Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “Not late, am I? I told you I was a punctual woman … good training.” She stood hands on hips, and looked out over the dust-filled valley. “Where are they? I mean, haven’t you started yet? I haven’t missed anything, I’d be furious.” She smiled a wide uncaring smile. Up on the rocks the English voices were still complaining and grumbling.

  “No. We haven’t started yet. I think, as a matter of fact, that Your Highness has rather mucked things up for the moment.”

  She looked vaguely surprised.

  “What have I done?”

  “The dust …” It was thinning slowly.

  “What of it?”

  “Well, we can’t shoot through dust; they’ll have to wait until it settles.”

  She shrugged impatiently. “Oh, the cinema. I never will understand you people. But it’s real, you know. There is dust here.”

  “I know. But you can’t see through it.”

  A rather plump, saried lady with Bata sandals and an Instamatic camera round her neck joined us from the white car and I was presented, and bowed my head. She smiled and said that they had passed hundreds and hundreds of people and goats down the road, were they the refugees? I said they were and she looked impressed. “So many, maybe a thousand. And so tired and hot and the children crying … oh dear …”

  “Well, they are supposed to be hot and tired and everything. They are supposed to be the last refugees out of Burma.”

  The saried Princess giggled and put her hand politely over her mouth. “How will they know when to start walking, I wonder?”

  “We will fire a Verey Light into the sky. That’s the signal.”

  “But first,” said Her Highness, “we’ll wait for my dust to settle, is that it?”

  She wandered up the slope in her gleaming slippers effortlessly. Captain Herkashin screamed something into the morning air and his entire Company thudded to the ground like dead grouse. He threw a salute, his eyes wild as a mad horse’s, belt and buttons gleaming. Her Highness walked past the grouse pulling a long strand of hair behind her ear. She murmured something to the Captain, who by the grace of her favour, and God, relaxed his anguished posture and screamed another order, and when the Company was standing once again in a row like a triple picketfence, they were inspected and the fat Princess in the sari started snapping away with her Instamatic. Other Princesses, and a Prince and a scatter of people had clambered out of the dark Bentley which had followed, and a faint feeling of a picnic was in the air. The dust was clearing, members of the English camera crew were presented, and then everyone took up positions for the first shot of the day. A worried-looking boy called Eric, in a thick blue serge suit from Burtons, stood ready with the Verey Pistol.

  “We won’t stay long … just see the first march of the refugees. I suppose you’ll do it again and again as they always do in the films?” She was cool and matter of fact. Bored really. “I have to get back anyway pretty soon; your party tonight. I think we have about five hundred coming, all in their traditional costumes; especially for you. They weren’t frightfully pleased, but I insisted. The City Palace is only opened occasionally now, for honoured guests …” A bleak smile. “So we might as well make a splash, mightn’t we? It will be almost like old times again. Not quite, of course.” She smiled a vivid, accusing smile. “Not quite, but as near as we can make it. And, anyway, it’ll be the last time too … this time next year it will be an hotel, full of Americans all over my tennis courts.” She turned away with distaste. The Princess was photographing Eric in his blue serge suit. Up on the rocks someone yelled down: “We can go! Dust is settled. Eric?” He nodded blindly, pistol in hand.

  “I’ll give you a count down. On ‘one’ you fire, right?”

  Her Highness moved a little nearer to me, on my slope, and shaded her eyes with a slender, ivory, hand. “It’ll be very beautiful tonight. I hope you’ll be pleased with it all. They are working on the water pumps so that all the fountains will play, and the little canals will flow, scattered with rose petals and jasmin and marigolds. What happened to your foot, is it for the film?”

  “No. I broke it yesterday jumping out of a jeep.”

  Her laugh, at once derisive and unbelieving, frightened Eric, who, forgetting his position, cried out, “Shush! … please!”

  “Oh we’re used to broken feet and every other sort of broken thing here! Polo, you remember? We have lots of wheel-chairs … you’ll come in one of them. I’ll have someone very beautiful to push you about.”

