I approached and snatched the book from him, which, given his condition, was not hard. The sour-apple reek from his breath would have felled a racehorse.
‘Stroked your nerve, have I, Auntie? Always knew how to find it.’
‘Let me make one thing plain and clear to you,’ I said. ‘We are not presenting a play “inspired” by these murders.’
He shook his dewlaps and imitated my accent and as I turned to depart he reeled me in again.
‘By the way, I know who it is.’
I stopped in the doorway.
‘You quiet types can be savage,’ he said, ‘in your furious little hearts. You are far more cruel than the show-offs.’
‘I leave cruelty to those who specialise in it,’ I said.
‘Oh it was nice that they put your picture in Punch,’ he went on. ‘Had you seen?’
He pointed me towards his desk, on which lay a folded-open page of that journal displaying a cartoon. It depicted a simian, slack-jawed, monkeylike face but with the nose of a pig and filthy dripping fangs, on its head a leprechaun’s hat emblazed with a shamrock, around its neck a set of rosary beads with dangling crucifix.
The slogan was: THE IRISH VAMPIRE.
There have been instances in my life when I was glad not to be carrying a loaded Winchester. This was one such moment.
THE VOICE OF ELLEN TERRY
… And well, that was the time of the Ripper, you see. Dreadful time for London. Never quite recovered. I don’t know if you have ever lived in a city where a murderer was loose and keeping on and bloody on at it, but it has a way of infecting everything, like a poison in the reservoir or filth in the air.
One looks at the neighbours differently. Starts remembering things that didn’t happen. That chap down the road who glanced at me in a funny way in the library the other week, or that queer little cove in his tobacconist’s shop. Wonder if it’s him doing the killings. Has he chopped up his wife, walled her up in the cellar? For a day or two, I thought it was our vicar, a fellow who never looked you in the eye when you spoke to him. That’s what happens, you see. You start suspecting everyone.
There was gossip that he was a foreigner, stands to reason, people said. ‘No Englishman could ever carry out such hideous things.’ Filthy rubbish about the Jews painted up on the walls. A lot of bunkum gets talked when you’re living with something like that. People want to reassure themselves. Must be one of ‘The Others’. England’s funny that way. Probably everywhere is.
No, I wouldn’t say I felt afraid. That’s not quite the word.
Darling, I’ve played the late show at the Liverpool Apollo on a Saturday night. Hell itself holds no fears for me.
I should say I felt more resentment and anger than fear. Small thing: I was living in Surrey at the time, in the countryside near Richmond, which is ten or a dozen miles from the West End, and I would drive myself home in my own pony-and-trap, every night after a show. It was something one loved doing, it kept one sane, upstairs. Extinguished the fire one gets from being onstage. Never wanted or needed a driver. Preferred one’s own company. Midnight or one o’clock, sometimes sunrise, no matter. I drove myself home unaccompanied.
Very calming and settling, to leave the theatre at maybe two in the morning following the after-show talk and an hour and a half to clop homeward. Rinses the applause out of your ears. Kills the roars. Slow trot along Oxford Street, nobody about. Along by Park Lane, Bayswater Road, Maida Vale, out towards Acton. I had a sweet pony at the time, Firefly, coquettish but an oak-hearted girl. We must have taken one another home a thousand times.
The different birds one heard as one came to the outskirts of the city and then the meadows beyond, tiny linnets and tits and wood pigeons and finches, no more bully-boy London gulls. Being able to hear the river. That coconut smell of the gorse. If it was later, coming on for five, say, on a warm spring morning, that orchestra of the dawn chorus could move one to tears of joy. The golden sky above. The alleluia of the linnets. Firefly and me, and a night of good hard work behind us. No feeling like that in the world.
We’d stop on a stone bridge, over a meander of the Thames, and I’d give her an apple or a carrot and I’d have a last cigarette. I’d tell her ‘Well, we got through another one, love, that’s another night survived. There’s Richmond in the distance, we’re nearly home, girl.’
The Ripper took that from me.
A small private reason to despise him.
He took everything from others, I know. From me, he took England.
Because one had to be sensible, those nights had to stop. So they stopped. But I would not grant him the importance of my fear.
