by Rosie Thomas
Monty owned four other little clubs in the surrounding streets, and like all his other girls Mattie spent her day working a circuit of them. When one act was over she would pull her clothes on again backstage and haul her holdall with her costume in it through the streets to the next club, and the next invisible audience hunched in the dark beyond the footlights. When her music started, a crackly version of ‘Teach Me Tonight’ that had dinned itself sickeningly into her head, it was time to bundle her hair up under the tasselled mortar-board and sweep through the curtains and on to the stage. Into the cubicle afterwards and dress again. Round and round. Sometimes Monty’s schedule gave her enough time to down a gin in one of the pubs, or to share a sandwich with the other girls. There was a camaraderie between them that was nothing to do with friendship, everything to do with mutually surviving the physical demands and mental stultification of the job. Mattie’s way of getting through the day was to treat each spot as a theatrical performance. She concentrated on injecting fresh nuances into the process of stripping down to her G-string and flinging it triumphantly offstage in the second before the lights went down.
The punters appreciated her work, and Monty loved it.
‘You’re a natural, pet. Born to it.’
He even paid her a pound or two more than the other girls, swearing her to secrecy first.
The music stopped and the girl before Mattie came offstage and slouched into the cubicle. She had big, blue-veined breasts. Neither the girl nor Mattie even glanced round when the boy who worked as backstage factotum dumped her discarded stage costume inside after her. Mattie had told Julia the truth when she said that stripping didn’t bother her. It simply numbed her, somewhere inside herself where she already felt cold. She yawned now, and wished there was somewhere to sit down and wait that wasn’t on the floor.
‘One more tonight,’ she muttered. ‘I’m half dead.’
The other girl was wriggling into her tight skirt. The zipper dragged at her flesh as she pulled it up. She glanced at Mattie and reached for her handbag.
‘Here. Have a blue.’
She held out a crumpled paper cone, just like the ones Mattie used to buy pennyworth’s of sweets in. Mattie dipped into it. She cupped the amphetamine in the palm of her hand and gulped it straight down.
‘Thanks, Vee. Saved my life.’
There had been some shuffling beyond the stage that meant new customers had arrived, but it had settled now into impatient creaking. The audience didn’t like to be kept waiting for too long between turns.
The first bars of Mattie’s music suddenly blared out and the backstage boy jerked his thumb at her. Mattie picked up her cane, made a resigned face at Vee, and pushed through the dusty curtains and on to the stage.
Julia sat between Flowers and John Douglas. The wooden chairs were very small, very hard and upright. She couldn’t see much of the room because it was so dark, but she had the impression that she was the only woman. She folded her hands in her lap, aware of the laughable primness of her posture, and waited. She had never thought of coming to one of Mattie’s performances before this, and Mattie had never suggested it. She wondered now if Mattie would mind.
The music was very loud and distorted. A black-gowned figure materialised on the stage. It was wearing a teacher’s mortar-board and heavy spectacles with no glass in the frames, and it was just recognisably Mattie.
At first Julia wanted to laugh. The pantomime strictness, frowning and cane-waving, was almost irresistibly funny. But then Mattie reached up and swept off her cap. Her wonderful hair fell over her face and down over her shoulders. There was a sigh of indrawn breath, and every man in the stuffy basement room leaned forward on his upright chair. Mattie smiled. She swung the point of her cane down to the stage and balanced it with the tip of one finger. With the other hand, lazily, she opened the front of her gown. Red satin flashed underneath it. With one movement Mattie slid the black stuff off her shoulders and let it fall at her feet. Her skin was so white that it looked blue under the lights.
She took her spectacles off, touching them to her mouth before letting them drop. Miss Matilda was completely gone and it was Mattie on the stage, the shape of her only just veiled by her red slip. Mattie danced, moving as gracefully as she always did. Julia could hear John Douglas’s breathing. Johnny Flowers was leaning forward too, motionlessly watching. The straps of the flimsy thing eased off her shoulders. Under the red slip was the sequined bra and G-string that Julia had made fun of. The dance went on, and the lights caught on the sequins, twinkling points under the bald lights. Mattie took the bra off. She stood still for a moment, her back half turned, black shadows emphasising her curves and hollows. The horrible music reached a crescendo.
