Part 8 (1/2)

Bunny felt in his pocket, fiddling for loose change.

9.

O'Hara's landlady called up the stairs that he was wanted on the telephone. 'Long distance,' she said.

When he heard Potter's voice he was taken aback. 'How are you?' he asked, and was annoyed with himself for sounding so effusive.

'I must apologise for disturbing you at such a late hour,' Potter said. There was that familiar intake of breath as he drew on a cigarette. 'Rose felt we couldn't leave it until the morning. Reynalde gave me your number.'

He explained, briefly, the difficulties they were in. 'I don't expect you'll want to come up here... even if you're available.'

O'Hara reminded him that Jung had considered Liverpool the centre of the Universe.

'How interesting,' said Potter. 'I take it he didn't live here. It'll be a six-week run, two matinees a week, from Tuesday.'

'I presume I'll be doubling up on both parts,' O'Hara said.

'But of course. It's traditional.'

'Not invariably,' said O'Hara. 'Laughton only played Hook.'

Afterwards he telephoned Lizzie to ask what she thought.

'Christmas in the provinces,' she said. 'It's not everybody's cup of tea, is it? Still, you've always wanted to go back, and I dare say you can demand the earth in salary.'

'But think about it... Potter of all people.'

'I am thinking,' she said. 'It was donkey's years ago.'

'We can never measure the effect we have on other people,' he said, although he, more than most, had a fair idea. 'Time has nothing to do with it.'

'Who else will be up there,' she enquired, 'besides Mary Deare?'

'Dotty probably. I didn't ask.'

'And when are you off?'

'As soon as I've packed. I shall ride up on the Norton,' he told her, and there was a difficult pause in which she waited for him to suggest she should come up to Liverpool in the New Year.

'Well then,' she said, at last. 'Don't forget to send a postcard.'

Frowning, he rang Mona Gage and hung up when her husband answered.

Rose booked O'Hara into the Adelphi Hotel at the theatre's expense. It was an empty gesture she knew he wouldn't stay there. He had always, even as a young man, hankered for the past.

After only one night he went out and rented his old room in the front bas.e.m.e.nt of a house in Percy Street. He sought, self-consciously, now that he once again walked those familiar streets, to catch up with that other, vanished self who, at this distance, seemed more real than the person he had become.

The room hadn't changed. The fire still smoked, the damp still grew vegetable growths the colour of peaches on the wall between the grimy windows. Even the table that Keeley, the painter, had used as a palette was in its place beneath the sink. He didn't dare inspect the mattress in case that too was the same.

When he dragged out the table and the lamplight spilled onto the splodges of cadmium yellow and scarlet lake, he thought of the girl who had shown him to his dressing-room on the morning of his arrival. She was dressed as a munitions worker, and when he switched on the light her hair had blazed under the dim bulb. 'I know this is your old dressing-room,' she said. 'George told me.'

'Ah, George,' he repeated. 'Salt of the earth.'

'You still have to kick the pipes before the water comes out of the tap,' she said.

Outside, the gate had gone from the bas.e.m.e.nt steps, and the slanting roof of the coal hole had fallen in, but when he looked he could see the chafed paint, those marks on the rusted railings, where once he had padlocked his motorcycle.

Keeley, of course, had long since departed. A biology student with a stutter now occupied the back room. He was lonely and broke and had already barged in for the loan of a cupful of Quaker oats.

Those first evenings O'Hara avoided going to the Oyster Bar. Grace Bird, whom he had worked with before and of whom he was fond, spent most nights up at the hospital knitting in the waiting-room while Dotty ministered to poor old d.i.c.kie St Ives, and although he respected Mary Deare as a performer she was possibly the best Peter since Nina Boucicault she had never been a chum. He rather took to Bunny, but it was obvious the stage-manager was a crony of Potter's and it was advisable, this early on, to leave well alone. To be fair, Potter was behaving better than would have been expected cold yet civil.

