by Dirk Bogarde
“Head’s too small, kid,” said Earl St John from behind his cigar. He threw a scatter of glossy photographs across the partners’ desk. “We’re looking for people like that!” he said proudly indicating Stewart Granger, James Mason, Dennis Price and a sundry collection of retouched, lipsticked, hair-creamed gods.
“Nice of you to come … but your head’s too small for the camera, you are too thin, and the neck isn’t right. I don’t know what it is, exactly, about the neck …” he squinted through money-box eyes, “but it’s not right.”
Crestfallen, with a neck-complex, not to mention a too-small head, I went back to Freddy’s flat, comfort and a coffee.
“I think it’s time I really packed it all in … it’s so bloody humiliating.”
He was warmly sympathetic. “Well … they know what they want, you understand. It won’t be easy. Your head is a bit small for your body, you know, and I think your legs are too long really … but they want you for another Television. At Alexandra Palace, something called …” he riffled about in his briefcase … “‘The Case of Helvig Delbo’. It’s a war story and you would have to be a spy I think, as I said, they are just starting up again, so they’ll take anyone, they aren’t the least bit fussy. Perhaps your small head doesn’t show up on Television. I don’t know, I haven’t seen anything, not having a set myself. Anyway, quite good money. You start on Monday week.” Which was just as well since Christmas was looming and term at Windlesham was not far behind.
I remember nothing whatever about “Helvig Delbo” except that I seemed to spend a great deal of time tearing about Alexandra Palace changing my costumes and leaping up in bits of set all over the place. It was over and done with in a matter of days, it seemed, and not a ripple did it, or I, cause.
No sooner was it over than Freddy had me out on the beat again—he never let the grass grow under his War Reserve Police boots.
“You are doing very well, you know,” he said reasonably. “You have only been demobbed a few weeks when you think of it … and you have already done two television shows. I know that’s not very important but it is a start, and now there’s another one. They want to audition you this time, it’s a very serious play, I believe. I don’t think it is because of your head or your neck, but they said they wanted to see you before they committed. It’s really not like them, they seem quite pleased to take anyone these days. Anyway,” he brightened up a little, “anyway, it is good money and the Male Lead … perhaps they want to match you for height with the female star, although I can’t for the life of me see why it matters on the television since everything is just big close-ups or whatever they call them. Four-thirty, Thursday, Aeolian Hall, Bond Street … oh!” Suddenly he had a thought and rustled through the papers scattered all over the cramped desk. “Tell you what, while you’re there, go up and see Freddie Piffard; he runs a little theatre in the suburbs. Not much chance, but you can’t tell. The play they are doing is cast already anyway, but there is no harm in your just meeting him, so that they can look you over. He’s in the Aeolian Hall too … I’ll telephone and say that you’ll be coming in after the television thing. Studio 4a. Don’t forget. And this is the script.”
I went down the stairs into the bitter winter sun, filled with Freddy’s negatives. I wondered, vaguely crossing Regent Street, what he would sound like positive. It was an improbable vision, so I put it aside and went on down to the Tube.
* * *
It was snowing heavily when I got to the Aeolian Hall the following Thursday. However, the hall-way, guarded by a large uniformed, bemedalled, porter was warm, and having given him my name and the number of the studio where I was apparently expected, I settled down to wait on a hard bench with the floppy script from the BBC.
I noticed, as I arrived, that he did not write my name down in the ledger on his table, and that he was changing over duties with another bemedalled fellow. Shortly afterwards he came out of a doorway, changed into civilian clothes, and with a nod to his replacement, he tramped down the hall into the snow. I sat there for an hour and a half, and nothing happened at all. No one rang the telephone on the porter’s table, or if they did it was not about me; people drifted in and out all the time, but I paid no attention to anyone, immersed, as I was, in the difficulties of reading a television script which contained more camera angles, it appeared, than dialogue. Eventually I plucked up courage, gave my name and studio number yet again and waited patiently while he thumbed through the ledger.
“You ain’t down here,” he said in a surly manner. “No one of that name here.”
I was patient. “I gave it to the porter you relieved about an hour and a half ago … Studio 4a … perhaps he forgot to write it down.”
