An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [37]
‘I’ll have to tell Meredith he can’t keep her on,’ St Ives decided. ‘It’s either her or me.’
‘Perhaps prayer might be the answer,’ said Grace. ‘I shall burn an extra-large candle for you on Sunday.’
‘She kept fiddling with that blasted lighter,’ moaned St Ives. ‘Every time we got to the dying fall of Come Back to Sorrento she wound the damn thing up again. I tell you, I was hard put not to snatch it from her hand and throw it and her out of the window.’
Both Dotty and Grace began to laugh. Stella did too – after all, she was one of them – until a picture grew in her head of Dawn Allenby in St Ives’s bed-sitter, cheeks hollowed as she sucked on her peppermints, the gas fire burning blue, those unwrapped, unwanted flowers lying on the table. She said, ‘She’s quite reasonable really. It’s just that no one ever tells her the truth, so she feels confused. She doesn’t know where she stands.’
‘No, sweetie,’ said Dotty, snatching up a twist of cotton wool and wiping the carmine from Stella’s cheeks. ‘If you must add more colour, dab it a little lower down, on a line with your ear lobes.’
Afterwards Stella was convinced she had been rebuked. She began to wonder whether St Ives’s abrupt departure hadn’t been occasioned by her ill-judged remark rather than by Geoffrey’s calling out of the quarter hour. And had perhaps Grace Bird’s goddammit of irritation been directed at her and not at the ball of beige knitting wool which had just then rolled off the shelf of the dressing-table?
Certainly Dotty was less effusive in her thanks when Stella brought her up a tray of tea in the interval. And half way through the second act, when Ptolemy accused Caesar of driving him from his palace and Caesar said, ‘Go, my boy, I will not harm you; but you will be safer away, among your friends, here you are in the lion’s mouth’, Stella imagined St Ives spoke more severely than usual. His sky-blue eyes, ringed with black liner, were hard as coloured beads. ‘It’s not the lion I fear,’ she cried, ‘but the jackal’, and although she was referring to Rufio, not Caesar, it was St Ives she confronted. Glancing at those muscular knees, ruddy beneath the hem of his pleated tunic, she made up her mind that if he ever attempted to spank her again she would scream blue murder.
He caught the drift of her thoughts, she could tell. A conqueror’s laugh should have accompanied his following line of ‘Brave boy’, but all he could manage was a smile.
She left the theatre ten minutes after the curtain fell, running up the hill with her elbows pumping up and down, watching the clouds spreading behind the ruined tower of the church. She felt unwell.
Vernon knew something was up; the droop to her mouth, the expression in her eyes. She didn’t snap his head off when he suggested she gave him a hand with the laying of the tables for the morning. Dog-tired, Lily had gone to bed a good hour before.
‘How did the play go?’ he asked.
‘Not bad,’ she said.
‘Are you happy,’ he prodded, wiping the damp neck of a salt-cellar on the cuff of his sleeve.
‘Happy enough,’ she replied.
‘What about the new play, the one with the principal boy. Are you featuring?’
‘I keep telling you,’ Stella said, ‘it’s not a pantomine.’ She was biting on her lip, distressed, frowning at him under her fringe of red hair.
‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I stand corrected.’ And he rattled a cornflake packet before setting it on the table nearest the door.
Presently she said grudgingly, ‘I don’t have a proper part. Mr Potter says it’s as well not to rush things, not this early in my career. Better a steady flame than one that flares up and burns itself out.’ She sat down at the table reserved for the traveller with the skin grafts and began to score the cloth with a fork.
‘Don’t,’ Vernon admonished. ‘It makes marks.’ He longed to discuss Meredith further, his background, his opinions – on the surface he sounded a sensible enough sort of fellow but he didn’t know how to go about it. One ill-considered word and Stella would be up and running.
‘You know Miss Allenby,