An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [47]
It was then that Rose, distractedly rearranging the framed photographs on her desk top, thought of O’Hara.
‘No,’ shouted Meredith. Bringing his voice under control he suggested it was unlikely that a man of O’Hara’s established reputation would want to appear in the provinces.
‘Fiddlesticks,’ said Rose, ‘if he’s not working he’ll jump at it, for old time’s sake.’ She couldn’t think why it hadn’t occurred to her sooner.
Bunny stood at the window and stared wearily down into the lamp-lit street. A figure in a raincoat was preparing for sleep in the doorway of George Henry Lee’s, treading round and round on a heap of old newspapers like a dog at the hearth.
Bunny felt in his pocket, fiddling for loose change.
9
O’Hara’s landlady called up the stairs that he was wanted on the telephone. ‘Long distance,’ she said.
When he heard Potter’s voice he was taken aback. ‘How are you?’ he asked, and was annoyed with himself for sounding so effusive.
‘I must apologise for disturbing you at such a late hour,’ Potter said. There was that familiar intake of breath as he drew on a cigarette. ‘Rose felt we couldn’t leave it until the morning. Reynalde gave me your number.’
He explained, briefly, the difficulties they were in. ‘I don’t expect you’ll want to come up here . . . even if you’re available.’
O’Hara reminded him that Jung had considered Liverpool the centre of the Universe.
‘How interesting,’ said Potter. ‘I take it he didn’t live here. It’ll be a six-week run, two matinées a week, from Tuesday.’
‘I presume I’ll be doubling up on both parts,’ O’Hara said.
‘But of course. It’s traditional.’
‘Not invariably,’ said O’Hara. ‘Laughton only played Hook.’
Afterwards he telephoned Lizzie to ask what she thought.
‘Christmas in the provinces,’ she said. ‘It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, is it? Still, you’ve always wanted to go back, and I dare say you can demand the earth in salary.’
‘But think about it . . . Potter of all people.’
‘I am thinking,’ she said. ‘It was donkey’s years ago.’
‘We can never measure the effect we have on other people,’ he said, although he, more than most, had a fair idea. ‘Time has nothing to do with it.’
‘Who else will be up there,’ she enquired, ‘besides Mary Deare?’
‘Dotty probably. I didn’t ask.’
‘And when are you off?’
‘As soon as I’ve packed. I shall ride up on the Norton,’ he told her, and there was a difficult pause in which she waited for him to suggest she should come up to Liverpool in the New Year.
‘Well then,’ she said, at last. ‘Don’t forget to send a postcard.’
Frowning, he rang Mona Gage and hung up when her husband answered.
Rose booked O’Hara into the Adelphi Hotel at the theatre’s expense. It was an empty gesture – she knew he wouldn’t stay there. He had always, even as a young man, hankered for the past.
After only one night he went out and rented his old room in the front basement of a house in Percy Street. He sought, self-consciously, now that he once again walked those familiar streets, to catch up with that other, vanished self who, at this distance, seemed more real than the person he had become.
The room hadn’t changed. The fire still smoked, the damp still grew vegetable growths the colour of peaches on the wall between the grimy windows. Even the table that Keeley, the painter, had used as a palette was in its place beneath the sink. He didn’t dare inspect the mattress in case that too was the same.
When he dragged out the table and the lamplight spilled onto the splodges of cadmium yellow and scarlet lake, he thought of the girl who had shown him to his dressing-room on the morning of his arrival. She was dressed as a munitions worker, and when he switched on the light her hair had blazed under the dim bulb. ‘I know this is your old dressing-room,’ she said. ‘George told me.’
‘Ah, George,’ he repeated. ‘Salt of the earth.’
‘You still have to kick the pipes before the water comes out of the tap,’ she said.
Outside, the gate had gone from the basement steps, and the slanting