Still, one felt for the younger girls, you’re pretty vulnerable on a stage. Even at the best of times, there is always a sort of element hanging around the Stage Door wanting to give you trouble. Men can take a notion about an actress, always have, don’t know why. And it’s a one-way mirror, isn’t it, when you think. He can see you up there in the light but you can’t see him back. Women attending a play are better at realising it’s just made up. We don’t get so carried away.
It was obvious that this Ripper coward had it in for a certain sort of girl, whoever he was. I don’t like to use the word that’s often employed to describe them. As an actress, one gets called that a lot. Oh yes, it’s quite true, there was still that idea. A woman in a theatre was only one step removed from the street corner. Do you know, I’ll be honest, I’m not quite certain that idea’s ever died out, quite.
As for me, once the murderer got into the swing of things, I took certain precautions of my own.
Probably better not say. Oh well. Since you insist.
On tour to Baltimore in ’86, I’d bought just the dishiest little Smith & Wesson revolver, about the size of a lady’s purse. Actually, now that I remember, I won it in a charity Tombola, for war widows or orphans or something. Or amputees, perhaps it was. You know the Americans, they’re always having a war.
You could buy a gun in Baltimore as easily as people buy candyfloss or apples-on-sticks in England. Well, I took it back on the ship to Southampton with me, just thought, you know, unusual souvenir. No, I didn’t mention it to the Customs chappie, flounced through the barrier, best minxy smile. Oh, I tell a lie. He asked for an autograph. Which I gave. The ruddy gun was in my garter. Honestly, the folly of youth.
Well, when the Ripper got himself going, I took it down from the shelf. Brought it up to Hampstead Heath one night. Shot a yew tree. Rather fun. Shot a dustbin on the way home, in the Earls Court Road. Mischievous, I admit. Good lark, though.
I just thought: Mr Ripper, you’d better not make my acquaintance. Step out of the fog at me and you won’t step much further. You might do Len in but I’ll blow your ruddy teeth through the back of your skull as I go.
This girl wasn’t for ripping. Not without a fight.
I thought, come here to pretty Len, dear, and see what she’s got. I’ll make puddles of you, darling. Rip that.
I still have it somewhere at home. I used to keep it in a hatbox under the stairs. I remember once showing it to Shaw, the Smith & Wesson, not the hatbox. He asked me to let him shoot it – all pacifists are terribly excited and obsessed with weaponry, one’s found. But I wouldn’t. Give an Irishman a gun, angel? You must think I’m off my chump.
Anyhow. Where was I? Yes, the time of the Ripper. I still wonder who he was. Do you?
28th September, 1888
We have located a site that, with a modicum of modification, may be employed from here on as our scenery store. It is a disused pair of large railway bridges, side by side, near a quarter called Buck’s Row, a somewhat desolate and hungry neighbourhood of the East End. The structures are dry, of good granite blockwork, ninety foot high and will be defended by barbed-wire chevals-de-frise and by the cast-iron gates I have ordered from the Sun foundry at Glasgow.
Today Harks and I went to the site to take copious measurements and to attend to the paperwork with the Railway Company, whose
people appear relieved to be rid of the responsibility and, what is more, to receive a handsome rent for casting it away. Contract signed, they fled like phantoms from dawn, the ink on the parchment still tacky.
Harks seems less convinced than I am about the venture. She had been doing one or two calculations in her ledger – this is never good news – and pointed out to me in the hansom that there will be seventy thousand pounds worth of scenery stored there within a matter of a few weeks, many individual pieces immeasurably valuable and impossible to replace, the sets for thirty-one of the thirty-four shows in our repertoire. She spoke of damp, theft, wreckers, dust. Also, she is worried about rats.
I think she is inclined to fret, not always for good reason, but I could see a sort of merit in at least one respect, which is that we should arrange immediately for a rota of watchmen. I told her that local fellows would do well, who might be trusted and will not want more than a few shillings. If I know anything about cockneys it is that they will always relish easy money, especially when accompanied by the opportunity to do violence. In addition to guarding the store they might regularly set out traps and cages so that any quadruped guests might be prevented from nibbling on Elsinore.
