Distant Music Read online

  ‘Yes, nothing to be done at all. Just put her up there. Magic.’ Portly snapped his fingers, still smiling, and at the same time shaking his head in wonder. Donald Bourton too smiled.

  ‘It’s the first time it has happened to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, my first time.’ Portly nodded, also serious for the first time, the realisation hitting him of a sudden. ‘Yes, this is the first time it has happened.’

  ‘You never get over it, always remember that.’ Donald said this matter of factly, in the same way that he might announce the price of fish and chips in a café. ‘The first time it happened to me, you know, was the young Harris James. He came on stage, recited a piece from Henry V, and then promptly sat down on a chair to the side of the stage and proceeded to yawn fit to bust, looking if anything not just bored stiff by the whole audition procedure, but bored to ribbons by everything that was happening. Never mind it was John Sisley’s production company putting it on, and starring the great man as well; it was of no possible interest to young Harris James. It was quite obvious to everyone that he just wanted to go home and listen to sport on the wireless. Outrageous! He was only seventeen, or perhaps sixteen – no, seventeen, anyway something like that, but already with the looks of a young god. Old Plum Loughborough turned to me as soon as Harris had finished galloping through Once more unto the breach, dear friends – I was producing at the time – and said, “What can one say, old boy? Except sign him at once.” That was the marvel of it, do you see, even sitting on stage yawning you could not take your eyes off him. Really, you just could not take your eyes off him. It is as simple as that, Portly, it really is. They have either got it, or they have not got it, and that young lady has got it.’

  ‘I will telephone through to her agent.’

  Portly Cosgrove hurried off back up to his office on the first floor of the building, while Donald Bourton sat down and called, ‘Next please!’

  He liked to think that he was a kind man, a man who would not, as it were, willingly hurt another, and the undeniable fact was that he really hated this next bit of the audition process. Having to sit through singing and dancing, recitation and movement while all the time knowing that the part in question had already been assigned was a form of torture for him, yet it had to be done, because, after all, Elsie Lancaster might not be lying, she might really be thinking of signing on at Tyningham Repertory Theatre.

  Having reached home and battled her way through the front door Elsie shook out her little plastic umbrella and wiped her face with a handkerchief.

  The rain had made her hair turn a little too frizzy, which was never flattering, so she went quickly to her room on the ground floor – overlooking the pavement and the street lights, rather than the garden with its few shrubs and its iron bench at the back – and hung up her coat and rubbed her hair dry. No good presenting herself to Dottie, at any time of the day or night, in any less than starry condition. Even a button undone on her blouse, or a muddy shoe, would gain a reprimand. As far as Dottie was concerned, if you wanted to be a star you got up as a star and you stayed as a star, all day and all night, even in your sleep, if necessary. Anything else was simply not tolerated.

  ‘Doors do not open to nondescripts with their hair messed and their clothes muddied. Doors do not open to actresses without glamour. Doors do not open, ever, to those who are careless of their appearance,’ she would intone with the measured voice of an Eastern holy man calling the faithful to prayer from a minaret.

  So it was only when Elsie was once more completely presentable, once more the potential star, that she climbed down the stairs to the basement kitchen that was the engine room of the house, and Dottie’s power base. And it was only when she was about to push open the kitchen door that she realised she had actually been offered the lead role in the pantomime for the coming season.

  For one single solitary second Elsie’s heart took off and seemed to sweep all normality out of her body, and against all the rules, against everything she knew to be the facts of theatrical life, she let it. For what seemed like a single glorious second she let herself feel thrilled, full to the brim with the singular happiness, the ecstatic realisation, that she had been offered the role of Cinderella.

  It would drive her arch rival Jane Buskin potty! It would drive Jane’s mother Mrs Buskin mad! It would make everyone else at Tippy Toes furious!

  All this went through her head for the one second that she allowed herself to enjoy the moment, before reality set in and she began to wonder how best to approach Dottie with the news.

