The City Under Siege (Stefan Gillespie), page 4
‘I’m sure you’re rather a stranger to London now,’ said Coward.
‘I thought I should come. Eric did a lot for me.’
‘I saw him last year. Very ill. I can’t say I kept in touch with him, but at least I did something. He spoke a lot about old times. I have to be honest and say I couldn’t remember most of what he was talking about. I think he invented some of it, and even that wasn’t particularly entertaining. Well, nothing wrong with that. If I am ever so ancient that I find myself spending most of my time talking about the past, I shall make everything up. Anyway, there he lies. He mentioned you. I think he’d rather you’d come to see him … when he was still alive.’
‘I should have done.’ Mac Liammóir smiled. ‘Thank you, Noël.’
‘Not often I can be self-righteous, Alfred. Don’t begrudge it me. And I still can’t call you Michael, let alone say it the way one is supposed to in Irish. I don’t do it to irritate you. It’s how I see you. I still resent the fact that you’re a serious actor.’ Coward laughed. ‘And rather too serious, I sometimes think.’
‘If my father had given me a more interesting name, I might have kept it.’
‘There’s something in that. As a child I took some pleasure in you having an uninspiring name. I might have come to nothing without my diaeresis.’
The two men joined the drift away from the graveside, heading along the avenue towards other avenues and the entrance to the cemetery, walking slowly.
‘I have a car waiting, if you want a lift into Town?’
‘I think I’ll get a breath more air and take the Tube.’ Mac Liammóir wasn’t sure why he suddenly said that, except that he wanted some time on his own. ‘I gather a few people are going for a drink, at Billie’s. I might do that. I don’t know. I have a night in Town before I go back to Dublin. Are you going?’
‘I have work to do. Well, dinner with tedious people is always work.’
‘I’m sure you’ll amuse them.’
‘You see what I mean, Alfred. You’re the serious one, I’m the clown.’
‘Ah, but what a clown!’
Noël Coward laughed. ‘There is that.’
They walked on for a moment, silently. Mac Liammóir smiled.
‘I remember you at ten, Noël, auditioning for a goldfish in one of Miss Lila Field’s thankfully forgotten productions. We met at the audition. You asked me if I’d done much work. I’d no idea you meant acting. You also asked me if I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t. You were unimpressed. You said people should always be clear about what they want. You were. I don’t think you ever doubted or lost your way. I opted for uncertainty.’
‘You finally discovered what you wanted to be, Alfred. An Irishman.’
Micheál Mac Liammóir laughed.
‘I hope I make a better Irishman than I did a goldfish.’
‘I’m sure you do, but I have never forgotten that Miss Field cast you as King Goldfish. I was stuck with Prince Mussel, not on until the third act.’ Coward grinned and shook his head. ‘The Morning Post review singled you out as the pretty little boy with the curls. It left a scar on my heart that never went.’
‘I don’t remember that at all,’ said Mac Liammóir.
‘Terrifying that I do,’ replied Noël Coward. ‘Ten or not, a low point in my career. You were earning two pounds a week and I was only on thirty bob!’
‘You’ve made up for that since, Noël.’
‘Money is a small compensation.’
‘But you’re busy enough, from what I read.’
‘I suppose so. I’ve tried to find an obviously heroic role in the business of war, swanning around the world on some vague Intelligence mission, all grand hotels and secret assignations. They did give me a diplomatic passport, but it seems Winston didn’t think I was achieving much by travelling the empire. They decided I’d be better singing while the guns fire, or words to that effect. Jolly songs for the troops. Positive propaganda. Which sounds like an exercise in boring the Germans into submission. I hope it doesn’t do the same to Britain.’
‘I doubt it will, Noël.’ Mac Liammóir said what he knew his old friend expected him to say, but perhaps without the conviction that was required.
