Curtain Call (46 page)

Their sundering was never officially marked. It simply became understood that Tom would not be working for Jimmy any longer. All the same, he had expected something from his erstwhile boss, if not a full
mea culpa
then at least an acknowledgement of his unseemly (or should he call it unconscionable?) behaviour on the night of the drag ball. He had abandoned one friend in a medical emergency, and allowed another to sacrifice himself to a prison sentence. Surely that demanded some form of contrition. Tom heard from Peter when he visited him at Pentonville that Jimmy had written a letter of apology, ‘or the nearest he would ever come to one'. He had boiled with rage about the whole affair while he was in hospital, but Peter's attitude of civilised drollery was a corrective. If a man incarcerated for six months could so easily forgive his treacherous friend, then shouldn't he, too?

There was of course the danger of encountering one another at the theatre. Having deputised as critic (‘keeping the chair warm', as Jimmy put it) Tom was still in the habit of going to press nights, even if he wasn't reviewing. Most of the time he kept a distance, or else went on a different night. He continued to read Jimmy's reviews in the
Chronicle
, wondering if he'd detect some falling off, some diminution in the energy of the writing now that his editor-secretary had gone. He never did. The Erskine voice remained the same: exacting, adversarial, puckish. It would be the last thing of his to go. Then, back in April, he had spotted Jimmy, at the far end of the bar during an interval, characteristically surrounded by a group of his young men. Jimmy had spotted him in turn, and looked away. When the play resumed Tom noticed that the last seat on the critics' row – Jimmy's – was now empty. It saddened him, unexpectedly.

He told Edie about it over lunch a few days later. They met quite often now. In Peter's enforced absence he was understudying in the role of her best friend and confidant.

‘I don't know, I thought a tip of his hat, or a wave. But nothing. He just looked away.'

Edie tilted her head in rueful sympathy. ‘He was probably embarrassed. People like Jimmy don't know how to behave when they're in the wrong.' Then she suddenly frowned at him. ‘You're not going back to him, are you?'

Tom shook his head, and smiled. ‘Not a chance. I stayed with him for too long, and I took on too much work – another thing the doctors have warned me about. But it wasn't all bad, you know. We had fun.'

‘Of course, darling. He's a caution! And if a man's to be judged by the company he keeps Jimmy comes off pretty well.'

‘What, Jolyon and that lot?'

‘No, they're just his boys. I mean his proper friends – you and me and Peter and László. Look how generous he's been to László.'

‘I know, I know. We can rely on him for everything except loyalty.'

Edie laughed throatily. ‘But we love him just the same.'

‘Strange, isn't it? With certain people the normal rules don't apply. He behaves badly, lets people down, and yet we forgive him, you're right, just because he's Jimmy. When he was at his most swinish I cursed him for a monster of egotism and vanity and self-delusion, but I was wrong – I mean about the self-delusion. He knows exactly what he can get away with.'

‘A “monster”, darling?'

‘It's a figure of speech, mostly.'

Edie nodded it away. ‘Listen, I'm going to have a little dinner at Fashion Street for when Peter gets out – a welcome home. You, me, László – and Jimmy. You will come, won't you?'

‘Well, I'm not sure . . .' he said with a heavy shake of his head. But when he caught Edie's hurt expression he gave up his teasing and pulled a fooled-you face. She gave him a reproving smack on the wrist in return. ‘I've just had a note from László, actually,' he continued. ‘He's going to some show next week, and he's very keen for me to accompany him. I don't know why.'

‘Don't you, now?' said Edie, and Tom thought he heard some ironic chime in her voice. But after a moment's hesitation he dismissed it, and the talk turned to something else.

‘So you didn't see
any
of it?'

‘No, not a thing,' Madeleine admitted. ‘After I'd finished at the bar I was so tired I went home and just got into bed. When I woke up it was all over.'

‘Oh,
shame
. Maddy, you've never seen such crowds! I mean, I can't hardly remember the last one, I was just a girl. But this . . . He looked so dignified, and the paper said he did ever so well, even with his stammer. And we sang “God Save the King” and waved our flags like mad – and then burst out cryin'!'