Mattie unhooked the G-string and threw it aside. She turned full on, her pretty body fully revealed.
Her expression was defiant, almost taunting.
Julia didn’t feel the remotest desire to laugh now. Mattie’s striptease had touched her, and she shivered. She also thought that it was painfully erotic.
A second later Mattie had disappeared. There was a wave of clapping, some foot-stamping and catcalling.
Beside Julia John Douglas murmured, ‘Sweet Jesus Christ.’ Flowers took Julia’s hand and held it tightly. They stood up in unison and pushed their way out through the darkness.
They waited for Mattie beside the row of dustbins outside the back door of the club. She emerged hardly a minute later, her hair wound up in a knot, ordinary Mattie again in her stovepipe trousers, except for a teacher’s cane gripped in one fist.
She stared blankly at John Douglas.
Then she pointed back over her shoulder. ‘Were you in there tonight? All of you?’ It was Julia who nodded.
Mattie suddenly grinned, surprisingly child-like. ‘It wasn’t much cop, was it? I usually put more effort into it than that. I was too tired tonight.’ Her eyes looked very bright in the dingy light. ‘But I’m livening up now. Are we all going to the Rocket? You too, John, whatever you’re doing here?’
His hand shot out and snatched at her wrist. ‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? In that place?’
Mattie stared at him for a second and then she shrugged wearily. ‘Don’t you start. It isn’t all that different from the theatre, is it? One way or another?’
There was a silence. They stood there, in an awkward circle, until John Douglas said, ‘I want you to come home now. I want you to read something.’
‘To read? It’s Saturday night. I want to go dancing. Julia?’ She looked round to her for support and the girls’ eyes met.
‘Go on,’ Julia said softly. ‘Go with him.’ So that Mattie couldn’t protest any more she turned and let Johnny Flowers lead her away down the alley. She rested her head for a second against his black-leather shoulder.
‘Come on, baby,’ he murmured. ‘You’re big girls now. Both of you.’
They came out into Wardour Street and began to walk northwards towards the Rocket.
‘Are we? Yes, I suppose we are.’ It was cold and the few other shadowy figures in the street looked menacing. Julia shivered again. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Johnny.’
Cheerfully he said, ‘I’m always here when I’m wanted.’
Mattie turned the light on and glanced disparagingly around the room. ‘Julia’s been at the polish again. Well, where is it? Whatever it is you want me to read?’
John Douglas picked the envelope up from its place on the table. Mattie opened it and took out a script in a blue binding.
‘This?’ The title was set in a little window cut out of the blue paper and Mattie read it aloud. ‘One More Day. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Why should you have done?’ John Douglas said sharply. ‘I more or less stole it, and I’ve left the company to bring it down here to you. Now sit down in that chair and bloody well read it. Have you got any whisky?’
Mattie opened the blue cover. ‘There’s a bottle of gin in the kitchen.’
‘I n
ever drink gin.’
Mattie didn’t answer. She was sitting in Jessie’s old armchair with her legs drawn up underneath her, reading the play.
It took her an hour, and the only movement she made was to turn the pages.
When she did look up again she couldn’t speak for a minute. When she did manage to ask the question breathlessness caught at her words.
‘Have they cast it yet?’
John Douglas shook his heavy grey head. ‘Auditions on Monday.’
Mattie could hardly bear to look at him. ‘Can you get me in?’
‘You’re on the list, love. I’ve managed to do that much for you.’
She got up then and went to him. She laid her cheek against his hair. ‘Why?’
‘Because I think you can play the part. It might have been written for you.’
Mattie waited, and then rubbed her cheek sadly against his head. Of course John Douglas wouldn’t say, Because I love you. A little. Even if he felt it, he wouldn’t say it. He hadn’t ever said anything of the kind. He had kept his irascible distance, and Mattie understood that there wouldn’t be anything more between them. But he had come down here to give her this wonderful, terrifying play, and he had secured her an audition, He must believe, after all, that she could act. That was as good as being loved, wasn’t it? Sometimes Mattie despised her own needs.
