Curtain Call Read online

  ‘Sir,’ he replied, with a tap to his helmet, walking on.

  Jimmy wondered how respectful the bobby would have been had he witnessed his recent ‘conduck’ with the guardsmen. The younger of the two had been rather shy when he asked for his usual. ‘What – in there?’ he said, looking at the tankard on the table. Jimmy watched as the man unbuttoned his fly and flipped out his cock, giving it a quick peremptory tug; a few moments later an arc of urine drummed inside the pewter, then slowed to a dribble. The man gave himself a shake, and withdrew.

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ said Jimmy, taking the remainder of the Scotch and upending it into the tankard. He sniffed a thin ammoniac odour, then put the vessel to his lips and downed it in great gulps.

  He went softly down the hall, shrugged off his coat and peeked into the living room. Through the grainy dark he saw the recumbent form of Tom, his secretary, asleep on the sofa. The bed he had made for himself was, like everything he did, severely neat; he had even tucked in the blanket corners. With tender feelings of relief Jimmy crept into the room to turn down the lamp. As he did so the prone body on the sofa stirred, and a sleep-blurred voice came: ‘Jim – that you?’

  He gave him a little pat. ‘Yes. Go back to sleep. Bring me in some tea at eight, will you?’

  Tom grunted a vague affirmative.

  ‘Good man,’ whispered Jimmy, backing out of the room and closing the door.

  4

  MADELEINE JUMPED WHEN the waitress put down the pot of tea at her elbow. She’d been miles away. ‘Sorry, dearie,’ cooed the woman, who must have seen her startled expression because she patted her hand in apology. A sudden hot surge prickled at Madeleine’s eyes. It was the sort of random gesture of sympathy that could set her off these days, she didn’t know why. The waitress, older than the others, had just asked her something, and mechanically she replied, ‘No, nothing else, thank you.’

  ‘Right you are,’ she said, and moved away. Madeleine’s gaze followed her halting progress around the other tables, where she would stoop enquiringly, nodding through the orders on her notepad, sharing an inaudible moment of cheer. She treated all of her customers in the same affable way, and none of them seemed to find it unusual. If only – if only this nice old lady were her friend, the things she would tell her, all those things choked up so tight inside they felt like some terrible indigestion. But then perhaps she would only frighten her off, for who would wish to be tainted by her sordid packet of despair?

  Without removing her thin scarf she put her fingertips to the skin around her throat, which still felt sore, weeks after. She looked about her to check that nobody was watching, and, of course, nobody was. Who were these people, she wondered, these blithe patrons of the tea room, jawing away to one another without a care in the world? How had they come by such unthinking gaiety? She drew the scarf around her protectively. It was one of only two souvenirs from her time at Diprose’s, the smart ladies’ clothing establishment off Piccadilly. She sometimes tormented herself with the notion that all might have been well if she had stuck it out there. If she had been a little more self-possessed . . . The manager, Mr Campbell, had seemed quite the gentleman, asking her how she liked working in the linen and hosiery department, often popping down from the third floor to say good morning. She soon learned why. He was old – at least forty-five, she supposed – and immaculately turned out, with a pocket square in blazing scarlet or gold to offset his dark double-breasted suits. She had once seen him in the Burlington Arcade reading a newspaper while a shoeblack worked away on his gleaming oxfords.

  At first, when she was required at his office to help with the mail orders, she thought his standing rather close to her was a helpless eccentricity – she had noticed the tendency in others before. When he started to touch her she said nothing, but tried to keep her distance if they happened to be left alone together. He must have taken her silence as encouragement, because he became bolder, not just rubbing up against her but actually snaking his hand along her neck and shoulders. She didn’t know what to do. She was friendly with a couple of the other assistants without their being actual friends, but she sensed that telling them about Mr Campbell’s interferences would not be welcomed. They would think her a troublemaker, or the type of girl who sought attention. Her superior in the hosiery department was a middle-aged lady, Mrs Pearce, whose horn-rimmed spectacles alone were enough to repel any thought of confiding in her. Her obsequious regard for their employer left no doubt in Madeleine’s mind whose side she would take if the story came out.

