The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  – I’m using a short stitch in case you want to stuff more books in your pocket.

  – Oh I don’t think I’ll try that again, said Frank Stone.

  – You never know. Heat of the moment.

  She glanced up at him. In her spectacles she looked like a schoolmistress. He said nothing. He laid his hand on her shoulder and turned his head away.

  – There!

  She took her foot off the treadle, withdrew the garment and, lifting it, bit off the trailing thread. She inspected the mended pocket then turned to him and told him to put the jacket on.

  – Put your hand in the pocket.

  Gingerly he did so.

  – Make a fist. Move it around.

  – I don’t want to tear it again.

  – You won’t.

  He could feel the strength of the stitching.

  – Good, she said. Let’s have supper.

  They went back to the kitchen, into the warmth, and the earlier awkwardness, when their secrets hung thick in the air, was dissipated now. Joan was even able to ask him how it had gone that day, and poor Frank Stone, he had not the guile to conceal his satisfaction at having played Antonio to Vera’s Duchess once more. He was careless enough to suggest that if Harry never returned, and he, Frank, took on the role instead—

  He stopped, appalled. It was as though he wanted Harry dead, as he might once have wanted Gricey dead – and if he hadn’t, then Joan would think he had—

  She saw all this going through his mind and told him that every actor had such thoughts. It was only natural. Only human.

  – Only human, said Frank, faintly.

  The meeting was on Sunday. Julius was to drive them in to the East End, where they would leave the car in a side street close to the event. The day was overcast. Everything seemed turned to metal, everything the colour of lead, or iron or steel. Strong gusts of wind lifted sheets of newspaper from the pavement and sent tin cans and bottles clattering along the gutters. Men in overcoats and flat caps in twos and threes pushed through the wind; women and children, too. The meeting was at noon and Frederic Bacon was to speak. Joan walked between Julius and Gustl, the three arm-in-arm. Her face was like stone. She was anxious. She feared she would let down her companions through some display of weakness. But she was committed to it now.

  About sixty people were gathered on a patch of ground where a house had come down and the ruins were only partly cleared from the site. Nearby stood other buildings with empty windows and no roofs. It was rough ground with a few heaps of rubble still, and the sky was blustery and grey, the clouds thick and low overhead. There were a dozen policemen. The platform was a crude wooden stage four feet high, rough-carpentered with old planks, a short leg at each corner. Four men in raincoats and hats stood on it. They were talking in low tones and casting glances at the crowd.

  Frederic Bacon wore a pale shearling coat and carried a polished black stick. He made a short bow to Joan, whom he had not yet met. He then descended from the platform, helped down by a young man in a belted raincoat who was eyeing the crowd from the side of the platform. Julius recognised him as Edgar Cartridge. Later he pointed him out to the two women, saying under his breath that he was a particularly nasty specimen. Several more men gathered around the platform but the crowd remained sparse.

  Frederic Bacon stood in front of Joan. She heard his heels click. This time he bowed deeply from the waist, then held his hand out. She gave him hers. He bent low over it, and applied his lips; fortunately she was wearing gloves. There was a little ragged singing in the crowd and then a black van, backfiring, appeared from the direction of Ridley Road. It mounted the pavement and came bumping and rattling across the waste ground to the side of the stage. Two men got out, and from the back of the van they lifted down a table. They manhandled it onto the stage.

  – Here comes the flag, said Julius. Raise your voices.

  Joan was cold. She hated this. She now bitterly regretted agreeing to become involved with these people. She watched a black flag with a swastika being draped over the table. As a gust of wind picked it off the table it fluttered wildly, and had not the two men held it down it would have gone flapping off across the waste ground, oh, with a gang of fascists chasing after it, and kicking it to death for insubordination. It seemed then the decision was made to get started. Chairs had been handed up onto the stage. The men sat down as Frederic Bacon stepped forward with a megaphone.

  There was shouting, a disturbance, some kind of scuffle in the crowd but Joan had no clear view of what was happening. She felt violence was imminent and wanted only to leave. Gustl again slipped an arm through hers and murmured that she wasn’t to worry for she would come to no harm.

