Distant Music Read online

  Having quietly shut the door, Elsie stood for a moment in the middle of her bedroom as if she was waiting for a producer’s voice to come from the stalls to direct her next move. Then, lifting the old blackout blind that still hung at her window, she peered out into the spring night of the old seaside town.

  Portly had assured Elsie that Donald would be very kind, that he would be more than reasonable, but now that Dottie was crying, something that was in itself utterly unbelievable, it seemed to Elsie that the producer must have done or said something quite horrifying for Dottie to have returned home in tears.

  Momentarily distracted, she found herself watching an old man making his way drunkenly home, sitting first on one bench overlooking the seafront before rising unsteadily and continuing to the next. As she observed him by the light of the old-fashioned lamps it occurred to her that no actor she had yet seen had captured a drunkard’s walk accurately, always seeming to miss the desperation that lay behind the determination to try to appear sober, just as she, at that moment, was desperately trying to pretend that she could not still imagine that she could hear Dottie crying, if not in actuality, but in her head. That sound, slight but persistent, that was causing Elsie agonies of guilt.

  Elsie climbed into bed again and pulled the pillow over her head. ‘It is not all my fault that Dottie has been sacked, is it?’ she asked herself in the darkness of her bedclothes.

  Of course, it was certainly her fault that Dottie had been cast, but not that she had been sacked. It was not her fault that Dottie had been so bad, that was Dottie’s fault, surely? Where lay the blame, and if there was blame, did it matter? Dottie had been so, so bad that it had finally proved impossible for anyone to look at her. Not just Elsie, but none of the other actors could watch her stilted performance, first the words and then the gestures, and last of all the feet. She had even counted under her breath as she moved. ‘One, two, three, the table, four, five six – the door.’ It had been excruciating to watch, positively sweat-making.

  Yet, Elsie asked the bedclothes, should she go to her? Was that where her duty lay? To go and attend to her grandmother?

  She sat up in bed. She knew that she should, but she also knew that Dottie, whose pride came before everything, would not want Elsie to see her crying, or to know that she had been upset. Determined to try to alleviate her own guilt, but not knowing quite how to do it, she finally decided to knock on the door, risking her grandmother’s fury, while at the same time using as an excuse that she was not feeling well, or something like that. She would also make sure to make a great deal of noise to warn Dottie of her coming. However, it seemed that was not now going to be necessary, because the sound of the torn off, tightly held in sobs appeared to have ceased.

  Elsie knocked gently on the door to Dottie’s sitting room, relieved to hear the old wireless playing, and at the same time the sound of Dottie blowing her nose fiercely.

  ‘What was that? Who is that? Was that someone? Is there someone there?’

  She had obviously turned down the wireless to listen, so Elsie knocked again, this time a little louder.

  ‘It’s only me, Dottie. I have a headache and can’t sleep, so I wondered if I could get us both a cup of Horlicks or cocoa, or something?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing for me, Elsie,’ Dottie called in a shaking, tearstained voice. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Are you all right, Dottie?’

  Bravely Elsie stood on, finding she was staring at the door as if it was indeed the spirit of her redoubtable grandmother, as if she was in fact standing in front of her.

  ‘No, of course I am not all right.’

  Of a sudden Dottie flung open the door and stood before Elsie in what Elsie knew to be her best evening dress, a sequined pre-war top, a long black crepe skirt, about 1935 probably, Elsie found herself thinking distractedly, not looking at the mascara streaks her grandmother was busy wiping from her face.

  ‘And how you, of all people, can come knocking on my door at this time of night, when you know what you know, I do not know. How you can sleep at night, I know less. How you can even talk of sleeping at night is even more a mystery, you little viper.’

  Elsie lost all colour. She did not need a mirror to know that she had lost all colour because she was sure she could actually feel all her colour draining from her and seeping away. So much so that she would not have been surprised if she had looked down and seen it flowing off down the corridor, a stream of colour, trickling off back to her own room.

  ‘I don’t understand, Dottie!’

  ‘Oh yes, you do! You double-crossing little bitch!’

