Tremendous family arguments followed. Harry, tall, boyish, unassuming and mild, stood firm. A compromise was reached. He could spend a year with Constance Albury at the Imperial, but once it was out of his system, the question of the Civil Service exams would be seriously reconsidered.
The tall, gangling youth proved valuable to the company. He progressed from tiny spear-carrying roles in Julius Caesar, until by the end of the first year he was playing Mercutio to Kit Sloane’s Romeo – and this was to prove his emotional downfall. Sloane was tall and handsome, with clear-cut features and dark blue eyes. His looks made up for a slightly wooden style of acting. He was what other, less handsome, actors called with a sneer a matinée idol. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, when Sloane was appearing, the stalls were a sea of women in fancy hats, who ordered trays of tea for the interval. However, managements had no complaints about that. Sloane had another asset too: he was efficient and reliable. He always knew his lines and moves early. Once the play started its run, he knew where his props were, where everyone else’s were too. He was punctual, economical and quick. He was also married, with two children, but kept his family on his father-in-law’s farm in Shropshire, well away from London, or any city the company might be expected to tour. At twenty-eight, Sloane was a dedicated seducer. Almost mechanically, as if driven by a force he could not control or understand, he would flatter and charm his way into the affections of a member of the cast of any company he was with. Or more than one.
Gerry Fitzgerald had protested violently when Constance Albury took Sloane on, a year before Harry Hislop joined the company. He had told her vigorously, ‘The man can’t keep his hands off other members of the company. He rejoices in the confusion his affairs cause – he seems to delight in tears and rows. He was the cause of the separation of Polly and James Rowe when he was with Doratelli; they say little Margot Lambert tried to commit suicide over him when she found he had another affair going – with his landlady’s sister-in-law, believe it or not. Married, single, men or women – Sloane takes them.’
‘We need a competent actor for principal male leads, since Geoffrey Leighton left for Canada a day ahead of his creditors—’
‘Not Sloane,’ Gerry Fitzgerald said emphatically.
‘He seems an ordinary enough—’
‘They say that in pursuit he’s like an animal. Like many animals he exudes a kind of irresistible body heat. They say he smells of almonds—’
‘Like cyanide?’
‘Just like cyanide.’
‘There’s no one better available at the moment; I have no choice,’ Constance told him. ‘I’ll make sure he behaves himself.’
And so Kit Sloane joined the company at the Imperial. Initially, nothing went wrong. He confined his affairs to the outside world. Notes on scented paper were delivered, but often ignored; the stage doorkeeper was warned to expect clashes; sometimes there was the sound of raised voices or noisy tears from Sloane’s dressing room. But in spite of this, and a busy social life spent in grand houses and hotels, Sloane’s professional life was impeccable. And, it had to be admitted, though he was ruthless in his sexual life, he was a generous and unselfish actor. He did not upstage, he did not exploit the weaknesses of others, he was, on stage, not vain. He was uninspired in Ghosts, his Hamlet met with a very mixed response, but in roles where his good looks and physical energy were paramount, he almost never failed. His Romeo was well thought of, and the play ran for seven months, because every woman in London wanted to see him.
It was during the run of Romeo and Juliet that disaster struck. Harry Hislop as Mercutio came into the dressing room where Sloane, dressed only in a shirt, was changing into his trunks. Sloane straightened, looked at Harry, in velvet and full make-up, and cried, ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight.’
Harry was unembarrassed. The sight of partial nakedness was unavoidable backstage. ‘Have you been drinking, Kit? Be careful,’ he warned.
Then Kit Sloane reached out and pulled Harry to him, put his arms round him and kissed him full on the mouth. As Harry had suspected, Kit was a bit drunk. He suffered from boredom. As long as the part was challenging, his personal affairs complex and his body and soul gratified by the love and attention of others, Kit Sloane was an angel. But the run had been extended, because of his success; his affair with the flighty Lady Eldreth was off, for she had been taken to Kenya by her aged husband; and his other mistress, a pretty girl who worked in a flower shop, had fallen pregnant, had an abortion and declared that she would marry her old admirer, a grocer with three shops in West London. Sloane was bored, furiously bored; and when in that state, he would do anything to relieve it.
