Dancers in Mourning (2 page)

Her success in the days after the war when modern underclothes had reached an uninteresting minimum was considerable and her turn had borrowed an added glamour by the gossip which surrounded her private life.

In those days promiscuity had still the remnants of novelty and her affairs were eagerly discussed, but today, when the weary business of polyandry was arriving at the end of its melancholy cul-de-sac, her reputation, when it was remembered at all, detracted from rather than enhanced her appeal.

So, too, the return of underclothes in shop windows and on the familiar bodies of wives and sisters destroyed the attraction of the original idea, and tonight there was no murmur of tolerant protest as petticoat after petticoat dropped to the ground.

‘Highbrow?' murmured Mr Campion, harking back to his host's earlier criticism.

‘Historical,' explained Mr Faraday briefly. ‘Don't see why he put her in. Nothin' to do with the book. They tell me she used to draw. Won't sell a seat now.'

Looking at her, Campion was inclined to agree with him. The audience, thoroughly warmed and friendly, was kind, but it was obvious that its mood was anticipatory and it only awaited the return of Sutane and Slippers in their Round the World in a Four-in-Hand number, to the tune which Mercer had written one afternoon while Jimmy talked to him and which was now all over two continents.

‘Don't like the woman,' Mr Faraday murmured. ‘Might have thought she was at the bottom of it if she hadn't only just come back to England. Look at her – fifty if a day.'

With his eyes on the dark vivacious figure on the stage Campion reflected that he was wrong. Chloe Pye was forty-two and in excellent physical trim. It was her mind, not her body, that was so hopelessly
vieux jeu
.

His companion touched his arm.

‘Come behind,' he whispered gustily. ‘Can't stand this. Shouldn't say so, of course. Want your help, my boy. Relyin' on you. Come along.'

The Argosy was an old theatre and true to its type its backstage accommodation had never received any serious thought. Campion edged through a door which inconvenienced him in height almost as much as it incommoded Mr Faraday in width, risked his neck by climbing down an iron staircase with a wobble, and came out into a corridor which looked and smelled like one of the less frequently used passages in a riverside tube station.

Mr Faraday glanced over his shoulder, his eyes brightening.

‘Used to come here to see Connie. Before your time,' he murmured. ‘Pretty little woman. Must be old now.' He sighed and added with a shy confiding which was almost the whole of his charm, ‘Still gives me a thrill, you know, this sort of thing.
Vie de bohème
, lights, far-off music, smell of the greasepaint, women and so on.'

Fortunately Mr Campion, who was somewhat at a loss, was spared the necessity of comment. One of the doors a little higher up the corridor burst open and a golden-haired young man in exquisite evening clothes appeared wheeling a silver-plated racing bicycle. He was very angry and the expression upon his face, which was a little too beautiful to be altogether pleasant, was sulky and absurd.

‘It's all very well for you to behave revoltingly, Richards, but I can bring my bicycle where I like,' he said over his shoulder. ‘You know it as well as anybody.'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Konrad.' A harassed uniformed man with weary eyes and an untidy moustache came out of the door. ‘Mr Webb told me himself to see nothing of the sort come into the theatre. There's not enough room for the artists, let alone you bringing in bicycles.'

‘But Miss Bellew brings in her Great Dane.' The young man gripped his machine with something approaching ferocity, but the doorkeeper spoke with the obstinacy of old authority.

‘Miss Bellew is a principal,' he said heavily.

The boy with the bicycle stiffened as the colour rose slowly over his face into the roots of his curling golden hair. For an embarrassing moment it seemed as if he were about to cry.

‘This bicycle was presented to me by my admirers,' he said. ‘Why should I let pure jealousy on the part of some people –' he shot a waspish glance back through the doorways, presumably at some third person within, ‘– prevent me from showing it to anyone I like? You're making a fool of yourself. I shall certainly speak to Jimmy himself about it. Why don't you keep your eye on the important things that keep happening?'

