An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [29]
‘I don’t mind being personal,’ she said. ‘I don’t think anything else is all that interesting.’
‘I mean gossip,’ he warned. ‘Don’t let him lead you into discussing other members of the company.’
‘Sometimes,’ observed Geoffrey darkly, ‘too much publicity can have an adverse effect on both career and character.’
‘Give me an example?’ Stella demanded.
‘T.E. Lawrence,’ he replied, though not without a struggle.
‘Never heard of him,’ she said, and shrugged her shoulders dismissively.
The man from the newspaper wore a black trilby hat and a long black overcoat. He was bothered about his weight. ‘Ignore the barrage balloon,’ he joked, flattening himself exaggeratedly against the wall as the actors came out of the pass door and went up to their rooms. ‘That’s never Richard St Ives?’ he exclaimed, watching an elderly man in a peaked cap stumbling on the stairs. ‘Surely he’s heavier than that?’
‘It’s Mr Cartwright,’ said Stella. ‘He’s from a dramatic society on the Wirral. He plays Brittanicus. It’s a big cast, you see. Twenty students from the University are coming in as extras.’
They walked to the snack-bar of the news-theatre in Clayton Square. It was Stella’s suggestion; she thought the lady behind the tea-urn would be impressed when the reporter took out his pencil.
‘I was a slip of a lad when the war started,’ he lamented. ‘Two years in the air force and I blew up.’ He hoisted himself onto a high stool and wedged his stout thighs beneath the rail of the counter.
‘I expect you want to ask me how I began in the theatre,’ Stella said. Anxious to give credit where credit was due, she added, ‘I was trained by Mrs Ackerley at Crane Hall. I got a gold medal when I was twelve.’
‘It was all that Naafi food,’ the reporter complained. ‘Those boiled potatoes.’
‘She plumped out my vowels. I tend to have flat ones. It’s to do with catarrh as much as region.’
‘It was all that stodge,’ he persisted. ‘I developed a taste for it.’
For a man who despaired of his appetite he was surprisingly offhand with the buck rarebit he had ordered; he did no more than shove it round and round his plate. Every so often he took a square-shaped flask from the inside pocket of his coat and stuck it to his lips like a trumpet. ‘I need starch,’ he said, gurgling.
‘It’s never as simple as that, is it?’ said Stella. ‘I expect you’re unhappy.’
‘I am, my dear,’ he admitted. ‘How very acute of you. It’s my home life, you see.’ And he removed his hat and discussed for some minutes the shortcomings of his wife Rita who had been in the land-army when they met. He had first caught sight of her riding in a ploughed field beyond the barbed wire perimeter of the air base. With hindsight it would have saved a lot of heartbreak if he had looked the other way. She had been perched on the seat of a tractor with the gulls flowing behind her in a slip-stream.
‘She looked very jaunty,’ he said. ‘Monarch of all she surveyed . . . Tess of the D’Urbervilles . . . that sort of thing. But I don’t mind confessing that after a few honeymoon months we stalled more times than we took off . . . if you take my meaning.’
Stella didn’t; she nodded just the same. ‘I suppose that’s why you’re so fat,’ she said. ‘You put on bulk to withstand the pressures.’
He gave her an unhappy smile and excused himself, flopping off his stool and lumbering towards the gents. ‘I’m being interviewed,’ Stella told the tea-lady. ‘I’m at the Playhouse. I play a boy-king, son of the flute-blower.’
‘It’s all right for some,’ the tea-lady said.’ And she picked up the plate of spurned buck rarebit and emptied it into the bin under the counter.
Outside the window the day was already darkening. Across the square a gush of steam billowed from the kitchen vent of Reece’s Restaurant and swallowed the sparks of a shuddering tram.
The reporter returned with two tickets for the news-theatre. He said he’d expire if he had to sit on that high stool much longer. They sat in the back row and watched a newsreel