Tails of Wonder and Imagination

PUSS-CAT Reggie Oliver

So, you want to know about Sir Roderick Bentley, do you? Well, you’ve come to the right department, as they say. Thank you, I’ll have a large Bell’s Whisky, if I may. Plenty of soda. Ice? Good God, no! Yes, Roddy and I went back a long way, to the Old Vic days just after the war. No. No resentment. Roddy was always destined for great things, me for the supporting roles.

“Godders,” Roddy said to me once. He always called me “Godders” for some reason, but I prefer to be called Godfrey, if you don’t mind. That’s my name. “Godders, you’re a good actor. Devilish good, and you’ll always be in work. I’ll tell you why. You’re good but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.” I’ll never forget that. Of course, I suppose I knew he was right, but that doesn’t mean to say it wasn’t an almighty sock in the jaw.

Well, when Roddy formed his own company, Navigator Productions, he asked me to be in it. Played some good parts—not leads or anything, of course—but I did understudy him quite a bit. In fact I understudied him in his last two productions, and thereby hangs a tale, as they say.

Want to know a funny thing about Roddy? He couldn’t stand cats. No, I know on it’s own that’s not particularly strange, but it is odd when you consider that in spite of that he always used to call his girlfriends “puss-cat.”

You don’t know about the girlfriends? Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said, but you were bound to find out in the end, weren’t you? But you won’t mention, will you, in this biography of yours that it was I who told you? I’d hate it to get back to Lady Margery that I said such a thing. I rather doubt that she knows, you see. Or perhaps she does and won’t admit it. Women are queer cattle. Ah, the drinks! Well, here’s to your book, eh?

Let me make it quite clear: Roddy was devoted to Lady Margery. Devoted. But, you know, when Margery started to have the kids she gave up the theatre. They had this lovely home down in Kent and she didn’t like to leave it just to go on tour with him or off to some godforsaken film location in Spain or California. So Roddy had his little adventures, but he always came home.

Now, I know what’s going through your mind. I’m not quite the drink-sodden old idiot you think I am, you see. You’ve got the neat psychological explanation all lined up, haven’t you? You think he despised these girlfriends of his, and as he hated cats he called them “puss-cat” out of some subconscious urge to put them down. But it’s rather more complicated than that. You see Roddy had three passions in life: the theatre, women and sailing. He had an absolute mania for messing about in boats and when he became rich and famous he bought this yacht which was his pride and joy. It was a catamaran, and do you know what he called it? Yes. “Puss-Cat.” So you see it wasn’t that simple. Roddy did a lot for his girls one way and another: he brought them on professionally, encouraged them. Some of them have had very good careers thanks to him. No, I’m not going to tell all you their names—you’ll have to find that out for yourself—but I’ll mention a couple of them perhaps, because they’re relevant to what you came to me for. I assume it was the last months of Roddy’s life that you wanted me to tell you about?

Thank you. Just another double Bell’s with soda and that’s my lot. I’ve always known my limit: key to success, knowing your limits, believe me. By the way, I’ll say it just once: this is my version of what happened. Others will tell you different, and it’s up to you to decide what the truth of the matter is, because at the end of the day your guess is as good as mine. Probably better actually. After all, you’re the writer, aren’t you?

Well, the year after Roddy got his “K” and became Sir Roderick, he took out a tour of Pinero’s The Magistrate and, of course, I was in it. I understudied him and played the nice little role of Wormington. Gets some good laughs in the third act, but you don’t want to hear about that, do you? Well naturally Roddy plays the title role of the Magistrate, Posket, and he was superb, believe me.

Do you know The Magistrate? It’s a good old-fashioned farce. No smut. Never fails: except with the critics who think it’s a bit dusty and dated. That’s why we didn’t come into the West-End with it, I’m convinced. Well, anyway, in this play there’s a rather nice part of a young music teacher called Beatie, and for it Roddy hires a young unknown actress, name of Yolande Carey. You’ve heard about her? Well, hold your horses, because believe me, you don’t know the half.

Yolande was a sweet little thing, just Roddy’s type as it happens. His type? Well, she was slender—“petite,” I suppose is the word—blonde with delicate features and a little turned-up nose. Looked as if she’d blow away in a light gale. That was Roddy’s type. Attraction of opposites, I suppose, because Roddy, as you know, was a big man with one hell of a physique. He was sixty-three at the time I’m talking about but if it wasn’t for the grey hair he could have passed for forty-five. Don’t get the idea though that Roddy picked Yolande just because he fancied her. He wasn’t like that. Yolande had talent, believe me, a bit raw, perhaps, and underpowered in the vocal department, but definitely there, and Roddy had spotted it at the audition.

