The Wardrobe Mistress

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘Of course, but aren’t you the third most handsome man in England?’

  ‘Fourth. I’ve slipped, but Ronnie’s at number six so I can bear it.’ He studied her ersatz necklace. ‘That little key hints at much to be unlocked, Mrs K.’

  Vanessa’s glass was filled by a waiter, and she savoured the champagne, leaning forward to chat with Roy FitzPeter who confessed to being in agony.

  ‘At this moment, a dozen reviewers are penning judgement on us. It only takes one to have toothache or a gouty knee, and we’re slain.’ FitzPeter had left his Australian accent at the theatre.

  ‘It’s so much worse for you than me,’ Vanessa admitted. The hardest part of her job was over. Until a new play was chosen, she had only to maintain the costumes in her care. She felt a sudden prickle and discovered that Miss Bovary was staring at her.

  Miss Bovary hadn’t touched her champagne. She was out of place among these jubilant, over-excited actors. Why come at all, Vanessa wondered? She formed an idea why when Miss Eddrich proposed a toast.

  ‘To Commander Redenhall, who brought us back together.’

  Everyone raised their glass, except Miss Bovary. Edwin got to his feet with an air of superior indulgence. Each cast-member was toasted in turn, more champagne ordered as the bottles ran dry. Tanith, the last to be feted, thanked them all for being so ‘wonderful and lovely and kind’.

  She blushed as Roy, her onstage fiancé, said, ‘Thank you for bringing such corking swagger to the words, “Yes, mamma”!’ FitzPeter had reverted to broad Australian.

  Patrick tapped his glass with a spoon. ‘Someone else deserves a toast. She slips between the corridors, quiet of tread, yet without her we would be – ’

  Miss Bovary arranged her features.

  ‘Quite naked,’ Patrick went on. ‘I give you Mrs Kingcourt.’

  ‘Oh, don’t.’ Vanessa shook her head.

  Rosa put in softly, ‘Not everybody loves the limelight, Patrick. Leave Vanessa be.’

  Patrick was not to be deflected. ‘A few weeks ago, I watched a provincial production of The Scottish Play.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ Vic Pagnell commiserated. J Victor Pagnell was well cast as Mr Dumby. Plump, affable.

  ‘It was all right, but the costumes . . .’ Patrick made a face of pain. ‘The ladies’ frocks were cut from battlefield-surplus lavatory tents. The men sported belted hessian sacks and leggings knitted from unravelled dishcloth. We, on the contrary, have postured in silks and velvets and could not have done so but for this girl.’

  ‘It was Hugo,’ Vanessa insisted. ‘Hugo Brennan’s work.’

  ‘And Yorke of Mayfair,’ Miss Bovary cut in. ‘Without dear Daphne and her niece, you would indeed have been naked, Mr Carnford.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Vanessa agreed.

  Patrick wouldn’t have it. ‘Vanessa led the unit to victory after the commanding officer was shot. As darling Bo would have said, “No false modesty”.’

  Alistair raised his glass. ‘To our Wardrobe Mistress, who stumbled into a job she was born to.’

  ‘Well, we know the two of you get along rather well,’ Miss Bovary said. She stood up, murmuring something about the ladies’ room but took a moment to address Alistair. ‘Praising Mrs Kingcourt does you no credit. A man on the threshold of divorce should not arrive at a public place with an unattached widow, unless he wants to wipe the floor with her reputation. Poor judgement, Commander.’

  ‘Leave my private life alone, Barbara. Leave Vanessa alone.’

  Miss Bovary sniffed. ‘We know about those photographs.’

  Alistair’s eyes grew cold. The dinner guests tensed. ‘What do “we” know?’

  ‘You two were caught in bed together.’ Miss Bovary shifted her contempt from Alistair to Vanessa.

  Vanessa knew she had a split second in which to rise above the accusation, or be buried. ‘I’ve seen photographic stills of you wearing a lot less than I was on that occasion, Miss Bovary. I believe there’s one of you dangling over the stage in nothing but fleshings and three sequinned hearts.’

  Laughter greeted this, but Irene Eddrich silenced it. ‘Go powder your nose, Miss Bovary. When you return, we will have changed the subject.’

  Edwin Bovary drawled, ‘I don’t care for the mixing of actors with backstage. It never works.’

  ‘Neither does my watch,’ Vic Pagnell snapped, ‘yet it tells perfect time twice a day. Shall we raise our glasses to Mrs Kingcourt, then sit down?’

