The Disappearance Boy (27 page)

Reggie had been a bit of a godsend all round, in fact, and not just when madam got tearful. He’d more or less taken care of her throughout, leaving Mr Brookes free to concentrate on the work in hand. Admittedly it hadn’t been the best bit of timing in the world for the boy to choose this
particular
week to slice his right hand open on a corned beef tin, but at least it didn’t seem to be affecting his work. The sequence where he dodged and clung to the sides of the apparatus while Mr Brookes flipped the doors open and shut was coming along very prettily indeed, and once they were up to full speed together, it was going to give a very nice clean edge to the overall presentation.

If he could just make the time to get his own produces and vanishes in the opening sequence as smooth as he wanted them to be, and to iron out the adding of the handcuffs to the rope on her wrists – which was proving trickier than it looked – then he thought they could really be onto a winner.

On the Saturday they stopped rehearsals at lunchtime, as always. Reggie offered to go and get Pam into a taxi up at the station, and Mr Brookes, after asking him to check that Pam had remembered the money, shut himself into his dressing room to work in his mirror. He was still working on the sequence with the comb and watch and carnation when Reggie knocked at the door at seven o’clock that evening – the sequence was proving a bastard, and his fingers were properly hurting. Reg didn’t actually come in, seeing straight away that Mr Brookes wasn’t in a mood to be interrupted, but just stuck his head round the door and said rather nervously that he thought Mr Brookes would like to know he’d just dropped by at Mrs Brennan’s to see if Pam was doing all right after her appointment, and that she was, and that he’d drop in again tomorrow to double-check she was OK for work on Monday if that was all right with him. Mr Brookes assured him that it was, and once he’d shut the door went back to checking the action of his right wrist on the produce with his comb.
First impressions count
, he reminded himself. For the umpteenth time that evening his wrist flicked and circled in the mirror; flicked, and circled. There was a telegram from London lying open on his dressing table, confirming that that booking agent from Poland Street would be there for the second half of the six twenty house on Tuesday. He must remember to speak to Clements about getting the man a good ticket.

Christ, it had better go well.

Just a couple more days.

The wrist flicked, circled.

Pageants, parades, HMS
Eagle
moored off the West Pier, synchronised fireworks, the Hove Girl Guides in their special choral tribute, Dress Uniform balls at the Royal Albion and Metropole, communal midnight singing of the National Anthem all along the seafront, new programmes at the Grand, Royal, Palace Pier and Aquarium theatres – according to the
Argus
, there seemed to be no end to the plans for the big day. Backstage, everyone was talking about food and drink, and who knew who’d bought a television. There was much renovating of costumes and accessories as girls worried about whether their outfits would be quite right for the day, and Mr English invested in a new silver, maroon and royal-blue cravat, not wanting to be too obvious with his colour scheme, but feeling obliged to be patriotic nonetheless. Everyone was worried that things wouldn’t be ready in time, but they really needn’t have been. As I’m sure you know, it’s amazing what people can pull together under pressure when they absolutely have to.

13

When people who were there talk about that day, it’s often the silence that they mention first. It seems to have lodged in people’s minds even more than the shouting or the crowds or the disappointing weather. At ten minutes past eleven, as the great doors of the Abbey up in Westminster finally swung open and the trumpets blared out in greeting, a synchronised quiet fell across Brighton like a slowly spreading cloud-shadow. In people’s memories at least, even the traffic stopped. On the Queen’s Road and West Street, buses pulled over; people got off and stood clustered around the open windows of pubs and shops to listen in silence to radios which had been placed out on the window ledges. In the crowds gathered round the loudspeakers that had been set up at intervals along the seafront, men doffed their hats in the drizzle. Even in houses like that of Mrs Steed’s sister, where half the street seemed to have pushed its way into the darkened front room, the plates of sandwiches and sausage rolls sat untouched, and the children were kept hushed on strangers’ laps as everybody stared at the television. The black-and-white figures blurred and fractured as they moved around the carefully polished ten-inch screen, but it was all very beautiful – everyone agreed about that. As the bishops hovered and shifted around the young woman in white who was in the middle of it all, helping her to change her gowns and jewellery, escorting and conducting her, they looked very strange and far away; nonetheless, everyone behaved as if they were right there in the room, and could easily be disturbed in their solemn business. When the camera seemed to catch the young woman herself smiling bravely, just the once, people murmured, and cried – but only quietly.