‘It is a work in progress, dear boy. Some argument about whether a dressing gown and cigarette holder is good for morale or not. However, Herr Hitler has been helpful in making me a normal Londoner. The Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on my flat. I’m at the Savoy now. Beggars can’t be choosers.’
The last joke, as if scripted for it, coincided with Noël Coward’s arrival at his Rover. It was perfectly timed. The chauffeur was holding open the door.
‘You’re sure about the lift, Alfred?’
‘I’m sure. Take care.’
The Englishman took out another cigarette, fixing it into a black cigarette holder with a shrug that was a rare moment of self-deprecation. He was on stage, even in the back of a car driving through suburban London. But the conversation with Mac Liammóir had been a performance too. It was something the Irishman understood. They were very different men, with very different ideas about what they did, but they shared something in that need to keep performing, whether on stage or not, in public or in private. Performance was a way to survive. It always had been. They knew it as children, even before knowing why survival was necessary.
Leaving the cemetery for Kensal Green Underground Station, Micheál Mac Liammóir slowed down. There were several people ahead of him from the funeral. He chose not to catch up with them. He might talk to them later, over a drink. For now, he turned away from the station, towards College Road. Burrows Road, Ashburnham Road; the turnings were still familiar. They were in his head, though he had forgotten they were. And the houses were as drab and as heavy as they had been in his teenage years. On Purves Road he stood outside number 150. He looked at it for only seconds before retracing his steps. He had a dread of this place that bore no real relation to what it was, or what it had been. If he felt any guilt about the battered scenery stored in the back of his mind, perhaps it was because his mother and father had never been as interesting as his story needed them to be. They were as solid and as ordinary and as English as these houses. They belonged in a place where he had been unable to breathe. But it was the reason he couldn’t breathe that separated him from this place. That was the truth. The real desires that were his real identity.
The platform at Kensal Green Underground Station was empty now. The funeral contingent was gone. Only a few people stepped forward on to the red Bakerloo Line train as the doors opened. Micheál Mac Liammóir got in and sat down, conscious that a drink would be no bad thing now. He had not noticed the young Indian man who had been waiting by the platform entrance and ran to get into the next carriage at the last moment. He had already forgotten the uncomfortable encounter at the graveside. He had not registered that the man had been following him, keeping far off in the quiet streets of Kensal Green. He would not notice, as the journey into London continued, that the man had him in sight through the windows at the end of the adjacent carriages and was ready at every station for him to disembark. He was less likely to notice anything as the train went into the tunnels and filled up with passengers, and as it passed through stations closer to the West End, where the platforms were filling with people settling down to spend the night underground, in anticipation of the bombing. He was absorbed in what he was looking at, interrupted by the stretches of darkness in the tunnel. It was a rhythm he still knew, the rhythm of the stations that had been like a heartbeat when he was young. Queen’s Park, Kilburn Park, Maida Vale, Warwick Avenue, Paddington, Edgware Road, Marylebone, Baker Street, Regents Park, Oxford Circus. He counted them, as he used to count them once. He did not notice, at Piccadilly Circus, getting off the train, threading his way through the crowds to the escalators and emerging into late-afternoon London, that the young Indian man was still following him.
4
Billie’s
In the bar at Billie’s, in cellars beneath Little Denmark Street, a quartet of black musicians played ‘Somebody Loves Me’ with lazy familiarity. A woman with a peroxide-blonde perm, who might have sounded better without the American accent she was failing to imitate, sang in a breathy, slightly off-key whisper.
Somebody loves me, I wish I knew
Who can he be worries me,
For every boy who passes me
I shout, ‘Hey maybe
You were meant to be my loving baby.’
Somebody loves me, I wonder who,
Maybe it’s you.
