‘please don’t cry. I’m nothing. I’m just any old understudy.’
‘That’s pretty hot, I must say,’ Miss Gainsford said. Her voice wavered grotesquely between two registers like an adolescent boy’s; ‘to talk about any old understudy when you’ve got that appearance. What’s everyone saying about you when they think I’m not about? “She’s got the appearance!” It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,’ she continued wildly, ‘the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artistes like that man speaks to me. In any other management an artiste would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.’
She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.
Martyn said: ‘I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals do have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?’
‘I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of highbrow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just more than I can stand.’
‘But I’m not going to play the part,’ Martyn said desperately. ‘You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down for the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.’
‘It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.’
‘Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.’
‘Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining all the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you can stay here and take it! Unless it’s true. Is it true?’
Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. ‘I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.’
‘So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?’
Martyn said: ‘It seems that we are very distantly related: so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.’
‘I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you can hang on knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so damnably cruel.’
Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. ‘Don’t!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t say that, I need this job so desperately. Honestly, honestly you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.’
‘Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted.’ Miss Gainsford sobbed with an air of quoting somebody else. ‘It just needed you to send me over the border-line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock bottom. If,’ Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, ‘if you have any pity at all, any humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.’
‘But this is all nonsense. You’re making a song about nothing. I won’t be taken in by it,’ Martyn said and recognized defeat in her own voice.
Miss Gainsford stared at her with watery indignation and through trembling lips uttered her final cliché. ‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘do this thing to me,’ and broke down completely.
It seemed to Martyn that beyond a façade of stock emotionalism she recognized a real and a profound distress. She thought confusedly that if they had met on some common and reasonable ground she would have been able to put up a better defence. As it was they merely floundered in a welter of unreason. It was intolerably distressing to her. Her precarious happiness died, she wanted to escape: she was lost. With a feeling of nightmarish detachment she heard herself say: ‘All right. I’ll speak to Mr Poole. I’ll say I can’t do the understudy.’
Miss Gainsford had turned away. She held her handkerchief to her face. Her shoulders and head had been quivering but now they were still. There was a considerable pause. She blew her nose fussily, cleared her throat, and looked up at Martyn.
‘But if you’re Helena’s dresser,’ she said ‘you’ll still be about.’
‘You can’t mean you want to turn me out of the theatre altogether.’
‘There’s no need,’ Miss Gainsford mumbled, ‘to put it like that.’
Martyn heard a voice and footsteps in the passage. She didn’t want to be confronted with Jacko. She said: ‘I’ll see if Mr Poole’s still in the theatre. I’ll speak to him now if he is.’
As she made for the door Miss Gainsford snatched at her arm. ‘Please!’ she said. ‘I am grateful. But you will be really generous won’t you? Really big? You won’t bring me into it will you? With Adam I mean. Adam wouldn’t underst –’
Her face set as if she had been held in suspension like a motion picture freezing into a still. She didn’t even release her hold on Martyn’s arm.
Martyn spun round and saw Poole, with Jacko behind him in the passage. To her own astonishment she burst out laughing.
‘No really!’ she stammered, ‘it’s too much! This is the third time. Like the demon king in pantomime.’
‘What the devil to you mean?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just your flair for popping up in crises. Other people’s crises. Mine in fact.’
He grimaced as if he gave her up as a bad job. ‘What’s the present crisis?’ he said and looked at Miss Gainsford who had turned aside and was uneasily painting her mouth.
‘What is it, Gay?’
‘Please!’ she choked. ‘Please let me go. I’m all right, really. Quite all right. I just rather want to be alone.’
She achieved a tearful smile at Poole and an imploring glance at Martyn. Poole stood away from the door and watched her go out with her chin up and with courageous suffering neatly portrayed in every inch of her body.
She disappeared into the passage and a moment later the door of the greenroom was heard to shut.
‘It is a case of miscasting,’ said Jacko, coming into the room. ‘She should be in Hollywood. She has what it takes in Hollywood. What an exit! We have misjudged her.’
‘Go
