‘I didn’t go!’
‘I held them for three minutes, you know. You can’t be great in the theatre for more than three minutes. But you didn’t come round afterwards. Hannah, you didn’t come.’
If the Bluebell had not needed her, Boney evidently had.
‘Boney, have you been drinking?’
‘Yes, thank God.’
Hannah switched on her bedside light. He stood there blinking his blue eyes, which he always kept half closed, as though to save trouble if he felt like going to sleep.
‘Did you get my good luck telegram?’ she asked.
Clinging on to the bookshelves, which admirably met the strain, he sank into a chair. Now he had an air of permanence. Something would have to be done about him.
It was of no use going on about the telegram. Probably he hadn’t even got it. No one who sends a telegram is really surprised when it doesn’t arrive. ‘Where are you supposed to be, Boney? Have you got locked out? Why did you come here for heaven’s sake?’
‘Your place is so tidy,’ Boney mumbled. ‘It’s not every girl who tidies up before I come.’
‘How did you know where I live?’
Seeing and hearing that he had fallen asleep she got out of bed and put on her raincoat. It was very cold in the room and although it was only November there had been something on the radio about snow. For a guest, of course, she would have put on the fire at once, but Boney was hardly a guest; he looked so comfortable, however, that she began to feel more like a visitor herself. His antiquated gold watch ticked away peaceably on his wrist.
She ought to find out what his address was because somebody might be missing him and worrying. That meant going through his pockets, which wasn’t the kind of thing Hannah did or had ever seen anyone do, except in a film. Her mother (and 8.15 tomorrow morning, or by now it would be this morning, was the time for her telephone call) would consider it low. But, even if it was low, it was certainly quick, because Boney seemed to have nothing in his pockets at all, certainly no money. Perhaps he had come here because he hadn’t been able to pay the rent. Hannah still thought of actors as airily unconcerned with practical details. What would he have done if the door had been locked?
It was disconcerting to find a leather folder exactly where you’d expect it, in his inside breast pocket. There were no photographs, only a cheque-book and an Equity card, no pen, no address-book, but this was certainly the place for addresses. Leaning against his knees she discovered, turning over various bills and postcards, that Boney had a house in Hampstead – no 4, Well Lane – and, as Sr G. Sebastiano Lewis, apparently a place in Venice as well. So he couldn’t be hard put to it for money, or indeed for somewhere to go to. There were keys, too, in the pocket of the grand overcoat, now heaped on her floor. She felt glad for his sake, although of course these addresses might be fantasies, he might have felt impelled to make them both up. It did not occur to Hannah that as a good unambitious character actor, never out of work, Boney was earning very well.
With the postcards was a folded title page torn out of a Junior Geography, with her address on it in Mattie’s handwriting. He had added: Mr Lewis. This is it, no mucking about, I got it off our other teacher.
She got back into bed and lay there, cold as the frost outside. The clock from the Prudential Building struck two, and at the plangent sound Boney seemed to revive, as though these were his appointed hours.
‘Where are you, Hannah? What have you been doing?’
‘Looking through your pockets and trying to find out about your affairs.’
‘Wonderful, that’s what I came for.’ He began to undress, adding, ‘I’m only doing this for you, it’s terribly cold.’
‘Is it snowing?’
‘Now you’ve stolen my line.’
He climbed into bed and the whole little 2ft 6 mattress sank in protesting acceptance. Hannah felt happy, and indeed that was the effect Boney knew how to produce. In spite of his impersonations of outrage and dismay he was completely at home with the world, having made a kind of arrangement with life not to undertake anything he couldn’t comfortably manage, while enjoying the pretence, from time to time, of needing to be managed himself; this was one of those times. His close presence was like that of the genial inhabitant of a den.
