'I expect you want to ask me how I began in the theatre,' Stella said. Anxious to give credit where credit was due, she added, 'I was trained by Mrs Ackerley at Crane Hall. I got a gold medal when I was twelve.'

'It was all that Naafi food,' the reporter complained. 'Those boiled potatoes.'

'She plumped out my vowels. I tend to have flat ones. It's to do with catarrh as much as region.'

'It was all that stodge,' he persisted. 'I developed a taste for it.'

For a man who despaired of his appet.i.te he was surprisingly offhand with the buck rarebit he had ordered; he did no more than shove it round and round his plate. Every so often he took a square-shaped flask from the inside pocket of his coat and stuck it to his lips like a trumpet. 'I need starch,' he said, gurgling.

'It's never as simple as that, is it?' said Stella. 'I expect you're unhappy.'

'I am, my dear,' he admitted. 'How very acute of you. It's my home life, you see.' And he removed his hat and discussed for some minutes the shortcomings of his wife Rita who had been in the land-army when they met. He had first caught sight of her riding in a ploughed field beyond the barbed wire perimeter of the air base. With hindsight it would have saved a lot of heartbreak if he had looked the other way. She had been perched on the seat of a tractor with the gulls flowing behind her in a slip-stream.

'She looked very jaunty,' he said. 'Monarch of all she surveyed... Tess of the D'Urbervilles... that sort of thing. But I don't mind confessing that after a few honeymoon months we stalled more times than we took off... if you take my meaning.'

Stella didn't; she nodded just the same. 'I suppose that's why you're so fat,' she said. 'You put on bulk to withstand the pressures.'

He gave her an unhappy smile and excused himself, flopping off his stool and lumbering towards the gents. 'I'm being interviewed,' Stella told the tea-lady. 'I'm at the Playhouse. I play a boy-king, son of the flute-blower.'

'It's all right for some,' the tea-lady said.' And she picked up the plate of spurned buck rarebit and emptied it into the bin under the counter.

Outside the window the day was already darkening. Across the square a gush of steam billowed from the kitchen vent of Reece's Restaurant and swallowed the sparks of a shuddering tram.

The reporter returned with two tickets for the news-theatre. He said he'd expire if he had to sit on that high stool much longer. They sat in the back row and watched a newsreel of Jack Gardiner punching Bruce Woodc.o.c.k into a corner, followed by a cartoon. The reporter squirmed in his seat, and then seizing Stella's hand placed it on his lap and held it there, gripping her by the wrist. She was astonished and sat as though turned to stone, her fingers thrust through the opening of his unb.u.t.toned trousers. On the flickering screen the wicked wolf tried his best to blow down the house of the three little pigs. The reporter covered Stella's hand with his hat.

She examined her conscience to discover if she was in any way to blame for her companion's curious behaviour. Every evening when she called 'Overture' and 'Beginners' Richard St Ives dragged her through the doorway and, putting her across his knee, whacked her on the bottom with a rolled-up copy of The Stage The Stage. And only last night, Desmond Fairchild, hearing her shouting the minutes in the pa.s.sage, had come out of the lavatory still holding himself. Neither occurrence was as rude as what the reporter was doing, but she was pretty sure the intention was the same. It was only a matter of degree. Did this sort of thing happen to Babs...o...b..rne or Miss Blundell?

She tried to pull her hand free, but it was held fast. The protuberance under her fingers felt soft and hard at the same time, an iron fist in a velvet glove. Attempting to bring what Meredith would call a philosophical approach to her predicament, she pondered on the differences in men's and women's clothing. Trousers, she now realised, were so designed not because their wearers had funny legs but because men were constantly worried that an essential part of themselves might have gone missing. They wanted instant access, just to make sure things were in place. What was more puzzling was why they needed everyone else to check as well.

The reporter removed his hat and shoved a handkerchief at her. She wondered whether she had been sniffing; it was true she had the beginnings of a cold. Suddenly he let out a huge sigh, as though the air was being forced out of him. He seemed to grow smaller; certainly his thingumajig shrank. Almost at once he fell into a doze. She was left holding a jelly baby of shrivelled skin, her fingers glued together, webbed by a sticky emission.

