Twopence Coloured

by Patrick Hamilton

Genres: Biographical; City Life; Classics; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters

'If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man' Nick Hornby


Patrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

West Kensington - grey area of rot, and caretaking, and cat-slinking basements. West Kensington - drab asylum for the driven and cast-off genteel!' Patrick Hamilton was acutely conscious that his third novel (first published in 1928) was longer and 'much grimmer' than his previous and well-received productions. Twopence Coloured is the story of nineteen-year-old Jackie Mortimer, who leaves Hove in search of a life on the London stage, only to become entangled in 'provincial theatre' and complex affairs of the heart with two brothers, Richard and Charles Gissing. The novel, unavailable for many years, is a gimlet-eyed portrait of the theatrical vocation, and fully exhibits Hamilton's celebrated gift for conjuring London - the 'vast, thronged, unknown, hooting, electric-lit, dark-rumbling metropolis.

Release date: August 2, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 528

Sample

It is a mystery that for many years the work of one of the century’s most darkly hilarious and penetrating artists fell into near obscurity. Doris Lessing declared: ‘I am continually amazed that there is a kind of roll call of OK names from the 1930s… Auden, Isherwood, etc. But Hamilton is never on them and he is a much better writer than any of them’.

Recently, however, Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude was adapted for the stage, and the films of his taut thrillers, Gaslight and Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Rope, are now considered classics. He is regularly championed by contemporary writers such as Sarah Waters, Dan Rhodes and Will Self.

Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. With a father who made an excellent prototype for the bombastic bullies of his later novels and a snobbish mother who alternately neglected and smothered him, Hamilton was born into Edwardian gentility in Hassocks, Sussex, in 1904. He and his parents moved a short while later to Hove, where he spent his early years. He became a keen observer of the English boarding house, the twilit world of pubs and London backstreets and of the quiet desperation of everyday life. But after gaining acclaim and prosperity through his early work, Hamilton’s morale was shattered when a road accident left him disfigured and an already sensitive nature turned towards morbidity.

Hamilton’s personality was plagued by contradictions. He played the West End clubman and the low-life bohemian. He sought, with sometimes menacing zeal, his ‘ideal woman’ and then would indulge with equal intensity his sadomasochistic obsessions among prostitutes. He was an ideological Marxist who in later years reverted to blimpish Toryism. Two successive wives, who catered to contradictory demands, shuttled him back and forth. Through his work run the themes of revenge and punishment, torturer and victim; yet there is also a compassion and humanity which frequently produces high comedy.

In 1924 Hamilton gave up his job as a shorthand typist, working for a sugar producer in the City of London, and began work on the novel that would become his first work of published fiction, Monday Morning. The book went through a number of working titles, including ‘Immaturity’, ‘Adolescence’ and ‘Ferment’. By the end of the year it was finished.

An introduction via his sister, Lalla, led to the book being taken on by the distinguished literary agents A.M. Heath. After rejections from Jonathan Cape and Heinemann, the rights were bought by the respected Michael Sadleir at Constable, and a very happy personal and professional relationship began. Hamilton received a £50 advance against future royalty earnings. Within a year Monday Morning was published to good reviews and in an American edition from Houghton Mifflin. Hamilton’s career had begun.

After the success of his second novel, Craven House, came Twopence Coloured, his witty satire on the theatrical profession, published in 1928.

In the 1930s and 40s, despite personal setbacks and an increasing problem with drink, he was able to write some of his best work. His novels include the masterpiece Hangover Square, The Midnight Bell, The Plains of Cement, The Siege of Pleasure, a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and The Gorse Trilogy, made up of The West Pier, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse and Unknown Assailant.

J. B. Priestley described Hamilton as ‘uniquely individual… he is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil.’ Patrick Hamilton died in 1962.

 

Shortly before midnight, several years ago, a pretty but unusually foolish girl, for her age (which was nineteen), was walking by herself along the Brighton front. It was raining slightly, and the movement of her even strides made little thunders with her mackintosh, and the rain spat with a kind of sullen suddenness upon her glistening white face and mouth, and she was very full of her quiet self and her quiet decisions.