Harry’s time at the Imperial was almost up. In a few months his family would review his life and career. He knew they planned to discount his stage success and put heavy pressure on him to take the Civil Service exams. He was not paid much, as he was theoretically in training, even though he was taking major roles. He lived in uncomfortable lodgings in Streatham and had no friends in London, apart from his contacts at the theatre. That was the nature of theatrical life. He was having nightmares. He had no experience of women and had attended a school where homosexuality was taken for granted. He was very miserable and lonely.
He wrenched himself free.
‘Don’t go. Don’t go,’ Sloane urged, and kissed him again.
If Harry had not been so lonely, Sloane so bored and depressed, nothing would have happened. As it was, Sloane’s need to exercise his magnetism and Harry’s feeling of living alone on a desert island converged. Two minutes later Sloane had Harry on a sagging couch someone had dumped in the corner of the dressing room. Sloane’s ego was slaked; Harry was no longer lonely.
For three months Sloane was all attention, all flattery, all physical satisfaction; Harry’s loneliness and sexual frustration were assuaged. He was happy. The affair had, of course, to be kept a secret. Then Sloane, cold-hearted and driven, a man for whom pursuit and capture were, finally, more important than the object of his attention, began to cool off. He was highly successful in his next role, as the gallant lover in The Lady of the Camellias. He resumed his affair with Lady Eldreth when she returned from Africa. He seduced his Marguerite, the lady of the Camellias, into the bargain. She was married, too. He was back on form, the successful hunter and intriguer. Harry was naïve. He suspected nothing for some months, only grieving over Sloane’s neglect. When he tried to get away completely, Sloane resumed the courtship. When he began to believe, happily, that all was well again, Sloane began to cut short or cancel their meetings, as before.
Then Harry found out. Edith Strutton, who had long suspected the affair, was responsible. Constance had very boldly just cast Harry as Creon in Antigone, a part for a much older man and demanding considerable authority. The company was in rehearsal. The importance of this role to Harry was enormous. Not only was it a challenge, but his family would find it harder to attack his acting career after he had been given a significant classical part.
At this point Edith Strutton chose to strike. Harry had never thought to disbelieve Kit Sloane’s protestations of love, and had no conception of what it was to deal with a practised seducer, expert at covering his tracks and lying wholeheartedly if it looked as if the truth might begin to emerge. Edith, then, invited him tenderly to tea at the Ritz. There was something, she said, she thought he must know. Planting her darts carefully, she revealed everything about Sloane’s other affairs. She had one soft hand on his, watching the horror in his eyes as she spoke. ‘I know you have a little – tenderness for Kit,’ she said. ‘But you know, he really is a naughty boy.’ Then she left, saying she expected guests for dinner at home and must return to make preparations. She swept out, erect and calm, leaving Harry struggling to conceal tears. Not only was he betrayed, but the secret of his homosexuality was out. He had not realised that anyone knew. He raced to Sloane’s lodgings. He found the air scented with a woman’s perfume. Sloane denied nothing. Standing in his silk dressing g
own, he only said, ‘I told you, no promises, old boy. I told you I was not a reliable man.’ Harry, weeping, left. That day he took the boat train to France and disappeared to Italy, then Spain, then Germany for four months.
While he was gone, Constance, of course, sacked him. Antigone was abandoned, leaving her to mount a quick production of Congreve’s Love for Love, which at least the company knew well.
When Harry returned, a stone lighter and grim-faced, he found himself entered for the Civil Service exams. He knew that no young actor whose manager had offered him the moon, which was what his part in Antigone had been, and who had then disappeared three weeks into rehearsals, would ever be employed again. Nevertheless, his heart in his boots, he went to Constance to apologise. Astonishingly, she reinstated him, though she told him he would have to work his way back into her good graces for a year or more. Edith was furious, but it was her own fault. She had been unable to prevent herself from spreading the story and her own part in it, and Constance had heard. Constance, knowing that Edith preferred to play women much younger than herself, punished her by casting her as the aged Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. She did not renew Sloane’s contract. Finding it hard to get taken on elsewhere, he went to South Africa and stayed there.
