What is odd here is that although, we talk about all kinds of things that one would not dream of mentioning at home (this is when we aren’t talking shop which, I must admit, is nearly all the time), there are things that don’t get talked about at all. We don’t talk about the war, for instance. Several people here are pacifists, and Chris is a member of the PPU. We don’t have newspapers, and although Chris has a wireless, he uses it mainly for things like ITMA, which is a frightfully good programme, have you heard it? And Lilli – alias Mrs Noel Carstairs, also known as ‘Matron’ – listens to people singing sometimes. But we also never talk about our families particularly our parents. Nobody talks about their homes at all, or much about what they did before they came here. On the other hand, we had a very interesting discussion about lesbians last week, but nobody present had ever been one, and only one person knew one, so I didn’t learn much. People being virgins is rather frowned upon – I think – at least it is by the oldest girl here who is called Ernestine and is supposed to be twenty-five, but she looks miles older. I am learning a lot about life as well as acting. A very interesting actor here, called Jay Coren, is amazed at how little I’ve read, and he gave me a novel by Ernest Hemingway who he says is the greatest novelist in the world. It is called A Farewell to Arms and is nearly all about sex – but the people are in love – and she has a baby and she dies. You must read it. Something amazing. Chris has hired the most wonderful costumes for us for the Shakespeare, etc. I have the actual dress that Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies wore for Richard of Bordeaux when she played with Gielgud! It is yellow with a marvellous headdress. And for Katherina I have a terrific red velvet dress embroidered with pearls. It is awfully hot though and it smells rather. We get free seats for the cinema which fortunately is almost next to the theatre so one can nip in and see a bit of film when not wanted for rehearsals. I had to go to The Private Lives of Henry VIII nine times to see all of the film. But rather grand, don’t you think?
Lilli gives us voice lessons: we each get two a week. Also we spend quite a lot of time cueing each other. The days go very fast, and our first night is next week! I do so wish you could come to it. But think of me at eight o’clock next Friday: we start with The Shrew. Poor Roy has awful boils on his neck, and when he tried on his ruff it made them much worse …
She thought for a bit. It was much easier to write to Stella than to her mother, but she’d used up all her news. Oh!
You needn’t worry about me and Michael Hadleigh. He hasn’t written, so I should think he’s forgotten all about me.
And the very next day she got a letter from him forwarded from home. She knew it must be he, because the envelope had ‘Received from HM Ships’ where a stamp would have been. She took it into the broken-down old greenhouse in the back garden of Stow House so that she could read it in comfortable privacy.
Darling Louise,
I had quite decided not to write to you because I was afraid you might not want me to, but I couldn’t go through with it. But if you don’t want me to write, then just drop me a line and say so, but I hope you won’t feel that. It’s lateish at night and I am Officer of the Day and I keep getting interrupted to go ‘rounds’ and do various other routine jobs, and as I’m the only officer in the ship at the moment I don’t get much peace.
This is an awfully difficult letter to write. Inhibitions … the censor, and also because it is the first letter I’ve written to you. But all these weeks when we’ve been at sea, I’ve kept seeing you sitting with such a beautiful dignity in the night club when the bomb fell – and you so young! I think I am a little afraid of your youth, as well. Oh, Louise, whatever you do, don’t take me seriously, because it would need only that to make me take myself seriously, and that would be laughable.
But we did have fun that weekend, didn’t we? You were marvellous in the charades – Mummy was most impressed. Those drawings I did of you don’t do you justice. But I’ve got one with me now, and it does at least serve to remind me of small, important things, like the way your mouth turns up at the corners, and the way your eyebrows tilt suddenly in the middle – not triangular, but interestingly angled – no, that’s wrong, I mean that they are more like gentle little pitched roofs than the usual curve.
I wonder whether your repertory company is going to happen. Whether it does or not, I have no doubt that you will be a tremendous actress. And if you refuse to know me, in later years, I shall haunt the West End theatre where you will be playing the lead, and tell people that I knew you when you were young … Darling Louise, I’ve got to go and sort out a mooring line that seems to have come adrift. Goodnight.
Yours ever, Mike
She read it very quickly – gulped it – and then again very slowly. My first love letter, she thought, and then wondered if indeed it could be said to be that. She examined it again, trying to be calm. He said ‘Darling Louise’ but, then, people here called each other darling all the time, even when they were saying quite catty things – it didn’t mean a thing. But then the bit about not taking him seriously – that might be because he didn’t want her to take him seriously – but the bits about her face, her beautiful dignity and her mouth and eyebrows … Well, you could like things about a person without being in love with them, and he was terrifically sophisticated and old and must have met hundreds of girls. He was flattering her but nobody else had ever done that. One had to admit that it was exciting: she tried to say this aloud and very calmly, but her hand, holding the letter, was trembling. It was rather – adult (a word much in use at Stow House) to get a letter like that. She read it carefully once more, and then folded it up and returned it to its envelope. She would keep it in her bag in case she wanted to read it again.
