Bad Girls Good Women (80 page)

Mattie had played there, with John Douglas and Sheila Firth and the others. It had been another town, smelling of fish and chips and bottled Guinness. ‘I’ve been there.’

‘It’s a grand place.’

She looked sideways at him. He was squarely built, not very tall, zipped up in an anonymous greenish anorak. With the addition of a map and rucksack he might have been a hiker, with binoculars perhaps a birdwatcher. Except that a birdwatcher would have talked about gulls, not birds in the mud. The man was balding, probably in his late fifties. He wore glasses, and the lenses were spotted with raindrops. He took them off and wiped them with a clean white handkerchief.

‘What are you doing here?’ Mattie asked, rather reluctantly.

‘Vacationing.’ The transatlantic word sounded odd.

It was raining harder. The wind batted it into their faces.

‘Getting ugly,’ the man announced. ‘Shall we go and have some tea? I saw a teashop, a little way back. It might even be open.’

Mattie looked at her watch, preparing to decline the invitation. It was four o’clock. Three and a half hours to curtain up. Too late to go back to her hotel, too early to go to the theatre.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Tea’s a good idea.’

The man held out his hand. ‘Mitchell Howorth. Mitch.’ They shook. His grip was firm, unlingering.

‘That sounds American. Are you from the States?’

‘Nope. Lived there, for a long time. But my mother was a Mitchell, my father was a Howorth. Both from Whitby.’

Well here goes, Mattie thought. ‘I’m Mattie Banner.’

Mitch’s face didn’t flicker. ‘Hello, Mattie.’

He doesn’t know
, she thought. She was just a woman, caught in the rain. The notion delighted her.

They reached the teashop after a stiff walk. It was just like the ones Mattie used to sit in with Lenny and Vera, on rainy afternoons identical to this one. There was a plastic OPEN sign hanging on a chain between the glass door and a frilled nylon curtain caught in a double V-shape. Inside there were red gingham tablecloths and plastic cruets, and a bored waitress in a sauce-spotted apron. It smelt, rather too strongly for Mattie, of lunchtime fried egg.

Mattie undid the headscarf that she had knotted under her chin. Mitch looked at her hair, and at her face. The frankness of his sudden admiration was endearing. For the first time, Mattie smiled at him. They were standing too close together in the narrow entrance, they realised. Mitch stepped backwards to help her off with her coat.

They sat at a table in the window, cut off from the rainy street by more net curtaining. They were the only customers.

Briskly summoning the waitress, Mitch ordered tea for two and toasted teacakes. Evidently he had clear ideas about what tea constituted.

The teacakes came, very quickly. They were thickly spread with butter, yellow clots of it swimming in its own melted halo. The smell of fried egg seemed to thicken around Mattie, and her stomach heaved. She stood up at once.

‘Excuse me,’ she muttered.

She made for the door at the back of the tearoom. In the pink-distempered cubicle of the Ladies she was very neatly sick. Afterwards she washed her face and combed her damp hair, staring briefly at herself in the mirror. Then she made her way back to Mitch. He stood up at once. To her relief, she saw that the teacakes had been removed. He held out her chair for her, settled her into it, touched her shoulder briefly.

‘Have some tea,’ he ordered her. ‘Weak, no milk.’

‘Thank you,’ Mattie took it, thinking that what she really needed was whisky, strong, no water. But she sipped the tea anyway, and it warmed her.

‘Are you ill?’ Mitch asked. She liked him for not fussing her.

‘No. Just frightened. But I’ll be all right now.’

He looked at her, over the top of his glasses, a mock-quizzical expression that made her want to laugh. ‘What can someone like you possibly be frightened of?’

To her surprise, Mattie told him.

She told him about the well-made tragedy of manners that was trying out for the West End. She told him about her own starring role in it, and her agent and her publicist and the director and the theatre management, about the critics who would at this moment be irritably
en route
for Chichester, and the writer who thought she was too tainted with Hollywood for his precious play. She told him about the telegrams and the flowers and the witty little presents that would be waiting for her in the star’s dressing room, and about the painful clutches of her stage fright.

At the end of the recital she sighed. ‘Now you’ll think I’m a self-obsessed hysterical actress.’

