An Awfully Big Adventure (5 page)

‘I like old George,’ he insisted. ‘Really I do. Trouble is, he stinks.’ And he went downstairs to drape his mittens in front of the coals.

Stella stayed behind, dipping her nose like a pecking hen into the front of her jumper to sniff herself. She hadn’t known George smelled, or rather that the sour whiffs of stale tobacco and unwashed clothing constituted an unacceptable reek. Stink had an awful sound, on a par with putrefaction.

She raised her head and stood there, her hand cupped over her nose to trap the scent of her skin, and all at once she inhaled some forgotten, familiar odour of the past. It wasn’t a bad smell: something between wood smoke and a house left empty. Her lips parted to give it a name but the word got lost before it was uttered, and all that remained was the sweet brilliantine caught on her fingers and her own breath smelling of the liquorice that George had given her.

It was inconvenient, Stella coming home and wanting a bath. As Uncle Vernon pointed out, it was only Wednesday.

‘I don’t care what day it is,’ she said. She was so set on it she was actually grinding her teeth.

It meant paraffin had to be fetched from Cairo Joe’s chandler’s shop next door to the Greek Orthodox church, and then the stove lugged two flights up the stairs and the blanket nailed to the window with tacks. In the alleyway beyond the back wall stood a row of disused stables and a bombed house with the wallpaper hanging in shreds from the chimney-breast, and sometimes women, no better than they ought to be, lured men into the ruined shadows.

‘You’ll freeze,’ Lily threatened, having run upstairs in her coat and hat to lay out the family towel and returned, teeth chattering, like Scott on his way to the Pole.

‘You’re a fool to yourself,’ said Uncle Vernon. He’d put two and two together and come up with Stella’s monthlies. There wasn’t any other reasonable explanation, and anyone with an ounce of sense knew it was courting disaster to get into water at such a time.

Then there was the business of lighting the geyser, never easy on the best of days, let alone unscheduled. A loss of nerve, a miscalculation of timing between the release of the gas and the striking of the match could blow them all into eternity. ‘Can’t it wait until next week?’ he implored, catching his breath on the first landing with the stove in his arms and the loofah, stiff as a smoked kipper, slotted for convenience through the braces of his trousers. ‘No,’ rasped Stella, ‘it can’t.’

When he’d fixed the ‘Bath in use’ notice on the door and gone stumping disapprovingly down the stairs, she pulled aside the blanket and peered into the yard. There was a high wind blowing a new moon through the clouds billowing above the chimney tops. She couldn’t see any women in the alley-way, nor had she ever. They were all images in Uncle Vernon’s wanton mind.

In the mirror above the wash-basin she spoke to Meredith. ‘Good evening. I’m Stella Bradshaw. I don’t expect you’ll ever want to love me’. It was only make-believe but her mouth trembled at the suggestion. She thought she looked haunted, as though there was a demon standing at her shoulder. Perhaps it had something to do with the swooping shadows thrown by the naked light bulb swinging in the draught from the window.

There was something wrong with her hair; she had too much forehead and her neck wasn’t long enough. When she wasn’t concentrating her eyebrows shot up and her mouth fell open. But then, when she willed her face to remain immobile, her mind stopped working. When she had first met Meredith she had noticed how he controlled the muscles of his cheeks, even though his eyes showed curiosity. She suspected it was education and breeding that enabled him to keep his face and his feelings separate. Bunny, who plainly came from the same sort of background as herself, hadn’t mastered the trick. Under pressure, particularly when ordering the stage hands about their business, he grimaced like a gargoyle.

