by P. G. Glynn
THE FOREIGNER
P.G. GLYNN
Piper Publishing
Published by Piper Publishing December 2009
Copyright © P.G. Glynn 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978-0-9564470-0-5
With heartfelt thoughts of Mamie Thorpe
A BIG THANK YOU
to
INGE, GEORGE AND ALFRED
PART ONE
1
London, 1919
Marie Howard could hardly breathe for excitement. She sat next to Nell in a corner of the Green Room while the debate raged on the morning’s furore. A rapt expression on her compelling face, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap thinking back to that scandalous moment when Dolly Martin stormed from the stage threatening never to return. Of all the times to do such a thing, Dolly had done it during dress rehearsal, with OLIVER TWIST just hours from opening – and she was the Tavistock’s leading lady!
Marie marvelled at Dolly’s nerve but squirmed at the memory of the words hurled at Charles Brodie before she walked out, leaving everyone in the lurch. Even if Dolly returned, to Marie’s mind she did not deserve to go on tonight.
There was someone who did deserve to go on as Nancy and who would put her heart and soul into the part. Marie felt feverish and her eyes burned with the turmoil she was stifling as she tried to follow Pa’s advice. She could almost hear his dear, gentle voice advising her above all else to be circumspect. As she pictured Pa, Marie sighed. Now, though, was no time to think of him or of how he had died. It was essential to stay in the present and abreast of events.
Marie took a deliberate deep breath and directed her gaze round the rather shabby room furnished for the cast to relax in. From its faded blue velvet curtains and well-worn matching chair-covers to the threadbare purplish carpet, the room’s shabbiness was all part of the essential backstage atmosphere. It was when she went she went on-stage and became the person she was playing that the magic set in. There was no other magic like it.
So, try as she might, Marie could not begin to comprehend Dolly’s action. Whatever the provocation, no actor should put a play at risk. The play was everything, the performer nothing by comparison. It was not even as if Mr Brodie had been especially provoking. As actor/manager he reigned supreme in his theatre and was surely entitled to issue directives as he saw fit. A leading lady was not meant to challenge him. Who did Dolly think she was, walking out with a First Night imminent and the Company under-rehearsed? Being famous did not entitle her to behave so selfishly. Fame was no excuse for unreliability. Marie suddenly smiled. It was high time Mr Brodie replaced Dolly with someone more reliable.
“Why are you smiling?” asked Nell, who had been watching her friend and wishing that Nature could have shared her bounty out a bit instead of giving Marie all the advantages. What she would give, for such freckle-free creamy skin and for such inky black brows and lashes! As for those high cheekbones that added their own drama to an already dramatic face … “There’s nothing to smile at that I can see: not with us opening tonight and no Dolly.”
“There is,” Marie told her with an impish grin, “from where I’m sitting.”
“How do you mean?” Nell, who was as different from Marie as she could be, closely resembled her cat ‘family’. Her collection of strays was ever on the increase and she, with her button nose, slanting tawny eyes and small, sharp teeth, had a distinctly feline quality. She wore her auburn hair with a centre parting and with two plaits wound into wheels covering her ears. Freckles she had in plenty. Nell sometimes thought that her freckles would be the death of her. She said, looking perplexed: “We’re sat side-by-side and I’m not smiling.”
“You would be, if you were me – and if you thought like I did.” Although nobody was showing a scrap of interest in them or in what they were saying, Marie lowered her voice to a whisper before explaining: “You think that Dolly’s absence is a bad thing, whereas I think it might just be the best thing imaginable.”
Nell frowned as she tried to fathom Marie’s reasoning. “How can it be? We need Dolly. She … ”
“ … isn’t the only actress in the world who can play Nancy,” Marie butted in impatiently.
“True enough,” agreed Nell. “But she’s the only one who can play her tonight, here in this theatre. We have to face facts, dear. Dolly Martin is our leading lady, and she … ”
“ … has an understudy,” said Marie. Knowing the value of a pause, she paused before: “Me.”
