audience, the scene changes, the laundry mistresses, the wardrobe people and the carpenters. He knew how to get scorch marks out of a starched collar, how to fix a cellulose filter over a follow-spot, how to unjam the springs on a star trap and how to keep bills unpaid until the receipts were in.
Like Elspeth, he was unmarried and probably unmarriageable, because his career constituted a betrothal of sorts. Unlike Elspeth, he had a sex life, rather too much of one. In addition to dating girls in the shows, he made visits to a private house in the East End, where for a reasonable fee his needs were taken care of. This abundance of sexual activity allowed him to concentrate on his job without becoming distracted by the dancers’ bodies during rehearsals. He had grown up in the Empires and Alhambras, helping his parents prepare for the night’s performance, and could imagine no other world. Colours were duller outside, and the skies were not painted but real, which made them untrustworthy. In the theatre, you always followed the script. Beyond this world there were only unrehearsed moves, mistimed entrances, lines spoken out of turn.
The start of the second great war brought unwelcome transitions to Geoffrey’s hermetic world. Venues were changing hands, falling empty, getting bombed. Philanthropy had been replaced by the desire for quick profit. Boxing matches and coarse variety acts moved in to entertain a new type of audience: commoner, louder, one that lived from moment to moment. Now there was something less comforting in the atmosphere before a show, something contaminated by the urgent, hysterical laughter that nightly rang from the stalls. Theatres were more frenetic, and companies diminished as the most able-bodied men went off to war. The Shaftesbury was bombed, the Strand and Sadler’s Wells went dark. It was like a game of musical chairs, and nobody knew when the music might suddenly stop.
But Elspeth and Geoffrey still heard the audiences of their childhoods above the sound of hot water gurgling in the pipes, still listened to the ticking of the warm-air conduits, the backstage footfalls of departing painters. They were still the sounds of home.
And something had irreversibly changed. Elspeth had sensed it first at the outbreak of the war, a creeping disquiet that felt wholly out of place between the gaudy vermilion aisles of the Palace Theatre. She was alive to the smallest changes around her, and could detect any eddy of emotion in the silent building.
Late one night, closing up after a performance, she had suffered a terrible premonition, and her life had passed before her eyes. She told no one about the dark, scarred thing that stalked behind her in the rufescent rows of the dress circle, creeping down the vertiginous steps of the balcony. She experienced a sense of panic more with each passing performance, never knowing at what hour it might strike, for there is no day and night in a theatre. She only knew that it was there, watching and waiting, that it meant harm, and that something wicked had to happen.
Anxious to escape, she slipped out of the building and into the blackout, following the white stripes that had been painted on the paraffin lamps hanging from the protection boards around the front wall of the theatre. The Palace was her habitat, but she was lately being driven from it. She stopped and looked up at the entresol windows, and glimpsed the terrible visage, a pale oval peering out of the smoking salon at her, its features so distorted that it could barely be considered human.
Geoffrey had seen the faceless creature too, scurrying between the rows of the balcony, loping across a distant corridor, but he had not believed his senses. It was the war, he told himself, shaking his head. The constant fear played tricks on you. Last month a bomb had fallen through the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, destroying the high altar. For many it had seemed like a blow struck against God himself. If Hitler was the devil kept at bay, perhaps his acolytes were already here, moving among them, and wouldn’t they choose such a godless place as a theatre from which to corrupt the innocent?
Geoffrey Whittaker sat in his office on Sunday evening and smoked, but his hands shook. Nothing could drive him from the only world he understood. He told himself that, at forty-six, he was too old for an attack of nerves. There were men out there less than half his age fighting to preserve his freedom, even though he did not want to be free. He was a willing prisoner of the theatre, its plans and strictures. His life was patterned on the stage directions of a dog-eared script. But something had crept inside his world that had no place in the production. His trembling fingers pulled another cigarette from the pack and inserted it between his lips.
Outside the Palace, Elspeth Wynter ran on into the blackout, through the empty city streets, her breath ragged behind her ribs, daring herself to go forward into darkness, frightened to return. But the home that had nurtured her for so many years could not be left so easily. It too was her domain, and beyond it, beyond the blackouts, there was no structure, no control, only the terrible light of freedom.
For Elspeth and Geoffrey, and hundreds like them, theatres were the last repose of stasis and sanity in a world hurtling beyond sense. But even they would be touched by the bloody hand of madness.
? Full Dark House ?
14
DOUBLE ACT
“What the hell are you talking about, keep it out of the press?” asked Benjamin Woolf. “I’ve already had a call asking why she didn’t keep an appointment with a photographer this morning. What am I supposed to do?”
“This is a tragedy for all of us, Ben,” said Helena Parole, whose earnest attempts to empathize with others were undermined by the fact that she didn’t care about anyone else. “I understand your feelings entirely.” She compounded the hypocrisy by rolling her eyes at May coquettishly.
That Tuesday morning, the mood at the Palace Theatre was fractious. Thanks to a night of bright moonlight there had been bombing raids until dawn, and no one had slept well. Sloane Square tube station had been hit, killing many. In the morning’s papers, questions were being raised about the efficacy of public shelters. Not enough people were using them, and there were rumours among those who did that infection was rampant. Sanitation remained haphazard, and there was a general feeling that the unchanged air spread all manner of germs. Most Londoners preferred to stay at home, tucked inside cupboards, under the stairs, sleeping in ground-floor rooms or outside in an Anderson shelter: fourteen arched sheets of corrugated iron bolted together and half buried under earth that flooded in wet weather but could survive everything except a direct hit.
The stage was still empty. Few of the cast had yet arrived, but members of the orchestra were seated in the pit, patiently waiting to resume rehearsals. They usually practised in airy rooms behind Waterloo Station, but those had been requisitioned by the War Office, and now the musicians were crammed before the stage in a dimly lit theatre instead of playing in a sunlit space overlooking the river. The most able-bodied among them had been taken by conscription, and they had been forced to fill up their ranks with fiddlescratchers from the twice-nightlies and even a couple of Leicester Square buskers.
Luckily their conductor, Anton Varisich, like many great conductors, was as adept at diplomacy as he was at extracting mellifluous harmonies from his motley crew. He had topped up the percussion and woodwind sections with exiled Spanish and French players, lending the arrangements a jaunty cosmopolitan air in keeping with Offenbach’s play, but previously unheard in London. The nation’s music still owed more to the palm court than the boulevard, and consequently the players were having a whale of a time because they were doing something new. Quite how they’d manage to rehearse when the cast turned up and wanted to practise their lines would remain to be seen.
“Will you understand when I tell the next person who calls that your star dancer might be a little late for rehearsals on account of not having any
“You can’t be serious.”
“That’s what they’re saying.” Woolf threw his long body back down onto seat C15 and smoothed a hand across his brilliantined hair. There was an ever-present aura of sarcasm about him that no one responded to positively. “The police are crawling all over the building, you won’t tell any of us what’s going on and I’m supposed to act like everything’s tickety-boo.”
Helena glared up into the darkness beneath the roof. “Benjamin, please, you’re an agent, lying is a professional qualification for you, like a merit badge or something. You can tell the press she’s joined the WAAFs and flown to Timbuktu on a mercy mission if you want, and they’d have no choice but to believe you. She’s frightfully upper class, and her reputation will need protecting.”
Their conversation was punctuated by the noise of the wind section practising scales. Woolf had to raise his
