Distant Music

by Charlotte Bingham

  But there was worse to come, and not just from Oliver.

  At the theatre that afternoon, having suffered Oliver’s moaning about Portly all the way there, Elsie found out exactly what was missing from her life at that moment. Oddly it was not something that anyone else would have put at the top of their list of necessities for a balanced existence, but once she heard those footsteps Elsie found out what was missing from her life all right – it was fear. And if she had been in any danger of taking her new life for granted, that particular danger would now have been very much a thing of the past.

  It was the ring of those shoes in the corridor, that way of swaying from side to side to side as she walked, that put the dread back into Elsie. It was Dottie’s walk, the walk that any lodger who was late with his rent would come to dread more than a bad review. It was a fact that no one else walked like Dottie.

  Then, all at once, there it was, the unmistakable cry that Dottie always gave backstage. ‘Darling, Jenny, darling. Marvellous, really, marvellous, darling.’

  Dottie was visiting Jennifer Polesden, and seeing that Jennifer’s blasted dressing room was right next door to Elsie’s larger, more starry one it was really very easy for the old friends to make sure that Elsie and her dresser could hear them. It was at the end of a matinée, so they must both have known that Elsie would be about to rest between shows on her newly acquired silk-covered chaise longue, surrounded by her favourite white and blue flowers, and attended by her adoring dresser.

  Seeing Elsie freeze suddenly and put her finger to her lips while pointing to the lock on the dressing room door, her dresser crept quietly over and turned the key. Then, together, as if performing a duet, and as all backstage people know to do, they both picked up the drinking glasses, more normally used for visitors’ refreshment, and put them to the wall.

  The dialogue in the next door dressing room came through loud and clear. It was all there, as always, in place, almost as if it had already been written, as if it was carefully scripted, the ticky tacky criticism of intimate dressing room talk.

  ‘… takes that far too fast, darling, and really you know – Freddie, in the second act, he can hardly be heard. No, really.’ (Pause to light cigarette). ‘No, when I tell you,’ Elsie could hear Dottie’s loud actressy tones, ‘when I tell you, Jenny, that the woman next to me complained that she could not hear him at all, she could not hear Freddie, and she was only four back in the dress circle – darling, only four from the front, you know.’

  ‘I told Bartlett that he should call a rehearsal – I told him that last week, he should call a rehearsal, we are all getting sloppy, I said that. We are mistiming, we are, really.’

  And so it went on, the clamour of the nit-picking and the fault-finding, everything that was said interspersed with exaggerated sighs and ‘Oh, don’t, darling’ until finally, the real taboo subject was aired.

  ‘Are you going next door, Dottie? Tell me, are you going next door to see Elsie? I must know. Because you know, if she knows you’re in, she will ask.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘I am sure Elsie would love to see you, darling. She has behaved very well. Personally I have nothing to find fault with. The consummate professional is Elsie, really, completely professional.’

  ‘And so she should be! The sacrifices I made for that girl – but really, I would rather drop dead, darling, really I would. There is nothing Miss Elsie Lancaster and I have to say to each other any more, but nothing. Not a thing. I actually thought she was quite disappointing this afternoon, as a matter of fact. Probably getting tired, so long into the run, but she was not as good as I had been led to believe. Not bad, mind you, but definitely not as brilliant as that review Osgood Lamsden gave her. I mean, talk about going over the top! I mean the review, not Elsie. One thing Elsie does not do is go over the top. But really, I expected more. And no, I will not go and see her. Had to come and see you though, Jenny darling, really. And you must come and see me at the house. Sea air, do you good, when the run closes, come and have a weekend.’

  Noisy goodbyes outside Elsie’s dressing room door signalled the end of the visit, and also the end of Elsie and her dresser listening to the studied dialogue next door. As the sound of those footsteps receded Elsie lay down on her chaise longue and closed her eyes.

  She did not care, she did not care, she did not care in the very least, she told herself, and the ceiling of her dressing room far above her.