I knew Roddy and I could tell from the start of rehearsals that he fancied her because he gave her such a hard time. Incidentally, Roddy was directing as well as playing the lead. That was not the usual practice, rather archaic, but still done, like the soloist conducting a piano concerto from the keyboard. But, dammit, Gielgud did it, Olivier did it, why not Roddy? He could be a bit of a bully, but, on the other hand, he always bullied the ones he cared about most, because he knew they had it in them to give more. Sometimes younger actors found that hard to understand; just as he failed to understand that some people just don’t respond well to bullying, Yolande being one of them. He kept on at her to project more, throw herself more into the role, until once or twice I could see she was close to tears.

I did my best to reassure Yolande but she thought I was just taking pity on her. When I tried a quiet word with Roddy about it he was very sharp with me, told me to mind my own something something business. I got the impression that he suspected me of being sweet on Yolande, but this wasn’t the case. Just to make things clear at the start, I’m gay: not a word I like terribly but the only one available these days. It was a fact about my life that Roddy always chose to ignore. You see, though I don’t deny it, I’m not open or obvious about it, and I was actually once married. She left me for a dentist: I won’t bore you with the details. Cheers!

Where was I? Yes, well, the Yolande-Roddy situation was resolved in a rather odd way. We were rehearsing for the tour in a run-down old Church Hall in Lambeth. It was a gruesome place, but it was cheap to hire. Roddy, like nearly all theatrical managements I’ve worked with, could be both very mean and very extravagant in the most unexpected directions, and the Church Hall was one of his false economies. It had Biblical texts on the walls; its windows were dirty; it got us down. It also had a resident cat, an ancient ginger Tom, called Charlie—God knows why I remember that, but I do!—the mangiest old bruiser you ever saw. Charlie had a habit of trotting into rehearsals at odd moments, and standing or sitting very still while he stared at proceedings; then he would start to howl. I think Charlie just wanted to be fed, but we all called him “The Critic”, because he did sometimes seem to be commenting on our attempts at comedy.

Needless to say, Roddy loathed Charlie, and one afternoon the animal started howling at a particularly tense moment in rehearsals. Roddy, who was trying to remember lines, lost his temper completely, rushed at Charlie and gave him the most almighty kick. Charlie let out an awful screech and Yolande, who was standing nearby, ran to pick him up. She was the only one of us who had shown any sort of soft spot for Charlie, the Critic. She cuddled the wretched old beast in her arms and absolutely tore a strip off Roddy for what he had done. Roddy stared at her in amazement. He said nothing, and I could see his mind working. Once I saw his mouth twitch into a smile, but he controlled himself. Having heard her out in silence he simply and graciously apologised to her. He said that what he had done was “unpardonable.” Yolande released Charlie, who had been clawing and struggling in her arms in the most ungrateful way. He dashed off and was never seen again.

That incident marked a turning point in relations between Roddy and Yolande. Her acting became bolder and more confident; Roddy’s criticisms became more muted. They ceased to be boss and junior employee and became colleagues. It was a great relief all round.

I don’t exactly know when their affair started, but I think it was fairly early on in the tour, and I suspect it was our second week which was at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle. Do you know it? Lovely old theatre.

On the Tuesday morning Yolande and I happened to meet Roddy at the stage door. We had just been in to see if there was any mail for us and, as it was a fine April day, we were standing outside talking about nothing in particular when Roddy appeared. I could see he was in one of his restless moods, and on the spur of the moment he proposed to take us out on a jaunt. He was going to show us Hadrian’s Wall, an idea which seemed to thrill Yolande, me less so. I’d been. However I went because it was clear from Roddy’s look that he wanted me there. I wasn’t quite sure why, but, you know, Roddy was a compulsive performer and liked an audience for practically everything he did, even seduction.

