An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [10]
Geoffrey went even further and said that any man who squandered his energies on behalf of a Bank was incapable, a priori, of speaking with authority. Stella wondered whether Geoffrey was anti-Semitic. No one but a bigot, after what had happened, would lump rats and Jews together.
It was odd Geoffrey sounding clever on account of words when in other respects he was clearly pig-ignorant. If George addressed him directly, face to face, Geoffrey stepped backwards with his chin in the air like a girl taking umbrage. When George brewed up the tea and handed it round, Geoffrey wiped the rim of the mug with his handkerchief, and sometimes the handle. He didn’t care if George saw him. Nor had he an ounce of curiosity. Stella had coughed on and off for half an hour in the snack-bar of the News Theatre in Clayton Square and he hadn’t once asked her if she was in line for consumption.
All the same he threw her off balance. Uncle Vernon had always given her to understand she was brighter than most. His business acquaintance, Mr Harcourt, an old boy of the Liverpool Collegiate in spite of landing up in toilet rolls, had backed his assumption. But for George she might have sunk under the weight of her new-found ignorance.
It was George rather than Bunny who took charge of her. Bunny was there, padding up and down the stone passages in his galoshes, but he was too occupied to pay her and Geoffrey much attention. It was left to George to explain that Meredith was away in London with the set designer, choosing costumes for the opening production. Until then, in the hope that Meredith would stumble across her, Stella had wasted the best part of three days hunched on the stairs turning over the pages of a library edition of Shakespeare’s tragedies. She had combed her hair so often in anticipation she imagined it had grown thinner.
It was George who informed her that the actors wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days. One or two of the junior members might sidle in to enquire about digs, but she needn’t expect to spot Richard St Ives, the leading man, or Dorothy Blundell, his opposite number, until the very last moment. St Ives and Miss Blundell, along with Babs Osborne, the character juvenile, had been in last season’s company. It was unusual in repertory to be engaged for a second term, although before the war P.L. O’Hara, by public demand, had returned three years running. Not that St Ives could hold a candle to P.L. O’Hara. Had he wanted, and the hostilities not intervened, O’Hara might have come back for a fourth season.
‘What’s a character juvenile?’ asked Stella, and George said it was any girl not handsome enough to be a straight juvenile. He didn’t look her in the eye, but she wasn’t offended; she had always known to which category she belonged.
St Ives and Dorothy Blundell shared the same digs, though there was nothing going on between them. Since playing the Queen to his King in the 1938 production of Richard II, Miss Blundell had carried a torch for P.L. O’Hara. She was wasting her time. In life, as in the play, she had never been more than an appendage. According to George, Dotty Blundell was an unrequited woman.
St Ives preferred to woo touring actresses appearing at the Royal Court or the Empire. Having loved them, it was convenient the way they left him. Last year he’d clicked with the lead in Rose Marie, a soprano with legs that wouldn’t have disgraced a piano stool and twin infants being bottle-fed by her Mum in Blackburn.
‘I saw it,’ cried Stella, greatly excited, remembering Lily’s birthday treat, and Uncle Vernon turning queasy in the second interval following high tea in the Golden Dragon.
‘Rose Marie’ had misunderstood St Ives’s intentions. Her tour had moved on to the Hippodrome in Leeds and on the Sunday, starting at dawn and driven by a trombonist in the orchestra who was sweet on her, she had motored all the way back to Liverpool. The trombone player, thinking they’d returned to collect a ration book left with the landlady, had remained outside in Faulkner Square, puffing