  The next and last time it happened was one afternoon after Campbell had returned from lunch. She had been distracted by some footling paperwork and hadn’t noticed him sidling into the room. Before she knew it he had twisted her around and pressed his mouth against hers; the smell of meat and alcohol warm on his breath made her recoil with nausea. She could not remember exactly what he said after she pulled away, but his tone suggested that she was being a spoilsport, and that all he was after was ‘a bit of fun’. She was not entirely in command of herself as her open hand swung wildly at his face and connected with a smack that actually spun him sideways. When he righted himself his expression was one of such stupefied incomprehension that she felt suddenly inclined to laugh. Instead, she snatched the bright handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped her mouth and threw it on the floor. ‘You will not do that to me again,’ she said quietly, and turned on her heel. She said nothing to anyone as she went downstairs to the staff cloakroom, retrieved her hat and coat and walked out of the shop.

  It was the bravest thing she had ever done, though once the giddy sense of righteousness had evaporated she wondered if it wasn’t also the stupidest. In her haste she had not even collected the previous week’s money. The rent at the boarding house in Camden was cheap enough, but it still had to be paid. She would not go back to Chertsey, where she had lived on and off with her aunt since the age of twelve. It was not that Aunt Beryl had been unkind – merely unmaternal. Aside from arranging for her to attend the convent school and ensuring that she had regular meals and clean clothes, she seemed barely to know what to do with her niece. Beryl liked to go shopping, do crosswords, eat violet creams and hold bridge evenings with her WI friends. It was only in her late teens that Madeleine realised that children as a species bored her aunt into fits. So she had left Chertsey for London two years ago, without regret on either side.

  She had thought, naively, that it would be simple to get another job, but employers demanded references, and of course she had none from Diprose’s. She knew not a single person she might call upon in London. She wasn’t sure if her shyness was to blame, or whether circumstances had conspired in her failure to form friendships. An only child, she had a faint memory of her father, a lawyer’s clerk in Dorchester who had been killed at Ypres in the autumn of 1917. She had been loved devotedly by her mother, a pale, beautiful and neurasthenic woman who was in and out of hospitals for most of Madeleine’s short life. She had died of complications from pneumonia in 1926. If her aunt, living a distance from neighbours, had made little effort to bring out the gregarious instincts within her, convent school actively repressed them.

  On her first or second day there she had formed a bond with the one child who looked lonelier than she did, a fourteen-year-old girl named Veronica whose skin was caramel-coloured from a childhood spent in India, where her father was a colonel in the army. Some girls laughed at the sing-song accent Veronica had acquired and called her a ‘darkie’; Madeleine, however, was entranced by her extraordinarily pretty eyes and slim wrists. For weeks they were as inseparable as honeymooners, oblivious to all, until one of the nuns, Sister Ignatius, summoned the girls to her office for separate interviews. Madeleine could not imagine what she had done wrong, though Sister’s tone as she spoke became metallic with admonition. Did she know that Veronica was actually a year older than her? Yes, she did, they knew each other’s birthdays, it was one of the first things they had talked about. And what else did they tal
k about? Having never known an adult to express such interest in her, she responded with an earnest inventory of topics – dogs, music, parents, illness, food and (what was inexhaustible) the fascination of Veronica’s life in India. The nun let a silence hang before she asked if there was not something odd about two girls becoming so close to one another. Madeleine didn’t understand what she was being asked to admit, though she could tell from the pursing of her interrogator’s mouth that she was not quite pleased. Another silence intervened, rather like the one in the confessional when the priest waited for you to list your sins. Eventually Sister Ignatius said, ‘We do not encourage particular friendships among pupils at our school. They give rise to vanity and self-indulgence, and they trespass on the devotion that is more properly owing to Our Lord. Do you understand?’

