by Dodie Smith
Sometimes there was a trace of grandeur in her manner; this was when she was launching into expenditure – usually on us – and wished to make it clear that the cost was of no importance. At other times she could be humble, slightly scared, and childlike. And though she dressed with a quiet sophistication that was almost elderly, compared with most young Club members, she was undoubtedly childlike in some of her tastes. She had brought with her from her flat a picture of a baby faun crouching over a fire in a misty landscape, at which she would gaze lovingly, making such remarks as, ‘Look at his darling furry ears.’ She had also brought some very impressive books, dealing with politics and world affairs – surprising reading for anyone who admired that faun, though perhaps not more surprising than The Times, which was the only newspaper she ever opened. I have a vivid mental picture of her sitting in the lounge, with her pony-straight legs neatly placed together, turning page after page. All the same, I was never sure if she actually read The Times – or the impressive books, though she sometimes handled them. What she certainly did read, swiftly and from cover to cover, was a copy of Dracula she found in the Green Room, a Members Only room where people often left their possessions lying about. She became so obsessed by this book that, for several very hot nights, she refused to have her bedroom window open in case Count Dracula climbed up from the street, four floors below, to bite her. She told this against herself, laughing; but she undoubtedly had a terror of the supernatural. When she heard that the top floor of the Club was said to be haunted she seriously considered moving to another floor. We were fond of her attic so Lilian assured her that the ghost only walked, if ever, on Hallowe’en, by which time Zelle expected to be back in her flat. It seemed that her guardian disapproved of women’s clubs and had only agreed to her staying with us while he was out of England; he had recently taken his family to the Continent. ‘In the autumn, I may study something,’ said Zelle, rather grandly. ‘That’s all the more reason why I should enjoy myself now.’
Her main way of enjoying herself seemed to be treating people to meals, which was a godsend to Molly and Lilian. They had now been promised work in the autumn but we were still only at the beginning of August and they had to be economical. (Molly’s thousand pounds – referred to by her as ‘bastard’s pay-off’ – had not yet arrived.) Zelle, overriding their mild protests, had taken them out to dinner almost every night since we had first met her. She also took them to theatres and a concert (both Molly and Lilian felt one concert was more than enough) and suggested Westminster Abbey for her first Sunday. The girls declined this firmly. ‘Well, what can one do on a Sunday?’ said Zelle, whose ideal was at least one entertainment per day. It was the scarcity of Sunday entertainments that led her to take the girls on an outing that changed all our lives.
I had known for some time that Mr Crossway had a younger brother, named Adrian, who was the vicar of the Suffolk village near which Mr Crossway had a country house. A few days after Zelle came to stay at the Club, Miss Lester told me that Adrian Crossway was about to give a garden party, in aid of his church, at which an entertainment would be performed by villagers. This happened every August. Mr Crossway always spoke the prologue and epilogue and read the lessons at the church services; the party had to be on a Sunday so that he could be free. Brice Marton stage-managed the entertainment, and this year he had asked Miss Lester if I could be his assistant, thus releasing Tom, who particularly wanted the day off.
Brice had been up in the office quite often since the night I had ‘kept his curtain up’. (As predicted by Mr Crossway, the row between them had blown over.) He had been very pleasant to me and I now considered we were friends, so I was only too willing to help him and delighted to be in on the vicarage garden party. I happened to speak of it to Zelle, at lunch one day, and she at once saw a way of spending a Sunday – the party was open to the public. She decided to hire a car; and when I left for the theatre, she and the girls were discussing what they should wear.
It was now over a week since my happy excursion to Hampstead and, except in the presence of Miss Lester or through the spy-hole, I had not seen my dear. He had warned me that it would be difficult to arrange meetings but I had expected him to manage something before this and I was feeling starved. So I was thankful when he came up to the office that afternoon and found me alone, Miss Lester being out having her hair done.
