An Awfully Big Adventure Part 2

The next day, seeing her dressed in such workmanlike attire, Bunny had disconcertingly handed her a measuring rule and a stub of chalk and instructed her to work out the dimensions of a door, stage right, which would feature on the set of Dangerous Corner Dangerous Corner. He had talked mysteriously of an angle of forty-five degrees. Half an hour later, returning to the wings and finding the boards unmarked, he had sought Stella out in the prop room. She was making a great show of sand-papering the wheels of the bicycle perched on the sofa. 'Anything wrong?' he said. He was very pale and his lips looked swollen.

'I don't know what you mean about dimensions,' she said.

'What particular bit defeats you?' he asked patiently.

'All of it,' she admitted. 'I've never got the hang of feet and inches.' She knew by his expression, the clamp of his dry mouth, that he was annoyed. 'I'm not being awkward,' she said. 'It's just that I had a disturbed schooling.'

'Think nothing of it,' he retorted, and sent her upstairs to fetch Geoffrey down from the paint-frame. Geoffrey laid a newspaper on the stage to protect the knees of his cavalry-twill trousers and finished the task in two minutes flat.

'It's not that I thought the job demeaning,' Stella a.s.sured George. 'Uncle Vernon says I haven't the humility to find anything beneath me.'

There and then George made her measure the rail of the fire-guard. Twice the rule snapped back and drew blood. 'There must be a better way of learning something,' whined Stella, sucking her fingers. 'Get away,' said George, whose own knowledge of such things had been acquired through pain.

At fourteen he had gone straight from St Aloysius's school to s.h.i.+ft scenery at the Royal Court. If he slopped whitewash onto the floor the stage manager clouted him over the ear with the brush and, if he forgot to grease the rag in which the tools were rolled, at curtain fall he had sixpence docked from his wages. When he cut short a length of timber the master carpenter brought the saw down on his knuckles.

Having learnt all he could, George had given in his notice and applied up the road to the Repertory Company. His very first job had been in that celebrated production of Richard II Richard II in which P.L. O'Hara had performed the King. The designer, who was later blown to smithereens at Tripoli, had wanted the deposed Richard ranting and roaming beneath the underground arches of a palace '... I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I dwell unto the world...' and George, a man accustomed to sleeping eight to a room, the condensation weeping down the cellar walls, the baby coughing itself into the Infirmary, had sketched out a confined s.p.a.ce, a simple box-like structure just roomy enough for a man to stand up in. in which P.L. O'Hara had performed the King. The designer, who was later blown to smithereens at Tripoli, had wanted the deposed Richard ranting and roaming beneath the underground arches of a palace '... I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I dwell unto the world...' and George, a man accustomed to sleeping eight to a room, the condensation weeping down the cellar walls, the baby coughing itself into the Infirmary, had sketched out a confined s.p.a.ce, a simple box-like structure just roomy enough for a man to stand up in.

The local newspaper had commented in its review: 'The King's face, petulant, wilful, caught in a noose of light from the number one flood, floated in darkness... when Exton entered and struck weak Richard down, such was the power of the set, the shadow of the prison bars rearing like spears against the backcloth, there was not a woman in the stalls worthy of her s.e.x who could refrain from weeping.'

Then the war came, and George joined the Merchant Navy. Two years later his s.h.i.+p was torpedoed twenty-four hours out of Trinidad. He spent nine days adrift in an open boat, croaking out Christmas carols and spitting up oil.

Stella was used to such stories. Every man she had ever met told tales of escape and heroism and immersion. They had gone down in submarines, stolen through frontiers disguised as postmen, limped home across the Channel on a wing and a prayer. The commercial travellers pushed back sleeves and rolled up trouser legs to point at scars; they tapped their skulls to show where the shrapnel still lodged.

George's chief officer had collapsed in the boat. They tried to lay him flat, but he was so badly burnt he was trapped upright with his fingers stuck to the gunnel. George had sc.r.a.ped the skin free with his teeth. The cobweb of a hand, like a woman's lace glove, clung to the wood until the salt spray dashed it away.

'How awful,' said Stella dutifully. George was rocking over the fireguard and smiling. It was astonis.h.i.+ng to Stella how fondly men remembered their darkest hours.

