‘Then make me,’ said Thornton.
Snow on a Warm August Afternoon
But could she? Could she even bring herself to try?
He said persuasively, ‘Come on, now. And remember I want to know all about you, as well as about your relationship with Miles. It’s an extraordinary feeling to be so much in love with a woman I know so little about. I’m like those people who say they know nothing about painting but know what they like – only I want to find out why I like.’
‘Perhaps you’ll just find out that you like me less,’ – and remembering her past self she thought this very possible. Well, that might be no bad thing; not that she wanted him to stop being attracted by her, merely to stop wanting to marry her. Anyway, she’d try to be completely honest. ‘I’d better begin with my despised girlhood,’ – despised, certainly, by her and if anyone had not despised it, that fact hadn’t come to her notice.
‘Go back further. What were you like as a child?’
‘Horrible, I should think, and generally miserable. Oh, perhaps not really miserable, just deadly bored and uncomfortable and so often cold. My father was a stage manager, usually on tour; in those days – I mean when I was really small – there were still a good many touring companies. My mother and I trailed round with him. I’ve heard old pros describe theatrical lodgings as cosy but they never struck me that way. And there were the dreary Sunday train calls.’
What she called her camp-following days had ended when she had to go to school – ‘You can’t think how nasty cheap boarding schools can be.’ And even the cheapest cost more than her parents could well afford so that twice, when her father had stage-managed West End shows, she’d been brought home (always theatrical digs) and sent to the nearest day school – ‘Then off they’d go on tour again, and once to Australia, and I’d go back to boarding school – a different one, the one I’d left not being keen on such an impermanent boarder. I doubt if I’m much better educated than gipsy children.’
She had left school for good at sixteen, to work as her father’s assistant and also keep house for him, as her mother had died. ‘I probably didn’t miss her as much as I thought I did. Perhaps I just thought I was entitled to feel forlorn and motherless. And from seeing too little of my father, I then saw too much. He was quite a kind man but short-tempered, also he was an old-fashioned stage manager and thought it necessary to bully people and use foul language. The comic thing was that he could switch the foul language off whenever he was with my mother and me. But once I was in the theatre, working for him, he didn’t think it necessary to. I found it humiliating when he swore at stage hands in front of me – and sometimes at me in front of them. I suppose it made me feel a bit extra inferior. Silly, really, as when my father swore it meant no more than when a dog barks. And he trained me well; by the time I was eighteen I was a good A.S.M. in spite of loathing the job. Oh, God, do you really want to hear all this stuff?’
‘Every word. Go on and don’t skip anything.’
She spoke of various jobs, with and without her father. When she was twenty he had gone to Australia again. He could have taken her as his assistant but she’d just landed a fairly good job and preferred to stick to it. ‘I never saw him again. He stayed out there, married a woman who owned a small hotel, and died four years later.’ She paused, conscious of a disinclination to talk about her life after her father left England. But she must, of course, because it was the mess she had made of things then that had led up to her marriage, or more specifically, to her gratitude for it, and it was the gratitude she had to make clear.
‘What happened after you were left on your own?’ Thornton gently prodded.
‘Nothing pleasant, and no wonder. You can’t imagine how ghastly I was at twenty: gawky, badly dressed, with the most awful hair. Either it was lanky and greasy, or frizzed up by a cheap permanent wave. I’m not at all sure I was even clean – no, really; I always seemed to be in the kind of rooms where you felt dirtier after getting out of the bath than before you got into it. Oh, no doubt I managed badly about my looks and clothes, but an A.S.M. gets no time for private life, especially on tour. By then there weren’t so many regular tours, but I had a genius for getting into pre-London try-outs that went on for weeks and then didn’t get to London. But my real trouble –’
She broke off, unwilling to describe that real trouble to a man to whom she wanted to remain attractive. But this was all part of the credit Miles deserved and she was going to do the job thoroughly. ‘Let’s face it,’ she said at last. ‘I was sex-mad and sex-starved. It’s a repulsive combination – and anyway, my whole life was in the theatre where there are always plenty of attractive girls around. I was twenty-two before anyone obliged by seducing me. He was fifty and the occasion couldn’t have been less glamorous. Can I skip it?’
