Part 5 (1/2)

'I expect you want to ask me how I began in the theatre,' Stella said. Anxious to give credit where credit was due, she added, 'I was trained by Mrs Ackerley at Crane Hall. I got a gold medal when I was twelve.'

'It was all that Naafi food,' the reporter complained. 'Those boiled potatoes.'

'She plumped out my vowels. I tend to have flat ones. It's to do with catarrh as much as region.'

'It was all that stodge,' he persisted. 'I developed a taste for it.'

For a man who despaired of his appet.i.te he was surprisingly offhand with the buck rarebit he had ordered; he did no more than shove it round and round his plate. Every so often he took a square-shaped flask from the inside pocket of his coat and stuck it to his lips like a trumpet. 'I need starch,' he said, gurgling.

'It's never as simple as that, is it?' said Stella. 'I expect you're unhappy.'

'I am, my dear,' he admitted. 'How very acute of you. It's my home life, you see.' And he removed his hat and discussed for some minutes the shortcomings of his wife Rita who had been in the land-army when they met. He had first caught sight of her riding in a ploughed field beyond the barbed wire perimeter of the air base. With hindsight it would have saved a lot of heartbreak if he had looked the other way. She had been perched on the seat of a tractor with the gulls flowing behind her in a slip-stream.

'She looked very jaunty,' he said. 'Monarch of all she surveyed... Tess of the D'Urbervilles... that sort of thing. But I don't mind confessing that after a few honeymoon months we stalled more times than we took off... if you take my meaning.'

Stella didn't; she nodded just the same. 'I suppose that's why you're so fat,' she said. 'You put on bulk to withstand the pressures.'

He gave her an unhappy smile and excused himself, flopping off his stool and lumbering towards the gents. 'I'm being interviewed,' Stella told the tea-lady. 'I'm at the Playhouse. I play a boy-king, son of the flute-blower.'

'It's all right for some,' the tea-lady said.' And she picked up the plate of spurned buck rarebit and emptied it into the bin under the counter.

Outside the window the day was already darkening. Across the square a gush of steam billowed from the kitchen vent of Reece's Restaurant and swallowed the sparks of a shuddering tram.

The reporter returned with two tickets for the news-theatre. He said he'd expire if he had to sit on that high stool much longer. They sat in the back row and watched a newsreel of Jack Gardiner punching Bruce Woodc.o.c.k into a corner, followed by a cartoon. The reporter squirmed in his seat, and then seizing Stella's hand placed it on his lap and held it there, gripping her by the wrist. She was astonished and sat as though turned to stone, her fingers thrust through the opening of his unb.u.t.toned trousers. On the flickering screen the wicked wolf tried his best to blow down the house of the three little pigs. The reporter covered Stella's hand with his hat.

She examined her conscience to discover if she was in any way to blame for her companion's curious behaviour. Every evening when she called 'Overture' and 'Beginners' Richard St Ives dragged her through the doorway and, putting her across his knee, whacked her on the bottom with a rolled-up copy of The Stage The Stage. And only last night, Desmond Fairchild, hearing her shouting the minutes in the pa.s.sage, had come out of the lavatory still holding himself. Neither occurrence was as rude as what the reporter was doing, but she was pretty sure the intention was the same. It was only a matter of degree. Did this sort of thing happen to Babs...o...b..rne or Miss Blundell?

She tried to pull her hand free, but it was held fast. The protuberance under her fingers felt soft and hard at the same time, an iron fist in a velvet glove. Attempting to bring what Meredith would call a philosophical approach to her predicament, she pondered on the differences in men's and women's clothing. Trousers, she now realised, were so designed not because their wearers had funny legs but because men were constantly worried that an essential part of themselves might have gone missing. They wanted instant access, just to make sure things were in place. What was more puzzling was why they needed everyone else to check as well.

The reporter removed his hat and shoved a handkerchief at her. She wondered whether she had been sniffing; it was true she had the beginnings of a cold. Suddenly he let out a huge sigh, as though the air was being forced out of him. He seemed to grow smaller; certainly his thingumajig shrank. Almost at once he fell into a doze. She was left holding a jelly baby of shrivelled skin, her fingers glued together, webbed by a sticky emission.