Madeleine was in the Blue Posts listening to Rita's awestruck account of the Coronation. She could tell that Rita found something odd about her not bothering with the occasion. She wasn't the only one. When Madeleine had been at Tite Street the day before, Stephen had asked her if she was excited about the ‘big day'. She felt herself rather a party-pooper having agreed to work at the Railway Arms all day. They had taken to one another pretty well, the only wobble of alarm being the afternoon Stephen came back to find the sash windows washed and gleaming. ‘Oh . . .' He'd always thought the layer of dirt created a romantic, Turneresque blur, and consequently had not disturbed them. When Madeleine saw him looking dazed by this sudden access of light she felt somehow in error. ‘I'm sorry if – I just thought they needed a clean.' After a long pause Stephen gave her a pained smile. ‘I know, you're right. I've become used to not seeing out of them.' She kept noticing him pause in front of the windows, as though trying to recall what had gone missing. But he lost the habit, and came to accept their new grimeless state.

Their traumatic involvement in the case of the Tiepin Murders made an unspoken bond between them. The police's questioning went on for days, and she told them the story, over and over, of meeting Everett Druce for the first time at the Imperial, and of Nina's part in unwittingly saving her life. It was soon established that Nina had in fact been the killer's fifth and final victim. Ludo Talman had confirmed that Druce, whose money backed the studio, must have seen her screen test at the Marlborough and then set about tracking her down. The house in Hampstead was found to be rented under the name Rusk, which he had taken from Barry Rusk, crime correspondent of the
Chronicle
. Madeleine gathered that Nina would probably not have known anything about her killer. To judge from the injuries to her head, death would have been instantaneous. It was cold comfort that Druce had not left his macabre signature upon her.

As to what had motivated his grisly crimes, they were no more able to explain it now than they had been at the start. The only chance of understanding would have been to question Druce himself, and that possibility had vanished at the moment he fell to his doom in a Camden boarding house. Madeleine would think of that night, and remember her strange fatalistic behaviour on being confronted by the murderer. At the time it had felt as though someone else was inhabiting her body, someone who had accepted the certainty of her own end, and was calm. She had not described this experience of transcendent equanimity to anyone, partly because it sounded so odd, and partly because she could not quite comprehend it herself. All she knew was that death – or whatever was on the other side of death – held no terror for her.

Rita, having exhausted her supply of superlatives on the Coronation, was looking at Madeleine inquisitively. ‘So you're getting by, then. No regrets 'bout the Elysian?'

She shook her head. ‘The money was good, better than I've ever earned. But I couldn't bear to . . . D'you ever see Roddy?'

‘Hmm, I seen him skulking about now and then. What was it made you sling your hook in the end?'

Madeleine stared off into the pub's pale light. It already seemed a long time ago. ‘Oh . . . There was someone – a feller. We'd been out a few times, nothing more. But I was fond of him. Roddy found out, and he made sure the feller would never look at me the same way again.'

‘
Ooh
, the snake,' Rita hissed. Something else seemed to trouble her. ‘You know, if you're short of money . . .'

Madeleine clasped Rita's hand in hers. ‘I'm fine. Char work, the pub. And the painter I told you about has asked me if I can give his daughter piano lessons.'

Rita's eyes widened in astonishment. ‘You play the piano?'

‘I thought I'd forgotten how, but there's one in his studio, so . . .' Stephen had overheard her by chance, and had been so beguiled that he'd insisted she play whenever she liked. A few weeks later he'd mentioned his daughter – Freya – who might want lessons. She'd been unhappy at her school, he explained, and had recently come back to London. ‘Quite a
character
,' he'd added, with a sidelong look.

‘Piano lessons!' cried Rita. ‘I must tell Arthur about that. He's got a piano round his place. Here, d'you think you could play this?' And she began, in a clear fluting alto, a music-hall song from the old days, something about a girl and a boy meeting by the sad sea waves. Madeleine didn't know it, but it didn't sound very difficult. She could certainly give it a try.

