Читать книгу Flaming Sussex - Ian Sansom - Страница 20

DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES partly within my control (poor map-reading) and partly without (slow-moving vehicles; cattle being driven along the road on the way to an abattoir; a family apparently moving house using a large cart, upon which they had balanced a dog in a kennel, some rabbits in a hutch, a canary in a cage, a goldfish in a bowl, some hens in a chicken house, a garden shed, bags of logs and several sacks of coal), we arrived rather late in Brighton. Fortunately for us, Brighton was and is, and with any luck will always be, the kind of town that stays up to welcome late-arriving visitors. Cruising into town on a chilly autumn evening around 10 p.m. – by which time most, if not all English towns and villages have long since shut up shop, pulled the curtains tight and retired safely to bed till morning – on the streets of Brighton there were still dog-walkers, cyclists, courting couples and children out playing. According to Morley in The County Guides: Sussex, ‘Eastbourne stands aloof, Hastings is of the people, but Brighton alone has a continental character.’ The place certainly had a character continental that evening, as if it were an English town holidaying late in the season somewhere in the south of France. And as it turned out, the evening became more and more continental as it wore on.

Molly Harper, Morley’s American adventuress, was giving a recital at the Theatre Royal, or, rather, had been giving a recital at the Theatre Royal. The performance was almost over by the time we arrived, which was a cause for great celebration on Miriam’s part.

‘Thank goodness for that, Sefton,’ she said. ‘I have absolutely no desire to hear the American Oval sing. It’s bad enough having to hear her talk. Come on, let’s find a quick drink, and then we shall go and rescue Father from her carmine clutches.’

We parked conveniently outside the theatre and persuaded – or, rather, Miriam persuaded – an usher to serve us in the bar, where we happily sat alone drinking gin cocktails until the audience departed, whereupon we made our way backstage and soon found Molly’s dressing room by following the tinkling sound of laughter.

‘Enter!’ came the cry, as Miriam knocked briskly on the door.

The first thing I noticed on entering was the large presentation basket of fruit – Fortnum’s, naturally – and numerous exquisite bouquets of flowers, which were most certainly not in season and therefore most certainly wildly expensive. Set among this extraordinary colourful display, like a life-size mascot Pierrot, was Molly Harper herself.

It has to be said that Miriam’s description of Molly was not entirely inaccurate: she did indeed have eyes that looked like they might winkle you out; she did indeed have rather ludicrous eyebrows, suggesting a look of constant surprise verging on astonishment; and she did, in that American fashion, appear in every way to be a slightly inflated version of herself. She had a ready laugh, for example, that to English ears rang rather hollow, and she was seemingly equipped with endlessly bubbling reserves of the kind of enthusiasm that is entirely alien to the slow and long-cooled Brit. Her entire manner and appearance – her eyebrows, her hair, her enthusiasm, her vivid painted nails – struck one as being rather more suitable for the stage than for any average everyday activities. Larger than life, she was also rather larger than her tight, billowing black and white evening gown naturally allowed. With her white arm-length buttoned gloves, her perpetual look of astonishment, and her raven-black soignée hair, she had all the appearance of a rather sinister, pampered silken panda.

What Miriam had not mentioned in her description, however, was that Molly looked very much like an older, fuller version of … Miriam.

Swanton Morley of course looked precisely as he always did: he was someone whose success had been achieved entirely by dint of his own efforts and by unchanging daily habits and rituals, which meant that there was little about him that ever seemed to alter. Photographs of him aged thirty resembled exactly photographs of him aged forty and fifty – not so much Dorian Gray as an immovable and immutable Easter Island statue. He always wore exactly the same clothes, or at least exactly the same sort of clothes, a uniform that he had chosen as a young man and which he had stuck with ever since, the Morley Style: the sober-coloured suits in finest tweed or worsted, the tightly buttoned waistcoat with its additional notebook and pencil pockets, the sharply cuffed trousers, the tailoring always stiff, conservative and redolent of an earlier age. His tailor was a man in Norwich, a Mr Barton Bendish, who kept premises in an arcade near the city’s market and whom Morley had known since childhood. Mr Bendish was, according to Morley, the equal of any tailor on Savile Row and a man capable of transforming even the stoutest and dowdiest John Bull into a super-sleek Sydney Greenstreet. He often suggested to me that he could provide me with an introduction to Mr Bendish, who would happily provide me with outfits similar to Morley’s own, an offer I always refused since at the time I cultivated a studiedly carefree appearance that was quite in contrast to Morley’s rather more sober-suited image. Though how I wish now that I had a Barton Bendish of my own. The only sartorial eccentricity Morley ever allowed himself were his brown brogue boots, always highly polished, and his bow ties, many of them patterned to resemble fine Scottish knitwear. This evening, at the Theatre Royal, he looked as well-tended as ever, in a three-piece light grey suit, with a red and white polka-dot bow tie – not merely smart, I thought, but actually elegant, as if the mere presence of a woman like Molly were slowly turning his tweed to silk.

