‘A while ago now,’ Bea heard her telling the woman who’d said she was playing the bag-lady. She’d had great ambitions, Iris said, but then the marriage and all that had been a setback. He’d been out of work for six years as near’s no matter, and then again later of course. A regular thing it became and she’d had to take what was going in a typing pool. Ruinous that was, as she’d known it would be, as anyone in the profession could guess.
‘The kiddie’ll make it up to you,’ the bag-lady predicted. ‘Definitely,’ she added, as if making up herself for not sounding interested enough.
‘When the call came I couldn’t believe it. “Ring Dickie,” I said. Well, it’s only fair, no matter what the past.’
‘A father’d want to know. Any father would.’
‘She’s had to have her hair cut off.’
Bea listened to these exchanges because there was nothing else to do. When she’d rung Dickie to tell him he’d said immediately that he was over the moon and she knew he was. ‘You say well done to Iris for me,’ he’d said, and immediately she had imagined him coming back to the flat, as sometimes she did, arriving with his two old suitcases. ‘Well, what d’you know!’ he’d kept saying on the phone. ‘Well, I never!’
He liked Bea to call him Dickie because she called Iris Iris; he liked the warmth of it, he said. ‘Remember the time we stayed in the hotel?’ he often reminded her, having once taken her to Brighton for a night. ‘Remember the day we saw the accident, the bus going too fast? Remember the first time in the Wild Park?’
He was big and awkward, given to knocking things over. He had another child, dark-skinned, who didn’t live with him either. ‘You tell her good old Iris,’ he said on the phone, giving credit where it was due because he knew Iris had been trying for this for years. ‘You won’t forget now, old girl?’
Any excuse, he’d be back. When he said he was over the moon it was because this was the kind of chance that could change everything. Bea saw him once a fortnight, a week on Sunday the next time was and he’d said he couldn’t wait.
‘Hi, Bea,’ the man called Roland said, getting her name right when they were all sitting down at the drill-hall’s long trestle-table. The girl in the navy-blue jumper had a walkie-talkie attached to her clipboard, and a badge with Andi on it. A boy with fuzzy hair was handing round biscuits, and coffee in paper cups. ‘Best coffee in London,’ he kept saying and sometimes someone laughed.
Bea watched while the scripts were leafed through, some of them being marked with a ballpoint. She turned the pages of hers, finding page fourteen, which was where she came into it, even though in the whole script she didn’t actually speak. ‘Mr Hance,’ the man who came to sit in the chair next to hers introduced himself as, giving the name of the character he played. He was thin and lank, with milky eyes beneath a squashed forehead, his grey suit spotted a bit, his tie a tight knot in an uncomfortable-looking collar. ‘You’ve dressed the part,’ Bea had heard Andi saying to him.
‘From the top,’ Roland called out, and the drill-hall went silent. Then the voices began.
It was the old woman with the dyed red hair who was murdered. In the drill-hall her elderliness was disguised with bright crimson lipstick and the henna in her hair. Mr Hance put the poison in the yoghurt carton that was left with her milk on Wednesdays and Fridays. Iris had explained all that, but Bea understood it better when she heard the voices in the drill-hall.
Not that she understood everything. In the script it said that Mr Hance played marbles with her, which was a game no one Bea knew played or had an interest in. ‘That’s a very lonely man,’ Iris had said, but it seemed peculiar to Bea that a lonely person wouldn’t go to the pub or some billiard hall instead of playing marbles with a child in a car park. In the script she was meant to be lonely herself; ‘Little Miss Latchkey’ Mr Hance called her because there was never anyone at home to let her in. In the script it said the old woman had tidy white hair, and a walking-stick because she couldn’t manage without one.
Iris was happy from the moment they entered the drill-halclass="underline" Bea could tell. She remembered it all so well, Bea heard her telling the bag-lady and later Ann-Marie, the newsagent’s daughter. The gossip of the profession, the knitting while you waited for your cue, the puffing at a cigarette you didn’t want when something wasn’t going right: Iris was back where she belonged, among the friends she might have had.
In the late afternoon there was the funeral scene: the clergyman’s words ringing out, the mourners standing round a chalked rectangle on the floor, the old woman who was dead completing the Daily Telegraph crossword. When the burial was over the boy with the fuzzy hair was given the task of showing Bea and Mr Hance how to play marbles.
‘All right then, Bea?’ Andi asked a few times, and Bea said she was. It was probably not being tall, she thought, that gave Andi the heavy look she had heard her complaining about earlier. She was on a slimming course, she’d said, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. Bea liked her best of all the people in the drill-hall.
‘From the top one more time,’ Roland called out when Bea thought the rehearsing must surely be over, and they went through the whole script again. She hadn’t shared her mother’s pleasure in the day. She hadn’t known what to expect, any more than she’d known what to expect at the audition. When the script had come in Iris said that the only disappointment was that Bea didn’t ever get to speak. She had remarked as much to Ann-Marie while the funeral scene was going on, mouthing it so as not to interrupt. And Ann-Marie, who was pussy-faced, Bea thought, but very pretty, waited until the funeral scene was over to say that Bea’s part was all the more telling for being silent. Bea had been glad she didn’t have to say anything, but she wondered now if it might perhaps be less boring if she had to say just a little.
‘How’s it going, Beasie?’
Dickie’s brown jacket needed a stitch at the pocket that was nearer to her, on a level with her eyes when she looked. It needed more of a stitch than it had two Sundays ago, which was the last time she’d seen it. He was incapable of attending to his clothes, Iris said.
‘OK,’ Bea said. Three weeks had passed since the first day in the drill-hall and the drill-hall had long ago been left behind. They’d moved into the set at the studios, and there’d been days of filming on location.
‘You tell Iris what I said that time, Beasie? You say I said well done?’
She nodded, cold on the street where they were walking even though it was August. She dug her hands into the pockets of the coat Iris had said to take in case it rained. The Sunday before last she’d said she’d told Iris.
‘I told her,’ she said again.
He hadn’t seen Iris today. He hadn’t seen her the last Sunday either. He’d rung the bell and Bea had called down on the intercom and he’d waited for her, the same both times.
‘All these years,’ he said on the street, ‘The Stage’s been her Bible.’
‘Yes.’
And in the end it was The Stage that came up trumps. Dickie went on talking about that, and Bea imagined her mother inviting him in. One Sunday or another, she said to herself, sooner or later. ‘We must tell Dickie,’ Iris had kept saying during the three weeks that had passed – about Ann-Marie being half asleep in the early morning and letting the piles of newspapers she’d just opened fall off the counter, and how she put back the different sections any old how; about Mr Hance and the marbles; about the caged canary still singing when the old woman lay dead.