‘No, I will
not
come into the office! I will stay here in the hall and scream the place down until you agree to open the Grey Bedroom. My husband is locked in there.’
Mrs Loxton-Pocock glared at Maggie. A narrow but abysmally deep social chasm lay between them. ‘Vulgar’ versus ‘stuck-up’: each had a term she could employ to despise the other. But then the current of mutual hatred was dissipated because both of them had the sense to realise it would achieve nothing.
‘Very well, then,’ said Mrs Loxton-Pocock briskly but not ungently. ‘But you
will
have to come with me to the office to fetch the key to the Grey Bedroom.’
Having fetched the key, they ascended the stairs and walked through the other rooms to the Long Gallery in silence. In silence Mrs Loxton-Pocock opened the door to the Grey Bedroom. It was empty, and it was exactly as it had been when Maggie and the children had left it. No, there was one difference. Someone had thrown a dust sheet over the old wheelchair by the bed, turning it into a bizarre, hunched creature. Maggie pulled the dust sheet off, but the chair was unoccupied.
‘He must have gone in there,’ said Maggie pointing to the door which Mr Cheke had said led to the Black Room. She went over to try the door handle but it did not even turn.
‘No, I’m sorry Maggie,’ said Mrs Loxton-Pocock, ‘but that really
is
impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t have the key, and anyway the room beyond was blocked up, oh ages ago, even before the Trust took over, I think. There’s just a brick wall behind that door.’
‘But Mr Cheke said . . . And that’s another thing, where is Mr Cheke?’
‘Mr Cheke? Are you sure that was his name?’
‘He said so. A little, thin, bony, bald man. With pebble glasses. Does that sound like a Mr Cheke you know?’
‘It does sound like Mr Cheke,’ said Mrs Loxton-Pocock hesitantly.
‘Well?’
‘Mr Cheke no longer works here. Mr Cheke is dead.’
When Maggie had stopped screaming Mrs. Loxton-Pocock went down stairs to call the Police.
* * * * *
The Sergeant had left two keen young Constables at the Hall to make further enquiries. As Maggie was finishing her narrative one of them phoned in his report. The Grey Bedroom as empty as stated and the Black Room bricked up, but of Jack Protheroe there was no trace. The Hall had been thoroughly searched, even the roof had been inspected. Of course, Jack could have found his way out of the house somehow, but he was not by the family car in the car park, and he had not been sighted in the grounds.
The station sergeant, having relayed this information to Maggie, now braced himself for the ordeal of consoling a hysterical woman. He stared out of the window of the interview room for a brief respite, but turned back when he heard a strange sound. It was Maggie Protheroe gently humming to herself, and the expression on her face was no longer tear-stained and distraught, but calm, almost beatific. She was gazing down at her small, rather dainty feet and smiling.
Mr Cheke smiled too, as he closed the door of the Black Room and took his stand once again in a corner of the Grey Bedroom.
Grab a Granny Night
‘DON’T TELL ME,’ said Owen. ‘You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?’
It was true: there had been nervous fumblings at drama school, but the whole works had somehow eluded him. Shyness and an overbearing Evangelical mother had played their part in Tim’s lack of experience. When asked about it by Owen he had neither the desire nor the ability to dissemble. Owen threw back his head and laughed. As he did so, Tim noticed that Owen gave a quick sidelong glance at himself in the dressing room mirror. It comforted Tim to think that, while he was being humiliated, he had caught Owen out in a tiny but characteristic moment of vanity.
Owen Probert was a Celtic Welshman with curly hair, black and shiny as wet coal, a wiry, compact body, and a voice that sometimes aped the overripe resonances of a Burton, or a Dylan Thomas. The perfect whiteness of his teeth, so triumphantly flashed in the mirror, were accentuated by his tan, which some members of the company wrongly assumed to be fake. Owen spent every daylight hour when he was not rehearsing for the shows ‘attending to the body beautiful’ as he called it, which meant either swimming or lying in the sun learning lines. During that summer at Pontybwlch, which was unusually hot and cloudless, Owen had been in his early thirties and his prime. He was a leading player in the Pontybwlch Summer Theatre Repertory Company of which Tim, fresh from RADA, was the most junior member. In Tim’s contract had been written those humiliating words: ‘assistant stage manager and play as cast.’
‘I thought so,’ said Owen. ‘You can always tell. And you want to get your cherry away, don’t you, boy?’ Owen liked to extract the maximum from any given situation on or off stage. He admitted it proudly and called it ‘milking.’
They would be sharing the number one dressing room on stage level for the week, because the play was Ira Levin’s
Deathtrap
, and Tim was the only actor in the company young enough to play the part of Clifford Anderson, one of the two leading roles in the play; the other one being Sidney Bruhl, played by Owen. Owen had been very helpful and encouraging towards Tim in his first leading professional role, and Tim had yet to learn that advice from a fellow actor is not always altruistically intended.
‘The trouble is, young Tim Boy,’ said Owen, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder, ‘all the girls in the company are spoken for. And if you’re thinking about Tammy,
I’m
fucking her.’ Tim could not hide his feelings. Owen roared with laughter. ‘You should see your face! It’s a picture!’
Tammy, or Tamsyn as she preferred to be called, was the Company Stage Manager. She was slim-hipped and boyish in appearance with fine, clear-cut features. Apart from stage management her one passion in life seemed to be the owning and breeding of West Highland Terriers. Though only a few years older than Tim she had an air of self-possession and competence which he found both intimidating and attractive. Tim had thought he was falling in love with her: now he wanted passionately to roll back his fantasies and shut them away.
