‘When Jean and Julie come back on after the ballet. Everything’s changed,’ he said. ‘They haven’t just been billing and cooing in the rose garden. They’ve been – you know, passionately, irresistibly . . .’ He paused. ‘It affects the whole play. That’s why you commit suicide.’
‘You sound like Rutherford,’ she said. ‘Or have you been reading too much D. H. Lawrence?’
They were rolling down Regent Street towards the Café Royal. It was a warm clear night, not too muggy for late July. The cab pulled up and Lysander paid the driver and helped Gilda down carefully. She was wearing a very tight hobble-skirt that gave her a footstep of no more than eighteen inches and a sleeveless silk blouse freighted with flounces and ribbonry. She had a pearl choker at her throat and long white gloves almost to her armpits. Her curly blonde hair had been subdued under numerous hair-ornaments. He handed over her chiffon stole and she wound it loosely around her bare shoulders.
‘You look very beautiful, Gilda,’ he said. ‘And you were superb tonight as Isabella,’ he added, sincerely.
‘Stop. You’ll make me cry.’
He offered her his arm and they went into the Café through the revolving doors to be met by a manic babble of talk and laughter and a blurry wall of smoke.
‘We’re with the Rutherford Davison party,’ Lysander said to the maître d’.
‘Upstairs, first floor,’ the man said. ‘The smaller of the two private rooms.’
They walked up the stairs. On the landing they could hear the excited talk and laughter coming from the rest of the company through the open door of the private room, left ajar as if in welcome, expecting them. There was a pop of a champagne bottle opening and the sound of people clapping. Gilda tugged on his elbow and held him back, pausing them both in the gloom of the corridor. She looked around and took his hand and drew him to her. Their faces were close.
‘What’s going on?’ Lysander said.
She kissed him hard on his lips and pressed herself against him. He felt her tongue pushing, flickering, and he opened his mouth. Then she stepped back, checked the copious frilling of her blouse and readjusted her chiffon stole. Lysander took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his lips in case there were any traces of her lip-rouge. She looked at him squarely – a look that came from the real Gilda Butterfield.
‘We’d better go in,’ she said, ‘or they’ll wonder what’s become of us.’
She linked arms with him again and they walked into the room together. The company rose to their feet and applauded.
Lysander allowed a waiter to pour him more champagne as he tried to listen to what Rutherford Davison was saying. He was very aware of Gilda across the room and the many glances she was throwing his way. He felt in something of a quandary. He decided to see simply where the evening would lead. A night for instincts, not rationality, he decided.
‘No,’ Rutherford was saying, ‘I think we’ll do two full weeks of Measure and then very quickly announce Miss Julie. I have a horrible feeling they’ll close us down as soon as the reviews start appearing so we want to have as many performances as possible.’
‘But it was done in Birmingham this year, you said. So there’s a precedent.’
‘A precedent for a very boring, prudish, safe-as-houses production. Wait till you see how we do it – what I’ve got planned.’
‘It’s your company.’
Lysander had grown to like Rutherford – perhaps ‘like’ was the wrong word – he had grown to trust his intuition and his intelligence. He was not naturally a warm or open person but he seemed to know what he was doing and didn’t waver from his purpose. He had said that Measure for Measure and Miss Julie were a perfect double-bill as both plays were fundamentally about sex, even though they were written three centuries apart. Certainly the emphases and undercurrents that had been revealed this evening had set audible mutterings running through the audience a few times. He wondered what the reviews would be like – not that he’d be reading them. Rutherford said he only read reviews for adjectives and adverbs – he was hoping for ‘shocking’ and ‘daring’ – even ‘disgraceful’ would suit. We’re here to stir things up, he had said to the company. Let’s show them a Shakespeare as troubled and worldly as the sonnets. This Swan of Avon has paddled through a sewer.
Lysander moved off and wandered round the room. He ate a couple of canapés and chatted to some of the other actors and their friends, aware of Gilda circling the room in the other direction – anti- to his clockwise. It was after midnight. He went back to the bar and ordered a brandy and soda.
‘Would you light my cigarette, please, kind sir?’ Cockney accent. Lysander turned.
Gilda stood there, a cigarette in a jet holder, poised. A little tipsy, he thought. He took out his lighter and clicked the flame into life and offered it to the end of her cigarette. She inhaled, checked the fit of the cigarette in the holder and blew smoke from the side of her mouth. She lowered her voice to an intimate near whisper, moving her mouth close to his ear. He felt her warm breath on his neck. Goosebumps.
‘Don’t you think, Lysander dear, purely in the interests of dramatic authenticity, we should practise our “Miss Julie” fornication? Perhaps?’
‘As long as it’s purely in the interests of the drama. What could be wrong with that?’
‘Nothing. Even Rutherford would approve.’
‘Then I think it’s an excellent idea. My place isn’t far. I’m alone tonight. We can practise there undisturbed.’ Greville was in Manchester, touring in Nance Oldfield with Virginia Farringford.
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? he thought to himself, feeling very tempted. He looked her in the eye – she didn’t flinch
‘Why don’t you go down,’ Gilda said, smiling, ‘find a cab and I’ll be there in five minutes?’
She blew him a kiss, making a moue with her lips, and glided away from him. Lysander felt that breathless pressure in his chest and blood-heat around the neck and ears that signalled his excitement. It was probably a very, very bad idea and no doubt he would curse himself for the rest of the run but for the first time since Vienna and Hettie he felt like being with a woman – felt like being with Gilda Butterfield, to be precise.
He said his goodbyes and went downstairs. The maître d’ sent a boy out to hail him a cab and he stood there waiting, humming a song to himself – ‘My Melancholy Baby’ – full of eager anticipation and pushing the thought to the back of his mind that this evening would also be the acid test of his Bensimon cure. There had never been a problem with Hettie but then there had never been anyone since Hettie . . . He saw a man he vaguely knew collecting his hat and coat from the cloakroom. Their eyes met and recognition was immediate. Alwyn Munro sauntered over towards him.
‘Lysander Rief, the great escapologist, as I live and breathe.’
They shook hands. For some reason, Lysander noted, he was pleased to see Munro.
‘Celebrating?’ Munro said, indicating his dinner jacket and buttonhole.
‘First night. Measure for Measure.’
‘Congratulations. Funnily enough we were just talking about you today,’ Munro said, looking at him shrewdly. ‘Where’re you living now? I’ve something to send you.’
Lysander gave him his address in Chandos Place.
‘Still in Vienna?’ Lysander asked.
‘No, no. We’ve almost all got out now. Now the war seems inevitable.’
‘War? I thought it was just general sabre-rattling. Austria and Serbia, you know.’
‘And the Russians and the Germans and the French rattling their sabres too. It’ll be us in a few days. You wait and see.’