Presently she slid her hand away and wiped it furtively on the upholstery of the seat beside her. Cuckoo spit, she thought, watching a working man emerging from a mining cage with an inappropriate smile on his blackened face.

The reporter woke and got abruptly to his feet, jamming his hat on his head. In the square the flower-sellers had lit the naphtha flares in the buckets set along the cobblestones. The windows of Owen Owens blazed with light. It was gone half past five.

'I have a complimentary ticket for Dangerous Corner Dangerous Corner,' the reporter said in a business-like way. 'Perhaps we could meet afterwards. There are one or two questions we never got round to.'

'That would be nice,' she said. She didn't think he would use the ticket, any more than he would wait for her after the performance. He was already worried lest she should tell someone what had happened. If she really wanted she could get him sent to prison. All his c.o.c.kiness had deserted him; under the street lamp his face was old and frightened.

She wished him goodnight and he raised that shameful hat as she turned and walked away towards the theatre, rubbing her hand against her hip-bone like a soiled cloth against a scrubbing board.

Bunny asked how the interview had gone and she said it had gone very well. She didn't think anything of a personal nature had entered the conversation. After the first interval she took Freddie Reynalde's coffee and biscuits down to the band room under the stage. Mr Reynalde played the piano in the intermissions and could remember a time before the war when there was a proper orchestra in the pit. Things, he often told Stella, weren't the same, and neither was he. Because of his principles he hadn't served in the Forces and they'd made him do labouring jobs instead, so that now his hands weren't what they used to be either.

On the table he kept a photograph, ringed with the imprint of coffee cups, of a man sitting sideways on a motor bike. Across one corner was written in ink 'To Freddie, affectionately O'Hara'. Every time she saw the photograph Stella was reminded of someone, but she could never catch who it was. In profile the man appeared haughty, contemptuous almost. She had the feeling that if she could only get him to turn and look at her she'd recognise him. She was going out of the band room when she suddenly asked, 'If someone takes liberties with you, is it partly your own fault?'

'Liberties?' Freddie said. 'What the h.e.l.l does that mean?'

She found she couldn't tell him after all. 'I keep getting put over someone's knee and smacked.'

'St Ives,' said Reynalde. 'He's harmless. If you don't like it tell him so, or else stay out of his reach.'

'It's not that I either like or dislike it,' said Stella, 'I just don't see what good it does.'

After the curtain had come down and she'd put away the props she hid in the extra's dressing-room in case the reporter had changed his mind and dared to wait for her. Her wrist hurt. When she held it up to the light she saw that a small circle of skin was inflamed. She hoped she hadn't caught an unmentionable disease from her visit to the news-theatre. Half an hour later, descending the stairs, she was startled to hear voices coming from the first floor. She had thought everyone would have gone to the Oyster Bar and that only the night-watchman would be in the building. She stopped and listened, and heard first laughter and then a voice shouting, 'For G.o.d's sake.' The next moment a door was flung violently open.

She crouched back into the shadows and saw Geoffrey run headlong down the stairs. He came and went so quickly that she might not have known it was him save for the flash of his yellow cravat under the gas-lamp. There was silence for a few seconds and then she heard Meredith's voice: 'Not to worry. He'll get over it by the morning.' She wondered if Geoffrey had complained about not getting a bigger part.

The door of Meredith's office slammed shut and he and John Harbour appeared round the bend of the pa.s.sage. She was going to call out to them, but something in Meredith's face stopped her, and the next instant he had swept down the stairs with his arm about John Harbour's shoulders and was gone.

The dress rehearsal of Caesar and Cleopatra lasted nine hours. Cleopatra's barge wouldn't slide off the stage properly and the sphinx proved difficult to light. There was Cleopatra simpering away in her best Shirley Temple voice, 'Old gentleman,... don't go, old gentleman', and the spot couldn't find her. St Ives shouted, 'Can you hear me, mother?', and everyone laughed, and then Meredith pulled the hood of his duffle coat over his eyes and lay full length in the centre aisle and moaned. Everyone laughed again, but it was obviously no joking matter because Bunny flew into a rage, dancing up and down, sending the dust spiralling like fireflies above the footlights as he thundered, 'Quiet, please.' He was worn out trying to control the University students who dropped their spears on the stairs and chatted loudly to each other in the wings.

