Geoffrey Whittaker sat in his office on Sunday evening and smoked, but his hands shook. Nothing could drive him from the only world he understood. He told himself that, at forty-six, he was too old for an attack of nerves. There were men out there less than half his age fighting to preserve his freedom, even though he did not want to be free. He was a willing prisoner of the theatre, its plans and strictures. His life was patterned on the stage directions of a dog-eared script. But something had crept inside his world that had no place in the production. His trembling fingers pulled another cigarette from the pack and inserted it between his lips.
Outside the Palace, Elspeth Wynter ran on into the blackout, through the empty city streets, her breath ragged behind her ribs, daring herself to go forward into darkness, frightened to return. But the home that had nurtured her for so many years could not be left so easily. It too was her domain, and beyond it, beyond the blackouts, there was no structure, no control, only the terrible light of freedom.
For Elspeth and Geoffrey, and hundreds like them, theatres were the last repose of stasis and sanity in a world hurtling beyond sense. But even they would be touched by the bloody hand of madness.
14
DOUBLE ACT
‘What the hell are you talking about, keep it out of the press?’ asked Benjamin Woolf. ‘I’ve already had a call asking why she didn’t keep an appointment with a photographer this morning. What am I supposed to do?’
‘This is a tragedy for all of us, Ben,’ said Helena Parole, whose earnest attempts to empathize with others were undermined by the fact that she didn’t care about anyone else. ‘I understand your feelings entirely.’ She compounded the hypocrisy by rolling her eyes at May coquettishly.
That Tuesday morning, the mood at the Palace Theatre was fractious. Thanks to a night of bright moonlight there had been bombing raids until dawn, and no one had slept well. Sloane Square tube station had been hit, killing many. In the morning’s papers, questions were being raised about the efficacy of public shelters. Not enough people were using them, and there were rumours among those who did that infection was rampant. Sanitation remained haphazard, and there was a general feeling that the unchanged air spread all manner of germs. Most Londoners preferred to stay at home, tucked inside cupboards, under the stairs, sleeping in ground-floor rooms or outside in an Anderson shelter: fourteen arched sheets of corrugated iron bolted together and half buried under earth that flooded in wet weather but could survive everything except a direct hit.
The stage was still empty. Few of the cast had yet arrived, but members of the orchestra were seated in the pit, patiently waiting to resume rehearsals. They usually practised in airy rooms behind Waterloo Station, but those had been requisitioned by the War Office, and now the musicians were crammed before the stage in a dimly lit theatre instead of playing in a sunlit space overlooking the river. The most able-bodied among them had been taken by conscription, and they had been forced to fill up their ranks with fiddle-scratchers from the twice-nightlies and even a couple of Leicester Square buskers.
Luckily their conductor, Anton Varisich, like many great conductors, was as adept at diplomacy as he was at extracting mellifluous harmonies from his motley crew. He had topped up the percussion and woodwind sections with exiled Spanish and French players, lending the arrangements a jaunty cosmopolitan air in keeping with Offenbach’s play, but previously unheard in London. The nation’s music still owed more to the palm court than the boulevard, and consequently the players were having a whale of a time because they were doing something new. Quite how they’d manage to rehearse when the cast turned up and wanted to practise their lines would remain to be seen.
‘Will you understand when I tell the next person who calls that your star dancer might be a little late for rehearsals on account of not having any feet?’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘That’s what they’re saying.’ Woolf threw his long body back down onto seat C15 and smoothed a hand across his brilliantined hair. There was an ever-present aura of sarcasm about him that no one responded to positively. ‘The police are crawling all over the building, you won’t tell any of us what’s going on and I’m supposed to act like everything’s tickety-boo.’
Helena glared up into the darkness beneath the roof. ‘Benjamin, please, you’re an agent, lying is a professional qualification for you, like a merit badge or something. You can tell the press she’s joined the WAAFs and flown to Timbuktu on a mercy mission if you want, and they’d have no choice but to believe you. She’s frightfully upper class, and her reputation will need protecting.’