Ha'penny Read online

  “How about the suitors?” I asked.

  “I haven’t made any approaches, but I thought perhaps Brandin for Laertes, and Douglas James for Horatio. I hadn’t thought about Ophelia at all, at least, I was thinking in terms of a woman. There won’t be many women. No—I could make the Player King and the whole troupe women, and have the play-within-the-play work something like a ballet.” He wasn’t seeing me at all.

  “That would be glorious,” I said. “How about Mark Tillet for Ophelia? I played with him in Crotchets two years ago, the play was nothing and it didn’t run, but I thought he was jolly good.”

  “Hmm?” Antony came back from his reverie. “Who?”

  “Mark Tillet?”

  “Oh no.” Antony sighed. “Jewish, my dear, and therefore ruin at the moment. I wouldn’t even want the word Jew whispered around a play of mine this season, unless it was The Merchant of Venice.”

  I finished my coffee. “Mark? Really? I had no idea. He doesn’t look Jewish.”

  “You mean he doesn’t have a hooked nose and long ringlets and a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion under his arm?” Antony laughed without mirth, a stage laugh. “A young lady of your background would probably be surprised how many Jews there are in the theater.”

  “Leave my bloody background out of it,” I snapped. “I’ve been treading the boards since 1936. That wasn’t what I meant at all.”

  “Sorry,” Antony said, insincerely. “Nobody would doubt you know your way around the theater by now.” He set down his coffee cup and signaled to the hovering waiter. “Well, since I have secured your services as a leading lady, I shall leave you, and attempt to secure the rest of my cast. Rehearsals begin on Monday, ten sharp, in the theater.”

  “You haven’t told me which theater, yet,” I said, laughing.

  “The Siddons,” he said. “Appropriate, isn’t it?”

  “Very appropriate,” I agreed. There may have been women who had played Hamlet between me and Sarah Siddons, but I couldn’t think of any.

  “Oh, and one other thing, now you’ve agreed,” he said, confidentially, leaning towards me. “I’ve told Lauria, but nobody else at all, so keep it to yourself until it’s announced officially. The first night, which will be Friday, July first, we’ll have a very distinguished audience—the Prime Minister and Herr Hitler.”

  I wasn’t a snob and didn’t give two hoots, but it did mean that the play was likely to get lots of attention from the papers. “Good,” I said. “What a coup for you, Antony!”

  We parted on the pavement outside the Venezia. It was a typical English June day, drizzling in a fine mist, the kind of day my Irish nanny used to describe as “soft.” I wanted to go home and read the play, though I couldn’t really start learning my lines until I had a proper acting copy with Antony’s “judicious cuts” and whatever he/she changes it needed. I started to walk briskly through Covent Garden towards the tube station. I shared a flat behind the British Museum with my dear friend Mollie Gaston and our dresser, Mrs. Tring. Mrs. Tring wasn’t really our dresser. She was a dresser, but she wasn’t picky, she’d dress anyone. She’d been my dresser back in the summer of 1941 in The Importance of Being Earnest and in the chaos that London was then, just after the Blitz, had happened to mention that she was looking for somewhere to live. She’d been making me comfortable ever since, and the flat, chosen because it was so cheap, had become like a home. Mollie and Mrs. Tring were like family, only better than my own family because less bloody poisonous.

  People always think that because my father is a lord, I must live off the family wealth. This is total rot. I could, of course, or to be more precise, there was a time when it would have been possible. In 1935, when I was eighteen, my mother wanted me to be a debutante and I wanted to act. I’d done her thing for one season, incidentally learning quite a lot in the process, and thereafter I went my own way. She said she’d never speak to me again and the family would cut me off with a shilling, and I walked out. Our relations have been rocky ever since. Swearing you’ll never speak to someone again is easy, but of course very hard to keep up. But I’ve never quite forgotten it, and I never go to Carnforth. My little sister Dodo comes to see me when she’s in London, and when she brings her children up we all go to the zoo and I take them out for ices. But when Rosie unexpectedly came to see me in Crotchets and sent round flowers, which was sweet of her, I didn’t invite her backstage. The theater is a different world. I knew she wouldn’t understand.