Bunny wasn't the only one to lose his temper. Desmond Fairchild and Dotty Blundell were heard arguing in the corridor, though no one could be sure what was at issue. He was supposed to have called her a cow, or something worse, and she had slapped his face, at which, according to George, he had returned the blow.

Vernon telephoned twice to know what Stella was up to. On the first occasion Bunny was tactful, a.s.suring him she would be sent home in a taxi at any moment. In response to the second enquiry he said tersely, 'Look here, she's not working in a bank, you know', and hung up.

Stella didn't know about the telephone calls. When she wasn't required for her scene in the court room of Alexandria she was fetching and carrying and dabbing calamine lotion on the shoulders of John Harbour who, earlier in the day, had been broiled pink as a lobster by inexpertly using a sun-lamp.

A small pale woman with a pink bow in her hair sat in Grace Bird's dressing-room for most of the evening. George told Geoffrey she had been engaged to play Peter Pan in the next production. Babs...o...b..rne was too tall for the part, and besides the woman had played the part before, the time P.L. O'Hara had appeared as Captain Hook. Out front, yawning in the stalls, sat the priests.

On the first night Rose Lipman came backstage as usual to wish the cast good luck. Bunny complained of a fearful draught coming from the front of the house. 'There's nowt wrong,' she said. 'It's just the wind from the gents.'

Uncle Vernon and Lily were in the audience. They thought Stella was wonderful, though Lily gasped audibly when, in the middle of her speech, she had to be helped out by a man in a white toga. 'Don't act soft,' whispered Vernon. 'She's meant to hesitate.'

During the interval they b.u.mped into Mrs Ackerley in the foyer. She was with a man in plus-fours who, she claimed, was her husband. She p.r.o.nounced both Stella and the production excellent. 'I didn't recognise her at first,' Lily told her. 'She looked very haughty, didn't she?'

Mrs Ackerley introduced Vernon and Lily to no less a personage than Freddie Reynalde. He wasn't on the piano in this intermission because in the next act they were using the orchestra pit as part of the scenery. Mr Reynalde, on realising who they were, said that Stella was an interesting child.

'What's that supposed to mean?' Lily asked Vernon, when they were queuing to buy a round of drinks. She would have preferred Stella to have been labelled as 'nice' or 'well-mannered'; 'interesting' was a shade ambiguous. 'Get back and be social,' hissed Vernon.

Afterwards they waited outside the stage door to take Stella home. Other people went inside, including the Ackerleys, but Vernon knew Stella would hide in a cupboard or show them up if they were bold enough to enter. Once, the doorkeeper popped his head out and asked if they wanted to hand in autograph books. Lily said, 'No, we can get Miss Bradshaw's signature any time we want it', and Vernon shouted that they had a perfect right to loiter on a public pavement.

The leading man came out arm in arm with a girl with corkscrew curls, followed by a chap in a duffle coat, who wore a monocle and flashed a sardonic smile as though he was a member of the SS.

Stella kept them waiting a long time, and when she did appear she sprinted off down the street ahead of them. They caught up with her in Cases Street, crouching on her haunches outside the tobacconist's.

'For G.o.d's sake,' cried Lily, 'stop making an exhibition of us.' Stella compromised by walking behind them. Every time Vernon looked back she was striding with her chin tilted theatrically, her eyes fixed on the smoky heavens. 'I can't take much more of this,' he confided to Lily, and she told him to shush. 'It's not as if she's ever been any different,' she said.

Though it was late when they reached home, he felt compelled to ring Harcourt.

'You must be pleased,' Harcourt said, 'her playing Cleopatra's brother.'

'Husband,' corrected Vernon. 'Even if he is ten years old.'

'I think you'll find he's also her brother.'

'I'm not all that familiar with the play myself,' Vernon admitted. 'Naturally it's set in foreign parts. You will go and see it, I trust?'

'Wouldn't miss it for worlds,' Harcourt enthused.

'She's lost weight,' said Vernon. A sparrow eats more. Leastways when she's home. Consequently she's got the beginnings of a nasty boil on her arm.'

'Oh dear,' Harcourt said. 'That should be nipped in the bud.'

