Spies and Stars

by Charlotte Bingham

  For this reason Harry and I found ourselves, as usual, hanging about in the dustbin area too early in order that we should be absolutely on time. After which we would present ourselves at the front door, looking and feeling pleased.

  Which was not how the rest of the assembled company were looking as we went into the drawing room. To say the least, the atmosphere was leaden. Melville, playing the piano, looked as if he was playing it on a sinking ship.

  My father gave Harry a penetrating look before pouring him a very large drink. He gave me a very large drink too, which I hugged to me before hiding it under a nearby chair.

  ‘Go on in, Lottie, I’m not joining you tonight. The dinner is only for you and Harry and Hal and Melville – security business,’ my mother announced, coming back into the drawing room, retrieving the drink and sitting down with it to listen to the wireless. ‘The less people know about this matter the better,’ she added.

  In the dining room, I sat down with the rest of them, and before long my father started to speak – always stopping when Mrs Graham was in the room. As he spoke I had the distinct feeling Harry and I were in a play someone else had written; not a Trevor Duncan play, I hasten to add, but someone who was keen on skulduggery at the highest level.

  It seemed that the famous Shakespearean actor Roland Andrews – always referred to by Hal and Melville as ‘dear old Roly’ – was about to walk into a sinister plot, which would finish his career and cast a dark shadow over the whole English acting profession. Hollywood would shun our brilliant actors and directors and writers – any taint of communism, socialism, or other isms. In other words, it would be death to all future hopes for film investment in this country.

  ‘Roly is a duck, actually,’ Melville stated as the conversation turned to the nature of Roland Andrews’ character, ‘but he is also gormless. Reality went years ago from playing dear Shakespeare’s greatest roles. He is most famous for King Lear, but then there is the Scottish play of course – that split up him and Melinda. They ignored the golden rule, which is never, ever play the starring roles in the Scottish play if you are married. And then of course there’s Romeo – he still does Romeo, bless him, although nowadays only on tour, and then only north of Crewe.’

  I tried to clear my throat a little too loudly because I could see that Harry was about to make a statement, or worse – ask a question.

  ‘I am wondering, sir,’ he asked my father during a pause in the conversation, ‘how you all think that Lottie and I can help prevent this sinister plot?’

  ‘Easy, my dear fellow. You have to infiltrate Roly’s household, and somehow provide us with the information we need to stop him bringing the house of theatrical cards down around his ears. Roly could end up in jug if he goes on getting involved in something he does not understand. He is not only a well-meaning old monster, but a bit of a dancing bear too.’

  ‘The whole establishment will stand shoulder to shoulder against him,’ Melville said in a quiet voice. ‘People are still very sensitive on these issues.’

  I frowned. This was all getting beyond me, but not it seemed beyond Harry.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You want to use Lottie and myself to – to infiltrate Roland Andrews’ household, and somehow rescue him from these sinister plotting communist-leaning characters?’

  My father smiled for the first time. ‘That’s the ticket,’ he said.

  ‘You will do splendidly,’ Hal announced. ‘Young, enthusiastic … you will have him tied to your cause rather than these other ghastlies, in a few seconds. Besides he’s with my agent, couldn’t be simpler. I believe you have the perfect script – only just finished, Lottie tells me – ready to wave before him,’ he concluded, firmly.

  After dinner ended Harry tried to walk home in a normal fashion, but it was just not possible. He kept stopping and having to take deep breaths. I knew this was because he had just agreed to do something neither of us wanted to do.

  ‘I expect you wish you had never had anything to do with me?’ I prompted him.

  ‘I do not wish anything like that, I just wish we had said no, but with those three round a table it is impossible to say anything but yes. They are so persuasive. I mean who can refuse to rescue a poor ageing old actor from his enemies? But to have to offer him our script as well, that is true patriotism.’

  ‘It means I will have to take another bit of leave, but apparently that will be made all right with Commander Steerforth, the powers that be will smooth it all over.’

