Curtain Call Read online

  The goldish late-October light was receding from the Hamiltons’ garden as Stephen, on a terrace deckchair, smoked a cigarette and doodled in his notebook. Its recent pages were filled with minutely different configurations of a group portrait, roughs for the one which would eventually adorn the wall of the Nines. Enjoying a few moments alone while Mr Hamilton dozed and Freya entertained the others at the piano, he started to sketch the contours of a face. How odd that his wife should mention Nina like that. It was as though she had inspected the recent turnover of his thoughts and plucked out the incriminating image almost to tease him. And yet she suspected nothing: why would she?

  He was the least likely of adulterers. Thirteen years of marriage and not once had he strayed. He had friends who played away, one or two of them apparently proud of it, and he despised them. Cora had not given him any reason to look elsewhere. She was beautiful, and clever, good company, a fond wife and an excellent mother. She also had her own money, and filled their house with lovely things. He knew how lucky he was. So why had he allowed himself to start falling in love with someone else? He sighed, knowing the answer already. It was simply this: Nina was different, more self-assured, more interesting, a single woman who lived for late nights and fast company. With her he could be different too, no longer the dutiful husband and father but another, idealised self, a dashing individual who was his own man, not a creature pulled every which way by obligations and responsibilities. He wanted to recapture that thrill of being new and mysterious to someone, someone who didn’t take him for granted. Was this how most men justified themselves in the business of betrayal? He didn’t know, but it was what he felt. As he sketched, her face filled his mind’s eye, and he felt a sudden pricking of desire.

  A shadow loomed at his shoulder. ‘Who’s that?’ said Freya, peering down. He hadn’t heard her approach.

  ‘I thought you were playing the piano?’

  She shrugged, and continued to stare. Stephen, feigning a casual air, added a little cross-hatching to the sketch.

  ‘She looks nice. Who is she?’

  Stephen paused. ‘She’s an actress –’

  ‘Oh, the one you met recently?’

  ‘Yes. Her name’s Nina. It was just your mother mentioning her that made me think . . . Anyway, you’re right. She is nice.’

  ‘She’s the lover. In the play. I know what a lover is, by the way.’

  ‘I see.’ He closed his sketch pad. ‘So – school’s all right, then?’

  Freya nodded, folding her arms.

  ‘How are you off for friends?’

  ‘There’s a girl called Cassandra. I like her. I’m not sure she likes me.’

  Stephen, turning in his chair to face her, frowned. ‘I bet she does. Who wouldn’t like you?’

  ‘I wonder,’ she mused, ‘do you ever think of us, of me, when we’re at Tipton?’

  ‘Of course. Quite often, as it happens.’

  ‘So you miss us?’

  Stephen squinted at her uncertainly. ‘Yes, I do.’

  She nodded appraisingly. ‘It’s just that, if you miss someone, why would you bother sending them away in the first place?’

  He had not seen that one coming. If she had asked the question in a self-pitying or plaintive way he might have dismissed it as child’s talk. But Freya spoke as she so often did, with a cool matter-of-factness; there was no apparent intention to manipulate his sympathy. He decided to meet it head-on. ‘Are you unhappy there?’

  ‘Not really. I’d just rather be at home.’

  ‘Rowan too?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Somewhere he heard a door open and Granny Hamilton’s laughter. He shook his head, not knowing how to answer. He reached over and put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Will you let me have a think about this?’

  Freya signalled her acquiescence.

  ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘I forgot to mention. Grandpa Wyley has some drawings you might be interested in. He inherited them from his father, who was taught at Oxford by – can you guess?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ruskin, back in – oh – the 1870s. Your house! Anyway, George Wyley, your great-grandfather, kept some of Ruskin’s drawings from those days and left them to the family. Shall I dig them out to show you next time?’

  ‘Bloody hell – yes!’ she cooed.

  Stephen sighed. But what was the use in rebuking her? If it were anyone’s fault it was that bloody ass Mr Mulhall.

