Curtain Call Page 21

  Ludo, seeming to read Stephen’s disappointment, said in belated compensation, ‘We may show the reel to a few others, I don’t know, it’s not final. But I wouldn’t get her hopes up.’

  ‘No, I see that . . .’ He watched the rain purling down the window, and fell to brooding again. When he looked up, Ludo had fixed him with a shrewd gaze.

  ‘Am I missing something here?’ said the producer. ‘If I didn’t know you better I’d say that your interest in Miss Land extends somewhat beyond her career.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Call it a sordid intuition. It struck me the first time I saw you together, when she was telling that story about her moment with the Tiepin Killer. You seemed very jumpy.’

  Stephen paused, holding his gaze. ‘She’s a very dear friend, and I’m concerned for her. She ought to have kept that story to herself. It could get her into trouble if someone put it about.’

  Ludo’s eyebrows arched. ‘Which would imply . . .?

  ‘I’m counting on your discretion, Ludo.’

  ‘That’s rich,’ he said with a disbelieving laugh. ‘To judge from the company you’ve been keeping I don’t think it’s my discretion we have to worry about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Gerald Carmody. Not the sort you should be seen with, old boy.’

  Stephen shook his head. ‘Carmody is no friend of mine, I assure you. He inveigled me into attending a charity dinner the other night – otherwise I barely see him.’

  Ludo, with a dubious look, said, ‘I’ve a notion you’ve not read today’s Times.’ He stood and walked over to the rack of newspapers, plucking one by its wooden rod. Riffling through it he found the page, and spread it on the table in front of Stephen. It was a news story about the activities of the British People’s Brigade, a breakaway Fascist party led by ‘ex-MP Gerald Carmody, a one-time comrade of Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists’. Stephen’s eye flitted to the accompanying photographs. One was of the new party’s aristocratic sponsor, Lady Trevelyan, greeting the German ambassador to London, Ribbentrop, with Carmody dancing attendance. Another was Carmody presiding over a rally, his arm held aloft in a Nazi salute.

  Still at his shoulder, Ludo read from the story: ‘“Having left the BUF Carmody made an alliance with fellow anti-Semite William Joyce. Together they have formed the British People’s Brigade, a party devoted to keeping Britain out of a war and to fighting international Jewish finance, a ruthless conspiracy, according to Carmody, which ‘stretches its hands from the shelter of England to throttle trade and menace the peace of the world’.”’ Ludo chuckled, adding, ‘I could take that rather personally.’

  Stephen shook his head. ‘I don’t understand what this has to do with me.’

  ‘Try the next page,’ he replied with a thin smile.

  Stephen did so, and found there his own face looming out of a photograph, his expression uncertain and at odds with a manically grinning Carmody next to him. They were shaking hands. Someone had taken it at the Carlton that night of the Marquess dinner. A caption helpfully supplied: Gerald Carmody with (right) society portraitist Stephen Wyley. He had thought little of it at the time, of course, recalling only the camera bulb’s explosive flash. If he were being honest about it, Stephen had suspected the danger of associating with Carmody all along – and yet he had deluded himself that no one would notice, or care. He’d got that wrong. At his side he felt Ludo’s unspoken appraisal.

  ‘I could hardly refuse his hand. He was our host for the evening.’

  Ludo shrugged in a conciliating gesture. ‘You don’t have to defend yourself to me. I don’t imagine for a moment you go Sieg-Heiling about the place or demanding the expulsion of the Jews, or whatever else it is they do –’

  ‘Ludo, for God’s sake –’

  ‘– I am merely iterating your point about discretion, dear boy.’ He looked about the half-full dining room. ‘They’re a liberal lot here, as you know, but they won’t stand for a member being involved with – well – the Fascist fringe.’

  Stephen lowered his head, rubbing his eyelids with thumb and middle finger. ‘You want to know the irony? It so happened that fellow Joyce was at the same dinner, the one Carmody invited me to, drunk and spouting the most ludicrous rot about Jews – I actually took a swing at him! But of course that didn’t make the story.’

