by Rosie Thomas
He said, ‘Don’t look like that. Celia isn’t getting worse because of what we did. She would have found someone, somewhere, to tell her what she wanted to hear. The damage is within her, and in the damned morphine, and most of all in me.’
He dropped his head into his hands.
‘If I could take this into myself, I would.’
All the gloss of all the money in the world couldn’t eradicate unhappiness, Nancy thought. She kissed him and told him she loved him.
‘You are strong. You’ll do the right thing, I know that.’
‘Thank you,’ Gil said.
A few minutes later the Bentley headed into the darkness.
That evening, after Freddie had gone out to dine, Guillaume slid into her bedroom. He took up his place next to her and tugged for a share of the eiderdown. She edged closer so she could lean against his shoulder. A strange tentative happiness hatched from hope was fluttering inside her.
Guillaume said, ‘That wise old owl Freddie told me I should not say one word to you, but I’m going to anyway.’
‘A word about what?’
There was a meaningful silence until she murmured, ‘About Gil?’
Guillaume tapped her arm.
‘I see the whole picture, dear. So handsome, and rich. And more than a tiny bit triste, which is always alluring in a boyfriend because you think you can be the one to make him happy. You know, I saw him only the other night. A week ago this evening, it was. And he knows I did, the wretch.’
There had been that little pause. A pause of mutual recognition, she understood.
Nancy said, ‘Where was this?’
‘I was meeting a Russian choreographer, very wicked, who invited me to a delicious supper at a secret place. I think you could take anyone there, the greatest criminal in Europe, and no one would murmur about it.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
‘Fifteen.’
He flicked an eyebrow.
‘Another couple was dining there à deux, très intime, and Sergei knew the lady, so he spoke briefly to her and I was also introduced.’
‘To Lady Celia Maitland?’
But Celia was in a mental hospital.
Nancy traced the embroidered arabesques on the satin eiderdown.
Guillaume pursed his mouth. ‘This lady is an American and quite a patron of the ballet, Sergei says. A Mrs Thelma Auger. Chic à l’extrème.’
Freddie was right, he shouldn’t have told her. Guillaume was fascinated by rich and titled people and couldn’t resist the opportunity to gossip.
Nancy fought down the urge to bombard him with questions. Perhaps the patent holder of the Maitland Process was making a donation to fund an important avant-garde dance production. There was no reason in the world why Gil should not have dinner with a friend. An intimate dinner, even.
She inwardly shook herself.
‘How fascinating.’ She stretched, and produced a little yawn. ‘Do you know what? I’d love a drink, wouldn’t you?’
He squeezed her hand. ‘Let’s do that. I’m going to run and get us a glass of champagne.’
She drew the folds of the cream cashmere to cover her shoulders.
It was time, Nancy decided the next day, to think about going back to London. She had been away too long, and she was conscious that every day set her further apart. Her eye was healing well and Dr Pennington had been talking about modelling a glass replacement to hold the shape of the socket.
She would need to make decisions about the Palmyra, although Norah Vaughan was bringing in good audiences.
She wanted to be back with Devil and Cornelius, and Jinny Main.
And with Gil. Most of all with Gil.
Freddie tried to persuade her to stay longer.
‘I’ll miss you. Can’t you wait until Jake gets home? It’s only another week or so.’
She shook her head. Freddie looked shrewdly at her.
‘You didn’t pay too much attention to what Guillaume said, I hope? He talks a little too much, that one. Did you know that his real name is Kenneth?’
She smiled. Everyone needed a piece of unreality, his own illusion.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A month after she left Whistlehalt Nancy made her carefully planned return to the Palmyra. She didn’t want to spend her time fretting about Gil and Celia and wishing for their divorce, or even in reflecting on her own infirmity. Be strong, she told herself. To concentrate on work was the best distraction and anyway she needed the money.
Before curtain-up she stood at the peephole to study the house. The inverted palm tree suspended beneath the cupola was switched on and the clusters of electric bulbs lit every corner of the auditorium. She surveyed the scrolls of gilt plasterwork, and the coloured lozenges fronting the double tier of boxes. By candlelight or gas the effect was smoky and exotic, as Devil intended – his jewel box, he called the theatre – but under the electric glare it was gaudy. The down-at-heel impression was made worse by the scuffed walls and the chips gouged out of green-painted palm fronds to expose dimples of raw plaster.
Nancy turned her mind to this evening. She was apprehensive in a new and alarming way.
Since her injury the Uncanny had been fading. When she tried to draw it about her it broke up like a morning mist, and when it crept up on her unawares it was tentative where it had once been overwhelming. Sometimes it closed her out altogether, and although the audible click like Cornelius turning off his wireless was only in her imagination, the effect was just as abrupt and absolute.
Her sparse audience was filing in. It was a wet evening and steamy raincoats dripped over the green plush seats. There were some drawn faces, people anxious for a message or a hint from the other side, but most of them seemed listless. She memorised as many sets of features as her confused head could hold, searching for the hook that would help her to begin a story. Here was a woman alone, wearing a pink scarf patterned with red roses. Perhaps her husband had passed, leaving her with a tiny pension and a legacy of loneliness. Two young girls came in, giggling together. They were making a joke of their night out, yet were still hoping for a word that might change their lives. A pair of elderly sisters, shop workers, were tired at the end of a day on their feet and eager for a sit-down. Perhaps they had misread the programme and were expecting an evening of Miss Vaughan’s songs and cockney patter.
