Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (5 page)

As I was going into the theatre tonight, I was stopped by Alf in his little glass fronted booth by the stage door. Alf, like quite a few West End stage doormen I have known, is a middle-aged ex-con (armed robbery) who will tell you stories of bank jobs and gang warfare if you can spare the time. He is not at all stage struck which I find refreshing and he is usually very cheery, but not tonight for some reason.

‘Some bloke’s been asking for you,’ he said. ‘Says he knows you. Big bloke. Scottish accent.’

‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Did he give a name?’

‘Yes. I’ve got it here somewhere. Yes. Mr . . . er . . . Archer, I think he said. Hard to tell. You could cut his accent with a fucking knife.’

‘No. Means nothing to me. Can you describe him?’

‘Not really. Had on this big overcoat, smelt of mothballs. He wanted to come in to the theatre. Said he’d worked here once. I wasn’t having any of that.’

‘Well, I know nothing about him.’

‘Anyway, sir, I’d rather you didn’t let him come into the theatre, if you don’t mind.’

‘Why not, Alf?’ There was a long pause.

‘I know his sort,’ said Alf. That was all he had to offer me.

The show went well and I signed a dozen or so programmes on the way out. As I was doing so I heard someone close behind me say:

‘So what d’ye think, eh? What d’ye think.’

It was that Scottish accent again, the one which, according to Alf, you could cut with a fucking knife. I turned round and met only pink faces and programmes pleadingly held out. There was someone dark in the background, and, oddly enough, a smell of mothballs. Probably my imagination, though: people don’t use mothballs much these days.

19th December

I can’t get this
Countess Otho
out of my head. Perhaps there is something to it after all. I seem to be finding parts of it that I had overlooked. There is a whole scene, for instance, in which the Countess, shut up alone in a cell, talks to a fly that she finds crawling over a loaf of bread. At the end of the scene the stage direction reads:

The fly begins to laugh. It grows to the size of a Kirk clapping its wings in her face and blowing her hair to flinders. Then in a flash of lightning it is gone
.

Impossible of course, but oddly memorable. . . . Memorable indeed, because I have just looked for this scene to see if I’ve got the words right and I can’t find it in the ridiculous nest of paper, all different sizes, shapes and colour, that make up the manuscript. I’ll try again later when I’ve been in and done the show.

(Later.) Can’t be bothered to look for it. I’m not interested. I came off after the first half and was confronted by Jill, the Company Stage Manager. She’s a stocky, truculent, crop-haired girl with a permanent sense of grievance about something. I’m not saying she’s a Lesbian, but I’ve met that attitude towards men before.

‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘I don’t know how your father got into the theatre, but he is not allowed backstage. It is against all regulations, and I’m sorry but I do not want him standing behind me in the prompt corner talking the whole time.’

I was astonished. I explained to her that she must be mistaken because my father had died three years ago. She seemed unwilling to take my word for it.

‘Was he Scottish?’ she asked.

I told her that my father’s family came from Derbyshire and that he had spent his entire life as a solicitor in Reading. ‘Anyway, what makes you think this man was my father?’

‘He kept saying that you were his “bairn” and that if it weren’t for him you wouldn’t be there.’

Jill was unable to give an accurate description of him, because it was dark, she said, and she had been ‘trying to concentrate on the show’. (This last spoken in an indignant self-righteous tone, as if I were somehow responsible for the disruption.) She told me the man had on a big heavy black overcoat and hadn’t shaved for a few days, and that he gave off a smell that was ‘half way between a distillery and a chemist’s shop’.

I suggested we look for him, but we drew a blank. Nobody else had seen him and Alf vehemently denied having let any strangers in at the stage door. I glanced at Jill and the words ‘are you sure. . . ?’ formed themselves in my mind, but I did not say them. Jill’s look told me that they would have lit a very short fuse.

The man, whoever he was, did not reappear after the interval, but, when the show was over and I had left the theatre, I was just turning into Maiden Lane when I heard the voice.

‘I have made ye; I can break ye.’

I look round and see no-one. Maybe there is a shadow back in the alley leading to the stage door. It is suddenly very cold so I move on quickly.

