Distant Music Page 13

  He opened his eyes again, and they all laughed. ‘Portly is such an old queen, isn’t he?’ Donald rolled his eyes and set the bottle of champagne down on the bar in the corner of the room. ‘Don’t you love bars in drawing rooms? It has always been my fantasy, to turn a sitting room into a bar, but to have one in the corner of the room is next best really, and not bad, not bad at all.’

  Taking some glasses from the shelf he put them down on the bar, and beckoning to the other two he waved to the leather-covered bar stools, and then to the nuts and snacks he was setting out.

  ‘Asseyez-vous, mesdames and messieurs, je vous en prie! The Bar Bourton is now open!’

  Portly helped Elsie on to one seat and sat himself down on one of the others, and they all laughed as if they were doing something rather shocking, which they were really, because Portly and Donald knew only too well that drinking at a bar led to more drinking, and drinking late when in rehearsal was frowned upon by everyone who was anyone in the theatre.

  ‘I really must go to bed,’ Elsie confessed, a couple of hours later, and she went off, kissing her hand to the other two, leaving them still at the bar.

  Having undressed and washed, she tumbled into her lone bed thinking only of the luck that had recently befallen her, having for the first time for some hours quite put behind her the fact that her only relation in this world no longer wanted to have anything to do with her.

  She closed her eyes and fell asleep, and when she awoke in the morning she found that she could hardly remember that twelve hours earlier she had felt so homesick that if she could have run all the way home to Dottie and the lodgers, she would have done. But, as it was, she contented herself with bathing and dressing herself, while from afar she could hear the sound of Donald singing somewhere around, in a strong baritone voice, and, a little later, Portly’s voice raised on the telephone as he argued with someone or other’s agent. And all the time, although alone and awake, she did not feel a second of the pain she had felt when she had arrived at the Mount the previous evening. In fact, if she thought about it, Dottie had now become as much part of her past as everyone else in her family. In throwing Elsie out of her life, Dottie had effectively freed her. From now on she would make her way on her own. She would travel alone, by herself, and there would be no one to whom she had to feel grateful or who would expect her to be subservient.

  Rehearsals beckoned. She would make the play succeed, whatever happened. She would make sure that the local critics boomed her performance to the skies. She would see to it that everyone who had seen the play in the West End, starring Gwen Leronde, would say that Elsie Lancaster was better, that they had never thought that anyone could be better than Gwen Leronde, but that Elsie Lancaster most definitely was, that she was everything and more in the part than anyone else could or would ever be.

  She checked her image in the mirror. She still looked as she had the day before, but she was more than she had been the day before. She was now a grown-up.

  The time for the curtain to go up on the first night had arrived. Rehearsals had flown by, as rehearsals for a play that the cast is enjoying always seem to do, and now the audience, that voracious animal, that great chattering set of individuals that seemed to be intent on devouring anyone or anything that displeased it, was busily settling itself, making itself comfortable before dispatching any object of its displeasure within seconds of a sighting. Elsie stared at them through the spyhole set to the side of the stage. The whole town was out front, but no one that she knew, thank God, would be in the audience. That was one of the unending blessings of Dottie’s throwing her out of the house. There was no one sent by the great landlady to spy on Elsie, to report back on how the play had or had not gone; no one of whom Elsie had to be afraid, no pair of eyes belonging to someone who knew her, who would sit in silent, unmoved, critical judgement on her.

  The very thought was such a relief that her heart seemed to burst with happiness as she skipped back to the number one dressing room. No one but her and a bunch of strangers was a fair contest, and it was a contest that she knew she could win, and would.

  Whatever anyone says, a light heart is actually a prerequisite for the lightest of comedies, and so the actual moment when Elsie stepped gracefully on to the stage to speak her first line was for her a moment of joy. She knew that she looked perfect, and she felt assured, happy and relaxed, waiting only for the audience to welcome her into their hearts, take her to them, make her their own, as she had read in so many accounts of theatrical debuts. Nothing could go wrong, the cast loved her, Donald loved her, Portly loved her, and now the audience would too. She was quite sure of their welcome, until she heard the laugh.