We drove out of Newcastle and followed the wall. It was one of those soft, mild days of spring, full of haze and new bird song when the pale green of the hills blended with the grey ribs and ridges of Roman wall and fortress. Yolande listened to Roddy with the rapt wonder of a schoolgirl as he explained the wall to her. We got out at Housesteads, the best preserved fort on the wall, and wandered about, almost the only people there. At one point Yolande asked about Hadrian himself, what sort of man was he? Roddy who, outside military history and dates, was less well informed, hesitated. So I gave them an account of the only thing I knew about Hadrian, his passion for the glamorous youth Antinous whose mysterious death blighted the Emperor’s later years. Yolande was puzzled.

“I didn’t know they had gays in those days,” she said. Roddy, who was standing behind her, looked at me and winked. I ignored him and went into some rubbish about the Greeks and Plato and Socrates. For the rest of the time we were out I felt very uneasy. Roddy was flirting with Yolande and completely ignoring me, while she was laughing at everything he said in that way people do when they meet Royalty or fall in love.

He drove us back to the theatre. At the stage door I noticed that the theatre cat, a black, green-eyed streak of feline cunning, had stretched out its lean body on the door step to catch the weak Newcastle sun. When he saw it, Roddy did a thing I’d never seen him do before. He crouched down and tentatively tickled the animal’s stomach.

“Hello, puss-cat,” he said with a rather unconvincing show of bonhomie. The cat ignored him, and Roddy looked up at Yolande.

He said: “I wonder, old thing. I’m going back to my hotel. I’ve got to look over that bit in the third act where I got in such a tangle last night. Remember? You wouldn’t be an absolute brick and come back with me for a cuppa and test me on my lines, would you?”

There was a little pause, just long enough for it to be made obvious that she knew what he meant and he knew that she knew, and, well, you know the rest. I thought for a moment she was going to turn him down rather huffily, but she didn’t; she simply said: “Okay,” and off they went.

I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of things, because after that one would often see them together in the wings or in the dressing room corridors, just talking. They weren’t touching or anything obvious like that and I’m sure they thought they were being incredibly discreet, but very soon the rumours were flying around. You know how these things are picked up amazingly quickly by a company on tour with nothing much to do except gossip about each other.

One thing that one of the other actresses in the company said stuck in my mind. She said: “I wonder what would happen if Bel knew.” Bel of course was Belinda Courteney. Yes, the Belinda Courteney. Yes, she was one of Roddy’s girls at one time, but don’t tell her I told you. I’m up for an interview for the National next week and you know how her writ runs there. As a matter of fact I thought the Bel Courteney affair was over, but apparently some thought otherwise.

Yolande occasionally confided in me. I suppose I was a safe pair of hands, and she knew I knew, so to speak. I tried to sound kindly and wise: you know how one slips into these roles, especially if one is an actor. I was dear old Uncle Godfrey to her, and, I’m afraid, to me too in those moments. Yolande was a sweet thing, but such a child. She had become obsessed by Roddy and used to ask me about every detail of his career, the books he liked, the food he preferred, everything. I honestly think she thought he was going to leave Lady Margery for her. She said: “You know he hasn’t slept with her for eight years.” I refrained from saying that that was what he told all the girls, because it was only a guess, but perhaps I should have done.

Well, the tour wound up fairly successfully in October at the Theatre Royal Richmond, traditionally one of those “last date before the West End” venues, but it was not to be. There had been talk of a West End Theatre several times in the tour, but it came to nothing. With such a huge cast we needed a thousand-seater-plus just to break even and all the big houses were stubbornly full of American musicals that year.

So the company disbanded, but Yolande and I kept in touch, partly because I sensed she needed someone to talk to about Roddy. Most of her other friends wouldn’t have understood. They were non-theatrical and, frankly, just a bit odd. They tended to call themselves “aromatherapists,” “Feng Shui consultants,” “musicians,” “spiritual healers”: all those euphemisms by which the barely employable salve the wound of their uselessness. Forgive me, my prejudice is showing; it must be the Bell’s.

She had a little flat above a patisserie in the St John’s Wood High Street. She’d ask me round at odd times of the day for a cup of herb tea and, if I was lucky, a slice of carrot cake, but the subject of conversation was always the same: Roddy. They were still seeing each other, and he occasionally used to take her away for weekends in Paris or Torquay—his boat was down at Torquay, you see—but after one or two visits he wouldn’t come to her flat any more. The excuse he gave was that he was allergic to her cat, and one can’t altogether blame him. I’m not myself averse to cats, but this one of Yolande’s, a rescued stray, was not a notably attractive specimen. It was an elderly, neutered Tom, brindled, with a sagging belly and a passion for tinned sardines. Yolande, you see, was one of those people who is instantly drawn to anything even more defenceless than herself.

