Читать книгу At Freddie’s - Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow - Страница 11

CARROLL and Hannah did not meet until the beginning of term, by which time both of them had found somewhere to live. Hannah had gone straight from her interview with Freddie to the Petrou Shoe Bar at the end of the street. The interior smelled powerfully of feet. Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. She took off her shoes and handed them over the counter, saying that she would like the heels done at once as she had to walk round the district till she found accommodation. The Cypriot glanced at her and after affixing the new Phillips heels he knocked a number of steel brads into them, flattening the heads. ‘You will find somewhere before these wear out,’ he said. The two of them recognised each other as people of determination, not fortunate, but not daunted.

Carroll asked Hannah to come and have tea with him after their first week at work, so that she saw his room before he saw hers. She wished then that she’d been able to go with him and help him look and then they might surely have been able to find somewhere a little less neglected.

‘Come on up,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about all those letters in the hall. They’re all for people who used to be here last year.’ His room was exceedingly cold. Everything was in order – more than I can say for mine, Hannah thought – except for an open umbrella put to dry before the gas-fire, which, however, he did not turn on. ‘We were never allowed an open umbrella in the house at home,’ she said. ‘One of the aunts thought it would bring bad luck. But I don’t expect you’re superstitious.’

He reflected. ‘I think perhaps I am. It’s an article of faith with me that whatever I do is bound to turn out unsuccessfully. I’m sometimes driven, therefore, to do the opposite of what I really want.’ Perhaps that was why he put things to dry and didn’t light the fire. ‘You’re too much alone, Pierce,’ she said.

He created around him his own atmosphere of sad acceptance. Under the window stood a formerly polished wooden table, and on it was laid out his dictionary and paper and a biro with three refills attached to a card. Carroll told her that he hoped now he’d got to London that he’d be able to commit some of his thoughts to writing.

‘So that’s where you sit and work.’

‘When I sit there I feel as if I’m working.’

Something in Carroll made Hannah feel less innocent, but more compassionate. He eventually made a cup of tea with evaporated milk, and unfolding a copy of The Times, began to read to her aloud. The snow had held up work on the National Theatre site on the South Bank. A small crowd had gathered to see Mr Macmillan … ‘? read through the paper myself this morning,’ he said, ‘and I just marked one or two of the more amusing paragraphs, as I knew you’d be coming this afternoon.’

God in heaven, does he think I can’t read the paper for myself, Hannah thought. And it was not exactly that he lacked confidence. He showed no more hesitation than a sleepwalker. ‘Do you think you’ll stay long in this job?’ she asked.

He put down The Times and looked at her bright puzzled face. ‘At first I’d had it in mind to give notice at the end of the first term,’ he said. ‘But now I haven’t.’ Then, perceiving that he had made things awkward, he asked her what she thought of the place herself.

Hannah cast her mind back. The children did a half day’s education only. If they went to their music, dancing and dramatic classes in the morning, they spent the afternoon in a kind of torpor; if they weren’t to go till the afternoon, they were almost uncontrollable all morning. Feverishly competitive, like birds in a stubblefield, twitching looks over their shoulder to make sure they were still ahead, they all of them lied as fast as they could speak. Whether they had any kind of a part in a show or not, they wrote Working against their names in the register and claimed that they were only in school because there wasn’t a rehearsal that day. The first professional secret they learned was an insane optimism. Still, all children tell lies. But not all of them, if reproached, well up at once with unshed crystal tears, or strike their foreheads in self-reproach, like the prince in Swan Lake.

At least their names weren’t difficult to learn. They pressed them upon Hannah. That was Gianni, the school’s best dancer, faintly moustached at eleven years old, then Mattie leaning back with arms folded in the back row, one finger against his cheek, miming concentration, next to him a very small preoccupied boy who did not speak, but was indicated as Jonathan, then, as near to Gianni as possible, the terrifying Joybelle Morgan. Mattie, Gianni, and Joybelle, whose very curls seemed to tinkle like brass filings, should none of them have been in Hannah’s junior form, but they were used apparently to going unchecked from one shabby classroom to another. They wanted to see the new teacher. They were aching and sick with anxiety to show her what they could do. – I’m not a theatrical agent, she told them – I’m here to teach you conversational French. – We know French, Miss, said Gianni. All of them could produce a stream of words and intonations which sounded precisely like French, if meaning was not required. Give them half an hour, indeed, and they could imitate anything. Fortunately they were also able to imitate silence, or, rather, that impressive moment of stillness when a player knows he has carried the whole audience. Even for thirty seconds, which was all they could manage, the hush was welcome.

