Long Acre

by Claire Rayner

  He smiled then, a thin little smile which looked odd on his stolid features. ‘Of course, it is all right for you, is it not, Phoebe? When Abel dies no doubt his money will come down in due course to his favourite grandson, Freddy. Your husband. It is all right for you —’

  She shook her head at him, speechless with rage, and then turned and swiftly wove her way through the tables towards the curtained door which led out into King Street. ‘I have told you my views, Oliver!’ she said in ringing tones. ‘I have no more to add to them. You ally yourself with these — these creatures and I for one will never ever speak to you again! It is in your own hands!’

  ‘Oh, Isabel, do not be so stuffy! You know quite well what I mean! Connections of the family, then.’

  ‘I will not talk about it further. Have you the music for the new Strauss waltz? If we practise it now we may have it ready in time for next week’s party at the Montefiores —’

  ‘Oh, I do not want to practise silly waltzes! I want to talk about Fenton and — Phoebe — where are you going? Phoebe! — oh, Phoebe, you are tiresome! — do come back!’

  ‘I can only tell you what he has told me to tell you, Freddy. Come, you know better than to expect more!’

  Maria smiled at him with great tranquillity and bent her head again to her needlework. She was making a drawn-thread firescreen for Phoebe and quite obviously considered this of much greater importance than any fuss about a Will. Freddy sighed a little impatiently.

  ‘Dearest Grandmamma Maria — I do not wish to fuss you, nor do I wish you to make any troubles with my grandfather — but something has to be done! He cannot go on pretending that this is none of his business and refuse to admit he is involved. It is quite absurd.’

  Patiently Maria put down her sewing again. ‘I have tried to explain to you, Freddy. This is a subject upon which he will not be drawn. If it were merely that he lost his temper and shouted and stamped when I tried to discuss the matter, that would not perturb me in the least. I am accustomed to behaviour such as that —’ Her lips curled reminiscently. ‘In — the twenty-seven years we have been wed, my dear boy, I can promise you there have been many occasions when I have had such set-to’s with him. And usually won my point, if it was a good one. If it was not, then of course — however, the case here is quite different. He will not talk at all about anything to do with Lilith Lucas or her Will. He becomes like — like an oyster if I even mention the matter. It is as much use talking to him about it as talking to the wall. This is why I tell you there is nothing to be done. He told me only to bid you to mind your own affairs, and pay no heed to any of his. And that is the start, the finish and the whole of his message. And now, my love, talk to me of other matters. The children—’

  ‘Oh, they are very well —’ He stopped and stared at her, pulling at his lower lip in a way he had when anxious. ‘I suppose I could talk to his lawyers — Vivian and Onions —’

  ‘I suppose you could, dear,’ Maria said equably and bent her head once more over her sewing. ‘I daresay that will make you feel a little better. It will not make any difference, however. Tell me, do you like this stitch? Just here? It is a new one I have invented and venture to congratulate myself upon its intricacy. Do you think Phoebe will admire it? I do hope so —’

  It had been a long time since the Caspars and the Lacklands and the Henriques had been so disturbed. And so remote from each other. For the first time in many years, Martha took her tea alone on Sunday afternoon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Black-Ey’d Susan’ opened on 9th June 1867 at nine in the evening.

  It had been raining heavily all day, much to Rourke’s chagrin though not to his surprise, for the summer had been wet throughout and bade fair to remain so. At first he and the entire company had been afraid that the rain would badly affect business. If the weather were too inclement then the audience would prefer to remain dryshod at home, and in a business which relied more heavily on word of mouth recommendation than on puffs in the daily newspapers a sparsely attended first night could be disastrous.

  But the rain cleared for an hour or so after eight o’clock, and the audience came. They filled the newly painted Royalty with a hubbub of chatter and new clothes and bibulous laughter, and their good humour seeped from the auditorium through the heavy red rep curtains to the stage beyond.

  Amy, sitting in her tiny dressing-room which she shared in great discomfort with the leading character lady who was stout in person as well as in voice and appetite, and who smelled rather strongly of her favourite cheese and onion and ale suppers, felt the stirrings of excitement and let her spirits rise for the first time in many days.

  The past few weeks had been wretchedly miserable; Felix had tried hard not to allow her to know how distressed he was at the way matters had fallen out, and made no complaints or comments; but she knew he was unhappy about his rift with Martha, and felt keenly for him. But there was nothing she could do and anyway, was deeply hurt herself by her own rift with Fenton.

  He had been obdurate. She had tried all the ploys she could, tears and temper, even feigned illness, begging him to desist from this absurd case and to call off his hounds, the disagreeable Wormold brothers (whom she had not met but heartily disliked) but it made no difference. There was a hard glittering determination about him that was new to her. He was so unlike the Fenton she had known all her life and loved so dearly. The weak petulance that was so much a part of him and which had always been within her ability to soothe was quite gone. Now he just smiled thinly and remotely when she tried to talk to him, and refused.