It was no hards.h.i.+p isolating himself. He had no wish for company nor wanted to be anywhere else than in that room with the paint-flecked table. He lay on the narrow bed and waited for the bas.e.m.e.nt gate to bang in the windswept night, until he remembered it was no longer there.

Dotty had once gone out with a piece of string to stop its clanging. Dotty had pinned a photograph of Charles Laughton, torn from a movie magazine, on the wall above the fireplace. If he got up and peered closely enough he would still see the p.r.i.c.k of that vanished drawing-pin in the plaster.

The girl behind the beauty-counter at Lewis's had scrawled her name in pencil on the window frame. Then you won't forget me, she had said. But he had, long before the condensation, dribbling, like Dotty's tears, had smeared the name away.

Dotty had cried a lot. He had only to go for a spin with Freddie Reynalde or spend half an hour too long in the pub for her shoulders to slump and her eyes to fill. Once, she'd taken a hammer to the headlamp of his motorcycle. She'd done it because she cared. It was no good repressing her feelings. It struck him as convenient the way women placed such reliance on their emotions.

She'd offered to lend him the money to have the bike fixed, and when he accepted she said, 'I've broken something precious, haven't I?' and knelt in the street among the bits of gla.s.s, looking up at him as if she understood it was more than a lamp she had smashed.

He forgave her, and then a week later he and Keeley came home from the Beaux Arts Club to find her sitting on the bas.e.m.e.nt steps, smiling nice as pie. Fooled, he let her in, and she ran straight to his jazz records and whipping off her court shoe brought the heel down on his favourite Blossom Dearie.

This time it was because her feelings told her he didn't love her. She dragged up that other business he'd been foolish enough to confide in her, that lost girl with the golden voice. No wonder she she'd disappeared into the wide blue yonder. He was a monster. Why, in all the time she'd known him he had never said the words words.

'What words?' he asked, and she said, 'Exactly. You don't begin to know what I mean.' And then Keeley had nudged him and he'd found the words she wanted, and still it wasn't enough she called him a liar and wept even louder.

He'd thought he did love her, until she went on worrying at it, thras.h.i.+ng it to and fro, churning up feelings like a dog digging up a bone. By the time she was through he didn't know what he felt.

He'd had no such doubts when embracing that model Keeley had brought home from the Art School. She had tufts of hair in her armpits like clumps of gra.s.s. A man couldn't slide into the abyss when she was around.

He'd told Dotty she wouldn't always feel so unhappy, that one day she'd look at him and his face would seem quite ordinary, and she'd flown at him, pummelling his chest with her fists, sobbing that the day would never come.

They were both young, of course, and neither of them knew what they were talking about. Keeley said girls were unreasonable because they weren't any good at sport they hadn't learnt any rules.

At his first rehearsal of Peter Pan Peter Pan, almost before Bunny had finished introducing him to the rest of the cast, Dotty had taken him proprietorially by the arm and strolled him into the wings. There was no need for her to be present. She was playing Mrs Darling and she and Hook were never on stage together.

He thought, how changed she is, how nearly old she has become. She wore a smart blue costume with a tiny hat tilted over one eye. She whispered, 'How strange it is, you and I here together... after all these years.' Then he thought, how little she has altered. She chided him for not responding to her Christmas cards. 'One every year,' she cried reproachfully. 'Without fail. But then, you were never one to dwell on the past, were you?'

In spite of this, she never lost an opportunity to jog his memory, mostly during the coffee breaks when Desmond Fairchild and the girl with red hair were within earshot.

'Remember that time we went dancing at the Rialto ballroom,' she would say. 'After the second night of Richard II Richard II... when that fight broke out? There were bottles of stout flying like skittles.' Or, 'Wasn't it a scream that afternoon we went to the matinee at the Court and you got a fit of the hiccoughs.' And Mou-Mou!... How fond he had been of darling Mou-Mou... it broke Mummy's heart to have her put down, but it was the kindest thing to do... 'You must have got my letter,' she said. 'It was some years back.'

'No,' he said. 'I'm afraid I didn't. It must have been after I moved.'