MASQUES OF SATAN (38 page)

‘Sell them, do you, you little beggar? Ask Mort before he drives you back. He’s got all the pictures and he signs them for me, too. Does my autograph better than I do. Now bugger off, the pair of you. I want some shut-eye.’ And he winks mysteriously.

I smile at Roxanne who smiles back at me, but I notice that she also smiles, and perhaps longer, at Sarson.

We bought sweets and comics in the town, and played the fruit machines that glittered and clattered in the arcades along the Seabourne front, all activities expressly banned by Russell Court. Soon, though, time was tugging at our sleeves, reminding us to return to school, and anyway the forbidden fruit machines had lost their savour. Sarson bought a packet of cigarettes, but having smoked half of one — I took a puff — and felt very sick, he threw it off the end of the pier.

We thought of looking in on Rex in his suite and thanking him, but Sarson wisely decided against it, so we made our way to the top floor of the Metropole, room six hundred and something, to seek out Mort so that he could take us back in the Rolls.

His door is open, and I can see him sitting with his back to us, reading. The odd thing that strikes me now is that he is wearing his cap. In fact I never saw him bareheaded, without his cap on. No, there was one occasion. I’ll come to that later.

The room is small. There is a bed, a wardrobe, a wash hand basin, and the chair in which he sits. A dormer window permits a glimpse of sky with a pale grey stain of sea below it. I notice the strange, sinewy column of Mort’s neck, the dry, dull, sandy hairs sticking out from under his cap, and the book, an American paperback with a lurid cover. The title is
Hot Dames on Cold Slabs
. Sarson asks for some signed photos, which he gets from a drawer in the wardrobe and signs according to instructions, as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do. He drives us back to Russell Court.

There is little else that I remember about that occasion except that Sarson was Scipio’d for being found in possession of a comic,
The Beano
, I think it was. I never much liked children’s comics, even though I read them greedily if they came my way. I hate the way they portray children not as real boys and girls, but as malignant demons.

II

In the Summer Holidays, I am invited to stay for three weeks with Sarson in Seabourne. He was at the Metropole with his Uncle Rex and I was to share a room with him. My mother cannot understand my reluctance, but I sense that this is what she wants, so I give in. She promises to come and join me at the end of the three weeks.

I think I have to mention one thing she asked me to do, because it seems odd. She asked me to continue to go to church on Sundays in Seabourne. It is true that we go to church every Sunday in London, but I have never quite understood my mother’s insistence on the practice. Apart from these attendances she never showed any sign of piety or interest in doctrine. Perhaps it has something to do with my father, but I have forgotten.

Having gone out together with Rex in the Summer term, Sarson and I maintained cordial relations, but we did not get any closer. There was something in his smiling, scheming nature which either prevented intimacy, or warned of its dangers. I did not look forward to being so close to him, but the world of Rex Raymond had captivated me and held out a prize for my tolerance of Sarson. The question that I did not ask till later, too late, is why Rex wants us there.

Sarson and Mort are there to meet me at Seabourne station with the Rolls. I do not know what to say to Sarson, but that is all right, because he chatters all the way back to the Metropole. He tells me about the dog track that Rex took him to last night, and how he won five pounds. He is full of repressed excitement, and I am sure that it not simply the dog racing. I notice that his voice is beginning to crack; mine is still a treble.

I’ll give you the memories that come to me. They are clear, but mostly they have no date. The first night there we go to see the show — I’ll come to that later. But I remember the first night that Sarson and I share a room together. We are talking a long time about the show and everything, in whispers, though there is no danger of anyone overhearing. I fall asleep. The window is open and we can faintly hear the waves scratching the shingle beach. I fall asleep and then I am awake. A weight is on top of me. I look up and find I am staring into the face of Sarson two inches away from mine. He is lying on top of me, naked and smiling, that much I can see in the dim light. I think he senses my alarm, because all he does is to say, ‘Ha!ha!ha!’ in a conspiratorial, whispery sort of voice and slide off me.

I don’t know what to make of it all, but I know I have entered a new and strange world. It is frightening and exciting in about equal measures. Nothing is said about this incident in the morning. We have breakfast in the dining room with Rex, and discuss the show.

