Now find yer Number Two.’
A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage and, above it, was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: ‘It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.’
He glanced at Martyn and added: ‘Put them in her room, dear, will you?’
She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here, too, there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to having sewing materials at hand. Here was the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.
‘And how,’ a disembodied voice inquired, ‘is La Belle Tansey this morning?’
Sucking her left hand and arranging roses with her right, Martyn wondered how she should respond to this advance. She called out, tentatively: ‘I’m afraid it’s not Miss Tansey.’
‘What’s that?’ the voice said vaguely, and a moment later she heard the brisk sound of a clothes-brush at work.
The roses were done at last. She stood with the ends of the stalks in her hand and wondered why she had become so nervous.
‘Here we go again,’ a voice said in the doorway. She spun round to face a small man in an alpaca coat with a dinner jacket in his hands. He stared at her with his jaw dropped. ‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘I thought you was Miss Tansey.’
Martyn explained.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘That’ll be her heart, that will. She ought to have given up before this. I warned her. In hospital, too? T’ch, t’ch, t’ch.’ He wagged his head and looked, apparently in astonishment, at Martyn. ‘So that’s the story,’ he continued, ‘and you’ve stepped into the breach? Fancy that! Better introduce ourselves, hadn’t we? The name’s Cringle but Bob’ll do as well as anything else. I’m ’is lordship’s dresser. How are you?’
Martyn gave him her name and they shook hands. He had a pleasant face covered with a cobweb of fine wrinkles. ‘Been long at this game?’ he asked and added: ‘Well, that’s a foolish question, isn’t it? I should have said: will this be your first place or are you doing it in your school holidays or something of that sort.’
‘Do you suppose,’ Martyn said anxiously, ‘Miss Hamilton will think I’m too young?’
‘Not if you give satisfaction she won’t. She’s all right if you give satisfaction. Different from my case. Slave meself dizzy, I can, and if ’is lordship’s in one of ’is moods, what do I get for it? Spare me days, I don’t know why I put up with it and that’s a fact: But she’s all right if she likes you.’ He paused and added tentatively: ‘but you know all about that, I dare say.’ Martyn was silent and felt his curiosity reach out as if it was something tangible. At last she said desperately: ‘I’ll try. I want to give satisfaction.’
He glanced round the room. ‘Looks nice,’ he said. ‘Are you pressed and shook out? Yes, I can see you are. Flowers too. Very nice. Would you be a friend of hers? Doing it to oblige, like?’
‘No, no. I’ve never seen her. Except in the pictures, of course.’
‘Is that a fact?’ His rather bird-like eyes were bright with speculation. ‘Young ladies,’ he said, ‘have to turn their hands to all sorts of work these days, don’t they?’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘No offence, I hope, but I was wondering if you come from one of these drama schools. Hoping to learn a bit, watching from the side, like.’
A kind of sheepishness that had hardened into obstinacy prevented her from telling him in a few words, why she was there. The impulse of a fortnight ago to rush to somebody – the ship’s captain, the High Commissioner for her own country, anyone – and unload her burden of disaster, had given place almost at once to a determined silence. This mess was of her own making, she had decided, and she herself would see it out. And throughout the loneliness and panic of her ordeal, to this resolution she had stuck. It had ceased to be a reasoned affair with Martyn: the less she said, the less she wanted to say. She had become crystallized in reticence.
So she met the curiosity of the little dresser with an evasion. ‘It’d be wonderful,’ she said, ‘if I did get the chance.’
A deep voice with an unusually vibrant quality called out on the stage. ‘Bob! Where the devil have you got to? Bob!’
‘Cripes!’ the little dresser ejaculated. ‘Here we are and in one of our tantrums. In here, sir! Coming, sir.’
He darted towards the doorway but before he reached it a man áppeared there, a man so tall that for a fraction of a second he looked down over the dresser’s head directly into Martyn’s eyes.
‘This young lady,’ Bob Cringle explained with an air of discovery, ‘is the new dresser for Miss Hamilton. I just been showing her the ropes, Mr Poole, sir.’
‘You’d much better attend to your own work. I want you.’ He glanced again at Martyn. ‘Good morning,’ he said and was gone. ‘Look at this!’ she heard him say angrily in the next room. ‘Where are you!’
Cringle paused in the doorway to turn his thumbs down and his eyes up. ‘Here we are, sir. What’s the little trouble?’ he said pacifically, and disappeared.
Martyn thought: ‘The picture in the greenroom is more like him than the photographs.’ Preoccupied with this discovery she was only vaguely aware of a fragrance in the air and a new voice in the passage. The next moment her employer came into the dressing-room.
II
An encounter with a person hitherto only seen and heard on the cinema screen is often disconcerting. It is as if the two-dimensional and enormous image had contracted about a living skeleton and in taking on substance had acquired an embarrassing normality. One is not always glad to change the familiar shadow for the strange reality.
Helena Hamilton was a blonde woman. She had every grace. To set down in detail the perfections of her hair, eyes, mouth and complexion, her shape and the gallantry of her carriage would be to reiterate merely that which everyone had seen in her innumerable pictures. She was, in fact, quite astonishingly beautiful. Even the circumstance of her looking somewhat older than her moving shadow could not modify the shock of finding her its equal in everything but this.
Coupled with her beauty was her charm. This was famous. She could reduce press conferences to a conglomerate of eager, even naïve, males. She could make a curtain-speech that every leading woman in every theatre in the English-speaking world had made before her and persuade
