Distant Music Read online

  They both nodded sagely before finishing their drinks and going in to dinner.

  Coco could not decide on the right clothes to wear that morning. The only thing she did know was that if she was to be examined, it would be better to wear things that came off easily. She did not fancy struggling out of her clothes. She finally opted for a pinafore dress and white shirt together with long white socks and flat shoes. She stared at herself in the mirror. She still could not believe that she was pregnant. Pregnant, and, it had to be faced, quite alone.

  Keeping it from her guardians had been tough. She had finally opted for pretending that she was immersing herself in her acting, promising to visit them, even making dates and subsequently not turning up, telephoning at the last minute to say she had an audition, sending them flowers and letters, but never going to Norfolk to see them.

  It was an exhausting and very hurtful way of going on, and she knew that she was behaving very, very badly towards them, causing them terrible pain, but it was better than confessing all, telling them that she was pregnant, which she was certain would be a shock from which they would never, ever recover, such was the disgrace of a baby born, as the saying still went, out of wedlock.

  Not that whoever she was carrying was visible yet, but since Coco’s bosom had, for some reason, shot from thirty-three to thirty-six, and her waist expanded by about the same number of inches, she was feeling both dismal and claustrophobic. She had never given a thought to having a baby, nor would she have ever thought that it would be a good thing for someone such as herself to bring one into the world. So, it had to be admitted, she was now doing the last thing, apart from shooting herself in the head, that she had ever wanted to do. She was having a baby.

  Her distress at night was particular. It amounted to staring into the darkness and wondering, over and over again, how she had come to be in such a mess. And in the morning, as she clung to the bathroom basin being hopelessly sick, she wondered again why she had not ‘done’ something.

  But for no reason that she could clearly define, she came to realise that the morality of having or not having a baby was, for her, a strange one. She could not have said why, but from the moment that she had found out that she was pregnant she had been overwhelmed by an intense feeling that not to go through with her pregnancy would be in some way completely immoral.

  What she was facing now was her own mistake, but what she would face, it seemed to her, if she did not see her pregnancy through would be compounding that first mistake. She could not go back on her own stupidity, but she could go forward into a future that could make something positive out of it. To do anything else would be to be untrue to herself.

  ‘What was it like then, the old nunny wunny nursing home? They treat you all right when you went along for your interview? They’re usually very good, nuns as nurses, or nurses as nuns, at least so Cliffie always said. Quite disciplined, and so on, very clean, very hygienic, comes naturally to nuns to be clean and hygienic, and of course since they can’t have babies of their own they’re usually rather fond and all that, at least so they tell me. But, you know, it is only a rumour.’

  Oliver said all this hopefully, because he wanted Coco, despite showing every outward appearance of being quite miserably unhappy, not to have a bad time. In fact Clifton had never mentioned nuns as nurses to Oliver, or indeed nurses as nuns, not even once. Oliver had made it all up just to fill in time, to cover his discomfort at seeing his oldest friend at what must be, in reality, rock bottom.

  Coco looked at Oliver. How could she describe the chill she had felt when she entered the frighteningly pristine nursing home with its nursing sisters in their winged headdresses, and seen the beds filled with what had seemed to her to be an endless line of miserable young girls holding or feeding babies that perhaps, like hers, had been the result, not of careful planning, but only of a hot night in some faraway place?

  ‘Oh, it was all right. Quite clean. In fact very clean. In fact spotless. Yes, you could eat off the floor, if you wanted to. Strange expression, isn’t it? When you come to think of it? I mean, who wants to eat off the floor, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Good. Well, so long as you can if you want to, I mean eat off the floor, that’s all right, then. You look well, anyway, Coco. Quite well,’ Oliver finished lamely, not being quite able to find in himself anything which he could celebrate in Coco’s condition. Although he had to admit her skin did look exactly, but exactly, like a ripe peach on a summer day, there was no denying that.

  Yet ever since he had arrived in her flat Oliver had been trying not to look at Coco’s burgeoning shape. It had truly shocked him to see how big she had become in the short time since she had made her great announcement to him.

