Full Dark House (10 page)

The start of the second great war brought unwelcome transitions to Geoffrey’s hermetic world. Venues were changing hands, falling empty, getting bombed. Philanthropy had been replaced by the desire for quick profit. Boxing matches and coarse variety acts moved in to entertain a new type of audience: commoner, louder, one that lived from moment to moment. Now there was something less comforting in the atmosphere before a show, something contaminated by the urgent, hysterical laughter that nightly rang from the stalls. Theatres were more frenetic, and companies diminished as the most able-bodied men went off to war. The Shaftesbury was bombed, the Strand and Sadler’s Wells went dark. It was like a game of musical chairs, and nobody knew when the music might suddenly stop.

But Elspeth and Geoffrey still heard the audiences of their childhoods above the sound of hot water gurgling in the pipes, still listened to the ticking of the warm-air conduits, the backstage footfalls of departing painters. They were still the sounds of home.

And something had irreversibly changed. Elspeth had sensed it first at the outbreak of the war, a creeping disquiet that felt wholly out of place between the gaudy vermilion aisles of the Palace Theatre. She was alive to the smallest changes around her, and could detect any eddy of emotion in the silent building.

Late one night, closing up after a performance, she had suffered a terrible premonition, and her life had passed before her eyes. She told no one about the dark, scarred thing that stalked behind her in the rufescent rows of the dress circle, creeping down the vertiginous steps of the balcony. She experienced a sense of panic more with each passing performance, never knowing at what hour it might strike, for there is no day and night in a theatre. She only knew that it was there, watching and waiting, that it meant harm, and that something wicked had to happen.

Anxious to escape, she slipped out of the building and into the blackout, following the white stripes that had been painted on the paraffin lamps hanging from the protection boards around the front wall of the theatre. The Palace was her habitat, but she was lately being driven from it. She stopped and looked up at the entresol windows, and glimpsed the terrible visage, a pale oval peering out of the smoking salon at her, its features so distorted that it could barely be considered human.

Geoffrey had seen the faceless creature too, scurrying between the rows of the balcony, loping across a distant corridor, but he had not believed his senses. It was the war, he told himself, shaking his head. The constant fear played tricks on you. Last month a bomb had fallen through the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, destroying the high altar. For many it had seemed like a blow struck against God himself. If Hitler was the devil kept at bay, perhaps his acolytes were already here, moving among them, and wouldn’t they choose such a godless place as a theatre from which to corrupt the innocent?

Geoffrey Whittaker sat in his office on Sunday evening and smoked, but his hands shook. Nothing could drive him from the only world he understood. He told himself that, at forty-six, he was too old for an attack of nerves. There were men out there less than half his age fighting to preserve his freedom, even though he did not want to be free. He was a willing prisoner of the theatre, its plans and strictures. His life was patterned on the stage directions of a dog-eared script. But something had crept inside his world that had no place in the production. His trembling fingers pulled another cigarette from the pack and inserted it between his lips.

Outside the Palace, Elspeth Wynter ran on into the blackout, through the empty city streets, her breath ragged behind her ribs, daring herself to go forward into darkness, frightened to return. But the home that had nurtured her for so many years could not be left so easily. It too was her domain, and beyond it, beyond the blackouts, there was no structure, no control, only the terrible light of freedom.

For Elspeth and Geoffrey, and hundreds like them, theatres were the last repose of stasis and sanity in a world hurtling beyond sense. But even they would be touched by the bloody hand of madness.

14

DOUBLE ACT

‘What the hell are you talking about, keep it out of the press?’ asked Benjamin Woolf. ‘I’ve already had a call asking why she didn’t keep an appointment with a photographer this morning. What am I supposed to do?’

‘This is a tragedy for all of us, Ben,’ said Helena Parole, whose earnest attempts to empathize with others were undermined by the fact that she didn’t care about anyone else. ‘I understand your feelings entirely.’ She compounded the hypocrisy by rolling her eyes at May coquettishly.