She wet the loofah under the tap and flattened her hair down over her eyebrows. In the corridor of the upper circle she had seen a photograph of an actress dressed as a page-boy. She had asked Bunny who she was and Bunny had said it was someone or other in the role of Joan of Arc, and that she mustn’t go up there again because Rose Lipman wouldn’t like to find her wandering about the passages. Up there was Miss Lipman’s territory. As a girl she had been employed in the crush-bar, her arms immersed up to the elbows in beer slops. The bar had long since been done away with, but some compulsion drove Rose to climb the stairs, morning and evening, to stand vigil at the window overlooking the square. Bunny said that sometimes she let Meredith accompany her. She took a special interest in him on account of the affection she felt for his mother. Meredith had once asked her outright why she came there, and she spoke evasively of the state of the paint-work, and had he noticed the rat droppings on the bend of the stairs? He thought he saw tears in her eyes, although it was possibly only a trick of the gaslight, and he squeezed her arm in a little gesture of sympathy, and she said, looking not at him but out of the window, that she came because the past never went away, that it was always out there, waiting. Then Bunny had added, ‘Mind you, we only have Meredith’s version of it. And we all know how he likes to put words into other people’s mouths, don’t we?’ It was an unguarded thing to say, and Bunny clearly regretted it because a moment later, when Geoffrey butted in with some daft remark on how extraordinary it was that a woman of Miss Lipman’s humble beginnings should be aware of the theory of four-dimensional time, he had rounded on him and ticked him off for being disrespectful. Geoffrey had coloured up and marched out of the prop room as though he was putting himself under close arrest. The really extraordinary thing was that Miss Lipman should be a friend of Meredith’s mother.

Uncle Vernon was dozing in his chair when Stella came downstairs. His mouth hung open and he had taken out the bottom set of his dentures; they sat in the hearth, nudging the pom-pom of his slipper, the flames flickering across them in a smile.

‘I’m sorry to be a burden,’ she said. ‘I can’t help myself. Really, I think the world of you. I’ve cleaned the tide-mark and I’ve put the loofah back under the stairs.’ She knew that even if he heard he wouldn’t let on. Declarations, like rich food, upset him. She kissed the air above his head and scurried on icy feet through to her bedroom, off the scullery. She didn’t bother to turn on the light. She flung her coat onto the bed and curled beneath the sheets, shutting her eyes to the glitter of the moon spilling across the linoleum.

Vernon waited until Stella’s door closed before leaving his chair. He considered whether he should go upstairs to take down the blanket or leave it until the morning. He didn’t think Stella would have remembered, not being the one to pay the bills. Come daybreak the lodgers would be burrowing in and out of the bathroom like ferrets, burning the electricity with abandon when they found the place in darkness. The poor wretch with the sewn-back eyelids would spot the difference, being in a state of perpetual light, but his sleeping habits were so irregular that by the time he surfaced from his nightmares the meter would have run up a tidy penny.

Rubbing his back, Vernon limped to the window. Above him he could see the outline of the railings and the black smudge of a wallflower thrusting through the cracks of the basement bricks. A man walked past, the steel tips to his boots striking the pavement. He was trailed by a frisky dog who stopped and cocked a dancing leg in the lamplight to let fly droplets of dazzling urine. ‘Bugger off,’ shouted Vernon, thumping the window with his fist.

He felt out of sorts. Stella had worked for no more than three weeks, and already she was changing. For five days she had refused to let Lily come near her with the curling tongs, and several times she had left the food uneaten on her plate. She hadn’t shown insolence; she simply told them she wasn’t hungry, and that she thought it was high time she chose for herself whether to crimp her hair or leave it as God made it. Lily said she had a point, on both counts.

The girl was less argumentative all round, with the exception of tonight, and that had been his fault for setting up such opposition. He had wanted her to alter, had himself at some sacrifice to his pocket jostled her onto the path towards advancement, and yet he sensed she was leaving him behind. He hadn’t realised how bereft he would feel, how alarmed.

There was more to baths, he thought uneasily, than cleanliness.

4

Meredith made a telephone call both before and after breakfast in the lobby of the Commercial Hotel where he lodged. On the second occasion the wife of his landlord caught him thumping the side of the machine with his fist. ‘Has button B stuck, Mr Potter?’ she asked, and he murmured something unintelligible at her over his shoulder as he pushed into the revolving doors and spun out into the street.

Next door to the hotel was a garden laid out in memory of some worthy citizen of an earlier century, its beds planted with roses pruned brutally to the soil. The municipal railings had been taken away for the war effort and through the gaps in the makeshift fence of galvanised iron he saw a tramp in an army greatcoat sitting on a green bench. The tramp looked up and glared maliciously back; he was sucking on a chicken bone and the stubble of his beard glistened.

‘It’s all right,’ said Meredith. ‘I was merely admiring the garden. Such an oasis of peace in all these bricks.’ And he walked on in the winter sunshine, the tom-cat smell of the tramp in his nostrils, the wind swelling his clothes, bowling him down the hill towards the station.