‘No,’ said Thornton. ‘Back in the witness box, my love.’
‘I’d almost forgotten you’re a barrister as well as an M.P. – doubly out of my world. Well, onward with True Confession….’
She had taken a job with a repertory company which, at Christmas, had put on The Importance of Being Earnest – ‘Funny I was thinking of it just a little while back, when I was eating all your cucumber sandwiches. Well, they’d engaged a West End actor to play John Worthing. He was much too old, of course, but he wore his clothes well and still looked handsome in his make-up. We were staying at the same horrid little hotel, so we got together a bit – anyway, we did on Christmas Day when we were at a loose end because there was no performance, I mean in the theatre.’ She broke off to laugh. ‘Oh, dear, no girl could have had a more putting-off introduction to sex. He hadn’t known I was a virgin and he hated it, both morally and physically one might say. I’m not sure I wasn’t still a virgin when it was all over. For the rest of the Christmas season we barely spoke, and then when he left the company he tried to be gallant and said, “Thank you, dear girl, for a memory I shall treasure.” And believe it or not, that was quite a comfort to me. I pretended to myself that I’d been in love with him and he with me and it was simply his conscience that had come between us. Perhaps I’ve always been able to let one half of my mind fool the other half. But in the end, I see what I’ve been up to.’
She had looked away while describing what she had come to think of as a ludicrous episode. Now she offered a rueful grin, and was worried by the gravity of his expression. She instantly wondered if he had found the story in bad taste – as she now instantly did. Even while telling it – and before – she had disliked the tone of her voice and the words she was choosing. It was as if the girl she had been was taking over from her present self. But perhaps her present self was only a veneer; if so, he’d better know it. She looked away again, quickly, and pressed on.
‘Well, after that, I was out of work for some time, and then in some plays that never came to London. There was no one I could even pretend to be in love with and life was just a monotony of hard work and discomfort. I remember sitting in that Spa Street café where we first met thinking that if I could be peacefully dead by just wishing it, I probably would wish it – well, it was raining and I was extra full of self-pity because I’d been hankering for clothes in the Spa Street shops. And there was worse ahead of me because I was then with yet another play that folded on tour, after which I was out of work for months. But eventually I landed another job – and in London; the best job I ever had, as a matter of fact, only – I’d better warn you that what’s coming isn’t pretty, but it’s important if you want to know why I married Miles.’
She had fallen in love with the stage manager she worked with and she still considered him worth falling in love with. ‘He was superb at his job – great authority and without shouting and swearing. And he was as good with the company as he was with his staff. Some stage managers bully the staff and toady to the company – that is, the important members of it. But he was just universally both kind and firm. He was the first man – the only man – to teach me that our job was to keep the company h
appy. And we were always partners in the job, not just the boss and his run-about. Naturally, I adored him, and I’m sure he was fond of me, perhaps even a little in love, though I always knew he really loved his wife. Anyway, we had an affair, a real affair, it lasted a whole year.’
She broke off, and sat staring at the stopped kitchen clock, wondering how best to convey what that year had meant to her, which was all the more difficult because it now meant so little; indeed, she couldn’t remember when last she had thought about it. And yet … Perhaps talking about the past stirred a flicker in the embers. After a moment, Thornton said, ‘Does the memory still distress you? Have a rest. There’s another thermos of chocolate. And how about some more cake?’
‘I’ve already had two pieces. Still … it’s such very good cake. You’ll be thinking I’m a compulsive eater.’
‘You well might be. Women who sublimate their sexual life to the extent you must have been doing are liable to compensate with food.’
‘Oh, God, are they? I don’t think I do, though there was a time when – I don’t need this cake.’
He looked at her amusedly. ‘It wouldn’t worry me even if you were a glutton – which you couldn’t be, with your figure. Eat your cake. And then tell me about your nice stage manager. Were you happy at last?’