  Let Dottie visit whomsoever she cared to visit, let her visit the whole cast, daily, Elsie would not care. All she cared about was that she was in a long-running hit, the money was rolling into her bank and she was able to buy lovely clothes and live in a marvellous flat with thick white carpet and sleep in until eleven in the morning instead of going out to find work; not to mention hire a maid to bring her a cup of China tea and plain biscuit when she woke up.

  She turned her head, her eyes searching suddenly for those of her dresser.

  ‘Can you get me a glass of water and an aspirin, Beattie, love?’

  As it happened, Oliver’s acting agent, Tad Protheroe, was not the only person who found Oliver Lowell’s play killingly funny. So, to Oliver’s amazement, did Denholm Heighton, and unfortunately for Portly he telephoned Oliver almost immediately to say that, no matter what, he wanted to put it on as soon as Oliver and Elsie came out of Popeye.

  Now Portly was faced with a dilemma which he had seen arriving on the far horizon for some few months. Either he advised Elsie not to do her lover’s play, at least until Oliver had rewritten it extensively, or he allowed her to go into the play, take it on tour, and suffer what Portly was sure would be an ignominious flop, at a time when her star was riding so high it might as well be the evening star itself.

  ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

  Elsie faced Portly across his new leather-topped desk. He was still in the same old building, opposite the apothecary shop, where the tramp had performed his untimely christening – a christening that was proving, even now, to be as lucky as Portly himself had predicted.

  ‘No, I don’t like it, Elsie, you know that. I like it as little as I loved Love To Popeye the moment I read it. Popeye is unselfconscious, artless, and light in touch, and this one is quite the opposite. I don’t even like the title. The Magic of Love – it’s just too Spring in Park Lane for me, you know. Just nothing works, Elsie, not for me. Although, of course, I may be wrong.’

  They both knew that he was not wrong. They knew it, because without her saying so Elsie quite obviously hated the play just as much as her agent. But Oliver was her lover, and Portly only her agent, and more than that she was in love with Oliver, and she was not in love with Portly.

  ‘Oh, heck, I’ll do it. After all – you know – Denholm wants to put it on, I mean he wants so much to put it on. He thinks it is killingly funny. He said as much to Oliver.’

  ‘OK, then whenever you want to come out of Popeye, at the end of your twelve-month get-out clause, I will put the thing in motion for you to tour. Of course you know Oliver will be in it with you, again, don’t you? I mean he will be in it? You don’t mind that, do you?’

  ‘No, you know I love acting with Oliver in his plays. It means I can get a rewrite done without leaving the rehearsal room.’ Elsie pulled a wry little face, and Portly smiled, despite the fact that he actually felt like groaning.

  He could not tell Elsie that she was making a big mistake, because there was no point. There was no point in his saying so because he knew that she knew it already, but had no idea of how she could avoid it. She was only doing the play to please Oliver. Yet in pleasing Oliver, if it was a flop and she was starring in it she would doubtless also displease him to such an extent that she would become the focus of his frustrations. More than that, as people in the theatre so often did, Oliver would wish, ever after, to dissociate himself from Elsie because of the flop, a flop that she had only agreed to do to please Oliver.

  ‘You are sure that you are not saying yes whe
n you actually mean no?’

  ‘I am quite sure. I love Ollie’s work, you know that, all two plays of it.’

  Portly watched the elegant figure of his brightest and most glamorous star sashaying into the street outside and stepping into a taxicab to be taken across town to lunch with a producer at the Caprice. Mario would now know Elsie Lancaster, of course. More than that, everyone would know her. Everyone now did know her. What they did not know, but Portly did, was that she was just about to bomb in a vehicle which she did not like, and for no better reason than to please her lover.

