Authors: Stephen Benatar
Then sod them! Sod them all! If the choice of myself had been little more than just a sympathy vote I would damn well prove I wasn’t a man they could afford to patronize. I would damn well make them wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night … only to think of what might have happened if they had sent somebody else. Or if they had not sent anyone at all.
Yes, all right. I could acknowledge it. Ever since meeting this woman I might have been behaving in a vaguely adolescent way. I might indeed have been allowing my personal feelings to get the better of my judgment. All afternoon perhaps (and why even try to hide it?) I might have been half-consciously aware of something being—what?—not
altogether
right.
And in that case might have been—yes, half-consciously—suppressing my unease? I really didn’t know.
But what came to me suddenly and mercifully and with the full force of unexpected absolution … I really didn’t need to know! It was
now
that mattered. And
now
—although this was paradoxically so hard to admit, more than hard, since it filled me with a feeling that was close to desolation—
now
the all-but-inadmissible truth was this: Sybella Standish was leading me up the garden path.
She was flagrantly deceiving me.
Your responsibility, Mannheim had said. I couldn’t forget that. I now felt practically certain this whole thing was a hoax. But was that quite enough—‘practically’?
‘
Your
responsibility’ was what he had implied.
20
“Anyway … Now that I’ve finished staring…?”
She didn’t answer. But she looked encouraging.
“I’ve begun to wonder about your attitude to dress rehearsals,” I went on.
“Well,
naturally
you have.”
“Are they essential?”
“Yes. I’d have said so. Definitely.”
“Then taking that into consideration (for, of course, I trust you
implicitly
)—and as a dress rehearsal for the live theatre in London tomorrow—will you come with me to a
picture
theatre in Aldershot tonight?”
I eventually carried the day. Therefore, after I had paid my bill at the counter, I asked the manageress for information. She found me a copy of the previous Friday’s
Aldershot News
.
Or, not to sell it short, the previous Friday’s
Aldershot News and Military Gazette, Farnborough Chronicle and Fleet Times.
“My word!” exclaimed Sybella, when—back at the table—I had proclaimed this to her in its full majesty. “You really get all that for just three pence?”
I turned directly to the entertainments page.
“At the Empire we can see Humphrey Bogart as
King of the Underworld
and Cesar Romero as
The Gay Caballero
.”
“Right.”
“At the Alexandra,
The Doctor Takes a Wife
, with Loretta Young. And
Jungle Man
, starring good old Buster Crabbe.”
“Why good old Buster Crabbe but not good old Loretta Young?”
“I don’t think
she
ever played Tarzan or Flash Gordon. Not to mention Buck Rogers.”
“And as soon as she does, things will automatically even out? Fair enough. But are those the only two cinemas open on a Sunday?”
“No, not at all. No, at the Ritz—oh, yes, let’s settle for the Ritz—Greer Garson! As Mrs Chips she absolutely stole my heart! And apparently
this
film happens to be The Most Memorable Of All Motion Picture Love Stories, Ever. Which must be true because it says so here. Therefore it seems we just can’t afford to miss it.”
Yet then I was suddenly mindful of dashed futures and drowned fiancés and wondered if I hadn’t been appallingly tactless. I added hurriedly, “Oh, but no second feature. That’s a bind.”
“I should have thought it was a definite advantage, if our choice is only between jungle men and gay caballeros. But what’s the picture at the Ritz? Whatever you do, please don’t say it’s
Random Harvest
!”
“Why, yes! How did you guess?”
She gave a groan.
“Oh, it isn’t fair,” she said. “First, you invite me to the last West End show I went to with Bill; and then—as if God feels the joke has to get funnier with repetition—you pick out the last film we saw together, too!”
But she quickly held up her hand, pre-empting my reaction.
“Don’t worry, though. I think you’ll find that during the past hour or so I have managed to gird up my loins, wonderfully.”
“Oh God,” I said, “the film as well! I had absolutely no idea.”
“Not like you had before, of course, when bringing up the subject of the show?”
We both smiled a little.
“So,” she said, “it will indeed be like a dress rehearsal. More than you imagined!”
