But she had style and must once have been a beautiful woman. Though probably seventy, she behaved with the assurance of a woman who has no doubt of her sexual magnetism. There was no coquetry, but a grace and dignity, heightened by her theatrical manner.
‘Good morning,’ she enunciated with the attention to each vowel and consonant which she had instilled into generations of young hopefuls.
‘Hello, I’m Alfred Bostock.’ He slipped easily into his Everything in the Garden twang. ‘I’m a journalist. I’m researching an article on Christopher Milton and I’m here because I’ve heard that you had so much to do with shaping his early career.’
She laughed a clear, tinkling laugh, only shown to be staged by the over-dramatic intake of breath which followed it. ‘Ah, dear Christopher. Everyone wants to know about him.’
‘Other members of the Press, you mean?’
‘Yes, dear boy. There was the cub from the local rag, then a charming American girl, and now you.’
‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind going over the ground again.’
‘Mind? But, mon cher, I am always delighted to speak about my little ones. And when it is the one, the one of all others who had the je ne sais quoi, the unknowable something that is stardom, why should I refuse? We who serve genius must do our duty. Do come in.’
Charles, who was beginning to find her language a bit excessive, followed her up a couple of staircases to a dark sitting-room. It needn’t have been as dark as it was, but much of the window was obscured by an Art Deco glass fire-screen with a colourful design of a butterfly. The splashes of pale green, blue and red which the sun cast over the floor and furniture gave an ecclesiastical flavour to the room and this was intensified by the rows of photographs in ornate metal frames on the walls. They looked like images of saints and youthful miracle-workers, with their slicked hair and unearthly smiles. They were presumably the ‘little ones’, the pupils who had taken their theatrical orders under Miss da Costa’s guidance and gone on to work in the field.
Two untimely candles added to the stuffy atmosphere of Italian Catholicism which the room generated. Every surface was crowded with souvenirs, more tiny framed photographs, dolls, masks, gloves, programmes, massed untidily like offerings before a shrine.
The votaress sank dramatically into a small velvet chair and lay back so that the candle-light played gently over her fine profile. It reminded Charles of Spotlight photographs of ten years before, when every actor and actress was captured in a fuzzy light which picked out their bones in a murk of deepening shadows. (Nowadays actors tend to be photographed as if they’ve just come off a building site or are about to start life sentences for rape.) ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you want to ask me about Christopher.’
She didn’t ask for any credentials, which was a relief, because Charles hadn’t thought through the details of what Alfred Bostock was meant to be researching.
‘Yes, I’m after a bit of background, you know, what was he like as a child?’ Charles mentally practised his Alfred Bostock voice by repeating ‘Ford Cortina’, ‘double glazing’ and ‘ceiling tiles’ to himself.
‘Christopher came to me when he was ten.’ Ellen da Costa settled down to her recitation from Lives of the Saints. ‘Just a scrap of a boy, but with that same appealing charm and, of course, the talent. Even then, when he was unformed, the talent was there. Quite exceptional. His parents had died, in a car crash, I think, and it was an aunt who brought him to me. Very self-possessed he was.’
‘When was this that he first came to you?’
Ellen da Costa gave him a look for talking in prayers, but she answered his question, revealing that she had not been in on the shedding of four years considered necessary to the star’s career.
She then continued at some length describing the evolution of the embryo talent under the ideal laboratory conditions of her school. Charles was beginning to feel sated with superlatives when she offered to illustrate her lecture with a collection of press cuttings pasted into large blue ledgers.
They weren’t very revealing. One or two good notices for the young Christopher Milton, but nothing which suggested a performer set to take the world by storm. Charles mentioned this to Ellen da Costa in suitably reverential tones.
‘Ah well, the press has never been notorious for its recognition of true quality, particularly in the theatre. I once knew an actor.. ’ the pause was deliberately left long to summon up images of years of wild passion. ‘… a very great actor, who was nearly crucified by the critics. It was a martyrdom, a true martyrdom, very triste. Pardon my speaking so of your chosen occupation — ’ for a moment Charles couldn’t think what she was talking about — ‘but in my experience the press has never, in this country anyway, had the delicatesse to understand the workings of genius.’
Charles did not attempt to defend his assumed calling, but murmured something suitable. ‘Also,’ she continued, her finely modulated voice drawing out the final ‘o’ almost to breaking point, ‘perhaps Christopher was not fully realised at first. The potential was there, massive potential. Of course, with my experience I could see that, I was sympathique to it, but it was slow to blossom. At first there were others who appeared more talented than he, certainly who attracted more public notice, more press reaction, more work.’
‘They worked while they were here?’
She at once became guarded, as if this were a patch of coals over which she had been hauled before. ‘Most stage schools also act as agencies for child performers and a lot of our pupils do a great deal of work, subject of course to the legal restrictions of only working forty days in the year and with adequate breaks. All the children are chaperoned and — ’
But Charles was not writing a muck-raking article on the exploitation of child actors, so he tactfully cut her short, and asked if she would show him some of the early photographs of Christopher Milton.
She obliged readily. ‘Here are some from 1952.’ They looked very dated. Styles of period stage costume change quite as much as current fashion and the starched ruffs and heavy Elizabethan garments the children wore had the same distant unreal quality as Victorian pornography. ‘This is from a production of Much Ado my students did. Christopher was playing Claudio.’
Charles took the photograph she proffered. Christopher Milton’s face was instantly recognisable, even under a jewelled and feathered hat. All twenty-three years had done was to cut the creases deeper into his skin.
But it was the other two children who intrigued Charles. They were beautiful. Their grace in the heavy costumes made them look like figures from an Elizabethan painting and showed up Christopher Milton as very twentieth century, almost gauche in doublet and hose. The girl had a perfect heart-shaped face and long-lashed eyes whose grave stare, even from the old photograph, was strongly sensual. She appeared to be looking at the boy, who returned her gaze with the same kind of intensity. He had the epicene grace which some adolescent boys capture before they coarsen into adults. The face was almost baby-like in its frame of long blond curls. The eyes were deep-set and powerful.
‘Claudio,’ Charles repeated after a long pause. ‘That’s not the best part in the play. Presumably this young man played Benedict?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was he good?’
‘Yes, he was very good. He did a lot of film work in his teens. Gareth Warden, do you remember the name?’
‘It rings a bell.’ Yes, Julian Paddon had mentioned it and, now he saw the photograph, Charles realised that Gareth Warden had been in the film he’d caught the tail-end of on Jim Waldeman’s television. That seemed so long ago it was like a memory from a previous incarnation. ‘And the girl?’
‘Prudence Carr. She was a clever little actress, so clever.’
‘And she played Beatrice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any idea what happened to her? Or to Gareth Warden, come to that?’