be.

  The corridor looked as though it had never been repainted because someone took a pride in its bleakness. The cold kept the dank smell somewhat at bay. Out of a sort of cupboard, or pantry, a shape emerged with a broom.

  ‘Have you seen Mattie Stewart?’ Hannah asked, knowing that Mattie only had to be in any place for a day to make himself known, however unfavourably, to everyone.

  The cleaner was a West Indian, tolerant of the useless anxiety of others.

  ‘He won’t be where he’s supposed to be, love.’

  Hannah did not care to go back to the doorkeeper. She had the kind of temperament which always goes forward rather than back. Surely someone would be wandering about, that was what corridors were for, and then she could find out when Mattie would be free for a lesson. She turned left, away from a distant noise of echoing voices and interrupted music, and began to climb a flight of stairs. This was from habit rather than reason, because when the Bluebell couldn’t get passes they always tried for the back of the upper circle. On the first landing, however, marked in gilt letters, and with a pointing hand, as B dressing rooms – but these were much too good for Mattie and she’d better go on up – she met, as she had expected, someone wandering. It was the wreck of a blue-eyed grey-haired man, just able to pull himself together enough to give her a well-worn smile.

  ‘Please could you help me?’ she asked.

  ‘Since you say “please”.’

  ‘I’m looking for Matthew Stewart. I want to give him a lesson.’

  ‘Congratulations, my dear.’

  ‘I’m his education,’ Hannah persisted. ‘But I don’t know where to start looking for him or where to find a room to teach him in … I think you must be one of the cast?’

  ‘I’m Boney Lewis,’ he said, pausing, as every actor must, in no matter what state of decay, to see if the name was recognised. Nothing. She continued to look up at him. ‘If you want Mattie, though, you’ve come to the right place. The rumour is that he feels ill and he’s been sent to lie down in my dressing-room. In all honesty, the dressing-room I share. B1, the first one you come to, which, to my mind, is not a sufficient reason for turning it into the juveniles’ sick room.’

  ‘Do you know what’s wrong with him?’

  Boney threw up his hands in a lavish gesture.

  ‘My dear.’

  With the shadow of a bow he passed her and began to negotiate the stairs down. It was the first time Hannah had ever talked to an actor, as you might to an ordinary fellow, and she was not disappointed. He had never yet given – though Hannah could not know this – a disappointing performance.

  She rattled at the door of B1 and then sharply opened it, meeting a smell like a chemist’s shop, cold cream and something else. The light was on and unexpectedly she caught sight of herself in the glass opposite, a disconcerting moment always, for then it seems as if your reflection has been waiting for you. She looked pink-faced and tidy, and, it struck her now, absurdly determined.

  Mattie was lying on a narrow seat or sofa, wrapped in a military greatcoat. The slight groan he gave might or might not be deliberate. With his long lashes fluttering on his pallid cheeks, he looked like one of the photographs which Italian undertakers supply for the graves of the departed.

  ‘William … Mr Beardless … you came …’

  ‘Who were you expecting, Mattie?’ asked Hannah sharply.

  He glimmered at her through the fringe of his lashes.

  ‘Miss …’, he said faintly.

  In class or out of it, Mattie had never called her anything but ‘Miss Graves’, or once or twice ‘Hannah’, when excitement had got the better of him. It was Gianni who had called her ‘Miss’ and Hannah took note that Mattie was giving a fair imitation of Gianni’s voice; he was for the time being a child from a poor home, dogged now by ill fortune and scarcely able to manage a weak word or a smile.

  She put down the bag of books she had brought and looked round for somewhere to hang her raincoat. Every wall fluttered with bits of paper, old messages, old telegrams, good luck notes, notices from the Actors’ Church Union, newspaper cuttings, flags, mascots and one or two ex-votos in the shape of silver arms and legs. What would poor Pierce do in here, she thought. It would drive him mad within ten minutes.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask what’s wrong with me, Miss?’

  ‘I expect you’ve told everyone else in the place.’ But she was moved by the curious atmosphere of the dressing-room, the air of expectancy and of all its past expectancies, disappointments perhaps, reduced now to the withered telegrams, two or three deep.

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with you, Mattie?’ she asked at length.

  Mattie lay back and relaxed, his power recognised.

  ‘I’ve seen it, Miss.’

  He pulled the overcoat round him with trembling fingers.
/>
  ‘Don’t you want to know what I’ve seen?’ ‘Well, what did you see?’

