An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [50]
Wendy: (with noble calmness): Are they to die?
Hook: They are. Silence all, for a mother’s last words to her children.
Wendy: These are my last words. Dear boys, I feel that I have a message for you from your real mothers, and it is this: we hope our sons will die like Englishmen.
At which Father Dooley rose unsteadily in his seat and denounced the philosophy behind the words. Nobody on stage heard him. Grace, who was purling in the front circle, gathered he was drawing their attention to the war and the number of dead and maimed. Meredith endeavoured to explain that the play had been written long before the carnage of the First World War, let alone the Second. Besides in 1915 Mr Barrie had written to George, his adopted son and one of the original Lost Boys, that he no longer thought of war as glorious. It is just unspeakably monstrous to me now. To clinch matters, a few days later George was killed, shot through the head as his battalion advanced on St Eloi.
Father Dooley refused to see the connection and continued to protest. Dr Parvin took him home. Meredith, who had served in nothing more bloody than the Catering Corps, called a break and clambered into the orchestra pit to mangle Bach on the piano.
After the national anthem, and before the curtain went up, Rose made a speech expressing her mixed emotions at the unfortunate accident which had befallen Richard St Ives. Mixed, she said, because it had given the theatre the opportunity to invite P.L. O’Hara to step into the breach. She drew the audience’s attention to the injured leading man, who, leg propped on a cushioned trestle arrangement protruding into the centre aisle, sat under a red blanket in the third row of the stalls. He was given an ovation, and Rushworth’s grand-daughter, a stout girl with ringlets, ran forward and, leaning heavily against his broken leg, presented him with a bouquet. It was this same child who later screamed piercingly when Hook made his first entrance, clawing the misty air above the frozen river.
After the final curtain-call Bunny came into the prop-room and invited Stella to a little party at the Commercial Hotel. The play had overrun the licensing hours and the Oyster Bar was already closed. ‘It might amuse you,’ he said, and added gallantly, ‘You aquitted yourself excellently with the torch.’
‘Thank you very much,’ she said. She longed to go, and yet she couldn’t bear the idea.
‘You too, George,’ said Bunny.
George wriggled out of it. His missus would go on a vinegar trip if he was late home again.
Stella ran upstairs and combed her hair in the extras’ dressing-room. She thought of taking off her overall – she was wearing one of Lily’s blouses underneath – only when it was unbuttoned and she looked in the mirror her chest poked out in a most peculiar way. She imagined it might settle down if she removed her brassière, but what if Dotty noticed and made some personal remark about her growth?
She couldn’t think how she was going to enter the Commercial Hotel, not unless accompanied or pushed. No doubt Babs and Grace would travel up the hill by taxi. Trouble was, if she appeared downstairs too soon it would look as if she was cadging a lift, and if she arrived too late they would have gone without her – and then how would she summon up the courage to go at all?
She went to find Geoffrey. The stage doorkeeper said he had already left. At last, emerging into the street, she found herself a hundred yards behind John Harbour and Meredith. Squatting, she pretended to tie a non-existent shoe-lace and waited until the two men had crossed Clayton Square and turned the corner in the direction of Bold Street.
I can’t go, she thought. Who needs parties? And she began to walk home the long way round so as not to bump into anybody. She felt annoyed with herself, made miserable with so little cause. If she had been the offspring of drunken parents in Scotland Road, or born with a hair-lip like Ma Tang’s daughter, there might be some excuse for feeling as she did. Why couldn’t she