So if this theory is right about lesser things, then you willed Matt and Bruce and Africa and all your experience there, just as I brought on to myself Joel. In which case all we can hope is that our deepest desires for our futures are better, since we neither know what they are nor can control them. For my part, I feel mine are better; you can tell I am very optimistic, especially when I go into my spare room, which I now regard as putatively yours. (‘Putatively’ is pure Joel of course. I have many words like that which are his legacy. ‘Irredentist’ and ‘recondite’ are my favourites, though I can hardly ever find a way to work them into a conversation.)
At last I am going to finish, but first I must just tell you that I’ve stopped puffing Players in the tube and munching Mars Bars on the telly and restarted to work properly. It’s a no. 1 touring company, and not spear-carrying this time! Don’t be jealous. Or, yes, do be jealous, let your jealousy move you here and challenge you to get back to the life you should have been living all these years.
So much love and lookings forward,
Tanya.
At the time of reading this, Maggie was all but stunned with a new sadness, the sadness of wasted years during which her exile might have been cheered by letters like this. However that might be, she couldn’t wait to be in touch when she got back to Britain, and she tried to be; but a tour by its nature goes on and on and its participants are virtually incommunicado while it does. Especially in this case, because instead of coming down to earth eventually in a London theatre, Tanya’s company went abroad in the middle of the British tour, and for more than six months she was in places like Germany and Italy, and then the company was whisked off to Singapore and thence to Australia. Postcards came and an occasional letter, and from these it was clear that Tanya was up to her eyes in the sort of social life that inevitably accompanies tours of this sort where the visiting ‘artistes’ are feted and lionised, a circumstance very much to Tanya’s taste and in which she could not be blamed for revelling.
While all this was galling for Maggie, who was dying to see her friend, in a ‘recondite’ sort of way it was a relief. Tanya’s offer of a batching-it, theatre-soaked lifestyle in her London flat had been all too tempting. And then there was her — Tanya’s — rising-star aspect to come to terms with. They had started level… It was true Tanya was older, but that didn’t make it any easier to appreciate her position three-quarters of the way up the ladder from Maggie’s at the bottom. Maggie had an uncomfortable feeling that seeing Tanya again would not only involve odious and envy-making comparisons but would arouse all sorts of old ambitions and unassuaged hungers.
And suddenly, one summer morning, a telegram came from Tanya. Her play, partly re-cast, was coming to Edinburgh. Could she stay with Maggie?
Maggie was thrown into a turmoil. She was galvanised by anticipation and rushed about the house getting things ready. Every time she encountered her mother or Matt, she hugged them, crying, ‘Tanya’s coming! She’s coming!’
‘Who’s Tanya?’ Matt asked at first.
‘She’s my best friend. She’s wonderful, you’ll love her.’
‘What do you mean, love her? Do you love her?’
‘Of course!’
‘How can you love another lady?’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Did you love Tolly?’
‘Yes. And Joan. And lots of people. But there’s no one like Tanya, she’s special.’
‘So was Tolly special.’
‘Differently.’
‘Is Tanya black?’ He often asked that still about people he was going to meet.
‘No! She’s — she’s sort of bright red!’
‘All over?’
Maggie hugged him again, laughing with joy. ‘You’ll understand when you see her.’
Mrs Robertson was excited too, in a quieter way. Her questions, too, were telling.
‘She’s almost a star, isn’t she?’
‘Almost!’
‘Is it grand enough here for a real theatrical leading lady?’
‘Of course, Mummy! She’s got no side at all, not Tanya.’
‘I hope she’ll like me.’
‘Don’t you worry about that.’
‘Will she be here at the weekend?’
‘Yes. She’s coming on Sunday morning.’
‘Oh! What about Sunday lunch?’
That gave Maggie pause, but then she felt a great burst of happiness, which swept all doubts before it. ‘We’ll have them all as usual. I’ll make Stip come too, and she can meet them. She always used to say she wanted to meet my brothers.’
One of these at least was not so keen.