There were many more women than men. Male or female, none of the faces seemed to stand out except by their ordinariness. What could she tell these people?
The spot operators took up their positions and Desmond waited at the left of the stage. Five minutes to the up had already been called when Sylvia came to her side.
‘I’m ready,’ Nancy told her, although she felt far from it.
‘You forgot.’
The dresser opened her hand. The new glass eye was cupped in her palm. Nancy already hated the thing with its fishy painted glare.
‘I am going on in my patch.’
The triangle of black silk was threaded on thin elastic. She hoped by its plainness it could be excluded from Devil’s prohibited categories of turbans and feathers and fringed shawls.
Sylvia reminded her of the doctor’s advice to wear the glass eye and preserve the shape of the socket. Nancy stopped her. On the other side of the curtain the necessary stillness was gathering and spreading through the theatre. The rustling and coughing subsided as the swell of anticipation rose. She waited, as she had long ago learned to do, until the last possible second. Then she nodded to the curtain boy.
The green drapes parted and she walked into a column of light.
The words of her introduction came to her and there was the pressure of captured attention as her audience shifted forward in their seats.
‘Who is here?’ she asked. ‘Who will speak to us?’
She could see her mirrors on only one side. She thought she knew where her targets were sitting. Sylvia and Desmond with the lighting boys and the stagehands were primed for her signals. At the righ
t moment she would give the cue for the lights to filter towards blue and for colder air to seep through the ventilation grilles. Up in the gallery someone sneezed.
She attended to the Uncanny, urging it to swell around her.
Nothing happened. No one was there. She could hear a mutter from one of the boxes, even feel the scrape of stage dust through the thin soles of her shoes. Nothing more than that.
Anxiety crystallised into dismay, and dismay ballooned into a shocking wave of stage fright. She tried to remember where the woman in the rose-patterned scarf had been sitting, or the two young girls. Panic closed her throat.
‘Lindley,’ she managed to croak. ‘Is there anyone called Lindley in the room?’
Two tickets for the performance had been paid for by cheque in the name of Mr Lindley Watts. She always memorised such cues and at least this discipline hadn’t deserted her.
Mr Watts didn’t want to put up his hand so his companion raised hers. The man was middle-aged and his mother might or might not be still alive. He might have fought in the war, or lost a brother or a friend. But it would soon be fifteen years since the armistice. Memories were fading.
‘Lindley. May I call you that? I can hear the name Margaret. Do you know her?’
A popular name, even more so since it had been chosen by the Duke and Duchess of York.
The wretched man wouldn’t speak. His face resembled a slab of rock.
‘His cousin, in Canada,’ his companion volunteered. ‘Still on this side.’
Damn him then, and his bloody cousin and his entire family, dead or alive.
‘Is it a family name? Margaret speaks up very clearly.’
The man folded his arms and stared back. In the wings Sylvia put her hands together and mimed a prayer. A shock of wayward amusement ran through Nancy. The evening’s premise was ridiculous and she was the most ridiculous part of it.
Do it, she ordered herself.
Earn your money, keep them happy. Tell them something, anything that comes into your head.
Then get off this stage and never set foot on it again.
She took one sip of water and replaced the glass before raising it for a second sip. This was the cue for the change in lights and temperature. She walked forwards, almost to the footlights, and gazed deep into the auditorium.
‘There are so many voices,’ she softly confided.
She listened to the empty air before apparently suppressing a shudder. She pressed her fingers to her ears. This was another cue, one she rarely used, but Desmond didn’t let her down. Immediately a fusillade of knocking ran through the theatre, amplified by speakers hidden in the walls. Several women gave little shrieks of alarm. Nancy took her chance. She shouted, ‘Who is here? Who has come to speak with us?’
Walking the stage in sweeping circles she began a wild monologue, pointing at random and improvising from any clue offered by face or gesture. Sweat gathered under her eyepatch and a bead of it trickled down her cheek.
It wasn’t the best seance she had ever offered – it might have been the worst – but somehow she carried it off as far as the interval.
The curtain fell and she tottered into the wings. There was some applause and even a little buzz of talk. Sylvia stood ready but Nancy had never been further from the Uncanny. She felt a wave of exhausted relief.
The act booked to carry the middle of the show was a magician. He made people disappear and materialise in different places and the stagehands were hurrying to put his apparatus into place.
Desmond looked harassed.
‘What happened?’
‘I dried.’
He patted her hand.
‘The second half will be better.’
‘I can’t go back on.’
The manager and Sylvia stared. Even when almost too ill or exhausted to walk, Nancy would never miss a ticketed performance.
Desmond cleared his throat. ‘Is it the eye that’s troubling you?’
The lack of an eye, she inwardly corrected.