He turned back some more pages and then closed the book. “Nothing ’ere,” he said. “BBC was it?” He picked up the telephone and dialled something. There was a long time of unanswered ringing. He replaced it thoughtfully and looked up at the clock. “If it was BBC Studio 4a, they’ve all left. Closed. They don’t work after five o’clock that lot. Been a mistake, I shouldn’t wonder, try again tomorrer.”
I went back to the hard bench and sat down miserably. My train from Victoria didn’t go until 6.45, and it was at least warm in the liver-coloured marble hall-way. I’d wait, then walk down to Piccadilly, call Freddy about the muck-up and go home. It was just my luck to arrive at the bloody place the very moment that the damned porters were changing over. For the tenth time I opened my Evening News and started to read the Situations Vacant column. You never knew …
“You’re late! You’re late! You’re late!” A shrill, angry, impatient female voice jerked me from the paper. She was hurrying down the staircase, coat over her shoulders flying like a banner, her reddish hair had unpinned and flew about her face like rope, she had a long, sharp nose and a cigarette stuck to the corner of her lips. “Come along, come along! Some people have no sense of time or discipline, it seems to me …” Grumbling furiously, and breathless, but with the cigarette still sticking amazingly to her lip, she hurried my bewildered body up the stairs and along a corridor into a small, smoke-sour little room.
A blaze of light, a table and two chairs, people standing or lolling around the walls. “People are so bloody casual these days.” Her voice was exasperated. “I’m Chloe Gibson. Sit down there.” She indicated the table and one empty chair. The other chair was occupied by a slim, dark-haired girl, who smiled, offered her hand and said her name was Maureen Pook. I hadn’t even taken off my coat by this time. The angry woman with the rope hair shoved a couple of sheets of typed paper before me and said crossly: “Now; this is the end of the second act. You read ‘Cliff’. You’ve done a murder, and you are confessing it to ‘Anna’, Miss Pook here. You can have a couple of seconds to read it through, don’t hurry, then we’ll go. It really is bloody tiresome of people being late all the time,” she complained to the silent smoke-hazed room, lighting another cigarette from the smouldering butt glued to her lower lip. Taking a deep pull she sat down, crossed her legs, put one elbow on her knee, shoved her chin into her cupped hand and squinted at me through the smoke and her rope-straggle of hair. Her foot began to swing impatiently. “When you’re ready bang off,” she said.
For the next ten minutes or so Miss Pook and I read the scene together. It came quite easily, and since I had to do most of the talking I just ploughed on. I was flustered, irritated, cold, angry at having missed the BBC interview and frightened of missing the six-forty-five. No one interrupted us, and when it was done, I placed the loose sheets of the script neatly together on the table, and started to pull on my gloves for the walk down to the Tube.
The rope-haired woman was still sitting hunched intently, as if she was watching a cock-fight with a bet placed. Her cigarette, I noticed, had grown a long length of grey ash which spilled all over her red woollen skirt when she suddenly sprang to her feet and said briskly: “What’s your name then, after all this?” I told her and she looked angrily at a sheet of paper in her ha
nd.
“You aren’t here!” she cried accusingly. “Your name isn’t on my list!” She turned despairingly, arms thrown wide, to the room in general. “What am I to do … he’s not on the list … where do you come from? Who are you?”
I told her about Studio 4a and told her the agent’s name and that it had all been a mistake and that I was sorry for wasting her time. She threw her list on to the table, and spun round on one leg so fast that her coat fell to the floor.
“Dear God!” she cried. “These bloody agents … you’re in the wrong place! We are casting a play … we aren’t the bloody BBC … you are here under false pretences!” It was useless to explain to this hysterical virago about the mistake, so I just thanked Miss Pook, still patiently sitting at the table, and headed for the door. “Anyway that part was cast weeks ago!” the angry voice zipped across the room like a ricochetting bullet. “Weeks ago! I don’t know what happens in this business. You aren’t on the list!”
I walked slowly through driving snow down to Piccadilly underground. My feet sodden, the demob shoes as waterproof as a fishing net, my hands, in spite of the woollen gloves, wet and frozen. What I badly needed after such a wasted day was a good stiff drink, or even a cup of bottled coffee. However, all I had was the half of my return ticket to Hay wards Heath, and a few coppers which I inserted into the telephone at a call box to tell Freddy of my failure.
