by Dodie Smith
Miss Lester looked pleased to see me. ‘Good child. I’ve lots for you to do. But first we’re going out to dinner. There’s a pub round the corner where they do quite good meals.’
She put on a small felt hat and slung a fox fur over her shoulder. I always remember Eve Lester’s clothes as elegant, rather than smart or fashionable. She usually wore plain, dark suits which, while comforming to fashion, seemed somehow dateless. And she wore them, and all her clothes, as if she never gave them a thought; she seldom looked in a glass when putting on her hat. She used little make-up. On first sight she had seemed to me pretty but what she really had was a faded beauty; or perhaps only a dimmed beauty which might have shone had she helped it to.
I had never been in a pub and did not much fancy a meal there. But I found there was a pleasant old upstairs dining-room, where outsize cruets stood on white tablecloths. As we sat down Miss Lester said, ‘By the way, we charge our dinners here to the theatre. That’s been a rule ever since Sir Roy’s day – when the office staff works on in the evenings.’
I mentioned that I hadn’t worked during the day.
‘Doesn’t matter. When you work at night, you get fed.’
I asked if she worked mornings, afternoons and evenings. She said, ‘Usually, and sometimes even on Sunday. Thank God I don’t have far to come. I’ve a barely sanitary old maisonette just along in Covent Garden. My work at the theatre’s my whole life – has been almost since I first came to it, twenty years ago. I was just your age then. Do you smoke?’ She offered me a cigarette. ‘And how about a drink?’
I said I didn’t drink or smoke. ‘But perhaps I should. Most people on the stage do, don’t they?’
She laughed. ‘Well, you’ll get no encouragement from me. I withdraw both offers. Incidentally, if you take to swigging double whiskies here, don’t charge those to the management – not that Mr Crossway would mind, really; he’s as generous as his father was. I have a drink if I’m dead tired but it doesn’t help me much, which is just as well; if I depended on drink as I do on cigarettes I’d be dead by now. Where’s that waitress? I haven’t too much time.’
We had a good, solid meal of steak-and-kidney pie and apple tart. ‘No coffee, unless you pine for it,’ said Miss Lester. ‘It’s poor stuff here, and I always make some during the evening. Now we ought to hurry.’
When we got back to the theatre there were quite long queues waiting for the pit and gallery. This surprised me, as the play was coming off.
‘Oh, we shall fill our cheap seats until the end of the run,’ said Miss Lester, ‘but the stalls and circles have dropped off badly. And now it’s going to rain – that’s bad for the doors.’ Seeing my puzzled expression she added, ‘That means people who haven’t booked seats but decide to come at the last minute. Not that we get much passing trade here, as they do in Shaftesbury Avenue and the Strand. There’s hardly anyone about here after the shops close; one might be in some little country town.’
The Crossway, with its four narrow streets, certainly looked unlike my idea of London. Some of the shops still had their old wooden shutters, and the street lamps gave only a dim light. But the theatre was brilliantly lit and there was an electric sign giving the name of the play, with ‘Rex Crossway in’ above it. As I looked upwards, Miss Lester said, ‘Sir Roy wouldn’t like that sign and it does rather spoil the facade, but one must move with the times; not that we do in all ways and I can’t say I’m sorry, but we probably need to if the Crossway’s to go on paying.’
‘Surely it does very well?’
‘Well, we haven’t done too badly with this last show, though it’s a pretty weak play. You must see it before it comes off. Now I’m going my rounds. You can tag along with me and learn your way about the theatre; it’s a rabbit warren of passages and staircases.’
First we went to the box-office and one of the two elderly men inside unlocked the door for her. She went in and closed it after her. When she came out she said there would be a better house than she had expected. ‘And it’s going to look nice, anyway. I hate seeing empty seats.’
‘I suppose it’ll be papered?’ I said knowledgeably.
‘And with good-looking paper. It’s quite a job to paper houses tactfully. I’ll let you have some seats for your Club if you’ll give them to people who’ll dress.’
