Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

‘L illian, it is glorious,’ Nikolai said, with a sharp intake of breath.

Lillian felt almost overcome with relief. The drive, the lunch, their arrival on the outskirts of Highbridge had all gone well, but this was the clincher. She had discovered with a shock, as they stepped out of the car, that all her future happiness rested on whether this rather marvellous, exciting, clever man liked a building or not. It was ridiculous, but there it was. She could not be happy with someone who did not love The Empire, and she was rapidly coming to the conclusion that she could not be happy without Nikolai either. She, Agnes de Montfort, Jack and Grace had poured their hearts into the project. It had once been a symbol of her late husband’s love for her; now it was a symbol – no, a manifestation – of Lillian’s love for her town, for her friends and her newly rediscovered son.

The high frontage of the theatre was faced with white stone, carved with sinuous reliefs suggesting vines. Among department stores and offices, with their pitched slate roofs, it looked remarkably modern, but still part of the city. The theatre was a prima ballerina, looking over her bare white shoulder at the city, supported by a chorus dressed in patterned brickwork. The glass canopy, which extended over the frontage like a tutu, was supported and complemented by cast-iron work in the art nouveau style. Nikolai was right – it was glorious. Only the frontage of the failed restaurant, now shielded with boards painted a dark green, looked a little off. Like a beauty mark on the face of a pretty woman, she told herself bravely, then took Nikolai’s arm.

‘Wait until you see inside,’ she said.

They crossed the road, dodging past a mixture of motor buses advertising cough syrups and Fry’s Turkish Delight, and horse-drawn carts piled with hessian sacks and wooden crates full of curious chickens, and Lillian pushed open the double doors to the lobby.

‘Mr Poole! I’m home.’

‘Good Lord,’ Nikolai breathed, looking upwards. The lobby was huge, the ceiling made of delicate interlocking arches growing out of slender green pillars, the floor a smooth progression of marbled tiles in geometric patterns, circles made of squares, squares made of circles, in cream, black, terracotta and amber, and across the ceiling characters from myth and fairy tale, Shakespearean tragedy and antic comedy chased one another across fantastic landscapes. Lillian rarely saw Nikolai speechless. It made her terribly proud.

Frederick Poole emerged from his polished mahogany ticket booth and bowed.

‘Lady Lassiter! How wonderfully jolly to see you!’

Lillian introduced him to Nikolai, whose expressions of delight with the interior made him flutter his eyelashes.

‘The posters for the panto have arrived!’ Mr Poole said, squeezing his hands together. ‘We’ll be papering the town with them next week, and lodgings are arranged for all the principals.’

Lillian patted him on the arm. ‘Thank you so much for arranging that, Mr Poole. It should be the job of Jack’s assistant, of course . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Have we had any more applications?’

Mr Poole snorted. ‘Oh, plenty of applicants, but they take one look at the office and turn tail. That Darien . . . I know Mr Treadwell would bounce back if he only had a little more help. And we’re in desperate need. I’d even go so far as to say . . .’ His breath caught a little. ‘Yes, we are in dire need, Lady Lassiter! You don’t think that perhaps Mrs Treadwell would . . .?’

Lillian sighed. ‘Grace would come and work here again in a heartbeat, Mr Poole, but you know Jack won’t have it. He says she should be writing her next play, not taking messages for him, and he’s quite right.’

Mr Poole’s face became a mask of dejection. Things must have got worse while she was away. ‘I’m home now, Mr Poole! I hope I can lighten the load a little.’ He sniffed, bravely. ‘We thought we’d catch the second act of the matinee,’ Lillian added. She noted a look of nervousness. ‘I assume there are seats available?’

‘Indeed!’ Mr Poole replied in strangled tones. ‘Naturally! Only . . . That is, we offered a special for the matinee today, and we have a couple of large school parties in attendance. Nice boys and girls, I’m sure, but they seemed a little overexcited on the way in.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There has already been a little trouble with sweet wrappers being thrown into the orchestra pit.’

A cheer rose up from beyond the double doors leading into the auditorium, but Lillian, Nikolai and Mr Poole all frowned. It was not the cheer of an audience having a good time. It had a derisive, sneering sort of edge to it. The door opened and one of the ushers, her hair a little untidy, emerged.

‘Oh, Mr Poole! Good afternoon, Lady Lassiter. The stage lift has jammed! On a tilt! Poor Miss Jones is stuck fifteen feet in the air halfway through her entrance, and the orchestra have been vamping for five minutes! Little Sam is out visiting his mother in Sheffield, and Pete and Jonah are on stage banging on the thing with rubber mallets, and the little devils in the audience have started throwing apple cores!’

