It was a clean sunny morning. The air struck sharply at her lips and nostrils and the light dazzled her. A van had drawn up outside the Vulcan and men were lifting furniture from it. There were cleaners at work in the foyer and a telegraph boy came out whistling. Carpet Street was noisy with traffic. Martyn turned left and walked quickly downhill until she came to a corner shop called Florian. In the window a girl in a blue overall was setting out a large gilt basket of roses. The door was still locked, but Martyn, emboldened by fresh air and a sense of freedom and adventure, tapped on the window and when the girl looked up, pointed to the roses and held up Mr Grantley’s card. The girl smiled and, leaving the window, came to let her in.
Martyn said: ‘I’m sorry to bother you but Mr Grantley at the Vulcan told me to get some roses for Miss Helena Hamilton. He didn’t give me any money and I’m afraid I haven’t got any. Is this all very irregular and tiresome?’
‘That will be quayte OK,’ the girl said in a friendly manner. ‘Mr Grantley has an account.’
‘Perhaps you know what sort of rose I should get,’ Martyn suggested. She felt extraordinarily light and rather loquacious. ‘You see, I’m Miss Hamilton’s dresser but I’m new and I don’t know what she likes.’
‘Red would be quayte in order, I think. There are some lovely Bloody Warriors just in.’ She caught Martyn’s eye and giggled. ‘Well, they do think of the weirdest names, don’t they? Look: aren’t they lovelies?’
She held up a group of roses with drops of water clinging to their half-opened petals. ‘Gorgeous,’ she said, ‘aren’t they? Such a colour.’
Martyn, appalled at the price, took a dozen. The girl looked curiously at her and said: ‘Miss Hamilton’s dresser. Fancy! Aren’t you lucky?’ and she was vividly reminded of Fred Badger.
‘I feel terribly lucky this morning,’ she said and was going away when the girl, turning pink under her makeup, said: ‘Pardon me asking but I don’t suppose you could get me Miss Hamilton’s autograph. I’d be ever so thrilled.’
‘I haven’t even seen her yet but I’ll do my best.’
‘You are a ducks. Thanks a million. Of course,’ the girl added, ‘I’m a real fan. I never miss any of her pictures and I do think Adam Poole – pardon me, Mr Poole – is simply mawvellous. I mean to say I just think he’s mawvellous. They’re so mawvellous together. I suppose he’s crazy about her in real life, isn’t he? I always say they couldn’t ect together like that – you know – so gorgeously – unless they had a pretty hot clue on the sayde. Don’t you agree?’
Martyn said she hadn’t had a chance of forming an opinion as yet and left the florist in pensive contemplation of the remaining Bloody Warriors.
When she got back to the theatre its character had completely changed; it was alive and noisy. The dock-doors were open and sunlight lay in incongruous patches on painted canvas and stacked furniture. Up in the grid there was a sound of hammering. A back-cloth hung diagonally in mid-air and descended in jerks, while a man in shirt sleeves shouted, ‘Down on yer long. Now yer short. Now bodily. Right-oh. Dead it. Now find yer Number Two.’
A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage and, above it, was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: ‘It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.’
He glanced at Martyn and added: ‘Put them in her room, dear, will you?’
She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here, too, there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to having sewing materials at hand. Here was the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.
‘And how,’ a disembodied voice inquired, ‘is La Belle Tansey this morning?’
Sucking her left hand and arranging roses with her right, Martyn wondered how she should respond to this advance. She called out, tentatively: ‘I’m afraid it’s not Miss Tansey.’
‘What’s that?’ the voice said vaguely, and a moment later she heard the brisk sound of a clothes-brush at work.
The roses were done at last. She stood with the ends of the stalks in her hand and wondered why she had become so nervous.
‘Here we go again,’ a voice said in the doorway. She spun round to face a small man in an alpaca coat with a dinner jacket in his hands. He stared at her with his jaw dropped. ‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘I thought you was Miss Tansey.’
Martyn explained.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘That’ll be her heart, that will. She ought to have given up before this. I warned her. In hospital, too? T’ch, t’ch, t’ch.’ He wagged his head and looked, apparently in astonishment, at Martyn. ‘So that’s the story,’ he continued, ‘and you’ve stepped into the breach? Fancy that! Better introduce ourselves, hadn’t we? The name’s Cringle but Bob’ll do as well as anything else. I’m ’is lordship’s dresser. How are you?’
Martyn gave him her name and they shook hands. He had a pleasant face covered with a cobweb of fine wrinkles. ‘Been long at this game?’ he asked and added: ‘Well, that’s a foolish question, isn’t it? I should have said: will this be your first place or are you doing it in your school holidays or something of that sort.’
‘Do you suppose,’ Martyn said anxiously, ‘Miss Hamilton will think I’m too young?’
‘Not if you give satisfaction she won’t. She’s all right if you give satisfaction. Different from my case. Slave meself dizzy, I can, and if ’is lordship’s in one of ’is moods, what do I get for it? Spare me days, I don’t know why I put up with it and that’s a fact: But she’s all right if she likes you.’ He paused and added tentatively: ‘but you know all about that, I dare say.’ Martyn was silent and felt his curiosity reach out as if it was something tangible. At last she said desperately: ‘I’ll try. I want to give satisfaction.’
He glanced round the room. ‘Looks nice,’ he said. ‘Are you pressed and shook out? Yes, I can see you are. Flowers too. Very nice. Would you be a friend of hers? Doing it to oblige, like?’
‘No, no. I’ve never seen her. Except in the pictures, of course.’
‘Is that a fact?’ His rather bird-like eyes were bright with speculation. ‘Young ladies,’ he said, ‘have to turn their hands to all sorts of work these days, don’t they?’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘No offence, I hope, but I was wondering if you come from one of these drama schools. Hoping to learn a bit, watching from the side, like.’
A kind of sheepishness that had hardened into obstinacy prevented her from telling him in a few words, why she was there. The impulse of a fortnight ago to rush to somebody – the ship’s captain, the High Commissioner for her own country, anyone – and unload her burden