The Wardrobe Mistress Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Patrick McGrath

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  January 1947.

  London is in ruins, there’s nothing to eat, and it’s the coldest winter in living memory.

  To make matters worse, Charlie Grice, one of the great stage actors of the day, has suddenly died. His widow Joan, the wardrobe mistress, is beside herself with grief.

  Then one night she discover’s her late husband’s secret. Plunged into a dark new world, Joan realises that though facism might hide, it never dies. Her war isn’t over after all.

  About the Author

  Patrick McGrath is the author of two short story collections and nine novels, including the international bestseller, Asylum. He is also the author of Writing Madness, a collection of his short fiction and selected non-fiction. His novel Trauma was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and Spider was filmed by David Cronenberg from McGrath’s adaptation. He co-edited an influential anthology of short fiction, The New Gothic, and recent non-fiction includes introductions to The Monk, Moby Dick and Barnaby Rudge. Patrick McGrath lives in Manhattan and London.

  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

  FOR MARIA

  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.

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  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?

  Glad did I live, and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  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. T
hey’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.