  I ran into Charlie Brandin coming out of the lift at the Underground as I was about to go in. “Viola!” he called. “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?” I asked, stopping and walking back outside with him. Actors love gossip worse than parlor maids. “I heard Antony’s going to offer you Laertes in his new Hamlet, so we’re to play lovers again, and we can languish madly at each other.”

  Charlie’s a pansy, the theater is full of them as I was saying, so it’s quite safe to tease him about this kind of thing. “But Laertes is Ophelia’s brother . . .” he said, taking a moment to get it. “No! You’re playing Hamlet?”

  I grinned. “I couldn’t resist.”

  “My dear, I’m so relieved I’ll be able to eat this season without showing my legs in a skirt that I shall endure the torments of being your lover with hardly a pang,” he said. Some of the theaters were casting cross-dressed as well as cross-cast. “Shall we go to Mimi’s and eat pancakes to celebrate?”

  “I’ve been stuffing myself at the Venezia with Antony. I couldn’t eat a thing. But I could drink coffee and watch you eat, if you like.”

  By common consent, we turned and walked back into Covent Garden. Mimi’s is a little café on two stories with rickety stairs between them, catering largely to the theater crowd.

  “This cross-casting thing, it’s just a fad,” Charlie said as we walked. “It’ll die out in no time.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe one day they’ll say in theatrical histories that in Elizabethan times men played all the parts, even the women, then they started to allow actresses in the Restoration, and for a while people believed everyone should stick to their own gender, then in the late forties people began to experiment and now anyone can play any part. . . .”

  Charlie laughed. “By next year, everyone will be back in their right clothes again. I bet you a fiver.”

  “No bet, because I think you’re right, really,” I admitted. He held open the condensation-streaked door of Mimi’s for me and I led the way inside.

  Mollie was sitting in one of the coveted downstairs booths, eating a curled-edge ham sandwich. She waved at me. “Have you heard?” she asked.

  “Heard what?” I asked. “Can we sit with you?”

  “I was lunching with Pat, but he’s gone, as you can see, and I was just about to go, but I’ll have more coffee as you’re here.”

  The waitress came over. She was not, like half the staff at Mimi’s, a would-be actress, but a local woman. “What do you want, love?” she asked.

  “Three coffees, and one pancake stack,” I said. I slid onto the bench beside Mollie, and Charlie folded himself onto the bench opposite.

  “Lauria Gilmore is dead. She’s got herself blown up,” Mollie said.

  “I was going to tell you that, but you distracted me with your Hamlet news,” Charlie complained.

  “Blown up?” I asked. The waitress brought the coffee and set it down on the table, slopping mine into the saucer. “How? Anarchists, like those people who blew up that castle in Wales?”

  “Well, it might have been anarchists, but why would they want to?” Charlie asked.

  “I suppose they simply go around blowing people up, just for fun,” I said.

  “She might have Known Something,” Mollie said, darkly significant.

  “Or she might have been In Their Way,” Charlie said in a dreadfully fake Russian accent.

  “I don’t know, she was always rather left than otherwise,” Mollie said in an ordinary voice. “Frightfully keen on w
omen’s rights and unions and voting and all that.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “She was an actress. Actors aren’t political. It seems much more likely to me that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Poor Lauria. Now she’ll never play my mother.”

  Charlie laughed immoderately and put his hand to his heart. “Dead, and never called me mother,” he said, in tones of deepest melodrama.

  I giggled. “Never called me daughter, more like,” I said. “But we shouldn’t laugh, I mean, whatever happened, it’s awful. I liked Lauria, and she was a good solid trouper, one of the best, a real old-school actress.”

  “You’ll have to go to the funeral,” Mollie said. “If she was in your play.”

  “Antony said she’d agreed. But we should all go to the funeral anyway. I haven’t acted with her since Ernest but it’s showing respect.”

