For a moment Miss Blewett scarcely recognised her for what she was. So much of the grey woollen stockings had never shown before.
If only Hannah had been there to help her, another woman, a woman’s touch, or even Pierce, but it was after six, neither of them would be there. The evening post was, or was supposed to be, the last little task of the day.
‘What’s your trouble, lady?’
Of all people it was Joey Blatt, still hovering about as usual, the last kind of assistance one wanted, think of that poor wee Jonathan, still if it was going to be a matter of lifting a heavy weight …
‘What’s happening, what’s the idea, what’s she doing?’
‘I imagine I am about to die,’ Freddie declared from the floor in a full, but hollow tone.
Her fallen presence dominated the room.
‘And if I am dying,’ Freddie continued, turning her great grey head to fix her gaze on Miss Blewett, ‘I should be deeply interested to know how you’re going to manage. Don’t think I’ve put you down for anything in my will. You can ask Unwin if you don’t believe me.’
Unaccustomed allies, Blatt and Miss Blewett joined hands under the spreading shoulders. His heavy gold signet rings grated against her solitaire. ‘Kindly wait till I give the signal,’ he said, ‘then heave together.’
Blatt’s strength was surprising, and his side, in spite of his precautions, was raised much more quickly than the other, so that he looked down and across the breadth of Freddie at an impressive slope.
No, she won’t die, he thought. She won’t change her habits so easily. ‘I’ll stay and take the weight,’ he directed Miss Blewett. ‘You go on steering her, sideways and right, steady now, you’re on the wrong lock, right hand down, nicely, that’s it, we’re there.’
Mass into mass, Freddie was restored, without loss of dignity, to her chair. Quite against their better judgement, they felt rewarded. It was as though she had collapsed largely, or even entirely, for their benefit.
‘Is that Mr Unwin? This is Hilary Blewett … I’m speaking from an outside call-box … we had quite a fright this evening … it was this whole dreadful business of the National Stage School, she must have suddenly felt quite overcome, it was more like a stroke.’
‘Did it put her face straight?’ Unwin asked fiercely. ‘Has it gone lopsided the other way?’
‘I never looked. Well yes, I did look. She’s exactly the same as she was before.’
‘Not thinking of retiring?’
‘Oh, no, she’s back in her chair.’
‘How did you manage?’
‘I’ve called the doctor now. When I found her, though, Mr Blatt was there. There’s a good side to all of us, you know, and it’s only in trouble that we find it out.’
‘Blatt’s looking after his own interests, I’ve no doubt. Did she ask for me?’
The Bluebell hesitated. ‘She said something about her will.’
‘She hasn’t made a will. She hasn’t anything to leave anyway.’
Unwin made yet another of his unprofitable journeys to the Temple. As usual, he was expected, but unwanted. He was told that an end must be made to the pretensions of the Njss. No need for them to be made to rue, all they had to do was to disappear quietly. They must be dealt with, that was all.
‘That will require a re-assessment of our position,’ Unwin said, ‘and careful thought and planning.’
‘I had time to think and plan, dear, while I was lying on the floor, and now it seems I’m going to have a little more. They’re sending me to hospital for two days, for rest and observation.’
‘She can’t take on the government,’ Blatt and Unwin agreed at lunchtime the next day. ‘Not when it’s in spending mood. You can’t stop a committee once it’s made up its mind to waste money. She’ll just have to compromise and climb down in face of competition, the school will become a little of this, a bit of TV, a little of that. She’ll be glad of an injection of capital and some sane advice. A collapse like that takes a lot out of you. She’ll have to face the fact that she’s a very old woman. Do you know where they’ve put her in this hospital? In the geriatric ward!’ Their faces were those of haunted men.
So many flowers, exclaimed Miss Blewett, the only person who was allowed to visit during the forty-eight hours. She brought sympathetic messages of all kinds, from Blatt in particular.
‘I expect he’s delighted,’ said Freddie.
