MI5 and Me

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘It is bad luck to pass on the stairs, because in the old days it meant you crossed swords and that led to duels,’ said Melville, standing aside for us to continue past him.

  Hal too stopped, but the expression on his face changed, as did that on Melville’s.

  ‘Hal! Oh, God, Hal,’ Melville said in a strangled tone. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Good God, Melville!’ said Hal. ‘I could ask you the same question. I haven’t seen you since – when was it last – Crewe station?’

  ‘It’s always Crewe Station,’ Melville said in a suddenly bitter tone. ‘Always.’

  ‘But before that it was Benningham Rep, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I am afraid it was.’

  They stared at each other, remembering.

  ‘Which room are you in?’

  ‘I have yet to discover, my dear Melville. All is yet to be revealed to me by this pretty young lady.’

  ‘He is in the room next to mine,’ I said, trying not to sound thrilled.

  Melville nodded briefly before continuing downstairs.

  ‘At least we are not on the same floor, Hal, that at least is a blessing.’

  Hal stood still and a glint came into his eye as he watched Melville progressing down the wide staircase to the hall.

  ‘No, I am on the floor above you, I understand. Higher up the billing, Melville. Higher up the billing.’

  I don’t suppose my father had ever imagined that Melville and Hal would have known each other in any particular way, and of course being of an essentially benign nature he would have been amazed to think that they were not happy in each other’s company. He would assume that all actors would like all other actors, rather like people in a regiment who had to get along together or else they couldn’t go about their business of defending the realm.

  ‘Your father is a very easy-going man – that is why he makes such a deadly enemy,’ my mother often said to me now I was working at MI5. ‘The communists have made an enemy of him by the way they behaved in Berlin after the war, not to mention Stalin before the war … and of course Trotsky was always such a pest.’ She looked vague. ‘So many of these left-wing actor types, they believe it all. They really believe everyone is born equal. As Melville said only yesterday, you would honestly have thought a few days’ rehearsal would have put any idea of equality to bed for good and all.’

  At that point I was happily unaware of how deep the feelings of antipathy ran between Melville and Hal, and perhaps they themselves were so shocked to discover they were sharing the same house that they were careful to avoid each other’s company, which given Melville’s West End commitments and Hal’s daytime rehearsals was not difficult.

  Obviously, having visited the house quite often now, Arabella knew not just about Melville, but about Hal, although she did not know for sure that my father had actually recruited them, but speculated about them being part of a grand MI5 plan.

  I kept to the cover already agreed between my father and myself, which was that my mother had decided to take in lodgers to help cover the cost of employing the Grahams. In fact, Arabella seemed more than happy to go along with this story as her own mother had lodgers although, from the sounds of them, not quite the same type as ours.

  So I was quite able to talk to Arabella about the lodgers, and she was all too eager to hear about them.

  Hal being in the next-door room was a real excitement to me, because he rehearsed his lines very, very loudly. It kept me awake.

  ‘Poor men remain poor, rich men become richer’ was one line I would never forget; another was, ‘Walk on, woman, walk on, the hill looks never so steep as when you stop’.

  Hal rehearsing his lines to himself like that went on keeping me awake until late at night, but since Commander Steerforth had little or no work for me – and this despite the office having been repainted and both of us spending a great deal of time rearranging the cabinets and the shelves several times – my being a bit tired at work did not seem to matter.

  However such was not the case with Melville. He came back late at night and he too was kept awake by the booming of Hal’s lines, and this would not do. He took to banging on the ceiling above his bed and shouting ‘Do belt up, Hal!’, which seemed only to make him boom louder. Happily my parents’ suite was on the other side of the house and they were left serenely undisturbed, until daytime dawned, and the telephone started ringing, in a way that upset my mother.