'It's in hand, rest a.s.sured,' said Vernon. He cleared his throat. 'There's a picture appeared in her room, the size of a postcard, of a fellow with a crown of thorns. You know the sort of thing.'

'Jesus, you mean?' said Harcourt.

'He's holding a lantern.'

'That'll be him,' Harcourt said.

'One of her lines... as the king... goes on about the G.o.ds not suffering the unpiety of his sister to go unpunished. They're heathen G.o.ds, you understand.' He cleared his throat again.

'It's all part of the play,' soothed Harcourt. 'I shouldn't attach too much importance to it. She's at an impressionable age and she's mixing with some very odd people.'

'Odd?' said Vernon.

'Not exactly odd,' amended Harcourt. 'I just mean they're not exactly the sort of people she'd be rubbing shoulders with if she was working in a bank. And there's been a resurgence of interest in religion, you know. It's a reaction to the war. People are looking for guidance.'

'There's no call to go looking in that direction,' Vernon said.

'Go along with it,' urged Harcourt. 'Put yourself in her place.'

Vernon couldn't. There was nothing in the girl's present that remotely matched up to his past. He ordered some carbolic soap and abruptly hung up.

Lily asked him what was wrong; he had a face on him.

'I've just got off on the wrong foot with Harcourt. I meant to be open with him but when it came to it I beat about the bush. It had something to do with his tone. I often think he regards me as a fool.

'I thought he was the cat's whiskers in your books,' Lily said. She was secretly pleased at this sudden spark of criticism leaping towards the almighty Harcourt.

'I'm worried,' fretted Vernon. 'I can't get over how different things are to the way it was when we were young. I can't keep pace. Can you imagine what it must feel like to our Stella?'

Lily remembered being cold, being hungry; how before she went to bed her mother had scorched the skirting board with the flame of a kerosene lamp to make the bugs jump out of the walls.

'No,' she said, 'I can't. I'd never even been on a train until I was past thirty and if you recall that was no joyride, simply a mercy dash to get Renee out of one of her sc.r.a.pes.'

'Does it count for nothing?' Vernon said. 'Was it in vain? All that misery!'

Lily felt uncomfortable. If she hadn't known better she'd have thought he'd been drinking. 'I'm thinking of giving them rabbit tomorrow,' she said.

'It's a different world, isn't it,' he pondered. 'She takes pocket money for granted. Likewise baths.'

'Not to mention telephones,' Lily said.

'If only we knew the sort of people she was mixing with. They may be educated but that doesn't mean they have standards. I don't want her made unhappy. I don't want her to get out of her depth. I know she'll learn in time but I want her to avoid the pitfalls.'

'I'll need carrots,' said Lily.

'I'd just like to b.u.mp into that Potter fellow she's always on about.'

'Some hopes,' Lily said. 'She'd die first.'

Vernon went upstairs with the intention of ringing Harcourt again, but the lounge door was ajar and he was seen by the soap salesman who was playing gin rummy with the traveller in miscellaneous stationery. They asked him if they were making too much noise and he said no, not at all, he was just checking that everything was in order.

He opened the front door and stood for a moment on the step looking at the glimmer of light touching the pale dome of the church and the glow of the city thrown up against the sky. In the opposite direction the street sloped downhill in darkness. Someone had chucked a brick through the gas-mantle on the corner by the Cathedral railings and it hadn't been replaced. There was fog rolling in across the river. Out in the bay sounded the distant boom of a buoy warning of danger.

7.

The read-through of Peter Pan Peter Pan took place in the foyer beneath the back stalls. Decorated in lime-green and pink, its columns twined with formal festoons and palm trees of plaster in low relief, it smelt of coffee and cigars. Once, in the days when the building was known as Kelly's Star Music Hall, the s.p.a.ce had served as a beer cellar. took place in the foyer beneath the back stalls. Decorated in lime-green and pink, its columns twined with formal festoons and palm trees of plaster in low relief, it smelt of coffee and cigars. Once, in the days when the building was known as Kelly's Star Music Hall, the s.p.a.ce had served as a beer cellar.

