by Rosie Thomas
‘You’re in charge, then. Where shall we start?’
It was Leonard, a spindly youth in tight trousers, and the theatre’s two stage-hands. They were staring blankly at her, without hostility, but with no hint of friendship either.
Mattie wanted to cry, or to run away, but the three of them were blocking her way, and she hated anyone to see her in tears. She breathed in instead, and said sharply, ‘I’m new here, Leonard, and you know the show. Do what you usually do, and I’ll get started on the hampers.’
To her relief, they turned away and began dismantling the flats. The heavy weights thumped and the metal poles clanked. That, at least, was familiar.
Mattie found the big wicker costume and prop baskets stacked up backstage. She trailed around the deserted dressing rooms collecting discarded costumes and props, praying that she was finding everything, and began packing them up.
It took one and a half back-breaking hours to clear the theatre. Mattie and Leonard heaved the last wicker basket into the waiting lorry, and the two stage-hands melted away. The theatre janitor was locking the doors within five minutes, and Mattie only just retrieved her suitcase. She found herself out in the foggy street again, without even the glow of the theatre lights for reassurance.
‘You got any digs?’ Leonard asked her. He was about Mattie’s own age, an undernourished-looking boy with a bad skin and sparse, greasy hair.
She shook her head, and Leonard sighed.
‘They never think, do they? You’d better come to mine. They’re nothing special because the cast always pinch the best ones. But it’ll be better than nothing.’
He held out his hand for her suitcase, smiling at her Mattie was so tired that she let him take it. Leonard might easily have resented her arrival, she reflected, except that he didn’t seem to have the necessary spirit. He didn’t look like much of an ally as he loped along beside her, but Mattie needed a friend that night. She was grateful to him.
‘Thanks, Leonard,’ she said.
‘You can call me Lenny, if you like.’
His landlady served them a late supper in the front room. Eggs and bacon and fried bread, two bottles of Guinness, and a choice from the bottles of sauce that stood on a wooden tray on the sideboard. Lenny ate in silence, with his mouth open, and Mattie tried to keep her eyes fixed on the Victorian oleograph hung over the chilly grate.
She wanted to talk, to say, This is it. I’m here, but there was no one to share her mystified triumph with. Not Lenny, with his churning mouthfuls of food, and certainly not the brick-jawed landlady.
‘No funny business, is it?’ the landlady had snapped when Lenny presented her.
‘Of course not,’ they murmured.
Mattie thought of Jessie, on their first night in the square. Nothing funny at all, Mattie repeated, as she prepared for bed in the icy back bedroom. I’d give anything for something to laugh at.
Her first night in the professional theatre ended with her shivering between damp sheets, and longing for Julia and Jessie and Felix at home in the cluttered warmth of the flat.
Through the lumpy wallpaper, she could hear Lenny snoring.
It was the hardest week that Mattie had ever lived through, but when the time came round for her second get-out she was beginning to believe that she might survive as stage manager of the Headline number one company.
By sitting up late in her digs, and by working early when the rest of the company were comfortably asleep, she had learned the two scripts. She had mastered the props list and the calls. She knew that she could avoid any more of Sheila Firth’s tantrums by always calling her at the correct second, and always waiting meekly in her dressing room doorway for her languid acknowledgement. Sheila Firth was the actress playing Raina, and the fiancée in Welcome Home. She was temperamental and sickly, and not at all convincing as Shaw’s heroine, but Mattie watched her with intrigued intensity. She was the Leading F that Mattie had sighed over in the Stage.
Sheila’s technique for dealing with John Douglas was to ignore him. His abuses seemed to roll off her tilted head, and Mattie thought it was a very effective technique indeed. She adopted a mild version of it herself, and it helped her to survive the first week’s exposure to the director-manager’s fury. Mattie also had the comfort of recognising that even a hopeless stage manager was better than no one at all, and if John Douglas threw her out Francis was unlikely to replace her at any great speed.