Very softly she said, ‘I can play it. I know I can.’
‘Good girl. And now, if there isn’t anything else except bloody gin, perhaps we could have a cup of tea?’
Mattie went into the kitchen and came back after a few moments with a tray. She put it down on a low table in front of the hissing gas fire. The red glow of it shone through the tips of her hair, lending her a bronze halo. John Douglas was irresistibly reminded of the Showbox. Mattie up on the tiny, tawdry stage, with her hair spilling out from under the black cap. The worthless glitter of sequins and then her body, taunting and innocent at the same time.
Of all the ways she might have chosen to support herself. He was angry with her, and touched, and titillated. Yet if Mattie could do that, he thought, she had the toughness he had doubted in her. And she would need to be tough, if she was to go the way she wanted. There might well be times when she would have to go further than stripping.
He stood up, ignoring his cup of tea, balancing awkwardly without the aid of his stick. He put his arm round her and pulled her body against his.’ ‘Do you remember the night in Yarmouth?’
‘I remember.’
He started kissing her and then rubbed his hands over her breasts, grunting softly. Mattie stood very still until he lifted his head again.
He saw her face, but he asked, ‘Shall we go to bed, then?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Mattie said, as gently as she could. She was surprised to find that she had acquired a kind of resolve. ‘It didn’t have very much value when we did it before. It seems a … meaningless transaction now.’
He looked sharply at her, and then he thought of the men in the darkness at the Showbox, leaning forward to peer at her white skin. ‘I’m not surprised,’ was all John Douglas said.
Mattie exhaled with relief and immediately insisted, ‘But you must stay here tonight, there’s Felix’s room. You will, won’t you?’
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely. His arms had dropped to his sides and Mattie went away mumbling about sheets and blankets.
For a long time after John Douglas had gone to sleep in his room across the hallway, Mattie lay wide-eyed in her own bed. She was thinking about the audition. There was already a knot of longing and fear and determination in the pit of her stomach. The time when the Rocket would be closing came and went, but Julia didn’t come home. Mattie guessed that she must have gone back to Bayswater, or Paddington, or wherever Flowers was currently living, tactfully leaving her on her own with John Douglas. Mattie’s mouth twisted in the darkness, but the thought slipped away as quickly as it had come. She didn’t sleep, or even close her eyes. She was thinking about One More Day. Her play. Her part.
‘Name?’
‘Mattie Banner.’
The man in the middle of the row of chairs nodded, and drew a line through an item on a list in front of him. There were two other middle-aged men in the cold, bare rehearsal room, a woman with grey hair and a much younger girl who looked like someone’s assistant. She had just brought coffee in mugs for everyone, except Mattie, of course. A young man with tufty-black hair and a hungry, hollow face sat a little apart from them. Mattie thought he must be the playwright, Jimmy Proffitt. She stared covertly at him, wondering how someone she wouldn’t have glanced at in the Rocket might have written such a play. He felt her eyes on him and looked up. Mattie stared at the room instead. It was in the Angel Theatre, a Victorian building of faded grandeur that had once been a music hall. It was in an unfashionable inner suburb, and it looked much the same as any of the northern theatres that Mattie had trailed through with Francis Willoughby’s company. It existed just as precariously on the brink of financial collapse, but the Angel Company was distinguished by its willingness to stage new and experimental plays, to displease the Lord Chamberlain, and to give directors a free rein. Mattie recognised two of the men facing her by sight and by reputation. She swallowed and rolled the blue-covered script in damp hands.
‘And you’re going to read for the part of Mary?’
‘Yes.’
I want this part.
She had read it so many times since John Douglas had given it to her on Saturday night that she almost knew the lines already. The play was a tragedy, so raw and strident that it hurt Mattie’s throat to whisper some of the words. But when she thought of other new pieces, three-act pieces of fluff that dealt with engagements and tea parties and family misunderstandings, as two-dimensional as the painted flat behind the French windows, Mattie wanted to laugh in the same harsh voice as Jimmy Proffitt’s play.
