Perfect Gallows Read online

  Cyril was delighted to see him, as flu was raging and last night they’d gone on with only five dwarfs, raising a bit of a laugh by saying the other two had gone to be Bevan boys. Two bob a performance and he could sleep under the makeshift stage, but keep a look-out for a stage-hand called Toby. He liked boys.

  There were matinées six days of the week and evening performances four. At least you got a full house matinées, shrieking kids bussed in for their Christmas treat from villages miles around, never mind it was only a church hall and not a real theatre. They understood about one line in three and drowned half those with squabbles over their sandwich-packs. The main cast was professional, but otherwise as makeshift as the theatre. Snow White was fifty, though she managed to look ten years younger under the greasepaint. Prince Charming had the voice of a bad-tempered mouse, having been cast for her legs. The Wicked Queen might once have had promise; now she brought sailors along, different ones each time, and chattered audibly with them in the wings. The Dame could perform with real gusto when he’d found enough to drink, but at that stage was apt to veer off into Aladdin or Jack and the Beanstalk.

  Evening performances were dire in a different way, the front seats only half full, with older and prissier children than the afternoon ones, balanced by a couple of dozen adults in the back rows who’d been attracted by the posters of Prince Charming, all thigh and tooth and bust; these became rowdy with boredom unless the Dame placated them with lines that tended to make the parents nearer the stage start hustling their children into overcoats and taking them away in mid-scene.

  For Andrew it was the appallingness that made it so satisfying. It was the real thing, the bottom rung. His chart of the future showed him climbing from the insignificance of Fawley Street to world-wide stardom, missing nothing on the way. He would never retire. He would die on stage (Our revels now are … ended …) but before that last, spell-binding instant he would dictate his autobiography, a summation of the theatre in this century, so it had to be all there—tolerant but telling anecdotes about famous colleagues, the applause of Broadway and the West End, the mad tycoons of Hollywood tamed, and so on, but also the dragon landladies of Doncaster, Blackpool nights, Hamlet on one cheese sandwich, and this, including the first tiny triumph that when Dopey came palely back from his sickbed the producer sent him packing because his replacement was getting laughs.

  Still, dire it was, reaching its nadir on Friday night with the back rows fuller and rowdier than usual. Just after the interval the Dame came weaving on and tapped Snow White on the shoulder just as she was reaching for a high note in “Somewhere over the Rainbow”. Snow White spun round and socked him.

  “Lay off, you silly bitch,” said the Dame. “I got a nouncement.”

  The audience were yelling to Snow White to finish him off but he raised his arms in a priestly, compelling gesture and got them half-quieted.

  “Announcement from the management, ladies and gents,” he said. “Sirens have gone for an air-raid warning. Those as want to leave, nearest shelters are in Houndwell Park, left and left again as you go, duckies. Those as want to stay, well, we’re staying. We never closed, not for that fat bugger Goering, at any rate. Now, just to give them as are going time to clear out, before we get on with this elegant entertainment we are laying on for your benefit, you unappreciative drunken slobs, I’ll tell you a little story, shall I? Talking of sirens, that reminds me … Any sailors in the audience? No, thank you, I don’t want you up here now. After the performance, Jack, and I’ll be only too happy to oblige you … Now did any of you maritime heroes ever happen to meet a real genuine siren, the sort that sits around on rocks, singing her head off, with nothing to wear but a bit of seaweed? I’m going to tell you about some as did. It seems there were these three shipwrecked sailors floating across the great big empty ocean on this raft …”

  Not more than half a dozen of the audience had left but the story lasted twenty minutes. Andrew had been on stage when it began, being sung to about rainbows. He listened and watched, rapt. The story was rubbish, its plot just an excuse for anatomical extravagances, with the back rows bellowing encouragement at each variation, but despite that something thrilling took place. Like Samson being given his strength for an hour to pull the temple down on the Philistines, so the battered old Dame was given this last spurt of theatrical energy to do whatever he wanted, winding the tension of laughter up and letting it unreel, at the height of the uproar commanding silence with one crooked finger, then tossing a hiccup into the pool of silence and allowing the ripples to fade and fade until, at the exact and necessary instant, he plunged on.