Harry went home and insisted on dropping any idea of the Civil Service. For two years after that, he had no emotional entanglements. He gloomily considered himself a homosexual, feared his emotional future, and knew, in addition, that if he were caught by the police sleeping with a man, he could be prosecuted and sent to prison for two years. He was approached by other actors after that, but it was easy to turn them down. Sloane’s betrayal had left him enclosed in a block of ice. But after his return the company was kind. He had no love affairs, but made friends and was very popular.
Elizabeth, after Constance put her in his charge, grew to like Harry very much. But Edith Strutton was learning to fear Elizabeth. In her she saw a potential rival. And so, for a combination of reasons, starting with the desire to upset Elizabeth and ending with the hope that, shocked, she might flee the company, Edith, ‘for her own good’, told Elizabeth the old story of Harry Hislop and Kit Sloane. Then she left her shocked victim alone in the dressing room. This time she claimed a fitting at her dressmaker’s. Up to that time Elizabeth had not known about homosexuality. The company had been resolutely protecting her from life’s disturbing truths. Indeed, she had only barely taken in, and not in much detail, the true nature of the physical relationship between men and women. Learning that men could make love to other men, and the knowledge that Harry, whom she adored, had himself been involved in such a thing, left her shattered. It was very fortunate that Edward Stott saw her, standing stock-still and chalky-faced, through the half-open door of Edith’s dressing room. He went in, asked her if anything was the matter, got no reply, and just caught Lilah Zakarova as she was going through the stage door, all rustling silks and clouds of scent. Kind Lilah turned back from her engagement to have supper with a besotted young man. As he stood at the stage door, waiting for her in the rain, Lilah coaxed the story from Elizabeth. Then she threw the elegant lamp on Edith’s dressing table at the wall, saying, ‘That bitch! That bitch! She’s never happy unless she’s causing misery to others.’
‘It’s not true, then?’ asked a tear-stained Elizabeth, hopefully, from the couch.
‘Oh, it’s true all right,’ Lilah said. ‘But – well – it’s not exactly like that.’ She embarked on stumbling explanations and justifications, concluding triumphantly, ‘It’s still the same Harry, isn’t it, Elizabeth? You liked him when you didn’t know all this. He’s not changed—’
‘Everything’s changed,’ Elizabeth said in a calm voice.
‘Everything and nothing,’ said Lilah firmly, and swept Elizabeth, in her plain coat and skirt, out to dinner with her rich young suitor, who was forced to pay for both Lilah and her friend, who looked more like a schoolgirl – not the outcome he had planned when he’d set out hopefully that evening.
Perhaps it was Elizabeth’s basic naïveté which made it easy for her to accept Harry’s past easily. They spoke of it sometimes, but not often, for Harry preferred to forget Sloane, and in any case they were happy – too happy to spend much time worrying about the past.
When Gerry eventually told Constance what was going on, she turned a blind eye. But she was not the only threat.
It was two months before Elizabeth’s twenty-first birthday. Up to that time, her mother and her Uncle Robert had jurisdiction over what she did. In similar circumstances doctors had been called in by parents to examine girls, mentally and physically, if their parents thought they were in moral danger. They had been declared deranged, subjected to cruel medical treatment, even dispatched to institutions. Elizabeth knew that Robert Warren was capable of this, purely to torment her. He could call doctors, make scenes, insist she give up the theatre, shame her, upset Bella, evict her from Linden Grove. She was still living at home because Robert insisted on it – small wonder, since she was now earning fifteen to thirty guineas a week, depending on what part she took, an enormous sum of money for a young woman of her age. Robert had firmly taken her guinea a week when she started at the Imperial, handing her a third, seven shillings, for her fares and clothes. She had often gone without lunch and walked to the theatre, or back, when she was short of money. Robert determinedly continued to take the same proportion of her salary now that she was earning more, though Elizabeth now received her own share directly from Constance. She handed it over to Robert, who returned to her a portion, stating that he was deducting the amount it cost him to have her living at home, adding a little more to cover her mother’s costs, and banking the rest on her behalf. Elizabeth assented to this rather than cause an argument. She had once asked to see her bank book, saying she wondered how much, through Robert, she had saved. Her uncle had flown into a rage, demanding loudly to know if she trusted him to guard her financial affairs for her or not, so Elizabeth had not insisted. With the amount of money left to her, still a good deal for a young woman, she was able to help Bella a little, buying her small things she wanted: new boots, a warm quilt for her bed, a bottle of scent. In return Bella made all her clothes, showing much flair and economy.