The morning after the Coronation Tom woke feeling rather low. He was fatigued by his footslog home from the Mall, and he knew he could have used the day more profitably than gawping at a pageant whose significance barely interested him. Now that he was cast on the open seas of freelance writing he could not afford to drift; there was no longer the safe harbour of a regular income, however meagre it had been. He had a career to keep afloat.

On emerging from his bedroom he almost tripped over the cardboard box that Allenby, his landlord, had deposited there. It was addressed to him. Inside, wrapped in newspaper, was a lady's hat box from Peter Jones, though the weight of it suggested that something other than headgear was contained therein. He felt a tender shock on lifting out the green Smith-Corona typewriter, which he hadn't touched since he was last at Jimmy's office back in November.

A typewritten letter had been wedged into the carriage.

Princess Louise Mansions, W.C.2

11th May 1937

My dear Tom,

I have been long, too long, pondering what token of manumission I should bestow upon you. The choice has preoccupied me, for I wished to communicate by it some sense of our shared endeavours over the last nine and a half years. An Erskine first edition? You would laugh. A precious
objet de luxe
? You would cry (and so would I to part with it!). A theatre programme from our first outing together? I couldn't recall it for the life of me. And then I would be haplessly borne down memory's byways thinking of all those press nights we attended together, the dinners afterwards, the parties, the jaunts, the jollities. I dare say we spent more time in one another's company than did the average married couple. Perhaps you regard our association in a less emollient spirit – something closer to Strindberg than to Wilde. But I trust in time you will remember that some of it was fun, too.

I have read your critical ebullitions these last months with great interest and, I must say, admiration. Would it be outrageous of me to suggest that you have absorbed the lessons of a master and incorporated them into your own distinctive style? You know me better than to expect modesty where none has ever been intended, but I should say you are a better writer in your mid-thirties than I was at a like age. I do not say
critic
, mind. Your judgement, measured and incisive for the most part, is still too inclined towards leniency; you are apt to hold back when you ought to go for the kill. There is another way of looking at that. You have a proper generosity of feeling, whereas the milk of human kindness has rather soured in me. Either way, I shall follow your progress with a keen eye. And since I find myself in pedagogic mood, let me remind you of advice that Johnson once gave to Boswell: ‘If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.' You may arraign my character on any number of charges, but indolence could never be one of them.

Thus we return to the subject with which I began. I had been racking my brain for the gift that should mark our professional span when lo! I saw that it was right before my eyes, indeed, beneath my very fingertips. This typewriter, once a
casus belli
between us, is surely the appropriate memento to be handed from employer to secretary – or, as I prefer to imagine, from one old friend to another. I know its owner will use it wisely, and well. It shall have no more words from me, beyond these two.

Yours,

Jimmy

Tom read the letter once, and a second time. His feelings about it were quite confused. On the one hand, there was no mention in it whatsoever of Jimmy's shameful dereliction on the night of the party. No mention of Peter being left to face the music. Nor was there any reference to Tom's illness, his time in hospital, or his convalescence. Not even a simple ‘How are you?' The closest it had come to any hint of discord in their relationship was a passing allusion to Strindberg. The astonishing nerve! On the other hand, it wasn't astonishing at all. He had not really expected phrases of self-blame and remorse, because he knew Jimmy was incapable of them. Edie had him right. He didn't know how to behave when he was in the wrong. Did he even know he
was
in the wrong?

He read it again, and, with slow reluctance, he found the best parts of the writer in it – his charm, his wit, his thoughtful praise, albeit mixed with a piercing dose of condescension. He was disreputable, incorrigible, inimitable. But it took courage, Tom supposed, to be so much his own man. He ran his fingers lightly over the metal keys. It was a beautiful thing, and as a gift – the donor was right – it couldn't have been more appropriate. He felt a surge of determination to make himself worthy of it. Leaning across his desk for a sheet of paper, he inserted it into the carriage, and scrolled down.