At Freddie's

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘I’ve never been on stage without it.’

  All the cast looked as though Voysey, whether he had ever worked with Boney before or not, should have known this.

  ‘Well, if it’s helpful, if it seems to help …’

  ‘My father used it when he was starter at the Chepstow Races. Have you ever heard of a late start there?’

  ‘My dear, if it’s brought you luck, there’s absolutely nothing more to say … Has it brought you luck?’

  ‘No,’ said Boney, But I don’t know what things would be like without it.’

  For the carry, to which he now hurried on, Ed now had in mind a kind of funeral procession, the little dead prince to be borne along with one arm hanging limply down, when the audience left the theatre they’d still see that arm and hand in their mind’s eye – the hand would be very white, very heavily made up – he’d have to be carried right at the audience, perhaps right into the audience and up and around the back of the dress circle – could they just walk that?

  ‘An idea,’ said Boney, ‘we might drag him along by the feet.’

  Mattie, who was now blissfully the centre of attention, cast a piteous glance at his director.

  ‘Please, Mr Voysey, I think I should feel safer if Mr Beardless was on stage.’

  Ed tried for an indulgent smile, feeling no answer was necessary, but William immediately leant forward.

  ‘Well, Ed, why not? The king can’t actually be a witness of the death, of course, that’s counter to the whole plot, but I could appear rather high up as a disembodied presence, say stage right, brooding quietly over the whole pitiful scene.’

  And Mattie enquired, in his lightest treble tones, whether, if he had to carry on without Mr Beardless’ protection, he might chew gum in order to calm himself during the carry. ‘Spearmint, Mr Voysey!’ he thrilled. A chewing morsel of dead royalty. Ed got to his feet, and asserting himself at last told them to run through the scene twice, and then break.

  Out of these setbacks, more, surely, than any director should reasonably be called on to bear, the proud illusion had to arise. The time was getting short. But he knew that actors are at their most perverse and bloody-minded only when things are going well.

  12

  HANNAH did not need another letter from her mother, asking her whether she had come to her senses, to know that she hadn’t. She owed it to herself, however, to put her thoughts in order, at least to the extent that her room was in order, that was, good enough to pass.

  To begin with, she earned her own living and was answerable to nobody, except to her own sense of what was right. No need to give an account of herself to her family, or to the nuns, or to her first-year tutor at Queen’s who had been a very, very dear friend of an old friend of her mother’s, and yet it seemed to have taken her a long time to realise this and even now she had to remind herself of it for fear it should slip her memory. It was partly in order to prove it to herself (though mainly because she was soft about him and even truly fond of him) that in her second year she had taken to going out with John Brannon and later, whenever they could afford it, going away with him. Just for the first time they had saved to go to London, to the Regent Palace, and back came the embarrassment, hot as fire, which she had felt when she had got out of her bath and found there wasn’t a towel, and hadn’t liked to call out for fear Johnny wasn’t in the room and some waiter or other might come, and had been reduced to drying herself with her pale blue linen dress, which had done the job well enough but had looked like a dishrag afterwards. The agony of the missing towel and the dress – which had been her best one, after all, seven guineas from My Fair Lady in Belfast and only bought because they were going to a London theatre – had stayed with her longer than the memory of Johnny’s love-making or even Johnny himself. He couldn’t be expected to write often from the States, where he went to finish his medical training, and it was a relief not to have to answer when she could think of less and less to say. Her mother, however, still dwelt unsuspectingly on that nice Brannon boy you were so great with at one time, they say he’s getting on very well over there and in any case a doctor never starves.

  It was Romeo and Juliet that they’d gone to together, at the Old Vic. Hannah, in her damp, wrinkled linen dress had watched Juliet die. It had been grand, really, they’d had a grand time while it lasted. But she believed, from experience, that people are divided into choosers and chosen, and that only by continuous effort can you struggle from one class to the other. She wanted to choose. She had chosen not to follow Johnny and not to help him get on well in Galveston, Texas.

