As they approached the soot-grimed, pillared, porticoed theatre, built only ten years before, but already dark with the smoke of a thousand factory and household chimneys, Harry Hislop stopped by a flower-seller, a girl of Elizabeth’s own age, wearing an apron and overlarge black boots. He bought a little nosegay of five tiny pink roses. To Elizabeth, with a mock bow, he said, ‘This is to mark your entry into the profession.’
Blushing, she took the flowers. Her career began that afternoon. Suddenly the actors and actresses she had seen laughing, making jokes, tucking into big plates of roast beef, became different people. Edith Strutton, with whom she had had a whispered conversation about the gloves she had not collected, who had hissed at her, ‘Silly girl–why couldn’tyoujust have paid? I would have repaid you’, became a straight-backed, no-nonsense Manchester factory owner; Frederick Soames, the red-faced drinker from the Strangler, suddenly emerged as a solid, upper-class landowner. Constance Albury had assembled about her a gifted team.
The biggest transformation was in Constance herself, suddenly fifteen years younger, three inches taller, and completely commanding. But it was Harry Hislop’s performance that astonished Elizabeth most. He had described his role in the company as that of the younger man destined to play minor parts in serious plays and the silly ass parts in comedies. His small role in Shaw’s play was as the land agent to one of Anastasia’s suitors, played by Frederick Soames. This secretary, seemingly ordinary, seemingly loyal to his employer, was actually mistrustful of him. Hislop’s uneasiness about his employment and his employer, his fear of resigning and being without an income, his queasiness about the motives behind his employer’s pursuit of strong-minded Anastasia, were all clearly and subtly portrayed. It was as if, instead of just piecing it together as the reading went on, he had studied the play for a week. None of the cast had previously read the play in its entirety. Obviously Constance did not consider it necessary. It was only at the end of the reading that the rest of them knew the whole plot, though many had got the gist of it from Constance’s summary and intelligent guessing.
Elizabeth was stunned by Harry Hislop’s performance. She saw that his day-to-day manner might be more of a performance than she’d thought. As her own lines came up, she became dry-mouthed, and stumbled through her part, feeling she was not doing them or herself much justice. But when she had finished and was standing there staring, still in something of a panic, Harry Hislop flashed her a reassuring smile over his script, and she felt better.
In the Green Room after the read-through, Edith Strutton said discontentedly, ‘If the play succeeds it’ll only be on bounce. There’s only one reason for putting it on, in my opinion, and that’s because it provides a big, meaty part for Constance Albury. No wonder – she knows the author, and he had his orders, I suppose. He’s written more lines for her than for all of us put together. I said two lumps, my dear, this is as bitter as sin,’ she observed coolly to Elizabeth, who had been asked to make tea and was carrying cups round the room to all the cast. ‘As I say, only bounce and speed will get us through, and we’re the foot soldiers who’ll have to do the marching at the double. Or it’ll fall like a stone, mark my words. Those speeches she has! Miles long – and you say modern drama has no speeches, Fred.’
‘I didn’t mean speeches like sermons or long arguments in Parliament, as you well know,’ Frederick Soames said. ‘I meant speeches which rouse up the audience. “Now is the winter of our discontent”, he declaimed. “I’m dying, Egypt, dying.”’
‘“Dead, dead, and never called me mother”,’ added Harry Hislop.
‘Quite so, Fred, quite so,’ Edith said impatiently. ‘Constance’s speeches are like a particularly dull parliamentary report. Oh, this filthy tea,’ she exclaimed, putting the cup down. ‘Elizabeth, do ask your cook at home to give you a lesson on how to make a cup of tea. I think I’ll go back to Chester Square and ask mine to produce something a little less like metal polish. Goodbye, my dears. I’ll see you in the morning.’ And, flinging a sable stole with tails hanging down round her neck, she went off.