That Tuesday morning, the mood at the Palace Theatre was fractious. Thanks to a night of bright moonlight there had been bombing raids until dawn, and no one had slept well. Sloane Square tube station had been hit, killing many. In the morning’s papers, questions were being raised about the efficacy of public shelters. Not enough people were using them, and there were rumours among those who did that infection was rampant. Sanitation remained haphazard, and there was a general feeling that the unchanged air spread all manner of germs. Most Londoners preferred to stay at home, tucked inside cupboards, under the stairs, sleeping in ground-floor rooms or outside in an Anderson shelter: fourteen arched sheets of corrugated iron bolted together and half buried under earth that flooded in wet weather but could survive everything except a direct hit.

The stage was still empty. Few of the cast had yet arrived, but members of the orchestra were seated in the pit, patiently waiting to resume rehearsals. They usually practised in airy rooms behind Waterloo Station, but those had been requisitioned by the War Office, and now the musicians were crammed before the stage in a dimly lit theatre instead of playing in a sunlit space overlooking the river. The most able-bodied among them had been taken by conscription, and they had been forced to fill up their ranks with fiddle-scratchers from the twice-nightlies and even a couple of Leicester Square buskers.

Luckily their conductor, Anton Varisich, like many great conductors, was as adept at diplomacy as he was at extracting mellifluous harmonies from his motley crew. He had topped up the percussion and woodwind sections with exiled Spanish and French players, lending the arrangements a jaunty cosmopolitan air in keeping with Offenbach’s play, but previously unheard in London. The nation’s music still owed more to the palm court than the boulevard, and consequently the players were having a whale of a time because they were doing something new. Quite how they’d manage to rehearse when the cast turned up and wanted to practise their lines would remain to be seen.

‘Will you understand when I tell the next person who calls that your star dancer might be a little late for rehearsals on account of not having any
feet
?’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘That’s what they’re saying.’ Woolf threw his long body back down onto seat C15 and smoothed a hand across his brilliantined hair. There was an ever-present aura of sarcasm about him that no one responded to positively. ‘The police are crawling all over the building, you won’t tell any of us what’s going on and I’m supposed to act like everything’s tickety-boo.’

Helena glared up into the darkness beneath the roof. ‘Benjamin, please, you’re an agent, lying is a professional qualification for you, like a merit badge or something. You can tell the press she’s joined the WAAFs and flown to Timbuktu on a mercy mission if you want, and they’d have no choice but to believe you. She’s frightfully upper class, and her reputation will need protecting.’

Their conversation was punctuated by the noise of the wind section practising scales. Woolf had to raise his voice to be heard, but Helena did not wish to shout back. She knew how easily panic could infect a cast facing a deadline under already difficult conditions, but she was going to make sure that the Windmill wasn’t the only theatre to stay open throughout the war.

‘It’s difficult for all of us,’ she explained with feigned sufferance. ‘You’ll just have to do the best you can. I’m out of gaspers, darling, would you light me?’ Benjamin touched a match to a Viceroy and passed it to her. ‘These gentlemen are detectives, and hope to have the whole thing quickly sorted out. You know how easily these girls fall in with the wrong types.’

‘Perhaps we should continue this discussion in Miss Parole’s office,’ May suggested. ‘I think we’re in the way here.’ He looked back at Bryant and followed his partner’s gaze to the stage. Bryant’s attention had been drawn away by the arriving dancers, half a dozen long-legged girls who stood whispering and giggling in the shadows of the wings.

Bryant was captivated by what he saw. The theatre held a special fascination for him. When John looked at posturing actresses angling their best sides to the audience, he saw nothing but mannequins and painted flats. Arthur saw something fleeting and indefinable. He saw the promises of youth made flesh, something beautiful and distant, a spontaneous gaiety forever denied to a man who couldn’t open his mouth without thinking.

In Helena’s office May raised the window behind the battered oak desk and looked down into Moor Street, where men in black heavy rescue and white light rescue helmets were clearing sections of charred wood from a blackened shop front.

