An Awfully Big Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bunny who took charge of her. Bunny was there, padding up and down the stone passages in his galoshes, but he was too occupied to pay her and Geoffrey much attention. It was left to George to explain that Meredith was away in London with the set designer, choosing costumes for the opening production. Until then, in the hope that Meredith would stumble across her, Stella had wasted the best part of three days hunched on the stairs turning over the pages of a library edition of Shakespeare’s tragedies. She had combed her hair so often in anticipation she imagined it had grown thinner.
    It was George who informed her that the actors wouldn’t be arriving for another ten days. One or two of the junior members might sidle in to enquire about digs, but she needn’t expect to spot Richard St Ives, the leading man, or Dorothy Blundell, his opposite number, until the very last moment. St Ives and Miss Blundell, along with Babs Osborne, the character juvenile, had been in last season’s company. It was unusual in repertory to be engaged for a second term, although before the war P.L. O’Hara, by public demand, had returned three years running. Not that St Ives could hold a candle to P.L. O’Hara. Had he wanted, and the hostilities not intervened, O’Hara might have come back for a fourth season.
    ‘What’s a character juvenile?’ asked Stella, and George said it was any girl not handsome enough to be a straight juvenile. He didn’t look her in the eye, but she wasn’t offended; she had always known to which category she belonged.
    St Ives and Dorothy Blundell shared the same digs, though there was nothing going on between them. Since playing the Queen to his King in the 1938 production of Richard II , Miss Blundell had carried a torch for P.L. O’Hara. She was wasting her time. In life, as in the play, she had never been more than an appendage. According to George, Dotty Blundell was an unrequited woman.
    St Ives preferred to woo touring actresses appearing at the Royal Court or the Empire. Having loved them, it was convenient the way they left him. Last year he’d clicked with the lead in Rose Marie , a soprano with legs that wouldn’t have disgraced a piano stool and twin infants being bottle-fed by her Mum in Blackburn.
    ‘I saw it,’ cried Stella, greatly excited, remembering Lily’s birthday treat, and Uncle Vernon turning queasy in the second interval following high tea in the Golden Dragon.
    ‘Rose Marie’ had misunderstood St Ives’s intentions. Her tour had moved on to the Hippodrome in Leeds and on the Sunday, starting at dawn and driven by a trombonist in the orchestra who was sweet on her, she had motored all the way back to Liverpool. The trombone player, thinking they’d returned to collect a ration book left with the landlady, had remained outside in Faulkner Square, puffing on a cigar. He’d wound up the window when the bells of the Anglican cathedral began to ring for morning service and missed altogether the commotion inside the boarding-house. The penny having dropped – St Ives and a woman he swore was his Auntie from Cardiff were discovered in matching pyjamas, he in the top and she in the bottoms – ‘Rose Marie’ took a screwdriver, normally used to poke the fat from the gas jets on the cooker, and attempted to stab him in the groin. St Ives had got into hot water over it with Rose Lipman; she’d said he could have gone down with blood poisoning and jeopardised the season. Babs Osborne was the paramour of a Polish ex-fighter pilot who was now big in scrap metal.
    ‘He’s romancing,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ve met his sort before. He’s just trying to make out he’s pally with them all.’
    ‘The cooker bit sounds authentic,’ argued Stella. ‘You don’t mention fat for nothing.’
    She felt at ease with George. He had lent her a dark blue overall to guard her clothes from the dust. It covered almost completely the mustard-coloured slacks and jumper that Lily had bought her.