The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  – Not much sunlight these days, Mum.

  – I’ll have to get you some muslin bags. Oh dear.

  She was genuinely distressed. But the point was, Vera chose to stay in her husband’s house even though she now apparently preferred to live in the attic like a servant and put her entire wardrobe at risk. And he allowed it. He must have thought she was mad, this was Joan’s conclusion, that’s why he let her go up there, that’s where you put the madwomen. But oh, no, not mad, let her not be mad, she thought, sweet heaven, poor Vera—

  But confused, yes, divided, uncertain who she was when she wasn’t onstage, and of course it had all come to a crisis when her father lay dying and Julius tried to stop her going to the hospital. And that, thought Joan, was entirely my doing, selfish bloody woman I am.

  3

  WHEN SHE GOT home she didn’t have another drink, nor did she go to bed. Instead she started in on a piece of work she’d been meaning to finish for weeks now. She wanted to make some alterations to Gricey’s coat. The fit of it displeased her. She’d bought it in the Ridley Street market for next to nothing, first year of the war. It had fitted him nice and snug but she didn’t like that it was too big for her, not the length of it but in the chest and shoulders. She felt he was close to her, and she could smell him in the lining. But she wanted to wear it as though it were her own, so nobody would guess how close to her he really was.

  Poor Joan. Because as she sewed and picked and bit off the thread with her teeth, her eyes lifted and she wondered if he was angry with her that she’d allowed all this to happen. His death. She was tormented by the thought. But what could she have done? She wasn’t there! Oh but she worried at it often, and made endless reconstructions of the events that led up to the – what? – the tragedy, if that’s what it was, although she was starting to think it was something other than that, for tragedy, the idea of tragedy, as she understood it, lacked an element of agency – tragedy happened, it wasn’t done to you, was it? – unless by fate, or destiny – and it was agency that she now glimpsed in the slowly clarifying outline of the thing.

  She remembered a day in December, just a few weeks before, and the weather already very cold. There was an area of high pressure somewhere over Archangel, moving across Scandinavia – so we heard on the wireless – heading for England and sucking Siberian air in with it as it came. Londoners could talk of little else. In fact we could talk of much else, but we started with the weather – it broke the ice. That was the joke going round. Because that’s all we did that winter, break the ice. Or slip on the ice, break an arm or a leg, and put up with the blackouts and the slow trams, the bad coal, and an east wind that blew nonstop for a month. Worst weather in living memory.

  Joan remembered a tall and rather stylish couple, the man in his sixties in a black coat with leather at the cuffs and lapels, and fur on the collar, the woman some years younger and more soberly dressed – it was them, of course, Mr and Mrs Charlie Grice, walking down the Charing Cross Road one cold grey Saturday afternoon. How handsome, how smart they were! As they turned along the Strand Joan murmured, as though talking to herself – it’s a thing that happens to long-married couples, speaking without preamble, on the assumption that the other has followed their train of thought – that Vera might be having a bit of trouble with her nerves again.

  – Yes, Gricey said.

  He too had been far away. Joan turned to him as though awoken from her own distant reverie of their daughter.

  – You think so?

  – I’m worried about her.

  – You’re always worried about her.

  – It’s different this time.

  – I wish you’d say something.

  This is how she wanted to remember it. But she knew this wasn’t what she’d said, that her tone had been harsher by far, for she could be a sharp-tongued woman. For Christ’s sake, Gricey, what’s the matter with you? Just tell him! Or do I have to do it for you?

  They’d walked on in silence. Now she thought, if only I could say to him I never meant to be so cold. She’d slipped her arm in his. But it was a concern they’d expressed to each other for years, that they were worried about Vera, although this time it was different because so much more was at stake, because she was doing so well. It was in her bones, of course, acting, but where did her bones come from? From them, from what they’d given her, the exposure she’d had all her life to actors, to theatres and to costumes, and Gricey had encouraged her, they both had. And then the inculcation of taste, without which of course there’s nothing.