  II

  A Face to Meet the Faces

  8

  WIDENING HER EYES at the bulb-fringed mirror, Nina gave an involuntary shudder. Hair scraped back off her forehead, the glazed white paint on her face made an unnerving contrast with the vampish mascara around her eyes. It was a face that seemed to have swum out of an unhappy dream.

  ‘My God, I look a frightful old witch,’ she said, a damp flannel poised against her cheek.

  From across the dressing room came a voice: ‘I wouldn’t say old.’ Dolly, her dresser, was smirking in the reflection.

  ‘You horrible hag!’ Nina laughed, and threw a slipper that skimmed over Dolly’s head. She turned back to her dressing table, a battlefield chaos of pots, paints and cratered powders, littered with the used ammo of lipsticks and blunted eyebrow pencils, glittering puddles of jewellery, corpses of cigarettes twisted in ashtrays and the bomb-site tumulus of a discarded feather boa. Her quarters had become so sluttish that she forbade entry to everyone but Dolly and the call boy. Slowly she began wiping her face clean of its mask.

  ‘Full tonight,’ she said absently.

  ‘To the doors,’ replied Dolly, as she picked up clothes and hung them over Nina’s folding screen.

  ‘Did you hear the Colonel?’

  ‘I know. Missed his cue again.’

  ‘Whole thing’s a bit ragged at the moment.’

  ‘He should call a rehearsal.’

  ‘Tighten it up, yes.’

  This laconic review of the show continued back and forth, as brisk as Morse code. Dolly, with her thirty-three years’ experience in theatrical dressing rooms, was the least surprisable person Nina had ever met. Months of intimate proximity had forged a kind of telepathy between them. It had become almost impossible to keep secrets from her. She sometimes felt that Dolly was like a mother to her – the sort of mother you could talk to – which, in the light of how things stood with her actual mother, was a considerable comfort.

  Only now did she spot the decorous bouquet of flowers behind her.

  ‘Who brought them?’

  ‘Call boy.’

  ‘I mean, who sent them?’

  ‘There’s a note.’

  She plucked the neat little envelope from its pin and opened it.

  Dearest N,

  Surprise! Wanted to hand these in personally but the boy said nobody enters the lady’s dressing room on pain of death. Will you meet me at the club afterwards? I’m there till midnight, probably later. Break a leg – isn’t that what they say? S.

  ‘Oh, the dear booby,’ said Nina with a pleased giggle. ‘They’re from him.’

  ‘Fancy.’

  ‘He wants to meet me later.’

  Dolly lifted her chin knowingly. ‘Is his wife all right with that?’

  Nina half snorted in reply, and read Stephen’s note again. She had supposed him to be too reserved for such spontaneity. Could it be he was really missing her? She had instructed herself not to go chasing after him. It was up to him to make the running in this affair – he was the one with the wife and children, after all. She would not plead for his company. Admittedly, it was nearly killing her. When they were together she had to stop herself blurting out that she was sick with love for him. At times she felt her restraint to be bordering on the masochistic. One evening when he told her that she was looking especially beautiful, she had batted it away with a queenly tilt of her head, while inside her heart thumped against her ribs.

  ‘You ’aven’t forgotten about milady?’ enquired Dolly, breaking int
o this train of thought.

  ‘No – though I wish to God I could.’

  ‘Milady’, or Nina’s mother, had been in the stalls this evening with her older sister Felicity. The tickets had actually been reserved for her younger sister Bee, who had cried off the previous day for reasons unknown. Now she would have to meet them for supper when she would much rather have gone straight to Stephen. What’s more, she would have to pretend pleasure at seeing her mother: a performance after the performance. She picked up a tangled pair of stockings from her table, gave them a wary sniff and decided they would do.

  Dolly gave a philosophical pout. ‘Well, you only get one mother.’

  ‘Hmm. I find one is more than enough. What was the secret with yours?’

