Black Beech and Honeydew (15 page)

I have scarcely any recollection of the meeting. Mr Wilkie seemed immensely tall and his wife extremely beautiful. He said, I fancy, that my central scene showed some appreciation of actable dialogue and that I would no doubt write another play. My mother spoke about the pleasure their season had given us and presently I was floating home on a pink cloud.

The company left Christchurch and I returned in a peculiar state of mind to the Art School.

With a group of fellow students, I shared at this time a small, scantily furnished room at the top of an old office block near the school. We gave it the courtesy title of a studio and in it we had meals between classes, worked at anatomy, perspective and composition, talked and talked and sometimes sat to each other as models for the head. My parents would meet me there on nights when we went to the cinema or the theatre and the room became a rendezvous for our friends. Late on a summer afternoon with my paintbox slung on my shoulder I climbed the stairs alone and walked in.

Mr and Mrs Wilkie were sitting in the studio.

‘I obtained the address,’ Mr Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, ‘from your father. I have a suggestion to make.’

To this day I have no idea how he found my father and at the time was much too dumbfounded to ask. My bewilderment was, I suppose, comically apparent and the reason why they both seemed so amused.

I was speechless. Beyond an open window, somewhere down the street a gramophone blared out the final duet from
Trovatore.
I have only to think of those plangent exchanges and at once I am back in the studio and Mr Wilkie is smiling at my astonishment.

‘How,’ he says, ‘would you like to be an actress?’

They were passing through Christchurch on their way to the North Island and had only two hours to spare before they left. In a trance I heard that Miss Lorna Forbes was obliged to return to Australia for domestic reasons and that her absence would leave a gap in the company. If, said Mr Wilkie, I intended, as of course I did, to write for the professional theatre, it would be of advantage to me to learn something about it from the inside. He planned to make a return tour of New Zealand with four modern plays. He offered me a part in each of them. My father, he said, had not rejected the idea out-of-hand. How did I feel about it?

On the whole I felt as if the heavens had opened and Mr and Mrs Wilkie had descended in a chariot to the sound of trumpets. I felt wonderful. I felt as I had never felt in my life before. I suppose I contrived to say something to this effect and that my rapture was in any case self-evident. Mr Wilkie stood looking down at me with his hands in his pockets.

‘You haven’t asked me what your salary is to be,’ he said.

‘Oh. Er –’

‘What do you demand?’

I didn’t know.

‘Pound a week and all travelling expenses?’

I think I said that would do very nicely, I expected, and he burst out laughing. ‘Nine pounds,’ he said. ‘Ruin stares me in the face.’

A very sobering thought occurred. ‘How,’ I said, ‘about Mummy?’

‘Will Mrs Marsh not care for the idea?’

Recollections of my mother’s lack of enthusiasm when a similar chance had come her way were not encouraging.

We had no telephone and there were no means of communicating with her. My father, I realized, was now on his way home, vaguely freighted with his momentous tidings. It was arranged that the decision would be communicated to Mr Wilkie within the week.

They went away and a shutter clicks down upon the sequel. Strangely enough I can remember nothing of the long discussion that must have followed this unnerving visit. Only the upshot remains: the offer was to be accepted.

I have said that whatever I may write about my mother will be full of contradictions. This episode might well be thought to illustrate the contention. My mother was an exceptionally gifted amateur, she dearly loved the theatre and enjoyed the company and conversation of actors. Although she was, I think, fundamentally an unconventional woman she had, nevertheless, a distaste for many forms of unconventional behaviour and a contempt for anything that suggested easy promiscuity. Above all, she despised humbug and self-deception. During her brief acquaintance with the Charles Warner Company she had discovered these elements in the offstage life of actors and had found them disagreeable. This fastidiousness was very much to the fore in my upbringing. When, in the process of growing up, my attitude to my boy friends changed and theirs to me, my mother, always loving and discerning, grew more watchful. Anything remotely provocative on my part or physically demonstrative on theirs was, in the most economical manner possible, condemned as second-rate behaviour. It was, I understood, a matter of taste. I accepted her ruling and continued in a state of unbelievable naïveté, to wonder why such demonstrations of physical attraction as came my way should have the bad taste to be agreeable.

It is not my intention to dwell upon emotional engagements that have naturally cropped up with varying intensity over the years, but in this instance, if my mother’s non-resistance to Mr Wilkie’s offer is to make any kind of sense, I shall have to recall two of them.