  – I’m not so sure, said Joan. Look at them all.

  A limping man in a long RAF overcoat was meanwhile moving through the crowd. He was handing out pamphlets and collecting coins in a box. It was Peter Ryder.

  – You’ve met Joan Grice, have you, Peter? said Julius.

  – I have, he said, and lifted his hat.

  Joan took the pamphlet he offered her. The words Britain for the British were printed across the top. Julius put some coins in the box. Peter Ryder moved off, but not before exchanging a whispered word or two with Julius.

  – Karsh is coming, Julius then murmured to Gustl and Joan.

  – Can you hear me? shouted Frederic Bacon. His megaphone wasn’t working

  There was shouting from the crowd, much of it unfriendly.

  – Never has Britain faced a crisis like the one we face today!

  – That’s your bloody fault!

  There was laughter. The young men standing around the platform moved towards the source of the barracking. Bacon was calling for order.

  – Let me speak! he cried. Hear me out!

  Some kind of fracas had occurred but it ceased abruptly when the police started to move in. The first rain was felt in the gusting wind.

  – England cannot afford to drop her guard! We are under attack as never before. But it comes not from the skies, no, but from within! From within! We must be rid of the alien parasite! The Jew power must be stopped!

  There was more of this.

  – Hear hear! shouted Julius, and Gustl echoed him. They attracted sharp looks from people around them. There was muttering.

  – Shout, love, she murmured to Joan. Make them know you are on what side.

  Was it what Gricey did? That fine baritone, with which he’d filled theatres, speaking, oh, speaking the finest English verse, in the service of this contemptible tosh? Frederic Bacon was shouting himself hoarse. He was flinging his arms up as though directing traffic, although clearly it was a very low form of traffic. Alien filth! he shouted. Inhuman scum! Bacteria! You pass him on the street, you push him in the gutter! You see him on the bus, you throw him off the bus!

  There were scattered shouts and jeers. Joan realised it was performance, merely, and her disgust deepened. They were pathetic, despicable. How could Julius think them so dangerous? All at once she was aware of movement, of something happening, and turning, she saw Karsh running through the crowd like a small bull, coming fast, a bomb of a man with his coat flapping out behind him, and men running with him, towards the platform, a group of three or four – no, two groups, another over on the far side, fascists now rushing from the platform at these running men and screaming with rage, and the crowd falling back and hustling themselves clear even as the groups clashed and were at once swinging and kicking at each other—

  Then Karsh and another man had seized hold of the edge of the platform and from his now unstable footing Frederic Bacon lashed at them with his stick but he was losing his balance – the stick flew up – then he was tumbling backwards – the platform rose higher, steeply canted, and table, chairs, the other men on top, all were sliding backwards, Frederic Bacon screaming, ‘The flag! Get the bloody flag!’ – and the fascists below were being set upon by more and more men emerging from the back of the crowd, much shouting and scre
aming now as people in genuine panic tried to get away, and then in came the police striking out wildly with their truncheons until suddenly, with a great roar, the platform was overturned, it toppled over backwards, and there was more cheering—

  Then the rain started coming down in earnest.

  They were all dispersing rapidly now as though by some prearranged signal. Joan and Gustl were hurried away by Julius and they crossed the street among the throngs and then they were in the car again and moving through the now busy streets, honking at people in the road, edging slowly forward, being jeered, and Joan sat upright in the back seat trembling, for the violence had terrified her. Julius soon had them clear away from the crowd.

  – Sorry about that, love, he said, Karsh thought it was a good day for a rumble.

  Later the three of them were sitting in a warm pub.

  – Why do you take them seriously? said Joan.

  – It doesn’t die on its own, said Julius.

  But it was Gricey she was thinking about. Where had it come from, all that hatred? She wasn’t rid of him yet, she realised, and thinking this, she heard Gustl saying that they couldn’t let it happen again, never again, and herself now saying silently that yes, it can happen again, it is. It is happening again, Gricey is still out there, she’d heard him.