  ‘It means we will have to finish this rewrite on the script, so that they can get it round to him through his agent, which he just so happens to share with Hal.’

  ‘Time for cold towels around the head—’

  ‘And some. It might have helped if you hadn’t said we had finished it already.’

  Harry stopped walking, or rather wobbling, down the street towards his flat, and faced me.

  ‘I am not changing a word of it, you understand, not even for your father, MI5, MI6 or Uncle Tom Cobley.’

  ‘Why would we have to?’ I asked, and it was my turn to gulp for air. ‘I mean our script is just going to be a foot in the door.’

  ‘Let’s hope he hates it,’ Harry said gloomily. ‘Of course, there’s a good chance he will hate it.’

  ‘Let us pray hard to the God of scripts—’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  I don’t think we could have prayed hard enough because within a couple of weeks Harry had the call from Hal’s agent. At the end of the call Harry put down the telephone with an expression of despair.

  ‘Oh, Lord, he loves it. Apparently we must go round – Tuesday of next week. Make plans at once, free us for this great patriotic task.’

  After that Harry had to go for a walk, and he let me go with him.

  ‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ he moaned, ‘sneaking about some poor old star’s house on the pretence that we are going to be doing this film together. It just doesn’t seem right. I mean the part of the father is hardly huge, is it?’

  I agreed the part of the father was not huge, but obviously it was big enough to attract Roland Andrews or we would not be going round, would we?

  *

  Roland Andrews lived in a very smart part of Chelsea, not quite Belgravia, but very up and coming, and yet enough of the whiff of bohemia to give it a pleasantly raffish air – the front door black and shiny, the brass knocker depicting the twin faces of comedy and tragedy, and the door opened by a butler in a striped apron with a very purposeful feather duster under his arm.

  ‘You are?’ he asked in a measured way, with a distinct theatrical timbre.

  ‘That voice has been on many long tours,’ I muttered to Harry as the butler left us in the first-floor drawing room.

  It was a room filled with the kind of art that makes you feel at home – well, that makes me feel at home. I never quite like a room that has no real paintings on the walls, and this one had a nice collection – not Old Masters but English Impressionists, a Rex Whistler drawing, and a pair of paintings that I could treasure of golden wheat fields, England in the autumn. Above the chimneypiece was a large portrait of Roland Andrews – as Romeo.

  At last the door opened and the great man appeared.

  Roland Andrews was still slim, but his hair was thinning, and his skin had that slight flush that in late middle age speaks of many enjoyable evenings at the Garrick Club.

  ‘My dear scribes,’ he said, warmly, shaking our hands. ‘How very pleasant, and bless you for coming.’

  Harry and I nodded, still standing.

  ‘It is a great privilege to meet you, sir,’ Harry said, filling in the ensuing pause.

  I looked at Harry. He wasn’t usually so awestruck, and then I remembered that he had been at the first night of the never-to-be-forgotten Roland Andrews’ King Lear – a performance so brilliant it was still talked about in lowered tones.

  ‘Sit, please sit.’ Roland Andrews indicated some sofas. We sat down obediently as he ensconced him
self in a large library chair from which vantage point he could gaze down on us lowly writers.

  ‘I love your script,’ he said, smiling. ‘I really love it. I read it in one sitting, which is unusual for me. I am so flattered that you thought of sending it to me. I love Mike. I love his attitude, I love the way he puts Sophie down, and yet he is still in love with her, obviously. It is a part made for me.’

  He rose from his chair and started to walk about as he spoke, and it was just as well he did as the expression on Harry’s face, let alone my own, could only have been described as aghast. Mike, the male lead, was a randy thirty year old.

  ‘I have already thought of how to play him, beginning with the feet of course. One must always start with the feet. Even with Lear I started with the feet.’

  ‘Mr Andrews, sir—’ Harry began, but sensing danger I interrupted him before he could get any further.