Rather unwisely I think, Yolande called the cat Roddy. I don’t know whether she actually addressed the cat as such in the other Roddy’s presence, but it would explain his allergy if she did.

I was managing to keep myself alive by the odd voice-over, and a beer commercial, but by the end of November Yolande was beginning to be rather uncomfortably out of work. She had some sort of part-time employment at a nearby book shop which didn’t bring in much, but it wasn’t just the money. Acting is a drug: once you become addicted, you need a regular fix. Yolande told me that Roddy had offered to “lend” her some money which she had indignantly refused, and he was beginning to see less of her. In December he went away for some filming in Spain; then just before Christmas something happened which lifted her out of the gloom she was falling into. She had a Christmas Card from Roddy, and there was a message in it.

Excitedly she asked me round for herb tea to see the card. She wouldn’t say anything more on the phone, so I came. I had barely taken a sip of Dandelion and Chamomile—a filthy concoction, take my word, don’t go near the stuff—before she had thrust the Actor’s Benevolent Fund card into my hand. Inside it read as follows:

“Darling Puss-Cat,

“Filming here nearly over. Shan’t be sorry. Ghastly Spanish food swimming in oil. Fell off a horse yesterday in full armour. No joke. Puss-Cat, I’m taking out a Spring Tour of King Lear next year and I’ve done a deal which guarantees us a West End Theatre. The long and the short of it is I want you to be my Cordelia. What say you?

“Your ever loving,

“Roddy”

I have to confess that my first reaction was a typical actor’s one: jealousy. He was taking out a tour of King Lear and there were plenty of parts for me—Kent, perhaps even Gloucester—why hadn’t Roddy been in touch about it? But this was no time to feel hurt; Yolande was asking me what she should do. I said it was obvious. She should get her agent to contact the Navigator Productions office and accept the offer. Yolande said she had already done that.

Then there was a long laborious discussion in which she went on about her utter inadequacy for the role—she had never done Shakespeare professionally—and I, as I was expected to do, reassured her that she would make a splendid Cordelia. I thought it might be tactless to remark that one of her main qualifications for the part was the fact that she was a light girl, only just over seven stone. The elderly actor playing Lear, you see, must carry Cordelia on stage at the end of the play, so weight is a consideration, especially in a long run, and it was one of which I am sure Roddy had been mindful.

Well, that seemed to be that. I didn’t hear much from Yolande till after Christmas. Then she began to be a bit worried because Roddy had not been in touch with her. This was the arrangement, you see. She was not allowed to ring him in case Lady Margery answered the phone: he would always call her. More worrying perhaps than that, there had been no response from the Navigator Productions office about her acceptance of Cordelia. This puzzled me because by this time my agent had been notified that Roddy was “interested” in me for the part of Kent.

Early in January Roddy asked me over to the Navigator Offices just off the Charing Cross Road to “talk about Kent.” I knew this amounted to a firm offer, so I went eagerly and found him welcoming and friendly as always, but, I thought, a little distracted. We discussed the production and my part which he described as “hell’s important” and “absolutely key.” We also discussed the salary he was offering. He apologised profusely that it couldn’t be higher; in fact he seemed so distressed about it that in the end I began to feel guilty, as if I had gone in asking for more money than he could afford which, of course, I hadn’t. In the end, to relieve the tension, I said:

“I gather Yolande is going to be your Cordelia.”

Roddy’s reaction was most unexpected. He looked at me with a shocked, almost fearful expression, as if something poisonous had just bitten him.

“What the hell are you on about, Godders?” he said.

Now, I didn’t want to admit that I’d read a private Christmas card so I was a bit vague at first, but Roddy simply didn’t understand. In the end I had to tell him explicitly that she had shown me the message from him. Even then, it was quite some time before he reacted. Then it was as if a flash from a bolt of lightning had suddenly bleached his face.

Roddy said: “Oh, my God! Oh, my Christ! Oh, my golly gosh!” Then, after a long pause, he said in a quiet, thoughtful sort of a way: “Oh, fuck!”