It was damping to learn that he had come to see her, not me. And he did not at first show any wish to take advantage of this fine opportunity for affection. However, he succumbed quite soon, if only briefly.
While disentangling himself he said, ‘This reminds me. I hear Brice is bringing you to my brother’s garden party on Sunday. When we meet there, will you please treat me with the respect due to me from my junior secretary?’
I nodded resignedly. ‘I suppose your wife will be there.’
‘No, she’s away, staying with her father. But all the village pussy-cats will be around with their very wide-open old eyes. So be a good child and behave discreetly, will you?’
I said it didn’t sound as if I should get the chance not to.
‘Well, you won’t if I can help it. But one never knows what you’ll be up to, especially as I shall be looking my best. I speak the prologue as an eighteenth-century squire – almost as ravishing as when I played Charles Surface, except for the corsets.’
‘Did you wear corsets?’
‘I did indeed. Doesn’t that put you off?’
‘It wouldn’t put me off now if you wore a truss – whatever that is.’
This amused him so much that he again succumbed to affection and we narrowly missed being caught by Miss Lester. He carried things off well and at once began talking to her about business matters. Before he left he said to me: ‘Well, I shall see you on Sunday. If I’ve a free moment I’ll show you round my workroom. I’ve some models of stage sets that will interest you.’ This raised my hopes of a private meeting.
Miss Lester told me that the workroom was in a converted barn, close to the house, and that he sometimes stayed there when working on a production. The house itself was seldom used now as Mrs Crossway did not care for it. Realising how little I knew of Mrs Crossway, I asked what she was like.
‘Beautiful and charming. Beyond that, I know little. We’ve probably not met a dozen times in all the years I’ve been here.’
I found this astonishing. And I noticed Miss Lester changed the conversation. My guess was that she didn’t like Mrs Crossway.
On the Sunday morning I got up at six-thirty (wakened by the night porter, to the sleepy wrath of disturbed neighbours) and met Brice Marton at the station in time to have breakfast before we caught an early train. The journey sounded complicated; we should have to change from this train into a smaller one and then a car was booked to meet us. At first I thought it might be difficult to keep a conversation going but it got easier and easier – perhaps because Brice kept questioning me about myself and seemed interested in everything I told him. I questioned him, too, but for a long time the conversation kept sliding back to me.
Eventually we worked out that as he had lived in Manchester until he was fifteen – and I was eight – it was possible we might have been in a theatre at the same time; he and his mother had often had ‘passes’ and I had begun my theatre going very early. Apart from this, we had little common ground. He had never been in my suburb and thought of it as a luxurious place almost in the country. The ‘slum’ he had once said he was brought up in was the street where his mother, now dead, had been a theatrical landlady. He said residential streets in large industrial cities were apt to be slummy – ‘But theatrical lodgings can be cosy. Old pros like Mr Crossway’s father often preferred them to hotels.’
‘Did he stay with your mother – Sir Roy?’
‘Tour after tour. I first knew him when I was two years old. He was very kind to me – used to bring me toys. And soon after I left school he found me a job as a call boy.’
I said I had only seen Sir
Roy when he was an old man, as Sir Peter Teazle; and though I realised he was a splendid actor I had thought his personality harsh. ‘But perhaps that was the part. I expect you were fond of him.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Brice Marton. ‘I hated him like hell.’
‘How extraordinary, when he was so kind to you. But then, Mr Crossway’s kind and you’re not exactly fond of him, are you?’
‘Frankly, no. But I don’t hate him like I hated Sir Roy. And as a matter of fact I’m fairly well disposed to Mr C. at the moment. I’m apt to be, for some weeks after we’ve had a row, because he behaves so well. There isn’t another man in his position who would apologise to his stage manager.’
‘Why don’t you apologise, for a change?’
‘Because I’m never in the wrong – I mean, with him; I apologised to you, when I was. Anyway, apart from the row, this is one day of the year when I almost love our Rex, because he’s so much nicer than his horrible brother Adrian. Do you know why we’re coming all this way? It’s so that Adrian Crossway can say to people, “My brother puts his stage staff at my disposal.” The villagers could manage quite well on their own but that wouldn’t satisfy Adrian’s sense of importance.’
