Bad Girls Good Women (36 page)

Julia didn’t feel the remotest desire to laugh now. Mattie’s striptease had touched her, and she shivered. She also thought that it was painfully erotic.

A second later Mattie had disappeared. There was a wave of clapping, some foot-stamping and catcalling.

Beside Julia John Douglas murmured, ‘Sweet Jesus Christ.’ Flowers took Julia’s hand and held it tightly. They stood up in unison and pushed their way out through the darkness.

They waited for Mattie beside the row of dustbins outside the back door of the club. She emerged hardly a minute later, her hair wound up in a knot, ordinary Mattie again in her stovepipe trousers, except for a teacher’s cane gripped in one fist.

She stared blankly at John Douglas.

Then she pointed back over her shoulder. ‘Were you in there tonight? All of you?’ It was Julia who nodded.

Mattie suddenly grinned, surprisingly child-like. ‘It wasn’t much cop, was it? I usually put more effort into it than that. I was too tired tonight.’ Her eyes looked very bright in the dingy light. ‘But I’m livening up now. Are we all going to the Rocket? You too, John, whatever you’re doing here?’

His hand shot out and snatched at her wrist. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? In that place?’

Mattie stared at him for a second and then she shrugged wearily. ‘Don’t you start. It isn’t all that different from the theatre, is it? One way or another?’

There was a silence. They stood there, in an awkward circle, until John Douglas said, ‘I want you to come home now. I want you to read something.’

‘To read? It’s Saturday night. I want to go dancing. Julia?’ She looked round to her for support and the girls’ eyes met.

‘Go on,’ Julia said softly. ‘Go with him.’ So that Mattie couldn’t protest any more she turned and let Johnny Flowers lead her away down the alley. She rested her head for a second against his black-leather shoulder.

‘Come on, baby,’ he murmured. ‘You’re big girls now. Both of you.’

They came out into Wardour Street and began to walk northwards towards the Rocket.

‘Are we? Yes, I suppose we are.’ It was cold and the few other shadowy figures in the street looked menacing. Julia shivered again. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Johnny.’

Cheerfully he said, ‘I’m always here when I’m wanted.’

Mattie turned the light on and glanced disparagingly around the room. ‘Julia’s been at the polish again. Well, where is it? Whatever it is you want me to read?’

John Douglas picked the envelope up from its place on the table. Mattie opened it and took out a script in a blue binding.

‘This?’ The title was set in a little window cut out of the blue paper and Mattie read it aloud. ‘
One More Day
. I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Why should you have done?’ John Douglas said sharply. ‘I more or less stole it, and I’ve left the company to bring it down here to you. Now sit down in that chair and bloody well read it. Have you got any whisky?’

Mattie opened the blue cover. ‘There’s a bottle of gin in the kitchen.’

‘I never drink gin.’

Mattie didn’t answer. She was sitting in Jessie’s old armchair with her legs drawn up underneath her, reading the play.

It took her an hour, and the only movement she made was to turn the pages.

When she did look up again she couldn’t speak for a minute. When she did manage to ask the question breathlessness caught at her words.

‘Have they cast it yet?’

John Douglas shook his heavy grey head. ‘Auditions on Monday.’

Mattie could hardly bear to look at him. ‘Can you get me in?’

‘You’re on the list, love. I’ve managed to do that much for you.’

She got up then and went to him. She laid her cheek against his hair. ‘Why?’

‘Because I think you can play the part. It might have been written for you.’

Mattie waited, and then rubbed her cheek sadly against his head. Of course John Douglas wouldn’t say,
Because I love you. A little
. Even if he felt it, he wouldn’t say it. He hadn’t ever said anything of the kind. He had kept his irascible distance, and Mattie understood that there wouldn’t be anything more between them. But he had come down here to give her this wonderful, terrifying play, and he had secured her an audition, He must believe, after all, that she could act. That was as good as being loved, wasn’t it? Sometimes Mattie despised her own needs.

Very softly she said, ‘I can play it. I know I can.’

‘Good girl. And now, if there isn’t anything else except bloody gin, perhaps we could have a cup of tea?’

