An Awfully Big Adventure Read online

  CONTENTS

  An Awfully Big Adventure

  About the Author

  An Awfully Big Adventure

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Chapter 0

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 0

  About the Author

  Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.

  AN AWFULLY

  BIG ADVENTURE

  Beryl Bainbridge

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  For Yolanta and Derwent May

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  First published in Great Britain by Duckworth in 1989

  Published with minor revisions by Penguin Books in 1991

  Copyright © Beryl Bainbridge, 1989, 1990

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Special Trustees of the Hospitals for Sick Children for their permission to quote from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; to Faber & Faber Ltd for kind permission to reprint four lines from ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot; and to Peters Fraser and Dunlop for permission to reprint a quotation from Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley.

  All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 0 748 12526 5

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

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  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  www.hachettelivre.co.uk

  SLIGHTLY: (Examining the fallen Wendy more minutely) This is no bird; I think it must be a lady.

  NIBS: (Who would have preferred it to be a bird) And Tootles has killed her.

  CURLY: Now I see. Peter was bringing her to us. (They wonder for what object).

  OMNES: (Though everyone of them had wanted to take a shot at her) Oh, Tootles!

  TOOTLES: (Gulping) I did it. When ladies used to come to me in dreams I said: ‘Pretty mother‘, but when she really came I shot her.

  James Barrie, Peter Pan, Act Two.

  0

  When the fire curtain had been lowered and the doors were at last closed, Meredith thought he heard a child crying. He switched on the house lights, but of course there was no one there. Some unfortunate had left a teddy-bear perched on the tip-up seat in the third row.

  The girl was waiting for him in the property room. At his approach she stepped backwards, as though afraid he would strike her. He didn’t look at her; he simply told her, in that particular tone of voice which in the past he had always used for other people, that he wasn’t interested in excuses and that in any case there were none that would fit the bill.

  ‘I was upset,’ she protested. ‘Anybody would be. It will never happen again.’

  They both heard a door opening on the floor above, and footsteps as Rose clumped along the passage.

  ‘If it was up to me,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘you wouldn’t get the chance.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ the girl persisted. ‘He was happy. He kept saying “Well done”. I’m not old enough to shoulder the blame. Not all of it. I’m not the only one at fault.’

  ‘Get out of my sight,’ he said, and pushing past her strode up the corridor to waylay Rose.

  ‘I was encouraged,’ she shouted after him. ‘Don’t you forget that!’

  He slashed the air with his hook.

  ‘You don’t want to be too hard on her,’ Rose said. ‘She’s young.’

  He followed her through the pass door and across the dark stage into the auditorium. When Rose saw the teddy-bear she picked it up by one ear and walked on with it dangling against the skirt of her black frock.

  ‘Did you get through to the wife?’ asked Meredith.

  ‘I did,’ Rose said. ‘She’s coming up on the milk train.’

  He climbed the stone steps after her, ducking his head beneath the singing gas mantles until they reached the top floor and the round window overlooking the square. Only the fireman and the rat-catcher came this far.

  ‘The note,’ he enquired. ‘Did it shed any illumination?’

  ‘Who can tell?’ she said. ‘Bunny saw fit to put a match to it.’

  At this hour the square was empty. The flower-sellers had long since gone home, leaving the orange boxes piled up beside the urinals. Between the jagged buildings the lights of ships jumped like sparks above the river.

  They stood in silence, looking down into the darkness as though waiting for a curtain to rise. There was a sudden seep of orange light as the door of Brown’s Café opened and the slattern in the gumboots staggered out to sling washing-up slops into the gutter.

  Then the girl appeared from out of the side street and began to run in the direction of the telephone box on the corner. Once she looked back and up at the window as though she knew she was observed. At this distance her face was a pale blur. A man with a white muffler wound about his throat rolled from the black shadows of Ice Warehouse and the girl stopped and spoke to him.

  He fumbled in his pockets and handed her something. He was holding a bouquet of flowers in a twist of paper.

  ‘The Board won’t like it,’ Meredith said. ‘Rushworth is bound to kick up rough.’

  ‘I’m a match for him,’ said Rose. She was holding the teddy-bear to her sequinned breast, circling with the pad of her finger the cold button of its eye.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Meredith asked her, ‘that we can keep it out of the newspapers.’

  ‘I could,’ Rose told him, ‘but I won’t. The orphanage has rung twice already. God forgive us, but it’ll be good for business.’

  Directly below, where the branches of the lime trees bounced in the wind, sending the lamplight skeetering across the cobblestones, the man in the muffler stood relieving himself within the wrought-iron enclosure of the public urinal, one arm fastidiously raised above his head. They could see his boots, glossy under the street lamp, and that bedraggled fistful of winter daffodils . . .