  It appeared that he had caught sight of the ghost of an old-timer – that was how Mattie described him – who was known to haunt the theatre on Thursday nights. The ghost was said to be that of a Victorian music-hall comic, who in his last days went over the border of sanity and applied at one theatre after another, begging to play Richard III.

  ‘He tries to go out where the box-office is now, but he can’t get through,’ Mattie went on. ‘All that part’s been built on since … Don’t you want to know what it looked like?’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘It might just have been an ordinary sort of old man going by, that’s why I got this shock, Miss. Still with his make-up on, eyebrows like this, honest, Miss, he seemed to be beckoning me.’

  ‘No, he didn’t, Mattie.’

  ‘You don’t know the gestures these old men make, Miss. At all events he wasn’t natural.’

  ‘Perhaps that was just as well.’

  ‘Tell you something, I’m old enough not to get over a thing like this. A thing like this could make its mark on me for as long as it takes.’

  Hannah felt that she was not getting the better of Mattie. She remembered with self-reproach that Gianni had told her at least half a truth, and she had not believed him. She struggled, however, to keep her viewpoint correct. Mattie was simply trying to draw attention to himself. And this came back to her now as one of the most reprehended faults of her own childhood: don’t show off, don’t make a holy show of yourself, don’t keep thinking about your looks, nobody’s going to notice you anyway, but it could hardly be so much of a fault if you hoped, as Mattie did, to make your living by it.

  She made him sit up and gave him a French vocabulary and a pencil. He accepted them readily enough, but it was all quite hopeless, she’d better come back another day and find someone, the assistant house manager probably, who would tell her exactly where she ought to go on these occasions. It was only a kind of willing bemusement which had led her up to the dressing-room in the first place.

  While Mattie, still in character, copied out a few weak words, Hannah tried to make room for her things on a row of iron pegs above his head. Three of the pegs were already taken up by a tweed overcoat, a Donegal tweed so fine that she felt like stroking it, with a pale silk lining, the sort of coat that would always look good anywhere.

  ‘That’s Mr Lewis’s coat’, said Mattie faintly.

  Hannah was surprised. From the meeting on the stairs she would have thought him only just about able to make ends meet. Perhaps this garment, which was never likely to show its age, was all he had left from more prosperous days. And the ready though inconvenient sympathy welled up. She saw Boney as the needy Colline in La Bohème, obliged to sing a farewell to his favourite overcoat. Still he was in work now, and King John might have a good run. She checked herself, seeming to hear her mother’s voice with painful clearness: ‘Who is this fellow, anyway, some kind of actor? Are you mad, Hannah, or what?’ She was getting nowhere with her lesson, and after all it was as a teacher she was paid – and now there was someone coming in, not much privacy here it seemed. The door opened with a large gesture, and Boney made his entrance.

  ‘Is he in pain?’ he asked, glancing towards the sofa.

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘You should think what you’re saying,’ cried Hannah, too indignant to care whether she sounded like a schoolteacher or not.

  ‘No emotion can be so pure as the hatred you feel for a child.’

  Mattie put down his pencil and looked at Boney with feigned surprise.

  ‘You’re not drunk, Mr Lewis.’

  ‘You’re not ill,’ said Boney.

  They understood each other perfectly. And after all they were in the same profession. Hannah felt distressed. Of one of them she wondered, what will he grow into? and of the other, what was he once?

  ‘I’ve just started Matthew’s education,’ she said, ‘I’m aware that this is your dressing-room, or half of it is, but I should be very grateful if I could have the use of it for a little longer.’

  ‘The child is wanted on stage,’ Boney replied. ‘They’re going to rehearse the carry in Act 4. Go, bear him in thine arms, From forth this morsel of dead royalty The life is fled.’

  ‘I haven’t had a call,’ said Mattie doubtfully.

  But, as though on cue, the intercom in the corner, one of the very few new pieces of equipment at the Nonesuch, cleared its throat; a call for Prince Arthur.

  Hannah had expected the child to spring up at once, and as he slowly uncurled, the idea seized her that he might really be ill, but he only said:

  ‘I hope Mr Beardless isn’t annoyed with me. I’m afraid I made him miss an entrance this morning.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re hiding in my dressing-room,’ said Boney.

  Hannah didn’t at all mind being left alone to talk to an actor, but why did she have to begin by saying, ‘You’re the first actor I’ve met,’ a needless remark, just as needless as what she’d said to poor Pierce about those sheets of hers. And then, although she’d explained twice already, she found herself beginning on how she was afraid she wasn’t much of an advertisement for the Temple School, because she’d only just arrived and got started and now she supposed there was nothing else for it but to go back again.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Boney, enormous on the narrow sofa.

