He tried these thoughts on Stewart. ‘Of course, none of this is going to affect a serious career like your Mattie’s.’
‘Nothing’s going to affect Mattie.’
‘Or that other one that you told me about, the one that’s not yet tall enough.’
‘You’ve got to concentrate on talking Freddie round. It’s that you should be thinking about. Kids on Tap and the kids themselves, you can worry about them later.’
Blatt felt he ought to be able to understand old women and children. If not, where was his native facility? He had his mother still alive, and his grandmother.
‘You won’t find her much like your grandmother,’ said Stewart. ‘But I want to wish you luck.’
Blatt, then, was making his attempt where Freddie’s brother, and several others, whose projects were now no more than whitening bones, had failed before him. Fortunately, he didn’t know this. Unwin and Miss Blewett, who did know it, were both of them astonished that he should have been encouraged at all. Perhaps Freddie had received a Word about him. Or perhaps the last crisis had had its effect on her. Unwin, however, didn’t think this was it; the accounts, though worse than they had ever been before, were not much worse. On the morning of the appointment he brought along the balance sheet, having tidied it up as much as he decently could.
‘Put it away,’ said Freddie, in the tone she used to the local flasher.
‘Surely a discussion should have a basis of substantial fact.’
‘Not if it’s with me, dear.’
Miss Blewett reported from the front window that Mr Blatt was coming, and that she felt sure it must be him and so it was, arriving after the delay inevitable to those who didn’t know the district’s one-way streets and cul-de-sacs. They could all see him, dark and dapper, cutting short whatever the taxi-man was saying and tucking away his notecase. Apologies and explanations for lateness often took up the first ten minutes of an interview, and gained Freddie a distinct advantage. But Blatt said nothing at all about it. The time spent during the taxi’s meanderings had given him a chance to arrange his thoughts exactly.
He began very effectively by saying that Miss Wentworth would probably want to know a bit about him and his interest in the theatre and in stage schools in particular. He described himself as someone who liked a show but to whom Shakespeare didn’t mean much. – I can’t think why we need this Blewett woman here, he kept thinking, or that greaser Unwin, I could have a chat with him later. – Well, in the same way that he couldn’t get on to terms with Shakespeare, and never had been able to, so there must be pupils with very different capacities in the school, all kinds, really. Some of them probably came from pretty rough districts.
‘I did myself,’ he said, turning to each of them with engaging frankness. ‘I lived in a rough part, and that’s why I know what they’re like.’
‘And do you think I don’t?’ Freddie asked him.
Blatt smiled.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve spent much time in Mission Street, E.14.’
‘I knew it very well as a young woman. Well, let us say, as a woman. Old women are something different.’
‘Social worker, then.’
‘I lived there because I was poor.’
Unwin couldn’t hide his amazement at this quite new variation on Freddie’s former life and times. Blatt, against all his resolutions, felt himself possessed by an agony of rage at what seemed to him a monstrous and gratuitous lie, introduced for the sole purpose of putting him down, and rejecting his traditional plea for sympathy. Mild blackmail on the subject of humble origins should surely be acceptable everywhere. He could see that Unwin didn’t believe this tale either, mistake to employ a man like that who couldn’t conceal his reactions.
Freddie watched him with interest, and took the opportunity of the pause to say; ‘You have the hands of an artist, Mr Blatt. Has anyone ever told you that?’
Strong enough to ignore this, and leaving his hands exactly where they were, spread out upon his knees, Blatt still could not quite control his voice and broke out in an uncertain baritone:
‘You don’t know Mission Street, that you can’t make me believe, you’ve never been within miles of it. If you lived there as a young woman, pardon me, kindly pardon me for saying this, that must have been in the early nineteen-twenties, when my great-uncle’s business was on the corner of Mission Street and the Commercial Road. If you were familiar with the district you would have known of my great-uncle.’
‘Well?’