The company moved from Doncaster to Scarborough, and from Scarborough to Nottingham, and Mattie’s new life began to develop a pattern.
On Saturday night, after the last curtain, there was the get-out. When it was done, two lorries took the flats and the props and the hampers of costumes away. The people were all gone, and the two-dimensional bric-à-brac that created the illusions, and the stage was left. Mattie liked it best then. It was easier to recapture some of her illusions about it in the absence of Francis Willoughby’s touring productions.
When the theatre was finally dark, Mattie could limp home to her digs for the last evening’s supper and bed. The digs improved after the first week. Vera took her under her wing, and introduced her to the network of theatrical landladies. They were there, in all the foggy northern towns that the company visited. Some of them were ex-professionals themselves; all of them were in love with the theatre. They always saw all the shows, and the actors waited politely for their verdicts. They treated their weekly regulars like members of the family, feeding them huge, fatty, late meals in gas-fire-heated parlours, and sitting with them afterwards for long sessions of gossip and discreet tippling.
Mattie suspected that the digs patronised by company members less genteel than Vera must be even livelier. There were two middle-aged actors in particular, who had been working the circuit for years and years and who always stayed in the same place in each town. At the end of the week they would murmur something like, ‘Old Nellie’s still got the stamina, dear, but I don’t know that I have. Just look at my skin. Early bed for me every night in Middlesbrough, whatever Phyllis says.’
Their names were Fergus and Alan, but they always referred to each other as Ada and Doris. They were the first homosexuals that Mattie had ever seen at close quarters, and her first introduction to theatrical camp. Doris and Ada convinced her that Felix couldn’t be queer. The thought of Felix pursing his lips and whispering, ‘She’s nice, and she knows it’ behind the back of some stage-hand made her laugh, and long for Julia.
On Sundays they did the transfer. Usually that meant a long, cold train journey with awkward connections. John Douglas drove himself in his filthy black Standard Vanguard, but the rest of the company huddled into the train with thermos flasks and sandwiches and the Sunday papers. The actors read the reviews of the West End productions aloud to each other. Mattie enjoyed the acrimony of that, listening in her corner. Most of the company was too old or too defeated for anything more challenging than Francis’s seedy productions and one or two of them were grateful to be working at all. But the younger ones like Sheila Firth believed that they deserved better, and used the close captivity of the train to tell everyone else. There were uninhibited rows, and shouting, and tears. Mattie watched everything, from behind the shelter of the News of the World.
In the Sunday twilight of the new town, smelling of fish and chips, and canal water, and coal-smoke, there would be the new digs, perhaps a cinema with Vera or Lenny or Alan and Fergus, and then bed in another back bedroom with a brass bedstead, and a china bowl and ewer on the washstand.
Monday was a hard day. There was the physical struggle with recalcitrant flats as they came off the lorries, unpacking the costumes in various dressing rooms, and then a long trail of visits to unsympathetic shopkeepers to beg for the loan of furniture or supplies in exchange for a mention in a programme slip. The cast hated Mondays too, and they complained about their dressing rooms, the lack of their pet props, their unmended or uncleaned costumes, and Mattie had to try to soothe them all. At the end of the day there was
the show itself, with the calls to be made, the backstage business to handle, and her turn to be taken with Lenny in the prompt box.
Mattie had promised that she would write down everything she was seeing and doing, like a diary, and send it to Julia. It was Julia herself, greedy even for someone else’s experience, who had begged her to do it. But by the end of the day Mattie was too bleary with exhaustion and suppertime Guinness to do anything but roll into bed.
Julia wrote two or three letters, thin little notes with news of Jessie and Felix, but none of herself. Josh has been here, she told Mattie dully. Nothing happened. Mattie sighed over the letters in her backstage corner, not even needing to read between the lines.