‘What are you looking so fizzy about?’ asked Stip suspiciously when she rushed round to tell him her news.
‘My friend Tanya Zandler’s coming to stay,’ she cried.
‘God, you sound like Milly-Molly-Mandy,’ said Stip sourly. He recognised the threat of Tanya by instinct. ‘And her imminence is what’s lit you up like a Roman candle?’
‘Oh, come on, Stip! I haven’t seen her for eight years. She was my closest friend.’
There was a silence, and then Stip said, with unwonted spite, ‘I just hope she’s not too actressy, that’s all. I can’t bear over-made-up shrieky women. If she calls me “darling”, I’ll walk out of the house.’
Maggie was startled and chagrined. She’d expected him to be pleased for her. ‘You’ve nothing to fear,’ she said huffily. ‘She’s not that sort at all.’
‘Is it today she’s coming — the red lady?’
Matt was sitting on the foot of her bed, cross-legged, a gnome in a red flannel stocking-cap thing Maggie had never seen before. She struggled up out of sleep.
‘What on earth’s that on your head?’
‘Grandad’s bedcap.’
‘I never knew he had such a thing,’ said Maggie, blinking.
‘It was a secret. Granny told me.’
Maggie stared at the tasselled cap and tried to remember her father.
‘It’s a good house for secrets,’ Matt said. ‘Not like the bungalow.’
‘Does that mean you like it here better?’ she asked unwisely.
Matt shook his head vigorously. ‘Oh no,’ he said, but quite cheerfully. ‘I couldn’t like anywhere better than with Tolly.’ She saw him shiver and pulled him into bed. He had something under his pyjama jacket, a soft padding on his chest. She caught a glimpse of sharp blue between the buttons. Tolly’s blouse. Would he ever discard it, discard Tolly? She suspected the former would fall to pieces, the latter herself have forgotten, before he did. Matt, unlike his father, was the faithful type.
‘Is it today?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. I must get up and start making a super lunch.’
‘Has she got any children?’
‘No. She’s not married.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know…’
Why not, indeed? Had the thing with Joel lasted, in its effects, all these years? Was there, nowadays, outside of fiction, a kind of passion which, denied propinquity, denied reciprocity, kept its effective hold on a woman’s life for years? If there were, and if Tanya were a victim of it, Maggie knew with her head that she was to be pitied. Objectively she did pity her for such unrewarded thraldom. But subjectively she felt nothing but the profoundest envy. To feel like that! To feel like that! Even pain, even the aridity of loneliness and childlessness — no. Not that perhaps, Maggie amended as she held Matt tenderly under her wing. But to know yourself capable of a deep, passionate, lasting love … how un-shallow that must reassure you that you are! A real woman, painted in bright strong colours, not a bland pale thing like herself, whose strongest emotion ever, till now, had certainly been guilt.
She went to the station at 11 a.m. to meet Tanya, shaking with excitement. She had examined herself in the mirror before she left. She was incapable of judging how much she had changed, how she might strike Tanya… Her eyes were unmistakably more strained, her face thinner.
That apple-cheeked bloom, the country-girl look she had been teased about at RADA had faded, giving place to a more fine-drawn and intense, a less — well, less remorselessly wholesome look. The years in Africa had begun the de-appling, the months in Scotland had thinned and sallowed her face further. ‘But at least I look more grown-up,’ Maggie told herself as she stood on the platform under the grimy glass roof, staring up the track. ‘After all, however much of a mess I’ve made up to now, it’s been living, of a sort. Surely that’s part of what matters.’ Thus, she tried to arm herself in advance against the impact of Tanya’s vitality, the inner sureness that triumphed over real tragedies, real losses… Wasn’t Bruce a real loss? No. There were moments in Maggie’s life where nothing seemed quite real, nothing seemed ever to have truly touched her. Except acting… The worst and most testing experience she had ever had, she realised suddenly as the train came snarling in and she rushed to the barrier, was not the death of close relatives, the agony of childbirth, the shattering unexpected loss of a husband. It was being nine months out of work when she was nineteen.
