‘She harms herself sometimes,’ she said.
I dismissed the nun, saying that I would like to pray for a while in the chapel. She went reluctantly. I did not go far into the chapel, but knelt in a stall some distance from Meriel.
Something else was wrong. It was as if the air around Meriel was disturbed. There were tiny sounds—whispers, grunts, creaks—all of which emanated from her direction. At the same time the light near her was somehow being broken into little irrational sparks and shadows. It is hard to describe, but it was as if her head were surrounded by a swarm of invisible insects, buzzing, whining, fluttering; the occasional flash of an iridescent wing coruscating weakly in the gloom. I wondered if she would turn and see me, as she had done all those years ago when we first met. She did not, so I said a prayer for her and left the chapel.
That was the last time I saw her, except possibly for the following morning. I had risen early and was taking a walk in the convent’s Calvary garden before morning prayer. The garden, as is customary, adjoins a small burial ground for the nuns. It was one of those damp November mornings when the earth seems entombed in a white fog. There is a special quality to their silences which can be conducive to meditation. I could hear nothing except the faint crackle of my feet along the gravel path, and when I stopped before the stone Calvary in the centre of the garden there was perfect stillness. So it could not have been a noise which made me suddenly turn and look in the direction of the cemetery. There, through the mist, I thought I caught a glimpse of a thin white figure standing very upright by one of the nuns’ gravestones. It appeared to be naked. I cannot be absolutely certain if it was Meriel, but I think it was, and I think she saw me. When I tried to approach the figure it moved off rapidly into the mist.
Meriel died at the convent a few months later.
**
There was a pause after Father Humphreys had finished, then Canon Carey asked: ‘Do you mean she had taken on his—demon, burden—whatever it was?’
‘I really couldn’t say. That is a possible explanation.’
‘No, no!’ said the Archdeacon. ‘This contradicts the entire doctrine of the Gospels. If you must allow this notion of demons, they can be cast out. Our Lord cast out demons. Why didn’t she let herself be exorcised by a properly trained member of the priesthood licensed by the bishop?’
‘Perhaps because everyone just thought she was nuts, like you, Archdeacon. Or perhaps she thought she ought to let the entity die with her in case when it was thrown out of her it entered someone else and carried on with its work there. Like the Gadarene Swine.’
I suddenly noticed that the lights in the room were very dim. Father Humphreys looked at us and smiled, not altogether encouragingly.
‘We all carry our own shadows. They run by our side when we are young; they creep behind us when we are old; they sleep with us in the grave. We must learn to live and die with them. We should not try to cut them off, and we should not try to take on anyone else’s shadows. Perhaps a real saint could do it, but I’m not sure. A good deed like that never goes unpunished in this world.’
THE SKINS
Syd and Peggy Brinton in August 1977 on the Sunday after Elvis Presley died.
It was a sultry evening at the Pier Pavilion Theatre, Scarmouth, and an argument was simmering before the show in No 5 dressing room which Victor Bright and I occupied. We had come in early that day to gorge ourselves on images of the doomed star in our shared Sunday papers. Details about hamburgers and drugs, the distended, tawdry glamour of Graceland, were pored over with sickened fascination. Thinking of that mountain of flesh, now cold and corrupting, I felt a strange, guilty satisfaction: I would never know such stardom; but I would equally never know the futility of success, or its ignominious end.
To purge myself of these unworthy thoughts, I gave way to pious platitudes. ‘What a waste!’ I said. ‘That fantastic talent. It’s just such a waste . . .’
Victor, who loved to pick a fight, took the opposite view. Of course it wasn’t a waste. It was the inevitable end. Elvis was finished, had been finished for years. He had done what he was meant to do: changed the face of modern music. He had nowhere else to go, nothing to do except give increasingly pathetic displays of his spent talent. Dying was the best thing he could have done. He ought to have died sooner.
I rose to the bait and was beginning to challenge Victor when there was a knock at the door. It opened a fraction and two smiling heads popped round it simultaneously, a male and a female.
‘Hello,’ they said, almost in unison. ‘We’re Syd and Peggy. We’re the new Spesh!’ The next instant they were gone.
