An Awfully Big Adventure (6 page)

‘How lovely,’ she enthused. ‘Do show me.’

He identified several actors caught by the camera in poses of dramatic intensity and had judged from the frown between her heavy brows and the unsuitability of her responses that she would have been more enlightened had she worn spectacles.

‘I was in a season of Restoration comedy at Preston,’ she said, peering at a study of P.L. O’Hara with treacle ringlets playing Captain Hook in
Peter Pan
.

Bunny agreed with Meredith that there was nothing wrong with Dawn Allenby apart from her love of beauty, an affliction she was ill-equipped to fight. He put it in a nutshell when he said she was the sort of girl who, if there had been a meadow handy, would have been out there in a flash picking cowslips.

Meredith went up to the rehearsal room in a less tetchy state of mind. His brush with John Harbour had soothed him; it was always satisfying to the senses, however diminishing to the soul, to wield power. He even managed to compliment Dawn Allenby on the silk head-scarf, printed all over with the heads of Scottie dogs, which she wore twisted into a turban about her dark hair.

‘It is rather a find,’ she agreed. ‘But then I love beautiful things, don’t you?’ Beneath her jolly headgear her tired eyes momentarily sparkled.

Before rehearsal began Desmond Fairchild ordered the new girl, Stella, to fetch him a packet of cigarettes from the porter’s desk.

‘Just a moment,’ called out Meredith, and pointedly asked Bunny if it was all right by him.

Bunny mumbled it was.

‘It’s always as well to check,’ said Meredith.

They rehearsed Act One from the top. When Bunny clicked his fingers, signifying the rise of the curtain, Geoffrey, the student, was supposed to imitate the sound of a gun being fired. Given his military background, such a task should have been in the nature of coals to Newcastle, but in the event he was scrutinising his reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. Bunny banged on a table instead and the new girl gave a convincing scream.

Grace Bird, who had the smallest part in the play, that of Maud Mockridge the lady novelist, had still not memorised her lines and read from the script. Meredith wasn’t bothered. Grace had appeared in supporting roles in West End productions for the last twenty years and he knew she would be word-perfect when she felt it necessary. He had only managed to persuade her to join the company because her husband had recently left her for an older woman and she needed to get away from London. Everyone liked Grace. She was in pain, but she was taking it out on a complicated Fair Isle jumper that she was knitting for some nephew in Canada.

The scene towards the close of Act One, in which Dotty Blundell as the sophisticated Frieda tells her husband Robert, played by St Ives, that Olwyn is in love with him, went particularly well:

Although Dotty had all the words, Dawn Allenby’s face spoke volumes; until love had struck she had been merely adequate in the role of Olwyn.

It was during the tea break that Meredith began to feel agitated again. Babs Osborne was dissatisfied with her digs. She was lodged in Faulkner Square with Florence O’Connor whose mother, Bessie Murphy, had been a famous theatrical landlady; supper on the table at eleven o’clock, a fire lit in the bedroom, a jug of hot water outside the door at eight-thirty sharp, Sundays excluded on account of Mass.

‘The Cock of the North invited her to his wedding,’ said Grace. ‘And there was a rumour that John Galsworthy once left her five guineas under the spine of his breakfast kipper.’

Florence wasn’t a patch on Bessie. She had marital troubles. The uproar in the middle of the night when Bernard Murphy rolled home fighting drunk from the seamen’s club had to be heard to be credited. Babs could have borne all that if other standards had been maintained. She waved her right hand feebly in the air, as though the bone in her wrist were broken. ‘Last week,’ she said, ‘my nail snapped off. I was struggling to set a mouse-trap.’

‘Dear God,’ said Grace, ‘vermin are the responsibility of the landlord.’

‘I don’t receive any messages,’ wailed Babs. ‘Stanislaus telephones and they never tell me. And if I ring him we get cut off in the middle of the call.’

‘Time hurries,’ Meredith said, clapping his hands. He could hear the irritation in his voice. It’s killing to love, he thought. And death when love stops. Everyone, save Babs Osborne, understood that her Polish lover was trying to give her the push.

