The Wardrobe Mistress

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Frank finds it hard at times not to laugh when Vera is cross with him.

  – I need you dirty. But not immediately. Do you see?

  She takes his hand and draws it towards her groin. Her eyes never leave his face. He almost touches her, then all at once she pushes him away! She then draws his hand in once more, still closer to her body now – shallow breaths, tongue on her lip, mouth open, eyes on his face – then away again – dropping his hand only when she sees he understands.

  – Dirty, he says.

  – Yes, darling.

  They’re standing in the kitchen, him having struggled out of his coat, and her padding back and forth in her plimsolls, leggings and big grey jersey, with her hair up in a leaky bun.

  – So let’s start with Cariola going behind the arras. You enter, I say: I sent for you. Sit down; take pen and ink and write.

  She looks up. Frank sits down. Yes, he says, and picks up a pen and makes as if to write. Off they go. Frank soon grasps the movement and feeling of the scene the way Vera wants it – that is, the push and pull of sexual electricity as the current shifts and surges between them. On the third run-through it begins to feel like a dance, and to those watching them – that would be us, of course – they do seem to be dancing, and if at first it had been a minuet, it soon becomes a quickening waltz, as formality vanishes and the scene impels them ever closer together, until at last they stand panting in the kitchen, damp with the effort and delighted with themselves and each other.

  It’s then they hear voices in the hall.

  Vera throws open the kitchen door and cries out. At the end of the hall a tall man covered in blood leans groaning against the front door. He’s clinging to Julius’ shoulder. With his other hand he presses a bloody handkerchief to his face. He and Julius now lurch towards the kitchen, Julius holding up this injured man who’s unable, it’s now clear, to put any weight on one leg. Frank is there at once, and he and Julius between them somehow get him into the kitchen, and onto a chair, where he lays his head on the table, wheezing in pain.

  – Some entrance, darling, says Vera, gazing at the bloody man in their kitchen. She knows him, of course, this is Peter Ryder, who now lifts his head off the table and asks her if she’s got a cigarette. Vera’s already on the telephone. She tells him that what he needs isn’t a bloody cigarette, it’s a bloody doctor.

  When a doctor’s been summoned, and Frank has poured everyone a whisky, Julius tells them what happened. He stares at the floor through much of the account. Many more people had showed up than anyone had anticipated. There were a lot of fascists, and a lot of people who hated fascists, and then another crowd who thought it was all a bit of theatre, a bit of a lark. But there was tension in the air all right, said Julius. The sun came out very late in the afternoon, he said, and the light was strange after the rain, with the dusk coming on, a ghostly sort of damply drizzled half-light, really, with some kind of a rainbow in the west, off towards Hampstead, but not much of one, more an excuse for a rainbow, really—

  Julius faltered; he paused. Still staring at the floor he lifted his eyebrows, as though in some slight surprise. Peter Ryder threw back his whisky, pushed his glass across the table and asked for another one. He smoked, groaning.

  – Where’s that bloody doctor? Vera said, and went off down the hall to see if he was in the mews. When she returned Julius continued.

  – Then that idiot appeared, he said.

  – What idiot?

  – Edgar Cartridge. He came in the van. He was wearing the uniform.

  – Oh Christ, that’s against the law—!

  – He should have been arrested. They should have got him straight out of there. It set something off in her, made her furious, I don’t know what. The boots, the belt—

  – Set something off in who?

  Julius gazed at Vera for a second or two, with a terrible pity, so it seemed to us.

  – Your mother.

  – What did she do, Julius? Julius?

  – She had a pair of scissors.

  – Oh Christ, no—

  – In her handbag. The long sharp ones for cutting material.

  – Oh Jesus, no, don’t tell me!

  Vera’s hands flew to her face.

  – She was standing by the stage, she was waiting to go on, she was going to talk to the crowd but I could see she was in a bad way—

  Vera was on her feet now and Julius was growing tearful.

  – I don’t know, darling, she was, oh, she was demented, and I’d just stepped away for a second and Gustl was with her when Edgar Cartridge appeared all in blackshirt and he gave her a bit of a shock—

  – I can’t bear this!

