Stella, page 9
He pressed a button on his desk and a bell could be heard from within an adjoining room. Another panelled door opened and another attractive secretary came inside. ‘Sherry for Miss Raven; usual for me.’
Stella couldn’t stop herself from peering over her shoul-der to see where the drinks cabinet was kept, but there was no obvious cabinet on show in the room.
The woman pushed firmly against a particular wooden panel on the rear wall and there followed a humming sound. Then the wall turned on casters and, lo and behold, Stella could see a bar counter with an array of glinting bottles. ‘Good God!’ she exclaimed, and instantly put a hand to her mouth. Henry Charles chuckled in a calm, unenthusiastic manner.
‘I take it you haven’t seen too many contraptions like this?’ he said.
‘No, sir, I haven’t.’
The drinks were brought over, his usual being a large Scotch with two lumps of ice. ‘Are you represented?’ he asked, not wasting any more time on small talk. The woman left the room and Stella waited until she had gone before replying.
‘Not exactly. I don’t have a contract or anything, though Mr Hutton has been kind enough to help me find some work here and there.’
‘No one’s “kind enough” to do anything in this business,’ he said, honestly. ‘Ken Hutton is a fairly good agent, who saw a prospect talent come into his office of whom he wanted ten per cent. Trouble is, you’re not really Hutton material. He needs established talent – that’s how he’s always got by. I like to find possible talent and then make it great.’
He looked at her for a while as if trying to weigh her up. Then he asked her, ‘How would you like this agency to represent you? My junior partner is one of the best agents you’ll ever come across in this business, so if you say no, then you’re as good as putting an end to what I think could be a great career.’
His words were bouncing around her head, making her giddy with excitement. ‘Y . . . yes, I would like to be with your agency.’
‘Good.’ He was still quite placid and unflinching. His attitude would have been the same even had she said, ‘No thank you.’ He was a professional. ‘The office is called Charles and Farrow. It is Farrow, Mr Michael Farrow, who I’ll be directing you to. At the moment we’re working on a new idea for a West End revue for about November time, and I think I’d like you to have a small part in it. I want you to do that stormy weather number.’ He chuckled as he reminisced. ‘It was really very good indeed,’ he mused. He was serious again. ‘I want you to get the kind of laughs you got when I saw you do it on the Isle of Wight.’ He paused. ‘Can you get those kind of laughs again?’ he asked.
Stella nodded with self-conviction. ‘Oh yes.’
‘Good. There’s nothing better than belief in your own talent, and there’s nothing better in a revue than a lovely girl doing a “point” number and having the audience laugh with her, not at her. I thought you showed a great potential for comedy, and in due course I’d like to help you all I can to develop it – with the assistance of Woody Woodville. Do you know him?’
‘The American producer?’ she asked, a little dumbstruck. She was feeling as though she had just arrived in fairyland. Surely none of this was true. When she returned to the stark reality of her bedsit in Brixton she would realise that it was all just a dream to torment her.
‘That’s the man. Well, he’s coming over here in a few weeks’ time and then we start rehearsals, and then open a tour in the provinces – maybe Bristol, Brighton, Manchester, and Birmingham. Then, we hope, into the West End itself.’
His phone rang and it allowed her time to quickly swallow her drink. She noticed it was a very monosyllabic phone conversation. Perhaps he didn’t want to talk business in front of her, or perhaps he just always had that sort of phone manner. He soon finished and picked up just where he’d left off, which impressed her immensely. ‘But to get into the West End the show has obviously got to prove its worth in those provinces. Now, you must meet Mr Farrow and discuss a few things: no less than a contract itself.’
He climbed out of his chair in a way that suggested he didn’t do it very often during the course of his day and that it was quite an inconvenience that he should have to do it at all. Briefly, he left the room to return with a handsome grey-haired man who Stella judged was on the verge of entering his forties, but reluctantly so.
