by Rosie Thomas
Julia sighed. ‘Mattie’s doing something, of course. Right at this very minute.’ She held up her crossed fingers. ‘And so will I. Soon. I promise you, Felix.’
Restlessly she stood up and switched on the fairy lights on the Christmas tree. The little Woolworths’ lanterns shone against the brown needles. Julia put out a finger to the tip of the lowest branch and the dry, falling whisper came again.
Twelve
The auditorium of the Angel Theatre was small, and it was filled to capacity. Julia glanced up at the ornamental plasterwork garnishing the red velvet boxes. There seemed to be dozens of faces floating over the gilt cherubs, leaning forward, peering down at the curtain. Mattie had been ghostly with fear when she left for the theatre, and Julia understood now how she must feel, waiting to come out in front of so many pairs of eyes. She groped to her left for Felix’s hand and squeezed it nervously. He nodded at the seats in front of them.
‘All the critics are here. That’s Hobson, on the end.’
Glad to focus on something other than the tension of waiting, Julia wondered how it was that Felix knew so much about everything. She had only heard the critics names through Mattie, and she would never have recognised any of the impassive profiles dotted along the row of stalls.
On Julia’s right-hand side China Bliss sat with her ringless hands folded in her lap. She had arrived at the theatre fifteen minutes earlier, escorted by Bliss. Alexander’s mother was small, swathed in a thick, dark mink coat, with her greying blonde hair drawn up into a neat chignon. She held out a thin, cool hand to Julia and Felix. Her face was smooth, well cared for and impeccably made-up, but when she turned to accept the glass of Tio Pepe that Felix had bought for her in the crowded stalls bar Julia saw that she had the same beaked profile as her son. Her plucked eyebrows made the same sardonic arcs. Her appearance was understated, but Julia understood what Sophia had meant.
People automatically turned to look at China Bliss, even though she stood quite still, sipping her sherry, hardly speaking at all.
Julia thought Bliss’s mother was unnerving. She found herself overtaken by an unfamiliar desire to be approved of, to do and say the right things in front of this small, straight-backed figure. The result was that she felt awkward and oversized, and suspected that she was talking too much. China’s unblinking eyes studied her over the rim of the sherry glass. Julia was relieved when the bell rang and they joined the shuffling crowd making its way into the theatre.
There was another thing, too.
From the way that Bliss looked at her and listened to the few words that she did utter, Julia recognised what she had already suspected, that he adored his mother. Since she had met him, quite unthinkingly, Julia had become used to being the focus of his attention. Now it was divided she was faintly, but surprisingly, resentful.
As she waited for the curtain to go up, Julia sat as still as she could, so that her arm wouldn’t brush unnecessarily against China’s furred one. She didn’t try to look at Bliss, seated on the other side of his mother. And then, without warning, the house lights dimmed. An unusual silence fell at once, and Julia didn’t think of anything except Mattie. The red velvet folds and gold fringe swept upwards, incongruously revealing the set. It was a small, square room, papered with stained wallpaper. There was an old gas-oven, a sink with a pail standing in it, an oilcloth-covered table. Mattie was sitting at the table with her back to the audience. Her hair was pinned up so that the white, childish nape of her neck was revealed. In the breathing quiet she began to hum.
The tune was ‘Greensleeves’. Mattie’s voice was high and clear, and it was as if it cast a spell. Julia shivered, and the fine hairs stood up all down the length of her back. She slid forward on to the edge of her seat, conscious of Felix, beside her, leaning forward too. After that, Julia didn’t move at all. The play, and Mattie’s performance, transfixed her.
In the single short interval the four of them sat in their places, not talking but listening to the heightened buzz of talk, feeling the electricity generated in the fusty red and gilt space. Julia couldn’t look at the critics, As the house lights went down again her fingernails clenched into the palms of her hands. Please, Mattie, she whispered. Just go on being as good. Somehow China Bliss must have heard her.
‘She will,’ she said crisply.
The first act had had its bitter comedy. The second swung into tragedy.
Julia had lost all consciousness that it was Mattie on the stage. Mattie was another person, remote from here, whose laughter and exploits were nothing to do with this Mary or her lover and their fatal disintegration.