Boney pointed out that her hair was damp and had just been washed so that evidently she must have been expecting him. He appeared to have sobered up completely, and carefully took off the rubber band, spreading her hair over the pillow. ‘I’ll tell you another thing, my dear,’ he said. ‘There’s a system that’s been recommended to me, a hint I’ve been given by a very distinguished member of the profession about cutting down all this kind of self-indulgence. Tomorrow I’m going to start ten minutes later, the night after that twenty minutes later … and then I’m going to see how much good it’s done me.’
16
SHE had another key to her room cut by the Cypriot who had mended her shoes when she first came to London, and who did that kind of thing as a sideline; he looked at her mournfully as he handed back the two keys, implying that London corrupted. She never knew whether Boney would come or not, or where he was when he didn’t. It would have been quite possible to go up to Hampstead and find out whether he really had a house at 4, Well Lane, but the thought frightened her. It might destroy the little that she had.
Well, once she had been great with John Brannon, and now she supposed she was great with Boney Lewis; it puzzled her all the same. The Bluebell had warned her, during her very first week at the job, that not only did theatre people talk about themselves all the time – that was nothing, after all – but they found it impossible to take any real interest in anyone outside the theatre. Hannah knew that this was true. It was true of even the smallest of the Temple children. Gianni, of whom she often thought, removed by the dissatisfied tailor back to the daylight world, must have found it painful to adapt. Trying to make this clearer to herself she had once asked Pierce – but this must have been quite a while ago – whether he didn’t find it rather sad to see human beings giving a lifetime’s concentration to what must melt into air, into thin air.
‘I think that’s a bit from Shakespeare you’ve got there,’ Pierce had said.
‘Well, yes.’
‘If you ask me, he was a bit of a showman.’
After the spare key was ready Hannah ordered an extra pint of milk every other day and bought some extra cans of beer and abandoned herself to the passing moment. She went to see King John by herself, three nights running. Boney was still making a remarkable success in the prison scene, all the more so because the audience knew about it and were ready for it. Even though the original effect had been produced entirely naturally by surprise and fury, a certain corner of his mind had registered professionally exactly what he was doing, and he was able to produce it, though in a broader and coarser form, night after night after night.
She knew that he wanted to amuse himself, and see if he could make a schoolteacher laugh. He did make her laugh. Heaven knows she ought to have been used to impersonations by this time, certainly she knew they were the lowest branch of the art, but they beguiled her just the same. When he had gone the room seemed full of the other voices he had brought into it, and even the kettle, whose wavering whistle he imitated exactly, spoke like him. He told her that as soon as the run of King John was over he wanted to take her to Venice.
‘Have you got a place there?’ she asked.
Not quite as grand as a place, he thought, just two or three rooms in someone’s house off the Zattere. Two rooms or three rooms? she asked, but saw that he had genuinely forgotten.
‘I shall have to see,’ she told him firmly. ‘I don’t suppose I should be able to afford the fare.’
Boney looked at her indulgently. ‘Don’t worry, perhaps I shan’t be able to either by that time.’
That struck her as a fair warning. There must be a system for preserving one’s independence, it was only a question of working it out. In t
he first place, whatever happened, she must stop regulating her movements by his. For this reason she did not go to the Nonesuch for the next two evenings, and in that way she missed seeing Mattie’s accident.
After his uncertain opening Mattie’s performance had been lacklustre, and in spite of extra rehearsals called by Ed, it had remained so. He seemed not to be able to tighten up, except, unfortunately, in the carry, where limpness was required. Mattie came to Freddie’s office, and sobbed, ‘I can’t get on with Mr Lewis. I’ve done everything I could to get into his good books, but he doesn’t like me.’ Freddie consoled him, but told him that she couldn’t – by which she meant that she wouldn’t – interfere. William Beardless drew Ed aside, and begged him to put the whole thing to rest.
‘He’s tacky, William.’
‘But I happen to know that the child’s worried to death at the thought of having failed you. He can’t bear to cause anyone disappointment. Give him time, Ed, give him space.’
