An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [18]
‘Dear God,’ said Grace, ‘vermin are the responsibility of the landlord.’
‘I don’t receive any messages,’ wailed Babs. ‘Stanislaus telephones and they never tell me. And if I ring him we get cut off in the middle of the call.’
‘Time hurries,’ Meredith said, clapping his hands. He could hear the irritation in his voice. It’s killing to love, he thought. And death when love stops. Everyone, save Babs Osborne, understood that her Polish lover was trying to give her the push.
Five minutes into the First Act Dotty Blundell forgot her lines and snapped her fingers for a prompt. The new girl was so lost in the action of the play that she cried out, ‘It doesn’t matter, go on, go on’, and everyone laughed, even Meredith. In spite of this, sitting on his Empire chair beneath the window, head tilted to one side at an angle of acute concentration, he had the curious sensation that if he shifted his gaze from the little group mouthing in front of him his head might fall off. He felt for the monocle dangling against his shirt front and tumbled it between his fingers, over and over as though telling a Rosary.
St Ives was confessing to Olwyn that he and Frieda had never been happy together. Not really. ‘Somehow our marriage hasn’t worked. Nobody knows.’ This was the moment when Dotty gave her shrug expressive of pity. For the umpteenth time the leopard-skin coat which she wore slung about her shoulders slid to the carpet. At which Bunny fussily swooped to retrieve it. ‘For God’s sake,’ shouted Meredith, ‘leave it. Stop behaving like an old Queen.’
Almost immediately he beckoned Stella and stood with his back to the room. Outside the window sounded the thin blast of a whistle as a train prepared to leave the platform. It was as though he himself had screamed.
The girl came to him at once, her face a reflection of his own, eyes wide, her teeth biting on her lip. He told her to fetch a pencil and paper and when she brought them scribbled down several sentences in capital letters.
‘Do you know where the General Post Office is?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘Can you read my writing?’
‘I believe I can.’
‘Run all the way and don’t change a word.’
Soon afterwards he announced it was lunchtime. He pretended to be engrossed in making notes until the actors had left the room. He expected Bunny to stay behind, but he was the first out of the door. Desmond Fairchild was the last to leave. ‘Care to join me for a snifter, old boy?’ he said, buttoning on his chamois leather glove with the hole in the thumb. Meredith ignored him.
Below the window a crocodile of children in striped caps marched across the booking hall. The flower-seller who kept a stall in the mouth of the granite arch leading to the subterranean tunnel into the street was bent over, dunking tulips in a galvanised bucket. Passing beneath the arch the children felt the slope beneath them and tumbled into a trot, the echoes of their stamping feet sending the pigeons plummeting from their perches. When the birds spewed out of the darkness the flower-seller flapped her great shawl like a matador to ward them off; they broke formation, circling the massive clock stopped at ten to ten, floundering upwards towards the whirling sky framed in the shards of glass set in the iron ribs of the shattered roof. Then Bunny, battling his way against the flow of the children, appeared in the hall and halted for a moment, the belt of his mackintosh undone, looking up at the windows of the rehearsal room. Meredith waved; he didn’t think Bunny saw him.
They had met in a railway carriage in the third year of the war. Bunny was going home on a twenty-four-hour pass and Meredith returning