Bad Girls Good Women (21 page)

So long as he was working, he could keep the darker anxieties at bay.

It was dark, with the sudden depressing weight of a northern November, when Mattie reached Leeds. She stood beside the ticket barrier with her suitcase, peering around her. Even under the station lights, fog thickened the air, and her breath hung in a cloud in front of her.

There was no one to meet her.

Mattie squared her shoulders and went out to the taxi rank beyond the station. She gave the taxi-driver the address of the theatre and they started off into the murk. The driver called something to her over his shoulder, in an accent so impenetrable that Mattie could hardly understand him. She felt as if she was in a foreign land.

But the theatre, when they reached it, reassured her a little. It was a huge grey edifice, seemingly big enough to seat a thousand playgoers. Lights streamed out and the taxi slid forward into the yellow glow. Mattie paid off the driver and went up the semicircle of shallow steps into the foyer. It was hung with playbills from past shows, and with grainy photographs of the two Headline productions.

It was completely deserted, except for a bored girl staring vacantly out of a glass-fronted booth. Mattie strode up to her.

‘I’m here to see Mr Douglas. I’m the new stage manager for Headline.’ It was the proudest sentence that Mattie had ever uttered, but the girl’s face didn’t even flicker.

‘They’re halfway through t’second act. You want stage door. Or mebbe e’ll be oopstairs. You can tek that door.’

She nodded across the expanse of darned carpet to a door marked
Staff
.

‘Can I leave my things here?’

‘Suits yersen.’

Behind the door was a narrow staircase of bare boards. It was almost pitch dark. Mattie groped her way upwards, with no idea where she was heading.

Then she heard the voice. It was unmistakably John Douglas, and he was shouting. While Mattie hesitated a woman’s voice screamed back. She couldn’t make out the words, but it was clearly a full-blown row. Making her way towards the noise Mattie came to a dingy corridor lit by a bare bulb, and a door marked
Office
. The door banged open and a woman stumbled out. Her greying hair was falling out of a bun and she was crying.

‘You’re a monster,’ she sobbed. ‘No less than a monster. Not a human being at all.’ Then she pushed past Mattie without glancing at her and ran down the stairs.

‘Yes, yes,’ said John Douglas from inside the office. ‘Tell me something new, Vera.’

Mattie tiptoed forward and tapped on the open door.

‘I thought you’d bloody gone,’ John Douglas said.

‘She has,’ Mattie answered. ‘I’m Mattie Banner.’

John Douglas looked up from the one chair in the room. There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘Is that supposed to mean anything to me?’

Mattie quailed.

He was a big man with a lion’s head of shaggy grey hair. Mattie saw a rubber-tipped walking stick leaning against his chair.

‘I’m your new stage manager.’

His sudden shout of laughter was even more disconcerting. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.’

It was the same rich voice that she had admired, but how could such a voice belong to this creased, belligerent man?

‘What’s funny about it?’ Mattie asked, stung by his rudeness.

‘Just that Willoughby said he was sending me his own personal assistant, as a great favour.’

‘I am – I was – Francis’s assistant.’

John was still laughing as he looked her up and down. It made Mattie feel hot and angry.

‘Yes, of course. It’s just that I was expecting a lady of a certain age and certain capabilities. Give that we’re talking about Francis I should have known better. I’m sure you’ve got your own talents, love, but I doubt that they’ll be the ones I need for eight shows a week. How old are you?’

Twenty-two.’

John Douglas’s mouth twisted. ‘Of course you are. Kids and cripples, that’s what we are in this company. They should give us special billing.’ He took hold of his stick, and stood up. He was tall, but his body screwed over to one side. ‘I provide the cripple element, in case you were wondering. Usually I tell pretty girls it’s a war wound, but I can’t be bothered tonight. It’s osteoarthritis, and I blame my vile temper on it.’

‘I thought there must be a reason for it,’ Mattie murmured.

He looked at her then, with the corners of his mouth drawn down. ‘What do you know about stage management?’ he snapped at her.

‘Enough.’

‘Oh, that’s very good. You can do the get-out tonight, and I’ll go home to bed.’

Mattie felt her face go stiff. ‘Do the …?