‘Is he like Mr Crossway to look at?’
‘Much handsomer – you’ll probably fall for him, especially when you see him welcoming the audience. He stands up on a mound under a cedar tree and stretches out his arms like St Francis blessing the birds. And then he turns into Christ suffering little children – he has all the smallest ones at his feet to watch that show. Sorry if that shocked you. I’m an atheist.’
I said I had been one at sixteen. ‘Getting confirmed so terribly put me off God. But I think I’ve more or less slid into being an agnostic – a sort of Christian agnostic, really.’
He grinned. ‘Mind you don’t slide into being a full-blown Christian. You might, if you go to Adrian’s service this evening. What with Adrian in the pulpit looking superb and Rex at the lectern sounding superb, and the church lit only by candlelight except for a stray gleam of sunset – if there wasn’t a sunset I swear Adrian would fake one – the whole show would pack any London theatre. Of course the truth is that Adrian’s a frustrated actor. He played a few parts and was shocking, stiff as a poker. Which reminds me, what did Rex say to you about your performance that night?’
‘Well, he didn’t say I was stiff as a poker, but he said almost everything else bad. He just doesn’t think I can act.’
‘You could get a job on tour if you tried hard enough. What’s happened to all the drive you had when you butted into that audition?’
‘I wonder.’ And as I said it, I did wonder, but only for a second. Then I knew that I now wanted something far more than I had ever wanted a job on the stage, and every bit of my driving force was directed towards getting it. This was so startlingly clear to me that I almost feared Brice might read my thoughts – he was looking at me intently. So I changed the subject by asking what county we were passing through. He said we were just about entering Suffolk.
We had talked so much that I had hardly looked out of the window. By now we had changed into the little train and were passing through lovely country, unlike any I had seen before. Most of my childhood’s holidays had been spent at the seaside. ‘The country’, for me, had mainly meant Cheshire or Derbyshire, around which friends had sometimes taken me for drives. Here in Suffolk the trees were softer, somehow furry, their leaves a paler green. The whole landscape seemed to me gently blurred, with no harsh outlines; cornfields, water meadows, the thatched roofs of cottages and the tiled roofs of farms all merged into each other under the summer sun. And I kept mentally turning the real landscape into a painted landscape. I mentioned this to Brice, who said it might be because we were in Constable country. But Constable landscapes are darker, browner, than my landscape that day. I was painting it myself, covering it all with the hazy wash of my own happiness.
Brice had quite a lot to do with that happiness. I felt on such easy terms of friendship with him; and I had never before had a man friend. Also he was stimulating to talk to about life in general; we did not discuss only personal matters, as I always did with the girls at the Club. But I was shocked to learn that he rarely read a book. He said he had been fond of reading as a child but had lost the habit once he became connected with the theatre. I was even more shocked to realise that, since coming to London, I had not read a book myself – nor, until now, noticed that I hadn’t; every day had been filled with its own interest. Though I had, since falling in love, repeated a good deal of poetry to myself while riding on buses: the only time, except when sleeping, that I was on my own.
After the little train dropped us at a tiny station we had a two-mile drive along a narrow road, mainly bordered by cornfields, until we reached the park surrounding Mr Crossway’s old, gabled house, which was not as large as the words ‘country house’ had led me to expect; though Brice said it was the local Hall. I spotted the barn which must be Mr Crossway’s workroom and wondered when he would show it to me. Then we passed the small, less old, lodge. A woman looked out of a window and Brice said she acted as caretaker, now the house was not used, and looked after Mr Crossway when he occasionally came down for a night.
