An Awfully Big Adventure (15 page)

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 prick 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 glass, 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 basement 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
’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
.

‘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, thrashing 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 grass. 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
, 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
 . . . 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 matinée 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.’

‘But, of course,’ she said. ‘Otherwise you would have replied.’

He didn’t mind. There was nothing so cosily malicious, once it was mutually accepted, as dead love, and besides it was plain Dotty had a thing going with Fairchild. The man had a faint discoloration under one eye – he couldn’t help speculating whether Dotty hadn’t been giving him a hard time.

He discovered the girl’s name was Stella and tried to engage her in gossip. She eyed him shrewdly and said Mr Fairchild was very nice, very nice indeed, and so was Miss Blundell. Miss Blundell had been particularly nice to her. ‘It’s nice when people are nice, isn’t it?’ he said, and she snapped back, ‘I do know other words, but usually nobody likes the sound of them.’ She reminded him of someone, or rather he felt he had met her before.

‘It’s hardly likely,’ Freddie Reynalde pointed out. ‘You haven’t been in this neck of the woods for years, and I doubt if in all her life she’s been further than Blackpool.’

The first dress-rehearsal lasted the whole of Saturday. Bunny had taken the precaution of holding separate flying- and lighting-rehearsals on the Friday, with the result that the delays were structural rather than technical – the deck of the
Jolly Roger
swayed alarmingly during the fight between the pirates and the Lost Boys, and the ticking of the crocodile was found to be inaudible beyond the first three rows of the stalls. When Hook, communing with his ego, murmured, ‘
How still the night is; nothing sounds alive . . . split my infinitives, but ‘tis my hour of triumph
’, the mast creaked ominously and all but fell against the backcloth.

In spite of this, those actors who stole into the auditorium between entrances returned full of enthusiasm. John Harbour pronounced the production nothing short of magical. The missed cues, the botching of business, the somewhat lumpy prancings of the Tiger Lily troupe counted for nothing beside the chilling authority of Hook and the strutting Peter, unearthly yet real of Mary Deare. O’Hara, he said, was the terrifying shadow on the wall which every child saw through half-closed lids once the nursery door had shut. Not many of those present had first-hand knowledge of such rarified accommodation, but they took his meaning.

In Act Five, Father Dooley, who had been sipping Irish whisky from a camouflaged army-issue water-bottle, responded dramatically to the exchange between Hook and Wendy.

(Wendy is brought up from the hold and sees at a glance that the deck hasn’t been scrubbed for years.)

At which Father Dooley rose unsteadily in his seat and denounced the philosophy behind the words. Nobody on stage heard him. Grace, who was purling in the front circle, gathered he was drawing their attention to the war and the number of dead and maimed. Meredith endeavoured to explain that the play had been written long before the carnage of the First World War, let alone the Second. Besides in 1915 Mr Barrie had written to George, his adopted son and one of the original Lost Boys, that he no longer thought of war as glorious.
It is just unspeakably monstrous to me now
. To clinch matters, a few days later George was killed, shot through the head as his battalion advanced on St Eloi.

Father Dooley refused to see the connection and continued to protest. Dr Parvin took him home. Meredith, who had served in nothing more bloody than the Catering Corps, called a break and clambered into the orchestra pit to mangle Bach on the piano.

After the national anthem, and before the curtain went up, Rose made a speech expressing her mixed emotions at the unfortunate accident which had befallen Richard St Ives. Mixed, she said, because it had given the theatre the opportunity to invite P.L. O’Hara to step into the breach. She drew the audience’s attention to the injured leading man, who, leg propped on a cushioned trestle arrangement protruding into the centre aisle, sat under a red blanket in the third row of the stalls. He was given an ovation, and Rushworth’s grand-daughter, a stout girl with ringlets, ran forward and, leaning heavily against his broken leg, presented him with a bouquet. It was this same child who later screamed piercingly when Hook made his first entrance, clawing the misty air above the frozen river.

After the final curtain-call Bunny came into the prop-room and invited Stella to a little party at the Commercial Hotel. The play had overrun the licensing hours and the Oyster Bar was already closed. ‘It might amuse you,’ he said, and added gallantly, ‘You aquitted yourself excellently with the torch.’

‘Thank you very much,’ she said. She longed to go, and yet she couldn’t bear the idea.

