Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (10 page)

‘So they sacked him?’

‘Oh, God no! That would have meant Equity and all hell breaking loose, but somehow they got him to resign, break his own contract. Illness or some such excuse. I don’t know how they did it, but Steve sure as hell wasn’t happy about it. Me, I keep mum and try not to fall over the furniture. All the same, I get it in the neck from Pussy Cudworth from time to time. You’ll see.’

‘Pussy?’

‘God, didn’t you know, I thought everyone in the biz knew he was called Pussy. Soft and sweet as a pussy cat and then suddenly out come the claws. When he and Rog get into a huddle, watch out; it means that Rog isn’t happy about the way rehearsals are going, and someone has to pay. That someone is usually me, or it could be you. Generally it’s the younger unimportant ones, but Billie’s been getting stick recently.’

‘So Steve said.’

‘You’ve spoken to him!’

‘He rang me up yesterday. I don’t really know why.’

‘What did he say about me?’

‘If I told you it would turn your head.’

‘Oh, fuck off!’ She was laughing as she said it, but Sir Roger was passing by and frowned. ‘Sorry, Rog!’ She said. ‘I’ll wash my mouth out with soap.’ Sir Roger wagged his finger at her, but I could tell he was not unhappy about being called ‘Rog’ by an attractive young actress. It was lucky he did not overhear her murmuring: ‘I wish
you
would too.’

Towards the end of that first tea break Billie Beverley arrived. She was one of those people who do not enter a room, they make an entrance. She came in a whisper of furs, a murmur of apologies, encircled by an invisible nimbus of heady, deep vanilla-like fragrance, quite unlike any other that I had known. This, she later told me, was
Ambre Antique
, a Coty perfume long since discontinued but one of which she had acquired, in her halcyon days, a substantial personal supply. It seemed to me the very essence of ancient glamour.

She was, I believe, in her mid-seventies with white blond hair, silkily coifed; her heart-shaped face lined but still majestically beautiful. She had kept her figure and, above all I think, her sense of being beautiful and a star.

Cudworth rose to make the expected fuss of her, but I noticed that Sir Roger remained in his seat, sipping the milky tea that had finally been weakened to his satisfaction. Talbot Wemyss was not present.

I had one scene, perhaps my most important in the play, with Billie. In it I told her, somewhat priggishly, that it was time she either married or stopped having male admirers while she insisted that it was possible even in her seventies to have an active love life. It was a scene with something to say, but it was thin and repetitive. Not much wit and imagination had been expended on its construction. As a result it was far from memorable: the unconscious mind was tempted to skip the otiose passages. I was able to make a passable shot at it, but Billie was not at ease with her lines. She paraphrased, stumbled, and sometimes lost the thread completely. Whenever she could she would stop and make some trivial enquiry about a prop or where she should be sitting; at other times she would question the line she was saying and suggest an alternative which was rarely an improvement on what she had been given. Cudworth was indulgent with her, but Sir Roger was becoming increasingly impatient.

At last he snapped: ‘Billie, darling, I really think it would be easier if you just stuck to your job of saying the lines as I wrote them.’

‘Of course, darling Roger, and we’re doing our best,’ said Billie, ‘but sometimes you know, a line can be easier to type than to say.’

Sir Roger’s long slit of a mouth tightened and I saw him grip his chair in preparation to rising. I sensed a moment of crisis, as did Cudworth who immediately walked across the Billie and Sir Roger axis and began to talk to me volubly about my interpretation of the role of Captain Lazenby. I responded to his diversionary tactics by loudly agreeing with everything he said. The moment passed.

Later in the afternoon Talbot Wemyss arrived and when we finally broke for the day I noticed that he, Cudworth and Sir Roger were conferring earnestly in a corner. As I opened the door of the rehearsal room to let Billie pass through she said to me: ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got a look of Ivor?’ I looked blank. ‘Ivor Novello. Such a darling.’ Just then Cudworth detached himself from Talbot and Sir Roger and trotted over to us flapping his podgy pink hands.

‘Billie, Allan, I think we’ll begin with that scene between you two first thing tomorrow, don’t you?’

Billie said: ‘I haven’t upset Roger too much today, have I, Pussy darling?’

‘Good heavens, no!’ said Cudworth with airy insincerity, casting a furtive eye in the direction of his playwright.

