Distant Music Page 17

  Oliver stared at Coco. ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ he told the once more empty room in a flat voice.

  In Coco’s absence, Oliver stared around him at the stylish new furnishings that his childhood friend was accumulating. It was always the same with actors, Melson had told him very early on in his coaching.

  ‘You starve to do the classics, dear boy, and then, later, things come your way. But you will have to wait, if that is how you want it.’

  And a great part of Oliver did want it, the part that wanted to show his father, but most of all Cliffie, just what he was made of. But another part of him – at this he put his hand out and stroked the seat of a new leather chair that Coco had just bought for herself – another part of him wanted fine things like leather chairs, and cashmere, and Italian shoes, and steak and salad whenever he felt like it, not to mention an Austin Healey.

  This duality of purpose was what was known at drama school as ‘a right Edward the Second’.

  Did you starve for art, with a capital A, or did you pay the bills and let the art come around when, or if, it could? Like some maiden aunt who called occasionally to make sure that you were eating healthily, and were changing your socks at regular intervals.

  ‘I say, Coco, when you’re out there, on location, in Spain, keep an eye out for anything that might suit me, any recasts, that kind of thing, would you? Know what I mean? Sometimes they change the script on location and they need other actors. So you will keep your ears open for me, won’t you?’

  Coco smiled. ‘Of course. Croutons?’

  With this vague agreement between them now settled, Oliver’s blues immediately lifted and he was able to wolf his soup and his steak and salad, and smoke the subsequent Gauloise cigarettes with all the élan of a man who sensed that he had come to an uneasy compromise. Not only that, but they both knew that Coco’s promise to keep an eye out for him had stilled a little of his envy, and that after all was not nothing. Nor indeed was his admission that he would not object to earning a buck or two on a film.

  ‘Now, how are you getting on with Hamlet. How was it, in the end?’

  ‘I was brilliant.’

  ‘Naturally. And modest with it.’

  ‘Only saying what everyone else said, darling. But Ophelia was a pain in the neck, I can tell you. And Osric stole it.’

  ‘Osric always does.’

  ‘Still, I’ve already had offers on the strength of it.’

  ‘What to do?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Things.’

  ‘What things, Ollie?’

  ‘Television.’

  They stared at each other.

  ‘So.’

  ‘Oh come on, Coco, no one decent does television. Bad enough doing films. And no one in England does those, unless they’re starving, or saving up for an Austin Healey.’

  Oliver smiled at her, and Coco found herself catching her breath, while at the same time turning away from the implied insult, because really Oliver had become such an artistic snob, there was nothing to be done about it, at the moment. It was obviously a drama school thing. She herself could not have cared less what anyone thought of her doing films, but even so, of a sudden, it seemed to her that the British acting profession was filled with the biggest bunch of spoiled children that she had ever come across.

  What was wrong with television, for heaven’s sake?

  ‘Know what I think, Ollie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you’re frightened. You’re all frightened of television, that’s what I think, you’re frightened because it’s live and reaches so many people. You’re scared rigid, all of you. That is why you look down on it so, because if you fall on your face on television, it is live in front of millions of people, and you will never recover from it, like the opera singer who fell into the orchestra pit. You think you will only ever be remembered for your fluffs or your dries, or your mistiming, and that is such a risk. Could kill off your career. That is why you all avoid it like the plague.’

  Of course after that, Oliver promptly lost his temper, which made Coco smile smugly knowing that she must have hit a six, scored a bull’s-eye, aimed and shot and blown up the target. She was absolutely sure that she was right. Actors were all scared witless by the very idea of television, which was exactly why Oliver was being so condescending about it.

  Nevertheless, despite her know-all airs, Coco was still innocent of the ways of filming, and film people, and completely ignorant of the old theatrical saying about infidelity – that on location or on tour it did not count.

  If she was ignorant of the saying, however, she very soon was not ignorant of the fact. Her first day on the set, just outside Malaga in southern Spain, thinking to get away from the crowds of extras being used for the battle scenes of this newest of what seemed to be an endless succession of inane pictures pouring out of England, she climbed up the hillside, taking with her a half-bottle of cold white wine and a plate of food.