  ‘Yes, it’s quite clean. Yes, the nursing home is quite clean.’

  Coco sipped at her fruit juice and stared ahead of her morosely. She could not bring herself to ask Oliver about what he was doing, but she knew she had to do just that. She had to face asking Oliver what he was doing. She had to ask him, even though she was fairly sure that if he said that he had been signed up to make a film and was now, in his turn, saving up to buy an Austin Healey, she might scream and throw her fruit juice at the wall.

  In the event, and happily for her at any rate, all Oliver had to tell her was that he was going to Tadcaster, to the Stephens Theatre, which had been founded by a wealthy butcher solely, it seemed, so that his musician son could muck about putting on musicals every now and then. Oliver himself was going there to play in a mixed season of plays, starting with a Noel Coward revival and going on from there.

  As Oliver started to talk about going up to be seen for a major role at Tadcaster, the wonderful new facilities there, the costume department that made all its own clothes for the productions, the new theatre designs, all the old longing for the way of life that Coco had once so enjoyed mocking returned in a flood of nostalgia. Of a sudden she yearned for the smell of the size, the hollow sound of footsteps ringing on the floors of corridors outside dressing rooms, all the things that she had only just begun to appreciate before she fell, as the saying went, for a baby.

  She turned away to search for a handkerchief, desolation welling up inside her like the morning sickness that had, at last, gone away.

  The good thing about Oliver was that he knew her so well that he said nothing at all to make light of her problem, because he must have realised just how annoying that would be, and how she would resent it. Nor did he attempt to sympathise with her, or mouth stupid bromides at her to try to make her feel better about something that she knew no one could make her feel better about. He just put out his hand and covered one of hers with it, and lit a cigarette with the other.

  ‘It won’t be long, love, and then you will be back in the swing, and having a grand time of it, you will see. You can have the baby adopted and make someone very happy, and be back with all of us before you can say happy nappy!’

  They both started to laugh, although Coco was as usual now hiccupping and sniffing at the same time, such was her lowness of spirits, such her feeling that her life was now, irrevocably, ruined.

  ‘I don’t know why, but since I got preggers I can’t stop snivelling.’

  ‘I expect that’s normal.’ Oliver gave her a brotherly pat on her back. ‘Anyway, as I say, it will soon be all over, and the new-born kitten given to a new and loving home that will welcome it with open arms.’

  ‘There’s only one fly in that particular face cream, Ollie. I am not going to have the baby, or the kitten as you call it, adopted.’

  Oliver promptly removed his hand from hers, lit yet another cigarette and handed it to Coco.

  ‘Oh my Gahd, Coco!’

  ‘I know – I agree. I know. Oh my Gahd.’

  For some reason, ever since they were young, besides making pints of Birds Eye custard the moment Coco’s guardians had gone out to a cocktail party, they had found saying ‘Oh my Gahd’ exceedingly funny, accompanying the phrase as they had used to d
o, and now were doing again, with a downward flap of their hands, while at the same time bending their knees.

  ‘But how can you bring up a tiny baby, Coco? You don’t know anything about tiny babies.’

  Coco pulled a face. ‘I dunno,’ she said, immediately switching accents. ‘But you know, I gotta do it, or else what? I mean, the baby will have bits of me in it, and I sort of do know about what it is like to be given away and brought up by other people, and, you know, he or she might be dotty about the theatre and want to make costumes, like me, or act like you. And – just think – the kitten might be brought up by some couple who did not approve of acting and so on, and have a terrible time making its way into the theatre, or something. I mean I keep thinking about that, and it makes me realise that I am not, after all, just having a kitten, I am having a human being.’

  ‘A human bean—’

  ‘Exactly, a human person, not a puppy or a kitten. A human person might be someone like us, Ollie, and they might not want to be brought up by a bank manager and his wife, because however kind and sweet they just would not understand the sort of kooky types that we are.’

  ‘And talking of them, the kooky types I mean, what, I mean to say, what – what about the man who time forgot – the father of the tiny baby?’