It had all been done with such precision, such show-business flair, it had come as if on cue at such a critical moment, that the tension was immediately relieved and both of us burst out laughing. So they were Syd and Peggy Brinton, the new Spesh.
The ‘Spesh’, or Speciality Act, was a feature of our Sunday nights at the Pier Pavilion, Scarmouth. During the week we performed in a couple of plays, a comedy and a thriller, changing midweek, but on Sunday, the night when we regularly filled the theatre, there was ‘Old Tyme Music Hall with Special Guest Stars’, two of whom were Syd and Peggy.
They came to us nearly at the end of the season because the management, ‘Bunny G. Enterprises’, had a violent disagreement with the previous ‘Spesh’, an Ultra Violet Puppet act called Fantastique! We were not sorry to see it go because the two men who were Fantastique! gave themselves airs. They thought they were better than us lowly actors; they called themselves artists rather than ‘artistes’. Entertainment, not art, was what Bunny G. Enterprises was about and Syd and Peggy Brinton had similar priorities.
Their bill material was ‘Syd and Peggy Brinton, Comedy Tap Sensation’. Their act, always a precise and theatrically correct twenty minutes, began with ‘Happy Feet’ and ended with ‘Me and My Shadow’. Between these two numbers, the tap dancing elements of their performance, they executed a harmless and fairly ordinary magic act involving balloons and mild comic banter. Their routine never varied and was always well if not enthusiastically received.
I had watched them from the side that night and enjoyed their performance. Syd had winked at me once through his sweat as they clicked and shuffled round the stage to ‘Happy Feet’. Peggy had barmaid blonde looks, a good figure and excellent legs. At five foot five, Syd was no more than an inch taller, lithe and slightly wizened. They seemed to my young eyes pretty ancient but they were only in their mid forties. He wore a dinner jacket, she a gold lamé leotard and fishnet tights; both carried straw boaters and canes for their numbers.
I saw them in the theatre bar after the performance. Syd stood at the bar with the boss, Mr ‘Bunny’ Warren Goldman, who had come down specially to see them into the show. Syd was laughing uproariously at Bunny’s jokes, as one had to, but I noticed that Peggy was sitting alone at a distant table sipping from a schooner of sweet sherry. The rest of the company were ignoring her for some reason. When our eyes met I felt compelled to go over and keep her company and I saw relief in her smile as I joined her. Close to, her face, still carrying a heavy stage make-up, looked quite deeply lined. She fished in her bag, took out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. I declined and she lit up with a quick, almost convulsive movement.
‘I enjoyed the act,’ I said.
‘Yes. We spotted you in the wings there. Did you really like it?’
I made further noises of assent, surprised by the plaintive note in her question. I had thought Peggy too consummate a professional to need reassurance because I had not yet learned that everything in show-business is an act, including, and indeed especially, complete self-confidence.
‘Isn’t it terrible about Elvis?’ she said after a slight pause. I nodded. She went on: ‘It’s terrible the things they’re saying about him in the papers now he’s dead. I’m sure none of them are true. He had a lovely act. Syd used to do an Elvis impersonation in the routine. We couldn’t do it now of course.’
I was intrigued. As a young actor in ‘legit’ theatre I had very little understanding of the Variety side of things and was curious to know more about it.
‘Mostly we do the clubs and guest appearances, like this,’ she told me. ‘We have done summer season variety, but we like the clubs. We always go down well in the clubs. It’s a clean act: I think they like that for a change. There’s a lot of blue material in the clubs these days. Yes, it’s a good act. But there’s always room for improvement, isn’t there? That’s what I say. I keep telling Syd. We ought to change now and then. Put in more gags. We’ve got to move with the times. But he’s happy as it is. He won’t budge. Typical man. We could be a top flight supporting act. We’ve done it before. Once we closed the first half for Frankie Lane at the Empire, Hartlepool, you know. We’re very big in Hartlepool.’
I looked impressed and asked her if they worked the clubs all the year round.
‘Oh, no! We’re always in Panto at Christmas. We do the skins, you see.’
