Ben was near the door when she came in, looking uncertainly about her, for Geneva had not told her what Ben’s job was, and she imagined that he was in an office behind the scenes.
“Hullo, Mum.” He stood before her in his long apron, limp and stained at the end of a long afternoon’s work. His mother was wearing a fiery suit and an electric-blue turban which looked as if it was on back to front, from beneath which her hair fussed out in twiddled curls, some black, some grey. She stood and stared at him with round, incredulous eyes while people pushed past them, and her unpowdered face grew red, as if she were going to cry.
“Don’t make a scene, Mum,” Ben said, as he had said so often as a boy when his mother had been displeased in shops and restaurants. “Brace up. I’ll find you a table and get you some tea.”
His mother put out a hand blindly and leaned on the trolley for support. “How could you, Benjamin?” she said faintly. “How could you?”
“I should have told you,” he said, “but I knew you wouldn’t like it. Just a temporary thing, to give me something to do while I———”
“Ben, Ben!” Sir Thomas Beecham came up wringing his hands, his long face twisted with anxiety. “Please do something. Your tables by the wall are absolutely piling up, simply piling, and people have nowhere to put their trays. Oh, why do you have to slack-off just now when it’s our busiest time? You know what the next shift are like if they think we’ve left too much for them.”
“Calm down,” Ben said. “I’m on the job. This is my mother. Mum, this is Tommy Maverick, the future organist at Westminster Abbey.”
“Oh, shut up.” Tommy ducked his head sideways. “You know I’ll never get that job. Your mother—I say, how wonderful. I’m delighted to meet you.” Mothers to Tommy were almost as sacred as organs. “Please excuse me, Mrs—er, I can’t stay. I simply must———” He panicked off, his apron flapping round his legs like a wet sail.
Mrs Francis had given him neither word nor glance. She was still staring at Ben in a kind of stupor. He led her to a table, sat her down, and brought her a cup of tea, and she rallied enough to say: “But you didn’t bring me any sugar.”
“Hang on there,” he said. “I’ll be off in twenty minutes, and we’ll go somewhere and talk.” Working like a beaver to catch up on the time he had lost, for on this job and at this time of day you could not afford to take two minutes off for a chat, he looked across the crowded room and saw that she was crying, dabbing at her nose with a screwed-up handkerchief in between sips of tea. Two girls at the table were talking across it spellbound, un-noticing, but a middle-aged woman sitting opposite his mother was nodding and smiling at her, apparently trying to comfort her. Ben wondered what his mother was telling her. He could not go to her then, but when he handed over his trolley to the sub-alcoholic on the next shift, and went over to tell her that he was going to get his coat, she was not there.
“Did the lady go, who was sitting here?” he asked the middle-aged woman.
“Yes, just now. What’s wrong?” The woman’s face brightened. “Didn’t she pay for her tea? Poor soul, she’s in trouble. Her son has let her down, she was telling me. After all she’s done and hoped for him, he’s broken her heart. Why be surprised? I told her. The pains we suffer in childbirth are only the beginning.”
When Ben got back to the flat, his mother was not there. Later, he telephoned her at home, but there was no answer. His father must have gone to meet her train. He imagined her telling him, crying out the bad news as soon as she hopped off the train, hanging on his arm and gabbling out her heartbreak as they went past the ticket collector and out through the crowd to the car. Damn. Now his father would start writing again to say that he could get him the job of secretary to the Nautical Club at Hamble if only he would come home.
* Chapter 10 *
At the end of his second week at the cafeteria, Ben decided that Rose had suffered enough, and he went down to the television studio to see her.
It was the evening of her show, and he timed himself to arrive about half an hour before she went on the air, when she would be alone in her dressing-room, “growing into her part,” as she told people.
Ben knew that she would be more likely to be eating a sandwich. The camera fright, which Rose concealed but had never completely overcome, had the effect of making her hungry. Nobody but Ben knew about the little packet wrapped in greaseproof paper which travelled at the bottom of her cosmetic case. The sandwich was one of the most endearing things about her. The moment when she had admitted its presence to Ben, and had stood before him in a sequinned dress and full television make-up tearing at it like a hungry schoolgirl, had been more intimate than if she had taken off all her clothes.