  “It hurts like hell at the moment. I don’t honestly think I could make the evening really. I’m terribly sorry. Can we just see how I get through today? I have to walk all the way down the valley with the damned refugees … I’m just terrified I’ll pass out.”

  She was flat. “They have goats and sheep with them, the people in the gorge, we saw them on our way here. So no one will be walking faster than the cattle. You’ll manage. And you’ll manage tonight, I’m sure. A wheel-chair and Heaven knows how many nobles. All ‘Our Court’ … and all in honour of you, Sir.” Her sarcasm was pointed if faint.

  Eric fidgeted; from the rocks a voice yelled down and asked me if I was ready to start moving; I was to start my descent of the hill to the valley as the head of the refugee column reached a certain tree a million miles, it seemed to me, below. There was a moment of tense silence; even the Princess with her Instamatic was still. On the morning air we heard the count down start. A thick Cockney accent began the numbers: “Eight, seven, six …”

  Her Highness turned slightly towards me, smiling, her eyes were very bright. “Broken foot indeed … goodness me! You’re British, aren’t you? Well, you must show us what you can do.”

  * * *

  “You really must, dear. You must show us what you can do.” Chloe Gibson’s voice was dull with defeat and cigarettes. Her hair, which had once hung down around her face like old rope, was scragged back into an untidy bun. She dropped her cigarette stub into the thick coffee cup where it hissed sullenly for a second before extinguishing itself in the weak dregs. Hunching her shoulders, she leaned towards me: “I know you can do it. I knew that first evening when you came up late and read the part. I knew it … I know it. But it’s the Company: they don’t know. They can’t judge what you are going to do. Or even if you can. It’s nearly three weeks and you haven’t given much of a sign, dear. Nothing. You can’t go on just walking through it, the others are trying desperately hard to give performances, but it is completely and utterly impossible for them if you don’t play back. You must see that?”

  She was being more than reasonable, and I knew, with terror, that she was right. I was still walking through it; I hadn’t even tried to give a performance. Yet. We still had another five days before opening and I was trying to save performance until we had the costumes and the props, the real chairs, tables and the chenille curtains at the windows. Walking about on the top floor of the dingy red brick building across the street, with chalk marks on the scratched parquet floor, two or three bentwood chairs and a Watneys beer crate, didn’t, for me at any rate, hold magic. I was, I thought, storing up my work until the time was ripe. All the others were hard at it making characters; Maureen even managed tears, so did Beatrice as my mother: they were able, in their actors’ minds, to transform the chalk marks into the walls and the door of the back-shop parlour as if it had the fireplace and the whole staircase down. They mimed brilliantly, teapots, beer glasses, door handles; they believed. And they obviously didn’t like me much, nor, as it turned out now, did they get any help from me.

  I was shattered by my selfishness, terrified by my innate shyness—this shyness which has inhibited me all my life. The wrong profession for such a malady; for malady it was which crippled me before I walked into a crowded room, theatre, restaurant or bar. But I knew, sitting at the tacky table in the Linden Cafe in Notting Hill Gate that day, that my time for timidity and selfish shyness was about up. Someone was calling my bluff. And she wasn’t going to let me get away with it: he
r production, and her blinding faith in my capabilities, were at stake. I was at stake too. Windlesham still waited; I had not, as yet, cancelled my appointment with the patient Headmaster in the pines and heather.

  She hunched and shrugged herself into her tweed coat, avoiding my assistance. “Of course,” she fumbled about in her large, beaten, handbag, “of course, we could always postpone things for a week …” She pulled a stubby bit of lipstick across her thin, cracked lips, and smacked them together as if savouring a sauce. “Just for a week. It would give us time to re-cast you.’

  My heart stopped beating altogether. I looked out through the steamy windows into the dirty snow-packed street. The red shape of a bus slowly ambled past. Re-cast. In my first theatre job in years. The utter shame overwhelmed me. I was stiff with silence. She snapped the clasp of the bag, and studied the slip of paper which was the bill for our coffees and sandwiches. “If you would like that? The boy who was cast and went up to Newcastle with that Tour is free … they closed in Leeds last week. It would break my heart but I must think of the Company, and my play. I know you’ll understand.” She laid some money on the slip of paper, left three pennies under her cup for a tip and started for the greasy door.

