An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [16]
He was just debating whether it was a shade pompous to refer to himself as ‘I’ rather than ‘me’ when young Harbour, the juvenile lead, tapped him on the shoulder. Harbour was extremely nervous, this being his first professional engagement, and equally determined to seize his chance. Meredith had spotted him at an end of term production of You Never Can Tell at drama school.
‘Good morning,’ said Harbour. ‘Sorry to butt in.’
‘I’ve rather a lot on my mind,’ Meredith said. He didn’t look at the boy but stared instead at a potted palm withering in its tub beside the grand piano on the rostrum.
Discomfited, Harbour blurted out that he thought Dangerous Corner a wonderful play, absolutely wonderful. And Dotty Blundell was wonderful too. How old was she exactly? He had the round blue eyes of a doll, ringed with stiff black lashes.
‘On the wrong side of forty,’ said Meredith. Dotty was thirty-nine, but had he added twenty years onto her age he knew it wouldn’t have deterred Harbour. Not for the first time he thought how monotonous it was, this unerring selection of inappropriate objects of desire. John Harbour ought to have winged, a bee to the honey, to Babs Osborne. Dawn Allenby, a masochist if ever there was one, should have prostrated herself at the feet of Desmond Fairchild, a sadist in a trilby hat worn with the brim turned up all the way round like a vaudeville comic.
‘Have I time for coffee?’ asked Harbour. This morning he was wearing a rugby scarf flung boyishly about his neck.
‘I think not,’ said Meredith, and was gratified at the crestfallen slump to the young man’s shoulders as he trailed towards the lift.
The company, until such time as the carpenters had finished building the set on stage at the theatre, had the use of a private function room on the top floor of the hotel. The room, which overlooked the booking hall or the station, was large enough for their purposes and grandly panelled in mahogany. When the trains came in or out, sending the pigeons wheeling from the vaulted roof and the steam rolling against the windows, Meredith felt he was on the poop of some ancient brig sailing a ghostly sea.
There were three men and four women in the cast of Dangerous Corner, all of whom, save one, were under contract for the season. The exception was Dawn Allenby, a woman in her thirties who had been engaged for this first production only and who, two days into rehearsal, had fallen heavily for Richard St Ives. If she was served before him at the morning tea-break she offered her cup to him at once, protesting that his need was greater than hers. He had only to fumble in the pocket of his sports jacket, preparatory to taking out his pipe, and she was at his elbow striking on a musical lighter which tinkled out the tune of ‘Come Back to Sorrento’.
St Ives was plainly terrified of her. Cornered, he resorted to patting her on the shoulder, while across his face flitted the craven smile of a man dealing with an unpredictable pet that yet might turn on him. He laughed whenever she spoke to him and clung to Dotty Blundell for protection, whirling her away on his arm the moment rehearsals were over.
It was his own fault for having been conceited enough to be pleasant to her on the morning of the read-through. Mistakenly thinking it would do no harm to put her at her ease – she was a plain woman with the faintest smell of spirits on her breath even at ten o’clock in the morning – he had mentioned the interesting photographs hung on the stairway leading to the stalls. ‘They’re of past productions,’ he elaborated. ‘Going way back to 1911.’
‘How lovely,’ she enthused.