  It was never a good idea to announce anything to Dottie in a big way. If you did that she would always deflate you with some crushing remark. Not was it a good idea not to tell her as soon as an offer had been made, because if Dottie picked up the telephone and was surprised by someone, charming though she might be to the caller she often lost her temper with Elsie afterwards, and then there was hell to pay, not to mention a mound of the lodgers’ ironing to do by way of punishment.

  No, Elsie had to think of a way to approach Dottie that would make sense of what had happened, and at the same time prepare her to negotiate for Elsie.

  Elsie loathed the whole process of being bargained over, simply because it always made her feel like a pound of old plums on a market stall. The grander Dottie made Elsie sound, the more she demanded for her, for some reason the worse Elsie found she felt, and this despite knowing that, of course, Dottie was right.

  And of course she was right. If Dottie was doing her job she had to make the people hiring Elsie Lancaster feel grateful, and humble, but most of all she had to make sure that they paid up, on time, and the right amount. All this took being tough and difficult and demanding, and not having the famous wool pulled over your eyes.

  If the offer was going to go through from Portly Cosgrove, Elsie knew that it would begin with Dottie slamming down the telephone, declaring in a raised voice to the empty hall above them that all managements were unmentionables. Just as, if an offer was being considered but had not yet been agreed, Dottie would shout at the silent telephone to ring – damn it! All this, and many other patterns of behaviour that Elsie found draining and humiliating, had to be endured, somehow, before she could even begin to consider that she might have landed a part, or, as in this case, the part.

  As it was the telephone in the hall was ringing even now, and she still had not told Dottie the news.

  Elsie doubled back up the stairs, and having prepared herself for a few seconds by slipping into the character of a charlady, such as she had seen depicted many times on the films and at the local repertory theatre, she picked up the telephone and said, ‘Temple and Mead, Theatrical Agency, could you please ring back in five minutes? Miss Temple is negotiating on the other telephone. Thank-ah yoooo!’

  After which, knowing that it had been Portly Cosgrove on the other end, she shot down to the kitchen and told Dottie everything, but not as herself, that would have been a mistake. Instead, cunningly, she told her grandmother everything that had happened at the audition in just the same way that her grandmother might have told her. In other words, as if their roles had been reversed. This did the trick, as it always did, because quite apart from anything else, as Elsie herself was well aware, she was not just good at playing her grandmother, she was excellent. She should be. She had studied her enough.

  Elsie therefore embarked on her first speech to Dottie with a particular form of cold, detached, but for her, familiar, artistic energy.

  Everyone at the audition had been a silly ass or a proper pansy or a complete clot. Dottie nodded her head in satisfaction at this. It was just how she saw everyone with any power over their lives. Not in simple black and white, but in roles as colourful as any being currently cast. As to the management, Elsie made sure to make them sound not as even she herself had been forced to appraise them, as being rather more gentlemanly than the normal run of producers, but as if they were a right pair, and more than likely to be going to try to double-cross the
m.

  She took especially great care not to mention that Mr Cosgrove and Mr Bourton had proved, also most unusually for a provincial management, really rather polite, if not gentle and charming to an inordinate degree. Dottie would not have understood that; far from understanding it she would have been vaguely appalled, certainly shocked. Managements as far as she was concerned were out to do you – one of her favourite words – and it did not do to regard them as anything less than criminal.

  Satisfyingly, as she drew her account of her audition to a close, Elsie could see that it had pleased Dottie no end, for it portrayed the world in which her grandmother had failed to succeed in a way that Dottie understood. It made no sense of her own failure if there were any nice guys out there. They had all to be black hats, otherwise she might have to contemplate the idea that the reason she had not succeeded as an actress had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mr Cosgroves and the Mr Bourtons of her generation; but everything to do with Dottie not having had it.

  So much had Elsie’s account pleased her that by the time the telephone in the hall was once more ringing, Dottie was positively purring with pleasure at the idea that she was going to have to deal with the usual double-crossing so-and-sos that made up management. She sprang up the back stairs and into the hall.

