Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered - Rosie Thomas - Страница 28

John Douglas was on the telephone again.

Mattie listened to his wonderful voice. She was doodling on her notepad with her free hand, a proscenium arch and curtains, a single spot shining on the empty boards …

‘Tell him what I said, won’t you?’ John Douglas finished.

‘As soon as he comes in,’ Mattie promised.

‘Good girl. Be seeing you.’

If only, Mattie thought wistfully. Did he look like he sounded? She went back to her one-fingered typing, frowning at the keyboard in search of elusive characters.

Francis appeared a few minutes later. He looked cheerful, and he was smoking a cigar so big that it threatened to overbalance him.

‘It’s a cruel world, my love,’ he told her. ‘A big cruel world, and you have to go with it or go under.’

Mattie deduced that he had satisfactorily done somebody down. His instincts were predatory and self-seeking, but Mattie didn’t condemn him for that. She was beginning to like Francis, and through him to see a picture of the theatre that wasn’t all glitter. She was glad of it.

She ripped a completed letter to a theatre manager in Durham out of her machine and pushed it across for Francis’s signature. ‘What have you done? Stabbed your grandmother in an alley for two per cent of the takings?’ She had discovered that Francis loved to be teased about his ruthlessness.

‘That’s enough cheek from you. Look at your bloody spelling. Is this supposed to be “commencing”? Any phone messages?’

‘My spelling’s as good as yours. Just different.’ They smiled appreciatively at each other. ‘Just one message. From John Douglas. He says that Jennifer Edge has left the company. He also said, as far as I can remember, that she’s gone off with the fucking Italian chef from some poncy caff, and you’d better send him up someone else who isn’t going to fall on her back every time some fucking dago unbuttons his equipment and waves it at her. And you’d better do it right off, or he’s wrapping the whole fucking show and sod ’em. And sod you.’

Francis sat down behind his desk and rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Language, language.’

‘I quote,’ Mattie said crisply, and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter.

‘That fat bitch,’ Francis sighed. ‘I should have known better than to send Douglas off with a middle-aged nympho for a stage manager. Once she’d had him and everything else in the company in trousers, she’d be bound to be looking elsewhere. Gone off, you said.’

‘Gone off, left the company. Took the half a week’s wages owing to her out of the night’s takings and went without a forwarding address. That’s loosely what Mr Douglas said, if you prefer it that way.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ sighed Francis. He took his cigar out of his mouth and stared gloomily at the shiny, wet end of it. ‘Let’s think. No use hoping that they could do without anyone. The company’s stripped to the bone as it is, and Douglas wouldn’t stand for it. Who can I send up there halfway through a tour?’

Mattie knew. She saw her chance, shining at her like a beacon through the banks of cigar smoke. ‘I’ll go.’

Francis snorted. ‘You? What do you know about stage management? Edge knew what she was doing, if she could get herself off the horizontal for long enough. We’ll have to advertise.’

Mattie jumped up and went round to his chair. She perched on his desk, gripping the splintered wood with her fingers to contain her eagerness. ‘I can do it. I’ve got experience. It’s only amateur, but I know what to do. Let me, Francis.’

He was silent for a second, and her heart jumped in her chest. She pressed on recklessly. ‘I could go straight away. Tomorrow, if you like. You won’t get anyone else that quickly.’ When he still said nothing she begged him. ‘Please, Francis. Send me.’

Francis looked down at her knees. They were smooth and nylon shiny. He put his hand over one of them and squeezed it. For once Mattie didn’t pull away. He was remembering the first time he saw her, singing with old Jessie. She can’t sing, he had thought, but she’s got plenty of other talents.

A rare generous impulse took hold of Francis. He liked her, and she deserved her chance. She was also the worst typist he had ever known. ‘You can go as a fill-in. Just until I find a proper replacement.’

Mattie put her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. Francis leaned back, resting against her breasts, glowing with the pleasure of being rewarded, for once, for having done the right thing. ‘You’re not going for good,’ he reminded her hastily. ‘Just for half a six-month tour. I need you here.’

‘Not for good, of course,’ Mattie agreed. Just for as long as it takes.

Three days later, Julia and Felix were seeing her off from Euston Station. There had been a surprise addition to the send-off party – at the last minute Josh had turned up too.

Mattie leaned out of the carriage window. Sprouts of wet, stale steam separated her from Julia and Felix, and now that the time had come she didn’t want to leave them. In the last weeks in the square they had become a family. But Felix had heaved her one suitcase into the rack over her seat, and her single ticket was stowed in her purse.

‘Goodbye,’ she called. ‘I’ll write, lots and lots.’ As if she was going to Australia. It felt like it, suddenly. She wanted to whisper to Julia, ‘Be as happy with him as you like. Just don’t make him be your happiness.’ There was no chance of saying anything of the kind now, even if she could have found words precise enough to express her uneasiness. Julia was smiling, waving, with Josh’s arm round her shoulder.

Mattie wanted to whisper to Felix, too, but she had even less idea of what she might have said. There was just something in his face, behind his smile. Perhaps bewilderment. Josh’s other arm rested on Felix’s shoulder, drawing the three of them together, into a little circle of light. Josh’s vitality and charm had that effect, Mattie thought.

They might have been a picture, the three of them on the platform. Called something like Au Revoir, or We’ll Meet Again. That was another effect of Josh’s. He didn’t seem to belong, quite, to reality.

The guard’s whistle blew. Steam was thickened with smoke, and the train jolted forwards. She was going, anyway. She would miss them, but she wouldn’t miss her chance.

‘Goodbye! Good luck!’

‘Be a good girl, Mattie!’

She leaned out as far as she could, and blew kisses. ‘Not if I can help it!’ Julia and Felix stood waving, linked by Josh, until the guard’s van of Mattie’s train swayed out of sight.

‘I wish she hadn’t gone,’ Julia said, but she could only make herself aware of Josh. When he was with her everything else faded into insignificance, even the bleakness that she suffered when he wasn’t.

Since the flying weekend he had come to see her two or three times, appearing as if he had just thought of the idea five minutes earlier. His seeming casualness hurt Julia, but she accepted it because there was nothing else she could do.

Josh fitted well into the family in the square. Jessie always had time for good-looking young men, and although Mattie was wary of him for Julia’s sake, her touchiness disappeared when he brought a pile of American records in their paper sleeves and lay on the floor beside her to play them. One of the records was by Bill Haley, and that was the first that Mattie and Julia heard of rock and roll. From that time on, the sound of it belonged to their bedroom over the square, and to Josh.

Julia watched him with admiration, and pride, and such unmistakable love that made Jessie sigh for her. Only Felix held himself apart. He almost never looked straight at Josh. Whenever he was there, Felix was busy in the kitchen or in his own room. If Jessie insisted that he join them, he spread his work out on the table so that he could keep his head bent over that. He did one drawing, of Julia and Josh and Mattie listening to ‘Rock Around the Clock’, and he kept it pinned to the wall in his room.

Felix walked all the way from Euston to the block of flats in Ladbroke Grove. He walked quickly, with his head bent, and the rhythm helped to drum some of the impatience out of him. He didn’t enjoy being with Julia and Josh, but when he was apart from them he found himself thinking about them.

