Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 11

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After that, he expected that Rokov would accompany him to Caroline’s dressing-room in the interval; the producer said, “No; I’ll go to the bar; see you later,” and forbore to explain. Dennis edged through the pass-door with the small, privileged crowd. It was a safe assumption that they were none of them going to see Caroline. He had made several back-stage visits to her; to the cramped dressing-rooms that she had shared with lesser lights. It was remarkable to find her alone and temporarily installed in the spacious sanctuary where the leading actress should be. She met him at the door and before he could speak he saw her looking past his shoulder.

“Is Michael with you?” were her first words.

“No,” he said, “I came with Leopold Rokov.”

She did not appear to be listening; at close range, in these clothes and this make-up, she seemed a stranger, tall and glittering, with blue eyelids that moved quickly. This was all the more odd because behind the footlights she had been the essence of herself. She stood with her fingers lightly touching his arm, looking down the corridor.

She said, “I suppose he had a call from one of his bloody patients. It’s sad, because I shan’t be playing to-morrow night.” She appeared to wake to the fact of Dennis: “Come in and have a drink. Isn’t this elegant?”

He looked round him, at the flowers and the gold baskets, at the mosaic of greeting-telegrams on the wall. There was a low couch beside him and he sat on it while Caroline poured out the drink; she gave herself a glass of soda-water.

“Palatial, I call it,” said Caroline, “and pretty decent of her to let me move in.” He saw that her hand shook as she lifted the glass; the brilliant mask of make-up seemed to stand out from a face that was in fact pale and suffering. She grinned at him.

He raised his own glass, looking at them both in the large mirror; he thought that he did not often look at himself for fun; he saw his face while he was shaving, but that was a business-acquaintance, as when he gave a last look at his total reflection before he left his bedroom. Now, perhaps because there was so little amusement to be had from his encounters with Caroline, he found diversion in the sight of his smooth dark head, his hawkish profile, the conventional evening clothes, with the glittering shape of Caroline beside them. It looked all right; it looked like a man sitting in an actress’s dressing-room, with a drink in his hand, having a good time.

“Am I going to take you out to supper, Caro?”

At once she looked hunted. “Oh, dear, I don’t know. You see, Michael was coming and now it’s all got loused up.”

“You use more cant words than anybody I know,” he said peevishly. “It is a sin to hear them spoken in that voice; by somebody who can do what you’ve just done to an audience out there.”

“What did I do to an audience out there?”

“Don’t you know?”

She hesitated. “I thought I knew; but I’m no judge; how can one be?”

“You’re good,” he said. “So good. Oh, darling, don’t be in any doubt about it.”

“I felt good,” she said, still sounding abstracted and glancing at the clock on the dressing-table.

“Will you concentrate? Stop thinking about whether you will telephone and where you will telephone. I told you I was with Rokov.”

“Yes, well ...” she said flatly.

“If he’s coming to supper, you’ll jolly well come.”

“M’m.” Then she woke and snapped, “What’s the point of Rokov being here?”

“To look at you.”

She frowned. “Look, Dennis, forgive me, only I must go to the lavatory and it means I shall have to cope with these tights.”

“Oh, really....” Dennis thought; jarred and angry, he waited for her. “Does that thrusting vulgarity—or simplicity—enrage Michael? Nobody can make such violent swoops between good taste and bad taste. At twenty-six surely, one ought to have the beginnings of dignity.” When she came back, he said, “Go on; get your telephoning over and tell me if you can come to supper. Ask him to join us if you like.”

“I was thinking; Rokov won’t want to have supper. Particularly if he’s looking at me with a view to casting. That isn’t the way he works.”

“How do you know the way he works?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, what does he do?” Dennis asked.

“Pompous stuff; affairé; secretary asking if you could step round to his office at thirteen-and-a-half minutes past eleven on the twenty-second of next month.”

“I don’t see how you can know. Will you, at any rate, promise to come if he does?”

“I hate promising.”

“Caroline, I don’t want to bully you.”

“But——” she said, grinning widely.

“Damn it, how you like to spoil things; your own things.”

“What am I spoiling?”

He said, “Listen, silly. What you’re having to-night is a triumph; and Rokov knows it. And he’s got a play with a leading part that they’d all give their eye-teeth for. All of them, do you see? From——” he named the owner of the dressing-room—“downwards. Every one of them has read it and he’s still not satisfied. You don’t realise what a break it is to have him here to-night; what work I put in to get him. I doubt if Jay could have done it.”

“Put your mind at rest on that point, darling. Jay wouldn’t have done it. Jay hates my guts.”

“Miss Seward, please——” chanted the voice outside the door.

“Damn,” he said again.

“Sorry, Dennis. Look,” she said. “Come round afterwards.”