Then, at just past one o’clock, the silence broke like a wave; at the moment when the crown touched the young woman’s head – the moment when her transformation was effected, that is (the
reveal
, you might even say), people forgot themselves, and started to clap. Most people’s windows were open, and the pattering applause from one house joined up with that emerging from next door, and together they combined with the sound of the next street and then the next, so that the sound spread and dispersed itself as mysteriously as distant rainfall heard at sea, slowly connecting street to street to seafront to suburb until it gathered and then unfurled itself above the town like some great ragged banner of noise, cresting and glittering in rising outbreaks of cheers and shouts. Then, to underwrite this majesty, the distant boom of the twenty-one guns being fired from the Tower of London came thudding through the loudspeakers on the prom, and people threw their hats, and the gulls huddled out on the sand of the low-tide beach lifted and wheeled in alarm, adding their wild obbligato to the strange, involuntary tumult. Out at sea, the sky broke into light behind the great ship moored off the West Pier; the drizzle eased, and stopped, and everyone agreed that this was a good sign, and waved their flags and hugged each other tight. No one really knew why they were crying, but now lots of people were.

Pamela missed all of that.

She’d done fine on the Monday; the run-through onstage in rehearsal clothes and with the band had been subdued, obviously, but had passed without any major mishaps. The two stagehands who were going to bring on the apparatus and strike the steps were introduced, and she’d even managed to have a laugh with one of them over the business with the blindfold. But then she’d told Mr Brookes that she felt sore, and needed to lie down; if he wouldn’t mind, she’d said, she’d like to spend the Tuesday morning in bed, and then just meet up with Reggie in the afternoon to check through a couple of things with her costumes before the show and then go straight on. Mr Brookes had reluctantly agreed, not wanting to push his luck or risk upsetting her at this late stage of the game, and that was more or less what had happened; Reggie had gone up to her place to meet her, and then they’d walked down into town together.

It had taken them a while. The pavements on the Queen’s Road were getting crowded already, especially outside a couple of the small hotels, and people were striding around in groups, linking their arms and singing and waving their flags. Someone had even set up a barrel organ. The curtain was going up on the first house at twenty past six, and even at four o’clock North Road was packed; they could see throngs of people crowded under the bunting outside the theatre, laughing and cheering as they moved from street party to street party. Even when they got up the alley and safely inside, the noise continued; Mr English had set up his radio in the bottom of the backstage stairwell for everybody to hear, and when the man from the BBC described the happy couple stepping out onto their balcony there was cheering and clapping from the dressing rooms all the way up and down the corridors, making the tiled walls ring.

It was clearly going to be quite a night.

Pamela frowned, and took a swig from the small bottle of brandy that she’d talked out of Mr English on her way in. Apparently Margaret had worn embroidered white satin at the Abbey, and had been officially described by the radio as looking ‘stately’ at the ceremony; well, Pam wasn’t having any of that
she’s a good girl really
nonsense tonight, thank you very much, not after what she’d just been through. She’d got a bit of a surprise planned. She had retrieved one of her clippings from the waste-paper basket in her dressing room, and using it as his guide – it was a recent one of the Princess laughing and waving as she stepped out of yet another taxi – Reg had given her hair a snip and set up at Mrs Brennan’s, putting a right-hand side parting into the curls, whereas Pam’s was usually on the left. Reggie wasn’t what you would call a professional, but once the new style was fixed into place with a quick once-over from a borrowed can of Spray Net they’d both agreed it looked pretty much exactly right. Now all Pam had to do was to get her version of Margaret’s full lips and velvet eyebrows as spot on as her shaking hands would allow, and the illusion would be complete. She’d show that Teddy Brookes a thing or two on his opening night. A thing or two about Ladies, about what they would and wouldn’t put up with for the sake of a bit of jewellery.

