Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Miranda Emmerson 2017

The right of Miranda Emmerson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Harper’s Bazaar and Times logos used with permission

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Cover photograph © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Source ISBN: 9780008170608

Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008170585

Version: 2017-05-10

Dedication

For Chas

Chapters

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

A Beloved Daughter of County Cork

Walk On and Walk Off

Miss Treadway

The Deplorable Word

Not Going Out

Very Dark, the Georgians

Let’s

Going Out

Dr Jones Is Having Supper

A Library for Naval Men

Like the Layers of an Onion

Orla and Brennan

The Duke Vin Sound System

A Suit-Wearing, Tea-Drinking Man of London Town

Early-Morning Savile Row Blues

My Whole Life’s Just a Series of Interviews

Harold Wilson Is Not a Fascist Dictator

Colonies

The Strength of Weeds

Barnaby Hayes

Summer and Washington

Modern Holidays

Liverpool Street Station

A Chill Night on the Steps

We’re All Friends to the Police

Anna

Such a Small Person to Mean All the World

The Second Best Hotel in Town

Passengers

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

A Beloved Daughter of County Cork

Saturday, 30 October

‘Look out into the darkness,’ Iolanthe had told her. ‘Look out into the darkness and you’ll see them.’

‘Do you look?’ Anna asked.

‘Sometimes. Sometimes I forget not to. Always at the curtain, at the end. The old ones with their bags of liquorice. The dates who look at me, the dates who look at him. The students; herringbone jackets, no tie. The ones who look lustful. The ones who look bored. Some of them, you can see they’re thinking about something else entirely. You, up there on the stage, you’re nothing more than the reflection of a bulb.’

‘What are they thinking about?’ Anna asked.

‘All the stuff that’s going wrong. The stuff they can’t fix. What they’re always thinking about.’

Anna paused in the action of pinning Iolanthe’s hair and caught her eye in the mirror. The older woman was sitting in her underwear, quite still and unselfconscious as if Anna were a lover or a sister.

Anna moved Lanny’s hand to hold a roll of curls while she picked through a bowl of oddments for more hairpins. ‘It must be very strange,’ she said. ‘Everyone looking and seeing something different. As if you were a funhouse mirror.’

This made Iolanthe laugh. ‘That’s just what I am. Different for everybody. The Lanny who sits here will die as soon as she walks through that door. And a new Lanny will be born. Stage-door Lanny. Interview Lanny. Getting-the-drinks-in Lanny. I walk through the door and I start afresh. No hang-ups. No neuroses.’

Anna cast a questioning glance towards the surface of the mirror and Iolanthe seemed almost to blush. ‘That’s the idea, anyway. Live in the moment. Don’t get caught in the net.’

***

Out in the darkness of the upper stalls, tiny pinpricks of light caught Anna’s eye. Opera glasses, trained no doubt on Iolanthe, bouncing back light. Towards the stage she could see long rows of pale faces tilted upwards. From where she stood the stage looked tiny and the sound was flattened and distorted, muffled by the footsteps of the actors and the crew. Look at us all, she thought. Look at all us monkeys sitting in a great black box. Less than ten of us facing one way; nine hundred facing the other. One person speaks; the many hundred stay silent. And at the end all but the speakers will bang their little paws together. How did we all learn what to do? What made us so obedient?

Anna watched Lanny stride upstage and gesture to the crude oil painting of a woman in 1920s garb which hung above her on the living-room wall. In the semi-darkness the scene-shifters were quietly rolling the fairground set into place behind it.

‘… I had the inspiration … the ability … to be anything.’

Lanny paused and gauged the level of attention, the silence in the space. In the upper circle there was a fit of coughing. Anna saw Lanny’s face twitch just slightly with displeasure. She drove her next speech across the heads of the stalls and right into the upper circle high above. Her annoyance rang through in her delivery, her anger directed not at her fellow actor but at the audience members themselves.

‘This whoreish existence that you despise me for … I chose it. I had everything before me and I chose the life that would fit me best.’

Archie flicked three switches down and the stage went dark. Anna blinked in the blackness waiting for her eyes to refocus, and when they did she saw the shape of Lanny hopping towards her, pulling her heels off as she came.

‘Awful audience,’ she pronounced darkly, shoving her feet into black Oxfords. ‘Fuck ’em.’

Anna stripped Lanny of the negligee and opened her orange flower dress wide so she could step into it. Lanny popped the poppers shut and Anna cinched the belt as the lights rose on half a carousel and strings of fairy lights and bunting. Anna ran her hand quickly over the line of the dress, feeling for mistakes, then squeezed Lanny’s arm, telling her she was okay to step on out. And out she bounded, literally kicking her heels up, high on all kinds of wild energy.

In the corridor on the way back to the dressing room Anna met Dick, whose job it was to man the counter at the stage door.