  ‘Well . . . I didn’t see so much of her. She was out working the whole bleedin’ time, doing people’s laundry, raddling the steps, off to the factory. And there was seven of us kids, of course – no time to dawdle!’

  ‘Seven? She must have been exhausted.’

  ‘Yeah,’ sighed Dolly. ‘No wonder she died young. First rest she’d ever ’ad.’

  Ten minutes later Nina was dressed and out of the place. With a quick goodnight to the stage-door man she dodged through the post-show crowds milling on the Aldwych and made for the dining rooms on Catherine Street. Her vexation with familial duties had been somewhat mollified by Stephen’s note. With any luck she would be on her way to him in an hour or so.

  ‘Heavens, you look tired,’ said Mrs Land by way of greeting.

  Nina bent in low to kiss her, then did the same with Felicity, who said, with more tact, ‘You were good – really awfully good.’ Felicity was her senior by five years, taller than Nina but not as fine-featured. She was the most even-tempered of the three sisters, and the easiest to like. Her life was settled at home in Guildford: she had a husband who did something at the Treasury, three young children, and a black Labrador. She came up to town infrequently.

  ‘Thanks, Fliss. I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  Mrs Land shook her head. ‘It’s such a shame Bee couldn’t come. She was going to bring one of her colleagues.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she come?’ said Nina.

  ‘Oh, she’s quite out of sorts. They work her to the bone at that school.’ Nina only nodded. Her mother tended to talk of her favourite child as though she were the only person who had ever had a job.

  ‘So we were the lucky beneficiaries,’ said Felicity brightly. ‘Second time for you, Mum.’

  ‘Yes, well, I didn’t mind seeing it again,’ said her mother, and Nina waited for a word of praise, a pleasantry – in vain.

  A waiter had arrived to take their order, and Mrs Land, coquettish in the presence of any moderately handsome man, made a little show of being taken by surprise. ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you could tell us the specials this evening?’

  ‘Braised veal with carrots, madam.’

  Nina snapped her menu shut. ‘I’ll just have a mushroom omelette, thanks.’

  When the wine arrived Nina bolted down a glass and immediately poured another: it took the edge off her mood. Still thinking of the flowers Stephen had sent, and the accompanying note, she hardly heard what her mother and sister were talking about – a bridge evening with people she’d never heard of, and a driving holiday in the new car which John, Felicity’s husband, had just bought. It was when the conversation turned to their friend and benefactor Eric Dorsch that her ears pricked up.

  ‘The last time I saw you he was going to take you out to dinner,’ said Nina.

  Her mother blinked. ‘Ah, we had to postpone that, I’m afraid. Eric’s so busy at the moment with his Spanish aid committee – orphans from the war there, you know. Hundreds of them are being sent over.’

  ‘But you think he’s keen to marry again.’

  ‘I have an inkling he is,’ said Mrs Land, with a little smirk. ‘Poor Monica’s been gone three years now, and a man like Eric will need a companion in life . . . He told me only the other day how much he values me – I’ve done a few mornings as a volunteer in the office, finding homes for the little ones.’

  ‘Volunteer work? You?’ She must be crazy about him, Nina thought. She had never before expressed the remotest interest in helping displaced children. It wasn’t stretching a point to say she could barely muster an interest in her own children.

  Felicity was perhaps thinking along the same lines, for she now said, ‘Is this what you wanted to talk to us about? Are you going to get married?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Mrs Land, with a look that suggested she would take a proposal in her stride. ‘It’s not beyond the realms of possibility. But no, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  She put on her ‘thoughtful’ expression, which Nina found faintly ominous. ‘I had a talk with the solicitor this week, and he’s advised me on certain – amendments to my will. Practical things.’

  ‘Your will. I assumed we –’

  ‘Yes, of course, whatever savings I have will be divided among the three of you equally. The same goes for the jewellery.’

  Nina looked across to her sister, who was frowning. The ‘savings’, as far as she knew, were negligible, and the jewellery was mostly paste. ‘So what have you changed?’ Felicity said.