‘Thank you, sir, I’ll see to it,’ she said, staring at the upper arches of the bridges in an odd way, as though she had seen someone suspicious there.
‘How did you find this place, sir?’ she asked me, then.
I told her the truth, which is that I walk a bit at night.
‘You don’t want to be doing that, sir, with what’s occurring in the East End. One of the girls, they found her only a couple of streets away.’
‘So I saw in The Times.’
‘Cousin of mine works at the mortuary, sir, where they brung the girl after. Said you wouldn’t credit the things he done to her. Man’s a monster.’
I said nothing to that. The belief that wickedness is the province of monsters, not men, is consoling to those who are young.
She began to enumerate the dire butcheries perpetrated on the body of this girl but I implored her to stop, I could soon bear no more. Hearing such things spoken was in some way to defile the girl again.
‘Know what they’re saying, sir? That he dresses as a woman.’
‘I don’t think you should pay too much attention to rumours, Harks, old thing.’
‘Queer to think we might walk past him in the street at any moment, sir, all the same.’
‘Quite.’
Back at the Lyceum, I found that I could not concentrate on the receipts. Came up here to the attics. In strange mood.
Was thinking of the poor girls. How they must have suffered.
Headache, a bit breathless, weepy.
Went out onto the roof and looked down at the city a long while. My mind seemed to picture the tens of thousands of rooms, all empty, as though some plague or terrible curse had purged them. The great nave of St Paul’s, the Mall, the Palace, the rookeries and hovels and grog shops, empty, the gaols without prisoners, the workplaces burning, the Zoo’s cages opened, the beasts roaming Paddington. And only one man left in London.
Seemed to glimpse myself, then, as through a curtain in time. What came was a day when I was aged seven or eight, in bed, as ever, unable to walk or even to move my withered legs, and this particular afternoon feeling mighty low in my spirit, as a lonesome and sick child can. Some schoolgirls had seen me through the window and teased me horribly, in that gesturing, face-pulling imitative manner that is merciless because accurate.
Mother could do nothing for me, I wept all day. Father came home from his work. Still I wept. It was a golden summer honeylike evening, I could hear the other boys kicking a ball about in the lane, the neighbour-girls skipping and singing their little songs. Father, who was not strong, nevertheless picked me up, gathered me into his greatcoat and carried me across the tramlines to Fairview Park.
On the bandstand, the people were dancing quadrilles. A puppeteer – from memory an Italian – was wooing the strollers, the screeches of Punchinello at Judy coaxing whoops from those who stopped. A lady at an easel was sketching with chalks. The parish priest, a gloomy Derryman who always smelt of peppermint, was reading his breviary beneath an oak. I asked Father what did Roman Catholics believe that was different from what we ourselves believed and why should we not befriend them? He said we Protestants were in a boat, were crossing a great river, our safety was assured by Truth and God’s Grace but that we should always pray for those of our unfortunate papist neighbours who could only swim. Some might cross. Most would not. Bread was bread and could never be blood.
Mother shushed him. She was gentle. The night’s warmth had made her mellow.
There we remained, my parents and I, until nine or ten o’clock, whatever time the park was locked. Mother had brought cushions and a hastily assembled simple picnic, Father his meerschaum pipe and an old book of the Connaught fairy tales, from which he read while I lay on the grass, gazing up at the sky. At one point, a balladeer was singing a queer song. ‘There once was a woman and she lived in the woods, weela, weela, waulyeh.’ That is all that happened. Written down, it does not seem to amount to much. But were I to live a thousand years, I should never know a happier few hours.
When I came down from the rooftop, I foostered for a time on the wretched type writing machine but nothing of even the faintest worth would come. A remark of Dickens that I had read in a preface unfurled in my mind and it occurred to me to put certain events of the day into the Third Person, change the details. But I was exhausted by then, and still in strange mood, haunted by the killings, by the faces of those girls.
I type wrote and copied a slip for Harks to pin in all the backstage dressing rooms and women’s lavatories.