‘Where is Jack?’ Lillian asked smartly. ‘He knows the mechanics almost as well as Sam.’

‘The club,’ Mr Poole said, looking at his watch. ‘I’ll send Marcus.’

‘But poor Clara!’ the usherette said. ‘She’s up there in her peacock costume being abused .’

‘I think our tour will continue backstage, Nikolai,’ Lillian said. Nikolai snapped his heels together and bowed. Then she turned to the usherette. ‘Run round the back, dear, and tell them to bring the curtain down at once.’

Danny, the stage door manager, was waiting in the yard at the back of The Empire, leaning on his cane, with the theatre dog, Ollie, at his heels. One side of his face was covered with a plain white mask, hiding injuries from the war in which he and Jack had served. The other side of his face, when Jack arrived, encumbered with trap and plunger, showed concern.

‘How bad is it, Danny?’ he asked, heading into the lobby and handing over his packages, then bending over to scratch Ollie between the ears.

‘M-mayhem, Mr T.,’ Danny replied, and Ollie huffed in agreement. ‘Lady Lassiter and some foreign fellow, a friend of hers, are up a ladder trying to free Clara’s feathers.’

‘Lillian’s back? Splendid. What foreign fellow?’

The side of Danny’s face not hidden by his mask went a bit pink.

‘Some sort of duke, I think. Lady Lassiter brought him up from London.’

‘What, as a souvenir?’ Jack asked. ‘No, never mind. Take care of that plunger.’

He bustled through the ‘company only’ doors which led off the lobby and into the maze of corridors and staircases of the backstage area, then into the wings.

He stopped dead. The working lights were on, and the tableau they illuminated resembled a Rubens painting Jack had seen in Antwerp after the war, of Christ being fetched down from the cross. Dramatic lighting, taut muscles and tension all over the place – though, of course, Christ hadn’t been smothered in peacock feathers.

The stage lift on which Clara was supposed to make her dramatic Act Two entrance, descending like a goddess on her cloud while the chorus wafted great swathes of white muslin around her, was stuck almost at its highest point, and had tilted. Clara was hanging onto its upper edge, not in any immediate danger of falling, but hardly secure either, and obviously rather alarmed. Pete and Jonah, the stagehands on duty that afternoon, were banging rubber mallets at random points on the zigzag of jointed metal which held the lift aloft. This was doing nothing but further startling poor Clara.

The chorus, such as it was – three men and three women, at least two of whom should have moved on to character roles by now – were clustered at the foot of the lift, their white muslin abandoned, squeaking with alarm whenever Pete or Jonah struck a blow.

A ladder was leaning against the lift, and Lillian Lassiter, in her long buff travel coat and a wide-brimmed black hat, was at the top of it, trying to persuade Clara to take her hand. A dark-haired stranger stood at the bottom of the ladder, holding it steady. He glanced over his shoulder.

‘Ah, Jack Treadwell! I am Nikolai. Lillian has freed the feathers, but Miss Jones is a little nervous.’

He released his grip on the ladder to offer Jack his hand. Jack shook it. The grip was restored.

‘Understandable,’ Jack said brightly. ‘Pete, do stop that. It needs a shove on the right quadrant, from under the stage.’

‘Clara, darling, hang on!’ one of the chorus said in ringing tones. ‘The machinery might crush you at any moment!’

Jack would have given the ass a poke with his plunger if he hadn’t surrendered it to Danny.

‘You lot, back to your dressing rooms now, please.’ The speaker looked as if he was going to protest, but caught the look in Jack’s eye and edged away. ‘Right, Clara, let’s get you down.’

The starlet heard her name. ‘I can’t move – I bloody well can’t! I’m shaking that hard, and if I slip I’ll break my leg, then I’ll starve.’ She tilted her head upwards, addressing the ineffable. ‘Oh, Mother, you were right!’

Jack didn’t have time to ponder her mother’s prophetic abilities. ‘Some sort of jump mat? Jonah, Pete, go and grab the tumble mats out of the store. Lillian, do come down, and I’ll pop up. Clara, I promise I can hold you if you slip, but I’m sure you won’t.’

Lillian, who had turned at the sound of his voice and waved, now started her descent. Nikolai put his arm round Lillian’s waist to jump her down the last rung with an easy familiarity Jack didn’t quite like, but he didn’t have time to ponder that either at the moment.

‘Afternoon, Lillian. How was London?’

She kissed his cheek.

‘Splendid. Now do fetch Clara down.’

Beyond the curtain, the swelling jeers were increasing in volume, interspersed with cackles of laughter. The velvet curtain shivered slightly – a sign of something being thrown against it with some force.

Jack took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, then scrambled up the ladder and put out his hand.

