Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars
How do you find a missing actress in a city where everyone’s playing a role?A mystery, a love-story and a darkly beguiling tale of secrets and reinvention set in 1960s London.Soho. 1965, When an American actress disappears from the Galaxy Theatre, her young dresser, Anna Treadway is determined to find out what happened to her.Anna's search will lead her through a London she barely knew existed: a city of reggae clubs and back street doctors, of dangerous prejudice and unexpected allies. She is aided by a disparate group of émigrés, each carrying secrets of their own.But before she can discover the truth about Iolanthe, Anna will need to open herself – to her past, her present and the possibility of love.
Читать Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars онлайн беплатно
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Miranda Emmerson 2017
The right of Miranda Emmerson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Harper’s Bazaar and Times logos used with permission
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Hulton Archive/Getty Images
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008170608
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008170585
Version: 2017-05-10
For Chas
Chapters
A Beloved Daughter of County Cork
A Suit-Wearing, Tea-Drinking Man of London Town
Early-Morning Savile Row Blues
My Whole Life’s Just a Series of Interviews
Harold Wilson Is Not a Fascist Dictator
We’re All Friends to the Police
Saturday, 30 October
‘Look out into the darkness,’ Iolanthe had told her. ‘Look out into the darkness and you’ll see them.’
‘Do you look?’ Anna asked.
‘Sometimes. Sometimes I forget not to. Always at the curtain, at the end. The old ones with their bags of liquorice. The dates who look at me, the dates who look at him. The students; herringbone jackets, no tie. The ones who look lustful. The ones who look bored. Some of them, you can see they’re thinking about something else entirely. You, up there on the stage, you’re nothing more than the reflection of a bulb.’
‘What are they thinking about?’ Anna asked.
‘All the stuff that’s going wrong. The stuff they can’t fix. What they’re always thinking about.’
Anna paused in the action of pinning Iolanthe’s hair and caught her eye in the mirror. The older woman was sitting in her underwear, quite still and unselfconscious as if Anna were a lover or a sister.
Anna moved Lanny’s hand to hold a roll of curls while she picked through a bowl of oddments for more hairpins. ‘It must be very strange,’ she said. ‘Everyone looking and seeing something different. As if you were a funhouse mirror.’
This made Iolanthe laugh. ‘That’s just what I am. Different for everybody. The Lanny who sits here will die as soon as she walks through that door. And a new Lanny will be born. Stage-door Lanny. Interview Lanny. Getting-the-drinks-in Lanny. I walk through the door and I start afresh. No hang-ups. No neuroses.’
Anna cast a questioning glance towards the surface of the mirror and Iolanthe seemed almost to blush. ‘That’s the idea, anyway. Live in the moment. Don’t get caught in the net.’
***
Out in the darkness of the upper stalls, tiny pinpricks of light caught Anna’s eye. Opera glasses, trained no doubt on Iolanthe, bouncing back light. Towards the stage she could see long rows of pale faces tilted upwards. From where she stood the stage looked tiny and the sound was flattened and distorted, muffled by the footsteps of the actors and the crew. Look at us all, she thought. Look at all us monkeys sitting in a great black box. Less than ten of us facing one way; nine hundred facing the other. One person speaks; the many hundred stay silent. And at the end all but the speakers will bang their little paws together. How did we all learn what to do? What made us so obedient?
Anna watched Lanny stride upstage and gesture to the crude oil painting of a woman in 1920s garb which hung above her on the living-room wall. In the semi-darkness the scene-shifters were quietly rolling the fairground set into place behind it.
‘… I had the inspiration … the ability … to be anything.’
Lanny paused and gauged the level of attention, the silence in the space. In the upper circle there was a fit of coughing. Anna saw Lanny’s face twitch just slightly with displeasure. She drove her next speech across the heads of the stalls and right into the upper circle high above. Her annoyance rang through in her delivery, her anger directed not at her fellow actor but at the audience members themselves.