She had just been to the Theatre Royal in this town. That is to say, she had been one of a large crowd of people who earlier in the evening had fled in a state of unnatural excitement and seriousness from their dinners, spent two hours and a half shut up in a stewed atmosphere of ardent illuminations and rippling facial darknesses, poured out into a distressed vestibule amid the uneasy superciliousness of the frustrated taxi-seeker, and the maddened importunities of the professional umbrella-holder, and at last dispersed to their respective homes again, in good order, but with their taste for such ebullitions temporarily damped, if in no way permanently satisfied.

But this girl was in no way damped. She was braced and wrought up by it, on the other hand (why, else, should she have gone home and changed her clothes to walk by the rainy sea at midnight?): and the thick sights and sounds of the echoing evening behind her – the restless resplendence of the audience in the plush of the stalls, the hot whisperings, the lemon glare from the stage, the ring of actor’s voices and the hard roar of applause – were still in her eyes and ears, were still an intoxication to her, and were the very stuff from which she was making her decisions. And her decisions were very clearly defined, and most charmingly and alarmingly simplified, and yet a little defiant and tremulous withal (for she was by no means quite sure of herself as yet), and they amounted to this – that she intended – or rather that she intended – she was underlining tremendously to-night, which shows how insecure she was down below – that she intended – to Go upon the Stage.

 

For in the calculations of the youthful, light-hearted, and in every respect untheatrical circles in which she had hitherto moved, you had no difficulty in Going upon the Stage like that. The Stage (whatever that was) had no say in the matter. It was, presumably, just waiting somewhere, like a bus, or a tram, or the Giant Racer at Wembley, to be Gone Upon… That the cold testimony of Science might one day succeed in cumbering the situation with whispers of an Agent (or some such coarse reality), she was, of course, vaguely aware; but such a thing never entered her head as a serious barrier. If there were any deterrent at all, it came from the character of the Stage itself, which was conceived by this girl as being unalterably, lamentably, and yet also a little enthrallingly inseparable from a nebulous kind of Wickedness. This Wickedness was obscurely collective, of course, rather than actively individual – otherwise you would naturally have little desire to Go amongst it – but that did not alter the fact of this Wickedness. Wickedness, indeed, confronted you at the very opening of your negotiations in this quarter, inasmuch as it was another unalterable and lamentable axiom (much impressed upon this girl by her various girlish and sympathetic discouragers) that you were not likely to Succeed upon the Stage unless you Carried On with the Manager.

With respect to this Manager, it seems that the poor man had no more say in the matter than the Stage had in the first place; and that just as there was some placidly receptive Stage, to be Gone Upon at will, so there was some kind of ideal and all-embracing Manager, pleasantly and professionally intemperate, simply waiting in an iniquitous flat somewhere to be Carried On with.

It is believed that those actually concerned in this connection would not defer to this outlook. That is all very well, they might say, but the thing’s not so easy as all that. The enigma hitherto has been to find your Manager. We shouldn’t mind Carrying On with him a bit if you could only tell us where to look him up. And they would surely be justified in thus casting disparagement upon questionable data. For experience has exhibited, with respect to Managers, that although there may yet be a certain quantity extant who (as this girl imagined the greater part of them to do) relieve their daily energies in a nefarious round of cigar-eating, champagne-drinking, being bloated, buying souls, and turning beautiful (and trusting) creatures into Things and so forth – that although there can never be any natural guarantee against the acquirement of any of the above-mentioned characteristics by Managers – they are a great deal more likely to appear in everyday affairs as middle-aged and heavily married bodies, in the habit of returning to their wives punctually for supper, with a severe talking-to if they forget the greens, and not without the threat of a strong mustard bath and a pot of gruel if there’s any sneezing and the weather’s on the chilly side… For the domesticity of the average Manager, experience would affirm, is as pious as it is proverbial.

But once get on to experience, and what experience would have had to say on the subject of the profession this girl was choosing at midnight with such tremulous audacity, and instances of her general bemusement might be multiplied indefinitely. Her misinterpretation of managerial intention was but a preliminary misinterpretation.