The dress rehearsal on Thursday went on from ten in the morning until half past eleven in the evening. This was partly because everything had to be done twice, so that all the girls went through it. Chris sent some of them to get fish and chips for everybody in the evening, and Lilli made quarts of tea in one of the dressing rooms. Louise felt a complete flop. She did not actually forget her lines, but was flat, whereas Roy preserved a uniform, it seemed to her, very professional standard. Chris, and a lady who had mysteriously appeared a few days previously, sat in the stalls, and she took his notes on each scene. The notes devastated her. ‘You’re supposed to be sexually attracted to the man – right from the start,’ he stormed, ‘and you might as well be talking to the postman who’d delivered your letters late. Come on, girl, you know what I’m talking about.’ The trouble was that she didn’t, really. She had not the least idea how one behaved towards a stranger to whom one was sexually attracted, but she would have died rather than admit that. She smiled with complicit weakness, and, self-conscious and wooden, went through it all again. After it, he gave her the practical notes: when she was moving late on lines, when she had lost pace on the first waspish exchange by not picking up her cues fast enough, the point at which she upstaged Roy during a speech, ‘You can’t expect the attention of the audience to be on you all the time,’ and so on. Afterwards in the dressing room, as she was getting out of the red velvet dress, she started crying, and people were very nice to her: Lilli said she must not spoil her make-up, and the other Katherina, Jane Mayhew, fetched her yet another cup of tea, before she climbed into the dress to do her scene. Then she was alone for a few minutes. She mopped her eyes carefully, and stared into the brilliantly lit mirror. Perhaps I’m no good after all, she thought. One of the things Chris had said to her was that she moved clumsily: what Mummy kept saying. Of course it was true. Not much ‘beautiful dignity’ about her now! she thought, looking at her smudged eyes and the tracks her tears had made in carefully applied five and nine. Her black tin box of make-up – her most treasured possession – sat before her, hardly used. It looked far too new. Some of the others had deliberately made theirs look dirty and much used, but she had thought this cheating: this would be her precious box all of her life and she wanted its dilapidation to be genuine.
; There was a knock on the door: it was Jay, with a packet of cigarettes.
‘He did put you through it,’ he said, seating himself on the dressing-table beside her. ‘That must mean he thinks you’re good.’
‘What on earth makes you say that?’
‘I’ve noticed. With some people, he just tells them when they’ve got a line wrong – the words, I mean – and then tells them it was jolly good.’
‘Perhaps they were.’
‘Nope.’
‘Perhaps he thought they were.’
He shook his head. ‘He’s a bloody fool in many ways, but he doesn’t get that sort of thing wrong. What do you think of his girlfriend?’
‘Is she?’
‘You bet. She’s living in Exford. For the moment. My bet is that she’ll move in quite soon. Under some pretext like helping the poor benighted Poppy.’ He looked at her. ‘Are you cold? You’re shivering.’ Suddenly he leaned forward, and put his hand under the old silky kimono her mother had let her have, felt for and found her breast. ‘Just as big as my hand,’ he said with surprising gentleness. When he kissed her mouth, a lock of his yellow hair fell forward and tickled her neck.
‘There.’ He straightened up; he was smiling at her in a watchful sort of way. ‘I rather go for you,’ he said. ‘Now I must don my fucking white tights.’
He had left the cigarettes. On the packet, he had written, ‘For Anne of Bohemia’ and in brackets underneath ‘(Mrs Queenie Plantagenet)’.
She felt suddenly much better. Then Lilli came back and showed her how to use her brand new hot black on her eyelashes.
When she went out into the auditorium to watch Jane and Roy do the Shrew scene, she looked covertly at Chris’s girlfriend. She was quite old, with long dark hair cut in a fringe and a muffler round her neck. In the dark, that was all she could notice. She turned her attention to the acting. Jane was small and red-haired with a surprisingly powerful voice and an air of great assurance. The unhappiness that Louise felt lay beneath Katherina’s shrewishness was not apparent. She was almost pretending to be bad-tempered and she was making up to Roy like anything. Roy seemed to her to give exactly the same performance. It had not shifted at all since the read-through. She felt that there must be something wrong in this, but could not think what. She noticed at the end that Chris gave Jane only perfunctory notes, and none to Roy at all, and wondered whether Jay had been right. He seemed much older than the others and she decided that she liked older men. I can say that now, she thought, because I know two of them. His kissing her, his hand on her breast, had seemed at the time to happen so fleetingly that it had felt unreal: there had been no warning of it and no conclusion, but now it touched her – there was something light and daring but unmomentous about it that was entirely new to her.
She came to from this reverie to hear Chris announcing a ten-minute break before they started on Macbeth.
‘Griselda has been sick,’ someone said as she went back to the dressing room to find the poor girl hunched over a bucket, her face, under her pallid Lady Macbeth make-up, the colour of a duck’s egg. ‘I can’t remember my lines!’ she moaned. ‘I start, and then I just peter out. Oh, God! It’s no good. I can’t go on. Helen will have to do it instead.’
