Personality Read online

  An eye hovers at the keyhole of Madame Tussaud’s. The museum is silent but for the ghosts of female voices.

  ‘Surely people will soon tire of hearing about my weaknesses?’ says Marie Antoinette to the dark.

  An eye, brightening, going on, passes the Royal Academy of Music near Ulster Place, where on the third floor a young Japanese lady plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. She stops because she is told she is not sitting properly. She stops again because she is still too bent. The bow is bouncing off the strings, she is told, and she blushes; the man’s eyes are telling her she will never be great. She is told the traffic outside is more musical. The young woman stares at the window and wonders if the sound in her head will ever stop. She wonders if she will ever honour the music, or honour herself: ‘The traffic is more musical,’ the man says again.

  An eye, the self-same eye, travelling at speed round Park Crescent and through the columns into Portland Place, zooming above taxis and wet branches strewn by the road, black bags of rubbish heaped in the doorways; an eye, the same eye, crossing Weymouth Street and New Cavendish Street, over the statues of proud men, British men in the iron throes of remembrance, Joseph Lister for furthering the use of antiseptics, George Stuart White the hero of Kandahar, and Quintin Hogg, educationalist, founder of the Polytechnic Day School for Boys and author of the first Boys’ Handbook.

  An eye, the breeze oncoming, racing down Portland Place and along the window ledges of Broadcasting House; inside the building a hundred microphones are live, and the world listens, and music plays to distant ears. There are voices thrown back and forth in the studios, yet along the corridors, hung with the heads-and-shoulders of celebrities, there is a strange quietness at the BBC. An eye travels over Oxford Circus. Newspaper sellers shout, ‘Late final!’ A German couple rehearse their arguments while carrying a load of Hamleys bags, each person balanced with goods, each with his, with her own scales of justice. A girl from Boots, a boy from Westminster School with a bag full of sums. Drivers, shoppers, beggars, laughers. A man with a placard against protein. A woman selling sweet peanuts and dreaming of life in Europe. A policeman with no chance of promotion. A poet with an acceptance letter from a small magazine.

  Legislators, truants, accountants, Scots. A beautiful woman who works for Asprey’s in Bond Street and used to steal good pens when she worked at Harrods. Men who love their mothers more than their wives. Women who love one child more than another. Children out late, who think their parents are good for a few quid, and grandmothers, fresh from the escalators at John Lewis, who quite enjoy being pitied in their old age and wish it had started with their families years ago. Tourists, seamstresses, barmen, lawyers, an airline pilot, an art historian. An actor who works as a clown for kids’ parties. A gentleman who sells Christmas cards in the hall at St James’s Church every year but has serious doubts about the existence of God. A librarian from the London Library who pockets her own books. A red-haired plumber who worked on a bathroom that morning in Kensington Gore and knowingly drove a nail into a supply pipe and left it there to leak. A woman from New Zealand with a lump in her breast. A man who despairs of Britain and all it has become. A boy who will die soon in a field at the other side of the world. A girl with blonde hair, from Leicester, who will go home tonight and find that her boyfriend wants her to be his wife. She will cry with happiness before midnight and soon choose her dress and walk down the aisle of a familiar church with a notion the world was ordered for her. A young man from Bethnal Green playing saxophone, the notes drifting over the crowd and into the cold air over Oxford Circus this night and never again.

  An eye over Argyll Street. An eye in the melée of everyday things, moving up the street and over it all, past the cafés and the people counting their change, and low down now, next to the pavement where people aren’t sure where they are, turning maps over in their hands in the rain. A girl with black nail-polish outside a pub wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Victim’. An eye travels up the doors of the theatre; it climbs up a white column and moves over the bold letters of a word – PALLADIUM – and creeping around the white façade and over the side of the building, it finds an open window.

