Bea was different, with everything ahead of her. And Bea had talent, Iris was certain of that. She could see her one day as Ophelia, or the young just-married in Outward Bound, which she had played herself, or Rachel-Elizabeth in Bring on the Night. Iris had taught Bea all she knew.
Another child came in to wait, with a stout young woman who was presumably a mother too, unhealthy-looking, Iris considered. The child was timid, which of course was what they wanted, but rabbity in appearance, which Iris doubted they’d want, not for a minute. Bea was quiet, always had been, but she didn’t look half dead. More to the point, she didn’t have teeth like that.
‘Hi,’ the mother said.
Iris wrinkled her lips a bit, the smile she gave to strangers. There would be others, of course. Every fifteen minutes, they’d keep coming all morning. She knew the drill.
Iris was not a young mother herself. She hadn’t wanted to have children, but when she reached forty she had suddenly felt panicky, which of course — she readily admitted — was her all over. She had a part in the hospital serial then, but she’d begun to think she’d never have another one. The last year in Wanstead it was. Dickie was still on the road, office stationery.
Another mother and another child came in, the mother even younger than the fat one, the child brazen-faced, not right at all. They liked to be early, half an hour at least, and this time there was no greeting, nothing said, no smiles. Competitiveness had taken over; Iris could feel it in herself, a mounting dislike of those she shared the small waiting-room with.
‘There we are,’ the girl in the navy-blue jumper and jeans said, bringing Bea back. ‘You like to come in now?’ she invited the rabbity child, and shook her head when the mother attempted to accompany her. ‘We’ll call you this evening,’ she said to Iris, ‘if Bea has been successful. After five it’ll be. All right, after five?’
Iris said it would be, handing Bea her coat. They didn’t say ‘Don’t ring us’ any more, a joke it had become. But she remembered when it wasn’t.
A mother and child were on the way in as they left and Iris stared quickly at the child: lumpy, you couldn’t call her anything else, and thin hair with a grey tinge.
‘Let’s have a coffee,’ Iris said on the street.
*
Bea was thinking about Dickie. When Iris had come off the phone and said there’d be an audition she had thought about him; and ever since, while they were practising and going through the script, he’d kept coming into her mind. It was two years since the quarrel about the shirts, when Iris said she’d had enough and Dickie went off, the summer before last, a Monday.
‘They say they liked you?’ Iris asked in the café. ‘They say anything?’
Bea shook her head, then pushed back her hair where it had fallen over her forehead. John’s the café was called, all done out in green, which Bea liked because it was her favourite colour. They sat at a counter that ran along the windows and a girl brought them cappuccinos.
‘They only said about the waking up,’ Bea said.
When she’d told Dickie about the audition he’d stopped suddenly as they were walking across the dusty grass in the Wild Park. She’d told him then because Iris said she should, the Sunday after it was all fixed up. He’d stood perfectly still, looking into the trees in the distance, then he turned and looked down at her. That was marvellous, he said.
‘They wanted you to do it with the movements?’ Iris asked. ‘Like I showed you?’
Bea shook her head. They didn’t want movements, she said. The man called her Leah, she said.
‘Leah? My God, he thought you were one of the others! My God!’
‘He didn’t understand “Bea”.’
She’d known what was passing through Dickie’s thoughts when he heard the news in the Wild Park. She’d known because of the other times there’d been good news — when Iris won fifteen pounds in the milkman’s draw, when Dickie was in work again one time, when Iris’s aunt died and there was the will. Dickie had been invited in the Sunday after the milkman’s draw and there’d been a bottle of wine. ‘He still holding on to that job?’ Iris would ask, but he hadn’t, not for long; and the will had brought only the fish cutlery. But even so, good news when it came always brightened things up where Dickie and Iris were concerned, and one of these days it wouldn’t just go away again. Quite often Bea felt sure of that.
‘You told that man, though? You said about the name?’
‘The girl knew.’
‘You said it to her? You’re sure?’
‘She had it written down.’
It was July, warm and airless, no sign of the sun. It pleased Bea that all this had occurred when the summer holidays were about to start and no one in her class would have to know she was in an audition for a TV thing. ‘Of course you’ll have to say,’ Iris had said, ‘if you get the part. On account they’ll see you when it comes on.’
Bea thought she probably wouldn’t. It could even be they wouldn’t recognize her, which was what she’d like. She didn’t know why she wanted that, at the same time wanting so much to get the part because of Dickie. ‘So what kind of a story is it?’ Dickie had asked in the Wild Park and she said a woman was murdered in it.
‘Practise a bit?’ Iris said when they were back in the flat, after they’d had clam chowder and salad.
Bea didn’t want to, now that the audition was over, but Iris said it would pass the time. So they practised for an hour and then sat by the open window, listening to the sound of the traffic coming from Chalmers Street, watching the people going by, the afternoon turned sunny at last. ‘Don’t be disappointed,’ Iris kept saying, and when the telephone rang at a quarter to six she said it could be anyone. It could be Dickie about tomorrow, or the telephone people, who often rang at this time on a Saturday to explain some scheme or other, offering free calls if you did what they wanted you to do.
But it was the girl in the navy-blue jumper to say that Bea had got the part.
*
The rehearsals took place in an army drill-hall. Iris had to be there too, and at the studios where the set was, and on location. She had arranged to take her holiday specially; and it worried Bea that she intended to call in sick when the holiday time ran out. ‘I know this place!’ she cried, excitedly looking round the drill-hall when they walked into it the first morning.
‘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?’