  ‘Well,’ she said with a decided air, ‘I’ve been thinking of the future, and what it holds for you all. You two are set up, of course. You’ve got John and the children in Guildford, and Nina has her career, which I’m sure will go from strength to strength. So that’s splendid. Poor Bee, on the other hand, is a junior-school teacher with scarcely a penny to her name, scraping by in that horrid boarding house in Fulham. You know how I worry about her . . .’

  ‘So you’re going to leave her some extra money?’ said Nina, still in the dark.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Land with a beatific shake of her head. ‘She’s going to have the house.’

  Nina, not wanting to believe what she had just heard, gave a little gasp. ‘What?’

  ‘She hasn’t got any security in her life, so I want to make sure she’s provided for. I am her mother, after all.’

  Felicity still wore a puzzled frown. ‘Mum, I know Bee has had a hard time of it lately, but she’s twenty-nine – there’s plenty of time to find a husband and get a new job. You like to think she’s some poor waif, but she’s not. I mean, aren’t we entitled to a share as well?’

  ‘But, darling, you have a house – and all the money you need. I’m sure you’d feel better knowing that she’ll have a roof over her head.’

  ‘I don’t feel better,’ said Nina, failing to keep the asperity from her voice. ‘What kind of security d’you think I have? What happens when my career goes to pot and I can’t even get a job in rep?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll always have work. What about those film people you said you’re going to meet?’

  ‘A screen test, that’s all. And the idea of “always” having work is nonsense. Do you know what I have lined up after this run? Nothing, that’s what.’

  Felicity, hearing her sister’s aggrieved tone, attempted a more conciliatory approach. ‘I’m sure Bee will appreciate the thought, but I can’t imagine she’ll agree to the idea of us being . . . cut off.’

  ‘You’re not “cut off”,’ said Mrs Land with an irked little movement of her head. ‘It’s very hurtful of you to suggest I would do such a thing. Anyway, I’ve already discussed it with Bee, and she’s got no objection to the plan at all.’

  That’s why she hasn’t come tonight, thought Nina. She’s not out of sorts – she’s just embarrassed to face us. Keeping her voice low and steady, she said, ‘Of course you must dispose of the house as you wish. But I would ask you – no, I would beg you – to reconsider, and I’ll tell you why. You may think you’re being generous, and Bee may think so too, but in the long run this will cause nothing but ill feeling. D’you not see?’

  As she li
stened, her mother’s mouth seemed to contract into a thin hard slot. Plainly wrong-footed by her daughters’ uncooperative response, she had gone on the defensive. After some moments of cold silence she spoke in a tone Nina had come to know well: resentment mingled with defiance. ‘I really don’t know why I bothered to tell you. I should have just amended the will and left it at that.’

  ‘That would have been a nice surprise for us,’ said Nina with a sarcastic half-laugh.

  At that Mrs Land rose from her seat and, with a look of hurt dignity, said, ‘I’m going to powder my nose. I hope on my return you’ll have recovered your manners.’

  Nina stared straight ahead as her mother stalked away from the table. She found she was in a tremble, whether from shock or indignation she didn’t know. She couldn’t speak. Not knowing what to do with herself she took out a cigarette, and struck the match so fiercely that it flew out of her hand and landed on the table. Felicity, calming her, took the box of matches and lit it for her. She took a great gasping lungful of smoke.

  Moments passed before she looked to her sister and said, ‘Sorry, I’m – I feel like I’ve just been . . . mugged.’

  Felicity shook her head rather sadly. ‘No – merely disinherited.’

  ‘You know what’s behind it? She believes Mr Dorsch is going to ask her to marry him. Then she’ll go to live in his house and let Bee move into hers.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather presumptuous of her?’

  ‘Not as far as she’s concerned. She thinks she’s a catch.’

  Felicity looked doubtful. ‘I’d better go and check on her.’

  ‘And I’d better leave.’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Felicity replied sharply, standing up. ‘I’m not going through this on my own.’ She went off in the direction of the Ladies.