Marking Time (47 page)

‘He’s very good as Richard,’ Griselda said. ‘And he tells wonderful stories. God, I’m hungry! I could eat absolutely anything!’

‘Will there be anything when we get back?’

‘I don’t know.’

They had to share three cabs home because it was so late. Poppy had left two plates of thick sandwiches filled with a choice of cheese and bloater paste, but Tsar Alexander had interfered with
the latter and nobody wanted the stodgy remnants he had left.

‘Annie should have taken him up to bed,’ Chris said; he was ravenous.

‘She did, but I’m afraid he came down again. It’s my fault, I should have left them in the larder, but I was afraid you might be even later and I’d be in bed and you
wouldn’t see them or know they were there.’

‘You could have left a note, Poppy. Never mind, girl. No tears, please – I’ve had enough of emotion for the day. Bring me up a little something in bed, there’s an
angel.’

In the end, most of them decided that they were more exhausted than hungry and dispersed, leaving Poppy trailing round the kitchen with a tin of corned beef and some water biscuits. ‘I
can’t use the bread or there won’t be enough for breakfast.’ She looked as tired as they did.

‘She doesn’t have a very nice life,’ Louise said while they were undressing quickly because of the cold.

‘No, and it’s rather unfair because she wants to be an actress too.’

‘Does she really? She doesn’t look as though she could act.’

‘Well, it’s an acting family. Her mother was apparently awfully good.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She died in a car accident some time ago. Not sure when. Lilli told me when she gave me a manicure.’ Griselda was trying not to bite her nails because Lilli, who was shocked by
this, had said that she must learn to care for them.

‘Perhaps I ought to help her. I’ve been taught cooking.’

‘I shouldn’t, if I was you. If you let them know you can, Chris’ll have you doing it all the time.’

This prospect was so awful that Louise resolved on selfish silence.

The day of the first night everybody slept late and they had an indeterminate meal in the middle of the day. In the afternoon, Louise got back into bed – the warmest place – and
settled down to write her letter to Michael.

‘Dear Mike – Darling Mike – dear Mike,’ she began, and then stopped. ‘Dear Mike’ looked cold, but on the other hand ‘Darling Mike’ looked
copy-cattish, for certainly she would never have dreamed of calling him darling at all if he had not done so first. In the end, she took a fresh piece of paper and left that part of it blank to be
put in at the end when she could see what sort of letter it turned out to be. ‘Thank you for your letter. It was sent on from home because the repertory company
has
happened; in
fact, tonight is our first First Night and we are all very nervous. We are doing scenes from Shakespeare and two scenes from a play by Gordon Daviot who is actually a woman.’ She went on in
that vein, telling him about the dress rehearsal and how bad she felt she’d been, but ending ‘Anyway, if one has wanted to do something all one’s life and now at long last is
doing it what more can one want? We live in a rather cold, bare house with not much to eat, but none of us minds because everybody is totally
dedicated
to their art and if you are that,
material things are of no account, don’t you think?’ (She thought that bit was rather good, but was afraid that he might find all the theatre part a bit dull.) ‘Yes, it was fun at
the weekend. I loved our ride and the charades and nobody has ever drawn me before. And your mother was very kind,’ she wrote carefully, because she couldn’t think of anything else to
call her. ‘I did write her a Collins – that’s what we call thank you letters for visits in our family because of Mr Collins.’ Then she wondered if he had read
Pride and
Prejudice
and added ‘Austen’ in brackets.

Then she put, ‘But of course you would know all that’ so that he wouldn’t be hurt at her thinking he didn’t know things. Then she read the letter through. It seemed to
her very dull. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a very interesting letter. I see what you mean about writing to somebody for the first time. You don’t quite know how well you know
them on paper.

‘I can’t really imagine life in a battleship. Uncle Rupert used to feel seasick for the first two days. It must be awful to have to fight feeling seasick, but I remember my governess
saying that Nelson often felt like that, although I cannot imagine why that should be a comfort to you. But I hope it’s not too bad. Anyway, love from Louise.’ Then she thought again
and wrote underneath: ‘P.S. I wasn’t really brave when the bomb fell. I just sat still because I didn’t know what else to do. Of course I’m glad you like my
appearance.’ Then she put ‘Dear Mike’. The Mike made ‘dear’ OK, she thought. She wrote his name, and the name of his ship, c/o GPO. It seemed a funny address, but that
is what he had put on the paper, so it must be all right.

The First Night came – and went. Stella sent her a telegram which was lovely of her, because all the others got telegrams from their family except for her. ‘The house’ as she
had learned to call it, was only half full, but that didn’t matter to her; they were a real live audience who had paid to come, and that was the point. Jay kissed her again in the wings while
she was waiting to go on. ‘There, my honey,’ he said, ‘a stirrup cup of affection or lust – take your choice.’ Roy was beautifully reliable and some of the time she
pretended he was Jay which made him feel more interesting. She remembered what she’d thought about Jane’s performance as Katherina, and put the sadness in a bit. It was lovely curtsying
in the sweeping red velvet when she took her curtain call. Afterwards Chris came round and gave her a smacking kiss on each cheek and pressed her to his hard, round tummy and said,
‘That’s my girl! You did well, Louise. You’ll do better, but you did well.’

They all went home on the last bus, and then sat round the kitchen table going over all the details of their performances, and finally fell into their beds. The next morning, Louise found
brownish greasepaint on her pillow which made her wonder whether Trex was the best thing.