Mattie went into the kitchen and came back after a few moments with a tray. She put it down on a low table in front of the hissing gas fire. The red glow of it shone through the tips of her hair, lending her a bronze halo. John Douglas was irresistibly reminded of the Showbox. Mattie up on the tiny, tawdry stage, with her hair spilling out from under the black cap. The worthless glitter of sequins and then her body, taunting and innocent at the same time.

Of all the ways she might have chosen to support herself. He was angry with her, and touched, and titillated. Yet if Mattie could do that, he thought, she had the toughness he had doubted in her. And she would need to be tough, if she was to go the way she wanted. There might well be times when she would have to go further than stripping.

He stood up, ignoring his cup of tea, balancing awkwardly without the aid of his stick. He put his arm round her and pulled her body against his.’ ‘Do you remember the night in Yarmouth?’

‘I remember.’

He started kissing her and then rubbed his hands over her breasts, grunting softly. Mattie stood very still until he lifted his head again.

He saw her face, but he asked, ‘Shall we go to bed, then?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Mattie said, as gently as she could. She was surprised to find that she had acquired a kind of resolve. ‘It didn’t have very much value when we did it before. It seems a … meaningless transaction now.’

He looked sharply at her, and then he thought of the men in the darkness at the Showbox, leaning forward to peer at her white skin. ‘I’m not surprised,’ was all John Douglas said.

Mattie exhaled with relief and immediately insisted, ‘But you must stay here tonight, there’s Felix’s room. You will, won’t you?’

‘Thank you,’ he said gravely. His arms had dropped to his sides and Mattie went away mumbling about sheets and blankets.

For a long time after John Douglas had gone to sleep in his room across the hallway, Mattie lay wide-eyed in her own bed. She was thinking about the audition. There was already a knot of longing and fear and determination in the pit of her stomach. The time when the Rocket would be closing came and went, but Julia didn’t come home. Mattie guessed that she must have gone back to Bayswater, or Paddington, or wherever Flowers was currently living, tactfully leaving her on her own with John Douglas. Mattie’s mouth twisted in the darkness, but the thought slipped away as quickly as it had come. She didn’t sleep, or even close her eyes. She was thinking about
One More Day
. Her play. Her part.

‘Name?’

‘Mattie Banner.’

The man in the middle of the row of chairs nodded, and drew a line through an item on a list in front of him. There were two other middle-aged men in the cold, bare rehearsal room, a woman with grey hair and a much younger girl who looked like someone’s assistant. She had just brought coffee in mugs for everyone, except Mattie, of course. A young man with tufty-black hair and a hungry, hollow face sat a little apart from them. Mattie thought he must be the playwright, Jimmy Proffitt. She stared covertly at him, wondering how someone she wouldn’t have glanced at in the Rocket might have written such a play. He felt her eyes on him and looked up. Mattie stared at the room instead. It was in the Angel Theatre, a Victorian building of faded grandeur that had once been a music hall. It was in an unfashionable inner suburb, and it looked much the same as any of the northern theatres that Mattie had trailed through with Francis Willoughby’s company. It existed just as precariously on the brink of financial collapse, but the Angel Company was distinguished by its willingness to stage new and experimental plays, to displease the Lord Chamberlain, and to give directors a free rein. Mattie recognised two of the men facing her by sight and by reputation. She swallowed and rolled the blue-covered script in damp hands.

‘And you’re going to read for the part of Mary?’

‘Yes.’

I want this part
.

She had read it so many times since John Douglas had given it to her on Saturday night that she almost knew the lines already. The play was a tragedy, so raw and strident that it hurt Mattie’s throat to whisper some of the words. But when she thought of other new pieces, three-act pieces of fluff that dealt with engagements and tea parties and family misunderstandings, as two-dimensional as the painted flat behind the French windows, Mattie wanted to laugh in the same harsh voice as Jimmy Proffitt’s play.

‘At the top of page seventeen, then. Mr Curtis will read the part of Dennis for you. When you’re ready, Miss Banner.’

Mattie read.

At first her hands shook so much that the typed speeches jumped in front of her eyes and she faltered over the words. But then, as the lines worked inside her, Mary became more important than Mattie.