  – I mean he jostled her, she stumbled and then when – well, she got the shears out of her bag and she just stabbed him.

  – No.

  – Just like that. Pulled them out of her bag and stuck him in the stomach, it was all so quick and poor Gustl, she had no chance to stop her—

  Julius sat down. Vera was standing at the sink staring at him.

  – She stabbed him? But—

  Frank stared at Julius with his mouth open. Peter Ryder had his elbows on the table and his face in his hands. Julius gazed at his wife with the tears now streaming down his cheeks.

  28

  RIDLEY ROAD IS a busy market street in Hackney. It runs into Dalston Lane at one end and Kingsland High Street at the other. At the Kingsland end it opens out into a square that could hold five thousand, and that Sunday afternoon, when Charlie Grice’s widow was to speak from the stage, the fascists were there early to secure their pitch. Frederic Bacon expected trouble and he’d brought in a lot of young toughs, Mosley boys mostly, BUF street soldiers who still had uniforms in their wardrobes, which by law they were now forbidden to wear. There’d be a big crowd so they planned to distribute their literature, but just that morning a problem had arisen: there was no literature. There was no printed matter at all! It had been shifted out of the warehouse at dead of night, and gone up in flames on a lonely bomb site in Dulwich. That was Karsh’s work, for which he’d relied on Julius’ intelligence, much of it supplied by Peter Ryder.

  Two dozen of Karsh’s hardest men were selected for the assault on the platform, with thirty more in support. They would come to the meeting in groups of five, and after Joan had done her piece they would attack the platform in wedges. None of them was happy about it. They all had a bad feeling about it, although, since she’d arrived, Joan was now strangely calm. But that was just dread, or so Gustl thought.

  Julius left the car in Hackney and they walked in from Sandringham Road. Hundreds were already in the square when they arrived. The fascists around the platform were silent, spooked. They looked over at the uniformed police lined up along the shopfronts. Fascists and coppers, they were as edgy as each other. All the shouting came from the crowd.

  Later that day, in the house in Lupus Mews, you could hear a pin drop. Julius was paralysed by the heaving gravitational mass of the monstrous tragic event he’d witnessed. Vera was impatient.

  – Then what happened, Julius, for Christ’s sake!

  He looked up, blinking and smeared a hand across his face.

  – He was vomiting blood.

  Each of them in their own mind saw the astonished fascist, down on his knees beside the platform, clutching his stomach and choking.

  – We had a doctor but there wasn’t much he could do …

  Julius drifted off again.

  – Word got round fast, he said. The police were moving people away. Nobody felt like fighting, or giving speeches—

  – Where was my mum?

  Julius gazed at his wife.

  – In the back of a police car.

  – Was there an ambulance?

  – Oh yes.

  – Where is she now?

  – At the nick. Stoke Newington.

  – I want to see her, Julius.

  – Yes, of course.

  The police station was on the High
Street and as they approached in the Wolseley, Julius and Vera, with Frank in the back, they saw remnants of the crowd hanging around outside the pubs, still somehow caught up in the horror of this thing that had happened earlier. There’d never been a death before. Did it mean the end of it? There were rocks and bricks and overturned dustbins in the street. Gustl was in the police station waiting for them. There were tearful cries of desolation when they found her there, but they weren’t allowed to see Joan. The desk sergeant told them to wait. It was after eight at night by this time, and reporters were around, but they wouldn’t speak to the press, not yet. Peter Ryder had been taken to Casualty to have his injuries seen to. Worst of it, he’d taken a deep cut the length of his face from a razored potato.

  They sat on hard chairs in an ill-lit waiting room. It was cold. Vera at least had her fur coat. The sergeant brought them cups of tea. They heard shouts from the street and could only think that fascists were still wandering around out there. Time dragged. The desk sergeant told them nothing. Vera imagined her mother sitting in a bare room with bars on the window, and she couldn’t hold back a cry. Julius at once put his arm around her and she sobbed into his chest as he stroked her head.

  At midnight they were told that Vera and Julius could go down to the cells. They were met in the narrow stairwell by a bearded man in a black suit who introduced himself as Dr Strathclyde and told them he was a psychiatrist.