Frannie and Cora, seeing the results, had instantly come to Bella with their own requests – a ballgown for the ball at the Town Hall, a white skirt for the tennis club, a lace blouse for church. She meekly obliged.
Both Frannie and Cora were at home now that their schooling was over. Frannie was engaged to a young solicitor who worked in his uncle’s firm in Kensington. She made sure that he visited the family on Saturday afternoons, when Elizabeth was usually playing the matinée at the Imperial. She did not want her fiancé to see too much of her glamorous cousin. Cora, with several young men in tow, followed Frannie’s example as much as possible.
At first, the family was obliged to go occasionally to see Elizabeth in a play, if only because, otherwise, their friends would think it odd. The whole family would sit in the stalls, Bella glowing with pride. Later, Frannie and Cora began to come to the performances without their parents. They sometimes found it difficult to tell their mother later what they were supposed to say – how bad the play had been and how awful the acting, Elizabeth’s being worst of all. Often they had enjoyed themselves.
Cora, once Elizabeth started to make headway, even went to Harriet and hinted that she would like her mother to approach Constance Albury on her behalf with a view to getting a position in the company. Harriet banged this suggestion hard on the head. ‘You are my daughter. What on earth makes you think I would let you go on the stage?’
‘Elizabeth’s your niece,’ Cora had said. ‘She’s on the stage.’
‘My niece, not my daughter. And a penniless girl who has to earn a living. You are not in that category, Cora.’
Cora looked petulant and said, ‘It’s not a hardship for her. She’s having a lovely time.’
‘A lovely time,�
� Harriet had told her portentously, ‘is not a lovely life. Reputation and decency and a good name are more important. Who do you think is going to marry Elizabeth, now?’
‘Will no one marry her, then?’ Cora had asked.
‘Someone may, but not the kind of person I should like to see you marry,’ her mother had said, and Cora had gone away, dissatisfied, but unable to take the matter any further. She should, she thought, have approached Constance Albury first. It wasn’t fair that Elizabeth had gone away to school and been spotted at the school play. Cora was bored with being at home, waiting for a husband. Nothing was fair. She went and harassed Bella about a new skirt, and forced her to raise the hem well above her ankles.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s existence was divided between the sometimes jolly, sometimes emotional, always intense life of the stage, and the glum, frugal and sour life at Linden Grove. She had learned to endure that life early, when she was too young to know that any other kind was possible. Now she was happy, and knew that, inexorably, she was arriving at the age of twenty-one, when she would be legally free. Robert Warren would no longer be her guardian.
Her love affair with Harry, now five months old, lightened her heart. Fearless and loving, perhaps she returned to the happy, confident child she would have been had her father not died and the Warrens taken over the household.
And then, there was politics.
Chapter Twenty–Six
It had all begun, though Elizabeth did not realise it at the time, when she had been with the company for only one week. The author of Her Own Opinion had appeared from the darkened stalls during a rehearsal and advanced to the foot of the stage in what seemed to Elizabeth to be a menacing manner. From this position the tall man in a tweed suit addressed Constance Albury: ‘Come, come, Constance. All this is very good but not good enough. You’re imparting to Anastasia some of that conventional English can’t-see-through-the-fog, would-ye-care-for-a-cup-of-tea tepidity we all know so well. Come – let’s you, me and Gerry go and have a little lunch to discuss this matter.’
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