Kind Are Her Answers (19 page)

“Don’t be unhappy, darling,” she whispered. “I’m going to take such care of you. Everything will be all right. You’ll never be allowed to be unhappy for a minute, even when I’m not there.”

He kissed her, turned from the trees towards the road where they were to go.

T
HE LONG LOW ROOM
was littered with dusty colour like a fair. A scarlet military cloak covered one of its rush-seated chairs; over another a blue sari edged with silver, with a half-mended tear in it, hung in a classic curve. On a trestle table down the middle, dominating the boards with a swagger, stood a towering brass helmet with a horsehair plume. Gauntlets, greaves, mob-caps and cravats of dingy lace, a rapier, a pair of canary tights, a string hauberk and a leopard-skin, stravaged round it with a cowed look, like a crowd of supers. The sound of a recorder playing Purcell, with uncertainties in the upper octave, floated through the wall, mingled with noises of gear-changing and shouting children from the street outside. Sitting on one corner of the table, a dark wiry young man, wearing slacks and a grubby grey flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was polishing a breastplate. The rag he was using was scarlet, and fringed with a remnant of gold lace. The table, and the objects on it, accompanied with rhythmic rattles the jerks of his arm.

The breastplate was decorated with a Gorgon mask in high relief. Among the coils of its entwined serpents the polish lodged in black oily pockets, eluding the pursuit of the rag. The young man swore irritably. Blue traces of make-up, lingering round his eyes, gave him a soulful hungry look. He fished about on the chair seat which supported, besides his feet, two thumbed typescripts and a swordbelt encrusted with glass jewels.

“Christie!” he shouted. “Where’s that damned brush?”

From the middle distance came the scrape of curtain rings and the sound of heavy fabrics disturbed. It brought with it stronger wafts of the room’s characteristic smell; a rich compound of greasepaint, camphor, musty stuff, wood-rot and dust. The source of movement was hidden by a tall hanging stand filled with clothes. Glimpses of velvet, fur, tinsel and gauze, mellowed by a romantic grubbiness, burst out from inadequate dust sheets thrown over the top. The curtain rings rattled again.

“Chris
-tie!”

“How the hell do I know? I haven’t been in the room five minutes.”

Christie’s head was thrust out between an orange satin panier and a red velvet farthingale, catching the sun and making the colours of both look a little dejected.

“You’re sitting on it, or something. What did you clean all that armour on the table with? And the helmet? Look under that.”

“Funny, aren’t you?” snarled the young man, slewing round with a clank of metal. “I haven’t cleaned them yet.”

“What are you cleaning them
for,
anyway? There’s nothing going out except
Quality Street
and the
Shrew.
If you’d tell me where the lute is, it would be some help.”

“Oh, my God!” One of the typescripts flew across the floor. “Have I got to put on the whole of this emetic whimsy
and
paint the backcloth
and
turn up my guts acting in it,
and
send out the hampers as well? Ask Flossie where it is. She’s probably gone off with it for the angels. Tell her she can’t; she’ll have to make one.”

Christie surged back through the clothes-stand and disappeared. There was a sound of creaking wicker, from which her voice emerged muffled with stooping. “She won’t do that. It wouldn’t have a psychic emanation.”

The young man grinned. “It’s nice having you back,” he remarked. “Don’t take any notice of me, I’m not myself on a Thursday.”

“Poor sweet.” Christie came round the stand, with a pair of gold slippers hanging from one hand. “Truly, Rollo, I haven’t seen the brush.” She rummaged on a window-sill. “Here, have the spare clothes-brush, and I’ll wash it some time.”

Rollo took the offering, and turned it over. “This is the brass-brush,” he observed without rancour.

“Oh, is it? Never mind, I’ve only used it for the quite dark things. One of these vile Bianca slippers has got a tear in it.” She got a needle and thread out of a tin box on the table, and swung herself on to the edge beside him, dangling her feet. “Honestly, Rollo, what
do
you want the armour for?”

Rollo gouged savagely at a serpent’s tail. “To wear to-morrow,” he said bitterly, “as Flossie’s ruddy prince.”

“But Rollo,
dear.”
Christie tried to turn a giggle into a cough, jerked the needle in the wrong direction, and sucked her finger. “But it’s twice too big for you.”

