Marking Time (45 page)

‘Yes.’

‘This your luggage? Right. You follow me.’

She got gratefully into the battered old cab, which smelled, she thought, of damp prayerbooks.

‘I’ve two others to collect,’ he said, when he had stowed her cases.

The other two turned out to be a boy called Reuben who had been a second-year student when she joined, and a girl who was new called Matilda. They sat, almost silent, crammed on the back seat
for the short drive, unable to think of anything arresting enough to say to one another.

Chris Mulloney was waiting for them full of theatrical hospitality in a dark mosaic-paved hall. He wore, as usual, his shapeless tweed trousers, dirty white tennis shoes, and grey polo-necked
sweater, which because of the shortness of his neck embraced quite a lot of his ears. Above it, his domed bald head was adorned by a woolly cap. His merry brown eyes gleamed beneath the tundra of
his tufted eyebrows, and he had a nose that people said someone had hit a long time ago.

‘My darlings!’ he said. ‘Welcome to Exford, my darlings!’

Louise, pressed momentarily against his rotund but rather surprisingly firm stomach, smiled uneasily. The last time she had seen him, he had reduced her to tears as he had made her repeat the
same line again and again with him telling her how much worse it was each time. He had been regarded with awe in London, as he certainly got results. He had two weapons, artificial rage and real,
profound sentiment, and used them both to the hilt.

‘Matron,’ he now said in a rather jokey voice (inverted commas round the title), ‘will show you to your rooms. Matron!’

Sharp on cue, the lady appeared at the head of the stairs above them. ‘This is Louise, Reuben and . . .’

‘Matilda,’ Matilda said.

‘Matilda. Mrs Noel Carstairs.’ He said it as though she was famous, or at least they should know who she was. She was a tiny little bird-like woman with peroxide blonde hair in much
need of attention. She wore a sort of dressing gown of pale blue satin, the neck edged with ruffles of rather dirty lace, and held a piece of paper in her hand at which she peered hopelessly.
‘Darlings,’ she said – she had a foreign accent – while she searched for their names. ‘Ah, yes. Louise! You are to share with Griselda. Come!’

The room was small, with two beds, two chests of drawers and one cupboard. ‘In the daytime you will look on the sea. That is OK?’ Her faded and wistful eyes looked out below enormous
blue false eyelashes that seemed almost too heavy for her. Her face was otherwise shiny and devoid of make-up. ‘Today I rest my skin,’ she said. Her high-heeled slippers, which had no
backs to them, clacked away across floorboards stained the colour of black treacle.

Griselda must have arrived: one of the chests had bottles and pots on it, and a photograph of two middle-aged people in tennis clothes. The bed furthest from the window was clearly
Griselda’s: her gas mask and a woolly dressing gown lay upon it. The room was icy cold, and there was only one light, which hung from the middle of the ceiling shrouded in an ageing parchment
shade. No reading in bed, Louise thought. She felt cold and depressed. She unpacked a warmer jersey and went in search of a bathroom.

The house seemed to ramble interminably, with dark passages going off in about three directions. Eventually she saw an open door to a large bedroom that contained three girls.

‘I was looking for a bathroom.’

‘
The
bathroom. And nearly
the
lav. There’s another rather murky one at the back of the kitchen, but the plug is bloody difficult to pull. I’ll show
you.’

‘I’m Betty Farrell,’ she said as she led the way. ‘The kitchen’s mildly warm because of the range. It’ll be supper quite soon. I should go down there and
introduce yourself.’ She was small and cheerful, with freckles and a turned-up nose.

The bathroom was small: a bath that had been painted cream inside for some reason, a small rusty geyser, a kitchen sink and a lavatory with a wooden seat. The sash window would not shut
properly, and someone had stuffed pieces of newspaper in the crack, but not effectively.

The kitchen was huge, seemed to be full of people, and was distinctly warmer. Chris introduced her to everyone, ending with a drab, thin girl who looked much younger than anyone else and wore
her long hair in an untidy pigtail. ‘And this is my invaluable daughter Poppy who keeps the whole household together.’

Poppy smiled shyly, but did not say anything. She was lifting an enormous saucepan off the range and now staggered to the sink with it, and tipped the contents into two colanders. The steamy
smell of hot greens rose in the air. A long kitchen table was laid with knives and forks.