Mitch Howorth poured her another cup of tea. ‘Does it matter what I think?’

Mattie blushed, like a schoolgirl, all the way up into her scalp. ‘Not a bit,’ she answered.

‘I’ll tell you, anyway. I don’t know anything about plays, or about movies. But I don’t believe, from looking at you and listening to you, that you would be capable of doing anything badly. That’s what I think. You’re frightened for nothing, Mattie.’

It isn’t nothing
, she was going to snap back at him.
Do you think it’s nothing, going out in front of all those people?

Then their eyes met.

His mild, level gaze disarmed her. It wasn’t nothing, she knew that, but it wasn’t everything, either.

Mattie laughed. ‘If you say so.’ She noticed that behind Mitch Howorth’s glasses, and the neutrality of his rounded, unremarkable face, there was sympathy and intelligence. She leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette. ‘That’s enough about that. Now you tell me who you are,’ she ordered flatly.

‘Nothing remotely as impressive.’

Mitch told her that he had left Whitby after his discharge from the Royal Navy. He had spent time as an engineer in the merchant marine, working routes to the Far East, and to Central and Northern America. ‘A drifter, not a mover,’ he said. But then, in Baltimore, he had met and struck up a friendship with a young American, another engineer.

‘We liked each other. And I liked the States a whole lot better than Britain in 1950. We went into partnership together, in Baltimore.’

Mattie blinked at him. ‘Doing what?’

‘Manufacturing metal casings.’

‘Oh.’ Mattie knew that she wasn’t equipped to pursue a conversation about metal casings.

‘I stayed put,’ Mitch continued. ‘Applied for citizenship. I’ve been a Yankee for seventeen years.’

‘Was your manufacturing successful?’ she asked, mostly because she couldn’t think of anything else to ask about it. Mitch grinned at her. He shrugged his shoulders and the corners of his eyes and mouth turned up. From a solid middle-aged man he was suddenly transformed into an impish schoolboy. It was very attractive.

‘You could say that.’

And that was it, Mattie thought. There had been something about him that she had been unable quite to define, and now she had it. Mr Howorth from Whitby via Baltimore was a successful man. She glanced at his watch. It was a Rolex, a not too ostentatiously gold one. He was wealthy, and he was used to people doing what he told them to. Not just tearoom waitresses. He probably had a chain of metal casings plants or factories or units, or whatever they were, stretching halfway across North America. Mattie decided that she had the complete picture now.

Her new friend was over here on his vacation, touring round little England, chuckling and reminiscing, and looking up fading Mitchells and Howorths in their retirement flats and council semis. His wife, bored to tears, was at this minute back at the Holiday Inn having her hair seen to. Where, Mattie wondered, was the nearest Holiday Inn to Chichester? But Mitch surprised her.

‘I’d had enough. I retired early, and handed over to a bunch of kids with letters after their names. I’ve no management control, although I’m still a stockholder. My partner died a couple of years back.’ He tapped his green anorak, superstitiously, over his own heart. ‘And now I’m free. I came home. I started at Whitby, and I’ve travelled right around the coast to here. I like seaside towns.’

‘So do I,’ Mattie said. She turned her head away and stared through the drooping swathes of net curtains. ‘What about your wife? Does she like them too?’

There was the briefest of pauses. Mattie watched the rain.

‘I’m divorced. Evie was a mover, and she moved on.’

‘Children?’

‘No. Never happened. How about you?’

‘Neither. I’ve already told you all there is to know about me. I’m an actress.’

Why have I
? Mattie wondered.
To a manufacturer of metal casings, in a teashop
? Belatedly, her defences rose again. She became aware of the waitress ostentatiously rattling and locking up in the background. The bill on its saucer had been slapped down in front of Mitch ages ago.

They had been sitting in the teashop window for a long time.

‘I’ve got to go,’ Mattie said. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve run off to.’

Mitch stood up, held her chair again. ‘May I come and see the performance?’ His faintly formal manners reminded her of Alexander. Mattie headed off the thought. ‘Oh no, for God’s sake.’

They laughed, and the waitress scowled at them.

Outside, to forestall any further approaches, Mattie held out her hand. She shook Mitch’s like a fellow metal casings trader.

