At Brian’s insistence, she didn’t go back to Derry and Toms.
‘I have to give two weeks’ notice.’
She had already phoned in sick so that she could visit Brian in his office. She couldn’t take any more time off.
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Because . . .’ She couldn’t think of a reason, other than that those were the rules. ‘Anyway, how will I pay my rent?’
‘I’ll find you work.’
‘I need money now.’
‘I’ll sub you for a couple of weeks. A month, even. What are you earning, twenty quid a week? I’m not having you turning down work for the sake of eighty quid.’
She wasn’t earning anything like twenty pounds a week. She’d only been on twelve since she’d finished her probationary period.
‘But what work am I turning down? I’ve never acted in anything in my life.’
‘That’s the beauty of it, darling. No experience necessary. No acting necessary, even. I won’t mention Sabrina ever again after this. But you may have noticed that she’s not exactly Dorothy Tutin.
Sweetheart, you only have to stand there and people will throw money at me. Some of which I’ll pass on to you. Honestly, it’s the easiest game in the world.’
‘Sounds like the oldest game in the world.’
‘Don’t be cynical, darling. That’s my job. Listen. Do you know what a soubrette is?’
She sighed and rolled her eyes. She was going to find a library the moment she’d left Brian’s office.
‘You are the very epitome of a soubrette. And everybody wants them. But really, you don’t even need to do that. People will pay you a lot of money just to be you. Just do what I tell you to do and we’ll all be happy.’
‘What are you going to tell me to do?’
‘I’m going to tell you to meet people, and these people will tell you to do things. Smile. Walk up and down. Stick your chest or your bottom out. That sort of thing. We’ll have you under contract to a studio in no time. And before you know it, every man under the age of seventy will have a picture of you wearing a bikini on the wall of his potting shed.’
‘As long as they let me act, I’ll wear anything they want.’
‘Are you telling me you actually want to act?’
‘I want to be a comedienne,’ said Barbara. ‘I want to be Lucille Ball.’
The desire to act was the bane of Brian’s life. All these beautiful, shapely girls, and half of them didn’t want to appear in calendars, or turn up for openings. They wanted three lines in a BBC play about unwed mothers down coal mines. He didn’t understand the impulse, but he cultivated contacts with producers and casting agents, and sent the girls out for auditions anyway. They were much more malleable once they’d been repeatedly turned down.
‘The way I remember it, Lucille Ball wasn’t left with much choice. She was knocking on a bit, and nobody was giving her romantic leads any more, so she had to start making funny faces. You’ve got years before we have to start thinking about that. Decades, probably. Look at you.’
‘I want to go to auditions.’
‘What I’m trying to tell you is that you won’t need to go to auditions.You could be a model, and then you can be in any film you want.’
How many times had he given the same little speech? They never listened.
‘Any film I want as long as I don’t open my mouth.’
‘I’m not going to bankroll you for ever.’
‘You think if I open my mouth you’re going to have to bankroll me for ever?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Send me to auditions.’
Brian shrugged. They would have to go the long way round. The next morning, she had to explain to Marjorie that she wouldn’t be going into work with her because a man she’d met in a nightclub was paying her not to.
‘What kind of man?’ said Marjorie. ‘And are there any more where he came from? I know I’m only in Shoes, but you can tell him I really would do anything.’
‘He’s an agent.’
‘Did you see his licence or whatever it is you need to be an agent?’
‘No. But I believe him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I went to his office today. He had a secretary, and a desk . . .’
‘People do that all the time.’
‘Do what?’
‘Get secretaries and desks. To con people. I wonder if the desk will still be there if you go back today.’
‘He had filing cabinets.’
‘You can be very naive, Barbara.’
‘But what’s he conning me out of ?’
‘I’m not going to spell it out.’
‘You think people get secretaries and desks and filing cabinets so that they can seduce girls? It seems like an awful lot of trouble.’
Marjorie wouldn’t be drawn on that, but Barbara was clearly being invited to reach her own conclusions.
‘Has he given you any money?’
‘Not yet. But he’s promised to.’
