– What?
Vera was half naked in front of her mirror. She was made up for the stage. A stocking cap was pinned tightly to her skull in preparation for the wig. The dresser was lacing up her corset, and she at once realised that Vera didn’t know.
– What do you mean, feeling better, Janet?
Then out it had to come.
Frank Stone had tried to make his peace with Willy Ogilvie but Willy was not to be placated. It had not escaped him that Frank was receiving favourable mentions in the glowing notices the play received. Willy knew that he could have done what Frank was doing with Malateste, and he resented it. Such grievances can bite deep into the tender tissue of an actor’s heart. But Frank, he had no worries now. For they remembered his Malvolio, those whose job it was to be aware of such things, and now they saw him make something fresh of Count Malateste. An actor to keep your eye on, they said. And backstage too there was a new respect, and most gratifying was the warmth he felt coming from Vera. Until Friday.
On Friday in her dressing room Vera heard that her mother had almost ruined the first curtain. After the show she sent for Frank, and when her visitors had left she told him to stay. She asked him what he knew about her mother on opening night and Frank pretended to know nothing. Vera was at once angry. She told him not to treat her like an idiot and to please just answer the question.
Frank was sitting as usual on the edge of the armchair with his hands clasped between his knees. His feet were wide apart and his head was hanging. She was cleaning her face and watching him in her mirror. Now she turned in her chair and faced him. She’d put a sweater on over the gown she wore to be strangled in. The theatre was very cold after the show.
– The question is, Frank, why did my mum start shouting before the first show?
– I don’t know.
– Try.
– I think she’s angry with your father.
– Why? My father’s dead.
– I think that’s why.
Frank was groping in the dark here, but then so was Vera. She had to agree he was probably right. But she hadn’t finished with him.
– You haven’t helped matters, have you?
Frank deserved this, he knew.
– My father was barely in his grave!
– He was cremated.
– She’s almost old enough to be your mother.
– I know.
– So why did you do it?
– It just happened. These things happen, Vera. A man, a woman—
Vera stood up and went behind the screen at the far end of the dressing room to change. Her voice, when it came, was disembodied, although as she got out of her gown Frank could see parts of her actual body in the mirror.
– What are you going to do now?
– Nothing! I’m sorry it happened at all.
– Not good enough, Frank.
She emerged from behind the screen buttoning her blouse over her brassiere and Frank didn’t turn away.
– I want you to comfort her, she said.
Frank didn’t know what to say.
– That’s what she needs and who else is going to do it?
– What about you?
– Don’t be so fucking daft, she needs a man. Anyway I’m busy right now if you hadn’t noticed.
Frank didn’t like to say that he was busy too. He agreed to go and see Joan and comfort her.
– You’ll have to tell me what happens. Everything.
– Yes, Vera.
– All right. Is the pub still open?
– We might get a quick one in.
– Come on then.
26
IT HAPPENED DURING what they called the graveyard scene in Act V. Antonio and Delio were under the walls of the ruins of an ancient abbey. The stage was dark, the atmosphere distinctly eerie, for the Duchess, who unknown to Antonio has already been murdered, will be heard as an echo. Antonio at one point says: Echo, I will not talk with thee/For thou art a dead thing.
And comes the Echo: Thou art a dead thing.
Antonio, unnerved, turns away, takes a few steps – takes one too many – and falls off the stage. He lands in the orchestra pit and almost destroys the bassoon. The curtain descends on the graveyard scene and the house lights come up.
There is a rapid conference backstage. Harry Catermole can put no weight on the leg, so Frank will cover Antonio and be stabbed in the next scene by Bosola, who tells him as he lies dying that his wife the Duchess and two of their children have been murdered. Frank makes a last speech and a few seconds later his body is carried out to the accompaniment of a funeral march from the percussion section of the orchestra with much bass drum. A deep solemn silence in the auditorium.