Presently she slid her hand away and wiped it furtively on the upholstery of the seat beside her. Cuckoo spit, she thought, watching a working man emerging from a mining cage with an inappropriate smile on his blackened face.

The reporter woke and got abruptly to his feet, jamming his hat on his head. In the square the flower-sellers had lit the naphtha flares in the buckets set along the cobblestones. The windows of Owen Owens blazed with light. It was gone half past five.

'I have a complimentary ticket for Dangerous Corner Dangerous Corner,' the reporter said in a business-like way. 'Perhaps we could meet afterwards. There are one or two questions we never got round to.'

'That would be nice,' she said. She didn't think he would use the ticket, any more than he would wait for her after the performance. He was already worried lest she should tell someone what had happened. If she really wanted she could get him sent to prison. All his c.o.c.kiness had deserted him; under the street lamp his face was old and frightened.

She wished him goodnight and he raised that shameful hat as she turned and walked away towards the theatre, rubbing her hand against her hip-bone like a soiled cloth against a scrubbing board.

Bunny asked how the interview had gone and she said it had gone very well. She didn't think anything of a personal nature had entered the conversation. After the first interval she took Freddie Reynalde's coffee and biscuits down to the band room under the stage. Mr Reynalde played the piano in the intermissions and could remember a time before the war when there was a proper orchestra in the pit. Things, he often told Stella, weren't the same, and neither was he. Because of his principles he hadn't served in the Forces and they'd made him do labouring jobs instead, so that now his hands weren't what they used to be either.

On the table he kept a photograph, ringed with the imprint of coffee cups, of a man sitting sideways on a motor bike. Across one corner was written in ink 'To Freddie, affectionately O'Hara'. Every time she saw the photograph Stella was reminded of someone, but she could never catch who it was. In profile the man appeared haughty, contemptuous almost. She had the feeling that if she could only get him to turn and look at her she'd recognise him. She was going out of the band room when she suddenly asked, 'If someone takes liberties with you, is it partly your own fault?'

'Liberties?' Freddie said. 'What the h.e.l.l does that mean?'

She found she couldn't tell him after all. 'I keep getting put over someone's knee and smacked.'

'St Ives,' said Reynalde. 'He's harmless. If you don't like it tell him so, or else stay out of his reach.'

'It's not that I either like or dislike it,' said Stella, 'I just don't see what good it does.'

After the curtain had come down and she'd put away the props she hid in the extra's dressing-room in case the reporter had changed his mind and dared to wait for her. Her wrist hurt. When she held it up to the light she saw that a small circle of skin was inflamed. She hoped she hadn't caught an unmentionable disease from her visit to the news-theatre. Half an hour later, descending the stairs, she was startled to hear voices coming from the first floor. She had thought everyone would have gone to the Oyster Bar and that only the night-watchman would be in the building. She stopped and listened, and heard first laughter and then a voice shouting, 'For G.o.d's sake.' The next moment a door was flung violently open.

She crouched back into the shadows and saw Geoffrey run headlong down the stairs. He came and went so quickly that she might not have known it was him save for the flash of his yellow cravat under the gas-lamp. There was silence for a few seconds and then she heard Meredith's voice: 'Not to worry. He'll get over it by the morning.' She wondered if Geoffrey had complained about not getting a bigger part.

The door of Meredith's office slammed shut and he and John Harbour appeared round the bend of the pa.s.sage. She was going to call out to them, but something in Meredith's face stopped her, and the next instant he had swept down the stairs with his arm about John Harbour's shoulders and was gone.

The dress rehearsal of Caesar and Cleopatra lasted nine hours. Cleopatra's barge wouldn't slide off the stage properly and the sphinx proved difficult to light. There was Cleopatra simpering away in her best s.h.i.+rley Temple voice, 'Old gentleman,... don't go, old gentleman', and the spot couldn't find her. St Ives shouted, 'Can you hear me, mother?', and everyone laughed, and then Meredith pulled the hood of his duffle coat over his eyes and lay full length in the centre aisle and moaned. Everyone laughed again, but it was obviously no joking matter because Bunny flew into a rage, dancing up and down, sending the dust spiralling like fireflies above the footlights as he thundered, 'Quiet, please.' He was worn out trying to control the University students who dropped their spears on the stairs and chatted loudly to each other in the wings.