Awed by such presumptuousness, Nell could not speak immediately. Marie could not be serious, surely? Then she saw the glint in her friend’s eyes, which were lit with a strange light, and realised that she really believed there was a possibility of going on as Nancy tonight. So it was up to Nell to put her wise! Fearing deeply for Marie, who was so impulsive and who did not yet know how things were done in London, she said: “We’re just soubrettes.”
“Which is a stepping-stone to something else.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is! Being a soubrette is simply the first step on the ladder to fame. Why be a lady’s maid when one could be centre-stage? I don’t intend staying part of the scenery … and don’t forget that I’ve already played Nancy both in Bath and Swansea.”
“I’m not forgetting. But Marie … ”
“Oh, now what are you ‘butting’ about?” It was hard not to feel exasperated. How typical of Nell, to be such a wet blanket! “With you, there’s invariably some ‘but’ or t’other.”
“I suppose there is, dear,” Nell readily agreed, “and I expect there always will be. Me, I’m Caution with a capital ‘C’, while you like leaping in with both feet. My advice, though, is to do no leaping, not at the Tavistock. London is different from the provinces and you’ve barely been here five minutes.”
“It’s been eight weeks, actually,” Marie began absently plaiting strands of the thick black hair that flowed in wanton waves to her waist, “and don’t assume that the provinces couldn’t teach Dolly a thing or three. They wouldn’t put up with her high jinks, nor her prima donna temperament, no, not for a second.”
“They would, for a name that draws audiences like hers does.”
Dolly’s drawing power was something in her favour, but not an insurmountable ‘something’. Marie told Nell: “A true artiste puts the play first, which is obviously a lesson Dolly has yet to learn. Someone must teach her.” She smiled again: the same enigmatic smile as earlier. “And who better for that task than her understudy? Oh, giddy godfathers, how I wish Mr Brodie would hurry up and send for me! If he doesn’t send for me soon, I’ll … I’ll go and offer myself to him.”
“You’d never do such a thing!” Nell’s eyes widened with disbelief. “Nobody, ever, goes to Charles Brodie’s office without first being sent for.”
Relishing this reaction, Marie said: “It’s high time somebody did then, but I shan’t be going yet. I’ll wait a bit longer, to see if he remembers of his own accord that there’s another fish in the sea … and that he doesn’t need Dolly.”
“He does, Marie.” Nell knew she must find some way of making her friend see sense. “He needs her if onl
y because she’s billed to appear tonight and it’s her as much as Charles Brodie the public will be flocking to see.”
“They’ll be coming to see the whole Company,” Marie asserted stubbornly, “and would soon adapt to a new leading lady, especially if she outshone Dolly. Crikey, Nell, if I listened to you I’d quickly start thinking like you do and resigning myself to perpetual anonymity. I won’t listen, though, and won’t stay anonymous a moment longer than I absolutely have to. My name is as good as Dolly Martin’s any day.” Marie closed her eyes, clearly visualising MARIE HOWARD outside the theatre in lights. Born plain Mary Jenkins, she had quickly seen that a stage-name needed a special ring to it, so had changed Mary to Marie (insisting that emphasis be placed on the Mar, not the ie ) and Jenkins to Howard, Pa’s Christian name. Pa had been pleased with her choice, while Mam had ranted and raved about airs and graces. Now Pa was gone and Mam was still nagging – except that these days it was Alice and Lucy, poor things, bearing the brunt of her tongue. Why had God taken Pa and left Mam to torment the family? While He was wise in most things, that decision of His seemed all wrong to Marie. “All I have to do,” she said to Nell, collecting herself, “is prove my worth to Mr Brodie and … and leave him to judge. He’ll soon see the merits of playing opposite a new Nancy.”
For a second or two Nell was blinkered into believing her friend could actually pull off such a coup. Marie had something in her, some spark that set her apart – and she must have nerves of steel even to consider putting such a fanciful proposition to Charles Brodie, especially with his mood close to murderous. Then reason prevailed again and Nell resolved to stop Marie, somehow, before such madness went too far. “Dolly’ll be back,” Nell said. “The last time she walked out, she reappeared at the eleventh hour expecting to be treated as our saviour. Seems to me she thrives on the drama of it all and, of course, she loves showing Mr Brodie she has a mind of her own. Keeping him, and us, in suspense is good for her ego. So don’t go burning your boats, dear. Think of your mother.”