  A distant sound of people shouting and hammering and a tinkling of glasses travels along the backstage corridors of the theatre. Red swirls on the carpet, and the walls smell of gloss paint and further along this smell mingles with that of stale cigarette smoke. A blackboard stands against a stairwell chalked-up with the words ‘First Half’ and a group of names:

  Faith Brown

  Ronnie Barker

  Olivia Newton-John

  Roger Moore

  Carol Charming

  Howard Keel

  The Brian Rogers Dancers

  Elton John

  An eye inches forward above the old carpet then hovers at a door. The door is part open, and an eye passes into the room and stops before a long mirror surrounded with bulbs, and it fixes at last on the face of a girl, who knew it was coming, an eye like a camera from her childhood. Maria Tambini, staring into the mirror, lost in her own eyes.

  *

  She felt dizzy looking at herself. She took sticks out of the makeup box and rubbed more red on her cheeks. She had noticed it before: sometimes, if she stared at her face for long enough, she grew dizzy, and what she saw became distorted, like an image in a dream of avarice. She had been in her dressing-room for hours, her hair was done and she had applied her make-up several times. The first two times she wiped it off with soap and water and started again. Her eyes were large in the mirror.

  There was a sink in the corner. She stood up. Carefully, without disturbing the tissues tucked around her neck, she went to the sink and vomited. She ran the cold tap while her head was bent down: there wasn’t a great deal to wash away, but she vomited again, while the tap was still running, and when she straightened up her main worry was whether her teary eyes would make the eyeliner run. Returning to the mirror, she took a tube of toothpaste from the smallest make-up bag and, squeezing an inch onto a finger, rubbed it over her teeth and around the inside of her mouth. She felt very clean now. She felt pure. There was something about the taste of mint.

  She had no idea how long Hughie Green had been standing behind her. ‘You look just swell sitting there.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Mr Green.’

  ‘That was a pretty terrific rehearsal, Maria.’

  ‘Such a big stage. I’ve never seen such a stage before.’

  ‘A big stage for mighty big talents, my dear. The first time I walked out there and heard the old rustling of the audience, my God …’

  She smiled. She’d heard it before. ‘You’d come home.’

  He winked. ‘How well you know me.’

  ‘Were you frightened?’

  ‘Never. Never scared. I was only scared they wouldn’t notice me, or they’d take me off early or something. I came here with a gang show and I did the old soft-shoe shuffle and I got the girl. Easy. It was all easy in those days.’

  ‘Did you see Eric and Ernie’s show?’

  ‘You were on it. A great success, Maria. You were terrific, everyone is saying the same.’

  ‘I just laughed all the time.’

  ‘No, but you sang.’

  ‘Aye, I sang.’

  ‘You really sang. You’re just like I am, Maria – television was invented for you. You stopped the show.’

  ‘Mrs Gaskell said the phone has rung all day with different sorts of work.’

  ‘You be careful.’

  ‘Good things. Abroad and that.’

  ‘Careful. You just watch yourself. You be careful she doesn’t have you overdoing it.’

  ‘Exciting isn’t it? It’s all fine. Mad though.’

  ‘I said be careful what you do. You think there’s freedom to do what you want in this business, but you’ve got to have good advice. Mrs Gaskell’s an old hand. She doesn’t tread lightly and you can upset people in this business. People are easily upset.’

 
‘I’m sixteen, Mr Green.’

  ‘You’re a baby. We were all babies once.’ He paused. ‘The Great British Public – all those mums and dads, they know a good turn when they see it all right. An American director I worked with used to say to me, “Hughie, talent conquers everything, and it can eventually conquer the talented as well.’”

  ‘It’s all experience,’ said Maria.

  ‘Is that what Mrs Gaskell told you?’

  ‘Just experience under your belt.’

  ‘Did your mother tell you that?’

  Maria turned in her chair. ‘Mr Green, why would my mother tell me things? She lives in Rothesay. My mother’s not in the business. She lives in Rothesay.’

  ‘You’re her daughter.’

  ‘Well spotted.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic, Maria. It doesn’t suit you, kiddo. Give us a smile there.’