  – Doctor—

  – Yes?

  He was impatient. It was late.

  – What’s wrong with her?

  – Delusional insanity. She’s psychotic. I don’t want her any more agitated—

  Then there’s a cry from below. Vera pushes past him—

  – than she is already—

  She rushes blindly down the stairs. She screams and it echoes through those dank police cells and up the stairwell. She is standing in the doorway of her mother’s cell with her hands lifted to her face. Julius joins her. In the cell he sees Joan Grice splayed sideways, recumbent, on a wooden bench pushed up against the wall. One arm is hanging limp to the stone floor, fingers trailing. Her hair is unkempt, her eyes are open, as is her coat, and so is the front of her blouse, with several buttons undone, and on the inside of her left breast is what looks like a small silver coin around which blood is pooling and staining the material and dripping onto the floor. Her hat lies upside down nearby.

  The doctor pushes past them into the cell. He goes down on one knee and with thumb and forefinger touches the silver coin. It is the head of a hatpin. He does not withdraw it: to do so would surely kill her, that is, if she’s not dead already. The hatpin has penetrated the pericardial membrane of her heart and is acting as a plug, and he doesn’t know how far it’s gone in. He lightly slaps her cheek but Joan’s eyes don’t close. They remain fixed, staring, ghastly.

  – Can you hear me, Mrs Grice?

  He bends over her and lays his ear against her breast, with his fingers on her wrist. A few seconds pass. Then he straightens up and turns to Julius and Vera.

  29

  SHE DIDN’T HAVE a large funeral in Golders Green, as Gricey did. She wouldn’t have liked that. She didn’t want a service in a synagogue either, but that’s what Vera wanted. And she knew the one she wanted, it was that modest place of worship in the deserted park near Lupus Mews where she and Joan had walked together more than once that winter, and where Vera had told her mother about the creeping man she’d seen at the bottom of the garden. The synagogue had since been whitewashed by unknown benefactors, so it was no longer defaced by swastikas or other fascist insignia.

  It was a small domed structure with a Romanesque arch over the front doors. Inside, a few benches with a central aisle between them were placed parallel to the side walls, which were unadorned. On the eastern wall stood the sanctuary ark, concealed by a curtain. The floor was of cold grey fieldstone. The Jewish congregation in Pimlico was never large, and preferred these days to worship in one of the grander West London synagogues. It was in one of those that Julius had found a rabbi willing to conduct Joan’s funeral service. The building seated no more than sixty, but less than half that number attended. The day was damp and there was mist in the trees. The sky was grey. The funeral was scheduled for four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

  It was not a long service. Julius spoke for a few minutes. Gustl of course was there, it was she who’d sat up in the front room in Lupus Mews and prepared the body for the hearse. She and Vera had ridden with Julius in the Wolseley, and were met at the synagogue by the rabbi, also by Frank Stone and his mother. Also present were Esther and Eunice from the costume shop of the Beaumont, and others from the London theatre world. Mabel Hatch was there, Hattie Waterstone, Ed Colefax. Jimmy Urquhart. Sir John sent flowers, as did Delphie Dix. And two more, from a different world: Karsh was there, grey-faced, solemn, his patchy hair scraped flat with grease and his pale eyes opaque, almost milky. He and Joan had become close friends towards the end of her life.

  Beside him with a livid scar the length of his sallow face sat Peter Ryder. Also present, a Hungarian in a green tweed overcoat, there to pay his respects and give comfort: Gabor Szirtes, the cellist.

  Joan was in a simple pine box. It was a closed coffin, and when it came time, six men including Julius and Frank, and Peter Ryder, and Karsh, lifted it easily onto their shoulders and brought it through the cold mist into the overgrown cemetery behind the synagogue. A few flowers had struggled to life since the snow melted, a snowdrop, a crocus, but there was little foliage in the old elms that hung over the gravestones in the fading light.

  A curious exchange had occurred earlier. As the family entered the synagogue, Julius had murmured to Vera, who leaned on his arm, her head veiled and lowered, oh, and her spirit a good deal less bold and stoic than it had been for her father’s funeral three months earlier – and why a synagogue?