‘Am I right in thinking that, as the company’s artistic director, the production’s success lies in your hands?’ Bryant asked.

‘Absolutely.’ Helena looked tense and angry. She brushed at the cigarette ash smudged in the cleavage of her tight white blouse. ‘I have a board of directors to answer to if
Orphée aux enfers
fails. I tried to keep Offenbach’s French title. They felt it would put people off. I said, “It shows solidarity with the people of France, and it’s the cancan, how much more accessible can you get?” Eighty years ago this was considered a trifle, an after-dinner joke. Now the English think it’s high art because three words are French. They’re such peasants. They’ll queue to see a mayoress open a fête but only fall asleep in opera houses. It’s not like this on the continent, you know. The French have more respect for their artists.’

The thin November sunshine threw slats of light across her make-up as she unfurled a plume of cigarette smoke into the coils of her coppery hair. The exhalation softened her harshly painted eyes. Bryant realized that she was probably his new partner’s type, firm-jawed, full-busted, full of life. She had presence, like an expensively upholstered piece of furniture, a reminder of more luxurious times.

Helena knew that it was important to care about the members of her cast. They weren’t actors, Benjamin had once told her, they were her children. But she had no children. What she had was a failed three-year marriage to her agent which had foundered over the argument of raising mixed-race infants in a land where black skin was still seen as a peculiarity. Now, because of the war and the lack of jobs in the theatre, she and her former husband had been forced into each other’s company again.

‘We have to find a way of keeping it out of the press.’ Helena joined May at the window. ‘Although the story would do wonders for the box office.’ She closed the window. Smoke still loitered in her hair, momentarily recalling an image of the Medusa. ‘This show represents a massive commitment of time, energy and money. It’s going to brighten up London and raise the morale of thousands of people every week.’ She turned to the detectives. ‘The board has been planning it for years, setting
Orpheus
up as a public company, raising finance on an international scale, waiting for cast availability. The war has made us redouble our efforts. None of us can afford a flop. We’re putting our futures on the line. If
Orpheus
fails to recoup its costs, the insurers will step in, and one of our greatest theatres will fall dark for the remainder of the hostilities, perhaps for ever. So, does anybody have to know what happened? They’re more concerned with their own safety than hearing about some dancer’s misfortune. We open in four days.’ Helena felt safer when others considered her incapable of kindness. ‘As far as we knew, she was working late on Sunday night and went home. Couldn’t she have decided the role wasn’t for her and left the country?’

‘Don’t you think you owe her something, Helena?’ asked Benjamin. ‘Suppose somebody has a grudge against the performers? What about the safety of the rest of the cast? The safety of the audience?’

‘You know as well as I do that the audience is always separated from the stage.’

‘Is that really true?’ asked May.

‘Backstage and front of house are two entirely different worlds. You can get from one to the other only by going through the ground-level pass doors. There are just two of those, and one has been locked for so many years I don’t think anyone knows where the keys are.’ She ground out her cigarette. ‘It was probably someone from the cast of
No, No, Nanette,
driven insane by Jessie Matthews.’

‘I can make a case for press restriction if you really think the play is in the interests of the city’s morale,’ Bryant offered.

‘It’ll be tough keeping things quiet this end. So long as an actor’s near a telephone, word always gets out. Death poisons the atmosphere in a place like this.’ Helena knew that performers were sensitive to the slightest undercurrents rippling the still air of an auditorium.

‘How are we going to explain that our dancer has disappeared?’

‘She had no friends.’ Helena stole another cigarette. ‘Nobody who pushes that hard ever does. She told me she was getting weird letters, Mr May. Sex-crazed men wanting her to walk on them with stilettos, that sort of thing. People were drawn to her aggression. It could be any one of them. They follow the movements of performers in the papers and turn up in the front row every night applauding in the wrong places, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘There is something,’ said May. ‘The telephone bookings for which you mail out tickets, we can cross-check the addresses of all the reservations so far.’

‘And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?’ asked Benjamin.