They were introduced, and Mr Farrow crinkled his face, making deep wrinkles form around his laughing eyes. His suit was noticeably baggy and seemed able to allow him to move around in it while the suit itself remained still. ‘Miss Raven. Henry told me you were a picture of beauty. He’s rarely wrong and on this occasion he’s right again.’ He reached forward and, in a chivalrous manner, softly touched the back of her right hand with his lips and nose. With a continuous grin he released her hand then allowed his suit to take him across to the other side of the room.
She said, ‘I must stress, Mr Farrow—’
‘Call me Mike – only my wife calls me Mr Farrow. Ha ha ha!’
‘Thank you, Mike. I must stress I haven’t done too much solo work, and I’ve very little work in the book, except next week. I’m in a variety bill at the Empire, Oldham.’
‘Oldham, you say? I come from near there – Accrington.’ She looked to Mr Charles as if with a need for verification. He grinned and gave a single nod. ‘And let me tell you one thing, Stella, you will soon have so much work you’ll hardly have time to eat and drink. You’ll be begging me to let you have a day off, because when you look at me you are looking at a genius. Is that not right, Henry?’
‘So you keep telling everyone, Mike, so you keep telling everyone.’
‘And that’s because it’s the truth, Stella.’ She didn’t doubt it for a second. ‘Now step next door, Stella Raven, star of the near future, and we’ll produce a contract for you to study.’
He turned to Henry Charles, but his suit remained facing the door. ‘See you later, Henry, and thank you for bringing this wonderful star to my notice.’ He asked Stella, ‘Where do you live?’
‘Brixton at the moment, but—’
‘Now isn’t that a coincidence.’
‘You don’t mean you live in Brixton?’ she asked, incredulously.
‘Tomorrow I might,’ he replied, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
Stella was sure that things were starting to look up. She now had an agent, and a particularly good one, although it was early days in her representation, and Mike Farrow would have to prove himself before she could be certain; and one of the cleverest men in the business, Henry Charles, had shown her respect and wanted to consider her for a West End revue. ‘Oh God, please let me get the job in the revue,’ she prayed aloud as she sipped her third cup of coffee of the morning. ‘If you do, I’ll go to church every Sunday that I’m not travelling.’
She was sitting in her small Brixton flat, wondering who she could break the good news to. She thought about writing to her parents, but they wouldn’t really understand, and the letter would only end up as yet another souvenir on the mantle-shelf.
She rang Euston Station to find out the times of trains going to Oldham. Playing Oldham was now the last thing she felt like doing, but she knew it had to be done, and done well. There was an overnight train to Manchester on Sunday night, leaving midnight and arriving at five in the morning. She booked a sleeper, then found herself adding, to her own surprise, ‘Make it first-class.’ It would cost her a small fortune, but she felt in the mood for celebrating.
As Shipton Bellinger made his way with the rest of the theatrical company towards Oldham in the grimy third-class railway carriage he looked up from the borrowed Sunday Dispatch to peer through a rain-streaked window at the gateway to one week of oblivion. The unheated carriages rattled through a long tunnel to emerge some seconds later into shafts of sunlit soot. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed, and then, crossing his legs, pulled his hat over his face as if to cut out reality.
He had no digs arranged but he knew that the stage manager would be able to recommend somewhere to stay – they always did, because most of them took a small cut off the landlord or landlady.
Leaving behind him the ‘root-toot’ noises of the incoming and outgoing trains he weaved an unsure path down various unknown streets. Like most artistes of the show, he had been given directions, and like most directions that are given, they are easy to understand if you are the one giving them.
Then he came across a street sign – Tunstall Street. He glanced at his wrist-watch through its fractured glass casing. It was about quarter past very early morning. He studied the street that ran way down a steep hill. It must have been a mile long and perfectly straight. It was drizzling, just as it had been when he left the train, and probably just how it had been when he boarded the train. It was fine drizzle, the sort that seemed to fall without touching you. It was a miserable day in what Shipton Bell-inger was beginning to think was a miserable career.
The running, shouting children, or the walking quiet grown-ups, didn’t seem to care about the damp. They didn’t even seem to wear any protective clothing for it.