There was defiance in the last words, as though the speaker deliberately touched on a tabooed subject. A spot of colour appeared in the doorkeeper's grey cheeks and he glanced behind him. Seeing Campion, he started forward angrily, only to fall back reassured at the sight of Mr Faraday, to whom he nodded. Shaken but still obdurate, he returned to the job in hand.

‘Now, Mr Konrad,' he began, laying a heavy hand on the glittering machine, ‘we'll have this outside, if you please.'

The boy with the golden hair relinquished it to him with a contemptuous shrug of his graceful shoulders.

‘Oh, it's Uncle William,' he said. ‘Do look here and see what the Speedo Club has insisted on sending me. Isn't it too absurd?'

Mr Faraday coughed noisily. ‘Magnificent,' he said fiercely and gripping Campion's arm, he propelled him firmly down the corridor. ‘I hate those fellers,' he muttered in an all too audible undertone. ‘Called me Uncle William – did you hear him? – impudent little tick! Don't mind it from my friends – rather like it. Used to it. Notice you've dropped it. Don't hesitate, my dear feller. But a worm like that … turns my stomach over, don't mind tellin' you. Golden curls …! Come on, we'll slip into the wings. Know my way about by this time. Want you to see Slippers. Nice girl. No damned nonsense about her. No sex appeal off, though,' he added regretfully and coughed again, as if he feared he had betrayed himself.

The Round the World in a Four-in-Hand number was at its height as they approached. Over Mr Faraday's shoulder Campion caught a glimpse of the two figures, so familiar to the fashionable audiences of both continents. Slippers Bellew was a pale gold flame flickering over a twilit stage, while beside her moved Sutane, faithful as a shadow, and contriving by his very sympathy of movement to convey the mute adoration which the song demanded of him and which was so great a part of his appeal.

The roar of the audience at the end was tremendous. The harsh sound swept in on them like a great hot breath, and they stepped back through the crowd of girls and small-part folk coming down for the Little White Petticoats finale.

The excitement which is never wholly absent from the theatre, even on the three hundredth night, forced itself upon Campion and he, too, was aware of the power of the Sutane personality which dominated the house, both before and behind the curtain. He tried to analyse it as he followed Uncle William to the dressing-room. There was grace and skill personified in the man, but that alone was not sufficient to make so deep an appeal. It was the sophisticated, amused but utterly discontented intelligence which constituted the real attraction, he decided, an ease and dignity which was yet emotionally unsatisfied – the old pull of the hero in love, in fact.

His companion was still talking.

‘Wait for him in here,' he remarked, tapping at a door with a One on it. ‘Wants to see you. Promised I'd bring you along.'

They were admitted to a large room, overlit to the point of discomfort, by a stolid young man in a white coat and spectacles with very thick pebbles.

‘Come in, sir. Glad to see you,' he said, conducting the elder man to an arm-chair beside the dressing-table.

Uncle William grunted gratefully and sat down.

‘This is Henry, Campion,' he said with a wave of a pudgy hand. ‘Good feller, Henry.'

The young man beamed and set a chair for the other guest. He managed to convey at once that he was not at all sure if he was behaving like a first-class manservant, but thought that there was a very good chance that he was.

‘A nice drop of whisky, sir?' he ventured hopefully.

Uncle William looked interested. ‘Good idea,' he said consideringly and Henry coloured as if he had received a compliment.

While the decanter was forthcoming Campion had leisure to observe the room, which displayed three different influences in sharp contrast. There was the florid taste of the original furnisher, which ran to turkey carpet and a day-bed with gilded legs; the somewhat militaristic neatness and a feeling for gadgets as expressed by the bar concealed in an old gramophone cabinet, which was obviously Henry's contribution; and something else, not so easy to define. Apart from a mass of papers, photographs and telegrams mostly, there were several odd indications of Jimmy Sutane's personal interests. Two or three cheap mechanical toys lay upon the dressing-table beside a box of liquorice allsorts and a bunch of white flowers, while on a shelf in the corner sat a very nice white Ho-Tei and a tear-off calendar, complete with an astrological forecast for each day of the year.

