An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [30]
She examined her conscience to discover if she was in any way to blame for her companion’s curious behaviour. Every evening when she called ‘Overture’ and ‘Beginners’ Richard St Ives dragged her through the doorway and, putting her across his knee, whacked her on the bottom with a rolled-up copy of The Stage. And only last night, Desmond Fairchild, hearing her shouting the minutes in the passage, had come out of the lavatory still holding himself. Neither occurrence was as rude as what the reporter was doing, but she was pretty sure the intention was the same. It was only a matter of degree. Did this sort of thing happen to Babs Osborne or Miss Blundell?
She tried to pull her hand free, but it was held fast. The protuberance under her fingers felt soft and hard at the same time, an iron fist in a velvet glove. Attempting to bring what Meredith would call a philosophical approach to her predicament, she pondered on the differences in men’s and women’s clothing. Trousers, she now realised, were so designed not because their wearers had funny legs but because men were constantly worried that an essential part of themselves might have gone missing. They wanted instant access, just to make sure things were in place. What was more puzzling was why they needed everyone else to check as well.
The reporter removed his hat and shoved a handkerchief at her. She wondered whether she had been sniffing; it was true she had the beginnings of a cold. Suddenly he let out a huge sigh, as though the air was being forced out of him. He seemed to grow smaller; certainly his thingumajig shrank. Almost at once he fell into a doze. She was left holding a jelly baby of shrivelled skin, her fingers glued together, webbed by a sticky emission.
Presently she slid her hand away and wiped it furtively on the upholstery of the seat beside her. Cuckoo spit, she thought, watching a working man emerging from a mining cage with an inappropriate smile on his blackened face.
The reporter woke and got abruptly to his feet, jamming his hat on his head. In the square the flower-sellers had lit the naphtha flares in the buckets set along the cobblestones. The windows of Owen Owens blazed with light. It was gone half past five.
‘I have a complimentary ticket for Dangerous Corner,’ the reporter said in a business-like way. ‘Perhaps we could meet afterwards. There are one or two questions we never got round to.’
‘That would be nice,’ she said. She didn’t think he would use the ticket, any more than he would wait for her after the performance. He was already worried lest she should tell someone what had happened. If she really wanted she could get him sent to prison. All his cockiness had deserted him; under the street lamp his face was old and frightened.
She wished him goodnight and he raised that shameful hat as she turned and walked away towards the theatre, rubbing her hand against her hip-bone like a soiled cloth against a scrubbing board.
Bunny asked how the interview had gone and she said it had gone very well. She didn’t think anything of a personal nature had entered the conversation. After the first interval she took Freddie Reynalde’s coffee and biscuits down to the band room under the stage. Mr Reynalde played the piano in the intermissions and could remember a time before the war when there was a proper orchestra in the pit. Things, he often told Stella, weren’t the same, and neither was he. Because of his principles he hadn’t served in the Forces and they’d made him do labouring jobs instead, so that now his hands weren’t what they used to be either.
On the table