  It was an impossible act to follow. Snow White, almost as old a hand as the Dame, must have seen this in the first few minutes. She went home to her digs, giving the assistant stage manager, a fat woman who wouldn’t take her specs off, time to dress and take over. The rest of the performance was drowned in cat-calls except when the Dame was on stage, and then shouts for more of the same. He obliged with ancient blue lines, but the God Hercules had left him. By common consent the cast cut most of the remaining scenes, performing what they chose in front of the wrong sets, so despite the interpolation they finished five minutes before the usual time. The audience went out to the sound of the All Clear.

  Toby was a gentle, sad, elderly man who had worked in theatres since he was a child. The only trouble with him was that he kept hoping. While he was supposed to be clearing up after the first evening performance he would find excuses to enter the cave which Andrew had made for himself under the stage, talking about long-forgotten stand-up comics and patter-song artists, settling on to the end of the mattress and trying to progress from there. Once he’d finished his work he went home, so Andrew had found it simplest to leave with the cast, taking a key with him, and wander about till midnight.

  The first night he tried going south-east, into the bomb-flattened heart of the city, empty now but not silent. The docks were working all night, and the trains rattled to and fro across the wilderness of cleared rubble. A few buildings and half-buildings still stood, but blind, their shattered windows boarded. He walked quickly, because of the cold, and it was only by luck that he didn’t run into the arms of a couple of bobbies on patrol; he spotted the flicker of a torch-beam before they could have heard his footsteps and had time to hide among the gravestones of a roofless church. Anybody found wandering down here would be stopped and questioned. He didn’t want that. It struck him that by now a letter might have come from The Mimms, and Mum would be worrying because he hadn’t turned up. In a day or two the police might be looking for him.

  So the next night he walked north-west and slid a note under the door of Number 19—“Everything OK. Having fine time. See you Monday. Love, A.” Then he zig-zagged back to St Michael’s, giving Toby time to clear off. From then on he did his wandering through still-inhabited areas, though about every street had the odd bomb-gap. Here he could walk as if he was going somewhere definite, with a confident officer-voiced “Good-night” for any bobby or warden he ran into. He found these places better suited to his mood in any case, the unlit streets and the still, inward-turned houses, thousands of bedrooms each with its dreamers, individuals all with their own names, identities they would never leave, while among them, unnoticed walked Adrian Waring—Adrian who had no identity, let alone an Identity Card, and who thus was able to become anybody, by the power inside him—magic-seeming but real as an electric current—was able to step forth for three blazing hours in the face of an audience, to show them a whole human being, rounded, complete, known like an old friend—and then, as the curtain fell, vanish!

  On the Friday of the Dame’s extravaganza he walked the streets in a trance. It was a frosty night, with a half-moon coming and going behind the light clouds, but he didn’t notice the cold. His mind was full of the episode. He recreated it, detail by detail, trying to analyse how the old boy had achieved his effects, the switchings of pace and volume, the va
ried pauses, the apparent hesitations, the tone at times of joining his audience in a glorious conspiracy against common decency, and at others of silent outrage that they should find anything amusing in the obscenities he was uttering, all with the faint but thrilling undertone of contempt for them that they should have brought a man of the Dame’s abilities down to pig it at their level. The slave’s contempt for his master, the mob. Adrian would have that too. The slave’s contempt …

  “And where are we off to, lad?”

  Enthralled by his vision Andrew hadn’t noticed the bobby. He blinked into the shaded torch-beam. He had no idea where he’d got to in the city. He shook his head and put on a friendly but adult smile.

  “I seem to have got a bit lost,” he said. “I was trying to get to Fawley Street.”