Felix shrugged so angrily that two girls who were passing giggled and stared. He didn’t suppose that Julia and Josh thought about him. He didn’t have any reason to suppose that Joshua Flood thought about anything at all except his various appetites. So why did he occupy Felix’s own consciousness like a splinter under a ball of flesh?

Deliberately, with an effort of will, Felix turned the thought away. He was going to work, and he would concentrate on that.

Felix had given up the pretence of studying art on a formal basis. The building work on the flats belonging to Mr Mogridge’s friend was almost complete, and there were six empty shells waiting to be fitted. Felix discovered that he was expected to be designer and decorator, and he was enjoying the challenge. On a tiny budget, and with his employer’s instructions to make the flats look ‘classy, you know the kind of thing, but not overpowering’, he was struggling to turn his ideas into cupboards and curtains.

Felix hated almost everything to do with modern design. He disliked splashy prints in harsh colours, and spindle-legged furniture, and synthetic materials. Felix dreamed of country houses and acres of brocade, Aubusson carpets and crystal chandeliers and the faded splendours of inherited treasures. It was hard to know how to translate that yearning into the reality of six spectacular conversions in Ladbroke Grove, or even how to recreate the particular atmosphere of the flat above the square, but Felix was going to do his best. By the time he reached the site he had almost forgotten Julia and Josh. On a Saturday afternoon the flats would be empty of builders and their sneering foreman, and he could walk around and think in peace.

So long as he was working, he could keep the darker anxieties at bay.

It was dark, with the sudden depressing weight of a northern November, when Mattie reached Leeds. She stood beside the ticket barrier with her suitcase, peering around her. Even under the station lights, fog thickened the air, and her breath hung in a cloud in front of her.

There was no one to meet her.

Mattie squared her shoulders and went out to the taxi rank beyond the station. She gave the taxi-driver the address of the theatre and they started off into the murk. The driver called something to her over his shoulder, in an accent so impenetrable that Mattie could hardly understand him. She felt as if she was in a foreign land.

But the theatre, when they reached it, reassured her a little. It was a huge grey edifice, seemingly big enough to seat a thousand playgoers. Lights streamed out and the taxi slid forward into the yellow glow. Mattie paid off the driver and went up the semicircle of shallow steps into the foyer. It was hung with playbills from past shows, and with grainy photographs of the two Headline productions.

It was completely deserted, except for a bored girl staring vacantly out of a glass-fronted booth. Mattie strode up to her.

‘I’m here to see Mr Douglas. I’m the new stage manager for Headline.’ It was the proudest sentence that Mattie had ever uttered, but the girl’s face didn’t even flicker.

‘They’re halfway through t’second act. You want stage door. Or mebbe e’ll be oopstairs. You can tek that door.’

She nodded across the expanse of darned carpet to a door marked Staff.

‘Can I leave my things here?’

‘Suits yersen.’

Behind the door was a narrow staircase of bare boards. It was almost pitch dark. Mattie groped her way upwards, with no idea where she was heading.

Then she heard the voice. It was unmistakably John Douglas, and he was shouting. While Mattie hesitated a woman’s voice screamed back. She couldn’t make out the words, but it was clearly a full-blown row. Making her way towards the noise Mattie came to a dingy corridor lit by a bare bulb, and a door marked Office. The door banged open and a woman stumbled out. Her greying hair was falling out of a bun and she was crying.

‘You’re a monster,’ she sobbed. ‘No less than a monster. Not a human being at all.’ Then she pushed past Mattie without glancing at her and ran down the stairs.

‘Yes, yes,’ said John Douglas from inside the office. ‘Tell me something new, Vera.’

Mattie tiptoed forward and tapped on the open door.

‘I thought you’d bloody gone,’ John Douglas said.

‘She has,’ Mattie answered. ‘I’m Mattie Banner.’

John Douglas looked up from the one chair in the room. There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘Is that supposed to mean anything to me?’

Mattie quailed.

He was a big man with a lion’s head of shaggy grey hair. Mattie saw a rubber-tipped walking stick leaning against his chair.

‘I’m your new stage manager.’

His sudden shout of laughter was even more disconcerting. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.’

It was the same rich voice that she had admired, but how could such a voice belong to this creased, belligerent man?

‘What’s funny about it?’ Mattie asked, stung by his rudeness.

‘Just that Willoughby said he was sending me his own personal assistant, as a great favour.’

‘I am – I was – Francis’s assistant.’

John was still laughing as he looked her up and down. It made Mattie feel hot and angry.

‘Yes, of course. It’s just that I was expecting a lady of a certain age and certain capabilities. Give that we’re talking about Francis I should have known better. I’m sure you’ve got your own talents, love, but I doubt that they’ll be the ones I need for eight shows a week. How old are you?’

Twenty-two.’

John Douglas’s mouth twisted. ‘Of course you are. Kids and cripples, that’s what we are in this company. They should give us special billing.’ He took hold of his stick, and stood up. He was tall, but his body screwed over to one side. ‘I provide the cripple element, in case you were wondering. Usually I tell pretty girls it’s a war wound, but I can’t be bothered tonight. It’s osteoarthritis, and I blame my vile temper on it.’

‘I thought there must be a reason for it,’ Mattie murmured.

He looked at her then, with the corners of his mouth drawn down. ‘What do you know about stage management?’ he snapped at her.

‘Enough.’

‘Oh, that’s very good. You can do the get-out tonight, and I’ll go home to bed.’

Mattie felt her face go stiff. ‘Do the …?

‘This is wonderful.’ He laughed again, without any warmth. ‘Francis may not have explained to you that this is a touring company. This lovely Saturday evening is our last night in Leeds, and on Monday we open a week in Doncaster. We have two shows on this tour, George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, and Welcome Home, which is a three-act drawing-room comedy complete with maid, of the sort beloved by mystified northern audiences. After the curtain tonight both sets have to be struck and loaded, with props and costumes, on to lorries. This leaves room for the next company to bring in Rookery Nook, or Ghost Train, or whatever bloody masterpiece the manager imagines will appeal to the citizens of Leeds. On Monday the procedure is reversed, in the next theatre. The get-in, as we theatre folk call it. That’s your job, dear, amongst other things. I’m afraid you’ll have Leonard to help you, too.’

‘Leonard?’

‘Your ASM. One of the kids, and half-witted as well. You’d better come backstage now, in the interval, and I’ll introduce you. You’ve already seen Vera. She’s the deputy manager.’ He was walking away down the dingy corridor, moving awkwardly but surprisingly quickly.

‘What was the matter with her?’

His voice boomed back, amplified by the funnel of the passage. ‘Apart from incompetence? Time of the month, I should think. All women are the same, from our lovely leading lady to yourself, no doubt. No, that’s not quite true. Our lamented Jennifer Edge didn’t seem to suffer, but then she took plenty of exercise.’

She heard him laughing.

Mattie contented herself with making a face at the director’s distorted shadow as she scuttled after him down to the stage.

An hour later the curtain had come down. It was a thin house for a Saturday night, and the audience dispersed quickly. The actors vanished in their wake, heading for the pub or the landlady’s cooking at their digs. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mattie. John Douglas had gone, and she found herself standing in front of the Welcome Home set, frozen by the certainty that she could do nothing with it. She would still be standing there when Rookery Nook arrived on Monday.