  ‘Hannah Graves.’

  ‘Well, Hannah, whatever mystery there may be about your movements, there is none about mine. Three-quarters of an actor’s life is spent waiting for something.’

  His voice was a rich bass, but now he continued on a note half way between grumbling and keening:

  ‘They tell me that I’ve got to speak in a higher register, so that King John will come out as the deepest voice in the play. Just to raise my pitch a fraction, to squeak and gibber, doubtless they want to turn me into a boy soprano, just a little operation, just a little snip with a pair of scissors, ensuring me a job for life, the Papal choir, the Aldeburgh Festival, a Japanese salesman at the Motor Show …’

  ‘I think you’re exaggerating,’ Hannah said. Boney was not disconcerted.

  ‘So, my dear, you want to meet actors. Well, that can’t be done. They can’t be met. They don’t make good friends.’

  ‘I think it’s a very difficult profession.’ But that was absurd. No one could possibly have looked more at their ease, or less prepared to make any kind of effort, than Boney. She tried again. ‘I’ve heard it said that you can’t be a public and a private success at the same time.’

  ‘They’re right. I’m not.’

  As she leaned over him to get her bag and raincoat down from the iron pegs Boney stretched out an arm and with the ease of long habit grasped her round the thighs and squeezed her energetically.

  ‘Don’t let me excite you too much,’ he muttered with closed eyes. ‘I’ll have a call in a few minutes.’

  ‘Is that what you came back here for?’ Hannah asked, interested.

  ‘No, no, I came back because I thought you might be giving a maths lesson … I wanted just to sit and listen to it … I came back specially for that … I’m quite uneducated, I’ve had no chance of a decent education, no chance, none, I need everything explained to me …’

  She might, perhaps, have explained that he had shown neither kindness nor responsibility towards Mattie, and that it was time for her to be getting back, but it was delightful to Hannah not to have to worry about such things, at least for the time being, and in any case they might sound better when he had let go of her, she thought.

  Sitting half way down the stalls, in N22, from which supposedly very little could be heard and which therefore served as a test for all the others, Ed Voysey was by now in a very nervous condition. William Beardless, who preferred to discuss each point alone with the director, sat beside him, in N23. William was not
an easy person to deal with. It was cruelty, nothing less than cruelty, to be asked to deal with him. With his high reputation, distinctive style, and large following, he occupied his own chosen ground, but insecurely, always on the watch for infringements. Ed felt obliged to listen to him, although one part of his mind was calculating how long one could do this without becoming insane, and everything they said was interrupted by snatches of taped music from the stage, where the cast were waiting to rehearse the carry. This music was disturbing in itself, being in fact Land of Hope and Glory played backwards, the Edwardian dream, as Ed saw it, in reverse.

  ‘What is it, William, what ails you, dear William?’

  ‘I just want to query the passage in Act Four where I, where King John hears of his mother’s death. The messenger has six lines there to tell me that my noble mother’s dead, her ears are stopt with dust, and all I say in reply is: “What! Mother dead!”’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘“What! Mother dead!” would seem inadequate, I think, even if said – and mothers must die there, as elsewhere – in Surbiton or Tonbridge.’

  ‘Surely you’ve got some more lines, William, some more to say at that point, some more lines there.’

  ‘You cut them yesterday’, said the assistant stage manager, from two rows back.

  The greatest of actors would rather be cheated of a pound of flesh and blood than of even half of one of his lines; if he didn’t feel this, he would not be an actor. Moved by his principal’s anguish, Ed yielded, and restored all that he had removed. Beardless, with an irritating smile of Christian forgiveness, received the lines back from his director’s hands. Ed could now go ahead with the run-through for the new carry.

  Shakespeare had slipped up badly, in Ed Voysey’s view, in leaving Arthur, the morsel of dead royalty, lying on the stage for over a hundred lines while various lords discussed what to do next. Better to cut everything, except the moment where Hubert enters and is wrongly accused of murder. Boney would have to draw his sword there in self-defence and the flash of light from the blade should tell all the better because he wouldn’t be wearing that conspicuous gold watch. Ed mentioned this as a kind of joke, to lighten the tension, or rather the lack of it, as Boney had emerged from the dressing-rooms only after being called twice, and looking drowsily amiable. But at the mention of his watch he stiffened.