Layton stood across the street, examining the front facades of the Nottingham Grand Imperial Theatre. It wrapped the corner of Merton and Ward Streets, anchored by a huge, domed tower clad in copper and topped by a tall, gilt spire. The ornate glass and cast-iron marquee also wrapped the corner; above it, letters outlined in lights glowed out GRAND IMPERIAL. The use of white marble gave the front of the theatre great presence.
A very strong design.
Everything had happened so quickly, thought Layton. A good thing, that; it had given him little time to back out. Roger had placed a trunk call from the village to his friend in London and learned the Grand was indeed looking for scenic artists. To keep Layton’s identity secret, Roger claimed he had a friend looking for work. From Nottingham, the nephew of his mate had wired that he’d put in a good word. Within a day, Oswald Black, the theatre manager, had granted Layton an interview. As he had no previous experience, he was asked to bring a portfolio of drawings to the meeting. While he didn’t have to “be any kind of Rembrandt,” Black had cautioned, he had to have some talent. Working late into the night in Raymond’s room, Layton made quick sketches of the countryside and streetscapes, then a portrait of Midnight.
Layton chose a new name at random, picking the first and last names from the Dorchester Times. He was now Frank Owen. He repeated his new name over and over again. It was interesting, he thought, that one had no say in what they were called. One’s last name was inherited from one’s father; the first and middle names were bestowed when one was less than a day old and couldn’t protest. Not until three or four, when the other children made fun of it, would a child know he’d been given a ridiculous name. Take Beechcrop Manningtree, the name of one of Layton’s childhood friends. Didn’t his parents know how stupid it was? Why not just plain John?
Layton also assumed a new physical identity. The full mustache and beard he had sported since he was eighteen had been shaved off the first day at Mulcaster because it was against prison rules, so he was already clean-shaven. The thirty pounds he’d lost in prison now became an advantage. To those who knew him before, Layton had always been on the slightly chubby side. To complete the masquerade, Roger had purchased some hair dye, so now Layton had chestnut-colored hair that was swept back with Livesy’s Hair Tonic. The final touch was a pair of spectacles that barely distorted his vision. He also gave Roger twelve quid to go into Dorchester to buy him a greatcoat, two suits, and a bare-bones wardrobe.
“Blimey, ’e looks a new man—if ya don’t look too closely,” his brother had said of his new creation.
Layton was amused by Roger’s enthusiasm in helping him out. He knew it wasn’t out of brotherly love but to get him the hell out the house.
In spite of himself, Layton liked the fact that he had been reborn. A brand-new name and identity—in a way, it was a clean slate. And now, within a week of Roger’s call, he found himself here, about to cross the street for his 11:00 a.m. interview. The job being in Nottingham, a city he’d never visited, pleased him. But for the Robin Hood stories, he knew nothing about the place. The bustling Midlands city looked like a perfect place to get lost in, with its crowds of people on the lively streets radiating out from its original medieval castle. All Layton craved was anonymity and a chance to get on with his life. Still, he had to be on his guard at all times not to reveal his true identity.
But as Layton stepped off the curb, an image of the Britannia exterior superimposed itself over the Grand in his mind, as if someone had wallpapered a giant photograph on top of the building. They shared many similar features, like a big dome. In a flash, he was back standing on Shaftesbury Avenue that terrible night. He closed his eyes as he stepped back up on the sidewalk. Breathing heavily as he’d done in Wragby when he saw the two little girls, he couldn’t bring himself to look up at the music hall, so he glued his eyes to the slate pavement. With his head down, Layton slowly backpedaled until he was right up against the wall of shops. To his immediate right was an entryway to a pub, into which he bolted and ordered a drink immediately. His hand trembling, he lifted a tumbler of whiskey to his lips and downed it in a gulp. Gathering every ounce of his inner strength, he resisted raising his hand to signal the barman to give him another one. The clock in the pub said two minutes to eleven, so Layton picked up the pasteboard portfolio of his drawings and the suitcase he’d borrowed from his father and slowly walked across the street.
The Grand’s front entrance was a series of handsome wood and cut-glass double doors stretched under the marquee. Under the morning sun, an elderly charwoman was shining the brass door handles to a brilliant finish. But Layton would not pass through them. Experience designing a music hall had taught him that employees always used the rear door, so he walked along the marble facade and turned the corner into an alley.
The deserted alley was lined with garbage cans and crates of construction material. In contrast to the magnificence of the front, the back of the theatre was done in plain brick with simple sash windows. In the center of the wall was a wide, green steel door marked STAGE ENTRANCE. Layton pulled it open and stepped inside. To his immediate right was a tiny cubicle perhaps six feet wide and six feet deep. An old man in a tweed coat and red bow tie sat there in an upholstered chair, reading the Nottingham Post.
Behind him, the wall was lined with wooden pigeonhole boxes like those in a post office. On the flanking walls were shelves piled with papers and glass cabinets holding rows of keys. The old man glared at Layton, seemingly annoyed at being disturbed.