After Mondays, the week grew easier. Even Mattie could he in bed late and take time over her breakfast before scurrying back to the theatre and her day’s work. Before the early evening preparations she mended scenery, repaired costumes or sewed curtains, developing talents she had never dreamed she possessed. On Wednesdays there was a matinee, Treasury call on Friday, and then it was Saturday once more, and everything was ready to begin all over again. She watched every performance, from the wings or from the shelter of the prompt box, thinking, I could do that. She listened to Sheila Firth’s high, consciously musical voice and mouthed her lines. If it was me, Mattie thought.
Her real position was much humbler. By the end of her first month on tour Mattie had found her niche in the company. Vera mothered her, and Lenny was her regular companion. Mattie was relieved that he at least didn’t try to be more than that. The younger men in the company regarded her as one of the props, and were surprised when she refused to let them try her on like a new costume. She joked with them and fended them off, secretly not liking any of them very much. She enjoyed the company of Alan and Fergus because they made her laugh, and they clearly preferred her to Miss Edge.
Fergus’s sandy eyebrows would go up. ‘Some of the things I could tell you about that one,’ he whispered.
‘Do tell me.’
‘I wouldn’t dream. You’re too innocent, love.’
The actresses mostly ignored her, except to complain about each other. Mattie particularly disliked Sheila’s breathless girlishness, but she did try to copy her posh-sounding elocuted accent. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ John Douglas asked her. ‘Got a gumboil?’
Mattie watched him, too. She was intrigued by his theatrical standards, and by the way he cajoled or insulted his lack-lustre company into meeting them. He must have been a good director, once, she thought. He was also realistic. He couldn’t give much stature to Raina and her Bluntschli, played by a hollow-chested, languidly poetic young actor called Hugh, so he made them tender instead. And he sent the hackneyed drawing-room comedy humming along at a snappy pace that disguised its predictability. The audiences always enjoyed it much more than the Shaw classic. John didn’t ask too much of his actors, but he expected a certain amount and he made certain that they delivered it. Most of the company hated him, but they were careful enough to be civil to his face. Vera lived in terror of him. Mattie didn’t know what she thought. There was still the potent appeal of his voice. Sometimes when she heard it she would turn around and look covertly at him.
Mattie had suffered from his temper more than any of the others at the beginning. On her third night she had failed to deliver a tray of glasses to the wings for the maid to walk on with. The actors on stage had been forced to drink the engaged couple’s health in thin air, and John Douglas had rounded on Mattie in the interval as if he wanted to tear her arms off.
‘I won’t tolerate incompetence,’ the voice boomed at her. ‘You can’t help your ignorance or your crassness, and the rest of us must put up with you. But you do have a marked script in your hands and it tells you in plain English what to do, and when.
None of it is very difficult, even for you. Don’t make another fucking mess-up like that.’
‘I won’t,’ Mattie made the mistake of saying.
The voice attacked her all over again. ‘Don’t assure me of that as though you’re giving me a fucking present. Just remember what I say.’
How could I forget? Mattie retorted silently as she backed away. It was after that that she learned to listen and say nothing, like Sheila Firth did. Wisely she didn’t copy Sheila’s pained, innocent, I-will-forgive-you expression. She was only the stage manager, not Leading F.
Gradually, as she grew more confident and more capable, John Douglas turned his attention elsewhere.
One Friday evening John and Vera were sitting in the office before the six o’clock Treasury call. In very poor weeks the box-office receipts didn’t even cover the company’s wages, and those were the times when John had to telephone Francis Willoughby. This time, however, the takings were good and John and Vera were working on the wage packets. It was a complicated process because some actors received a percentage of the take above a certain figure, so their cuts had to be calculated and deducted from the total before the profits could be grudgingly sent off to Francis. It was Mattie’s job to keep Vera supplied with tea and John with whisky while they worked.
She was filling the kettle in the grubby kitchen cubby-hole when Sheila Firth brushed past. Sheila was wearing her street clothes, complete with a soft black felt hat pulled down over her eyes. That was unusual, because Sheila liked to be in her dressing room in good time so that she could drift soulfully around in her robe, dabbing at her wig and make-up. Mattie heard her stop at the office door. Sheila opened it, and when John and Vera looked up she half-fell against the frame.
