An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [40]
Presently Dawn stopped sobbing and raised her head. Her nose was blobbed with talcum powder; she gulped for air as if suffocating. Recovering, she said briskly, ‘I’ve been asked to leave. I expect you’ve heard. Heaven knows how I’m going to tell Richard. He begged me not to take that job at Warrington. We were going dancing, you know. He’d invited me to a supper dance after the show on Christmas Eve.’ She wept again, talking through her snuffles of things done behind her back, of stabbings. It would have meant nothing to that pervert to let her stay . . . he had wielded the knife, the cruel swine . . . telling her he regretted there was nothing for her when all the time he was still hiring people . . . examining her through that monocle as though he was God . . .
‘Mr Potter!’ said Stella, indignantly. ‘He’s not to blame. It was St Ives who wanted you to leave. He told Mr Potter it was either him or you.’
George heard the screaming and ran upstairs and slapped Dawn Allenby hard across the cheek. Then he bathed her eyes and made her a cup of tea. By the half hour, when Dotty and Babs arrived, she was sitting quietly in front of the mirror making up her face.
It was during Act Four, Scene One that she went missing. She was there to answer when Cleopatra asked her who she was laughing at, and gone by the time she was supposed to say, ‘Heigho! I wish Caesar was back in Rome.’ One of the university students said she had brushed past him in the corridor and gone out into the street. He was sure it was her because he had smelt the peppermints. The doorkeeper said nobody in costume had left the theatre.
As soon as Stella had finished on stage Bunny told her to go home. For the time being she was excused from her prop-room duties and she needn’t wait for the curtain call. She must take it easy for the next few days. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she grumbled. ‘It was only a rotten old boil.’ But he said they were Miss Lipman’s orders. She was upset at missing all the excitement.
When she was dressed she went out into the square to ring Mother. She thought at first somebody had left a bundle of washing in the telephone box. The door wouldn’t open, no matter how hard she shoved. She squatted down to peer through the glass and saw a head-scarf printed with Scottie dogs and a hand clutching a potted plant with its leaves torn off.
8
Bunny escorted Dawn Allenby to the station. She was going to Birmingham to stay with her sister who had just had a baby girl. It would be a nice rest and such a joy to hold the child. Professional women, women of the theatre, missed out on that sort of thing, didn’t they? Still, sacrifices had to be made, though sometimes one couldn’t help wondering whether it was all worth while.
She looked rather well after her night in the hospital and spoke complacently of the bother she had caused. What confusion! She’d had one of her headaches, taken three aspirins and popped out to telephone her sister. She remembered nothing more until she woke up in the ambulance. Such an absurd misunderstanding.
Bunny didn’t feel it was either the time or the place to mention the half-dozen empty aspirin bottles strewn about the floor of the phone box – their contents were later found heaped like so many loose sweets in the bottom of her handbag – or that she had ‘popped out’ in the middle of the scene in Cleopatra’s boudoir. Nor did he think it would serve any purpose to refer to the lipstick-smeared card, originally written by Dotty and still wired to the stem of the mutilated plant, which, in the heat of the moment and the fitful light of the streetlamps was mistakenly thought to have been dipped in blood.
He bought Dawn a newspaper for the journey and carried her suitcase along the platform to the compartment. She ran in front of him, head high, as though someone important was waiting for her. When they reached