A few hundred yards ahead was the church, very old, square-towered, and much larger than I had expected – as was the Georgian vicarage just opposite, which seemed to me more imposing than Mr Crossway’s gabled house. The road had turned sharply before we got out of the car at the vicarage, and I could see the beautiful village street. I longed to explore it, also to go into the church and hear Mr Crossway read the lessons – the bells were still ringing – but Brice said we were due to meet the local stage manager in the vicarage garden. So we went in, through an arched wooden door in the high wall.
It was an extensive garden, at the side and the back of the vicarage, running down to a little stream where a wooden bridge led across to the park around Mr Crossway’s house. Chairs for the audience were already set out on the lawn. Brice pointed out the quite high mound, topped by a cedar, where Adrian Crossway would stand to bless everyone; and then the local stage manager and his assistant came out of the vicarage. Except that one was middle-aged and one young and both were pleasant and efficient, I can’t remember a thing about them, not even their names.
The entertainment was to take place on the wide terrace at the back of the vicarage, onto which a central door and four tall windows opened. The players – I gathered there were many – dressed in the vicarage bedrooms and had to get downstairs at the right moment to make their entrances. The method of achieving this was explained to me and then the four of us rehearsed it. Brice, in a kind of prompt corner hidden from the audience by a piece of scenery, held up cards with large black numbers on them. I, at an upper window where I could see him, called the number on the card to the local assistant stage manager stationed on a landing. He then warned the players needed for the next episode. When Brice turned the card over, so that the number was in red, I called ‘Ready, One!’ (or whatever the number was) and then the players concerned marched downstairs to the vicarage drawing-room, where the local stage manager waited in readiness to get them out on the terrace at the right moment. I was told again and again that it was absolutely simple.
At the end of the rehearsal somebody mentioned that there were many other players concealed in the yew walk – knights on hobby horses, folk singers, half a dozen monks – who would come on between some episodes (without any help from me, thank God). So many villagers seemed to be in the entertainment that I couldn’t imagine how there could be anyone left to look at it.
Brice and I were coming out of the vicarage to get an early lunch at the inn when Mr Crossway and Adrian Crossway came through the lych gate of the churchyard and crossed the road to talk to us. Adrian Crossway was wearing a long and most becoming clerical garment, and I saw in a flash that his looks were all I had expected my dear’s to be, that day at the audition – an
d which they had so depressed me by not being. Adrian’s hair was thicker and fairer, his eyes larger and bluer, his nose straighter, his mouth more classical in outline. Also he was slimmer than Mr Crossway. I took pleasure in seeing them side by side and thinking that Adrian’s good looks meant nothing to me – except that I rather resented them. And Brice’s description had made him sound dislikeable. But I must say he couldn’t have been nicer.
He apologised because the church service had prevented his being at the vicarage to meet us, regretted he couldn’t give us lunch there as his housekeeper was busy with preparations for the garden party, and said he would look forward to meeting me during the afternoon. He even walked all the way to the inn with us, after Mr Crossway had gone to lay out his clothes in his dressing-room – which, he mildly complained, was the house maid’s pantry. One difference between them was that, unless Adrian was actually smiling, he looked extremely serious; whereas my dear Mr C. usually looked as if just about to see a joke. Anyway, he looked like that when he was with me.
After Brice and I were on our own at lunch he said, ‘I can’t decide if you’ve made a hit with Adrian or if he simply turned on his charm-the-woman manner. Tom would have only got the curtest “good morning”.’
I had really quite liked Adrian, so I said, ‘You’re prejudiced, just because he’s a Crossway.’ But Brice wouldn’t admit that. He said he found Adrian dislikeable in his own right.
After a scrappy meal we went back to the vicarage and did some more rehearsing with the black and red number cards. I had begun to fear I might wreck the show.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Brice. ‘When there’s any hold-up I cue in the hobby horses from the yew walk and they prance round until I yell for them to go off.’
I felt I might be less confused if I knew what the entertainment was about; but Brice said that, after stage managing it for five years, he still hadn’t any clear idea. He vaguely thought it dealt with the history of the village, with Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth thrown in for good measure.