Authors: Stephen Benatar
No, it should not. Not for an instant.
(But actually, I thought, for someone in a situation like mine, it was no bad thing to be hearing warning bells. Even to be hearing them at every turn. All I had to guard against, however, was taking them each time for an injunction to jump ship.)
And, anyway, I must continually hold fast to that all-important possibility which had just re-occurred to me.
She had known about the nature of his work.
14
The previous day’s train journey from Mold to Euston had been a relatively easy one, notwithstanding its couple of time-consuming changes, but this morning’s journey into Hampshire was an altogether different matter.
As soon as I came up from the underground at Waterloo and emerged into the mainline station I received warning of how it was going to be. The crowds appeared impregnable.
And almost at once I gave up any attempt to penetrate them. My suitcase in itself would hardly have allowed it. Mrs Hilling had wanted to lend me an overnight bag and look after the rest of my belongings until I came back, but since I had neither known how long I’d be away nor whether, in fact, I should be going back, this was an offer I hadn’t accepted. So now I found myself with an encumbrance which seemed doggedly insubordinate and which banged continually against both my own shins and other people’s. I was repeatedly needing to apologize.
Yet, on the whole, everybody remained calm-tempered. Perhaps this was partly a consequence of the music being piped over the public address system. Good and lively. Or perhaps it had more to do with the traditional British mentality: accustomed both to muddle and to muddling through. (“Oh, things will work out, eventually. Somehow. We always land on our feet and come up smiling.” Many Germans, indeed, found this attitude contemptible, quite beyond their understanding.) But I heard a lot of laughter in the shuffling crowd. I also heard a lot of grumbling. Yet it was grumbling laced with humour.
And in the end even my suitcase proved a blessing. For if I’d left it in London not only would I have had nothing to sit on myself but obviously shouldn’t have been able to offer anyone else a seat—that ‘anyone’ being a pretty redhead serving with the Wrens, who had been some half-dozen places ahead of me in the queue and whose hair I’d been sporadically admiring. Throughout the journey she chatted to me so entertainingly, and was so philosophical about all the servicemen and civilians and railway officials who were forever squeezing past us, that her company appeared to reduce our travelling time by half.
Actually I had felt tempted, as we were pulling into Aldershot, to invite her to the ENSA show. But fortunately I’d decided against this even before I saw her being exuberantly embraced by a large and handsome staff sergeant.
And the warmth of their reunion gave me such a pang! I left the station rather hurriedly.
Yet in any case, after I had found a B and B and had also stopped for lunch, I was too late for the matinée I’d half hoped we’d be attending.
Still, I then bought my ticket for that evening’s performance. It cost me three-and-six. I could have got one for as little as two shillings but I wanted a seat in the front stalls. I had expected the garrison theatre to be inside the camp. Tonight, for some reason, the Theatre Royal—in Gordon Road—would be filling in.
The playbills all told me what ENSA stood for: Entertainments National Service Association. Yet none of them clued me in on Sybella’s surname. They didn’t list performers.
The woman in the box office said, both to myself and to the corporal in front of me—she must have been repeating it to everyone:
“You do realize, don’t you, that it’s a play, not a concert party or revue? For that kind of thing you’d need the Hippodrome. Don’t fret, though: the cast here is composed entirely of ladies—sixteen ladies—so none of you boys should find yourselves with any grounds for complaint!”
Nine Till Six.
Last week at some camp in the Midlands a group of soldiers—“a little bit under the influence,” she said—had thought that it was going to be a girlie show. They had stormed out, “behaving rather rudely as they did so,” and could easily, it seemed, have been court-martialled as a consequence.
“But luckily,” she added, “they were let off with jankers, or put on fatigue, and I think they had to apologize. My point is … it’s a very serious play.”
And at any rate, when here in Aldershot the time arrived, no one appeared to have misunderstood; she had clearly performed her job well.
