The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  He’d fallen silent. As usual she had a needle in one hand, fabric in the other.

  – How is your mother? she said.

  He stood gazing down at her as she sat at the table. She had no idea what he’d been talking about.

  – I’m sorry, love. What did you say?

  – I asked you if you knew her.

  – Who’s that, dear?

  – Elizabeth Morton-Stanley.

  She’d worked on productions of hers. An impatient, unpleasant woman, she thought. The girls hated her. A bully. She would come to the stockroom and go through the racks. There were disagreements always. Joan would tell her what was possible, and often she trusted Joan more than she did her costume designer. It made it no easier dealing with her.

  – I’ve worked with her.

  – Could you speak to her about me?

  Joan put her mending on the table and stood up. She was frowning. There was an unpleasantness in the air. She took the lapels of his jacket in her fingers. He’d asked her a few days before if he might have a new jacket, and she’d gone into Gricey’s wardrobe and found one. Now she was angry. For a few seconds she examined the material. Then she looked him right in the eye. He was a grown man, talking like a boy.

  – No, Mr Stone, I could not. Don’t be so impatient. You’ll get what you want.

  – You think I will?

  She sat down.

  – Yes Mr Stone. Frank. I do.

  – Why?

  – It’s always why. I won’t tell you.

  He was beside her now, he was sitting close to her, begging her to tell him why he’d get what he wanted. He was grinning. It was undignified.

  – Because you want it too much. It’s a bloody curse.

  – What do you mean?

  – That’s enough. No more of this.

  He laid his face on her breast and she ran her fingers through his thick hair and gazed out the window, thinking, he’ll fall in love with someone else, that’s what’ll happen next. Someone who can do more for him than I can. Then he’ll see me as a gargoyle. I must be prepared for this. He’s got his confidence now. It’s the new clothes. So it’s all my doing. Oh, I am an idiot!

  So something between them died a little that night.

  Later as he slept she lay awake beside him and watched him, thinking that once she’d believed he was a vessel for her husband, whose spirit was in him. What she saw now was just a man, with his head on her pillow and his mouth open, and his arm flung across her body. Not a vessel, not a spirit, just a man, another vain, ambitious man. She eased him off her so she could turn and face the wall. It was warm at least in the bed with another living body. She didn’t know what she wanted now, perhaps only to grieve for a good man, and Gricey had denied her that. The anger again rose up in her and she had to clench her fists and squeeze her eyes shut so as not to disturb the other one, whose breath was warm on her back. She pushed against him just a little and he stirred in his sleep.

  For some minutes she was comforted by his closeness. She was growing drowsy. What was she to say to Vera about her father? Nothing. Vera was not to be disturbed by any of this, not yet. After they’d finished rehearsals, after they’d been on for a week or so, then she’d tell her. She’d have to, before someone else did. Or maybe let her finish the run. Who was looking after Frank Stone’s mother? He wasn’t supposed to be spending the night. What if the old woman took ill? What if she died, and him not there? What would they say? It would all come out. Vera would be hysterical. She turned in the bed to shake him awake and tell him he had to go home. But even as her hand hung in the dark there, close to his shoulder, she thought, it’s all right. Let him sleep. The old woman was asleep. She would soon be asleep herself, she thought; and then she was. But not before she’d again pondered what Julius was asking her to do. Es ist ein wenig gefährlich, Liebste, Gustl had said. Yes, said Joan, when she’d got her to say it in English, she knew it was a bit dangerous. Her last thought was, I still don’t know what to say to them.

  16

  JOAN BEGAN SITTING for her portrait. Gustl had told her several times she wanted to ‘do’ her and Joan hadn’t seen the point. Me? Why me? Then finally: if you must. It was still cold but the light was clear when the blackout curtains were open. Since Heartbreak House had finished she was sometimes free in the afternoon. She still had much to do in the empty theatre. There were sewing machines to be cleaned and oiled, a thousand small necessary tasks to be delegated and overseen, but she could get away in the afternoon and Gustl was grateful, for she preferred to paint by natural light and Joan was a good subject. Such strong features, with her unblemished skin, her coal-black hair, her fine hands.