  She half closed her eyes, wanting to block out both the sound of the people below her on the hillside and the few events that were actually being filmed at the usual snail-like pace. She sipped her wine and ate her food, thinking about Aeneas and wondering how he was getting on in Australia, and whether he had saved enough yet for his Austin Healey, or had ever thought of her again.

  ‘How shallow we are!’ she remembered him shouting at her between their mutual bouts of joyous laughter as they compared their ambitions during that first dinner together. ‘Why don’t I want to play Hamlet and wear tights?’

  ‘Because you see acting just as a means to bringing home the bacon. Of course it takes some art and some sacrifice, but basically, it’s mostly about bacon rather than Shakespeare.’

  Aeneas was so pleased with what he thought of as Coco’s bon mot that they continued to sign off their subsequent telephone calls to each other with ‘Remember – it’s mostly about bacon rather than Shakespeare.’

  That was the difference between Oliver and Aeneas.

  Oliver was serious-minded and looked down on Coco for only wanting to act so that she could have a nice flat and an Austin Healey, while Aeneas on the other hand thought it hilarious that Coco did not mind being frank about her complete lack of depth. What was more, Aeneas articulated his own feelings with admirable brevity.

  ‘If you have to do Shakespeare to bring home the bacon, so be it, but how much better if you can avoid the tights, and those ghastly little tunics that only just cover your family jewels, leaving everyone to wonder why a Prince of Denmark can’t afford a longer top.’

  Now a voice near to her said, ‘A penny for them?’

  Coco had an unnatural hatred for people who disturbed other people’s daydreams, not to mention people who enjoyed saying something so crass as ‘A penny for them’. She opened her eyes – oh so slowly – and half sat up, hoping that whoever it was would buzz off pretty soon.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ she said, seeing that it was Victor. ‘If you really want to know, I was just wondering if my old mate Aeneas had saved up enough for his Austin Healey yet. We are having a race, to be the first one to buy the car of our dreams, and there’s money on it.’

  ‘You haven’t come all the way out to Spain to talk about him again, have you?’ Victor groaned as Coco shook her head.

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that I’m due to take a few quid off him, that’s all. We’re only mates.’

  ‘Which is not what that lot are by the looks of it!’

  Victor pointed down the hill. It was half an hour into the lunch break for the large cast of extras and they were obviously determined not to waste a minute of their time off after pushing cannons up hill and down dale, not to mention marching endlessly and pointlessly towards the same twenty-yard point and back again.

  Coco stared down the hill. It was a film in itself. There was not an extra, anywhere, who was not busying him or herself with another her or him, unless he was busying himself with another him.

  ‘What a – what a – what a sight!�
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  ‘Such a pity they’re not filming Sodom and Gomorrah, isn’t it?’

  They laughed in a companionable sort of way, still staring at the sight below them.

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Makes you wonder what kind of home lives they have – that they are so frustrated, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly does.’

  Victor stared into Coco’s eyes, and she became uneasily aware that three or four weeks of filming might be going to lead to the kind of trouble she did not want. She carefully lay down in the grass again, of a sudden covering her low-cut costume with a table napkin, murmuring as she did so, ‘Must be careful not to get a tan, so out of period.’

  But the voice beside her murmured, ‘No point in covering them up, Coco, I have memorised them already.’

  Chapter Eight

  So there it was, at last, the train, bringing Master Oliver back to Yorkshire, and, as the saying went, straight to the bosom of his family. Clifton stamped his feet up and down for perhaps the fiftieth time and blew fruitlessly on his woolly gloved fingers, Yorkshire in spring not being the warmest of places.

  He repeated this exercise once more before hurrying forward to where he knew the first class carriages would be stopping. The great engine drew slowly to a halt alongside the platform, looking for a few alarming seconds to be about to outstrip the station itself. Slowly carriage doors started to open, as if the realisation of arrival was only just dawning on the occupants of the train, and then decorously, brusquely, hurriedly, ponderously, the different passengers stepped down and out on to the platform.

