by David Rain
* * *
School years in Australia, where summer comes at Christmas, run to a different schedule from those in England. Roger, Quentin Phelps decided, must cut short his matriculation year. What could he learn in Australia when England beckoned? He would sail in August.
The months of waiting were the headiest of his life. He was the Laurence Olivier of Crater Lakes. But how to celebrate him before he went away? At school, his name was placed on the honour roll, months before it otherwise would have been: ‘1948 – R. DANSIE’, the letters picked out in glittering gold. What other triumph remained to this darling of the gods? Only one thing would suffice: a last exhibition of Roger’s talents.
Quentin Phelps planned it all. The Players (had they not, collectively, been blessed by Olivier?) must mount their most ambitious production yet. What play? No mere spectacle! No matinee-idol flim-flam! Let Roger show the gravitas of a great classical actor, the genius that had left Sir Larry awed and envious. What role better, Phelps decided, than Dr Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People? Never mind that the play was gloomy! The after-show party would bring joy enough. The crowds that flocked to the King Edward VII Theatre that night were every bit as enthusiastic as those who had turned out for Sir Larry and Scarlett O’Hara in Adelaide.
And yet one person was unhappy. Deirdre Gull had loved Roger for years. How could he treat her like a sister when soon he would be gone? Only in Romeo and Juliet, with the whole town watching, had he taken her in his arms. Couldn’t he see the longing in her eyes? Of course, she knew what the problem was: Roger respected her. She was the mayor’s daughter. He needed a sign, that was all. ‘I’ll give myself to you, Roger.’ Yes, she could hear herself saying that. ‘Afterwards, I’ll wait until you come back.’ Because he must. Must. For her.
Deirdre’s role in his last performance was a disappointingly meagre one. Petra! Never would she forgive Quentin Phelps. Playing Cleopatra, with Roger as Antony, Deirdre would soon enough have made their kisses real. Instead, Roger had to be a country doctor obsessed with drains, and she his drab daughter.
On the night of the performance she arrived at the theatre early. Her declaration could not wait. Roger’s last appearance in Crater Lakes must be fuelled by her love. In the foyer she pushed back swinging doors. She made her way down a linoleum aisle. Soon every one of these leathery seats would squeak and crack under human weight. Bellowing, whoops, the slap-slap of meaty hands would surge like a tide about these boxes, these mouldings, this chandelier that burned with brownish wattage and would fade into darkness when the curtain rose. She climbed the steps at the side of the stage; she lifted her chin to the dress circle. Where, she used to ask her mother, had King Edward VII sat? (Nowhere, her mother said. He was never here.) She pushed through the curtains. Behind them, the light was reddish. Her footsteps echoed on the barren stage. Quickly she descended into backstage passages.
Roger, as star, had the only solo dressing room. It was empty. Night gleamed behind a small window. His costume hung darkly on a rack. On the bench before the mirror, among the brushes, the powder puffs, the pots of cream, lay a book he had been reading: Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop. Deirdre had given him that. A shabby screen, papered with press cuttings, covered one corner. The room smelled damp; bluish mould crawled up the walls. Was she a fool? She stared at herself in the mirror: a small girl, nut-brown, not pretty. Her lips moved, whispering the words that would change everything: ‘I’ll give myself to you, Roger.’
She started, hearing footsteps. Did she dare? She could stop it now: ‘Oh, just come to wish you luck, Rog.’ But no. Soon the red rep curtains would part. They must take the stage as lovers.
Voices. The doorknob turned.
In a flash, Deirdre had hidden behind the screen. The door closed. Mr Phelps was speaking to Roger in a voice low and intent. Deirdre peered through the crack where the screen’s hinges folded. Oh, what had she done? What would Mr Phelps think if he found her here? What would Roger? Shame burned in her like fever. Surely they must hear her heart pounding. She strained to hear their words.
‘I knew it would end.’ (Mr Phelps. He sounded sad.) ‘I’m just sorry it’s come so quick.’
‘Oh, Quentin!’ (Quentin?) ‘Nothing’s over.’
‘You’ll be back? Sure. But you’ll have changed. You’ll meet people, have experiences.’
‘I hope so.’ Roger laughed. He turned to the mirror, and Mr Phelps clutched him from behind.