  It happened as the lights seemed to hit her, and she opened her mouth to say her first line – the laugh, the unmistakable laugh that only Dottie could produce, the long, rippling laugh that she sometimes gave when she was listening to some hit radio show or other. Elsie did not need to look towards the stalls. She knew just where the old devil would be. She would be sitting in the front row, leaning forward, ready to ‘fright her’ as she always called it, because there were two things at which Dottie was really quite accomplished – besides ironing that is – and one was ‘standing people up’ and the other was ‘frighting them’. She had always kept a little black book in which she wrote the names of those who had offended her, and it was they who became the objects of Dottie’s frighting.

  ‘Off to fright old Eddie Griffiths,’ she would tell Elsie proudly, before making one of her rare attendances at a theatre. For, to Elsie’s certain knowledge, the only time Dottie ever went to the theatre was to pay out some old enemy who, unbeknownst or beknownst to them, had upset Dottie or her husband or daughter in the dim and distant past. Which was why she kept her little black book filled with names, and why she checked them against the cast lists of forthcoming productions coming to town.

  Sometimes it was true she would let them off, but only if one of the lodgers told her that the person in question was known to be dying, or something similar. Otherwise, they got Dottie’s treatment.

  And now Elsie was getting Dottie’s treatment, and so she knew, for certain, that her name had been written up in Dottie’s little black book, and that it would, in all likelihood, stay there for ever.

  Frighting was a perfect way of putting off an actor or performer. So ridiculous, it always seemed to Elsie, from when she was quite small, that it was silly to be put off by it. The action of the perpetrator was quite simple. They merely sat in one of the front rows of the stalls and laughed in all the wrong places, and applauded in the wrong places. However, and this had always astonished Elsie, despite being simple it was always horribly effective. So fragile was the average actor’s confidence that it was not more than a few seconds before they were effectively put off, and their performances, however assured, would become something to be retrieved, if not, finally – lost.

  Now, however, that it was being directed at her, Elsie realised in an instant why it did put off the most seasoned actor. It was not the laugh itself, or the applause in the wrong place – that served merely as a warning for what was to come. It was the awful sense of anticipation.

  Would there be another misplaced laugh, and if there was, when would it be? Would there be a sudden handclap, coming out of nowhere, favouring something that had not yet transpired, and if so, when would that too happen? Cool as the evening was, Elsie could feel herself perspiring as, of a sudden, yet another of Dottie’s laughs came rolling towards her as she began her next line.

  ‘It’s all—’ (loud laugh from the stalls). She tried again. ‘It’s—’ (loud and prolonged laugh from the stalls). She tried once more. ‘It’s-all-right-Benda-I-will-do-that.’

  The only way, finally, to take the line was at the gallop and on one long breath.

  Elsie looked at Phil Mander who was playing the butler and he must have seen the terror in her eyes, because he turned and wrote something on a pad laid out on the desk behind him. Obedient
ly, seeing his signal, Elsie allowed her eyes to stray to the pad as she crossed stage left.

  TELL WHOEVER IT IS TO TAKE A RUNNING JUMP! Phil had written in large capitals.

  Elsie paused. Then, realising that this was the only possible way forward, she went to the front of the stage and shading her eyes said clearly, pointing at her grandmother, ‘Someone out there is making a terrible noise, Benda, driving me dotty, in fact. Take care of it, would you?’

  She turned and looked at Phil who, bowing slightly and keeping an admirably straight face, intoned, ‘Certainly madam. Silence out there, please!’

  The audience, quickly realising that something was going on but not quite what, responded immediately by applauding, and Elsie and Phil went back to the play as written.

  After that the first act became everything that it should be, and as the curtain was about to rise on the second, Elsie, looking through the spyhole to the stalls, was unsurprised to see that no one had returned to Dottie’s seat.

