said simply. It was unthinkable that he might not come. Another week went by.
Julia stopped talking about her aviator, but Mattie could see from the way that she sat with her head cocked that she was listening to the street noises below their window, willing the buzz of the doorbell to cut through their aimless conversation. Julia wouldn’t go out any more, however hard Mattie tried to persuade her. She sat on her bed, apparently absorbed in a book, but the pages either flicked over too quickly or else they didn’t turn at all.
‘Do you think he’ll come?’ Mattie whispered to Felix one night, but Felix only shrugged and turned away.
Mattie had her own preoccupations. After the party she had dialled the number on the card that Francis Willoughby had given her. She had imagined that such an important man would be shielded by secretaries, and she was faintly surprised when he answered the telephone himself.
‘Come and see me in my office,’ Mr Willoughby said.
‘Shaftesbury Avenue, of course. Address on the card I gave you. Top floor. Tuesday at three sharp.’
On the Tuesday afternoon Mattie told her shoe shop mangeress that she had a headache and would have to go home.
‘You can’t do that,’ the woman said. ‘What if we all went home on the slightest excuse?’ Mattie made her face sag, and swallowed very hard. ‘I feel sick. I might be sick near a customer. Or on some stock.’
‘Oh, go on then,’ the manageress said hastily.
Mattie caught a bus to Piccadilly Circus and began the walk up the enchanted curve of Shaftesbury Avenue. She didn’t see the dusty shop windows, or the advertisement hoardings, or the city-sharpened faces of the ordinary people passing her. She only saw the majestic fronts of the theatres and the names up in lights. She dawdled for a moment, staring greedily at the production stills in their glass cases. She had seen two or three of the plays, perched up in the cheapest seats, but with the talisman of Mr Willoughby’s card in her hand, Headline Repertory Companies, she felt closer to the stage than she had ever done in any audience.
It was further than she thought. She found the Victorian redbrick block housing the Headline company at the northernmost end of the avenue, set amongst a cluster of tiny shops and Italian cafés. She took the ancient lift to the top floor, panting from having run the last hundred yards. Mr Willoughby was sitting alone behind the glass-panelled door of his office. The door announced his name, and the name of his company in full, in not quite evenly painted white letters. Mattie saw at a glance that the office was a green-painted cell, furnished with two deal desks and a pair of battered metal filing cabinets, a telephone and an electric kettle, and a dog-eared copy of Spotlight. It smelt of linoleum and cigarette smoke and, rather strongly, of Mr Willoughby himself.
‘Come in, dear, come in,’ he said. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’
He was looking at Mattie’s flushed cheeks and the corkscrews of blonde hair sticking to her forehead. Then his glance travelled downwards. Mattie was wearing a new circle-stitched bra and her jumper fitted tightly. She stumbled to the empty desk and perched on a typist’s chair with a broken back.
‘What I need, dear,’ Francis Willoughby announced with a show of briskness, ‘is a really efficient girl to help me with all aspects of this business.’ He waved his hand around the office. ‘Bookings, Contracts. Auditions. I’m a very busy man.’ He glanced at the telephone, but it remained silent. ‘There’s answering that thing for me. Are you used to the telephone?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Mattie assured him.
‘Typing, of course …’
‘I’m afraid I can’t type.’ I can’t pretend about that, Mattie thought desperately. Mr Willoughby glanced at her jumper again and ran his thumb to and fro over his thin moustache.
‘Well. Perhaps you could pick it up as you go along?’
‘I’m sure I could.’
‘The job pays six pounds ten a week.’
Less than at the shoe shop. Mattie looked over Mr Willoughby’s shoulder and through the sweaty green walls. Beyond them was the stage.
‘Could you make it seven pounds?’
Mr Willoughby’s smile showed his teeth, too white and even to be real.
‘Lots of girls want to do theatre management, dear. It’s not like ordinary office work, is it?’
‘All right,’ Mattie said quickly. ‘Six pounds ten.’
She started work with Headline Repertory Companies the following Monday, leaving the shoe shop without a backward glance.
While Julia listened to the clamour inside herself and waited, trying to contain it, Mattie went out to explore the limits of her new job. It seemed to consist mostly of explaining to angry-sounding voices on the telephone that Mr Willoughby was auditioning and couldn’t speak to anyone now.
Mattie quickly understood that most of the anger related to the non-appearance of money. Francis would look up from his desk, squinting against the smoke from his cigarette, and hiss, ‘Cheque’s in the post, tell ’em.’
Mattie knew that there was nothing of the kind in the post, because she did Francis’s few letters too, but she made a convincing job of lying for him, and he grinned approvingly at her.
One caller was particularly insistent. His voice was deep and resonant, the perfect actor’s voice as far as Mattie was concerned. His name was John Douglas, he told her, and he was the manager of Francis’s number one company, currently on tour in the north of England.
‘Tell fucking Francis,’ the rich voice issued from the telephone mouthpiece, ‘that unless I get fucking paid in full and unless I get cash in hand to pay the fucking company every Friday night as well, I don’t take them or sodding Saint Joan to fucking Gateshead next week. Got that?’
‘I think so,’ Mattie murmured.
Wincing as if it hurt him, Francis at last unlocked the big company cheque-book from the safe.
‘It’s all cash-flow, dear,’ he told her as he wrote a cheque. ‘If you don’t get the takings during the week, it isn’t there to pay the actors at the end of the week, is it?’
When she bent down to find the company’s current address in the filing cabinet, Francis put his hand up her skirt. His fingers squeezed her thigh and then slid up over her stocking top. Mattie jerked away from him.
‘Six pounds ten a week doesn’t cover that, Francis,’ she told him wearily, and he chuckled. A large proportion of Mattie’s time was spent dodging his hands, but the more brusquely she shook him off the more Francis seemed to enjoy it. Sometimes, especially after one of his lengthy lunches, the atmosphere in the little office was so highly charged with his erotic tension that Mattie was half-afraid the spurt of flame from his cigarette lighter would set fire to it. But most of the time she felt sorry for Francis and his beleaguered existence. Were all men pathetic, she wondered, under the armour plate of their aggression?
Mattie sighed and directed her attention back to whatever non-task Francis had set her between fumbles and phone calls. This was the theatre, that was the thing to remember. However marginally, she was involved in the magic world
