An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [12]
The local newspaper had commented in its review: ‘The King’s face, petulant, wilful, caught in a noose of light from the number one flood, floated in darkness . . . when Exton entered and struck weak Richard down, such was the power of the set, the shadow of the prison bars rearing like spears against the backcloth, there was not a woman in the stalls worthy of her sex who could refrain from weeping.’
Then the war came, and George joined the Merchant Navy. Two years later his ship was torpedoed twenty-four hours out of Trinidad. He spent nine days adrift in an open boat, croaking out Christmas carols and spitting up oil.
Stella was used to such stories. Every man she had ever met told tales of escape and heroism and immersion. They had gone down in submarines, stolen through frontiers disguised as postmen, limped home across the Channel on a wing and a prayer. The commercial travellers pushed back sleeves and rolled up trouser legs to point at scars; they tapped their skulls to show where the shrapnel still lodged.
George’s chief officer had collapsed in the boat. They tried to lay him flat, but he was so badly burnt he was trapped upright with his fingers stuck to the gunnel. George had scraped the skin free with his teeth. The cobweb of a hand, like a woman’s lace glove, clung to the wood until the salt spray dashed it away.
‘How awful,’ said Stella dutifully. George was rocking over the fireguard and smiling. It was astonishing to Stella how fondly men remembered their darkest hours.
P.L. O’Hara had risen to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. In 1944 he’d sent George a postcard of an old man tapping his way up a village street somewhere in the Cotswolds. The card was pinned to the wall beneath the moose, alongside the yellowing cutting of the review of Richard II.
‘I wish I’d seen the play,’ said Stella, kindly.
Geoffrey said it was absurd to think the designer had taken the slightest heed of any suggestion put forward by the likes of George. And furthermore, if Captain Bee’s Knees O’Hara was the great actor he was cracked up to be, why hadn’t he been snapped up by Hollywood instead of returning year after year to the provinces?
‘Why don’t you like George?’ asked Stella, when they were upstairs, on the third floor, cleaning out the extra’s dressing room.
‘But I do,’ he protested. ‘He has considerable native intelligence.’
‘He’s not a nigger,’ she said, and noticed how he winced. He was wearing a pair of woollen mittens discovered in a cupboard; he was afraid of dirt. He was washing the long mirror with a scrunched-up page of the Evening Echo dunked under the running tap of the basin and his mittens were sopping wet.
‘You’d be better off without them,’ she advised. Her own hands were black with newsprint. She couldn’t quite reach the corners of the glass and was stretching on tiptoe across the dressing-table when Geoffrey put his arm round her shoulders. It wasn’t an accident; he was breathing too hard. She was about to shrug him away when she thought of Meredith. Rehearsing with Geoffrey would make it easier when the time came for Meredith to claim her. Penetration, from what she had gathered from library books, was inescapably painful unless one had played a lot of tennis or ridden stallions, and she hadn’t done either. Despite his Gestapo monocle, Meredith, as a man of the world, might be put off if she screamed. Hastily swallowing the liquorice George had given her earlier that morning, she swivelled round, eyes shut, and waited.
Ignoring her lips, Geoffrey nuzzled her ear. Even if it had been Meredith she didn’t think she would have found it very exciting. She was reminded of the time she’d taken part in Children’s Hour and they’d showed her how to simulate a rising storm by panting sideways into the microphone.
She began to stroke Geoffrey’s harsh hair. It was a womanly gesture witnessed often enough on the screen at the cinema. She supposed it was maternal rather than sensual; it was what