An old, white-haired man came through a door marked ‘Private’. She introduced him. ‘This is Mr Fortescue, our front of the house manager. Someday you must get him to tell you about the old days here.’
He said he would be delighted to, then asked her to spare him a few minutes. She went into his office with him; and when she came out she looked back to say, ‘Now don’t you worry. I can easily sort that out for you.’ As we started towards the stalls she said, ‘He’s such a darling but he’s always forgetting things. Well, what can you expect? He’s nearly eighty.’
‘Oughtn’t he to retire?’
‘People here never retire of their own accord. And Mr Crossway never has the heart to ask them to. Many of them date from his father’s early days.’
We went down to the stalls bar, which looked rather like a rose and gold drawing-room. The two barmaids seemed little younger than Mr Fortescue. They were eager to see Miss Lester and indignant about some supplies which they said had been deflected to the dress-circle bar. She promised to do something about it and eventually we went off to the pit bar, then to the dress-circle bar – where there was counter indignation to the stalls bar indignation – and then to the bars at the back of the upper circle and the gallery. Almost always there was some problem to iron out.
I said I’d never realised a theatre had so many bars.
‘God bless them all,’ said Miss Lester. ‘We’ve always kept control of them and their takings often mean the difference between profit and loss on a week. Now I’ll show you how to get from the gallery to the offices; it’s complicated.’
I had found the geography of the whole theatre complicated. There were wide public staircases and narrow private ones – or semi-private ones; the public could use them if it could find them, which seemed unlikely in most cases. Their decor corresponded to the part of the house they served: rose carpet and brocaded walls for the stalls and dress circle; linoleum and wallpaper for the upper circle; stone steps and drably painted walls for the gallery. It was that tour of the theatre which first made me notice the deliberate impoverishing of surroundings in proportion to the decrease in the price of seats. As we walked along the back of the gallery I looked down and said, ‘Couldn’t there be backs to the seats – even a railing? Surely that wouldn’t cost much?’
‘But if we make the gallery seats more comfortable, people won’t pay for the pit. And if we make the pit more comfortable then heaven help the upper circle. Still, I do feel sorry for galleryites. But at least this gallery has a good sight line.’
She took a key out of her handbag, unlocked a door, led the way along a narrow passage and up a few steps, then through another door into the entrance hall of the offices.
She now had to dole out programmes and chocolates to the waiting programme girls – not that they could, with truth, be described as ‘girls’. One of them was complaining bitterly about her feet. ‘You girls from the cheap seats don’t know how lucky you are, walking on nice lino. Carpets are hell.’
I was so astonished at this that I butted in and said I’d have thought carpets would be soft to walk on.
‘Oh, they’re soft all right, but they burn the soles off your shoes.’
(Years later I noticed that chambermaids, walking the long passages of hotels, avoid the strips of carpets and walk on the lino.)
Soon after the ‘girls’ went down, I heard a rumbling noise.
‘That’s the gallery coming in,’ said Miss Lester. ‘One wall of the Throne Room backs on to it.’
‘The Throne Room?’
‘Mr Crossway once called it that, satirically, and the name stuck. I want you to work in there tonight.’
&nb
sp; She took me into a room which, like the office, had four round windows; but it was larger than the office, L-shaped, with the short part of the L jutting out towards the back of the gallery. On the long wall facing the windows were three oil paintings. Switching on the lights over them, she said: ‘Behold the Crossway dynasty.’
The largest painting was of an actor playing Hamlet. Miss Lester told me it was Mr Crossway’s grandfather, King Crossway. I asked if that had been his real name.
‘King was, believe it or not, but his surname was really Crossthwaite. He changed it when he managed to get hold of the Crossway Theatre. It’s a shocking painting – and one gathers he was a shocking actor; just a barnstormer with a flair for business.’ Her eyes travelled to another of the paintings. ‘That’s Sir Roy, much as he was when I first knew him.’
I asked if Rex Crossway had children to carry on the dynasty. She said, ‘No, unfortunately. That portrait of him was done when he was a young man, by a very mediocre painter. The one of Sir Roy is a Sargent.’