The stage doorman, Layton thought, looking back at him. The master of the guard. It was he who made sure no interlopers invaded the theatre. No starstruck youth looking for jobs, no Piccadilly Johnnies stalking beautiful performers, and no bailiffs handing out arrest warrants to actors. The stage doorman’s job was to hand out messages and mail to performers and staff, distribute dressing room keys, and be cordial to everyone—except strangers like Layton.
“Appointment with Mr. Black.”
“Down the corridor and up them circular stairs on the right. Not the ones on the left, mind you,” the stage doorman growled.
Layton walked down the dimly lit passage. A music hall was made up of two parts. The front of the house was the public area, with the entrance foyer, bars, and auditorium; the back of the house consisted of the stage itself and the backstage area. Backstage was as plain as the front of the house was fancy, and entirely practical and unglamorous. Here, all the functions that created magic on the stage were carried out: the storage for props, costumes, and equipment; the dressing rooms; the workshops for carpenters and electricians. It was a hodgepodge of voids, of dark, tight corridors off of which trailed formless, rabbit-warren spaces. When Layton had been about to begin his design for the Britannia, he’d been shocked to learn that the stage manager and head carpenter would be laying out the backstage, not him. It was a specialized space, and they knew exactly what they wanted. This, he discovered, was how all music halls were designed.
The Grand’s walls were made of brick painted dark green up to five feet in height and a sickly yellow ocher from there to the ceiling. Bare Edison bulbs, hung every eight feet, cast a wavering light. Men and women passed Layton in the hallway but looked through him as if he were invisible. At the top of the black spiral stair was a wall with a glass door and tall interior windows that overlooked the backstage.
Layton did not have to knock; a middle-aged man with a shiny, bald head saw him at the door and waved him in. He wore a well-tailored, navy-blue suit, and his attention was focused on a pile of papers on his desk, to which he was furiously signing his name. Standing next to him was a very attractive middle-aged woman in a dark-blue skirt with a white shirtwaist, her sandy-blond hair pinned up. Layton’s immediate impression was that she was an actress, but because she was feeding the man business invoices, one after another, he realized she wasn’t. Might she be what they called a “New Woman” in England and a “Gibson Girl” in America? These unmarried women who actually earned their livings in offices and lived in their own flats? Layton shook his head in amazement at the thought.
“I tell you, Cissie, someone’s robbing us blind.” The man shook his head over the latest sheaf of papers. “These bloody prices are higher than Nelson’s Column.”
The woman smiled. “You’re balmy, Ozzie. You’re the cheapest bastard in town. No one pays the acts less than you. And the syndicate loves you for it.”
Without looking at Layton, Oswald Black extended his free hand, took the portfolio, and placed it on the desk. All the while, he continued to sign.
“Blimey. We have a real Mike Angelo here, Cissie,” he said, flipping through the drawings.
The woman leaned in to look over his shoulder and gave a thunderous laugh. “This man has talent, Ozzie,” she said. “He can paint better cloths than the ones at the Hackney Empire. But you’ll have to pay him more than you do the dancing bear.”
Finally, Black looked up at Layton. “No scene painter is going to get paid more than the dancing bear,” he said fiercely. “Especially if it’s his first job.”
“Ever been in a music hall—I mean, the back of the house?” asked the woman, meeting Layton’s eyes and giving him a warm smile.
“This is Mrs. Cissie Mapes,” Black said, gesturing vaguely in her direction. “She runs the place. Books the acts for the chain. Best mind her, Owen, or you’ll be for it.”
“No, Mrs. Mapes,” Layton said quietly and courteously. “I have had no experience with music halls.”
“Well, you’ll learn quick enough. Nine—I mean eight—quid a week to start, and we’ll see how it goes,” Black said. “Start tomorrow morning at eight. Go downstairs and see Albert Stone in the scene shop. He’ll show you everything.” With that, Black went back to his paperwork.
Layton picked up the portfolio and made to leave, but his new boss’s voice stilled his motion.
“Wait. I want you to come to the show tonight. Watch from the front of the house; I’ll have you passed through. Pay close attention to the cloths, not the singers’ tits.”
Cissie burst out laughing. “Don’t ask the impossible on his first day, Ozzie.”
• • •
“The house is filled six nights a week, even Mondays. Frank Matcham, who did the London Coliseum, designed it,” boasted Albert Stone, a genial, weak-chinned man of about fifty. He sounded as if he were bragging about his child’s academic achievements.
“With standing room, we can fit 2,233 in here. The proscenium opening is thirty-six feet wide, near twenty-eight feet high, with a metal fire curtain.”
Layton nodded. He knew of Matcham; the greatest music hall architect of them all, he’d done close to a hundred theatres throughout England. His nickname, “Can’t match Matcham,” was absolutely true. While there were other big theatre designers such as W. G. R. Sprague and Bertie Crewe, Matcham was king.
Looking out from the edge of the stage, Layton took in the breathtaking beauty of the French Renaissance-style auditorium, with its three curving tiers of column-free balconies, which stepped back as they soared up to the roof. At the ends on the side walls were the private boxes, which were framed by richly adorned arches and flanked by magnificent gilt pilasters. Hanging from the domed, mural-painted ceiling was an immense oval crystal chandelier. From where he stood, Layton could see how the tiers of horseshoe-shaped balconies embraced the stage, making for a more intimate connection between performer and audience.
