Ever After

7

But I have not told you yet about complication number three. I have not told you the third reason why my reception here has been such a mixed affair. I am referring now to my pretensions in the field (forget, for a moment, the Pearce manuscripts) which is properly my own. Namely, English Literature.

This is not a simple case, I should make clear, of inadequacy on the one hand and condescension on the other. I am not unequipped. I have read some books in my time, and I was for some ten years, as I may already have hinted, a lecturer in English at the University of London. Even when I abandoned that to become Ruth’s manager — a move which earned me at first as many frowns in the theatrical world as my reappearance now in the world of scholarship has done — I did not lapse. I was — you may have noticed, if you ever looked closely at your theatre programmes — a “literary consultant” (whatever that means) to certain productions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and not merely those in which Ruth appeared.

In short, the love which Tubby Baxter fired in me has never faded. There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on — a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. Even when I left it to enter — what? the real world? the theatre? — I acted with shrewd and miserly husbandry. I made sure there was a good stock of that other world still stored in the barn (the little library I set up in our Sussex cottage — while Ruth learnt her parts). Waiting for winter. I paid the real world the solemn respect of supposing it might not be real, and I paid happiness the compliment of supposing it might not last. “Call no man happy …” Isn’t that what literature says?

I did all these things. And, you see, I was right, I was prepared. But none of it helps you. Not one little bit.

So when Sam came up with his little arrangement for me …

I appreciate that from the point of view of these hallowed precincts my claims must seem paltry. I am not proud. I do not seek eminence (does my mother hear me?). All my life I have been — quite literally so in recent times — a man behind the scenes. A one-time academic who never aimed at professorship, a poetry lover who never aspired to poetry. All this, I’m sure, given the Ellison Endowment, would have been tactfully overlooked, even cheerfully indulged. But what has put the learned noses out of joint is the so-deemed simplicity of my actual views on literature. My latter-day return to scholarship has not, it seems, displayed any gathered maturity. Apparently, word has got out that in those tutorials of mine (which now seem to be a thing of the past) I have been doing little more than urging my students to acknowledge that literature is beautiful — yes, the thing about a poem is that it’s beautiful, beautiful! — and other such crude, sentimental and unschooled tosh.

Now, I admit that in my former days I could wrap this around a little more. I still can. I admit that if you stop at such a view you hardly leave the way open for those lengthy critical discussions and erudite commentaries which are the mainstay of the professional study of literature. I admit it is stating the obvious. But why shirk the obvious? Literature doesn’t, after all. A great deal of literature — why not be frank? — only states the obvious. A great deal of literature is only (only!) the obvious transformed into the sublime.

So is it a trick? Is it the case that if we can take it apart and discover that all there is is the crashingly commonplace, we are no better off than we were before? I don’t think so. I think (perhaps I should say now “thought”) there is something really there, something that comes out of the obvious. Something beyond the obvious.

Why should the simplest, tritest words (excuse this extemporary lecture) touch us with pure delight? “My true love hath my heart and I have his.” Why do the most tired and worn (and bitterest) thoughts — the thoughts we all have thought — return to us, in another’s words, like some redeeming balm?

Even such is time, which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

So? We all know this. We have heard this before, and we would rather not dwell, thank you, on the subject. But the words hold us with their poise, their gravity — their beauty. They catch us up and speak for us in their eloquence and equilibrium, and just for a little moment (are you listening, my fine Fellows, my prize pedants?), the obvious is luminous, darkness is matched with light and life is reconciled with death.

I rest my case.

(And, by the way, the words were penned — on the eve of his execution, they even say — by a putative ancestor of mine, Sir Walter Ralegh.)

Where is Tubby Baxter now? I should blame him, or thank him, for setting the whole course of my life. For if I hadn’t succumbed to this lifelong addiction, this lifelong refuge of literature, I would never have become, via my stepfather’s maledictions (“You like books so much, pal — you better learn how to eat them!”), a starveling student, perched in the chilly eyrie of a bed-sit in Camden, living, indeed, only on poetical nourishment and the irregular and surreptitious cheques (“Flesh and blood, darling, flesh and blood”) my mother sent me. And if I had never become a starveling student, I would never have been impelled, despite those maternal subsidies, to seek casual, nocturnal work to support my daytime studies. And so might never have entered, as part-time bar assistant and general dogsbody, a tinselly little temple of illusion, a den of late-night delights, called the Blue Moon Club in Soho.

And so (but aren’t these things meant to be?) would never have met her.

I see him now, that former, unformed self of mine. That spectral, prehistorical being. Hunched in the aura of a reading lamp (but what has changed?) like a creature suspended in amber. Like a creature still in embryo. Neither in nor out of the world. He is free, he is proud. He has Hamletesque pretensions: “You would pluck out the heart of my mystery …” He is studious, he is callow. His head is in the clouds. But the days are coming when the poetry will come alive. When the books will turn inside out. When the sighs and raptures and entreaties of all those love-sick bards will no longer seem like wishful thinking. And all those dubious and apocryphal mistresses, all those impossible and enslaving Cynthias, Julias and Amaryllises, will no longer seem like moonlit phantoms, like paper dreams.