  19

  FRANK WAS PLAYING First Madman, who appears in Act IV, and speaks the immortal line: Doomsday not come yet? Vera had liked his Antonio, what little she’d had of him in the two days of rehearsals when Harry Catermole was absent. There was something in Frank’s Antonio she missed in Harry’s, and among those who watched them many recognised a quality of affection and of tenderness and, too, urgency – of passion restrained – in Frank that Harry had never offered the Duchess. The director was worried about it.

  – That’s what’s missing when she acts with Harry, you see it, Sidney, when she’s with the other one.

  Sidney saw it all right.

  – Damn. Damn.

  Elizabeth Morton-Stanley hated this kind of thing. She created complication constantly but she hated it. A short break was called in the middle of the morning and Vera went looking for Frank. He was in the back of the hall, sitting on a crate.

  – Hello, she said.

  – Oh hello!

  He hadn’t seen her coming. He was on his feet at once.

  – Sit down, she said. Move over. What are you reading?

  – Act IV.

  – Oh Act IV. Let’s have a drink later. You want to?

  Vera never went out for a drink after rehearsal. And Frank Stone was planning to go to Archibald Street where Joan was giving him supper. But at once he said yes.

  When he arrived at Joan’s, much later that evening, he found her in some distress. She’d cooked him a meal but it was ruined in the oven. She was haunted still by what she’d heard at the street meeting on Sunday. She was confused and miserable and she needed Frank but he hadn’t come.

  She’d been unable to tell Julius and Gustl that she’d heard Gricey’s voice. But who knew that voice better than she did? It had rung out with volume and clarity within the coarse incoherence of the rest, she could hear it still. And now she’d convinced herself that she’d seen him too.

  Several times earlier that evening, when there was a footstep on the pavement, she’d gone into Gricey’s room and looked down into the street. She would then unlock the wardrobe, and such a disquieting stillness there was, there among the clothes left hanging. Briefly she’d fondled the pale silk lining of a good wool overcoat, then heard a whistling in the street. From the window she saw Frank Stone on the pavement, gazing up.

  She flew down the stairs without troubling to lock the wardrobe and flung open the door into the street. She clutched him, whispering, oh thank god, thank god. Frank had an explanation prepared but it wasn’t required; to have come at all was enough. Up the stairs they went together, and into the flat, to the kitchen where it was warm. For the first time he saw her in tears. She set her elbows on the table, covering her face with her hands, and Frank sat helpless before her heaving shoulders and muffled sobs until, one hand still clasped to her face, she reached with groping fingers for his hand.

  How could he tell her what had happened to him?

  That night he stayed with her for she wouldn’t allow him to leave. She had no thought for his mother. Never had she clung to him as she did that night, and never before had he felt ambivalence towards her. He wanted to leave the flat, not to be in his own home, no, but so as to be by himself. What was he doing, playing Vera’s lover then coming to the bed of her mother? It wasn’t funny any more. Was he mad? Well, we asked ourselves the same question! Only when the first grey light was apparent in the crack in the curtain did he slip silently out of her bed and, gathering his clothes up, make his way down the passage to the kitchen. Joan didn’t awaken. He quickly dressed then let himself out, and walked past the cemetery to the bus stop in the dawn.

  Well, Vera had kissed him, but so what? Boy meets girl, so what? She’d liked doing the wooing scene with him in the first act. She liked the delicacy of his flirting, and his seriousness late in the scene when he tells her that he’ll be the ‘constant sanctuary’ of her good name. What had he meant by it? That he promised discretion. And then there’d been the headlong rush into the marriage vows, which the pair of them took at the gallop, pouring the words out in front of Cariola and the deed was done. They were man and wife. It had aroused her, the haste and heat of it, with its palpable undertow of lust, so she took him for a drink and when they left the pub she led him into an alley and pushed him up against the wall and kissed him hard on the mouth. She was a very forward girl, Vera, very pushy when she chose to be. She opened her mouth and used her tongue on his lips and on his own tongue, flicking and licking. Startled at first, he became at once excited, and kissed her back, and was given some freedom with his hands, there in the chattering cold with their panting breath turning to smoke in the darkness. He tried to get his fingers up under her skirt but only managed the top of her stockings, a touch of womanly thigh, no further. Well, why not? He was in a state of some violent confusion, with this flurry of passion—

  Then she pulled away from him.

