CONTENTS
About the Author
Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.
AN AWFULLY
BIG ADVENTURE
Beryl Bainbridge
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
For Yolanta and Derwent May
Published by Hachette Digital 2010
First published in Great Britain by Duckworth in 1989
Published with minor revisions by Penguin Books in 1991
Copyright Beryl Bainbridge, 1989, 1990
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Special Trustees of the Hospitals for Sick Children for their permission to quote from J. M. Barries Peter Pan; to Faber & Faber Ltd for kind permission to reprint four lines from Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar from Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot; and to Peters Fraser and Dunlop for permission to reprint a quotation from Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley.
All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eBook ISBN 978 0 748 12526 5
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| SLIGHTLY: | (Examining the fallen Wendy more minutely) This is no bird; I think it must be a lady. |
| NIBS: | (Who would have preferred it to be a bird) And Tootles has killed her. |
| CURLY: | Now I see. Peter was bringing her to us. (They wonder for what object). |
| OMNES: | (Though everyone of them had wanted to take a shot at her) Oh, Tootles! |
| TOOTLES: | (Gulping) I did it. When ladies used to come to me in dreams I said: Pretty mother, but when she really came I shot her. |
James Barrie, Peter Pan, Act Two.
When the fire curtain had been lowered and the doors were at last closed, Meredith thought he heard a child crying. He switched on the house lights, but of course there was no one there. Some unfortunate had left a teddy-bear perched on the tip-up seat in the third row.
The girl was waiting for him in the property room. At his approach she stepped backwards, as though afraid he would strike her. He didnt look at her; he simply told her, in that particular tone of voice which in the past he had always used for other people, that he wasnt interested in excuses and that in any case there were none that would fit the bill.
I was upset, she protested. Anybody would be. It will never happen again.
They both heard a door opening on the floor above, and footsteps as Rose clumped along the passage.
If it was up to me, he said, lowering his voice, you wouldnt get the chance.
Youre wrong, the girl persisted. He was happy. He kept saying Well done. Im not old enough to shoulder the blame. Not all of it. Im not the only one at fault.
Get out of my sight, he said, and pushing past her strode up the corridor to waylay Rose.
I was encouraged, she shouted after him. Dont you forget that!
He slashed the air with his hook.
You dont want to be too hard on her, Rose said. Shes young.
He followed her through the pass door and across the dark stage into the auditorium. When Rose saw the teddy-bear she picked it up by one ear and walked on with it dangling against the skirt of her black frock.
Did you get through to the wife? asked Meredith.
I did, Rose said. Shes coming up on the milk train.
He climbed the stone steps after her, ducking his head beneath the singing gas mantles until they reached the top floor and the round window overlooking the square. Only the fireman and the rat-catcher came this far.
The note, he enquired. Did it shed any illumination?
Who can tell? she said. Bunny saw fit to put a match to it.
At this hour the square was empty. The flower-sellers had long since gone home, leaving the orange boxes piled up beside the urinals. Between the jagged buildings the lights of ships jumped like sparks above the river.
They stood in silence, looking down into the darkness as though waiting for a curtain to rise. There was a sudden seep of orange light as the door of Browns Caf opened and the slattern in the gumboots staggered out to sling washing-up slops into the gutter.
Then the girl appeared from out of the side street and began to run in the direction of the telephone box on the corner. Once she looked back and up at the window as though she knew she was observed. At this distance her face was a pale blur. A man with a white muffler wound about his throat rolled from the black shadows of Ice Warehouse and the girl stopped and spoke to him.
He fumbled in his pockets and handed her something. He was holding a bouquet of flowers in a twist of paper.
The Board wont like it, Meredith said. Rushworth is bound to kick up rough.
Im a match for him, said Rose. She was holding the teddy-bear to her sequinned breast, circling with the pad of her finger the cold button of its eye.
I dont suppose, Meredith asked her, that we can keep it out of the newspapers.
I could, Rose told him, but I wont. The orphanage has rung twice already. God forgive us, but itll be good for business.
Directly below, where the branches of the lime trees bounced in the wind, sending the lamplight skeetering across the cobblestones, the man in the muffler stood relieving himself within the wrought-iron enclosure of the public urinal, one arm fastidiously raised above his head. They could see his boots, glossy under the street lamp, and that bedraggled fistful of winter daffodils...
At first it had been Uncle Vernons ambition, not Stellas. He thought he understood her; from the moment she could toddle he had watched her lurching towards the limelight. Stella herself had shown more caution. Ill not chase moonbeams, she told him.
Still, she went along with the idea and for two years, on a Friday after school, she ran down the hill to Hanover Street and rode the lift in Crane Hall, up through the showrooms of polished pianofortes where the blind men fingered scales, until she reached the top floor and Mrs Ackerley whose puckered mouth spat out How now brown cow behind the smokescreen of her Russian cigarettes.