“I know that too,” said Rollo. “Thanks.”

“I thought it was supposed to be sort of mediæval. The backcloth is.”

“Only when I painted it I didn’t know we were going to get a rush order for
Saint Joan.
You can’t send that out without suits of plate for Joan and Dunois, anyhow. This is what’s left.” He waved at the table.

“Why not a string hauberk? It only wants a lick of gold paint. I’ll do it for you when I’ve finished the hampers.”

“Do you suppose I didn’t think of that? But Flossie reminded me that I’ve got to take it off in the last act and dedicate it on the altar. Can you see me with my arms over my head, peeling? They can’t expect a striptease on a silver collection. Blast them.”

“Couldn’t you just dedicate your sword on the altar instead?”

“Tell that to Flossie. She says it’s essential symbolism. Look out, she’s stopped.” The assault on Purcell had ceased next door. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

There were footsteps in the passage. Christie took Bianca’s slipper and dived with it behind the hanging stand. Rollo, bent over his breastplate, made the noise associated with grooms.

A voice said, “Oh,
there
you are, Mr. Baines,” with silvery clear enunciation, ending with a short run up the scale. Florizelle Fuller never simply came into a room. She entered. The upward tilt of her chin, and gaze fixed on something a little above the eye-level of those present, suggested a pursuit of occult music. Florizelle was aware of this; an admirer had told her so during the period when Barrie was on the crest of the wave. She had swimming, deeply set brown eyes, spiritual concavities in her cheeks, and a vertical chest. To-day she was wearing a smock of purple handwoven linen, held in at the waist with a belt of Hungarian peasant work. The neck was clasped with a large plaque of hammered pewter surrounding an art porcelain jewel. A thin tapering plait of hair was wound several times round her head. She was extremely proud of its length. Rollo’s favourite story was to the effect that when applying for her passport she had filled in the space for Distinguishing Marks with “Hair Below Knees,” and that an official with a taste for conciseness had returned the passport marked “Hairy Legs.”

“Don’t let me disturb you two busy bees.” Her progress was arrested by the fallen typescript, which had entangled itself in her sandaled feet. She retrieved it, and patted it back into order with a reproachful tenderness, appropriate to an ill-used child. Her plays
were
her children, as she often said. This time she said it with her eyes. “I just came to tell you, Mr. Baines, about a little inspiration I’ve had for your entrance in the last act. Then I promise I’ll leave you in peace.” She poised herself ethereally, as if for levitation. In the presence of urgent manual activity, she always had an air of being about to dematerialize. Rollo, to whom these symptoms were familiar, blew on the breastplate.

“Don’t you think it would be
rather
delightful if you made the entrance to the altar through the audience, with the Child-Angels round you?”

The packing noises behind the stand gave place to a crisp expectant silence. Entrance through the audience was fraught, at Brimpton Abbey, with all the liveliness of an Irish Question.

“Don’t you think,” Rollo remarked to the Gorgon’s head, “the costumes need a bit of lighting?”

“The audience
like
it so much, don’t they? It gives them the feeling of
participating,
you know. Then, you see, you could be led in with a chain of flowers. We
have
a chain of flowers, you remember, from
The Spirit of May.
And my idea was that you might have the smallest Child-Angel—little Gladys it would be—sitting on your shoulder.”

Rollo put down the breastplate, and rose to his full height. He was five foot six, and sparely proportioned. A feverish sound of creaking wicker came from the corner.

“I don’t
think
so. Not
with
the Greek armour. I shall look rather like a turtle in it, in any case. Even supposing I didn’t fall over.”

Miss Fuller gave a fluting, reproachful laugh.

“You know you really
are
very naughty. I
know
you and Miss Heath don’t take my little playlets seriously, but I do think …”

“Oh, nothing of the kind, of course,” began Rollo rapidly. He looked over his shoulder, but this signal of distress was intercepted by the hanging stand.

The delicate adjustment of influences at Brimpton Abbey lent itself to recurrent crises. A growth of the 1920s, it had burgeoned overnight in a soil richly fertilized with wishful ideals. Its mission had been the presentation of Art to the Folk, and in its heyday it had ramified into every uplifting activity from the League of Nations Union down.