‘Sit ye down, my darlings, and dinner will shortly be served. Annie? Annie, go and help your sister, do.’

An even younger girl, a child with long fair hair hanging down her back, removed three fingers from her mouth, went to the range and lifted another large saucepan full of boiled potatoes and
lurched, in a heavy uneven trot, to the table. As soon as she had deposited the potatoes, she returned the fingers to her mouth. At the same time, and at the far end of the room, a thin, fair boy
had been telling some story, interrupted by shrieks of laughter from several girls round him. Now, as he moved to the table, one of them said, ‘But do,
do
tell the parrot story
– go on, Jay!’

‘Go on, while Chris is carving.’

He looked round the table. Everybody had sat down excepting Poppy who was now carting an immense grey joint of meat which she put in front of her father and Annie was collecting serving spoons
with her left hand.

‘The parrot story? Right: the parrot story.’ He had a slightly pedantic drawling voice which seemed particularly suited to story-telling. He described an old lady’s parrot,
reputed to have remarkable intelligence and encouraged by its proud owner to walk across a clothes line which had been slung across the room for that purpose. He became the parrot, precariously
putting one claw on the line, almost losing its balance, and then proceeding with the other claw. Then as narrator he described one oldish lady giving a titter of nerves and excitement at the
spectacle. He was the parrot again, looking up from the line on which he wobbled and saying in a parrot voice: ‘Ludicrous, no doubt, but
fucking
difficult.’

People laughed, and Louise joined sycophantically with the others, but privately she was confounded. She had never heard anyone use that word, and was unclear what it meant, but she knew that it
was what her mother would have described as unspeakably rude. She glanced at Chris, but he was intent upon carving. Annie, who had now sat down, was staring at the meat, and Poppy was making gravy
at the range. Then she caught Jay looking at her; he did not say anything, but he smiled, a small knowing smile, as though he knew exactly what she was thinking, and this made her blush. She bent
her head over the steaming plate in front of her, so that people would think it was the food that had made her hot.

During supper, everybody talked about acting. Apparently, they were to start by doing some scenes from Shakespeare which they would perform to local schools, but Chris refused to discuss the
casting. After supper, two people washed up, and the others drifted away. Griselda turned out to be a striking girl with blue-black hair, high cheekbones and long, narrow, slanting eyes –
very fascinating, Louise thought, as they trudged upstairs together.

‘What happens in the morning?’

‘Oh. Breakfast. You can’t have toast, because the toaster’s broken, but bread and marge and some sort of jam and tea. Then we go into Exford – three miles, and most of us
hitch to save bus money.’

‘What’s the theatre like?’

‘Pretty dingy and it reeks of gas. The dressing rooms are freezing, and a lot of the seats in the auditorium are broken. Still, it’ll be
our
theatre.’

‘What happens to the rest of us while some of us are rehearsing?’

‘Well, Lilli gives us voice lessons.’

‘Who’s Lilli?’

‘Mrs Noel Carstairs. She’s Romanian actually. She was
the
musical comedy star in Romania. Then she came here and married Noel Carstairs – you know, the impresario?
– but he left her for someone far younger and she’s miserable.’

‘Is that why she didn’t come to dinner?’

‘Oh no. It was one of her raw-food days. She’s always doing things to make herself healthier. She makes fearful little plates of grated carrot and cabbage and eats them in her room.
She walks backwards on the sands for hours because she says it’s good for the figure. She has a huge picture of the Queen of Romania in her room – all signed in a spidery hand –
you can’t read it. She’s quite mad, actually, but awfully sweet.’

In the morning she could see that the house was on the front of a wide estuary: the tide was out; there was an expanse of glittering sand and a row of little houses on the opposite shore. It was
a fine, clear day with heavy frost. She woke full of excitement to find Griselda already dressed in trousers and a jersey.

‘The bathroom might still be free if you want it,’ she said. ‘I get up early otherwise there’s a frightful queue.’

Washed and dressed in Aunt Syb’s new red jersey and her – also new – dark blue corduroy trousers, she joined Griselda in the kitchen. Poppy was there, preparing a breakfast
tray for her father. The kitchen was not very warm: ‘The range was nearly out,’ Poppy said apologetically, ‘and could I have your ration book?’