‘I can’t go on tonight,’ she said. Her voice quivered with emotion.
Vera got up from her seat and scuttled away like a rabbit, ducking around the tragic Sheila. She left the door considerably open, so that Mattie could hear everything.
‘Why not?’ John’s voice was expressionless by comparison. There was a long, palpitating pause, and then Sheila said, ‘You don’t really understand about love, John, do you?’ Hugging herself with pleasure, Mattie crept closer.
Sheila’s story came spilling out without any further prompting. Everyone knew that she was in love with the leading man of another of Francis’s companies. It was a love conducted on a higher plane, a rarefied and special thing. Sheila was fond of elaborating on the themes of it. Now, Mattie gathered from between the racking sobs, her leading man had abandoned Sheila for a thirty-five-year-old character actress.
‘I worked with her in Peter Pan,’ Sheila wailed. ‘She’s a woman completely without talent or refinement.’
Mattie stifled her laughter. She was thinking. Sheila was understudied by a mousy girl who took the part of the maid and two other walk-ons. The mouse had a heavy cold. She was practically voiceless, and her nose was swollen and bright scarlet.
‘I’m so very, very hurt, John. So crushed, and broken. I can’t work when I feel like this. I can’t …’ The sobs broke out again.
Mattie waited gleefully for John’s outburst. But if she had been thinking, he had been thinking quicker. She heard his chair creak, then the thump of his stick as he took two steps.
‘My poor girl,’ the rich voice murmured. ‘You poor, brave girl. And now you must learn about pain.’
Mattie was transfixed. She slipped closer, to the spot where she could peer through the crack in the door and watch.
John was towering over Sheila. He had taken her face between his hands and he was looking deep into her eyes.
‘You will suffer, my dear. But you can, and you must, cling to your art. Only by making that sacrifice can you grow, and it will reward you by growing with you.’
Sheila let out a low moan and her head fell forwards against John’s shoulder.
Mattie gaped. You clever old bugger, she thought. Admiration flooded through her, and swept away her short-lived dream of stepping on to the stage in Raina’s opening-scene nightgown and fur wraps.
She slipped back to the cubby-hole and clattered noisily with the kettle and cups. When the tea was ready
she laid a tray and carried it back to the office. Sheila was nodding bravely, with her hands folded between John’s.
Mattie knelt beside her and poured her a cup of tea. When Sheila took the cup Mattie put her arm around her shoulder and gave her a hug of sisterly solidarity.
‘Oh, Mattie,’ Sheila broke out again. ‘It takes a terrible shock like this to make one realise how valuable friends are.’
‘I know, I know,’ Mattie saw warmly. ‘The door was open, and I couldn’t help hearing a little. Just remember that we all love you, and admire you.’ Not wanting to risk overdoing it, she tiptoed away again.
Ten minutes later, her face set in lines of sorrowful courage, Sheila was on her way to her dressing room.
Mattie went back for the tray. John was sprawled in his chair with his hands over his face, but he looked up when he heard her come in, and smiled at her.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
It was so rare for him to praise, and it was such an odd, conspiratorial moment, that Mattie didn’t know what to say.
‘I need a drink,’ John grumbled. He poured whisky into two glasses and handed one to Mattie. ‘Will you join me? To celebrate our success in going forward into another evening of theatrical mediocrity?’
They raised their glasses and drank.
With the spirits burning the back of her throat, Mattie blurted out, ‘What are you doing here?’
He turned his molten glare on her. His eyes were the colour of syrup, and because of their surprising glow they were the only part of him that looked healthy. His skin was grey, and the front of his ash-coloured hair was yellow with nicotine. Mattie noticed that his hands on the arms of his chair were knotty with pain. She might have felt sorry for him, if she hadn’t felt more afraid.
‘Doing?’ He laughed throatily and she relaxed a little. ‘Isn’t that obvious? Earning a few quid. A very few, I should say, thanks to your friend Francis. One has to live, and I do have a wife to support.’
‘You’re married?’