‘There’s a journalist downstairs. Wingate. Says he’s got a meeting with Lanny. Interview? I told him he’d need to hang around till five.’

‘Okay,’ Anna told him. ‘I’ll warn her.’

‘And Cassidy called again.’

‘Cassidy?’

‘American guy. Third time this week. Is she seeing someone?’

‘No one she’s mentioned. Is there a message?’

‘Just to say he’d called.’

As act three drew to a close, Anna made lemon tea in the little kitchenette at the top of the stairs and buttered some bread. She watered Lanny’s plants and Agatha’s for good measure. She cleared the rubbish from the dressing table. The wrapping from a malt loaf, sweet papers, ticket stubs from a lunchtime showing of The Great Race.

Lanny wasn’t big on culture but she liked the pictures. Every few afternoons she’d take herself off to a matinee at The Empire on Leicester Square. What’s New Pussycat? How to Murder Your Wife. Nothing too serious, nothing tragic. Anna had tried to persuade her to go and see The Hill, but Lanny had laughed in her face.

‘A film about a bunch of sweaty men trekking over a mound of earth! Seriously? Is that what passes for entertainment with you art school types?’

‘Art school! I went to secretarial college in Birmingham.’

‘Yeah, but you have the whole black stockings, polo neck, pony tail thing going on. You’re just missing a beret and a pack of French cigarettes.’

‘You’re calling me a pseud!’

‘I’m not. It’s a look. I’m fine with it.’

‘Lanny. I am not a pseud!’

‘No, I get that. Just because it walks like a pseud and talks like a pseud …’

Anna smiled at the memory of this derision – for in truth she was rather pleased with the art school reference – then she set to sweeping magazines, knickers and old socks off the chaise longue.

Lanny was back in her dressing room by ten to five. So anxious was she to get out of costume that she tried to pull her jacket off without unbuttoning it first. Anna took her by the shoulders and sat her down, then she unbuttoned and unzipped the woman as if she were a child. She hung the costume on the rail and found Lanny a pair of jeans and a shirt which she’d thrown into the corner of the dressing room a week earlier.

‘The jeans don’t fit,’ Lanny told her.

‘Would you like a skirt?’

‘I’d like not to be so fucking cold all the time. This country just makes me want to eat. All I could hear through my final speech was hack hack sniff sniff cough cough.’

‘British audiences sniff when it’s cold.’ Anna’s eyes searched the dressing room for whatever Lanny had worn into work that day. She found it under the make-up table, a green silk dress lying in a creased heap. Anna shook out the expensive rag and handed it over.

‘You know you have an appointment at five?’

‘Do I? Who with?’

‘Some journalist. He’s been downstairs for hours.’

Lanny pulled on a pair of heels and sat at the dressing table to drink her tea. ‘Would you hang around for a bit?’

‘For the interview?’

‘Yeah; sometimes journalists can be a bit … sleazy. I haven’t got the energy for all that crap.’

‘Of course. Also someone called Cassidy called.’

Lanny nodded. ‘Did he leave a message?’

‘Just that he called.’

‘Okay,’ Lanny said. ‘Okay.’

***

Anna showed James Wingate up the many flights of stairs. He was in his fifties, Anna thought, with a gaunt, handsome face. He wore a slim-fitting navy suit with a turquoise silk tie and smelled of cigarettes.

Wingate started talking before he was even in the room. ‘Miss Green, thank you so much for seeing me between performances.’ Lanny – who had arranged herself modestly on the chaise longue, legs covered by a lap blanket – sat very still and looked at Mr Wingate.

‘My dresser didn’t tell me who it was.’

‘That’s because she has no idea who I am.’

Lanny stood, letting the blanket fall from her lap. She tugged at her green silk dress, pulling the fabric free from its belt so that it hid the curve of her breasts. Nobody spoke.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know that I was meant to know,’ Anna said at last. ‘Shall I get you both something to drink?’

‘Mr Wingate interviewed me for Harper’s Bazaar – this past summer – just as I was finishing filming on Macbeth.’

Wingate sat down on the chair provided for him and drew out his notebook and a small stack of papers. ‘A coffee would be delightful,’ he said without looking up.

Anna went to the kitchenette by the green room and rifled through the cupboards for coffee. Did snotty journalists drink Nescafé? Leonard – the company manager – found her staring at the jar.

‘Lanny ripping the audience to pieces?’

‘No more than usual. Someone called James Wingate wants a cup of coffee.’

‘Wingate? Ugh. Okay. Take a cup, go across the road to the 101 and get them to put real coffee in it. Might be worth a nice write-up in The Times.’

‘Seriously?’

Leonard held up his hands. ‘This is the idiocy we live with. Make the best of it.’

The windows of the 101 were steamed white against the cold and the afternoon custom seemed mostly to consist of taxi drivers, off shift, who sat at separate tables silently contemplating the melamine.