  And so for the past weeks they had been on silent terms. They spoke to each other no more than they had to, and sometimes not even then, and poor Mrs Miller was almost in tears as they sat on each side of her table in Long Acre eating her food in total silence. In her bumbling well-meaning way she did try, one day, to persuade Fenton to ‘stop your sulks, there’s a dear boy, and be your own loving self again —’ and was treated to such a blistering response that she burst into tears and remained red-nosed and sniffing for several days thereafter.

  At rehearsals it had been little better; Wyndham had done all he could to help, being cheerful and friendly to both of them, whether they responded to him or not, and acting very much as a plaster laid over the fracture between them. All of which made it possible for the play to go on rehearsing smoothly and successfully.

  But until tonight there had been for Amy none of the lifting excitement that rehearsals ought to have meant. The smell of glue size as the scenery was put together, the sudden blazing of the lights on to newly painted flats which had once made her feel she was likely to float into the air with the joy of it all — none of that helped. Until now, feeling the lift of an audience beyond the stage, hearing the low roaring buzz of their voices and the tinny sounds as the strings and reeds of the little orchestra tuned up, when the theatre gave back its magic to her.

  She hurried out to the wings, her costume carefully covered with a woollen shawl, and stood there peering out through the little peep-hole cut into the curtain. There below her in the pit she could see the more raucous section of the audience, the street loungers and young men of the town, the dubious women and the out-of-work actors coming to stare belligerently and critically at other more fortunate companions of their craft. They would take a lot of pleasing, she thought, and felt her resolve hardening in her. Please them she would. That was for sure!

  Beyond them she could see the more respectable seats, with family parties and well-upholstered female bosoms and gold chain-embellished male bellies full of good living and success and she smiled a little into the folds of her shawl. They were never hard to please; she had no fears about them.

  And then she saw him, Felix, sitting with his legs crossed in an aisle seat with his head bent over a playbill, and she felt her belly contract and then seem to lift at the sight of him. That so ordinary a young man, so square and undistinguished a young man, so serious a young man as this ph
ysician should have become so dear to her was quite, quite absurd. She, who had always been determined that she would grace the stage with her presence till the day she died, who had never intended to live the sort of dismal dull life her poor mother had, who was sure that all the glitter of success and riches were lying out there waiting for her, to feel so — it was madness. But it was a madness she needed and she smiled in the darkness behind the curtain, reaching out towards him with her love for him. And as though he felt it he lifted his head and seemed to look directly at her beyond the curtain and her eyes blurred with a sudden rush of emotion.

  In the past she had needed spurious feeling to carry her through a performance. She would spend some hours before each appearance thinking herself into a part, feeling herself into the person she was pretending to be. And the method had always helped her, and given her the audience to hold in the palm of her hand.

  But tonight her emotion was real. Out there in the darkness of the auditorium, for now the house lights had been lowered and the orchestra was rippling tinnily into its overture, was Felix. And the way she felt for Felix was the bedrock of her performance.

  As the curtain rose to show the sparkling newly painted colours of a Cottage Interior and she felt the heat of the audience come pouring onto the stage, she took a deep breath and shed her woollen shawl and tweaked at the white muslin of her costume and then, as the sound of the music altered to give her her cue, she stepped out into the blaze of light that awaited her. She was Black-Ey’d Susan, as real and as important and as fascinating as any person who ever lived. The play was not tawdry silly melodrama tricked out with songs and dances, but a slice of reality, cut fresh from the life-pattern of a living person. That audience must feel every atom of it, she told herself.

  And feel it they did. Long before the end of the first act Rourke knew he had a huge success. Wyndham, infected somehow by Amy’s wide-eyed breathless sheer excitement, gave a performance of such virtuosity that even the stage-hands looked up from their cribbage boards to applaud him. The actors with lesser parts caught the excitement too and slid into their roles with a zest that carried the indifferent lines over the absurdities of the plot with such panache that the audience thought it all exquisitely funny rather than foolishly banal.

  And Fenton — he seemed to be a new person. He was as responsive to an audience and the feel of a living piece of theatre as was his sister, and he gave to his audience a picture of himself that they revelled in. He was funny, he was tender, he was stern, and he was kind. He was exciting and soothing and romantic and sombre; whatever any woman in that audience wanted to see in a hero figure she saw in him as he moved from one mood to another as smoothly as butter sliding over a hot plate.

  The applause that ended the play was tumultuous. They shouted and stamped and clapped and even, Rourke swore afterwards, threw their hats in the air, though no one else could be certain they had seen anything quite so remarkable. But hats or not, the audience had clearly thoroughly enjoyed the scrap of nonsense which was ‘Black Ey’d Susan’ and next day tickets sold as fast as Rourke could hand them out. And Fenton and Amy, as well as Wyndham, found they were successes, were being talked of all over theatrical London, and were clearly set for a long run.