A large black cat sat in the middle of the kitchen table watching Annie cut scraps of last night’s joint and put them in a saucer. Griselda and Louise ate bread and marge and jam while
they waited for the big black kettle to boil.

‘I’ll take you in today on the bus,’ Griselda offered. ‘Then you’ll know your way around.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Less than a week. I came early because our house was bombed and my mother didn’t want me staying in Bristol.’

This took her aback, as she realised that since leaving home, she had not thought about the war at
all
, that nobody had mentioned it the previous evening, and that things like ration
books and gas masks had become so much a part of life that she had almost forgotten the reasons for them.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It must have been awful for you.’

Griselda shrugged. ‘I simply hate talking about the war,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’

The rest of the day was wildly exciting. The condition of the theatre didn’t matter to Louise at all. It was a
theatre
, with a dark red curtain trimmed with dirty yellow braid.
Stepping onto the dusty stage for the first time was a delight – an arrival, the beginning of her career. The odours of gas, old flats and the musty, cold, sweaty smell of the battered old
seats in the auditorium thrilled her; the dressing rooms with their concrete floors, faint odour of old greasepaint and rows of bare electric light bulbs round the spotted mirrors were all that she
could wish for. When they were ranged on hard wooden chairs on the stage lit by working lights and the curtain was up and they were given their scenes to rehearse and the casting was announced, she
felt dizzy with joy. She was to play Katherina in the first courting scene from
The Taming of the Shrew,
and also Anne in two scenes from
Richard of Bordeaux.
The only sadness was
that as the company consisted of ten girls and only four boys, the girls were having to double, which meant that they would only play every other performance, while the fortunate boys were not only
in nearly every scene but would get to play all the time. Griselda was cast as Lady Macbeth, to do the murder scene with Roy, who from the read-through was easily, Louise thought, the best actor
there. He was also doing Petruchio with her. She had Jay to play opposite her as Richard.

At lunch-time, they went to a cafe facing the river, and she shared a fried egg and chips with Griselda – dividing the egg with scrupulous care and counting the chips. They were both very
hungry.

In the weeks that followed she learned much – and not only about acting. Her letters home were carefully considered: she was terrified of being taken away if she sent any
information that might alarm them. When she wrote asking for an additional allowance for bus fares and lunches, she did not, for example, explain that otherwise the nightly joint, boiled greens and
potatoes (the only thing that Poppy knew how to cook) was the one meal of the day (they frequently went without breakfast, as the range constantly went out which meant no water could be boiled, and
the marge and jam got used up before rations enabled Poppy to buy any more). She also did not mention that most mornings they hitch-hiked into Exford to save the bus fare (and buy cigarettes); and
she particularly withheld the method some of them employed – that of lying down in the middle of the road and pretending to have fainted or to be feeling ill which invariably procured a lift.
She said that they all had very interesting conversations after supper in the evenings, reciting poetry aloud, and had they heard of Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot who were both simply marvellous
poets. She did not mention someone’s birthday party when there was a competition for who could wear least, and that she had won it with two pieces of stamp edge and a powder puff. She did
not, of course, mention the swearing that was immensely fashionable: people said fuck nearly all the time. She did not say that one night they got drunk on a wicked yellow-green sticky drink called
Strega which some Dutch people who lived on a boat in the estuary gave them. She did not mention the rather awful weeks when Annie was discovered to have hair that was literally stiff with louse
eggs, and that the whole company by then had caught them. Exford ran out of fine-tooth combs, and they had to keep washing their hair at the sink with frightful smelling stuff. She did not say that
‘Matron’ was really a little tired old actress with no domestic or nursing skills at all, and that Chris Mulloney ran the whole establishment on his teenage daughters. Poppy turned out
to be sixteen, and Annie twelve. The latter had never been to school, but read all day and looked after her cat, whom she had called Tsar Alexander, and seemed quite content. Some people’s
parents visited, staying in the local pub at the end of the road, and then, by mutual but unspoken consent, everyone changed their ways for the visit. She did not say that they were all of them
ravenously hungry nearly all the time, any more than she told them that she was lucky if she got one bath a week, and that so far their sheets had not been changed; she did not, above all, mention
the fact that Chris Mulloney was a member of the Peace Pledge Union – a communist organisation. To Stella, she was more forthcoming.