  ‘It is all very well your father going about saying what an asset Melville and Hal are going to be to his work, he does not have to deal with their agents ringing up all the time. I mean, yesterday Hal’s agent became a bit offhand because Mrs Graham did not immediately pass on a message about Denham Studios. She can’t be expected to act as his secretary, really she can’t.’ My mother shook her head. ‘I only hope your father is pursuing the right line in using actors for his work. For myself, I think they’re going to prove to be a marsh light, just leading him on, and he will end up in the swamp.’

  Before the threat of the marsh light leading the occupants of Dingley Dell on towards their squelchy doom could manifest itself, Sunday lunch came round again, as it is prone to do.

  As before, Sunday lunch opened with Melville, having been to church, seating himself at the piano and beginning to play and sing. My father leaned on it and happily joined in, all the while sounding more and more like a howling wolf.

  My mother sipped her sherry and read a book, wearing the expression of someone in a public library, who has to put up with noise but is hard put to look as if she is enjoying it.

  Melville and my father were in the middle of a particularly rousing drinking song, I happened to know it was one of my father’s favourites, when the door opened and Hal walked in. Naturally the happy pair around the piano did not stop singing, or – in my father’s case – howling, but merely carried on enjoying themselves.

  ‘Do help yourself to a drink, Hal,’ my mother called to him above the uproar. She indicated the Dingley Dell drinks cupboard whose doors, according to Mrs Graham, had been left open since the start of the last war.

  ‘Your father is the most generous man,’ she would say proudly. ‘Doesn’t matter who passes by, if they want a drink they can take one, help themselves to whatever they want. And the result is, of course, no one does.’

  Hal stood and surveyed the drinks, and then taking a large Waterford tumbler he poured himself a whisky so large that my mother put her sherry glass down and stood up and sat down again as if she had just heard the low moan of a doodlebug.

  ‘Gracious,’ she said, as Hal drank it down in what seemed like one. ‘You are thirsty.’ And then she added, over-brightly, as she sat down again: ‘How are rehearsals going, Hal?’

  ‘Dreadfully,’ he boomed, before walking over to the piano and starting to join in the drinking song.

  Of course my father loved it. I could see that, singing with his two actor-spooks around the piano, he could imagine he was not just at a musical, he was in one.

  Before we went in to lunch he insisted on Melville singing the best number from his show. This did not go down well with Hal, who went and stood by the window, making sure that my mother and I could see him as he quite obviously practised his lines despite the intrusion of the piano and the singing.

  Over lunch the small matter of their old days in repertory together came up. I say, a small matter. That is not right. It was quite obviously of huge concern to them, and the stories they told about it were hilarious: of the sea washing into dressing rooms, of leading ladies who pulled each other’s wigs off, of leading men whose tights ripped as they duelled, of scenery that went missing so that looking for ‘yonder window’ was impossible since yonder window had failed to appear. In fact, it seemed that scenery had a habit of disappearing never to be seen again, or else appearing in the wrong act, so hapless actors found themselves arriving out of fireplaces to play what should have been moving and dramatic scenes, only to be greeted with howls of laughte
r. One star actor was in the habit of pasting his lines on to prop trees, only to find them changed around by the stage hands because they hadn’t been paid.

  ‘I fail to see how this has anything to do with the fight against communism,’ I heard my mother grumbling to my father the following day, but since we were all invited to Hal’s first night, she was prepared to be mollified.

  ‘Break a leg, Hal,’ Melville called as his rival left that morning for the theatre.

  ‘I wish I could, dear boy, I wish I could. Dame Lil is such a pill, I wish I could break both my legs.’

  A West End opening night was always inclined to be glamorous, and even more so if it starred a famous name. Dame Lily Farjeon was extremely famous, Henry Flanagan a little less so. Nevertheless their joint names lit up Shaftesbury Avenue, and seeing them certainly made an impression on my parents and myself.

  ‘Hal said Dame Lily is so convinced her lettering’s smaller than his,’ my mother informed us, nodding to the sign, ‘she sent someone up a ladder yesterday with a tape measure.’

  ‘Looks all right to me,’ my father said, peering at it. ‘But I gather Dame Lily is a bit of a stickler.’