  1

  At first it had been Uncle Vernon’s ambition, not Stella’s. He thought he understood he
r; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown more caution. ‘I’ll not chase moonbeams,’ she told him.

  Still, she went along with the idea and for two years, on a Friday after school, she ran down the hill to Hanover Street and rode the lift in Crane Hall, up through the showrooms of polished pianofortes where the blind men fingered scales, until she reached the top floor and Mrs Ackerley whose puckered mouth spat out ‘How now brown cow’ behind the smokescreen of her Russian cigarettes.

  She came home and shut herself in her bedroom off the scullery and spouted speeches. She sat at the tea table and dropped her cup to the saucer, spotting the good cloth with tannic acid, wailing that it might be a poison that the Friar Lawrence had administered. When Uncle Vernon shouted at her she said she wasn’t old enough to control either her reflexes or her emotions. She had always had a precise notion of what could be expected of her.

  Lily had imagined that the girl was merely learning to speak properly and was dismayed to hear it was called Dramatic Art. She fretted lest Stella build up hopes only to have them dashed.

  Then Stella failed her mock school certificate and her teachers decided it wasn’t worth while entering her for the real thing. Uncle Vernon went off to the school prepared to bluster, and returned convinced. They’d agreed she had the brains but not the application.

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ he told Lily. ‘We both know it’s useless reasoning with her.’

  He made enquiries and pulled strings. After the letter came Stella spent four extra Saturday mornings at Crane Hall being coached by Mrs Ackerley in the telephone scene from the Bill of Divorcement. Mrs Ackerley, dubious about her accent, had thought a Lancashire drama more suitable, preferably a comedy; the girl was something of a clown.

  Stella would have none of it. She was a mimic, she said, and sure enough she took off Mrs Ackerley’s own smoky tone of voice to perfection. Admittedly she was a little young for the part, but, as she shrewdly observed, this would only stress her versatility. The audition was fixed for the third Monday in September.

  Ten days before, over breakfast, she told Uncle Vernon she was having second thoughts.

  ‘Get away with you,’ he said. ‘It’s too late to change things now.’ He wrote out a shopping list and gave her a ten-shilling note. Half an hour later when he came up into the dark hall, jingling the loose coppers in his pocket, he found her huddled on the stairs, one plump knee wedged between the banister rails. He was annoyed because she knew she wasn’t supposed to hang about this part of the house, not unless she was in her good school uniform. She was staring at the damp patch that splodged the leaf-patterned wallpaper above the telephone.

  He switched on the light and demanded to know what she was playing at. At this rate there’d be nothing left on Paddy’s vegetable barrow but a bunch of mouldy carrots. Did she think this was any way to conduct a business?

  She was in one of her moods and pretended to be lost in thought. He could have hit her. There was nothing of her mother in her face, save perhaps for the freckles on her cheek-bones.

  ‘Carry on like this,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘and you’ll end up behind the counter at Woolworth’s.’ It was foolish of him to goad her. It was not beyond her to run towards such employment in order to spite him.

  ‘You push me too hard,’ she said. ‘You want reflected glory.’

  He raised his arm then, but when she pushed past him with swimming eyes his world was drowned in tears.

  He telephoned Harcourt and sought reassurance, in a round-about way. ‘Three bottles of disinfectant,’ he said, reading from the list in front of him. ‘Four pounds of carbolic soap . . . one dozen candles . . . two dozen toilet rolls . . . George Lipman’s put in a word with his sister. On Stella’s behalf.’

  ‘’Fraid I can only manage a dozen,’ Harcourt said. ‘And they’re shop-soiled.’

  ‘Am I doing the right thing, I ask myself?’

  ‘I don’t see what else is open to her,’ said Harcourt. ‘Not if the school won’t have her back.’

  ‘Not won’t,’ corrected Vernon. ‘It’s more that they don’t feel she’ll gain any benefit from staying on. And you know Stella. Once her mind’s made up . . .’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ said Harcourt. Although he had never met the girl he often remarked to his wife that he could take an exam on the subject, if pushed. His extensive knowledge of Stella was based on the regular progress reports provided by Vernon when making his monthly order for bathroom and wash-house supplies.

  ‘She caused an uproar the other week,’ confided Vernon, ‘over the hoteliers’ dinner dance: Lily got her hands on some parachute silk and took her to that dressmaker in Duke Street to be fitted for a frock. Come the night, with the damn thing hanging up on the back door to get rid of the creases, she refused to wear it. She was adamant. In the end none of us went. I expect you all wondered where we were.’

  ‘We did,’ lied Harcourt.

  ‘She took exception to the sleeves. According to her they were too puffy. She said she wasn’t going out looking as if her arms belonged to an all-in wrestler. I never saw her in it, but Lily said she was a picture. She’s burgeoning, you know.’

