An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [38]
‘The fat one? The one who ends up with her throat cut?’
‘That’s Grace Bird. She’s not fat really, it’s just padding. Her husband struck a mean bargain with her. I mean the one with the long nose.’
‘Oh that one,’ he said, although he hadn’t the faintest idea.
‘Well, she’s in our dressing-room and nobody likes her. She’s just tolerated. She has rows of aspirin bottles on her dressing-table to counteract her headaches.’
‘Leave them alone,’ he said, for now she was fiddling with the crochet mats of green wool, flipping them over like pancakes. She flung the fork down, looking daggers at him, and continued: ‘The house she lived in during the war received a direct hit, and for two days she was buried alive nursing a glass vase belonging to her mother. When they pulled her out the vase hadn’t a crack in it, and then the air-raid warden stumbled . . .’
‘Is that boil bothering you?’ Vernon interrupted, noticing the way she held her arm up against her chest as though it was in a sling.
‘I was trying to tell you something,’ Stella cried out. ‘Something interesting.’ And she rushed from the room.
He could have kicked himself.
Two nights later Stella fainted in the prompt corner. Bunny carried her upstairs to Rose Lipman’s office. Stella had changed into slacks and overall to keep her costume clean for the curtain call, but still wore a heavy gilt bracelet on her arm. Rose thought the girl hadn’t been eating enough until she unclasped the bracelet and discovered the pus-stained square of lint beneath.
She packed Stella off home in a taxi, though not before interrogating her as to what she was doing with a six-inch wooden crucifix wedged down her ankle sock. She had spotted it when Stella was laid out on the sofa.
‘It’s just a symbol,’ Stella said.
‘I’m not soft,’ said Rose.
‘I find it comforting.’
‘You’re never a Catholic.’
‘No,’ admitted Stella, ‘but I’m thinking about it.’
‘While you’re thinking,’ Rose said, ‘it might be worth considering wearing a slightly smaller cross, on a chain round your neck, like normal folk.’
Stella had been told to take the following morning off. It was out of the question. Lily might worm the reason out of her, and then Uncle Vernon would most likely telephone the theatre and accuse anyone who would listen of being nothing less than a slave-driver. She didn’t want Rose Lipman retaliating and telling him what had been found down her sock.
While Vernon and Lily were serving breakfast she sneaked out and hid the crucifix behind a pile of Mr Harcourt’s empty cardboard boxes in the backyard. She hadn’t forgotten going to the pictures with Vernon to see The Song of Bernadette. He’d only agreed to go because Lily told him it was a musical and had walked out the moment Bernadette started sinking to her knees in the fields. Afterwards he’d sworn he would prefer to see any child of his six foot under rather than taken for a nun.
She didn’t go straight from the house to the Station Hotel. Instead she took a tram to the Pier Head and walked about until the hands of the Cunard clock stood at half past ten. She was looking forward to making a late entrance – the cast would cluster round her, expressing their admiration at her fortitude. Meredith would be particularly impressed.
It was a windy morning, and mild. She could see clear across the water to the smashed dome of the Pleasure Gardens at New Brighton. When the ferry ploughed in from Seacombe the passengers clung to the rail of the landing-stage as it bucked under the swell of the river. Centuries before, according to Uncle Vernon, the water came right up into the town, and in rough weather people had to be carried ashore. She was just imagining Meredith dressed up as a sailor and herself with her arms round his neck, clinging to him as the wind tried to tear them apart, when a man with a tray hung from his neck asked her to buy bootlaces. He had a patch over one eye and wore a row of medals sewn lopsidedly to the lapels of his ragged jacket. She said she was in the same boat as himself and