 

Jackie Mortimer, for that was this girl’s name, was the product of a late Edwardian and early Georgian Brighton, which was not really Edwardian, and not really Georgian; and she belonged to an indeterminate society which was dominated from no particular quarter, but conspicuously active in Cutting itself. This was a golden era for the Cut, in fact, and that naïve bludgeon of social consciousness and rectitude was wielded judiciously but lavishly on all sides. But then, from the standpoint of the present time, it was a naïve and simple-hearted Brighton altogether. It is impossible to say why it should have been so; but it was so, in its very artless Edward-Georgian self. It was a naïve Brighton merely because Horse Cabs are naïve things, and the spectacle of people whistling like blazes in the night for them is a spectacle of naïveté, and because people who can still make conversation on Ankles, and get into a great state about Glad Eyes, and speak derisively of Knuts, and wear straw hats, and play Coon Can, and try to get thin on Antipon, and consider themselves on the road to becoming fast, and talk with strong conceit about Motoring, are fundamentally and necessarily a naïve people.

In this Brighton, or rather in the Hove lying ponderously and residentially to the west of this Brighton, the whole of Jackie’s life had been spent. In the last days on earth of King Edward the Peacemaker, when that lovable yet imposing monarch was allowed to come out, laboriously and without molestation from the populace, into the King’s Gardens, and there take the sun with surly receptivity and asthmatic silence, Jackie Mortimer was a little girl of about five or six, herself playing with a ball in those gardens. And in the early part of the reign of King George the Fifth, just before the war, when all Brighton and Hove was going out on excited steamers to the fleet of battleships that lay peacefully off the coast, and the front was festive with pink and green and blue electric bulbs, hung all the way along, Jackie was a very composed and full-grown girl of about sixteen, who walked in twilights on the lawns of those same King’s Gardens, and was loved – walked up and down on the twilit grass, harangued, beseeched, peacefully worshipped, kissed, and withal very calm and friendly under the importunities of her straining young adorers.

Where and when Jackie was first taken with the idea of adopting a theatrical line of business, it is difficult to say; though there can be no doubt that it was her nurse who, in the very first instance, Put Ideas into the child’s head. For Jackie was an exceptionally alluring little girl, and had just that kind of thoughtful-eyed and champagne-haired head into which it is a great pleasure for nurses to Put Ideas. But inasmuch as, among other ideas, Put, at this time, into Jackie’s head, there was always a positive and unequivocal understanding that she was one day (and if Good) to be the Queen, it is doubtful whether anything of so professional a nature could ever have entered into her mind as a serious project. But she must have acquired it somewhere, and that very young, for it had always been a tradition at Jackie’s day-schools, from the earliest and satchel-carrying times, that that, somehow, was Jackie’s line, and that one day Jackie was coming back, in her glory, to play at the Theatre Royal. ‘You won’t know us then,’ the other girls used to say. (That was the way in which people spoke to Jackie. She had just that quality of inspiring enthusiasm without resentment, and popularity without jealousy. She was always rather fêted and made much, was Jackie – in these days anyway.) Also, whenever there were any private theatricals in progress, she was always the leading figure, and naturally given the principal part, and played, it has been said, superbly. Indeed in a certain play, given by the school in her last term there, and called, you will not be surprised to hear, ‘The Dream Man,’ Jackie came on in a sweet boy’s dress and with a large bag (purported to contain dreams), and took by storm the dark little hall that was specially hired for the entertainment. There was hardly one who did not join in the general applause of Jackie, then: and when she came up to take her prizes afterwards – for Jackie was as clever as Macaulay, as well as being so talented and beautiful (The Headmistress said that Their Youthful Siddons seemed to possess historic as well as histrionic talent (Laughter)) – such a roar of clapping and cheering and footstamping arose, that signs of tears became apparent not only in Jackie’s eyes, and not only in the eyes of her closest friends, but even in those of her few detractors, so carried away were they all, by the occasion. Indeed one impassionable person of twelve years of age, celebrated for having nourished a Crush on the figure in the limelight, was positively observed to be no longer in command of herself, and compelled to withdraw to the back of the hall, with an accommodating companion of the same years, until such time as she could again face the world with a dry and sober countenance.