20th December

Rumours are flying around the company that I am going to be replaced as Poe in the New Year by a ‘name’. This so-called name is Bill Terry, the star of a TV soap called
Magnolia Buildings
. Everybody in the company seems to be quite indignant on my behalf, and I’m pretty angry myself, but somehow I don’t think it will happen.

Today another parcel arrived from Vince. (He likes to be called Vincent, so I call him Vince.) It contained Great Aunt Cecily’s scrapbooks and albums. I am surprised she never showed them to me in her lifetime.

Cecily Payne, as she was in those days, came from a good family, but was set on becoming an actress from an early age. She began her career as respectably as any young woman could in the Edwardian Theatre by joining the chorus at the Gaiety Theatre as one of Mr George Edwardes’ ‘young ladies’. Her name appears in programmes at first simply as ‘Miss Payne’. In
Play Pictorial
she is pictured in a group of bouffant-haired beauties with identical white floor length gowns. I think she stands out: her large eyes are intelligent and knowing; she is slimmer, less pigeon-chested than the others.

I see from the programmes that she features in several musical shows starring Seymour Hicks and his wife Ellaline Terriss, daughter of the celebrated actor William Terriss who was murdered by a lunatic. In one of Hicks’s shows,
The Dashing Little Duke
(1909), my Great Aunt appears for the first time on a programme as ‘Miss Cecily Payne’ in the role of ‘Lady Kitty’. After this she graduates to straight dramatic roles in the West End and on tour, but in 1915 there is a sudden break. Pasted into the album is the stub of a second class ticket on the
Oceanic
travelling from Southampton to New York. There she resumes her theatrical career, but, it would appear, on a rather lower level than in England. I never knew till now that she had been in America and could only guess at the cause of her migration. A loose newspaper cutting in her scrapbook records the death of a Lieutenant James Sullivan of the London Rifle Brigade in the attack on Vimy Ridge on September 26th 1915. A smudged, black-bordered photo, shows the head and shoulders of a man in uniform. There is a touch of flamboyance about the look and the set of the head: perhaps in life he had been an actor.

In one or two of her American theatre programmes I notice that William Abingdon is in the cast. He is mentioned in the letter that came with the parcel. Along with these programmes, Cecily had stuck into the book a number of little cards with a printed floral decoration in the corner and handwriting on them. The pinholes in them suggest that they had been attached to bouquets, and the words written on them, all in the same hand, would appear to confirm this:

‘These roses will see you tonight before I do. Lucky old roses! J.R.S.’

‘You will be wonderful tonight. Remember what I said. Jacob.’

‘From your Master and Slave! Jacob.’

‘Dine with me after the show tonight at the St Regis. I have something important to say to you. Jacob.’

I could confirm by a comparison of the handwriting that this was the Jacob R. Sammons of the letter that accompanied
Countess Otho
.

By the end of 1918 Cecily is back in London and her career picks up remarkably quickly. She appears in the West End, but mostly as a leading lady on tour or in the better repertory companies. Then in 1927 she meets and marries Colonel George Arthur, and the programmes and press cuttings stop.

‘By that time,’ Cecily told me once, ‘I had run out of ambition. I still loved the theatre, but I’d seen what it did to people, so I gave it up quite happily. I just wanted to be with George and breed Fox Terriers in the country.’ And that is what she did until her husband died and old age confined her to a home. It was not a bad life, I suppose. I have been haunted by that phrase of hers ‘I had run out of ambition’. I wonder if the same will happen to me. Sometimes I hope it does; sometimes I don’t.

Now I understand her career better, but mysteries remain. Why did Jacob Sammons send her the manuscript? The reasons he gives in the letter are vague and unconvincing. Above all, why did she never open his parcel?

My life is quite strange at the moment: its only centre is the few hours I spend on stage six days of the week. The rest of the time is curiously unreal. I see friends; talk to my agent about future prospects, go to films and art galleries, but none of it means much. I sleep in the afternoons before a show, but afterwards I am restless and can’t go to bed till at least three in the morning. Sometimes I go to the clubs with mates, but, to be honest, I can’t take the noise any more. What I really like doing is walking about London on my own. It’s quite safe: people talk a lot of rubbish about muggings and knife crime. I’ve never met any. I feel invulnerable which perhaps I shouldn’t, but I’m fit and I could outrun any attacker.