Nearly two hours after leaving the train, he knocked on the door of 287 Tunstall Street, a brisk twenty-minute walk from the station if you were fit, and going in the right direction. If the landlords or landladies of this randomly chosen street were unable to oblige him, he would report to the theatre and seek the advice of the stage manager.
He rested his suitcase down and his arms felt as if they could touch his toes without his bending. He knocked lightly at the door, trying hard not to stand on the well-scrubbed yellow doorstep. An evil-faced boy of about five answered it. Shipton had to work hard to raise a smile. He didn’t like kids. He had played too many matinees where sweets and other edibles had been tossed at him. ‘Is your dear mother at home, little boy?’
‘She’s on’t lav!’
‘Oh!’ He really didn’t know what to say after that.
‘Who is it?’ asked a muffled female voice.
‘A man with a big hat,’ shouted back the boy.
‘Is it the rent man?’ Shipton pursed his lips and shook his head at the boy. ‘Is it the rent man?’ was asked again, only louder.
‘No, it’s not the rent man,’ replied Shipton. There was a short silence, followed by a toilet being flushed.
A door cracked open and a woman stepped briskly down a corridor and appeared behind her son. He looked at the woman, who was probably about thirty-five. She drooped a protective arm around her son’s neck. ‘Yes?’
‘Who is it, Mum?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Good evening. My name is Shipton Bellinger,’ he announced, with an actor’s accentuated bow that made the mother and child take a step back.
‘What’s he say, Mum?’
‘Shut up. Er, can I help you?’
‘I’m appearing at your local theatre in a play – a comedy. A Restoration comedy, in fact.’ He gave her the same smile that Gary Cooper gave to Carole Lombard in Now and Then. ‘I’m an actor,’ he said, in a way that told them they should be impressed.
‘Why’s he talking funny, Mum?’
‘Shut up!’
‘The, er, theatre recommended Tunstall Street when supplying us with directions for lodgings,’ he lied.
He had never been greeted by two such deadpan faces before. He knew he would have to play another card. He grabbed the back of his left knee and winced with pain. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s the damp, you know. Brings out the war wound. Took in some shrapnel on November the eleventh 1918, while serving in France. Just outside Bapaume, actually. His Majesty told me, while he was pinning the Victoria . . . the old gong on, that I was probably one of the last British officers to be wounded. All very well, but it doesn’t stop the old pain.’
He leant forward to support himself against the front wall of the terraced house. The boy stared at his leg with curiosity, and the woman said, ‘Well, you’d better come inside and rest it.’
He gave her the ‘ devil-may-care’ look similar to the one Clark Gable gave Jean Harlow in Red Dust, then allowed his chin to quiver as if bravely containing the pain.
‘What’s up with him, Mum?’
‘Shut up!’
He followed them both inside, and had removed his hat and coat by the time they were in the sitting-room. ‘You say Mr Jenkins said try a few houses in Tunstall Street?’
‘Yes, Mr Jenkins – the stage manager. May I sit down for a moment? It’s the leg.’ He gave her the Robert Young tight-lipped smile of controlled agony. ‘Always like this when it’s damp,’ he explained.
She pointed to an armchair, then gave its cushion a hefty thump, hard enough to make it gasp. ‘Is he going to stay here, Mum?’ Shipton glared at the boy and thought, don’t spoil my chances by rushing her, you little brat.
‘Shut up!’
The little boy was fascinated by the man’s pain, and Ship ton was trying every trick in the book to make them welcome him. He placed the boy on his right – ‘good’ – leg and held him there firmly, with a loving smile on his face. He gave the woman his Robert Taylor look and she unconsciously returned it with a Joan Crawford look. ‘Well,’ she said, at length. ‘I did ask Mr Jenkins to send anyone down he felt was suitable.’
That’s a bit of luck. I stopped at the right place here.
‘I just didn’t think it would be so soon.’ She giggled, showing her nerves. ‘See, I’ve never been a landlady before. You’ll be my first one.’
‘There’s a first time for everything,’ said Shipton, blandly.
She pushed her hand out at him. ‘I’m Mrs Jane Butter-worth.’ She didn’t know what to say about rates – who should mention money, him or her?