At the end, in the last scene, Mary knelt down in front of the oven’s mouth. She showed the same bare, defenceless neck. And then, with shocking distractedness, she began to hum again. It was ‘Greensleeves’ again, but the phrases were broken now and the clear voice was cracked.
The tears ran down Julia’s face.
There was a moment of blessed darkness and then there were lights again. And now it was Mattie once more, her hands linked with the other actors’, while the applause surged up and broke over them. She was smiling, but she looked dazed. The clapping went on, and on, mixed with shouting and cheering. Half angrily, Julia rubbed the tears off her cheeks with her wrists and went on clapping until her hands were raw, needing to make some offering to Mattie from herself and all the rest of the people who had seen her. Oddly, she remembered the Showbox. Mattie had been right, she thought. She had uncovered far more tonight than she had ever needed to do on Monty’s seedy stage.
They were shouting for the author now. Jimmy Proffitt emerged suddenly from the wings, spindly, in a black jacket and tight trousers, his neck looking almost too fragile to support his domed head. He nodded, without smiling, with the same dazed look as Mattie. He took Mattie’s hand and the actor’s who had played her husband and held them up, like prize-fighters. A moment later, with the applause still thundering, the curtain dropped for the last time. The gold fringe shut out the last glimpse of it, but the sordid room stayed with them all.
The house lights seemed high and hard, and the overblown Victorian decor even more incongruous. Julia blinked, and saw Felix’s face. He was still staring at where Mattie had stood.
‘She was good, wasn’t she?’ Julia whispered idiotically. He nodded.
‘Oh yes. She was good. I didn’t realise how good.’
China stood up, drawing her fur coat neatly around her. She fitted her black suede gloves on to her hands, smoothing each finger in turn before she looked up at Julia. ‘Thank you,’ she said calmly. ‘That was a memorable evening. Your friend, and Mr Proffitt, have an interesting future ahead of them. I’m sure the critics will agree.’
Julia had forgotten them. When she looked, the seats were all empty.
‘Gone to do their stuff,’ Felix said.
Over his mother’s head, Bliss was smiling at her. Julia felt a surge of elation, fuelled by her relief for Mattie. It swelled into euphoria and she held out her hand to China. ‘Let’s all go backstage,’ she insisted. ‘We must go back, and see her.’
Mattie sat in her dressing room.
The flowers and telegrams that had seemed to fill the space before the performance were obliterated by people. Half of the faces were totally strange, although they swooped down on her and made kissing and congratulating noises. The others were so familiar that they were incongruous in this place: Julia and Felix, looking as happy as if they had just fallen in love, Francis Willoughby grinning like an overfed cat, with his cigar bobbing up and down as he shook hands, Bliss, with an autocratic-looking woman who was unmistakably his mother, John Douglas, Rozzie, with her husband, looking awkward and overawed, Ricky and Sam beaming and nudging each other, Johnny Flowers wearing a clean white vest, seemingly dozens of others.
Mattie wanted to hug them all to her, but she couldn’t move. She felt as though the viscera had been lifted out of her. She was empty, a shaky bag of skin with a mouth that went on smiling, and murmuring Thank you.
>
Someone put a full glass into her hand and she drank gratefully. It was champagne, and the bubbles at the back of her throat made her choke. A hand patted her back, and held her glass while she wiped her eyes. She saw that it was Jimmy Proffitt.
‘You did well,’ he whispered.
‘I messed some lines at the beginning.’
‘Yeah. I wasn’t going to mention that until tomorrow.’ He was smiling. His eyes slanted at the corners and his long top lip lifted from his teeth. Mattie emptied her glass, and it was filled up at once.
Later, there was dinner in an Italian restaurant near the theatre. Mattie felt exhausted now, the weight of it pressing down on her head, but there seemed to be no possibility of escape. She longed to be at home in the square, warming her feet at the gas fire and drinking gin out of a mug, with Julia. But Julia and Felix had gone, presumably to have dinner with Bliss and his mother. Everyone she knew seemed to have gone, all of a sudden, and she had been swept away by the rest of the cast, and the director, and the Angel Company stalwarts, and a lot of strange faces who clamoured and squawked around the red tablecloths. Mattie wondered dimly why she didn’t share the universal sense of euphoria.