Otherwise they were in constant agitation. They were flexing their fragile toes and fingers, or trying out their unmarked faces. Mattie’s kid-glove features stretched into shapes of incomprehension and joy. He had to keep flexible, he said. Happy are those who can be sure that what they are doing at the moment is the most important thing on earth. That, surely, is a child’s privilege. Reality is his game. But what becomes of him if the game he is playing is work?

All they needed was to be noticed, and to be seen not to care whether they were noticed or not. In the lunch break Gianni was rattling about the lockers. He had a top-hat-and-cane class at two o’clock, now his hat was missing out of his locker, also his cane. ‘Robbery!’ he sang, dancing rapidly, for Hannah’s benefit, between the desks. He hoped before too long to start in Dombey & Son. His feet prattled and flashed in elaborate practice steps.

‘I can do all my pick-ups,’ he called, gyrating.

Joybelle appeared and remarked, quite automatically, that Gianni was a pick-up himself, only she’d been told he came expensive.

‘She can’t help talking double,’ Gianni explained. ‘Her parents are in the licensed trade, they have to drum up custom.’

Joybelle gave Hannah a smile, as between two understanding women. ‘I’m everything to my mother. She would have loved me to have a little sister.’

‘Called off by popular request,’ said Gianni.

Joybelle came close and leaned her brightly crisp head against Hannah’s breast.

‘When he heard my mother was carrying again my father got something to terminate it. He made mum swallow it out of a spoon. She showed me the spoon afterwards in case I had to come to court and swear to something. The metal had gone all black. It was black, Miss.’

Joybelle had little talent, and although she would not reach the age of ten for another few weeks, it was not difficult to predict her future. She had, as it turned out, concealed Gianni’s hat and cane in order to offer them to him later, because she wanted to feel like his slave maiden. Hannah called the afternoon class together and gave out some outline maps which she had brought with her, and on which the children were to fill in the capitals of Europe. She felt indignation come over her, because when they were bent down, with the round tops of their shining heads towards her, they looked like any other class.

Rightly or wrongly, she saw them at that moment as taking their place in the whole world’s history of squandered childhood, got rid of for fashion or convenience sake, worked into apathy, pressed into service as adults, or lost in some total loss, photographed as expendable and staring up with saucer eyes at the unstarved reporter. All that she managed to say to Carroll was that it might in some ways be a pity for the children to turn professional so young. He was mildly surprised, and reminded her that she had only taken the post, wasn’t that so, because she was fond of the theatre.

True for you, she thought, although she might have managed to suppress the fondness if her mother hadn’t suggested so often that she ought to do so. It was hard to explain, a matter perhaps of the senses. One of her younger sisters felt the same way about hospitals and had said that at the first breath of disinfected air she’d known she wanted to work there. Yes, the scent of Dettol had worked powerfully on Bridie. The convent, too, came at those with a vocation through its fragrance of furniture polish. In the same way Hannah felt native to the theatre, and yet she had never been backstage. She had only lingered outside and wondered in passing. It was all guesswork for her.

Her mother had phoned to ask about her new appointment. What sort of a place was it, a stage school sounded more like a half and half to her, and was this Miss Wentworth anything to the Wentworths of Ballymoyle whom her mother had known quite well as a girl, and if the school was privately run what kind of arrangements were being made about Hannah’s annual increment and pension, also were there any men at all on the staff, men teachers of course she meant, well, Carroll was a common enough name, he might be something to Mrs Carroll over at Mullen who had three sons two grown, one an undertaker one in the bank, but of course there was no need to settle anything in a hurry and she took it Hannah was only having a look round her before she got placed in a decent grammar school.

‘Pierce, do you know any undertakers?’ she asked him idly now. He began to deliberate. ‘Don’t worry, it was only my mother was on at me.’

After tea Carroll showed her down the stairs, indicating for the second time the worn portions of the carpet. ‘There’s one more thing I’d thought of saying to you, and that is that you have the real Northern Irish complexion. I think we really only see it at home, very radiant, very fair. I consider that it’s produced by the damp prevailing winds, and by the cold draughts inside the houses themselves. I hope it won’t disimprove over here.’

‘You must tell me if it does, Pierce. You must tell me the moment I start going to pieces.’

There was a possibility that he might smile at this, but Hannah felt she couldn’t spare the time to see whether he would or not. She left him standing in the dark hall, piled with other people’s letters, and took the bus back to the Temple School.

There was no need for her to go back, she was off at four-fifteen and the time was long past that. Indeed it was probably a mistake, and might give Freddie the notion that slave-driving encourages slavery. But Hannah wanted to put the next day’s work on the blackboard. This would mean that she needn’t turn her back on the class first thing, which is as unwise in junior teaching as in lion-taming.

She had to give up this idea, however, when she found the lights on, and Jonathan still occupying his dormouse space at his desk. Pale, unfathomable, and compact, he raised heavy blue-veined lids from bluer eyes to watch her. Mattie was also there, messing about with the switches.