‘You’re in charge, then. Where shall we start?’

It was Leonard, a spindly youth in tight trousers, and the theatre’s two stage-hands. They were staring blankly at her, without hostility, but with no hint of friendship either.

Mattie wanted to cry, or to run away, but the three of them were blocking her way, and she hated anyone to see her in tears. She breathed in instead, and said sharply, ‘I’m new here, Leonard, and you know the show. Do what you usually do, and I’ll get started on the hampers.’

To her relief, they turned away and began dismantling the flats. The heavy weights thumped and the metal poles clanked. That, at least, was familiar.

Mattie found the big wicker costume and prop baskets stacked up backstage. She trailed around the deserted dressing rooms collecting discarded costumes and props, praying that she was finding everything, and began packing them up.

It took one and a half back-breaking hours to clear the theatre. Mattie and Leonard heaved the last wicker basket into the waiting lorry, and the two stage-hands melted away. The theatre janitor was locking the doors within five minutes, and Mattie only just retrieved her suitcase. She found herself out in the foggy street again, without even the glow of the theatre lights for reassurance.

‘You got any digs?’ Leonard asked her. He was about Mattie’s own age, an undernourished-looking boy with a bad skin and sparse, greasy hair.

She shook her head, and Leonard sighed.

‘They never think, do they? You’d better come to mine. They’re nothing special because the cast always pinch the best ones. But it’ll be better than nothing.’

He held out his hand for her suitcase, smiling at her Mattie was so tired that she let him take it. Leonard might easily have resented her arrival, she reflected, except that he didn’t seem to have the necessary spirit. He didn’t look like much of an ally as he loped along beside her, but Mattie needed a friend that night. She was grateful to him.

‘Thanks, Leonard,’ she said.

‘You can call me Lenny, if you like.’

His landlady served them a late supper in the front room. Eggs and bacon and fried bread, two bottles of Guinness, and a choice from the bottles of sauce that stood on a wooden tray on the sideboard. Lenny ate in silence, with his mouth open, and Mattie tried to keep her eyes fixed on the Victorian oleograph hung over the chilly grate.

She wanted to talk, to say, This is it. I’m here, but there was no one to share her mystified triumph with. Not Lenny, with his churning mouthfuls of food, and certainly not the brick-jawed landlady.

‘No funny business, is it?’ the landlady had snapped when Lenny presented her.

‘Of course not,’ they murmured.

Mattie thought of Jessie, on their first night in the square. Nothing funny at all, Mattie repeated, as she prepared for bed in the icy back bedroom. I’d give anything for something to laugh at.

Her first night in the professional theatre ended with her shivering between damp sheets, and longing for Julia and Jessie and Felix at home in the cluttered warmth of the flat.

Through the lumpy wallpaper, she could hear Lenny snoring.

It was the hardest week that Mattie had ever lived through, but when the time came round for her second get-out she was beginning to believe that she might survive as stage manager of the Headline number one company.

By sitting up late in her digs, and by working early when the rest of the company were comfortably asleep, she had learned the two scripts. She had mastered the props list and the calls. She knew that she could avoid any more of Sheila Firth’s tantrums by always calling her at the correct second, and always waiting meekly in her dressing room doorway for her languid acknowledgement. Sheila Firth was the actress playing Raina, and the fiancée in Welcome Home. She was temperamental and sickly, and not at all convincing as Shaw’s heroine, but Mattie watched her with intrigued intensity. She was the Leading F that Mattie had sighed over in the Stage.

Sheila’s technique for dealing with John Douglas was to ignore him. His abuses seemed to roll off her tilted head, and Mattie thought it was a very effective technique indeed. She adopted a mild version of it herself, and it helped her to survive the first week’s exposure to the director-manager’s fury. Mattie also had the comfort of recognising that even a hopeless stage manager was better than no one at all, and if John Douglas threw her out Francis was unlikely to replace her at any great speed.

The company moved from Doncaster to Scarborough, and from Scarborough to Nottingham, and Mattie’s new life began to develop a pattern.

On Saturday night, after the last curtain, there was the get-out. When it was done, two lorries took the flats and the props and the hampers of costumes away. The people were all gone, and the two-dimensional bric-à-brac that created the illusions, and the stage was left. Mattie liked it best then. It was easier to recapture some of her illusions about it in the absence of Francis Willoughby’s touring productions.

When the theatre was finally dark, Mattie could limp home to her digs for the last evening’s supper and bed. The digs improved after the first week. Vera took her under her wing, and introduced her to the network of theatrical landladies. They were there, in all the foggy northern towns that the company visited. Some of them were ex-professionals themselves; all of them were in love with the theatre. They always saw all the shows, and the actors waited politely for their verdicts. They treated their weekly regulars like members of the family, feeding them huge, fatty, late meals in gas-fire-heated parlours, and sitting with them afterwards for long sessions of gossip and discreet tippling.

Mattie suspected that the digs patronised by company members less genteel than Vera must be even livelier. There were two middle-aged actors in particular, who had been working the circuit for years and years and who always stayed in the same place in each town. At the end of the week they would murmur something like, ‘Old Nellie’s still got the stamina, dear, but I don’t know that I have. Just look at my skin. Early bed for me every night in Middlesbrough, whatever Phyllis says.’

Their names were Fergus and Alan, but they always referred to each other as Ada and Doris. They were the first homosexuals that Mattie had ever seen at close quarters, and her first introduction to theatrical camp. Doris and Ada convinced her that Felix couldn’t be queer. The thought of Felix pursing his lips and whispering, ‘She’s nice, and she knows it’ behind the back of some stage-hand made her laugh, and long for Julia.

On Sundays they did the transfer. Usually that meant a long, cold train journey with awkward connections. John Douglas drove himself in his filthy black Standard Vanguard, but the rest of the company huddled into the train with thermos flasks and sandwiches and the Sunday papers. The actors read the reviews of the West End productions aloud to each other. Mattie enjoyed the acrimony of that, listening in her corner. Most of the company was too old or too defeated for anything more challenging than Francis’s seedy productions and one or two of them were grateful to be working at all. But the younger ones like Sheila Firth believed that they deserved better, and used the close captivity of the train to tell everyone else. There were uninhibited rows, and shouting, and tears. Mattie watched everything, from behind the shelter of the News of the World.

In the Sunday twilight of the new town, smelling of fish and chips, and canal water, and coal-smoke, there would be the new digs, perhaps a cinema with Vera or Lenny or Alan and Fergus, and then bed in another back bedroom with a brass bedstead, and a china bowl and ewer on the washstand.

Monday was a hard day. There was the physical struggle with recalcitrant flats as they came off the lorries, unpacking the costumes in various dressing rooms, and then a long trail of visits to unsympathetic shopkeepers to beg for the loan of furniture or supplies in exchange for a mention in a programme slip. The cast hated Mondays too, and they complained about their dressing rooms, the lack of their pet props, their unmended or uncleaned costumes, and Mattie had to try to soothe them all. At the end of the day there was the show itself, with the calls to be made, the backstage business to handle, and her turn to be taken with Lenny in the prompt box.