  “You’re right off track for that … sir. Got an identity card, then?”

  Andrew took out his wallet and produced the card. The bobby studied it under the torch-beam.

  “Heard there’s been a bomb in Fawley Street?” he said.

  “No! Are you … which number?”

  “Don’t know that, sir. News in just as I was leaving the Station. Wasn’t there a bit of bombing there in forty-two?”

  “That was the other end … I suppose … How … I mean, from here …”

  “Steady now, sir. Just the one house hit, I heard. Let me see, Fawley Street—you want to go back the way you come far as …”

  Neat as a missing tooth. The roof-ridge snapped out between the two chimney-stacks. Clear sky now, and the moon shining on to the far wall, so that Andrew could see (or think he saw, knowing it so well) the tulip-pattern of Mum’s bedroom wallpaper. Her mantelpiece hung in mid-air, swept clean of its clutter of knick-knacks and photos. A beam-end poked out of the shadow below. Faint smoke, white in the moon, drifted away. Some shaded hand-torches gleamed in the blackness, defining by their movements the invisible mound of debris.

  The street was roped off either side of the gap. A few spectators lounged on the further pavement, their attitudes somehow suggesting that nothing new was going to happen. It was cold and late. They had almost made up their minds to go home.

  Andrew stood and stared for a moment. His only feeling was emptiness. He knew he ought to have grand emotions churning inside him, horror and grief and outrage, but they weren’t there. He ducked under the rope and crossed towards the shadow, but a man in a steel helmet, an ARP warden, immediately came out of the darkness.

  “Other side of the line, sonny.”

  “Excuse me. Can you tell me? Mrs Wragge …”

  “Goner, I’m afraid. Dug her out half an hour back.”

  “Oh … was there …?”

  “Anyone else? We’re still digging. The boy’s bed was empty. He’s staying away, from what the neighbours say. Pal of yours?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Happen to know where he’s staying?”

  “I might find out.”

  “You do that, sonny. Any news, report it to the police station. Father a POW, right?”

  “Yes. I could get his address too.”

  “Good lad. Back across the rope, now.”

  Andrew did as he was told. He knew quite well why he had lied to the warden—so that he could go on playing Dopey in the panto till the end of the run, which had been almost the only thought in his mind. But the lie had been a strange relief, giving him not just something to say but something to feel, worry for his friend Andrew, sympathy, anxiety to help. Now the thought struck him that with Mum gone Andrew might go too. Andrew’s bed was empty, but he might still have been up. The searchers might have missed the body …

  The idea lasted only an instant. His ration-book. His identity card. Anyway, he wasn’t ready. One day …

  As he crossed the rope one of the spectators, a bulky man made squarer by a fur-collared coat with padded shoulders moved to meet him. The man’s face was invisible in the shadow of his hat-brim.

  “Real bit of bad luck, that,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Just the one little bomb, far as I hear. Only one plane, too, on a sneak raid to Gloucester or somewhere, found this little buckshee bomb they’d forgotten to drop, chucked it out when they saw the Solent. Waste not, want not.”

  “I expect so.”

  The man had continued to move while he talked in his soft purr, until he was a black silhouette against the moon. His idea, obviously, was to take a good look at Andrew. Andrew was ready.

  “Step over this way a bit,” said the man.

  “I’m not interested.”

  The briefest of pauses, then the man laughed, getting the point, but not minding.

  “Not what I’m on about,” he said. “Other way inclined, I am, and you can say that again.”

  He turned and started to stroll off, pausing in his stride to let Andrew catch up.

  “Heard what you told the warden,” he said. “None of my business, but you’re young Andrew, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Recognized you from the photos.”

  There had been two, one on the pianola in the front parlour and one on Mum’s bedroom mantelpiece, Polyfoto enlargements, a present from Mum to herself this Christmas, less than a fortnight back. The man had seen them both.

  “I didn’t want a scene,” said Andrew.

  “Know what you mean.”

