An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [41]
She thanked him without warmth and stuffed the notes casually into her bag. Rose had already given her two weeks’ salary. ‘That girl,’ she said. ‘Her mother left her alone in an empty house. You want to keep an eye on her. She’s trouble.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be off.’ And he escaped onto the platform, praying for the whistle to blow. At the last moment, when the engine blew steam, she let down the window and handed him an envelope addressed to St Ives; she looked at him with the eyes of one waking from a dangerous dream. ‘God speed,’ he cried, and ran a few steps alongside the departing train to show it wasn’t just a question of out of sight out of mind. She stared straight ahead as she slid away.
He opened the envelope on his way back to the theatre. The scrap of paper it contained, torn from a telephone pad, was wrapped round the musical lighter.
He read the letter not out of curiosity but to spare St Ives further embarrassment – the last thing he needed in his present introspective state was a love letter from Dawn Allenby.
St Ives blamed himself for what had happened. In the interval she had apparently asked him to have supper with her, and he’d mumbled something about wanting an early night. He couldn’t recall his exact words – he suspected they were cutting – but he did remember holding his fingers against one nostril to blot out the stench of her Cologne. The memory of that gesture would never cease to haunt him. How could he have been capable of such cruelty?
Dotty had sat up all night assuring him that Dawn wasn’t his responsibility. If he had accepted her invitation to supper she would have taken it for encouragement; he would simply have put off the evil day. Besides, she had only pretended to take an overdose. She was just drunk and seeking attention. Young Stella had said she was quite cheerful earlier in the evening, before she had her hysterical attack, and had talked of nothing but her sister’s new baby. St Ives’s name had never crossed her lips.
St Ives said it was a mercy he hadn’t after all approached Meredith and asked him to give her the push. Thank God he hadn’t got that on his conscience. Still, he would have done if it hadn’t slipped his mind, and surely the intention made him culpable. Dotty told him he was worrying needlessly seeing he was a Methodist, a belief which favoured an artificial rather than a natural classification of guilt.
She herself had spent a distressing and hectic ten minutes in Rose Lipman’s office helping to remove Dawn’s costume and button her into her street clothes. Dressed, Dawn could be passed off as a member of the audience. Dottie wasn’t at all sure the poor woman shouldn’t have been left in the telephone box until the ambulance arrived, rather than carried by George across the square in a fireman’s lift under an old blanket, but Rose had convinced her that a scandal must be avoided at all costs.
The letter was brief and lacked punctuation – Dear Swine, I have no money no job no friends I hope you and the girl are satisfied Hail Caesar use this in memory of me.
Bunny dropped the lighter into a china vase in the cocktail cabinet in the prop-room and burnt the letter on the fire. Then he washed his hands.
Christmas was approaching and the shop windows began to fill with seasonal tableaux. In George Henry Lee’s an angel with silver wings spun above three Wise Men kneeling in cotton wool snow. A sixty-foot tree, a gift from the people of Stockholm in recognition of the hospitality shown to Swedish seamen during the war, arrived at the Docks and was ceremoniously welcomed by the Lord Mayor. In the middle of the Thursday matinée a Salvation Army band began to play carols in the square and Rose sent out a donation with a request for them to move further off.
At home, Uncle Vernon ferreted out the laundry box from under the stairs and dusted off the streamers and the loops of coloured paper.