Deirdre felt first confusion, then astonishment, and finally horror. Could what she was seeing be true? Here was Mr Phelps – their teacher! – running his fingers through Roger’s hair; Roger turning into his embrace; Mr Phelps shuddering, sinking to his knees, fumbling with Roger’s belt buckle … Pleasure filled Roger’s face as he stood against the dressing table, heels of his hands planted each side of him, arching his neck, head dropping back.
Deirdre screamed. Had she, in that moment, been able to think at all, she might have hoped her cry would shatter the scene like a pane of glass. Instead came the flurry of bodies springing apart, and Quentin Phelps calling out her name as she flung herself out of the dressing room.
In the corridor, she collided with her father. The mayor, who was to give an introductory speech, wore his robes and chains of office; gasping, his daughter clattered into his arms. She sobbed and sobbed. He tried to hush her. Backstage was busy; the auditorium was filling; and here, skidding dishevelled from the dressing rooms … Quentin? Roger? What was this about?
In seconds, the truth had burst on the air. Why should Deirdre feel shame? With her eyes blazing, the plain girl gathered all her small strength and flung back at the guilty parties their depravity in raw shrieked words her shocked father could barely believe she knew.
Afterwards, Deirdre’s recollection of what happened next came in indistinct flashes, like a fever dream. Where was Roger? Where was Mr Phelps? Who pushed her into her father’s car? Who drove the needle into her flesh? In the days that followed, she wandered her father’s house like a spectre. Everywhere she heard voices murmuring: Deirdre, Deirdre. Did somebody laugh? Sweat beaded on her temples and pooled beneath her armpits. She dug desperate fists between her thighs. Frequently she broke down, calling for the boy she half believed was her lover: Roger, Roger. Oh, what had she done? Only Vlad, the reffo boy, could calm her. Slowly, the young gardener helped her understand: Roger Dansie was gone, and so was Mr Phelps.
Some said the Dansie business destroyed Mayor Gull. He had hoped the boy would marry his daughter; he had counted Phelps as a friend. Then there was the question of his own complicity. Phelps, or so rumour soon had it, concealed a dark past. Once a master at Geelong Grammar, he had, it seemed, left abruptly to sequester himself in the Lakes. Why? Obvious! He had been caught out in his perversion and the school, no doubt, forced him to resign – in return for covering up the scandal.
Citizens of Crater Lakes demanded an investigation: what other lads had Phelps lured into his clutches? Why, he had coached the Magpies. He had taught at the high. And the Boys’ Club! At every turn, the picture grew blacker. ‘The law must seek out that degenerate,’ boomed hardware store owner Willard Hartley Puce across Mayor Gull’s desk. ‘Drag the bugger back to the Lakes in chains, I say, and try him in a court of law.’ Much of the town would agree; but the mayor, who had clashed often with this prominent businessman, only shook his head and said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have him drawn and quartered?’
It was a fatal response. Mr Puce had long suspected the mayor of liberal tendencies. Now horrible suspicions assailed him. Had Gull known about the pervert all along – tolerated him, indulged him, rather than hounding him out of town with a leper bell around his neck? If so, Mr Puce declared exultantly, Gull had committed the greatest folly of his career.
Mr Puce was right. Arch L. Gull’s reign as mayor of Crater Lakes had begun in 1922 and seemed likely never to end. Now, in a matter of days, it crashed around his ears. He announced that, owing to his health, he would not
stand at the next election. Soon afterwards he died, living just long enough (so Mr Puce crowed) to see his slut of a daughter marry a reffo.
The mayor’s death brought relief of a sort for the townsfolk. The scandal was over. They could forget. Nobody would speak of the vileness that had been visited upon them. Life would carry on as if there had been no Roger Dansie.
Yet his story was far from its end. The young genius was very much alive and his scholarship to England remained in force. The horror that began at the King Edward VII Theatre was all the time mounting, biding its time like an angry volcano that swells in secret with its scalding burden until at last it erupts.
Spin the globe.