I waited patiently for the explanation. At last he sighed, as if these things had been sent to try him and he told me:

“I wrote all my bloody Christmas cards in Spain. I thought it would be something to do. You know the waiting around that goes on, especially when you’re filming one of these ghastly Hollywood Epics. I can remember writing all the cards, then I got a tummy bug from some fearful Spanish muck they served us. Well, the doc, under instructions from the director of course, just drugged me up to the eyeballs so I could get onto that bloody horse again. It was while I was under the influence that I did the envelopes for the cards. I do vaguely remember doing Bel Courteney’s at the same time as Yolande’s—”

I got his drift. “You mean the offer of Cordelia was meant for Belinda Courteney? You put the card in the wrong envelope?”

“Yes. Dammit! Yes! I’ve been wondering why Bel hadn’t responded. In fact… Oh, buggeration and hell!”

He seemed even more upset than before and I asked him what was the matter. At last I got it out of him that the card he had intended for Yolande contained a suggestion, couched in the gentlest possible terms, that perhaps in future they might be seeing rather less of each other than before.

I said: “You mean, you might have sent the brush-off for Yolande to Belinda by mistake as well?” Roddy started rubbing his face with his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at me. By this time, I was almost as upset as he was. I said: “But you called her puss-cat.”

“Who?”

“Yolande—I mean Belinda.”

“Yes. Yes! They’re all called puss-cat.” He seemed very irritated that I had brought the matter up. Then he became all abject and apologetic which was almost worse. He said: “Look, Godfrey, dear old thing, would you do me the most enormous favour? Would you try to break all this to Yolande? And do it gently, won’t you, dear old boy. I know you will. You’re such a brick. The fact is I just can’t face it at the moment. I’m up to here with Lear, as you can imagine, and I’ve got to try and sort things out with Belinda.”

I said: “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to tackle her as well?”

Roddy didn’t react; he just shook his head solemnly. “No, thanks. That’s awfully decent, but I have to do that myself.” My attempts at irony have always fallen on deaf ears. Not so much esprit de l’escalier as esprit de corpse, eh? Oh, never mind. So I agreed to see Yolande for him. Of course I agreed. You can’t just fall out of love with someone after forty years. At least, I can’t.

I thought of telling Yolande by phone or even a letter, but in the end I decided to go to see her: it seemed the only decent thing to do. Well, we got sat down with the herb tea and everything and the cat Roddy purring on her lap and I began to explain. It was horrible because she found it so hard to take it in. I had to say everything twice. She didn’t rage, or throw things, or spit with hatred or anything—I would have preferred that—she just listened with a baffled expression on her face. There were no sobs, but her eyes were wet with tears. She kept saying: “But why? Does he hate me or something?” And I said “No,” very loudly and firmly, because I was sure he didn’t. Then she asked me to explain about the card yet again, so I did.

She nodded a few times before she said: “So he doesn’t want me to be his Cordelia?”

I shook my head. There was a bit of a pause, then she came out with something which jolly nearly broke me up. She said: “I’d started learning the lines.”

Oh, God! You wouldn’t understand, would you? You’re not an actor.

Well, we began work on Lear and I rather lost touch with Yolande. Rehearsals were engrossing and I had the feeling she would not want to hear about them. Incidentally, Belinda Courteney did not play Cordelia—it was the year of her groundbreaking Hedda Gabler at the National—and the girl who did was no better and no worse than Yolande might have been. Roddy was on top form as Lear and I think everyone who saw him agrees that he gave the performance of his life. The rest of the cast was good, the set was functional and, though the costumes belonged to the then-fashionable “Ruritanian Stalinist” school, they did at least fit. We opened fairly triumphantly in, of all places, Blackpool.

There was a six week pre-West End tour and I must admit that I completely forgot about Yolande until the last week at Cardiff when, half an hour before curtain up on the Thursday I was summoned through the loudspeaker in my dressing room to the phone at the stage door. There was a call for me.

It was one of Yolande’s odd friends—the aromatherapist, I think—and how she had managed to track me down to the Theatre Royal Cardiff, I do not know. She told me that the previous day the couple in the flat above Yolande’s had heard this howling and scratching on the door of Yolande’s flat, obviously the wretched cat Roddy in some distress. They tried calling Yolande but got no reply. To cut a long story short, the police were summoned and when they broke down the door they found Yolande lying on the bed, dead. She’d taken enough barbiturates to kill a horse. Roddy the cat had gone frantic with hunger and everything and the place stank of his poo, but he hadn’t touched Yolande’s body.