  ‘How do you see Mike’s background, sir?’

  There was a pregnant pause, well – all right – just a pause as I made my special silent ‘shut up’ gesture to Harry, finger-waggling, usually behind my back, but as I was sitting on a lowly sofa for lesser folk, I had to do it in front of me.

  By now Harry, pale to the lips, sat in a frozen pose, staring ahead of him as a starving man might who has just had a plate of crumpets pass under his nose only for them to be offered to someone else. I could see that he simply could not believe what he was hearing.

  Roland turned from the window where he had been gazing into the street below and gave us his thoughts.

  ‘Oh, I think Mike is the son of a landlady running theatrical digs, don’t you?’

  Needless to say, I knew Roland Andrews’ mother was just such a woman. Harry was about to correct this and tell the great star that actually our fictional Mike was the son of a famous athlete, a father figure whom – as it happened – he greatly resented, when I made my ‘shut up’ gesture again.

  ‘I wish you would stop doing that,’ Harry moaned as Roland Andrews left us to take a telephone call in the next room.

  ‘Just let it happen,’ I instructed him. ‘Let things unravel … they will have to, I mean no one is going to believe that he can play Mike. It won’t happen, just can’t.’

  ‘In that case what on earth are we doing here?’

  ‘We’re trying to find the wretched compromising document he is being persuaded to sign, remember?’

  Harry looked round the immaculately tidy room.

  ‘No point in looking here, there’s nowhere to hide it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I always believe in improving the shining hour, so I immediately struggled up from our sofa and started to look under the cushions. Nothing revealed itself until I dared to raise the seat of the library chair, and lo, before our astonished eyes, and they were astonished, lay a large white envelope.

  ‘Leave it!’

  ‘No, must look. Just must.’

  ‘Drat. Bank statements. Double, double drat. Funny place to keep them.’

  There was the sound of someone at the door; Harry flew to it as I shoved the envelope back under the resident cushion.

  The someone at the door was the butler. ‘So sorry, must fly to the bathroom …’

  ‘To the left, sir. No, your left, not mine.’

  Harry’s dash for the little boys’ room was enough to distract the butler, who was a person of lofty height. This gave me enough time to sink back down on to our sofa of humble dimensions.

  ‘Sir will be with you in a moment,’ the butler told me. ‘He has to sign a few documents. People are always after him for his signature, and he is much in demand for so many causes.’

  We took the bus home in a state of great relief, because it was now quite obvious to us that we had arrived too late in Roland Andrews’ life to be able to prevent him from signing things.

  It was a relief, I tell you, to go to bed that night thinking that we would not have to struggle with the worthy old Shakespearean actor impersonating our Mike.

  Relief came too soon, as it always seems to with writers.

  I was back in the War Office the next day, taking up the reins again, when the telephone rang and it was Harry calling.

  ‘It’s still on, the job is still on.’

  The arrangement had been that Harry should report back to my father about Andrews, which he had indeed done.

  ‘What do you mean, the job is still on?’

  ‘What do you think I mean? We’re to go round there tomorrow morning. Tell you more when I see you.’

  Commander Steerforth was impressed.

  ‘Still on active service, eh? Well done. But remember, always make sure of your exit before you go in. It’s the golden rule. Can get you out of a lot of trouble, particularly in the Bight.’

  I was getting a bit fed up of golden rules, but nevertheless I smiled my thanks, and the day finished with a mound of typing and any number of carbon copies, all of which seemed intent on turning my fingers blue, which was probably better than turning the air blue, which I felt like doing at the very idea of having to go back into the fray with Roland Andrews.

  ‘He’s got such a big bottom,’ I moaned the following day on the bus to Chelsea.

  ‘Never mind his bottom, it’s his face we have to worry about. No amount of make-up will hide those crags and sags.’

  Harry stared out of the window and I could feel him wishing that the film he had done had been released, and then wondering if it ever would be.