  How the mind will drift. Thinking about Vera got her thinking about Julius Glass, and she remembered the night Vera opened in A Doll’s House. The reviews were excellent, really. The best of her generation, one of them said. A luminous stage presence. Then for a while it seemed there’d been nothing she couldn’t do. She played Nina in The Seagull. People were hungry for theatre during the war, well, it raised morale. The theatres were only dark for a few weeks, that’s when it properly started, the Blitz, late 1940, then they were up again, first show at lunchtime, the second at five so they could let out before dark when the bombers came back. Entire audience in uniform. What’s it look like out there? an actor might ask the stage manager, and khaki came the answer. Sea of khaki.

  Julius was the man who’d lost Swinburne’s. The building across the street got flattened by a big one and his place was hit by the blast. He was no less shattered than his theatre, poor man. Always he’d kept his seats cheap, and there was no white tie or low-backed evening gowns at Swinburne’s, it was the people’s theatre. He put on Shakespeare, Sheridan, the Jacobeans, the Restoration comedies. Good actors came so they could play the classic roles. It wasn’t the Old Vic, but it was in the tradition. And then in the space of one night it was gone. He’d never forget what it looked like. Ground-floor façade more or less intact but nothing above it except bits of walls and charred rafters. What was left of the stage was covered with broken scenery and blackened wreckage fallen from above. He remembered, too, finding a fluttering envelope, and on the back of it, in pencil, in block capitals: MAD TOM, NEW PANTS FOR THE FIGHT. GLOUCESTER BOOTS NOT COMFY. And he thought, Mad Tom and Gloucester would never tread these boards again. A month later he went to the opening of A Doll’s House and met Vera Grice. It was the worst month of his life, but then – suddenly – from out of nowhere, so it seemed – here was this glorious girl, and life was not over yet.

  Joan said, although not in her daughter’s hearing, that it wouldn’t be the first time a man fell in love with an actress from a good seat in the stalls, or from a cheap seat in the gods, for that matter. She was with a few of our friends, Hattie and Delphie, one or two others, in the snug parlour of a pub in Greek Street. She didn’t trust it, she said. She didn’t trust him. He gave Vera expensive gifts, she said, for he’d been in the money before the Luftwaffe put him out of business, and he always seemed to have enough still. Of course he invested shrewdly in other men’s plays. And he did like to see Vera wearing the clothes he bought her, the fancy frocks and such.

  Once when the four of them were out together – and this was long before things soured between the two men – Joan remarked on what Vera was wearing. It was a black cocktail dress with a tight bodice that lifted her bosom, made a lovely cleavage, then blossomed from the waist like a parachute. They were in the Ladies, mother and daughter, powdering their noses. It seems Julius had already proposed marriage but Vera was taking her sweet time deciding. He was a lot older than her, of course. Some of us thought that a good thing.

  – I hate it, said Vera, leaning into the mirror over the sink to do her lipstick. I’m bound to spill something down it and Christ alone knows what he paid for it.

  – Arm and a bloody leg, you ask me, said Joan. Unless he got it on the fiddle. Or in Paris.

  That was a laugh. Paris was full of Nazis.

  – Which he undoubtedly did.

  – Which he undoubtedly did.

  Because it was whispe
red that Julius had been over there more than once. On government business, it was darkly hinted. And that from one of these trips he’d returned with Gustl Herzfeld: snatched from under the noses of the Gestapo, we heard.

  Joan was reminded of this as she sat on a chair by the door of the Ladies and watched her daughter gaze at herself in the mirror, frowning, pushing her tits about.

  – I’ll give it away. I’ll let some fucking charity have it.

  That was Vera. Then several women came in and Joan and Vera left, and were shortly back at their table where they couldn’t pursue the conversation. Later Julius told them about a party they’d attended, and how Vera, wearing that same frock, was applauded when they walked through the door.

  – Why were you applauded, love? said Joan.

  – Oh, who knows. It was ridiculous.

  Fame, how very tiresome it was. Joan glanced at Gricey, who mildly snorted. Julius threw up his yellow hands.

  – Because she’s a star! he cried.