Mattie had promised that she would write down everything she was seeing and doing, like a diary, and send it to Julia. It was Julia herself, greedy even for someone else’s experience, who had begged her to do it. But by the end of the day Mattie was too bleary with exhaustion and suppertime Guinness to do anything but roll into bed.

Julia wrote two or three letters, thin little notes with news of Jessie and Felix, but none of herself. Josh has been here, she told Mattie dully. Nothing happened. Mattie sighed over the letters in her backstage corner, not even needing to read between the lines.

After Mondays, the week grew easier. Even Mattie could he in bed late and take time over her breakfast before scurrying back to the theatre and her day’s work. Before the early evening preparations she mended scenery, repaired costumes or sewed curtains, developing talents she had never dreamed she possessed. On Wednesdays there was a matinee, Treasury call on Friday, and then it was Saturday once more, and everything was ready to begin all over again. She watched every performance, from the wings or from the shelter of the prompt box, thinking, I could do that. She listened to Sheila Firth’s high, consciously musical voice and mouthed her lines. If it was me, Mattie thought.

Her real position was much humbler. By the end of her first month on tour Mattie had found her niche in the company. Vera mothered her, and Lenny was her regular companion. Mattie was relieved that he at least didn’t try to be more than that. The younger men in the company regarded her as one of the props, and were surprised when she refused to let them try her on like a new costume. She joked with them and fended them off, secretly not liking any of them very much. She enjoyed the company of Alan and Fergus because they made her laugh, and they clearly preferred her to Miss Edge.

Fergus’s sandy eyebrows would go up. ‘Some of the things I could tell you about that one,’ he whispered.

‘Do tell me.’

‘I wouldn’t dream. You’re too innocent, love.’

The actresses mostly ignored her, except to complain about each other. Mattie particularly disliked Sheila’s breathless girlishness, but she did try to copy her posh-sounding elocuted accent. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ John Douglas asked her. ‘Got a gumboil?’

Mattie watched him, too. She was intrigued by his theatrical standards, and by the way he cajoled or insulted his lack-lustre company into meeting them. He must have been a good director, once, she thought. He was also realistic. He couldn’t give much stature to Raina and her Bluntschli, played by a hollow-chested, languidly poetic young actor called Hugh, so he made them tender instead. And he sent the hackneyed drawing-room comedy humming along at a snappy pace that disguised its predictability. The audiences always enjoyed it much more than the Shaw classic. John didn’t ask too much of his actors, but he expected a certain amount and he made certain that they delivered it. Most of the company hated him, but they were careful enough to be civil to his face. Vera lived in terror of him. Mattie didn’t know what she thought. There was still the potent appeal of his voice. Sometimes when she heard it she would turn around and look covertly at him.

Mattie had suffered from his temper more than any of the others at the beginning. On her third night she had failed to deliver a tray of glasses to the wings for the maid to walk on with. The actors on stage had been forced to drink the engaged couple’s health in thin air, and John Douglas had rounded on Mattie in the interval as if he wanted to tear her arms off.

‘I won’t tolerate incompetence,’ the voice boomed at her. ‘You can’t help your ignorance or your crassness, and the rest of us must put up with you. But you do have a marked script in your hands and it tells you in plain English what to do, and when.

None of it is very difficult, even for you. Don’t make another fucking mess-up like that.’

‘I won’t,’ Mattie made the mistake of saying.

The voice attacked her all over again. ‘Don’t assure me of that as though you’re giving me a fucking present. Just remember what I say.’

How could I forget? Mattie retorted silently as she backed away. It was after that that she learned to listen and say nothing, like Sheila Firth did. Wisely she didn’t copy Sheila’s pained, innocent, I-will-forgive-you expression. She was only the stage manager, not Leading F.

Gradually, as she grew more confident and more capable, John Douglas turned his attention elsewhere.

One Friday evening John and Vera were sitting in the office before the six o’clock Treasury call. In very poor weeks the box-office receipts didn’t even cover the company’s wages, and those were the times when John had to telephone Francis Willoughby. This time, however, the takings were good and John and Vera were working on the wage packets. It was a complicated process because some actors received a percentage of the take above a certain figure, so their cuts had to be calculated and deducted from the total before the profits could be grudgingly sent off to Francis. It was Mattie’s job to keep Vera supplied with tea and John with whisky while they worked.

She was filling the kettle in the grubby kitchen cubby-hole when Sheila Firth brushed past. Sheila was wearing her street clothes, complete with a soft black felt hat pulled down over her eyes. That was unusual, because Sheila liked to be in her dressing room in good time so that she could drift soulfully around in her robe, dabbing at her wig and make-up. Mattie heard her stop at the office door. Sheila opened it, and when John and Vera looked up she half-fell against the frame.

‘I can’t go on tonight,’ she said. Her voice quivered with emotion.

Vera got up from her seat and scuttled away like a rabbit, ducking around the tragic Sheila. She left the door considerably open, so that Mattie could hear everything.

‘Why not?’ John’s voice was expressionless by comparison. There was a long, palpitating pause, and then Sheila said, ‘You don’t really understand about love, John, do you?’ Hugging herself with pleasure, Mattie crept closer.

Sheila’s story came spilling out without any further prompting. Everyone knew that she was in love with the leading man of another of Francis’s companies. It was a love conducted on a higher plane, a rarefied and special thing. Sheila was fond of elaborating on the themes of it. Now, Mattie gathered from between the racking sobs, her leading man had abandoned Sheila for a thirty-five-year-old character actress.

‘I worked with her in Peter Pan,’ Sheila wailed. ‘She’s a woman completely without talent or refinement.’

Mattie stifled her laughter. She was thinking. Sheila was understudied by a mousy girl who took the part of the maid and two other walk-ons. The mouse had a heavy cold. She was practically voiceless, and her nose was swollen and bright scarlet.

‘I’m so very, very hurt, John. So crushed, and broken. I can’t work when I feel like this. I can’t …’ The sobs broke out again.

Mattie waited gleefully for John’s outburst. But if she had been thinking, he had been thinking quicker. She heard his chair creak, then the thump of his stick as he took two steps.

‘My poor girl,’ the rich voice murmured. ‘You poor, brave girl. And now you must learn about pain.’

Mattie was transfixed. She slipped closer, to the spot where she could peer through the crack in the door and watch.

John was towering over Sheila. He had taken her face between his hands and he was looking deep into her eyes.

‘You will suffer, my dear. But you can, and you must, cling to your art. Only by making that sacrifice can you grow, and it will reward you by growing with you.’

Sheila let out a low moan and her head fell forwards against John’s shoulder.

Mattie gaped. You clever old bugger, she thought. Admiration flooded through her, and swept away her short-lived dream of stepping on to the stage in Raina’s opening-scene nightgown and fur wraps.

She slipped back to the cubby-hole and clattered noisily with the kettle and cups. When the tea was ready she laid a tray and carried it back to the office. Sheila was nodding bravely, with her hands folded between John’s.

Mattie knelt beside her and poured her a cup of tea. When Sheila took the cup Mattie put her arm around her shoulder and gave her a hug of sisterly solidarity.

