Curtain Call (3 page)

Nina looked away, considering, then gave a reluctant nod. He was right. They weren't supposed to be at this hotel in the first place. Her gaze drifted, wistfully, to the disordered bed they had lately shared.

‘If only I hadn't insisted on going down for cigarettes . . .'

Stephen shook his head. ‘I should have gone myself. Then none of this would have . . .' He fell silent, not sure where that line of thought might be tending. If he had gone down to the bar instead, then presumably
he
would have overheard the disturbance on the way back. But would he have stopped, like her, and interrupted it? He could not altogether convince himself he would have done.

Nina checked her wristwatch. ‘Nearly six. I ought to be on my way.'

‘Surely we've time for another drink?'

She shook her head. ‘I'm afraid not. Dolly can't stand 'avin' to rush me.' This last sentence she cockney-cawed in imitation of her dresser, the redoubtable Dolly. In an effort to rekindle the earlier mood he snaked an exploratory arm around her waist and lowered his face towards her. She smiled rather sadly, and detached herself from him.

‘I'm sorry, darling. That business with the girl has shaken me up, I don't mind telling you.' Stephen must have looked slightly crestfallen, because she gave a comical wince of apology as she took his hands in hers. ‘You must think me an awful ninny.'

He took her self-deprecation more seriously than was intended. ‘I don't think that at all. Actually, I think you're smashing.'

She raised a cheek for him to kiss, laughing, which made him feel less sore about being fobbed off. Having swiped a brush through her hair and attended to her make-up in the mirror, she was ready to go. They were just crossing the foyer when a voice ambushed them.

‘Wyley!'

Stephen looked round, his heart plunging, and took a moment to register the floridly handsome face, the blazing eyes and confident leading chin. What abject timing he had today, he thought.

‘Gerald – hullo.'

‘Fancy running into
you
,' the man drawled, his eyes already sliding away from him to Nina, bright with expectation. With a casualness he didn't feel, Stephen said, ‘Nina Land – Gerald Carmody. Gerald and I have known one another for years,' he added.

‘Ah, Miss Land,' said Carmody, ‘I've been lucky enough to see you onstage.
The Dance of Death
– at the Lyceum? Remarkable!'

Nina gave a queenly tilt of her head at this suavity. Carmody was now shooting inquisitive looks between them, and Stephen realised he would have to be quick with an explanation.

‘Nina has agreed to sit for a series of portraits I'm meant to be doing – of the leading lights of theatreland.' He looked to her for confirmation of this lie.

‘He says I have a very sculptural head,' Nina explained, unblinking.

Carmody craned forward excitedly. ‘Leading lights? Then you should do me! You know I'm trying to raise funds for the Marquess in Drury Lane?'

‘Why's that?' said Nina.

‘I'm the manager, for my sins. Our last run was a disaster, and with the rent at two hundred and fifty a week it's touch-and-go whether we can hold off the bank.' He gave Stephen a narrow-eyed speculative glance. ‘As a matter of fact I'm organising a dinner for a month or so, a charitable thing to whip up some cash for the old place. We've already got Larry and a few others on board. I'm hoping to tap prosperous fellows like yourself.'

The prompt was too brazen to ignore. ‘If I can help in some way . . .' said Stephen, aiming for vagueness.

Carmody's voice rose in enthusiasm. ‘Well, that would be marvellous!' He was already taking a pen from his breast pocket. ‘Are you still down at Chelsea?'

‘Best way to reach me is through the gallery. Dallington's, on Bury Street.'

‘Capital. I'll send you a note about it.'

Nina gave a polite cough and said that she had to dash, allowing Stephen an excuse to get away. They shook hands with Carmody and hurried out of the hotel into Southampton Row. A cab picked them up almost immediately. Once settled Stephen gave vent to a groan.

‘Hellfire. That was awkward.'

‘How d'you know him?'

‘I hope he didn't see us coming out of the lift . . . Hmm? Oh, we were at Oxford, though I didn't know him well. Still don't – we occasionally bump into one another. He's had quite a career.'

‘Wasn't he an MP?'