‘Oh, I think you’re doing him an injustice, that lovely stephanotis is from him, let me just give a little twist to the card so you can read it.’
‘What are Pierce and Hannah doing?’
‘They’re managing quite all right, dear. The important thing is for you to rest and not to worry. Are you sure they’re treating you properly?’ In fact Freddie seemed to be complaining unnaturally little. She had always been quite indifferent to comfort, and the other geriatrics delighted her. But as Miss Blewett rose to go she unexpectedly smiled and murmured: ‘They don’t make the Ovaltine right, you know. Not as you make it.’
A very detailed history of the nineteen-sixties might mention how Freddie, once restored to the Temple School, closed the South Bank’s unacceptable venture without ever leaving the office. Her fall had proved fortunate. No one, of course, knew how long she had been lying there before help came. She had not been heard to call out. But she seemed to have renewed her strength by contact with the earth, or rather with her own worn carpet.
‘I shall proceed as I’ve always done, dear – find out who’s got what I want and ask them to give it to Freddie’s as a matter of conscience, which is what it is, after all. This time it’s a question of fluence.’ Unwin was aware that fluence was what influence had usually been called in the old days at the Vic. ‘We just want a few people with fluence,’ Freddie repeated.
‘What would you do with them if you had them?’ said Unwin, who had a nagging feeling of treachery, all the more because he wasn’t sure what he was betraying.
‘I shall simply remind them, not so much that I exist, but that I need preservation. You may call it a campaign, if you like.’
‘In that case it’s going to cost money.’
‘I don’t see why. There are plenty of stamps left in the drawer.’
She intended to conduct her defence, which would be an attack at the same time, entirely through letters to The Times, which were then still in their golden age of influence and respect. Although she turned straight to the theatre page and never read any more of any newspaper, Freddie knew, as she did in every situation, where the power lay. And Unwin, with an odd feeling which he imagined must be relief, supposed that the idea would be quite practicable. ‘You mean you might get some theatre people to write in and put your case, directors and well-loved actors and so forth.’
Freddie treated this notion with contempt. Her whole capacity for scorn seemed to have increased. She laughed, and even crowed. Protests were only effective in this country when they were made by people who knew as little as possible about the subject. Nobody trusted an expert. Through the columns of The Times bishops complained about motorways, merchant bankers appealed for thatched cottages and politicians for free speech, while industrialists took up the cause of single-track railways.
‘But you don’t know any bankers or industrialists,’ Unwin pointed out.
‘I don’t want them to know me. I want them to love me.’
Freddie – and perhaps it was sad that she never found scope for her talents in a wider air – could judge the moment for entire simplicity. Her plea, she saw, must be based on one point and one only: longevity. She had been particularly struck, while among the geriatrics, by their success in getting a greater share of attention even than herself by repeating that they were 89, 93 or 97. Nothing more had been necessary.
Accordingly, through the medium of the Bluebell at the upright cackling old office typewriter, Freddie wrote to the addresses of the powerful. She explained the position and implored them to use their fluence. She told th
em that she herself was a piece of old London who had been knocked about a bit, that Floral Street and the theatres round it had been trodden in days long past by Hogarth, Garrick and Dr Johnson, who had said: ‘I’ll come no more behind your scenes, David, for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities,’ that the Temple School had never closed even during the darkest hours of the Nazi onslaught and that she had almost lost count, though not quite, because an old teacher never forgets a pupil, of the number of Prince Arthurs and Young Macduffs, Lost Boys, Tiny Tims, Peaseblossoms, Cobwebs, Moths and Mustardseeds who had passed out through the Temple’s plain unpretentious doorway. She quoted a line or so from Noël Coward’s song about what one recalls when the twilight falls, and she asked whether it was really the intention of those who had charge of such things to destroy what was old and traditional and small and true in favour of what was official and impersonal and all that we have now come to understand by experimental – in other words very expensive at the moment and unworkable within eighteen months. Not all these remarks had too much relevance to Freddie’s case. But then, she wasn’t asking her correspondents to send money or raise money or even to reply, only to write to The Times, and in every instance she finished by appealing to them to look back through the years and remember when they first went to the play, and sat enchanted, and heard the music die away and saw their first curtain go up. And none of them, not the archbishop, not the round-the-world small boat sailor, not the Cabinet Minister, not the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, not the Royal connection, could resist writing to The Times about their own childhood, which either because of its misery or of its ecstatic happiness was totally distinct from anyone else’s.