It seemed a quietly anticipatory audience. After the curtain went up, there was a round of clapping in appreciation of the set—which presented a smart dressmaking establishment: not just its showroom but its office and its staff canteen. All this was especially ambitious, I thought, considering how regularly it must have needed to be adapted to different-sized venues. (And to have had this pointed out in advance greatly increased my admiration: the Wren on the train had been knowledgeable about ENSA, having a sister touring in some production in the Middle East.)
Yet for roughly the next forty minutes—until almost the end of the first act—I felt perplexed by the play itself. Not by its content; more by its supposed appeal to an audience composed mainly of troops. Admittedly there were several glimpses of young women in their underclothes. But apart from that? Surely members of the armed services didn’t by and large take any great interest in the intricacies of women’s fashion? It seemed to me that these opening scenes were filled chiefly with comings and goings, which—despite their undoubted air of busyness—didn’t add up to very much. Along with the venting of petty grievances and the pointing out of rivalries amongst the staff there appeared to be a good deal of unnecessary chatter.
Just before the first-act curtain, however, the stock-keeper stole a dress; and at last you felt the drama might be getting under way.
During the interval many people stayed in their seats (some had trays of tea and biscuits brought to them) but at least half the audience headed for the bar. I did so myself.
And at the bar—to my surprise—I deduced from several animated conversations that the play was being enjoyed. Yet most of what I overheard had little to do with its intrinsic dramatic appeal: female voices were raised in appreciation of the costumes and the hats; male voices—equally expectedly—in appreciation of the women who were modelling them.
All the same, when in the second act several more dresses went missing, the acceleration of interest was maintained. And, by the third, the play had turned into an eloquent diatribe against social injustice, and it had grown to be affecting.
The stock-keeper was the person you mainly cared about. The thief. And I knew I didn’t feel this way only because the role was being played by Sybella … Sybella Standish, so the programme had informed me. Naturally I’d felt impatient for her to come on, and naturally I had been conscious of her, all through that first act, not as Freda the stock-keeper but as Sybella the fiancée of Bill Martin. But long before the final curtain I had almost forgotten the true purpose of my being there and had become thoroughly caught up in her actual performance and with the character she was portraying … If it hadn’t been for the cast list I wasn’t sure I should have recognized the woman
giving
the performance. She was pale, downtrodden and defeated. Gone was all the vivacity of that snapshot.
Of course, such vivacity wouldn’t be present in real life, either—not for the time being.
But at first even her voice had come as a shock—despite my rapidly perceiving how stupid this was. What had I expected? A replica of her mother speaking down the telephone from the Manor House?
After that initial jolt, however, I felt very much impressed: not only was her accent flawlessly consistent; it conveyed—without any trace of comic condescension—all those grinding years of poverty and hopelessness that had finally reduced her to this moment of sobbing self-abasement in front of her employer.
“Yes, all right, I stole them because I thought you were getting everything and me nothing. I thought I had a right to them—a right to have pretty things to wear so I could look decent on my holiday and perhaps get off with someone that had money enough to give me a good time.”
That was the climax to the play. When the curtain came down a few minutes later, the audience appeared dazed. As at the end of any compelling drama (and this one contained in its last line the just-learned revelation of a loved one’s death) the silence that descended on the theatre was disconcerting. You thought that nobody was going to clap.
Yet, bit by bit, the clapping did break out.
And eventually became tumultuous.
By this time, though, the curtain had risen again and the whole cast stood in a row, smiling its acknowledgment. Mrs Pembroke, the kindly proprietress, was positioned in the centre, with her daughter Clare to her left and Freda to her right. In fact, because of the even number in the line-up, you could certainly attest Freda stood as fully in the centre as her boss. But it was an ensemble piece—there were no ‘stars’—the young woman at either end (each of whom had played a junior) seemed to receive as much recognition as those who had been given the more demanding roles.
The curtain came down and went up a further three or four times. On the last occasion there were wolf whistles mixed in with the applause—and at least one ebullient invitation. “Want to get off with me tonight, darlin’? Here’s someone that can give you a good time all right!”
The soldier’s wording suggested precisely whom he had in mind but it was Mrs Pembroke, probably in her late fifties, who then stepped forward.