P.L. O'Hara had risen to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. In 1944 he'd sent George a postcard of an old man tapping his way up a village street somewhere in the Cotswolds. The card was pinned to the wall beneath the moose, alongside the yellowing cutting of the review of Richard II Richard II.

'I wish I'd seen the play,' said Stella, kindly.

Geoffrey said it was absurd to think the designer had taken the slightest heed of any suggestion put forward by the likes of George. And furthermore, if Captain Bee's Knees O'Hara was the great actor he was cracked up to be, why hadn't he been snapped up by Hollywood instead of returning year after year to the provinces?

'Why don't you like George?' asked Stella, when they were upstairs, on the third floor, cleaning out the extra's dressing room.

'But I do,' he protested. 'He has considerable native intelligence.'

'He's not a n.i.g.g.e.r,' she said, and noticed how he winced. He was wearing a pair of woollen mittens discovered in a cupboard; he was afraid of dirt. He was was.h.i.+ng the long mirror with a scrunched-up page of the Evening Echo Evening Echo dunked under the running tap of the basin and his mittens were sopping wet. dunked under the running tap of the basin and his mittens were sopping wet.

'You'd be better off without them,' she advised. Her own hands were black with newsprint. She couldn't quite reach the corners of the gla.s.s and was stretching on tiptoe across the dressing-table when Geoffrey put his arm round her shoulders. It wasn't an accident; he was breathing too hard. She was about to shrug him away when she thought of Meredith. Rehearsing with Geoffrey would make it easier when the time came for Meredith to claim her. Penetration, from what she had gathered from library books, was inescapably painful unless one had played a lot of tennis or ridden stallions, and she hadn't done either. Despite his Gestapo monocle, Meredith, as a man of the world, might be put off if she screamed. Hastily swallowing the liquorice George had given her earlier that morning, she swivelled round, eyes shut, and waited.

Ignoring her lips, Geoffrey nuzzled her ear. Even if it had been Meredith she didn't think she would have found it very exciting. She was reminded of the time she'd taken part in Children's Hour Children's Hour and they'd showed her how to simulate a rising storm by panting sideways into the microphone. and they'd showed her how to simulate a rising storm by panting sideways into the microphone.

She began to stroke Geoffrey's harsh hair. It was a womanly gesture witnessed often enough on the screen at the cinema. She supposed it was maternal rather than sensual; it was what women did for babies, to make them feel secure and stop their heads from wobbling.

She was glad her ears were clean. Every fortnight, on bath night, Lily probed them with a kirby-grip. Uncle Vernon said it was a dangerous thing to do. Stella could be perforated. Squirming, she left off cradling Geoffrey's head and brought her hand down to separate her stomach from his. It was disgusting really, linking men with babies.

Something with the texture of an orange, peeled and sticky, b.u.mped against her wrist. She couldn't suppress crying out her distaste, any more than she could help envying Geoffrey his lack of inhibition. On occasions, when visiting the doctor for some minor ailment, she had even felt it immodest to stick out her tongue. She didn't dare look down in case she glimpsed that object bobbing against her overall.

It's no use, she thought. I'll have to practise on someone else. It would be fearful enough to be up against something as dreadful as that belonging to a beloved, let alone attached to a person one despised. Punching Geoffrey in the chest she broke free from his arms and leapt upwards to swipe a cobweb from the ceiling. She was shaking all over and yet she felt much fonder of him now that he'd behaved so rudely. Even his hair looked different, less annoying.

'I know I give the wrong impression,' Geoffrey said, when they had finished cleaning the dressing-room. 'I know you think I'm a sn.o.b.'

'You are,' she said, 'but it's no longer an issue.' It was the truth. If he had a need to s.h.i.+ne it was all right by her. He could spout his foreign words until the cows came home; he wasn't a stranger any more.

'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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sages. 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 b.u.t.ted 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 bas.e.m.e.nt bricks. A man walked past, the steel tips to his boots striking the pavement. He was trailed by a frisky dog who stopped and c.o.c.ked a dancing leg in the lamplight to let fly droplets of dazzling urine. 'b.u.g.g.e.r 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 G.o.d 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 b.u.t.ton 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 munic.i.p.al railings had been taken away for the war effort and through the gaps in the makes.h.i.+ft 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 G.o.d, 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 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 You Never Can Tell at drama school. at drama school.