The Editor, as Freddie had calculated, thought the subject quite suitable to run so near Christmas, and the letters began to appear at once. A headmaster recalled that his great-great-grandfather had been given an orange by David Garrick in Drury Lane and that his family still treasured one of the pips. A very distinguished general wrote: ‘May an old soldier who has long since passed the Psalmist’s span venture to speak on matters in which his “tongue is rusty” and his “speech unused”? Is not the vexed question (still vexed to me, at least) of the old Mountain Mule Training School, now so sadly abandoned in favour of mechanisation and “things made with hands”, recalled by the present threat to “Freddie’s”?’ A Regius Professor of the History of the Drama, to whose attention the correspondence had been drawn, pointed out that David Garrick was notoriously mean and was unlikely to have given an orange to anybody. A controversy arose over whose memories of the Old Vic went back farthest, and some, rather surprisingly, remembered Miss Wentworth as a smiling helpful presence there in the days of Lilian Baylis. All these letters and those that followed were printed under the title ‘At Freddie’s.’
Freddie’s informers, on the telephone to her every night when the second house was over and the parties after the show had begun, told her that all was going well. Though almost nothing had appeared which had much bearing on her problems, she was safe. Someone had spoken to the Prime Minister. Nostalgia, on its broad current, was carrying her gently to shore. And yet Freddie, whose campaigning instincts told her that the correspondence couldn’t go on much longer, was not quite satisfied. She had touched the heart of the Fluential. But shouldn’t the appeal on her behalf draw to a close in the most graceful manner possible, with a letter from one of the Temple children themselves?
‘I don’t think I’m the right person,’ said Jonathan, blinking at Carroll, who put a clean sheet of paper from the office in front of him.
‘Miss Wentworth would like you to do it.’
‘You know what my writing’s like. It doesn’t do you any credit as a teacher.’
‘Well then you can take your time about it. And it will look just the same as all the others once it’s printed.’
‘But I never do write letters,’ persisted Jonathan. ‘If I want to say anything to anyone I get some money from Miss Blewett and ring them up. I could ring up The Times, if you like.’
Mattie had to be applied to. Though well aware that he hadn’t been asked first, he readily obliged, and presumably as the forthcoming Prince Arthur he was really the more suitable of the two. His letter, with one or two wrong spellings introduced into it by Freddie, was printed at the head of a column. But she felt for the first time in the whole affair a cold breath of dissatisfaction.
In the end the victory, though substantial, was only half Freddie’s doing, and might even have taken place without her. The Committee, not through any outside pressure, but simply through the natural organic processes of any committee, was suddenly wound down, restructured and reconvened. Although the members were in fact the same as before, with one or two omissions, they felt it was important to work on something different. Partly (but only partly) because of the hints of the powerful, partly to enjoy the luxurious sensation of having enough and to spare induced by the words ‘the project has been dropped’, they shelved indefinitely the discussion of a National Stage School.
Some time had to pass before there was any hint of the curious effect of the episode upon Freddie. Possibly she didn’t know herself, at least at first, what it had done to her. It was at times like this that she particularly needed a Word to make the future clear. She was glad to be spoken to by something that she could not control.
