An Awfully Big Adventure (20 page)

He was pacing back and forth, mulling over what he would say to her, when the biology student knocked at his door for the loan of a shilling for the gas-meter. He was so damned humble that O’Hara was obliged to offer him a cup of coffee. Afterwards he slept badly, his mind swilling with nightmares. He was drowning in the lagoon, sinking beneath the ticking belly of the crocodile.

At midday he walked to the Aber House Hotel and rang the bell. A woman appeared in the area below holding a dustpan and brush. She asked what he was selling. ‘My name’s O’Hara,’ he said. ‘I’m from the theatre. I’m anxious to know how Mr Bradshaw is.’ He was down the basement steps before Lily could stop him. Flustered, she let him in.

Vernon was sitting in his armchair by the fire, his injured ankle propped on a telephone book. He hadn’t shaved and was at a disadvantage.

‘Nice of you to call,’ he said. ‘Bring a chair to the fire.’ Hastily he popped in his teeth.

‘It’s not broken, is it?’ asked O’Hara, studying the swollen foot.

‘Merely a sprain,’ said Vernon. ‘I shall be as right as rain in no time.’ He turned to tell Lily to put the kettle on, but she had fled into the scullery to tidy herself up.

O’Hara was looking round the room, trying to see the imprint of Stella. He longed to know which chair she sat in, what space she occupied. He noticed the picture frames on the mantelpiece had been turned to the wall. Then he saw her shoes, scuffed with mud, placed together on a sheet of newspaper at the hearth, and his heart leapt.

‘It was my own fault, you know,’ Vernon told him. ‘I wasn’t watching where I was putting my feet. It’s Mr Potter I feel sorry for. Our Stella says the lad who butted him comes from a well-to-do family.’

‘So I believe,’ said O’Hara.

‘She thinks he ought to be given the sack, but Mr Potter won’t hear of it. He told me this morning that he thought the boy had been working too hard.’

‘Potter’s been here this morning?’

‘You’ve just missed him,’ said Vernon. ‘Like you, he was bothered about my injury. But that’s the sort of man he is, isn’t he? One of nature’s gentlemen. He’s been very kind to me and Lily, as regards putting our minds at rest about Stella. She’s secretive, you see. She always has been, and me and Lily get worried about what she might get up to. Don’t misunderstand me . . . she’s a good girl and generous-hearted once you get to know her. Of course, you won’t know her very well, you being a newcomer.’

‘No,’ O’Hara said. ‘I haven’t been here very long. I suppose Stella told you I took over from Richard St Ives.’

‘She didn’t tell us. Mr Potter did. Stella never tells us anything, or anybody else for that matter. She seems outgoing enough but she keeps things locked inside her. That was why I wanted her to go on the stage . . . to help get them out.’

‘I would have thought she’s very close to her mother,’ O’Hara said. ‘She’s always telephoning her, even if she’s only just left the house.’

‘She’s having you on,’ said Vernon. He looked at O’Hara with something like reproach. ‘She can’t ring her mother.’

O’Hara remained silent. He had the curious feeling that the whole house had fallen silent too, as though listening.

‘Lily,’ called Vernon, ‘Lily, get in here.’ He tried to stand up and fell back with a little snort of pain.

‘What’s up?’ demanded Lily. She’d powered her face and put on a dab of lipstick. It had made her look older.

‘Stella’s been ringing somebody,’ Vernon said. ‘Two or three times a day.’

‘Not as much as that,’ O’Hara said.

‘She’s told
him
she’s ringing her mother.’

‘She can’t be,’ Lily said, not looking at O’Hara. She began to tidy the room. She picked up the shoes from the hearth and put them under the table.

‘Who the blazes is she ringing then?’ shouted Vernon. Suddenly he thumped the arm of his chair with his fist, remembering all the times he’d caught Stella on the stairs in the middle of the night, staring at the telephone. He asked O’Hara, ‘Has she told you anything else about her mother?’

‘Only about the rose on her pillow at Christmas . . . with the pearls.’