  ‘Something the matter, love?’ Phil glanced down at Elsie, not quite understanding the expression on her face.

  ‘No, nothing. Nothing, really.’

  ‘Just for a moment I thought you were upset about something. You shouldn’t be – the play’s taken off, thanks to you. I loved the look you put in at the end of that first—’

  But Elsie shook her head, and put a finger to her lips. ‘Not now, Phil, you know that. Not now or at any other time.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and, having checked his costume in the mirror to the side of the stage, went on.

  Elsie watched him through half-closed lids, her head raised slightly.

  What a fool people thought you were. Just because you were young, they thought you were wet behind the ears. Well, not only was she not wet behind the ears, but not even Dottie could win now. She had trounced her. Dottie, the old battleaxe, had tried to fright her, but she had not succeeded. Elsie had frighted her back, and now Dottie’s name would be in Elsie’s little black book. What was more, she would top the list.

  You are done for. You have closed our deal for ever. You have betrayed me, but I don’t care, because you are no one now. You tried to kill my performance, but you did not succeed in frighting me. I would see you in hell before you could succeed at that, you witch! Elsie wrote in her engagement diary when she awoke the next day. Unfortunately Portly read it. Quite by mistake of course, but read it he did, and he looked shocked.

  ‘Why did you write that?’ He stared at Elsie, his eyes rounder than she had yet seen them.

  Elsie coloured. ‘Oh, it was nothing. Just someone, in the stalls last night, trying to put me off. So I was writing about it.’ She closed the book.

  ‘Elsie. You mustn’t feel like that about anyone, really. I’m sure whoever it was wasn’t trying to put you off, not doing anything on purpose. They were just nervous for you, that’s all. After all, so much runs on your being good in the play, doesn’t it? They were just nervous for you.’

  Elsie looked at Portly. He had led such a sheltered life she almost felt sorry for him. Never known what it was like to be out there, quite alone in life. She looked at him, not guessing what her beautiful, large, slightly protruding eyes did to his heart, and smiled. Her smile was serene and cat-like and so contained it could have been accompanied by a swishing of the tail.

  ‘Think what you like, Portly, but as far as I am concerned, I never want to see that woman again, not ever. She did to me what she only ever does to her worst enemies, people who have done her harm, people whose names she has written in her little black book. People like my father, those sorts of people, and last night she made me one of them, and I shall never forget that. I stopped loving her last night, for ever, and I hope she knows it. That is all. I just hope she knows it.’

  ‘I must say I never saw who it was. Donald and I were outside in the street, smoking our heads off!’ He shook his head, laughing at the memory.

  ‘Nothing is too far for someone who does that to you! Anyway. She didn’t stay for more, not once she knew she couldn’t shake me. She left. As well she should.’ Elsie smiled again. ‘No one should do that to anyone, let alone someone they have pretended to love all these years.’

  Portly, who hated hearing anything distasteful for more than a few seconds, had lost interest halfway through Elsie’s speech. He was already far too used to actors’ shenanigans to pay much heed to any surface drama, suspecting as he did that Elsie would probably be reunited with whoever it was within a few days, and all would be tears and kisses, and all that.

  ‘Want to read your reviews?’

  To change the subject he at once slapped down a large pile of newspapers on the table in front of them both, and reached into his pocket for his cigar case, smiling.

  ‘Are they interesting?’

  ‘Interesting? Well, yes. You have not been discovered, Elsie darling, you have been hailed!’

  And so it seemed she had.

  A STAR IS BORN the Evening Argus declaimed, showing a picture of Elsie that made her look five years older. THE DISCOVERY OF THE YEAR was a small piece in the morning paper, also showing a photograph of Elsie, but making her look at least five years younger. ELECTRIFYING PERFORMANCE FROM JUVE! was on the front of one of the trade papers.

  And on it went, and in such a manner that as Elsie read through them she had no doubt at all that she had arrived. Whether it was to stay or not did not matter in the least. What mattered was that Dottie would be reading at least some of them, and, her granddaughter hoped intensely, grinding her teeth with fury as she did so.