  “I should think the whole theater will go,” Charlie said. “What could be more dramatic than being blown to pieces, after all? Nobody will be able to resist. Besides, Lauria was at the top of her career, or she would have been if she’d been a man. There aren’t all that many roles for older women, but all the ones there are she’s played magnificently. She’d have been wonderful as Gertrude. She was when she played her before.”

  “Had you ever played with her?” Mollie asked.

  Charlie shook his head. “It would have been the first time. And now I never will. The funeral will have to be very splendid to make up.”

  Mollie laughed. “You are awful, Charlie!”

  The waitress brought his pancakes, which really are practically the only edible thing on the Mimi’s menu, being made fresh when you order them.

  “I can’t quite believe she really got blown up,” I said. “Who told you?”

  “Bunny,” Mollie said. “You know he was always chummy with her. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. It might even be in the late edition of today’s Standard.”

  And it was. When Charlie had finished his pancakes and we walked back to the tube station the new hoarding headline for the Evening Standard was “Actress Blown to Bits in New Terrorist Atrocity.”

  2

  Nasty day, sir,” Sergeant Royston said as Inspector Carmichael slammed the car door.

  Carmichael didn’t deign to reply. Royston put the car into gear and eased it out into the traffic of High Holborn. “Supposed to be June, but it doesn’t look like June.”

  Carmichael grunted.

  “At least we don’t have to go right out into the country, this time, sir,” Royston offered.

  Carmichael stared straight forward as the police Bentley purred through the gray London streets. The hard edges of the buildings were dampened and softened with rain. Selling out, he thought, should mean selling out body and soul. You were supposed to get Helen of Troy when you sold your soul, you shouldn’t have to go on afterwards doing the same things you used to do when your soul was still your own, dealing with reprimands for the car left on the meter and listening to Sergeant Royston talking platitudes.

  “I said, at least we don’t have to go right out into the country,” Royston repeated, looking sideways at Carmichael as they stopped at a red light. “Sir—”

  The last thing Carmichael wanted was a conversation with Royston about the state of their souls. “Hampstead,” he said, letting his loathing of the place show in his voice. “Hampstead’s almost as bad as the country, or worse in some ways. Full of people who have money and pretensions.”

  “Funny place for an actress to live, come to think,” Royston said.

  “No doubt,” Carmichael agreed. “Where would you expect an actress to live, sergeant?”

  “Bloomsbury,” Royston said, promptly. “Or Covent Garden, maybe. Somewhere central, anyway, and near the theaters. Hampstead’s more stockbroker country, like you said, pretentious.”

  “One of the villages London swallowed up,” Carmichael said, as Royston turned into the Finchley Road. “Once, Hampstead would have been like those awful places we drove through down in Hampshire, deep in the country, miles from London. Children playing on the green. Flowers in the hedgerows. In Dr. Johnson’s day, parties of Londoners would ride out to Hampstead Heath for picnics. Now it’s been swallowed. It’s on the Underground. I don’t see why an actress shouldn’t live there as well as anywhere else, if she’s been doing well for herself.”

  “And getting herself blown up?” Royston asked, turning into Bedford Drive, a tree-lined avenue of Victorian villas.

  “That’s another matter,” Carmichael said.

  Royston slowed to a halt halfway down the street as they came to a police barrier. On one side stood a young bobby in uniform. On the other were the massed ranks of the press, who would have been recognizable even without their notebooks and cameras by the unmistakable predatory cast of their features.

  “Scotland Yard,” Royston said to the bobby, showing his card through the window. “Inspector Carmichael and Sergeant Royston.”

  “They’re expecting you, sir. Park here and come through, I can’t raise the barrier,” the bobby said. Royston parked carefully at the side of the street, and as soon as they stepped out the press began to photograph them.

  “Was it terrorists?” shouted a man in a beige raincoat, beginning a barrage of questions, impossible to distinguish individually. Carmichael stopped and held his hand up for silence. Royston scuttled through as they closed in on Carmichael.

  “. . . same as in Wales?” one last journalist trailed off, embarrassed.