  I caught her up, pulling on gloves against the bitter afternoon. I couldn’t speak. Crossing Notting Hill Gate, slithering among the lumps of packed, oily, snow, I kept behind her a little, watching the red tweed coat flapping, the battered bag swinging, remembering that night in the Aeolian Hall when she had hustled me up the stairs and into the little smoky room to read the play and finally to give me the part. I couldn’t betray her. At the door of the grimy red brick building I took her arm. She stopped. “What shall I do?” she asked. “Send them home and re-cast … or what?”

  There were icicles hanging from a burst pipe just above us. “No … don’t do that. Not yet. Could you, I mean would you, just let’s run the play right through; from start to finish, no notes, pauses … all three acts … so I can get a run at it. Perhaps then …” I knew that then I’d be on trial, that I’d have to bash through, that shyness and timidity and all the rest of it would be put aside in the sheer exhilarating excitement of becoming another person. In becoming the man I was trying to play: “Cliff”.

  While they all sat about, the Company, on chairs round the wall of the beastly little room, I was sure that all they were thinking was how bad I was; inept, thin, useless: irritation and dismissal floated from their slouched bodies like a gas. Of course this was arrant nonsense; they had their own worries and problems, their own fears and doubts, as I did. But, naturally, I only considered myself. And how I felt. Not how they did. I wanted it all my way. And got it. Chloe sighed, shoved a sliding pin back into her pot-scrap-bun, and nodded doubtfully. “I meant to do a polishing job on the Second Act. Still … if you think it’ll help …” We started up the stone steps to the Rehearsal Room, slowly, her beaten-up handbag slapping the iron handrail.

  The Company were assembled. Sitting round the small gas fire which blinked and popped (it was the coldest winter for fifty-three years) they looked up with no surprise. I almost expected it, because we have a cruel, and true, saying in our profession, should you be taken to lunch by your Producer, that you “won’t be with us after lunch, dear”—a sure sign of recasting. But perhaps she hadn’t told them before … they might not even have known anything. Perhaps I wasn’t so awful. I warmed. Kenneth More, sitting in his ex-Naval overcoat, badges of rank long since ripped off, a string bag beside him with a packet of cornflakes and a pint of milk (he’d collected his rations in the break); Dandy Nichols reading the noon edition of The Standard to find her horoscope; Maureen Pook just sitting and smoking and warming her frozen legs; Beatrice Varley knitting with the placidity of a country nanny. How could I have doubted them? How could I have behaved so badly? Self-pity started and was smothered swiftly by Chloe chucking her coat into a corner and announcing that we would forget the polishing of the Second Act, and instead we’d run through the entire play from start to finish, no pauses, no notes, no timing. “Just bash away at it,” she cried, as if we were all novice jockeys. “Bash away and see what we get.”

  A slightly bewildered Company got to its feet, stuffed newspapers into handbags, knitting into chintz-holdalls, and Kenny slowly removed his heavy navy blue overcoat. We started on the First Act.

  At the finish, two hours later, Chloe with swimming eyes embraced us all, said nothing, and struggled into her red coat. “There’s a hell of a lot to do … but we still have time, thank God. Maureen, when you say ‘Do you see?’ go below the table, not above it, so that Beatrice can play downstage … must see her eyes. Kenneth dear; I think you could stay a titch bit longer at the door, only a titch mind you, in the Second Act with Cliff and Anna, take the shock, see what I mean?” She rattled off orders, suggestions, pulling on gloves, tucking a tartan scarf about the scraggy hair, cigarette dangling. Eyes bright. “Tomorrow, same time. We’ll start with Act Two … and I’ll give you notes then. What the bloody hell have I done with my lighter?”