Half a world away. Look, London. Focus in: Earls Court, a shabby street with barren trees where autumn slides into winter. Our scene is a big house, part of a once-grand terrace, with stone steps leading to a portico fecund with trash and splashed liberally by the piss of passing drunks. Inside, up several flights of stairs at the back, Roger Dansie and Quentin Phelps share what is known in England as a bedsit: a single room, and a small one. It is cheerless. Damp presses behind the wallpaper, wind shudders the window that faces out on a back garden of thorns and brambles, and the gas fire burbles and plops and gutters out if coins are not fed often to its hungry meter. Saggy twin beds, a rickety chest of drawers, two squelchy armchairs with stained antimacassars and a mothball-smelling wardrobe complete the accommodation. In daytime, the light through the dirty window is brown. At night a single bulb, hanging from the high ceiling like a distant star, provides brownish light. The floor is brown linoleum. The lavatory lies two floors down and is freezing. Neighbours include a negro; a kindly old tart long past her best; several rowdy demobbed soldiers who still wear their uniforms; and two fellow Australians, a youngish would-be writer and his raw-voiced mistress whose drunken quarrels wake the house each night. The landlady, a whiskery Irish hag who should be ashamed of presiding over such squalor but is not, lumbers up the stairs for the rent each Sunday evening after attending mass.
Roger Dansie does not repine. He is jubilant. From here, he ventures each day on rattling tube trains (Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square, Northern Line to Waterloo) to the theatre on the south bank that gives its name to Olivier’s company. Damaged in the Blitz, the Old Vic in 1948 remains closed as a playhouse; the company performs in the New Theatre over the river, leaving its shabby home to the students. Rubble, some of it fallen bricks and beams, some of it scenery from past productions, clutters the auditorium; classes take place in the foyer, the bars, and a big rehearsal room upstairs. Nobody minds. Students are proud to be here. Contained in this building is the spirit of British theatre; simply to walk in from the street is to feel the rush of a classic tradition. But the Old Vic is not all about tradition. The theatre school is radical in style, no stuffy bastion of anyone-for-tennis traditionalism like the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the Old Vic, teachers speak excitedly of Stanislavsky. There are improvisation exercises, movement classes. Outside, the city lies in ruins; here, a glorious new era seems about to dawn: Roger Dansie’s era. For Roger is a promising pupil – more than promising. This is no story of a puffed-up rube who comes to the metropolis only to be laughed at; from the first, there are murmurs of greatness. And Quentin Phelps, is he filled with regret? No. Postwar England shocks him, it is true – a drab place of ruins and ration cards, of pasty-faced shopgirls and spotty clerks hurrying by in threadbare raincoats – but what, he urges, is apocalypse but the start of something new?
Eagerly, Phelps shows his protégé the sights. Picture them, master and pupil, on a red London bus, or at the railings of Buckingham Palace, or walking on the Embankment as the dirty river rushes past, saved from reeking only by the cold. Australia – for all its blinding sunshine the truly grey place, the place of oppressive shame – is as far away as another country can be. Many evenings find our friends in a certain establishment in Soho, one Phelps remembers fondly from his visit years ago. Let the city gape with bomb sites like a mouth with carious teeth; here, time is suspended, as queens with cigarette holders cackle through skeins of smoke about Bette and Joan and the new young barman and close shaves in the gents’ at Piccadilly Circus Underground, and eye up Roger and say, exchanging glances, ‘She’s nice, isn’t she?’
Winter seems endless, but then it ends. White evaporates from the streets and green returns to the trees outside their window. Grey skies turn blue. Warmth fills the air; there are irises in the overgrown garden. And Quentin Phelps thinks: My season has passed. The changes have come slowly: Roger is bored when Quentin proposes a visit to the Wallace Collection or the Strangers’ Gallery at the Palace of Westminster. Roger has lines to learn: ‘Quentin, let me read this.’ Roger must practise his animal improvisation: ‘I’m a lion. Let me be a lion.’ (Quentin scoffs. Has he ever heard such nonsense? For days Roger has repaired to London Zoo, studying the lions, imitating their movements. Quentin never taught drama like this.) Roger stays out late, carousing with fellow students. Young men, and one young woman, call for Roger and seem puzzled, even alarmed, by the ‘Australian friend’ who shares their classmate’s room: so shabby (for Quentin is shabby now), so old-maidish, so old. ‘And what, Mr Phelps, do you do?’ they ask. Do? Nothing! For the first month or so, he wrote to public schools: Eton, Harrow, Winchester. Only Harrow replied, and that was to decline his services.
Roger crosses less often to Quentin’s bed; then not at all.
