Curtain Call

by Anthony Quinn

  Jimmy felt a nudge at his shoulder. Gilbert had leaned in to whisper: ‘You should listen to this.’

  The editor, Bostock, was at the podium, though nothing he had been saying had penetrated Jimmy’s clouded consciousness. It seemed he was in the middle of some panegyric on the Chronicle’s veterans, ‘a doughty breed of scribes who have helped make this the great paper that it is’. Through the applause and the ragged ‘hear, hear’s he droned on, for the evening would not be complete (he said) without his acknowledging one especially renowned member of the old guard, a servant of the Chronicle for twenty-seven years.

  Jimmy was making a vague calculation of his own span at the paper when Bostock’s next words caused him a convulsive, scalp-tingling shock: ‘. . . and Lord Swaim has allowed me the honour of presenting this trophy – please be upstanding for our peerless theatre critic, Mr James Erskine.’

  Was he hallucinating?

  No. All eyes had turned on him amid the purling thunder of applause. They were not giving him the sack. They were giving him an award! He thought of Kipling’s line about Triumph and Disaster, and treating those two impostors just the same. Well, you had to try, you had to try . . .

  Barry was laughing, his hand cupped over Jimmy’s ear, trying to be heard above the noise. ‘Getting rid of you, are they?’

  Madeleine stepped off the tram on Camden High Street and headed for home. She was carrying a few things she had bought in town, an aquamarine brooch and silk stockings (Christmas presents for Rita), a jar of honey and some little pastries from an Italian cookshop in Soho. She thought she might save some to take round to Rita, who was doing Christmas dinner for her and a couple of the girls she knew from the Blue Posts. She stopped off at her local to buy a bottle of wine, a red, she thought, was best on a cold night. It was a relief to her she could still afford treats. Her savings from the Elysian were meagre, but she had the pub shift three nights a week and Stephen was paying her over the odds for the two afternoons she spent cleaning his studio.

  When she entered the hallway at Bayham Street the place was in darkness. She called the landlady’s name, without reply. It was odd, she could have sworn she had put a shilling in the meter yesterday. Ascending the stairs she reached her door on the second-floor back and let herself in. Setting down her bag on the kitchen table she went to the cupboard where the candles were kept. But before she had opened it a sound made her jump – the rasping of a match – and turning she saw a figure behind her. He had been waiting. The wick of the oil lamp was lit, and in its flickering illumination she recognised him.

  ‘Madeleine.’

  She stood paralysed, rooted to the spot. How? And yet something in her knew that this moment had always been coming. Beneath the terrible pounding that had started in her breast she realised her fate had come to meet her, that this was the reckoning for the life she had chosen, all the men, all the hotel rooms, all the brief encounters . . . She had tried to forget them, banish them from sight. But not this one. He had never been forgotten. We meet our end on the road we take to avoid it. The stillness of his head, the dark, hooded eyes, and that voice, the way it almost purred her name.

  She knew what he had come to do, but still she forced herself to ask him: ‘Why me?’ It came out as barely a whisper.

  Druce looked at her, and almost smiled. ‘Why you? I remember enjoying the fear in your eyes. And once you’d seen my face there was the problem . . .’

  She swallowed, and nodded. ‘Well, I’m – I’m ready. If you are.’

  He cocked his head. ‘You begged me last time. You begged me to stop, remember?’

  She nodded again. ‘Yes. But not now. I’m ready.’ It was the simplest thing to say. In the near-dark of a terraced house in Camden, with the world outside hurrying on, endless in its indifference, she was ready to face her last – for she knew there was no escaping it for anyone.

  He had removed his tiepin and tossed it onto the kitchen table, where it glinted. He pulled the tie loose from his neck and held it straight with both hands in front of his face. And now he did smile. ‘Come here, then.’