‘Have you done anything to earn the money?’
‘No!’
‘Oh dear.’
‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. If he’s giving you money already, God knows what he’s expecting.’
Barbara would have started to feel foolish if Brian hadn’t sent her out to auditions immediately. She didn’t have a phone, so she would begin the day with a pile of threepenny bits and a trip to the phone box on the corner; if he had nothing for her, he’d instruct his secretary to say so straight away so she didn’t put a second coin in the slot.
The first audition was for a farce called In My Lady’s Chamber. It was about . . . Oh, it didn’t matter what it was about. It was full of young women in their underwear and lustful husbands caught with their trousers down, and their awful, joyless wives. What it was really about was people not having sex when they wanted it. A lot of British comedy was about that, Barbara had noticed. People always got stopped before they’d done it, rather than found out afterwards. It depressed her.
The play was being staged in a theatre club off Charing Cross Road. The producer told Brian that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office might have banned it from a proper theatre.
‘Utter nonsense, of course. The Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t give two hoots. But that’s what they want you to think,’ said Brian.
‘Why do they want you to think that?’
‘You’ve read it,’ he said. ‘It’s desperate stuff. It wouldn’t last two nights in the West End. But this way they can sell a few tickets to mugs who think they’re getting something too saucy for legit.’
‘It’s not at all funny.’
‘It’s not the remotest bit funny,’ said Brian. ‘But it is a comedy.
This is what you told me you want to do.’
She was being punished, she could see that. He’d put her up for a handful of terrible jobs, and then she’d be in a swimsuit on a quiz show and he’d be happy.
She read it again the night before the audition. It was even worse than she’d thought, and she wanted to be in it so much she thought she might faint from the hunger.
Her character was called Polly, and she was the one that the central character, the husband with the prim, grim wife, was prevented from making love to, over and over again. She sat down at one of the tables in the dingy little club, and the director, a tired man in his sixties with nicotine-stained silver hair, read in for Barbara’s scenes.
She started to deliver her lines – with some confidence, she thought, and a bit of snap.
‘ “We can’t do it here. Not with your wife upstairs.” ’
But he started shaking his head immediately, the moment she’d opened her mouth.
‘Is that actually you, or are you trying something?’
She’d never been in a room with someone as posh as him. Her father would take this meeting alone as evidence that Barbara’s life in London was an astonishing social triumph. She started again, without doing anything different, because she didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘It is you, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘That.’ He nodded at her mouth. ‘The accent.’
‘It’s not an accent. It’s how I talk.’
‘In the theatre, that’s an accent.’
He sighed and rubbed his eyes.
‘I’m sixty-three years old,’ he said. ‘I was the second-youngest director ever to work at the Bristol Old Vic. This is the worst play I’ve ever read. We meet at perhaps the lowest point of my professional life, and there is no evidence to suggest that there are better days ahead. I could be forgiven for not caring, I’m sure you’d agree. And yet I do care. And if I cast you, it would show that I’d given up, d’you see?’
She didn’t, and she said so.
‘Why are you resisting?’
‘I’m not.’
‘In the play. You’re resisting. And before I go on, I should say, yes, yes, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Richard Burton, kitchen sink, marvellous, marvellous. But there isn’t a kitchen sink to be seen, unfortunately. The play is called In My Lady’s Chamber. So. Why are you resisting? You sound as though you’ve spent your life selling tuppenny bags of chips. You’d let a man like Nigel have whatever he wants, surely? I need the audience to believe, you see. I’m doomed,
I know. I’m a dinosaur. These things are important to me.’
She was shaking with rage, but, for reasons that remained opaque to her, she didn’t want him to see.
‘Anyway. You were a darling to come in and try.’
She wanted to remember this man. She had a feeling that she’d never see him again, because he was tired and old and useless, and she wasn’t. But she needed to know the name, in case she was ever in a position to stamp on his hand when he was dangling perilously from his chosen profession.
‘Sorry,’ she said sweetly. ‘I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Sorry. Very rude of me. Julian Squires.’
He offered a limp hand, but she didn’t take it. She had that much pride, at least.