  “Were you one of Mum’s lovers?”

  “What you mean, one of?”

  There was a note of aggression in the purr. Andrew shrugged.

  “She said as I was the first,” said the man. “You telling me she was pulling a fast one?”

  “No. I mean I don’t know. I’ve only been away once before, when we were evacuated. I don’t see how, apart from that she could have …”

  “There’s ways and means. What gave you the idea?”

  “Saturday morning I came back when she wasn’t expecting me. There was someone with her upstairs.”

  “That’d’ve been me. Fact, now I think of it, she fancied she heard someone moving around, but I told her it was the neighbours. Listen, Andrew lad, your mum was a bloody fine woman. She wasn’t a whore. She was a bloody fine woman, in more ways than just the one. I’m going to miss her.”

  “Me too.”

  Andrew said it because it was expected of him. He didn’t yet know if it was true. They walked on in silence, now through the flattened area towards the docks. The man seemed to have a definite idea where he was going.

  “Take it you found somewhere to sleep,” he said. “She showed me your note.”

  “I won’t feel like sleeping for a bit.”

  “Same here. Let’s find ourselves a mug of tea.”

  “There won’t be anywhere open.”

  “If you know, there will.”

  It was right inside the docks, a sort of makeshift shed in a nook between two warehouses. Two dim bare light-bulbs, a few rickety tables and chairs, packing-cases. Dockers, a dozen or so, sat around smoking and talking in low voices. An old Chinese woman went to and fro with a brown enamel tea-pot. The milk was condensed, poured straight from the tin. There was greyish sugar in jam-jars. Smells of frying came from behind a curtain of canvas at the back of the shed, and sometimes an almost-pretty Chinese girl brought plates of sausages and chips out to the men at the tables.

  The place was illegal. Andrew could feel it in his bones. The dockers were skiving off their shifts—you could tell from their low voices, their poses, their gestures. The tea and the sugar were sweepings out of a warehouse, the milk was missing from its consignment, the sausages too—a fortnight missing to judge by the cooking smells.

  But Mr Trinder was at home here. That was the man’s name, he said, Stan Trinder. He had other names, obviously. He’d brought Andrew to one of the railway-gates and stood in the shadow waitin
g, listening to the dock noises. There’d been a sentry on the gate, stamping to and fro with his rifle on his shoulder in the frosty moonlight. A train had come clunking up from the quays and the gates had opened. As the train churned through Mr Trinder had strolled over and spoken to the soldier on the near gate, then signalled to Andrew to join him. Nobody’d even looked at them as they slipped along beside the clanking trucks into the dockyard, and then on, keeping where possible to the shadows but walking with a casual, OK-to-be-here gait, to this den.

  “Didn’t hit it off with Sir Arnold’s lot, then?” said Mr Trinder.

  Of course Mum would have told him. You couldn’t imagine her not.

  “Too nobby?” said Mr Trinder. “You’ve got the voice, though.”

  “Fuckin’ right I ’ave. When I wannit.”

  Mr Trinder raised his horse-shoe eyebrows. He was pale-faced, balding, with a big wet mobile mouth and soft brown eyes. He laughed his pleasant laugh but his eyes sharpened for a moment.

  “Full of that type of trick, according to your mum,” he said. “Try it on Sir Arnold, then?”

  “No. He just told me to clear out. He said it was because I refused to get drunk and I couldn’t talk women, but really he took against the idea of me becoming an actor.”

  “She told me about that too.”

  “It’s all I’m interested in. In fact I was glad Sir Arnold chucked me out, because I had a job lined up at the panto.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. I was only expecting to help back stage, but I’ve got a part. That’s where I’m sleeping, as a matter of fact.”

  “Ah. Having any trouble with Toby?”

  “A bit.”

  “Heard how he was out. Stupid sod—never learns. You mention my name, though. That’ll cool him off.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What are they going to do about the house, then?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Got a stupid sort of name. The something.”