Miss Young rummaged around on her desk until she found a piece of paper and, after giving it the most cursory of glances, said that she had no record of any Freda Murgatroyd being on the call list. “There’s no such person.”
“But there is such a person,” Freda protested. “It’s me.” A wave of desperation began to engulf her. She would go under. She would disappear without trace. “From the Vanbrugh Academy of Dance,” she urged. “Miss Sherbourne sent me. To see the management,” she added, suddenly inspired.
The word did indeed prove to be an Open Sesame, and Miss Young said sarcastically, “Oh, well, then, if it’s the management that wants to see you…” More wearied sighing on her part. If the Adelphi had been a sailing ship it would be halfway round the Cape by now, fanned by the amount of sighing that went on within its walls.
Miss Young led Freda along another series of confusing passages and then said, “On the left, second door. Mr. Varley,” before abandoning her and retreating.
“Owen Varley,” a small nameplate on the door announced. Freda’s heart beat fast with anticipation. She stood up straight, took a deep breath and knocked firmly on the door.
From within, an angry voice bellowed, “Enter if you must!”
Yes, I must, Freda thought grandly to herself. I am opening the door to my future. “We must gird our loins,” Duncan used to say before they went on with the Knits. Freda girded her loins.
A very large man was seated at a rather small desk. Like everyone else in the building he appeared to be irritated and Freda anticipated more excessive sighing, but his expression changed when he looked up and saw her. “Ah, my dear child,” he said. “Won’t you come in?”
* * *
—
“Oh, hello, there you are,” Florence said when Freda dropped onto the chair opposite her in the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street. “How did it go at the Adelphi? Did you get the part?” Florence was working her way through a plate of rock buns. She was a slow, methodical eater, rather like a cow chewing her cud.
“No, I didn’t,” Freda said. Her mouth was so dry she could barely speak. She could taste the iron tang of blood on her tongue. Her heart was pounding because she had run nearly the whole way from the Strand as if the devil were on her heels. She shed her coat and handbag onto the chair next to her and fanned herself with a napkin.
The ruminant Florence was oblivious to the state Freda was in. “Oh, bad luck,” she said. “I expect you’ll get offered another audition soon. Have a rock bun.”
Freda felt her stomach heave. “Got to go to the Ladies’,” she mumbled before making a quick exit towards the lavatories.
The Ladies’ in the Coventry Street Lyons were particularly magnificent, with big marble sinks and crystal-clear mirrors and lovely mahogany woodwork. The soap smelt nice as well, not like the carbolic in their boarding house, and usually when they came here Freda made the most of the facilities.
Not this time. This time she rushed into a toilet cubicle and retched up the contents of her stomach into the bowl.
Hot tears pricked her eyes, but she would not give Owen Varley the precious gift of them. Freda had never felt more sorry for herself than she did at this moment, kneeling on the cold, hard tiles of the Lyons Ladies’. Her soul had been hollowed out of her, along with the contents of her stomach.
Had there ever really been an audition?, she wondered. If there had, it certainly had not been for a play. She was so stupid! No mouse ever scampered into a baited trap more blithely.
* * *
—
“Shut the door behind you, dear,” Owen Varley had said. He asked her name and her age, to which she replied “sixteen,” which was something she had been claiming since she was twelve. She had decided to adopt the veneer of a jaded metropolitan girl. “Metropolitan” was a word she had learnt from Miss Sherbourne. It was the opposite of the accursed “provincial,” apparently. He seemed not to notice her attempt at sophistication.
“Well, Flora,” he said, “so you want to be an actress?”
“It’s Freda actually, Mr. Varley, although my stage name is Fay le Mont.” (Miss Sherbourne said that everyone should have a stage name.) “Actually, I’m a dancer. Miss Sherbourne set up an audition for me.”
“Miss Sherbourne?”
“The Vanbrugh Academy of Dance.”
“Yes, of course, I know her well. So…a dancer, eh?” he said. Then he quizzed her about what experience she had and she said, “Oh, quite a lot, Mr. Varley. In the provinces, of course,” she added nonchalantly. It seemed a good idea to get that particular drawback out of the way.
She removed a folder from her handbag—a handbag that was soon to play a part in Freda’s downfall. In her role as treasurer, Freda kept both their money and Mrs. Ingram’s jewellery in Vanda’s old bag, as there was no safe hiding place in the boarding house in Henrietta Street. The bag had a long strap and Freda wore it, bandolier-style, across her body. Anyone trying to snatch it in the street would have had to fight her to the death for it.
The folder that she removed from this precious bag also contained the portfolio of her most recent stage photographs. She passed it to Owen Varley, who laid it down on his desk without looking at it. Freda began to recite a list of some of the productions she had been in, but she didn’t even get as far as a Babes in the Wood three years ago, when she had played the usual maypole-dancing village child. Freda would have made a much better job of Gretel than the actress they chose. (She was twenty-five!) She was stopped by Owen Varley saying, “You’re a chirpy little thing, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“If you could just lift your skirt for me, Flora.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your legs, Flora. Let me see your legs, dear.”
Well, Freda reasoned, perhaps it wasn’t so odd to want to see a dancer’s legs. Dancers were all about legs, without them you couldn’t dance, could you? And things were probably different in the West End. So, somewhat tentatively, she raised her skirt to her knee. Plenty of women in London were wearing their skirts as short as this, she thought.
“Higher, dear. A bit of thigh, please.”
Freda didn’t really think of herself as having thighs. They were just legs, top to bottom.
“That’s it, Flora. A bit higher. Don’t be shy, we’re all friends here, aren’t we?”
And as a frog will remain passively in the pot as the water around it grows hotter, so Freda’s skirt gradually crept uncomfortably higher, like a slow-moving theatre curtain. At least no tentacle was touching her, she thought.
“Splendid,” Owen Varley muttered. He was growing red in the face. “Now your blouse, dear.”
“My blouse?” Freda thought that she must have misheard. He was Management, for heaven’s sake.
“Yes, your blouse, your top. Off with it, dear. I need to see your assets.”
Freda faltered. The metropolis, she thought, and undid the top button. The water was reaching boiling point. She fingered the second button and then said, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Mr. Varley.”
“Don’t be a silly girl. Come along now.”
“No.”
He heaved his great bulk up from the chair and Freda gasped in horror at the sight of his unfastened trousers. Vanda’s “dangles” suddenly seemed a frivolously inappropriate term for what looked like uncooked giblets. What had he been doing behind that desk? She turned to leave, to jump from the pot, but he was astonishingly agile for a man of his size and before she could reach the door he had ambushed her, pressing her up against the wall, the whole enormous weight of his body squashing her so that she couldn’t even breathe.