An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [11]
‘He’s romancing,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ve met his sort before. He’s just trying to make out he’s pally with them all.’
‘The cooker bit sounds authentic,’ argued Stella. ‘You don’t mention fat for nothing.’
She felt at ease with George. He had lent her a dark blue overall to guard her clothes from the dust. It covered almost completely the mustard-coloured slacks and jumper that Lily had bought her. Once, running back across the square from Brown’s café with a fried-egg sandwich for Bunny, she had bumped into Uncle Vernon. He had been to St John’s market to buy a lump of pork and looked beaten.
‘What are you got up like that for?’ he had demanded, outraged at her appearance.
‘It’s a sort of uniform,’ she said. ‘It’s obligatory.’
The next day, seeing her dressed in such workmanlike attire, Bunny had disconcertingly handed her a measuring rule and a stub of chalk and instructed her to work out the dimensions of a door, stage right, which would feature on the set of Dangerous Corner. He had talked mysteriously of an angle of forty-five degrees. Half an hour later, returning to the wings and finding the boards unmarked, he had sought Stella out in the prop room. She was making a great show of sand-papering the wheels of the bicycle perched on the sofa. ‘Anything wrong?’ he said. He was very pale and his lips looked swollen.
‘I don’t know what you mean about dimensions,’ she said.
‘What particular bit defeats you?’ he asked patiently.
‘All of it,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never got the hang of feet and inches.’ She knew by his expression, the clamp of his dry mouth, that he was annoyed. ‘I’m not being awkward,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I had a disturbed schooling.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ he retorted, and sent her upstairs to fetch Geoffrey down from the paint-frame. Geoffrey laid a newspaper on the stage to protect the knees of his cavalry-twill trousers and finished the task in two minutes flat.
‘It’s not that I thought the job demeaning,’ Stella assured George. ‘Uncle Vernon says I haven’t the humility to find anything beneath me.’
There and then George made her measure the rail of the fire-guard. Twice the rule snapped back and drew blood. ‘There must be a better way of learning something,’ whined Stella, sucking her fingers. ‘Get away,’ said George, whose own knowledge of such things had been acquired through pain.
At fourteen he had gone straight from St Aloysius’s school to shift scenery at the Royal Court. If he slopped whitewash onto the floor the stage manager clouted him over the ear with the brush and, if he forgot to grease the rag in which the tools were rolled, at curtain fall he had sixpence docked from his wages. When he cut short a length of timber the master carpenter brought the saw down on his knuckles.
Having learnt all he could, George had given in his notice and applied up the road to the Repertory Company. His very first job had been in that celebrated production of Richard II in which P.L. O’Hara had performed the King. The designer, who was later blown to smithereens at Tripoli, had wanted the deposed Richard ranting and roaming beneath the underground arches of a palace ‘. . . I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I dwell unto the world . . .’ and George, a man accustomed to sleeping eight to a room, the condensation weeping down the cellar walls, the baby coughing itself into the Infirmary,