‘Well then, Miss Wentworth, what did he die of? You tell me that!’
And everything, to ridiculous degree, seemed to turn on this.
‘His name was Blatt as well?’
‘Yes, my grandfather’s brother. A leather business, he was in leather. What did he die of?’
Freddie smiled. ‘You mean, don’t you, how did he die? I don’t think the police were ever quite sure.’
The Bluebell knew that Freddie would never have gone so far if she had not been sure of her ground. She could not bear to watch the discomfiture of the smart business man. At this moment the office door was opened a little and Jonathan trustfully came in. She made a sign to him to go away, but he looked at Freddie, and recognised that he was welcome.
‘This is Mr Blatt, dear.’
Jonathan shook the visitor’s hand. He was wearing blue jeans, as always, but gave a curious suggestion of a Victorian child, woken and brought downstairs to the drawing-room in the middle of the night.
‘Mr Blatt has come to tell me that I don’t know how to run my own business,’ Freddie went on.
‘Oh, surely that can’t be so, Miss Wentworth.’
‘He says he wants to help the school. He’s anxious to give me some money.’
‘What is money?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Now look here, son,’ said Blatt, ‘you know what money is.’
Unwin felt that if no one else was going to put a stop to this, he must, particularly when the little boy went on, in a sleepy whisper that chilled the blood, ‘Money isn’t cruel, is it? But if it isn’t cruel, why didn’t it save my mother?’
‘I can’t think that it’s useful to have the pupils coming in here at this stage,’ said Unwin. ‘Miss Blewett, surely he ought to be somewhere else?’
‘I only came in to see if she’d like a hundred up at Allsorts,’ said Jonathan, quite himself again, as he left them, if it could be decided what that was.
Blatt, saw that, after all, there was something to be said for Unwin. He rallied gamely, largely because he was convinced that the boy had been brought in on purpose to impress him, as a kind of talent demonstration. To the end he never understood the fluid nature of the Temple School, where the children, as a relief from their hard training, wandered to and fro almost at liberty, nor did he grasp the nature of Freddie’s benevolence. As a matter of fact, he had been impressed; he hadn’t meant to say, ‘Now look here, you know what money is.’ He seemed to have been made to say it, by the line he had just been given. There was talent, then, in that boy. This made him all the more anxious to press on with his scheme.
As he saw it, the demand for kids on TV was expanding and would expand, but their faces only stayed commercial for about six months or less, then their noses got too big or their teeth went wrong, or the viewers got sick of seeing them. Better, then, if they only stayed at the Temple a term or so and then left with the money they’d made, just like the Japs used to run their light industries, girls worked in the factory till they’d collected enough for their dowries, then back to the village, no trouble or fuss that way, smiling and bowing all round. The system worked well, very well indeed. Naturally they wouldn’t drop the long-term training and the Shakespeare completely, that was the biggest asset, really, apart from the leasehold, the only asset. She would be the figurehead. Very probably they would still train up a few stars, you couldn’t miss star quality, but in the main it would be a quick turnover, and probably they’d be able to cut down the teaching staff
by at least fifty per cent.
‘That would only leave me with one teacher,’ said Freddie, who had been studying him, rather than following him, intently. Blatt was disconcerted.
‘I saw an attractive-looking young lady in the hall as I came in.’
‘That was my fifty per cent. She has a colleague, who is not so easily noticed.’
Obviously the next step must be a tour of the premises. But Unwin, mindful of the mouldering floorboards, suggested that they could leave this till later and that they might now adjourn to his own office in Bishopsgate to glance through the accounts. He had put aside the morning for this, he said. An expert in the streets’ complexity, he dislodged a taxi almost at once. As soon as they had got in and the door was shut, Blatt spread out his hands and looked at them.
‘I’ve never thought of them as different from anyone else’s.’
Freddie was not displeased with herself. ‘He was surprised, dear, that I knew about his great-uncle. That was old Max Blatt, who broke his neck falling down the cellar steps.’