Tonight when Ben told her that he had held a slave’s job for two weeks, and showed her the unopened pay packet with which he was going to take her to supper, she might not need the sandwich. She would be so glad to hear what he had done for her sake that she would go radiantly on to the set and give the best performance of her life. That would make her still happier, and there would be no problem about the rest of the evening.
“Nice to see you back, Commander,” said the man in the satin-backed waistcoat, to whom Ben had become almost as familiar as if he were one of the staff. “You been away?”
“I’ve been too busy to get down here,” Ben said. “Working on a big project.”
“Ah,” said the man, imagining heaven knew what. “I know how it is.”
Turning the corner into the familiar corridor which led to Rose’s dressing-room, Ben ran into Bob Whiting, who was travelling fast on his small, light feet, with a board full of papers under his arm and a discontented pout to his childish mouth.
“What’s the headache?” Ben asked. “I thought you were off Rose’s show.”
“I am, but the headaches are still there. I’m filling in this week for Alan Rickie as interviewer on Who’s Doing What. God, what a mess. The people are all cranks. They have some impossible job, or they do some crazy thing like making music with spoons and a kitchen chair, or teaching parrots to recite the Ten Commandments. They’re all half bats, and one of them hasn’t turned up at all. Just rung up from Chichester to say he missed the train. That’s what you get for relying on a man who makes model railways out of toothpicks. I’ve got to use that revolting girl from the typing pool who makes bird noises. She’s been trying to get on the show for weeks. Catch my act,” he said, patting Ben on the arm as he turned to go. “I’ll be a riot. Nice to see you again, Ben old boy. You haven’t been around lately. I suppose you’ve had a row with little Rosie, like everyone else.”
“Not exactly. I’ve been working.”
“Got that directorship at last? More power to you.”
Bob was already beginning to walk away when Ben said, to amuse him, for it was flattering to be able to make a cynic laugh: “I’m working in a cafeteria, clearing tables and mopping up.”
Bob stopped as if he had been shot, pivoted on one suede boot and stepped back. “Say that again,” he growled, thrusting his face close to Ben’s.
Ben said it. Encouraged by the sight of Bob’s streaked eyeballs, which only protruded like this when he was interested, he began to fill in some details.
“All right, all right.” Bob held up his fleshy white hand. “Save it for the air. I want it fresh. Come with me.” He took Ben’s arm in a pinching grip and hustled him protesting down the stairs and into the office of the producer of the Who’s Doing What show.
“Tell that girl to stuff her bird noises,” he said, sweeping Ben up to the desk. “Here’s our number three spot.”
The producer, a dynamic type in giant horn-rimmed spectacles, slapped his thigh at what Bob told him and gave them both a drink. “Are you sure he’ll talk?” he asked Bob, as if Ben were not there. “We don’t want another lemon like that woman who put the holes in processed cheese. Have you got time to rehearse him?”
“We’ll play it by ear. He’ll be all right. I know old Ben.
He’s solid, aren’t you?”
“Possibly, but look here, Bob, I don’t think I want to———”
“Of course you do. It’s your big chance. Get a little public sympathy for all the poor devils who’ve been kicked out of the Services and can’t get a decent job.”
“I don’t think the Admiralty———”
“Who cares? They should have thought of this before they started swinging the axe. Don’t be selfish, Ben old boy. There are men out there who need you, and by ten o’clock tonight you’ll be a ruddy hero.”
“I’ll be out of a job if the manageress has a television set. When the débutante———”
“Don’t ramble. I want your mind on this.” When Bob was on the job, his voice lost its querulous drawl. “England expects, and all that sort of filth. We’ll get you an apron from the canteen. The viewers will eat it up. Come on.” He put down his glass. “I want to catch Rose’s show.”
“I hear she’s terrible,” the producer said, not without satisfaction.