  Maria shook her head and showed her teeth. Hughie Green walked to the side of the dressing-room and laid down the book he was carrying. A plastic ruler was jammed between the pages of the book, Flight to Arras.

  ‘Do you like books?’ he asked, sitting on the edge of the dressing-table.

  She wondered whether to say a true thing or not. Then quite suddenly she spoke five words. ‘I’ve never read a book.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘Never all the way through,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had the time.’

  ‘But you like stories?’

  ‘We did some books at school,’ she said, ‘but just bits of them, for homework and things, and sometimes the teachers would read something. We had these reading cards. SRA. That’s what it was called. You read bits of stories off cards and then answered questions from another card and depending how good you were you got a colour. I think olive was the highest and pink the lowest.’

  ‘How extraordinary,’ said Hughie Green, and then he paused. ‘But you’ve been busy. I didn’t have much schooling either, but my father loved books.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I think gold was the highest.’

  They sat for a while in silence, Maria thinking of the reading cards in Rothesay, Hughie fingering the book’s edges. ‘My granny liked fairy stories,’ she said, ‘and they are the stories I remember. I don’t know what my dad liked and my mum only likes real-life stories about people like Dolly Parton.’ She smiled at the mirror. ‘I loved my granny’s stories.’

  ‘Well, you’re top of the bill tonight, Maria. I’m telling you, that’s worth all the qualifications in the world. Huh? Who would have reckoned on that, huh? Those years ago.’

  ‘I better get ready.’

  ‘You look swell.’

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘Swell. One cute dame is what you’re becoming. One cute dame I’m telling you. The old puppy fat is still there mind you, are you taking care of yourself?’

  Maria blushed. ‘It’s not really me,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, honey?’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about any silly thing like that. You’re looking good.’

  She put down her comb and glanced in the mirror. ‘Everybody says I look good, don’t they? I look fat.’

  ‘Not at all. You know this famous business of ours. We all have to look our best. You look great. You’re growing up and I’m telling you it’s one fine dame you’re becoming.’

  ‘How many people tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘Full house,’ he said. ‘Over two thousand. Engelbert is here and he’s coming along to see you. One fine dame. You just give it the lot tonight, Maria. You’re a star, do you hear me. My favourite. My girl, huh?’

  Hughie Green had a way of looking round a room as if he wanted to suck out all its oxygen. He used words as if words were all he really had, snapping sentences shut in your face. He left Maria in a state of disorder in her dressing room. Her eyes were full of water and her hands were shaking, and when Mrs Gaskell arrived with a sheet of paper Maria was rubbing more toothpaste around the inside of her mouth.

  ‘All right, dear?’ said Mrs Gaskell. ‘After the show there are some fans congregating at the stage door. They are armed with photographs and records that want signing. Righty-ho? I’m sure photographers will take the opportunity for snaps down there, so reapply, you know, before coming down. Richard will be there with the car.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Maria.

  ‘Good, good,’ said Mrs Gaskell, ‘but bear in mind the telephone. They’re putting through a call from the Daily Record any minute.’

  ‘Do I have to?’ said Maria. ‘I don’t feel like doing interviews right now. I just want to sit.’

  ‘No Maria. Come, come now. It’s the Record and you know they are good to us, so buck up, please, it will only take a few minutes.’

  ‘I wish I could just sit.’

  ‘That’s enough, Maria! Come now, it’s a special night and we won’t go spoiling everything. It’s the Record.’

  Maria grew unfamiliar to herself in the mirror. She sighed and knocked over a group of lipsticks.

  ‘Now listen young lady.’

  ‘Now listen young lady.’

  ‘Don’t start this now.’

  ‘Don’t start this now.’

  ‘Stop it, Maria!’

  ‘Stop it, Maria.’

  ‘Stop!’

  Maria looked up at Mrs Gaskell and narrowed her eyes. ‘Listen lady,’ she said.

  Mrs Gaskell shook her head and folded a towel. ‘I don’t appreciate this tonight of all nights,’ she said. ‘All that’s required of you is that you behave professionally. It’s no skin off my nose, my dear …’

  ‘No skin off my nose.’

