Or when, a few minutes later, Cora Rutherford, half-Alexis Baddeley, half-herself, was asked her opinion of the ingenue, a simpering redhead with insufferable freckles, she cattishly replied, ‘My dear, I rather fancy that tonight will turn out to be her farewell debut.’
The audience, needless to say, adored all the rudery and ribaldry, all the banter and bitching and back-stabbing. So too did Trubshawe, once he had quietly decided to forget that so irresponsible a stunt, played out in a packed theatre, really ought not to be condoned by laughter or crowned by applause.
What a strange business, he thought, the show business is. The theatre, for example. If people go to a play, it’s surely because they take pleasure in being caught up in all the illusions the theatre can offer. Yet, if there’s one thing in which they take pleasure even more than these illusions, it’s to have them unexpectedly shattered.
It always seems as though the warmest round of applause is reserved for the actor who understudies a role at the last minute and has to go on-stage with script in hand or the actress so decrepit she can hardly remember her lines or the matinée idol known to have served a prison sentence for buying petrol on the black market or the chorus girl whose husband has dragged both her and her swarthy masseur-cum-lover through the divorce courts. As Trubshawe had good cause to know, considering how often she had told him during their former acquaintance, Evadne Mount’s plays had all enjoyed lengthy runs in the West End. Yet he would have wagered his last ten-shilling note that not one of them had been so rapturously received as this trivial squib, the whole point of which was to mock the whiskery props and devices by which the same audience would have been enthralled when watching one of her more serious efforts.
And it fleeted across his mind that if the audience knew what he knew – that, the moment the curtain came down, the leading lady was fated to receive some as yet unspecified piece of bad news – they would have adored it even more.
In any case, after a running time that was neither too long nor too short but, like the baby bear’s bowl of porridge, just right, the sketch reached its triumphant climax. The ‘victim’ abruptly sprang to his feet and, turning to face the audience, let his blood-stained dickey roll up his chest like a circus clown’s. Beneath it, on his undervest, three words had been scribbled: APRIL THE FIRST.
*
‘Anywhere,’ declared Cora, ‘but the Ivy.’
It was just after ten-thirty when the three companions stood on the steps of the Theatre Royal and wondered where to have supper together.
‘But, Cora,’ protested Evadne, ‘you adore the Ivy.’
‘Used to, darling, used to,’ Cora drawled, bundling her pale furs about her neck. ‘You seem to forget, I’ve withdrawn from that frivolous world. No more hugging and mugging and table-hopping for poor lonely little Cora.’
‘But I saw you there only last week.’
‘Ah yes,’ replied the actress defensively, ‘but then I was dining with Noël. I mean to say, Noël …’
‘Oh, very well, have it your own foolish way. The thing is, it’s cold and it’s late. Do we eat or do we don’t? And, if we do, then where?’
‘What about the Kit-Kat?’
Cora turned to Trubshawe who, because he suspected that no proposal he might make would cut much ice with his two redoubtable dining companions, had so far refrained from taking part in the conversation.
‘You know it?’ she queried. ‘It’s in Chelsea – the King’s Road. First it was the Kafka Klub. Then it was the Kandinsky Klub. Then the Kokoschka Klub. Now it’s the Kit-Kat Klub. It’s one of those places that are renamed a hundred times but never go out of fashion.’
Evadne Mount’s answer was pat and to the point.
‘I absolutely refuse to go to the Kit-Kat,’ she said. ‘The food costs the earth – and tastes like it too. But I say,’ she changed tack, ‘if what you’re hankering after is something off the beaten track, I know a simply marvellous Chinese restaurant in Limehouse. There may be table-smashing but I can assure you there won’t be any table-hopping. What say you, Eustace?’
The Chief-Inspector looked slightly ill-at-ease.
‘What’s the matter? You aren’t afraid, as an ex-copper, of being caught in such a den of iniquity? You really needn’t worry. Frankly, it couldn’t be more respectable.’
‘No, no, it isn’t that at all.’
‘What, then?’
‘Well, you see,’ he explained, ‘I ate Chinese food once. When my wife and I took a weekend break in Dieppe. I just couldn’t get a grip on those – those whatyamacallums.’
‘You mean chopsticks?’
‘That’s the word. Chopsticks. I couldn’t handle them at all. It felt as though I was eating on stilts, don’t you know.’
‘Well, of course Trubbers doesn’t want to have some foul Chinee muck in the East End!’ said Cora Rutherford.
With a plaintive sigh she faded further into her furs.
‘I can see it’s up to me as usual to make the sacrifice. Oh well, if it must be the Ivy, then the Ivy it is. Allons-y, les enfants.’
Chapter Three
‘I’m simply gasping for a ciggie!’
A short taxi ride later, they were comfortably installed at one of the most enviable of the Ivy’s tables. The two women had ordered a couple of exotic cocktails, Trubshawe was hospitably aquainting himself with a whisky-and-soda, and the incipient conversation awaited only the lighting of Cora’s first cigarette.
It was a real performance. For the actress, a cigarette represented a sixth finger. Once, indeed, she had languorously informed an impressionable lady columnist from the Sunday Sundial that she was incapable of contemplating Michelangelo’s image of God breathing life into Adam without transforming it in her mind into an allegory – an allegory, darling! – of the immemorial gesture of one smoker offering a light to another. The columnist was suitably thrilled. So too, presumably, were her readers.
Now, the cigarette extracted from its platinum case, inserted into a jet-black ebony holder, lit up and luxuriously inhaled, she was ready to rejoin the living.
She turned to face Trubshawe.
‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘After all those years! So much more gemütlich than last time around. I think we all prefer a spoof murder to a genuine one – except for Evie, of course. Now this is a question I really don’t have to put to you, because I could plainly see you sitting there large as life in the front row, but I’ll put it to you anyway. How did you enjoy the show?’
‘The show?’ replied Trubshawe. ‘I haven’t laughed so much since – I don’t know when I last laughed so much. And watching you two bicker on the stage certainly brought back a few memories. If I still had my hat on, I’d take it off to both of you.’
He hesitated before pursuing his train of thought.
‘Even if …’
‘Even if what?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘even if it did seem to me you were sailing a wee bit close to the wind. Pulling a stunt like that inside a crowded theatre, you know, it’s tantamount to crying “Fire!”. Had the worst come to the worst, you could have provoked a stampede. It was all so very believable, at least for the first few minutes, I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the more gullible members of the audience had assumed there really was a murderer skulking about backstage. I don’t suppose you bothered to apply for authorisation, now did you?’
‘Well, naturally we didn’t,’ snorted the novelist. ‘Imagine how much red tape we would have had spewed out at us. It was in a Good Cause, don’t forget. Besides, that was an exceptionally sophisticated audience out front. Did they look to you about to stampede?’