Miss Blewett, having committed a good part of her life, and the closing years that lay ahead, to the Temple School, had to stand up for herself sometimes. Blatt’s propositions would not do, but she was reluctant to see him disappear, with his investment capital, over their horizon. He might be the last of his kind. She did not believe that Freddie had taken him seriously for one moment.
And yet, perhaps because he had not admitted defeat, he was not dismissed. Somewhat to the neglect of his other interests, he continued to drop in at the Temple. And Freddie continued to withhold, from her store of unforgivable remarks, the insult which might part them for ever.
8
AUTUMN was Freddie’s best season – in a sense, her spring. Comparison between her old age and the approaching winter worried her not at all. She, to all appearances, stayed the same; it was only the year that turned. When the October winds drove sodden leaves and bits of packing straw and dropped theatre programmes round the gutters, Freddie, although she never dined out, emerged sometimes for an evening stroll.
Unsavoury Baddeley Street, as the Temple children’s playground, was also Freddie’s village lane. Next to the school was the character-shoe store, which also did duty as a sex shop. Miss Blewett thought that Joybelle ought not to run in and out quite so much; Freddie replied that she was probably giving them a few tips. Then came an agency which did accommodation addresses, Tito’s smelly cafe, a small chemist who sold make-up a good deal cheaper than Leichners, another agency, and the Cypriot who had mended Hannah’s shoes. But now that it was dark the upper air trembled with the fiery brilliance of the theatre lights from a dozen streets round about, while in the narrow glimpse of sky above the night clouds glowed with reflected red. The street, whose own lights were dim, was transformed into a kind of coulisse, waiting for the overture.
Two hundred years earlier, when slops were emptied direct out of the plain flat-faced houses, the smell must have been if anything less strong than now when great gusts of vegetable odour from the market floated above the heavier diesel vapour and a hint of the cafe’s drains. But Freddie thought poorly of fresh air. In particular she believed that the theatre should never be exposed to it, or taken outdoors, or brought to the people. The theatre was there for audiences to come to. At this very moment they were hurrying off from work, bolting their macaroni cheese (Freddie’s heart was always with the cheaper seats) and braving the struggle back into the city, to concentrate on what was said and done in a lighted frame, which, when it went dark, would make them cry to dream again. They were creators in their own right, each performance coming to life, if it ever did, between the actors and the audience, and after that lost for eternity. The extravagance of that loss was its charm.
At the school itself, most of the children were in autumn work. They had calls for suburban pantomimes. Dombey & Son continued to run, and it was given out that King John was coming on at the Nonesuch. This play Freddie considered, in justice, to be her own property. The faded and flaking NAUGHT SHALL MAKE US RUE on the office wall seemed to give her a hereditary right to it. The part she coveted was that of little Prince Arthur. With a tear-raising scene begging mercy from his gaoler, who has orders to blind him with red hot irons, and, in Act 4, a spectacular death on stage, Arthur must be one of the most nauseatingly sentimental and theatrically effective parts that Shakespeare ever wrote. Considering how much he seems to have disliked children, it does him great credit. And really he might have been pleased to see the ferocity with which Freddie chased the part, to make sure of it for her own.
While the office was so busy, Hannah was downstairs a good deal, acting as the first and in reality the only line of defence between Freddie and the parents. Sometimes they were newcomers, asking about places and fees. Then they must be encouraged, that is if they knew English, which wasn’t always to be counted on. In the autumn the International Circus came to Olympia, and the high trapeze acts, aristocrats of their world, liked to put their children into school for a few weeks. They themselves were grave and sober people, dark-suited like the members of an academy or a bank. Their daughters were exquisite little idols, Delphine, Chantal, Loulotte, jealously guarded from following their parents into the air. They must be dancers. The sons had been left behind, in lycées all over Europe, to continue their studies for the baccalauréat.