  Ludo puffed on his cigar. ‘It sounds as though you were just in the wrong place. But guilt by association is the devil to shake off. I think your best bet is to lie low and avoid places that Carmody goes. He hasn’t got anything on you, has he?’

  ‘What? No, no. Like I said, he’s not a friend.’ He glanced back over the page at the photograph of Lady Trevelyan and Ribbentrop. It would not be the moment to admit he’d been a guest at the former’s house. He had been tweaking his portrait of her for months. Now he came to think of it, she had mentioned her admiration of Mosley – ‘Tom’, as she called him. Stephen, utterly bored by politics, had ignored it. The claim of ignorance no longer felt convincing. Somehow he had managed to sleepwalk into a coven of Nazi sympathisers.

  ‘The thing may just blow over,’ said Ludo presently. ‘After all, it’s not as though there’s a shortage of right-wing crackpots to keep the press occupied. Carmody’s pretty small beer.’

  Stephen nodded, not feeling reassured. It was a joke – a farce, really – but he didn’t like the idea of being its punchline.

  Later, too distracted to work, he put his brushes away and pinned back the dust sheet to protect the mural. Five of the members’ faces had been completed, with another ten to go. No, eleven – he had forgotten the late addition of Talman’s affluent friend. He made a mental note to dig out his old college record and look for Everett Druce in it; he felt certain they had met before.

  He was crossing the hall on his way out of the club when a porter hailed him. He followed the man into the panelled vestibule where the staff loitered in their waistcoats and striped trews. The porter plucked a letter from one of the narrow pigeonholes and handed it to him.

  ‘Gentleman left it for you, sir,’ the man said quietly, and withdrew.

  His name was written on the envelope in an untidy, boyish hand. Stephen, in a momentary spasm of paranoia, thought of Oscar Wilde and the fateful calling card left at his club by the Marquess of Queensberry, insulting him as a ‘posing somdomite’. Was the news of his social blemish already out? ‘Stephen Wyley: crypto-Fascist’. He looked around, to see if he was being watched. There was no one; it was a somnolent late afternoon at the Nines. With fluttering heart he cut open the envelope, whose folded contents turned out to be a photographic plate excised from a book, and short note in the same untidy hand:

  My dear Mr Wyley,

  It was most kind of you to host James and myself for drinks at your club the other evening. I have enclosed a reproduction of the Parmigianino Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror which you may recall being lectured upon at the Carlton Hotel dinner – forgive me, I am too apt to be ‘carried away’ by my enthusiasms. I fear the curse of loquaciousness has been refined through generations of my family! But I venture to hope you will not be unstimulated by the painting. As I said, it seems to me the most perfect conceit – the artist’s beautiful hand, hovering, unable to grasp the truth of his own self.

  Of your noble behaviour on the night in question I will say only this – it shall not be forgotten. Believe me, sir.

  Very respectfully yours,

  László Balázsovits

  Stephen stared at the reflected face of the young painter, pale, delicate, epicene – perhaps more girl than boy. Even in this small reproduction he could tell it was a remarkable thing, like a magical apparition in a crystal ball. It was that hand at the front you couldn’t help staring at, distorted by the mirror and suggesting something hidden from the viewer’s gaze. He turned back to the letter and read the bit about his ‘noble behaviour’ again. With a rueful twist to his mouth he folded it away in his pocket, put up the
collar of his coat and left the building. The bloated sky was still leaking rain as he hurried towards his bus stop.

  13

  MADELEINE WAITED FOR the operator’s click, then slipped the coin into the slot. The voice came on the line.

  ‘Museum 3581 . . . Hullo?’

  Drat, she thought, it’s him. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s me again, I’m –’

  ‘Kindly identify “me”, madam.’

  ‘Madeleine – Madeleine Farewell.’

  ‘Madeleine Farewell? Sounds like someone from a Restoration comedy.’

  At a loss for a reply, she pressed on. ‘I wonder if Tom is there. He gave me this number, you see . . .’