The quarrels began soon enough. Roger, to the envy of his fellow students, landed a part in an Old Vic production that would open early in his second year: Tony Lumpkin, Jack-the-lad troublemaker in She Stoops to Conquer. More than once, Quentin turned up at rehearsals; sitting far back in the New Theatre auditorium, he would sup on a bottle of whisky, applaud Roger’s entrances, and rush up to his protégé between scenes and critique his performance. The director frowned. Fellow cast members laughed uneasily. The guiding light of the Crater Lakes Players was not wanted here. Gently, Roger tried to tell him so, to no avail. Next day, Quentin was there again, and this time he was belligerent, interrupting the dialogue, calling the director a blind fool. Three burly stagehands were needed to throw him out.
‘Why did you do it?’ Roger asked later.
‘You really need to ask that? You’ve changed, Roger.’
And Phelps had not. In England he was an embarrassment, a provincial boor. Roger had swiftly eradicated his own accent; Phelps, by contrast, sounded ever more Australian. His slurring whine set teeth on edge. His pretensions to art and culture were pathetic: they might have impressed a boy in Crater Lakes, but hardly the worldly young man he had become.
‘You’ve got to move out,’ said Roger’s newest friend.
Roger shook his head. ‘I can’t abandon Quentin.’
Quentin felt abandoned all the same. His jealousy over this new friend precipitated the crisis. Colin Manning-Symes was a personable young fellow with thick, extravagantly pink lips and floppy blond hair that he flung back frequently in a rousing laugh. When he invited Roger for a weekend at his parents’ place in Buckinghamshire, Phelps raged. He drank. And kept drinking. In due course he propelled himself through the streets, muttering under his breath, and hovered at last in public lavatories. How long had it been? Too long. Anyone would do. This drivelling old man with piss-stained flies. This spotty adolescent who cried, ‘You’re hurting me!’ as Quentin fucked him against the wall. This drunken sailor (how Quentin had wanted him!) who knocked him to the floor, kicked him, took his wallet, and called him a dirty ponce.
Late on Sunday afternoon, Quentin waited for Roger’s return. He sat in one of the armchairs, a hand on each fraying arm. Light came only from a pink tasselled lamp he had found in a junk shop the week before. Several times he heard noise on the stairs, and turned his head slowly; his neck hurt. He wore a grey silver-threaded smoking jacket and red spotted cravat that Roger had always, in the past, claimed to like. He had borrowed some powder, to cover a black eye, and
pungent cologne from the old tart upstairs. An ashtray rested on one of the chair arms.
Night had fallen and Quentin had almost worked his way through a whole pack of Capstans when Roger finally opened the door. ‘What are you sitting in the dark for?’ he asked, and flipped on the overhead light.
Quentin winced. ‘Nice weekend with Manning-Symes?’
‘Hmm.’ Roger leaned an umbrella in a corner. He flung down his suitcase, stripped off his coat.
‘Get on well with the mater and pater?’
‘Hmm.’ He went to the window, flung it wide. ‘The fug in here! I don’t know how you stand it. Have you been sitting here smoking since I left?’
How late was it? Rain pattered on the unweeded garden. Quentin ground out another cigarette. The ashtray brimmed; his fingers were grey. ‘Explored the estate, did we? Bit of motoring, what-what?’
‘What are you talking about? They’re not that sort.’
‘Spot of shooting, perhaps? Bam!’ Quentin stood now. With unsteady, pained steps, he made it to the wall. ‘Go in for fox hunting, do they, down in Fuckinghamshire? Tally-ho, old bean! Or did he just suck your cock?’
‘Quentin, I’m not listening. Stop it.’
‘Don’t want to tell me? Not like you to be a shy boy.’
Roger remained by the window, staring into wet darkness. Quentin plunged towards him, grabbed him, forced him to turn. ‘That’s right, recoil. You never used to, Rog.’
‘You stink! And what have you done to your eye?’
‘Oh! I stink, do I? You jumped-up little bastard.’ Ashy fingers grabbed Roger’s crotch. ‘Christ, you’re so green you can’t even see through a mater-and-pater piece of shit like Manning-Symes. Does he say “actually” all the time? I’ll bet he does. “Actually, I think the lavatory bowl is ideal for depositing a turd in, don’t you, Mater?” He’s only middle-class, you know! You probably think he’s the royal family. Come on’ – the fist tightened painfully – ‘when do I get what little Actually gets?’