The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  20

  JOAN WENT TO Lupus Mews the next day, as arranged. She’d taken some care with her appearance. It was a mark of the mettle of the woman that she did not suffer a collapse or a breakdown after what had happened. Rather her resolution, once tentative, became strong and sure, and pure too, and it seemed fortuitous to her that it now lay within her power to work against the men Gricey had associated with in his last years. She was in no doubt as to what she must do.

  So after work she cycled down to Westminster Bridge, Big Ben dim and silent in the dusk, then along the Embankment and everywhere people going home, the streets smoky and crowded, and despondent, the frowning men and women in hats and heavy overcoats streaming over the river, and on she went into Pimlico, until she reached the ruins of Sutherland Terrace and its unstable walls, empty black holes in them like lost teeth where once the windows had been, and charred rafters in the wreckage above. She reached Julius’ house at the corner of Lupus Mews. The window in the front room, Gustl’s room, was bright against the gloom, and a figure stood within. Joan wheeled her bicycle up the path and leaned it against the railing. Climbing the steps, she banged the brass knocker. The door opened immediately.

  – Hello love, said Auntie Gustl. You were being expected.

  She led her into the front room where Joan’s painting still stood on the easel. Joan paused before it. She barely recognised herself. Gustl didn’t ask her what had happened. Joan sank into the wicker chair beside the fireplace. For a second she buried her face in her hands. Then she looked up.

  – I’m ready, she said.

  – I’ll get Julius.

  A little later they got in the Wolseley and Julius drove them to the quiet street in Chelsea where the Brompton Club occupied the ground floor. Julius and Gustl were silent in the car, and Joan remembered the voice of Gricey in the darkness of the shuddering wardrobe, and saw him again as she had during the street meeting, in the crowd, screaming, his arm lifted in the fascist salute and his face inflamed with hatred and rage. So much rage, would there never come an end to rage? It was another kind of grief she felt, and far worse, with what she thought of as this second death. Her sorrow now was for herself, that he hadn’t allowed her to hold him in her memory as she would have liked to, but had left her with only a mask. She’d been thinking earlier of him telling stories in the saloon bar, doing his imitations of the great stage actors of their time. Oh, and with warm, laughing faces all around, and at a table nearby, the women, yes, we were there, with Joan among us taking quiet pleasure in her husband’s talent to amuse. But all an act. The real man was always elsewhere. She saw that now, and so did we.

  And the elsewhere, the place the real man was to be found? It was the Black House. It was the headquarters of the BUF, a grey, Gothic pile on Battersea Park Road that Mosley purchased with Italian money in August 1933. We shiver to think of it, it reminds us of a dark house, an empty theatre. He filled it with young Blackshirts, students of fascism, and older men with army backgrounds like Frederic Bacon, living together under military discipline and the club rooms ringing nightly with laughter and song. And who entertained them, these fierce young men for whom life had become worth living again? Gricey did. Gricey Grice entertained them. He told them stories, he sang them songs, he was even up for a soft-shoe shuffle with walking stick and straw boater should the situation require it. He pandered to their politics because he shared them. They loved him. He needed them. But never a word about Joan, of course.

  Hilda Bacon opened the door and led them upstairs. Joan was stiff and unsmiling as she entered the drawing room and saw at once the portrait of Oswald Mosley. From their various perches fascists abruptly rose to their feet, like crows rising flapping from a branch. Many of them were in uniform that night, yes, some even in full Nazi officer costume, and they came forward to click their heels and she was chilled and at the same time fascinated to see these absurd Englishmen taking themselves so very seriously, each one bending to kiss her hand, each one muttering a few words of respect and admiration for her husband as though he were still alive and perhaps, she thought, they had to keep their heroes alive, so few had survived. But the whole thing was a masquerade, and Joan, a bit stunned now, murmured her thanks. She remained calm; Julius had told her what to expect. Perform the grieving widow, he’d said, and talk as little as possible. He stood at her left shoulder, Gustl on her right and slightly to the rear. When these extraordinary introductions were complete they heiled the picture of Mosley and Joan nodded her approval.