  ‘I’ll see if he’s available,’ said Jimmy, with an audible sigh. He had become used to answering the phone during Tom’s absence, and now couldn’t stop himself. Madeleine heard a heavy clunk as the receiver was set down and muffled voices echoed tinnily at the other end. The louder of them was the man who had answered her, and he didn’t sound best pleased to be ‘trotting about’ with messages for his secretary. Half a minute later the receiver scraped back into life and she heard, to her relief, Tom.

  ‘Madeleine?’

  ‘Hullo! I think your boss must be fed up with my calling this number. I hadn’t heard from you, so I – well, I was a little anxious.’

  Tom felt a jolt, pleased to hear that he’d been missed. It was not a sensation he was familiar with. He explained that he had been kept to his flat by ‘illness’, without specifying its nature.

  ‘I wanted to apologise,’ she said. ‘I left your friend’s birthday party without – I should have said goodnight, but . . .’

  ‘Never mind!’ He was madly curious about that night of the party, having seen her leave with Nina Land, but he sensed it wasn’t the moment to start investigating. She was rather a private person, like himself; perhaps that was why they had been drawn to one another. As he was talking Jimmy scribbled a note for him to read. With Madeleine now silent at the other end of the line, Tom began, falteringly, ‘I wonder, um – that is, my employer wanted to know – if you’d like to have lunch with us one day this week. I suppose you’re busy –’

  ‘No, I’m not busy,’ she replied artlessly.

  Looking over at Jimmy, he indicated with only his eyebrows her acceptance: their code of facial expressions had become almost marital. Jimmy mouthed a word, and Tom relayed it out loud: ‘Would Friday suit you?’

  Having rung off, Madeleine returned through the slow lunchtime fug of the Blue Posts to where Rita was sitting. The latter had just applied a fresh swipe of pillar-box-red lipstick and was puckering her mouth in a compact mirror, tilting her head this way and that.

  ‘There’s me warpaint,’ she said, snapping the compact shut. She turned a curious look on Madeleine. ‘So – how was it last night? With him.’

  ‘Him’ was Roddy, who had intensified his campaign of charm by inviting her to dinner. It had put her in a quandary. Roddy had laid the ground during the last few weeks, driving her home at night, paying small compliments, supplying her with a perfume he knew she liked. He showed every sign of being besotted with her. To refuse his offer outright would be tantamount to an insult. But to yield might be hazardous, too, for she suspected her acceptance might be interpreted as a ‘green light’. In the end she decided that it would be better to risk it and hope that an amiable distance could be preserved between them.

  Somehow she got through it. Roddy had booked a table at an expensive fish restaurant off St James’s Square, and seemed no more at ease there than she was. They were seated awkwardly alongside each other on an olive-green banquette, and Madeleine sensed they were intruding on a room of regulars. When they were handed the tasselled menus, heavy as photograph albums, Roddy had squinted at it in alarmed distaste (‘It’s all in French,’ he muttered). Madeleine, with a loose grasp of the language from convent school, attempted to translate, but when it came to ordering the food he insisted on doing the job by himself. She noticed the aproned waiter smirking at his clumsy efforts (he pronounced langoustine to rhyme with ‘Frankenstein’) and was surprised to find herself feeling sorry for him. He drank at pace, and kept telling the waiter ‘to top ’em up’, which drew haughty glances from the maître d’.

  The odd thing was that Roddy could not leave a silence alone, and yet seemed unable to talk about the reason they were having dinner in the first place. Any time the conversation veered towards the personal he would bluster through with some jokey complaint about the Elysian, or about the other girls. In a way she was glad; she must have misread his intentions, or else he had been planning to make a move and then lost his nerve. By the time they got to pudding – vanilla ice with a hot cherry sauce – her relief at this non-event was so acute that she almost persuaded herself she was having a nice time. Roddy had relaxed, too, his face reddening from the concerted effect of the wine and the Martinis he kept tipping down.

  ‘So,’ he began, lighting a stubby cigar, ‘heard anything more from that feller?’

  ‘What feller?’

  ‘Your admirer – Mr Rusk, is it?’

  Madeleine paused, her innards turning cold. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes, you do. I asked your pal – y’know, Amphetamine Alice – she told me he’s been looking for you.’

