Also by Patrick McGrath

The Grotesque

Blood and Water and Other Tales

Spider

Dr Haggard’s Disease

Asylum

Martha Peake: a Novel of the Revolution

Port Mungo

Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now

Trauma

Constance

Writing Madness

The Wardrobe Mistress

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Epub ISBN: 9781473544802

Version 1.0

Published by Hutchinson 2017

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Copyright © Patrick McGrath 2017

Cover © Getty images

Patrick McGrath has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson in 2017

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

ISBN 9781786330574

1

THE ACTOR CHARLIE Grice was dead. It was a shock, and that good society, the men and women of the London theatre, had come together for the funeral. It was January 1947 and a bitterly cold day in Golders Green. We gathered in the forecourt, and there were so many of us, once we got into the big chapel, that latecomers had to stand outside. A full house; well, Gricey deserved no less. Although whether he’d have chosen Golders Green, we rather doubt that. His daughter Vera was in dark glasses and a black fur coat. Herself an actress, she looked fragile, and clung to her mother’s arm throughout. Joan Grice was the mother, also in black and wearing a veil. Not well liked, Joan, but it was hard not to feel sorry for her that day. The marriage had apparently been a good one.

We’ve heard Joan Grice called a beautiful woman. A striking-looking woman, certainly, and a formidable one. Her hair was black and without a thread of silver. She wore it pulled back with some severity from her face, the better, it was said, to come at the world like a scythe. As tall as her late husband and a slim woman, her face was pale and sculpted, with the chin carried high, the whole seeming forged from some hard white stone; the effect could be dramatic. But oh dear – we hate to say it – her teeth were horrible! Discoloured, black at the roots and with gaps between. And as is the case with so many of the English, it may have accounted for the sourness of her personality, that is, her profound reluctance to smile. But if her tongue could be vicious her mind was clear, even in drink. And she was one of the best wardrobe mistresses in London.

For herself she liked good black cloth, an old-fashioned cut perhaps set off with a touch of silver at throat or wrist. With a needle she was more adroit than most, when she had to be, and fast too. With a little padding, a trim, a pleat, a pin, a stitch – a scrap of lace – she could turn the most unpromising garment into a thing of elegance and distinction. Under the coat she wore a boxy jacket, broad in the shoulder with a narrow skirt. Legs in sheer silk.

Joan took pride in her work and expected those who worked under her to observe her own high standards. She’d always tried to spare her husband the devastation she could visit on other, lesser mortals, not always successfully. But where their daughter was concerned – that is, when it came to Vera – she was a lion. Most of those present were known to her but there were a few – we knew who they were, oh yes – she’d never seen before, and they weren’t theatrical types, but then Gricey had mixed with all sorts, criminals not excepted. Sir John Brogue was there, and in good order, she’d often looked after his costumes, and there was Dame Anna Flitch, all in white, a vague smile on her badly powdered face as she handed out lilies, and where in god’s name did she get lilies in this winter of austerity? Ed Colefax was present, and Jimmy Urquhart, looking none the worse for a spell in the nick, her old friends Hattie Waterstone and Delphie Dix – that old hoofer in a wheelchair now – and Rupert, of course, skint, they said, but yes, so many of the old crowd, the ones who’d survived the war – and to think that Gricey missed it. He’d have loved it.

Vera meanwhile was still in her dark glasses, gripping tight her mother’s arm as they moved towards the chapel, and it was clear the poor girl was in some distress. So tall and lovely, a more statuesque woman than her mother and yet so delicate today, heartbreaking really, we thought so.

Vera’s husband was Julius Glass, the former impresario, a thin, sallow-skinned man some twenty years her senior, and he was on her left flank, and beside him was Gustl Herzfeld, a Jewish refugee he’d apparently saved from the Nazis, and a most interesting creature. She’d told Hattie she was Julius’ sister but we had our doubts. It seemed improbable, frankly. Julius meanwhile was sombre and watchful and loomed close over his women like a kind of yellow marsh heron. How Joan felt about him that day was anybody’s guess, but we’d heard talk that Julius and Gricey were not on the best of terms – put it mildly – and it was even said that Julius was there, on the steps, when he fell.

