Jasmine Nights by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online Page B

She was in such a state about the audition now, and the fact that she was in London by herself, it was all she could think about.
    The first confusion was that the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was in fact in Catherine Street, so she got lost trying to find it. When she did see it, she was disappointed, what with the theatre looking so drab and workmanlike in its wartime uniform. There were no thrilling posters advertising musical stars or famous actors hanging about, no twinkling lights or liveried doormen, no scented and glamorous ladies in furs outside – only a large painted officey-looking sign saying that this was the headquarters of the Entertainments National Service Association, and inside, what looked like a rabbit warren of hastily erected offices, out of which the Corinthian columns soared like the bones of a once beautiful woman.
    She walked upstairs and into the foyer, where a harassed-looking NCO sat at a desk with a clipboard and a list, and a pile of official-looking forms.
    ‘I’ve come for the ENSA audition,’ she told him. She hadn’t expected to feel so nervous on her own, but then Mum was usually with her.
    ‘Overseas or domestic?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Name?’ He consulted his list.
    ‘Saba Tarcan.’ She felt almost sick with nerves and regretted the powdered egg earlier.
    ‘You’re an hour early,’ he said, adding more kindly, ‘Sit over there, love, if you want to.’
    She sat on a spindly gilt chair, and gazed up at the gold ceiling, the one beautiful thing not covered by partitions and desks.
    ‘Smashing, isn’t it?’ An old man in a green cardy and with a mop and bucket had been watching her. His peaked cap looked like the remains of a doorman’s uniform. ‘But nothing like it used to look.’
    His name was Bob, he said. He’d been a doorman at this theatre for over ten years and loved the place. When a 500lb bomb had fallen through the roof during the Blitz the year before, he’d taken it hard.
    ‘Wallop,’ he said. ‘Straight through the galleries and into the pit. The safety curtain looked like a crumpled hanky, the seats was sodden from the fire brigade. We’ve cleared it up a bit since then.’
    He asked her the name of the show she was auditioning for; she said she didn’t have a clue – she’d just been told to come at 11.30.
    If he had to take a guess, he told her out of the corner of his mouth, she’d be replacing a singer called Elsa Valentine, but it was a shambles here at the moment, particularly since the new call-up. In one company alone over in France, seventy-five per cent of the performers, including the hind legs of a pantomime horse, were on the sick.
    ‘So don’t worry, love,’ he added. ‘They’re really scraping the barrel now, they’re that desperate.’
    ‘Well there’s tactful,’ she said, and he winked at her.
    ‘I’m joking, my darling,’ he said. ‘You’re a little corker.’
    She hated it when she blushed, but right there and then she got what her little sister called one of her red-hot pokers – she felt it creeping up her chest and neck until her whole face was on fire.
    Next, forms to fill in, stating her name and business, which she did with a shaking hand. An hour later, as she followed Bob up some marbled steps and down a dark corridor, he flung out snippets of history. This, love, was the boardroom, where Sheridan had written The School for Scandal . And there, he opened heavy oak doors and pointed towards the darkened stage, was where Nell Gwyn, ‘you know, the orange lady’, had performed.
    ‘Wardrobe’ – he shouted towards a room full of whirling sewing machines, backcloths, wigs. ‘And here,’ he stopped and put his finger to his lips, ‘is where a body was found.’ He pointed into a dark room. ‘The most famous one,’ he added, his eyes very round. ‘A real body,’ he whispered, ‘under the stage here, and his ghost haunts us to—’
    His hat hit the floor before he could finish the