Lilah Zakarova said to Elizabeth, ‘Don’t worry – the tea’s perfectly good. I can remember La Strutton when we were both in a second-rate company touring the Black Country, living in digs in factory streets, rinsing out stockings every evening and hanging them up on clothes lines in back yards. I could tell you things about Edith Strutton you’d hardly believe.’ She stood up and flung imaginary furs round her, mimicking Edith: ‘Ai’ll go back to Chester Square and ask mai cook to produce something a little less like metal polish.’ Returning to her own voice, she added, ‘Born in Balham, father a tram driver, that’s Lady Strutton for you, before she got married to the unfortunate Mr Macdonald of Chester Square. He’s itching to be out of it, that’s why she has lunch with him every day – to keep an eye on him. Otherwise he’ll go to his club for lunch and stay there for weeks. He’s done it before. Didn’t go home for a fortnight.’
‘How do you know these things, Lilah?’ Harry Hislop asked. ‘Not a sparrow falls but you know who pushed it. It’s uncanny.’
Lilah just winked. Harry got up. ‘Come along, Elizabeth. I’m going to put you on your tram home. You’ve got your lines to learn before tomorrow. We all have. Constance is a stickler, she’ll expect even the big parts to be half learned by tomorrow, and you’ll have to be word perfect. I’ve seen her take the script away from one actor she thought should have known his lines; left him floundering on stage. I hope your memory’s good.’
‘You wouldn’t be with us if your predecessor hadn’t cracked up completely,’ Edward Stott told her with some relish. ‘Her family had to come from Sussex in a hired carriage to collect her. She spent three weeks in bed, recovering, and vowed never to go near a theatre again. Between Constance and Edith, the poor girl’s life was a misery. I hope you’re made of stronger stuff.’
Elizabeth bit her lip. ‘I hope so, too,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty–Four
1907
It seemed she was. By the time she was twenty she was still with the Imperial Theatre Company, and playing important roles.
Snuggled up in bed with the jeune premier of the company, Harry Hislop, she heard the heavy ticking of the casement clock in the corner of his bedroom, and pretended she couldn’t.
‘I should go,’ she murmured finally. The clock pealed, then struck the hour, six.
‘You should go,’ Harry said, not meaning it, and his long arms went round her. His long legs came over hers and Elizabeth did not, for the time being, go. A barge on the river hooted. On the rug before the bright embers of the fire, Harry’s dog stirred at Elizabeth’s sound of pleasure, then went back to sleep again.
Harry, his lips on Elizabeth’s cheek, murmured, ‘I love you. Do you love me?’
‘I do love you,’ Elizabeth said.
‘I know. Stay a little longer. Deeds, not words, is your motto. It says so on the women’s suffrage banner.’
‘Yes, but…’ said Elizabeth in a drowsy voice. Then, more wakefully, ‘Oh Lord – I heard the clock strike again.’ She sat up abruptly. ‘I must go,’ she moaned.
‘Can’t you risk it?’ he asked. ‘Say you’re at Lilah’s again?’
‘I daren’t. I’ve made too many excuses – it’s only two more months after all.’
And she got out of bed, threw another log on the fire and, as the firelight licked up, began to put on her clothes.
Although Elizabeth had been at the Imperial for four years, the affair with Harry was only five months old.
Her career with the company had advanced steadily, but it had been the previous spring when it began to soar. That was when Lilah Zakarova, who had been playing Rosalind in As You Like It, had suddenly developed laryngitis. Elizabeth, the understudy, took over. The notices had been extraordinary. ‘A shimmering, shining presence on the stage,’ The Times had said of her. ‘Miss Armitage is a faery, light as Ariel, yet in her beautiful voice lies a depth of human feeling,’ said
the Daily Telegraph. The Imperial troupe then began a summer tour with Ibsen’s Ghosts, Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Pinero’s Trelawney of the Wells.
And in Oxford, to the surprise of both of them, Elizabeth and Harry fell in love. They had been there a week, playing Ghosts and Trelawney of the Wells on alternate nights. After the performance they had walked back through the quiet old streets to their lodgings. Term was over and the colleges were deserted. Before they rang the doorbell of the house they were staying in, they had given each other an affectionate kiss. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that this time the kiss was prolonged, and suddenly Elizabeth, completely unawakened until then, was swept with passion. No direct sexual information had ever been given her, but girls always talked at school, and gradually the basic facts, improbable as they seemed, had been pieced together. Life in a theatrical company, too, wasn’t short of love affairs or talk of them. Nevertheless, for Elizabeth, experiencing passion was very different from witnessing it. And she had thought Harry was homosexual, was astonished to find he could feel anything for a woman. And as for Harry, he too had believed he was homosexual.
