At Freddie’s. Simon Callow

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      This was the world of the Temple children, who had no playground, and no particular place to eat their school dinner. When the midday break came Miss Blewett unlocked the front door and stood back to let them out. The better-off got themselves something to eat at Tito’s Cafe, or at the twenty-four-hour coffee-stall outside St Paul’s, the actors’ church. The others ran, like little half-tame animals on the scavenge, through the alleys of the great market. By that time most of the warehouses had rolled down their shutters, and the ground was littered with straw and cardboard and crushed baskets, of the kind called frails. But round one corner or another there would be a wholesaler who hadn’t locked up yet, or a van loading up for the return journey. Far from wanting to sell cheap, the Garden defended their damaged and unsold fruit, declared they were only allowed by law to sell in six dozens, denounced the children as pests, muckers and bleeders and only grudgingly, on the point of departure, released in exchange for ready money a few misshapen apples or carrots. In this way every dinner-hour was a drama. To cajole the unwilling traders, in fact to Freddie them, was better than bargaining for a stale bacon sandwich from the back of the market public houses, which opened at seven o’clock in the morning and closed at nine. Whatever they got, they ate it at once, sitting on the empty floats. Yet in all those years the police never had to record a complaint against them. Doubtless they were regarded as one of the hazards of the market, like the rats, like the frails.

      The children in their turn were perfectly used to the dilapidation of their school. Maintenance was supposed to be in the hands of Baines, the odd job man, who had once stood in as doorkeeper at the Old Vic, and now called himself a schoolkeeper, but in fact only gave a casual glance twice a week at the boiler and the incinerator. Baines also understood what might be called his dramatic role, as age and mortality’s emblem, muttering at the kids’ antics and hinting at the heartbreaks of a stage career, which would soon cut them down to size. He was not a skilled handyman and couldn’t have undertaken the repairs in any case; that was why he suited Freddie. Although he would never have admitted it, Baines also did whatever cleaning was allowed to take place. With Miss Blewett he constituted the permanent staff. Others, like those two who’d just been taken on, came and went with the seasons.

4

      CARROLL and Hannah did not meet until the beginning of term, by which time both of them had found somewhere to live. Hannah had gone straight from her interview with Freddie to the Petrou Shoe Bar at the end of the street. The interior smelled powerfully of feet. Still she hadn’t come to London for the fresh air there, there was enough and to spare of that at home. She took off her shoes and handed them over the counter, saying that she would like the heels done at once as she had to walk round the district till she found accommodation. The Cypriot glanced at her and after affixing the new Phillips heels he knocked a number of steel brads into them, flattening the heads. ‘You will find somewhere before these wear out,’ he said. The two of them recognised each other 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 СКАЧАТЬ