An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [31]
‘Liberties?’ Freddie said. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
She found she couldn’t tell him after all. ‘I keep getting put over someone’s knee and smacked.’
‘St Ives,’ said Reynalde. ‘He’s harmless. If you don’t like it tell him so, or else stay out of his reach.’
‘It’s not that I either like or dislike it,’ said Stella, ‘I just don’t see what good it does.’
After the curtain had come down and she’d put away the props she hid in the extra’s dressing-room in case the reporter had changed his mind and dared to wait for her. Her wrist hurt. When she held it up to the light she saw that a small circle of skin was inflamed. She hoped she hadn’t caught an unmentionable disease from her visit to the news-theatre. Half an hour later, descending the stairs, she was startled to hear voices coming from the first floor. She had thought everyone would have gone to the Oyster Bar and that only the night-watchman would be in the building. She stopped and listened, and heard first laughter and then a voice shouting, ‘For God’s sake.’ The next moment a door was flung violently open.
She crouched back into the shadows and saw Geoffrey run headlong down the stairs. He came and went so quickly that she might not have known it was him save for the flash of his yellow cravat under the gas-lamp. There was silence for a few seconds and then she heard Meredith’s voice: ‘Not to worry. He’ll get over it by the morning.’ She wondered if Geoffrey had complained about not getting a bigger part.
The door of Meredith’s office slammed shut and he and John Harbour appeared round the bend of the passage. She was going to call out to them, but something in Meredith’s face stopped her, and the next instant he had swept down the stairs with his arm about John Harbour’s shoulders and was gone.
The dress rehearsal of Caesar and Cleopatra lasted nine hours. Cleopatra’s barge wouldn’t slide off the stage properly and the sphinx proved difficult to light. There was Cleopatra simpering away in her best Shirley Temple voice, ‘Old gentleman, . . . don’t go, old gentleman’, and the spot couldn’t find her. St Ives shouted, ‘Can you hear me, mother?’, and everyone laughed, and then Meredith pulled the hood of his duffle coat over his eyes and lay full length in the centre aisle and moaned. Everyone laughed again, but it was obviously no joking matter because Bunny flew into a rage, dancing up and down, sending the dust spiralling like fireflies above the footlights as he thundered, ‘Quiet, please.’ He was worn out trying to control the University students who dropped their spears on the stairs and chatted loudly to each other in the wings.
Bunny wasn’t the only one to lose his temper. Desmond Fairchild and Dotty Blundell were heard arguing in the corridor, though no one could be sure what was at issue. He was supposed to have called her a cow, or something worse, and she had slapped his face, at which, according to George, he had returned the blow.
Vernon telephoned twice to know what Stella was up to. On the first occasion Bunny was tactful, assuring him she would be sent home in a taxi at any moment. In response to the second enquiry he said tersely, ‘Look here, she’s not working in a bank, you know’, and hung up.
Stella didn’t know about the telephone calls. When she wasn’t required for her scene in the court room of Alexandria she was fetching and carrying and dabbing calamine lotion on the shoulders of John Harbour who, earlier in the day, had been broiled pink as a lobster by inexpertly using a sun-lamp.