‘Oh, dear!’ Martyn said. She leant towards the dressing-shelf and propped her face in her hands. ‘It sounds so wonderful,’ she said and tried to steady her voice, ‘a nice little bed.’
‘All right, Jacko,’ Poole said. She heard the door open and shut. ‘I want you to relax for a few minutes,’ his voice went on. ‘Relax all over like a cat. Don’t think of anything in particular. You’re going to sleep sound tonight. All will be well.’
The gas-fire hummed, the smell of roses and cosmetics filled the warm room. ‘Do you smoke?’ Poole asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Here you are.’
She drew in the smoke gratefully. He went into the passage and she watched him light his own cigarette. Her thoughts drifted aimlessly about the bony structure of his head and face. Presently a stronger light streamed down the passage. Jacko’s voice called something from a great distance.
Poole turned to her. ‘Come along,’ he said.
On the stage, dust-thickened rays from pageant-lamps settled in a pool of light about a desk and two chairs. It was like an island in a vague region of blueness. She found herself seated there at the desk, facing him across it. In response to a gesture of Poole’s she rested her arms on the desk and her face in her arms.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘and don’t move. You are in the hall of an old house, beautiful but decaying. You are the girl with the bad heredity. You are the creature who goes round and round in her great empty cage like a stoat filled with a wicked desire. The object of your desire is the man on the other side of the desk who is joined to you in blood and of whose face and mind you are the ill reflection. In a moment you will raise your face to his. He will make a gesture and you will make the same gesture. Then you will say: “Don’t you like what you see?” It must be horrible and real. Don’t move. Think of it. Then raise your head and speak.’
There was a kind of voluptuousness in Martyn’s fatigue. Only the chair she sat on and the desk that propped her arms and head prevented her, she felt, from slipping to the floor. Into this defencelessness Poole’s suggestions entered like those of a mesmerist, and that perfection of duality for which actors pray and which they are so rarely granted now fully invested her. She was herself and she was the girl in the play. She guided the girl and was aware of her and she governed the possession of the girl by the obverse of the man in the play. When at last she raised her face and looked at him and repeated his gesture it seemed to her that she looked into a glass and saw her own reflection and spoke to it.
‘Don’t you like what you see? ’ Martyn said.
In the pause that followed, the sound of her own breathing and Poole’s returned. She could hear her heart beat.
‘Can you do it again?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘I don’t know at all.’ She turned away and with a childish gesture hid her face in the crook of her arm. In dismay and shame she set loose the tears she had so long denied herself.
‘There now!’ he said, not so much as if to comfort her as to proclaim some private triumph of his own. Out in the dark auditorium Jacko struck his hands together once.
Poole touched her shoulder. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘These are growing pains. They will pass.’ From the door in the set he said: ‘You can have the understudy. We’ll make terms tomorrow. If you prefer it, the relationship can be forgotten. Goodnight.’
He left her alone and presently Jacko returned to the stage carrying her suitcase.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we go home.’
When Martyn opened her eyes on the second morning of her adventure it was with the sensation of having come to rest after a painful journey.
She lay quiet and looked about her. It was a bright morning and the sun came in at the attic window above her bed. The room had an air of great cleanliness and freshness. She remembered now that Jacko had told her he occasionally made use of it and indeed, tiny as it was it bore his eccentric imprint. A set of designs for Twelfth Night was pinned to a wall-board. Ranged along the shelf were a number of figures dressed in paper as the persons in this play and on the wall facing her bed hung a mask of the fool, Feste, looking very like Jacko himself.
There never was such a little room,’ Martyn sighed and began to plan how she would collect and stow away her modest belongings. She was filled with gratitude and with astonished humility.
The bathroom was on the next floor and as she went downstairs she smelt coffee and fresh bread. A door on the landing opened and Jacko’s clownish head looked out.
‘Breakfast in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Speed is essential.’
Of all the amenities, it seemed to Martyn, a hot bath was the most beneficent and after that a shower under which one could wash one’s hair quickly. ‘Lucky it’s short,’ she thought and rubbed it dry with her towel.
She was out again in eight minutes to find Jacko on the landing.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘In your woollen gown you are entirely respectable. A clean school child. In.’
He marshalled her into a largish room set out in an orderly manner as a workshop. Martyn wondered why Jacko, who showed such exquisite neatness in his work, should in his person present such a wild front to the world. He was dressed now in faded cotton trousers, a paint-stained undervest and a tattered dressing-gown. He was unshaven and uncombed and his prominent eyes were slightly bloodshot. His manner, however, was as usual, amiable and disarming.
‘I propose,’ he said, ‘that we breakfast together as a general rule. A light breakfast and supper are included in the arrangement. You will hand me your ration book and I shall shop with discretion. Undoubtedly I am a better cook than you and will therefore make myself responsible for supper. For luncheon you may return if you wish and forage ineffectually for yourself or make what other arrangement seems good to you. Approved?’
Martyn said carefully: ‘If you please, Jacko, I’m so grateful and so muddled I can’t think at all sensibly. You see, I don’t know what I shall be earning.’
‘For your dual and unusual role of understudy and dresser, I imagine about eight pounds a week. Your rental, demi-pension, here, is two.’
‘It seems so little,’ Martyn said timidly. ‘The rent, I mean.’
Jacko tapped the side of the coffee-pot with a spoon.
‘Attention,’ he said. ‘How often must I repeat. You will have the goodness to understand I am not a dirty old man. It is true that I am virile,’ he continued with some complacency, ‘but you are not my type. I prefer the more mature, the more mondaine, the –’ He stopped short, the spoon with which he had been gesticulating, still held aloof. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind Martyn. She turned her head to see a sketch in watercolour of Helena Hamilton. When she faced Jacko again, he was grinning desperately.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘you are in no danger of discomfort from the smallest whisper of scandal. I am notoriously pure. This morning there are eggs and therefore an omelette. Let us observe silence while I make it.’
He was gay, in his outlandish fashion, from then onwards. When they had finished their admirable breakfast she helped him wash up and he gave her what he called her orders for the day. She was to go down to the theatre with him, set about her work as a dresser and at three o’clock she would be given a formal rehearsal as understudy.