Unchanging in appearance he may have been, but Morley was of course entirely unpredictable in conversation – and this evening was no exception.

‘Billy Button buttoned his bright brown boots,’ he was saying as we entered. ‘Good evening, Miriam. Good evening, Sefton.’

Molly beckoned us into the dressing room.

‘Billy Button buttoned his bright brown boots,’ she repeated, after Morley. ‘Your father is teaching me some English tongue-twisters, Miriam.’

‘Is he now?’ said Miriam.

‘Betty Blue was beating butter,’ said Morley.

‘Betty Blue was beating butter,’ repeated Molly.

‘Miriam?’ said Morley, nodding towards her. ‘Betty …’

‘I am not practising tongue-twisters, thank you, Father. It’s far too late in the evening.’

‘Never too late for tongue-twisting,’ said Morley.

‘Gig-whip, gig-whip, gig-whip, gig-whip,’ said Molly.

‘Oh yes, that’s one of our favourites,’ said Morley. ‘Gig-whip, gig-whip, gig-whip, gig-whip. Sefton?’

‘Gig-whip, gig-whip, whip-wig, wig-gip …’ I gave up.

‘Not as easy as it sounds, is it?’ said Morley.

‘Indeed,’ I agreed.

‘We’ve not met, have we?’ asked Molly, breaking off from her tongue-twisting but remaining seated among the flowers and fruit and extending her hand.

‘No. I’m Stephen Sefton,’ I said, leaning forward, not entirely sure whether to kiss her hand, shake it, or kneel before her and receive a blessing.

‘Ah, yes, Swanton has told me so much about you,’ said Molly. No one called Morley Swanton.

We shook hands.

‘All of it good, I hope,’ I said.

‘Hardly any of it good,’ Molly said with a laugh. ‘And all the better for that. Can I offer you a drink?’ She indicated some unopened bottles – champagne, wine, lemonade – on the dressing room table.

I looked at Miriam out of the corner of my eye. She gave a sharp, vigorous shake of her head.

‘I won’t, thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day. Miriam and I have just motored down from London. We should probably retire.’

‘You are clearly as self-disciplined as your famously abstemious employer,’ said Molly.

‘Perhaps not quite,’ I said.

‘You must have something,’ she said. ‘Here.’ She got up, took two bottles of what looked like American lemonade, pushed down the marbles in the two bottle tops simultaneously, one in each hand, and thrust them towards us. ‘A little trick I learned back home.’

‘Flexibility of the lips is very important, you see,’ said Morley, who was still on the subject of tongue-twisters.

‘Oh yes, flexibility of the lips is very important, isn’t it, Miriam?’ said Molly.

‘I have no idea,’ said Miriam, rather huffily.

‘Vowels as well as consonants suffer terribly from a lack of good lip movement,’ said Morley. ‘The lips are part of the resonating system, you see, which is what makes each human voice unique.’ His own voice was as rapid as ever and as strange, rattling like a kettle on the range. ‘The lungs and the diaphragm are the bellows, the larynx the vibrator, and this’ – he tapped a finger to his head – ‘the resonator. Molly has a magnificent resonator, Miriam.’

‘I’m sure she has, Father,’ said Miriam, as Morley and Molly started to make a humming sound together.

Miriam huffed.

Even by the high standards of embarrassment I had become accustomed to while working with Morley and Miriam, it was all rather embarrassing. Morley was clearly as fascinated with Molly as she was intent on fascinating him. They had first met, I later discovered, at a meeting of Morley’s so-called Bonhomie Club, a group of friends whom he brought together once a month in London, for the purposes of discussion, playing chess, and listening to music. Molly had been invited by Morley to give a recital, and the two of them had quickly become inseparable.