  ‘Temple and Mead, Theatrical Agency, good afternoon.’

  The voice at the other end was the pleasant voice of Portly Cosgrove, but as far as Dottie Temple was concerned it might have been Satan himself speaking to her on the telephone.

  ‘I am so glad you liked Miss Lancaster, Mr Cosgrove, but as you are no doubt aware the Tyningham Repertory Thee-ay-ter is after her for Salome, and the Importance, not to mention the young Queen Victoria in an original musical.’

  After she had announced this Dottie winked at Elsie, her spiky black mascaraed lashes seeming to open and close like those of an expensive china doll. Elsie smiled back, whilst at the same time feeling the colour draining from her face. It was not unknown for Dottie not just to get her better salaries than everyone else at Tippy Toes, but also to lose her jobs.

  Of course, when Dottie lost a job for her through too much boasting and overpricing, she always justified it with, ‘Well, you didn’t really want to do it, anyway, did you, dear?’

  This was never true, because Elsie always wanted to do everything, if only so that she need have nothing to do with the lodgers and their trays, or Dottie’s washing and ironing, because that was Dottie’s bargain. If Elsie worked, then she gave Dottie her salary to bank, but she got off the housework. If she was not earning, she was swiftly sent back to being the maid of all work, which, as Dottie said, ‘soon gets your ambitions stoked up again, my girl!’

  Nevertheless, whenever Dottie did negotiate the hell out of a situation and lose her a job, Elsie knew that she always, always had to smile and nod, before absenting herself quietly to her room where she would spend some minutes battling with tears that always seemed to turn to gulping hiccups in her efforts to send them back to where they belonged – deep down in a place that not even she cared to visit.

  This time, however, she took care to peel off to her own room and switch off any feelings that she might or might not be having as efficiently as Dottie switched off Music While You Work on the wireless. She had not been seated pretending to read an old edition of Autumn Crocus for very long when Dottie flung open her bedroom door.

  ‘Well, of all the so and sos I have ever had to deal with on your behalf,’ she intoned, ‘Mr Cosgrove of Cosgrove and Bourton is the wettest yet! Wait till you hear this. He has only agreed to everything, but everything, that I have ever asked for, and more!’

  As Elsie allowed her mouth to drop open in a most unbecoming manner and at the same time stood up as if royalty had entered the room, Dottie struck off each of her demands for Elsie on her once elegant fingers.

  ‘Miss Lancaster will require a taxi to take her to the theatre every evening; a dresser, naturally; fifteen pounds a week for a salary; her costumes cleaned twice a week – and two sets of those, thank you very much. She will require one per cent at the box office, and hairdressing and make-up paid for.’ There was a small pause as Dottie frowned and tried to think of what other outrageous demand she had made which had now been agreed to, but then, not being able to recall exactly what else she had spelled out to Cosgrove and Bourton, she finished by saying in a helpless tone, ‘He’s mad of course. Quite, quite mad.’ There was another pause. ‘Oh, and the dresser to act as chaperon, someone to sit in the dressing room and make sure of everything. That too he agreed. I tell you, he is potty. Needs his brains examined.’ There was another pause. ‘That’s another thing. He says not that you have the making of a star, but that you are one! Just like that. He thinks you’re a star.’ Dottie paused again. ‘A star. You!’ Yet another pause. ‘Well, we’ll see if he comes through, but all in all, if he does, you’re on your way, young lady, and about time too, if you ask me.’

  She nodded at Elsie as if to dismiss her with ‘That’s all for now’, but instead of Elsie it was she who left the room, and Elsie, after a few seconds, sat down very suddenly at her dressing table and stared at herself.

  Mr Cosgrove had said she was a star.

  Was it true after all? Were several of the lodgers, not just Roger Dimchurch, right in their predictions that she would one day become a famous actress?