  – Don’t move so, said Gustl, and Joan smiled a little, seated there on a high-backed wooden chair with her back straight, her chin lifted, and her hands folded in her lap. She was wearing the black dress she’d made for Gricey’s funeral. She’d wanted to wear the veil too, but that request was met with laughter. Behind her Gustl had placed a small round table on high legs with a white china vase on it, and in the vase an off-white, almost yellowish rose. It was the smile Gustl wanted. Joan’s lips never truly parted, for reasons already established concerning her teeth, and the lips themselves curved only slightly, and downward. But in the marble pallor of her cheek, there the smile was briefly evident as an almost imperceptible lift in the flesh, and because it was so fleeting, so arcane, it had aroused the imagination of the painter.

  – So restless, she said.

  She liked to paint portraits. There was a yellow one of Julius where his fingers were the focus. There was a small, half-finished study in oils for which Vera had briefly sat, then grown impatient and walked out of the room; never to return. And there were others stored at the top of the house, in the attic, including a number of self-portraits. She mentioned once to Joan that she’d lost ten years’ work when she fled Germany.

  Then there was one large work, painted here in London and hanging in the corridor above the kitchen door so you saw it as soon as you came in through the front door. The sky was dark and a woman was fleeing an unseen terror with a baby in her arms. She was looking over her shoulder. It was stark and fearful and Joan was very much impressed with it, for while she understood little about Gustl’s flight to England she saw there in the painting how her friend must have experienced it. She didn’t ask her about the baby. She associated this painting with the turmoil she was herself enduring with Gricey. It touched her dread and, too, it touched her sense of violation and shame. Although she didn’t like it she seized on it as a sort of confirmation of what she felt. It affected her friendship with Gustl. It aroused trust.

  Her mind drifted. In Gustl’s studio a large canvas was propped against the wall that showed a group of refugees in a rowing boat on a stormy sea at dusk. The woman in flight from the unseen terror, the one in the painting in the hallway over the kitchen door, she was also in the rowing boat. It occurred to Joan to ask Gustl who she was but she would wait until she knew her better. Her thoughts wandered, but she always returned to Frank Stone and his pitiful desperation to succeed, and then to the sick mother in the cold flat he’d described to her in the alley off Seven Dials.

  One day Joan went to visit her. She knew Seven Dials and she found the building. It was what her own mother would have done, tried to help a neighbour in need. She took a tin of tea. It was the middle of the day and the West End streets were crowded. The sun was out but it was very cold still, dirty snow in frozen heaps beside the pavement. She rode her bicycle up Shaftesbury Avenue to Cambridge Circus and in heavy traffic made a left turn with arm extended, the large bicycle swinging around the corner in a wide soaring arc, the tin of tea rattling about in the basket on the front mudguard. Her breath came like gusts of fog as she pushed on into the Charing Cross Road and up the hill, her backside lifted off the saddle and her eyes ablaze with exertion; her mouth in a fierce rictus with her wide-spaced, blackened teeth exposed.

  She saw old imposing buil
dings reduced to mere facades, skeletal, unsafe to enter, with wintry light spilling out of empty windows because the roof was gone. The crowds she saw on the pavements were poorly dressed and all worn out by this hard winter that still seemed to have no end in sight: everything grim and austere; everything cold. No work, the government useless, decline and fall wherever you looked. Just like ’31, when Mosley started up. She slowed and turned into the alley off Seven Dials, and dismounting, leaned her bicycle against a lamp post. As usual there were a few prostitutes about, hugging thin coats to their scrawny frames, shivering. The front door of the narrow tenement opened at her touch.