‘Fancy her, do you? Well, never mind. Plenty more fish in the sea, that’s what your Uncle Owen says. Now what you want to look for is an older woman. Trust me. You want a bit of experience. They’re the best for a beginner.’
‘That’s all very well——’ said Tim, who was trying to move the conversation onto a lighter, more impersonal plane. But Owen had seen his opportunity and was not to be held back.
‘No. You listen here, Tim Boy. I’ve got a brilliant idea. What you want to go for is Grab a Granny Night. Never heard of Grab a Granny Night?’
Tim shook his head almost penitently, which amused Owen.
‘Ah, you’ve a lot to learn, Tim Boy. A lot. Well. Grab a Granny. It’s a bit of an institution round here holiday time. There are some bars in Pontybwlch, and one or two holiday camps, when certain nights the — what you might say, the mature women——’ He made a meal of the word ‘mature’, pronouncing it ‘matyooah’ in a very Welsh way. ‘Specially the ones on holiday, they go, and they’re up for it, see. You know what I mean? It’s understood. Oh, it’s not advertised or anything. You won’t see no “Grab a Granny” up on a poster, but it’s well known. So what d’you say? D’you want to give it a go? I’ll come with you first time. Hold your hand. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?’
Tim’s silence was taken for consent.
‘This Friday, then, after the show, at The Copacabana on the Promenade. There’s a GAG night there. You never been to The Copacabana? You’ll like it. Exotic, you know. Dennis the owner’s a bit of a mate of mine, see. Does a drag act sometimes, just for a laugh. Carmen Miranda. You know, with all the fruit in the hair. He’s a real scream. Out-rageous! Mind you, don’t mistake
him
for a Granny, eh?’ He laughed again his self-admiring laugh.
Pontybwlch was a quiet, respectable seaside resort in those days, but it had its pockets of loucheness, and The Copacabana was one of them. It was well situated on the sea front, next to an amusement arcade. The name suggested a Brazilian theme, but nothing so subtle was in evidence. The bar had a frontage of split bamboo and was canopied with swags of artificial vegetation, in which could be found a quantity of violently coloured plastic melons, pumpkins, bananas, citrus fruit, budgerigars, and parrots, some of which were lit from within. Music of a vaguely Continental flavour was filtered through loudspeakers swathed in synthetic creeper. A further concession to exoticism was made by the addition of gaudy little paper parasols to the more expensive drinks. The barmen all wore Hawaiian shirts, as did the manager, Dennis, a big man with a face like slab of condemned veal. Tim found it hard to imagine him dressed as Carmen Miranda.
Tim did not know quite why he had come to The Copacabana that Friday after the show. He might have resisted Owen’s forcefulness, had it not been for a tiny incident during the performance that night involving Tamsyn. He had forgotten to put a prop back on the prop table and received a sharp rebuke from her. The implication had been that because he was playing a leading role this week did not mean he could forget his status in the company of ‘assistant stage manager and play as cast.’ Tamsyn’s West Highland Terrier Freddie who slept in a basket beside her in the prompt corner had woken up and growled at him in sympathy with his mistress.
Humiliation always brought out the rebel in Tim. So he went to The Copacabana partly out of an obscure desire to spite Tamsyn for whom he was trying, unsuccessfully, to eradicate all feelings.
The bar was quite crowded, but the provocative atmosphere which Tim had anticipated was absent. There were indeed some ‘mature’ looking women sipping cocktails at the bar, but they seemed to be fairly soberly occupied with some equally mature looking men. Owen expressed disappointment on his friend’s behalf, but then, as he was looking round rather desperately, he suddenly spotted a woman sitting alone at a table, out of the light, half in shadow.
‘What did I tell you, Tim boy? Now’s your moment. Go on!’ Tim felt no inclination to go on. ‘All right, tell you what. I’ll take you over and introduce you. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?’ He gave Tim a little push, and the moment of resistance passed.
As they were walking over to her the woman at the table raised her head so that they could see her face clearly, and this time it was Owen who hesitated. Tim asked what the matter was.
‘I know her,’ he said. ‘Met her last year. That’s Sheilah. I thought she . . . Come on, I’ll introduce you.’
Tim’s annoyance at being handed one of Owen’s cast-offs was diminished by Sheilah’s appearance. She could have been forty, but looked a little younger. She was darkly handsome with an olive-coloured skin that suggested exotic origins. She wore a low cut dress of what looked like black silk and earrings of jet which glittered darkly, like her eyes. She smiled warmly.
‘Hello, Owen,’ she said. ‘Where have you been?’ There was a touch of mockery, and perhaps contempt in her soft, low voice.
‘Oh, around, you know. Fancy seeing you again, Sheilah.’
‘Yes. Quite. We had a date, remember?’
‘That was a year ago, Sheilah,’ said Owen.
‘A year ago tomorrow, to be exact.’
Owen began to jig from one foot to the other, a habit of his when nervous. ‘Yes . . . Right,’ he said. ‘So where are you staying this year, then?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Not specially, darling.’
‘Coward.’
‘This is Tim, by the way,’ said Owen and he performed the introductions. Tim shook a cool, dry hand and sat down opposite her. There was a silence which seemed to unnerve Owen more than it did Sheilah.
‘So,’ said Owen eventually. ‘Shall I get us all some drinky-poos?’
‘No,’ said Sheilah. ‘Why don’t you just bugger off to the bar and talk to your mate Dennis.’
‘Righty-ho,’ said Owen, and did so.