The Blue Moon Club in Soho. What a far cry from this place. Do not imagine anything too wicked. Nor, on the other hand, too demure. This is the year of our Lord 1957: half-way between the age of rationing and the age of permissiveness; half-way between the syrupy ballad and the full frenzy of rock-and-roll.

The Blue Moon was a “night-club,” not a dive, and definitely not a strip joint. There was no disrobing, even if there was scant attire. Its atmosphere was charged with a piquant ambiguity in which it was hard to distinguish failed innocence from failed sophistication. The girls (there were three of them — as many as the tiny stage could hold — along with three musicians and a “resident” singer, a buxom, brassy trouper called “Miss Rita”) were only “passing through” this slightly risqué venue en route (you could gauge their degrees of conviction) for “real” work in the “real” theatre. Hence their fondness for an impoverished student who, like them, was only dabbling in this dubious night-work to serve his aspiration to higher things. He was no more interested, therefore, in their frivolous titillations than they were in teasing his callowness. So when, in the narrow, rear-of-house passage, they scampered past him in single file (Mandy, Diana, Barbara — where are they now?), forcing him to press his back against the wall and smile weakly while he was successively brushed by their frills, plumes, flounces and tassels; or when one of them slipped in or out of their cramped communal dressing-room and he caught a glimpse of fevered undress — this was only accidental. Their winks, tut-tuts and little blown kisses were just their excuse-mes.

He is callow, he is studious. Brought up on ballerinas worshipped from afar and the high jinks of Sam and his mother just across the landing, he has acquired a certain tentativeness in a certain area (in which Hamlet himself did not exactly have plain sailing). He is gauche, he is guarded (believe me, he is no Errol Flynn), but he is Paris-trained. And here he stands again, on his army-exempting flat feet, with his brain in a spin, gawping at dancing-girls.

At a certain point in the “show,” around midnight, when Miss Rita took her solo spot, it was my task — a strangely domestic ritual — to slip out to the kitchen behind the bar and make the girls mugs of hot, sweet tea (they drank nothing stronger while they performed). I would knock on the dressing-room door, while from the stage would come Miss Rita’s husky imprecations—“Got a crush on you, swee-eetie pie …” A polite pause. “Entrez.” And I would enter, bearing the tray on the outspread fingers of one hand, consciously imitating the gestures of a waiter I had once seen in a Left Bank café. An aroma of perfume, talc and cigarettes never quite disguised the smell of sweat. Three pairs of eyes would greet me. And then one night, in June 1957 (it was Barbara, I think, who left with unexplained suddenness), a new pair of (melting-piercing, greenish-brown) eyes.

You could say I saw her in her first performing role. Girl Number Three at the Blue Moon Club. When she had yet to make her name. Though her name was then just as it would be later, and she was surely no less herself. Ruth: a first-year drama student (en route, yes, for the real theatre), who had jumped into the deep end of this haunt of pleasure in order, like me, to make a little needed money, but also to cure — her stage fright.

In a diamanté-plastered leotard, white gloves, tiara and plume. In a little feminine mockery of black tie and tails, with fish-net tights. Wiggle, kick, smile, turn. She couldn’t dance as well as Mandy and Diana. But she had something that made you not realise this. Something which Mandy and Diana didn’t have.

A look of delicately courted danger, a look which, even as she cradled her mug of sweet tea, made you feel as if you were out on an adventure …

“Ruth, this is Bill, our tea boy. Watch him, he’s a tiger.”

Giggles.

One night Miss Rita couldn’t perform — stricken with flu — and Mr Silvester, proprietor of the Blue Moon Club, a self-possessed East-Ender who had a way of suggesting he had steered himself capably through all manner of roughness to reach this haven of (as he liked to call it) “class,” was thrown into untypical panic.

She volunteered. She had to do it. Of such stuff are show-business fables made. She even uttered a plucky “Don’t worry, Mr Silvester.” And she proved, not exactly that she could sing, but that she could disguise impeccably the fact that she couldn’t sing, could act impeccably the part of a singer; and that she had, moreover, that indefinable, spell-casting quality called (but why don’t we all have it, since we are all present?) “presence.”

I think I saw — and perhaps only I saw — just for a moment, the terror in her eyes, the hidden absence out of which the presence emerged. Then it was gone, she had overcome it, a little internal victory, and I was caught in the spell. And I knew then what I would always be and always want to be and need to be for the rest of my life: a perpetual stagehand waiting for the leading lady’s kiss; a lurker amidst lights and scenery; a shambling devotee of poets and performers; a humble thrall to this business of show-business.

Somewhere in this vision was already a scene in which, in some hotel suite stuffed with flowers and invitations, where Ruth held court to journalists and photographers, I would open the door from the bedroom, a preposterous figure in a dressing-gown, blink, pause, then withdraw again with a mumbled apology. But in that brief instant she would have turned to me with a smile and a look quite different from that reserved for her sycophantic retinue. And the retinue would have noticed and would think (much in the manner of some new acquaintances in this place): Can that really be—? Him?