‘Your father, Miriam!’ said Molly, breaking her gaze and her hum with Morley. ‘He’s incredible. I mean, his life, his experiences. His capacity for hard work! I’m surprised it doesn’t simply sap all the energy out of him!’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll find other ways of sapping the energy out of him.’

‘His knowledge!’

‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,’ said Miriam.

‘“A little learning is a dangerous thing,”’ corrected Morley.

‘“Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,”’ said Miriam.

‘“And drinking largely sobers us again,”’ said Morley, completing the quotation. ‘Sefton?’ he asked.

‘Dryden?’ I suggested.

‘Pope!’ said Morley. ‘Essay on Criticism.’

‘Marvellous!’ said Molly, clapping her gloved hands together. ‘You know, you’re all just so … curious.’

‘That’s one word for it,’ said Miriam.

‘I’m terribly curious myself,’ said Molly.

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. I married my first husband entirely out of curiosity.’

‘Isn’t one supposed to marry for love?’ said Miriam.

‘One is supposed to do a lot of things, my dear,’ said Molly. ‘Do you know the final trio from Der Rosenkavalier?’

‘Not off the top of my head,’ said Miriam. ‘No.’

‘“Hab mir’s gelobt”,’ said Morley.

‘Indeed,’ said Molly. ‘In which the Marschallin gives up her young lover, Octavian, when she realises that he is in love with Sophie.’

Molly closed her eyes for a moment and then quietly began to sketch out the melody with her – admittedly – extraordinary voice, a soft, clear, luminous soprano. Morley closed his eyes and hummed along.

I thought for a moment that Miriam might actually be physically sick, but fortunately we had the Bedlington with us, who made his presence known at this point by attempting to climb up onto Molly’s lap, interrupting the impromptu recital.

‘Well, well, who is this little fellow?’ Molly said, scooping him up.

‘This is Pablo,’ I said.

‘Pablito, surely,’ said Molly, petting him like a baby.

Miriam snorted derisively.

‘I met Picasso at a dance in Madrid some years ago. Did I ever tell you, Swanton?’

‘I don’t think so, my dear,’ said Morley.

‘Yes. I’d been performing – Teatro de la Zarzuela – and there had been a dinner in my honour and we all went dancing in this wonderful little taverna, and Picasso was there and he really was quite a … bull of a man.’

‘The minotaur of modern art,’ said Morley.

‘Exactly!’ said Molly. ‘The minotaur of modern art! How clever!’

Miriam sighed so loudly it sounded like a rushing wind had entered the room: her exasperation, I could tell, was reaching the point of no return and great regret. Thank goodness, there came a knock at the door.

‘Enter!’ cried Molly, though almost before she had uttered the word the door had already opened and a rather ugly bald-headed man with bulgy eyes poked his head around.

‘This is Giacomo,’ said Molly. ‘He’s my manager.’

‘Good evening.’

The Bedlington leapt down from Molly’s lap and snarled at Giacomo.

‘Is he yours, Sefton?’ asked Morley.

‘He’s mine, actually, Father.’

‘I see,’ said Morley, not entirely approvingly.

‘I might need to take him outside, actually,’ I said, having become keenly attuned to the dog’s toileting habits during our drive down from London.

‘Will there be anything else, madam?’ asked Giacomo, ignoring the dog, and indeed the rest of us.

‘Not tonight, thank you, no,’ said Molly, with which Giacomo disappeared as swiftly as he had appeared.

‘We’re staying at the Grand, Father, isn’t that right?’ said Miriam.

‘Yes,’ said Morley. ‘Perhaps I should come with you. Lots to plan for the next couple of days. We can take the dog, Sefton, if you’d be so kind as to ensure Molly gets back to her digs?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘We’ll take the Lagonda,’ said Miriam.

‘Do you have a driver, my dear?’ asked Morley.

‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I can fend for myself,’ said Molly, rising. ‘And I have Giacomo, of course.’ She bestowed triple cheek kisses all round. ‘Now, we all have a busy week ahead of us. I shall see you tomorrow, Swanton. And you too, Miriam.’

‘Hmm,’ said Miriam.

And so Morley and Miriam departed, and I was suddenly left alone with Molly in her dressing room.