‘This is wonderful.’ He laughed again, without any warmth. ‘Francis may not have explained to you that this is a touring company. This lovely Saturday evening is our last night in Leeds, and on Monday we open a week in Doncaster. We have two shows on this tour, George Bernard Shaw’s
Arms and the Man
, and
Welcome Home
, which is a three-act drawing-room comedy complete with maid, of the sort beloved by mystified northern audiences. After the curtain tonight both sets have to be struck and loaded, with props and costumes, on to lorries. This leaves room for the next company to bring in
Rookery Nook
, or
Ghost Train
, or whatever bloody masterpiece the manager imagines will appeal to the citizens of Leeds. On Monday the procedure is reversed, in the next theatre. The get-in, as we theatre folk call it. That’s your job, dear, amongst other things. I’m afraid you’ll have Leonard to help you, too.’

‘Leonard?’

‘Your ASM. One of the kids, and half-witted as well. You’d better come backstage now, in the interval, and I’ll introduce you. You’ve already seen Vera. She’s the deputy manager.’ He was walking away down the dingy corridor, moving awkwardly but surprisingly quickly.

‘What was the matter with her?’

His voice boomed back, amplified by the funnel of the passage. ‘Apart from incompetence? Time of the month, I should think. All women are the same, from our lovely leading lady to yourself, no doubt. No, that’s not quite true. Our lamented Jennifer Edge didn’t seem to suffer, but then she took plenty of exercise.’

She heard him laughing.

Mattie contented herself with making a face at the director’s distorted shadow as she scuttled after him down to the stage.

An hour later the curtain had come down. It was a thin house for a Saturday night, and the audience dispersed quickly. The actors vanished in their wake, heading for the pub or the landlady’s cooking at their digs. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mattie. John Douglas had gone, and she found herself standing in front of the
Welcome Home
set, frozen by the certainty that she could do nothing with it. She would still be standing there when
Rookery Nook
arrived on Monday.

‘You’re in charge, then. Where shall we start?’

It was Leonard, a spindly youth in tight trousers, and the theatre’s two stage-hands. They were staring blankly at her, without hostility, but with no hint of friendship either.

Mattie wanted to cry, or to run away, but the three of them were blocking her way, and she hated anyone to see her in tears. She breathed in instead, and said sharply, ‘I’m new here, Leonard, and you know the show. Do what you usually do, and I’ll get started on the hampers.’

To her relief, they turned away and began dismantling the flats. The heavy weights thumped and the metal poles clanked. That, at least, was familiar.

Mattie found the big wicker costume and prop baskets stacked up backstage. She trailed around the deserted dressing rooms collecting discarded costumes and props, praying that she was finding everything, and began packing them up.

It took one and a half back-breaking hours to clear the theatre. Mattie and Leonard heaved the last wicker basket into the waiting lorry, and the two stage-hands melted away. The theatre janitor was locking the doors within five minutes, and Mattie only just retrieved her suitcase. She found herself out in the foggy street again, without even the glow of the theatre lights for reassurance.

‘You got any digs?’ Leonard asked her. He was about Mattie’s own age, an undernourished-looking boy with a bad skin and sparse, greasy hair.

She shook her head, and Leonard sighed.

‘They never think, do they? You’d better come to mine. They’re nothing special because the cast always pinch the best ones. But it’ll be better than nothing.’

He held out his hand for her suitcase, smiling at her Mattie was so tired that she let him take it. Leonard might easily have resented her arrival, she reflected, except that he didn’t seem to have the necessary spirit. He didn’t look like much of an ally as he loped along beside her, but Mattie needed a friend that night. She was grateful to him.

‘Thanks, Leonard,’ she said.

‘You can call me Lenny, if you like.’

His landlady served them a late supper in the front room. Eggs and bacon and fried bread, two bottles of Guinness, and a choice from the bottles of sauce that stood on a wooden tray on the sideboard. Lenny ate in silence, with his mouth open, and Mattie tried to keep her eyes fixed on the Victorian oleograph hung over the chilly grate.

She wanted to talk, to say,
This is it. I’m here
, but there was no one to share her mystified triumph with. Not Lenny, with his churning mouthfuls of food, and certainly not the brick-jawed landlady.