  After the rehearsal of King John Boney had taken her backstage just for a few moments. The lighting designer had arrived for a run-through, and she stood in the darkness cast by the back of the set and vanishing upwards into the high vaulting shadows above. Boney showed her the prompt corner and switchboard, and engaged her with a series of tales – how Larry Olivier had been shot through the leg with an arrow in Henry V, how he himself had caught his sword in the overhead wiring and been shocked rigid, how William Beardless, playing Peer Gynt, had been struck by the Troll-King’s tail and had fallen weeping into the front row of the stalls – tales of danger and disaster, and other gentler ones of misunderstanding. When she left he had come as far as the corner of Wellington Street, where he embraced her shapelessly. ‘Hannah, whose hair shadows her neck, and her eyes are clear.’ She had decided, not really then because she had thought of it much earlier, that she would like to train as an assistant stage manager. Practical sense was needed there, surely, as much as in teaching. Her family would think her mad to break her career and her pension, probably her aunts would say she ought to be committed, but she would be working on the edge of the theatre’s lighted world.

  It was a strange thing, if you came to think of it, that both her family and Pierce Carroll’s had once been as dead against the stage as they well could be. The Carroll grandparents had been black Protestants and had thought the theatre a place of sin, while her own grandfather had been a Mayo man who’d come up to Dublin on a special train to shout down the first night of The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey because it was known that the play was insulting to Irish womanhood. That had been in 1907 and it was his one and only outing to any theatre. She had seen the newspaper cutting he preserved for so long – House Disorderly as Comedy Resumes: Mr Yeats Greeted with ‘Get Off, You Bloody Fraud!’ And for the matter of that it was grandfather’s one and only mention in any newspaper, and even then, not by name.

  She didn’t know why Pierce should have come into her mind at this point; now that he was there she had the familiar sensation of pity, but also of inferiority. There was you had to admit it a stubborn incorruptible intensity in Pierce, which she could never hope to come near. It made her associate him with Jonathan, but Jonathan after all was single-minded because of the talent in him which he scarcely understood himself. What ever talent could Pierce be said to have? Well, she reminded herself, there were those shelves, he was handy with the carpentry, but outside that what could he be said to do supremely well, or even well at all?

  Incorruptible is not the same as unchangeable, and Pierce, in order to please her, had noticeably tried to change. Last week he had even bought two tickets for the theatre, for Uncle Vanya, which was hard to get into, and it was a thousand pities that he hadn’t asked her earlier because she had seen it already, and that disappointed him. She told him that he could easily get his money back by standing outside and selling them to the first people who wanted to buy them, it was always two they wanted, or failing that she’d be glad to go with him anyway. Seeing a good production twice was always worth while, you noticed little details that you’d missed the first time.

  ‘Is that a fact?’ he asked sadly.

  In the end he had given the seats to old Ernest, who seemed gratified. Hannah felt that if it had been possible he would have wagged his tail.

  And now this evening it was raining and Pierce wanted to see her h
ome and shelter her with his umbrella, which was made of black cotton, the kind of thing you’d only see nowadays on a farm, or perhaps at a convent or at the Christian Brothers. Hannah disciplined herself not to mind walking along with a man who carried an umbrella like that. She knew very well what the children said about it.

  Pierce suggested that they should go down one of the side streets and along the Strand; that way they’d avoid the smell of rotten cabbages. Hannah had become familiar to the point of addiction with the wafted odour of the Garden, impossible to separate from the piazza round which the great theatres stood. The lights were up, the box-offices were open. But she very well knew that Pierce wanted to take her that way, three sides of a square, to make the walk back somewhat longer. Carroll also knew that she knew this.

  He was telling her that he would have liked to train as a scientist, or at least as a drainage engineer. ‘That’s a life’s work I should have felt satisfied with.’