‘You too, George,’ said Bunny.

George wriggled out of it. His missus would go on a vinegar trip if he was late home again.

Stella ran upstairs and combed her hair in the extras’ dressing-room. She thought of taking off her overall – she was wearing one of Lily’s blouses underneath – only when it was unbuttoned and she looked in the mirror her chest poked out in a most peculiar way. She imagined it might settle down if she removed her brassière, but what if Dotty noticed and made some personal remark about her growth?

She couldn’t think how she was going to enter the Commercial Hotel, not unless accompanied or pushed. No doubt Babs and Grace would travel up the hill by taxi. Trouble was, if she appeared downstairs too soon it would look as if she was cadging a lift, and if she arrived too late they would have gone without her – and then how would she summon up the courage to go at all?

She went to find Geoffrey. The stage doorkeeper said he had already left. At last, emerging into the street, she found herself a hundred yards behind John Harbour and Meredith. Squatting, she pretended to tie a non-existent shoe-lace and waited until the two men had crossed Clayton Square and turned the corner in the direction of Bold Street.

I can’t go, she thought. Who needs parties? And she began to walk home the long way round so as not to bump into anybody. She felt annoyed with herself, made miserable with so little cause. If she had been the offspring of drunken parents in Scotland Road, or born with a hair-lip like Ma Tang’s daughter, there might be some excuse for feeling as she did. Why couldn’t she slide out of herself and be someone else, if only for the ten seconds it would take to push open the door of the hotel and step across the threshold?

She was making for the telephone box outside the Broken Dolls Hospital when she heard the puttering of a motorcycle engine as it reduced speed in the gutter behind her. Turning, she recognised O’Hara. He wore the flying helmet he had affected on the morning of his arrival and those goggles which, when removed, had left him looking like a barn owl, white-ringed eyes blinking in a smut-flecked face.

‘Hop on,’ he said, patting the pillion.

She clung to the waist of his crackling leather overcoat as they thundered up the hill and roared along Hope Street, past the Mission Hall and the Institute and the ruined silhouette of the Methodist church. The headlamp picked out a cat streaking towards a wall, and a child without shoes between the shafts of a wooden cart, straining to pull it into an alleyway, and both images were gone in an instant, drowned in darkness as the bike sped past, the road a triangle of bright water as they rode the glittering breakers of the tramlines and swerved to the kerb of the Commercial Hotel.

Meredith’s landlord had put the back parlour at their disposal. There was a fire in the hearth and sandwiches on the sideboard. One of the pirates gave Stella a glass half-full of gin. She swallowed it in one gulp and started to cough.

Toasts were drunk to Mary Deare and O’Hara. It had been a wonderful night, absolutely marvellous. It couldn’t have gone better. Seven curtain calls, and they would have taken more if Rose, concerned at the overtime the stagehands were in danger of earning, hadn’t signalled Freddie Reynalde to play the audience out.

What about that child who had screamed in Act Two, and the hissing that had followed . . . and the outbreak of sobbing when Tinkerbell drank the poison and Peter announced she was dying . . . and the sigh that had rippled . . . yes, rippled through the theatre when Peter, alone on the rock in the lagoon, heard the mermaid’s melancholy cry as the moon began to rise over Never-Never Land.

O’Hara, on behalf of the company, spoke a few words in appreciation of Meredith. He said he’d done a wonderful job in very difficult circumstances. The lighting had been quite brilliant.

Meredith, wearing his duffle-coat and sitting cross-legged on the floor, raised his glass in response. ‘How very kind,’ he murmured. ‘Such praise, coming from you.’

Stella asked John Harbour if he had seen Geoffrey.

‘He’s off sulking most likely,’ said Harbour, and started to tell her his reasons for believing O’Hara’s performance that evening had been the equal of any of the great Shakespearian roles as portrayed by the likes of Ralphie or Larry. ‘He had the audience in the palm of his hand,’ he cried. ‘How they hated him. Those flourishes, those poses, that diabolical smile . . . the appalling courtesy of his gestures . . .’ He broke off in mid-sentence, as if suddenly realising who he was talking to, and abruptly left her for Mary Deare. Sitting at her feet he gazed up into her withered child’s face and began again. ‘You had the audience in the palm of your hand. How they loved you.’