“Mam?” Marie asked, startled. “Why on earth should I think of her?”
“You told me she went crackers when you set off for London.”
“She did,” Marie agreed, wondering where this was leading. “But she would, wouldn’t she, given that she sees big cities as seething dens of iniquity?” A gifted mimic, Marie now aped her mother to a T: “You should be satisfied with Gilchrist, my girl, like I’ve always been. No good will come of gallivanting off beyond the mountains, I’ll tell you that for nothing. No good ever comes of girls wanting the moon and chasing it to God-forsaken places. If it were down to me, no daughter of mine would ever set foot inside a theatre, never mind posturing in front of the footlights. But where you’re concerned it’s your father as usual who has the last word.” Remembering with a fresh surge of shock that Pa was now past tense – that he would never again act as a buffer between her and Mam and that she had lost her best friend – Marie’s expression clouded. Then, with one of her quicksilver mood-changes, she grinned engagingly and reverting to her own voice said: “Oh, don’t listen to me! Mam isn’t half as bad as I make her out to be. Now, for pity’s sake, tell me what you meant.”
Nell had seen Marie’s fleeting unhappiness and blamed it instantly on the war. War, of the sort they’d endured till last year, had such horrors to answer for. Countless lives lost, or blighted forever: it was all so futile and so desperately sad for humanity. Everybody seemed to have lost somebody. Marie’s beloved father had perished in a mustard gas attack at Vimy Ridge while Nell was now learning how to live without her sweetheart, Billy, who had died fighting in a Flanders trench. What a waste it all was: what a wicked, tragic waste! But life must continue, somehow … and Marie must be discouraged from doing something as rash as going to see Mr Brodie. So Nell explained: “I get the impression that your mother would like nothing better than to see you back home in Wales with your tail between your legs, which is where you and it will be if you go bothering the Guv’nor.”
That silenced Marie for a moment. Surely Mr Brodie wouldn’t sack her for offering to rescue his show? No. Though she found him intimidating, with his piercing gaze and the amazing way he dominated the stage, Marie felt that he also had a gentleness hidden in him, much as Pa had had, along with a liking for justice. True, she had little evidence for her feeling but as in everything she trusted her instinct. So she asserted: “I doubt Mr Brodie would see it as being bothered, were he to receive a timely visit from Dolly Martin’s understudy. I’d have thought he’d see it more as being saved from a tiresome, temperamental leading lady.”
Was there no deterring her? Nell had never met a more headstrong girl. All the same, there must be some way of saving Marie from herself. “Mr Brodie respects Dolly for standing up to him,” Nell said pensively. “She gives as good as she gets and he knows that, so it’s no surprise when the fur starts flying. Those two, they know each other of old. So don’t go jumping the gun and barging in on him. He wouldn’t see your arrival the way you think he’d see it, believe me. And he only ever uses an understudy in a dire emergency.”
“If this isn’t dire,” retorted Marie, “I’d like to know what is. Here we are, rehearsal unfinished, opening tonight in a new play – and where’s our leading lady? If she cared a fig about anyone or anything except herself and her precious ego, Dolly’d be here and we’d still be rehearsing. How are any of us to give of our best after her histrionics? Dolly Martin should be shot for waltzing off and I don’t care who hears it.”
Expecting someone to have heard, Marie glanced about her. But no, she and Nell might as well have been invisible for all the interest being shown in them. The other performers’ eyes and ears were universally focussed on Clive Swindall, who was generally seen as the Company’s mouthpiece and who was still holding court from his favourite stance over by the fireplace where it was warmest and where, with flames leaping and dancing behind him, he seemed to Marie like the devil incarnate.
Following her gaze, Nell observed: “We’re nobodies. We don’t even exist, for the likes of Clive.”