I went through the performance that night in a daze, wondering when and how I should tell Roddy. In the end I funked it altogether. The following evening I was standing in the wings waiting to go on and begin the play when I became aware of Roddy lurking behind me.

He said: “You’ve heard about Yolande?” I nodded. He said: “I’ve been rather knocked endways by it all. The Company Office rang and told me this afternoon. Someone there had seen a paragraph in the Evening Standard. I can’t understand it, can you?”

I shook my head.

“I mean, I know she was out of work and all that, but… She must have had some sort of mental trouble. A breakdown. Terrible. She was a dear, sweet thing. Not without talent.” There was a pause, then he said: “You know, Godders, I hate to say it, but young people today, they don’t seem to have the backbone. They give up too easily. I mean, we’ve all had our bad patches in this profession, God knows, but you need a bit of grit and spunk to stick to it. Don’t you agree?” To my shame I nodded and Roddy gave me a great bear hug.

The next minute the lights had gone up on stage and I was striding into another world as Kent and uttering the first words of the play: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.”

Roddy never mentioned Yolande again in my presence, but I believe there was a moment that night at the end of the play when perhaps he remembered her. It came in the final scene when he is on the ground, lamenting over the dead body of Cordelia and I am in attendance, and he says the words:

“A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!

I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever.”

At that moment he did something he’d never done before, he looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes, and they were not stage tears. I like to think they weren’t.

So we moved to our London venue, the Irving Theatre in The Strand, for a limited run of three months, and the critics fortunately decided that Roddy was a great Lear. All the same, after the exhilaration of the tour when we were all discovering how good the show was, the West End run seemed to be a bit flat, and, of course, because in London most of the cast had their own homes to go to and their own lives to lead, some of the camaraderie in the company went too.

I didn’t particularly like the Irving. It’s big, draughty old Victorian building, perhaps even a little sinister, and it had, of course, a theatre cat. They’re vital things you know, because theatres get rats, and rats gnaw cables, and gnawed electric cables start fires, especially in theatres. The Irving cat was a black Tom called Nimrod, not a very sociable beast, but, as befitted his name, a “mighty hunter before the Lord” who kept the rats and mice down very effectively. But here’s a funny thing: about a week into our run Nimrod disappeared.

The theatre manager was very distressed and offered a reward for his discovery and return. There was even a bit in the papers about it. I wouldn’t have mentioned this only it may have a bearing on what happened next.

Fortunately, the disappearance of Nimrod did not result in a rodent invasion. In fact—and this was something that puzzled many of us—the odd half-eaten rat or mouse could still be found in odd corners of the theatre, if anything with more frequency than before Nimrod’s vanishing act. These grisly remains, which had been left around by Nimrod as tokens of his prowess, were now nearly always to be found either in the wings or in the corridor leading to Dressing Room Number 1, Roddy’s of course. In fact Roddy came in one day for a matinee to find a headless rat carefully placed on the very threshold of Number 1. He made a terrific fuss about that, as he had every right to, of course, but I thought there was a touch of hysteria in his manner which was uncharacteristic. He didn’t usually play the Prima Donna.

A couple of days later Roddy happened to meet me back stage in the interval and invited me to his dressing room for a whisky. The one he poured himself was unusually large. He’d never been a boozer, and certainly not during a show. He seemed to be under some sort of strain.

Having sat me down, he said: “Now, then, Godders, what are we going to do about this cat business?” I looked blank. He said: “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed this damned cat which keeps following me around the theatre?”

I said that I hadn’t seen any cat and anyway—didn’t he know?—Nimrod had disappeared. Roddy banged his glass impatiently down on the dressing table.

“Yes! Yes! I know all about Nimrod. That damn theatre manager is obsessed with Nimrod. I didn’t mind Nimrod. He kept out of your way and did his job. This is a different cat altogether. It won’t leave me alone. It keeps coming up to me just as I’m going on stage and purring, and doing that thing that cats do, you know, curling itself round your legs. It nearly tripped me up the other day just as I was going on for ‘Blow Winds!’ It’s a blasted nuisance. And it keeps leaving these offerings for me in my dressing room. You know, bits of disemboweled rat and mouse. I trod on an intestine with my bare foot the other day as I was changing. Ugh! I can’t think how the bugger gets in. I always lock my dressing room when I go. I suppose it must be the cleaners. I’ve spoken to the manager about it but he hasn’t a clue. He’s so obsessed about Nimrod I don’t think he believes in this other cat.”