But this was the family, and together they were ushered to the front of the chapel and there took their pew. Joan could hear from behind her a murmur of chatter, and now and then some laughter. We’d all loved Gricey; some of us had, anyway. Then came the coffin. Oh, the hardest moment of all, surely. It entered stage left with six strong men carrying it. One convulsive sob from Vera, and Julius slid an arm around her. Joan thought she’d shake him off but instead she leaned into him as though she might otherwise crumple legless to the cold stone floor, poor girl. And cold it was in there all right, bloody freezing, we saw the speakers’ breath turn to smoke in the chill damp of that packed and steamy chapel. Snow was forecast for later in the day. We’re in for it, we thought, another foul bloody winter.

Then up they came to the podium to talk about the man. There were anecdotes. His war work as a special constable in the West End. The stories he’d told. He’d been there after that dreadful bomb came down the ventilation shaft of the Café de Paris, no laughing matter. It blew Snakehips Johnson to pieces. A hundred and eighty-six people died in London that night. Acts of kindness were remembered, support he’d given to others both moral and monetary at times of crisis or loss. Monetary, thought Joan, and where did that come from? There’d never been that much to spare.

Waves of sympathy flowed from the back of the chapel to those who’d been closest to him, she could feel it now, and much of it was for Vera, whose own story was familiar to this company. Such promise, a luminous stage presence; everyone said so. Absolutely distraught. She’d been very close to her father, of course. Everything she knew she’d learned from him, and just look at her now. Shattered.

When the service was over we watched old Gricey going out the back way, through the curtains, in his coffin – in his coffin! – and how are we supposed to live without him now? must have been their common thought, mother and daughter – then the danger of collapse was most real. But upright they stood, Vera’s dark glasses having come off, damp red eyes revealed in the wan, tragic face, lovely even in grief. Her arm was in her mother’s now as slowly they moved down the aisle, and not a dry eye in the house, every one of them fixed on these two tall, slow women in black, the mother upright and slender, the daughter swaying ever so slightly, seeming almost to totter in her sorrow. Like royalty they turned this way and that, nodding, offering the pressed-lip stoic half-smile to faces both sympathetic and tearful, but above all familiar from a thousand dressing rooms and curtain calls, opening-night parties and chilly rehearsals in cold church halls with frost on the windows. This was our world. We were saying goodbye to one of our own.

Then we were milling about in the courtyard again. Julius had offered his house for the wake, even laid on transport for those who had none. Joan wasn’t too happy about it, that was clear, but she didn’t have the energy to protest, poor thing. It’s a long way to Tipperary and it’s even longer from Golders Green to Pimlico but off we went, dozens of us, and when the family joined us later, after seeing Gricey laid to rest, or his ashes anyway, the party was going strong.

Actors are like priests, or perhaps undertakers, we’ve heard it said, for we live with death in a rather intimate kind of a way. We’ve all died a thousand deaths on a public stage and we don’t take it lightly. We don’t take it too seriously either. What we do take seriously is the suffering of the bereaved, and we’d turned out en masse for old Gricey, and when Joan and Vera entered Julius’ house it was packed, people in every room – in the backyard even, despite the cold and despite the long journey, but Vera had insisted. She wanted her dad’s wake in her husband’s house, as she’d wanted him cremated in Golders Green, and who could deny her? She had her reasons, and her mother knew better than to argue with her when Vera’s mind was made up. Even if it did mean having the wake in that man’s house.

It was just as the front door closed behind them, and the great wave of voices was upon them and they had to go forward and be part of it all, in fact play leading roles, that Joan first heard it – quiet, amused, oh, unmistakably him – her husband’s voice.

– Now just pull yourself together, dear. You’re on.

When she reached the kitchen she was given a large gin but she was bewildered, almost undone at hearing Gricey’s voice, and she wanted more. She wanted to hear him again, what she actually wanted was conversation, so she left the kitchen and went upstairs to Julius and Vera’s bedroom. She sat on the bed but there was nothing. Silence. She pleaded with him to speak again. She heard the cries and laughter of the several dozen people gathered below, but no Gricey. For the first time since his death she felt herself starting to crack, like a dead twig in winter, she told us later. She was weeping now, in frustration as much as sorrow. She didn’t notice she was shivering until the door started slowly to open. She turned, frozen – rooted to the bed – expecting she knew not what – then a head came round the door. It was Vera.

– Here you are. Oh god, Mum, you’re freezing.

