Ha'penny (26 page)

I sighed. I remembered Lady Mary when she was a pudgy five-year-old bridesmaid at Tess’s wedding. “It doesn’t matter what I wear, I can’t possibly compete. Siddy’s got a new Molyneux. Every woman there will have dresses made especially for them, from this year’s Paris collections, or by the court couturiers here in London. I can’t buy something today or tomorrow that wouldn’t look like cheap trash by comparison, no matter what I spend. With people like that, you’ve lost if you try to copy them. I may as well wear a three-year-old good dress as a new bad one. At least this way they might think I simply get terribly fond of my old clothes.”

Mollie didn’t laugh.

“It’s not as if I’m trying to meet someone,” I said.

“I wish you would. I think Devlin has bewitched you or something. I’ve never seen you like this about a man.”

“Again!” Antony called. “And this time, Viola, as you thrust, put your left hand on the edge of the arras and give it a little push leftwards.”

I went through the motions again, and this time the arras, which was on casters, went sailing off into the wings. I corpsed, and so did Tim.

“A little push, I said, not a great shove!” Antony screamed.

I went back to the bed as the stagehands started fussing with the arras again. “Devlin—” I started.

“Never mind Devlin,” Mollie said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re ga-ga over him and that’s the end of it. But I’ve thought what to do about clothes. You could wear your first act costume. It was made for you. And while it isn’t in fashion, it isn’t out of it either, it’s timelessly Elizabethan. And I know it’s finished, because I saw you trying it on.”

My first act costume was a dark blue velvet gown trimmed with gold, high necked—all my Hamlet clothes were high necked—close fitting and embroidered to the waist, then flaring out below to give me room to do all the things I had to do. The only time I wore doublet and hose was at the end, because even Antony could see that I couldn’t fence in a skirt. “It would look awfully odd,” I said. It was a rich dark blue and this year’s colors were all beiges and pastels.

“It would advertise the play,” Mollie said. “It would remind people you’re Viola Lark, not just the Larkin sister who acts.”

“That’s true,” I said, struck by the thought. “I’ll have to ask Antony if I can take it out.”

Antony was raving at the arras.

“Catch him at a good moment and he’ll see how it’s almost as good for the play as Hitler coming,” Mollie said.

I went down to look at the dress when Antony gave us a ten-minute. It didn’t look quite as good close up as it would from front-of-house, but then it wasn’t meant to. It looked like a costume. I stroked the sleeve. It was cheap stuff, dyed too brightly, it wouldn’t wear. Still, it didn’t need to. There hadn’t been a play since the war that had run more than a year. Besides, I reminded myself, this play wasn’t going to run at all. The dress might as well get an airing. I went to find Antony.

Nothing else happened that day but a lot more rehearsing. I spent the night with Devlin, as usual, but we didn’t talk much. On Tuesday morning I had my hair trimmed and marcelled into the Mollie-lookalike cut. I almost didn’t recognize my face without my hair flying everywhere. I wondered as I looked at the mirror whether I’d have been happier with a wig, but it was too late. Antony loved it, anyway. When I got to the theater he said admiring things about the shapes of my earlobes.

I left Mollie at the theater at half-past five in order to be dressed and ready for the reception at seven. I didn’t go back to Devlin’s for once; he’d agreed I could dress at my own flat. I had a bath, with rose petals in the water—the last of Antony’s roses. I enjoyed the luxury of soaking with them. Then I was worried that I’d have unsettled my hair, but they’d clearly put enough of the marcel stuff on to lacquer it to my head; hardly a hair had loosened.

Mrs. Tring was there when I came out of the bathroom. She came out of the kitchen when she saw me, a dishcloth in her hand. “I hope you don’t want dinner,” she said. “It’s chops, and chops don’t stretch.”

“I remember when you stretched one chop into a meal for four,” I said.

“That was a chop and some bacon, and pies take time, in case you didn’t know.”

I laughed. “I don’t want dinner anyway, there’s bound to be food at this stupid reception I’m going to.”

“Is that why you’ve done that to your hair?”

“No, that’s for the part. It’s supposed to look like Mollie’s. You’ll see when you see us together, or at the worst at the dress rehearsal.”

“Not a bit like Mollie’s if you ask me. And she has those streaks in it. Be going gray soon enough, I said to her, no need to bring it on sooner. Wigs were good enough in my day, or finding someone who has gray hair natural.”

“Will you help me on with my dress now?” I asked. “After I’ve done my face that is.”