‘That’s right, Pussy,’ said Billie smiling ambiguously and patting his cheek. Something had passed between them which I could not remotely fathom.

As Billie and I descended the steps from the rehearsal room, she suggested that I come back with her to her flat for a drink ‘to go through those wretched lines in peace and quiet.’ When I agreed she said: ‘That’s lovely darling. I think we’ll take a cab, don’t you? Now would you mind awfully going out and getting us one?’

Billie had a flat on the first floor of a mansion in Belgrave Square. As I handed her out of the taxi she gave me the money to pay the driver and murmured to me the amount he should be tipped. Our conversation in the cab, and in the lift up to her apartment consisted mainly of interrogations about my background and current amatory status. When she discovered I was single, she said: ‘I’d steer clear of that Sophie girl if I were you. By all means have an affair with her during the tour if you must, but don’t fall in love with her. She’s all skin and bone, darling, and I don’t think she’s very stable.’

As we stepped out of the lift, the door of Billie’s flat was opened by the person she called her ‘housekeeper’. This was Bridie, Billie’s former dresser, an angular elderly woman with a severe, flat face, like a Japanese mask. Her accent was Irish; her inscrutability Oriental.

Billie’s flat was a temple of faded glamour. The walls were an indeterminate greyish colour, though I suspect that they had dimmed over the years from some fashionable 1930s hue like
Eau de Nil
. The pictures were mainly framed playbills and costume designs.

I was shown into the sitting room which looked out on Belgrave Square. It was a room big enough to accommodate comfortably a grand piano on which reposed several silver framed photographs and a vase of fresh flowers. Above the mantelpiece was the famous Lavery portrait of Billie in
Dancer in the Dark
, shimmering in white chiffon against a deep black background. I recognised the piercing blue eyes and that charming but self-possessed smile. Behind the porcelain prettiness the artist had captured something shrewd and resolute.

‘Darling John Lavery,’ said Billie, breaking into my thoughts. ‘It was probably the last great thing he did. I think he was inspired by me, you know. Now will you have a little drinkie? I’m afraid I only drink Oloroso these days. Does that suit?’

Almost before I had consented, Bridie presented us with two dark sweet sherries and a glass bowl of cocktail biscuits on a silver tray.

‘Do sit down, darling,’ said Billie. ‘No, not there! That’s Winkie’s chair.’

In a nest of cushions on the Louis XVI armchair I had been about to occupy, a tan coloured Pekinese revealed itself, and stared at me with glassy, round-eyed disapproval. He did not move from his improvised couch, but consented to be adored by his mistress. I guessed that he must be as ancient in dog years as Billie.

I sat instead on a grey velvet and gilt-tasseled Chesterfield and Billie began to talk. Rehearsal of our scene was postponed. Her conversation consisted mainly of reminiscence. There was a lot of ‘darling Noël’ and ‘dear Ivor’ and of course ‘that divine old rascal Jack’ (Buchanan) with whom she had worked a good deal. I have a weakness for theatrical gossip, however antiquated, so I was not bored; and I sensed a purpose behind her meanderings. From each of her little anecdotes Billie Beverley emerged as the most generous, the most dedicated, above all, the most perceptive character in the tale. From being a marginal figure, almost in the wings, she would graduate to a position upstage centre, and it was always she who delivered the curtain line. A great many men had been ‘madly in love’ with her, it would seem, and that was in an age when dozens of red roses were regularly delivered to the stage door, often with a diamond and sapphire Cartier bracelet wrapped around their stems.

I was still not quite sure what she was driving at until she began to talk about Talbot, Cudworth and Sir Roger.