Five minutes into the First Act Dotty Blundell forgot her lines and snapped her fingers for a prompt. The new girl was so lost in the action of the play that she cried out, ‘It doesn’t matter, go on, go on’, and everyone laughed, even Meredith. In spite of this, sitting on his Empire chair beneath the window, head tilted to one side at an angle of acute concentration, he had the curious sensation that if he shifted his gaze from the little group mouthing in front of him his head might fall off. He felt for the monocle dangling against his shirt front and tumbled it between his fingers, over and over as though telling a Rosary.

St Ives was confessing to Olwyn that he and Frieda had never been happy together. Not really. ‘Somehow our marriage hasn’t worked. Nobody knows.’ This was the moment when Dotty gave her shrug expressive of pity. For the umpteenth time the leopard-skin coat which she wore slung about her shoulders slid to the carpet. At which Bunny fussily swooped to retrieve it. ‘For God’s sake,’ shouted Meredith, ‘leave it. Stop behaving like an old Queen.’

Almost immediately he beckoned Stella and stood with his back to the room. Outside the window sounded the thin blast of a whistle as a train prepared to leave the platform. It was as though he himself had screamed.

The girl came to him at once, her face a reflection of his own, eyes wide, her teeth biting on her lip. He told her to fetch a pencil and paper and when she brought them scribbled down several sentences in capital letters.

‘Do you know where the General Post Office is?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Can you read my writing?’

‘I believe I can.’

‘Run all the way and don’t change a word.’

Soon afterwards he announced it was lunchtime. He pretended to be engrossed in making notes until the actors had left the room. He expected Bunny to stay behind, but he was the first out of the door. Desmond Fairchild was the last to leave. ‘Care to join me for a snifter, old boy?’ he said, buttoning on his chamois leather glove with the hole in the thumb. Meredith ignored him.

Below the window a crocodile of children in striped caps marched across the booking hall. The flower-seller who kept a stall in the mouth of the granite arch leading to the subterranean tunnel into the street was bent over, dunking tulips in a galvanised bucket. Passing beneath the arch the children felt the slope beneath them and tumbled into a trot, the echoes of their stamping feet sending the pigeons plummeting from their perches. When the birds spewed out of the darkness the flower-seller flapped her great shawl like a matador to ward them off; they broke formation, circling the massive clock stopped at ten to ten, floundering upwards towards the whirling sky framed in the shards of glass set in the iron ribs of the shattered roof. Then Bunny, battling his way against the flow of the children, appeared in the hall and halted for a moment, the belt of his mackintosh undone, looking up at the windows of the rehearsal room. Meredith waved; he didn’t think Bunny saw him.

They had met in a railway carriage in the third year of the war. Bunny was going home on a twenty-four-hour pass and Meredith returning from a week’s leave in Hoylake. They had sat opposite each other in a compartment crowded with able seamen, he watching the darkening fields flying outside the window and Bunny staring down at a single sheet of notepaper, pale blue in colour, which he held on his jigging knee and from whose fold poked a spring of crab apple in bloom. At intervals, re-crossing his cramped legs humped on the hassock of his kit-bag, his boot struck Meredith’s shin and he muttered an apology, to which Meredith responded with a polite shrug of the shoulders. But then, as night fell and the lights were switched on in the carriage, illuminating the sepia photographs of Morecambe Bay at dawn and donkeys trotting Blackpool sands, he felt his privacy was being invaded and had stopped making those conciliatory gestures. Besides, from the pallor of his fat cheeks, those nails bitten to the quick, the splodge of oil on his trouser-leg and the button missing from his tunic, it was easy to distinguish to which class the man belonged. Though they both wore the uniform of a Private it was plain who was of superior rank.

He had tried to sleep but the gambling sailors made too much noise. Instead he studied the reflections in the window; the blurred beak of his own nose, that thong as if of an Indian brave imprinted across his brow by the absurd cap which he had removed at Crewe and which now lay among the cigarette butts at his feet; the jutting shoulders of the poker players who sprayed their cards like fans beneath their mouths.
Madame Butterfly
, he thought, for he had sneaked a glance at the soldier opposite and seen that he was now weeping, the letter crumpled in his fist, scrunching apple blossom.