Hannah, speaking her correct French or her little bit of German, assured these anxious parents that the ballet classes were conducted on classic lines and that all the pupils were of good family. There was no rough language, no unseemliness. Something’s giving way in me, she thought. I’m getting so that I don’t know whether I’m telling the truth or not.
One afternoon Joybelle came to tell her, with a deeply suggestive leer, that Gianni’s father would like to have a word with her. There was no waiting room; Hannah came down and saw a little sharp-looking Italian, olive-green in the cold draughts which penetrated the hall.
‘Mr Baccelli? I’m Miss Graves.’
‘I wanted to consult you about my son. He mentioned you as his teacher.’
‘Oh, I’m not his only teacher.’
‘Your name was the one he mentioned.’
She asked him to sit down on one of the hall chairs; she saw that he would have liked to dust it off before having anything to do with it, but was too well-mannered to do so.
‘Gianni spoke to me about you, too, Mr Baccelli.’
‘I expect he told you that I was in business.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘I am a tailor … does that surprise you?’
Hannah found this difficult to answer. She was ashamed now of having disbelieved Gianni. But there it was, after even a short time at the Temple the distinction between truth, imitation and pretence became lost.
‘What did he say I was, Miss Graves?’
‘A tailor.’
Baccelli looked at her mournfully, and Hannah hurried on, ‘I don’t think you ought to worry about Gianni’s class work. It’s only moderate, but that’s because he’s concentrating on his career.’
‘Yes, he has concentrated. But he has not been chosen for Dombey & Son.’
‘Oh, they all have to take their turn at that. Perhaps after Christmas he’ll be in the chorus.’
‘Yes, the chorus, but now I don’t think that’s enough. I had hoped he would be given the rôle of Little Paul. Then he would sing that beautiful song, What is money, father, is it cruel, father? If money isn’t cruel, why … did it let my Mamma die?… My boy knows by heart every word and every note of that song, Miss Graves.’
‘Well, I don’t really know about the stage side of it, I’m just here for their lessons, but I think you’ll find that the Little Paul they’ve got in the show at the moment is about eighteen or nineteen.’
Mr Baccelli ignored this attempt to pacify him.
‘Every word and every note, Miss Graves. And perhaps you’re not aware that I’ve made him a number of stage suits, in stret
ch materials, in anticipation of his career. I could show them to you at any time, hanging in his bedroom cupboard.’
‘That must have been a great strain for you,’ said Hannah warmly.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I remember that Gianni told me … I mean it must have been a terrible business for you, making the first cut in the material.’
‘Why should that be a strain for me? There is no difficulty there at all.’ He stared at her. ‘Perhaps I didn’t make it clear that I am a tailor.’
Mr Baccelli wrote to say that Giovanni would be withdrawn from the school as from the following term. But Freddie refused, in her autumn jubilation, to look on this as a setback. Gianni was a hard worker, yes, but that was no substitute for talent. What was more, she persuaded Baccelli to present the no longer needed stage suits to the school’s wardrobe. Hannah saw them later over Miss Blewett’s arm; one Little Paul Dombey outfit, with simulated brass buttons, one shimmering diamanté suit, one with a red, white and blue waistcoat.
‘What will we do with that, for pity’s sake?’ Hannah asked. Miss Blewett replied that it would have a thousand uses.
Meanwhile the Peter Pan classes had already started, and were to go on until the auditions began for the parts of the Lost Boys. These classes were a speciality of Freddie’s. It was perhaps a pity that they had to be entrusted to old Ernest Valentine, who, being, as he said, on his uppers, could not possibly be got rid of. For many years he had understudied the role of the St Bernard dog, Nana. Sir James Barrie himself had once praised his work. Recalling this, as he did every week, he went on to block out Nana’s scene exactly, crossing and recrossing the room on all fours and barking in an insane manner. The children refused to listen to him at all.
At Freddie's Page 6