And then, of course, quite apart from her demonstrable dramatic skill, Jackie’s adorers and Jackie’s beauty must in themselves have been incitements to some sort of theatrical aspiration. And as for the quantity of those adorers, and the high quality of that beauty – the latter was proved by the former, and proved beyond question. Very possibly no other young girl in the whole history of those King’s Gardens could lay claim to quite so much admiration and quite so much of soft intrigue as Jackie had drawn towards her in those days. But whether or no she could actually and objectively have been styled a beauty in these days, and what kind of beauty she would have been if she fell under that category, are different questions. It need only be said that to the world at large she was certainly recognizable in her looks as one belonging to a type aiming distantly at some racial ideal, and she could not go abroad without making this fact subtly manifest in whatever quarter. Old ladies in buses were to be discovered either gazing with lost and dim-smiling benignancy, or frowning with fierce absorption at her, as she sat opposite: ticket-collectors, carpenters, porters, and their ingenuous kind were either reduced to almost emotional direction-giving and professional exposition, or braced to misanthropic curtness, in her presence: factory hoydens, when they passed her in the street, at once began to nudge, and giggle, and cry ‘La-di-dah!’ and tumble about with similar derisive and envious expressions until she was out of sight: and she was, in general, considered in the course of nature to be unequal to carrying anything, of any weight whatever, or to standing up on the two legs which God had given her for any decent length of time, or to transacting any daily business with ordinary care or efficiency. Whether it was defined or not, Jackie introduced a new and slightly strained and slightly elevated atmosphere wherever she went; and it was taken for granted that she was constructed on slightly different principles.

You must figure Jackie in these days as being very modest, but very bright-eyed and serene, and full of the most high-minded intentions of Knowing her old friends when she came back to the Theatre Royal in her glory, and with all the unhurried air of one who knows that the world is at her feet, and that the world’s prizes are for her leisurely picking. She had, at the time, the most curious credibility towards life as an occurrence, and success as a thing that would happen to her from the outside. Success, and the admitted obstacles to success, were alike to fall upon her as the natural results and indications of her talents. She had no sense of having to seek or make anything, to thrust, and watch the results, and thrust again. She had certain gifts, and the world would show the fit and normal worldly reaction to such gifts.

Indeed at this time everything hung so deliciously and yet so very much in the air, that the whole thing seemed likely to remain in the air for ever, and finally dissolve into its own element: but two events occurred which brought her projects down to earth, where they still remained phantasmal, and delicious, and vague, but were down to earth for all that. The first of these was the outbreak of the war, and the second of these was the death of her father. Her mother had died when she was very young.

Possibly there was no decline in Jackie’s popularity at the outbreak of the war, but there was, of course, a war to think about, and she could not expect, had no notion of expecting, to be the talk and pet of her circle to the same extent. Her circle, in fact, towards the end, showed every sign of getting itself involved in war-work and war-marriage and dispersing altogether. At war-work proper Jackie herself was utterly incompetent. She fainted instantly on being confronted by a day’s work at a canteen; she was the wretched and scared origin of a deplorable scene (involving a Tram) in the Dyke Road while trying to learn how to drive a car; and apart from a little rather strained singing and cigarette-bestowing amongst well-disposed wounded soldiers, and apart from a little estimably patriotic vilification of the Germans, whom she declared, with conviction, to be Brutes (or even, after great outrages, Swine), she was hardly any true support to her country in its hour of need. Indeed Jackie was always rather out of it as far as the war was concerned.

It was three months before the Armistice that Jackie’s father died. Jackie’s father is only of interest to this story in so far as he claimed to be immortal, but was not. At least that is the only interpretation that can be made of his incessant reiteration to Jackie that If Anything Should Happen to him, she would be well provided for. It was never supposed for a moment that anything could happen to him, but it did. Furthermore, she was not well provided for. Apart from that, Jackie’s father was a much-loved father, who was a Punch artist, and who wore a close grey beard, and who was large, and tolerant, and a little guttural, and a figure in the neighbourhood: and when he died there was a great deal of him in the local papers, and much private commiseration for Jackie, to whom, it was affirmed by those in the know, he had left nothing but the Clothes she Stood Up in.