  ‘Best forgotten about, I am afraid – I mean, don’t you think, Ollie? Best forgotten about, handsome Victor whose surname I couldn’t even remember.’

  Coco now discarded her cigarette halfway through, leaving it to make a little snake in the ashtray.

  ‘He is not really the father in any way. I mean to say, to be a father you have to really know the person whom you have made fearfully enceinte, and, since I can’t even really remember his name without a huge big effort, à quoi bon?’

  ‘Nil despairing then, Coco. And no good trying to stop me. I am now, quite officially, going to appoint myself the tiny baby’s goddaddy and come through the door at Christmas and birthdays with armfuls of wonder goods, and marvels of every kind, so that he or she will finally love me far more than you who have to be quite beastly to him, or her, and make sure that they don’t turn into an axe murderer or a theatrical bore who tells long, tedious stories about very old and very dead actors.’

  Coco smiled.

  It was after all better than crying.

  Oliver too smiled, and for just the same reason.

  Elsie also felt like crying, not just because she knew that the casting of Elliott had been a fix, but also because she had been looking forward so much to playing in Coward and now she was convinced that she would be faced with some great big unseasoned amateur who would naturally ruin it all.

  Some London agent called Tad Protheroe was at the bottom of it all. He had, it seemed, some interest in the theatre, way back when, and had known Stephens the Tadcaster butcher and businessman and owner of the Stephens Theatre for many a long year. Apparently they had been in the army together, something like that. Whatever the actual connection Elsie knew that there was one, and she also knew that Bartlett would be the last person to admit as much to her, or to anyone else. Dottie had used to say that you never could get anyone in the theatre to admit to either of two things – that they had been bad in a part, or that undue influence had been used to secure them a role.

  ‘Actors are such hypocrites!’ Dottie would boom over the sound of the wireless, completely forgetting that she was meant to be one. ‘Sleep their way to the top most of them, and then turn to God and the vicar and become horribly pious once they become famous.’

  This particular morning was the morning of the first read-through of the Coward play. Elsie climbed out of bed and surveyed herself in the long mirror of her bedroom. Did she look as she should? Young, vital, hair long and glossy, eyes bright. Mentally she ticked off the physical list as nerves started to eat at her insides, and outside the traffic started to ease itself down the main street of Tadcaster. To take her mind off her feelings, she found herself looking out of the window. Opposite she could see the woman who owned the hat shop arriving early with a whole lot of parcels.

  For a second Elsie found herself envying her. She could quite fancy owning a hat shop. It would be a very pretty sort of shop to own, now she came to think of it, and people were happily wearing hats again, not just for weddings and christenings, but all the time.

  As was now her established routine, Elsie went out to the baker opposite and purchased a loaf of springy white bread, and bought a paper. She took longer than usual to complete each commission, spending minutes over the choosing of her loaf, and finally buying a magazine as well as a newspaper. She did so because she was dreading what she knew the rest of the morning was going to bring her, namely meeting the fresh-from-drama-school lummox that the management had undoubtedly cast opposite her.

  ‘Of course you are far too young, and so is he, but I think we can get away with it simply and solely because of that one line we were so young and so over in love.’

  Bartlett had said this about a hundred times to Elsie, with the result that she had started to see herself as nothing more than totally unsuitable, as unsuitable as the characters in the play had obviously been for each other when they had married first time round.

  Elsie now sighed and stared around her flat. She had been very lucky to find a place that was so warm and comfortable, and above a green-grocer’s shop with vegetables and fruit sold off cheap at the end of the week. Fruit and vegetables in abundance were deemed not good enough to last the weekend, but they were certainly good enough for Elsie who did not much like meat, probably because Dottie had always kept the lion’s share of her larder for the lodgers and herself. As a consequence Elsie had grown up grateful for a diet of grilled tomatoes and fried mushrooms, or the occasional boiled egg, and the equally occasional steamed pudding. She did not particularly like alcohol either because, until people like Portly Cosgrove had offered it to her, she had never been given it, and since it was expensive it seemed quite mad to acquire a taste for it now.