  – Remember, she said, panting a little, and put her finger on his lips.

  – What?

  He stared at her with wild eyes, hard as coal in his trousers and desperate to finish.

  – Constant sanctuary.

  He nodded, breathless. Oh, he had no wish to betray their secret, and for Christ’s sake, Vera, lift your skirt, won’t you, so we can bloody have a secret!

  – Cheer up, sweetheart, she whispered, then again laid her fingers briefly on his lips and left him, her coat wrapped tight around her and her heels tapping on the cobbles down the alley.

  – Bloody hell, said Frank.

  Joan awoke to find him gone from her bed but this had happened before. She still felt she could trust him, although she would never tell him what she was doing with Julius and Gustl, no. In a way she was doing it for him, or maybe for his mother. She wanted to believe that.

  Meanwhile rehearsals went forward and Elizabeth Morton-Stanley made it clear to Harry that she wanted more from his Antonio, and particularly in the first act, when the foundation is laid for the horror to come. Harry listened in silence and understood that Frank Stone must have produced some kind of an effect that he as yet had not. He thought: if passion and tenderness is what they require then that is what they shall have. Frank Stone looked on as his rival became more amorous and tactile, his glances more burning, his words now soft, now husky with emotion. Any actor can do love, love is easy, as well we know, don’t we, ladies? We do. Love onstage is like hate, like rage, like anything with passion in it, and all you do is produce the passion and it reads like love if that’s what the words say. Harry was probably a bit angry. And Frank, watching him, was at once resentful because he still thought he could play it better.

  Then came the day the cast left t
he rehearsal room and entered the theatre, the New Apollo. It was a big, old, square building, dark too long. They got onto the stage and had their first real look at the set, which had gone up the previous night. They stood around in their overcoats and scarves, smoking and making jokes, and gazing up into the flies and out into the empty auditorium. Never a simple occasion for an actor. For he now finds actual walls where before he’d walked through them as though they were invisible. There were real doors too, by which we mean flimsy hinged openings in vertical flats, where before there were chalk marks on a floor. There was furniture.

  – This is here? cried the Duke Ferdinand of Calabria, twin brother of the Duchess of Malfi – Ed Colefax, that is – coming upon a table where he’d intended to make a vigorous upstage exit. Stagehands watched with amusement as he stared at the table, became bewildered, gazed out into the auditorium with a hand on his forehead as though an answer would come from a voice in the back stalls regarding the peculiar fact of the presence of a table. They’d all seen this before. Actors were constantly astonished to encounter actual furniture on a stage. Elizabeth Morton-Stanley allowed the silence to go on for a while. Then she lit a cigarette and lay back, closing her eyes.

  – It was always on the floor plan, Edmund.

  Later each of the actors flung a few words into the empty auditorium to hear what bounced back. Then they went off to find their dressing rooms and discover just how far from the stage they’d be.

  Frank Stone was sharing a dressing room with four others, two of them Madmen, one a Pilgrim, all Executioners, and other minor roles such as Officers, Servants, Churchmen. They were deep in the bowels of the building, and it was impossible to reach the stage in under three minutes. The others were already there, each laying out his make-up and his rabbit’s feet and what-have-you, including a man called Willy Ogilvie. Frank had the chair furthest from the door. The chatter was genial, these actors relieved to have at last come into the theatre.

  Well, we all know the feeling. It’s jaded you’d have to be if you’re not quickened to the marrow by getting into the theatre with real work to do on a stage, even if only to play a lady-in-waiting or a servant or a whore, or maybe all three, in the course of one evening. The dressing room was stifling hot where Frank had his chair, at the end next to the wall, there being no window but several very hot steam pipes with ancient ring brackets attached to the bricks and painted a muddy yellow colour. The door was wide open so as to cool the room but it made little difference to Frank. He didn’t complain. It would do no good. And he knew now for sure that he would again show them how Antonio was to be played. It was with a kind of pent impatience that he anticipated his opportunity, for he didn’t for a moment doubt it would come.