In the following night’s Act 4, Mattie appeared on the walls, lingered in the spotlight, took off his straw hat, put his hand to his forehead, swayed noticeably, walked down several steps lower, crumpled, rather than leaped, on to his mattress and then sat up, rubbing his left shoulder imploringly. A shuffle of concern ran through the spectators from the front of the stalls to the back, and from the top of the gallery downwards.
‘Oh, please, there’s something broken …’
At such a moment the old theatre might regret the days when there was a curtain to be lowered. Not only the loyal lords but the St John’s Ambulance personnel hurried on to the stage, and with them, clean counter to the sense of the play, King John himself. Unfortunately Beardless could not speak other than clearly and his exclamation, ‘Speak to me, you little scrubber! Tell me you’re not dead!’ carried to the back of the house. Mattie, whatever shortcomings there had been so far, did not fail his great moment. Lying like a broken plaything, then raising himself with difficulty on to one arm, he favoured Beardless with a languishing glance.
In a television interview which he gave nearly twenty years later, Mattie Stewart recalled, or at any rate insisted, that he had damaged himself deliberately that night at the Nonesuch for one reason only – because he recognised the talent of another young actor and wanted to give him his chance in the part as soon as possible. He was speaking, of course, as Stuart Matthew, a celebrity in every country where conditions were sufficiently settled for movies to be shown, and if he could look back on his Prince Arthur of 1963 and remember his collapse as a matter of pure self-sacrifice, then that must be the truth for the theatrical historian. Perhaps it was. Love and jealousy feed on the future even more readily than the past. Mattie might well have wanted to hurry on the keenly-felt moment when Jonathan would play Prince Arthur better than he could. On the other hand the accident certainly earned him, for the first time since his letter to The Times, a mention in the Press.
Ed was able to announce from the stage, before the beginning of Act 5, that there were no bones broken, but after a further examination Mattie was said to be shocked, exhausted, and emotionally drained. Beardless offered to go out of the play for a few weeks to take him to recuperate somewhere in the sun. Freddie, being made aware of this, wired to Mr Stewart and advised him to come back from Zurich immediately.
The understudy could only be tolerated for two nights, Jonathan was to go in on the Friday. That gave him, from the time when Mattie was carried into the wings to his own first appearance, about seventy hours to get perfect. But he had been rehearsed already, and after all, he had been supplied by Freddie’s.
Although Jonathan’s serene manner remained unaltered, his entire horizon was now filled with the interpretation of his part, that is to say, with the problem of becoming princely. His vision or double vision of the torture scene during the first night at the Nonesuch had apparently been a case of ‘seeing true’. At least, at the run-through on the morning after the accident he had covered his eyes with his hands to give the idea of imagining blindness and Ed Voysey had shrieked from the stalls: ‘You’re doing something rather good there, keep it, keep that rather good thing in.’ The assistant stage manager had noted it down accordingly. But the matter of the Jump remained in doubt, since Ed’s only direction had been to do it any way he liked as long as it was full front and he didn’t screw himself up. A new and specially low projection had been built on to the wall not more than three feet above the ground and the instructor, in whose hands the whole thing had been left, was going to make Jonathan take off from that.
But Jonathan knew that Arthur had jumped from the top. What kind of a boy was he, well, obviously quite a good actor himself, something like Mattie, able to get round Hubert and soften him up and rapidly reduce him to tears. Jonathan saw that Arthur was not naturally courageous. As a prince, however, he had to make himself behave in a princely manner, however senseless that might turn out to be. The best way to escape would be to have another go at Hubert and steam the keys out of him. The princely way would be to jump from the wall, but only from the very top.
If he could bring it off successfully the first time, without causing anyone any trouble, Jonathan was prepared to bet that it would be written into the book and accepted for the rest of the run. His concept of the future ended there. Then there was his hat. That had got to sail slowly down behind him.