I’m tired, she thought.
‘You look knackered,’ Jimmy Proffitt’s flat voice said in her ear. Gratefully, she let her head fall on his shoulder. Here was a friend, at least. His arm came around her as if to prove it.
‘I am.’
‘Well, bear up. We can get away soon.’
Mattie drank the glasses of Chianti as they arrived in front of her, and waved the plates of food away. The laughter and voices seemed to reach her down a very long tunnel. But when she turned she could see Jimmy’s ear, very close, seemingly larger than life. It had intricate pinky-grey folds, and it lay flat to his head in a way that seemed not quite human. The room was thick with smoke and the noise seemed unbearable. People were still eating and she stared at them, wondering how they could force down the mottled red and creamy coils.
Then at last there was a movement. They were standing up and there were bursts of laughter, and she was nodding and smiling and answering. Jimmy’s arm was round her waist, half holding her up, half drawing her to him. Outside, on the pavement, his face was level with hers. He put his mouth close to her ear.
‘Come home with me. I’ll take care of you, if you want.’
Oh, please. Mattie seized at the thought. She knew how exhausted she was, how dazed by the seemingly ecstatic reception of Jimmy’s play and her performance, and now, in the cold air, just how drunk. To be taken care of. That was what she needed.
She smiled into Jimmy’s slanting eyes. ‘Yes. I’ll come.’
He lived in one and a half rooms over a restaurant near Tottenham Court Road. When he clicked on the lights Mattie saw that the small space was obsessively tidy. There was a bed, a table with a typewriter on it, a few clothes hanging behind a piece of curtain. It reminded her a little of Felix’s room, except that there were none of Felix’s odd or beautiful objects to decorate it. Jimmy’s only ornaments were huge collages, made from pictures snipped out of magazines. They were intricate and disturbing, ears pasted to grow out of noses, eyes out of mouths, many heads from a single body. Mattie shivered and looked away.
‘Cold?’ Jimmy asked. He turned on a one-bar electric fire. His hands were warm when they touched her face, and his mouth was warm when he kissed her. She felt his long, thin lips move against hers. It was very quiet in the room. Mattie wanted to say something, almost anything, to make a bridge of words between them before anything else happened. She lifted her head. ‘I’ve never told you before. How brilliant I think it is. One More Day. You deserve … everything that’s coming.’
He looked at her, sideways, considering her. ‘I know. I was never worried about the play, after I’d finished it.’ He took her praise as no more than his due. ‘I was just afraid of what they’d do to it on the stage. But you did well. I told you.’ He kissed her neck, pulling the collar of her blouse away from the skin. That was all there was to say, seemingly.
‘Thank you,’ Mattie whispered.
‘Are we going to bed?’ Jimmy asked.
When she was undressed she tried to wrap the bedcover around herself but he held it away, looking at her.
‘You’ve got wonderful tits,’ he said, and buried his face in them.
What Jimmy Proffitt did was not much different from what John Douglas had done, or the one or two men she had experimented with since then, except that it went on for much longer. He came, at last, and rolled away from her, smiling in a way that seemed to Mattie to be inside himself, nothing to do with her at all.
‘Did you like that?’ he asked.
‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. She was wondering why, on what should have been a triumphant night, when everything was happening to her that she had ever hoped for, she should feel so lonely and separate, even from Jimmy, who was part of the triumph and whose body had just been part of hers. More than anything else she wanted to cry, just to lie still and let the tears flood out of her eyes.
‘Hey.’ Jimmy put his arm beneath her shoulder and pulled her closer to him. ‘Go to sleep now. You’re okay. And you can act.’
The unexpected tenderness finished Mattie. But Jimmy turned out the light, so her tears were at least invisible. She lay against him, her hand fluttering awkwardly over his flat body and hollow flanks. He caught it and held it between them. Mattie’s tears ran into the thin pillow, and then dried.
I can act, she told herself. I knew I could do it. And I did, didn’t I?
It was her last thought before she fell asleep.
In the morning, when she woke up and blinked in the dirty, early light, Jimmy was already out of bed. He was standing in the middle of the floor pulling a pair of jeans up over his bare thighs. ‘Where’re you going?’ Mattie mumbled.
