Part 1 (1/2)

An Awfully Big Adventure.

by Beryl Bainbridge.

SLIGHTLY:.

( (Examining the fallen Wendy more minutely) This is no bird; I think it must be a lady.

NIBS:.

( (Who would have preferred it to be a bird) And Tootles has killed her.

CURLY:.

Now I see. Peter was bringing her to us. ( Now I see. Peter was bringing her to us. (They wonder for what object).

OMNES:.

( (Though everyone of them had wanted to take a shot at her) Oh, Tootles!

TOOTLES:.

( (Gulping) I did it. When ladies used to come to me in dreams I said: 'Pretty mother', but when she really came I shot her.

James Barrie, Peter Pan Peter Pan, Act Two.

0.

When the fire curtain had been lowered and the doors were at last closed, Meredith thought he heard a child crying. He switched on the house lights, but of course there was no one there. Some unfortunate had left a teddy-bear perched on the tip-up seat in the third row.

The girl was waiting for him in the property room. At his approach she stepped backwards, as though afraid he would strike her. He didn't look at her; he simply told her, in that particular tone of voice which in the past he had always used for other people, that he wasn't interested in excuses and that in any case there were none that would fit the bill.

'I was upset,' she protested. 'Anybody would be. It will never happen again.'

They both heard a door opening on the floor above, and footsteps as Rose clumped along the pa.s.sage.

'If it was up to me,' he said, lowering his voice, 'you wouldn't get the chance.'

'You're wrong,' the girl persisted. 'He was happy. He kept saying ”Well done”. I'm not old enough to shoulder the blame. Not all of it. I'm not the only one at fault.'

'Get out of my sight,' he said, and pus.h.i.+ng past her strode up the corridor to waylay Rose.

'I was encouraged,' she shouted after him. 'Don't you forget that!'

He slashed the air with his hook.

'You don't want to be too hard on her,' Rose said. 'She's young.'

He followed her through the pa.s.s door and across the dark stage into the auditorium. When Rose saw the teddy-bear she picked it up by one ear and walked on with it dangling against the skirt of her black frock.

'Did you get through to the wife?' asked Meredith.

'I did,' Rose said. 'She's coming up on the milk train.'

He climbed the stone steps after her, ducking his head beneath the singing gas mantles until they reached the top floor and the round window overlooking the square. Only the fireman and the rat-catcher came this far.

'The note,' he enquired. 'Did it shed any illumination?'

'Who can tell?' she said. 'Bunny saw fit to put a match to it.'

At this hour the square was empty. The flower-sellers had long since gone home, leaving the orange boxes piled up beside the urinals. Between the jagged buildings the lights of s.h.i.+ps jumped like sparks above the river.

They stood in silence, looking down into the darkness as though waiting for a curtain to rise. There was a sudden seep of orange light as the door of Brown's Cafe opened and the slattern in the gumboots staggered out to sling was.h.i.+ng-up slops into the gutter.

Then the girl appeared from out of the side street and began to run in the direction of the telephone box on the corner. Once she looked back and up at the window as though she knew she was observed. At this distance her face was a pale blur. A man with a white m.u.f.fler wound about his throat rolled from the black shadows of Ice Warehouse and the girl stopped and spoke to him.

He fumbled in his pockets and handed her something. He was holding a bouquet of flowers in a twist of paper.

'The Board won't like it,' Meredith said. 'Rushworth is bound to kick up rough.'

'I'm a match for him,' said Rose. She was holding the teddy-bear to her sequinned breast, circling with the pad of her finger the cold b.u.t.ton of its eye.

'I don't suppose,' Meredith asked her, 'that we can keep it out of the newspapers.'

'I could,' Rose told him, 'but I won't. The orphanage has rung twice already. G.o.d forgive us, but it'll be good for business.'

Directly below, where the branches of the lime trees bounced in the wind, sending the lamplight skeetering across the cobblestones, the man in the m.u.f.fler stood relieving himself within the wrought-iron enclosure of the public urinal, one arm fastidiously raised above his head. They could see his boots, glossy under the street lamp, and that bedraggled fistful of winter daffodils...

1.

At first it had been Uncle Vernon's ambition, not Stella's. He thought he understood her; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown more caution. 'I'll not chase moonbeams,' she told him.

Still, she went along with the idea and for two years, on a Friday after school, she ran down the hill to Hanover Street and rode the lift in Crane Hall, up through the showrooms of polished pianofortes where the blind men fingered scales, until she reached the top floor and Mrs Ackerley whose puckered mouth spat out 'How now brown cow' behind the smokescreen of her Russian cigarettes.

She came home and shut herself in her bedroom off the scullery and spouted speeches. She sat at the tea table and dropped her cup to the saucer, spotting the good cloth with tannic acid, wailing that it might be a poison that the Friar Lawrence had administered. When Uncle Vernon shouted at her she said she wasn't old enough to control either her reflexes or her emotions. She had always had a precise notion of what could be expected of her.

Lily had imagined that the girl was merely learning to speak properly and was dismayed to hear it was called Dramatic Art. She fretted lest Stella build up hopes only to have them dashed.

Then Stella failed her mock school certificate and her teachers decided it wasn't worth while entering her for the real thing. Uncle Vernon went off to the school prepared to bl.u.s.ter, and returned convinced. They'd agreed she had the brains but not the application.

'That's good enough for me,' he told Lily. 'We both know it's useless reasoning with her.'

He made enquiries and pulled strings. After the letter came Stella spent four extra Sat.u.r.day mornings at Crane Hall being coached by Mrs Ackerley in the telephone scene from the Bill of Divorcement Bill of Divorcement. Mrs Ackerley, dubious about her accent, had thought a Lancas.h.i.+re drama more suitable, preferably a comedy; the girl was something of a clown.