Ngaio Marsh - Opening Night

‘Here we are,’ said the doorkeeper. ‘All yer own.’

She turned to thank him and encountered a speculative stare. ‘Cosy,’ he said, ‘ain’t it?’ and moved nearer. ‘Nice little hidey-hole, ain’t it?’

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Martyn said. ‘I’ll manage splendidly now. Thank you very much indeed.’

‘Don’t mention it. Any time.’ His hand reached out clumsily to her. ‘Been aht in the rain,’ he said thickly. ‘Naughty girl.’

‘I’ll soon dry off. I’m quite all right.’

She moved behind the pile of dress-boxes and fumbled with the string on the top one. There was a hissing noise. She heard him strike a match and a moment later was horribly jolted by an explosion from the gas-heater. It forced an involuntary cry from her.

‘’Allo, ’allo!’ her companion said. ‘Ain’t superstitious, are we?’

‘Superstitious?’

He made an inexplicable gesture towards the gas-fire. ‘ You know,’ he said, grinning horridly at her.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t tell me you never ’eard abaht the great Jupiter case! Don’t they learn you nothing in them anti-podes?’

The heater reddened and purred.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘it’d be before your time. I wasn’t here myself when it occurred, a-course, but them that was don’t give you a chance to forget it. Not that they mention it direct-like but it don’t get forgotten.’

‘What was it?’ Martyn asked against her will.

‘Sure yer not superstitious?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You ain’t been long in this business, then. Nor more am I. Shake ’ands.’ He extended his hand so pointedly that she was obliged to put her own in it and had some difficulty in releasing herself.

‘It must be five years ago,’ he said, ‘all of that. A bloke in number four dressing-room did another bloke in, very cunning, by blowing dahn the tube of ’is own gas-fire. Like if I went nex’ door and blew dahn the tube, this fire’d go aht. And if you was dead drunk like you might of been if this girl friend of yours’d been very generous with ’er brandy you’d be commy-toes and before you knew where you was you’d be dead. Which is what occurred. It made a very nasty impression and the theatre was shut dahn for a long time until they ’ad it all altered and pansied up. The guvnor won’t ’ave it mentioned. ’E changed the name of the ’ouse when ’e took it on. But call it what you like the memory, as they say, lingers on. Silly, though, ain’t it? You and me don’t care. That’s right, isn’t it? We’d rather be cosy. Wouldn’t we?’ He gave a kind of significance to the word ‘cosy’. Martyn unlocked the suitcases. Her fingers were unsteady and she turned her back in order to hide them from him. He stood in front of the gas-fire and began to give out a smell of hot dirty cloth. She took sheets from the suitcase, hung them under the clothes pegs round the walls, and began to unpack the boxes. Her feet throbbed cruelly and, with a surreptitious manipulation, she shuffled them out of her wet shoes.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘Dry ’em orf, shall we?’

He advanced upon her and squatted to gather up the shoes. His hand, large and prehensile, with a life of its own, darted out and closed over her foot. ‘’Ow abaht yer stockings?’

Martyn felt not only frightened but humiliated and ridiculous: wobbling, dead tired, on one foot. It was as if she were half caught in some particularly degrading kind of stocks.

She said: ‘Look here, you’re a good chap. You’ve been terribly kind. Let me get on with the job.’

His grip slackened. He looked up at her without embarrassment, his thin London face sharp with curiosity. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No offence meant. Call it a day, eh?’

‘Call it a day.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said and got to his feet. He put her shoes down in front of the gas-fire and went to the door. ‘Live far from ’ere?’ he asked. A feeling of intense desolation swept through her and left her without the heart to prevaricate.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to find somewhere. There’s a women’s hostel near Paddington, I think.’

‘Broke?’

‘I’ll be all right, now I’ve got this job.’

His hand was in his pocket: ‘’Ere,’ he said.

‘No, no. Please.’

‘Come orf it. We’re pals, ain’t we?’

‘No, really. I’m terribly grateful but I’d rather not. I’m all right.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said again, and after a pause: ‘I can’t get the idea, honest I can’t. The way you speak and be’ave and all. What’s the story? ’Ard luck or what?’

‘There’s no story, really.’

‘Just what you say yourself. No questions asked.’ He opened the door and moved into the passage. ‘Mind,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘it’s against the rules but I won’t be rahnd again. My mate relieves me at eight ack emma but I’ll tip ’im the wink if it suits you. Them chairs in the greenroom’s not bad for a bit of kip and there’s the fire. I’ll turn it on. Please yerself a-course.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘could I? Could I?’

‘Never know what you can do till you try. Keep it under your tifter, though, or I’ll be in trouble. So long. Don’t get down’earted. It’ll be all the same in a fahsand years.’

He had gone. Martyn ran into the passage and saw his torchlight bobbing out on the stage. She called after him:

‘Thank you – thank you so much. I don’t know your name – but thank you and goodnight.’

‘Badger’s the name,’ he said, and his voice sounded hollow in the empty darkness. ‘Call me Fred.’

The light bobbed out of sight. She heard him whistling for a moment and then a door slammed and she was alone.

With renewed heart she turned back to her job.

IV

At ten o’clock she had finished. She had traversed with diligence all the hazards of fatigue: the mounting threat of sleep, the clumsiness that makes the simplest action an ordeal, the horror of inertia and the temptation to let go the tortured muscles and give up, finally and indifferently, the awful struggle.

Five carefully ironed dresses hung sheeted against the walls, the make-up was laid out on the covered dressing-shelf. The boxes were stacked away, the framed photographs set out. It only remained to buy roses in the morning for Miss Helena Hamilton. Even the vase was ready and filled with water.

Martyn leant heavily on the back of a chair and stared at two photographs of the same face in a double leather case. They were not theatre photographs but studio portraits and the face looked younger than the face in the greenroom: younger and more formidable, with the mouth set truculently and the gaze withdrawn. But it had the same effect on Martyn. Written at the bottom of each of these photographs, in a small incisive hand, was ‘Helena from Adam. 1950’. ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘he’s married to her.’

Hag-ridden by the fear that she had forgotten some important detail, she paused in the doorway and looked round the room. No, she thought, there was nothing more to be done. But as she turned to go she saw herself, cruelly reflected in the long cheval-glass. It was not, of course, the first time she had seen herself that night; she had passed before the looking-glasses a dozen times and had actually polished them, but her attention had been ruthlessly fixed on the job in hand and she had not once focused her eyes on her own image. Now she did so. She saw a girl in a yellow sweater and dark skirt with black hair that hung in streaks over her forehead. She saw a white, heart-shaped face with smudges under the eyes and a mouth that was normally firm and delicate but now drooped with fatigue. She raised her hand, pushed the hair back from her face and stared for a moment or two longer. Then she switched off the light and blundered across the passage into the greenroom. Here, collapsed in an armchair with her overcoat across her, she slept heavily until morning.