  She dressed slowly for the read-through, putting together her wardrobe of clothes with the same care that she was in the habit of putting into her performances. It was not a question of being spoilt for choice, it was simply a question of asking herself which of her three cardigans she should start off wearing. Which of her three cotton dresses would she team with her cardigan? Which of her three sets of shoes would be the best to wear for the first day of rehearsal?

  Everything that was going to happen in the ensuing weeks was, in her experience, hinted at, sketched in, and made obvious on the first day. That was why everyone went to the first rehearsal in a state of nerves. They knew that everyone would know by the evening of that day just what the state of play would doubtless turn out to be. Of that there was no doubt at all.

  Elsie was always word-perfect before any read-through. It was part of her training. Dottie would never let her attend rehearsal without having learnt not just her own part, but the whole script. To Dottie’s annoyance this had never been a chore for Elsie, who had been born with a photographic memory. Dottie had found this irritating. She wanted learning a play to be a trial for her granddaughter.

  ‘Here, you don’t know all that!’ she would say, snatching some rehearsal script from Elsie, only to find that Elsie not only knew it all, but could tell her where the typing mistakes occurred, and recite the stage instructions off by heart. ‘You’ll end up as Mrs Memory Woman, if you’re not careful! Nothing but a parrot, that’s what you’ll be if that’s all you can come up with. Have to give a performance too, you know. Oh yes, it’s not just learning off by heart that gets you to the top.’

  Elsie had always switched off during Dottie’s longer speeches, the words seeming to flap around her head with the damp washing that hung overhead on the clothes airer. She knew that ‘parroting’ as Dottie called it would not get her anywhere, but she also knew that her ability to memorise was going to stand her in splendid stead. She had seen too many actors and actresses um um umming their way
through the dark days of rehearsal, seen too often how some other actor’s fluffing caused a cast unutterable misery, not to say senseless delays. So she closed her ears to Dottie’s threat that she would turn into a parrot and thanked her lucky stars for her ability to learn a play in less than a day.

  She had been so assiduous in her renaming of the unfortunate young actor brought up from London and cast opposite her that by the time she arrived in the empty rehearsal hall Elsie very nearly found herself asking Bartlett Corrigan, ‘Where’s the lummox then?’

  ‘Ah, there you are!’

  From the moment they met it had seemed to Elsie that Bartlett did not just beam bonhomie, he exuded it. Bonhomie was a sort of room fragrance which followed him in and out of rehearsal rooms, in and out of the auditorium, and everywhere he went. No matter how grim the news, how often it seemed to be coming from the left, Bartlett would nod and smile and pat the arm of the messenger, whoever it was, and say, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right, really it will.’ Or ‘Just you wait, it’ll turn out for the best.’ Or more often, ‘Well, we had better just press on then.’

  All in all he was the kind of man of whom everyone else will say, ‘Ah dear old Bartles, what a sweet fellow,’ and wonder to themselves if he really was as sweet as he seemed – which Elsie had soon discovered, however stern he sometimes appeared – he truly was.

  ‘Elsie, love, come over, come over. Late for you, Elsie, aren’t we, love? Elsie is usually here long before any of us, and always word-perfect,’ Bartlett told the young man standing by the tea urn at the end of the rehearsal hall. ‘Perhaps she has decided not to frighten us this morning? Come over, Elsie. Come over here and meet Oliver Lowell. Elsie Lancaster. Oliver Lowell. I say, I’ve suddenly realised that Elsie must win on the billing. A comes before o doesn’t it? No, seriously, no, we would not argue over billing, would we, darlings? Of course not.’

  Bartlett looked from one to the other. He had been hoping for some sort of chemistry between Elsie and Oliver. Hoping against hope that it would happen, and the thing would take off. It did so help, he always thought, if people fancied each other, at the very least a bit, when they were playing lovers in a play. It cut out so much of the director and producer’s problems. If they were always squabbling and chewing garlic before their love scenes – all that sort of nonsense – it made everything such an uphill struggle.