  A silence fell. All eyes were upon her. How impressive she was tonight, tall and proud, serene, remote, oh, undeniably a most remarkable woman. Her voice was clear, steady, quiet. They strained to hear her.

  – My husband would have wanted you to continue the struggle, she said. With all your vigour and resolve. He was proud of you all.

  Julius had suggested it and it went down well. She then sat down. There was sustained applause. She saw Julius speaking in low tones to Frederic Bacon and she could detect no trace of suspicion or distrust in the other man. So it was working, she thought, and felt a fresh flicker of contempt for these idiotic characters all trumped up as though about to perform a light German military farce. In fact what they intended, what Mosley intended, was to resuscitate the fascist spirit, raise it from the dead – if ever it could die, thought Joan, for perhaps like Gricey it only slept. But it was beyond the imagination of any of them, she thought, that their hero Gricey could have been married to a Jew. If only they knew.

  Frederic Bacon then said a few words about how Gricey had fallen like a good soldier. ‘Fallen’ at least was right, thought Joan, fallen down the back steps of Julius’ house, about which event she was still in the dark, but more convinced than ever that he hadn’t fallen at all. Pushed, rather. Their only martyr. And she knew who did the pushing. And now thought it the right thing.

  How very honoured they were, Bacon then said, that Gricey’s widow was with them now.

  At that the clowns all clapped again and muttered their approval. Angry, brutal young men, vindictive with envy. Vain in their black tunics and breeches, their badges and armband swastikas, the visored caps and riding boots they could wear nowhere else. And a few of the older ones were there, Peter Ryder, not in uniform at least, and three or four other men who might have worked in a bank or a classroom, and two flushed ladies, sisters evidently, built on the same lines as Hilda Bacon and plainly aroused in the presence of so many young men alive with angry unclean passions born of failure, frustration and hate. Yes, and Frederic and Hilda Bacon, herself in the black blouse and belted skirt, him in a pale blue uniform – Reichsmarschall und Frau – the epitome, the sum of all the parts, gathering to themselves the various grudges of these misfits, and reflecting them back in the form of a wrong political idea to which these men might attach themselves and so acquire in their own eyes at least a spurious dignity, a sense of being lifted clear above their fellows.

  But it was a frightful ordeal. She thought later she would rather spend all night in a locked wardrobe with Gricey’s ghost than another minute in a drawing room full of inadequate Englishmen dressed up as Nazis. It rose up in her throat like bile – the curdled digest of something tainted, and consumed in error – and only with difficulty did she sustain her gravitas. These young men, oh, so very infatuated, drunk on myths of racial purity and martial glory, their imaginations sick, diseased—

  – You are not impressed, Mrs Grice, Frederic Bacon murmured to her, as she stood by herself near the fireplace.

  She turned to him.

  – We are not impressive, I know that, he then said. We have not what the Germans had. No, we are an afterthought. It matters nothing, all this. A sideshow, at best. We try to ape what was once in its way quite magnificent, but it’s laughable, is it not, Mrs Grice? But it is for them that I do it.

  Joan was astonished by his candour. He lifted his glass to her and made a slight bow, a small ironic click of the heels, and moved away.


  Later, coming away, she felt soiled, and asked Julius if they might stop somewhere for a cup of tea so she could wash her face and pull herself together. Not something stronger? This was Gustl’s kindly suggestion. No, a cup of tea, she’d had far too much gin the night before, so they went into a little café where Joan sat for some moments covering her mouth with her hand as though frightened of coughing something up. Julius gazed at her in his lugubrious manner and told her he’d learned all he needed about the shipment from the publisher, and that Peter would do the rest.

  – What shipment? said Joan.

  So Julius then told her that a large shipment of fascist printed matter was to be delivered to the bookshop in the Bacons’ house for distribution at the meeting in two weeks. It was his intention that these materials be burned unread. Joan was gratified that her visit to that loathsome house had done some good. The destruction of fascist literature was surely devoutly to be wished for.