‘You’re my teacher,’ Jonathan finally said.

‘That’s love,’ Mattie interrupted with peculiar eagerness. Hannah was about to reproach them both for insincerity, but after only a week she had learned how little the word meant here.

‘Jonathan’s a genius,’ Mattie went on. ‘He’d have been in Dombey before I was, only he was too short. He’s grown one and five-eighth inches this year, though.’

He pointed to a series of ink marks, perhaps measurements, on the wall. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, either of you,’ Hannah said. ‘Mattie, you ought to be getting down to the theatre.’

Both of them listened with keen attention.

‘What are you doin here, young Jonathan,’ said Mattie suddenly. ‘Why don’t you g’wan home?’

Hannah recognised immediately her own Belfast accent.

‘I’m just waitin, mister.’

‘And what are you waitin for, little man?’

‘I’m not waitin for annythin, mister, I’m just waitin.’

‘You have to be waitin for somethin I’m tellin you, what are you fuckin well doin then?’

‘I’m trainin to be a waiter.’

She was not self-conscious and never listened to herself, but surely if she did she wouldn’t sound like that, not as hard as that, not at all like that really.

‘Have we hurt your feelings?’ they asked, delighted.

‘I don’t want your pity,’ she said.

Mattie offered her a cigarette. ‘They’re American. I get given these things. They’re Peter Stuyvesants.’

Hannah did not correct his pronunciation of this word. Mattie took out his little silver lighter.

‘Jonathan isn’t really allowed to do imitations. They’re bad for his acting.’

‘You have your dialect classes,’ said Hannah coldly.

‘Ah, holy smoke, those same dialect classes is no good at all,’ cried Jonathan, ‘you want to see the lines she’s givin us, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph [falling inflection], is it a star you’re wanting to make of me, why I’m thinkin that if I crossed the ocean to Hollywood that does be in America by the time I got there I’d surely be drowned. Talk is it? In the length and breadth of the Old Country, Miss Graves, I’m asking you did you ever hear talk the like of that?’

‘I haven’t been over the length and breadth of Ireland,’ she said, ‘but I’ve certainly never heard anyone talk like that.’

Jonathan nodded serenely. ‘We’ll refuse to do it. We’ll tell her you said she was an old fraud.’

He broke away from Mattie, whose arm was round his neck, and without a single glance behind him, walked backwards out of the room.

‘He’s been practising that,’ Mattie remarked. ‘He’ll go on until he gets it right.’

‘Hasn’t he got it right now?’

‘Not that time, he wasn’t exactly in the middle of the doorway. I can do it, though, I’ll show you some time.’

‘Show me now and then go off home, I’ve had quite enough of you.’

‘No, not now.’

He pulled the door to, and began in a low confidential tone to explain everything. He had no parents alive, or, if he had, he didn’t know them and had never known them. He was run by an agent who had a place the other side of the Garden and there was a room of sorts there for him, this agent collected all his fees and paid the school and he didn’t know if anything was being put aside for him or not. He got one pound ten a week spending money, but the agent, well, anyone could call themselves that, kept putting it to Mattie that he could earn a sight more if he left the Temple and went in for commercials, that is, if he could fix himself up with some freckles. Hannah was given to understand that it was impossible to get work advertising cornflakes without freckles. But there was some stuff you could use to bring freckles on, Mattie said. It was like the stuff blacks used to use in New York in the days when they wanted to look lighter, only in reverse. You had to grease up and let it work through a bit here and there, like acid. They mustn’t be too regular, you wanted more across the nose. The pain screwed you up. Of course some people minded pain more than others. That was called your pain threshold. – Hannah asked how the freckles could be removed when no longer wanted. Mattie rolled up the white of his eyes and spread his hands out; no idea. His whole manner changed as he spoke; he sounded tired to death, close to the gutter.

‘Who looks after you when you get back, Mattie?’

‘What looking after, Miss?’

She had meant his dinner, of course, and his clothes, though he always looked as smart as a child could.

‘That’s part of the job, that’s all part of the agent’s put-on, Miss. He’s got a Hoffmann presser in the basement.’

Hannah would not ask what or who this was.

‘We have to go out looking okay,’ Mattie pursued, ‘I don’t know what he’d do to us if we didn’t go out looking okay.’ Perhaps a Hoffmann presser was an instrument of torture. ‘I’m really in his hands, you see, Miss. Until I get a bit older, I’m helpless.’

Hannah, feeling the tears of indignation rise, turned away to clean the blackboard. She wondered how Mattie had dared to let himself get into trouble at the Alexandra. All his freaks, and in particular his extravagant affection for Jonathan, were excusable from a waif. Something might be said to that effect. However, when she looked round he was gone.