15
DURING Freddie’s silent victory over the National Junior Stage School – and who these days ever refers to that project or even remembers it? – during the actual week, indeed, of the letters to The Times – King John opened at the Nonesuch. The raddled old theatre, which had seen so many glorious and disastrous nights, and where a Victorian manager had once cut his throat in Box A, unnoticed until the blood dripped down into the orchestra pit, pulled itself together as it had done time and again, to turn its gilded and painted face towards one more audience.
The publicity manager had decided to refer to Ed Voysey as ‘dedicated’. What other word would be safe to describe a director who, at the last minute, had changed the lighting plot? Being at a delicate stage of over-rehearsal, where the slightest impulse was enough to drive him off course, and having been most unfortunately shown some Sickert drawings of the Old Bedford Music Hall, Ed was overwhelmed by a quite new way of seeing; he’d give the true Edwardian note, yes, truly Edwardian, this, by introducing real footlights. None of the cast, of course, had ever worked with them and the younger ones had never even seen any. Urgent signals were sent out without result until Voysey, his wits crazed to unnatural clarity, remembered having seen a set crammed into a storeroom under the stage at the Pier Theatre, Eastbourne. Retrieved and repaired, they had to be connected with the nearest gas supply; this was in a kind of cubbyhole, where the wig mistress sometimes boiled up kettles.
Franks, the chief electrician at the Nonesuch, had his own ideas about the whole improvised apparatus and about the dedication of Voysey. All his own lights would have to be lowered, so as not to kill the gaslight from the front. It was the first time, he pointed out, that he had been asked to take responsibility for a show which would be almost entirely invisible. His relish for disaster was only intensified by the director’s enthusiasm. ‘But it will be soft, Frankie, soft glowing reflections from the flesh, deep shadows below the chin and the eyebags, as in the old prints and photographs, the old photos, Frankie, the lost magic … with a gesture of total despair he advances down to the footlights … it’s going to take them back sixty years as soon as the house lights go down.’ On the whole, however, the innovation was a good thing because Ed became obsessed with the problems of raising and dimming the gas and this prevented him from rehearsing the whole show into the ground.
Meanwhile the small part actors were suffering from nerves, but they had also begun to act the part of actors having nerves, and the delicious falseness drew them together more than the last run-throughs had managed to do. William Beardless also trembled. ‘You’ll carry me i
n Act 3, won’t you,’ he implored Boney. ‘I’m not usually like this. God yes I’m always like this.’ But after the final rehearsal for light cues he had handed out even more notes than usual to the rest of the cast, and in particular one to Boney himself, not referring in any way to his performance but giving him a number of useful tips on Cutting Down; today, have your first drink ten minutes later than usual, tomorrow, twenty minutes later, and so on. Every day will be a little easier. Boney, hoarse and beery at this stage as a down-the-bill comic, had folded the note into a very small paper pellet.
‘He just flicked it, Miss Wentworth,’ Mattie brightly reported to Freddie. ‘I don’t know whether he meant to hit me or not.’
‘I daresay you’re a fairly good judge of that,’ Freddie replied. ‘Now come on, try it just once again.’
She meant the line This ship-boy’s semblance hath disguised me quite, which had given Mattie, in common with everyone else who has ever had to speak it, a great deal of trouble.
‘Thisshipboyshemblance,’ Mattie began confidently. ‘Mr Voysey told me to practise it quietly by myself.’
‘Ship boy’s, dear. Pause after “ship”.’
‘They gave me a pause after “semblance” yesterday,’ said Mattie, with his bright leer.
‘Try it again.’
‘Thishibboyshemblance …’
‘Keep it clean, dear.’
‘It’s not my fault, Miss Wentworth. Shakespeare buggered it up.’
It was too late for anything but Fate’s protection, and Freddie kissed him and wished him luck. The Temple children all dreaded this embrace, the odour of Mothaks, unmade beds, sandalwood and old woman that issued cloudily from blouse and cardigan, and with it often the painful scrape of the great brooches – and Freddie knew very well what they felt – but not one of them would have wanted to open in a new show without it.
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