Julia listened to him politely, but the smile had left her face.
‘I’m afraid I shall have to go in a minute,’ she said. ‘I’m late already.’
‘I ’aven’t got too much time meself. You see, meeting my young lady, I want to get away from the shop on the tick.’
The check had been put on the table when the girl brought their tea, and when they got up Julia took a shilling out of her bag.
‘What are you doing that for? You don’t think I’m going to let you pay. I invited you.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘But I’ll tell you what you can do, let me bring my young lady to see you in your dressing-room one day. Just shake ’ands with her, see? It would mean a rare lot to her. Why, she’d go on talking about it the rest of her life.’
Julia’s manner had been for some minutes growing stiffer and now, though gracious still, it was almost haughty.
‘I’m so sorry, but we never allow strangers behind.’
‘Oh, sorry. You don’t mind my asking though, do you? I mean, it’s not as if it was for meself.’
‘Not at all. I quite understand.’
She signalled to a cab crawling along the kerb and gave her hand to the young man.
‘Good-bye, Miss Lambert. So long, good luck and all that sort of thing. And thanks for the autograph.’
Julia sat in the corner of the taxi raging.
‘Vulgar little beast. Him and his young lady. The nerve of asking if he could bring her to see ME.’
When she got home she went upstairs to her room. She snatched her hat off her head and flung it angrily on the bed. She strode over to the looking-glass and stared at herself.
‘Old, old, old,’ she muttered. ‘There are no two ways about it; I’m entirely devoid of sex appeal. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? You’d say it was preposterous. What other explanation is there? I walk from one end of the Edgware Road to the other and God knows I’d dressed the part perfectly, and not a man pays the smallest attention to me except a bloody little shop-assistant who wants my autograph for his young lady. It’s absurd. A lot of sexless bastards. I don’t know what’s coming to the English. The British Empire!’
The last words she said with a scorn that would have withered a whole front bench of cabinet ministers. She began to gesticulate.
‘It’s ridiculous to suppose that I could have got to my position if I hadn’t got sex appeal. What do people come to see an actress for? Because they want to go to bed with her. Do you mean to tell me that I could fill a theatre for three months with a rotten play if I hadn’t got sex appeal? What is sex appeal anyway?’
She paused, looking at herself reflectively.
‘Surely I can act sex appeal. I can act anything.’
She began to think of the actresses who notoriously had it, of one especially, Lydia Mayne, whom one always engaged when one wanted a vamp. She was not much of an actress, but in certain parts she was wonderfully effective. Julia was a great mimic, and now she began to do an imitation of Lydia Mayne. Her eyelids drooped sensually over her eyes as Lydia’s did and her body writhed sinuously in her dress. She got into her eyes the provoking indecency of Lydia’s glance and into her serpentine gestures that invitation which was Lydia’s speciality. She began to speak in Lydia’s voice, with the lazy drawl that made every remark she uttered sound faintly obscene.
‘Oh, my dear man, I’ve heard that sort of thing so often. I don’t want to make trouble between you and your wife. Why won’t men leave me alone?’
It was a cruel caricature that Julia gave. It was quite ruthless. It amused her so much that she burst out laughing.
‘Well, there’s one thing, I may not have any sex appeal, but after seeing my imitation there aren’t many people who’d think Lydia had either.’
It made her feel much better.
26
REHEARSALS began and distracted Julia’s troubled mind. The revival that Michael put on when she went abroad had done neither very well nor very badly, but rather than close the theatre he was keeping it in the bill till Nowadays was ready. Because he was acting two matinées a week, and the weather was hot, he determined that they should take rehearsals easy. They had a month before them.
Though Julia had been on the stage so long she had never lost the thrill she got out of rehearsing, and the first rehearsal still made her almost sick with excitement. It was the beginning of a new adventure. She did not feel like a leading lady then, she felt as gay and eager as if she were a girl playing her first small part. But at the same time she had a delicious sense of her own powers. Once more she had the chance to exercise them.
At eleven o’clock she stepped on to the stage. The cast stood about idly. She kissed and shook hands with the artists she knew and Michael with urbanity introduced to her those she did not. She greeted Avice Crichton with cordiality. She told her how pretty she was and how much she liked her hat; she told her about the lovely frocks she had chosen for her in Paris.
‘Have you seen Tom lately?’ she asked.
‘No, I haven’t. He’s away on his holiday.’
‘Oh, yes. He’s a nice little thing, isn’t he?’
‘Sweet.’
The two women smiled into one another’s eyes. Julia watched her when she read her part and listened to her intonations. She smiled grimly. It was exactly what she had expected. Avice was one of those actresses who were quite sure of themselves from the first rehearsal. She didn’t know what was coming to her. Tom meant nothing to Julia any more, but she had a score to settle with Avice and she wasn’t going to forget it. The slut!
The play was a modern version of The Second Mrs Tanqueray, but with the change of manners of this generation it had been treated from the standpoint of comedy. Some of the old characters were introduced, and Aubrey Tanqueray, now a very old man, appeared in the second act. After Paula’s death he had married for the third time. Mrs Cortelyon had undertaken to compensate him for his unfortunate experience with his second wife, and she was now a cantankerous and insolent old lady. Ellean, his daughter, and Hugh Ardale had agreed to let bygones be bygones, for Paula’s tragic death had seemed to wipe out the recollection of his lapse into extra-conjugal relations; and they had married. He was now a retired brigadier-general who played golf and deplored the decline of the British Empire—‘Gad, sir, I’d stand those damned socialists against a wall and shoot ’em if I had my way’; whereas Ellean, by this time an elderly woman, after a prudish youth had become gay, modern and plain-spoken. The character that Michael played was called Robert Humphreys, and like the Aubrey of Pinero’s play he was a widower with an only daughter; he had been a consul in China for many years, and having come into money had retired and was settling on the estate, near where the Tanquerays still lived, which a cousin had left him. His daughter, Honor (this was the part for which Avice Crichton had been engaged), was studying medicine with the intention of practising in India. Alone in London, and friendless after so many years abroad, he had picked up a well-known woman of the town called Mrs Marten. Mrs Marten belonged to the same class as Paula, but she was less exclusive; she ‘did’ the summer and the winter season at Cannes and in the intervals lived in a flat in Albemarle Street where she entertained the officers of His Majesty’s brigade. She played a good game of bridge and an even better game of golf. The part well suited Julia.
The author followed the lines of the old play closely. Honor announced to her father that she was abandoning her medical studies and until her marriage wished to live with him, for she had just become engaged to Ellean’s son, a young guardsman. Somewhat disconcerted, Robert Humphreys broke to her his intention of marrying Mrs Marten. Honor took the information with composure.