‘No funny business, is it?’ the landlady had snapped when Lenny presented her.

‘Of course not,’ they murmured.

Mattie thought of Jessie, on their first night in the square.
Nothing funny at all
, Mattie repeated, as she prepared for bed in the icy back bedroom.
I’d give anything for something to laugh at
.

Her first night in the professional theatre ended with her shivering between damp sheets, and longing for Julia and Jessie and Felix at home in the cluttered warmth of the flat.

Through the lumpy wallpaper, she could hear Lenny snoring.

It was the hardest week that Mattie had ever lived through, but when the time came round for her second get-out she was beginning to believe that she might survive as stage manager of the Headline number one company.

By sitting up late in her digs, and by working early when the rest of the company were comfortably asleep, she had learned the two scripts. She had mastered the props list and the calls. She knew that she could avoid any more of Sheila Firth’s tantrums by always calling her at the correct second, and always waiting meekly in her dressing room doorway for her languid acknowledgement. Sheila Firth was the actress playing Raina, and the fiancée in
Welcome Home
. She was temperamental and sickly, and not at all convincing as Shaw’s heroine, but Mattie watched her with intrigued intensity. She was the
Leading F
that Mattie had sighed over in the
Stage
.

Sheila’s technique for dealing with John Douglas was to ignore him. His abuses seemed to roll off her tilted head, and Mattie thought it was a very effective technique indeed. She adopted a mild version of it herself, and it helped her to survive the first week’s exposure to the director-manager’s fury. Mattie also had the comfort of recognising that even a hopeless stage manager was better than no one at all, and if John Douglas threw her out Francis was unlikely to replace her at any great speed.

The company moved from Doncaster to Scarborough, and from Scarborough to Nottingham, and Mattie’s new life began to develop a pattern.

On Saturday night, after the last curtain, there was the get-out. When it was done, two lorries took the flats and the props and the hampers of costumes away. The people were all gone, and the two-dimensional bric-à-brac that created the illusions, and the stage was left. Mattie liked it best then. It was easier to recapture some of her illusions about it in the absence of Francis Willoughby’s touring productions.

When the theatre was finally dark, Mattie could limp home to her digs for the last evening’s supper and bed. The digs improved after the first week. Vera took her under her wing, and introduced her to the network of theatrical landladies. They were there, in all the foggy northern towns that the company visited. Some of them were ex-professionals themselves; all of them were in love with the theatre. They always saw all the shows, and the actors waited politely for their verdicts. They treated their weekly regulars like members of the family, feeding them huge, fatty, late meals in gas-fire-heated parlours, and sitting with them afterwards for long sessions of gossip and discreet tippling.

Mattie suspected that the digs patronised by company members less genteel than Vera must be even livelier. There were two middle-aged actors in particular, who had been working the circuit for years and years and who always stayed in the same place in each town. At the end of the week they would murmur something like, ‘Old Nellie’s still got the stamina, dear, but I don’t know that I have. Just look at my skin. Early bed for me every night in Middlesbrough, whatever Phyllis says.’

Their names were Fergus and Alan, but they always referred to each other as Ada and Doris. They were the first homosexuals that Mattie had ever seen at close quarters, and her first introduction to theatrical camp. Doris and Ada convinced her that Felix couldn’t be queer. The thought of Felix pursing his lips and whispering, ‘She’s nice,
and
she knows it’ behind the back of some stage-hand made her laugh, and long for Julia.

On Sundays they did the transfer. Usually that meant a long, cold train journey with awkward connections. John Douglas drove himself in his filthy black Standard Vanguard, but the rest of the company huddled into the train with thermos flasks and sandwiches and the Sunday papers. The actors read the reviews of the West End productions aloud to each other. Mattie enjoyed the acrimony of that, listening in her corner. Most of the company was too old or too defeated for anything more challenging than Francis’s seedy productions and one or two of them were grateful to be working at all. But the younger ones like Sheila Firth believed that they deserved better, and used the close captivity of the train to tell everyone else. There were uninhibited rows, and shouting, and tears. Mattie watched everything, from behind the shelter of the
News of the World
.