The first appears in the person of a man about whom it will be difficult to write without extravagance. He was a Little Russian, the son of a merchant father and an aristocratic mother. I shall call him
Sasha since that was the name of a part he played opposite my mother in a production of George Calderon’s
The Little Stone House.

He was a lawyer and had come out to New Zealand before the Russian Revolution to escape from political complications. These had followed his defence of two peasants who had offered violence to an unscrupulous landshark. Sasha’s intention was to discover a Tolstoyian fulfilment on the land and his first step towards this end was to enter himself as a student – he was about thirty-five years old – at an Agricultural University College. He had little English and no understanding of New Zealand youth. When, on his first night, he was subjected to a certain amount of student ragging, he wrenched an iron batten off his bed, laid about him with the utmost vigour, causing anguish among the hefty sons of run-holders, and then shook, as it were, the fertilizer from his boots. He next became an art, and later on a medical, student.

After the Russian Revolution and the extermination of his family, his ample remittances vanished and he was obliged to go back to the land in sober necessity. He became a ploughman and expected the hands on back-country farms to converse with beautiful peasant simplicity, about immortal longings, European literature and Grand Opera. When they responded but rudely to his overtures, he fought them. He was a powerful man.

He went from one job to another, sometimes becoming involved in lawsuits and always in quarrels. ‘I am insult,’ was an ejaculation with which his friends were all too familiar. He was a comic and a tragic person: subject to fits of the blackest depression, immensely lonely, very disturbing and destined for unhappiness.

The producer for
The Little Stone House
was a friend of Sasha’s and asked him to undertake the leading male role. Calderon’s play is a tragedy. For the first and last time I saw my mother play opposite someone of her own mettle. Sasha – her son in this piece – was a dynamic actor and she always said that at some point in his turbulent past he must have been a professional. During rehearsals he came often to our house and she helped him with his English.

In a scene in which the son, whom she had long supposed to be dead, returned from Siberia, he had to say: ‘I have seen my mother weeping on my tomb.’ They rehearsed it. He had a superb voice, very deep and vibrant.

‘I haff seen my mosser veepink on my tum.’

‘No – no. Tomb.’

‘Ah. Sank you. Toom-ber.’

But his accent improved very quickly, and his performance developed an extraordinary intensity. My mother enjoyed herself enormously and between them they created a sensation. The production is still remembered in Christchurch. After it was over Sasha continued to visit us and indeed, for a long time we were the only friends with whom he did not quarrel or by whom he did not fancy he had been insulted. He became very much attached to my mother and, adopting what he thought to be the correct and respectful English equivalent of ‘mamushka’, he continued their make-believe relationship and called her ‘Mum’. With me he fell in love.

Difficult to a degree, and impossibly touchy in all other respects, in this he was gentle and delicate. He knew very well that nothing could come of his attachment and when he declared himself, added at once: ‘But Mum would never permit.’ I agreed, but I was – and the Victorian phrase is exactly appropriate to my flustered reaction – not insensible of his attractions. Nor, in a different mode, were my parents. Without anything specific being said, I was steered past this strange and, as I now see it, oddly lyrical encounter. For a time, and at long intervals, Sasha would appear unexpectedly, usually in the evening. He would sing at the top of his formidable bass voice as he climbed the hill. My father, who found him noisy, would look up from his book and say mildly: ‘Good Lord, the Russian.’ The song of toiling peasants (in those days the Volga boatmen were unknown in New Zealand) would grow louder and he would arrive with some passionate account of his latest row. Shouting his tragic laughter, he would exhaust us with his need for an indefinable agreement, a wholesale acquiescence.

At last the inevitable happened: he became insulted over an imagined affront and never returned. We did not know what he was doing or where he lived until, after many months, we heard that, following a violent fracas with two drunken soldiers who had baited him, he had spent a night alone in an open park and at dawn, almost casually as it seemed, had ended his inexplicable life.

This interlude dropped like a meteorite into the field of my inexperience. Incongruous and completely alien, it lay spent in the
cavity it had made. Nobody had behaved really badly, unless it was the soldiers who were in any case irresponsible. The happening was terrible most of all because Sasha’s thoughts, during his vigil, were so tragically beyond our conjecture. We had, I think, come as near to understanding him as any foreigners could and we were haunted by the thought that if only he had not taken umbrage he might, in whatever desolation of spirit possessed him, have come to us that night.

In one of the many letters he wrote, letters to which his imperfect English lent a false air of quaintness, he said that I was ‘encased in transparent enwellop’. It was, I think, an accurate observation but perhaps only another way of saying I was very young.