  It was dark when we reached the street. Lamps flickered … there was a power cut again. She shivered, pulling the red coat round her, the bag slapping. “Oh by the by …” she grabbed my arm, “pause a bit longer at the top of the stairs on your first entrance; don’t milk it, just a beat longer, it’ll hold.” She suddenly leaned up and gave me a rough, completely unexpected kiss. “I knew. I knew!” she said, and hurried off down to Holland Park.

  * * *

  In 1947 India at last gained her Independence, and exploded bloodily; Princess Elizabeth married a Mountbatten and tied all that up; Henry Ford and Gordon Selfridge both died; Albert Camus wrote La Peste, and Michael Clayton-Hutton wrote, and had produced, on February 25th, at the New Lindsey Theatre, his first play, “Power Without Glory”. A good many other events took place as well in that year, but nothing was so impacted on my mind as that solitary event off Notting Hill Gate.

  At the fall of the curtain nothing much happened. We shuffled on to the stage in a complete silence, feeling drained, unhappy, worried. Kenny murmured under his breath at the line up, “They’ve all pissed off …” and then the place erupted. The applause and the cheering continued, after that first almost stunned silence, for so long that eventually we were all forced to take hands, on the stage, and stood grinning and laughing inanely at each other, as the curtain rose and fell. Chloe was standing in the wings in a long woollen dress. Smoking.

  Up in the dressing room which Kenny and I shared on the roof, a long wooden shelf on one side, some hooks banged into the wall on the other, a washbowl crammed into a corner, we quietly removed our make-up and stared into the long, scratched mirror before us.

  “I think we’re a hit,” he said presently.

  “They don’t often do that, do they? Audiences, I mean?”

  “Christ! No. Usually the other way round with a try out.”

  “It’s a very nice feeling is all I can say, isn’t it?”

  Kenny grinned into the mirror.

  “Enjoy it. You may never see its like again.”

  A scuffling on the stairs; the door flew open. A bright-eyed man. “Van Thai. Pinewood Studios. Remember I saw you first!” A woman behind him pushed under his arm. “And I saw you second!” They slammed the door and clattered away.

  Kenny winked. “Must be agents!”

  We laughed together and I started to dress hurriedly. There was a reception in the Club Bar; my Father and Mother had come all the way up from Sussex, and Elizabeth from somewhere else. Kenny was being maddeningly slow. He was still wiping muck off his face, still in his underpants, calm, as ever, unhurried.

  “Oh come on, for God’s sake! You’ll miss the party.”

  He got up slowly from his wooden chair, greasy face, a lump of cotton wool in one hand, his pants slipping round his hips. He hugged me suddenly to him. “Off you go, mate, it’s your night, I’ll catch you up later.”

  In the excitement of the night I didn�
�t really take in much of what he said. But somehow I did remember it. That evening I saw no further than the Club Bar of the New Lindsey, which was full to bursting with red-faced, jolly looking people. As I pushed through they clapped as if I was a dog at a Show, and some patted me on the back in the same manner. Freddy was in a corner with some people; he smiled cheerfully and raised his glass to me in a silent salute. I found my mother, and we embraced; people drew back for this moving moment of mother and son. “Marvellous, darling!” she cried. “Look, my mascara has all run, does it show? It hurts like hell.” My father, quiet, smiling, amused at some secret amusement (one never knew what with him), took my hand and kissed me too. “Very good. Curious play. I’ve been talking to your Author. Seems very young …” His voice tailed away. My Author was hunched in a group by the small bar; a slight man, with blazing eyes like a lizard, a red carnation, fresh at lunchtime, a large gin and tonic. He was smiling his odd little twisted smile, which was attractive, and, tonight, kind. He winked only. I winked back, and he turned and talked to a fat hovering woman with a note pad and pencil. Elizabeth was there, in the middle of some people, splendid in a monstrous Chinchilla cape. Somebody gave me a whisky which slopped over her skirt. I apologised and started patting at it.

  “Don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. It’s old anyway.” She was happy and smiling.

  “Chinchilla?”

  “Sylvia loaned it to me, belonged to her mother. Stored all the war in a tin trunk in the garage but they forgot the mothballs; don’t touch me, it comes out in handfuls.”