A sorry sight she made, she supposed, shivering and weeping on the bed, and she hated Vera seeing her like this. Vera in fact had very rarely seen her mother cry before, and she watched her now with some curiosity. She sat on the bed beside her and gently put her arms around her. Joan told her what had happened, hearing Gricey’s voice, and Vera didn’t say she’d heard him too, for she hadn’t. She just held her mother, murmuring words of comfort. Then she said they should go down to the party, and this Joan hadn’t expected, Vera having earlier given her to understand that a party was the last thing she needed but it was her father’s wake, after all. She now told her mother she had to get back in the swim. Or as Gricey would have said – as he did say – just pull yourself together, dear. You’re on.

So they went downstairs, where in the kitchen some old girl told Joan that she knew how she felt because she’d lost her husband too.

– When? said Joan.

– Seventeen years, love, this last Christmas.

– I’ll never last that long, said Joan. Then she asked the woman if she missed him still.

– Yes, dear, oh I do.

Drawing close she said: I haven’t told him he can go yet.

She clutched Joan’s elbow, all talcum powder and cackle and mothballs and gin, and said she hadn’t finished with him.

Joan thought, finished with him? There’d be no finishing for her either, not until she too was dead and the pair of them, she and Gricey, just dots of light in the minds of whoever remembered them. Yes, and then fading with each passing year until they grew so dim as to be practically invisible, and then blinked out. There’d be nothing left of them after that, she thought, just darkness. That’s finishing, she thought.

Yes, January it was, 17 January 1947. Coldest day of the year so far. Never forget it, well how could you?

Later that night, as the snow started to come down, she sat at the kitchen table in the flat in Archibald Street where they’d lived for almost thirty years. Mile End. Just up from the cemetery and St Clement’s. Her head was in her hands and there was a nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach. Grief comes in waves, this she was learning and it also happens in stages. She was at last starting to make an account of what had happened and it was hard not to place blame. Of course it was her fault, she was quite well aware of that, she should have been able to save him, although Christ alone knows, she thought, he was a difficult man at the best of times and these days, unless he ran them every morning he had trouble remembering his lines. He was at the Irving Theatre in St Martin’s giving his Malvolio at the time and yes, he’d been drinking, he was angry, and this she knew for a fact, that it would never have happened if he hadn’t been in a rage with Julius Glass, though what was said between the two men she had no way of knowing other than that it probably concerned Vera and, given what she knew about Julius, anyone would have got furious with him, stormed out the back door, oh dear – poor Joan – and fallen down the steps—

A week later she felt no better. Worse, in fact. Things hadn’t been so good between them for a while, well, years, if she were honest, but it made no difference to what she felt. She’d given her heart to that man, if he’d drifted away from her, she thought, that’s just what men did. He still came home to her every night. Now she was convinced he hadn’t died at all. No, he’d been buried alive. She’d let them bury him alive. Actually she’d had him cremated, but of course she wasn’t thinking straight. Again it was late, again she couldn’t sleep, and she’d gone into the kitchen to get a splash more gin. They were two parts of a whole, she thought, she and Gricey, indivisible. Or no, inseparable, even when apart. Even when he was in an out-of-town production they were inseparable; in spirit. And they were inseparable still. It was an idea she tried not to dwell upon but at times it arose with such clamour that against her will she was forced to attend to it. It had happened once already while she was coming home on her bicycle. A sudden cry in the darkness that seemed to leap from her throat like a fish, and of course it was for Gricey, who was dead, or so they claimed, who had left her to deal with it all, life ongoing, their daughter’s troubles, everything. They’d cremated him, she’d started to grieve, and now for what seemed the first time she was yet again faced not only with his absence, and a silence that once had been filled by that incomparable man, oh yes, tender, funny, faithful, in his way – he was an actor, dear, she’d had no illusions on that score – but loyal to a fault – was there no end to the qualities she discovered in him now he was dead? What’d it matter if he was short with her at times, if he had a temper, if he waxed hot then cold – he was the man she’d lived with for twenty-seven years, and herself not the easiest of women. And it wasn’t even just himself she missed. It was his sure, clear instinct as to what needed saying to Vera, how seriously her crises were to be taken; above all, how to bring the girl down when she started to climb the walls, which seemed to be happening more frequently these days, these bleak, desolate days of cold and want and loss—

No, Joan’s problem was, he wasn’t there to advise her, and she was angry about it, and frightened too. So when was he coming home? When?