  What Elsie did not also appreciate was that Denholm would, at that moment, send her out on tour in anything written by Oliver and starring herself, simply and solely because his backers would willingly stump up the cash. None of Heighton’s own money, after all, went into the productions he put on. What was more, Heighton would not care a tinker’s curse if the play failed, because after a long run Popeye was being transferred to Broadway with an American cast. As far as he was concerned, if the new play succeeded, all well and good, but if it failed it mattered not a fiddle. It would just be written up in the debit column and go to help any tax problems that Heighton Productions or its backers might be disenjoying at that moment.

  So, that was truly that, really. But none of this could be communicated to Elsie, Portly’s brightest star. He knew that his role would be to stand back and watch the hurt caused by failure, and hope that Elsie would be up to it.

  Whether or not Oliver would be up to it was quite another matter. Oliver was after all the all too tender-hearted playwright, but he was also pig-headed and stubborn, not to mention immensely conceited, and at the same time sensitive to a degree. He was, in effect, the consummate creative artist.

  Portly sighed and lit a cigar from his new box, a present from Elsie, who was almost criminally generous.

  ‘Nothing to be done,’ he told his new telephone, and waited for his new secretary to come back with a tray of coffee from the café two doors down. ‘Nothing to be done, nothing to be done.’

  The realisation that there was very little you could do, Portly was learning, was half the art of representation. Knowing when to step in and when not to, when to do nothing at all, except perhaps breathe, was another all-important lesson. All he could do at that moment was wait and see. He hoped he was wrong, but he somehow doubted it. In his unalterable opinion, The Magic of Love was about as funny as a tax form – or Denholm Heighton.

  ‘It’s not funny, Master Oliver, really it’s not. It doesn’t need rewriting, it needs abandoning, for ever.’

  ‘Cliffie!’

  Ever since he was a small boy, Oliver always had liked to protest both to Cliffie and at him, but the truth was that Clifton was too practised at dealing with him to pay any attention whatsoever.

  ‘You don’t mean that. Please, Cliffie, say you don’t mean that.’

  He had always said that.

  ‘I do, Master Oliver, I mean that very much, I am afraid. Your new play is not funny. I don’t know why it’s not funny, but it’s not, and there it is.’ The look that Clifton was now giving Oliver was so serious that he might have been bringing him news of a fatal disease, which, in a way, he was.

  ‘The trouble with comedy is that you can never prove it is funny until it is rather too late. I mean, you didn’t think Love To Popeye was that good, and look how long it has run for! It will soon be all set to celebrate its first year in the West End, against all your predictions. It will be going to Broadway, too.’

  ‘All I said about Popeye was that although it was delightful, it was lightweight. I thought it was funny, but immensely lightweight.’

  ‘Well, what else is a comedy meant to be if not lightweight – deadweight?’

  What they were really arguing about was that Clifton was disappointed with Oliver for writing a comedy, and scoring a triumph with it, instead of joining some weighty organisation and playing Hamlet.

  ‘Your problem is that you only want me to play Hamlet and nothing else. That is all you want of me, to stay in toga or tights spouting the Bard, and that is really not me. Besides, any amount of people can score in Shakespeare, and do, while very few can write and score in their own comedies. It is just a fact.’

  ‘That is true, Master Oliver. I do feel that you would make, indeed you might still make, a great Hamlet, a Hamlet for your generation. Remember it was me who told you to get out into the provinces and prove yourself in modern plays.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Oliver looked suddenly crestfallen. ‘I owe you so much, Cliffie. It’s just that I so hoped you would like The Magic of Love’

  ‘I even hate the title.’ Clifton sighed. He feared for Oliver, and yet he could not exactly say why.

  ‘You as well? What about my father?’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell him, not yet. Best not.’

  Plunkett Senior had not left Yorkshire for some time now, unlike Newell who attended the first night in London, going round to Oliver’s dressing room afterwards and giving his verdict as ‘too lightweight for me, I’m afraid. I like plays with some meat on them.’

  Seeing Oliver’s face not just fall, but crumble, at his middle brother’s sarcasm, Clifton, who had brought Newell to see the play, had taken Oliver aside.