A carriage door flew open a fraction of a second before all the others, and there she was. Vivid, alive, waving wildly before turning back to drag out case after case… Two men rushed to help before Maggie could get there. One produced a trolley, the other piled it high. Maggie arrived, breathless from running, and she and Tanya grabbed each other.
‘Oh, Maggie —’
‘Darling — it’s so lovely —’
‘How wonderful you look! How much more interesting now you are that little bit thinner! I thought having a baby made everybody more fat? All my friends who have are like plum puddings.’ She hooked her arm through Maggie’s and they walked up the platform while the two eager strangers toiled after them with the trolley. Others, less fortunate, simply gazed as they passed.
Tanya looked superb. You couldn’t mistake her for anything but a successful actress. And she was ‘bright red all over’, or very nearly. A scarlet Wetherall suit with pale blue piping topped by a reversible scarlet and blue cloak which swung debonairly as she strode along. Shoes with long pointed toes and spike heels. Skirt very short, emphasising her thrusting, pretty knees. Plus a marvellous black velour hat with a wide soft brim, like a beautiful spy. Her hair was cropped short with points to the cheeks and was a truly stunning shade of red, almost magenta.
Her make-up made her look all eyes. Maggie thought she had never seen anyone so swaggeringly smart. She felt ludicrously proud of the impression her friend made in the sombre purlieus of Edinburgh station.
‘You know I always used to think it was “plump hoodings”,’ Tanya was saying. ‘I kept looking up “hoodings” in the dictionary! So tell, you said a party for lunch, who is coming? I hope it will be all your family. If po-faced Ian is not there, I shall die of disappointment.’
‘He’ll be there, and Lilian, and Stip. And if you dare send any of them up or make shocking remarks, I shall drive you at once to the most straight-laced temperance hotel in Edinburgh and abandon you there.’
The car ride passed in a verbal kaleidoscope. It was as if they had not been parted for more than a few weeks, except that there was so much to catch up on; they scarcely scratched the surface of all that, though — it was just banter and nonsense at first. Tanya didn’t talk much about her career, which Maggie already knew was on the verge of bursting into real brilliance. Nor would Maggie be drawn on the subject of Bruce, whose shade passed across the conversation in the time it took for a red light to turn green.
‘Do you want to talk about him, get it out of your chest?’
‘Off. No.’
‘What do you mean, “off’?’ Tanya asked, bridling.
‘Off your chest, not out of.’
‘I said “off’!” I have not said “out of” for years, if ever! You know our producer is queer?’
‘No?’
‘Well, he is. And he says some most outrageous things. Last week I invited him to dinner with Oliver and another girl and I did everything nicely, with candles, and he looked at them and said in this madly camp voice, “My dear Tanya, fancy you still using candles! And lit, too — how kinky!” ’
Maggie laughed, though she didn’t get it. She was more interested in the name she’d caught.
‘Who’s Oliver?’
‘Oliver? But you remember him! Oliver Britten. From RADA.’
Maggie did remember, quite clearly — a tall, rather intense boy with the face of an intelligent goat. South African, very hot against apartheid at a time when nobody in England knew much about it, and among fellow-students who never gave a thought to politics or indeed anything but the theatre. She remembered him best from an occasion when they’d all gone to Shearn’s vegetarian restaurant in Tottenham Court Road for lunch, and Oliver had held forth about the iniquities of racialism while Tanya, still raw from her wartime nightmare, gazed into his face, forgetting to eat in the passion of her agreement. But he was talking, it seemed, exclusively about the blacks in South Africa; later in the same conversation he let slip some faintly anti-Semitic remark, which Maggie registered with amazement, glancing at Tanya and being glad to realise she hadn’t heard… Odd to recall that now so vividly, her first realisation that people could be liberal in their own handpicked spots, while maintaining their pet prejudices in separate, unbreachable compartments…
This all flashed through her mind in the time it took to say, ‘Of course I remember Oliver. What’s he like now?’