  ‘What’s wrong with teaching?’ Hannah replied. ‘Show me anyone who doesn’t remember the teacher they had when they were twelve.’ An unexpected guilt possessed her.

  ‘It’s not so much that I expect to be remembered. That would be excessive.’

  They turned left into the Strand, and caught a distant glimpse of the river. ‘It’s not raining now, Pierce,’ she said. ‘Put that old thing down, for pity’s sake.’

  He furled it slowly, respecting the great age of the stout steel ribs, and carefully aligning the folds.

  ‘In any case, Pierce, I thought you were going to do a bit of writing? You remember you told me that. How are you getting on with it?’

  ‘I’ve struck a difficulty, Hannah.’

  ‘Oh, but doesn’t everybody?’

  ‘I don’t know how many of them have the same difficulty as mine. I’ve discovered that I only have one subject to write about and one subject, the identical one, to think about.’

  ‘That should make it easier, surely.’

  ‘It makes it very painful.’ Looking at the delicate colour in her face which the damp wind brought he thought, I’m an inconvenience to her. ‘Well, as to teaching, then,’ Hannah persisted. ‘I believe you’re better suited to it than you think. Jonathan has confidence in you, I know that. He takes more notice of your advice than he does of Miss Wentworth’s, to my thinking. We’ll go to King John together and see him, Pierce, later on, when Mattie comes out of the show and he goes in.’

  ‘That’s a bold child, that Mattie Stewart,’ Carroll observed, and at the word ‘bold’, which you’d never hear used in that way in England, both of them were taken back together over many years. Without thinking she put her arm through his.

  They were passing the Strand side of the Nonesuch; some of the advance photographs for King John were already up in the foyer and could be seen through the ornate glass doors. They stood together craning their necks and trying to make out the picture of Mattie in his sailor suit, although they could perfectly well have gone in and looked properly. It was like a game, and Hannah, relaxing, began to describe the peculiar bleakness of the backstage corridors. ‘I don’t know if I’ve mentioned a man called Boney Lewis.’

  ‘You mentioned him twice the day before yesterday, four times yesterday, and today it was twice during the lunch break and I think twice again when we were tidying up the classrooms. He’s an actor, I take it.’

  ‘Well yes he is. But Pierce, he hasn’t had any education.’

  ‘Where did he get his schooling, then?’

  ‘He told me at Winchester.’

  As they went forlornly down the three marble steps Boney himself appeared, tacking against the current of the crowd with an occasional sleepy genial gesture of apology, heading, evidently, for the stage door. A whiff of tweed and wine. He paused, as though confronting the long-lost.

  ‘Pierce, this is Boney Lewis.’

  Boney focused not quite successfully and said that he was glad to meet Carroll and when was he coming to see the show. Carroll was not at all glad to meet Boney, or even to have this positive proof that he existed, so he made no reply. Boney took both Hannah’s hands in their knitted gloves, gave them the outline of a kiss, and lumbered on.

  ‘They open next Thursday,’ Hannah said, and then, willing to try again, ‘Did you notice that overcoat of his?’

  They walked on in silence. After all, she couldn’t come across someone she knew perfectly well in the middle of the street and just pretend not to recognise him. It was a pity they hadn’t gone straight back from the Temple, that way they wouldn’t have passed by the theatre at all. She couldn’t be blamed for that, for it hadn’t been her suggestion. This, of course, was true, and Hannah had behaved without design and perfectly naturally, but nature is consistently cruel.

  Hannah’s bed-sitter was above a small Italian grocer’s which opened when the market did, and was closed by midday. It suited her admirably, and there, for the first and last time in her life, she knew what it was to be free. She took out her key to the side-door and asked Pierce would he come in for a bit, knowing that on a wet night even the transfer from outdoors to in will end an estrangement.

  It was a bit of a shove, as usual, getting her door open. ‘It just needs taking off its hinges and planing a little,’ Pierce told her. ‘No doubt the wood expands in damp weather.’