That is very clear in my mind, because I saw it many times. It became an obsession with me, and with Sarson too, but I think for different reasons.

Oddly enough Rex’s act was the one I remember least clearly. He occupies much of the second half of the performance, with the first half being taken up with what he, but nobody else, calls his ‘support act..’ It is smooth and accomplished and, most importantly, rapturously received. I imagine that he must be on the pinnacle of happiness, but this is not the case. He is suspicious and insecure. He is troubled that there are others waiting to take his place, to depose Rex, the king.

I think he is wrong. He has a record player in his suite and he is always playing records, his own and other people’s, and restlessly comparing them. I remember he played me some records of a new man who is becoming all the rage in America. Priestly, I think his name was. Rex thought a lot of him, but I didn’t. Negro muck if you ask me — why are you looking at me like that? But he wasn’t a black, apparently. Rex thinks this new type of music will sweep aside what he is doing. I doubt it. It might have been big in the States for a while but would never have caught on in England. I wonder what happened to Mr Priestly. Do you know? He could still be alive, I suppose.

For me, the part of his show I love best is the dancers. This is mainly because of Roxanne, who is becoming a friend. But to me, the Dave Dixon Dancers are the essence of theatrical glamour. After the overture the red velvet curtains of the theatre womb part, and your vision is filled with light. Into them comes this line of girls, all moving and sparkling in unison. They and their ever changing costumes are the punctuation marks of the show, its shape and refrain. I know all their names now, and I am on the innocent edge of loving them for more than their sweetness.

The stage is crammed with spectacle with Carloni’s acrobats and with Mephisto, ‘The Great Illusionist’. I ought to remember him better. I think I can see a small, stout man in white tie and tails who does things with doves. There is a box in which Roxanne, who acts as his assistant, disappears, or is pierced with swords. But off stage he is an unremarkable person. His real name is Dennis Smith and, when he is not quarrelling with his wife in his dressing room, I see him slowly and meticulously poring over a stamp collection.

Then on comes the comedian, Joey King. Joey is, I suppose, in his fifties, red and raddled, with slicked black hair on a fat misshapen head that seems to burst from his collar like a boil on an adolescent’s back. On stage he wears black tie like the rest of them, but, as a concession to comedy, his jacket is composed of some loud check material of the kind you only otherwise see made into trousers for American golfers. ‘Only Jo-King!’, that is his catch phrase which Sarson and I thought was terribly clever, and we used to repeat it a lot, as a sort of secret code between us. We also repeat his other catch phrase which is ‘Here’s one off the top shelf.’ He says that when he’s going to give us a rather naughty joke.

‘Oi! Listen! The Manager’s just gone out for a quick one, so here’s one off the top shelf for you. Fellow goes into a chemist, and he’s a bit how’s-your-father. Know what I mean, Lady? Bet
you
do, sir! He walks a bit like this. Oops! Now, don’t get any ideas, sir. Goes up to the chemist, he says, ‘I’d like some Vaseline.’ Just like that. ‘I’d like some Vaseline.’ The chemist goes, ‘What’s it for? Is it for chilblains?’ He says, ‘No, it’s for chaps.’ Ooo! Wash my mouth out!’ We repeat this joke without quite knowing what it means, but we know it is funny because it always gets a good laugh, especially from the men: a rather raucous laugh, as if they don’t want to be found out
not
finding it funny.

He exudes a smell of brandy, and there is always a little patch of white foam on his lower lip. Roxanne tells me it is from the milk of magnesia tablets he takes incessantly for his dyspepsia. ‘He suffers from ulcers something chronic. A lot of comics do,’ she adds knowingly. Whenever I met him back stage or out in the town his reaction was always the same: he would wink at me and say: ‘Hello, son. What d’yer know, eh? What d’yer know?’ This unvarying ritual puzzled me at first, then began to worry me. I began to feel threatened, even persecuted by it, so much so that I consulted Billy Wilshire about it.

‘What am I supposed to say?’ I ask. There is a pause and finally Billy says, with his usual glum expression,
‘Well, why not say: ‘Not much for my age.’’