‘Oh, Mattie,’ Sheila broke out again. ‘It takes a terrible shock like this to make one realise how valuable friends are.’

‘I know, I know,’ Mattie saw warmly. ‘The door was open, and I couldn’t help hearing a little. Just remember that we all love you, and admire you.’ Not wanting to risk overdoing it, she tiptoed away again.

Ten minutes later, her face set in lines of sorrowful courage, Sheila was on her way to her dressing room.

Mattie went back for the tray. John was sprawled in his chair with his hands over his face, but he looked up when he heard her come in, and smiled at her.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

It was so rare for him to praise, and it was such an odd, conspiratorial moment, that Mattie didn’t know what to say.

‘I need a drink,’ John grumbled. He poured whisky into two glasses and handed one to Mattie. ‘Will you join me? To celebrate our success in going forward into another evening of theatrical mediocrity?’

They raised their glasses and drank.

With the spirits burning the back of her throat, Mattie blurted out, ‘What are you doing here?’

He turned his molten glare on her. His eyes were the colour of syrup, and because of their surprising glow they were the only part of him that looked healthy. His skin was grey, and the front of his ash-coloured hair was yellow with nicotine. Mattie noticed that his hands on the arms of his chair were knotty with pain. She might have felt sorry for him, if she hadn’t felt more afraid.

‘Doing?’ He laughed throatily and she relaxed a little. ‘Isn’t that obvious? Earning a few quid. A very few, I should say, thanks to your friend Francis. One has to live, and I do have a wife to support.’

‘You’re married?’

The laugh again. ‘Of course I’m married. I’m fifty-four years old, and one would have to be very clever, or very determined to escape the net, to survive as a bachelor for this long.’

Mattie thought back over the grinding weeks that had just passed. Her own time was fully occupied, but John Douglas was hardly less busy. How did he fit in a wife, unless he glimpsed her on Sundays when he drove off in his Standard Vanguard?

‘Where does she live?’

‘You’re an inquisitive little girl, aren’t you? Helen lives in our house, an attractive if chilly Cotswold stone edifice outside Burford, in Oxfordshire. To forestall your next question, she loathes and despises everything to do with the theatre, and prefers to live her own life while I pursue my spectacular career. It is a perfectly agreeable and amicable arrangement, and I return to Burford and to my wife whenever I can.’

If Mattie had had time to analyse it, she would have realised that the vaguely unhappy feeling that took hold of her now was disappointment. But John turned sharply to her.

‘And what are you doing here?’

‘I want to be an actress.’

She said it automatically, and she regretted it at once. His shout of laughter was hurtful, but it made her angry too. John Douglas saw both reactions.

‘Of course you do. Of course you do. Do you have any experience?’

‘Only amateur. But I’m good.’ She was stiff and red-faced now, like an offended child.

He nodded. ‘Tell me, did you think your big chance was coming tonight? With Sheila’s broken heart and whats-her-name’s laryngitis? I bet you know all the lines.’

Mattie shrugged. She felt too angry to give him the satisfaction of an answer. He waited for a moment, and then he drawled, ‘Well, then. Thank you.’

Both whisky glasses were empty. John glanced at the half-bottle on the table, and then snapped at her, ‘Haven’t you got work to do?’

Mattie swung round to the door, but he called after her. ‘Mattie?’

It was the first time she could remember that he had called her anything except You.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re not quite the worst stage manager I’ve ever had.’

She had to content herself with that.

The company moved on again. Two weeks before the Christmas of 1955 they were in Great Yarmouth. There was a sudden spell of clear, mild weather and through the usual smells of chips and sweaty costumes and smoke, Mattie caught the fresh salt tang of the sea. Early one morning she went for a walk along the beach. The world was an empty expanse of grey water and grey, glittering pebbles and sand. There wasn’t a sound except the sucking water, and the shingle crunching under her unsuitable shoes. The air tore at Mattie’s lungs.

She remembered that day, afterwards, and the scrubbed grey light of winter seascapes always brought the after-memories flooding back.

It was an ordinary evening, to begin with. It was a Shaw night, and Mattie noticed that John Douglas was hovering in the wings, watching the performance more closely than he usually did. Sheila was suffering an emotional relapse, and at the end of the first act she rushed offstage and flung herself against John.

‘I can’t,’ she whispered, loudly enough for everyone backstage to hear her. ‘I can’t do it. Why is it so hard? What have I done to be made to suffer like this?’

It was obvious to everyone except Sheila that the manager was only just keeping his temper. The edges of his nostrils went white with the effort.

‘You can’t? But your performance is only a little bit worse than fucking well usual.’

Sheila’s head tilted sideways, and her eyelashes made a dark crescent on her Leichner-pink skin. John looked down at her, and hoisted himself with the support of his stick. He took a deep breath that clearly hurt, and tried again.

‘My darling. Do it for me, if you can’t do it for yourself. It’s important for me, tonight.’

‘Is it?’ she breathed. ‘If it’s for you, John. I need to know that.’ She went on again for the second act, but watching her from the wings Mattie thought that the performance could hardly have been any more terrible without her. Sheila fluffed almost every line, and Lenny struggled to help her from the box. Hugh’s Bluntschli turned sulky and then perfunctory, while Fergus and Alan as Petkoff and Saranoff battled on with weary determination.

The final curtain came as a release for everyone. The applause was no more than a dry patter, extinguished by the banging of seats. John Douglas limped away without saying a word, and Sheila fled to her dressing room with her handkerchief pressed to her face.

I’ve seen worse performances, Mattie thought philosophically. Why the fuss? I wonder. She did her clearing up with the mechanical ease of familiarity, then went round the dressing rooms for the last time to turn off the lights. She was on her way down to the stage door, imagining she was the last person in the building, when she saw threads of light framing the closed door of the office. She tapped on the door, and when no answer came she opened it.

John was there, alone, although there were two other glasses on the table beside his.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie mumbled. ‘I was just doing the lights.’

He waved his arms at her, beckoning her in with a big, ironically florid gesture. The knuckles of his hand cracked against the wall of the poky room, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Come in, come in. I’m drowning. Oh, don’t look so fucking nervous. Just my sorrows. Nothing more dramatic than that. Oh, shit. Dramatic’s not the best bloody word this evening, is it? Here, come and join me.’ He held up one of the two empty glasses. ‘Don’t mind a dirty one, do you? That stupid bloody bastard had it first, but I don’t suppose that’s catching. Here.’ He pushed the drink across to Mattie and turned back to his own. He drank the three fingers of it in one gulp.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mattie asked. ‘Not Sheila, surely?’

‘Silly pre-menstrual bitch.’ He chuckled sourly. ‘If I could personally ensure that she never works again, I’d do it with the greatest pleasure. No, not Sheila specifically although she contributed in her special way.’ He poured himself another measure and drank again. ‘We both have our ridiculous ambitions, Mattie, you see. No, I don’t mean that. Yours is less risible than mine. After all, we have Miss Firth as our leading lady, don’t we? Why not Miss … ah, Miss …?’

‘Banner.’

