An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [39]
The man swore at her before turning away, the seagulls screeching above his battered hat. She felt bad and ran after him to part with twopence, and he swore at her again. He was selling, not begging.
She was astonished after riding the lift to the top floor of the hotel to find the room deserted, save for Meredith asleep in an armchair behind the door. She walked round him, whistling, but he didn’t stir. A quarter of an hour later three pirates arrived, and then Desmond Fairchild, hatless and with a bruise under one eye. ‘By the look of things,’ he told the pirates, ‘we might as well go downstairs and order coffee.’
‘Shouldn’t we wake Mr Potter?’ Stella asked. She couldn’t bear the way he was slumped there, his bow tie askew. There was a stain on his suede shoe and another on the leg of his trouser. Worse, a sour smell hung about his duffle coat.
‘Give him a few more minutes,’ Desmond advised. ‘We had a bit of a knees-up last night. Potter thought he was Peter Pan and flew out of the window of the Commercial Hotel. Fortunately it was from the Bar Parlour. The landlord refused to let him back in.’ He took the pirates downstairs to the lounge.
Shortly afterwards Bunny came in and hit Meredith quite sharply on the shoulder with his umbrella. He woke stupefied, flicking his tongue over his parched lips like a reptile.
‘Go to the kitchens,’ Bunny ordered Stella. ‘Ask the waiter with the dent in his forehead to give you a bucketful of ice cubes and three or four napkins. Tell him to send up black coffee and aspirins. And when you’ve done that go home and stay there until it’s time for the evening performance.’
She protested that she couldn’t go home, that she wasn’t allowed to hang around the house during the day, and Bunny said he didn’t care where the hell she went as long as it was out of his sight.
She sulked all the way to the theatre, darting up the corridor to the prop-room in case Rose Lipman should spot her. There was no sign of Geoffrey. She found George in the carpenter’s shop constructing a crocodile out of papier mâché. He was off-hand with her, even when she recounted the gossip about Meredith being thrown out of his lodgings.
‘Desmond Fairchild’s lost his hat,’ she said. ‘And he’s got a black eye.’
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ George said. ‘You were told not to come in.’
She spent the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the municipal gardens opposite the art gallery. It turned chilly in the afternoon, and a man in a bowler hat came and sat beside her and rubbed the side of his shoe up and down her leg.
At five o’clock she returned to the theatre and crept up the stairs to the dressing-room. Dawn Allenby was standing in her coat and headscarf staring at herself in the mirror. There was the remains of a quart of cider in front of the aspirin bottles on the shelf. ‘What would you do?’ she asked.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Stella.
‘If you were me? But then you can’t imagine that, can you? Nobody can imagine what it’s like to be me.’
‘I can,’ said Stella. ‘None of us are all that different from one another. We all have the same feelings.’
‘Feelings,’ cried Dawn, and she jerked back her head and made a funny sort of noise halfway between a laugh and a howl. Stella couldn’t tell whether she was acting or not – she looked dreadful, as if she was suffering from the worst sort of headache, and yet she kept watching herself in the glass, turning her face this way and that, peering forward to follow the track of a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘Feelings,’ she cried again. ‘That filthy bastard hasn’t any.’ She collapsed onto a stool and laid her head down among the bits of cotton wool and the sticks of greasepaint. She wept and spoke at the same time – uttering fragments of sentences, half completed threats, pieces of swear words, repeating the name Richard over and over with the intonation of a child calling for its mother.
Stella attempted to comfort her, patting her shoulder, trying not to smile;