that, I was sympathique to it, but it was slow to blossom. At first there were others who appeared more talented than he, certainly who attracted more public notice, more press reaction, more work.’
‘They worked while they were here?’
She at once became guarded, as if this were a patch of coals over which she had been hauled before. ‘Most stage schools also act as agencies for child performers and a lot of our pupils do a great deal of work, subject of course to the legal restrictions of only working forty days in the year and with adequate breaks. All the children are chaperoned and — ’
But Charles was not writing a muck-raking article on the exploitation of child actors, so he tactfully cut her short, and asked if she would show him some of the early photographs of Christopher Milton.
She obliged readily. ‘Here are some from 1952.’ They looked very dated. Styles of period stage costume change quite as much as current fashion and the starched ruffs and heavy Elizabethan garments the children wore had the same distant unreal quality as Victorian pornography. ‘This is from a production of Much Ado my students did. Christopher was playing Claudio.’
Charles took the photograph she proffered. Christopher Milton’s face was instantly recognisable, even under a jewelled and feathered hat. All twenty-three years had done was to cut the creases deeper into his skin.
But it was the other two children who intrigued Charles. They were beautiful. Their grace in the heavy costumes made them look like figures from an Elizabethan painting and showed up Christopher Milton as very twentieth century, almost gauche in doublet and hose. The girl had a perfect heart-shaped face and long-lashed eyes whose grave stare, even from the old photograph, was strongly sensual. She appeared to be looking at the boy, who returned her gaze with the same kind of intensity. He had the epicene grace which some adolescent boys capture before they coarsen into adults. The face was almost baby-like in its frame of long blond curls. The eyes were deep-set and powerful.
‘Claudio,’ Charles repeated after a long pause. ‘That’s not the best part in the play. Presumably this young man played Benedict?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he good?’
‘Yes, he was very good. He did a lot of film work in his teens. Gareth Warden, do you remember the name?’
‘It rings a bell.’ Yes, Julian Paddon had mentioned it and, now he saw the photograph, Charles realised that Gareth Warden had been in the film he’d caught the tail-end of on Jim Waldeman’s television. That seemed so long ago it was like a memory from a previous incarnation. ‘And the girl?’
‘Prudence Carr. She was a clever little actress, so clever.’
‘And she played Beatrice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any idea what happened to her? Or to Gareth Warden, come to that?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Bostock. The theatre brings its share of heartbreaks to everyone who is involved in it.’ She gave a long sigh, which was a good demonstration of the breath control so vital for elocution and which was also meant to imply a lifetime of theatrical heartbreaks. ‘Neither of them did much so far as I know. Dear Garry had the misfortune of early success. It’s so difficult for them to make the transition from playing child parts to adult ones. As you see, he was a beautiful boy. Perhaps he lost his looks as he got older. Perhaps he decided the theatre was not the career he wanted. Je no sais pas. He hasn’t kept in touch at all.’
‘And the girl?’
‘The same story. I haven’t seen her since she left my care. Maybe she didn’t go into the theatre.’
‘She should have done. With looks like that. And if she could act as well as you say.’
‘Ah, she was magic. But things change. Fate takes a hand. Maybe she settled down and got married. How many promising careers have been cut short by matrimony. And how many only started by the failure of matrimony,’ she added mysteriously with a suffering gaze out of the window to some distant memory. ‘But c’est la vie. Some rise and some fall. Of those three, all the same age, all so talented, one was chosen, one who was more talented, one who had the real magic of stardom, and that was dear Christopher. He triumphed and left his rivals standing.’
With recent knowledge of Christopher Milton’s methods of leaving his rivals standing, Charles wondered if there was some story from the past which might show a parallel. ‘Presumably, Miss da Costa, with three students who were so talented in the same area, there must have been moments of jealousy between them?’ he probed.
‘Ah, the young are always jealous. They are so afraid, they feel that if they are not the absolute best in the world, then they are the absolute worst. Only with time can they understand that most are destined to be fairly good or fairly bad, that the world is made up of mediocrity and that only a chosen few, like dear Christopher, will be the best.’
Charles tried to move her from generalisations to the specific. ‘You mean they were jealous of each other?’
‘But of course. They would not be normal if they weren’t.’
‘And was that jealousy ever expressed in violence?’
‘Violence?’ Her eyes widened and again she stiffened as if he were trying to find scandal. ‘Of course not I kept a respectable school, Mr Bostock. Nowadays, if one can believe the newspapers, violence in the classroom is commonplace. I did not allow it in my school.’
‘No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’ Charles covered his retreat clumsily, realising that he wasn’t going to get any answers to that question. But then it struck him that a bit of well-placed journalistic boorishness might be productive. ‘Of course, Miss da Costa, another thing we keep reading about in the newspapers is sex in the classroom.’
‘Sex.’ She gave the word Lady Bracknell delivery.
‘Yes, I mean, a group of young adolescents together, it’s inevitable that they’re going to form relationships. I was wondering, I mean, say these three youngsters, was there also some kind of emotional attachment between them?’ He was glad he had come in disguise. Charles Paris could sever have managed this crudeness of approach.
The question touched a nerve which had apparently been exposed before. ‘Mr Bostock, I don’t think there is any need to go over this ground again. The investigation by the local education authority in 1963 revealed that I was quite blameless in that matter.’
Intriguing though it was, Miss da Costa’s dark secret had no relevance to his current enquiries, so Charles tried to retrieve some of the ground he had lost. ‘I’m sorry, I think you misunderstand me. I’m not talking about 1963. As you know, I’m interested only in Christopher Milton. What I meant by my question was, was there maybe some early schoolboy romance we could mention? You know, the women readers go for all that stuff. “My first romance.” It was a perfectly innocent enquiry.’
It worked. ‘Oh, I see.’ She sat back. ‘I’m sorry, but I have had cause in my life to be somewhat wary of the press. When one has figured in the private life of the great…’ Again she left the hint of her wildly romantic past dangling to be snapped up by anyone interested. Charles wasn’t, so she continued after a pause. ‘Well, of course, when you are speaking of young people, of beautiful young people, yes, l’amour cannot be far away. Oh, I’m sure at one time or another, all three of them were in love with each other. All such sensitive creatures. Yes, I have seen the two boys wildly, madly in love. I have seen them both look at Prudence in a way… in a way one can recognise if one has seen it directed at oneself. Then one understands. Ah, I sometimes wonder if one has loved at all if one has not heard a lover’s voice reciting Swinburne soft in one’s ear. Don’t you?’
He thought that Charles Paris, and Alfred Bostock’s answers to that question might well be identical, so he tried to get the conversation back on the subject and avoid the Ellen da Costa Anthology of Love Poetry. ‘Hmm,’ he offered, in a way that he hoped dismissed Swinburne. ‘I was wondering, do you know if either of the affairs with Prudence continued after they left the school?’
‘Mr Bostock, I do not like your word “affair”; it implies impropriety at my school.’
‘I’m sorry. You’re misunderstanding me again. I just meant, you know, the… friendships.’
‘That, Mr Bostock, I’m afraid I don’t know. For the first year after they left, I heard a little of them — well, that was inevitable. I act as agent for all my pupils for their first year out of school.’
‘You mean you put them under exclusive contract?’