  She had nodded, not understanding at all. Later, she had asked Veronica about her interview, and the halting account she had given of Sister’s counsel was no more enlightening than her own experience of it. They had not been forbidden to associate with each other – that would have been impossible – but it seemed that, once it had been noticed, the light and spontaneity began leaking out of their ‘particular friendship’. Madeleine had sensed she was the keener of them to make things as they once were, hoping Veronica would settle back into being the affectionate and bewitching girl she had first known. And she had continued to hope even as Veronica drifted away, making other friends and apparently forgetting those early avowals of loyalty that remain, in some children’s hearts, stronger than death. A year later she had disappeared, back to live with her family in India, and was never heard from again. It might have surprised her to know how lasting her effect had been on one particular friend from her convent days.

  Madeleine’s life had changed a few months ago, not long after she left Diprose’s. She had been in a Corner House like this one, staring into the middle distance, pondering the very real possibility that she wouldn’t be able to pay that week’s rent, when a man slid softly into the bench opposite.

  ‘Pardon me, miss, but you’re breaking my heart.’

  ‘– sorry?’ she enquired, startled by the intrusion. He had taken off his hat and tilted his head in smiling sympathy.

  ‘It’s hurting me just to look at those big sad eyes of yours. It’s like your sweetheart’s just upped and left. I know, none of my business – you can tell me to buzz off if you like.’

  His air of twinkling suavity suggested that she wouldn’t. Madeleine regarded him hesitantly. He was thirtyish, well groomed, expensively dressed, and his manner, though forward, was not unpleasant. He had produced a silver cigarette case which he now held open across the table. She shook her head: years of inhaling her aunt’s Pall Malls had put her off the habit. He took one himself and lit it, steering a jet of smoke sideways from his mouth. His name was Roderick Astill, and he worked as a booking agent for clubs in the West End, a line of business in which he appeared to be doing rather well.

  ‘That’s why you caught my eye,’ he drawled. ‘I thought – she must be a dancer.’

  Madeleine frowned and looked away. ‘Nothing like that. The only job I’ve ever done is shop assistant, and I lost that a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh, shame. Left you a bit short for the rent, has it?’ The precision of this shot in the dark unsettled her. She managed a little shrug. ‘Too bad,’ he continued. ‘That’s London – sort of place you could always do with a few bob more.’

  Guarded at first, she gradually opened up to Mr Astill’s keen-eyed charm – he was the sort her aunt used to describe as ‘debonair’. Even the affected way he held a cigarette, between his middle and ring fingers, had a raffish appeal. He talked a great deal, but he listened too, when she was at last persuaded to tell him about her time in London, about Campbell’s vile behaviour and her fruitless search for a job ever since. The street lamps were casting daubs of yolky light on the cafe window before she realised it had gone seven o’clock. Mr Astill noticed her glancing at his wristwatch.

  ‘Well, you’ve turned down a cup of tea, and you’ve turned down my cigarettes. Will it be third time lucky if I ask you to dinner?’

  ‘Oh, no, really –’

  ‘Come on, Madeleine. You look half starved.’ He gave her a comical pleading look. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t want to hurt a chap’s feelings, now . . .’

  She replied, with a pained little smile, ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.’

  ‘Well, then!’ he cried, giving the table a triumphant smack, as if the matter were decided. ‘On with that coat, and we’ll put our best foot forward.’

  She could think of no reason to decline. He was probably right about her looking starved – she had been skimping on meals of late, desperate to make economies. She could do with a proper feed. And the company was far from disagreeable; he was not quite as smooth as he pretended to be, which she liked. It wasn’t his cigarette case or the name-dropping that impressed her, but the endearing way he had conceded her right to tell him to ‘buzz off’. Out on the street he crooked his arm in invitation, and she took it. They walked a little way up High Holborn before he stopped at a car, dark green and open-topped with a huge gleaming grille that made it look important. He was hovering about it proprietorially, and she blinked.

  ‘Is this – yours?’

  He laughed as he unlocked the passenger door. ‘What, you think I’m a car thief?’ Any lingering suspicion that he was just ‘talk’ fell away, and she hesitated again.

