An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [49]
At his first rehearsal of Peter Pan, almost before Bunny had finished introducing him to the rest of the cast, Dotty had taken him proprietorially by the arm and strolled him into the wings. There was no need for her to be present. She was playing Mrs Darling and she and Hook were never on stage together.
He thought, how changed she is, how nearly old she has become. She wore a smart blue costume with a tiny hat tilted over one eye. She whispered, ‘How strange it is, you and I here together . . . after all these years.’ Then he thought, how little she has altered. She chided him for not responding to her Christmas cards. ‘One every year,’ she cried reproachfully. ‘Without fail. But then, you were never one to dwell on the past, were you?’
In spite of this, she never lost an opportunity to jog his memory, mostly during the coffee breaks when Desmond Fairchild and the girl with red hair were within earshot.
‘Remember that time we went dancing at the Rialto ballroom,’ she would say. ‘After the second night of Richard II . . . when that fight broke out? There were bottles of stout flying like skittles.’ Or, ‘Wasn’t it a scream that afternoon we went to the matinée at the Court and you got a fit of the hiccoughs.’ And Mou-Mou! . . . How fond he had been of darling Mou-Mou . . . it broke Mummy’s heart to have her put down, but it was the kindest thing to do . . . ‘You must have got my letter,’ she said. ‘It was some years back.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t. It must have been after I moved.’
‘But, of course,’ she said. ‘Otherwise you would have replied.’
He didn’t mind. There was nothing so cosily malicious, once it was mutually accepted, as dead love, and besides it was plain Dotty had a thing going with Fairchild. The man had a faint discoloration under one eye – he couldn’t help speculating whether Dotty hadn’t been giving him a hard time.
He discovered the girl’s name was Stella and tried to engage her in gossip. She eyed him shrewdly and said Mr Fairchild was very nice, very nice indeed, and so was Miss Blundell. Miss Blundell had been particularly nice to her. ‘It’s nice when people are nice, isn’t it?’ he said, and she snapped back, ‘I do know other words, but usually nobody likes the sound of them.’ She reminded him of someone, or rather he felt he had met her before.
‘It’s hardly likely,’ Freddie Reynalde pointed out. ‘You haven’t been in this neck of the woods for years, and I doubt if in all her life she’s been further than Blackpool.’
The first dress-rehearsal lasted the whole of Saturday. Bunny had taken the precaution of holding separate flying- and lighting-rehearsals on the Friday, with the result that the delays were structural rather than technical – the deck of the Jolly Roger swayed alarmingly during the fight between the pirates and the Lost Boys, and the ticking of the crocodile was found to be inaudible beyond the first three rows of the stalls. When Hook, communing with his ego, murmured, ‘How still the night is; nothing sounds alive . . . split my infinitives, but ‘tis my hour of triumph’, the mast creaked ominously and all but fell against the backcloth.
In spite of this, those actors who stole into the auditorium between entrances returned full of enthusiasm. John Harbour pronounced the production nothing short of magical. The missed cues, the botching of business, the somewhat lumpy prancings of the Tiger Lily troupe counted for nothing beside the chilling authority of Hook and the strutting Peter, unearthly yet real of Mary Deare. O’Hara, he said, was the terrifying shadow on the wall which every child saw through half-closed lids once the nursery door had shut. Not many of those present had first-hand knowledge of such rarified accommodation, but they took his meaning.
In Act Five, Father Dooley, who had been sipping Irish whisky from a camouflaged army-issue water-bottle, responded dramatically to the exchange between Hook and Wendy.
(Wendy is brought up from the hold and sees at a glance that the deck hasn’t been scrubbed for years.)
Hook: So