Next time I see Joey King I try this, and from that moment on I am greeted only with a wink, which is horrible enough. I thank Billy for his advice.

Ah, Billy Willshire!  In many ways he is the strangest of the lot. Billy is around fifty, I think, but from a distance you’d think he’s my age, twelve, thirteen that is. He is only a little over five feet tall, so shorter than I am, slender and willowy, and he wears a chestnut coloured toupée and horn-rimmed spectacles. Close to, his face is wizened and worn, and he has a wary look. He is best known for his long-running radio comedy series
Billy the Kid
. You must remember. Well, the catch phrase then? He plays this naughty little boy of about ten, and at the end of every episode he gets found out and the last line is always: ‘Oo, not the slipper, dad!’ The voice is a husky falsetto with a Lancashire accent. I often catch him looking at me, and he is always ready to talk.

I think he has the same attitude to show business as Rex does; if anything, his view is blacker. ‘Don’t go into the show business, kid,’ he said to me once. ‘It’ll break your heart.’ He always has a bottle of port in his dressing room — ‘for the voice’, he says — and it’s always full at the beginning of the first house and empty by the end of the second. (Most days they do two evening shows back to back.) He always tries to give me some of his port in a plastic cup. It is cheap port — even I know that — it is raw and sticky and gives me a headache. Billy reeks of the stuff during the show. He does a few comedy sketches with Joey and then he has a solo spot, playing the xylophone, finishing off the first half with a version of the
William Tell
‘Overture’, very fast. That’s how he started in the business, he tells me, as a child musical prodigy. They called him ‘Little Billy Wilshire, the Miniature Maestro of the Xylophone.’ But that was long ago before the war, when he was younger, but no smaller.

We have chats, Billy and I, in his dressing room, and I’m not sure that I understand them. Mostly he tells me long stories about the friends he has had. They are not proper stories, because they have no beginning and no end and no point. Most of his friends seem to have been sailors: he has a liking for all the services, but the Senior is the one he prefers. ‘I had a friend once. A sailor. Jack, his name was. I used to call him Jack Tar. It was my bit of a joke, see. He liked that. We met on the front in Southsea. You should have seen his arms: big they were, like tree trunks. Muscles, you see. It’s all that pulling on ropes. He used to stay with me at my digs. I was in panto at the King’s playing Little Jack Horner. Mona didn’t mind; that was my landlady. Mind you, no more she should have: I once caught her in full sail on the kitchen table with a gas fitter. ‘Oh, Mr Wilshire,’ she said to me afterwards, ‘you must think I’m a terrible flirt.’ Jack was a lad. He went away. I never saw him again. I found out later he was lost on one of them convoys. Wartime, you see . . .’ Sometimes, after these recitals, which could be tearful if the day’s port bottle was nearly empty, he used to ask me about me and my life. I don’t think he really understood what I told him about school, but he’s interested in Giles Sarson. One day he said to me, ‘You want to watch that friend of yours, that Giles. He’s a growing lad. He’ll be up to all kinds of mischief. I know the sort. I had a friend like that once. Tinker, his name was. He
was
a tinker and all . . .’

Sometimes in the mornings Rex takes Sarson and me out in the Rolls. Often he drives himself — I think he may be afraid of Mort — and sometimes Roxanne comes too. The best fun is always when Roxanne comes, because she chirrups like a happy bird. She’s a child like me. Rex and Sarson are different somehow, and I can’t quite work out why. I think it’s in the way they take their pleasures. Roxanne and I just enjoy them as they come, and laugh them off when things go wrong. Rex and Sarson are fiercer, more intense, as if they want to suck the life out of their amusements. Rex takes a lot of photos of us all which I never see, and he always gets either Sarson or me to take a picture of him with Roxanne. I can see them through the reflex lens of his expensive camera. He is holding Roxanne’s slim little form close to him, too close, I think, for her comfort. She smiles bravely, though. We go to the races; we go to fun fairs (there isn’t one in Seabourne); once we set off really early and went to France and back, and nearly missed the first house in the evening.