  The toast was given. ‘Mrs Kingcourt!’

  Noreen Ruskin leaned over the table, saying to Vanessa in a wondering voice, ‘I knew I knew you. Knew the first time I saw you, at Wilton Bovary’s funeral. You were in uniform, a clumsy colt of a girl.’ Miss Ruskin nodded, certainty growing. ‘You have your mother’s eyes.’

  ‘The colour of a good Amontillado sherry,’ Patrick Carnford agreed. ‘Too unusual for there to be any doubt.’

  ‘Doubt about what?’ Edwin Bovary demanded.

  Patrick waved vaguely. ‘Never mind. Here comes our food.’

  Waiters came with trolleys. Hors d’oeuvres were served. Good humour spread around the table and Miss Bovary’s return was hardly noticed. When the first course was cleared, Noreen Ruskin beckoned to Vanessa, who reluctantly went to her.

  The older woman whispered, ‘Your mother was my very dear friend, but she broke rules.’

  ‘By not marrying my father?’

  ‘She couldn’t, could she?’ From Miss Ruskin’s painted eyes fell three or four tears. She fiddled for her handkerchief. ‘We too shall be friends now. The past is our secret.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Ruskin.’ Vanessa had no idea what she was agreeing to.

  Midnight struck. Champagne flowed up from the cellars, and by the time their main course had been removed, faces were flushed, the volume of chatter high. Dessert was mint fondants and coffee. A shout of ‘Commander Redenhall, Sir!’ went unheard.

  A young man in woolly hat and muffler, trousers caught in with bicycle clips, stumped up to their table. ‘Sir?’ he bellowed. ‘I’ve got them.’

  Peter Switt dropped a wad of newsprint next to Alistair. ‘The early editions, Sir. I’ve been all along Fleet Street, got the lot.’

  Silence fell. Alistair’s mouth tightened.

  ‘Mr Cottrill’s taken another lot to Rules,’ Switt said. ‘I biked here like a tornado.’

  ‘Sink or swim, Commander,’ Edwin Bovary murmured. ‘I watched the play sitting next to the Telegraph’s reviewer. He scribbled furiously and sighed a lot.’

  ‘I’ll start with The Times.’ Alistair flipped broadsheet pages till he found the review page. Vanessa could hardly breathe. She wanted to go to him, to be ready if, as Miss Bovary and Edwin clearly hoped, slaughter had been committed. Alistair was reading silently.

  ‘Well, what does the blighter say?’ Vic Pagnell demanded. ‘Stop torturing us!’

  Alistair finally looked around the table. He let the paper fall. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m deeply sorry – ’

  Patrick Carnford groaned. ‘They’ve stuck the dagger in. We’ll close, won’t we?’

  ‘Deeply sorry to tell you – ’ Alistair locked eyes with Edwin Bovary – ‘that we have a triumph on our hands.’

  The Times, Thursday, November 28th, 1946

  I went to The Farren tonight mourning the passing of Wilton Bovary, expecting I know not what. As the curtain rose, my rationed eye was seized by a spectacle of silk and the scene-painter’s art. What followed was Wilde, pure but never simple. Like the best of trifles, Lady Windermere’s Fan is sweet, filling and with a dash of dry cynicism. Irene Eddrich as Mrs Erlynne thrums with the complexity of a woman who knows herself to be bad, yet dares hope that the world might mistake her ravishing figure for virtue. Miss Eddrich’s voice charms like a nightingale in an orchard at dusk. Patrick Carnford lights a fire under the part of Lord Windermere, a more seductive aristocrat than is generally served. One wonders why her Ladyship would entertain the darkly presumptuous Lord Darlingt
on in her drawing room when her suave, wedded lord awaits her upstairs. Ronnie Gainsborough as Darlington offers us a superb variant of Ronnie Gainsborough. Clemency Abbott is a pretty Lady Windermere, a good woman wronged. She has enough depth to remind us that Wilde was an Irishman, a grain of sand in the English oyster. This production is a pearl.

  Only the Daily Express gave a lukewarm rating, calling the play ‘frothily old-fashioned’, but everyone agreed that Express readers would expect Wilde to be nothing else. After every review had been dissected and wrung dry, and the last champagne drunk, Roy FitzPeter suggested they all move on to a jazz club.

  Rosa shuddered. ‘I to my bed. Shall we share a taxi, Vic?’