  ‘That’s not what they called women like her when I was growing up,’ my mother announced, walking ahead of us into the theatre.

  I had quite forgotten that, what with Hal rehearsing next-door far into the night, I knew most of his lines.

  My mother did not have that luxury, but she did have an opinion about what she was seeing, and shortly into the first act, what with Dame Lily in rags and one thing and another, suddenly opined: ‘Of course, this is all nonsense, you realise, don’t you?’

  Despite knowing parts of it so well, I could not but agree.

  ‘And, Lottie, do stop mouthing all the lines. It’s bad enough having to hear them spoken.’

  Of course I stopped, but not just to please my mother. I stopped because I realised that Hal had forgotten a sizeable chunk, but only I, and possibly Dame Lily Farjeon, knew it. Certainly he seemed completely out of sorts during the whole first act, so much so that some of the audience started to walk out in that really loud way people will do when they think their money has been wasted.

  ‘Our lodger seems to be a bit ill at ease,’ my father said over interval drinks.

  My mother stared at the programme.

  ‘Awful to have to play such a part – I mean, Common Man. Who in their right mind would want a part like that? And why is Dame Lily always walking up a hill in those dreadful clothes? Surely Common Man should stop standing around and help her with whatever she has on her back?’

  My mother flicked through the rest of the programme as if trying to find out if there were more actors about to come on in the second act, only to find advertisements for hand cream and Greek restaurants.

  ‘I gather the thing on her back is a metaphor,’ my father offered, looking around for an ashtray.

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it is obviously as heavy as the play. Really, you would have thought that Dame Lily could have found something else to be in.’

  ‘Hal told me she wanted a change of direction, something to get her teeth into. She is fed up with teacups and drawing-room windows and plays that require her to look beautiful.’

  ‘She must be pleased then, she looks dreadful. Actresses should stick to what they do best. Who dragged this play up for her?’

  ‘It came from Berlin.’

  ‘As if we haven’t had enough trouble out of there without them sending us their awful plays! And why is Hal coughing so much? Shouldn’t he take something for that?’

  ‘That’s in the play, he is a diseased capitalist,’ I said, full of self-importance.

  My mother ignored this. ‘I thought you said this play was sure to make waves,’ she went on, looking accusingly at my father, as if it was his fault that our evening was proving to be so boring. ‘From what we have seen so far, it will have a hard job making a ripple.’

  My father nodded. I could tell that he appreciated my mother’s point, but I could see something else too. It was the look that his eyes always took on when he knew he had an ace up his sleeve.

  The second act remained as turgid as the first with Common Man taunting Poor Woman, and finally taking her burden from her back, which for some reason made her not grateful but very upset. Dame Lily cried very well – well, actually she didn’t cry, she screamed that she wanted her burden returned to her, but to no avail. Common Man went off with it and became a Rich Capitalist, and so Poor Woman was left to trudge uphill once more, to the accompaniment of some terrible music.

  The applause at the end was tepid – what my mother called ‘bathwater after the war’; and although we went backstage afterwards, we knew we should only stay for a minute or two because Hal said he was intent on getting drunk, and my mother said we really shouldn’t stand in his way.

  The notices the next morning were understandably terrible. What a waste of talents such as Dame Lily Farjeon and Henry Flanagan. One critic even wondered whether, since so much had gone wrong, the play would go down in the annals of Famous Flop First Nights.

  Hal being in a flop was sad for him, but at least it meant I could enjoy a good night’s sleep. Of course once the play closed, which it did within a matter of days, Hal did nothing but sleep, because there was nothing else for him to do. This did not go down well with Mrs Graham.

  ‘I’m not used to making beds at four in the afternoon,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s just not good housekeeping.’

  I could see her point, but I felt sorry for Hal. Even if he had always known he was touring in a turkey, as he had called it, it did not mean that the blow was easier to bear.

  Melville was wise about it.