‘They’re going mad out there,’ Clara said. The train of her feathered gown was twisted around her ankles, and she was gripping the tilted edge of the lift with white-knuckled determination.

‘Don’t worry about them, angel,’ Jack said in a voice which he hoped conveyed a brisk confidence. ‘We’ll just get you down, and they’ll be lambs again later.’

Below him, the tumble mats were being moved into position either side of the ladder. They had cost a fortune, so Jack was almost pleased to see them in use again. Since he became manager everything in the theatre seemed to have a price tag attached to it, visible only to him.

‘I’m frightened,’ Clara said, her voice suddenly very small.

Jack took a long breath in and out and the familiar smells of the theatre – sweat, oil, paint and sawdust – steadied him. His feelings of irritation with the lift, the chorus, Pete and his rubber mallet, Clara and the foreign fella all dissipated. At least his job was never boring. He smiled, with genuine warmth.

‘Clara, darling, you can’t be brave if you’re not frightened first, but trust me. Lillian got all your feathers unstuck, so if you just let go, you’ll slide ever so gently into my welcoming arms and we’ll be laughing about this in an hour. Come on, every accident in the theatre is a funny story just waiting to be told. You know that.’

The jeers had turned into slow handclaps. Jack could just hear a strangled yell from Mr Poole. ‘Stop clambering on the furnishings.’

Clara looked him in the eye, and seemed to find some comfort there, because she slowly unhooked her fingers. Jack braced his knees against the side of the ladder and lifted his arms to catch her. She slithered towards him with a suppressed squeak, gathering enough momentum sliding across the top of the lift to make him stagger as she fell into his arms, and for a terrible second he thought he was going to go over backwards. No. His knees held. He steadied himself and Clara wrapped her arms around his neck.

‘Got you! Now try not to strangle me and we’ll have you down in a jiffy.’

Making his way down a ladder with a nervous girl covered in feathers in his arms proved a challenge. It was that unsettling moment when his and her weight all balanced on one leg and knee, as his other foot felt in the air for the next rung down.

It was at just such a moment that Harry decided to put in an appearance.

‘Rat!’ Clara screamed in Jack’s ear, and pointed. Jack missed his footing and felt the terrible stomach-lurching moment of his fall. With a strange slowness, he half-twisted in the air and found Clara being taken from his arms. He heard Lillian cry out, and then felt a sharp jolt as he landed on his side on one of the tumble mats, at eye level with the rat. He lunged instinctively at it.

‘Harry! You devilish little . . .’

The rat twitched its tail at him and exited stage right, as Jack scrambled back to his feet and considered giving chase.

‘Oh, thank you!’ he heard Clara say in breathy tones, and turned round to tell her it was nothing at all, only to find she wasn’t talking to him. It appeared that Nikolai had plucked Clara out of the air, and she was now resting in his arms and staring at him with sudden devotion. He had longish black hair, a neatly trimmed beard and a very well-cut dark suit, and was smiling in a fatherly fashion at the rescued starlet. Jack did not warm to him.

‘Jack, dear, are you all right?’ Lillian asked, putting her hand on his arm. He brushed himself down.

‘Perfectly, thank you. Right, clear the mats please, gentlemen, and let’s get this lift moving. Clara, will you be able to carry on?’

Nikolai put the girl down and she seemed to slither, with a certain amount of reluctance, from his embrace.

‘Of course, Jack,’ she said firmly, then glanced down at her maimed costume. ‘Though I might need five minutes to make myself decent.’

Milly, the wardrobe assistant, appeared stage right, her sewing basket over her arm. She took one look at Clara and clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.

‘ Ten minutes, Mr Treadwell,’ she said. ‘Now come here, pet, and let’s sort you out.’

Now what?

Jack felt a slight thrill. There was something exciting about dealing with a real problem for a change, rather than paperwork and plumbing. ‘Pete, Jonah, let’s get under the stage and deal with the mechanics.’

‘Jack, what on earth are we going to do about the audience?’ Lillian asked. ‘In ten minutes they’ll have torn the place apart. And possibly Mr Poole, too.’

She was right: whatever was happening on the other side of the velvet curtain, it had left rowdy behind as a descriptor some time ago, and was verging on the riotous.

‘Do we throw them out?’ he asked. ‘ Can we throw them out?’

‘I suspect there would be casualties.’

Nikolai brushed down his sleeves, straightened his cravat, and addressed Jack. ‘Your house band is good, yes?’

‘The best,’ Jack replied.

‘Then leave it to me.’

Nikolai squared his shoulders and headed for the curtain. Jack thought of his arm round Lillian’s waist, and decided if he wanted to throw himself to the wolves, he would allow it.