At Freddie’s. Simon Callow
Читать онлайн книгу.
as people of determination, not fortunate, but not daunted.
Carroll asked Hannah to come and have tea with him after their first week at work, so that she saw his room before he saw hers. She wished then that she’d been able to go with him and help him look and then they might surely have been able to find somewhere a little less neglected.
‘Come on up,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about all those letters in the hall. They’re all for people who used to be here last year.’ His room was exceedingly cold. Everything was in order – more than I can say for mine, Hannah thought – except for an open umbrella put to dry before the gas-fire, which, however, he did not turn on. ‘We were never allowed an open umbrella in the house at home,’ she said. ‘One of the aunts thought it would bring bad luck. But I don’t expect you’re superstitious.’
He reflected. ‘I think perhaps I am. It’s an article of faith with me that whatever I do is bound to turn out unsuccessfully. I’m sometimes driven, therefore, to do the opposite of what I really want.’ Perhaps that was why he put things to dry and didn’t light the fire. ‘You’re too much alone, Pierce,’ she said.
He created around him his own atmosphere of sad acceptance. Under the window stood a formerly polished wooden table, and on it was laid out his dictionary and paper and a biro with three refills attached to a card. Carroll told her that he hoped now he’d got to London that he’d be able to commit some of his thoughts to writing.
‘So that’s where you sit and work.’
‘When I sit there I feel as if I’m working.’
Something in Carroll made Hannah feel less innocent, but more compassionate. He eventually made a cup of tea with evaporated milk, and unfolding a copy of The Times, began to read to her aloud. The snow had held up work on the National Theatre site on the South Bank. A small crowd had gathered to see Mr Macmillan … ‘? read through the paper myself this morning,’ he said, ‘and I just marked one or two of the more amusing paragraphs, as I knew you’d be coming this afternoon.’
God in heaven, does he think I can’t read the paper for myself, Hannah thought. And it was not exactly that he lacked confidence. He showed no more hesitation than a sleepwalker. ‘Do you think you’ll stay long in this job?’ she asked.
He put down The Times and looked at her bright puzzled face. ‘At first I’d had it in mind to give notice at the end of the first term,’ he said. ‘But now I haven’t.’ Then, perceiving that he had made things awkward, he asked her what she thought of the place herself.
Hannah cast her mind back. The children did a half day’s education only. If they went to their music, dancing and dramatic classes in the morning, they spent the afternoon in a kind of torpor; if they weren’t to go till the afternoon, they were almost uncontrollable all morning. Feverishly competitive, like birds in a stubblefield, twitching looks over their shoulder to make sure they were still ahead, they all of them lied as fast as they could speak. Whether they had any kind of a part in a show or not, they wrote Working against their names in the register and claimed that they were only in school because there wasn’t a rehearsal that day. The first professional secret they learned was an insane optimism. Still, all children tell lies. But not all of them, if reproached, well up at once with unshed crystal tears, or strike their foreheads in self-reproach, like the prince in Swan Lake.
At least their names weren’t difficult to learn. They pressed them upon Hannah. That was Gianni, the school’s best dancer, faintly moustached at eleven years old, then Mattie leaning back with arms folded in the back row, one finger against his cheek, miming concentration, next to him a very small preoccupied boy who did not speak, but was indicated as Jonathan, then, as near to Gianni as possible, the terrifying Joybelle Morgan. Mattie, Gianni, and Joybelle, whose very curls seemed to tinkle like brass filings, should none of them have been in Hannah’s junior form, but they were used apparently to going unchecked from one shabby classroom to another. They wanted to see the new teacher. They were aching and sick with anxiety to show her what they could do. – I’m not a theatrical agent, she told them – I’m here to teach you conversational French. – We know French, Miss, said Gianni. All of them could produce a stream of words and intonations which sounded precisely like French, if meaning was not required. Give them half an hour, indeed, and they could imitate anything. Fortunately they were also able to imitate silence, or, rather, that impressive moment of stillness when a player knows he has carried the whole audience. Even for thirty seconds, which was all they could manage, the hush was welcome.
Otherwise they were in constant agitation. They were flexing their fragile toes and fingers, or trying out their unmarked faces. Mattie’s kid-glove features stretched into shapes of incomprehension and joy. He had to keep flexible, he said. Happy are those who can be sure that what they are doing at the moment is the most important thing on earth. That, surely, is a child’s privilege. Reality is his game. But what becomes of him if the game he is playing is work?
All they needed was to be noticed, and to be seen not to care whether they were noticed or not. In the lunch break Gianni was rattling about the lockers. He had a top-hat-and-cane class at two o’clock, now his hat was missing out of his locker, also his cane. ‘Robbery!’ he sang, dancing rapidly, for Hannah’s benefit, between the desks. He hoped before too long to start in Dombey & Son. His feet prattled and flashed in elaborate practice steps.
‘I can do all my pick-ups,’ he called, gyrating.
Joybelle appeared and remarked, quite automatically, that Gianni was a pick-up himself, only she’d been told he came expensive.
‘She can’t help talking double,’ Gianni explained. ‘Her parents are in the licensed trade, they have to drum up custom.’
Joybelle gave Hannah a smile, as between two understanding women. ‘I’m everything to my mother. She would have loved me to have a little sister.’
‘Called off by popular request,’ said Gianni.
Joybelle came close and leaned her brightly crisp head against Hannah’s breast.
‘When he heard my mother was carrying again my father got something to terminate it. He made mum swallow it out of a spoon. She showed me the spoon afterwards in case I had to come to court and swear to something. The metal had gone all black. It was black, Miss.’
Joybelle had little talent, and although she would not reach the age of ten for another few weeks, it was not difficult to predict her future. She had, as it turned out, concealed Gianni’s hat and cane in order to offer them to him later, because she wanted to feel like his slave maiden. Hannah called the afternoon class together and gave out some outline maps which she had brought with her, and on which the children were to fill in the capitals of Europe. She felt indignation come over her, because when they were bent down, with the round tops of their shining heads towards her, they looked like any other class.
Rightly or wrongly, she saw them at that moment as taking their place in the whole world’s history of squandered childhood, got rid of for fashion or convenience sake, worked into apathy, pressed into service as adults, or lost in some total loss, photographed as expendable and staring up with saucer eyes at the unstarved reporter. All that she managed to say to Carroll was that it might in some ways be a pity for the children to turn professional so young. He was mildly surprised, and reminded her that she had only taken the post, wasn’t that so, because she was fond of the theatre.
True for you, she thought, although she might have managed to suppress the fondness if her mother hadn’t suggested so often that she ought to do so. It was hard to explain, a matter perhaps of the senses. One of her younger sisters felt the same way about hospitals and had said that at the first breath of disinfected air she’d known she wanted to work there. Yes, the scent of Dettol had worked powerfully on Bridie. The convent, too, came at those with a vocation through its fragrance of furniture polish. In the same way Hannah felt native to the theatre, and yet she had never been backstage. She had only lingered outside and wondered in passing. It was all guesswork for her.
Her mother had phoned to ask about her