  ‘And you believed her – Alice? She hardly knows what day of the week it is.’

  Roddy’s eyebrows were hoisted sceptically, and Madeleine realised she had to tell him something or else he’d never give her peace. She feigned a professional sigh. ‘She mentioned someone to me, a punter – I’d never heard of him. You know how many I see in a week, a month.’

  Roddy continued to stare at her. ‘So you don’t know this Mr Rusk?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘And you’re not seeing anyone else?’

  ‘No. I swear it.’ And she looked him in the eye as she spoke, knowing it was the truth. From an involuntary twitch to his mouth she saw that he was reassured by this information. He raised his arm to the waiter and twirled his hand in a circle to signal another round.

  ‘I can’t drink any more, really I can’t.’

  ‘Oh, you can manage a nightcap. Just one before bed.’

  As he drove her home she sank low in the passenger seat, eyes fixed on the corner of the windscreen, so that she was listening to London, not seeing it. The plaintive moan of buses on Marylebone Road, the clang of the trams as they turned into Hampstead Road, the distant clackety-clack of trains pulling out of Euston. On it all flowed, unceasing, oblivious. She felt her own inconsequential smallness in the larger pattern. You could live – and die – in London without anyone caring a rap. You wouldn’t even be forgotten when you were gone, since no one actually noticed you when you were alive. That didn’t seem so bad. What had disturbed her recently was a dream, horrifically vivid, about an enormous conflagration. She found herself on the streets of a city, which may have been London, she wasn’t sure; it was night in the dream, yet every house was lit up – on fire – and every person she saw wore an aureole of fire, just the top of their heads in blaze. They appeared to be sleepwalking, there was no sign of panic or hurrying. The fire was coming down like rain, long, liquid curtains of it drowning the roofs, the walls, the pavements; inescapable. Windows were bursting from the heat. Someone told her to look down, and she saw that her own hands were wreathed in flames. She couldn’t remember anything after that.

  ‘All up in smoke,’ she murmured into the darkness of the car.

  ‘Eh?’ said Roddy, glancing across. She had not meant to speak out loud.

  ‘Oh . . . I was just wondering how the world’s going to end.’ She gave a defensive little laugh to indicate this wasn’t to be taken seriously.

  Roddy’s stare was incredulous. ‘What’s with you?’ He took on an authoritative tone. ‘All this talk about a war, they’re dead wrong. Too much to lose, on all sides. Even Hitler won’t risk up
setting the apple cart.’

  Madeleine watched as the lights from outside skimmed in fleeting bands across his profile. She never really talked about serious things with Roddy. Or with anyone else, now she thought about it. She supposed Tom would be a good person for that, he seemed to know quite a lot about things, but not in a superior way. He wouldn’t laugh at you for not knowing much. For someone so bright and nervous he was also quite gentle – that was the nice thing about him.

  They had arrived at her lodgings in Bayham Street. Roddy pulled the car over, letting the engine idle for a few moments before switching off. She had started to thank him for a nice evening when he leaned across her and, before she could defend herself, his mouth was smothering hers. It was hot and eager and stank of alcohol and cigars. As soon as decency allowed she pulled away from him. He kept his head close, then said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  Her eyes briefly caught his gleam. ‘Probably not.’

  From his chuckle she could tell he wasn’t remotely discouraged. He shifted his weight against her and snaked an exploratory hand inside her coat. She tensed, wondering what she had done that he could possibly have interpreted as a come-on. And there was nothing. She had been polite, and attentive; she had smiled at his bad jokes, and expressed sympathy when he was moaning about work – as though his was more burdensome than hers.

  His hand was now pawing, hound-like, at the silk of her blouse, and she knew there was nothing to be gained from being ambiguous. Grasping his wrist she hauled the hand from inside her coat and matter-of-factly placed it on the car’s steering wheel. Before he could protest she said, without looking at him, ‘I’m off the clock, Roddy, and I’m tired.’

  She made to open the passenger door, but he stayed her arm. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said in an irked tone. ‘You just said you weren’t seeing anyone, but you’re giving me the brush-off.’