She’d got back to the flat exhausted, fed the cat and poured herself a nice drink. She’d gone into his room, where he kept his clothes in the wardrobe, and he’d sometimes slept there – often he’d slept there, if she were honest – and she stood at the window and looked down at the street. Lamp post, railings, cobblestones, the cemetery walls down the way, and it was snowing again. She sat on his bed for a while. She finished her drink and decided she’d have another. Why not? On her way back to the kitchen she realised there were tears streaming down her face. All she wanted was to hear his bloody voice again.

When she awoke the next morning she was at once aware of the two large gins she’d had before bed. In the old days they’d have a cocktail, sometimes they’d go down the pub, or up west when they were flush. Drinking alone had always seemed a pitiful business to Joan, for it smacked of despair. Who you going to talk to, yourself? Those first days she was tempted to drink herself into a stupor every night, but that way madness lay, or if not madness then a kind of dissipated languor that would soon sap the light from her eye and the fire from her brain, and then where would she be? Not running the wardrobe of the Beaumont Theatre, that’s where. And that job, it was her task in life. Give that up, you might just as well turn your face to the wall.

But she’d made an exception last night and now she regretted it. She knew exactly what had happened. It was being in his room. She’d made a fatal error. She’d gone into his wardrobe.

Yes, we know. Ridiculous. Most unwise. Move along, dearie, how mawkish can an old girl get? She hadn’t told Vera, she could imagine what she’d say. She’d told herself she’d get rid of them but it was almost two weeks now and they were all still there, all his suits, shirts, shoes, underwear, everything. So much he had, even despite the years of austerity, the rationing of cloth. What was so very, very destructive was that she could still raise a faint residue of the man if she pressed her nose to a collar or a cuff and it always finished her off. That hair oil – why such almost imperceptible traces of a stale fragrance should summon the essence of a man whose earthly remains had now apparently been reduced to a small heap of ashes and put in a pot she kept under her bed, this she didn’t understand. But all it took was a large gin or sometimes two and she was at them again, oh yes, and oh, she hauled them out, she laid them out as though she were his valet, or his dresser, spread them across the bed all the while in her mind’s eye admiring him as they went out the front door together, or even as he emerged from this same room to ask her if he looked all right. For he was a dandy, old Gricey, he liked a sharp crease and a clean line, he was a Tottenham boy of course but he did enjoy carrying himself like a gent – a proper man of the theatre – and in another second she was on top of them on the bed with the fabric clutched in her fists and her nose buried deep in collars and cuffs, in armpits, in crotches—

Funny, isn’t it, we said, how it’s so often the strong women who give themselves to these tricky men who don’t really seem worth the trouble?

She sat at the kitchen table in her overcoat and cut half a banana into small slices (it wasn’t often you got a banana) and drank her tea. She’d have the other half later. A grey, windy day, very cold already. In five minutes she’d go in and put them back on their hangers, tidy the place up. Like looking in on the scene of an orgy the morning after. The hint of dawn in the sky when the revels have come to an end and the revellers all gone home. That’s depravity, she thought. That’s excess. They wanted her to come to some kind of a benefit performance at the Irving, for Gricey, see his Twelfth Night again. No, she wouldn’t be doing that. She wasn’t up to that.

But she did have to go to work. We see her now as we often did that winter, all in black, coat, gloves, hat, stockings, on her high black ladies’ model Raleigh with a basket fastened to the handlebars and a silver bell, and a reflector on the back mudguard, the lower part of which was painted white. She rode in stately fashion with her back very straight and her eyes on the road ahead. Mile End, Whitechapel, Aldgate, then the City, Holborn to Shaftesbury Avenue then the freewheel down to Piccadilly Circus and a little sweep round the corner to the Beaumont. Her hand signals were meticulous in their precision, the propriety of her dismount a joy to behold.

– Morning, Mrs Grice, murmured one or two tired voices when she walked into the costume shop, the steam irons hissing, sewing machines whirring away. Whirr–pause–whirr–pause, they went. Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk. The windows were steamed up but they only looked out on a wall, here in the basement at the very bottom of the building. The dawn chorus, she called it. Why was it always so gloomy in here? She’d asked for brighter bulbs, but no, even light was rationed in this dark new world, and sometimes they hardly had any light at all, no wonder they were all going blind, bent over their Singers, hands, eyes, shoulders knackered by the end of the day.