She blotted her lips, stood up straight, and smoothed the wrinkled satin of her gloves. She smiled, keeping her lips soft and promising just like her heroine always did, glad that the scarlet of her first costume looked so emphatically bloody. Bringing off a character was all to do with how you considered yourself, she thought. How you felt inside when you looked in the mirror.

She just wished she could stop this bloody shaking.

There’s always a slight edge to the atmosphere backstage on the first house of a brand-new bill – nobody knows how the running order is going to go down, not least the acts themselves, so nerves are quite a bit sharper than usual. And this, obviously, was going to be no ordinary first house. People had been celebrating since eleven o’clock already, and were bound to be rowdy; word had also gone round that the
House Full
sign was up at the box office – which would be the first time in a very long time that
that
had been dusted off at the Grand – and that always raised the temperature. Mr Clements had been spotted greedily rubbing his hands. The corridors were crowded as people ran to get themselves ready; the stage manager was shouting the calls, and the radio was still booming up the stairwell. As Pam made her way down to the stage the Devere Girls’ dressing room was as loud with laughter as an aviary, and two of the Queens of England – already in costume for their first parade, and having a quick final fag out in the corridor – shrieked in recognition and then dropped into a full court curtsy as she passed them. Pam waved in character, rotating one upraised, satin-gloved wrist, and reduced them to helpless giggling. Only her slightly startled eyes and a slight tightness at the corners of her mouth betrayed her nerves, and when she reached the top of the last flight of stairs, the ones that led down to the back of the stage, she took a deep breath to steady herself. Then she broadened her royal smile, and swept down in one go.

Mr Brookes laughed. The look was most convincing, he said. More to the point, he was relieved to see that his assistant had finally decided to rally and do a proper job with her face and hair. She was looking very presentable – very presentable indeed – despite the obvious first-night nerves, and once again he congratulated himself on having acquired such a first-class asset.

Pam wasn’t the only one who was feeling their nerves, however.

As the last but two of the Devere Girls swept on from the wings to join their tableau – she was meant to be Henrietta Maria, apparently, in not
quite
enough lace to cover her chest – Mr Brookes reached into his inside breast pocket and discovered that Reggie had made a stupid and uncharacteristic mistake. Mr Brookes always set his own hand props, loading the concealed compartments and pochettes of his tailcoat himself in the privacy of his dressing room before the half, but then it was always Reggie’s job to set the clean handkerchief that went in this particular pocket, the one Brookes used to wipe his hands if they got sweaty during the act. Tonight of all nights, he was going to need it to be there – and it wasn’t. Reg realised what he’d done as soon as he saw Mr Brookes’s hand reach inside his jacket; he grimaced with dismay, and bolted, calculating that he just had time to make it before Mr Clifford started up with their music. He took the stairs back up to Mr Brookes’s dressing room two at a time, almost twisting his ankle on the last turn of the handrail, and only just got back down in time.

‘Sorry,’ he panted, hobbling on his hurt foot as he held out the offending article. ‘Really sorry, Mr Brookes – I know the last thing you bloody need tonight is for me to be –’

‘Steady the buffs,’ said Mr Brookes, taking the handkerchief and firmly wiping each finger in turn as the applause greeted Good Queen Bess – in a particularly revealing ruff – taking the crowning place in the onstage tableau. ‘No particular harm done.’

‘No, Mr Brookes.’ Reg was still breathless, and hopping.

‘Right.’

Brookes tucked the handkerchief away, checked his bow tie for one last time in the pier glass, and shot a final glance at Pam. She was staring straight ahead. Out onstage, the pyramid of girls was being slowly sliced by the shadow of the descending curtain; the applause built to cheers, and then was muffled as the heavy fabric kissed the stage. Mr Brookes patted the rope coiled in his right-hand pocket, and walked straight on. Reggie patted his penknife, licked his lips and mouthed a quick hard
All right?
across the wing to Pam – but she was staring at Mr Brookes, and didn’t seem to have eyes for anything else. Reg shook himself like a dog, cursing the pain in his ankle, and set off for his wing.