‘But make sure the water’s really hot,’ Kit shouted. ‘That bath can be chilly to sit on.’
Jill settled for the first bathroom she came to; she was anxious not to keep Miles waiting. He was fully dressed when she got back to their room, so she told him to go on without her – ‘While I organize food to get you through the day. I suppose there’s no hope you’ll come back for an early lunch?’
‘No, thanks, I’ve a lot to do. And I want to be around to help Cyril with his make-up.’
‘Peter said he’d do that.’
‘Peter may be a brilliant director but he’s never been an actor. He knows practically nothing about make-up. I’m not having him turning the boy into a freak.’
Which wouldn’t be too hard, thought Jill. Poor Cyril! If Miles and Peter started arguing about how he was to look, it would be enough to make any boy embarrassed. Well, she’d plenty to do, as she would undoubtedly have to feed others besides Miles. Few members of a company ever organized food for themselves during a dress rehearsal. After seven or eight hours they would be existing on chocolate – if they’d even brought that – and sending out for cups of tea carried in by none too willing dressers.
The hotel, having supplied a hamper of food and drink, provided a car to take it and her to the theatre. She asked the driver where church parade was held and learned that it took place in the gardens surrounding the Pump Room. She felt a slight wistfulness to be there, and a whiff of regret at going out of the bright day into the theatre’s semi-darkness. Never had she been stage-struck; in her youth the theatre had merely meant work. Any play Miles was in was of interest to her but mainly on his account; and one did not, merely by attending a dress rehearsal, become part of the little closed world of a play’s production.
Miles was not in his dressing room and his dresser did not know where he was. She deposited her supplies of food and then went to the front of the house where she had a long and what she found to be depressing conversation with Frank Ashton, who assured her how honoured he was to be presenting Miles, and in a play which was to re-open this wonderful old theatre. Everything was so splendidly worth-while – ‘whatever happens.’ She wondered if he knew what could happen in the way of monetary loss to himself, poor, pleasant, inexperienced young man; but she loudly agreed with him about the worth-whileness and expressed great optimism – and even more when the play’s young author arrived to sit beside Frank Ashton.
Time passed. Long after the rehearsal was due to start the curtain remained down and the silence was only broken by sporadic hammering. Jill returned to Miles’s dressing room and found him arguing fairly fiercely with Peter Hesper about Cyril-Doug Digby’s make-up, which both of them seemed to have worked on. She persuaded them to eat a few sandwiches and then, on being assured by Peter that the rehearsal would now start, went back to the auditorium. Forty-five minutes later, the rehearsal did start.
The television play, like so many television plays, had begun with a noisy party presumably intended to establish important characters but actually, Jill often thought, establishing nothing but a noisy party. As no stage production could afford the cost of a score of players to be seen for only three minutes, the stage adaptation began at the end of the party when only characters who would pull their weight later were still lingering. After some complicated exposition which Jill, in spite of having read the script, found hard to follow, Cyril-Doug arrived with credentials from his allegedly dead mother and Miles came to believe he had a son. This scene was well written and Jill thought Cyril-Doug was surprisingly good, if difficult to hear. Peter interrupted the rehearsal to tell him to speak up, after which Cyril shouted and was less good. Still, by the time the curtain fell on the short first act Jill felt unexpectedly optimistic. She would go round and tell Miles so.
But as she reached the back of the stalls she was intercepted by a short, bald-headed, rubber-featured man who embraced her warmly.
‘Tom, darling! Were you there for the whole act? I thought it held splendidly.’ She then whispered, ‘Take care. Frank Ashton and the author are in the front row of the dress circle.’
‘Admirable first act,’ said Tom Albion, loudly and clearly. ‘Even better than I thought it was.’ He then steered Jill out of the stalls and added, ‘Actually, it is a little better, but then you know how abysmally bad I thought the script was. Why, why, did we let Miles get involved with this play?’
‘I don’t attempt to dictate to him,’ said Jill.
‘I do – but I don’t have much luck; anyway, not when your dear husband’s notorious kindness of heart is involved. But never mind. As you know, I’m keeping a film offer on ice for him.’