She was learning how not to be blindsided, not to swing her whole body when she turned to the dark side and how to cope with stumbling against obstacles. It wasn’t the narrowing of physical sight that affected her tonight, but the certainty that Lenny’s stone had cost her more than the eye. Somehow a window within her head had been smashed, and the sensory tumult that had blazed beyond the window was deserting her.
Her head was full of questions about how and why and there was only one person who could answer them.
She said hastily to Desmond, ‘Yes. The eye.’
Sylvia fumbled in her pocket.
‘Not the glass one. I don’t want it. I’m going home now.’
Sylvia followed her to the dressing room. A message reading ‘Welcome Back to the Old Palmyra and Good Luck’, signed by the whole of the company, was taped to the mirror and a half-bottle of champagne was set out for after the final curtain. Nancy looked at the dressing table, her outdoor clothes on the hook, the old tin kettle and the gas ring.
‘Forgive me, Sylvia. Something has happened inside my head. After the injury, I think … I’m not sure I can do this any longer.’
‘You’re still recovering, dear. You’re always so harsh on yourself. Take things slowly and gently, can’t you?’
‘I haven’t always relied on the … ability, you know that. I couldn’t have done. But it was always there, like the kernel in a nut, and by using it when I could I didn’t feel a fraud every minute of my working life. Do you understand? If it isn’t there, I can’t go on.’
Sylvia wanted to understand her, but she half-shook her head.
‘What will your dad say?’
This was the dresser’s first consideration and Nancy had to smile. Sylvia hurried on. ‘Well, I don’t suppose he’ll have much to say, will he?’
‘I’m not sure.’
It was hard to predict how Devil would be on any day.
Sylvia’s eyes glimmered with tears. ‘It’s been a good few years since I started work with your father and mother, dear. Marvellous years they’ve been.’
Nancy hugged her. The old woman was as light as a bird.
‘There will always be a job for you, Sylvia, for as long as the Palmyra stays open.’
‘No, dear. I worked with your mother and I’ve been your dresser all these years. Nothing less will do, thank you.’
‘Then you can let Cornelius and Arthur and me look after you. The two of us can be retired together.’
Sylvia stepped away and began to tidy the dressing table.
‘I don’t know what to say, Nancy. Losing your eye was a shocking thing for you, but this company has been through as bad and survived for another day. Carlo died, remember, out on that very stage.’
‘I know he did. I don’t want to let the company down.’
Sylvia slid a glance at her.
‘Go on. Get on home with you and have a good night’s sleep and maybe you’ll feel differently tomorrow.’
‘All right.’
Nancy was already hurrying along the Strand by the time Desmond took the stage to announce that Miss Zenobia Wix was unfortunately indisposed.
Home?
Tonight she didn’t even think of going to Bloomsbury and waiting for the telephone to ring. She wanted only to be safe at Waterloo Street with Cornelius and Devil.
In the morning she did put in her glass eye. It glittered disconcertingly when she peered in the mirror so she turned her back on her reflection. She walked down to Bloomsbury and let herself into the flat, where she could use the telephone in absolute seclusion. She could count almost on one hand the number of times she had spoken on it to anyone other than Gil, but today she gave the operator the number of Henley police station. A moment later she was speaking to the sympathetic officer who had interviewed her in the aftermath of the event.
In the presence of Mrs Templeton and Cornelius, Nancy had described what happened at the camp in the fields. She insisted that it was an unfortunate accident. T
he man Lenny Simmons had never intended to hit her with a stone propelled from a catapult. Everyone present had been upset by an argument about the sprits, even disturbed, but there was no malign intent.
The policeman had been deferential as well as sympathetic, because of her connection to Mrs Templeton, and also surprised that she did not want to pursue any charge. It seemed an unlikely accident, he said.
‘Nevertheless, that was what it was.’
The policeman had kept her informed of the later developments. A few days after Nancy’s injury, Lawrence Feather walked into Henley police station to give himself up.
In an interview he swore to the police that he had no knowledge of either Lenny Simmons’ or his wife’s present whereabouts. All the camp’s occupants had panicked, he claimed. The husband and wife had run off at once while he and the others had done what they could for Nancy. One of them had rushed for help, and the rest of them had stayed with her until rescuers were almost at her side.
‘Then we took ourselves off,’ he said. ‘That was a wrong thing to do, and so I have come to offer myself up. I am not a criminal. I am Lawrence Feather, the medium.’
He seemed surprised, at the end of an interview, to be told that there were no charges against him.
Feather gave as his address a street on the outskirts of Reading and Nancy now obtained that address from the policeman. Using a silver pencil she wrote it down on the leather-backed pad that was kept beside the telephone and had almost never been used.
Nancy took the train from Paddington, asked directions at the station and walked a long way down increasingly seedy streets lined with small factories and repair shops. She found the house in a brick terrace next to the railway marshalling yards. On the other side of a wire fence an engine shunted a line of wagons past clumps of ragwort and willowherb. It was the beginning of June, a day of blue skies and sailing clouds.
The house had no number but she checked those on either side to make sure it was the right one. When there was no response to her knock she tried to peer in through the downstairs window but the grey curtains were drawn tight.
She sat down on a low brick wall to wait.