– Morning, ladies. Esther, you finished Miss Conville’s bodice yet?

They were getting ready for a show. Heartbreak House. Lots of corsets and gowns. Steel bones and horsehair, tricky work. Tweed suits, merchant seaman’s kit, and one man in full Arab. And the wigs! But she ran a good shop, best in London, some said.

– Almost there, Mrs Grice.

– Hurry it up, dear, I shall be wanting you on the trousers. Eunice?

– Yes, Mrs Grice.

– That a scrap of fabric I see on the floor?

– Oops, sorry, Mrs Grice.

– Death fabric, that is. Slip on that, bang your head, curtains.

– Yes, Mrs Grice.

She had a little alcove from which she could keep an eye on things. She’d sit at her desk and get her spectacles out of their case to look at the budgets and what-have-you. But today she removes her spectacles almost at once, and instead gazes out across the busy room. She barely sees the toiling women, the heaps of muslin, the shelves spilling out their grommets and needles and buttons and zips, the steam presses, the long table where her draper cuts the patterns. And there’s Esther, foolish young Esther, a clutch of pins between her teeth as she flattens a length of thin black silk on a table, folding it down one side to make a hem then rapidly pinning it. Oh, and Joan sees herself all those years ago at the Watford Palace when she was Esther’s age, working for a wardrobe mistress no less exacting than she is now, and as she hemmed and sewed her mind was elsewhere, as Esther’s is now, yes, for that night, that distant night, she was meeting Gricey Grice, who was playing the lead in the new touring show just come in and he was taking her out for a drink after.

Yes, and later, in the men’s stockroom, in amongst the military uniforms, against the wall, in the dark, the smell of stale sweat and old wool serge strong in their nostrils, and him still with his slap on, she was in his arms, one leg up, clinging to him tight, kissing him with her mouth open and her tongue out and her fingers in his thick wavy chestnut hair all clogged with oil, the pair of them panting, gasping, loudly striving for a more perfect union—

Dear god it was good then to be alive, and heaven itself – how did it go? Heaven itself a quick shag in the men’s stockroom.

– Where you want these, missus?

A youth in shirtsleeves and braces stood in the doorway clutching an armful of trousers. The older women in the room paid no attention but the girls flicked their eyes at him, exchanged glances, and him trying not to grin.

– Those my trousers? Hang them up over there, Jimmy. Esther, get them sorted, will you, dear, soon as you’ve finished you and Eunice can start with the fittings. We’ve got Mangan at twelve and then the Captain. Thank you, Jimmy, you can go now.

– Yes, Mrs Grice.

– Jimmy. You can go now.

Jimmy left. A bit later, as the girls laid out the trousers fetched in from the stockroom, Joan’s mind was again elsewhere. But this time she wasn’t thinking about hot nights in Watford with Gricey, but about that last conversation with Julius, about what was said between the two men before he fell down the back steps into the yard. She wasn’t a woman comfortable with vagueness and imprecision, Joan. She was never one to be satisfied with the misty outline of a thing. It mattered, for it was at her insistence that he’d gone to talk to the bloody man in the first place.

She’d been round there a few days before, in fact, having a cup of tea with Vera in the kitchen when in he came.

– Ah, Joan. Joan, he said, taking his gloves off, and then his wire-framed spectacles, so as to polish them. How are you, my dear?

– Getting by, said Joan.

No smile, of course. It was only Gricey ever got her smile. The teeth, of course. But how calm he was, she thought, how composed, how bloody regal, as he settled at his kitchen table, with his heavy-lidded eyes and his long yellow hands, as though he were a gentleman butcher, or the son of one. Butchers were important men in London then what with the meat ration. Here’s a man might sell you a nice bit of tenderloin out the back of the shop if you treated him right, she thought. He’d produced instead what he called a nice drop of claret from under the sink and offered the women a glass. Where’d he get that then? On the fiddle. On the black. He’d crossed his legs and allowed one beige suede slipper to dangle from a silk-socked foot. The trouser leg had risen above the sock to reveal a hairless white calf. Vera once told her mother that Julius had three nipples, he’d shown them to her the night of the Doll’s House party. Joan had noticed something else that was strange about this awful man her daughter had married. At times in the late afternoon that winter, with the fading of the day, a faint shimmer of sunlight would seem to gather around his pale blond head. It created a halo, of sorts. As though he wore a crown of light.