  Vera didn’t look up, and her answer was barely audible.

  – Show Daddy what’s what.

  Vera crouched to scoop up a handful of soil from the heap at the head of the grave. Still not a tear, not a sound. Near the wall there was some shuffling among the strangers who had gathered there. Vera all at once flung the soil onto the coffin then rose to her feet, and stumbling a little, with a loud sob fell into the arms of her husband.

  Gustl then stepped up and threw in a handful of soil, and after her came Frank Stone, and then his mother, who never had the chance to bury her own husband, or hear Kaddish said over his grave. Karsh came forward and so did Peter Ryder, as Vera had asked them to, and they too threw soil onto the coffin. The murmuring of the rabbi continued throughout, and then they were done. The family and their friends moved away from the grave, towards the synagogue and the cars.

  Over by the wall, beneath the trees, by ones and twos the others left the cemetery and were swallowed in the gathering gloom. Only one remained. A minute passed, then two. The place was empty, deserted. No workman had yet appeared to fill in the new-dug grave. He was a boy, the one who was left, and now he emerged from the deeper shadows under the trees into the last of the misty afternoon. But wait – we know him! We know him. He’s the brother, he’s Hughie, he’s the little brother of the dead fascist, Edgar Cartridge! And look, he’s approaching the grave. His hand is on the lapel of his raincoat, and now he stands at the edge of Joan’s grave and from his lapel he unpins a badge. He tosses it into the grave, where it lands among the small heaps of soil on the coffin.

  Now we can see it – and it’s that badge, the one that caused all the trouble, Edgar had one, Gricey had one, they all did. White lightning on blue, and now it’s in Joan’s grave, flung down there in scorn and anger – and oh, poor Joan, that she should have to see that! Oh, we despair of them, don’t we, ladies, and none of us more so than Joan herself! Well, she’s with us now, isn’t she? Of course she is. We tell her it’s finished, it’s all over, but what do we know? We’re just the ladies of the Chorus.

  The boy stands there a moment longer, an
d then with some deliberation he leans over – and he spits into the open grave. What a dirty little bugger he is. Gazing down now at what he’s done, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as though he’s some sort of a hero. Silly cunt. Then for some moments he doesn’t move. Just stands there. He turns, at last, to our not inconsiderable relief, and walks off through the deserted cemetery. His manner is sombre, funereal. He holds his right arm by his side, oddly, the hand in a black leather glove now, with the fingers pointing straight down, in a rigid vertical salute.

  Acknowledgements

  First I must thank Nancy Hamann, who is Costume Director at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. For many months she answered my questions, and always with great warmth and expertise. She also gave me an extensive guided tour of her own department, which was hugely helpful. Diana Toman, with good humour and much subtle shading of meaning, gave me all the German I required to voice my brave refugee painter, Gustl Herzfeld. Gustl’s work as described in these pages was inspired by the paintings of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, who fled the Nazis in 1938 and later settled in Hampstead. Numerous actors and directors gave me a hand, among them Julie Legrand, Giles Havergal, Jefferson Mays, Dame Susan Lyons and Edward Hibbert, all of whom I’d like to thank. I plundered a very good and useful essay about playing the lead in The Duchess of Malfi, written by my friend Harriet Walter, so ta very much for that, Harriet! I also learned a lot about how Malvolio might be played from John Lithgow, by way of Neil Bartlett, who also taught me all about understudies. Thanks so much, Neil.

  Courtesy of Peter Carey at Hunter College, my reality instructor, and through him the Hertog Fellowship, I’ve had an annual supply of very smart, resourceful research assistants. Brian Harkin, Jack Austin, Danny Lorberbaum and Josh Krigman, thank you all very much. And belated big thanks to my good friend Lynne Tillman, particularly for her warm support and clear insight during my writing of Constance.

  I’d like also to acknowledge a great debt to Morris Beckman’s fascinating book The 43 Group: Battling with Mosley’s Blackshirts, published by The History Press of Stroud, UK. It opened the door.