This was practically true; but however that may have been, she did appear to be standing up with very tolerable success in those clothes. Also, even if there had been any decline in the cult of Jackie in the early days of the war, there was a kind of Jackie Renaissance on her father’s death, and from all quarters there came the most astounding and unforeseen remembrances and kindnesses and sweeping invitations to stay indefinitely and be second daughters and so forth. The world, in fact, seemed to open its protective arms to Jackie on her father’s death, and hardly a trace of misgiving as to worldly circumstance ever entered her head. From the very first evening of the disaster that had fallen upon her, when she went over to sleep under the roof of old Lady Perrin, the widow of an Indian judge, who lived two doors away in First Avenue, and with whom she had remained until the commencement of this story, she had never been able to feel any true perturbation in that direction.

What Jackie found to be a trifle curious in all this, though, was that now she had fallen upon more evil days and was so placed that some sort of profession seemed a bare necessity for her, the idea and her own suggestion of adopting a profession, and most particularly a theatrical profession, was slurred over by all her friends in a very strange and misty manner – by all her friends who had until that time incited her most whole-heartedly on those lines. But to Jackie, the more they slurred it over, the more her resistance, and even her slight resentment, arose. It was hence that she had come to be walking along the Brighton front intending to Go upon the Stage like that.

Indeed the thing which her best friends had in view for Jackie at this period was, without any doubt whatever, a Match. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it all, Jackie, if I were you,’ they would say. ‘You never know what’ll turn up.’ They always called her ‘Jackie,’ rather caressingly, on these occasions, and generally threw in an ‘if I were you’ – thus betraying, Jackie imagined, a certain superiority and inward mockery of her projects. And although this serene faith in something turning up was assumed with a great show of indifference, Jackie was on more than one occasion led to suspect that some remote forestalling and assisting of the capricious gods was demonstrating itself in the form of various Brothers of persons, not to say Male Cousins, Old Friends, and similar eligibles, with whom she was casually thrown and left from time to time.

Now in order to have any proper understanding of Jackie, and the step she was led to take at this time, it must be taken for granted that she was, on the whole, a complete fool, who was not even compensated with any of that impressionability and flaccidity which might have protected her from her own folly. There was, on the other hand, a certain stamina, interpreted by others (and in some measure justly) as self-will, which marked Jackie from the first. When Jackie said that she intended to do a thing, and underlined the word, it might have been as tremulous an emphasis as you liked, but she was going to do it for all that, you were surprised to discover. You were surprised because rather in the same way as you were mystically unable to credit that Jackie was really capable of carrying anything, of any weight, so you could not believe that she could ever maintain, by direct action, her own theories against those of her advisers. You were mistaken in either case. In this business of a Match, for instance, Jackie was a very depressing subject from the outset, and no amount of eligible reinforcement could bear her down. She had, in fact, quite different views.

When it was made clear to her friends that Jackie’s object was to go up to London there was some disapproval, but much less disapproval than when it was understood that she was not going to stay there with the Langham family – a family with an artist father and two daughters who were Jackie’s closest friends – as had been taken for granted, but going on her own to live by herself in rooms which were to be let to her by her old nurse and housekeeper, Mrs Lover.

