At Freddie’s. Simon Callow

be out of work, I’d never get work again, if you hadn’t spoken to Mr Lightfoot … I owe everything to you …’

      Freddie paid no attention whatsoever.

      ‘God who created me,’ Mattie went on in a thrilling contralto, ‘Nimble and light of limb In three elements free To run to ride to swim Not when the senses dim But from the heart of joy I would remember Him Take the thanks of a boy.’

      ‘I’m deducting thirty per cent this week for damage and nuisance,’ Freddie remarked. Mattie, with an expression of deep malignance, departed.

      ‘He’s acting,’ said Miss Blewett.

      ‘Worse than that,’ said Freddie. ‘He’s acting being a child actor.’ But both of them knew that the children came off stage in a state of pitiful and vibrant excitement that must be allowed to spend its impulse gradually into quiet. Told again and again to take off his make-up in the theatre, Mattie always slipped away and displayed his painted face in the Underground, taking pride and feverish pleasure in the passengers’ disapproval. To be glanced at from behind newspapers delighted him. The ambition of all children is to have their games taken seriously. Dodging round Covent Garden and up Floral Street with his reddened lips and doe’s eyes, he knew very well what kind of strangers were following him, slowed down to let them catch up, then shook them off just as he turned the corner to the school.

      ‘Is he a genius?’ the accountant asked.

      ‘I’ve got one great talent in the school at the moment, but it’s not Matthew Stewart. Mattie is something else. He’s a success.’ Unwin had become preternaturally sensitive to openings – the word ‘success’ was one – which might help him to lead the conversation back to the subject of the accounts. He would have liked to assert himself, and sometimes thought that unless some drastic step was taken he might lose his reason. The Bluebell sometimes took his part, but was an uncertain ally. His scheme was to introduce into the place a third party who would be prepared to invest a bit of money, and to talk rationally. That should not be impossible, because it was his opinion that Freddie, though unanswerable and seemingly immovable, did in fact modify her behaviour a little in the presence of a good-looking man. Unwin’s father had acted as the accountant here in the thirties, and about his relationship with Freddie there had always been speculation. Always, therefore, Unwin kept his eyes open for a saviour with, let’s say, fifteen thousand in hand, and the high courage necessary to make himself acceptable and turn Freddie into a going concern. Even for her there must soon be a limit to borrowing, demanding, and begging.

      On the wall above her head there was fixed a piece of painted canvas which Unwin did his best not to look at. The words upon it, written in foot-high letters and scrolled with gilt, read NAUGHT SHALL MAKE US RUE IF ENGLAND? ITSELF DO REST BUT TRUE. They were the closing lines of King John and the canvas had hung above the proscenium of the Old Vic for the production of 1917. Lilian Baylis had refused to take it down until the Kaiser had admitted defeat; it had been given to Freddie, as a significant parting present, when she left to open her school. In 1940 the Bluebell had suggested touching the whole thing up and brightening it a bit, so that they could hang it out of the window if Hitler’s tanks came rolling up Floral Street. Freddie refused; an unnecessary expense, it would last for at least one more war just as it was.

      The words were arranged in a half circle on a blue background, as though soaring through the clouds. Freddie herself never turned her head to look at them, she relied on their effect upon others. And even though he avoided reading them so often, Unwin couldn’t get away from them. They were a reproach to reason.

      He spoke now of the many new stage schools, mostly concentrating on pupils with freckles and missing front teeth, which were then considered necessary for film and television work, and the ease with which these pupils seemed to get county grants for their education.

      ‘No one takes me to the cinema any more,’ said Freddie, ‘and the school can’t afford a television set.’

      ‘You’ve probably hardly noticed all these new establishments. And of course I don’t mean that you wish them any harm.’

      ‘I do wish them some harm.’

      She must have been listening more closely than he’d thought.

      ‘You can run along now, dear,’ she added. ‘I’m going to sit here alone by the gas-fire a while. I’m in need of a bit of guidance. A Word may come to me.’

      Her reference, from time to time, to this Word was the most unfair of all Freddie’s tactics, since it was quite out of step with her general shrewdness. It was a mystery, but not a spiritual one. In the stuffy darkness, in the silence, a chance phrase, usually from something she had read or someone she had talked to recently, would come back to her and strike her with the authentic note. Then, lapped in her armchair, she smiled. The Word was taken to indicate the way through her next difficulty.

      It could manifest itself, however, outside the premises. Twice, it appeared, a man with a pale face and a black hat, a different hat, but black on both occasions, had come up to her in the crowded street and said quietly: ‘They depend on you.’ Or the Word might take the form of a peculiarly trivial inscription – OPEN OTHER WAY UP had served its turn – and there had even been some from Miss Blewett’s passing remarks – we can’t do more than we can, we all live under the same sky. This last had given Freddie guidance not to repair the roof, which was gaping wide in several places, until next year.

      Possibly it was one of these moments of inspiration which had led her to realise that the Temple could be run, on its educational side, with only two teachers, obtained at the very cheapest rate. About this, for once, the accountant and the Word had agreed. It would allow a larger allocation for the fencing instructor, the accent and dialect expert, the Shakespeare coach and for half-crazy old Ernest Valentine who only came in to do Peter Pan. Having made a clean sweep, then, at the end of the previous summer, Freddie had managed to acquire two new teachers, recent arrivals from Northern Ireland, who might be expected not to have found their feet yet.

      Hannah Graves was a nice-looking girl of twenty, with too much sense, one would have thought, to consider a job at eleven pounds fifteen shillings a week. But Freddie had instantly divined in her that attraction to the theatre, and indeed to everything theatrical, which can persist in the most hard-headed, opening the way to poetry and disaster. Hannah had no stage ambitions; backstage was the enchantment. Once sure of this, Freddie attacked on another front. Some of the pupils, she pointed out, were little better than waifs, needing only kindness and a firm hand. Of course, the job wasn’t an easy one. While the children were working, someone from the school had to go down to the theatres and see that they were getting the amount of education the law demanded.

      ‘That wouldn’t be what you’re used to, dear.’

      When Hannah had undertaken to take the junior class in all subjects for at least one year, Freddie offered the other post to a Mr Pierce Carroll. Carroll, who must have been about thirty, and came from Castlehen, a short way out of Derry, was a much more doubtful investment, but Freddie detected in him the welcome signs of someone who was never likely to earn much money, or even expect to.

      ‘Sit down, Mr Carroll,’ she said, without looking round, as he came sadly in. And he folded his long thin legs and sat down.

      There was his letter open on the desk, so that he could see, upside down, the pale grey product of his own typewriter.

      ‘Now, let me see, you didn’t go to university, no specialised training, no diploma.’

      ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he replied.

      ‘I’m afraid you don’t look particularly attractive either,’ Freddie went on, glancing at him to see how he took this. He was quite unperturbed, but acknowledged the truth with a nod, almost a slight bow.

      ‘But of course you’ve done some teaching?’

      ‘I’ve taught in the deaf and dumb school at Castlehen. They say that teaching the deaf makes you into a good actor, but it didn’t have any effect of that kind on me. I’ve no ability at all