  She was still trembling, but she took a step towards him, and then another. He went to raise the tie over her head when, from below, an urgent rapping sounded at the door. Druce froze momentarily; he retreated some paces to stand at the kitchen door. It was a man’s voice now, calling her name. She thought she knew it. They looked at one another, as if conspirators. Hesitating, Druce quietly opened the door and crept onto the landing. With an answering softness of foot she followed, so that when he turned back she was right behind him.

  ‘There’s nothing –’ he began, but the sentence turned into an astounded roar of agony as she thrust the tiepin deep into his right eye. Madeleine released her fingers from it and darted past him. As she bolted blindly down the stairs she heard the front door being forced open, wood splintering; Stephen had made it to the first turn, they were almost in one another’s arms when a shadow plummeted between the banisters, dropping fast, and the noise it made at the bottom sounded to her like a full suitcase hurled to the pavement from a high window.

  When they looked down, Everett Druce’s body lay sprawled, motionless, his neck at an odd angle to his shoulders.

  21

  THE STREETS LOOKED odd at the end of Coronation Day. They were aflutter with banners, and the pavements were strewn with discarded flags, bunting, splashes of red and white and blue. But there wasn’t a single bus to be seen, and Tom trudged home amid droves of tired revellers. The busmen had gone on strike the week before, leaving the city in chaos. Tramcars had been so tightly packed that they didn’t bother to stop for boarders. Every private car and taxi seemed to be out on the road, and parked anywhere they fancied. Tom hadn’t gone on the Underground since he’d left the hospital at Christmas. He had been told to avoid confined spaces or potential scenes of disorder. So he walked.

  In Green Park people had camped out so as to secure themselves a good view on the day. He overheard one old boy say to another, as he surveyed the rows of tents, ‘Reminds me of base camp at Étaples – without the smell.’

  Tom had wondered about going to the West End at all; he had no great affection for the monarchy, and nothing about the recent squabble over the American woman had endeared the institution to him. But something more than curiosity impelled him to go. He had an unfathomable intuition that this was the sort of day he would bump into her, with all of London in carnival mood, and strangers roaming about, greeting one another as if they were old familiars. He had once called in at the Elysian to ask about her. Nobody knew where she’d gone. He would even have asked Ronny, or Roddy, or whatever his name was, but he wasn’t there either. He could imagine reminiscing some day in the future about the coincidence of their meeting, and being able to pinpoint it by the occasion: ‘You remember, of course, it was the day of the Coronation – to think of running into one another in all those crowds!’

  But he didn’t run into her, or anyone. And now he was tramping back to his digs in Wapping, alone.

  Since the start of the year he had picked up quite a bit of freelance work, more than he had expected. It seemed that his time in Jimmy’s employ had won him a reflected prestige; one editor flatteringly called him ‘Erskine’s dauphin’. Tom wanted to believe the work coming in was down to his own talent, but sensed it was bestowed merely on his reputation for reliability. He felt destined to be always known as the willing secretary, the one who had ‘kept Jimmy going’ for the last ten years. It was not, he supposed, such a bad reputation to have.

  Their sundering was never officially marked. It simply became understood that Tom would not be working for Jimmy any longer. All the same, he had expected something from his erstwhile boss, if not a full mea culpa then at least an acknowledgement of his unseemly (or should he call it unconscionable?) behaviour on the night of the drag ball. He had abandoned one friend in a medical emergency, and allowed another to sacrifice himself to a prison sentence. Surely that demanded some for
m of contrition. Tom heard from Peter when he visited him at Pentonville that Jimmy had written a letter of apology, ‘or the nearest he would ever come to one’. He had boiled with rage about the whole affair while he was in hospital, but Peter’s attitude of civilised drollery was a corrective. If a man incarcerated for six months could so easily forgive his treacherous friend, then shouldn’t he, too?