ATTENTION
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, NO FEMALE EMPLOYEE OF THE LYCEUM THEATRE IS TO GO HOME UNACCOMPANIED AFTER DARK. THE COMPANY SHALL ARRANGE & PAY FOR CABS, WHICH SHALL BE ORDERED FROM A REPUTABLE FIRM & TOLD TO WAIT AT THE STAGE DOOR. YOU SHALL BE CONVEYED HOME IN GROUPS OF THREE & THE DRIVER WILL WAIT TO SEE YOU IN. THIS IS NOT A REQUEST BUT AN INSTRUCTION & WILL BE OBEYED.
BY ORDER – THE CHIEF
But it was too wordy and it annoyed me.
So I tore it.
Emerging from the Army & Navy Stores, parcel in hand, he is startled by the apparition that meets him.
Across the street. In cold sunlight. Outside Hillenbrand the jeweller’s. The black-veiled figure from Hatchard’s.
His gaze follows her like a spot-lamp as she moves along the pavement.
She pauses to look in shop windows, a dressmaker’s, a milliner’s. She seems to be taking notes. Scribbling in a book? An oddness in how she holds herself, the way she moves in her clothes.
She crosses Southampton Street, hastens into Grantchester Alley. He keeps his distance a moment too long and by the time he enters the filthy lane, there is no sign of her. Some instinct sends him leftward at the corner, and there, a hundred yards from him, he sees the long black coat, the hurrying gait.
Unwomanly.
Is it true? Can this be happening? Sweating, he pursues.
She turns right. Now left. Along the Strand. Crosses Exeter Street. Up the steps. Through the Lyceum stage door.
Stoker runs. The corridors of the theatre. Where has everyone gone?
The coat sweeping through the stalls, down the aisle, up the steps to the stage, towards the staircase to the Chief’s office, Stoker gasping and tripping as he follows.
‘Ho, stop there,’ he calls. ‘This is—’
‘Bram,’ says the Chief. ‘You look ghastly. Why so breathless?’
The veiled figure is standing in the window, peering down at the street.
‘Now you’re here,’ the Chief continues, with an odd, tight smile, ‘may I present to you the salvation of the world, the finest actress in England? Please meet my great friend, Ellen Terry.’
She turns slowly and lowers the veil. Her violet eyes take in light.
‘We met briefly
once, Mr Stoker. Backstage some years ago.’
‘What’s the matter, Bram old thing? Shake Ellen’s hand, for pity’s sake. You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I …’
‘Cat’s got his tongue, Len. Poor Bramzie’s lost for words.’
‘I would rather you did not tease Mr Stoker on my account, Henry, darling. The first time you and I met, you were a little lost for words yourself.’
‘I hardly think so.’
‘Incorrigible faker, you were and you know it. God’s truth, Mr Stoker, your Chief sat there tapping his fingertips on the restaurant table and glancing at himself in the soup spoons.’
‘Bram’s the manager and head bottle-washer about the place, Len, damned fine one too. Answers eighty letters a day for me. Devil with the pen. He’s a relatively well evolved mammal, you’ll find him approachable.’
‘I am aware – but thank you, darling – of Mr Stoker’s skill with the pen.’
‘You are?’
‘I have read Mr Stoker’s novel The Snake’s Pass and found it very fine. Some of his earlier tales in the magazines were recommended to me by Shaw himself. I adore your storytelling, Mr Stoker. You have quite kept me up all night.’
‘O, bit of good news, Bram. Miss Terry is joining the company with immediate effect. She has signed her contract. Here it is for the files.’
‘You didn’t mention to me that Miss Terry would be joining the company.’
‘Did I not?’
‘No you didn’t.’
‘Well, the sun arose this morning and will be setting tonight. Perhaps I didn’t mention that to you either.’
She laughs lightly. ‘I feel I am rather interrupting a marital spat.’
‘Not at all, darling,’ Irving replies, ‘we just do it to warm ourselves up.’
‘Nevertheless,’ she says, ‘I must along, forgive me for calling so briefly. Adieu, sweet prince.’ She holds out a gloved hand for Irving to kiss. ‘And nice to see you again, Mr Stoker, I shall look forward to some agreeable chats about writing.’
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