‘You’re a money-grubbing old ghoul, Tom – just ill-wishing this show because you want him to do the film.’
‘I should be a bad agent if I didn’t want him to. And not so much of your money-grubbing, my girl. It’ll be a worth-while film and this is hardly a worth-while play.’
‘Don’t say that to Miles, will you?’
‘Not again. But I don’t tell him lies. I shall just say he’s superb and leave it at that. All I hope is that this thing won’t limp on too long. My guess is that Ashton will tide it over for three weeks, to entitle him to a share of any film offer for it – not that there’ll be one. He’d be well advised to cut his losses and never open in London at all.’
‘You could be wrong, Tom. We may get a respectable run.
‘Three weeks,’ said Tom firmly.
They went round to Miles and were tactful, then returned to the auditorium and worked hard on tact to Frank Ashton and the author. Then the second act began.
Jill had three categories in which she placed dress rehearsals. There was the truly dreadful rehearsal, in which every conceivable thing, and various inconceivable ones, went wrong. This was often followed by a smooth and triumphant first night. There was the almost faultless rehearsal, often followed by a faulty and/or lifeless first night. And in between these extremes was the thoroughly mixed rehearsal, partly good, partly bad, from which it was impossible to prognosticate anything. Today’s rehearsal went into the mixed category. Her hopes rose in the second act – to be shattered by the ending, which Cyril certainly could not carry. (Peter was right about that.) Act III had a melodramatic confrontation between Miles’s wife and the mother of the boy which Jill found highly embarrassing, but the end of the play, when Miles accepted the boy as his son while knowing that he wasn’t, was extremely moving. Jill could, with sincerity, praise it to the author and Frank Ashton.
‘Let’s get a breath of fresh air before we go round to Miles,’ said Tom Albion.
They went out through the foyer and stood blinking in the late afternoon sunshine.
‘Well, at least it’s over earlier than I expected,’ said Jill. ‘What did you think of the boy?’
‘I think all child actors are ghastly – on the stage, that is; on television they can be marvellous, as this kid was. He’s got a certain amount of appeal. I suppose he just might make a hit. But even so, I only give it three weeks.’
‘You want only to give it three weeks.’
They found Miles cheerful. He had already asked Peter to dine with them at the Lion, and Tom of course joined them. The whole of the evening was spent discussing the rehearsal and the play in general. Tom praised Miles’s acting and Peter’s direction but otherwise was non-committal. Jill voiced her optimism and kept her pessimism to herself. But neither she nor Tom really needed to say very much. Peter and Miles did most of the talking and seemed oblivious of the fact that they were covering the same ground over and over again. It was after midnight before Tom was able to coerce Peter back to the station hotel with him, and Jill got Miles to bed.
Most of her Monday morning was spent in sending wires to the company and ordering flowers; and at the last moment she remembered to buy chocolates’ for Cyril’s understudy – he, anyway, was a real child and would welcome them. Miles had dug himself in at the theatre by eleven o’clock, ostensibl
y to ‘be around if needed’ but really to continue his conversation with Peter. Jill considered their shared capacity for practically non-stop discussions was the main reason they so much liked working together. And she was thankful that, while still disagreeing about Cyril, they were on their usual good terms with each other. After coaxing them out to lunch she left them on their own.
She had tea with the Thornton girls, Geoffrey Thornton being absent, and was impressed on hearing that Kit had already done some research about boots – ‘There’s a good library here with a pet of a librarian. White boots were worn during the First World War but they were laced, and often only the tops were white, with patent leather toes and heels.’ Jill was then shown the sisters’ dresses for the first night and the Civic Reception which was obviously going to be a grand occasion; she rather wished she had brought a grander dress for it. But the sisters admired her grey chiffon and mink stole. She found the gals’ gossip atmosphere pleasant; the girls somehow managed to treat her with deference and yet almost to co-opt her into their own age group.