I could find no resemblance between the painting and the old man I had seen playing Sir Peter Teazle. In middle age, Sir Roy had been darkly handsome, with a slightly satanic expression which I thought attractive. Mr Crossway was nothing like as interesting, either in the painting here or as his present-day self seen by me that morning – though in the painting he certainly had brighter hair and more of it.
Miss Lester was now pointing out a genealogical tree of the Crossway family. ‘It takes them back to an actor of Shakespeare’s time. Sir Roy was very proud of it, but Mr Crossway says nothing further back than the early eighteen hundreds is authentic. There are all sorts of things in here that will interest you. Letters, souvenirs….’
I was looking at an old print of the Crossway. ‘How marvellous it must be to own a theatre and to hand it on from generation to generation!’
‘I regret to say the Crossway family have never actually owned the theatre,’ said Miss Lester. ‘The barnstormer just had a very long lease at a fantastically low rent. Since then the lease has had to be renewed four times and the rent has soared higher and higher. But at least Mr Crossway’s still the direct lessee. So often managements have to rent from a sub-lessee and then rents really do go sky-high. Well, now: tonight I want you to work on press-cuttings; they’re terribly in arrears. Just sort them into date order and paste them in.’
She had set everything out for me on the very long table in the front part of the room. I said, ‘I suppose I mustn’t take time to read the cuttings?’
‘Oh yes, within reason. There’s no desperate hurry and they’ll help you to get the feel of the theatre. But I should think you’ll soon find them boring. And it’s messy work, I’m afraid. The job somehow has to go on, year after year, though we hardly ever need to look back at cuttings. I’ll be in my office if anything puzzles you.’
I did not find the cuttings boring; nothing connected with a theatre could have bored me then. But I did find the work tricky as the cuttings were so mixed up. And I soon realised I should never get finished if I read many of them, so I rationed myself to the letter-press under photographs. After a while I heard music and guessed that the theatre orchestra was playing. A few minutes later, Miss Lester came back.
Saying she was going to give me a little treat she switched off the lights, leaving the room lit only by a glow from the electric sign below the round windows. Then she told me to come and look through the spy-hole. We went into the short part of the room’s L and she slid open a very small, oblong section of the panelling.
I looked down over the people sitting in the gallery, down, down through the dark theatre, and was just in time to see the curtain rise to reveal a drawing-room. The orchestra was still playing but very softly. Miss Lester whispered, ‘You can stay here until I come back. But be sure to keep quiet; and if you leave the spy-hole, close the panel.’
The music dwindled into silence. The play began.
An elderly lady was talking to a butler – the little figures were so far away that I was surprised how well I could hear them. The elderly lady chatted pleasantly, treating the butler as a human being. The audience obviously thought this unusually kind, also funny; there were ripples of pleased laughter. Then a door was flung open by a pretty woman, laden with parcels, who said: ‘Mother, darling, I’ve kept you waiting!’ The butler went. Mother and daughter proceeded to talk about daughter’s husband’s infidelities. Mother wanted something done about them. Daughter pretended to be more interested in the contents of her parcels. But her frivolous behaviour was just a ruse to hide her deep feelings; and though Mother was fooled, the audience wasn’t – because Daughter (by now I had realised she was the leading lady) gave it a few hints Mother wasn’t in on.
Soon Mr Crossway came on, looking rather less ordinary than at the audition but by no means glamorous; and his acting was so quiet that it barely seemed like acting. Mother departed and he and his leading lady played a scene I found unexciting as they were supposed to have been married for ten years. However, I cheered up when the leading lady was replaced by a young actress who made overtures to Mr Crossway. Knowing that ‘daring’ plays were fashionable, I thought (and hoped) she might have some luck, but before she’d made much progress Miss Lester returned and asked me to close the panel.
‘Sorry to tear you away,’ she said, ‘but I want you to sit in my office while I go down to Mr Fortescue – in case the telephone rings.’
‘If it does, shall I take a message or come and find you?’
‘A message, unless it’s something important. I’m expecting a trunk call from an actor Mr Crossway wants in the new play but that shouldn’t come through till later.’