After the kiss, they sat at the dining-room table, as they had done each night since they had arrived in Oxford. Their landlady had prepared a cold snack and left some cocoa out for them. The only difference between this and previous nights was that they were silent. They ordinarily chatted away like magpies. Now it was as if the old confidence between them had broken down. They drank their cocoa without speaking. But once they had rounded the bend in the stairs, Elizabeth boldly took Harry’s hand, and they went, quickly and without any discussion, into Elizabeth’s room. It was in the creaking bedstead with the brass knobs on it, next door to the room where their landlady slept, that they first made love, shushing each other and giggling when they heard the landlady’s feet on the stairs, the clink of her jug on the ewer as she poured water for a wash before she went to bed.
The affair was friendly at first, like a game where they made love, then snuggled up like puppies and went to sleep. As they grew more experienced, it became more serious physically. They had to keep it a secret, making love when and where they could: in the lavatory of a train on the way to Norwich; on the Green Room sofa at a theatre, with a table wedging the door, while everyone else was on stage; even at the back of an empty church they visited on one of the country walks they took in the afternoons. They became known to the entire company as keen sightseers, walkers and fresh-air fiends. ‘Youth, youth,’ said the company, most of whom spent their free time in less apparently innocuous ways.
For Elizabeth it was the carefree childhood of which she had been robbed. Their great fear was, of course, that Constance would find out. She saw herself, to some extent, as the moral guardian of her company. She thought it important that the members of the company should behave, as she put it, ‘like ladies and gentlemen, not strolling players’. She knew that the theatre was seen as a barely respectable profession and that she had to preserve the distinction between the ladies and gentlemen of the company and those from lower forms of theatrical life such as variety or, worse still, the music halls.
Elizabeth and Harry suspected that if Constance found out they were lovers, she might sack one or both of them from the company. They did not know on whom the blow would fall – on Harry as the vile seducer of an innocent young woman, or on Elizabeth, who had been beguiled by him and was now ruined. Or on both. But they guessed that once Elizabeth was twenty-one, Constance might be more tolerant. Until then, she took it that she was responsible, to some extent, for Elizabeth’s behaviour.
However, Constance did not suspect anything. Gerry Fitzgerald did, as a matter of fact, but neither Harry nor Elizabeth was aware of it. Surprisingly, even Edith Strutton had no idea, but at that time she was pregnant, and struggling to keep her place in the company. Matters came to a head in August, after they had played a fortnight in Lancaster and were about to head south for London.
Edith Strutton had become increasingly wary of Elizabeth as her apprentice years continued. She became more and more spiteful and demanding, and more determined to curtail the amount of time Elizabeth had on stage. This was one of the chief reasons why, when she found she was expecting a baby, she refused to leave the company. When they started out on tour that summer, Edith was five months pregnant, but still showed no sign of withdrawing. On a bench at Lancaster railway station, where they sat with trunks and bags waiting for the train, Constance Albury was forced to speak. As tactfully as possible she said, ‘Edith – I’m beginning to wonder if the strain of touring is too much for you now. Your loyalty and devotion are beyond question. But now you must think of your child.’ Edith had denied any strain, said she had never felt healthier. Constance had then become blunter. ‘Edith – we are playing Trelawney. Trelawney is an innocent young woman, a mere slip of a thing, engaged to be married. Your presence on stage has the effect of diminishing the credibility of the character. Mr Pinero wishes us to believe in a young woman who, though a travelling player, is nevertheless of spotless reputation and a perfect lady to boot. And unmarried. Now, Edith, you are at present visibly, and increasingly, pregnant. So I ask you, in fairness, what is the audience to think of Trelawney? I appeal to you, for your sake, ours, and your baby’s…’
At this point Edith Strutton stood up and exclaimed, ‘Constance! Surely if you had anything to say, you need not have said it on a railway station, in front of the entire company.’ In fact, they had been sitting away from the others, some of whom were in the buffet. Others further down the platform were taking no notice. Only Gerry Fitzgerald, to whom Constance had confided her plan to tackle Edith, occasionally glanced towards them, and even he could not hear what was being said. Edith’s stance and ringing voice, however, turned all heads towards the pair. Constance stood up. ‘Please, Edith,’ she said, ‘be reasonable. Of course we all look forward to your returning to the company as soon as you feel able.’