She would quite have liked to join them at dinner, as they suggested when they found she would be on her own. But she felt she should get to the theatre earlier than dinner at the hotel would permit; also, once she thought about getting to the theatre her appetite deserted her. She was always nervous for Miles on first nights, and the fact that she had scarcely given him a thought while chattering to the girls added a sense of guilt to the nervousness which now took possession of her. She dressed quickly and hurried to the theatre – and then found herself at a loose end for well over an hour. True, Miles talked to her avidly for a few minutes but his dressing room was then invaded by a stream of people – the cast, the stage management and, of course, Peter Hesper, to all of whom he talked with equal avidity. She wondered if he would ever get his make-up on. But it was not her job to clear his dressing room. She lovingly wished him good luck, and then made a goodwill tour of all the dressing rooms. Cyril-Doug thanked her ‘ever so for the chocs’. Already made up (by Miles, she learned) he looked not a day over eleven. His understudy, a genuine fifteen, looked years older than Cyril did.
Waiting for Tom Albion in the foyer she felt her spirits rising. The incoming audience was dressed with an elegance she had never before seen in a provincial theatre. It was, on the whole, an elderly elegance and few of the long, graceful dresses were on bowing terms with fashions of the moment; but it seemed to Jill that the Spa Town ladies achieved a distinction that was timeless, and they were certainly doing their best to honour the re-opening of their old theatre.
Tom, as they went into the stalls together, said, ‘The Night of the Long Gloves – haven’t seen so many since I was a boy. God, this place is a backwater.’
‘But a charming backwater, surely?’
He shook his head with faint disapproval. ‘Backwaters get stagnant. But I’ll admit this looks a well-disposed audience. And let’s hope they take those gloves off to clap.’
‘Much you care if they clap or not. You want the show to fail.’
‘I don’t want to watch it fail. I suffer agonies for the actors when things go badly, even when one of them isn’t one of my top clients. But don’t worry. There’s bound to be at least a polite reception tonight because of the occasion and also because of Miles. They can’t have had an actor of his standing here for well over ten years.’
Jill’s nervousness dwindled even as the curtain rose and the very peculiar set got a round of applause. It was wonderful what audiences could take when in the mood to enjoy themselves, as this audience most obviously was. And it had, she decided as the act got fully into its stride, quite a lot to enjoy. The play certainly had a dramatic story line and a star actor was giving a first-rate performance – though in the stalls bar, during the first interval, she and Tom overheard almost as much praise for ‘that marvellous little boy’ as for Miles. Young Cyril might alternately shout and choke himself with glottal stop but the audience loved him.
Only at the end of the second act did Jill’s nervousness return. Surely even this audience could not but realize how Cyril failed to carry it? But Cyril did not fail. He yelled his little head off and brought the curtain down to tumultuous applause – during which Tom whispered to Jill, ‘If Peter doesn’t re-direct that before you open in London, there’ll be a huge roar of laughter.’
The third act went even better. The audience lapped up the melodrama and were then deeply moved by the last scene, which Miles played superbly. Jill counted six handkerchiefs (most of them lace-edged) being taken out of evening bags (some of them gold mesh). If powder compacts were taken out of bags near the end of a play, it was a sign of boredom; but handkerchiefs used for eye-mopping augured well. The reception was rapturous. Miles made a speech, paying special tribute to Cyril and putting his arm round him. The author bowed his thanks from a box, looking dazzled by the spotlight suddenly focussed on him. Jill whispered to Tom, ‘Have you ever seen a reception like this in London?’
‘Oh, they used to be fairly common before the war – not that they always meant anything. I remember one show that got nineteen curtains – and came off at the end of the week.’
They took their time getting out of the theatre, listening to comments. But there were seldom many of these. In London, audiences switched their thoughts to plans for supper, or the journey home. Here people asked people if they were going to the Civic Reception. ‘Oh, God, we’ve got that ahead of us,’ said Jill.
‘Not me,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve got to drive back to London. Will you tell Miles I’ll be along in a few minutes? I want to catch Peter first and try to make him see sense about that ludicrous second act curtain.’
Jill found Miles so cheerful that even the thought of the Civic Reception was not damping his spirits – ‘Think how much worse we’d feel if we had to face it knowing we’d been a flop. And I was right about the end of the second act, wasn’t I? The kid carried it splendidly.’
