‘Do you want me to fetch you a blanket, Blythe?’ she asked.
‘Hand me mymantoncillo.’
‘Youruh, what now?’ Kelsey followed the line of Blythe’s elegantly extended hand to the back of the door.
‘My Spanish shawl, dear. I wore it for a revival of Spanish golden age drama in the early seventies. It was supposed to be my comeback. I played some kind of prostitute if I remember rightly. Didn’t have any lines. I was out of favour by then. I liberated the shawl from the costume department at the end of the run.’
Blythe chuckled drolly as Kelsey spread the wonderful, deep-purple, fringed silk shawl embroidered with red and yellow flowers across Blythe’s lap.
‘What happened? It said in the paper you retired.’ Kelsey didn’t want to mention the ‘after a mysterious illness’ bit. ‘And it called your last season on stage “ill-fated”, what’s all that about?’
Blythe was silent for a moment as she took a swig of gin, placed her glass down on the table and closed her eyes, raising her face to the ceiling. She inhaled dramatically.
‘I’m sorry, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
One violet eye opened and peered at Kelsey.
‘I was preparing my monologue,’ Blythe said curtly.
Kelsey muttered an apology before clamping her lips together, chastened. Blythe took another deep breath and closed her eyes again like a medium reaching out to the other side.
At that moment Blythe’s black cat prowled into the room, disappearing under her chair before slinking out between the draped folds of the Spanish shawl as though it were making a dramatic entrance at a burlesque show. Even the old lady’s moggy seemed steeped in the life of the stage.
When Blythe’s eyes snapped open she fixed them upon the glow from the standard lamp in the corner of the room. This was a woman who could always find her light, Kelsey thought, but she dared not speak again.
‘It was nineteen sixty-six when I met him. Oh, he was a handsome devil, tall and dark, matador’s waist, hips I died for, hair deep black like the winter night’s sky. We were cast together in Ben Jonson’sVolpone. I took the role of Celia; he was in the title role. Whirlwind, our romance was. We were wonderful together, on stage and off. For a little while the press were hailing us as the leading figures of the sixties’ theatrical renaissance, you know?
‘By the next season I was under the lights as the Duchess of Malfi, big-bellied and bold. The managers, and Daddy, told him to marry me, but I didn’t feel he needed to. It wasn’t theeighteensixties, after all, and I was the Duchess of Malfi, for crying out loud! She’s a wonderful character to play, braver than any solider. She took on the ruling powers and the church all by herself, andshewasn’t afraid.’
The glaze over Blythe’s eyes told Kelsey the actress was getting lost in memories of the role. Blythe began reciting the Duchess’ lines to the lamp in the corner as though she were addressing an opening night audience.
‘…As men in some great battles by apprehending danger have achieved almost impossible actions (I have heard soldiers say so) so I through frights and threatenings will assay this dangerous venture.’
Blythe sighed wearily as the Duchess’ strength left her. ‘Oh, the scandal! You couldn’t imagine it. It was dangerous to speak your mind and refuse to be ashamed in those days. The theatre managers wanted to bring in my understudy when my condition got too obvious, but I bit back, told them they couldn’t controlme. I was lucky. I had a little status and a little money. Some of my girlfriends weren’t so fortunate. I’d seen the laundry girls and the seamstresses who’d fallen pregnant disappear one by one. Some of them came back after a few months away, without their babies, left at some nunnery or hospital or other, taken from their hands they were, to avoid the shame, you see? The ones that fought for their babies never came back and we never heard of them again. It was as though they fell through a crack in the pavement and stopped existing. Well, I wouldn’t go into one of those homes for the “ruined” to wait for my baby’s birth, not on your nelly, and anywayIwas of age. I stayed in town, I got up on that stage every night, and I wouldn’t be budged.
‘I answered every question the newspapermen asked me at the press calls. “Will we hear the sound of wedding bells soon, Miss Goode?” they asked. “Not bloody likely,” I said, bold as brass, waving my cigarette around. Oh, I was magnificent. I was atour de force, even if I did cry behind the scenes every now and then.
‘I was reprimanded for my unseemly conduct and for bringing the company into disrepute but my lover didn’t hear a word of it, of course. The men always got off scot-free, just like the sneaky thief Volpone himself. I didn’t mind. I loved him.
‘I bore the brunt of the anger and the gossip and I bore his child. I’d signed a contract by then for the next season and what with Daddy being a QC, the managers didn’t dare try to oust me. My son was born right there in the dressing room; just me, my lover and the company seamstresses. I was back onstage a week after. The show must go on, no matter what, my dear, but…’ Blythe’s voice thickened with an ominous, weary tone. ‘My body had different ideas. I fell ill.No one was sure what it was; it started as a simple case of measles, the doctors thought, but I ended up quarantined for weeks, drifting in and out of fevered states. I don’t remember any of it. They told Mummy and Daddy to prepare for the worst, but I surprised everyoneas is my way,’ she smiled indulgently, ‘and I got back on my feet. Well, almost.’ Blythe tapped her hip. ‘Whatever it was, it damaged my joints, ate away at my pelvis. I struggled through my Cleopatra and Queen Margaret roles the following winter, but the pain was something sinister. I was so thin with it. I hope you never come to learn how pain steals away your appetite.
‘Then Wagstaff fell off the stage onCleopatra’s opening night, straight into the orchestra pit, almost crushing that poor bassoonist! Wagstaff was in the role of Antony, blind drunk on stage, thinking he was Oliver Reed. The damned philanderer broke both his legs and that was that. We struggled on with the understudies but no one could command a stage like Wagstaff, and he was devilish handsome, everyone adored him, if only he’d been sober for long enough to grasp the fact, and so the audiences dwindled. The press called the season “ill-fated”, and it certainly was for me. The managers saw my illness as their opportunity to get rid of me at last. They never fired me but they stopped giving me lead roles, in fact, they stopped giving melines! Apart from a few bit-parts in the years afterwards I didn’t act again, not properly. Not as a star.’
A moment of silence fell for Blythe’s bright career and Kelsey made sure to observe it. Eventually, Blythe blinked as though waking from a dream and sipped her drink.
‘What,umm, what happened to your baby?’ Kelsey asked, softening her voice.
‘Ah, he’s in Granada in Spain. He didn’t take to the acting life. Youcouldsay he had his fill of drama in his early years and he went looking for something less… bohemian. He lives a steady life there, sends postcards every now and then.’ The sadness showed in her eyes before a stoic smile chased its shadows. ‘But I’ve no regrets, not a one.’
‘And his father abandoned you both? That’s terrible.’
‘Abandonedis too hard a word. What passed between us was all our own. I wouldn’t change a moment of it. In any other era we’d have lived a whole life together and the world wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.’ Blythe drained her gin glass in one quick swig while Kelsey was struck by the impression that the old woman was suddenly smaller and frailer than she had been as she was telling her tale. ‘Anyway, what’s done is done,’ Blythe added. ‘The whirligig of time brings in its revenges and all that. Goodness, is that the time, darling?’
Kelsey turned to the clock on the wall between the framed black and white photos of glamorous actors she couldn’t put names to. ‘It’s after six. Are you getting tired? I should go. I’ve intruded, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly, my dear. It’s almost cocktail hour. I’m expecting company.’
Kelsey didn’t say anything about Blythe’s cocktail hours seeming to fall at all kinds of irregular times. ‘Is it your,erm, your young man? The one who brought you the roses?’