In those days it had been a rallying ground for many eager and not untalented spirits; its foundress, the veteran Anna Sable, had still been vigorous, and the star performances of its Summer and Easter Schools had been attended by critics from the
Observer
and the
Sunday Times.
No one, least of all the permanent staff, could have said at what point its trajectory started the downward curve. By unnoticeable degrees Anna Sable’s arthritis had persuaded her from the stage to the drawing room, where her genius was spent on persuading rich visitors that they had made contact with a white-hot centre of creative art. The eager undergraduates became deflected to Marx and Freud; the neglected dramatists tended to be ruled out in increasing numbers by their differences with the Lord Chamberlain. Then came the slump, and for several months Brimpton Abbey had revolved, as far as it revolved at all, under the motive power of Anna Sable, who was by this time a purely nervous force, a few transient voluntary enthusiasts, a procession of resident secretaries, and Florizelle Fuller.

At the nuptials of Anna Sable and the Abbey, Florizelle had been a sort of chief bridesmaid. She worked without salary, and was therefore, by now, cemented as firmly into the fabric as the supports of the stage.

Rollo was an accident. He had arrived as a local amateur, and had remained so, with the help of a powerful motor-cycle, while he drifted in and out of a series of jobs, none of which turned out to be exactly adjusted to a vivid dramatic sense, an irreverent vein of humour, an almost total lack of business acumen, and a Heath-Robinson ingenuity for making do. During his periods of unemployment he had amused his leisure at the Abbey, where he experienced the delightful but unconscious homeliness of a duck that wanders for the first time into a duckpond. Nobody noticed for some time, and Rollo himself last of all, that he had made himself indispensable. It was not until he arrived on his motor-cycle one morning to say that he wouldn’t be coming any more because his people were moving to Edinburgh next month, that scales fell from the general eye. Rollo was taken on to a staff hitherto entirely vestal, and took up residence the following week.

Christie was not an accident. She could type and do shorthand passably, but not well enough to command a better salary elsewhere; it was her first job, so that she was not in a position to make unkind comparison between the hours of work at the Abbey and those obtaining in non-resident posts; and, which was important, she looked and sounded pretty on the stage. Rollo and Christie could be cast for juvenile leads without initiating blood-feuds, and—except during the Summer and Easter Schools, the high peaks of the year—they invariably were. Florizelle clung to her speciality of black spirits and white, red spirits and grey; she also enacted noble mothers, goddesses, and queens. This time, however, Christie’s absence during rehearsals had given her the chance to play the heroine, and it made her particularly sensitive, as Rollo was finding out.

He picked up the breastplate again and held it up, ostensibly to catch the light. It provided a sketchy screen from Florizelle’s wounded eyes. Reflected in the side of it, he saw with relief Christie advancing to his support. They formed a useful mutual-assistance guild. Christie smoothed things over when Rollo’s sense of the ridiculous ran away with him, which was once a week or so; and Rollo—who was permanently grateful to Christie for being an inch shorter than himself—was generally in time to save her from detection when she got something into an impossible muddle, which happened on an average of every other day.

“Oh, Miss Fuller.” Christie smiled with Sunday-school sweetness through her hair, which, loosened by stooping over the hampers, was falling into her eyes. “I was just coming along to ask you if you’ve seen the lute lately. I’ve only got the bashed-in one for Lucenzio. I can’t find the good one
any
where.”

Florizelle’s eyes swam; her hands flew to her breast, as if protecting an invisible relic from violation. During the early pourparlers, Rollo slipped away. He returned five minutes later to find Christie packing the lute. They exchanged acknowledgments which custom had reduced to a ritual.

K
IT SOUNDED HIS HORN
again. The petroleum van in front replied with a honk that seemed to come derisively from its belly, and continued to hug the crown of the road. Kit’s own blast had been an expletive rather than a suggestion; the road surface was filmed with oily mud, on which it would have been madness to overtake if there had been room. The hoardings of the arterial road, uglier with familiarity—he was making the journey for the third time—crept past him. In front the round red back of the petrol van bobbed and swayed with elephantine coquetry, like the posterior of a fat lady on a comic postcard.