“Yes, I’d love to!” she said. “Where shall we meet?”
Where upon, there was a good deal of laughter and a fresh wave of applause. I noticed that Sybella herself was laughing—a very different person from the one she’d just been playing. More the woman in the photograph again.
And then it suddenly occurred to me.
Oh, my God! Supposing that their secret engagement had been kept secret even from the War Office? Supposing the War Office hadn’t been aware of her existence?
Supposing she doesn’t
know
?
It was too awful to consider. Wouldn’t
anybody
have informed her? Mr Martin, in spite of his depression? Or, at the very least, Mr Gwatkin?
Yes, they must have, I decided. Must have! I felt a great surge of relief. Even if they hadn’t realized the news itself still needed to be broken, a message of sympathy would surely have been sent.
Oh, sweet heaven. Only imagine—if Sybella hadn’t known that anything had happened! Had continued to think of him as being alive and well!
The lights went up.
A scratchy record of the National Anthem was then played.
The first few bars produced instant calm and brought the audience to its feet. The sixteen members of the cast now led the singing. But as the last notes died away there was again a moment of deep silence. It seemed that people were actually thinking about the meaning of the Anthem and didn’t like to resume chatting too soon afterwards. Or even to start putting on their coats.
The curtain descended for the final time.
Outside the theatre I went and stood on the opposite pavement. As the crowd moved off, my view of the stage door became less restricted.
I was feeling nervous again. I’d decided that I wasn’t going to mention to Sybella (or to Miss Standish, as she’d now perforce become) either of my recent telephone conversations—on the grounds that, even if she had spoken to her mother in the interim or to her flatmate, there still wouldn’t,
inevitably
, be anything to connect me with that unknown caller. I should have to change the name, of course.
My wait on the pavement was a short one.
A dark blue charabanc drew up close to the stage door. This was in Birchett Road, not Gordon—the theatre stood on a corner. The driver didn’t get down. He lengthily sounded his horn. Then he rolled a cigarette and leaned back in satisfaction, from time to time exhaling the smoke through his partly lowered window.
And it wasn’t long before the stage door sprang open and all the ENSA women emerged—well, I didn’t do any counting but it seemed it must be all of them; Sybella was certainly amongst them, carrying the flowers presented to her following the performance. There was laughter as the women climbed onto the coach.
Through the windows I could make out nothing except for a jumble of moving shadows but when everybody was aboard I distinctly heard the driver say:
“One of you girls must have a suitor! That bloke was standing over there even before
I
ruddy well arrived. Lucky thing you’ve got yours truly to protect you!”
“And to deliver us up to the soldiers!” cried out one of his charges, seconds before somebody else called, “Well, then, why not let him on, for Gawd’s sake?”
Both sallies were greeted with guffaws.
I watched as the coach drove into the darkness and rounded a further corner. The streets became still again.
Slowly I too moved off into the night; turned back towards the quiet guesthouse where I had booked myself a room.
15
The following day I should have gone to church; but church for the present seemed a luxury. Instead, at roughly half past nine, I arrived outside the barracks. I gave the guard at the gatehouse an envelope bearing Sybella’s name and did my best, without causing him irritation, to stress its urgency. He only nodded and looked poker-faced.
Then I retreated to the edges of a park I had passed on the way. I had a book with me: a detective story I had bought in Mold and had read two-thirds of whilst travelling comfortably to London. I now sat on the bench closest to the park entrance and wondered how long it might be before Sybella received my letter.
Well, actually it wasn’t a letter. The envelope had held merely a postcard.
I wondered if she were awake yet and whether things appeared more bearable when she first awoke—or whether it was like receiving the news afresh every time that memory resurfaced?
A postcard had struck me as being preferable, since this meant I could withhold my address. In the first place the B and B wasn’t that impressive but, more important, I didn’t want her making do with just a phone call in return, or a quick line dropped through the letterbox, suggesting our meeting at some future date. I needed to see her now. Today. Already my allotted week was half over.