‘Exactly. Well, since you asked what’s wrong, I’ll tell you. My little dream is to start up a company of my own. No more Welcome Home. No more pig-ignorant Willoughby. To this magnificent end I have been saving up my hard-won wages, and looking around for some financial backing. Tonight, two dear old theatre cronies of mine, who have been more successful in lining their pockets than I, travelled all the way up here from Town to see my show. My Shaw. Miss Firth’s shitty Shaw show, ha ha. I’m sure you can guess the rest?’

There have been worse performances, Mattie thought again. But not very many.

‘No money?’

‘Quite right. And not only no money, but suddenly no time either. Not even for an hour or so of food and wine and conversation. A pressing need to drive back to Town developed after just one small whisky apiece. As if I smelled bad. But nothing stinks quite like failure, does it? What am I doing here, to take your own question from you?’

Mattie went over and stood by him, looking down into the thin patch in the hair at the top of his head. She had never noticed it before. She thought, he’s lonely too; how cut off we all are, living so close together.

She leaned down, very gently, and let her cheek rest against the top of his head for a second. He didn’t move, either to shake her off or draw her closer, and Mattie’s courage deserted her. She was hardly in a position to comfort John Douglas as if he was Ricky or Sam. She went back round the table and picked up her drink.

John drank in silence for another moment or two, and then he roused himself. ‘Come and have some dinner,’ he boomed at her. ‘Would you like that?’

‘Yes, please,’ Mattie said simply.

He looked surprised, but he heaved himself out of his chair and shuffled around with his stick. He put on an outsized overcoat and a khaki muffler, and a hat pulled down over his eyebrows. Immediately he looked like an old man.

They went down the stairs to the stage door. Mattie turned the lights off behind them and John produced a bunch of keys from his inner pocket and locked the door. Outside in the street, with the wind slicing off the sea, into their faces, he asked her, ‘Where are your outdoor things?’

‘I’m wearing them.’

It was much colder in the bleak northern towns than in the cocoon of London streets. Mattie had discovered that very early on. But she needed every penny of her wages to keep herself sheltered and fed, and there was nothing left over for thick winter coats.

John Douglas exhaled, and Mattie saw his cloudy breath dispelled by the wind. ‘You’d better see Vera at the end of the week, then. Get a loan before you get pneumonia.’

Mattie raised her eyebrows, but he was already walking away and she had to move quickly to keep pace with his fast, lopsided steps.

They went to a little French restaurant, tucked away in the angle of two streets behind the sea-front. It was the kind of place that Mattie and Lenny and Vera would have passed without a second glance, knowing that it was out of their league. The head waiter showed them to a table laid for three. The third setting was quickly removed and Mattie pretended not to have noticed it. She looked round instead at the red flocked wallpaper and the little wall lamps with pink-fringed shades. The handful of other diners, red-faced men and permed women, were already finishing their meals. A waiter brought the menus. They were bound in red leather and hung with gold tassels.

‘What do you want to eat?’ John asked her.

‘Steak,’ Mattie said at once. ‘And chips. And soup to start with.’ She was always hungry, and she wasn’t going to hold back in ordering a free meal in a place like this.

John frowned. ‘And ice-cream to follow, I suppose.’ He ordered the food rapidly. ‘And bring me the best bottle of burgundy you’ve got. Do you like wine, Mattie?’

She thought of Felix and his careful bottles of Beaujolais and Chianti stored under the kitchen sink. ‘I love wine.’

It wasn’t an easy meal, to begin with.

Mattie was sharply conscious that her company failed to compensate for John’s missing friends. He leaned back in his chair, watching her without seeing her, turning his glass in his fingers in between draughts of wine.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ he ordered. ‘Isn’t that what usually happens on these occasions?’

‘I haven’t experienced an occasion quite like this,’ Mattie said. She wouldn’t let John Douglas browbeat her. But she talked anyway, to fill the silence, to distract him. She glossed over her childhood, but she embroidered her escapades with Julia and she described Jessie and Felix in lengthy detail. The bottle of burgundy was emptied and John called for another. Once or twice he laughed, the loudness of it making the other diners peer covertly at him.

Their food came. John barely touched the cutlets he had ordered, but he drank steadily. Mattie ate because she was ravenous, but she thought privately that this food was nothing like as good as the meals that Felix cooked at home.

‘It’s your turn now,’ she said, with her red meat cooling on the plate in front of her. ‘You talk, while I eat.’

John Douglas’s thick, grey eyebrows drew together. ‘I was an ac—tor,’ he said. The dark, resonant voice seemed to fill the room. Mattie resolutely didn’t glance at the surrounding tables. John picked up his stick and thumped it on the floor. ‘But there aren’t many parts for cripples. You can’t play Dick the Bad for ever. I did have five or six good years, after the War. I was at Bristol Old Vic, Stratford for a couple of seasons.’

‘Tell me,’ Mattie implored.

‘Ah, it’s all bollocks. All of it. That’s my consolation. But I’ll tell you, if you want to hear.’

Mattie chewed her way through her tough steak and the floury chocolate pudding that followed, listening, entranced. He told her stories of Alex, and Sybil, and Larry, stories of first nights and tours and try-outs, triumphs and disasters.

When the burgundy was all gone he started on brandy, in a fat balloon glass. He had become briefly animated, embellishing his stories with comic accents and breaking into his thunderous belly-laugh, but the brandy seemed to puncture his euphoria. He sank back into his chair again, staring over Mattie’s head.

‘And now here we are. Washed up in fucking Yarmouth, dining out with a little girl stage manager.’

‘I’m not a little girl,’ Mattie said softly.

After a moment he said, ‘I know that. I’m sorry.’

Their eyes met, and it was Mattie who looked away first. She saw the waiters standing impatiently by the door. The chairs were stacked on all the other tables.

‘I think they want us to go.’

‘Who gives a fuck what they want?’

But he fumbled for the bill that had been placed at his elbow an hour ago. He slapped the pound notes on to the plate, and they stood up together. The waiter opened the door for them with an ironic bow.

Outside, the air broke over them like an icy sea-wave.

Even Mattie gasped, and John lurched sideways. His legs seemed to buckle under him and he clawed at Mattie for support. She leaned into him, trying to support his weight.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he murmured. ‘A cripple. A fucking legless cripple.’

They tottered together to the nearest lamp-post and leaned against it, washed by the impartial yellow light. John stared into the gloom. The waves crashed dully in the distance, but there was no other sound. They were alone, cut off by the lateness, the dark, and the muffled sea.

Fear turned over like a sick lump in John Douglas’s stomach. He was afraid of everything, the entirety of life beyond this circle of light. And the girl’s hair was close to his mouth, a metallic-shining mass of curls. He shuddered, and then he bent his head and buried his face in it.

She stood still, sturdy, holding him up.

‘Come home with me, Mattie,’ he begged her, knowing that he couldn’t bear it if she refused. She was so warm, so full of bloody life.

‘All right.’

It was as simple as that.

They began to walk, zig-zagging, with Mattie’s arm around his waist. He was too heavy for her, too drunk to be controllable. They reached the sea-front and the wind flattened them against the wall. A ball of screwed-up chip papers scudded past their feet.

‘This way,’ John said grandly, and they leaned forward into the salty blast.

He was staying not in digs but in a small hotel at the far end of the front. They stumbled up the steps and Mattie caught a glimpse of a sign in the front window announcing Vacancies. The doors were locked, and John pressed his fist against the bell push, mumbling.