In the last scene Willy Ogilvie takes over Count Malateste, and Grisolan is played by an unemployed Madman. Frank, standing in the wings, hears Willy imitate his Oh sad disaster, but misses the sardonic languor that he himself perfected, and the laughter is uncertain. It hardly matters. The play ends with the arrival of Antonio’s son. The audience rises to its feet, delirious.
Meanwhile backstage a doctor has been called in. It doesn’t look good. Frank Stone is among the cast members clustered in the door of Harry’s dressing room. Harry himself is seated with his hose off and the bare leg stretched across a chair. Swelling is already apparent. The doctor turns to the company manager and tells him that this man will be off for several weeks. He’s lucky not to have broken it.
A kind of groan is heard from the actors in the doorway. There are expressions of condolence. Harry turns to them and speaks in tragic cadences.
– I told them it was too dark, he cries, but did they listen?
But the indignation soon fades. There’s nothing to be done. A couple of actors glance at Frank, who sadly shakes his head, but inwardly he’s exulting. The rest of them know it. They’d be the same.
If only Gricey were going to die. But Gricey would never die, of this Joan grew more certain every day she heard him in the wardrobe, and she heard him in the wardrobe often now. How he must have hated her, this was what she thought, and not for the first time. This was the intolerable thought. This was what broke her heart, and thinking it she would have to sit down, or lie down on the couch, or her bed, and the sobs would rack her body until she was exhausted. Then she’d get up and go about her tasks, and ask herself how much longer she could carry this burden, the knowledge that whatever it was she’d done to Gricey, all unknowing, it had aroused such hatred in him. Poor Joan, it never occurred to her that it had nothing to do with her. He hated her because he could. He’d have hated anyone. It was the fascist way.
She attended The Duchess of Malfi for the second time. She pretended to be an old woman. She was bent and gaunt with her mittened fingers clasping the upturned collar at her throat. She took her seat in the gallery, and when the house lights went down her eyes darted about the auditorium, but no, Gricey wasn’t present, or not yet. She watched her daughter with real pleasure, and sadness, and anxiety, and she clapped with enthusiasm at the end of each act.
It was not until Antonio suffered his unscheduled accident in the orchestra pit that she became alarmed. She had grown sensitive to the untoward. She had begun to think there were no accidents now. The discovery of his fascist pin was just the start of it. Now she recognised Frank Stone coming on, saw him replace the other man, the injured one. She watched him coldly as he took up the part of Antonio, and was at first bitter to think that he would now play the husband of Vera, as once he’d played her father, that is, when he took Gricey’s role as Malvolio.
She didn’t go round to see Vera afterwards. Instead she slipped away and rode home through the dark streets with less composure than once she’d shown in the saddle, careless in the handling of the large bicycle such that she drew the attention of two policemen, but was not apprehended. Furiously she pedalled through the East End then past the cemetery, and St Clement’s, and into Archibald Street where she rattled over the wet cobbles to her own
front door. She swiftly unlocked it then wheeled her bicycle in, and left it on its side in the hallway under the stairs.
She was soon in her kitchen and before she’d even taken her coat off she’d got the bottle out of the cupboard, and only after strong fortification did she feel able to go into Gricey’s room and kick the hated wardrobe, and shout at it a few times, but he wasn’t to be roused tonight, being elsewhere, as she supposed, and with something like triumph in her voice she wished him bad dreams then turned off the light and locked the door and returned to the kitchen.
Frank had promised Vera he would visit her mother, and the following morning he did. She was surprised to see him; shocked, even.
– Mr Stone? she said when she opened the front door. What are you doing here? Never mind, come in, it’s raining.
For days it had been raining. Frank did not own an umbrella but he did have a decent raincoat, courtesy of Gricey, also his black fedora. In he came, and it was only with some effort of will that he did not at once tell her his good news. She knew it already, of course.