  ‘Mr Astill, I’m not sure –’

  ‘It’s Roddy, please. Hop in, would you? – that dinner’s not going to eat itself!’

  He drove them into Soho and parked in a side street with the air of someone who might have owned the place. They ate at an Italian restaurant where the staff all knew him, and with the veal saltimbocca they drank a heavy plum-coloured wine, very different from the sort she used to sip after her aunt’s bridge evenings. Mr Astill – Roddy – did most of the talking, which she didn’t mind, though by the end of the night her head was swimming (the second bottle had come and gone) and she felt a bit of a fool as she stumbled on the way out. She worried he might try to take advantage of her when they were back in the car, but he played fair, and drove her home to Camden. Before she got out of the car he asked her if she would join him for another dinner, this Saturday.

  Madeleine woke the next morning with a dry mouth, a crashing headache and a memory of having agreed to meet again. She ought to have said no, she wasn’t sure why, though by the time Saturday came round she found herself excited at the thought of being taken out. When he called for her he looked pleased by the effort she had made: she was wearing her one good dress, crêpe de Chine in navy with a cream trim, her other purchase (at a staff discount) from Diprose’s. It showed off her long legs, which she noticed him gazing at. This time he took her to a members’ club in Mayfair where they dined in the company of Roddy’s friends, most of them loud, good-looking types his own age, with a few older men he called – in a sly aside to her – ‘hangers-on’. She was astounded by their capacity for alcohol, the women as well as the men, and though she couldn’t keep up with that she joined them willingly enough in the dancing that followed at the next club. It was all very gay and exhilarating. Roddy, rarely straying from her side, made sure none of the younger chaps hogged her company, and once again drove her home through an unpeopled ash-grey dawn. ‘You can consider yourself one of the fast set now,’ he said, holding open the car door as if he were her chauffeur.

  The following week they met for dinner again, only this time there was just one other with them, an older fellow named Brevett whom she recognised from the Saturday. His pudgy, sallow face expressed an air of impatience, as though he needed to be somewhere else. He took little interest in her, preferring to talk business with Roddy. Madeleine, not caring either way, acquiesced in the role of mute and drank the wine that Roddy absently poured from a carafe. When they repaired afterwards to a smart flat off Cavendish Square – it h
ad a porter operating the lift – Brevett seemed to remember his manners, and pointed out to her a few landmarks visible through the huge picture window overlooking the city. He poured them all brandy in huge balloon glasses and played a lot of parping jazz records on his gramophone. Both men lit cigars the size of dynamite sticks. At some point a bottle of champagne was opened, and she downed a couple of glasses very quickly. By now the blood was drumming in her ears, and she resolved to give herself a good talking-to in the morning about alcohol; she liked it, but it plainly didn’t like her.

  She was examining a large abstract oil painting on the wall, mesmerised by its thick careless whorls of paint, when she sensed a shadow at her back. She looked round to find Brevett, his face flushed from drink and a light in his eye. Roddy, who’d been there five, maybe ten minutes ago, had disappeared.

  ‘Come over here and let’s finish this pop,’ he said, steering her towards a couch and clunking down the champagne bottle on a low mirrored coffee table. Through the unsteadying grip of the drink she felt a shiver of anxiety, and her smile tightened as he allowed himself to cosy up against her.

  ‘Roddy was right, you’re a bonny wee lass,’ he mused, then frowned as his hand encircled her pale wrist. ‘Though you need some meat on you. Perhaps one should say a bony wee lass, ha ha!’

  When he twisted himself round to kiss her neck she tensed, though she didn’t pull away. ‘Would you mind – not doing that?’ she said, trying to sound friendly but firm. It was as though he hadn’t heard, for instead of desisting he broadened his field of fire by caressing her knee.

  ‘Mr Brevett, please,’ she said, pushing the hand as it crept northwards up her thigh. ‘I’m not . . .’ she began, trying to keep her voice steady, ‘I’m not what you think I am.’

  He did stop then, and drew himself back to look at her. ‘I see . . . Then, pray tell – what do you think you are?’