Jimmy Proffitt’s Mary was a nineteen-year-old girl. Her husband was a boy even younger than herself, and they had a baby of five months. They lived in one room, and Mattie knew how it would be. The wallpaper would hang down in soaking strips and there would be foul blue-grey patches spreading behind it. Mattie also knew how life would be for Mary and Dennis. They would claw at each other while the baby cried, the way Jimmy Proffitt had made them do. There would be desperation, and the compensation of tenderness and savage laughter that he had also given them. The opening of the play was viciously comic, and then the seams of it split open. One night, after a quarrel with Mary, Dennis took their week’s money and spent it on whisky. Then, outside a bar, he met a man he owed money to. There was a fight, and Dennis killed him.

The stage was split for the rest of the play. On one side Dennis was marched towards life imprisonment. On the other, Mary slowly lost her insignificant battle. In the last scene she gave her baby away to a childless woman. The woman paid her fifty pounds. Mary went home and burned the money, and then she blew out the flame and knelt down in front of the square mouth of the oven.

When Mattie finished her reading there was a brief silence, no more than a second or two. The director looked up from his lists. ‘Thank you. Have you prepared another piece for us? Anything you like.’

‘Umm. One of Rosalind’s speeches. From
As You Like It
.’ Mattie wasn’t sure why she had chosen it, except in the vague hope that if she did Shakespeare they might mistake her for a proper actress. She was hardly half a dozen lines into the speech before the man held up his hand.

‘Right, right. Not thoroughly at home with the classics, eh?’

Mattie waited, her arms limp at her sides. They were mumbling with their heads together now. Then the grey-haired woman said, ‘Thank you, Miss – ah – Banner. We’ll let you know.’

She made her way, somehow, across the apparent miles of dusty floor to the door. She was only dimly aware, through her misery, of Jimmy Proffitt moving behind her, more mumbled talk. The door was already open when the director called, ‘Could you wait outside, please?’

She wanted to let her head fall forward, to rest her forehead against the cool, hard door.

‘What?’

‘Could you take a seat outside. We’ll try not to keep you waiting for too long.’

She stumbled out into the corridor. There was a row of hard chairs, reminiscent of the Showbox. Mattie sat down at the end of the row. Three other girls were waiting for their turns, and one of them was called in after Mattie. The other two went on talking about RADA. They had elocuted voices like Sheila Firth’s. Mattie sat with her head turned away from them, staring at the wall, resolutely not thinking.

Certainly not hoping.

But she was still here, wasn’t she?

The first girl came out and went straight down the stairs without speaking. The others followed her in their turn. It was cold in the unheated corridor and Mattie was shivering. At last the girl assistant put her head round the door. ‘Mr Brand would like you to read again, Miss Banner.’

Once again Mattie faced the row of chairs. She felt so stiff with cold and fear that she was sure her jaw would crack as soon as she opened it.

‘The last scene this time, if you wouldn’t mind, Miss Banner.’

Jimmy Proffitt was watching her, and so were Brand and the grey-haired woman, and the girl assistant had stopped winding her finger through her back-combing. Curtis’s voice was uninflected as he read Dennis’s corresponding lines.

Mattie was aware of everything, and nothing.

Afterwards, all they said was, ‘We’ll be in touch with you.’

At the door the assistant asked her, ‘Who is your agent, Miss Banner? We don’t seem to have a note of it here …’

‘Mr Francis Willoughby,’ Mattie improvised quickly. Francis would do it for her, of course. For a percentage, if there ever were to be anything for him to take his percentage of.

She felt so shaky that she was almost sick on the bus on the way home.

Four days later they called her back for a second audition. Monty was angry at her request for another afternoon off and even threatened her with the sack, but one of the other girls offered to stand in for her.

‘Just this once, Monty,’ Mattie soothed him. ‘I won’t ask again.’

She wouldn’t need to. It was this part or nothing at all. This time there were more faces in the line opposite her. Mattie had no idea whether she read well or badly. They dismissed her just as non-committally, but this time there was only one other girl waiting on the hard chairs. Mattie recognised her. She had had a success in a play at the Lyric.

When Mattie reached home Julia saw her white face and poured two inches of gin into a tumbler for her. ‘They want their money’s worth, don’t they?’ Julia said fiercely. ‘How much longer are they going to take?’