In the end they sent for Chris who marched in saying, ‘So you’ve been throwing up, have you? That’s a good thing. You’ve sicked up your nerves, and now you’ll be ready to go. Just say your opening lines to me and then we’ll carry on.’ He was squatting in front of her, and now took both her hands. ‘Now. Screw your courage to the sticking point, girl, and you’ll not fail.’
She stared at him, and then started falteringly, ‘“They met me in the day of my success—”’
‘You see?’ he interrupted her. ‘You know it. I know you know it, and you know you know it. You can take the letter quite slowly – I don’t suppose Macbeth’s handwriting was all that good—’
She was smiling at him now. He rose to his feet, still holding one of her hands, and led her out of the dressing room.
‘I thought you were marvellous!’ Louise exclaimed later as they sat with a large carton of Trex between them carefully smoothing it over their unnatural complexions. (It was the smart thing to use Trex: somebody had been round to rather a well-known actress’s dressing room in a London theatre and that was what she had been using, so they looked down on the poor novices who painstakingly bought cold cream.)
‘So were you. Especially Anne. You play far better with Jay than Helen did.’
‘What do you think of Jay?’ Louise asked very casually.
‘Well, he’s very intelligent and all that, but he’s got a rather cruel mouth, don’t you think?’
Privately, Louise thought that this sounded a bit silly: what on earth was a cruel mouth? What was different about one from a kind mouth? But Griselda went on: ‘You know. It’s sort of rather large, and curving, but hard. And he’s got cold eyes as well. I don’t think I’d trust him.’
There she went again. ‘Cold eyes’. Eyes, as they had been told, could change utterly, depending upon what the person was feeling. In the theatre, your eyes were your most important feature. Hers were sore now from her efforts to remove the hot black sticking in blobs to her eyelashes. She would have to ask Lilli about how to get it off.
‘He’s very good as Richard,’ Griselda said. ‘And he tells wonderful stories. God, I’m hungry! I could eat absolutely anything!’
‘Will there be anything when we get back?’
‘I don’t know.’
They had to share three cabs home because it was so late. Poppy had left two plates of thick sandwiches filled with a choice of cheese and bloater paste, but Tsar Alexander had interfered with the latter and nobody wanted the stodgy remnants he had left.
‘Annie should have taken him up to bed,’ Chris said: he was ravenous.
‘She did, but I’m afraid he came down again. It’s my fault, I should have left them in the larder, but I was afraid you might be even later and I’d be in bed and you wouldn’t see them or know they were there.’
‘You could have left a note, Poppy. Never mind, girl. No tears, please – I’ve had enough of emotion for the day. Bring me up a little something in bed, there’s an angel.’
In the end, most of them decided that they were more exhausted than hungry and dispersed, leaving Poppy trailing round the kitchen with a tin of corned beef and some water biscuits. ‘I can’t use the bread or there won’t be enough for breakfast.’ She looked as tired as they did.
‘She doesn’t have a very nice life,’ Louise said while they were undressing quickly because of the cold.
‘No, and it’s rather unfair because she wants to be an actress too.’
‘Does she really? She doesn’t look as though she could act.’
‘Well, it’s an acting family. Her mother was apparently awfully good.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She died in a car accident some time ago. Not sure when. Lilli told me when she gave me a manicure.’ Griselda was trying not to bite her nails because Lilli, who was shocked by this, had said that she must learn to care for them.
‘Perhaps I ought to help her. I’ve been taught cooking.’
‘I shouldn’t, if I was you. If you let them know you can, Chris’ll have you doing it all the time.’
This prospect was so awful, that Louise resolved on selfish silence.
The day of the first night everybody slept late and they had an indeterminate meal in the middle of the day. In the afternoon, Louise got back into bed – the warmest place – and settled down to write her letter to Michael.
‘Dear Mike – Darling Mike – dear Mike,’ she began, and then stopped. ‘Dear Mike’ looked cold, but on the other hand ‘Darling Mike’ looked copy-cattish, for certainly she would never have dreamed of calling him darling at all if he had not done so first. In the end, she took a fresh piece of paper and left that part of it blank to be put in at the end when she could see what sort of
letter it turned out to be. ‘Thank you for your letter. It was sent on from home because the repertory company has happened, in fact tonight is our first First Night and we are all very nervous. We are doing scenes from Shakespeare and two scenes from a play by Gordon Daviot who is actually a woman.’ She went on in that vein, telling him about the dress rehearsal and how bad she felt she’d been, but ending ‘Anyway, if one has wanted to do something all one’s life and now at long last is doing it what more can one want? We live in a rather cold, bare house with not much to eat, but none of us minds because everybody is totally dedicated to their art and if you are that, material things are of no account, don’t you think?’ (She thought that bit was rather good, but was afraid that he might find all the theatre part a bit dull.) ‘Yes, it was fun at the weekend. I loved our ride and the charades and nobody has ever drawn me before. And your mother was very kind,’ she wrote carefully, because she couldn’t think of anything else to call her. ‘I did write her a Collins – that’s what we call thank you letters for visits in our family because of Mr Collins.’ Then she wondered if he had read Pride and Prejudice and added ‘Austen’ in brackets.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 85