  As Clifton had expected, the doors of the first-class carriages were the first to open, making it appear to those waiting that even the act of dismounting from their carriages gave the first-class passengers precedence over those in the second- or third-class coaches, after which, slowly following on, came the rest. Clifton stood among the first to emerge, his eyes searching eagerly for his surrogate offspring.

  After a minute or so his heart started to sink as he realised that Oliver could not be going to be among this first elite. Turning round he hurried back towards the second-class carriages, walking anxiously along the length of them and peering in at the windows, yet still there was no sign. Finally, as he was beginning to despair, and as the other carriage doors were beginning to be closed by the assiduous porters, and the train engine prepared to leave the station once more, a door reopened and a tall, thin, youthful figure began to crawl down from his carriage and on to the platform.

  There, at last, was Oliver.

  After his initial double take, a double take which combined a feeling of relief at his safe arrival and astonishment at his appearance, Clifton hurried towards him. He had fully expected Oliver to change in the months that he had been away, but not to turn into a tramp. Unshaven, his hair longer than Clifton had ever seen it, Master Oliver’s face was not pale, but grey. And the lines under his eyes were so deeply etched that they could have been drawn in by a theatrical eye pencil. He looked worse than anything Clifton had ever seen, except perhaps on the Pathé News at the local fleapit.

  ‘Master Oliver.’

  ‘Cliffie.’

  Oliver hugged him, quite unselfconsciously. Clifton smiled, tentatively, momentarily flattered, while looking around for some sort of suitcase. But Oliver, it seemed, had no baggage that he could see, apart from a bag slung over one arm of his duffel-coated shoulder, and he stank of alcohol.

  ‘Had a couple on the train,’ he told Clifton, ingenuously.

  Clifton took him by the arm and marched him, not walked him, through the ticket barrier, nodding at his old friend Parker, who was on duty that day, and at the same time raising his own eyes to heaven. Parker responded by not bothering to ask to see Master Oliver’s ticket. He knew.

  Young men everywhere, his look told Clifton, they were all the same. Send them to London to improve their situation in life and they came back looking like something the cat had brought in.

  Outside in the station forecourt, Clifton paused. ‘Very well. Straight to the Station Hotel, Master Oliver, but first a stop-off at the chemist’s, I think.’

  ‘What for?’

  Clifton stared at the wreck that was his protégé. ‘What for, did you say? Why, to turn you into a human being before your father sees you, Master Oliver.’

  Clifton’s mind cast itself back to the old house where the Plunketts had lived for so many generations. Once back there Master Oliver would look worse than a bag of rubbish dumped in the middle of the immaculate drive. There his unshaven grey skin, his greasy unwashed hair, his shabby clothes and his vague but pungent smell of old stout would stand out against the immaculate presentation of centuries of proper living. The spring flowers in the halls and receptions rooms, so lovingly arranged by Clifton himself, the old silk curtains that could never be cleaned except by a specialist in old materials, and then only along approved lines. The old furniture that could never, ever be polished, only lightly dusted. The dull Charles I silver, the Georgian china, the French enamels, the lightly weighted eighteenth-century silver knives and forks, all of it, every single item, would gang up on Master Oliver’s appearance and frowningly reject him – and that was all before Easter Sunday mass in the private chapel, with Father Bill in his centuries-old vestments, vestments made of the palest silks and gold threads, vestments that exactly toned with the candles and the flowers, the incense and the lace.

  Clifton booked them into the best suite at the Station Hotel, which although not up to much had the advantage of being not so posh that it would reject the tramp of whom he was now in charge. Once let into the rooms he ran a great tub of water in the en suite bathroom, and, doubting that Oliver could be relied upon to wash himself properly, he threw in some bath salts for good measure. The rich lavender scent rose up towards Clifton as he also threw in a newly purchased loofah and placed a large bar of Pears Soap for Oliver’s use by the taps.