Practice was needed on the spot, and for practice he needed reassurance, or, failing that, at least attention. For the last few years he had never really been short of either, so he could hardly be blamed for expecting them now. Jonathan had never been particularly worried at having an agency in place of parents, any more than the Darling family in Peter Pan were worried by having a dog for a nursemaid. He considered himself, and was considered, as a child of the Temple, Freddie’s child.
Behind the school there was a little walled yard, oddly shaped, almost three-cornered, either because the ground had been appropriated at some earlier stage from the house directly behind, or because the street had encroached a little on the back of the Temple. The street lamp, in fact, was right up against the wall and a groove had been cut into the bricks to accommodate it, so that it cast a light into all but the near corner, which was profoundly shadowed. Freddie had frequently been pressed to rent out the yard – as her lease permitted her to do – by garage proprietors, pigeon fanciers, market traders and even by the Theatre Royal, whose scenery docks were hopelessly overcrowded. But the notion of possessing a coveted empty space in the thronged city’s heart appealed to Freddie. Her acquisitiveness gave way, in this instance, to a deeper sense of what was due to her.
The yard, however, had in a certain sense become, since he was six years old, the property of Jonathan, although his rights were fiercely contested by a last claimant, Baines, the odd-job man. Baines, like Freddie, had no real use for the few square feet of space, and was acting merely out of the territorial instinct. He had only been able to talk of having nowhere to stow his bits and pieces. Jonathan had remained in possession because it was there that he conducted whatever he had of home life. Having been allowed at one point to keep a guinea-pig, he had fixed up some kind of a hutch, while Mattie, trying for detachment, had hovered about, offering advice and prophesying disaster. The guinea-pig had quite soon been killed and eaten by one of the half-wild cats which patrolled the theatre district. Only the soles of the feet were left unconsumed, so that although the empty hut remained, a grave had to be dug by its side. The yard was paved with bricks, so it was only necessary to remove half a dozen and replace them. The bricks had stayed loose ever since in case Jonathan wanted to conduct an exhumation.
In his present emergency he had measured the walls during the lunch break and calculated that they were between seven and a half and seven and three-quarter foot, just about right for the purpose. As the day went on it seemed to him that the trajectory and landing were on the whole less important than the take-off, because that might be slippery. The rain which had been falling
lightly had turned to sleet, half way to snow, and as soon as it was dusk the flakes could be seen spinning against the shaft of light from the street lamp. The top of the wall grew white, but that could be cleared off easily.
A wise child, Jonathan had every intention of taking direction, but in devising this rehearsal he was, after all, only doing what Mr Voysey hadn’t time for. Everyone had to run through the bits that weren’t quite right in their spare time; Miss Wentworth had been on at Mattie all the time about the ship-boy’s semblance; really, there wasn’t such a thing as spare time. It took fifteen years to make an actor, by which time Jonathan would be decrepit, over twenty-four. Your character was formed by that time, you’d finished growing, and it was difficult if not impossible for you to learn anything new. What mattered was to concentrate your energy right at the beginning, for example when you were studying your first part. That was how things were done.
Jonathan’s ideas of how to do things were, as indeed they had to be, those of a nine-year-old – one who had entered an adult profession, but still a nine-year-old. By listening to, but far more by watching, the world that confronted him he had mastered a number of given rules which seemed to him to cover the whole conduct of life. But he was not old enough, or anything like it, to realise that the rules might be evaded, time and again, by the givers. Deeply pondering, and with ears turned purple by the cold, he went in through the back door to ask for help in his emergency.
Hannah and Miss Blewett, understanding the ways of almost benevolent tyranny, had told Jonathan that he ought to confide more often in Freddie. But if he hadn’t done so, it was very likely a further proof of the parental shape she occupied in his mind. She was essential to him, but always accessible. He had never been asked to feel afraid of her, or afraid of her not being there. There would always be another time for him to go and see her. It was only this evening that he needed her at once.
At Freddie's Page 14