  Elsie felt her mouth going dry, knowing at once that someone must have double-crossed her, but not quite knowing who it could have been, because she imagined that she trusted Portly Cosgrove more than any human being whom she had ever met.

  ‘Dottie, what do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Elsie Lancaster, I know what you agreed to, I know everything. Donald Bourton told me. He told all, Elsie. He said you were unhappy with my performance, that you thought it was too much for my health, that you had suggested I should be removed and given something less strenuous, that I had heart trouble, or something. And since you are his precious little star, he is replacing me, on your suggestion!’

  Elsie opened her mouth to say something about Donald Bourton, about his perfidy, and then the cold reality of caution struck.

  She had never yet known Dottie to tell the ‘so help me God’ type of truth, not ever. She had never yet known her not lie, in some way or other. Not creative lies as in I was once a great star, no, Dottie told small, twisted, furtive lies, lies that laid blame somewhere else, absolving her of guilt. It did not matter if it was a napkin she had burned while ironing, or a pair of stockings she had snagged on a piece of furniture, there was always a reason why it was not her fault.

  If that wretched Mr Labell had not barged in and talked the hind leg off a donkey, I wouldn’t have left the iron on …

  Elsie realised, almost instantly, and certainly happily, that this might easily be just such another occasion: that the story of Donald Bourton blaming Elsie for Dottie’s dismissal might well be one of Dottie’s endless fantasies, fantasies that if she laid them end to end would very likely stretch the whole length of the sea front outside the window; and some of her colour started to return.

  Dottie would never, ever blame herself for her amateur acting and rusty technique; she would have to quickly find someone else to blame. Naturally, within a very few minutes of Donald Bourton’s giving her a diplomatic and merciful release from the play, she would have alighted on the idea of blaming Elsie, but not in the way that Elsie had first thought she would: not for persuading her to do the part in the first place, but landing poor old Donald Bourton in it by making out that he had placed the blame for Dottie’s removal from the cast firmly at Elsie’s door.

  ‘I shall speak to Donald in the morning,’ was all Elsie heard herself saying, and then she shut her mouth tight, and Dottie’s bedroom door with it. Hardly had she done so when Dottie wrenched it open again.

  ‘And there is no point in you speaking to Donald Bourton, Elsie, he is in management. He will never, ever tell you the truth, and if you think he will, you must be quite, quite mad.’

  ‘No, I shall. I shall speak to him in the morning.’

  ‘You will do no such thing.’ Dottie stood in the corridor, powdering her nose with a small feathery powder puff and staring aimlessly at herself in an old-fashioned Art Deco powder compact as she busily changed conversational tack. ‘As it happens I have no wish to continue in the play. I was unhappy in it. Unhappy with my performance, and yours, I may say. No, I shall be quite happy to be out of that wretched play, and away from those shoddy standards that you all seem so happy with. I shall be happy to be back in my own dear home with my boys to look after, my boys who really care for me. But I shall never forget what you have done to me, Elsie, not ever. And you yourself, if you have any conscience whatsoe
ver, will wish to move out of here. Leave. You will leave. At once. After all, if you think about it, it will not, in view of what you said to Donald Bourton, be very comfortable if you stay on here. Besides, you have a job now. You have a tour.’ She prepared to shut her bedroom door once again. ‘Oh, and get yourself another agent, Elsie. I can’t – no, I don’t want to represent someone as two-faced as you, never again. Just don’t want it.’

  She shut the door again, quite heartily, and the sound of the small, fractured sobs having ceased, Elsie could hear her turning up the old-fashioned mahogany wireless.

  Elsie returned to her own room, and sat on at the window where she had been previously seated, feeling as muddled and at the same time bereft and shocked as she had ever felt.

  She did not like living with Dottie, now that she was older, but on the other hand the thought of leaving at once, and finding digs, was not the most entrancing idea she had ever entertained. And then too, finding an agent might be difficult.