He stared at her. ‘The papers. Where d’you think?’
He was only gone for a few moments. He burst back into the room with a thick sheaf of newsprint in his arms. Mattie hauled herself upright, wrapping the bedclothes carefully around her upper half. But Jimmy didn’t spare her a glance. He threw himself down on the bed beside her and tore feverishly into the first paper. His lips formed the first words as he read them, and then he shouted in triumph. ‘Mr Proffitt, the youngest and angriest of the Angry Young Men, has written a remarkable play. His voice is uncompromising, poetic, and as new as tomorrow.’
Mattie caught the fever. She snatched up another paper and riffled through it. ‘Here. Listen. A tragedy for our times … powerful, shocking, mordantly funny … umm, umm, Miss Banner is a great discovery.’
They were like children pulling open their Christmas stockings, exclaiming at each new revelation and then throwing it aside in favour of the next. They snatched the reviews from each other, tearing the paper and smudging their hands and faces with newsprint as the pages mounted up in a litter around them.
‘I am not ashamed to say that I wept, and I don’t believe that there were many dry eyes around me. Jesus, who wrote that?’
‘A directness that cuts straight to the heart.’
‘Hey, here’s one for you. I would travel a long way to see Miss Banner in one of our great tragic roles.’
‘How far is a long way? He never came to Sunderland to see me as the debutante in Welcome Home.’
They were flushed with their success now, shouting and laughing and poring over the best lines again. Mattie was bursting with the elated triumph that had evaded her last night. ‘Miss Banner is a faultless Mary.’
All the reviewers devoted most of their space to the play itself, and that was how it should be, Mattie thought generously. One More Day was a remarkable piece of work, and she was proud that she had recognised it on her first reading, with John Douglas watching her so anxiously. And her own share of the praise and attention was more than she had hoped for, more than she had even dreamed of. She gathered the scattered newspapers voluptuously to her chest and hugged them.
There was only one less than favourable review, in the Telegraph. The rims of Jimmy’s nostrils went white as he read it.
‘The unpleasantly realistic face of an unpleasant world, and Mr Proffitt dwells on it with evident relish. The fine acting of the newcomer, Miss Banner, is wasted on the self-seeking melodrama of One More Day.’ Jimmy almost spat. ‘What’s he talking about, the ignorant, bloated old bastard?’
Gently, Mattie took the paper from him and dropped it on the floor. ‘It’s only one,’ she said. ‘Against all the others.’
They went back to the good reviews, rereading them until they knew them by heart. Then Mattie leaned back luxuriously against the pillows while Jimmy went into his kitchen alcove and made bacon sandwiches with thick slabs of white bread smeared with tomato ketchup, and tea in a big brown pot. He brought them back to bed and they feasted together, speculating about what the director would say, and the backers, and on how many weeks the play would run after such reviews, and what Jimmy’s share of the take would amount to. Francis’s negotiations on Mattie’s behalf hadn’t secured her any more than a fairly modest weekly wage.
‘I’ll be rich,’ Jimmy announced.
At the same moment Mattie realised, with a little jolt, that even if she wasn’t rich, she was a definite success. There would be other parts now. Lots of them, perhaps even television or films. She had watched it happen to other actresses, and now it was her turn. Just as she had dreamed, ever since Blick Road. A slow, dazzled smile spread over her face.
Jimmy Proffitt saw it and he took her mug of tea out of her hand. ‘And now, don’t you think we should celebrate our mutual triumph?’
He pulled the blankets away and nuzzled his face against the creamy weight of Mattie’s breast. Her fists had already begun to tighten when he sat up again and reached for a tin box on the chair beside his bed. Inside the tin was a packet of tobacco and a folded paper of grass. ‘Shall we have a smoke first?’
Mattie nodded. She watched him while he rolled it and then took the first draw when he offered it to her. There was plenty of marijuana around at the Rocket and elsewhere, but Mattie generally preferred the blues and other uppers taken by the Showbox girls to keep themselves going. The grass made her feel thick-headed now, and her limbs felt heavy and tingly. But it was nice, lying dreamily with her cheek against Jimmy’s chest and watching the blue plumes of smoke. She thought that one of the eyes in the collage over the bed winked at her and she laughed a little.