They played four evenings and four matinées to schools – the latter were rather a noisy audience, but at least they filled up the house – whereas the evenings, for the general
public, were not very well attended. The local paper reviewed the scenes, and every single person in them was mentioned. The piece was not signed, and although it was clear that Chris knew who had
written it, he refused to tell them anything except that it had not been him. Still, to read ‘Louise Cazalet gave us two well-contrasted performances as Katherina and Anne’ was rather
exciting. She bought two copies, one to send home and one to keep in a scrapbook together with the programme.

As soon as the Shakespeare week was over, the next two plays were announced by Chris. They were to do
Hay Fever
and
Night Must Fall
. The reason that he announced both plays was
that even with the girls doubling on the female parts there were not enough parts for all of them to be in both plays. Louise, to her disappointment, was cast as Sorrel in
Hay Fever
, the
ingénue and, she thought, the dullest part, and not cast at all in
Night Must Fall. Hay Fever
was to be performed at Christmas and, after it, Chris said that she might go home for a
couple of weeks if she liked. She did not want to go, had a fear that they might not let her come back if she did. But then she got another letter from Mike – his third – saying that he
was getting a week’s leave while his ship was undergoing a refit and was there the slightest possibility that she could spend at least some of it with him? If not, he would try to get down
for a night to Devon to see her.

She wrote back saying that she would come to Markham Square on that Friday and that she could be away for a week. The bit about his wondering whether she was in love she did not answer, because
she didn’t know what she felt – either about him, or about Jay, who had taken to coming into their room when Griselda was not there, lying on the bed beside her and reading poetry to
her. She enjoyed this and when the poetry subsided into his kissing her and stroking and kissing her breasts she discovered a sort of enjoyment in that too, but not of the kind that she had
expected. She had thought that by the time somebody kissed you, you were certainly, surely, in love with them. But the blissful rhapsody that she had so often read about escaped her. She liked Jay
– was a little afraid of him, of his soft, satirical voice, his sophisticated vocabulary, his pale, appraising eyes. But he could be very gentle with her, and when she was not afraid, the
bottom of her spine seemed to unfurl as though it was not rigid at all; it seemed to have small, hitherto unknown fronds attached to it. But her body did not seem to connect with any of the rest of
her. She could shut her eyes and Jay became anybody, any fingers, hands, mouth. ‘Do you love me, then?’ she asked one evening.

There was a pause. She was lying on her back, and he propped himself on his elbows to look down on her. ‘That, my dear girl, is a ridiculous question. How would you like it if I asked you
that?’

‘I shouldn’t mind.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t. At least you don’t pretend. You’re not full of all that romantic sentimental nonsense. I find you attractive, which I expect
you’ve noticed by now. If you weren’t such a confirmed and utter little virgin I’d have you.’

‘
Have
me?’

‘Fuck you. But I have a feeling,’ he added after waiting for a reply, ‘that this would either horrify you, or produce a sonorous response that wouldn’t suit me. So I
don’t try.’ He picked up Geoffrey Grigson’s
New Verse
and continued to read:

and so on until the last verse:

Without saying anything, he riffled through the book and went on:

He shut the book and looked at her again.

‘You see? If you want to know what’s going
on
in the world, read the contemporary poets.
They
know.’

‘Were those poems by the same person?’

‘No. The first was by Louis MacNeice, and the second by W. H. Auden. Both people you should have heard of, but I don’t suppose you have.’

She shook her head, so disconsolately that he stroked it.

‘Cheer up. Here’s something to cheer you up.’

Then he read in a voice rather like the one he had used for the parrot story:

‘Do
you
soap your pretty breasts in the bath? Your pretty dukkys, as Henry VIII used to call them?’

‘It wouldn’t matter if I did,’ she said. ‘There isn’t room in this bathroom for a cupboard.’ The things that he knew fascinated her. ‘I wish I knew
more,’ she said. ‘The world seems to be full of things I don’t know.’

‘I’ll make you a list of poets if you like. That would make a respectable start.’

He did. But sometimes she didn’t see him alone for days. This was partly because he spent time with Ernestine, the oldest girl there, whom none of the other girls liked but whom everyone
was slightly afraid of. Ernestine had a room to herself on the ground floor. It had a fireplace in which she had a coal fire which meant she had the only warm room. She possessed a wardrobe of
glamorous clothes, and painted her long fingernails with white varnish. She was small, with beautiful legs and a good figure, but her face looked much older than the twenty-five that she claimed to
be. She wore her long dark brown hair in a kind of sausage fringe across her forehead, and the rest of it hanging down her back, and her long thin mouth was always painted with a cyclamen lipstick.
She had a loud, grating voice which was largely used to jeer at things: society, the class system, the English – she said she was half French – the rich, anybody whose work did not
involve the arts, virginity which she described variously as prissy and craven. She had lived in Chelsea before, and said it was the only civilised haven in the great inhibited, class-ridden tract
that made up the rest of London. She had very little talent, but was convinced of her potential greatness. Chris allowed her a lot of leeway; some people thought he actually sucked up to her, and
certainly he gave her privileges, like the room, which the others did not get. She was always talking about her lovers – notably one Torsten, a Norwegian, whom she said was the best she had
ever had. People listened politely when they had to, chiefly at meals, but avoided her when possible. It was thought that she was paying more than anyone else to be there, and that Chris needed the
money. She had clearly decided that Jay was the only man there worth her attention, and made it plain to Louise that she resented her. Somehow she had got wind of the letters from HM Ships –
being on the ground floor she could always go through the letters before anyone else – and sneered a good deal at Louise about her sailor man. ‘They say all the nice girls love a
sailor, but all I can say is that I’m not a nice girl, thank God. Louise must be a
very
nice girl, don’t you think?’ this to Jay.