London deserted in the early hours is a great place to be. After about half past one it’s almost dead, and that’s when I sometimes go back to the theatre to stare at the giant photos of myself on the front of house, and I look, when no-one else is looking, at my name in big gold letters and the brief quotations of critical acclaim: ‘a gripping performance’, ‘he holds the audience spellbound’.

A funny thing I’ve noticed these last few days. When I’m walking about London and it comes to the witching hour of about half past one or two, you often get quite a bit of fog. I had always imagined that fog in London was a thing of the past, what with the Clean Air Act, but it would appear not. I can’t say I like it much. It seems to put its white arms around you, and sometimes it smells of mothballs. No. I’m imagining that.

22nd December

It’s all over the papers. The soap star Bill Terry was mugged and knifed yesterday evening. The details are unclear, but he is in hospital in a critical condition. ‘Plans for Bill to take over the role of Edgar Poe in
Rue Morgue
,’ said the
Evening Standard
, ‘have been put on hold until he has made a full recovery.’ ‘Edgar Poe’ indeed! Everyone seems to be happy for me except Jill. As I passed her on the way to my first entrance I heard her say: ‘Someone seems to be looking after you.’

All this makes me very restless and after the show I go for a drink alone at the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane and when they close I walk and walk. I walk into the fog at about half past one and it thickens so much I can barely see my feet on the ground. I might be in Bratislava or 1897 for all I know. I hear distant traffic but see nothing apart from a few distant yellow headlights.

It doesn’t frighten me. It reminds me of being on stage, in the way that you are wrapped round by another world, not this one. I try to think about poor Bill Terry, and how his agony is my good fortune, but the thoughts slip away from me, and I am not going to pretend a compassion I cannot really feel.

I think I was by the embankment—at least I heard water and felt a parapet—when he joined me. For some time I have known he was around, and I suppose I have not been quite honest with myself about this.

Of course I couldn’t quite see him in the night and fog, but I know he was big and dark, and rough smelling, though with that overriding odour of mothballs I had noticed before. It was his presence that I felt most strongly, the presence of a man who has been outside and alone for too long, of someone who was everyone’s enemy except mine. And I was only his temporary and convenient ally.

‘Who the hell are you?’ I have put off the question for too long.

‘Jesus Christ. The Emperor of Johore. My name it is MacGregor and my foot is upon my native heath. And you are my heir.’

‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want? What do I want?’ The man and his voice seemed to swell with anger. ‘What d’ye think? Meat, money and fame, boy. Meat, money and fame.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, ye do, son. Ye do. We’re the same under the skin. We’re actors both. And what do actors want? Meat, money and fame!’

‘Leave me alone. Go away.’

‘I canna go away. I am your man and your maker. So tell me what ye think?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of the play, man! Of the play!’

‘Do you mean
Countess Otho
?’ I had to force the words out. Everything in me was rebelling against the impossibility of it all.

‘What d’ye think?’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘Aye . . . My hour has come. I have been waiting. So what will ye do?’

‘Do?’

‘As payment for services. The quad pro quo, as they say. The quad pro quo.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ye know what I mean. Y’are bound to me, and I canna let ye go. Blood brothers we are. Lo I am with you always even unto the end of time. D’ya ken now?’ His voice rose to a roar.

The mist cleared a little and I saw his face, a shaggy, dark, unshaven thing with hungry, restless eyes hanging over me. He pushed his head down close to mine and his smell was like a blow in the face. It was the age-old smell of vagrancy and desolation. He had been out in the cold far, far too long.

When I came to, I was standing outside the theatre, looking up at my name in foot-high golden letters over the entrance canopy. A solitary taxi was coming down the Strand. I hailed it and took it back to my flat in the King’s Road.

13th January 1988

A third huge parcel of Great Aunt Cecily’s papers has arrived from Vince. It consists of letters, postcards, loose photos, bits cut out of magazines and newspapers: the usual detritus of a long life. Had Vince felt anything except contempt for me, he wouldn’t have treated me as a kind of human rubbish tip. But I’m glad he has.