‘I shall go to the nearest hotel,’ declared Edith. ‘Please have someone summon porters to help with my trunks.’
A confusing scene ensued. There were not enough porters or trolleys about to deal with all Edith’s trunks and boxes. Finally, a column consisting of porters and such male members of the company – two scene-shifters, Gerry Fitzgerald and Harry Hislop – who would assist trailed from the station to the line of cabs outside. At the end came Elizabeth with two hat boxes.
Edith, furs wrapped round her, headed the column in a haughty silence, while Constance, walking beside her, talked rapidly, attempting to make peace. Everything was loaded on to the cab. As a result of this, the cast missed the train and had five hours to pass before the next arrived. Elizabeth and Harry went off together, while the others, who felt that during the three-week run they had seen as much of the town as they could ever want, sat on in the buffet.
Elizabeth and Harry had paddled in a small, clear, icy stream, found a sheltered spot and made love. They lay there naked, with sun dappling through the trees on to their bodies. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ sighed Elizabeth. ‘We really should put something on. Suppose a farmer comes along?’
‘In a minute,’ he said.
‘Do you think anyone in the company suspects?’
‘No. I suppose it won’t be long, though.’
‘Who cares?’ Elizabeth said, recklessly.
In the station buffet, Constance said to Gerry, ‘She will make a most charming Trelawney.’ She spoke of Elizabeth, who would take over the part now that Edith was gone.
Gerry responded, ‘Yes – but what do you think of this relationship between Harry and Elizabeth?’
Constance stared at him. After the scene with Edith, her face was very pale and her eyes burned. She had been looking tired for months. The strain of managing and acting in a company on tour – Oxford, Norwich, Stockport, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle and Lancaster – was telling on her. She said brusquely, ‘They’re the two youngest members of the company and it’s nice to see them toge
ther. Harry looked after her very well when she first joined us. Now they are friends. What else is there to say?’
‘If that’s all there is to it,’ he replied.
Constance said, ‘Gerry, for heaven’s sake. That’s all there can be. Do you think if I thought there could be anything else I’d have put a naive girl of sixteen in a young man’s care? We know what happened between Hislop and Sloane.’ She lowered her voice, for two ladies in black, eating scones at a nearby table, were plainly trying to hear what was being said. They were in any case attracting attention for many knew who they were.
Gerry said, so that only she could hear, ‘My dear, Sloane was the kind of man who could seduce an elephant if he wanted to. You know he had countless mistresses, as well as a wife and two children tucked away somewhere.’
‘A bad actor,’ she muttered.
‘On the stage, yes. Not too bad off it, though. And may I remind you, it was you who would have him, in spite of all my warnings. But to return to the point, there are aspects to a man’s life a lady cannot understand. This is one of them. Whatever happened between Hislop and Sloane, Hislop was only twenty, as you know…’
Constance stared at him. ‘You mean…?’
‘Yes,’ said Gerry Fitzgerald.
‘Oh my God,’ said Constance. ‘I’m responsible for that girl.’
Chapter Twenty–Five
Harry Hislop had joined the Imperial Theatre Company straight from his public school, much to the annoyance of his family, solid, prosperous, middle-class people with a small country estate.
They had assumed that his eager participation in the Greek play presented annually by his school, was a boyhood enthusiasm. They were appalled to discover that Harry had decided acting would be his career. On his own initiative, he’d sought out Constance Albury before he left school, where he was being coached for the Civil Service examinations. She had accepted him.
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