“So do I,” said Bob happily. “That’s why I want to see it.”
He took Ben to a small, hot room where a television set was playing loudly to some empty chairs and a table covered in brown serge. Bob turned down the volume and they sat down and waited for the familiar sentimental music that would lead in The Rose Kelly Show.
“Maybe you shouldn’t see it,” Bob said, “if you’re still doing the moth and candle act, but I suppose it will do you no harm to know the worst. I think the poor darling has really laid an egg this time.
“Yes, yes.” He clapped his hands softly, as the announcer appeared on the screen and began to read, with a controlled sympathy worthy of the B.B.C., a letter from a miner’s wife whose husband had been trapped in a pit disaster. “There she goes. This beastly thing has been in the files for ages, but I would never let her do it because it was much too grim for her to handle, and she couldn’t get within a mile of the accent. As soon as she got me off the show, she persuades Pete to let her do it. You know how Rose persuades, and Pete is so astonished to find himself suddenly producing a major show that he hasn’t got her number yet. Or else he’s sleeping with her. I don’t know.”
Ben said: “Shut up,” not knowing what else to say.
“I know, I know. You love her, and all that vomit. But if you marry her, don’t ask me round unless she’s out. Rose and I are through. After doing everything she could to push me off her show, she was so mad with me for leaving it when she found out how much of the show was mine that she tried to make some trouble for me with the high-ups. It didn’t get her anywhere, but you can’t expect me to send flowers and good-luck telegrams to her dressing-room. Look at that! Oh, my God, look at that.”
He covered his face with his hands as the announcing was faded discreetly from the screen and Rose was revealed standing bowed before an iron gate, with black stockings on her shapely legs, and her huge eyes, with the glycerine already forming tears on the lids, staring at the camera from beneath the decoratively arranged folds of a woollen shawl.
Bob peeped through his fingers, moaning lightly, then took down his hands and smacked them on his knees. “She’s furious,” he announced. “I can tell it. I know that face better than my own, and I like mine better. Something’s going wrong. Look, that other woman moved right in front of her as she began to speak. They’ve botched the whole thing. She turned on the tears too soon, and now she isn’t going to have anything left when the man comes up to the other side of the gate and it isn’t her man. Oh, God, she’s so tied up with the accent, she’s going to muff her lines.” He leaned forward and hitched his chair closer to the set. “This is going to be good.”
Ben sat and watched the play in silence. In spite of the drab costume, Rose was as beautiful as always, and considering how wrong the part was for her, he thought that she was doing nobly. Bob kept muttering gleefully: “God, she’s bad. She knows it. She’s livid. I hope the critics are getting this.”
Damn Bob. It was his fault that Ben had not been able to see Rose before the show and make her happy by telling her how he was working for her. If she was worried, he could have given her confidence by saying: I love you. What woman would not act better if someone said that to her just before she went on the air? He must get to her before he himself was put to the ordeal of the cameras. How had he let himself be railroaded into this? Damn Bob again. But if Rose were to tell him: I love you, he would not care how much of a fool he made of himself.
But she would not be thinking about love. She would be thinking about her show. If she was satisfied with her performance, he could tell her how marvellous she had been. If she was depressed, he could console her and tell her that it was everyone else’s fault. His fault, perhaps. He should not have stayed away from her for so long. Perhaps she was pining. …
No, no, said the voice from the third row of the empty stalls, listening to the dress rehearsal of his thoughts, now you’re going too far.
“She stinks,” Bob said with satisfaction, as the commercial blasted its way in half-way through the play, leaving Rose in the chapel in widow’s weeds.
“I thought,” said Ben, louder than necessary, “that she was jolly good.”
Bob stared at him, and Ben kept his eyes on the screen, feigning absorbed interest in a working diagram of what would happen to the tubes and little doors of his digestive system if only he would put a certain pill into it.
Before the play was over, Bob switched off the set, dusted off his hands as if Rose were on them and became business-like, for Who’s Doing What would be on the air in forty minutes.