“I’ll do your face too if you like,” she said, going back into the kitchen and coming out empty-handed. “You never remember how light you have to keep it when it’s not for the stage. How do you want it? Debutante?”

I sat down in front of the mirror in my bedroom, still wrapped in my towel, and she stood behind me. It was like every dressing room we’d ever been in. “Not debutante,” I said to her reflection. “As if I was going to be on a magazine cover over the title ‘Glamorous Viola Lark Stars in
Hamlet
This Month at the Siddons.’ ”

“You should be so lucky,” Mrs. Tring said, and in about ten minutes transformed my face into exactly what I’d wanted. I looked ten years younger. “For the part, we’ll have you paler, but for this ball you’d do better with some color.” She dabbed low down on my cheeks, and then higher, bringing out the angles. “What are you wearing?”

“My act one dress,” I said. She’d seen it already on the bed, not to mention at the theater when we did the dress parade on Saturday.

She pursed her lips. “Well, that’ll certainly show. Touch of violet on your lids then, bring out the blue.” I obediently shut my eyes. “And since your ears are showing, how about those pearl drops your auntie the Marchioness gave you?”

“She’s my mother’s cousin, not my aunt,” I said, as Mrs. Tring clipped them on. They hurt, and I knew the pressure would be agonizing by the end of the evening. “Dress,” I said, looking critically at my face.

“Perfume first,” Mrs. Tring reminded me. “Then I must get back to my chops, Mollie will be home soon and expecting dinner ready.”

The reception started at seven, so I timed my arrival for half-past. The German Embassy was in Carlton House Terrace, by Pall Mall. It’s strange how many Londons there are and how they overlap in some places but not at all in others. There’s the debutante London, which is mostly Mayfair and Knightsbridge, in which the embassies and Pall Mall are included. Then there’s theater London, which overlaps at the West End, but only there, and which includes bedsits and fix-ups in Muswell Hill and Clapham that I once hadn’t known existed. There’s financial London, around St. Paul’s and the City. There’s the London of the swarming poor, still almost Dickensian. All of these pass each other in some streets, rub shoulders in others, and leave certain areas untouched. I had lived for a year in debutante London, intriguing for invitations to parties only to pronounce them awful squeezes once I was there. Now I lived in theater London and Pall Mall was so firmly set within debutante London I hadn’t been near it for years.

When the taxi drew up at the Embassy I was surprised. The outside looked like a pair of restrained Regency frontages, hung about with swastika flags and guarded by storm troopers, but much less intimidating than I had been expecting. Inside was completely different. Clearly the entire building had been made over by some mad devotee of monumental Bauhaus. I gave my name at the door, and yielded up my invitation. A storm trooper searched my bag, finding nothing but makeup, a hairbrush, and a little purse with taxi money. He was polite but thorough. There would have been no smuggling a bomb in here.

After that I was taken up a line of heel-clicking, saluting, hand-kissing Germans until I finally reached the pinnacle at the top of the stairs and was introduced to Herr Hitler himself. He had very intense blue eyes that seemed almost mesmeric. I had seen hundreds of photographs of him, of course, but none of them captured that charismatic quality he had in person. He didn’t have the arrogance of most of the Germans I had met, Captain Keiler quite definitely included. He had a kind of humility that was quite charming. I instinctively liked him.

He didn’t speak English, but Herr Schnell stood next to him ready to translate. “The Fuhrer says, another of the beautiful Larkin sisters,” he said. “But he wants to know, why do you call yourself Lark?”

“Because I am an actress,” I said, and Schnell translated.

“What is a lark?” Hitler asked and Schnell passed the question on to me.

“A bird,” I said.

Schnell frowned. “What bird?”

“I don’t know the German name, but in French it is
alouetta.
”

He translated this. “Why is it that in England all the pretty girls learn French and not German?” was the response to this.

“When I was young they learned French, but they learn German these days,” I said. This wasn’t entirely true. It’s true that they learn German now, but my own French was pretty minimal, barely enough for shopping. I only knew a lark was
alouetta
because of the song, which Pappa used to sing. I think he’d learned it in the trenches.

“You are still young,” the Fuhrer said, gallantly. “I look forward to seeing you act.”

“Even though you won’t understand a word of it?” I asked.

“I know the play. And besides, Shakespeare transcends language.” While Schnell translated this, the Fuhrer took up position as if cradling a skull, and said, quite distinctly in English, “Alas, poor Yorick.”

