got a date, actually, and I’m running late.’
‘Yes, of course. Goodbye, and thank you.’
‘It’s open in front. There’s a seat in the foyer. Nobody’ll say anything. Why not sit there for a bit?’ She was halfway down the alley. ‘Hope you get fixed up,’ she said. ‘God, it’s going to rain. What a life!’
‘What a life,’ Martyn Tarne echoed and tried to sound gay and ironic.
‘I hope you’ll be all right. ’Bye.’
‘Goodbye and thank you.’
The alley was quiet now. Without moving she took stock of herself. Something thrummed inside her head and the tips of her fingers tingled but she no longer felt as if she was going to faint. The brandy glowed at the core of her being, sending out ripples of comfort. She tried to think what she should do. There was a church, back in the Strand: she ought to know its name. One could sleep there, she had been told, and perhaps there would be soup. That would leave two and eightpence for tomorrow: all she had. She lifted her suitcase, it was heavier than she had remembered, and walked to the end of the alleyway. Half a dozen raindrops plopped into a puddle. People hurried along the footpath with upward glances and opened their umbrellas. As she hesitated, the rain came down suddenly and decisively. She turned towards the front of the theatre and at first thought it was shut. Then she noticed that one of the plate-glass doors was ajar.
She pushed it open and went in.
The Vulcan was a new theatre, fashioned from the shell of an old one. Its foyer was an affair of geranium-red leather, chromium steel and double glass walls housing cacti. The central box-office marked ‘Reserved Tickets Only’ was flanked by doors and beyond them, in the corners, were tubular steel and rubber-foam seats. She crossed the heavily carpeted floor and sat in one of these. Her feet and legs, released from the torment of supporting and moving her body, throbbed ardently.
Facing Martyn, on a huge easel, was a frame of photographs under a printed legend: ‘Opening at this Theatre on Thursday, May 11th: Thus to Revisit, a New Play by John James Rutherford.’ She stared at two large familiar faces and four strange smaller ones. Adam Poole and Helena Hamilton: those were famous faces. Monstrously enlarged, they had looked out at the New Zealand and Australian public from hoardings and from above cinema entrances. She had stood in queues many times to see them, severally and together. They were in the centre and surrounding them were Clark Bennington with a pipe and stick and a look of faded romanticism in his eyes, J. G. Darcey with pince-nez and hair en brosse, Gay Gainsford, young and intense, and Parry Percival, youngish and dashing. The faces swam together and grew dim.
It was very quiet in the foyer and beginning to get dark. On the other side of the entrance doors the rain drove down slantways half blinding her vision of homeward-bound pedestrians and the traffic of the street beyond them. She saw the lights go on in the top of a bus, illuminating the passive and remote faces of its passengers. The glare of headlamps shone pale across the rain. A wave of loneliness, excruciating in its intensity, engulfed Martyn and she closed her eyes. For the first time since her ordeal began, panic rose in her throat and sickened her. Phrases drifted with an aimless rhythm on the tide of her desolation: ‘You’re sunk, you’re sunk, you’re utterly sunk, you asked for it, and you’ve got it. What’ll happen to you now?’
She was drowning at night in a very lonely sea. She saw lights shine on some unattainable shore. Pieces of flotsam bobbed indifferently against her hands. At the climax of despair, metallic noises, stupid and commonplace, set up a clatter in her head.
Martyn jerked galvanically and opened her eyes. The whirr and click of her fantasy had been repeated behind an obscured-glass wall on her left. Light glowed beyond the wall and she was confronted by the image of a god, sand-blasted across the surface of the glass and beating at a forge under the surprising supervision, it appeared, of Melpomene and Thalia. Farther along, a notice in red light: ‘Dress Circle and Stalls’, jutted out from an opening. Beyond the hammer-blows of her heart a muffled voice spoke peevishly.
‘… Not much use to me. What? Yes, I know, old boy, but that’s not the point.’
The voice seemed to listen. Martyn thought: ‘This is it. In a minute I’ll be turned out.’
‘… Something pretty bad,’ the voice said irritably. ‘She’s gone to hospital.… They said so but nobody’s turned up.… Well, you know what she’s like, old boy, don’t you? We’ve been snowed under all day and I haven’t been able to do anything about it … auditions for the northern tour of the old piece … yes, yes, that’s all fixed but … Look, another thing: The Onlooker wants a story and pictures for this week … yes, on stage. In costume. Nine-thirty in the morning and everything still in the boxes.… Well, can’t you think of anyone? … Who? … O, God, I’ll give it a pop. All right, old boy, thanks.’
To Martyn, dazed with brandy and sleep, it was a distortion of a daydream. Very often had she dreamt herself into a theatre where all was confusion because the leading actress had laryngitis and the understudy was useless. She would present herself modestly: ‘I happen to know the lines. I could perhaps …’ The sudden attentiveness, when she began to speak the lines … the opening night … the grateful tears streaming down the boiled shirts of the management … the critics … no image had been too gross for her.
‘Eileen?’ said the voice. ‘Thank God! Listen, darling, it’s Bob Grantley here. Listen, Eileen, I want you to do something terribly kind. I know it’s asking a hell of a lot but I’m in trouble and you’re my last hope. Helena’s dresser’s ill. Yes, indeed, poor old Tansey. Yes, I’m afraid so. Just this afternoon, and we haven’t been able to raise anybody. First dress-rehearsal tomorrow night and a photograph call in the morning and nothing unpacked or anything. I know what a good soul you are and I wondered … O, God! I see. Yes, I see. No, of course. Oh, well, never mind. I know you would. Yes. ’Bye.’
Silence. Precariously alone in the foyer, she meditated an advance upon the man beyond the glass wall and suppressed a dreadful impulse in herself towards hysteria. This was her daydream in terms of reality. She must have slept longer than she had thought. Her feet were sleeping still. She began to test them, tingling and pricking, against the floor. She could see her reflection in the front doors, a dingy figure with a pallid face and cavernous shadows for eyes.
The light behind the glass wall went out. There was, however, still a yellow glow coming through the box-office door. As she got to her feet and steadied herself, the door opened.
‘I believe,’ she said, ‘you are looking for a dresser.’
II
As he had stopped dead in the lighted doorway she couldn’t see the man clearly but his silhouette was stocky and trim.
He said with what seemed to be a mixture of irritation and relief: ‘Good Lord, how long have you been here?’
‘Not long. You were on the telephone. I didn’t like to interrupt.’
‘Interrupt!’ he ejaculated as if she talked nonsense.
He looked at his watch, groaned, and said rapidly: ‘You’ve come about this job? From Mrs Greenacres, aren’t you?’
She wondered who Mrs Greenacres could be? An employment agent? She hunted desperately for the right phrase, the authentic language.
‘I understood you required a dresser and I would be pleased to apply.’ Should she have added ‘sir’?
‘It’s