“Oh, no, it won’t,” I said. “Not to that extent. We’ll see
The Doctor Takes a Wife
. Or—here now—how about
The Perfect Crime
… which they’re showing at the Pavilion? We didn’t get so far as that.”
“We didn’t get so far as that,” she reminded me, “for one very good reason. We were stopped by Greer Garson. Greer Garson stole your heart. We must go to see Greer Garson.”
“Oh, bugger Greer Garson,” I exclaimed. “Let’s both learn about the perfect crime! At some stage, that’s something which might…”
I had been going to say come in handy. But now I suddenly heard the echo of my recent words. Previously, I hadn’t blushed in years.
“Oh, forgive me! Please forgive me. I didn’t mean that!”
She was smiling. It might have been the broadest smile I had seen from her all afternoon, apart from the hysteria. “I think Dr Freud might say you did—or, anyway, that you meant something very much like it. And it’s rather sweet: you’ve gone all red. Although I know it isn’t nice of me to point that out!”
“No, I deserve it.”
“In that case I must take full advantage of your penitence. I should like to see
Random Harvest
, please. I should really like to see it.”
She paused.
“And if I do start snivelling I promise you that it will be at nothing but the film. I tell you I’ve girt up my loins and this will be the perfect test. If not the perfect crime.”
We said goodbye to the manageress (in fact, the owner—she admitted to us shyly that she happened to be Daphne) and, after an unplanned but timely hour spent at evensong, sat in another café, in the café of the cinema itself, whilst awaiting the conclusion of the afternoon performance.
Over a glass of ginger beer Sybella showed herself still resolute; still keen to rise to the occasion.
“I’ll tell you where we saw it,” she said. “At the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. If you’ve never been there, it boasts one of the most barnlike auditoriums you can possibly imagine.
Bill
hadn’t been there and he bought tickets for the rear stalls. We had to move forward twice. He said that if people ever stayed at the back he hoped they’d be given binoculars for gazing at the stars.”
I decided I could risk it. “Sounds as though
his
jokes weren’t any better than mine.”
“Perhaps that’s why I feel so much at home with you. Before the cinema we had dinner at
l’Ecu de France
in Jermyn Street and it was all very jolly because we started off with double champagne cocktails.”
Her compliment hadn’t gone unnoticed. Nor had her phrase, ‘all very jolly’. Was that, perhaps, coming just a degree closer to the style of those letters?
“It really surprises me,” I said, “that you can still get champagne cocktails.”
“On that particular evening we could.”
“So I’ll tell you what strikes me now: is it any wonder you should need to see this film again? If champagne is what you started off with, you probably found the whole storyline more than a little confusing. Boy meets girl you could possibly have coped with. Boy loses girl was beginning to get tricky. Boy finds girl again … Well, I don’t know, I imagine by then you were both getting desperately out of your depth. Might have done better just to stay at the back and rest your legs. Are you honestly sure you want to do this?”
“Do what?”
“Go through it all again.”
“You’re meant to be helping me, you know. You volunteered.”
“Okay,” I said. “Merely checking.”
“Very well, then.” Her manner was bright but might have seemed a shade relentless. “Like I say, it was all very jolly—or should have been very jolly—except that the next day he was going off to Scotland and I didn’t know how long he’d be away;
he
didn’t know how long he’d be away; and I was already beginning to miss him and feel homesick. Well, obviously I was.”
“Homesick?”
“Yes. That’s the form my missing him always took. I was reduced to being a baby.”
Now her voice did falter.
“Of course, at the time, I didn’t know even the first thing about missing him!”
She unclasped her bag and fumbled through it for a hankie. I had seen her fumbling for one last night—although, admittedly,
that
had been in an overall pocket and not in a handbag. But something about her expression must have reminded me. So now it was I who might have seemed a shade relentless: annoyed that I could have forgotten, for so much as a single minute, that this was a performance, a charade: the catch in her voice, the handkerchief, the whole damned lot … And she had asked me emphatically—asked me more than once, hadn’t she?—to put her to the test.
“So when was this, then? Your double champagne cocktails? His going up to Scotland?”