  Victor Pagnell took her up on it.

  Vanessa looked at Alistair. ‘Fancy it?’

  ‘Ask your boyfriend.’

  Patrick was keen, as were Irene and Gwenda. Miss Bovary declined, and took Edwin as an escort home for Miss Ruskin and herself. Edwin looked so deflated, had he been anybody else, Vanessa would have felt sorry for him.

  It was a party of seven who crammed around a wobbly table in an upstairs room of a pub off the Strand. On a postage-stamp stage, The Solomon Risco Quintet was tuning up. They were a modernist jazz ensemble all the way from New York. The new, big thing according to Roy FitzPeter.

  ‘Is Solomon Risco deaf?’ Patrick demanded when, after ten minutes, it dawned on them that the band, far from tuning up, was playing its repertoire. A distonal segment reached its climax. ‘This your kind of thing, Commander?’

  ‘Not exactly. Whenever I sailed the Quarrel out of port, I played “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” over the loud speakers.’

  People were standing to applaud. A man in a tweed jacket, pebble glasses glinting, called out in old Etonian accents, ‘That was burnin’, man.’

  Vanessa started to giggle. Nerves. Whenever Patrick reached for his glass, his leg slid against her thigh. A touch that her dress was too fine to repel. He knows what he wants and usually gets it. When the same old Etonian applauded a steel guitar solo and shouted, ‘Blow that thing, man,’ she convulsed with laughter. It was too much for Patrick too. Roy FitzPeter hissed, ‘Luddites.’

  Alistair apologised. ‘But I don’t think I could dance like that girl in the corner.’

  A young woman with severe, black bangs, in denims and a man’s shirt, was doing an impression of somebody swimming to the top of a cylindrical fish tank.

  ‘If you children are aching to dance, we grownups won’t mind if you go elsewhere.’ Gwenda smiled at Roy. Whatever she made of the music, she clearly liked him. So did Tanith, who chirped, ‘I’ll stay, too.’

  ‘Go, go,’ Gwenda urged. ‘You know you want to.’

  ‘All right – so long as Roy undertakes to get you both safely home,’ Alistair said. Outside, he asked Irene, Patrick and Vanessa, ‘Can I choose the next place?’

  His choice was the subterranean Wishbone Club where he’d once taken Vanessa, Hugo and Tanith. As they walked downstairs, the band was playing ‘Stormy Weather’.

  They got a table from a party just leaving. Vanessa was alarmed to see Alistair remove five pound notes from his wallet and order more champagne. She’d have preferred a cup of tea.

  He and Irene took to the floor immediately. Vanessa sat alone while Patrick visited the men’s room. She didn’t want to watch Alistair with another woman, but it was like trying not to watch a high-wire artist take a leap. Irene had reached the boneless state, letting Alistair take her weight.

  Patrick returned, misreading her expression. ‘Been a long day, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll say. But now we don’t have to be up at dawn. We can lie in bed until eleven.’ She made a face. ‘I mean – ’

  ‘One can lie in bed until eleven. But one shouldn’t, you know. It’s bad for one’s circulation. Shall we, Mrs Kingcourt?’ He led her to the floor.

  Vanessa discovered what it was to be partnered by a trained dancer. Patrick talked nonsense, his breath warm against her ear. He masked her less steady footwork. ‘How well you stood up to Babs Bovary,’ he said. ‘Was she really dangling from a wire wearing nothing but a smile?’

  ‘She was about seventeen, I should think. Patrick, did you like my father?’

  ‘Very much. He taught me to act, how to time a comic line. How to raise a single, sardonic eyebrow.’ Patrick demonstrated. ‘His death pulled down a pillar of my world. I miss him.’

  ‘So do I, though I never knew him. Thank you for saying good things about him.’ She reached up and kissed Patrick lightly on the lips.

  He stopped her moving away and kissed her slowly, an invitation to a night together, but when the kiss ended, he said, ‘That was sisterly. Am I to take it that we won’t be waking at eleven tomorrow, in each other’s arms?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I. But not entirely surprised.’

  She followed his glance to where Alistair and Irene swayed.

  Patrick said, ‘Barbara Bovary was right, a man on the cusp of divorce is a man about to take a murky, public bath. Don’t join him in it.’ He looked at her. ‘I think I will invite Irene to dance. Shall I, Vanessa?’

  She understood the code. ‘Ask her.’