At Wolverhampton the carriage had all but emptied, leaving only a sleeping woman cradling a badminton racket. Some miles from Nuneaton, as the train jolted with drawn blinds between an embankment, the man gave an audible sob. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. His voice was educated although he was wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘Bad news?’ Meredith asked, and lent him a handkerchief.

The letter was from Bunny’s father, telling of a bomb that had exploded in the garden. Thinking in terms of his mother’s back yard in Hoylake, the washing sagging between poplar trees, Meredith had prepared himself for details of death. In his head he saw the hung sheets dotted with coal-smuts torn from their pegs and ripped into bandages as they sailed above the foxgloves. He assumed a melancholy expression and said, ‘I’m so sorry. No, please keep the handkerchief.’

‘There was a 300-year-old oak,’ Bunny said. ‘And a yew hedge even older. It wasn’t a raid. The bomber released its load because it was having difficulty reaching the coast. Another mile or so, another thirty seconds at the most and they would have dropped harmlessly in the Channel.’

‘What rotten luck,’ said Meredith.

‘Robyn was found in the orchard with his leg blown off.’

‘What can I say,’ murmured Meredith. ‘There aren’t any adequate words.’

‘My father had to shoot him.’

Meredith still hadn’t forgiven him – not for the big house, the holidays touring France on bicycles, the expensive schooling, the mutilated pony or the affectionate parents. He himself had never known a father, being the issue of a man who smoked cigars and a girl plucked from the typing pool of the Cunard buildings in 1913.

Desmond Fairchild was loitering in the corridor when Meredith emerged from the rehearsal room. He demanded to know when they would have the use of the stage. Like a beggar, he went so far as to pluck at Meredith’s sleeve. ‘Sorry to go on about it, squire,’ he said. ‘I just find it impossible to get into character here.’

‘So I’ve noticed,’ said Meredith, and he pushed past him impatiently and ran down the grand staircase in search of Bunny. He found him in the station buffet slouched against the counter eating toasted tea-cakes. Beside him stood a man whose boots had burst asunder at the toes.

‘No wonder you look ill,’ Meredith said. ‘You should eat proper food.’

‘I don’t have your appetite,’ said Bunny. ‘Nor your taste buds.’

‘My God, what a stench,’ cried Meredith and, snatching up Bunny’s plate, took it to a table near the door.

Bunny followed. ‘You don’t have to be so unkind,’ he complained. ‘People have feelings, you know.’

‘If you’d stood next to him much longer you’d be scratching by teatime.’

‘I haven’t got your sensitive skin either.’

‘That’s true enough,’ said Meredith and, unable to apologise directly for his outburst at rehearsal, invited him instead to dinner that evening at the Commercial Hotel.

‘I’d rather read,’ said Bunny.

‘Come early and leave early,’ coaxed Meredith, and as though it had just occurred to him wondered aloud whether it would be a good idea to include young Harbour.

‘Better not,’ said Bunny, avoiding his eye. ‘It’s as well not to rush things.’

‘I wasn’t very nice to him this morning.’

‘You weren’t very nice to quite a few people,’ said Bunny mildly.

His amiability irritated Meredith; it made him spiteful. He referred disparagingly to Bunny’s demob suit. ‘Own up,’ he demanded. ‘You sleep in it.’

‘Only in the winter months,’ conceded Bunny. ‘I suppose this has to do with Hilary.’

‘I telephoned twice this morning. I couldn’t raise a dicky bird.’

‘People go out, you know.’

‘At eight in the morning!’

‘Hilary’s mother could be ill. From what you say she’s very frail.’

‘Could be,’ sneered Meredith. ‘But I bet my bottom dollar she isn’t.’

‘The phone could be out of order. Perhaps the bill hasn’t been paid.’

‘I’ve paid the damned bill,’ shouted Meredith. ‘I pay for everything,’ and he lit another cigarette and exhaled furiously, glaring through the smoke at Bunny munching on the last of his tea-cakes.

The man in the worn-out boots limped towards the door carrying an ancient suitcase. Meredith, noticing Bunny fumbling in the pocket of his mackintosh, leaned across the table and seized him by the wrist. ‘Don’t you dare,’ he hissed. ‘By the state of you, it’s you that needs the hand-out.’