'Good morning,' said Harbour. 'Sorry to b.u.t.t 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 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. 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...o...b..rne. Dawn Allenby, a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t if ever there was one, should have prostrated herself at the feet of Desmond Fairchild, a s.a.d.i.s.t 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 p.o.o.p of some ancient brig sailing a ghostly sea.

There were three men and four women in the cast of Dangerous Corner 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.'

'How lovely,' she enthused. 'Do show me.'

He identified several actors caught by the camera in poses of dramatic intensity and had judged from the frown between her heavy brows and the unsuitability of her responses that she would have been more enlightened had she worn spectacles.

'I was in a season of Restoration comedy at Preston,' she said, peering at a study of P.L. O'Hara with treacle ringlets playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan Peter Pan.

Bunny agreed with Meredith that there was nothing wrong with Dawn Allenby apart from her love of beauty, an affliction she was ill-equipped to fight. He put it in a nutsh.e.l.l when he said she was the sort of girl who, if there had been a meadow handy, would have been out there in a flash picking cowslips.

Meredith went up to the rehearsal room in a less tetchy state of mind. His brush with John Harbour had soothed him; it was always satisfying to the senses, however diminis.h.i.+ng to the soul, to wield power. He even managed to compliment Dawn Allenby on the silk head-scarf, printed all over with the heads of Scottie dogs, which she wore twisted into a turban about her dark hair.

'It is rather a find,' she agreed. 'But then I love beautiful things, don't you?' Beneath her jolly headgear her tired eyes momentarily sparkled.

Before rehearsal began Desmond Fairchild ordered the new girl, Stella, to fetch him a packet of cigarettes from the porter's desk.

'Just a moment,' called out Meredith, and pointedly asked Bunny if it was all right by him.

Bunny mumbled it was.

'It's always as well to check,' said Meredith.

They rehea.r.s.ed Act One from the top. When Bunny clicked his fingers, signifying the rise of the curtain, Geoffrey, the student, was supposed to imitate the sound of a gun being fired. Given his military background, such a task should have been in the nature of coals to Newcastle, but in the event he was scrutinising his reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. Bunny banged on a table instead and the new girl gave a convincing scream.

Grace Bird, who had the smallest part in the play, that of Maud Mockridge the lady novelist, had still not memorised her lines and read from the script. Meredith wasn't bothered. Grace had appeared in supporting roles in West End productions for the last twenty years and he knew she would be word-perfect when she felt it necessary. He had only managed to persuade her to join the company because her husband had recently left her for an older woman and she needed to get away from London. Everyone liked Grace. She was in pain, but she was taking it out on a complicated Fair Isle jumper that she was knitting for some nephew in Canada.

The scene towards the close of Act One, in which Dotty Blundell as the sophisticated Frieda tells her husband Robert, played by St Ives, that Olwyn is in love with him, went particularly well: You wanted to know the truth, Robert, and here it is, some of it. Olwyn's been in love with you for ages. I don't know exactly how long, but I've been aware of it for the last eighteen months. Wives are always aware of these things, you know. And not only that, I'll tell you what I've longed to tell you for some time, that I think you're a fool for not having responded to it, for not having done something about it before now. If somebody loves you like that, for G.o.d's sake, make the most of it before it's too late.

Although Dotty had all the words, Dawn Allenby's face spoke volumes; until love had struck she had been merely adequate in the role of Olwyn.

It was during the tea break that Meredith began to feel agitated again. Babs...o...b..rne was dissatisfied with her digs. She was lodged in Faulkner Square with Florence O'Connor whose mother, Bessie Murphy, had been a famous theatrical landlady; supper on the table at eleven o'clock, a fire lit in the bedroom, a jug of hot water outside the door at eight-thirty sharp, Sundays excluded on account of Ma.s.s.

'The c.o.c.k of the North invited her to his wedding,' said Grace. 'And there was a rumour that John Galsworthy once left her five guineas under the spine of his breakfast kipper.'

Florence wasn't a patch on Bessie. She had marital troubles. The uproar in the middle of the night when Bernard Murphy rolled home fighting drunk from the seamen's club had to be heard to be credited. Babs could have borne all that if other standards had been maintained. She waved her right hand feebly in the air, as though the bone in her wrist were broken. 'Last week,' she said, 'my nail snapped off. I was struggling to set a mouse-trap.'