Vernon and Lily exchanged glances. If anything Vernon seemed more easy in his mind. ‘I’d be very grateful, Mr O’Hara,’ he said, ‘if you tried to find out, discreetly, of course, who she’s calling. I have my reasons for asking. It’s not just nosiness by any means. I’ve as much respect for her privacy as the next man.’

‘She can’t be ringing her mother,’ said Lily. ‘She doesn’t know where she is. None of us do, except she’s in America somewhere.’

Vernon fumbled with several beginnings. He wanted to confide in O’Hara, to get him on their side, but he didn’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry knowing their business. It wasn’t a story that put anyone in a good light. Under different circumstances he would have preferred to cover things over, the illegitimacy for one. It didn’t reflect well on Lily and him that they’d thrown Renée out.

‘We jumped through hoops to make allowances,’ he said. ‘I mean, we took her in when she came back from London with her tail between her legs, and we fed her and gave her a roof over her head, but she was forever dolling herself up and going out. She stayed out all night on more than one occasion.’

‘She was young,’ Lily said. ‘She wanted a bit of life.’ She was making the excuses to Vernon, not O’Hara.

‘She came back again when the baby was born and for a few months she tried, I’ll give her that. But she had some daft ideas about this place. She was always trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. The upshot was she got herself a room in a house full of artists round the corner. The place was filthy and the neighbours were always complaining.’

‘She found herself a job as a telephonist at the GPO,’ Lily said. ‘She did quite well . . .’

‘She won that competition,’ said Vernon. ‘There were thousands of entries.’

Lily put the shoes on a piece of newspaper on the table and began to pick the mud from them. She said, ‘I wanted Renée to leave Stella with us.’

‘She wouldn’t countenance it,’ Vernon said. ‘Then we heard she’d lost her job and was up to her old tricks, going out to dances and things.’

‘But we didn’t know she was leaving the child on her own,’ cried Lily. ‘We never thought she’d do that.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We never thought she’d do that.’

That was why it had been such a shock when the neighbours came round to tell Lily the baby was screaming and there was nobody answering the door or any lights on in the house. He had to break a window in the basement to get in. The place stank of paraffin and turpentine and dry rot. He wrinkled his nose as if the smell was still in his nostrils. She was in a cot in the back room with a row of night-lights set along the floor. The daft thing was there was a rose on her pillow. It was withered, of course.

O’Hara had risen and gone to stand at the mantelpiece. From time to time he had nodded politely. Now he drummed his fingers on the edge of the shelf; he looked bored.

‘There could have been a fire,’ said Lily. She came to the hearth, worried lest O’Hara should get his hands dirty. She began to turn the pictures round and flap at the mantelpiece with a duster.

‘Life is full of conflagrations,’ O’Hara said. ‘We can never be sure when we’ll be consumed by the past.’

She nodded. He had a lovely way of talking, but then, he was an actor.

When O’Hara had gone Vernon hobbled upstairs to ring Harcourt. ‘They’ve all been round,’ he said, after telling Harcourt of his accident. ‘That director chap came and a couple of the actors . . . the leading ones.’

‘I thought you weren’t going to the match.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Vernon, ‘Stella insisted. I didn’t like to let her down. She was very upset when I fell over. She cradled my head, you know.’

‘That was decent,’ said Harcourt.

‘I told this O’Hara fellow about her mother this morning. I had to. Something’s cropped up. He’s going to keep an eye open.’

‘It’s nothing serious, I hope.’

‘Nothing me and Lily can’t handle. She’s been telling her fibs again.’

‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Harcourt unwisely.

‘Renée wasn’t all bad,’ snapped Vernon. ‘She had a spark, if you remember. She won that competition to be the speaking clock out of the whole of England.’

‘The girl with the golden voice,’ said Harcourt, by way of apology.

Vernon told him how he’d been taken home from the football field in a chauffeur-driven car. He said it had smelt like a bar parlour.

O’Hara rode his motor-cycle to the Pier Head and parked it against the granite bollards at the entrance to the Albert Dock. He waited until the policeman disappeared inside his prefabricated hut before dodging under the railings and walking rapidly away across the giant crazy paving towards the blitzed warehouses. He had some notion of hiding in the ruins until it was time to go to the theatre. He wanted to howl like a dog and hear the echoes all around him.