  ‘I am sorry about all this skulduggery, Harry, but it might lead to real work, mightn’t it?’

  ‘Sure, and it might lead to this poor old thespian being put in prison.’

  ‘No, no, they won’t do that; they’ll do something much worse.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Skew any prospect of his knighthood.’

  ‘Poor old ham. After all that trolling the Bard through the provinces during the war with bombs dropping into his make-up, they would sabotage the ultimate reward?’

  ‘Worse than that – they will ruin his reputation, forever. You know how stuffy people are – any hint of something they don’t agree with themselves and, heigh-ho, off you go to the Gulag.’

  ‘That could be quite a smart address – Gulag 1.’

  ‘It might well turn out to be one we will be putting to our writing paper if we don’t find this wretched petition he is about to put his paw print on. Myself, I think it’s the butler who is influencing him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it is a golden rule in plays and things, when in doubt, make it the maid or the butler. After all, it could easily be the butler hiding the bank statements under the cushion—’

  ‘You think like that and you haven’t even acted in repertory theatre, madam?’

  ‘Seen a lot of tatty tours, Clever Drawers.’

  After these exchanges we had finally arrived outside the great man’s house.

  As soon as the front door opened and I re-appraised the butler in his entirety standing in the doorway, I realised I might be on to something.

  There was something not quite right about him. I don’t just mean that I could see he was wearing ladies’ nylons, and not socks with his shoes – after all, it was a theatrical household – but because he had a shifty look to his nostrils. People always go on about a shifty look to the eyes, but nostrils give away a great deal. They can open and close too quickly, as this chap’s nostrils were doing just that, as if he was a horse coming off the gallops. It was not natural; at least I didn’t think it was.

  ‘He keeps looking down at us as if we smell,’ Harry whispered after the butler had shown us to our sofa and closed the drawing-room door behind us.

  ‘So you noticed that too? I think it most suspicious. I think he thinks we are most suspicious. Perhaps he knows we are not here just for the script, perhaps he knows that Roland Andrews is making a tit of himself thinking he can play Mike?’

  ‘Or he knows we are from Another Sourc
e?’

  ‘Hardly—’

  ‘He might be from Another Source himself.’

  This was getting trying. I really hated the whole double-agent thing – I mean who was who and why was fine, but as soon as an agent was playing both ends against the middle, then no one knew where they really were, and not likely to find out either, so I was very relieved when the door opened again and this time it was not the nostril-inflating butler, but the star himself.

  ‘My favourite twosome!’

  He looked so pleased to see us that I felt quite awful to think we were busy leading him on, and I could see that Harry did too. There was such genuine warmth in Andrews’ eyes, and – after we had struggled to our feet – his handshake seemed so sincere that I just wanted to go home and call the whole thing off.

  ‘I have read and re-read your piece—’

  I frowned. I wasn’t sure I wanted our writing described in this way – property, yes, but piece seemed a bit fragmentary for my large ego – unless it was preceded by ‘master’, of course, following which I would give a modest smile and nudge Harry to do the same.

  ‘So, to continue. I have read and re-read the piece—’

  There was a small pause as I noticed Harry now openly wincing at the repetition of the word ‘piece’.

  ‘Yes,’ the great man continued. ‘And I have come to the conclusion that the principal parts are perfect for me and for Dame Nellie, but the father needs to be older than you have made him, don’t you think?’

  We both saw at once what he was getting at. By making the father much older, he and Dame Nellie would look as young as new-born kittens.

  We were totally silenced, which was unusual.

  ‘I expect you cannot believe your luck at the idea that Dame Nellie would, could or has even contemplated doing your film, but the truth is she has, and we would be reprising our great partnership in Love on the Move. Who can forget our scene – so beautifully written by Sir Paul – in the Morris Minor on Beachy Head? Do you know, people still come up to us and say they are convinced, however many times they see the film, that we are going to release the brake and depart this world together.’