'Dear G.o.d,' said Grace, 'vermin are the responsibility of the landlord.'

'I don't receive any messages,' wailed Babs. 'Stanislaus telephones and they never tell me. And if I ring him we get cut off in the middle of the call.'

'Time hurries,' Meredith said, clapping his hands. He could hear the irritation in his voice. It's killing to love, he thought. And death when love stops. Everyone, save Babs...o...b..rne, understood that her Polish lover was trying to give her the push.

Five minutes into the First Act Dotty Blundell forgot her lines and snapped her fingers for a prompt. The new girl was so lost in the action of the play that she cried out, 'It doesn't matter, go on, go on', and everyone laughed, even Meredith. In spite of this, sitting on his Empire chair beneath the window, head tilted to one side at an angle of acute concentration, he had the curious sensation that if he s.h.i.+fted his gaze from the little group mouthing in front of him his head might fall off. He felt for the monocle dangling against his s.h.i.+rt front and tumbled it between his fingers, over and over as though telling a Rosary.

St Ives was confessing to Olwyn that he and Frieda had never been happy together. Not really. 'Somehow our marriage hasn't worked. n.o.body knows.' This was the moment when Dotty gave her shrug expressive of pity. For the umpteenth time the leopard-skin coat which she wore slung about her shoulders slid to the carpet. At which Bunny fussily swooped to retrieve it. 'For G.o.d's sake,' shouted Meredith, 'leave it. Stop behaving like an old Queen.'

Almost immediately he beckoned Stella and stood with his back to the room. Outside the window sounded the thin blast of a whistle as a train prepared to leave the platform. It was as though he himself had screamed.

The girl came to him at once, her face a reflection of his own, eyes wide, her teeth biting on her lip. He told her to fetch a pencil and paper and when she brought them scribbled down several sentences in capital letters.

'Do you know where the General Post Office is?' he asked.

'Of course,' she said.

'Can you read my writing?'

'I believe I can.'

'Run all the way and don't change a word.'

Soon afterwards he announced it was lunchtime. He pretended to be engrossed in making notes until the actors had left the room. He expected Bunny to stay behind, but he was the first out of the door. Desmond Fairchild was the last to leave. 'Care to join me for a snifter, old boy?' he said, b.u.t.toning on his chamois leather glove with the hole in the thumb. Meredith ignored him.

Below the window a crocodile of children in striped caps marched across the booking hall. The flower-seller who kept a stall in the mouth of the granite arch leading to the subterranean tunnel into the street was bent over, dunking tulips in a galvanised bucket. Pa.s.sing beneath the arch the children felt the slope beneath them and tumbled into a trot, the echoes of their stamping feet sending the pigeons plummeting from their perches. When the birds spewed out of the darkness the flower-seller flapped her great shawl like a matador to ward them off; they broke formation, circling the ma.s.sive clock stopped at ten to ten, floundering upwards towards the whirling sky framed in the shards of gla.s.s set in the iron ribs of the shattered roof. Then Bunny, battling his way against the flow of the children, appeared in the hall and halted for a moment, the belt of his mackintosh undone, looking up at the windows of the rehearsal room. Meredith waved; he didn't think Bunny saw him.

They had met in a railway carriage in the third year of the war. Bunny was going home on a twenty-four-hour pa.s.s and Meredith returning from a week's leave in Hoylake. They had sat opposite each other in a compartment crowded with able seamen, he watching the darkening fields flying outside the window and Bunny staring down at a single sheet of notepaper, pale blue in colour, which he held on his jigging knee and from whose fold poked a spring of crab apple in bloom. At intervals, re-crossing his cramped legs humped on the ha.s.sock of his kit-bag, his boot struck Meredith's s.h.i.+n and he muttered an apology, to which Meredith responded with a polite shrug of the shoulders. But then, as night fell and the lights were switched on in the carriage, illuminating the sepia photographs of Morecambe Bay at dawn and donkeys trotting Blackpool sands, he felt his privacy was being invaded and had stopped making those conciliatory gestures. Besides, from the pallor of his fat cheeks, those nails bitten to the quick, the splodge of oil on his trouser-leg and the b.u.t.ton missing from his tunic, it was easy to distinguish to which cla.s.s the man belonged. Though they both wore the uniform of a Private it was plain who was of superior rank.