“It’s selfishness that’s at the bottom of it,” Simon shouted. “The actors ought to have smaller wages, see? What I reckon, the thing ought to be run for the good of everybody. Smaller wages all round.”
“Including the stage staff? The workmen?” asked Gaunt.
“They all ought to get the same.”
“Then I couldn’t afford to keep your friend Colly.”
“I reckon he’s wasting his time anyway,” said Simon, and Gaunt walked away in a rage.
Evidently Simon confided this conversation to Colly, who considered it necessary to apologize for his new friend.
“You don’t want to pay too much attention to him, sir,” Colly said, as he massaged his employer’s leg that evening. “He’s a nice young chap. Just a touch on the red side. He’s a bit funny. It’s Mr. Questing that’s upset his apple-cart, reely.”
“He’s an idiotic cub,” said Gaunt. “What’s Questing got to do with the price of stalls?”
“He’s been talking big business, sir. Young Simon thinks he’s lent a good bit to the Colonel on this show. He thinks the Colonel can’t pay up and Mr. Questing’s going to shut down on them and run the place on his pat. Young Simon’s that disgusted he’s taken a scunner on anything that looks like smart business.”
“Yes, but —”
“He’s funny. I had it out with him. He told me what he’d been saying to you, and I said he’d acted very silly. ‘I’ve been with my gentleman for ten years,’ I told him, ‘and there’s not much we don’t know about the show business. I seen him when he was a small-part actor playing a couple-of-coughs-and-a-spit in stock,’ I said, ‘and believe you me he’s worked for it. He may be a star now,’ I said, ‘and he may be getting the big money, but how long’ll it last?’ ”
“What the hell did you mean by that?”
“We’re not as young as we was, sir, are we? ‘You don’t want to talk silly,’ I said. ‘Questing’s one thing and my gentleman’s another.’ But no. ‘You’re no better than a flunkey,’ he says. ‘You’re demeaning yourself.’ I straightened him up about that. ‘There’s none of the blooming valley about me,’ I says, ‘I’m a dresser and make-up, and what I do on the side is done by me own choice. I’m in the game with my gentleman.’ ‘It’s greed for money,’ he howls, ‘that’s ruining the world. Big business started this war,’ he says, ‘and when we’ve won it us chaps that did the fighting are going to have a say in the way things are run. The Questings’ll be wiped right off the slate.’ That’s the way he talks, you see, sir. Mind, I feel sorry for him. He’s got the idea that his dad and ma are going to just about conk out over this business and to his way of thinking Questing’s as good as a murderer. He says Smith knows something about Questing and that’s why he had to jump for it when the train came. You’ve had fifteen minutes on them muscles and that’ll do you.”
“You’ve damned nearly flayed me alive.”
“Yes,” said Colly, flinging a blanket over his victim and going into the next room to wash his hands. “He’s morbid, is young Sim. And of course Mr. Questing’s little attempts at the funny business with Miss Barbara kind of put the pot on it.”
Dikon, who had been clattering his typewriter, paused.
“What’s that?” said Gaunt, suddenly alert.
“Had you missed the funny business, sir?” said Colly from the next room. “Oh, yes. Quite a bit of trouble she has with him, I understand.”
“What did I tell you, Dikon?”
“The way I look at it,” Colly went on, appearing in the doorway with a towel, “she’s capable. No getting away from it, and you can’t get domestic labour in this country without you pay the earth, so Questing thinks he’ll do better to keep her when the old people go.”
“But damn it,” Dikon said angrily, “this is insufferable. It’s revolting.”
“That’s right, Mr. Bell. That’s what young Sim thinks. He’s worked it out. Questing’ll try putting in the fine work, making out he’ll look after the old people if she sees it in the right light. Coo! It’s a touch of the old blood-and-thunder dope isn’t it, sir? Mortgage and all. The villain still pursued her. Only the juvenile to cast, and there, as we say in The Dream, sir, is a play fitted. I used to enjoy them old pieces.”
“You talk too much, Colly,” said Gaunt mildly.
“That’s right, sir. Beg pardon, I’m sure. Associating with young Mr. Claire must have brought out the latent democracy in me soul. I tell him there’s no call to worry about his sister. ‘It’s easy seen she hates his guts,’ I said, if you’ll excuse me.”
“I’ll excuse you altogether. I’m going to work.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Colly neatly, and closed the door.
He would perhaps have been gratified if he had known how accurately his speculations about Barbara were to be realized. It was on that same evening, a Thursday, nine days before the Maori concert, that Questing decided to carry forward his hitherto tentative approach to Barbara. He chose the time when, wearing a shabby bathing dress and a raincoat, she went for her four-o’clock swim in the warm lake. Her attitude towards public bathing had been settled for her by her mother. Mrs. Claire was nearly forty when Barbara was born, and her habit of mind was Victorian. She herself had grown up in an age when one ducked furtively in the ocean, surrounded by the heavy bell of one’s braided serge. She felt apprehensive whenever she saw her daughter drop her raincoat and plunge hastily into the lake clad in the longest and most conservative garment obtainable at the Harpoon Co-operative Stores. Only once did Barbara attempt to make a change in this procedure. Stimulated by some pre-war magazine photographs of fashionable nudities on the Lido, she thought of sun-bathing, of strolling in a leisurely, even a seductive manner down to the lake, not covered by her raincoat. She showed the magazines to her mother. Mrs. Claire looked at the welter of oiled limbs, glistening lips and greased eyelids. “I know, dear,” she said turning pink. “So very common. Of course newspaper photographers would never persuade the really, really quite to be taken, so I suppose they are obliged to fall back on these people.”
“But Mummy, they’re not ‘these people’! Look, there’s…”
“Barbara darling,” said Mrs. Claire in her special voice, “some day you will understand that there are folk who move in rather loud and vulgar sets, and who may seem to be very exciting, and who I expect are all very rich. But, my dear,” Mrs. Claire had added, gently, exhibiting a photograph of an enormously obese peer in bathing shorts, supported on the one hand by a famous coryphée and on the other by a fashionable prize-fighter — “my dear, they are not Our Sort.” And she had given Barbara a bright smile and a kiss, and Barbara had stuck to her raincoat. On the occasion of his proposal, Mr. Questing, who did not care for sitting on the ground, took a camp-stool to the far end of the lake, placed it behind some manuka scrub near the diving board, and, fortified by a cigar, sat there until he spied Barbara leaving the house. He then discarded the cigar, waited until she was within a few feet of his hiding place, and stepped out to meet her.