Had she been, even for so much as a day out of the whole of that year? ‘Well, I was happier – or rather, I was fully alive at last; sometimes I was more acutely unhappy than I’d ever been, because I knew he didn’t love me. And he was apt to make that painfully clear. It’s surprising how unkind fundamentally kind men can be when they feel guilty – as he did, towards his wife. And then it was all so difficult. He had to be at home every night and on Sundays. Of course we had the theatre to make love in but what with eight performances a week and understudy rehearsals we didn’t have too much time. And cleaners are always liable to barge into dressing rooms – which, anyway, aren’t the cosiest of love nests. Once or twice we went wandering round the dust-sheeted theatre, looking for somewhere private. There was a top box … Oh, dear!’ She broke off and took a drink of chocolate.
‘Sounds an exciting setting,’ said Thornton, encouragingly.
‘It didn’t excite me, just terrified me. But I was almost always terrified – of being discovered, of his getting tired of me, of not giving satisfaction.’
‘Hardly conducive to fun.’
‘Fun? That’s something I quite gave up hoping for. I didn’t mind too much. I concentrated on love. And it was love all right, on my side. Well, eventually his wife came to the theatre one afternoon unexpectedly, got as far as his office door and heard enough. She didn’t come in – at least I was spared that. She just went home, and had it out with him that night. I guessed he was quite glad to be forced to give me up, and the play was due to come off so it was all very convenient. He got work with a company that was going to Australia – I think my telling him about my father put that idea into his head. And off he went with his forgiving wife.’
‘Leaving you flat.’
‘Not as flat as you make it sound. He fixed a job for me, in a play that was going on tour for a month with a London theatre already booked. Miles was the leading man. He’d just blossomed into being a star, not as big a one as he is now but, in a way, more exciting because he was a newer one. And, goodness me, was he handsome! And not just boringly handsome; he’s never been that. There’s always been something off-beat about his good looks which saves them from being conventional. Lovelorn though I was, I was sure that, well, if I hadn’t been lovelorn I should have fallen for him. I felt distinctly swindled when I learned that he was a homosexual.’
‘You knew that from the outset?’
‘Yes, indeed. Jack – my stage manager – told me. He’d stage-managed a show Miles was in and liked him very much. Jack also told me that Miles lived with a boy – well, a man; he was thirty, only a couple of years younger than Miles – and they were completely devoted to each other. They’d been together nearly ten years. Alan – Miles’s love – was a small-part actor, not very good and he didn’t get a lot of work, but he was a dear. He came to several rehearsals. Miles introduced him to me and he was particularly pleasant to me, as Miles always was – though Miles was more than pleasant, he went out of his way to be kind to me, as he always does if he sees anyone is unhappy. And in my case it didn’t take much seeing. Night after night, as soon as I got into bed, I’d start thinking of the past year and then I’d put in a couple of hours crying. Naturally I looked like hell in the morning – no one ever looked more hideous than I do after crying. Really, I wonder that I held that job down; but my work was all right. Don’t look so worried. None of this harrows me now.’
‘It does me,’ said Thornton. ‘Have some more chocolate.’
She laughed. ‘No, thanks. You should, as you’re the harrowed one. Well, the show opened – in Brighton and it was a great success. Our next date was Manchester. Most of the company travelled by train on Sunday, but Miles went back to London on the Saturday night because he wanted to collect Alan, who was in a play that finished its run that night. They’d planned to drive to Manchester. Managements don’t much like members of a company to travel by car but Miles was allowed to. It was foggy on the Sunday and Alan, who had a horror of driving or being driven in fog, suggested they should go by train. But Miles wanted to have the car with him for the rest of the tour and the fog wasn’t at all bad and he thought it would probably lift. So off they went and took their time. But in the late afternoon, just as it was getting dusk, the fog got much worse and they ran into a car that had got onto the wrong side of the road. It wasn’t a bad crash as both cars were crawling – no one in the other car was hurt and Miles was only bruised, even the cars weren’t badly damaged – but Alan had been leaning out of his window, trying to see the kerb, and when his door shot open he went out head first into a stone wall. He was killed outright – suddenly gone for ever. And he hadn’t wanted to come in the fog. Well, you can imagine the horror of it all, and Miles had to play in Manchester the next night. You’d never have known anything was wrong with him. Oh, that’s not so remarkable, really; just the old tradition of “the show must go on”, lots of actors could have done it. What was remarkable was the way he behaved off-stage. He sent a message to the company asking that no one should mention the accident to him, and he somehow carried his stage performance – he was playing a very debonair part – right out into the wings. He actually joked with people, and the company played up like mad and joked back. It was so extraordinary that I wondered if he did, really, mind very much about Alan’s death, and then I happened to catch sight of him in the wings when there was no one with him and his face was like a mask of tragedy. That same night I was asked to run after him with some message and I didn’t catch up with him until he was going into the Midland Hotel, where he was staying. He simply switched on cheerfulness and insisted on my having supper with him.’