  Hannah threw her things on to the bed. Well, the matches, the kettle. Thank God, she thought, that even if our faith divides us, we both belong to a nation that makes tea as soon as it gets under a roof. Poor Pierce, though, wouldn’t know where to look, he wouldn’t like to look at the bookshelves for fear of drawing attention to his own kindness in putting them up, and he wouldn’t want to look at her clothes piled on the ironing-board in case he seemed to criticise. It wasn’t confusion by any means, just that a certain untidiness seemed to take over in her absence, like an old friend who has been asked for a long stay. Certainly the room was welcoming, with the two sagging red-cushioned wickerwork chairs. Perhaps her collection of postcards and tickets and theatre photographs was beginning to pile up a little, giving the place almost the air of a dressing-room.

  She stood shaking the biscuit tin to see if any were left, and wondering about him. But Carroll was much deeper sunk in himself than she had realised, almost out of her soundings.

  ‘If I’d been able to choose my sin, Hannah,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have chosen jealousy.’

  She watched the kettle, anxious that it shouldn’t start whistling when he was speaking seriously.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if our seven deadly sins are the same as yours, but I don’t think jealousy was one of them.’

  ‘They call it envy, but it’s all the same.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t have chosen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which one, then?’

  ‘I think, sloth. I have an elder brother who still lives at home with my mother and stays in bed every day till noon.’

  ‘What does he do for a living?’

  ‘Just that, but he enjoys it. He lies there wrapped in his blankets, dinner is brought up to him with the newspaper, and as I say he evidently enjoys himself. The jealous are wretched. The slothful are happy. And I’m not sure that my brother is sinning in any case. He once told me a saying of James Joyce’s, that the most reprehensible moment of human delight, in as much as it has given pleasure to a human being, is good in the sight of God. Now, jealousy gives pleasure to no one.’

  Hannah, warming the tea-pot, felt deeply indignant on Pierce’s account. She remembered that that same James Joyce had been a lazy fellow apart from the writing, and was supposed to have declared that every room should have a bed in it. But she guarded herself from saying this and only remarked that Joyce was a Dubliner and she believed he’d been given to drinking a great deal too much.

  ‘I believe that was so,’ Carroll said quietly. After a moment he added, ‘This actor, this Lewis fellow, looks as though he drinks.’

  There they were again. ‘Do you like you
r milk in first, Pierce? The nuns always said that was terribly common, and if you were properly brought up you’d let your guests help themselves.’

  ‘There’s no knowing what that might lead to. They might start helping themselves to tea as well.’

  ‘That’s true, the nuns don’t know everything.’ She still felt at a loss, and wished she had twenty cups to fill instead of two. ‘So you think I’m doing it right, then.’

  ‘I can’t get away from the feeling that you do everything right.’

  Hannah regretted having asked the question. It had been vanity, after all – she should have been worrying about his effort to explain himself. That must have cost him something. Indeed, he seemed to have to pay too much for everything.

  ‘If you choose to go on the stage,’ he said, still pondering, ‘you pass your life in a series of impersonations, some of them quite unsuccessful.’

  ‘Of course they’re bound to fail sometimes.’

  ‘They earn their money that way, and in fact they want to earn it that way. Do you know, Hannah, that causes me some astonishment. It seems to me a sufficient achievement to be an individual at all, what you might call a real person.’

  ‘Well, Pierce, real …’

  ‘I mean “real” in the sense that you might speak of a real cup of tea, meaning something up to your own standards of strength, while other cups of tea might fall short. Miss Wentworth is real in that way. On the whole in my relationships with other people I expect I fall short.’

  ‘You don’t ask for enough, Pierce! You accept so easily, you complain so little, you haven’t the sense you were born with, you’re an idiot! Can’t you let yourself go? Didn’t you let go a bit when you were young?’