Bunny wasn't the only one to lose his temper. Desmond Fairchild and Dotty Blundell were heard arguing in the corridor, though no one could be sure what was at issue. He was supposed to have called her a cow, or something worse, and she had slapped his face, at which, according to George, he had returned the blow.

Vernon telephoned twice to know what Stella was up to. On the first occasion Bunny was tactful, a.s.suring him she would be sent home in a taxi at any moment. In response to the second enquiry he said tersely, 'Look here, she's not working in a bank, you know', and hung up.

Stella didn't know about the telephone calls. When she wasn't required for her scene in the court room of Alexandria she was fetching and carrying and dabbing calamine lotion on the shoulders of John Harbour who, earlier in the day, had been broiled pink as a lobster by inexpertly using a sun-lamp.

A small pale woman with a pink bow in her hair sat in Grace Bird's dressing-room for most of the evening. George told Geoffrey she had been engaged to play Peter Pan in the next production. Babs...o...b..rne was too tall for the part, and besides the woman had played the part before, the time P.L. O'Hara had appeared as Captain Hook. Out front, yawning in the stalls, sat the priests.

On the first night Rose Lipman came backstage as usual to wish the cast good luck. Bunny complained of a fearful draught coming from the front of the house. 'There's nowt wrong,' she said. 'It's just the wind from the gents.'

Uncle Vernon and Lily were in the audience. They thought Stella was wonderful, though Lily gasped audibly when, in the middle of her speech, she had to be helped out by a man in a white toga. 'Don't act soft,' whispered Vernon. 'She's meant to hesitate.'

During the interval they b.u.mped into Mrs Ackerley in the foyer. She was with a man in plus-fours who, she claimed, was her husband. She p.r.o.nounced both Stella and the production excellent. 'I didn't recognise her at first,' Lily told her. 'She looked very haughty, didn't she?'

Mrs Ackerley introduced Vernon and Lily to no less a personage than Freddie Reynalde. He wasn't on the piano in this intermission because in the next act they were using the orchestra pit as part of the scenery. Mr Reynalde, on realising who they were, said that Stella was an interesting child.

'What's that supposed to mean?' Lily asked Vernon, when they were queuing to buy a round of drinks. She would have preferred Stella to have been labelled as 'nice' or 'well-mannered'; 'interesting' was a shade ambiguous. 'Get back and be social,' hissed Vernon.

Afterwards they waited outside the stage door to take Stella home. Other people went inside, including the Ackerleys, but Vernon knew Stella would hide in a cupboard or show them up if they were bold enough to enter. Once, the doorkeeper popped his head out and asked if they wanted to hand in autograph books. Lily said, 'No, we can get Miss Bradshaw's signature any time we want it', and Vernon shouted that they had a perfect right to loiter on a public pavement.

The leading man came out arm in arm with a girl with corkscrew curls, followed by a chap in a duffle coat, who wore a monocle and flashed a sardonic smile as though he was a member of the SS.

Stella kept them waiting a long time, and when she did appear she sprinted off down the street ahead of them. They caught up with her in Cases Street, crouching on her haunches outside the tobacconist's.

'For G.o.d's sake,' cried Lily, 'stop making an exhibition of us.' Stella compromised by walking behind them. Every time Vernon looked back she was striding with her chin tilted theatrically, her eyes fixed on the smoky heavens. 'I can't take much more of this,' he confided to Lily, and she told him to shush. 'It's not as if she's ever been any different,' she said.

Though it was late when they reached home, he felt compelled to ring Harcourt.

'You must be pleased,' Harcourt said, 'her playing Cleopatra's brother.'

'Husband,' corrected Vernon. 'Even if he is ten years old.'

'I think you'll find he's also her brother.'

'I'm not all that familiar with the play myself,' Vernon admitted. 'Naturally it's set in foreign parts. You will go and see it, I trust?'