But a bloody halo, thought Joan, when the last of the sun came drifting through the kitchen window of the house in Pimlico, the three of them drinking claret, talking for all the world as though nothing had happened, nothing had changed, Gricey was just – elsewhere. Later, when Joan was leaving, Vera reminded her she wanted to see the play again. Joan was reluctant, to say the least of it, but Vera wanted her to come. And what Vera wanted, Vera generally got.

– Esther! Pay attention to what you’re doing, please.

– Yes, Mrs Grice.

Joan was standing in the door of her office, face white as chalk and her eyes like hot coals, red at the rims.

– I don’t know where they find you girls these days. Where do they find you, Esther?

– Don’t know, I’m sure, Mrs Grice.

– Don’t know much, do you, child?

Esther flushed puce, poor thing, and stared at her fingers as she fed thin silk under a flickering needle. Joan went back to her desk, thinking, how am I to find out what he said, the cunt? And poor Gricey – to die in a rage. What kind of a way to go is that? She’d go round and see him again, that Julius Glass, break his bloody windows for him.

2

IT HAD BEEN a bad year anyway. Oh, an awful year, even if it was barely three weeks old. Still not enough to eat, and last summer, that was 1946, of course, the year of the big march, they’d put bread on the ration, and the war already over! Magnificent in victory, oh yes – and bankrupt. Morally magnificent and economically broke. Exhausted. Oh, England. Smog, ruins, drab clothes, bad food, bomb craters and rats. There was work to be had – in demolition. Someone said, some writer whose name we can never remember, that England was made of coal and surrounded by fish so why were we always so cold and hungry? And it’s not to mention the electric going off all the time so the blackouts were worse than in the Blitzkrieg, though at least you didn’t smell gas in the streets like after a bomb when it came up from the broken pipes. No more bloody bombs anyway. But after all that, oh, the endless sacrifices and all the rest – were we rid of the fascists?

We were not. Oh no. The Blackshirts that got banged up during the war under Regulation 18b – sympathy for enemy powers – they were back out on the streets. Joan used to see them on her way home and was glad her parents weren’t alive to witness it. They marched through the East End three abreast, they held public meetings, they papered walls with swastikas, spewing hatred like they’d never been gone, like there hadn’t even been a war, which they’d lost. Of course there was trouble. Fights broke out and people got hurt, hardly surprising. No, these were active fascists, selling their newspapers outside Tube stations, and of course it was worst in the East End, that’s where the Jews lived, Joan being one of them, her father a tailor who’d settled in London end of the last century, from eastern Europe, and raised his family in Stepney. Poverty, overcrowding, violence and political dissent, this is what we knew Stepney for, and Jews. And that’s where the fascists held their meetings. All over the East End in fact, men on platforms with bullhorns shouting for the expulsion of what they now had to call ‘aliens’. Telling us Hitler didn’t go far enough, didn’t finish the job. If you can believe it. In 1946.

The Sunday previous Joan had once again summoned her resolve and gone to see Julius but he was out with Gustl Herzfeld, or Auntie Gustl as some of us knew her, lord knows why. Julius’ house was a thin one with pointed gables and trees in front, late Victorian, built of yellow London brick stained black with coal dust. It was just a few steps from Sutherland Terrace, or what was left of it. It was on the corner of a short block of mews houses, Lupus Mews that was, not far from the Victoria railway yards. But Vera was home, and when they were settled in the kitchen Joan asked her how she was getting on, and that’s when Vera told her she’d moved up to the attic.

– No!

– Oh yes.

They were in the kitchen having a cup of tea, it was the warmest room, of course. Like so many London houses near where the bombs once fell it couldn’t be kept clean, for the soot would pour down the chimney and the carpets weren’t bright and the brasses didn’t shine, and it was dark, so many boards in the windows where the panes were smashed. And draughty. Joan kept her coat on but Vera seemed not to notice the cold. She was in a black sweater that nicely showed off her bosom, and what with her milky skin and long black shiny hair, which she usually wore up, she was turning into really a very lovely young woman, more so every day, that’s what her mother thought, apart from the rings under her eyes. Nice teeth too, unlike some. But yes, she’d moved out of the marital bedroom, and a bit soon for that, thought Joan, though she didn’t say it, of course. Vera nodded, rueful, amused. There was a bathroom up there with a bathtub and a toilet, what else did a girl need?

