Needless to say, Roddy loathed Charlie, and one afternoon the animal started howling at a particularly tense moment in rehearsals. Roddy, who was trying to remember lines, lost his temper completely, rushed at Charlie and gave him the most almighty kick. Charlie let out an awful screech and Yolande, who was standing nearby, ran to pick him up. She was the only one of us who had shown any sort of a soft spot for Charlie, the Critic. She cuddled the wretched old beast in her arms and absolutely tore a strip off Roddy for what he had done. Roddy stared at her in amazement. He said nothing, and I could see his mind working. Once I saw his mouth twitch into a smile, but he controlled himself. Having heard her out in silence he simply and graciously apologised to her. He said that what he had done was ‘unpardonable’. Yolande released Charlie, who had been clawing and struggling in her arms in the most ungrateful way. He dashed off and was never seen again.
That incident marked a turning point in relations between Roddy and Yolande. Her acting became bolder and more confident; Roddy’s criticisms became more muted. They ceased to be boss and junior employee and became colleagues. It was a great relief all round.
I don’t exactly know when their affair started, but I think it was fairly early on in the tour, and I suspect it was our second week which was the Theatre Royal, Newcastle. Do you know it? Lovely old theatre.
On the Tuesday morning Yolande and I happened to meet Roddy at the stage door. We had just been in to see if there was any mail for us and, as it was a fine April day, we were standing outside talking about nothing in particular when Roddy appeared. I could see he was in one of his restless moods, and on the spur of the moment he proposed to take us out on a jaunt. He was going to show us Hadrian’s Wall, an idea which seemed to thrill Yolande, me less so. I’d been. However, I went, because it was clear from Roddy’s look that he wanted me there. I wasn’t quite sure why, but, you know, Roddy was a compulsive performer and liked an audience for practically everything he did, even seduction.
We drove out of Newcastle and followed the wall. It was one of those soft, mild days of spring, full of haze and new bird song when the pale green of the hills blended with the grey ribs and ridges of Roman wall and fortress. Yolande listened to Roddy with the rapt wonder of a schoolgirl as he explained the wall to her. We got out at Housesteads, the best preserved fort on the wall, and wandered about, almost the only people there. At one point Yolande asked about Hadrian himself: what sort of man was he? Roddy who, outside military history and dates was less well informed, hesitated. So I gave them an account of the only thing I knew about Hadrian, his passion for the glamorous youth Antinous whose mysterious death blighted the Emperor’s later years. Yolande was puzzled.
‘I didn’t know they had gays in those days,’ she said. Roddy, who was standing behind her, looked at me and winked. I ignored him and went into some rubbish about the Greeks and Plato and Socrates. For the rest of the time we were out I felt very uneasy. Roddy was flirting with Yolande and completely ignoring me, while she was laughing at everything he said in that way people do when they meet Royalty, or fall in love.
He drove us back to the theatre. At the stage door I noticed that the theatre cat, a black, green-eyed streak of feline cunning, had stretched out its lean body on the door step to catch the weak Newcastle sun. When he saw it, Roddy did a thing I’d never seen him do before. He crouched down and tentatively tickled the animal’s stomach.
‘Hello, puss-cat,’ he said with a rather unconvincing show of bonhomie. The cat ignored him, and Roddy looked up at Yolande.
He said: ‘I wonder, old thing. I’m going back to my hotel. I’ve got to look over that bit in the third act where I got in such a tangle last night. Remember? You wouldn’t be an absolute brick and come back with me for a cuppa and test me on my lines, would you?’
There was a little pause, just long enough for it to be made obvious that she knew what he meant and he knew that she knew, and, well, you know the rest. I thought for a moment she was going to turn him down rather huffily, but she didn’t; she simply said, ‘Okay,’ and off they went.