A radio muttered on a shelf above the head of the proprietor. ‘Teams of police are this evening continuing to search a vast area of moorland on the Cheshire–Yorkshire border.’ Anna tuned it out and leaned across the counter.

She slopped some of the coffee down her skirt as she climbed the stairs back to the dressing room and Wingate barely acknowledged her as she handed him the cup. He was leaning in towards Iolanthe, brows furrowed, head tilted to one side. ‘I assume you wanted to be in films as a girl? Don’t all young girls want something of the kind?’

‘I … Well, I don’t know. Let me think. I knew from an early age that I’d have to earn my own money. Supporting myself. No one was going to do that for me.’

‘Because you didn’t come from money.’

‘Well, no. But also by the time I was eighteen my father and my mother were both dead.’

‘And brothers and sisters? I don’t think we covered brothers and sisters at our last meeting.’

‘It was a very small family.’

‘Just you, then.’

‘Well, no. Not exactly. But I was the one who had to earn.’

‘You supported your parents?’

‘No. I didn’t mean … I guess … Everybody worked.’

‘Sorry, I’m just a little unclear here. You are or you aren’t an only child.’

‘I had a brother.’

‘Okay. Good.’

‘I’d rather not …’

‘You don’t like talking about him?’

‘Yes. Well … no. I don’t. Can we talk about the films?’

‘Is he proud of you? Is he jealous of your success? I mean, what does he do?’

‘He doesn’t do anything.’

‘At all?’

‘He’s dead.’

Wingate sat back in his chair and slowly crossed his legs. ‘I’m so sorry, Iolanthe. I didn’t know.’ Anna glanced up to check that Lanny was okay but the woman was staring at the floor, looking a bit perplexed, as if she was trying to remember something.

‘That must be very hard for you,’ Wingate went on.

‘I don’t know …’ Lanny sat in silence for a minute. When she spoke again she addressed herself to the rail of clothes on the far wall. ‘He was killed in 1946 when he was stationed in Japan. He was riding in a Jeep and it turned over on a bad road. He’d been too young to fight and around where we lived … well, boys were getting fake IDs and signing up at sixteen and I think Nat saw it as a mark of shame that he hadn’t … He was seventeen years old. It was his first posting.

‘It’s very strange. It’s very strange to find yourself all alone at twenty-one. And to think … well, whatever I do in my life now … I mean … other people, they do it for their parents, they do it to make their parents proud. But I couldn’t do that; that was gone for me.’ And Lanny sat in silence as if she’d forgotten they were there.

‘So tell me, Miss Green, your parents … they were from Ireland originally.’

‘My parents? Oh, well, no. Second generation. My grandparents were from County Cork. I think they left in 1880, 1885, something like that.’

‘Not because of the famine, then?’

‘No. More general.’ Lanny waved her hands in the air. ‘You know, the whole making a better life thing.’

‘And have you ever been back to Ireland. I mean: have you visited?’

‘No. I have never had that pleasure or that privilege.’

‘Do you know where in Cork they were from?’

Lanny’s voice rose a little. ‘Anna. Anna! I’m so sorry, James. There’s something nagging at the back of my mind. Do I have someone in tonight?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Anna stood. ‘Do you want me to double-check who’s got the house seats?’

Lanny waved her hand frantically. ‘No. No. No. It doesn’t matter. I’m being silly. Sit down. Pre-show nerves.’ She directed this last remark to Wingate whose eyes were rather wide.

He waited a moment and then began again. ‘I only wondered. Partly, I suppose, because Green is not a typically Irish name. I wondered if it had been changed along the way?’

‘Green? No. I think if I’d chosen a stage name I’d have gone for something a bit wilder.’

‘I wondered if it had been anglicised. If you were once all O’Gradys or MacGoverns.’

‘Well … that’s very interesting. You see, my daddy was Green, but I didn’t know my grandaddy at all because he died so young. And, well now, I assume that we were all Greens – not my mother’s family of course, they were Callaghans – but I never really asked. I mean, it’s not something that you think of, is it? “Daddy, is that definitely your name?”’ Lanny laughed, showing Wingate all of her teeth.

‘Are you tempted now to go digging around and find out?’ Wingate asked her.

‘You’ve got me interested, James, you really have.’

‘Might you make a pilgrimage?’

‘To Ireland? Perhaps. If time allows and they want me back.’ Iolanthe laughed and Wingate joined in with her. He tasted his coffee, made a face of disgust and deposited it at his feet. Lanny’s eyes wrinkled into a smile. She held his gaze for a moment.