'There are numerous books on the meaning behind this particular play,' Meredith said. 'I've read most of them and am of the opinion they do the author a disservice. I'm not qualified to judge whether the grief his mother felt on the death of his elder brother had an adverse effect on Mr Barrie's emotional development, nor do I care one way or the other. We all have our crosses to bear. Sufficient to say that I regard the play as pure make-believe. I don't want any truck with symbolic interpretations.'

Bunny was frowning; the woman, who the night before had worn a bow in her hair, stared obliquely at Meredith. Her eyes were nearer black than brown and she wore woollen knee stockings; from a distance she could have been mistaken for a child, of either s.e.x. Her name was Mary Deare and she had played the t.i.tle role twice before; once in 1922 at the Scala Theatre, London, and again, fifteen years later, for the repertory company.

She radiated a peculiar authority they all felt it yet when she spoke it was in a small, flat voice hardly above a whisper. Within a moment of her arrival St Ives put on the rimless spectacles he detested, though usually he preferred to squint blindly down at the book rather than be seen in them. Desmond Fairchild was the only one who addressed her directly, and even he removed his hat for the occasion, standing deferentially in front of her, head unaccustomedly bowed as she stood, pigeon-toed in ballet slippers, sipping her coffee at the foyer bar. According to Dotty, Fairchild, while still in short trousers, had played Slightly in the Scala production of 1922.

George, who was to be in charge of the wires, having earlier walked round her as if he were the hangman measuring her for the drop, said Mary Deare would come into her own when she flew. She was built like a swallow. Secretly Stella thought Mary Deare resembled a monkey rather than a bird; it was those opaque, unblinking eyes.

The read-through finished at midday to give St Ives a rest before the evening performance of Caesar and Cleopatra Caesar and Cleopatra. Stella and Geoffrey stood in for the 'lost boys'. In compliance with the licensing laws the children's rehearsal wasn't to be held until later in the afternoon. Not for another ten days would the Tiger Lily girls, recruited from Miss Thelma Broadbent's school of tap-dancing at Crane Hall, put in an appearance.

It went to Geoffrey's head that he'd been cast as Mullins, the pirate. Somebody very distinguished had played the part in the last London production. When Meredith asked him to pop out for cigarettes, he replied vulgarly, 'What did your last servant die of?' He didn't raise his voice but he intended to be heard. Meredith frowned, then smirked, and John Harbour, punching Geoffrey playfully on the shoulder, called out, 'My, my! We are hoity-toity this morning.'

Bunny told Stella that in addition to understudying Michael he wanted her to manage Tinkerbell. 'What exactly does that entail?' she asked. He explained she had to stand in the wings directing the beam of a torch at a strategically placed mirror which would send a reflection of light dancing across the back-cloth of Never-Never Land. At the same time she'd need to ring a little hand-bell. She expressed alarm at being in control of such a complicated procedure.

'It's perfectly simple,' Bunny a.s.sured her. 'Surely, you were in the Girl Guides.'

'They wouldn't have me,' she said crossly.

'It's rather like flashing signals from a convenient hilltop.'

'I've an aversion to flickering lights,' she said. 'I thought I'd told you.'

She wanted sympathy from Freddie Reynalde, but he wasn't concentrating. 'There's something in my past,' she confided, 'which makes it difficult for me to confront night lights... something I can't go into. Sufficient to say it's the stuff of nightmares.'

'You're a bright girl,' he said. 'You'll soon get the hang of it,' and he launched into a story concerning himself and P.L. O'Hara on a motorcycle ride to the Bronte sisters' vicarage at Haworth. As far as she could tell it had no relevance to her own predicament. On the moors O'Hara had endeavoured to summon up Heathcliff, and a gust of wind from beyond the grave had blown the cycle off course and toppled them both into a ditch.

Geoffrey, spying Stella mooning about the prop room, imagined she was upset because she was only an understudy.

'In this precarious profession,' he informed her, 'one is lucky to have a foot in the door. It doesn't do to get too big for one's boots.'

'That's rich, coming from you,' she said witheringly. 'It's not me that goes round swearing at one's betters and pelting downstairs like a loony.' Thinking about it, she didn't mind in the least not having a proper part. If she couldn't be Peter she was quite prepared, once she'd mastered the technicalities, to hide behind a reflection.