He began to recite an act of resignation to the Divine Will. O, Lord my God, I now at this moment, readily and willingly accept at Thy Hand whatever kind of death . . . and checked himself in time, knowing his intention was unworthy. He was neither willing nor ready to die, not until he had strangled Hilary.

He had his suede shoes brushed over with a wire brush by the boot-black outside the General Post Office and arrived at Exchange station a few minutes before ten o’clock. Entering the railway hotel he ordered a pot of coffee and sat in the main lounge with his back to the stairs. His head was full of sentences he was going to write to Hilary when he had the time to put pen to paper: I may remind you that I never asked you for a penny towards the summer gas bill . . . do you think I am made of stone? . . . surely I deserve better consideration . . . who listened for hours when you had that disagreement at Bromley over Fortescue upstaging you in
She Stoops to Conquer
 . . . have you forgotten that it was I, when your mother had her second stroke, who travelled with her in the ambulance and went back on the bus to collect her plaster replica of the Sacred Heart?

He was just debating whether it was a shade pompous to refer to himself as ‘I’ rather than ‘me’ when young Harbour, the juvenile lead, tapped him on the shoulder. Harbour was extremely nervous, this being his first professional engagement, and equally determined to seize his chance. Meredith had spotted him at an end of term production of
You Never Can Tell
at drama school.

‘Good morning,’ said Harbour. ‘Sorry to butt in.’

‘I’ve rather a lot on my mind,’ Meredith said. He didn’t look at the boy but stared instead at a potted palm withering in its tub beside the grand piano on the rostrum.

Discomfited, Harbour blurted out that he thought
Dangerous Corner
a wonderful play, absolutely wonderful. And Dotty Blundell was wonderful too. How old was she exactly? He had the round blue eyes of a doll, ringed with stiff black lashes.

‘On the wrong side of forty,’ said Meredith. Dotty was thirty-nine, but had he added twenty years onto her age he knew it wouldn’t have deterred Harbour. Not for the first time he thought how monotonous it was, this unerring selection of inappropriate objects of desire. John Harbour ought to have winged, a bee to the honey, to Babs Osborne. Dawn Allenby, a masochist if ever there was one, should have prostrated herself at the feet of Desmond Fairchild, a sadist in a trilby hat worn with the brim turned up all the way round like a vaudeville comic.

‘Have I time for coffee?’ asked Harbour. This morning he was wearing a rugby scarf flung boyishly about his neck.

‘I think not,’ said Meredith, and was gratified at the crestfallen slump to the young man’s shoulders as he trailed towards the lift.

The company, until such time as the carpenters had finished building the set on stage at the theatre, had the use of a private function room on the top floor of the hotel. The room, which overlooked the booking hall or the station, was large enough for their purposes and grandly panelled in mahogany. When the trains came in or out, sending the pigeons wheeling from the vaulted roof and the steam rolling against the windows, Meredith felt he was on the poop of some ancient brig sailing a ghostly sea.

There were three men and four women in the cast of
Dangerous Corner
, all of whom, save one, were under contract for the season. The exception was Dawn Allenby, a woman in her thirties who had been engaged for this first production only and who, two days into rehearsal, had fallen heavily for Richard St Ives. If she was served before him at the morning tea-break she offered her cup to him at once, protesting that his need was greater than hers. He had only to fumble in the pocket of his sports jacket, preparatory to taking out his pipe, and she was at his elbow striking on a musical lighter which tinkled out the tune of ‘Come Back to Sorrento’.

St Ives was plainly terrified of her. Cornered, he resorted to patting her on the shoulder, while across his face flitted the craven smile of a man dealing with an unpredictable pet that yet might turn on him. He laughed whenever she spoke to him and clung to Dotty Blundell for protection, whirling her away on his arm the moment rehearsals were over.

It was his own fault for having been conceited enough to be pleasant to her on the morning of the read-through. Mistakenly thinking it would do no harm to put her at her ease – she was a plain woman with the faintest smell of spirits on her breath even at ten o’clock in the morning – he had mentioned the interesting photographs hung on the stairway leading to the stalls. ‘They’re of past productions,’ he elaborated. ‘Going way back to 1911.’