There was a buzz of conversation and laughter from the bar and the tables that were barely visible along the dark walls. There was little light anywhere except around the bar. No one was listening to the music, not even the dancers who shuffled round the small dance floor in front of the band. The couples dancing, most of them draped around each other, would have been unusual elsewhere. There were men and women dancing together, but among them white women danced with black men and black women with white men. Men danced with men and pressed their bodies close, slowly and sinuously, keeping time to what their bodies were saying more than to the music. Women dancing with women, in the face of men too busy at the bar, was familiar in any dance hall, but here two women’s lips touched in the darkness. The club was full, though it was still early. It had been barely dark when Micheál Mac Liammóir had walked down the steps from the street. But things happened earlier in London now. What the night had in store in terms of bombing, no one knew. At any moment the silence and the darkness outside could be pierced by the moan of engines overhead and the sounds of the first explosions. There were nights when nothing happened. There were nights when the bombing was elsewhere. Some ran to shelters or hurried home to the suburbs at the first sign of German planes. Others made fine judgements, forcing another half-hour of pleasure from an evening before seeking safety. Some diehards stayed in Billie’s basement, drinking their way through a raid.
Mac Liammóir had walked from Piccadilly Circus in the dusk. He had spent only two nights in London since the Blitz began. On neither occasion had bombs fallen close to where he was. He registered bombsites and shattered buildings, the broken windows of shops he knew, the sandbags at every entrance, the criss-crossed tape over every window. He had not seen the dead; he was conscious of that. But tonight, he was conscious of more. The walk from Piccadilly, along Coventry Street, to Leicester Square and Charing Cross Road, was another return. Coming out of the Underground he saw the Café Royal, still the safest place in London for a man like him; if you were welcome there you were important enough to be safe. Passing the Criterion, he smiled. The site where Eros stood was boarded over, but some things didn’t change. Two young men, barely boys, were eyeing passers-by, wearing too much rouge and too much lipstick. The Dilly boys, bombs or no bombs. Outside the Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street a noisy gaggle waited for tables. The queue was full of men in uniform, like everywhere, but this was a Corner House where the codes and signals of queer London were learnt and practised. He had learnt them as a young man, with a kind of bewilderment and then with joy, finally knowing he was not alone. No one said anything; all was discretion. No one suggested the first-floor restaurant was different from any other floor. But the waitresses never sat women there. It was a public space but a private club.
Mac Liammóir didn’t like the centre of London any more than its suburbs. It had always felt as if it was crumbling behind its imperial façades. The theatres mattered, but nothing else. Yet he felt an unfamiliar warmth for the city that night, with darkness closing in; such complete darkness, like a curtain coming down in the blackness of an auditorium, but with no lights to come up. Now the London he had turned his back on was being destroyed, he had time for it.
In Billie’s, a handful of men who were at the funeral occupied one end of the bar. Micheál Mac Liammóir joined them. The conversation was bright enough. They were theatre men, in one guise or another, acquaintances rather than friends. The talk was of before the war, of old friends, and as ever on such occasions, who had died. But the war was quickly there, even in the cheerful relief that the theatres had reopened. Someone had decided entertainment mattered; that meant there were still jobs. The bombing was always present, too, though mostly in black jokes and unlikely stories. Mac Liammóir listened and laughed, but he offered no jokes of his own. He had some, but it felt as if the right to joke came with being under the bombs. And if these old acquaintances were amiable enough, he knew that not every comment about him being safely tucked away in Dublin was well intentioned.
There was no sign of an air raid, though the maître d’ appeared at intervals to say that there were bombs along the Thames, beyond Greenwich. No one took much notice, but people were beginning to drift away. Whether the West End was to be spared for another night or not, evenings finished early now, just as they started early. Micheál Mac Liammóir ordered one more drink before setting off to his hotel. Suddenly the drummer at the side of the dance floor delivered a crashing drum roll that had nothing to do with the slow version of ‘Caravan’ being played. The trumpeter blew a discordant wail before, abruptly, resuming a muted solo. The actor noticed several customers moving across the dance floor at speed to disappear through a back door, among them a couple of men in uniform. Everyone else continued as before, talking, drinking, dancing. Two men in raincoats, hats still on, approached the bar. The maître d’ stood in front of them, smiling his broadest, apparently most welcoming smile. He knew who they were, as did most. The warning had already been sounded.