Remote and transparently enveloped I may have been but this did not prevent me some time later from foolishly getting myself involved in a very different and a wildly incongruous predicament. The trouble was that when I found myself the object of a violent attachment it seemed to me that it was, in the first place, astonishing and also extremely obliging of my admirer, whom I liked personally, to get himself into such a state about me and, in the second place, that perhaps all this vehemence and agitation could not, as it were, exist in a vacuum and rage away without any reciprocal justification. The situation was, in fact, a more explosive instance of the kind of muddle that had arisen out of Sister Winifred’s mistake. Badgered and bewildered, I shrank inside my transparent envelope and wondered if perhaps I was after all destined to marry a middle-aged Englishman simply because he so ardently desired me to do so. I became frightened and so miserable that at last, in answer to a question from my mother, I confided the whole story to her. Once again my unfortunate parents came to my rescue.

‘How could you,’ my poor mother asked, ‘be such an ass?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve plenty of sense but you’ve no
common
sense.’

‘But he’s in such a taking-on. You can’t think.’

She made an exasperated noise and gave me a hug.

‘Your father,’ she said, ‘will speak to him.’

And so he did and to some effect. ‘I felt damn’ sorry for the fellow,’ said my father. ‘He made such a thing of it.’

‘There you are, you see!’ I cried.

‘Well, never mind, old girl,’ said my father, vaguely discomforted. ‘He’ll get over it, no doubt.’

He didn’t do so as quickly as I could have wished. He took to haunting me at a distance. One night, when I was alone in the studio, he came up the stairs and stood (I knew it was he) in utter silence on the landing while I sat petrified and sick, on the other side of the door. After a long time I heard him creak away and the front door slammed. I was appalled by this incident and said nothing about it.

It was at this juncture that Mr Wilkie made his astonishing offer.

No doubt my mother felt that after these upheavals a change was the thing and I daresay my incredulous rapture did something to forward her decision, but, most of all, I think, she was influenced by the Wilkies themselves to whom she had taken a great liking. Never for one moment did she make the mistake of supposing me to have any more than an adequate talent for acting. For one thing, as she rightly said, I was too tall and for another I hadn’t the basic ingredients. She may have suspected that I might become a producer. My father was amiably detached and rather amused.

‘So you’re off,’ he said, ‘with the raggle-taggle-gypsies, O,’ and we grinned happily at each other.

It was to be a winter tour. Autumn – March with us – never comes round without its reminder of the enchanted weeks of anticipation that I now enjoyed. I would wake early in my bed on the verandah and look at the mountains, savouring my bliss before I remembered its cause. The Southern Alps were not more rosy in the dawnlight than were my thoughts. In a few weeks I would be on the other side of the curtain, behind the stage door: an initiate.

My part in the first play arrived: old-fashioned typed ‘sides’ in which only the dead cues were given and made, practically speaking, no sense. I appeared to be a German maid masquerading as a French maid and up to no good. I had to speak broken English and snatches of French with lapses into German ejaculations and I opened the second act with a polyglot conversation on the
telephone. Seduced, I had evidently been, and the dupe of a powerful group of spies. There were, I think, about twelve sides. The piece was called
The Luck of the Navy.
My name was Anna. I would have the benefit of seeing Miss Forbes in this role for two performances in Christchurch before she left for Australia and then I would replace her. Under these circumstances, of course, it was well to memorize, but had I been in for three weeks’ solid rehearsal I would, in my zeal, have come down to the first one word-perfect and prepared to act the boots off my feet.

By this time I had become a fairly regular contributor to the
Sun,
an evening newspaper that ‘featured’ short stories, special articles and verse. The editor suggested that during the four weeks’ absence on leave of the lady-editor I should take over her job. When the autumn term began I did not return to the Art School but, instead, reported parties, lectures and entertainments. I described clothes, sifted material provided by hostesses who yearned for the social column and concocted paragraphs to fill in the gaps on my page. I would take my copy down to the sub-editor’s tray and have my leg pulled by senior reporters. One of them, from the far end of the immensely long room, would telephone for the lady-editor and, in full view, would squeak fictitious and libellous gossip into the receiver. I spent my earnings on books, and on clothes for an actress.

April came and with it the advance notices of the Allan Wilkie Company in
The Luck of the Navy, Hindle Wakes, The Rotters
and
A Temporary Gentleman.
On a warm autumn morning I reported at the Theatre Royal, walked under the ringing iron stairs I had so often climbed and went in at the Stage Door. The world of glue-size, canvas, dust and shadows engulfed me.