Freda watched Florence crossing the road in the rain. She was expecting her to go back to Henrietta Street or, more likely, find shelter from the weather in a café somewhere （Florence should have had shares in Lyons Corner Houses）。 She did neither, but hovered uncertainly on the pavement outside the Coal Hole pub. A car drew up and Florence stepped forward and seemed to be in conversation with the driver. He was older, but not as old as Mr. Birdwhistle. Freda didn’t see what happened next because an omnibus stopped in front of her, blocking her view. By the time the omnibus had loaded itself with passengers and moved on, both the car and Florence had disappeared. Surely Florence knew not to step into a stranger’s car? But then Freda thought of Florence’s trusting bovine face and knew that it would probably take little more than the offer of a humbug to seduce her.
* * *
—
Two or three girls—the beginning of an early snake of hopefuls—were already queueing at the stage door, waiting for an open audition. Clearly, they had no Miss Sherbourne to recommend them and they cast envious looks in Freda’s direction as she walked straight past them and into the holy sepulchre. They probably mistook her for a cast member, Freda thought, preening. The Adelphi’s stage door was almost next door to Corpus Christi, perhaps she should have asked Florence to light a candle for her for luck. “You don’t light them for luck,” Florence said. “You light them for someone else, not yourself.”
Freda was so excited that she failed to notice that there were no playbills for Betty in Mayfair adorning the front of the theatre.
At the stage door, Freda found the doorman, who was squeezed into a small booth at the entrance. “It’s off,” he said when she interrupted his solemn perusal of racing tips in the Daily Mail to enquire about Betty in Mayfair.
“Off?”
“Yes, off. Transferred to Shaftesbury Avenue. We’ve got The Green Hat on now, didn’t you see the playbills outside?”
Apparently not. Still, Freda supposed, one show was as good as another.
“I’ve got a letter, inviting me for an audition,” she said. She didn’t, Miss Sherbourne had arranged the audition over the telephone, but it was the same thing really. The doorman seemed the indolent sort and, indeed, he returned to his newspaper and, without looking up, reached out his hand to a telephone on the wall and asked whoever was on the other end to send Mr. Lionel. “There’s a girl here,” he added.
After rather a long wait, Mr. Lionel appeared. He didn’t seem to be much older than Freda herself. He was quite yellow-looking, as if he needed a good dose of liver salts （something Vanda swore by）。 Was Lionel his Christian name or his surname?, she wondered. He said impatiently to the doorman, “What now, Alfred?” Mr. Lionel and the doorman appeared to be at loggerheads over something. A series of barbed comments was exchanged, the subject of which seemed to be a key that had gone missing. The more operatic Mr. Lionel grew on the subject, the more taciturn the doorman became. They seemed to have forgotten all about Freda until she gave a little cough to remind them. “I have an audition,” she said, and Mr. Lionel gave a long-suffering sigh, as if he couldn’t think of anything more tiresome.
“The management, I suppose?” he said to her.
“Yes, the management,” Freda agreed, not entirely sure what that meant in the context of the Adelphi. Her father had been in management, but the Adelphi wasn’t a chocolate factory.
The doorman gave a little snort of contempt at the word “management.”
“Follow me, then,” Mr. Lionel said to Freda, with magnificent indifference.
“The belly of the beast,” he said as he led her into this mysterious realm, a place that was cavernous and cramped by turns. York’s Theatre Royal was much better organized. The Adelphi was dark and dusty, not to mention chaotic, and Mr. Lionel was continually warning her about obstacles that they had to negotiate—coils of rope, enormous costume baskets, a large toolbox, even a small dog that regarded her with disinterest. “It’s a ratter” was said by way of explanation.
Eventually they fought their way through to an office, where he handed her over to a woman wearing pince-nez who was sitting at a desk amongst a jumble of paperwork. Freda quashed her instinct to tidy. She was Miss Young, she said （she wasn’t, she was very old, at least forty by Freda’s reckoning）。 She was also extremely cross. Had something happened to make everyone bad-tempered, Freda wondered, or was this just what the West End was like?