Mrs Lover was a good-looking woman of about forty, who had married well and settled in West Kensington, three years ago, and who had known Jackie a great deal longer than anyone else in the world. And although it seemed to every one else the height of imprudence, it was to Jackie a perfect solution to all her problems. It was this Mrs Lover who had in the first place Put Ideas into Miss Jackie’s head, and who had ever since been her closest and most sympathetic confidant on matters which Jackie had been able to share with no one else – her father included. Jackie’s admirers, indeed, who formed, in general, a section of the community divided against itself, had cause to be unanimous in the placating and propitiating of Mrs Lover, in whom they sensed a power behind the throne, and rightly. It was Mrs Lover who, with her brown sympathetic eyes and assumption of infinite experience, had sheltered and guided Jackie through all the intricacies of her twilight experiences. It was Mrs Lover who could guess exactly why he had said that, who had told you he would begin that sort of thing, and who insisted that you should be firm now, or there was no telling what you would be getting into. It was Mrs Lover who knew to a fine shade whether you should put Yours sincerely, Jackie, or Yours affectionately, Jacqueline Mortimer, or just Yours gratefully, J., and write it again and cut out one of the ‘dears’ in the middle so as to tone it down a bit. And the confidence was mutual. For when, in the course of time, the elder was in her turn confronted by the vexed problem of Lover himself, and was herself reduced to a baffling condition of indecision and lack of faith in her own precepts, it was Jackie who took on the sober wisdom of intelligent experience, and gave inflexible rulings and decisions on each turn of the affair. ‘But do you want to marry him?’ Jackie would ask again and again, and ‘Do you Love him?’ – thus getting a little of her own back…

There was every sympathy to be expected from this quarter, then, and apart from that, it will be understood that in the mere imprudence and slight abandon of setting up on her own there were attractions for Jackie. Not only, after her father’s death, did she tell herself that she wanted to get away from Brighton and its memories for ever, but also her whole life had lost its old values since that event, and the gesture, the symbol, of complete transplantation was, she felt, necessary for her in starting again. It may be said, in fact, that Jackie by this time had an almost passionate impulse to burn her ships.

Jackie did not of course come to this resolution all at once. It began as a dim supposition and possible ultimate refuge: it grew in suggestiveness as the days went by and the realities of her position were brought home to her: and at last it flooded in upon her as an inspiration. And by the time she had made her intentions known, there was no moving her at all. And although there was at first much dissent, it is possible that people were not a little relieved at getting Jackie once and for all off their shoulders and away in London. The first gush of hospitality and commiseration had died down into little more than a trickle of friendly sympathy, and apart from Lady Perrin, who was becoming a rather vague, aged and bewildered old person, there was not the same interest, and rash generosity at Jackie’s command. Accordingly, when the thing was accepted, all her friends found it easy enough to work themselves up into another climax over Jackie, and to send her off amid the acclamations of a roseate popularity. It was in some way regarded as a purely temporary parting, and she was to write, and to be written to, and doubtless to be met, and shown over the Town, and to come down again, and to visit, and heaven knew what, when she got up there. One of her friends might come and share rooms with her, indeed, if things shaped themselves as was hoped; and there was, altogether, quite a St Martin’s Summer of fame and adulation for Jackie. It is true that still very little mention was made of the Stage – nothing but continued slurrings in fact, save in one instance – but Jackie had her own ideas on the subject and rather enjoyed keeping them to herself.

That one instance was provided by the younger Langham girl, Iris, whom Jackie had promised to visit at Wimbledon when she came to London and who claimed to have at her command a Friend, of the name of Gladys Weston, who was closely concerned with the theatre and could be relied upon to give any introductions necessary. It is eloquent of Jackie’s general attitude at this time that a Friend of the name of Gladys Weston figured not in her imagination as an individual of any value to her at all. Indeed she was rather offended and chilled by the idea of a Friend of the name of Gladys Weston. It is impossible to say how Jackie conceived that she was going to enter this business without some at least figurative Friend of the name of Gladys Weston, but she did do so. As she walked along the Brighton front, the night before she left for London, she was Going upon the Stage, and the matter ended there.

It may be mentioned in passing that Jackie was very willing to begin with small parts.

 

As Jackie walked along the Brighton front, it became more and more her own Brighton front, and at last it seemed that there was no one there at all to share her striding and buoyant possession of it. At the same time the wind grew higher, bawling violently into Jackie’s ears, and the rain came with it, spitting itself into millions of little ardent sharp triangles on the slimy, streaming paving under the lamps. And the sea, which a little while before had been crashing measuredly away (as though it had really rather forgotten what it was aiming at, after all the nonsensical centuries it had been at the business), suddenly seemed to awake, and as good as said it had had