I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of things, because after that one would often see them together in the wings or in the dressing room corridors, just talking. They weren’t touching, or anything obvious like that, and I’m sure they thought they were being incredibly discreet, but very soon the rumours were flying around. You know how these things are picked up amazingly quickly by a company on tour with nothing much to do except gossip about each other.
One thing that one of the other actresses in the company said stuck in my mind. She said: ‘I wonder what would happen if Bel knew.’ Bel of course was Belinda Courteney. Yes, the Belinda Courteney. Yes, she was one of Roddy’s girls at one time, but don’t tell her I told you. I’m up for an interview for the National next week, and you know how her writ runs there. As a matter of fact I thought the Bel Courteney affair was over, but apparently others knew better.
Yolande occasionally confided in me. I suppose I was a safe pair of hands, and she knew I knew, so to speak. I tried to sound kindly and wise: you know how one slips into these roles, especially if one is an actor. I was dear old Uncle Godfrey to her, and, I’m afraid, to me too in those moments. Yolande was a sweet thing, but such a child. She had become obsessed by Roddy, and used to ask me about every detail of his career, the books he liked, the food he preferred, everything. I honestly think she thought he was going to leave Lady Margery for her. She said: ‘You know he hasn’t slept with her for eight years.’ I refrained from saying that that was what he told all the girls, because it was only a guess, but perhaps I should have done.
Well, the tour wound up fairly successfully in October at the Theatre Royal, Richmond, traditionally one of those ‘last date before the West End’ venues, but it was not to be. There had been talk of a West End theatre several times in the tour, but it came to nothing. With such a huge cast we needed a thousand-seater plus just to break even, and all the big houses were stubbornly full of American musicals that year.
So the company disbanded, but Yolande and I kept in touch, partly because I sensed she needed someone to talk to about Roddy. Most of her other friends wouldn’t have understood. They were non-theatrical and, frankly, just a bit odd. They tended to call themselves ‘aromatherapists’, ‘Feng Shui consultants’, ‘musicians’, ‘spiritual healers’: all those euphemisms by which the barely employable salve the wound of their uselessness. Forgive me, my prejudice is showing; it must be the Bell’s.
She had a little flat above a patisserie in the St John’s Wood High Street. She’d ask me round at odd times of the day for a cup of herb tea and, if I was lucky, a slice of carrot cake, but the subject of conversation was always the same: Roddy. They were still seeing each other, and he used occasionally to take her away for weekends in Paris or Torquay — his boat was down at Torquay, you see — but after one or two visits he wouldn’t come to her flat any more. The excuse he gave was that he was allergic to her cat, and one can’t altogether blame him. I’m not myself averse to cats, but this one of Yolande’s, a rescued stray, was not a notably attractive specimen. It was an elderly neutered tom, brindled, with a sagging belly and a passion for tinned sardines. Yolande, you see, was one of those people who are instantly drawn to anything even more defenceless than themselves.
Rather unwisely, I think, Yolande called the cat Roddy. I don’t know whether she actually addressed the cat as such in the other Roddy’s presence, but it would explain his allergy if she had.
I was managing to keep myself alive by the odd voice-over, and a beer commercial, but by the end of November Yolande was beginning to be rather uncomfortably out of work. She had some sort of part-time employment at a nearby book shop which didn’t bring in much, but it wasn’t just the money. Acting is a drug: once you become addicted, you need a regular fix. Yolande told me that Roddy had offered to ‘lend’ her some money which she had indignantly refused, and he was beginning to see less of her. In December he went a
way for some filming in Spain; then just before Christmas something happened which lifted her out of the gloom she was falling into. She had a Christmas Card from Roddy, and there was a message in it.
Excitedly she asked me round for herb tea to see the card. She wouldn’t say anything more on the phone, so I came. I had barely taken a sip of Dandelion and Camomile — a filthy concoction, take my word, don’t go near the stuff — before she had thrust the Actor’s Benevolent Fund card into my hand. Inside it read as follows:
‘Darling Puss-Cat,
‘Filming here nearly over. Shan’t be sorry. Ghastly Spanish food swimming in oil. Fell off a horse yesterday in full armour. No joke. Puss-Cat, I’m taking out a Spring Tour of King Lear next year and I’ve done a deal which guarantees us a West End Theatre. The long and the short of it is I want you to be my Cordelia. What say you?