‘Oh! He is handsome as ever … beautiful long hands… He is interested in politics. For that I love him.’
Maggie turned to her sharply, her ideal of eternal, unfed faithfulness wilting and dying.
‘Love him? Really love?’
Tanya threw back her head theatrically and closed her eyes. ‘Really really love!’ Her hat fell into the back of the car and she opened her eyes, laughed, and scrambled onto her knees to fish for it over the back of her seat. ‘No more of that! You see how it makes my hair stand on end. Later I will tell what there is to tell of Oliver. He has been monopolising me rather. Meanwhile, give me instructions how I am to get off with your brothers.’
‘Ian’s spoken for. And Stip is terrified of actresses.’
‘Ah. One of those. And Ian I am forbidden to shock. So perhaps I do my Calvinist matron? Have I time to remove my eyelashes and put on my high-necked dress and white Orlon cardigan before lunch?’
The answer was no. The family were ready ranged in the drawing-room by the time they arrived; in fact, Stip was on the doorstep to help in with the luggage before the car drew up.
He shook hands with Tanya rather gingerly and she lowered her eyes, not creating a particularly Calvinist impression since she was wearing a great deal of turquoise eyeshadow and the aforementioned devastating false lashes, like black-pointed stars. Stip gazed at these in fascination for a few seconds, then hastily turned, gathering up enough luggage for three porters, and staggered up the steps.
Tanya turned to Maggie and fractionally shook her head.
‘No,’ she said softly. ‘He is safe. I would be afraid… It will have to be Ian, after all.’
‘Watch out for Lilian then,’ Maggie muttered.
They went in. Ian was standing before the fireplace in a classic paterfamilias pose with Lilian sitting beside him. She was actually wearing a white Orlon cardigan, which made it very difficult for Maggie, who was feeling hilarious with nerves, to restrain herself. She managed to perform the introductions. Ian’s eyes came to rest on the flapper-style, magenta hair.
‘I hope you won’t find us too conventional,’ he said.
Tanya opened her eyes very wide. ‘Why should I? I am not sure what “conventional” really means. I know I am not it, or you wouldn’t have said that, but if it is something dull, I’m sure no one in Maggie’s family could be it either.’
Mrs Robertson came forward from the bay window where she had been hiding. Her eyes were very bright as she appraised her guest. ‘What
a lovely girl you are!’ she exclaimed spontaneously. ‘I do love an actress to look like an actress.’
Tanya laughed aloud, swung her cloak off her shoulders with a flourish, pulled her beautiful-spy hat off and bowed.
Stip was standing in the doorway, gazing, as if Tanya’s emanations might scorch him if he ventured too near. Ian by the same token appeared to be braced against a high wind. Maggie served sherry. Somewhat to her surprise, Lilian, who was normally all but teetotal, took one. This made Maggie give her a second look. She noticed now that Lilian had had her hair done and was wearing rouge. Or was it rouge? Anyway, she was decidedly bright of eye and her carriage was even more upright than usual. She seemed to be containing herself with an effort. But Maggie forgot her in fascination with the conversation Tanya was having with her mother.
‘Tell us about your play!’ Mrs Robertson was saying eagerly. ‘Am I to come and see it, or will it shock me too much?’
‘Are you easily shocked?’ asked Tanya. ‘I must say, you don’t look it.’
‘Oh, but I am! How could I not be, at my age, and with the speed things are changing?’
‘Things?’
‘Everything! Styles. Of speech, of dress, of — I love your skirt being so short, just like ours in the twenties, but those shoes with their sharp pointed toes, won’t they give you bunions? Oh, but that’s nothing, of course! It’s the changes in morals and what people talk about. When I was young, things altered slowly. One had time to accustom oneself. Except during wars. Hair and skirts shot up at a great rate in both the wars —’
Tanya gave a great, bawdy laugh.
‘Oh! Oh dear, I didn’t mean that, you bad girl! Anyway, so if your play is too strong, tell me at once, and I’ll stay away and make you a nice dinner for when you come home.’
The Warning Bell Page 21