An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [44]
Mary Deare as Peter was downright sinister. She was neither boy nor girl, neither old nor young. When she was on stage everyone else faded into the shadows. There was a scene between her and Wendy in the ‘Home under the Ground’ which caused Stella to tremble.
It was soppy enough to begin with. Babs was telling the Lost Boys a story of how mothers always waited for their children to return:
‘See, (pointing upward) there is the window standing open.’ So they flew to their loving parents and pen cannot describe the happy scene over which we draw a veil. (Her triumph is spoilt by a groan from Peter and she hurries to him) ‘Peter, what is it? Where is it?’ To which Mary Deare replied in a low voice, ‘It isn’t that kind of pain, and then cried out with terrible conviction – Wendy, you are wrong about mothers. I thought like you about the windows, so I stayed away for moons and moons and then I flew back, but the windows were barred, for my mother had forgotten me and another little boy was in my bed.
Bunny noticed Stella’s distress and patted her on the shoulder. ‘Try not to think about it,’ he urged. He imagined she was still dwelling on the accident.
She missed the rest of the rehearsal because Mary Deare kept sending her out on errands. First it was a little bit of yellow fish for her landlady’s cat – the poor thing was half starved – then it was a bulb for her bedside lamp, and lastly she remembered that a friend of hers had just opened in a play in Manchester and there just might be a review in the evening paper. Would she be a sweetie and run out and buy one?
Stella browsed through the newspaper under the lamp outside the stage door. On the inside page she was astonished to see a photograph of herself dressed as Ptolemy, accompanied by a short paragraph describing her as a ‘touchingly pert example of a young and ambitious actress’. She tore the photograph out and shoved the rest of the newspaper into the dustbin further along the road.
She hid the cutting in the cocktail cabinet in the prop-room – if she took it home Uncle Vernon might get his hands on it and embarrass her by reading it out to the commercial travellers. She was going to put it in the china vase, only one of the stage hands had left his lighter there for safe keeping, so she stuffed it between two books on the top shelf. She told Mary Deare the newspapers had sold out.
Mary was sitting in No. 3 dressing-room when Stella called the Overture for the evening performance of Caesar and Cleopatra. The little bit of fish for the landlady’s cat was beginning to stink. It appeared Mary would give her eye-teeth for a cup of tea with two sugars.
‘I’m not allowed in the prop-room when I’m in costume,’ Stella said. ‘I might get messed up.’ Grace Bird winked at her.
Mary Deare was still there after the curtain had risen on Act Four, and frantic because she’d run out of matches. None of the men had any. ‘Be a sweetie,’ she pleaded, ‘find me a match.’
Stella went bad-temperedly downstairs to borrow a box from the doorkeeper. On the bend of the lower landing she had to struggle past a Centurion lounging against the wall eating from a bag of chips. ‘You shouldn’t leave your spear there,’ she said, ‘it’s obstructing the passage.’ He ignored her.
The doorkeeper didn’t have any matches either. She went through to the prop-room to see if there were some on the mantelpiece, but there weren’t; and then she remembered the lighter in the vase in the cabinet. On