I asked if there was anything I could be doing for her and she said I could grind some coffee beans. She measured them out.
I had never ground coffee beans before and rather enjoyed it. Then I sat at the desk I knew would be mine and watched the heavy rain now beating on the round windows. After a while it seemed extraordinary that I should be alone here at the top of a theatre. Since early childhood I had occasionally had a strange feeling that I was not who I was or where I was, and what was happening wasn’t real. I had this feeling now and, as usual, found it more interesting than frightening, though I always suspected that if it went on long one might go mad. But it never did go on long; one failed to concentrate or got interrupted. Tonight the telephone rang.
I planned to answer, ‘Crossway Theatre. Miss Lester’s assistant speaking.’ But somehow this came out as, ‘Hello.’
A woman’s voice, high and confident, said, ‘Miss Lester? This is Nancy Warden, back from Paris. I bet you chose that lovely lilac’
I said I wasn’t Miss Lester and asked if I could take a message. Then, feeling the recipient of the lilac must rank as important, I added, ‘or I could go down and find her for you?’
After a second’s silence the voice said, ‘Oh, just give her a message. Ask her to let Mr Crossway know I’m expecting him for supper tonight. Did you get my name? Lady Warden.’
She had only just rung off when Miss Lester returned. I reported the whole conversation. She looked puzzled and said she’d chosen no lilac.
‘Someone called Tom did,’ I informed her and told what I had heard in the stalls that morning.
‘You do take things in, don’t you?’ she said amusedly. ‘Well, I must let Mr Crossway know about supper but I can’t go round yet; my trunk call may come through any minute now.’
‘Can’t you telephone Mr Crossway in an interval?’
She said he refused to have a telephone in his dressing-room and objected to taking calls at the stage door. ‘You’d better go round for me.’ She scribbled a note and put it in an envelope. ‘Take this to his dressing-room and wait for him; he’ll soon be off-stage for nearly ten minutes. Just explain that I sent you. And, er, don’t mention that you took the telephone call or know what’s in the note.’
She gave no reason for this and I needed none. Lilian’s
views on Mr Crossway, the ominous word ‘supper’, and the sophistication of the play I had just been watching, all combined to make me think the worst – and I enjoyed thinking it; this was life in the London theatre world. Also, it did something for Mr Crossway. Who was I to find him unglamorous if Lady Warden didn’t?
I went to get my cloak.
‘And take your umbrella,’ said Miss Lester.
But I had not brought my umbrella. It had, that morning, provoked more comment than I cared for.
The rain was heavier than ever. I asked if I couldn’t go through the pass door instead of out to the stage door. Miss Lester said that would be all right if I tiptoed through the wings – ‘And be sure to lock the door after you.’ She gave me the key.
‘Will Brice Marton be in the prompt corner?’
‘No, Tom – he’s the assistant stage manager – will be on the book. Brice will be on the other side of the stage, coping with some off-stage noises; I shouldn’t think you’ll see him. Hurry up. Mr Crossway will be coming off in a few minutes.’
When I got down to the back of the dress circle I allowed myself a glance at the second act of the play. The young actress now appeared to be making good headway with Mr Crossway; she’d got her arms round his neck. I was sorry to see him detach himself. Tearing myself away I hurried down to the stalls and the pass door. I unlocked it, went through, locked it behind me and went up the steps. From the top I could see into the prompt corner, where Tom stood in readiness to prompt. (‘On the book’ – I had stored up that phrase.) There was no one else to be seen and I was instantly conscious of an almost undescribable atmosphere. It was something like that of a cathedral when one wanders around while a service is taking place at the far end. But here in the wings I should have felt it blasphemous to wander around. The very air seemed quietly attentive, as if fully aware that everything here must be utterly subservient to what was happening in front of the audience.
I heard Mr Crossway addressing the young actress. ‘And now, my dear child, I shall beat a hasty retreat, still in good – well, fairly good – order.’ I took this to be his exit line so I made a dash for the door which led from the stage.