“I want to see Rose,” Ben said.
“Later, later. No time now.” Bob hustled him off to the makeup room where Ben enjoyed the attentions of a cool-handed girl who sent him away with unnaturally dark eyebrows and a complexion that looked as if he had spent the last six months in the Mediterranean. In the canteen the clean aprons were too white for the television cameras but the cook found a dirty one crumbled at the bottom of a laundry basket yellowed with age and tea stains.
It was too long for Ben. When he took off his jacket and hitched the apron high above his waist it still covered his shoes.
“I could never work in this,” he complained.
“That’s right,” said the cook, pursing her mouth and speaking to him as a colleague. “Nor could I.”
“Stop being so professional,” Bob said. “It’s perfect. The sloppier the better, in contrast to what you looked like as a naval officer.”
“Look here.” Ben’s hands went behind him to untie the apron.
“I don’t think I like this.”
Bob lit a cigarette. “O.K.,” he said, breathing smoke through his curved nostrils like a delicate dragon. “So you’re going to let down two thousand unemployed naval officers. I’m glad I wasn’t in your submarine, Ben. I’d have worn a Mae West all the time.”
“Don’t tease him,” said the cook, not understanding, but knowing Bob well enough to know what he was at. “It’s only stage fright. Don’t worry, dear.” She tightened the knot of the apron again and gave Ben a little pat behind. “You’ll be lovely. I wish I had your chance. I’ve been here two years, and they’ve never even asked me to read the weather forecast.”
In the corridor, Ben started for the staircase which led to Rose’s dressing-room, but Bob switched him round a corner and through the heavy door which led to the studio. By the time the floor manager had shown him where to stand before the cameras, and had tested his voice and told him what his cue would be to come on to the set, the huge studio clock with the thin red hand sweeping away the seconds like the wing of death showed eight minutes to air time.
Ben sat on a piano stool by the wall and prayed that Rose would not be gone before his part in the programme was over. Let her take a long time removing her make-up. Let her stop for a drink with someone. If she does go, let her not go out to supper. Ben would rush straight to the flat without taking off his Mediterranean face, a
nd if she was not there he would squat in the corridor like a Maltese beggar. If she came home with the new producer, Pete —well, Pete would have to clear out. If Pete would not go, Ben would throw him out. Let Pete not be a heavy-weight.
“You’re on the show, aren’t you?” A small, thin woman with make-up running into lumps and crevasses on her pinched face, and hair that was either a wig or had not been combed out since she left the hairdresser, sat down on the other end of the piano stool. “What do you do?” She looked down at the folds of dirty apron which swirled round Ben’s legs and feet.
“I work in a cafeteria.”
“Oh? So does my niece.” The woman patted her ridged hair.
“They never asked her to go on T.V.”
“Well, you see.” It was going to sound silly, but she would know it soon enough. “I was a naval officer, and so———”
“Oh, yes,” said the woman, losing interest. “That’s nice. I’m self-employed, myself.” She looked at him with her head on one side. She was obviously waiting for Ben to ask her what she did, so he asked her.
“I breed rats,” she told him. “White ones. For experimental purposes, you know.”
“Vivisection?”
“It’s more for psychology. I breed neurotic rats. But I know what you’re thinking. There’ll be people calling up the studio as soon as I get on the air. When I was on What’s My Line last year,” said the woman, who was apparently a professional television amateur, “they had forty telephone calls in ten minutes. And the letters I had—I wish you could see them. Some of the nasty words, I’d never even heard of. I had to look them up in the dictionary. I expect I’ll get a lot more after tonight.”
“Don’t you mind?”
“It’s good publicity. You can’t sell anything these days without advertising, even rats. Well, thanks for the chat. I’m on first. Top of the bill.” She got up and moved towards the lighted set where Bob was talking through a headset to the producer in the control-room. The little rat breeder took her place beside him under the hanging microphone and waited smiling, showing her front teeth like one of her nurslings, supremely confident in the knowledge that in two minutes she was going to have the studio switchboard jammed with abusive calls.
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