  She ascended a steep staircase. She was aware of cooking smells some of which she recognised, others not, as she passed through narrow landings. On the top floor she tapped at a door, believing it to be Frank’s flat.

  The woman was small, weary, unkempt, and spoke imperfect English with a strong German accent. She was no more, surely, than fifty years old, although the first impression suggested otherwise.

  – Rosa Stone?

  – I am Rosza Stein.

  Joan stood there with her tin of tea. She stared at this little German woman and felt that she had met her before. After a silence Rosza Stein said: I am the mother of Franz.

  – I am his friend, Joan said.

  – Please come in, said the woman.

  – I am Joan Grice.

  – Yes.

  She led Joan into a small, poorly furnished room, with a few objects and pictures that at once confirmed to Joan that this was a Jewish home she’d entered. The Sabbath candlesticks, a menorah. Rosza brought her to the couch and had her sit next to the unlit gas fire. She then sank to her knees, brushing her hair from her face, and with unsteady fingers struck a match and lit the gas. Behind the armchair stood an old piano and a kitchen chair, and on the chair a violin.

  – Sit, please, Mrs Grice, soon it will be warm. Franz has told me about you.

  Joan sat down slowly on the couch. Rosza disappeared. Joan did not take her coat off. She was still holding the tin of tea. There was a threadbare rug on bare boards and a few mean sticks of furniture: a table, some chairs, a worn-out couch, and she was startled to see a child on it, asleep beneath a blanket. There was only a thatch of black hair visible, a bare ankle, and a foot in a little sandal. The window frame was warped and the cracks were stuffed with rags. A stained ceiling, a single bulb, and a door into what must be a bedroom. This was Frank’s home. Joan experienced a sudden fierce sadness. Much had become clear to her in the last seconds, and she didn’t regret the impulse to descend upon the woman unannounced. If you sat close enough to it, the fire took the chill off the room a little. There was a history here that Joan knew only from Frank’s telling of it, which was certainly incomplete.

  Rosza Stein reappeared with a plate of what Joan at once recognised as latkes. She accepted one, and oh, the taste took her straight back to her childhood. On the mantelpiece, a framed photograph of a large family, with a bearded father seated in the middle. Beside him stood a child who might have been Frank. On the wall a Jewish calendar. She gave Rosza the tin of tea, and was thanked. The woman gazed at her.

  – Why did you leave Germany? said Joan, and knew it for a stupid question as soon as it was out of her mouth.

  But she was nothing if not direct, and Rosza Stein the same.

  – Because we’re Jews. As you are, Mrs Grice.

  – How did you get out?

  – You wish to know?

  Joan said that yes, she did wish to know, and the woman began to talk, and it seemed to Joan that she had not told this story often. It seemed not to have been organised by means of repetition. It required of her a kind of trance, and Joan understood that she must not be interrupted or it would be lost. A friend had come to Rosza’s husband and said they had to go, just take whatever money they had, and go. This was a year before the war. They lived in Berlin. No, no, you must not wait, you must go now. The woman remembered the urgency, it had terrified her. So they went to the station but there was a problem because they had no transit visa, and her husband – this was poor Edvard, she said – she paused – he went to the consulate for the visas. But they did have a passport, they were all three on the passport, Edvard and Franz and herself—

  So they had to go back and wait for the consul, who told Edvard that he would bring the visas. Others were leaving because they had their visas, but weeks passed and they were still waiting for the consul. Edvard said the consul would come tomorrow; every day, tomorrow. They lived in fear. They had to get out. Their bags were packed. And it seemed he did come, the consul with the visas but it was too late for Edvard. He had gone into his study the day before and shot himself.

  Rosza stared at the little gas fire and became very still, as did Joan. It was as though this death, out of all the millions, was held in a tiny egg with a very thin shell and must not be dropped.

  They went to the station, she and Franz, and now they had the child too, he was her daughter’s baby son. And her daughter? said Joan.