– You need a proper husband, that’s what you need, said Joan.

Vera looked at her teacup and said quietly that Julius thought she might be having a relapse.

– You think I am?

– No, dear, you’ve lost your father, that’s all. And you need a job. What you up for?

– Not much out there, Mum.

– Not what I heard.

She was highly strung, Vera herself admitted that much. There’d been that touch of hysteria a couple of years ago but she’d been fine for a while now, until she lost her father. Joan felt badly about it. She knew it was all her fault because when Julius phoned her, and told her Gricey had had a heart attack and was in an ambulance on his way to Edward VII, she told him she didn’t want Vera at the hospital, she couldn’t cope with her and Gricey too. So when Vera came home and he told her that her father had had a heart attack and was in Edward VII, of course she wanted to go to him at once. That’s when Julius locked the front door and pleaded with her not to go. So she tried to climb out the window and he stopped her, and that’s when she lost her temper and threw a glass at him and only just missed his head. Joan thought, I should have taught her to throw straight.

Julius was still worried about her, Vera then said, staring at her hands, turning her fingers over to examine her nails, which she’d painted scarlet. Joan said nothing, but oh, this gifted girl of mine, she thought, up in the attic? What would Gricey have said about that? So she offered her the empty room in the flat, the one that used to be her father’s. She felt she had to.

– No, I can’t, said Vera.

– I don’t see why not, love.

– I just can’t. It’s Daddy’s room. Anyway—

– Anyway what?

– I want to live in this house.

That was all she’d say. What sense was her mother to make of it? Presumably she wanted to be near Julius because she loved him. But didn’t she see it as a humiliation?

– Mum, you must understand, she said. He’s my husband.

– Yes, said Joan, I suppose he is that.

– Anyway I want to sleep in the attic.

Just like your dad, Joan thought, rather sleep alone. She was actually relieved. Better this way, she thought. She needed to be by herself in the flat for when he came home.

After they’d had a cup of tea Vera took her mother upstairs and showed her the room. You could hear the trains late at night, she said, the clanking and shunting as the railwaymen uncoupled the wagons. Intimacy could be suffocating, Joan thought, when what a woman wanted was distance from a husband, specially a husband like bloody Julius Glass. There’d never been an intimacy problem for her and Gricey, she then thought, whatever the sleeping arrangements. Oh no, nothing like that.

But upstairs in that tall, thin, ugly yellow house, down the end of a gloomy mews, in an attic, that’s where my daughter wants to live now? This was her thought. There was an old bathroom up there, with an ancient lavatory with a wooden seat, a deafening flush, wake the house, it would – poor Auntie Gustl – and a bathtub with claw feet and a plughole, the porcelain surround stained ochre. That’s where she washed her smalls now. The water came out rusty from the tap and lukewarm at best for the boiler was in the cellar, a very long way down, and who had the coal for a good hot bath these days? It was a small bathtub and Vera was a big girl. She told her mother it was like getting into a child’s coffin.

– Don’t say that, love.

The last coffin Joan had seen was Gricey’s, of course. Vera laid a hand on her arm and said, Mum, don’t be silly.

– But where do you hang your frocks?

– In here.

There was a door between the beams and when Joan opened it there was only darkness. Vera switched the light on, a single dim bulb hanging off a rafter. It was not much help. This was the attic proper, a narrow slanting space that ran the length of the house under the eaves. Joan stepped in, sniffing, her head bowed. In the gloom she saw piled up cabin trunks and suitcases with shipping labels, and cobwebs glistening in whatever wintry light got in through the dormers, and everywhere dust. There was also a stack of paintings in the back there, stretchered and with a sheet thrown over them. These would be Gustl’s, self-portraits mostly. It wasn’t insulated and the air was chill and a little bad; dead rat somewhere. From nails in the rafters between the roof beams Vera’s frocks rustled slightly on their wooden hangers. Joan was horrified. Had she learned nothing?

– What about the moths, dear? And the damp? There’ll be mould before you know it. And sunlight, oh it’ll bleach the colour out of these things in no time. Oh dear no, you can’t ruin them like this.

– Not much sunlight these days, Mum.

– I’ll have to get you some muslin bags. Oh dear.