A spotlight’s moonbeam. A shimmering creature in a clinging dress, hurriedly spirited up from somewhere, of midnight blue, hung with silver sequins and slit to mid-thigh. Smoke-furls. The piano’s tiptoe; the drum’s whisper. Her lashes flutter over the microphone, her lips part, noiselessly for a moment, as if inviting the audience to take delicious pity on her girlish trepidation.

Then: “I’m wild again, beguiled again …”

Pause: for the heavy-jowled patrons at the front tables to pull on their cigarettes, tap their cigars; for the old soak at the bar to bring his glass safely to his lips:

“… a simpering, whimpering child again …”

Who would not have been smitten? Who would not have been bewitched? And yet it was strange how this little world of smoochy melody and sugared lubricity seemed to make way specially, deferentially, for us, its hesitant protagonists. How Mandy and Diana, professional sirens, became as gooey and conniving as bridesmaids. As if everyone could see it even before we did. As if it weren’t supposed to happen, not the real thing, not in this dim-lit domain given over to the hint, the dream, the starry promise, but not the substance of love. But since it was happening — how sweet, how touching, how truly remarkable; and when were they going to get on with it?

When indeed?

Call it, also, stage fright. This stomach-fluttering period of waiting in the wings of love, this nervousness of lovers rehearsing the lines they will inevitably, redeemingly fluff. How strange to think, now, that there was a time when I did not know every inch of her body, every nook and niche and curve, when I had to imagine it — flaunted as it was, within proper limits, by her Blue Moon costumes. When there was as much a sweet shock of nakedness, of disclosure, to realise that this woman who could shine in the spotlight was the same woman who, backstage, would wrap round herself a simple fawn raincoat, run her fingers through her damp hair, light a cigarette or yawn with a sort of surprised intentness, one hand patting her lips the way boys make Red Indian noises. It was her, it was her, you see, never those roles she dressed in.

How strange to think there was a time when all those first times were yet to come. The first time we kissed (a mistimed, fumbling, near-bruising affair like a collision of birds in mid-air); the first time she shed her clothes for me; the first time my bare palms pressed her bare breasts; the first time … Then suddenly all these first times were passed through, like a dizzy mist; there was this woman who had stepped out of possibility into actuality, as if I had validated her existence. To put your arms round another. To say, be mine, be here, always be here. And then one day she was gone; where she had been there was air.

To think there was a time when I went back to my single, solitary, auto-erotic bed, on those summer nights which were already racing towards dawn, and hoped and feared and doubted and imagined, watched over by custodial and commiserative poets. And Mrs Nesbitt, my landlady, that old crow who hopped around below my eyrie, already had me down as a confirmed libertine. This “job” that brought me home, four nights a week, at three in the morning. At which hour, I suspect, she lay pruriently in wait, but never got her chance, hoping for a damning trail of scent, whispers and stifled giggles to ascend the stairs.

To think there was such a time when we hadn’t yet stepped into each other’s lives. When we never even knew each other. “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did, till we lov’d …?” These things are meant to be. Life has a thousand avenues, but these things (surely?) are meant to be. To think she too must have wondered: will this happen? Shall I, shan’t I? Will he, won’t he? It is a kind of stage fright. This rendering of yourself to another. This saying: here I am. And even at the height of her success (you won’t believe this) I would see her suddenly stricken with stage fright, enough to make her physically sick. That face (I try to remember it): so charged, so elusive (a thousand pictures failed to capture it). I never saw a face so brimming and in motion. So crystalline yet so liquid. So tender, so potent. A face that needed to be stilled. A cigarette helped. Better still, a kiss. Best of all, a part to play. A part to play. So fragile. So brave.

In the days before she was famous. Which was the greater fairy-tale?

I owe it all to a summer storm. The oldest ruse in the book of Romance. Dido and Aeneas. Ginger and Fred. Mr Silvester was a considerate, a courteous man. All that rough living that was now behind him had given him an exaggerated regard for the niceties of life. His club (or “establishment,” as he liked to call it) was a good, clean club; his girls were decent girls. One of the decencies he showed them in return was to pay for taxis to take them home in the early hours. My own means of transport was a rusting bike. While the Blue Moon Club warmed up, the cabaret commenced and all Soho went through its nightly paces, it waited, in sad but faithful exclusion, by the rear entrance, to take me home. But that night that the heavens opened (they opened! They poured down blessings!), it remained there, as on many a subsequent night, to rust even more.

Chucking it down at half-past two in the morning. I would get drenched (said Mandy and Diana). I would catch my death (said Miss Rita). Mr Silvester was shrewdly silent. And at last she said it. At last we stepped into each other’s limelight. And I dare swear that after we left, Miss Rita and the girls and even Mr Silvester and assorted unimpressible staff gave a little round of relieved applause. A midsummer night. No sylvan sorcery, no moonlit magic. But that night a wand was waved. I forgot I was Hamlet. I was a puckish soul. The world was no longer weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, and for months I would not plot a single act of further reprisal against my wicked stepfather.

These things are meant to be. Jack shall have Jill; nought shall go ill. I might have lived thenceforward happily ever after. (But what does “ever” mean?) Her best line, her most unforgettable line, delivered with such casualness but with such depths of promise:

“Share my taxi?”