‘Tom doesn’t think so – not for London. He’s now engaged in telling Peter so.’
‘Then he’ll be out of luck. Peter’s as pleased as I am. We both now think that Cyril’s got what it takes.’
Well, perhaps he had. Perhaps she had been too much influenced by Tom. All the same, in the argument that was still continuing when, before leaving for London, he drove them and Peter to the Civic Reception, she still found herself on his side. She feared that Miles and Peter were suffering from applause-intoxication.
The Assembly Rooms, with their tall pillars and high, domed windows, looked classically beautiful. Lights streamed out into Spa Street with its pollarded chestnuts. In the entrance hall marble goddesses in marble draperies, standing in niches, were thigh-high in non-marble flowers. Considered separately, the goddesses and the flowers were delightful; combined, they were slightly funny as the goddesses appeared to be legless. But nothing interfered with the admirable curves of the double staircase.
Jill, leaving her stole in the cloakroom, ran into the Thornton girls. They had been far away from her in the stalls and she had not met them in the intervals as Tom had felt the need of visiting the bar. She could now see them in the full glory of their party frocks. Kit was in a muslin Kate Greenaway dress reaching to her ankles. Robin’s white satin shift ended a couple of inches above her knees.
‘Perhaps I ought to have lengthened it for this highly conservative occasion, but I always feel my knees are my best feature. And one needs a good space between the bottom of one’s hem and the top of one’s boots.’
Jill paid due respect to the white satin boots.
Kit, pulling a cat-like face at herself in the glass, said, ‘If I wore them, people would call me Puss-in-Boots. I wonder if I should wear cat whiskers and start a vogue – false whiskers instead of false eyelashes. May we hang on to you, Mrs Quentin, so that Mr Quentin won’t forget he’s asked us to sit out with him?’
In the entrance hall Jill found that Miles and Peter had been joined by Geoffrey Thornton. They all w
ent to shake hands with the resplendent Mayor and Mayoress at the top of the stairs, then went on into the gallery to look down at the dancers in the ballroom. Peter, introduced to Kit, asked her if she had enjoyed the play. Jill thought there was a shade of talking down to a child in his tone and, presumably, Kit did too, for she gave him her most cat-like smile and said, ‘Oh, loved it. The touch of Henry Arthur Jones was so refreshing.’
Peter, startled, said, ‘Good God, child, what can you possibly know about Henry Arthur Jones?’
‘Oh, I’ve no first-hand knowledge but I’ve read Shaw’s Our Theatres in the Nineties, though it was some years ago, when I read all through Shaw. Anyway, am I right – or could I be mixing Jones up with Sardou? How would Sardou revive, Mr Hesper? I mean, of course, treated seriously – as you treated the play tonight.’
‘It’s a fascinating idea,’ said Peter. ‘Not that I’ve read a line of Sardou. Are you, by any chance, making fun of me?
Kit denied it charmingly, but Jill had her doubts.
Miles remembered having seen Sardou’s Diplomacy when he was a boy and obliged with vivid impressions of it, to Kit’s delight. A dance began below and a young man approached Robin. She whispered to her father, ‘Don’t forget your dance with the Mayoress,’ then tossed back her long, fair hair and went off with the young man. Geoffrey Thornton said to Jill, ‘I booked the Mayoress for the next waltz but this certainly isn’t it, so shall we?’ She looked at Miles, saw that he and Peter were happily talking to Kit, and said, ‘Yes, I’d like to – though I’m terribly out of practice.’
How long was it since she had danced? Miles never did, if he could get out of it. (As a dancer, he was unusually awkward and held women as if he disliked them – surprising for an actor whose stage movements were so easy and who was particularly good at love scenes. It had once occurred to her that he might dance better on the stage, acting dancing, than in a ballroom.) On the way downstairs she wished she had simply said that she didn’t dance. However, she got on quite well: Thornton was easy to follow. And though she was particularly conscious of his slightness of build she also noted that he held her firmly, imparting confidence. When the dance ended, he said, ‘That was delightful. It reminded me of how fond I once was of dancing. Now I’d better take you back to the others in case a waltz calls me to my civic duties.’