After a very long time a dim light blinked on over their heads. A yawning boy opened the door and gaped at them.

‘Where is the night porter?’ thundered John. ‘Why should my friend and I be kept waiting on the front steps?’

‘I’m sorry . . Mattie began, and then with a flutter of relief she realised that the boy wasn’t interested in anything except getting back to his bed.

He bolted the door behind them and disappeared. John took a key from a row of wooden pigeonholes and held it up for Mattie to see. ‘Number thirteen. Not a difficult one to remember, luckily.’

She followed him in silence. The hotel smelt pungently of air freshner and boiled vegetables, and then they passed the bar and the hoppy stink of beer was momentarily dominant. Mattie thought of the travelling salesmen congregated in there in the empty evenings. Past the bar they negotiated a flight of stairs, and reached John’s room. After several stabs with the key he found the door and opened it. Mattie looked back down the bare hallway, and then she followed John Douglas into room number thirteen. The ceiling light was very high up, a fringed and bobbled shade pendent in a grey, shadowy space. The room seemed full of shiny brown furniture, ranks of unmatching wardrobes and glass-topped dressing tables. The double bed had shiny wooden head- and footboards, and a green candlewick cover. The curtains were faded green velour and the carpet was a third shade of green.

Mattie wondered, Am I going to do this, here?

John Douglas took off his overcoat, and put his hat and scarf on one of the dressing tables.

‘Excuse me a minute,’ he muttered. He went out of the room, and Mattie heard the clank and flush of a lavatory. She stood motionless, still in her thin coat, waiting. John came back and closed the door. He came to her, and with his big hands began to undo her buttons. When he saw her bare shoulders he was breathing heavily, with his mouth open. He touched the scattered golden freckles with his fingers.

Mattie felt nothing, except the cold air of the room on her skin.

With a sudden blundering movement John pushed her backwards on to the bed. He fell on top of her, squashing her with his weight. Experimentally, Mattie reached up and put her arms around his neck. He kissed her face and told her, puzzled, ‘You taste of salt.’

The wind had blown the sea-spray into her face.

He licked her cheek gently. There was tenderness in it, and it touched her. She turned her head to find his mouth, but he had drawn back a little. He was lying with his eyes closed, and she listened to his breathing. It was a moment or two before she realised that he had fallen asleep.

Mattie looked up at the tiny light above them. Even the feeble speck of it seemed to hurt her eyes, and she realised that she was exhausted. Slowly and gently, inching herself sideways, she extricated herself from John Douglas’s heavy limbs. She went across to the bathroom and washed herself in cold water, then crept back into the bedroom. John hadn’t moved. He looked like a big, crestfallen child. Mattie struggled to pull off his trousers and jacket, and he grunted and pitched away from her. Under his clothes he was wearing long underwear, his big hands and feet protruding from the ribbed cuffs of it. She felt hot with her efforts, and with sadness, and with the burgundy fuming in her head.

Mattie half undressed herself and pulled the covers up over both of them. The weight of him in the bed beside her felt strange, but it comforted her. She fell asleep at once.

When she woke up again it was daylight. She frowned at the tall rectangle of light in front of her, and then it resolved itself into a window, with thin sunshine filtering through greyish net curtains. There were green velour curtains framing the net. She remembered, and turned under the bedcovers to look for him.

The bed was empty, although the pillows on the other side were dented and creased. He had been here, then.

Not a dream.

The room was empty too, for all the lowering, shiny furniture. Mattie drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She lay and listened to the sounds of doors opening and closing, distant hoovering, a car passing outside. She was thirsty and her head felt muzzy.

The door opened. John came in and closed it with a gentle click, before he looked and saw that she was awake. He stood at the side of the bed, peering down at her. Then he sat down heavily on his own side. He was wearing a startling, red paisley dressing gown.

‘I’m sorry,’ he offered at last. ‘That wasn’t a very attractive display, was it? I don’t often drink like that, although it may surprise you to hear it. Can’t afford it, for one thing. And when I did I used to be able to hold it. But I’m an old man now. Failing in every direction.’

Mattie broke into his monologue. ‘Fifty-four isn’t old. Not if you don’t let it be.’

She remembered how he had looked last night, in his underclothes. She felt pain for both of them, but John laughed. He was snorting a little, running his fingers through his hair so that it lay back flat, like a badger’s. He stood up again and walked restlessly around the room, then stopped at the window to stare through the mist of grey net towards the sea.

In a low voice he asked her, ‘Do you want to try again?’

Mattie tried to blot out the room and its depressing furnishings, and the dusty, heavy green folds of fabric shrouding them.

The room didn’t matter. They were here, that was all.

She was troubled more by the sense that nothing else mattered, either. Whether John Douglas made love to her against this shiny wooden headboard, or not. It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t be a cataclysmic moment, not like in the stories. Except that there had been that moment of tenderness last night. That stayed with her, like warmth and wetness still on her cheek.

Afterwards she had undressed him and he had been vulnerable.

In the restaurant’s sickly warmth, with the wine in her head, she had wanted to come here to his bedroom. This morning she only knew that she liked John Douglas, rumpled and hung-over in his cherry-coloured dressing gown. Liking unclouded by longing or lust.

Mattie thought fleetingly of Julia’s aviator. With his broad back and strong arms and blond head, his potency like a spell cast over Julia. Mattie’s mouth curved. She didn’t long for Josh Flood either.

What difference, then?

Without speaking she lifted her bare arm from the musty shelter of the blankets and held it out to him.

He came to her quickly, pulling at the paisley cloth. He was naked underneath it and Mattie saw white corded flesh and thickly matted grey hair. Then he was beside her, on top of her, his tongue in her hair and in her ears and in her mouth. He pulled at the layer of clothes she had slept in and she helped him where she could, wriggling awkwardly beneath him. He hoisted himself up so that he could see her.

‘Oh God, you’ve got a beautiful body.’

He seized her breasts, kneading and squeezing and bumping them, and then taking them in his mouth with the nipples between his teeth. Mattie lay perfectly still and let him do what he wanted to her. For a moment everything seemed simple. He just does it, she thought with relief. But it wasn’t enough.

‘Hold me,’ he ordered her. He fixed her fist over himself. She felt thin, shiny skin stretched perilously tight over hard flesh. Mattie moved her hand tentatively up and down, wanting to do it right for him. He hissed hotly in her ear, ‘Hold it tighter. And do it hard, like this.’ His hand pumped with hers, big, long strokes that he thrust into.

Is that right? she wanted to ask. Is that right?

His fingers tweaked at her, rubbing and probing. ‘You like, that don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Her breath came in a suffocating gasp, and she felt him smile.

‘Good. Yes. There’s nothing bloody like it.’

Mattie felt nothing. She had never felt anything with the boys outside the dance halls, or in the back row of the cinema, either.

Suddenly John pulled the pillows down from behind their heads. He thrust them under Mattie’s hips, lifting her into the air. She felt stripped and exposed and tried to roll aside but he bent his head over her, probing with his tongue. Mattie tried to respond. She screwed her eyes up so tightly that stars exploded behind her eyelids. John leaned over the side of the bed and fumbled in his dressing gown pocket. He unrolled the rubber over himself and balanced over her on all fours.