I asked what it looked like.

“Funny sort of colour. I don’t know. Greyish, I think, but these sort of yellow eyes which look as if they light up in the dark. You know how some cats seem to have luminous eyes. It’s difficult to tell exactly what it looks like because I haven’t seen it in full light. It usually turns up in the wings, just outside the glare of the stage lights. I wouldn’t mind only—I know this is a funny thing to say—it’s so damned fond of me. It’s obsessed. It’s like, you know, some creepy sort of stalker. Godders, you must have seen it.”

There was pleading in his voice, but I had to confess that I hadn’t. To reassure him I said I said I would keep “a weather eye” open for it. He liked that: a nautical expression, you see, “weather eye.”

In the final scene that night an odd thing happened. Lear has come on with the dead body of Cordelia and we’re standing around. Roddy was doing pretty well, but not on top form, I thought. He kept looking off-stage. Then comes his final speech when he is lamenting over the dead Cordelia and he says:

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

Except that this night he doesn’t quite say that, he says:

“Why should a dog, a horse, a cat have life,

And thou no breath at all?”

And his eyes are fixed on something off-stage right in the wings. Well, I couldn’t resist looking there myself. I was half-dazzled by the stage lights so I can’t be sure, but do you know for a second or two somewhere in the gloom I thought I did catch sight of two yellow cat’s eyes staring at the action on stage. Well, I can’t be sure because I had to get back to my job. I still had lines to say, but when I’d said my last ones—you remember—

“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;

My master calls me, I must not say no.”—I look back into the wings, and there’s nothing there. The eyes had gone.

Next day was a matinee day and before the first house Roddy summoned me to his dressing room. He seemed very excited.

He said: “I think I’ve got a way to nail the little bugger. You see this?” He held up a transparent plastic phial, the kind you pee into for doctors. It had about a centimetre of white powder in it. “Know what that is?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Strychnine. Don’t ask me how I got it. Had to pull a few strings. One of the few advantages of being ‘Sir Roderick’ is that you can occasionally pull a string or two. I’m going to put it in some milk and put the milk in a saucer in my dressing room and when that damn cat comes, it is going to drink that milk. All cats like milk, don’t they?”

I said I was no expert, but I understood that cats liked milk.

He said: “Right! That damn cat’s going to die and all our troubles are over!”

I couldn’t help feeling that Roddy had got things rather out of proportion, but he seemed exhilarated and that afternoon a slightly sparse audience got the performance of a lifetime. By the end of it Roddy was clearly exhausted, which worried me, but something was keeping him alight. He seemed—what’s the word I’m looking for?—febrile, that’s it, and it worried me.

That was why I decided to look in on him in his dressing room just before the half-hour call for the evening show. I knocked on the door which was slightly ajar but got no reply, so I looked in.

Roddy had not got out of his last act costume or his make-up. He was lying on the floor of his dressing room, arms outstretched. He didn’t look to me as if he was breathing. Beside him on the floor was an empty bowl. At the corners of his half-open mouth were little droplets of liquid which looked to me like milk.

But that was not the worst of it. Crouched on his chest was the biggest damned cat I’ve ever seen in my life. Its fur was shaggy and grey—it looked like a great ball of dirty smoke—and its angry eyes were a bright sulphur yellow. Slowly it arched its back and gave me a low, stertorous hiss like the sudden escape of steam from an engine under pressure.

You don’t believe me? Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I ran to get the Company Stage Manager and when we got back to Number One dressing room, Roddy was still there on the floor, but the cat had gone. We phoned for an ambulance and they carted him off to hospital but it wasn’t any good. He was dead as mutton: heart failure apparently. I said nothing about the strychnine business because I thought it would only muddy the waters, and it probably wasn’t relevant.

That night, for the first and last time in my life, I went on for Roddy as King Lear. Did I tell you I was his understudy? Made a pretty good fist of it too, though I says it as shouldn’t. Standing ovation and all that.

“Godders,” Roddy used to say to me, “you’re a good actor. Devilish good, but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.” Well, he should have seen me that night! What? Another Bell’s? Oh, all right, just this once, since you’re twisting my arm. Cheers!