‘Thank you for tea. You stopped me thinking about tonight, and I’m very grateful. Enjoy the rest of your holiday.’

In his mild way, Mitch studied her. ‘It’s raining very hard. Wouldn’t you like …’

‘Oh, no thanks. It’s no distance. Goodbye, and thank you.’

Mattie turned, and almost ran. Cold water oozed into her shoes, and splashed up the backs of her legs. She was glad to reach the theatre, even with what it held in store for her.

Her dresser was waiting for her, with more tea when what she really wanted was whisky. Mattie tried, not always successfully, never to drink before a performance. The flowers and messages were there too, and she tried to concentrate on the good wishes. Julia’s first night greetings were usually the best, but this time there were none. Julia was abroad, of course.

There was a knock at the door and the director stuck his head round it. He was followed a few minutes later by the orotund Shakespearean actor who was playing opposite Mattie. She went through the rituals, obligingly, because she was so used to them. Fear churned inside her and she thought of Mitch, probably driving his rented Ford back to wherever he had sprung from.

Mattie sat down at the mirror and made up her face. Her dresser brought her costume, and then she spent the last minutes sitting in silence, letting the scenes of the play flick through her head.

Then it was time. ‘Miss Banner? Five minutes, please.’ She was being called, just as she herself had called Sheila Firth and the others, years ago. Mattie went down to the wings and waited, the murmur from the audience beyond the curtain like thunder in her ears.

The first night performance was no worse than any of the week’s previews, perhaps even a little better. Everyone claimed to be thrilled with its reception. There were kisses and congratulations afterwards, the formalities no less familiar although she had been away from them for two years. Mattie didn’t go to the party that followed. She excused herself, saying that she was getting a migraine. She took a sleeping pill, and went to bed.

The reviews were good enough.

One critic implied that Mattie’s performance was muted, another wrote snippily that over-exposure to the camera lens and the dictates of commercialism had coarsened her technique.

‘Bollocks,’ Mattie said to that one, and tore the review in half.

‘That’s right, dear,’ her dresser agreed.

The company settled down into the run, and as it did so Mattie’s fear evaporated. She was working, burrowing inside the part, and the process engaged her, as it always had done. The houses were good, and there began to be optimistic talk about the West End transfer.

A week passed. Mattie wondered what had become of Mitch Howorth. After all he might have come to see the show, regardless of the fact that she had begged him not to. She was admitting to herself now that she would have liked to see him again and had to accept, with exasperation, that it was her own fault she wasn’t going to. By this time he must have moved on to Gosport, or Lymington, or to Weymouth where she had picnicked on the beach with Lily and Alexander. He would have forgotten the bilious actress and her first night nerves.

Two weeks after the opening night, a bunch of roses was delivered to her dressing room. They were shaggy, golden-yellow and richly scented, like the ones Julia grew in her garden overlooking the canal. Where could he have found such flowers in October? The card attached read simply,
With best wishes, Mitchell Howorth
.

Mattie spun round, holding the card aloft. Then she tore down the telegrams and tucked it into the mirror frame in their place. Before she left the room to go onstage, she buried her face in the depths of the golden petals.

When she came back, after her curtain call, the dressing room was full of the heady scent. She knew that he would come, even before she heard the knock.

He came in, bulky and solid in the small space. Even so she wanted to touch his arm, to make sure that he was real.

‘I told you you weren’t capable of doing anything badly,’ he said.

‘Mitch, where did you get roses like these?’ she asked him.

He had been staring at her, trying to marry the image of this Mattie, wrapped in a Japanese kimono with her hair loose over her shoulders, with the stage image that still filled his head.

‘By magic,’ he said.

In that minute, looking back at him and seeing a square-set man in a raincoat, and seeing much more because her skin burned under the Japanese silk, Mattie believed in magic.

‘May I take you out for dinner?’ Mitch asked.

Mattie’s smile was luminous. ‘I’ll be hurt if you don’t.’

He looked surprised, and pleased, as if he had prepared himself for her refusal and hadn’t dared to hope for the opposite.

When she had changed and pinned up her hair and gazed in mystification at her reflection in the mirror before turning her back on it, Mattie followed him.