“Afraid I screwed that all up. Missed the BBC, they forgot me or something, never saw the Piffard man you told me to, and went to the wrong room to read a play they have already cast. Terribly sorry. It’s the first thing I have made a bosh of; I don’t really know what went wrong.”
Freddy’s voice was calm and reassuring and quite unworried. “Never mind,” he said, “these things happen. Fortunately … you’ve got the part.”
I was stunned in my wet shoes. The khaki woollen gloves were steaming gently. “What part?”
“The thing you just read; they have just this minute telephoned to say they want to change their minds about the other actor and have you instead. Rehearsals start Monday morning at nine-thirty, New Lindsey Theatre, Notting Hill. Not much money, five quid. Still since you missed the BBC, you’d better accept. I think they are mad—but you never know … it may work out.”
Someone tapped with a coin on the glass door and made impatient signs for me to hurry up. “Freddy … I’ve got to go … I’ll miss my train. I don’t know what to do. It’s cast; and the woman was bloody rude as well; I can’t make up my mind.” Freddy’s voice was flat, clear and positive for the very first time. “You take it, that’s what you do. I’ll call them now and say it’s set. Have a nice weekend.” He rang off.
Crossing the wide underground circus, bashing into the milling throngs of commuters to Tulse Hill, Golders Green and Upminster, I found a wastepaper basket and shoved the Evening News and the floppy BBC script deep into its tin throat, then, unburdened, I joined the seething faceless mass and clattered down the escalator for Victoria. Entirely unaware that I was making my exit from privacy and anonymity for the rest of my life.
Chapter 5
Can a sky be the colour of opals? This one seemed to be; white, translucent with heat, little specks of green, blue and orange flicking across my tired eyes. It was not yet eight in the morning. What would it be like by noon? There was no breeze, everything still, silent, waiting, shimmering out of focus in little waves. I lay, half propped, half sprawled, against the trunk of a cusuarina tree, in the fretwork shade, where Johnny, George and a little Indian Corporal with brown teeth and a squint cap-badge had carefully set me down: my right foot hurt like fury, even though both boot and gaiter were removed, and the whole swollen lump had been carefully bandaged and eased, for some reason, into a thick, green woollen sock. An hour before Doctor Hubialla, with gentle hands, had given me a pain killing injection with a far from clean syringe.
“Is it broken?” My voice had a forced indifference.
“Oh … hard to tell, you know … could be … could be … angry swelling, I must say, but it’s not broken off, is it?” He laughed cheerfully. “Oh no, goodness me no, whatever next I say, not broken off. You still have it, don’t you? But hard to say without an X-ray.” He shoved the needle into the livid ankle. “This is not really big enough, you know.” He was apologetic. “Came in such a hurry … but if you keep still, like a good fellow, we’ll unscrew the plunger, fill it all up again, re-screw it in, and then Bob’s your uncle, to be sure.”
He did; refilling the syringe carefully, the needle and the base still sticking awkwardly out of the swollen foot. I was beyond caring anyway, and the pain was easing. Or I thought it was. When he had finished he carefully removed his cap, placed the syringe neatly inside the cap band, and shook my hand warmly.
“How did you do it? Not playing dominoes, I’ll be bound.”
“I jumped out of a jeep.”
“A jeep? Ah …”
“It was moving quite fast.”
“Foolishness.”
“Necessary.”
“I follow. Heedless youth …” He left in a flurry of little bows and laughter.
Across the burned scrubby valley, the hills were opal too … white to grey … scabby thorn bushes, cactus, buff-ragged rocks as high as a house, and, running like a strip of dirty bandage trailed through the scrub, the zigzag white road through the gorge along which, very soon, the first of the refugees, some thousand of them, would appear dragging along in the heat. And then, broken foot or no broken foot, I would have to scrabble down somehow and join them, and lead them painfully and slowly to the plains below—men, women, many children, goats, some sheep. Above me, slightly to my right, a baboon with matted hair the colour of dirty cornflakes defecated into the dust at my side. It spattered across my leg, and the green woollen sock. Sweat ran down my face, my neck, stinging under my chin. Flies came, humming with pleasure. The baboon threw the last of his half-eaten fruit at me and, scolding angrily, scampered into the branches which sagged and swayed with his weight. To my left the burned-out hulk of a Ford V8, tilted on its side against a boulder, smouldered acridly, thin oily smoke weaving out into the still, breathless air, like a veil. Vultures dragged, and squabbled at something fleshy crushed into the backseat.