‘How much will you be charging?’ he asked, sensing her awkwardness.
‘For the, er, week, from this morning ’til next Satur . . . Sunday morning, all meals provided, of course, and tea when ever you’re wanting it, umm.’ She thought for a second. ‘Thirty shillings?’ she asked, rather than stated. He smiled.
‘Thirty shillings sounds most reasonable, Mrs Butter-worth.’
‘Oh, does it?’ she said, disappointedly. Perhaps she had undercharged him.
‘Would you object to me calling you Joan?’ asked Errol Flynn.
‘Not really, though my name’s Jane,’ replied Myrna Loy.
‘Ah. You Jane, me Shipton.’ Spencer Tracy laughed, almost throwing the boy off his knee.
‘Shipton,’ said his new landlady, as if trying to get accustomed to the name.
‘That’s right – Jane.’
The boy was now standing next to his mother and lifting her dress to try and hide under it. She moved quickly away from the threatening danger, and clipped his head with the palm of her open hand without even looking to take aim.
‘Shipton’s a place near Leeds, isn’t it?’
‘You’re probably thinking of Skipton.’ He rose from the chair. ‘Would it be possible to have a cup of tea and take a look at my bedroom? Then I’ll go and take a look at the theatre.’
‘Yes, certainly. Come on, Adolf.’
‘Adolf?’ queried Shipton, and looked with some bewilderment at the boy.
‘Yes. My husband thought Adolf was doing a good job in putting Germany to rights. He decided to name our boy after him. His mother was German, you see.’
‘Hitler’s?’
‘No, silly. My husband’s.’
‘Ah, I see.’
Adolf had gone very quiet once he knew he’d become the centre of attention. Shipton smiled down at him, but it was a sad smile.
You poor little sod, he thought. At least mine’s a stage name.
She picked the boy up in her arms. ‘How’s your leg?’
‘Leg? What le—?’ He recovered in time. ‘Oh, the leg,’ he said as he massaged it. ‘Much better, thank you.’
She drifted into the kitchen, still carrying one of Hitler’s half-dozen English friends. Shipton watched her legs as she went. She was an attractive woman, and he was sure he’d have bedded her by Thursday. So long as her husband was at work all day, every day. He had a vision of himself and Jane entwined in a passionate embrace, their legs thrashing, their bodies heaving and convulsing, and their . . .
‘How much sugar?’
He blinked himself back into reality. ‘Just one, please. I’m sweet enough as it is.’
Of course, there was the child to consider. Perhaps he attended a nursery school. Mind you, he could always make a play for her late at night, after the show. He smiled at the thought of two performances in one night.
‘What are you smiling about?’ she asked, as she brought two mugs of tea into the room.
‘Oh, I’m just happy,’ he said, quickly dropping the smile. ‘Happy to be staying here with such a lovely family, though I’ve yet to meet your husband, of course.’
A shadow passed over her face. ‘I’m a widow,’ she whispered.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise. Please forgive me.’ Bedded by Tuesday he thought, then reproached himself for being so callous.
‘It’s nearly two years since Kurt was killed.’
‘Killed?’
‘Killed coming back from a football match. He always followed Oldham. His ambition was to see the boy have trials for them.’ She smiled softly, before explaining what had happened. ‘He and three other mates went to see the team play North End in Preston. They went in one of his mates’ works’ vans, and coming back, having probably had too much to drink, they hit a bus head-on. Kurt was killed outright, and one of his mates, Arnold, died later in hospital. The other two came out without a scratch.’ She gave an ironic smile. ‘That’s the luck of the draw, isn’t it?’ Shipton nodded. He felt awkward and guilty.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, for the second time.
‘You weren’t to know.’
The boy was now playing a mountaineering game across the settee. Hearing his late father talked about wasn’t upsetting for him, as he was so young. He had an image of his father, just like he had an image of the man called Jesus whom they talked about at Sunday school. ‘It’s not been easy bringing the boy up on my own,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a couple of jobs but nothing permanent. That’s why I asked Mr Jenkins to send me lodgers.’