Your ever loving,
Roddy
I have to confess that my first reaction was a typical actor’s one: jealousy. He was taking out a tour of King Lear and there were plenty of parts for me — Kent, perhaps even Gloucester — why hadn’t Roddy been in touch about it? But this was no time to feel hurt; Yolande was asking me what she should do. I said it was obvious. She should get her agent to contact the Navigator Productions office and accept the offer. Yolande said she had already done that.
Then there was a long laborious discussion in which she went on about her utter inadequacy for the role — she had never done Shakespeare professionally — and I, as I was expected to do, reassured her that she would make a splendid Cordelia. I thought it might be tactless to remark that one of her main qualifications for the part was the fact that she was a light girl, only just over seven stone. The elderly actor playing Lear, you see, must carry Cordelia on stage at the end of the play, so weight is a consideration, especially in a long run, and it was one of which I am sure Roddy had been mindful.
Well, that seemed to be that. I didn’t hear much from Yolande till after Christmas. Then she began to be a bit worried because Roddy had not been in touch with her. This was the arrangement, you see. She was not allowed to ring him in case Lady Margery answered the phone: he would always call her. More worrying perhaps than that, there had been no response from the Navigator Productions office about her acceptance of Cordelia. This puzzled me, because by this time my agent had been notified that Roddy was ‘interested’ in me for the part of Kent.
Early in January Roddy asked me over to the Navigator Offices just off the Charing Cross Road to ‘talk about Kent’. I knew this amounted to a firm offer, so I went eagerly and found him welcoming and friendly as always, but, I thought, a little distracted. We discussed the production and my part, which he described as ‘hellish important’ and ‘absolutely key.’ We also discussed the salary he was offering. He apologised profusely that it couldn’t be higher; in fact, he seemed so distressed about it that in the end I began to feel guilty, as if I had gone in asking for more money than he could afford which, of course, I hadn’t. In the end, to relieve the tension, I said:
‘I gather Yolande is going to be your Cordelia.’
Roddy’s reaction was most unexpected. He looked at me with a shocked, almost fearful, expression, as if something poisonous had just bitten him.
‘What the hell are you on about, Godders?’ he said.
Now, I didn’t want to admit that I’d read a private Christmas card, so I was a bit vague at first, but Roddy simply didn’t understand. In the end I had to tell him explicitly that she had shown me the message from him. Even then, it was quite some time before he reacted. Then it was as if a flash from a bolt of lightning had suddenly bleached his face.
Roddy said: ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my Christ! Oh, my golly gosh!’ Then, after a long pause, he said in a quiet, thoughtful sort of a way: ‘Oh, fuck!’
I waited patiently for the explanation. At last he sighed, as if these things had been sent to try him and he told me:
‘I wrote all my bloody Christmas cards in Spain. I thought it would be something to do. You know the waiting around that goes on, especially when you’re filming one of these ghastly Hollywood Epics. I can remember writing all the cards, then I got a tummy bug from some fearful Spanish muck they served us. Well, the doc, under instructions from the director, of course, just drugged me up to the eyeballs so I could get onto that bloody horse again. It was while I was under the influence that I did the envelopes for the cards. I do vaguely remember doing Bel Courteney’s at the same time as Yolande’s——’
I got his drift. ‘You mean the offer of Cordelia was meant for Belinda Courteney? You put the card in the wrong envelope?’
‘Yes. Dammit! Yes! I’ve been wondering why Bel hadn’t responded. In fact . . . Oh, buggeration and hell!’