  The Irving Theatre was under the management of Edwin Herbert, a corpulent man. The building had suffered a bit of bomb damage but it stayed open all through the war, with the posters out front proudly proclaiming the fact: OPEN FOR BUSINESS STILL! The foyer was given over to the selling of tickets and packets of potato crisps, but it wasn’t the point. Nor was the point of the Irving the auditorium. It was shabby. Worse than shabby, it was a risk to public safety. The seating was rickety, the arms broken, unloosed springs, ragged upholstery, and the curtain sagged. But Edwin Herbert said the curtain was not the point either. It was what was behind the curtain that mattered. Usually it was Shakespeare.

  To Joan’s dismay everyone who’d been at Gricey’s funeral seemed to be there for the memorial performance. The old friends were out in force, Hattie, Delphie, Rupert and Co., old Mabel Hatch was there, and the Chorus, of course, our own good selves. No sign of the grandees but enough citizens of the London Theatre to make it a family sort of affair, and Joan was glad now that she had Vera with her, although less glad of Julius. Auntie Gustl had come in a floor-length green velvet frock with a parrot on the front. There was some milling about in the foyer but nothing to drink, only crisps. Joan was in black but Vera was wearing a cream blouse under her burgundy jacket, and black slacks, and her hair was washed and set. She was heavily made up, and Joan understood why: weeping. She was relieved to get into her seat. Then the lights went down.

  It happened almost at once, his first entrance. Act I, scene v. What’s happened so far? Duke Orsino, played by Ed Colefax, an old friend of Gricey’s, opens with the music-food-of-love speech – such cadences! – and how deftly he avoided the various acoustic dead spots in Edwin Herbert’s notorious auditorium – That strain again, it had a dying fall … Enough, no more/’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

  No, thought Joan, it certainly bloody is not so sweet now as it was before. In a state of angry misery she dug herself deeper into her raddled seat in the balcony stalls, front row centre, with Vera beside her, as on came the shipwrecked sailors and the lovely Viola, and rapidly the plot was laid out before us. There’s a beautiful widow living nearby, one Olivia, and oh, irony, thinks Joan, who has never considered for a second that she’d be in the same boat as Olivia, although without the wealth, of course, or the youth. A few short scenes later we meet the lady in question, along with her steward, Malvolio. Himself. Gricey’s part, but now played by an actor who had previously been a lord with two lines, but had taken the trouble to learn the part of Malvolio and let this be known the day Gricey died. He’d gone on that night. His name was Daniel Francis. He’d been playing Malvolio ever since.

  Attending upon the lovely Olivia (the leggy Miriam Atkins, poorly cast, thought Joan), the new Malvolio stepped onto the stage with the same curiously delicate footstep Gricey had invented, spoke his first lines – Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool – and got Gricey’s laugh! Vera sat up, frowning, evidently disturbed. He was as tall as her father, this one, although much younger, but he lifted his shaggy head, extended a languid arm, inflected the line exactly the same. So yes, Vera was disturbed. But Joan, no, Joan wasn’t disturbed: the reverse. She was leaning forward barely able to believe it. For it was her Gricey, somehow made – visible – as Malvolio. For she could see him! Gricey was there, he was in there! He was in there behind the eyes.

  She gazed at the stage below, saw the back canvas flapping a bit when anyone entered downstage left, and there, strutting about was this Malvolio, with his Olivia, and Joan was rapt with astonishment. She didn’t want to believe what she was seeing; and then she did. Then she was drinking him up, but because Vera was distressed she kept it to herself. Not easy, when what she really wanted was to clap her hands over her head and do a little dance, shouting out her joy. Could it be? Was he back?

  She calmed down and for the rest of the play remained demure, her shining eyes alone betraying the emotion the production aroused in her. Even in the high comedy, the absurd yellow cross-gartered stockings, and the forged love letters and the rest, he was Gricey’s Malvolio every second, so very much in love with Olivia (who is quite unaware of it) that he plays it with a kind of rapturous erectile tenderness, just as Gricey had: he was a walking penis. Oh, but when later he’s flung into the dark room, incarcerated as a lunatic, and pleads his cause so very pitifully – Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad. They have laid me here in hideous darkness – he managed to arouse precisely the mixture of laughter and unease that Gricey had, reckoning shrewdly on his listeners’ cruel mockery being not uninflected with compassion for a sane man unjustly condemned as a lunatic.