  Rosza stared at her, her eyes dry and her tone flat.

  – In den Osten gegangen. Adresse unbekannt.

  – English, dear?

  – Gone East. Address unknown.

  Joan felt sick. Rosza continued. Their friends told them go, go, they would look after Edvard, they would make the arrangements. They had packed of course, they’d been packed for weeks, and they had tickets but by now all the frontiers were closing. But they went to the station all the same and it was the blackout. They were practising the blackout and it was all dark, thousands of people in the dark. More people were arriving, and such rumours they heard, terrible rumours, but Franz was very good, he said they would be OK, their papers were in order now but of course they had no papers for the baby. Then Franz got them on the train, she didn’t know how he did it, but they went to Köln, and SS men came through and asked her how much money she had. They took it, also her jewellery, hidden in her clothing. They let them keep thirty schillings, which was nothing, then another one came and told Franz to get their luggage because they had to go with him. The child was inside Franz’s coat and began to cry, and she said to herself, now we are all lost. But then as they were about to step off the train the SS man said, that is your child? And Franz said yes, and he said, go up again, and then the train started to move and they were saved. Why? She didn’t know.

  All her jewellery they’d taken but they let her keep her wedding ring. And then they were in the train and a man died and nobody knew what to do. But nobody wanted to leave the train. So they sat with him for hours, all through the night, and then when they crossed the border into Belgium they told a guard and the dead man was taken away.

  She fell silent. With her hands clasped together and her head lowered, she sat profoundly still. The fire hissed. The child slept on, stirring only once but not awakening.

  – Then what happened?

  They left the train at Calais and were allowed into England because they had their papers and there was Edvard’s cousin in Hampstead who Franz told them was going to help them, and Franz’s English was so good they believed him when he said his cousin’s letter with the offer of help had been taken from him. He had studied English for many years, since he was small. He had been one year in the Universität, and of course he was Musiker—

  Joan listened until Rosza seemed to have nothing left to say, and had begun to weep, although not for her husband, she said, but for her jewellery, which had come to her mother from her mother, and now she had lost it all.

  17

  HAD YOU BEEN passing down that dead-end mews street in Pimlico, not far from the Builders Arms and the small square with the defaced synagogue and the ruin of a house supposedly haunted by a German soldier, you might at around ten in the morning one cold day that spring have seen two persons emerge from the last house on the left. He was in a camel-hair coat, double breasted, with a silk scarf and a black beret. She wore a dark cloth coat, broad in the
shoulder, tight in the breast and waist, stockings of a heavy grey wool, and men’s walking shoes. And on her head, at a rakish angle, a slope-brimmed grey felt hat with a jaunty feather and pinned with a silver hatpin that had a small precious stone set in its head. Around her neck hung a tippet of red fox fur. She carried a bulky handbag, and he a tight-furled umbrella. There was a brief conversation, irritable on both sides, as to whether she had locked the front door behind her. Then they were on the pavement arm-in-arm, turning up the road towards the bus stop. There was that about them which suggested that they were not husband and wife, or, if they were, remarkably ill-suited to one another. There were stoppages, shiftings and annoyances. To walk together in that manner was apparently irksome to both.

  – Julius, don’t go so fast.

  – Please, Gustl, just pick up your feet. It’s like walking with a distracted child. We must always convince. There must be no question.

  – Yes yes. Sag mir nochmals ihren Namen.

  – Hilda Bacon.

  – My god. Frau Speck. Gib mir eine Zigarette.

  On they tottered, blowing smoke in the chill morning air, to join a bus queue by a bomb site near St George’s. There were three housewives with rollers under hairnets under headscarves knotted at the back, with empty shopping bags. There was a gent in a bowler hat with a briefcase and a face like a collapsing pastry. And two youths stamping their feet to stay warm. At last a bus. The uncoordinated couple sat upstairs at the front, their destination a small street off the Fulham Road.