She was genuinely distressed. But the point was, Vera chose to stay in her husband’s house even though she now apparently preferred to live in the attic like a servant and put her entire wardrobe at risk. And he allowed it. He must have thought she was mad, this was Joan’s conclusion, that’s why he let her go up there, that’s where you put the madwomen. But oh, no, not mad, let her not be mad, she thought, sweet heaven, poor Vera—

But confused, yes, divided, uncertain who she was when she wasn’t onstage, and of course it had all come to a crisis when her father lay dying and Julius tried to stop her going to the hospital. And that, thought Joan, was entirely my doing, selfish bloody woman I am.

3

WHEN SHE GOT home she didn’t have another drink, nor did she go to bed. Instead she started in on a piece of work she’d been meaning to finish for weeks now. She wanted to make some alterations to Gricey’s coat. The fit of it displeased her. She’d bought it in the Ridley Street market for next to nothing, first year of the war. It had fitted him nice and snug but she didn’t like that it was too big for her, not the length of it but in the chest and shoulders. She felt he was close to her, and she could smell him in the lining. But she wanted to wear it as though it were her own, so nobody would guess how close to her he really was.

Poor Joan. Because as she sewed and picked and bit off the thread with her teeth, her eyes lifted and she wondered if he was angry with her that she’d allowed all this to happen. His death. She was tormented by the thought. But what could she have done? She wasn’t there! Oh but she worried at it often, and made endless reconstructions of the events that led up to the – what? – the tragedy, if that’s what it was, although she was starting to think it was something other than that, for tragedy, the idea of tragedy, as she understood it, lacked an element of agency – tragedy happened, it wasn’t done to you, was it? – unless by fate, or destiny – and it was agency that she now glimpsed in the slowly clarifying outline of the thing.

She remembered a day in December, just a few weeks before, and the weather already very cold. There was an area of high pressure somewhere over Archangel, moving across Scandinavia – so we heard on the wireless – heading for England and sucking Siberian air in with it as it came. Londoners could talk of little else. In fact we could talk of much else, but we started with the weather – it broke the ice. That was the joke going round. Because that’s all we did that winter, break the ice. Or slip on the ice, break an arm or a leg, and put up with the blackouts and the slow trams, the bad coal, and an east wind that blew nonstop for a month. Worst weather in living memory.

Joan remembered a tall and rather stylish couple, the man in his sixties in a black coat with leather at the cuffs and lapels, and fur on the collar, the woman some years younger and more soberly dressed – it was them, of course, Mr and Mrs Charlie Grice, walking down the Charing Cross Road one cold grey Saturday afternoon. How handsome, how smart they were! As they turned along the Strand Joan murmured, as though talking to herself – it’s a thing that happens to long-married couples, speaking without preamble, on the assumption that the other has followed their train of thought – that Vera might be having a bit of trouble with her nerves again.

– Yes, Gricey said.

He too had been far away. Joan turned to him as though awoken from her own distant reverie of their daughter.

– You think so?

– I’m worried about her.

– You’re always worried about her.

– It’s different this time.

– I wish you’d say something.

This is how she wanted to remember it. But she knew this wasn’t what she’d said, that her tone had been harsher by far, for she could be a sharp-tongued woman. For Christ’s sake, Gricey, what’s the matter with you? Just tell him! Or do I have to do it for you?

They’d walked on in silence. Now she thought, if only I could say to him I never meant to be so cold. She’d slipped her arm in his. But it was a concern they’d expressed to each other for years, that they were worried about Vera, although this time it was different because so much more was at stake, because she was doing so well. It was in her bones, of course, acting, but where did her bones come from? From them, from what they’d given her, the exposure she’d had all her life to actors, to theatres and to costumes, and Gricey had encouraged her, they both had. And then the inculcation of taste, without which of course there’s nothing.

How the mind will drift. Thinking about Vera got her thinking about Julius Glass, and she remembered the night Vera opened in A Doll’s House. The reviews were excellent, really. The best of her generation, one of them said. A luminous stage presence. Then for a while it seemed there’d been nothing she couldn’t do. She played Nina in The Seagull. People were hungry for theatre during the war, well, it raised morale. The theatres were only dark for a few weeks, that’s when it properly started, the Blitz, late 1940, then they were up again, first show at lunchtime, the second at five so they could let out before dark when the bombers came back. Entire audience in uniform. What’s it look like out there? an actor might ask the stage manager, and khaki came the answer. Sea of khaki.

A Doll’s House