An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [68]
There was a crocodile of children winding halfway round the square for the afternoon matinee. George told Stella that St Aloysius’s orphanage had a block-booking. The seats had been paid for by the City Corporation. It was a gesture made every year.
She was talking to Prue in the wardrobe – it was Geoffrey’s turn to call the half hour, when Bunny came running up the stairs. He wanted to know if she had seen O’Hara. ‘Why me?’ she said.
‘Stop playing funny buggers,’ he shouted. ‘O’Hara isn’t in his dressing-room.’
At the quarter hour, when O’Hara still hadn’t arrived, Rose called a taxi and sent Bunny up to Percy Street. The biology student opened the door. He hadn’t seen O’Hara all morning because he’d slept in. ‘His bike’s not there,’ he said helpfully, having gone up into the street to look.
O’Hara’s bed was made and the dishes washed. Bunny read the unfinished letter on the table:
It may be that you think my association with a certain person will prevent me from doing anything about Geoffrey. If this is so, you are mistaken. My concern, as on a previous occasion, is for a young man whose life may well be ruined by your attentions. I was approached once before, and have been so again. If the situation continues I will have no other recourse than to set the facts before Rose Lipman. It is . . .
Bunny burned the letter in the sink and sluiced the ashes under the tap.
The curtain had to be delayed while Meredith made up as Mr Darling. None of the clothes fitted. He was taller than O’Hara, and thinner. Rose made a front-of-curtain speech begging the audience’s indulgence.
The police arrived during the beginning of Act Four, set in ‘the hole under the ground’. Tigerlily’s braves had finished chanting their ugh, ugh, wah, and Wendy, having reminded Peter to change his flannels and left his medicine bottle perched in the fork of a tree, had flown away home. Babs, emerging into the corridor, saw Bunny sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, being spoken to by an officer of the law. Bunny was smiling in a peculiar way, eyebrows raised as though preparing his face to respond to the punch line of a smutty joke.
Babs said, ‘Bunny, what’s happened? Is it bad news?’ But he flapped his hand at her in a dismissive gesture as if she had no right to be there.
Stella heard about O’Hara from the child playing Slightly. ‘Captain Hook’s downed hisself in the river,’ he babbled.
Presently, Tinkerbell drank the medicine intended for Peter. It was an affecting moment. ‘Why Tink,’ cried Peter, ‘it was poisoned and you drank it to save my life. Tink, dear, Tink, are you dying?’
Stella’s hands were trembling as she held the torch. She could hear Mary Deare droning on: ‘Her light is going faint, and if it goes out that means she is dead. Her voice is so low I can scarcely hear what she is saying. She says – she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies. Say quickly that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands.’
Stella dropped the torch and let it roll into the wings as the children brought their palms together to save Tinkerbell. The light swished from the back-cloth. For a moment the clapping continued, rose in volume, then died raggedly away, replaced by a tumult of weeping . . .
0
A man with a white muffler wound about his throat rolled from the black shadows of the Ice Warehouse and the girl stopped and spoke to him. ‘I need to make a telephone call,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t any money. Someone’s died.’
The man stared at her; he was holding a bouquet of flowers in a twist of paper. ‘I wasn’t to blame,’ the girl said. ‘He was happy. He kept saying well done. I’m not old enough to shoulder the blame. Not all of it.’
‘Give over,’ he said. ‘There’s no need to make a meal of it.’ He gave her five pennies and a farthing and lurched away under the bouncing lime trees, one hand unbuttoning his fly, the other, arm raised fastidiously above his head, clutching that bedraggled fistful of winter daffodils.