  21

  VERA AT THIS time was of course subject to the anxiety every actress feels when approaching her first appearance in front of an audience in the role she’s been rehearsing for weeks. But she had another, and far greater source of distress. It was this: that her father wouldn’t see her work. He’d seen everything she’d been in. He’d been supportive as no one else had, in large part because he understood what she was doing. Invariably he told her she had astonished him, or that he’d found nuances of character heretofore unsuspected in her Nora, or whoever it might be. How was she to know if her Duchess was any good if Gricey wasn’t there to tell her? Always he had told her what wasn’t working, as well as what was. That mad idea she’d had as Cordelia to play the prison scene wearing a blindfold? Others had had their doubts and expressed them carefully. Not Gricey. Not until he attended a dress rehearsal did she understand why it was a bad idea.

  – Dear girl, he’d said, if you don’t give me your bloody eyes I can’t tell what you’re bloody feeling.

  Grief swept through her whenever she contemplated performing without Daddy coming backstage after to give her the good news, for it was almost always good news. For two days she was sunk in despair. She was listless in rehearsal. The company was alarmed. Elizabeth Morton-Stanley was a woman with a headful of thunderstorm and it was Sidney who thought of asking Frank Stone to find out what was wrong. He spoke to him at the end of the corridor where the Madmen had their dressing room.

  Frank Stone’s hopes had at once been raised, when Sidney appeared at the door and asked for a private word. Was Antonio to be his? – but no.

  – We’d like you to have a word with Vera, said Sidney, when they were out in the corridor and beyond earshot of the curious Madmen. She likes you, doesn’t she?

  A stagehand with an armful of electrical cable emerged from the door at the far end of the corridor, and Sidney at once laid a finger on Frank’s lips.

  – What sort of a word, Mr Temple? said Frank when the stagehand was gone.

  – Calm her down, Frankie. Find out what’s the matter. Reassure her, any way you can.

  Frank was taken aback.

  – I don’t know, he said.

  Sidney gazed at him. Frank was frowning.

  – Elizabeth would take it as a personal favour.

  The meaning of these words wasn’t hard to read. Frank was being offered something, or promised it, he didn’t know what exactly although he guessed it was not unconnected to the role of Antonio. Frank allowed his ambition once more to take fire, well, he couldn’t help it, and in a reckless surge of confidence he said: All right, Mr Temple, I’ll do what I can.

  – Good boy, purred Sidney.

  He left Frank Stone kicking the dank brickwork in that gloomy corridor. Frank’s brief elation died. He had no idea how he was supposed to proceed. He’d planned to go and see Joan that night. Now he would somehow have to contrive to see Vera instead. He kicked the wall again, then back to the dressing room he limped. How we laughed. Oh, he never failed to amuse us, that fellow.

  In his bones Edgar Cartridge knew that Julius Glass and his alleged sister had infiltrated the movement so as to do it harm. That they had brought Gricey Grice’s widow to Mr Bacon’s house made no difference. He thought it likely that Joan Grice was no more a fascist than Julius Glass and his sister, and he voiced his suspicions later, when the meeting had broken up and Bacon sat conferring with his other closest lieutenants, Oakeshott and Rhinsfurt. Kosher fascists, he called them, spitting the words out. Jew power, bah.

  – Kosher fascists, very good, said Bacon. You are a most perceptive man, Edgar. I should have known they wouldn’t deceive you.

  Edgar Cartridge went to the sideboard and splashed a measure of whisky into his glass. He was a small man of powerful build and a head that seemed too large, with a shock of blond hair that rose perpendicular from his broad, low brow. His was a squarish, sullen face, clean shaven and with a dimple in the middle of the fierce chin. He invariably wore a grey suit with a dark shirt, blue or black, and a pale grey tie, when he was among fascists. He had not been wearing a uniform that night, although he carried with him a cherished leather glove, once the property of the Leader. He moved with deliberation but his air of menace was softened by his pleasant voice. As a boy he’d been a promising chorister with a lovely soprano voice. The combination of a violent home, however, reversals in his early career in the wholesale textile business, for which he later blamed something he’d heard called ‘the Anglo-Judaic plutocracy’ – all very tedious – and a thick streak of ferocity in his nature, all had led him inexorably into the ranks of Mosley’s movement. He’d entered the Black House as a teenager in 1934 and there he had flourished. During the war he’d gone to prison.