  ‘Never mind your brother, Master Ollie. I know it’s rather obvious to say this, but he is just jealous.’

  And Newell had been, quite openly jealous. After his first visit as Clifton’s guest, he had brought friends to the play and laughed his head off – so loudly that Oliver could not fail to hear him – before leaving the theatre without bothering to go round to Oliver’s dressing room afterwards.

  It was quite deliberately hurtful, and in due course Oliver, much as he did not want to, began to appreciate it as being precisely that, particularly since Newell proceeded to do it not just once, but upwards of at least half a dozen times.

  ‘He’s just frighting you.’

  Oliver had never heard this term used before, except by Elsie, but once he understood what it meant he realised that, in his own way, that was exactly what Newell was trying to do.

  He was making sure that Oliver knew he was there, and then by not bothering to go backstage and make himself known, he was leaving his younger brother in a state of growing uncertainty, not just about his acting performance, but also, perhaps more importantly, about his playwriting.

  Like Elsie with Dottie, Oliver told himself to forget all about Newell, put aside the question of why he did what he did, and get on with immersing himself in something other than Love To Popeye’s long run. He started writing The Magic of Love just at the precise moment when he was at his most confused. First hurt by his brother’s behaviour, and then confused as to what kind of man Newell might actually be.

  He had been coming out of a Soho restaurant with Elsie when he had seen the two figures. Unhappily he was not alone in his sighting; Newell had seen Oliver too. There was, quite simply, nothing that either of them could do. And Oliver, being Oliver, unable to think of anything to say in such circumstances, after his first glassy-eyed reaction, and not knowing the form – if there indeed was one – had simply dropped his eyes, followed Elsie into the taxi and driven off with her.

  ‘I do wish men like that wouldn’t be so public about everything, really,’ Elsie had grumbled, while Oliver remained silent, completely confused, staring ahead of him into the darkness of the London street, unable to quite believe how he had seen Newell, and what it meant.

  It was in this state of secret, puzzled depression, a state of mind that was anxious to conceal what he had seen, even from himself, that he had started The Magic of Love, which might account for why it had singularly failed to entertain anyone.

  It was not that Oliver had ever put Newell on a pedestal, the way that he had his eldest brother, Richard, but, Oliver being the youngest, Newell was, when all was said and done, an older brother by some way, and an older brother is usually, in the nature of things, a figure to whom a younger broth
er inevitably looks up.

  In fact, without realising it until now, or without allowing himself to admit it until now, all the time that Oliver had been growing up he had never really liked Newell, principally because Newell had always made such fun of him, overtly accusing the younger boy of being effeminate in his love for the theatre, and his hatred for blood sports.

  Now it was obvious, even to Oliver, why Newell had always been at such pains to ridicule and hurt him, going out of his way to be sarcastic. It had to be because Newell was trying to distract attention away from himself and his own inclinations.

  So it was that Oliver had sat down and written his second play, to clear his head, and at the same time to try to find an answer to the confusions brought about by family life. Forcing himself to write a play to make people laugh, he had also forced himself on to his artistic back foot, trying too hard, as people in a confused state of mind so often do, to be observant and acerbic. Worst of all, in his effort to turn away from everything he knew, Oliver had somehow forgotten to be funny, and that was what the audience coming back to see this second play wanted more than anything. They wanted Oliver Lowell to be funny again. They looked to be entertained by another Love To Popeye. They did not want him to force his newly confused vision on them. They wanted his lightness of touch, and he was unable to give it to them.

  To begin with, in the provinces, because it was the same team as Popeye, the audiences came in their droves, and the play was a sell-out, which might have been gratifying if they had liked it, but they did not like it at all. In fact, they hated it.

  Naturally word spread that The Magic of Love was a hopeless flop, and theatre managers everywhere panicked. It was not long before even the provincial critics could not find anything good to say about it. Unsurprisingly, after scenes of frightful tension both on stage and backstage, The Magic of Love closed, long before it came within even driving distance of London.