She instantly regretted her words, for her friend’s eyes were now flashing fire. “We shall exist for him!” Marie announced, jumping to her feet. “That is, I shall. I’m sick and tired of being treated as a nonentity – or, worse, as if I were absent. Watch this, Nell.” Marie was suddenly standing on her chair, shouting to make herself heard: “If Mr Brodie lets Dolly go on tonight, after the shocking way she has treated him and us, then I’ll be the first to agree with her that he’s a silly bugger!”
Nell, dumbstruck and fixing her gaze firmly on her tiny feet, had never known such a silence in the Green Room as that which greeted Marie’s outburst. It was as if nobody were breathing … as if nobody dared breathe. Whatever had possessed Marie? Not for the world would Nell currently be in her friend’s shoes.
Clive Swindall moved. From a state of suspended animation, he thrust sinuously through the little throng that had been clustered round him and that was now parting of its own volition. Every eye in the room was on him as, in his Fagin rig, he made a beeline for Marie, positioning himself finally no more than a yard from her chair. “And who,” he queried in his thin voice, looking sardonically up at her, “might one make so bold as to ask, are you?”
His question threw Marie slightly. He was having her on, wasn’t he? In the two months since joining this Company she must have made some impression, surely, even on bitchy old Mr Swindall. “Whether or not you know it,” she told him, intent on impressing him and the rest of the cast once and for all, “and I reckon your not-knowing is just pretence, my name will soon be quite as well-known to the public as yours is.”
“Is that a fact?” Clive said, peering down his long nose and narrowing his nostrils as if at a nasty smell. He achieved this with his head tilted upwards and his gaze fixed on Marie, whom he perceived merely as a pain – both physically and metaphorically – in the neck. He did not see her beauty. Clive’s perception of beauty f
ell in altogether another genre. “And how, pray, is your name to be brought to their discerning attention?”
Reasoning that she could talk to him better from his level, Marie stepped down to the ground saying: “You are forgetting something.” She looked away from him to glance round the room: “You’re all forgetting something.”
“Oh, we are, are we?” asked Pearl Francis, who would be playing Rose Maylie if the curtain rose tonight on OLIVER TWIST and who was now standing beside Clive eyeing Marie disbelievingly, hand on hip. “I’m sure everybody’s agog to hear from your lips just what it is we’re all forgetting.”
Marie knew momentary fear then. Had she gone too far? Should she have taken Nell’s advice and stayed on the sidelines? Well, it was too late to start such wonderings. Whatever the rights or wrongs, she had no choice now but to carry on. “We don’t have to put up with Dolly’s shenanigans,” she told them. “She isn’t as essential to this theatre as she thinks she is. There are other – better – actresses.”
“Oh?” queried Clive, his wide nostrils flared again, his rubbery lips curled into a smirk. “And could I conceivably be correct in concluding that you know of one willing and able to take over from her?”
“Yes,” said Marie. “I have both the will and the ability.” She paused, all too conscious of someone’s guffaw, weighing her words before: “I am also … Dolly’s understudy.”
“And I am Napoleon,” Clive informed her charmingly, “or as likely to be as you are to replace Dolly. Charles used that old ruse, did he, for bringing you into his darling Company?” He sighed, raising his eyes skywards. “The dear boy excels in dishing out the term understudy mindlessly. So he’s dishing it out now, is he, to little supernumeraries? You’re obviously ignorant of what that word means, so I’ll take it upon myself to acquaint you with its meaning before you indulge in any further high-falutin fantasies.” He stroked his pointed chin in exaggerated manner, saying: “A supernumerary is nothing more, lovey, than an extra person or thing without any standing. Therefore you aren’t even one of us. You’re a nothing, a nobody … and nobodies don’t dream, let alone speak, of being a candidate for leading lady. The status of understudy in your case is as meaningless as a train without steam, a tap without water. So unless you aspire to being an even bigger laughingstock than you already are, no more castles in the air … and no more interruptions when we’re in discussion. If we want your contribution we’ll ask for it. Now, tell me ducky, have I made myself clear?”