  – You told him about the printed matter, he said.

  Frederic Bacon shrugged, unconcerned.

  – What can he do about it? He thinks I still trust him.

  – He must be watched, said Victor Oakeshott.

  He was one of the movement’s intellectuals. A lanky, myopic man, shabby in his dress, ill-groomed, careless in personal hygiene, he was by occupation a lecturer in the same third-rate college in Paddington where Bacon taught Modern European History. Victor Oakeshott spoke fluent German and had once written a monograph on Schopenhauer, soon forgotten.

  – You overestimate his capabilities.

  – I think not, said Edgar Cartridge. We cannot have another meeting disrupted.

  – He’s right, said Hilda, sitting at the back of the room with a sleek white tomcat in her lap. She threw off the cat and went to the sideboard, where Edgar Cartridge poured her more gin.

  – Perhaps.

  – No, certainly, said Hilda Bacon. How can we recruit if we cannot be heard? You remember what the Leader told us.

  – Yes dear, said Frederic Bacon, grimly, I remember what the Leader told us. The answer is more stewards, better equipped. This is your responsibility, Piet.

  Piet Rhinsfurt was a short, flabby man with a bristly reddish moustache. There was something about his eyes. They were small and set close together, and shone with unnatural brightness. Some of us thought he used drugs. He certainly drank, and when he did his left eye wandered while the right one stayed put. Oddly, he worked in the film industry and, too, claimed to be the inventor of the razor-blade potato. Violence was his passion and fascism the means to that end. He had hinted more than once that he had thrashed a man to death in cold blood with a bicycle chain.

  – There will be more stewards and I am weeding out the weaklings myself. You will not be disappointed, Mrs Bacon.

  – I’m pleased to hear it, Piet, said Hilda, seating herself once more in a manner that was prim and feline at the same time. She invariably found herself aroused among the more dangerous of her husband’s followers. Rumours of her susceptibilities were rife in these circles. She was once famously overheard speaking with some relish of her partiality for fascist dick. Quiet laughter here among the ladies of the Chorus.

  There was no clear resolution other than that,
come the next meeting, no hard-case East End Yid would get near the platform, and any who did would regret the day he’d been born.

  Frank Stone waited near the stage door and when Vera emerged he asked her if she would like to go for a drink. These were the exact same words, he realised with some rue, he’d more than once spoken when it was Vera’s mother he awaited at the stage door. Vera had never felt more alone. She was facing the challenge of carrying the lead in a difficult play in which her own performance would be rigorously scrutinised by the critics and others, who in her imagination had swollen into a howling multitude. No, she didn’t want a drink.

  – Cup of tea, then? said Frank Stone as he fell into step beside her.

  The wind was brisk off the river and there was still some light in the day. Trees lashed about and ponderous grey clouds trampled across the sky like elephants. Vera stopped and turned to him, clutching her coat collar tight about her throat as the breeze snatched at her piled hair, and declared her heart’s desire.

  – Whelks, Frank, she said. I want whelks.

  Twenty minutes later as the dusk was coming on they stood at an open-fronted tripe-and-eel shop in Borough Market. They saw before them marble slabs heaped with tripe, pigs’ trotters, pigs’ cheeks, and live, wriggling eels. Behind these counters loud cockney girls were selling the stuff to Londoners on their way home from work. The day was windy and the girls’ hands were blue with cold despite the glowing brazier. Vera wanted a bag of whelks and Frank Stone purchased it, shouldering through to the front.

  They stood shivering on the corner of the street, Vera gobbling whelks while leaning against a wall, and Frank smoking a desultory Woodbine. Around them men and women pushed against the wind towards the bus stop and the Tube. Darkness was falling from the air. Vera felt better. She licked her fingers and at last gave some attention to her companion.

  – Now I want a glass of beer.

  There was a pub nearby. It was just after six and they went into the public bar. It was not crowded. Vera was recognised and the landlord came round from behind the counter and showed them to a small table in the corner. Frank ordered two pints of bitter and had barely enough in his pocket to pay for them. Vera drained half of hers then dabbed at her whelky lips and sighed.