I heaved myself up to a more or less sitting position, and tried carefully to move my foot. The stabbing pain swamped me, and left me breathless: the injection was wearing off. I grabbed for the large piece of branch someone had given me for a crutch, and tried to haul myself to my good foot. The movement irritated the vultures who, with bloody beaks and beady eyes, battered and scrambled out of the wrecked car and lumbered, gorged, into the air, to float gracefully away across the shimmering valley.
On the little slope below me, seeking what shade they could from a thicket of baked bamboo, the Indian troops sprawled motionless. The hard morning light winking on the brass and metal of their equipment. One of them, fanning his face with a bunch of leaves against the flies, murmured something and a ripple of laughter rose and faded into the heat. They were still, save for the rustling bunch of leaves. Standing a little apart, incongruous in boots and breeches, Captain “Sonny” Herkashin tapped his glittering shins thoughtfully with a swagger cane, his eyes fixed tiredly on the road across the valley. He was handsome, twenty-five, and worried. Seeing me, he called up the slope and asked me how I felt.
“Not so bad, as long as I don’t put my foot to the ground.”
He looked sad. “You resemble a stork standing there.”
“I feel like one.”
“What a business, I must say. Rotten luck.”
I hobbled down the slope towards him, sweat coursing down my throat, the green woollen foot swinging out before me like a gourd.
“It’s almost nine o’clock, they should be due at any minute.” I started past him, and he offered me his arm which, in a hum of flies, I brushed aside. He was stiff with hurt.
“Stubborn chap, you really are. I was offering you help …”<
br />
I was immediately contrite, took his wrist and rested on my crutch. “Sorry. Really … wasn’t thinking.”
His brown eyes, with the faint pink whites, of all Indians, were mournful.
“I must try and do it on my own, Sonny, don’t you see? I have to. Discipline, all that shit …” I hopped on slowly.
“Ah! Sandhurst and all that, what?”
I went on down, stubbornly, and tripped over part of a rather large ant-hill.
“Sandhurst and all that: you’ve got it.”
I stopped and looked back up at him standing on the little ridge. Impassive. Uncomprehending. His Sam Browne shining like conkers: suddenly he turned and walked away. I noticed he was wearing spurs and wondered if he’d trip in the sere, scraggy brush. At the bamboos he called out sharp, irritated, little orders and his Company started resentfully to straggle to their feet.
The vultures were wheeling, gliding, in the high draught from the plain. As soon as we were out of their sight they’d be down again, tugging obscenely at the muck stuffed into the back of the Ford. The valley lay before me, beige, still, and suddenly from the mouth of the gorge a low, open white roadster shot into view like a gleaming bullet. It whipped along the dusty winding bandage-road trailing a column of dust which rose into the motionless air like enormous plumes, higher and higher. Dimly through the fog, I could see a darker car following. Up on a rock behind me an English voice cursed splendidly, and someone came clattering down shouting orders beyond the reeking Ford. Captain Herkashin screamed at his Company, wagging his cane, straightening his jacket, wiping his forehead. The white car took a left turn, suddenly, and ripped across the valley floor like a toy gone wild—for a moment or two it was lost among the scrubby thorns and bushes—and then came on up towards my ridge. I stood storklike; the dust was now so thick and so high that the sun was a crimson ball. English curses drifted back across the rocks as the white sports car slammed to a stop yards from my sagging body. She jumped out with the agility of a track-runner, trim white slacks, spotless white shirt, her initials in black on the pocket, long dark hair streaming, a ring glittering, bracelets, the buckles on her Gucci slippers flashing. She was dazzling, beautiful. Brushing hair from her forehead she came towards me smiling. The bracelets slid down to her elbow.