You can do what you want, Mattie repeated childishly inside her starry head. I don’t mind. You can do what you want.

He pushed her legs so far apart that the tendons strained in her groin. Then he took hold of himself with his fist and guided it into her. He did it quite gently, but Mattie felt the resistance inside her, and the pressure of him jabbing in and down. There was a sharp tear and she yelled out, an aggrieved shout of pain.

John held himself still.

‘Jesus Christ. Is this your first time?’

She nodded blindly. ‘I’m sorry.’

He took her face in his hands and kissed it, rubbing her mouth with his lips.

‘You should have told me, you bloody silly girl. Oh, Mattie.’

His gentleness salved her a little, but he seemed to forget it quite quickly. He began to saw up and down inside her, all the way in and then almost out again. Mattie felt nothing. The soft, melting, warm-watery sensations that her father gave her when they were alone in the house together were all that Mattie knew. And she had buried those feelings so deeply and defensively that it would take more than John Douglas to disinter them.

It seemed to go on for a long time. The weight of him ground against her hip-bones, and her soft membranes felt bruised and assaulted. Mattie concentrated on his thick white shoulders sheeny with sweat, on the creases in his neck, and the tufts of grey hair that sprouted from his ears.

He began to move faster, his breath coming in hoarse gasps. He went rigid and shouted out, ‘Jesus,’ and then gave a long, wailing cry. Mattie was afraid for him, and then she realised that it was all over. She held his head between her hands, supporting him until he stopped thrashing over her.

Milky silence folded over the room and they lay limply in the knotted blankets.

There, Mattie thought. I was right it didn’t matter.

She thought that John had fallen asleep again, but he lifted his head to look at her. ‘I wish you’d told me that you were a virgin.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she whispered.

His face looked different, she noticed. Softer, perhaps.

‘You made me very happy, this morning, Mattie Banner,’ John said.

She smiled then, a quick flickering smile, but she felt warmer inside.

‘Good,’ Mattie said.

They lay comfortably together, listening to the world moving outside. It was nice, Mattie thought, to share a moment like this. Private, just to themselves. John reached for his cigarettes and lit one for each of them, fitting Mattie’s between her fingers for her. She inhaled deeply, knowingly. She felt wiser, almost happy.

‘John?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Mm?’

‘Did you go to bed with Jennifer Edge?’

A laugh rumbled in his chest, under her ear. ‘Yes. Everyone did, it was more or less obligatory. I’m not sure about Doris and Ada.’ Mattie laughed too, but the little glow of warmth faded. She could cope with his Burford wife. But Jennifer Edge, whom she had never seen and cared nothing about, she made a difference. She put Mattie herself into perspective. One in a line. It probably went with the job.

She tried to banter. ‘What? Lenny, too?’

‘Almost certainly.’

It was hard to laugh. Mattie saw the room again. Green and brown, hideous in the livid winter daylight. She butted out her cigarette in the tin ashtray beside the bed.

‘I should be at the theatre now.’

‘Come here for one more minute.’

He put his thick arms around and pulled her closer. The woolly hairs on his chest crinkled against her skin.

‘Jennifer’s nothing like you, you know. You’re a nice girl, Mattie.’ He kissed her thoroughly and when he let her go again Mattie said softly, ‘I used to be a nice girl.’

They both laughed, then. Mattie took the opportunity to slide out of bed. She put her crumpled clothes on and combed her hair in front of the greenish mirror.

‘I’ll see you later, my love, at the theatre,’ John said.

‘Of course.’

Mattie walked down through the Air-Wick-pungent hotel and out through the front door. Nobody shouted an accusation after her. The sea was puckered and steel-grey, but she didn’t stop to look at it. She turned into the town towards the theatre. Women with shopping bags passed her, and errand boys on bicycles.

They must all be able to see, Mattie thought. I know they can tell what I’ve been doing. She held her head up. It doesn’t matter. It’s happened, that’s all. She felt very lonely, and she longed to tell Julia. Not in a letter. Not after the weeks of silence that she had allowed to slip by.

She would have to wait until Christmas. Two weeks, until the company disbanded for the Christmas break.

Everyone in the company knew at once. Vera took her aside when she reached the theatre.

‘Where were you last night? I was so worried.’

‘Were you? I went out to dinner with John,’ Mattie said deliberately. ‘Someone else stood him up.’

Vera’s eyes and mouth made three amazed circles. She scuttled away as soon as she could to spread the news.

It turned out to be a short-lived sensation. Everyone was used to the permutations of company lovers, and when the brief flurry of interest died down Mattie discovered the effects were that the actors treated her more circumspectly and Sheila Firth adopted her as a kind of ally. Only Fergus and Alan didn’t share their jokes quite as generously, and Lenny didn’t expect her to be a friend now that she had John Douglas.

At the next Treasury call Vera handed her a separate envelope with her wages. It contained exactly seven guineas in notes and silver and Mattie was puzzled until she remembered that it was the price of a coat in the middle display window of the High Street department store. John Douglas must have seen it too. Mattie went to look at it again before the Saturday matinée. It was green tweed with big flaps and pockets and when she tried it on she looked like a farmer. She chose a black cloth coat instead. It had a big black fake-fur collar that framed her face, and a wide black patent belt. It was cheaper than the green tweed, and she spent the rest of the money on a pair of black suede gloves.

Mattie put on her new finery and went into the theatre office to see John. He frowned at her through the smoke of his cigarette and muttered, ‘You look like a bloody tart. But that’s your business, I suppose. Is it warm enough?’

‘It’s lovely and warm. Thank you.’

‘Vera’ll take ten bob a week out of your wages until it’s paid for.’

Mattie couldn’t help laughing.

The two weeks went by and there were carol singers outside the shops and strings of coloured light bulbs hung bravely from the street lights. Mattie had warned herself not to expect anything from John Douglas, but she was softened by his brusque affection. Sometimes he put his arm round her, almost abesent-mindedly, or touched her hair, as if he liked the feel of her for herself and not just for sex. He took her to bed in his salesman’s hotels too, of course, and she submitted to it because it mattered to him.

The best thing was the way that he talked to her, about books and opera as well as the theatre. Mattie listened thirstily.

The last week ended and she did the get-out with a mixture of relief and regret. The scenery and props were going into store until the tour started up again. There was an impromptu Christmas party for the whole company in the corner pub beyond the theatre. Mattie played darts and drank Guinness, and laughed at John’s stories which he performed for the benefit of everyone in the bar.

She felt that she had come a long way.

She had bought and wrapped a Christmas present for John. It was a book about opera, and she was hoping to impress him with her clever choice. But the afternoon ended, the company separated on a wave of boozy comradeship, and John drove her to the station in the Vanguard without producing a present for her. Mattie kept the book hidden.

He said goodbye absently. Mattie knew that he already belonged to Burford and not to her at all, and she accepted the knowledge uncomplainingly. John kissed her and opened the car door.

There was one thing, a kind of present.

‘When you get back,’ he said, ‘we’ll look at a bit part for you.’

The black car bucked away and Mattie went smiling to the London train.