  When the four of them returned to their table, the men took off their jackets and bow ties. When the music started again, Patrick extended his hand to Irene.

  ‘Fancy kicking a trotter?’

  ‘Why not, Mr Almond-Soap.’ Irene gave the bent smile that had made her famous. ‘Let’s see if it’s still true, what they claim.’

  ‘Remind me?’

  ‘“Atkinson’s Almond Shaving Soap, smooth as butter in moments”.’ Irene explained to Vanessa, ‘He was the face on the advertisement.’

  ‘Until I turned thirty. It lathers up beautifully at room temperature. The company still sends me several bars a month.’

  ‘Now we know why you have so many girlfriends.’ Irene shot Vanessa a look. No spite in it, no triumph. It said simply, ‘leave your apple on the table, someone else will eat it’. On the dance floor they melded perfectly because their heights matched. I hope I never regret this, Vanessa thought, picking up her wine glass.

  Alistair said, ‘Well?’

  ‘He wanted more than I was willing to hand over.’

  ‘And now he won’t dance with you.’

  ‘Actually, I turned him down. It’s all up to you now.’

  ‘I’m thinking of sitting out the rest of the evening.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t like my dress. You prefer greige to candle-flame.’ It was a reference to Irene’s dress. Greige was this year’s ‘must have’ shade from Paris. ‘Must have’ because it was pretty much the only one on offer.

  ‘I told you before, I don’t notice clothes.’

  ‘Then why on earth did you imagine you and Fern were suited?’

  There was a cooling in his eyes. Pride touched, etiquette offended – but not terminally because he rustled up a smile. ‘I rather liked her without clothes.’

  She mauled her wine glass. ‘So, for all you care, I could have turned up tonight in trousers?’

  ‘You could, but I wouldn’t have danced with you.’

  ‘I’m not wearing trousers.’

  ‘Are you asking – or waiting for me to ask you to dance?’

  ‘I’m asking, Alistair.’

  The last time they’d been this close, she’d been in stuffy day clothes. This time, it was silk, perfume and make up. And no Fern between them. The music was blue-tinged, a clarinet solo stirring their hair roots. Every couple danced cheek-to-cheek. When Alistair’s fingers flexed against the small of her back, she pressed her pelvis against him so he knew she wanted him.

  To hell with the world and its opinions.

  A singer came to the microphone, crooning ‘Fly to the Stars’, expressing everything Vanessa felt: “To be loved and held and missed by you – To fly to the stars and be kissed by you . . .”’

  She drew his face towards her and her mouth b
rushed his.

  ‘I’m not a celibate saint. I can’t repel you forever. You know where this ends, Vanessa.’

  ‘Take me home.’

  ‘Whose home?’

  She thought about it. ‘Yours. I’ve never seen it.’

  Cecil Court was pitch black, as were the stairs to Alistair’s flat. From habit, living through the blackout, they felt their way, only turning on lamps when they reached the lounge. Soft light fell on athletic bronze nymphs, wood-veneer cabinets and side tables. A sofa and armchairs upholstered in tobacco brown velvet promised a deep embrace.

  ‘Bo’s taste,’ Alistair told her. He went to the Georgian fireplace and turned on an electric stove. Dusty coal fires requiring the attention of house-maids and chimney sweeps had gone out of fashion in the 1920s. The decade, Vanessa guessed, when this flat had last been decorated. As the stove’s filaments turned amber, she studied the room. Until this moment, Bo Bovary had been a name. A face in a portrait. Here, she felt the man’s shadow.

  ‘That must be yours.’ She pointed to a framed photograph of a ship carving a creamy path through the waves, its deck cluttered with guns and masts.

  ‘It’s the Quarrel. Taken from on board a tug in Liverpool Bay. What’s it to be, Vanessa?’

  He wasn’t asking what she’d like to drink. From nowhere came Leo’s voice. You don’t know how to satisfy a man, so I’ll damn well show you. She wanted Alistair to make the opening move and erase the scars of her past.

  He wanted her. Desire had lived in his eyes since they’d danced to ‘Fly to the Stars’. But she knew that his complex code of honour would make him hold back even if it killed him. He would not risk being accused at some later date of seducing her.

  ‘Could you tell me the way to the bathroom?’

  ‘Down the corridor, the door with the fancy finger-plate.’ Don’t imagine you can dodge this all night, his gaze warned as she passed him.