  There was of course the danger of encountering one another at the theatre. Having deputised as critic (‘keeping the chair warm’, as Jimmy put it) Tom was still in the habit of going to press nights, even if he wasn’t reviewing. Most of the time he kept a distance, or else went on a different night. He continued to read Jimmy’s reviews in the Chronicle, wondering if he’d detect some falling off, some diminution in the energy of the writing now that his editor-secretary had gone. He never did. The Erskine voice remained the same: exacting, adversarial, puckish. It would be the last thing of his to go. Then, back in April, he had spotted Jimmy, at the far end of the bar during an interval, characteristically surrounded by a group of his young men. Jimmy had spotted him in turn, and looked away. When the play resumed Tom noticed that the last seat on the critics’ row – Jimmy’s – was now empty. It saddened him, unexpectedly.

  He told Edie about it over lunch a few days later. They met quite often now. In Peter’s enforced absence he was understudying in the role of her best friend and confidant.

  ‘I don’t know, I thought a tip of his hat, or a wave. But nothing. He just looked away.’

  Edie tilted her head in rueful sympathy. ‘He was probably embarrassed. People like Jimmy don’t know how to behave when they’re in the wrong.’ Then she suddenly frowned at him. ‘You’re not going back to him, are you?’

  Tom shook his head, and smiled. ‘Not a chance. I stayed with him for too long, and I took on too much work – another thing the doctors have warned me about. But it wasn’t all bad, you know. We had fun.’

  ‘Of course, darling. He’s a caution! And if a man’s to be judged by the company he keeps Jimmy comes off pretty well.’

  ‘What, Jolyon and that lot?’

  ‘No, they’re just his boys. I mean his proper friends – you and me and Peter and László. Look how generous he’s been to László.’

  ‘I know, I know. We can rely on him for everything except loyalty.’

  Edie laughed throatily. ‘But we love him just the same.’

  ‘Strange, isn’t it? With certain people the normal rules don’t apply. He behaves badly, lets people down, and yet we forgive him, you’re right, just because he’s Jimmy. When he was at his most swinish I cursed him for a monster of egotism and vanity and self-delusion, but I was wrong – I mean about the self-delusion. He knows exactly what he can get away with.’

  ‘A “monster”, darling?’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech, mostly.’

  Edie nodded it away. ‘Listen, I’m going to have a little dinner at Fashion Street for when Peter gets out – a welcome home. You, me, László – and Jimmy. You will come, won’t you?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure . . .’ he said with a heavy shake of his head. But when he caught Edie’s hurt expression he gave up his teasing and pulled a fooled-you face. She gave him a reproving smack on the wrist in return. ‘I’ve just had a note from László, actually,’ he continued. ‘He’s going to some show next week, and he’s very keen for me to accompany him. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Don’t you, now?’ said Edie, and Tom thought he heard some ironic chime in her voice. But after a moment’s hesitation he dismissed it, and the talk turned to something else.

  ‘So you didn’t see any of it?’

  ‘No, not a thing,’ Madeleine admitted. ‘After I’d finished at the bar I was so tired I went home and just got into bed. When I woke up it was all over.’

  ‘Oh, shame. Maddy, you’ve never seen such crowds! I mean, I can’t hardly remember the last one, I was just a girl. But this . . . He looked so dignified, and the paper said he did ever so well, even with his stammer. And we sang “God Save the King” and waved our flags like mad – and then burst out cryin’!’

  Madeleine was in the Blue Posts listening to Rita’s awestruck account of the Coronation. She could tell that Rita found something odd about her not bothering with the occasion. She wasn’t the only one. When Madeleine had been at Tite Street the day before, Stephen had asked her if she was excited about the ‘big day’. She felt herself rather a party-pooper having agreed to work at the Railway Arms all day. They had taken to one another pretty well, the only wobble of alarm being the afternoon Stephen came back to find the sash windows washed and gleaming. ‘Oh . . .’ He’d always thought the layer of dirt created a romantic, Turneresque blur, and consequently had not disturbed them. When Madeleine saw him looking dazed by this sudden access of light she felt somehow in error. ‘I’m sorry if – I just thought they needed a clean.’ After a long pause Stephen gave her a pained smile. ‘I know, you’re right. I’ve become used to not seeing out of them.’ She kept noticing him pause in front of the windows, as though trying to recall what had gone missing. But he lost the habit, and came to accept their new grimeless state.