But by this time she was dabbing at her eyes—doing so with a rueful, even a half-humorous air of apology. And I found myself thinking that I must be wrong. This could
not
be a performance. This could
not
be a charade. What kind of a hardened brute was I, to allow myself to go on doubting her love for him?
And abruptly—trying to make out that I hadn’t even noticed her distress—I glanced at my watch and stood up.
“I think you should be finishing your drink. The programme’s about to end at any moment.”
I walked across and gazed through the glass porthole in one of the dividing doors—myself being gazed at by the adenoidal waitress whose starched white circle sat precariously on a mass of woolly chestnut hair and whose expression seemed gently protective.
“You’ll know when it’s over,” she explained kindly, “when they all start coming out.”
I thanked her with a smile and only five seconds later—as if her statement had been the trigger—the shuffling exodus began. As the last of the audience leisurely emerged we went in and took our seats … far earlier than we should have, as it turned out, since no one had yet arrived to let us through. An usherette was waving around a flit gun—wafting misty clouds of disinfectant onto the fuggy, tobacco-laden air—but simultaneously carrying on a desultory conversation with her male counterpart downstairs who was performing the same service for the one-and-nine pennies and whom she twice addressed as Grandpa. Her spraying done, however, she went to take up her position in the doorway; but not before she’d made a reluctant detour to tear in half our own wickedly pristine tickets and to tell us off.
We had something of a wait until 7.50 … the advertised start of the performance;
much
later—as Sybella now pointed out in mild mystification—than the beginning of tomorrow night’s show in London. At first we had thought we were going to be the sole occupants of the dress circle and we boasted to each other of how grand we were. But during the last few minutes the place filled up surprisingly fast; and we actually had to admit to feeling pleased about this.
21
The programme started with a Pathé newsreel.
This showed us the calling-off of the coal strike in Washington, just minutes before Roosevelt would have signed an order to seize the mines. Next, we saw General Sikorski broadcasting from London to his people at home, warning them that they must remain friendly to the USSR. Then—appropriately—we had some footage of Stalin himself, in Moscow, stating his desire for a strong free Poland after the war.
Although I’d been fearing that I might have to watch the Allies entering Tunis and have to witness the rapturous acclaim of the Tunisians—watch the Allies, too, going into Bizerte—I now experienced a twinge of disappointment on realizing that all of this was obviously too recent for the ABC in Aldershot.
Likewise, of course, the Germans declaring martial law amongst the Dutch in anticipation of an Allied invasion. Yet at the necessary exclusion of
that
I felt nothing but a frankly recognized—if slightly disturbing—sense of relief.
The news ended with something more lightweight. Its final segment showed fresh batches of US troops arriving in Suffolk and dispensing chewing gum and toothy smiles. It contained an interview with a group of countrywomen who declared that the Americans would all be made warmly welcome and that, no, they had never yet seen any coloured men—other than at the pictures—but, yes, they would now be looking forward to meeting some.
However, it still wasn’t time for the feature. First came a Fitzpatrick Traveltalk—“and now as the sun goes down and we reluctantly take our leave of beautiful Buenos Aires…”; and then a trailer for the following Sunday’s seven-day offering,
Casablanca
, which, like every other English or American movie since the outbreak of war, I naturally hadn’t been able to see.
Gone with the Wind
was also coming back. It occurred to me that this cinema must have a policy of reintroducing ‘by popular demand’ all of the biggest romantic money-makers of the previous few years.
Then the lights came up once more and the massive theatre organ arose out of the depths in stately style and provided brief selections from
Showboat
and
Me and My Girl
; the entire audience sang the lyric to ‘The Lambeth Walk’. Afterwards, the startlingly raven-haired organist took his bow to both stalls and circle: “That was worrying,” I whispered, but his sleek toupee, with its neat central parting, remained spiderlike in place. He and his sturdy spaceship then sank smoothly out of sight and the lights finally dimmed. The curtains swished apart (but not before the censor’s certificate was already waveringly on screen) and at last it was time for Leo to roar and for
Random Harvest
to begin.