Crossing the swing-bridge above the water he lost his footing on a streak of black oil. Falling, he struck the back of his skull hard on the edge of the bridge. He swung his head from side to side, trying to get rid of that image of the girl he had known as Stella Maris holding a baby in her arms.

There was a crocodile of children winding halfway round the square for the afternoon matinee. George told Stella that St Aloysius’s orphanage had a block-booking. The seats had been paid for by the City Corporation. It was a gesture made every year.

She was talking to Prue in the wardrobe – it was Geoffrey’s turn to call the half hour, when Bunny came running up the stairs. He wanted to know if she had seen O’Hara. ‘Why me?’ she said.

‘Stop playing funny buggers,’ he shouted. ‘O’Hara isn’t in his dressing-room.’

At the quarter hour, when O’Hara still hadn’t arrived, Rose called a taxi and sent Bunny up to Percy Street. The biology student opened the door. He hadn’t seen O’Hara all morning because he’d slept in. ‘His bike’s not there,’ he said helpfully, having gone up into the street to look.

O’Hara’s bed was made and the dishes washed. Bunny read the unfinished letter on the table:

Bunny burned the letter in the sink and sluiced the ashes under the tap.

The curtain had to be delayed while Meredith made up as Mr Darling. None of the clothes fitted. He was taller than O’Hara, and thinner. Rose made a front-of-curtain speech begging the audience’s indulgence.

The police arrived during the beginning of Act Four, set in ‘the hole under the ground’. Tigerlily’s braves had finished chanting their ugh, ugh, wah, and Wendy, having reminded Peter to change his flannels and left his medicine bottle perched in the fork of a tree, had flown away home. Babs, emerging into the corridor, saw Bunny sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, being spoken to by an officer of the law. Bunny was smiling in a peculiar way, eyebrows raised as though preparing his face to respond to the punch line of a smutty joke.

Babs said, ‘Bunny, what’s happened? Is it bad news?’ But he flapped his hand at her in a dismissive gesture as if she had no right to be there.

Stella heard about O’Hara from the child playing Slightly. ‘Captain Hook’s downed hisself in the river,’ he babbled.

Presently, Tinkerbell drank the medicine intended for Peter. It was an affecting moment. ‘
Why Tink
,’ cried Peter, ‘
it was poisoned and you drank it to save my life. Tink, dear, Tink, are you dying?
’

Stella’s hands were trembling as she held the torch. She could hear Mary Deare droning on:
‘Her light is going faint, and if it goes out that means she is dead. Her voice is so low I can scarcely hear what she is saying. She says – she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies. Say quickly that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands.’

Stella dropped the torch and let it roll into the wings as the children brought their palms together to save Tinkerbell. The light swished from the back-cloth. For a moment the clapping continued, rose in volume, then died raggedly away, replaced by a tumult of weeping . . .

0

A man with a white muffler wound about his throat rolled from the black shadows of the Ice Warehouse and the girl stopped and spoke to him. ‘I need to make a telephone call,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t any money. Someone’s died.’

The man stared at her; he was holding a bouquet of flowers in a twist of paper. ‘I wasn’t to blame,’ the girl said. ‘He was happy. He kept saying well done. I’m not old enough to shoulder the blame. Not all of it.’

‘Give over,’ he said. ‘There’s no need to make a meal of it.’ He gave her five pennies and a farthing and lurched away under the bouncing lime trees, one hand unbuttoning his fly, the other, arm raised fastidiously above his head, clutching that bedraggled fistful of winter daffodils.

She rang the familiar combination of numbers. ‘It’s been awful,’ she said. ‘There was a man who seduced me.’

‘The time,’ mother intoned, ‘is 6.45 and 40 seconds precisely.’

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Stella shouted. ‘I’ll know how to behave next time. I’m learning. I’m just bending down to tie a shoe-lace. Everyone is just waiting round the corner.’

‘The time,’ pretty mother said, ‘is 6.47 and 20 seconds precisely.’