I must have looked blank, so she explained. ‘We’re in the skins. Like Pantomime Horse. And Daisy the Cow, you know. They call it the skins. People don’t understand, but it’s a very specialised field. Not just anyone can do it. Our feature is a tap routine in the skins. It’s famous. We’re one of the top skins double acts in the country. Of course, you know, the great skins role in panto is a single. It’s Mother Goose. You’ve got a real character there in Priscilla the Goose. You have to do pathos and everything. She’s central to the subject, you see; lays the golden eggs. I could do that. I haven’t yet because of Syd. He wouldn’t have a role, you see. So it’s Daisy and Dobbin for us.’ She sighed resentfully and pulled hard on her cigarette.
Over the course of the next few Sundays I had several talks with Peggy. She and Syd always seemed on amicable terms but, as if by some unspoken ritual, they never drank together in the bar after the show. Peggy liked to talk but she did not have Syd’s natural gregariousness. ‘Syd’s a man’s man, you see,’ she said to me once when we heard his loud laugh above the others at the bar. I gathered that she and Syd had teamed up and married early. They had one son, Mick, who was grown up and in work ‘stage managing at the London Palladium’. Peggy was inordinately proud of this. ‘He’s doing really well there,’ she would say. When I asked what position he occupied in the stage management hierarchy she was vague, but she said that he got on really well with everyone and ‘they all love Mick’.
I found that few people in the company cared to spend time with Peggy. I couldn’t quite see why. Victor in particular took against her: he objected to her smoking. ‘That’s bad enough,’ he said. ‘One has to look after one’s voice. But she will wave the bloody cigarette around in that twitchy way.’ Admittedly too, her conversational range was limited. She really only had two subjects: their son Mick and their professional status. She would often tell me how they were one of the top skins acts in the country and that her great ambition was to play Priscilla in Mother Goose.
On the last Sunday of the season there was a party in the bar afterwards; the drinks were on Bunny Goodman and everyone got a little drunk. I remember once again finding myself with Peggy who had abandoned her strict rule of one schooner of sherry per night and was on her fourth or fifth. She told me twice about how they had closed the first half for Frankie Lane in Hartlepool, then suddenly and quite unexpectedly she seized my knee under the table in a strong nervous grip.
With little relevance to what had gone before she fixed me with a stare and said: ‘Don’t get me wrong. Syd’s all right. I’m not complaining. But he doesn’t satisfy me. You know what I mean? I need to be satisfied.’ I saw her hazel eyes begin to flood with tears. Those eyes were the only real thing about her face: the rest was green eye shadow, false lashes, lip gloss, Max Factor pancake and powder. It was like a mask, or another skin.
Then, just as suddenly, she released my knee and began to apologise abjectly. I found this as embarrassing as what had gone before, so I made excuses and left her as soon as I could.
**
At Christmas a couple of years later, having nothing better to go to, I accepted an offer from Bunny to play Will Scarlett, one of the Merry Men in Babes in the Wood at the Alhambra, Brightsea. Victor Bright was playing the Sheriff of Nottingham and since we had last worked together he had become a ‘name’. He had landed the role of one of those ruthless yet virile businessmen, so beloved of TV soaps, in a thing called Seaways. So he was near the top of the bill as ‘Victor Bright, TV’s Mr Nasty’. Also in the cast were Syd and Peggy Brinton who, in addition to being ‘Merry Men’, were in the skins as ‘Dobbin, the Wonderhorse’. At the first rehearsal Peggy greeted me pleasantly but quite distantly. I wondered whether she remembered our intimate conversations at Scarmouth, or whether she had chosen to forget them. Victor Bright was similarly aloof, but for different reasons. Success had clad him in a hard, shiny carapace of invulnerability.
We opened on Boxing Day. It was a good show and there was talk of ‘breaking all box office records’, something which is done more frequently than you might imagine. To me everyone seemed happy, but I was wrong: I do not have the kind of sensitivities which detect what is going on in a company.
