An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [51]
She was making for the telephone box outside the Broken Dolls Hospital when she heard the puttering of a motorcycle engine as it reduced speed in the gutter behind her. Turning, she recognised O’Hara. He wore the flying helmet he had affected on the morning of his arrival and those goggles which, when removed, had left him looking like a barn owl, white-ringed eyes blinking in a smut-flecked face.
‘Hop on,’ he said, patting the pillion.
She clung to the waist of his crackling leather overcoat as they thundered up the hill and roared along Hope Street, past the Mission Hall and the Institute and the ruined silhouette of the Methodist church. The headlamp picked out a cat streaking towards a wall, and a child without shoes between the shafts of a wooden cart, straining to pull it into an alleyway, and both images were gone in an instant, drowned in darkness as the bike sped past, the road a triangle of bright water as they rode the glittering breakers of the tramlines and swerved to the kerb of the Commercial Hotel.
Meredith’s landlord had put the back parlour at their disposal. There was a fire in the hearth and sandwiches on the sideboard. One of the pirates gave Stella a glass half-full of gin. She swallowed it in one gulp and started to cough.
Toasts were drunk to Mary Deare and O’Hara. It had been a wonderful night, absolutely marvellous. It couldn’t have gone better. Seven curtain calls, and they would have taken more if Rose, concerned at the overtime the stagehands were in danger of earning, hadn’t signalled Freddie Reynalde to play the audience out.
What about that child who had screamed in Act Two, and the hissing that had followed . . . and the outbreak of sobbing when Tinkerbell drank the poison and Peter announced she was dying . . . and the sigh that had rippled . . . yes, rippled through the theatre when Peter, alone on the rock in the lagoon, heard the mermaid’s melancholy cry as the moon began to rise over Never-Never Land.
O’Hara, on behalf of the company, spoke a few words in appreciation of Meredith. He said he’d done a wonderful job in very difficult circumstances. The lighting had been quite brilliant.
Meredith, wearing his duffle-coat and sitting cross-legged on the floor, raised his glass in response. ‘How very kind,’ he murmured. ‘Such praise, coming from you.’
Stella asked John Harbour if he had seen Geoffrey.
‘He’s off sulking most likely,’ said Harbour, and started to tell her his reasons for believing O’Hara’s performance that evening had been the equal of any of the great Shakespearian roles as portrayed by the likes of Ralphie or Larry. ‘He had the audience in the palm of his hand,’ he cried. ‘How they hated him. Those flourishes, those poses, that diabolical smile . . . the appalling courtesy of his gestures . . .’ He broke off in mid-sentence, as if suddenly realising who he was talking to, and abruptly left her for Mary Deare. Sitting at her feet he gazed up into her withered child’s face and began again. ‘You had the audience in the palm of your hand. How they loved you.’
O’Hara had been buttonholed by Babs Osborne. She was reading him parts of a letter from some fellow with a foreign name. ‘Listen to this bit,’ she urged, ‘“I do not wish to treat you like a good-time girl. Were my feelings not so strong I could not bring myself to say goodbye.” You can tell the torment he’s in, can’t you? It’s obvious isn’t it, that he still loves me?’
‘Yes,’ said O’Hara. ‘It couldn’t be more obvious.’ He was watching Stella who stood at the fireplace, leaning against the armchair in which Potter now sat holding court. She had black eyebrows despite the colour of her hair, and a little Roman nose.
‘Why can’t he treat me like a good-time girl,’ wailed Babs. ‘It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’
Stella was feeling decidedly confident. I’ve cut the ropes that bind me to the shore, she thought, and sinking down onto the arm of Meredith’s chair she