Stephen nodded. ‘One of the youngest ever to be elected. Was tipped for the Cabinet, I think, but made a lot of enemies. The party kicked him out.'

‘He soon got his claws into you,' she smirked.

Stephen grimaced. ‘Yes – worrying, that. Much as I'd like to help his theatre, I'd rather not get involved. Carmody's a dangerous sort.'

‘Dangerous?'

‘Well . . . the company he keeps. He was once – and still may be – very thick with Mosley. You know he runs the weekly magazine for the blackshirts?'

‘Oh dear,' said Nina. ‘He doesn't look the type.'

Stephen thought of asking her how she imagined the typical blackshirt would look, but instead turned a brooding face to the office buildings of Holborn as they slid by the cab window. He could pretend to himself that Carmody would forget all about it, that it was merely a part of his chancer's routine. But he suspected a streak of tenacity in him. Nina seemed to pick up on his troubled silence.

‘Don't worry about him. He's probably just trying to make himself look grand – I'll bet he's never met
Larry
in his life!' The taxi had pulled up at the foot of the Aldwych's long curve. ‘I'm going to hop out. But before I do, Mr Melmotte' – she leaned across him – ‘give me a kiss and wish me luck.'

Stephen happily obliged, then watched as she sauntered up the pavement, straight-backed, hands in her coat pockets, all confidence. He could almost imagine her to be whistling. What a girl she was!

On arriving home at Elm Park Gardens he let himself in, and cautiously interrogated his reflection in the hall's gilt mirror for evidence of his afternoon. He was fussing with his tie again when the drawing-room door opened and Cora appeared, sheathed in an exquisite emerald-coloured gown. Her face was pale and creased in anxious concern.

‘Darling – I thought you'd forgotten about dinner,' she said. ‘You've got ten minutes to get ready.'

Stephen smiled at his wife. ‘I hadn't forgotten. I'm just going to get out of these shoes.'

ON THE WEDNESDAY
Nina awoke to an unplaceable sense of foreboding. From downstairs she could hear Mrs Keeffe, the landlady, chatting away to one of her boarders. And that smell . . . honestly, who could think of eating kippers at this hour? She turned over in her bed, trying to get comfortable on the lumpy mattress. What was it? she wondered, picking through the previous night for clues to this lowering mood. Not the show – she had just
torn
into it onstage, they all said how marvellous she'd been, even Dolly. Then they'd gone to the Ivy for a late one, and she'd got tight, but not terribly so, not roaring like ten men. So was it the other business, the eventful afternoon at the Imperial? No, that wasn't it either, but now that she had it in mind she would indulge herself for a few moments thinking of his face, his lovely hands with their tapering fingers, and his sweetly earnest compliments.
I think you're smashing
. . . Fancy! as Dolly would say.

Too bad he was married. He hadn't tried to conceal it, or not for long anyway. And she had exercised her own small deception the night they had met at the gallery, pretending not to know him when she was quite familiar with his work as a society portraitist. Having truanted from the gathering and agreed to dinner, she had to wait until pudding for him to confess that the lady he'd told her about at the theatre – the one who had blubbed at her performance in
The Second Arrangement
– was in fact his wife. Nina had muffled the stab of disappointment by asking questions about her, to which he replied in an even, perhaps rather neutral tone. She – Cora, was it? – had been a secretary at the Royal Academy when Stephen was there. Good family, stockbroker class, large house on Richmond Hill. They had two children, a girl and a boy, both at school; after that they had talked of other things. It was only when Stephen telephoned her the very next day to invite her to lunch that she felt the first vibrations of his seriousness.

The question of whether she ought to have resisted didn't really trouble her. She had fielded the attentions of married men before, without notable pain on either side, and this time seemed no different. Both of them knew what they were doing. Nina wasn't interested in Stephen's wife, and even if she had been, why on earth would they spend the small time they had together talking about her? He had charm – a charm born irresistibly of shyness – but he was plainly not to be trusted, in anything. His behaviour at the hotel, for instance, now that she thought about it, was far from exemplary – quite apart from dishonouring his marital vows. When she had suggested reporting the incident to the desk, his immediate instinct had been to protect himself. But didn't that girl need protecting too? It came back to her now, the whimpering (‘please,
no
') she had heard in the hotel corridor, the door flung open and the girl's face in front of her, goggle-eyed with terror as she bolted past. Nina shook her head as though to empty it of the offending image. It was horrible, quite horrible . . .