  ‘Enough!’

  ‘No skin off my nose.’

  The telephone rang. Mrs Gaskell lifted it up and smiled into the receiver. ‘Absolutely, Sam. How lovely. Yes it’s very exciting and a tremendous buzz down here this evening. Absolutely.’

  ‘A tremendous buzz,’ said Maria.

  ‘You’re not kidding there,’ said Mrs Gaskell, giving Maria a look. ‘I’d be delighted. Please do. Jolly good …’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  ‘She’s right beside me.’

  Maria took the phone and looked down into the table of make- up and scrunched-up tissues. Her voice immediately became soft and more Scottish, she giggled, and in a moment she was giving herself on the phone.

  ‘Are you missing Bute?’ asked the journalist.

  ‘I’m missing all my family,’ she said. ‘There are so many big stars in the Palladium tonight I really can’t believe it. But everybody up there in Scotland will be watching I hope.’

  ‘Is London your home now?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I really do miss the seaside,’ she said, ‘but I have a lot of family now. Millions of them.’

  ‘Is it a big audience tonight?’

  ‘I think it’s very big.’

  ‘And how do you feel to have come this far so early in your career, Maria?’

  ‘Well it’s such an honour to be sharing a stage with such big names. A thrill, really.’

  ‘Did you listen to them all when you were wee?’

  ‘Oh yes. My mum and I used to play the records at home and I have very fond memories of Scotland.’

  Mrs Gaskell folded the towels and left the room.

  ‘And are you rich now, Maria?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really need very much money but my manager and all the people look after things.’

  ‘Enough to buy a new dolly?’

  ‘Well, if I wanted one, that would be fine.’

  ‘Hughie Green is the compere. How does it feel to be back working with the man who started your career?’

  ‘Oh, he’s a lovely man and very professional. It’s always nice to see old faces.’

  ‘And what’s next for you after this?’

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of work. Abroad, and then a new album is coming out in May and, oh … what else? My manager’s arranged a tour and it’s all going really well.’

  ‘Any plans to perform in Scotland?’r />
  ‘I have fond memories of all the people there and hopefully it won’t be long before I get the chance to sing for them again in the near future.’

  She put down the phone then crossed over to the door and pushed it shut. She put her back against the door and stood for a moment. The room was empty but the surrounding mirrors reflected her back at herself from a dozen angles. Everywhere she looked there was another version of herself.

  ‘You’re in charge,’ she said.

  *

  The life underground. Caverns and chambers filled with darkness – arches, corridors, greasy pipes carrying gas to the metropolis, cracked sewers, bad air, ancient bones, mud, layers of broken plaster, former shelters, night-gloop, the remnants of the Great Fire, dust, soil and the mash of brick, passageways, vaults, lost merchandise, skin cells, a labyrinth of vanished facts, paving-stones, Victorian whispers, telephone cables, a Saxon cross of powdered sandstone, down there, in London.

  And tunnels, the tunnels of London, conveying people towards Cockfosters, Brixton, Walthamstow, Ruislip, the end of things. In a tube carriage, Central Line, stopped just short of Oxford Circus, stands a group of strangers packed together in the narrow train. They stand straight and look at each other’s shoes, eyes averted from each other’s eyes, and some of them look at their books, not reading.

  It is 9.45 p.m.

  The tube is stalled in the tunnel. There is heat between the people in the carriage, and close up a fragrance of shampoos on rain-dampened hair, a faint notion of aftershaves, coffees, and never has this happened before, these same people, this exact spot of the world underground, then round them the tube train shudders into motion. They are gone.

  Overhead, through the tunnel’s roof, a layer of bricks gives way to iron filings, to nubs of wood, to walkways, and on and upwards, to unbroken stones and dreck, compacted earth, and then there are shards of wine bottles embedded in a layer of sand near the surface – remnants of a Victorian wine cellar – and finally the beginning of foundation stones, laid in 1908, and then a thick layer of wooden floorboards.