‘At the top of page seventeen, then. Mr Curtis will read the part of Dennis for you. When you’re ready, Miss Banner.’
Mattie read.
At first her hands shook so much that the typed speeches jumped in front of her eyes and she faltered over the words. But then, as the lines worked inside her, Mary became more important than Mattie.
Jimmy Proffitt’s Mary was a nineteen-year-old girl. Her husband was a boy even younger than herself, and they had a baby of five months. They lived in one room, and Mattie knew how it would be. The wallpaper would hang down in soaking strips and there would be foul blue-grey patches spreading behind it. Mattie also knew how life would be for Mary and Dennis. They would claw at each other while the baby cried, the way Jimmy Proffitt had made them do. There would be desperation, and the compensation of tenderness and savage laughter that he had also given them. The opening of the play was viciously comic, and then the seams of it split open. One night, after a quarrel with Mary, Dennis took their week’s money and spent it on whisky. Then, outside a bar, he met a man he owed money to. There was a fight, and Dennis killed him.
The stage was split for the rest of the play. On one side Dennis was marched towards life imprisonment. On the other, Mary slowly lost her insignificant battle. In the last scene she gave her baby away to a childless woman. The woman paid her fifty pounds. Mary went home and burned the money, and then she blew out the flame and knelt down in front of the square mouth of the oven.
When Mattie finished her reading there was a brief silence, no more than a second or two. The director looked up from his lists. ‘Thank you. Have you prepared another piece for us? Anything you like.’
‘Umm. One of Rosalind’s speeches. From As You Like It.’ Mattie wasn’t sure why she had chosen it, except in the vague hope that if she did Shakespeare they might mistake her for a proper actress. She was hardly half a dozen lines into the speech before the man held up his hand.
‘Right, right. Not thoroughly at home with the classics, eh?’
Mattie waited, her arms limp at her sides. They were mumbling with their hea
ds together now. Then the grey-haired woman said, ‘Thank you, Miss – ah – Banner. We’ll let you know.’
She made her way, somehow, across the apparent miles of dusty floor to the door. She was only dimly aware, through her misery, of Jimmy Proffitt moving behind her, more mumbled talk. The door was already open when the director called, ‘Could you wait outside, please?’
She wanted to let her head fall forward, to rest her forehead against the cool, hard door.
‘What?’
‘Could you take a seat outside. We’ll try not to keep you waiting for too long.’
She stumbled out into the corridor. There was a row of hard chairs, reminiscent of the Showbox. Mattie sat down at the end of the row. Three other girls were waiting for their turns, and one of them was called in after Mattie. The other two went on talking about RADA. They had elocuted voices like Sheila Firth’s. Mattie sat with her head turned away from them, staring at the wall, resolutely not thinking.
Certainly not hoping.
But she was still here, wasn’t she?
The first girl came out and went straight down the stairs without speaking. The others followed her in their turn. It was cold in the unheated corridor and Mattie was shivering. At last the girl assistant put her head round the door. ‘Mr Brand would like you to read again, Miss Banner.’
Once again Mattie faced the row of chairs. She felt so stiff with cold and fear that she was sure her jaw would crack as soon as she opened it.
‘The last scene this time, if you wouldn’t mind, Miss Banner.’
Jimmy Proffitt was watching her, and so were Brand and the grey-haired woman, and the girl assistant had stopped winding her finger through her back-combing. Curtis’s voice was uninflected as he read Dennis’s corresponding lines.
Mattie was aware of everything, and nothing.
Afterwards, all they said was, ‘We’ll be in touch with you.’
At the door the assistant asked her, ‘Who is your agent, Miss Banner? We don’t seem to have a note of it here …’
‘Mr Francis Willoughby,’ Mattie improvised quickly. Francis would do it for her, of course. For a percentage, if there ever were to be anything for him to take his percentage of.