  All of which, Amy thought, would heal the breach between them. She had tried to talk to Fenton after the curtain had come down on their splendid first night success, but so crowded was the green-room and the dressing-rooms with well-wishers and friends that she could not get near him. And by the time she got home to Long Acre, so weary that Felix had almost to carry her up the stairs, she was unable to wait up to talk to him. And next morning he was sleeping when she left the house to be fitted for additional costumes (for, Rourke said, with such an obvious success on their hands, the spending of some money on extras was more than justified) and it was not until evening when he arrived at the Royalty that she could get near him.

  And even then she could not. Somehow he contrived to be always surrounded by other people, often women, who chattered to him and sometimes positively fawned over him in a way that made Wyndham laugh and Amy herself thoroughly irritable. He would nod and smile at her for clearly he thought it worth while to keep up a semblance of brotherly affection in public, but it was just not possible for her to get a moment alone with him to talk.

  The first week slid into the second and then into the third, and still she had not been able to talk to him, and frustration rose in her, and even threatened to interfere with her performances, although now the play was carried along by its own success-inspired momentum, and she brooded over the situation a great deal.

  She felt she could not talk to Felix about it; he had suffered enough, she told herself, because of her. After all, if she had not offered to go to Abel on Fenton’s behalf, would he ever have thought of this mad scheme? She turned that thought round and round in her head, and at last decided that somehow Fenton must be made to see how absurd he was being, and how essential it was that he call off his case.

  There was one point during the play when Fenton came on stage from the prompt side, shortly before she herself had to make an entrance from the opposite side. If only they could be together in the wings there for a few moments, she thought one evening, standing there watching him across the intervening brightly lit stage, would it not be possible to talk? In whispers, admittedly, but there would be no one there but themselves, and nowhere he could get away from her, for he would have to await his cue. If only she could change her entrance —

  It was almost as though fate were conspiring with her. The next evening, as she came down from her dressing-room, she saw Rourke leading a large and handsome if overdressed young woman to a seat in the wings so that she could watch from there, and Amy, recognizing her as a regular visitor to the tavern across Dean Street where the company took its luncheon break during rehearsals, said smoothly to Rourke as he came back, ‘It will be easier, I think, if I change the business slightly tonight, Mr Rourke. I shall make my Act Two entrance from the prompt side, shall I? Then your friend will see clearly, and I will not be impeded in my movements,’ and she smiled sweetly at him.

  ‘Hmph — oh, well — no need for that at all, no need, for I’m sure ye’ll do as well comin’ on in the usual—’

  ‘I will prefer it, Mr Rourke,’ she said still very sweetly. ‘Much prefer it. All I need to do is change my line a little, about having come in from the dairy rather than from the barn. The audience will take it well enough.’

  And she went, slipping away behind the rear flats leaving him embarrassed and muttering on the opposite prompt side. She was no prude, but she had made it clear from the very start of rehearsals that she was not one of the easy women of the theatre either; the whole company had early learned to treat her as a lady, and her insistence on this made her behaviour now fully understandable. Not that she would really have minded standing next to Rourke’s bit of muslin — but it suited her now to play the superior lady. And as one of the most successful cast members of his successful play, she knew Rourke would not risk upsetting her.

  And so she found herself standing in the wings waiting for her brother. It was an absurd way in which to have to seek a discussion with him, and well she knew it. In a way, had she been honest with herself, she would have seen it as a piece of play-acting in itself, for determined as Fenton was to avoid her, had she really been equally determined not to be avoided then talk to him she would. But there was a piquancy in arranging matters as she had, a theatricality that suited her well and she stood there in the wings, hugging herself tightly and shivering in the myriad backstage draughts as she waited for him.

  He stopped and stared at her as he came round the edge of the flat, his stage gun in his hand, for this was the scene in which he did his extremely funny dance with a gun in one hand and a dead rabbit in the other, and glowered.

  ‘What are you doing here? You enter from the other side,’ he whispered harshly.

  ‘I cannot. He has a female there,’
she hissed back, and looked over her shoulder at the stage where Charles Wyndham was dancing with great energy to a jig tune, and Rourke’s lady friend, her hat bobbing with green and crimson feathers, could just be seen in the shadows beyond. ‘Do you see? So I’m entering from this side tonight.’

  ‘Stupid —’ Fenton said in a low growl and moved into position on the far side of her against the spare Squire’s Castle flat waiting to be set for the next act.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said, still keeping her voice low. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Not now, idiot! This is no time or place for gossip. Be quiet.’

  ‘I will not! If you refuse to listen to me, then I shall shout — yes I shall! I am determined you shall hear me!’

  ‘You’re play-acting,’ he said scornfully and turned his back on her. ‘I have no patience with you.’

  ‘I am not play-acting! I’m telling you I will make a great noise and pother if you don’t listen to me — and I can, you know —’

  Unwillingly he turned and looked at her, and his eyes seemed to gleam a little in the dimness. ‘Well?’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Fenton! We have a great success here, you know! I have no doubt that we will be offered bigger and better parts after this, and make a great deal of money!’

  ‘I’m sure we shall,’ he said. ‘Is that all you wanted to say? Such a fuss to make to say just that!’