‘Talbot was my leading man in
Dark Romance
at the Adelphi before the war. He was very good-looking, of course, but it was practically his first job, darling. Fresh out of O.U.D.S., not even R.A.D.A., terribly gauche and inexperienced. The management wanted to get rid of him in the first week of rehearsals, but I saw something in him. I worked with him out of hours, gave him some backbone and maturity, darling. I don’t need to spell it out for you. Well, he blossomed. Picked up by Hollywood. Spent most of the War there, no doubt doing his duty, after a fashion. Then he married that frightful Adela Bennett woman. Clever little actress, of course, but—’ She tapped her sherry glass. ‘The booze, darling. They tell me she’s dry these days. I said: “She’s been dried up all her life. That’s her trouble.” She understudied me once in one of Roger’s plays and all I can say is, it was lucky she never had to go on for me. I remember when Roger was a fresh faced young lieutenant, just back from Germany after the War. He was a fan really. I used to see him lurking outside the stage door when I was in
Champagne Breakfast
. I signed his programme on a regular basis, dear. Then one day he thrust a package into my hands. It was a play called
The Double Duchess
. It was his first play: pretty impossible in all sorts of ways of course, but I could see something in it. I showed it to Pussy Cudworth and together we licked it into shape. I had a great success in it, you know, which was useful because by that time musical comedy was not what it was. Ivor was dead; Noël had rather gone off. It was all
Oklahoma
and that American stuff. Not for me, darling. Not my “scene”, as you say. Roger owes me a good deal for starting his career, though. He sort of knows it and doesn’t, if you know what I mean. I think he finds it a bit of a bore; now he’s supping with the Prime Minister and that sort of thing.
Sir
Roger indeed, and they haven’t even Damed me: just a miserable C.B.E. And all that E.N.S.A. work I did in the war! Even Pussy’s a C.B.E., not that I grudge him. He directed most of the things I did for Binkie at Tennents. He was always a pussy, but I still had to get him out of one or two scrapes. You wouldn’t think to look at him now. I remember once—this was long before Wolfenden, of course, darling—the police caught him doing whatever it is those people get up to in public loos. What is it about queers and public loos? I mean, if you must do it that way, why not do it in a nice bed? I would never have dreamt of doing it in a loo, even before the War when I was a bit of a goer. Anyway, the night he was caught, he happened to have been dining with me. So I went along to the police station and told them he had been blind drunk when he left me, and that anyway Pussy and I were having a mad affair. Total lies, of course, darling but it got him off with a caution. You know, Allan, you’ve got a look of Harry.’

‘Harry?’ The change of subject was sudden, but, not, I think uncalculated.

‘My darling husband Harry.’ She pointed to one of the silver framed photographs on the piano. It was a misty, sepia-tinted studio portrait of a man in airman’s uniform. He was dark, balding, with slightly blunt features; rather an ordinary face, I thought. I could detect no resemblance between us. ‘That’s Harry,’ she said. ‘Shot down over Dresden in 1945. Just as the whole ghastly business was ending. Such a waste! He was a darling, an absolute darling. I still talk to him you know. I ask his advice about everything and he tells me. He’s already told me he likes you.’

‘Was he an actor?’

‘Good God no! He was something in big business, darling, but he did his bit in the War, unlike some I could mention.’

She already had, of course. I was becoming aware that she was recruiting me in some way to her cause. The conversation drifted on with still no talk of going through the lines. My glass was refilled several times by Bridie. I was beginning to tire of Oloroso sherry. At seven Bridie brought in a plate of rather dry chicken sandwiches. I asked for a glass of water. Most of Billie’s chicken was snapped up in Winkie’s snuffling jaws.

We did eventually run the lines of our scene once and Billie delivered them rather confidently. When I took my leave, some time after eight o’clock, Billie came with me to the door of the flat. I remember that quite instinctively I kissed her hand and took in again the dark, rich fragrance of
Ambre Antique
. She patted my cheek.

‘You’re a dear boy,’ she said. ‘Harry and I both think so.’

III

The following morning, in spite of our private rehearsal, Billie was just as wayward as she had been the previous day. She had moments of splendour and repose when one could see the star in her, but these were vitiated by a general air of distraction. Her mind never seemed fully on her task; and she was not in command of the lines. At only one moment in the play was Billie truly at her best and this was at the very end.

In the final scene of the play, Lady Ashbrook, abandoned by her lovers and suitors, is finally alone on stage. She seems desolate, but then she crosses to the record player, selects a disc and puts it on. It is Johann Strauss’s
Emperor Waltz
. Slowly she begins to move in time to the music, then to dance. It is as if she is not simply remembering her past glories and romance, but actually reliving them. As she dances the lights fade and the curtain falls.

It was, I suppose, corny and absurd, but Billie contrived somehow to make it into an exquisite theatrical moment. All of us who saw it longed for the rest of her performance to rise to this level, but resolutely it refused to do so. The role was not beyond her capacity, but there was something she needed from someone. If anyone knew what that was, then they withheld it.