Joan set off up the stairs, Frank following. He’d pushed the hat to the back of his head, in what he considered a slightly raffish manner, as befitted his mood, and unbuttoned the overcoat so it flapped about his legs. There had been times, and not so long before, when he’d had eyes only for the sleek swells and curves of Joan’s hips and bum, a glimpse of long pale fingers on the banister, and the rather severe chignon which clung to her white swan’s neck, just a few stray wisps escaping, so that by the time they’d ascended the staircase to the first-floor landing, more had risen—
But this was not the case today. Frank had come to make amends. He’d been rehearsing his speech on the bus. He felt sure it would be well received. He would then go back to Vera and tell her that he had done what she’d asked him to.
– You want a cup of tea, I suppose.
He didn’t immediately recognise her tone of voice. He knew her tender mood, he knew her affectionate, maternal mood, and he’d felt, too, the quiet pushing whispery intensity that this most private of women had shown him in the darkness of her bed. He’d known her tearful, and he’d known the dry humour in which she indulged when she indulged in dry gin. But this offer of a cup of tea he didn’t recognise.
– Mrs Grice, I came to tell you—
– Oh you can spare me all that, Mr Stone, I don’t have the time for it, frankly. I don’t require you to apologise. I imagine my daughter put you up to it, did she?
– She thought you might be—
– Angry. Oh yes. Oh yes, Mr Stone – Frank – Francis – I am angry. I am very angry indeed.
She turned from the stove and stared at the actor seated at her kitchen table. His mouth fell open. He did not know what to say. In fact he was for the first time glimpsing what he would later come to think of as a woman in the first stages of a nervous breakdown of some kind, and a stray thought passed through his mind, he knew not where it came from, that we are all born mad and some of us remain so – it hardly matters, it only goes to show that on seeing Joan in her kitchen that morning, the idea of madness suggested itself, and he was bewildered.
– Are you angry with me?
Joan sank laughing onto a kitchen chair.
– You poor dear fool. No, Franz, I’m not angry with you.
– Then who?
But she had grown weary of him. He spoke in tongues.
– I won’t give you a cup of tea. I would like you to leave.
– But Joan—
She stood up and leaning forward, with her hands spread across the table, she stared at him with fierce hatred and as she did so, she groped for the breadboard, which was at the end of the table, and then as her fingers closed on the bread knife Frank Stone knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was being threatened, and felt himself to be at risk, for she frightened him now. He was never sure precisely what happened after that, for his next memory is of standing in the middle of Archibald Street in the rain, then walking rapidly in the direction of the cemetery and the bus stop. He’d left his hat behind.
Frank was quiet in the theatre that night. He’d moved his things into the dressing room Harry had been sharing with Ed Colefax, and now he sat at his mirror, distracted. Only when Jasper called the half did he rouse himself and begin to get ready for the evening performance. He would not tell Vera about his strange encounter with her mother. He didn’t know what to say about it.
He knew what to say on the stage of the New Apollo Theatre, however. From his first entrance he was a warmly passionate Antonio, dedicated only to the welfare of the woman he adored. Never had he and Vera acted in front of an audience together, and it escaped the notice of nobody familiar with the production, as it had been played with Harry Catermole, that the temperature was raised a number of degrees. However, to those of us who know about such things, Frank’s performance, while spirited, lacked discipline; and Vera thought so too.
Julius Glass meanwhile was a distracted man but not to the extent of forgetting for a moment his wife’s triumph in the theatre. He was just as pleased to know that his investment in the production was proving sound, for the advances were good. It was Gustl who mentioned to him the power of the onstage chemistry.
– Julius, she said, darkly, they are liking each other.
They were in the circle bar at the interval, a few nights after Frank took over, the Saturday night in fact. They had come in to see how Harry’s cover was getting on. But Julius was never troubled by what his wife did onstage.