  ‘Is she?’ Harcourt said, and thought briefly of his own daughter who, in comparison with Stella, often seemed an imitation of the real thing. He had no idea whether his daughter was burgeoning or not; night and day she walked with rounded shoulders, clutching a handbag to her chest. ‘And how’s the cough?’ he asked. He listened to the faint scratching of Vernon’s moustache as it brushed against the mouthpiece.

  ‘No problem at all,’ Vernon said. ‘Absolutely none. Kind of you to ask. I’m much obliged to you,’ and he ordered a new bucket and a tin of bath scourer before replacing the receiver.

  He told Lily that Harcourt believed they were doing the best thing. She was chopping up a rabbit in the scullery. ‘Harcourt thinks she was born for it,’ he said.

  Lily was unconvinced. ‘People like us don’t go to plays,’ she said. ‘Let alone act in them.’

  ‘But she’s not one of us, is she?’ he retorted, and what answer was there to that?

  They came down the steps as though walking a tightrope, Stella pointing her toes in borrowed shoes, Uncle Vernon leaning backwards, purple waistcoat bulging above the waistband of his trousers, one hand under her elbow, the other holding aloft a black umbrella against the rain.

  It was a terrible waistcoat, made out of pieces of untrimmed felt that Lily had bought at a salvage sale with the purpose of jollying up the cushions in the residents’ lounge. She had meant to sew triangles, squares and stars on to the covers, only she hadn’t got round to it.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ the girl said, shaking herself free. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’

  ‘So,’ Uncle Vernon said, ‘what’s new?’ But his tone was good-humoured.

  The three o’clock aeroplane, the one that climbed from Speke and circled the city on five-minute trips, had just bumped overhead. Alarmed at its passage the pigeons still swam above the cobblestones; all, that is, save the one-legged bird who hopped in the gutter, beak pecking at the rear mudguard of the taxi. It was such a dark day that the neon sign above the lintel of the door had been flashing on and off since breakfast; the puddles winked crimson. Later, after he had visited the house, Meredith said that only brothels went in for red lights.

  Spat upon by the rain, Stella covered her head with her hands; she knew she was watched from an upstairs window. Earlier that morning Lily had sat her down at the kitchen table and subjected her to the curling tongs. The tongs, fading in mid-air from rust to dull blue, had snapped at the locks of her hair and furled them up tight against her skull. Then, released in fits and starts, the singed curls, sausage-shaped, flopped upon the tacked-on collar of her velvet frock.

  ‘In the grave,’ Stella had said, ‘my hair and nails will continue to grow.’

  Lily had pulled a face, although later she
intended to repeat the remark for the benefit of the commercial traveller with the skin grafts. He, more than most, even if it was a bit close to the bone, would appreciate the observation. To her way of thinking it was yet another indication of the girl’s cleverness, a further example, should one be needed, of her ferocious, if morbid, imagination.

  Uncle Vernon paid off the cab right away. The arrangement had been struck the night before after a turbulent discussion in which Stella had declared she’d prefer to die rather than tip the driver. ‘I’ll go on the tram instead,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll rain,’ Uncle Vernon told her. ‘You’ll arrive messed up.’

  She said she didn’t care. There was something inside her, she intimated, that would become irretrievably sullied if she got involved with the business of tipping.

  ‘You just give him sixpence,’ Uncle Vernon had argued. ‘Ninepence at the most. I can’t see your difficulty.’

  To which Stella had retorted that she found the whole transaction degrading. In her opinion it damaged the giver quite as much as the receiver.

  ‘Well, don’t tip him, you fool,’ Uncle Vernon had countered. ‘Just chuck the exact amount through the window and make a run for it.’

  Debating anything with the girl was a lost cause. She constantly played to the gallery. No one was denying she could have had a better start in life, but then she wasn’t unique in that respect and it was no excuse for wringing the last drop of drama out of the smallest incident. Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to view.

  Mostly her behaviour smacked of manipulation, of opportunism. He’d known people like her in the army, people from working-class backgrounds, who’d read a few books and turned soft. If she had been a boy he’d have taken his belt to her, or at least the back of his hand.

  All that costly nonsense of keeping the landing light burning into the small hours. Lily said it was because she remembered that business of the night lights – for God’s sake, the child had been nine months old. He put it down to that poetry she was so fond of, all those rhymes and rhythms, those couplets of melancholy and madness that inflamed her imagination. Nor was he altogether sure she was afraid of the dark. Why, during the blackout, when the whole city was drowned in black ink, she had often gone out into the backyard and stood for an hour at a time, keening under the alderbush. And what about the time he had come home on leave and she had somehow slipped out of the shelter and he and the air-raid warden had found her crouched against the railings of the cemetery, clapping her hands together as the sugar warehouses on the Dock Road burst like paper bags and the sparks snapped like fire crackers against the sky?