“I hope you enjoy it,” I said.

“We will speak again at the theater afterwards,” the Fuhrer said, and as he translated this Herr Schnell signaled to me to pass on.

That’s all the conversation I ever had with Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of Europe, and it really couldn’t have been more trivial.

I went on, down a flight of stairs. At the bottom was Pip, acting hostess. Her hair was marcel waved like mine, but with gray streaks like Mollie’s, only in her case they were natural. She was wearing a floating apricot dress in several layers. “My God, Fats, you do look different,” she greeted me.

“It’s my act one costume for Hamlet,” I said.

She laughed. “Well drift on. I’ll come and find you in a bit. I have to do my hostess duties for a little while yet.”

“Don’t you find it a terrible bore?”

“Not in the least. The Fuhrer isn’t married you know, so Magda Goebbels and I take it in turns to do the formal entertaining for him. But he moves us around all the time, it’s his incentive system, and I’ve been stuck in Prague for the last year.”

“Siddy tells me you’re practically the queen of Czechoslovakia,” I said.

“Well, being first alone in Prague is nothing like as good as sharing first place in Berlin. Or London, for that matter. I’m hoping to use this trip to get Heinie back to Berlin in the next rotation.” Pip smiled at a stranger coming down the stairs. “Go on. I’m dying to have a proper chinnie with you, but I can’t now. I’ll find you in the crush as soon as I’m free.”

Siddy was dancing with Captain Keiler. She’d had her hair done too, trimmed sharply along her jaw. It made her look more catlike than ever when she looked at me sideways. I wondered if she’d brought Loy. I took a glass of hock from a passing waiter and stood against the wall. There were people there I knew, from years ago, but nobody I wanted to talk to. I wanted to talk to Pip, to have a chinnie as she put it in our old term, meaning a chin-wag, a cozy chat. I knew she’d be hours yet standing welcoming people. I drank my hock. I saw the man from the Foreign Office who had come to the theater spot me from across the room and make his way towards me.

“You look most striking, Miss Lark,” he said.

“It’s my costume from act one,” I said. I could see I was going to be saying it a lot.

“How original of you,” he said.

“Well, when it comes to it, I’d much rather be here in costume as an actor than as a poor relation in a three-year-old dress,” I confided.

He smiled. I saw that he was drunk already. “Ah, but we’re all poor relations here, all of us English. Don’t you feel it? The real centers of culture and economics are on the Continent, and we know it. The Empire’s a fading dream, it has been all this century. The countries of the future are Germany and Russia, where they’re prepared to try new things. We only copy them.”

“America?” I asked, to be perverse.

“If they could ever pull themselves out of their series of depressions they might make something of themselves,” he said. “But no, it’s the countries of the Continent we need to look to, the Reich and the Soviets. They’re the ones we have to choose to steer our star.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said, and carefully didn’t ask him which of those two titans he favored. If he was Siddy’s little man at the FO, then it would be Russia. I didn’t care and I didn’t want to know. To my astonishment, I caught sight of Dodo by the buffet, swathed in beige lace and looking like a hippo. “Excuse me, I must go and talk to my sister,” I said.

“She’s dancing,” the FO man said.

“My other sister,” I said, confusing him utterly.

I loaded a plate with lobster mayonnaise and vol-au-vents. There was sauerkraut, but nobody seemed to be taking it. Dodo saw me and grinned and we ducked into a corner with our loaded plates. “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“Well, I thought I was here to talk to Pip, but it seems that actually some German scientists want desperately to talk to Walter about atoms. Heinie kept on about it at dinner. They want us to go to Germany and for Walter to work on atoms for them. You know I don’t understand his work, though I was frightfully proud when he made that discovery and got all the attention.”

“Are you going to go?” I asked.

“Walter’s been stalling so far,” she said. “I think he’d like to, really, to have the funding for research Heinie was promising. But we have to think about whether it’s the best thing for the children. I suppose I can paint anywhere, it might even be good for my painting to see new places, but I am so very fond of the English landscape. I think I might feel exiled from my roots if I lived there and tried to paint it. I never really enjoy holidays abroad. Then I’d be near Pip, of course, but so far away from all the rest of you—and I don’t think I’d fit into society in the Reich, I don’t fancy queening it the way Pip does, I’m more of a home and children kind. Of course, that’s what they’re supposed to be for isn’t it,
kinder
and
kush
and all that, but then there’s the painting. And another thing, I don’t speak German and I’ve always been hopeless with foreign languages.”