The novelist laughed indulgently at her friend’s eccentricity.
‘It’s all rather preposterous, you know, because, from what I hear, she’s as much the woman-about-town as she ever was. But if it helps Cora to grow old painlessly by thinking of herself as the British Garbo, well, who am I to spoil her fun?’
‘And you say she’s appearing in the show?’
‘She plays Alexis Baddeley in the opening sketch, the one by yours truly. After which, there’ll be some singing, some dancing, a few laughs, a few tears, and a spectacular grand finale. So why don’t you come along as my guest?’
Trubshawe was tempted. It was obvious that, of late, not much singing, dancing, laughter or tears had enlivened his existence. Yet he was as cautious a private individual as he had been an officer of the law and he needed to tot up the pros and cons of any revision to his plans, particularly his immediate plans, before saying yes or no. In short, he definitely wanted to go to the show, but he was also determined to ascertain in advance whether there was any likelihood of his subsequently regretting having done so.
‘The question is,’ he finally said, scratching his chin, which wasn’t even itching, ‘will there be tickets left? You’ve made it sound such a prestigious event.’
‘There isn’t a single ticket to be had for love or money. The show was sold out weeks ago, even at the prices they’re asking. Five guineas for a seat in the stalls, can you imagine? Not to worry, though. I’ve been given a couple of comps, so that’s all taken care of.’
Trubshawe now cast a downward glance at his suit and tie. It was a perfectly respectable suit and tie, the suit grey worsted, the tie belonging to one of London’s less well-frequented gentlemen’s clubs. But even he, no habitué of Theatreland, was aware that not one of his fellow-members of what promised to be an exceptionally glamorous audience was likely to beg him for the name of his tailor.
A small grey cloud drifted across his stolid features.
‘You’re fine, absolutely fine!’ she said loudly and encouragingly. ‘Besides, just take a look at me, will you, and then tell me you’re going to feel out of place!’
It was true. She was dressed, as he recalled had been the case those ten years ago, in a shapeless tweed suit that protruded in the places in which she herself protruded but also contrived to protrude in a few places on its own initiative. Lying on the tablecloth, moreover, creased every conceivable way a hat can be creased, and then some, was the matelot’s navy-blue tricorne which had long been her trademark in London’s literary circles. No, Evadne Mount hadn’t changed.
‘Well, Eustace,’ she said, ‘shall we be off? The show starts at half-past seven, which really means quarter-to-eight, so we’ve just got twenty minutes to make it.’
Trubshawe nodded agreement. He also insisted on picking up the bill not merely for his own pot of tea but also for his companion’s order, which turned out to be not one but two double pink gins and pricier than he had bargained for.
Never mind, he thought to himself, as he cast a handful of silver onto the table and his companion, with a nonchalantly maladroit gesture, swept the stack of green Penguins all at once into her capacious handbag. Things happen around Evadne Mount. She had already teased him out of his sulks, cheered him out of his loneliness, half-cured him of what, in his rare introspective, even poetical moments, he would describe to himself as his ‘spiritual gout’, and here he was, wholly out of the blue, about to join the elite at a splendid theatrical gala. Well worth the twelve shillings and sixpence.
‘By the way,’ he said, escorting her from the Ritz, its door held open by a resplendently uniformed flunky, who bowed them into the street with the utmost correctitude, ‘what’s the name of this show we’re going to see?’
Pulling the tricorne hat down hard on her head, she gave its middle furrow a vicious bash.
‘Save the Last Valise for Me,’ she answered. ‘Oh, I know, it’s a daft title, but then, I fear it’s going to be a pretty daft evening. Except,’ she added, ‘for my own little sketch. That, I do assure you, is deadly serious.’
And, with these enigmatic words, in the gathering shades of a Friday evening in early April, they wandered off together towards the nearest bus-stop.
* See The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006).
Chapter Two
The shiny red omnibus which had borne them the length of Piccadilly, and on whose open top floor they had perched as majestically as on a Maharajah’s elephant, deposited them fifteen minutes later at the far end of the Haymarket, just a few yards from the Theatre Royal itself.
The Haymarket, it must be said, was but the shadow of its prewar self. Its pedestrians were threadbare, its underaged, undernourished beggars hollow-eyed. Even the lacklustre street-lamps served only to intensify the prevailing gloom. Yet the theatre itself, whose colonnade of six white pillars was taller by far than the theatregoers who passed between them, retained most of its faded grandeur. Nor was it the theatre alone. As though in a concerted protest against the drab post-war ethos, the cream of the theatrical, cinematical, political, journalistic and social world had patently decided to demonstrate that, in the War’s embattled aftermath just as during the conflict itself, London Could Take It!
Furs had been retrieved from vaults, necklaces from security boxes, evening gowns and dinner suits from mothballs, and all donned as defiantly as, not so long before, gas masks and camouflage kits. It’s true that not a few of the pearls had been born out of wedlock, so to speak, and most of the furs, evening gowns and dinner suits had grown old with their owners, but it was a magnificent spectacle nevertheless. For the crowd of onlookers who gawped at the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys gliding suavely down the Haymarket, the show was as dazzling in its way as that for which the toffs themselves had turned up.
Even Trubshawe, discreetly elbowing his way through hoi polloi as he and his companion entered the foyer, couldn’t help but feel slightly overawed.
Yes, he had been one of the top men at the Yard and, in his time and in his prime, he had had dealings with the most eminent and powerful figures in the land. Yet he had been born a fretworker’s son in Tooting and had clawed his way slowly up through the ranks, a fact which was all to his credit, more so than if he had been afforded entrée to the superior echelons of the Force through some august family connection. But it did mean that he had never quite succeeded in shedding the skin of his modest ancestry. He knew the ropes, in short, but he had never lost his fear of getting himself entangled in them. He had always had, and had always hated himself for it, a touch of deference in his encounters with the great and the good, even when, as had sometimes occurred, he had found himself obliged to caution them that anything they said might be used in evidence against them. And here he was, hobnobbing with Dukes and Duchesses, Ministers and Diplomats, Actresses and Playwrights.
On the steps of the theatre he even caught sight of someone he knew. The man was a former Cabinet Minister, and Trubshawe was on the point of doffing his cap to him when he remembered in time that their acquaintance was founded on his having managed, back in the teens of the century, to recover from the hands of agents employed by a certain Central European power the only complete blueprint of the X-27 prototype, the exploitation of which, had that power ever come to possess it, would undoubtedly have prolonged the Great War by several months, if not years. Realising, then, that if the facts were looked square in the face, the Minister was more beholden to him than vice versa, he merely returned the other’s circumspect nod with one of his own and rejoined Evadne Mount.