  ‘Where from here?’ Elsie looked up at Portly, already drawing happily on his cigar. In her own mind she had already played the tour, to packed houses of course, and was now buying herself a flat in London preparatory to storming the West End, as the newspapers always put it.

  ‘Where from here, Elsie?’ Portly frowned momentarily. ‘All the usual tour dates, Brighton of course, everywhere really. The interest we are getting in the tour at the moment is fantastic, Elsie darling, fantastic. We are going to fill and fill.’

  He stared dreamily out to sea at the now white-topped waves. The weather might be changing, but the box office till would be ringing, and the telephones as well.

  What a feeling it was too, and nothing to touch it. Just people putting their hands together and cheering at the end of a play, making a kind of magic that was indescribable, but meant that someone had arrived in their midst, a star. Someone with that something that sent the temperatures of theatre audiences soaring, that made people long, long afterwards sigh and say, Oh, but you didn’t see Elsie Lancaster in comedy, did you? Now there was a star!

  And so Elsie left her home town, Dottie, and the lodgers, everyone and everything that was familiar, for ever. Finally, she did so with all the usual regrets for what had happened to her, and to Dottie, but with no idea of how she could ever make anything or anyone better.

  She realised that Dottie had brought her up, had made her what she was, but that there was no looking back now, because Dottie, of all people, had frighted her. She had done to her own flesh and blood what she had only ever done to her most hated enemies. What she had done was not a quick frustrated stab in the back, which in the event might be forgivable; what she had done was nothing that could or would be passed off as an understandable crime of passion. Rather it had been a planned campaign, conducted in cold blood, and executed in the same way.

  One day, Elsie hoped, she would be able to forgive and forget what Dottie had done, but at that moment she turned away from her only relation in the world, remembering only now how hard Dottie had worked her from the time she was tiny, how she had kept her short of money and clothes, even when, as a little girl, she was earning a good salary dancing as a mushroom, or posing for a local cakemaker as a fairy on top of a wedding cake, doing ridiculous, embarrassing things which upset her for days afterwards, things which were stupid and degrading, but nevertheless brought in money. Even when she was doing al
l that, none of the money – none of it had come Elsie’s way.

  Dottie had never rewarded her with so much as a new dress, not ever – always sending her out to the second-hand shops to search for her clothes, for dresses and coats, for cast-offs worn by more well-off children, for children’s shoes that had been handed in, sometimes happily unworn, by nannies from rich houses who conducted a sideline in the nearly new, or sometimes quite new, clothes and shoes of their spoilt charges, thereby boosting their own meagre wages, and at the same time benefitting the less well off.

  Elsie settled back in the train carriage and folded her gloved hands neatly in her lap, and to avoid any feelings of sadness at leaving home she chose instead to go over and over in her mind, with renewed relish, how she had beaten Dottie at her own game, how she had forced her to leave the theatre before the second act, how she had finally kicked her grandmother in the teeth by making such a huge success in her first grown-up, starring, comedy role.

  As the train started to pull out of the station towards their first tour date, Elsie stared at the poor homes that ran down by the side of the railway tracks, at the washing that flapped in the early spring breeze, at the strained face of a woman digging at a bed of poor soil, and worse vegetables, but she saw nothing of these, to her, still unfamiliar sights. She saw only the glowing words of her reviews, and how those words would bite, deeper and deeper, into Dottie’s soul; how, even as she ironed sheets or moaned to the lodgers, or drank her sweet sherry at night, those words would crawl their way into the heart of Dottie, and, like some fearful desert insect, give her gip for the rest of her life.

  And she felt no pity for her.

  She felt no pity for her because when, at last, after all those long years of being turned away at auditions, after all those tedious roles, after all the studying and the dancing, after all the singing lessons, and the parts learned, when the moment came for Elsie to succeed, Dottie had responded by turning round and frighting her.