About a week into the run I happened to be in the wings watching Syd and Peggy as Dobbin the horse doing their tap dance. I regularly watched it from the side as it was a most expert performance. Peggy took the front half of the horse and Syd the rear. Suddenly I became aware of Freddie Dring, our Dame, gigantic in a white frock covered in huge red polka dots, standing beside me. He was waiting to make his entrance.
‘That’s a very Biblical Horse you’ve got there, my friend,’ he said, nudging me in the groin with a vast purple handbag. On and off stage Freddie Dring spoke almost entirely in gags, so I knew what was expected of me.
‘Oh, and why is that a Biblical Horse?’ I said, feeding him the punch line.
‘Because the back legs knoweth not what the front legs doeth.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think they’re amazingly co-ordinated. And that dance—’
But Freddie cut me off. ‘Don’t be green, son. Don’t be green,’ he said and made his entrance.
It often happens that when you get wind of trouble from one source it is almost immediately confirmed from another. During the interval I happened to overhear a conversation between the two actresses playing Principal Girl and Principal Boy. They had gone for a smoke just outside the stage door.
‘Bastard!’ said Robin Hood. ‘He thinks he’s God’s gift. I told him when he tried to put a hand up my tunic, “My boyfriend’s a black belt and he’s taught me a move or two”.’
‘Is he?’ asked Maid Marian. ‘A black belt?’
‘No. He’s a chartered surveyor. But he was in the Territorials. You know who Mr Wonderful’s trying it on with now?’
‘No! Who?’
‘Dobbin.’
‘No! Front or back?’
Robin Hood let out a snort of laughter. ‘Oh, Please! One thing he’s not is a wrong ender.’
‘Be a lot less trouble if he were, if you ask me,’ said Maid Marian, who was newly married and had a philosophical approach to life. ‘But that is so disgusting! Peggy! I mean she’s . . . Just because he’s been in some poxy soap he thinks he’s God’s gift. What’s Peggy doing about it?’
Robin Hood said: ‘You won’t believe this—’ But just then she saw me and drew Maid Marian away to share further secrets, unspied on.
I had heard enough, and next day a fresh piece of news was all over the company. Syd had caught Peggy and Victor ‘at it’ in Peggy and Syd’s camper van in the theatre car park. ‘I tell you, he wouldn’t have minded only they were doing terrible things to the suspension,’ said Freddie Dring.
That evening we saw Peggy and Syd enter the theatre, silent, tight-lipped. An equally taciturn Victor played the Sheriff of Nottingham with such venom that several terrified young members of the audience had to be removed from the a
uditorium. When it was time for Dobbin to do its tap dance most of the company was gathered on the side of the stage to watch the spectacle.
It seemed a monstrous thing that clattered and stamped its way about the stage that night. Syd and Peggy, consummate professionals, were giving their usual well-drilled performance, but perhaps their steps were more percussive than usual, their taps more brutally metallic. Every ripple of the shabby cloth skin, every nod of the clumsy beast’s head seemed a sign of the terrible, claustrophobic conflict that must be raging within. Freddie, who might have been expected to come up with something humorous, was in a gloomy mood. ‘I tell you,’ he said. ‘There’s worse to come. I’ve never liked Babes in the Wood as a subject. It’s always been a jinxed panto. It’s a well known fact.’
**
The following morning I was summoned to the theatre. Syd had had an accident after the previous night’s performance; he had injured his leg badly and was in hospital. The cause of the accident was not vouchsafed to me: I was there because Peggy had selected me to take over the back legs of Dobbin while Syd was out of action. I knew that any protest on my part would not be tolerated because Bunny Goldman had driven down from London and was sitting stony faced in the auditorium.
Peggy seemed unnaturally calm. She said that ‘everyone’ had thought it would be a shame to remove Dobbin altogether from the pantomime, but that I would not be expected to do anything too difficult like the tap dance. From now until the first show at 2.30 Peggy was to give me a crash course in ‘working the skins’.
It was a strange, uncomfortable time which Peggy handled better than I. Perhaps the concentration required in giving instructions to a novice purged her mind of other, more troublesome thoughts. And I was in the acutely embarrassing position of having to enter Syd’s skin.
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 9