***

After the show that evening, Anna stood by Lanny’s side as she always did and watched her clean off all the muck. The dark black liner, the red lips and the mascara made her glamorous and sultry, but she was far more lovely underneath it all. Her eyes were round and deepest brown, her eyebrows thin and delicate. Her nose was too broad for her face and underneath all the panstick it was covered in light brown freckles, which always made Anna think of her as a little girl from a storybook. Lanny’s lips were a soft, deep rose and her teeth snaggly, the inheritance of a childhood without money.

Lanny pawed at a mole on her cheek, which sprouted a single hair. ‘I look so old these days.’

Anna smiled at her in the mirror. ‘I think you look lovely. Like a woman from a Rossetti or a Waterhouse.’

‘I don’t know what those are.’

‘Rossetti? He was one of the Pre-Raphaelites. Waterhouse as well. They were painters in Victorian times who painted these big romantic pictures of women from literature. All flowing locks and big, bold eyes and lips.’

‘It sounds pornographic.’

‘Well, it is, in a way. It’s very sexual. But I wanted so much to look like those women when I was younger. My father had a book with plates in it. I wanted to be the Lady of Shalott or Pandora or a mermaid. But you really do … Without make-up …’ Anna shook her head. ‘You look more real somehow.’

‘Well, I am more real.’

‘I suppose.’

Lanny’s hand sneaked across the dressing table and picked up the mascara. ‘A little something, just for going home,’ she said.

‘What’s it like, living at The Savoy?’

Lanny met Anna’s eyes in the glass and her own eyes wrinkled into a smile. ‘It’s exactly what you’d think, child. Everything is very shiny, the breakfast is excellent and everyone looks terribly, terribly bored.’

Anna laughed and helped Iolanthe into her dress and coat. A little pile of post lay unopened on the dressing table. Lanny pushed the envelopes into her bulging handbag and then paused in the act of picking up yesterday’s Standard. She glanced down at the headline.

SNOW ON MOORS HAMPERS SEARCH

Brady and Hindley remanded

They’d hardly been off the front pages this past month. First the boy’s body, then the girl’s, now a second boy had been found.

Anna watched Lanny’s train of thought. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’ve been having nightmares.’

‘About the kids?’

‘After they found the girl. Under the earth. Who’d leave a child like that?’

Lanny’s face creased a little in pain. ‘I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Sorry,’ said Anna. ‘Let’s not.’

They walked in silence down the many flights of stairs. Outside the theatre Lanny belted her coat against the cold and drew on gloves. Anna paused at the corner and watched her walk away. Lanny looked over her shoulder just once and waved a hand.

‘See you Monday,’ she called.

‘See you Monday,’ Anna called back.

And then she was gone.

Walk On and Walk Off

Monday, 1 November

At half past five Anna was ready for Lanny’s arrival. A cup of lemon tea sat on the table waiting. Lanny’s clothes were ironed and hung ready for her in neat rows. The play began at seven and the cast were expected to be in place at the very latest by the half-hour call, which came at six twenty-five. Lanny normally liked to arrive early. She had make-up and hair to do. She wanted to drink her tea and go to the toilet. She wanted time so if anything went wrong with her costume it could be fixed.

Any moment now Lanny would come running in, throw down the newspaper, empty her pockets of sweets, peel herself out of her dress.

‘Fucking cold!’ she’d cry. ‘And the cabs! No one knows how to drive in this country!’

‘Did you look the wrong way again?’ Anna would ask.

‘I looked the right way. But all the assholes just kept driving in the wrong direction!’

Or perhaps tonight she’d be contemplative, slip into the dressing room without a word. If she was in a quiet mood Anna had learned to come and go without a sound. Fetching and carrying everything that might be needed as Lanny stripped herself. Sometimes Anna would find her standing naked before the mirror, touching her hand to her breasts or her belly or her thighs, lost in thought. Anna would look, too hard to be a human and not look, but then she would look away. She tried to imagine her way into the body of Iolanthe. The mind, she corrected herself. Iolanthe resided in her mind.

Half past five became six. Anna went downstairs to see Dick but Lanny hadn’t signed in yet. Leonard popped his head in to ask if she thought Lanny had been getting sick.

‘I don’t think so,’ Anna told him. ‘She just seemed her normal self.’

Anna waited. Lanny’s tea grew cold. At six twenty-five exactly the call came on the backstage tannoy:

‘Field of Stars company. This is your half-hour call. Thirty minutes, please.’

Leonard burst in again. ‘We can’t raise her at The Savoy. She isn’t there. Agatha is dressing to cover Lanny. Minnie is dressing to cover Agatha. Can you go and cast an eye over what she’s doing?’

Anna helped the young understudy to get into her clothes. Minnie was talking all the time. Running the lines at high speed over and over again. Anna gave her a hug.

‘It isn’t Shakespeare,’ she told her. ‘No one knows the words. You can say anything at all and they’ll still think it’s part of the play. Walk on, walk off and try to look like you know what you’re doing. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. I’ll see you later for the quick change.’