Uncle William sat back in his chair, the bright lights glinting on the double row of near-white curls at the nape of his plump pink neck. He looked worldly and benign, and somehow bogus, with his watery blue eyes serious and his expression unwontedly important.

‘Well,' he demanded, ‘anythin' new?'

Henry paused in the act of laying out a suit but did not turn round.

‘It just seems funny to me, sir,' he said sulkily. ‘Miss Finbrough may take it seriously but I don't.'

‘Miss Finbrough, eh?' Uncle William cleared his throat. ‘Things have to be pretty bad for her to get the wind up, I should think.'

‘You'd say so, sir.' Henry was deliberately non-committal and still did not turn round.

The elder man was silent for a moment or so.

‘May be nothin' in it,' he said at last.

Henry swung round, his face red and unhappy.

‘Theatrical people aren't like ordinary people, sir,' he burst out, blushing with shame at his own disloyalty. ‘I'm new to it and I notice it. They're
theatrical
. Things mean more to them than they would to you or me, little things do. There's not a nicer gentleman than Mr Sutane anywhere; no one's denying that. But he's been in the theatre all his life and he hasn't been about like an ordinary person. Suppose little things do happen now and again? … aren't they always happening? Being in the theatre is like living in a little tiny village where everybody's looking at everyone else and wondering what they're going to be up to next. It's small, that's what it is. And Miss Finbrough …' he broke off abruptly. Someone turned the door-handle with a rattle and Jimmy Sutane came in.

He stood for a moment smiling at them and Campion was aware of that odd quality of over-emphasis which there is about all very strong personalities seen close to for the first time. Confronted suddenly, at a distance of a couple of yards, Sutane presented a larger-than-life edition of his stage self. The lines of his famous smile were etched more deeply into his face than seemed possible in one so thin and the heavy-lidded eyes beneath the great dome of a forehead were desperately weary rather than merely tired.

‘Hallo, Uncle,' he said. ‘This is Mr Campion? Awfully good of you to come along. God, I'm exhausted! Henry, give me a drink. 'Fraid it's got to be milk, damn it.'

The pleasant boyish voice was unexpectedly resonant, and as he closed the door and came into the room the place seemed to have become smaller and the walls more solid.

While Henry brought a glass of milk from the bar cupboard and assisted him out of his clothes and into a dressing-gown there was a constant stream of interruptions. Excitable dinner-jacketed figures put their heads in, apologised, and disappeared. More notes and telegrams arrived and the phone bell clamoured incessantly.

Campion sat back in his chair in the corner and watched. After the urbanity of his greeting Sutane seemed to have forgotten his guests. There was a nervous tension, a suppressed excitability about him, which had not been noticeable on the stage. He looked harassed and the nervous force which exuded from him like vibrations from a dynamo was not directed at any one thing, but escaped abortively, creating an atmosphere which was uneasy and disquieting.

A minor climax came when he turned on an unsuspecting newcomer who was pushing the door timidly open and sent him scuttling off with a passionate protest.

‘For God's sake, Eddie! – give me ten minutes …'

The explosion embarrassed him and he grimaced at Campion, his temporary audience.

‘I'm going to pieces,' he said. ‘Henry, get on the other side of that door and put your back against it. Tell them I'm saying my prayers. Unhook the phone before you go.'

As the door closed behind the obedient dresser he turned to Campion.

‘Come down tomorrow, can you? I've got conferences and things about this
Swing Over
show for the Orient, but Sunday is more of a breather than any other day. I don't know what you'll think of it all. Something's going on; I know that. This fat ass here says I've got persecution mania … my hat, I wish I had!'