And yet even
that
wasn't the thing, naggingly stuck there like a thread of meat behind a molar. She looked at her alarm clock, and thought she might as well get up: at this hour there would still be hot water for a bath. Wrapped in her dressing gown she darted across the landing and into the bathroom, locked the door and turned on the taps, listening to the pipes clank and whinny as the tub filled. Once satisfactorily immersed, she lit a cigarette and rested her head against the porcelain roll-top.

She had been at Mrs Keeffe's boarding house for nearly four years. It was an unlyrical Victorian red-brick on Chiltern Street, and she had hated the place the minute she walked in – hated the linoleum floors, the mournful furniture, the dingy microbial wallpaper, the bedraggled aspidistra in the window. But four years ago it was a rent she could afford, and the house was only a hop, skip and a jump away from the West End. She had never got to know any of the other guests, and even to Mrs Keeffe she spoke only when she had to – the occasional encounter on the stairs, or that afternoon her mother had visited –

That was it – the foreboding – it was lunch with her mother, today. Worse, lunch with her mother
on her birthday
. How old was she now? Nina calculated it at fifty-nine, though that was certainly not an age Mrs Land would admit to. Her company didn't count as an ordeal, exactly, though it did demand on Nina's part a careful management of irritations brewed over a lifetime's exposure to her mother's brittle vanity and pettish grievances. Having the example of such a mother had made her determined not to be remotely like her, and the vigilance it entailed was faintly exhausting. Whenever she explained this to friends she realised how undaughterly she must sound. Her mother's life had not been an easy one, both through her own failings of character and the operations of fate, and Nina knew she ought to feel sorry for her instead of harping on her tiresomeness. The result of these guilty ruminations would be a birthday gift whose extravagance her mother would unsuspectingly take as her due.

She crushed her cigarette on the saucer and climbed dripping out of the tub. The heat of the bathwater had steamed up the mirror, presenting an irresistible
tabula rasa
. With her finger she traced a dainty pair of initials, NL + SW, and encircled them with a heart. ‘Silly,' she snickered after a moment, and wiped it clear. She stared at her reflection, warily amused by her towel-turbaned head: it reminded her of the genie she had played in panto at the Eastbourne Hippodrome. Below it her face glowed pink. She had turned thirty-two in April, supposedly in the prime of her acting life, yet she knew how precarious was the ground beneath her. A string of bad notices, an unsympathetic director or a stone-cold flop could disable you, to say nothing of that pack of younger, brighter, hungrier actresses snapping at your behind, taking your work. That was the trouble – you were always worrying about the one at your back.

She had just descended to the hall when a door behind her moaned on its hinges and Mrs Keeffe sidled into view. She was a mousy-haired widow of uncertain age whose slight stoop made it look as if she were trying to peer up her interlocutor's nose. Nina occasionally wondered what she wore under her never-changing floral-patterned housecoat, though felt it would be no hardship at all to remain ignorant on the subject. Her landlady treated Nina with a mixture of disapproval and respect, the former born of an older generation's understanding of the word ‘actress', the latter encouraged by a vague perception of her lodger's glamorous life: Mrs Keeffe had once seen her being dropped off outside the house in a Rolls-Royce.

‘Didn't hear you come in last night,' she said, addressing a point some distance over Nina's shoulder.

‘Ah – we had a late one,' Nina replied.

Mrs Keeffe gave her head a little shake. ‘Well, I hope someone brought you to the door. 'Snot safe for a lady' – she gave Nina a lightning once-over – ‘out on her own in the West End.'

‘Whatever d'you mean?'

‘You don't read the paper?' Her mouth formed into a perfect ‘O' of prim dismay. ‘Been another murder – girl found outside a hotel.'

Another
murder? Nina was not aware there had been a first. ‘And the police think it's the same . . .?'

‘Oh yes. Same man. Strangles 'em,' she added with a ghoulish twinkle.