He seemed even more upset than before, and I asked him what was the matter. At last I got it out of him that the card he had intended for Yolande contained a suggestion, couched in the gentlest possible terms, that perhaps in future they might be seeing rather less of each other than before.
I said: ‘You mean, you might have sent the brush off for Yolande to Belinda by mistake as well?’ Roddy started rubbing his face with his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at me. By this time, I was almost as upset as he was. I said: ‘But you called her puss-cat.’
‘Who?’
‘Yolande — I mean Belinda.’
‘Yes. Yes! They’re all called puss-cat.’ He seemed very irritated that I had brought the matter up. Then he became all abject and apologetic, which was almost worse. He said: ‘Look, Godfrey, dear old thing, would you do me the most enormous favour? Would you try to break all this to Yolande? And do it gently, won’t you, dear old boy. I know you will. You’re such a brick. The fact is, I just can’t face it at the moment. I’m up to here with Lear, as you can imagine, and I’ve got to try and sort things out with Belinda.’
I said: ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to tackle her as well?’
Roddy didn’t react; he just shook his head solemnly. ‘No thanks. That’s awfully decent, but I have to do that myself.’ My attempts at irony have always fallen on deaf ears. Not so much esprit de l’escalier as esprit de corpse, eh? Oh, never mind. So I agreed to see Yolande for him. Of course I agreed. You can’t just fall out of love with someone after forty years. At least, I can’t.
I thought of telling Yolande by phone, or even a letter, but in the end I decided to go to see her: it seemed the only decent thing to do. Well, we got sat down with the herb tea and everything, and the cat Roddy purring on her lap, and I began to explain. It was horrible because she found it so hard to take it in. I had to say everything twice. She didn’t rage, or throw things, or spit with hatred or anything — I would have preferred that — she just listened with a baffled expression on her face. There were no sobs, but her eyes were wet with tears. She kept saying: ‘But why? Does he hate me or something?’ And I said ‘No,’ very loudly and firmly, because I was sure he didn’t. Then she asked me to explain about the card yet again, so I did.
She nodded a few times before she said, ‘So he doesn’t want me to be his Cordelia?’
I shook my head. There was a bit of a pause; then she came out with something which jolly nearly broke me up. She said: ‘I’d started learning the lines.’
Oh, God! You wouldn’t understand, would you? You’re not an actor.
Well, we began work on Lear and I rather lost touch with Yolande. Rehearsals were engrossing and I had the feeling she would not want to hear about them. Incidentally, Belinda Courteney did not play Cordelia — it was the year of her groundbreaking Hedda Gabler at the National — and the girl who did was no better and no worse than Yolande might have been. Roddy was on top form as Lear, and I think everyone who saw him agrees that he gave the performance of his life. The rest of the cast was good, the set was functional and, though the costumes belonged to the then fashionable ‘Ruritanian Stalinist’ school, they did at least fit. We opened fairly triumphantly in, of all places, Blackpool.
It was one of Yolande’s odd friends — the aromatherapist, I think — and how she had managed to track me down to the Theatre Royal Cardiff, I do not know. She told me that the previous day the couple in the flat above Yolande’s had heard this howling and scratching on the door of Yolande’s flat, obviously the wretched cat Roddy in some distress. They tried calling Yolande but got no reply. To cut a long story short, the police were summoned, and when they broke down the door they found Yolande lying on the bed, dead. She’d taken enough barbiturates to kill a horse. Roddy the cat had gone frantic with hunger and everything and the place stank of his poo, but he hadn’t touched Yolande’s body.
I went through the performance that night in a daze, wondering when and how I should tell Roddy. In the end I funked it altogether. The following evening I was standing in the wings waiting to go on and begin the play when I became aware of Roddy lurking behind me.
He said: ‘You’ve heard about Yolande?’ I nodded. He said: ‘I’ve been rather knocked endways by it all. The Company Office rang and told me this afternoon. Someone there had seen a paragraph in the Evening Standard. I can’t understand it, can you?’
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 17