27
SHE AWOKE WITH a start. It was a wet morning, that Sunday, the day of the street meeting, and Joan had had a restless night. She’d dreamed about Gricey again, and she knew now where he was hiding. Oh stupid woman, she told herself – you should have realised he’d do this! But it hadn’t occurred to her. It was very bad. She had to go over there and confront him, tell him to leave Vera alone. But not yet. She sat at her sewing machine and worked on a length of parachute silk that had come into her possession. She was making a pair of slacks for Vera. Oh, that girl – she didn’t even know the danger she was in. Silk slacks weren’t enough but they were something. Joan had no need of a pattern, she just went at the silk with the long draper’s shears. She knew Vera liked them baggy so she was adding panels down the seams; you’d have to for silk, anyway. She would use a sharp needle and silk thread, and how lovely they’d be on Vera, and what a nice swishing, scroopy sound they’d make when her thighs rubbed together. Odd not to have the austerity rules any more, she thought, what with limits on how many pleats you could have, how many buttons and so on. Not now. Now she could do what she liked with Vera’s slacks, and how nice they’d feel next to the skin because nylon was so clammy, and so much harder to stitch. Silk was slippery but if she only wore them in the bedroom it wouldn’t matter. No, you had to have silk.
So ran Joan’s restless, anxious, distracted thoughts as she sewed Vera’s silk slacks for the bedroom, and the danger grew every moment more real to her. It was a while since she’d made clothes for her daughter, and now it gave her a strange, uneasy comfort. Later she would dye them in the kitchen sink. Old tea leaves in muslin bags, they’d come up lovely—
Then all at once she grew impatient, for there was something that had to be done and she couldn’t put it off a second longer. She flung the slacks aside, abruptly left the sewing room and got her coat and hat on. Soon she was on her bicycle. A light rain was falling. It was ten thirty in the morning when she arrived at the house in Lupus Mews. Gustl came to the door.
– Hello Liebste, I did not know you were so early coming. Julius is I think not ready.
– No no, I must just go up to Vera’s room.
They were in the hallway and Gustl was trying to get Joan’s wet coat and hat off her but Joan wouldn’t let her, in too big a hurry she was. Gustl told her that Vera now slept, not in the attic, but with her husband.
Then Joan was climbing up through the house in her wet coat, up the stairs t
o the attic, where she stood in the doorway of the small room with the slanted ceiling and the old beams and the dormer window. The floorboards were bare but for a raffia rug by the bed. The bed had been stripped. There was a wardrobe in there now, an old black thing pushed up against the wall across from the bed, one door hanging open. But Joan had no interest in this wardrobe, it was the space under the rafters she wanted. She crossed the floor and lifted the latch. She peered into the darkness and knew at once she was right: morbid spiritual residue. She could smell it.
– I’m coming in now, she said, and with lowered head she entered.
She pulled the door closed behind her. She was in there for some time. When she came downstairs again she looked exhausted. She would say nothing of what she’d been doing upstairs, and soon after, with Gustl and Julius, she left for Hackney.
Actors don’t usually work on a Sunday but Vera wants to do more with the wooing scene. Only once during rehearsal had Frank Stone stood in as Antonio, so he’d missed all the work she and Harry had done. Vera realises that’s why he comes in too strong too soon. He peaks when she puts her ring on his trembling finger, and then has nowhere to go in the last three pages, which involve kisses, a hasty marriage, then exit. Vera wants the audience to know that these two will explode if they can’t get into a bedroom now.
So she asks Frank to come round to Lupus Mews to work on the scene. Julius and Gustl will be out on Sunday afternoon, and they’ll have the house to themselves. It takes Frank about half a second to say yes to this suggestion. When he appears Vera brings him into the kitchen, where her script lies open on the table, middle of Act I, scene i. Frank tells her he was in the wings watching Harry every night, when he wasn’t onstage himself.
– I’m trying to give you everything he did, he says.
– No, says Vera, not what I want at all, Frank. He was like a block of wood and from you I want more.
– More what?
– Feeling, you fool. Fucking electricity, Frank.
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