  ‘He had to do it on account of Dame Lily. She gets them in, but from what I have heard, not even she could fill in that piece,’ he said, before letting his hands take charge and playing some commanding opening chords. In fact so commanding were they that, on hearing them, Mrs Graham rushed into the drawing room and announced that the curtain was rising on Sunday lunch in fifteen minutes.

  And indeed it was. Over lunch we all managed to cheer Hal up, and he, resuming his role as actor-laddie, rose to the occasion.

  ‘My agent told me that everyone is blaming Dame Lily,’ he boomed, ‘for choosing such a load of left-wing tripe. He said it should have closed after Brighton.’

  At that of course I pricked up my ears. I might not have worked at MI5 for very long but I knew my duty and, at the words ‘left-wing tripe’, alarm bells rang in my head.

  ‘So would you say Hal’s play was very left-wing?’ I asked my father, all innocence, a few days later.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, imperturbably. ‘And it’s never a good idea really to put any kind of politics into a play. Just write the story and the politics will take care of themselves.’ He paused. ‘Of course, poor Hal is feeling it a bit now, but he’s got a good part coming up at Denham Studios with a friend of mine. A film producer, nice chap – drinks a bit, but then don’t they all? He’s come to the rescue and offered something to Hal that will be just the ticket.’

  I was too curious to leave it at that, and besides it was a fact that when my father was in a good mood, that was the time to take ruthless advantage of him.

  At the moment he was staring out of the drawing-room window at nothing in particular, which was a habit of his when he was feeling at ease with the world.

  ‘Well, that is good,’ I agreed, and although I could see he was still in a beneficent mood, I decided not to push my luck, and turned to go. Perhaps he sensed that I would have liked to know more because he stopped me by continuing to speak.

  ‘This other chap, a director, likes to be helpful to the Office. As a matter of fact, it was he who managed to talk Dame Lily Farjeon into doing the play … told her it was going to be the challenge of her career, change her category, take London by storm. She fell for it, of course.’

  ‘Yes, she did, poor lady,’ I agreed.


  My father was now moving towards his drink cupboard, preparing for what he always called ‘an opener’. He poured himself a Scotch and gave me a glass of wine, which he kept especially for Arabella and myself, ‘young wine for the young’ he called it.

  ‘Of course, that is not the end of the story,’ he went on, after he had settled back in his favourite chair, and once more that familiar look came into his eyes. I stared at him, knowing he was about to take the ace from his sleeve.

  After a long pause, during which he lit a cigarette and exhaled appreciatively, he continued.

  ‘Once our contact had talked her into doing the part, his theatre management was able to raise the money to back the play; because of her name, the fact that, like Vivien Leigh, dear Dame Lily always fills, and because of the nature of the play – the Trotskyists put rather a large amount of party funds in it, and now of course they’ve lost the lot.’ He ran a finger across his upper lip where I imagined he might once have sported a moustache. ‘Bit of a pity for them, of course, but there you are. All’s fair, as they say.’

  Now I knew just why I had seen that particular expression in my father’s eyes on the play’s opening night. It was almost as contented as when he was with Melville, playing and singing at the drawing-room piano – almost, but not quite.

  MATER HARI

  I had given up learning Latin after my first lesson, but even I knew that Mater meant Mother in Latin. For some reason I couldn’t be bothered to find out from Arabella why she so often referred to her mother in that way.

  ‘Careful where you go – new gent in Mater’s life,’ she said shortly after she asked me up to her mother’s flat for a coffee one Saturday. She nodded towards what I realised must be the main bedroom, and we both walked quickly past and into the large kitchen, which was furnished by racks of wine and a maid in a navy blue uniform.

  ‘We want a coffee, please, Maria Constanza,’ Arabella told her.

  While the maid made the coffee I looked around in some amazement for not only was the kitchen fully stocked with wine, it was also host to a great many bottles of vodka; and when the maid opened the fridge door, I saw that inside its impressive interior was stacked jars of caviar, their gleaming contents only waiting, I imagined, to be enjoyed with hot toast and butter.