  ‘Scrub yourself, shave yourself, and stay where you are until I get back.’

  Leaving Oliver laughing helplessly at the whole fandangle, Clifton shot off in his car back to the house, happily not too far away to be returned from by the time Oliver had come to, let alone shaved off his ridiculous excuse for a beard. Up the stairs he ran to Master Richard’s wardrobe and from the back, where items of less interest were stored, he grabbed what he could of the older boy’s cast-off clothing, a shirt here, a tie there, a jacket, and a pair of cord trousers. Shoes he could not bring himself to steal, since he had noticed that Master Oliver was still wearing a much scuffed pair once worn by his eldest brother.

  ‘Lucky you are away in Africa, Master Richard!’ Clifton muttered to the photograph of John Plunkett’s eldest son on the dressing table. ‘Or else we might be having words by now.’

  He shot down the polished wooden stairs again, and out to his motor car, which he drove as fast as he dared back to the Station Hotel where, to his immense relief, he realised Oliver must have finally finished his ablutions, because he could hear him singing in a strong tenor voice a verse of two of the Slave Chorus from Verdi’s Aida, always one of Clifton’s favourites.

  Knocking on the door of the suite and letting himself in, he was confronted by a changed man. Master Oliver stood before him all pink and perfect from his bath, clean shaven, a towel around his waist, his face glowing and bright, and the smell of alcohol quite gone, happily replaced by a light waft of English lavender and clean shampooed hair.

  ‘Clothes.’

  Oliver held up his elder brother’s old clothes and looked across at his father’s old batman, teasing him.

  ‘Not really my part, you know, Cliffie. I have been playing more real characters lately. Hence why I travelled in this manner.’ He pointed at his old clothes. ‘And the beard and so on. I am just living one of my latest roles, trying to find out what it is like not just to be alienated, but to cause alienation in others. Very interesting too, particularly in the dining car!’

  ‘I k
now, I know, Master Oliver. I realised you must be up to something, but there is no time for that now.’ Clifton glanced down at his watch. ‘Tea is in the library at four o’clock, and you know Mr Plunkett does like punctuality.’

  Oliver nodded. It was always the same with his father. The memory of the iron routine, never varied or deviated from, came rushing back.

  First would come a glance at the library clock – Where are these people? – this would be barely one minute after the arranged time of their arrival. Then, two minutes later, Well, if they’re not coming we might as well carry on. Finally, Don’t they know that to be late is so selfish? The servants have to get home to their own families. Delay them and you ruin their families’ meals. So thoughtless. Really, unforgivably thoughtless.

  Oliver started to hurry. Much as he knew that he had changed in the previous eight months, and despite staying in London with only Coco for company at Christmas – and in a valiant attempt at saving money working in a restaurant throughout the whole holiday – let alone playing Hamlet, and winning a prize for verse speaking and plaudits for his acting that had everyone predicting – depending on whom they favoured – that he would be the new Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, Guinness, or whoever, Oliver wanted to be late for a meal at his old family home as much as he wanted to have his toenails pulled out.

  To be late for tea by as much as a minute would be to ruin the whole Easter break.

  It was as simple as that.

  In the event they both just made it, Oliver glowing from the bath and scrub up, not to mention the shave and the shampoo. Clifton on the other hand, far from glowing, was nothing if not hot and flustered from the whole horrible experience. Happily, however, having shot up the drive and decanted himself by the staff entrance, he was still, somehow, in time to serve tea from the library table, handing Oliver a tier of home-made scones and cakes, and a cup of China tea taken in an old Victorian teacup with precisely as distant an expression as any butler might wear who hardly knew who Oliver might be. There was, therefore, no sign on either Clifton or Oliver’s face of the previous little drama. No one would have known from the butler’s demeanour that only a little more than an hour before he had been standing in the town’s chemist with sweat pouring down the back of his legs while he purchased a razor, a toothbrush, a loofah, soap and bath salts, let alone hiring a hotel suite and risking life and limb to sort out new clothes for Master Oliver.