  And again, had Dottie been lying? Or had Donald Bourton really shopped Elsie? Had he really, after all that Portly had promised, laid the blame at Elsie’s door, and therefore, for whatever reason, cowardice or carelessness, made her life with Dottie totally untenable?

  ‘Of course Donald would never say such a thing!’ Portly looked appalled. ‘Good God, I would trust Donald with my life, Elsie. No, he is not that kind of person, really he isn’t. And anyway you must know that it would be ridiculous, that he would know that you wouldn’t forgive him for betraying you like that. No, Donald would never say anything like that, Elsie. I promise you.’

  Portly looked mature and kind, and at the same time his round, dark eyes looked troubled too. He was genuinely shocked at what Elsie had just told him, and at the same time worried. He did not want anything to upset the person whom he thought of as their brightest young star. He wanted everything to be smooth sailing for her.

  ‘I’ll ask him, of course. I’ll try and find out, if you like, but really, if my word is anything to go by, no – Donald would never do something like that.’

  ‘No point in asking him.’

  Elsie looked across the dingy little side room in which they were standing. Outside in the main hall they could both hear Act Two being rehearsed, and the assured, and for them reassuring, tones of a professional actress playing the part of the housekeeper.

  They could also hear Donald laughing, a great, fruity rumble that echoed across the rehearsal hall as the cast, refreshed and reinvigorated, brought more and more invention to their roles.

  ‘Plenty of happiness in there, at any rate.’ Portly nodded towards the hall, and for the first time Elsie smiled. It was true. With the arrival of poor Dottie’s replacement had come immense artistic relief to all concerned.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, Elsie.’ Portly stopped Elsie as she prepared to go back to rehearsal, the matter now closed, since they both knew that the truth, whatever it might be, would never now be discernible. ‘How come all the luggage et cetera in the hall outside? None of my business I know, but are you intending to spend the night in the rehearsal hall? Because if you are this is taking dedication just a half-inch too far, I should have thought.’

  ‘I’ve been chucked out of my lodgings, and – and no time to find any more before ten o’clock this morning.’

  Just in time Elsie avoided any kind of reference to Dottie’s being not just her agent, and a so-called distant relative, but her landlady too, not to mention her only relation.

  ‘Oh, what a blow.’ Portly stared at her. ‘Like to move in with us?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Nothing in Elsie’s calm manner indicated either suspicion or fear despite the fact that she was momentarily experiencing both.

  ‘Donald and I rent a house further along the coast, five miles out of town. If you would like, you could rent the wing from us? It’s furnished, quite cosy but best of all quite self-contained, so you will not be disturbed by Donald’s singing at unreasonably early hours. He is a lark, I am afraid, whereas I am an owl.’

  ‘Do you really mean that?’

  ‘If I didn’t, would I be asking you?’

  Elsie gave Portly a sudden hug. ‘You are kind.’

  After which she slipped off back to rehearsal leaving Portly head over heels in love with her.

  As promised, the house that Portly Cosgrove and Donald Bourton shared was at the top of a short carriage drive and overlooked the sea, which, on an afternoon in early spring, seemed to be a very different sea from the one Elsie had been able to glimpse from her grandmother’s house.

  This was a free sea. This was a sea filled with the hope of a new play, a play in which she had a starring role, and the admiration of two men who picked her up and dropped her back again outside her own front door as if she was a piece of Dresden china that would break if she was allowed to walk further than two yards on her own. This was a sea that sparkled and shone as soon as the sun came out. This was a sea that was no backdrop, but real and salty, quite unlike the one that she had only ever seemed to notice at the end of a long hard day spent either out trying to get work, or helping with the lodgers. Here was a sea that beckoned beguilingly, an anxious dog always ready to bound up and drop a stick at her feet. And in her new house there were no lodgers, and for all she knew, setting aside her own few clothes, no ironing either, only Portly Cosgrove and Donald Bourton, laughing and whistling, singing and playing records fresh from America. Here at Mount Vernon, as the house was called, Elsie felt that she might, finally, have arrived. And young though she still was, she realised that she had at long, long last crossed the tracks, and she had Dottie to thank for the complete change in her fortunes.

