holy smoke, those same dialect classes is no good at all,’ cried Jonathan, ‘you want to see the lines she’s givin us, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph [falling inflection], is it a star you’re wanting to make of me, why I’m thinkin that if I crossed the ocean to Hollywood that does be in America by the time I got there I’d surely be drowned. Talk is it? In the length and breadth of the Old Country, Miss Graves, I’m asking you did you ever hear talk the like of that?’
‘I haven’t been over the length and breadth of Ireland,’ she said, ‘but I’ve certainly never heard anyone talk like that.’
Jonathan nodded serenely. ‘We’ll refuse to do it. We’ll tell her you said she was an old fraud.’
He broke away from Mattie, whose arm was round his neck, and without a single glance behind him, walked backwards out of the room.
‘He’s been practising that,’ Mattie remarked. ‘He’ll go on until he gets it right.’
‘Hasn’t he got it right now?’
‘Not that time, he wasn’t exactly in the middle of the doorway. I can do it, though, I’ll show you some time.’
‘Show me now and then go off home, I’ve had quite enough of you.’
‘No, not now.’
He pulled the door to, and began in a low confidential tone to explain everything. He had no parents alive, or, if he had, he didn’t know them and had never known them. He was run by an agent who had a place the other side of the Garden and there was a room of sorts there for him, this agent collected all his fees and paid the school and he didn’t know if anything was being put aside for him or not. He got one pound ten a week spending money, but the agent, well, anyone could call themselves that, kept putting it to Mattie that he could earn a sight more if he left the Temple and went in for commercials, that is, if he could fix himself up with some freckles. Hannah was given to understand that it was impossible to get work advertising cornflakes without freckles. But there was some stuff you could use to bring freckles on, Mattie said. It was like the stuff blacks used to use in New York in the days when they wanted to look lighter, only in reverse. You had to grease up and let it work through a bit here and there, like acid. They mustn’t be too regular, you wanted more across the nose. The pain screwed you up. Of course some people minded pain more than others. That was called your pain threshold. – Hannah asked how the freckles could be removed when no longer wanted. Mattie rolled up the white of his eyes and spread his hands out; no idea. His whole manner changed as he spoke; he sounded tired to death, close to the gutter.
‘Who looks after you when you get back, Mattie?’
‘What looking after, Miss?’
She had meant his dinner, of course, and his clothes, though he always looked as smart as a child could.
‘That’s part of the job, that’s all part of the agent’s put-on, Miss. He’s got a Hoffmann presser in the basement.’
Hannah would not ask what or who this was.
‘We have to go out looking okay,’ Mattie pursued, ‘I don’t know what he’d do to us if we didn’t go out looking okay.’ Perhaps a Hoffmann presser was an instrument of torture. ‘I’m really in his hands, you see, Miss. Until I get a bit older, I’m helpless.’
Hannah, feeling the tears of indignation rise, turned away to clean the blackboard. She wondered how Mattie had dared to let himself get into trouble at the Alexandra. All his freaks, and in particular his extravagant affection for Jonathan, were excusable from a waif. Something might be said to that effect. However, when she looked round he was gone.
THERE was something uneasy in the friendship between Mattie and Jonathan, which was not a childish matter, and indeed not exactly a friendship. Hannah soon came to know how they were likely to behave, but not why. Anxious though she was to do nothing of the sort, she went to consult Freddie, who said, ‘I’m glad you’ve turned to me, dear, very glad.’
Hannah explained that she was distressed at the thought of Mattie’s home life, if it could be called that, and hardly knew whether he ought to be encouraged or kept under.
‘It’s not that he’s deprived, exactly. He gets one pound ten a week to spend on himself.’
‘Considerably more than that, in fact,’ said Freddie. ‘That’s one of his troubles, yes. Wealth produces its fantasies, like poverty.’
‘Well, what fantasies does he have?’
‘They take various forms. Unfortunately he has noticed that there are more important things than money. I may have taught him that myself. I’ll have to have a word with his father.’
‘What father?’ Hannah asked.
It turned out that Mattie’s father was the prosperous owner of a chain of dress-shops, Ragtime Ltd, and that his mother, who was as shrewd as they come, was actively concerned with the business. A luxurious home was maintained in Hendon, Mattie was their only child, though Mr and Mrs Stewart were often abroad. And the agent, the one room to go home to, the Hoffmann presser? ‘He must have been thinking of Jonathan, dear. Jonathan doesn’t seem to have been very necessary to his parents. We never hear anything about them, anyway; we have to make all his arrangements with the agents.’
‘But he’s only nine,’ said Hannah.
‘A little bit of anxiety there too, dear. He seems to be growing rather slowly. They’ve been paying for him for two years, and they wonder when they’ll get a return on their money.’
‘What do you say to them, Miss Wentworth?’
‘Shakespeare, dear, Shakespeare or nothing. I remind them that you only get a great actor once every fifty years, or, indeed, a great man of any kind. And without a great theatre you never have a great nation … Of course, you want your actors tall enough to be visible from the back of the stalls. They’ve paid to see them, dear. But they’ll only have to wait a little longer for Jonathan.’
Casual and lordly in his attitude to everyone about him, unless he hoped to get something out of them, Mattie was none the less obsessed by Jonathan. Constantly he tried to manoeuvre himself into what should have been his natural position of patron. But Jonathan was self-contained. Undemanding by temperament, he made do with very little. Mattie himself needed a number of rapidly changing items – sharp jackets, a new trannie, cigarettes in fifties, and so on. Jonathan gravely admired these things, indeed appeared to be impressed by them, but did not covet them. What is the use of admiration without envy? But Jonathan, secreting himself and watching the world as a passing show, appeared to have learned something so important that his whole time was taken up in considering it. Mattie would have liked to knock him black and blue and bend his little finger back to make him tell what it was. Only at rare intervals would Jonathan join in with him, as a kind of double act, as on the evening when they teased Hannah. Then Mattie became dangerously exalted.
In almost every observable way he was Jonathan’s superior – older, better looking, more intelligent, born to success in the profession – not a good voice, it’s true, it was light and rusty, but a wonderfully expressive dark-browed face which would carry across any theatre, and, young as he was, a completely finished personality, exactly the same on stage and off. Under his affectations