  Their traumatic involvement in the case of the Tiepin Murders made an unspoken bond between them. The police’s questioning went on for days, and she told them the story, over and over, of meeting Everett Druce for the first time at the Imperial, and of Nina’s part in unwittingly saving her life. It was soon established that Nina had in fact been the killer’s fifth and final victim. Ludo Talman had confirmed that Druce, whose money backed the studio, must have seen her screen test at the Marlborough and then set about tracking her down. The house in Hampstead was found to be rented under the name Rusk, which he had taken from Barry Rusk, crime correspondent of the Chronicle. Madeleine gathered that Nina would probably not have known anything about her killer. To judge from the injuries to her head, death would have been instantaneous. It was cold comfort that Druce had not left his macabre signature upon her.

  As to what had motivated his grisly crimes, they were no more able to explain it now than they had been at the start. The only chance of understanding would have been to question Druce himself, and that possibility had vanished at the moment he fell to his doom in a Camden boarding house. Madeleine would think of that night, and remember her strange fatalistic behaviour on being confronted by the murderer. At the time it had felt as though someone else was inhabiting her body, someone who had accepted the certainty of her own end, and was calm. She had not described this experience of transcendent equanimity to anyone, partly because it sounded so odd, and partly because she could not quite comprehend it herself. All she knew was that death – or whatever was on the other side of death – held no terror for her.

  Rita, having exhausted her supply of superlatives on the Coronation, was looking at Madeleine inquisitively. ‘So you’re getting by, then. No regrets ’bout the Elysian?’

  She shook her head. ‘The money was good, better than I’ve ever earned. But I couldn’t bear to . . . D’you ever see Roddy?’

  ‘Hmm, I seen him skulking about now and then. What was it made you sling your hook in the end?’

  Madeleine stared off into the pub’s pale light. It already seemed a long time ago. ‘Oh . . . There was someone – a feller. We’d been out a few times, nothing more. But I was fond of him. Roddy found out, and he made sure the feller would never look at me the same way again.’

  ‘Ooh, the snake,’ Rita hissed. Something else seemed to trouble her. ‘You know, if you’re short of money . . .’

  Madeleine clasped Rita’s hand in hers. ‘I’m fine. Char work, the pub. And the painter I told you about has asked me if I can give his daughter piano lessons.’

  Rita’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘You play the piano?’

  ‘I thought I’d forgotten how, but there’s one in his studio, so . . .’ Stephen had overheard her by chance, and had been so beguiled that he’d insisted she play whenever she liked. A few weeks
later he’d mentioned his daughter – Freya – who might want lessons. She’d been unhappy at her school, he explained, and had recently come back to London. ‘Quite a character,’ he’d added, with a sidelong look.

  ‘Piano lessons!’ cried Rita. ‘I must tell Arthur about that. He’s got a piano round his place. Here, d’you think you could play this?’ And she began, in a clear fluting alto, a music-hall song from the old days, something about a girl and a boy meeting by the sad sea waves. Madeleine didn’t know it, but it didn’t sound very difficult. She could certainly give it a try.

  The morning after the Coronation Tom woke feeling rather low. He was fatigued by his footslog home from the Mall, and he knew he could have used the day more profitably than gawping at a pageant whose significance barely interested him. Now that he was cast on the open seas of freelance writing he could not afford to drift; there was no longer the safe harbour of a regular income, however meagre it had been. He had a career to keep afloat.

  On emerging from his bedroom he almost tripped over the cardboard box that Allenby, his landlord, had deposited there. It was addressed to him. Inside, wrapped in newspaper, was a lady’s hat box from Peter Jones, though the weight of it suggested that something other than headgear was contained therein. He felt a tender shock on lifting out the green Smith-Corona typewriter, which he hadn’t touched since he was last at Jimmy’s office back in November.

  A typewritten letter had been wedged into the carriage.

  Princess Louise Mansions, W.C.2

  11th May 1937