  Elsie went to her mirror and gazed at her reflection. This must mean that Mr Cosgrove did not mind her bulging eyes – her eyes that were not as other people’s eyes and that Dottie was always on about. He could not even have minded them. She stared into their great green depths. Of course the bulging did not show up so much on stage. She knew that because Mr Labell had told her so, only to reassure her of course, and only because she had actually asked him once, when he had come to see her in a summer tableau.

  Now Elsie found herself pacing her small bedroom, the realisation coming to her little by little. She must not think about it. She must not even dream about it, she must just float on the top of the waves of her life, as she saw the little crabs doing sometimes when the high tide came in. Just floating, as seemingly careless of their future as Elsie was always at pains to pretend that she herself was, just lying back and waiting for the offers to come in.

  But now one had, and it was a big offer, and she would no longer have to battle down the seafront hiding behind her child’s umbrella, or stand in a queue waiting to buy cheap, stale, day-old bread which could be toasted for the lodgers. Once she had been Cinderella, she need never do those things again. She could go to the ball of life.

  Once she had been Cinderella it might even come about that not even Dottie could make Elsie do the ironing or the washing, or run about with breakfast trays. There would only be theatre, theatre, theatre.

  She crossed to her small bed, and having gently pulled back the pre-war satin cover she removed her shoes and laid herself carefully under it. Although she did not feel in the least bit tired, very soon she was fast asleep, dreaming of the sea beyond the windows, of the tides that came in and out, of long days to come when removing stubborn egg stains from cold plates under a cold water tap would be as dim and distant a memory as any dream that ever vanished on waking.

  Chapter Two

  Oliver Plunkett stared at his father. He had never had the slightest wish to irritate or disturb John Plunkett, and yet he knew that not only had he just managed to do so, but he had, very probably, always done so. Perhaps it was the fact that he was the youngest child, or perhaps it was the fact that his father had only ever seemed to look to Oliver’s older brothers to represent the family honour, but Oliver had always had the definite feeling that his father had one son too many. One son too many to have to pay for, one son too many to have to keep an eye on, morally and spiritually; one son with whom he could make no possible connection other than acknowledging that he was his son.

  It was, Oliver always thought, as if Oliver had come in the back door and decided to attach himself
to the rest of the family, trailing along behind, trying to convince everyone that, though he was undoubtedly a very different kind of creature, nevertheless he was still one of them.

  Even now the expression in his father’s eyes was one of a man pushed to the point of irritation. There were a thousand things that his father would rather be doing around his small estate than talking to Oliver about his future, his father’s eyes told Oliver.

  But, worse than that, he was now preparing to talk to his youngest son about a future that John Plunkett would not just despise but loathe his youngest son for even contemplating. He would be thinking that Oliver was about to pull the family name through the mire. He would be wondering why God had sent this third boy to him, and he would be supplying the only possible answer: to make him – John Plunkett – suffer. Oliver was his father’s mortification, his hangnail, his unreachable itch.

  And so much so that by the time Mr Plunkett Senior went to open his mouth they were both only too keenly aware that this younger son, this young man called Oliver, was his father’s sacrificial lamb. But while Abraham had unquestionably suffered at God’s hands when asked to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar, Oliver had always felt that in Abraham’s shoes John Plunkett would have been only too happy to oblige. In fact he would probably have hurried proceedings through at such breakneck speed that he would no doubt have greatly impressed the rest of Israel.

  What Oliver had actually just said, clearly enunciated, the Ts proudly crossed, was – ‘I want to be an actor, sir.’

  His father, being a Plunkett, the owner of a small estate in remote Yorkshire, a man known by all to be resolutely virtuous, unflappable in the face of the greatest adversity, and a member of a family that had survived many centuries of fluctuating fortunes, had not reacted to this simple statement with the usual, and only to be expected, paternal ‘You what?’ He had proceeded to the drinks tray, and after pouring them both a whisky had merely turned to Oliver and asked him in even tones, ‘Water or soda?’