  “I don’t know any more than you do. When I know anything, I’ll come out and make a statement,” Carmichael said.

  “Oh, be a sport and give us a quote,” a woman said, smiling at him under a dripping hat.

  “You’re the same Inspector Carmichael who solved the Thirkie murder, aren’t you?” asked a sharp-nosed man half-leaning on a little red Austin.

  “Yes,” Carmichael said, scowling. Flashbulbs popped. “When I have a statement to make, I’ll see you’re given it.”

  “Can you confirm that Miss Gilmore has been killed?” the woman asked.

  The rest was lost in the clamor as they all began to shout again. Carmichael ducked around the barrier and joined Royston on the far side.

  “It’s number thirty-five,” the bobby said, indicating a set of steps leading up from the street through a grass bank to a garden gate. “Go around the back.”

  Carmichael followed Royston up the steps. The shouted questions of the press sounded almost like the baying of hounds. He wondered if he’d get any hunting in this year. A few days in Leicestershire in November, perhaps. There was nothing like the feeling of going hell for leather forward across whatever territory lay before you, following wherever the fox led with no idea of what you might be getting into.

  The rain was easing off to a fine mist. Royston opened the gate. It was green ironwork, Victorian like the house. The path forked. One branch led through two flower beds, overflowing with roses and pansies, to a pink front door. The other curved away down the gap between this house and its identical fellow on the left. Carmichael followed Royston down the gap.

  “What would you call this gap between houses, sergeant?” he asked.

  “Alley, sir,” Royston replied. “Though it’s small for one.”

  “They’d call it a ginnel in Lancashire,” Carmichael said, as they came out into the back garden.

  There had been rosebushes here, too, and a little lawn. The explosion had disturbed the earth and the roses lay uprooted. There was a tremendous quantity of broken glass everywhere, crunching under Royston’s boots. There was a gaping hole in the back of the house, through which could be seen the remains of what had probably been a dining room. Torn shreds of wallpaper dangled around the hole, fluttering.

  “It’s like the Blitz,” Royston said, touching a twisted length of dark green metal with his foot.

  A tall man in Royal Engineers uniform came striding out of the hole in the house. “Not quite, not quite,” he s
aid. “In the Blitz, all the bombs came downwards. This one definitely started off inside.”

  “Scotland Yard,” Carmichael said, and they showed each other identification. The sapper’s name was Curry, and he was a captain. The two officers from the Metropolitan Police came out and were introduced as Sergeant Griffith and Inspector Jacobson of the Hampstead office. Everyone dutifully examined everyone else’s cards and shook hands.

  “I’d suggest we go inside, but there’s just a chance the ceiling will come down on us, so we’re better off here in the rain,” Jacobson said.

  “If you call this rain,” Griffith said, contemptuously.

  “So this definitely wasn’t a bomb left over from the Blitz?” Carmichael asked Captain Curry, declining the conversational possibilities of the weather.

  “Well, I thought at first it could have been a UXB, an unexploded bomb, you know. There was a greenhouse, you’re walking on the remains of it, and it might have been built more recently over a bomb from 1940 that had buried itself and then went off. That does happen sometimes. I’ve heard of cases in France where a shell from the Great War is sitting underground until a farmer pokes at it and up they both go.” Curry poked the ground thoughtfully with his toe. “But it doesn’t add up. The center of the blast was inside, not in the greenhouse, and nobody keeps old Jerry bombs sitting around in their dining room. Besides, I won’t be quite sure until we’ve done the analysis, but I’m almost sure that this was a homemade bomb.”

  “Jewish terrorists,” Griffith said, eagerly.

  Carmichael turned away to look more carefully at the ruin. Terrorists? Or was it like last time? Did the government have some reason for killing this actress? Was she someone else who knew more than she should? Had Royston and he been sent here because the powers that be knew they would acquiesce in a cover-up if necessary? Bring it on, he thought bitterly. Covering up for bombs, bombing people, throwing children into gas chambers. He knew how he would act if put to the test.