‘Are you friends of Dorothy, gentlemen?’ asked the maître d’.
There was chuckling from the onlookers.
One of the newcomers produced an identity card.
‘Military Police.’
‘Lovely, dear,’ continued the maître d’. ‘I wish you’d come in uniform.’
‘We’re looking for service personnel. This club is off-limits.’
‘Really? That makes us sound very exciting. Would you like a drink?’
‘Don’t come the faery with me.’
The second MP walked away from the bar, through the club. He was watched with distaste by some and laughed at by others. He looked ill at ease, uncertain what exactly he was supposed to do, unless he actually saw someone in uniform. The music continued. The first MP glared at the maître d’.
‘I have information that men in uniform were seen entering this club.’
‘Well, I don’t see any. Are you going to ask us all for our identity cards?’
The military policeman looked more doubtful.
‘I’m only interested in service personnel.’
‘I don’t blame you. Aren’t we all, dear?’ There was more laughter. Then the maître d’s tone changed. ‘I’ll give you a bit of advice, soldier boy. A lot of people who come in here are VIPs. That means Very Important Poofs. The police know that. And we’re surprisingly friendly with the police. They leave us alone. That’s how it works. You need to do the same. Or you could find your cushy job patrolling the West End cut short. If you bump into a senior officer, who knows where they’ll post you? Could be somewhere you might get shot at.’
The second MP returned from a fruitless circuit of the club.
‘Now piss off,’ said the maître d’, grinning cheerfully again.
As Micheál Mac Liammóir watched the two military policemen head for the exit, he saw a figure at the bar, watching him. The man was familiar, the young Indian from Kensal Green. The actor was unaware that the man had been sitting in Billie’s for some time, at a dark corner table, waiting until Mac Liammóir was finally on his own. He was smiling. He walked forward with his hand outstretched. The actor responded as he had to and shook, but he knew now that he had been followed.
‘Mr Mac Liammóir, you don’t remember me, do you?’
‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to remind me. I did see you at the funeral, and I had a feeling I really should know you. You’ll just have to put it down to age!’
‘Vikram Narayan. It was Cairo, the Royal Opera House, ’thirty-six. I was a stage manager. You gave me a part in Romeo and Juliet. One of your chaps was off with the usual Delhi belly, or whatever the Egyptian equivalent is.’
The young man grinned. Mac Liammóir nodded.
‘Yes, of course. I remember now.’
He did remember. The Indian had played Sampson in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. He remembered that it had been a mistake, all the more glaring because it was the beginning of the play. It was a mistake born of another mistake and a row he’d had with his partner, Hilton Edwards. There had been a night, a very drunken night, when he had fallen into bed with the, admittedly very beautiful, young stage manager. He had barely recalled anything the next day. He wasn’t convinced anything had happened except that he had passed out, though Hilton was never going to believe that. But he felt some kind of awkward obligation to Vikram Narayan; the result was the second mistake. That was the one Hilton Edwards had not let him forget. Narayan was appalling.
‘I can handle you fucking the boy, Micheál, but not fucking the Bard!’
Hilton’s words came back to him and he smiled.
Vikram Narayan was smiling too, an oddly fixed smile.
‘You’re living in London now, Vikram?’
‘I spent some time back in India, after Cairo, but I’ve been here a while.’
‘Are you still … working?’
Mac Liammóir was not finding it easy to say anything. It was not a problem he had normally, but the man unsettled him. As the words left his lips, he regretted them. For someone in the profession, the word working meant one thing. He knew, before he finished, that it was unlikely Narayan was acting.
‘I’m not in theatre at the moment, no.’
The great director thought that was probably an under-statement. The season in Cairo was in focus now. The man hadn’t been much better as a stage manager.