  It had taken an age to pack up all her things, and of course she had not had enough suitcases. Dottie had gone out, very noisily, ostentatiously leaving her a note on the hall table, a note that commanded her to be out of her room by noon because there would be a new lodger coming in that afternoon.

  Dottie had underlined that afternoon in her note, and Elsie had no trouble believing her because, when all was said and done, a theatrical boarding house, or digs, or bed and breakfast, or whatever it was in which she had spent her whole life, never had any real trouble filling its rooms, if it had any pretensions to comfort.

  Of course, Elsie, along with all the lodgers, was well used to Dottie leaving notes for everyone on the shabby little hall table. What she was not used to was having to leave the house where she had grown up, for ever, and by noon, as if she was just any old lodger who had offended Dottie in some way.

  Mr Labell, looking terrified but resolute (wearing much the expression that Elsie imagined aristocrats in the French Revolution might have worn), perhaps out of sudden pity for her situation, gave her one of his very old small leather trunks, and it was into this that Elsie packed all her childhood and other belongings. Dusted down, and the cobwebs removed, it still looked more like a prop than a private person’s suitcase as it was fitted into the back of a station taxi and driven, with Elsie, to rehearsal.

  But, sad though she had felt leaving her room and the house, never to return, it was not until Elsie found herself unpacking her few possessions at the Mount that she faced the moment of real truth. For it was only when she saw all her stupid possessions in another room, somewhere completely different, for the first time in their, and her life, that she started to feel the grip of true homesickness, that searing aching pain that seems to be more of a sickness than illness itself.

  It was not just that her few things looked really too pathetic for words. Worse than that was the feeling that all around her there was no one else near by. With Portly and Donald occupying the main part of the house, Elsie for the first time in her life realised that she was quite, quite alone. There was no one to walk past the window, below in the street, no one to tread past her door, no Dottie to call impatiently for her, no new lodger to introduce to the old ones, no old lodgers to ask her in for cups of tea or cocoa. No one would stop her on the stairs and
ask after her rehearsals as she carried laundry up and down, and there was no sound of Dottie’s old wireless turned up too loud. She was quite alone, and at peace, and after only a couple of hours inevitably she found herself wondering if she was in fact dead.

  The relief when Portly rang her doorbell and asked her into the main part of the house for a drink was therefore indescribable.

  Almost as indescribable was how beautiful Elsie looked when, later, around cocktail hour, she strayed into Portly’s part of the house wearing an old-fashioned dress of sprigged muslin supported by stiff petticoats that rustled. The kind of dress that Donald and Portly mutually imagined might have been worn in a drawing room comedy at the beginning of the decade, together with a large straw hat decorated by velvet ribbons which tied under the chin.

  ‘Oh, but you look so pretty, and that is such a lovely dress.’

  Portly stared at Elsie, intent on keeping detachment in his voice while not bothering to keep the admiration out of his eyes.

  ‘It was given to me. It’s actually an old costume, made for Vivien Leigh, but she never did the part, and they sold off all her costumes to help defray the costs, because Patricia Miller who was cast instead was too big for them. Anyway, I saw them advertised, and me voilà, my dear!’

  Elsie did not, as many another young actress might have done, ‘twirl’. Instead, she sat herself down on the chintz sofa near the window and arranged her skirts so beautifully around her that, it seemed to Portly, she succeeded in looking as if she had just arrived on wires from the wings, or on wings from the sea, and settled herself as a bird or a butterfly might, with that particular degree of delicate artistry that only nature seems to be able to practise.

  Portly sighed, his head on one side.

  ‘I shall always remember you like this,’ he told her. ‘I shall always remember this early spring evening, the sunlight on the sea out there, the sun itself sinking down, that sofa, that dress, and even’ – as Donald Bourton came in carrying a bottle of champagne – ‘and even Donald, I shall even remember him. There.’ He shut his eyes. ‘It has been painted on my mind. I always carry a sketch book in my mind, you know. It’s really because I can’t draw or paint, so when the moment arrives I quickly sketch, et voilà!’