‘Perhaps he was glad to have someone he had to act to.’
‘Probably. But I think it was kindness, too. By then I must have been looking more woebegone than ever as I’d realized that I was pregnant. Such a charming situation. Jack was in Australia and I’d promised not to write to him –’
‘But surely in the circumstances –’
‘No. Because the circumstances were my fault. I’d hung round his neck for “one last time”, when he wasn’t expecting it. By now my father was dead, and I hadn’t even a woman friend I could consult. In the theatre you make friends in dressing rooms, and I was seldom in dressing rooms. There seemed no one I could turn to. I remember thinking how extraordinary it was, me with my miseries and Miles with his, just eating supper and chatting about the show. After supper he saw me back to my digs and before I went in he put his arm round me and kissed me on the side of the head and said “Bear up” and I said “You, too” – and just those two words of sympathy were more than he could stand. He simply dashed away into the darkness.’
 
; She paused, collecting her thoughts. Every word she said was convincing her more and more that she could never leave Miles, and she must now convince Thornton too. Surely she could? Surely what she was going to tell him now would make him see? She hurried on to the last week of the tour.
She’d found herself staying in the same digs as Miles. Usually he stayed at hotels but these were good, old-fashioned rooms where he’d once stayed with Alan. He’d booked a bedroom and sitting room before the tour began and let the booking stand. She’d had a little combined room. Miles had asked her to have her meals with him, so they’d seen a good deal of each other, and half way through the week, when they’d finished supper after the show, he’d let his facade of cheerfulness break up and talked to her about Alan and the accident. From then on they’d been much more at ease with each other. On the Friday night it had been bitterly cold and the landlady had made up a specially good fire, given them a supper of bacon and eggs, and brought in a second pot of tea before she went off to bed.
‘You’d think we’d have turned to something stronger than tea for comfort but, with Miles, excessive alcohol acts as a depressant, and I’d never drunk much – couldn’t afford to. Anyway, we just went on coaxing cups of tea out of the teapot, while we sat up over the fire. He’d told me several days before that he’d guessed I was unhappy and I’d admitted I’d had an unhappy love affair but given him no details. Well, that night he asked me point-blank if I was going to have a child. There was nothing anyone could see yet, so I suppose it was just intuition; Miles is like that. Anyway, I didn’t deny it and he asked me what I was going to do. I said I was still hoping things would come all right, especially if I could find something to take. He said that was a crazy idea, probably wouldn’t work, might make me ill, and even affect the child. If I was determined to get rid of it I’d better have a proper operation and he’d pay for it, but he was dead against it. So was I. Somehow “taking something” hadn’t seemed to me like abortion. Then he asked me if I was quite sure I didn’t want the baby – and God knows I was; I just wanted it to go away. I hadn’t really thought about it as a baby, only as a terrifying thing that had happened to me. But the way he talked about it made it real. He said he’d help me until it was born and then I could get it adopted – or why shouldn’t I keep it? I could always get jobs – his agent would help over that. And his housekeeper might know of someone who would look after it well; it was the kind of thing she always seemed to know. And anyway, I was to stop worrying. Whatever I decided, I could count on him to help.’