Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

Excitedly she asked me round for herb tea to see the card. She wouldn’t say anything more on the phone, so I came. I had barely taken a sip of Dandelion and Chamomile—a filthy concoction, take my word, don’t go near the stuff—before she had thrust the Actor’s Benevolent Fund card into my hand. Inside it read as follows:

“Darling Puss-Cat,

“Filming here nearly over. Shan’t be sorry. Ghastly Spanish food swimming in oil. Fell off a horse yesterday in full armour. No joke. Puss-Cat, I’m taking out a Spring Tour of King Lear next year and I’ve done a deal which guarantees us a West End Theatre. The long and the short of it is I want you to be my Cordelia. What say you?

“Your ever loving,

“Roddy”

I have to confess that my first reaction was a typical actor’s one: jealousy. He was taking out a tour of King Lear and there were plenty of parts for me—Kent, perhaps even Gloucester—why hadn’t Roddy been in touch about it? But this was no time to feel hurt; Yolande was asking me what she should do. I said it was obvious. She should get her agent to contact the Navigator Productions office and accept the offer. Yolande said she had already done that.

Then there was a long laborious discussion in which she went on about her utter inadequacy for the role—she had never done Shakespeare professionally—and I, as I was expected to do, reassured her that she would make a splendid Cordelia. I thought it might be tactless to remark that one of her main qualifications for the part was the fact that she was a light girl, only just over seven stone. The elderly actor playing Lear, you see, must carry Cordelia on stage at the end of the play, so weight is a consideration, especially in a long run, and it was one of which I am sure Roddy had been mindful.

Well, that seemed to be that. I didn’t hear much from Yolande till after Christmas. Then she began to be a bit worried because Roddy had not been in touch with her. This was the arrangement, you see. She was not allowed to ring him in case Lady Margery answered the phone: he would always call her. More worrying perhaps than that, there had been no response from the Navigator Productions office about her acceptance of Cordelia. This puzzled me because by this time my agent had been notified that Roddy was “interested” in me for the part of Kent.

Early in January Roddy asked me over to the Navigator Offices just off the Charing Cross Road to “talk about Kent.” I knew this amounted to a firm offer, so I went eagerly and found him welcoming and friendly as always, but, I thought, a little distracted. We discussed the production and my part which he described as “hell’s important” and “absolutely key.” We also discussed the salary he was offering. He apologised profusely that it couldn’t be higher; in fact he seemed so distressed about it that in the end I began to feel guilty, as if I had gone in asking for more money than he could afford which, of course, I hadn’t. In the end, to relieve the tension, I said:

“I gather Yolande is going to be your Cordelia.”

Roddy’s reaction was most unexpected. He looked at me with a shocked, almost fearful expression, as if something poisonous had just bitten him.

“What the hell are you on about, Godders?” he said.

Now, I didn’t want to admit that I’d read a private Christmas card so I was a bit vague at first, but Roddy simply didn’t understand. In the end I had to tell him explicitly that she had shown me the message from him. Even then, it was quite some time before he reacted. Then it was as if a flash from a bolt of lightning had suddenly bleached his face.

Roddy said: “Oh, my God! Oh, my Christ! Oh, my golly gosh!” Then, after a long pause, he said in a quiet, thoughtful sort of a way: “Oh, fuck!”

I waited patiently for the explanation. At last he sighed, as if these things had been sent to try him and he told me:

“I wrote all my bloody Christmas cards in Spain. I thought it would be something to do. You know the waiting around that goes on, especially when you’re filming one of these ghastly Hollywood Epics. I can remember writing all the cards, then I got a tummy bug from some fearful Spanish muck they served us. Well, the doc, under instructions from the director of course, just drugged me up to the eyeballs so I could get onto that bloody horse again. It was while I was under the influence that I did the envelopes for the cards. I do vaguely remember doing Bel Courteney’s at the same time as Yolande’s—”

I got his drift. “You mean the offer of Cordelia was meant for Belinda Courteney? You put the card in the wrong envelope?”

“Yes. Dammit! Yes! I’ve been wondering why Bel hadn’t responded. In fact… Oh, buggeration and hell!”

He seemed even more upset than before and I asked him what was the matter. At last I got it out of him that the card he had intended for Yolande contained a suggestion, couched in the gentlest possible terms, that perhaps in future they might be seeing rather less of each other than before.

I said: “You mean, you might have sent the brush-off for Yolande to Belinda by mistake as well?” Roddy started rubbing his face with his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at me. By this time, I was almost as upset as he was. I said: “But you called her puss-cat.”

“Who?”

“Yolande—I mean Belinda.”

“Yes. Yes! They’re all called puss-cat.” He seemed very irritated that I had brought the matter up. Then he became all abject and apologetic which was almost worse. He said: “Look, Godfrey, dear old thing, would you do me the most enormous favour? Would you try to break all this to Yolande? And do it gently, won’t you, dear old boy. I know you will. You’re such a brick. The fact is I just can’t face it at the moment. I’m up to here with Lear, as you can imagine, and I’ve got to try and sort things out with Belinda.”

I said: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to tackle her as well?”

Roddy didn’t react; he just shook his head solemnly. “No, thanks. That’s awfully decent, but I have to do that myself.” My attempts at irony have always fallen on deaf ears. Not so much esprit de l’escalier as esprit de corpse , eh? Oh, never mind. So I agreed to see Yolande for him. Of course I agreed. You can’t just fall out of love with someone after forty years. At least, I can’t.

I thought of telling Yolande by phone or even a letter, but in the end I decided to go to see her: it seemed the only decent thing to do. Well, we got sat down with the herb tea and everything and the cat Roddy purring on her lap and I began to explain. It was horrible because she found it so hard to take it in. I had to say everything twice. She didn’t rage, or throw things, or spit with hatred or anything—I would have preferred that—she just listened with a baffled expression on her face. There were no sobs, but her eyes were wet with tears. She kept saying: “But why? Does he hate me or something?” And I said “No,” very loudly and firmly, because I was sure he didn’t. Then she asked me to explain about the card yet again, so I did.

She nodded a few times before she said: “So he doesn’t want me to be his Cordelia?”

I shook my head. There was a bit of a pause, then she came out with something which jolly nearly broke me up. She said: “I’d started learning the lines.”

Oh, God! You wouldn’t understand, would you? You’re not an actor.

Well, we began work on Lear and I rather lost touch with Yolande. Rehearsals were engrossing and I had the feeling she would not want to hear about them. Incidentally, Belinda Courteney did not play Cordelia—it was the year of her groundbreaking Hedda Gabler at the National—and the girl who did was no better and no worse than Yolande might have been. Roddy was on top form as Lear and I think everyone who saw him agrees that he gave the performance of his life. The rest of the cast was good, the set was functional and, though the costumes belonged to the then-fashionable “Ruritanian Stalinist” school, they did at least fit. We opened fairly triumphantly in, of all places, Blackpool.