  For who among us hasn’t worried about that? But yes, he pulled it off without losing the laugh, and as for his final dramatic exit – I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you – chills up the spine. Oh, an inspired performance, we all thought so, and when the curtain fell, then swept up again for the players to come forward, Joan was not the first on her feet but she wasn’t slow.

  Afterwards the director took Joan and Vera round to the stage door and down a flight of stairs to the green room. All the usual detritus back there, flats and ropes, malodorous corridors with sweaty brick walls, coils of electrical cord hung on nails, and glimpses of dressers clutching heaps of sweaty costumes, hastening for the wardrobe sinks. The actors knew they were in, of course, and soon they started to appear, in twos and threes, having wiped off their slap, more or less, some of them, others greasy-faced and still in costume, or partially. They all knew each other and it was heartbreaking. They missed him, they loved him. Everybody loved Gricey. Ed Colefax was in tears.

  Then came Malvolio.

  Joan had been watching for him. Daniel Francis. His entrance was diffident. Gone, the measured step, the arrogance, the simper, the languor. He was thinner than Gricey, his long jaw blue with shadow, and he had a cliff of pale forehead over sad, deep-set eyes from which he had not as yet removed the mascara, and there was a little something of the décadent about him. His hair was very black and lacked the oiled amber density of Gricey’s mane, rather it flopped, and he pushed it off his forehead with nervous fingers. There was a touch of the antic in him, you’d need it for Malvolio, but he was keeping it under control now, for he understood the peculiar significance of his situation as he shook their hands and muttered his condolences – sorry for your loss, Mrs Grice. To Joan he appeared – at first, at least – a little resentful, somehow, or just touchy perhaps, as though it were onerous for him to have to show sorrow for their loss, as though they might think it was his fault (because in fact it was his good fortune) although that wasn’t his fault either; and he wished it were otherwise.

  All this Joan read in his hesitant, frowning approach. Of course he was in an awkward position, being as it were the embodiment of a dead man for whom these women actively grieved, while at the same time very much alive, but masked and costumed in an alien persona that had until very recently been assumed by Gricey himself. Joan had never met him
, but understanding his discomfort she felt a distinct sympathy. Quietly she told him how much she’d liked his performance.

  She saw the hint of a flush briefly sweep across the man’s cheeks.

  – Thank you.

  He made a slight bow and smiled a little, but still frowning. It must have been preying on his mind, she thought, the reaction he’d get from Gricey’s widow, even more so the daughter, Vera Grice being a much-admired actress and on her way to becoming a star, so we all thought. He was still holding Joan’s hand.

  – Yes, I did, said Joan. Really and truly, love.

  She clasped his hand in both of hers and we think some kind of understanding must have passed between them. She imagined perhaps that this man understood what she felt, since he too lived in Gricey’s shadow. She knew how closely he must have studied her husband’s performance. He’d have stood in the wings every night with the other actors, all watching the master at work. And he must have wondered when – or if, more like – he’d ever go on in the role, since he’d taken the trouble to learn the part through slavish imitation of Gricey’s exact timing and inflection – his every entrance and exit, every gesture, every pause, every preen, sneer, reproach—

  Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s house, that you squeak out your coziers’ catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?

  That comes in Act II, scene iii, when Toby Belch and his friends are making too much noise in the kitchen late at night. His indignation, that his beloved, his Olivia, whom he serves as her steward, should have her hospitality abused in this way, oh, it was every bit as nicely judged as Gricey’s, a pleasure to hear, and there was much laughter in the auditorium.

  But the broken heart, the pain breaking the surface like a dying dolphin when in the last act he says: Madam, you have done me wrong/Notorious wrong – this alone was worth the price of admission.