The irony of it all was that many of Britain’s architects looked down upon the men who specialized in theatres. They felt it a vulgar building type and beneath them to design. But Layton admired their skill, and when he’d been offered the commission for the Britannia Empire, he’d snapped it up regardless of the criticism from his fellow members of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Even his father-in-law, Lord Charles Litton, had objected.
But Layton hadn’t cared. The music hall represented the joy he’d felt as a child, going to the theatres in Dorchester and Weymouth. Taking that commission was the only time he had retreated back to the working-class roots he’d hidden so well. And it had cost him everything. His eyes locked onto the theatre’s cantilevered first balcony, and his brain instantly conjured up an image of a fifteen-foot section collapsing down on the seats below. He had to look away, his heart in his throat.
“When are you damn foreigners going to change your music? You’ve been using the same cues for the last fifty years,” shouted an angry voice to the left and below.
“I a wanna the orchestra to play like they’ve never played before—in tune,” answered a heavily accented Italian voice, followed by a bellowing laugh.
“Go to hell, you dago twit,” someone shouted.
“Play the goddamn cues,” called the Italian. “And be sure to speed up tempo when we finish a trick.”
While Stone and Layton talked, the orchestra had filed into the depressed space in front of the stage. “That’s band call,” Stone said. “Every Monday morning, the acts meet with the musical director and the orchestra. They place their music by the footlights there.” He pointed to the piles of sheet music heaped at the edge of the stage. “That’s Gino, one of the Flying Donatellos, an acrobat act, and that’s Broadchurch, the conductor, in the orchestra pit.”
A swarthy, broad-shouldered man was jabbing his finger and yelling at Broadchurch. When the conductor ignored him, waving his baton disinterestedly in front of the equally disinterested orchestra, Gino began stamping his feet to the rhythm.
“All right, you bloody dago, we have it down. Next!” Broadchurch yelled.
“Bastardo! You give me hard time because I no give you and band beer money to play.”
“That’s right, you don’t. So shove off, wop,” yelled a trumpet player.
A pretty girl of about eighteen stepped up to the edge of the stage, a rueful smile on her lips. “We’ll start with ‘You Are My Honey Bee,’ please, Mr. Broadchurch.”
“That’s Nellie of Nellie, Kellie, and the Two Gents, one of the most popular turns here,” Stone whispered. “She’s a scrumptious little bit, eh? I’d love to slip her a length. A real saucy number onstage, but the opposite off, if you know what I mean. Colder than an iceberg.”
The orchestra played a fast, bright number, and the girl swayed to the rhythm. She then began to dance around and pulled her skirt up a bit, exposing her ankles. All the orchestra musicians kept their eyes glued to Nellie as they played.
“Let me show ya how things work around here,” said Stone, though he was clearly reluctant to drag his eyes away from Nellie. He and Layton walked to the rear of the stage, and Stone gestured to the boards below them. “Notice how the floor rises from front to back. That’s called ‘upstage,’ and it’s that way to show the swells in the stalls the dancers’ feet better.”
Layton already knew what upstage meant, but he remained silent and followed Stone to a room directly behind the backstage wall. The space was huge, with a soaring twenty-five-foot ceiling.
“This here’s the scene shop. Most theatres have to have their scenery done off-site, but we have our own shop. Makes it damn more convenient, I say.”
Layton nodded, and Stone continued.
“That’s a flat, where we draw out and paint the scenery—or ‘cloths,’ as they’re called.”
A big wooden frame the length of the stage was fixed to the back wall, and attached to it was a stretched canvas cloth. A man was painting what looked like a London street scene; Layton could make out Big Ben in the distance. The man wore a gray smock splattered with a thousand different colors of paint. As he worked, he looked repeatedly to a colored sketch on a small portable by his side.
“In the old days, we had to erect scaffolding to reach the upper part because the backcloths were so damn tall. But these flats can be lowered through those slots in the floor to the understage, so you can stand and paint.”
Layton nodded, deeply impressed; he wished he’d thought of such a thing for the Britannia. Stone led him back to the stage, seemingly pleased by his approval.
“Now, once the cloths are finished, the tops are fastened to those bars up above us and hoisted out of sight, up into what’s called the fly tower. Ours is twenty-nine feet high. The cloths can be raised or lowered from that platform on the sidewall they call the fly floor. The stagehands hoist them by hand with those ropes y’see there and tie them off on the cleats.”
Far above his head, Layton could see half a dozen cloths, held in place by ropes like sheets hanging from a clothesline.
“The first thing you’ll be doing is transferring a sketch to the cloth and painting it up,” said Stone, pointing to the artist already at work. “After a while, you can start designin’ ’em yourself. Heard ya were a real bloody Remy-brandt.”
Layton smiled at this comment. It would be great fun to design these cloths.
“Do you have digs yet?” Stone asked.
Layton shook his head. He hadn’t wanted to get a hotel room until he was sure of the job.
“Roy!” Stone shouted. A boy of around twenty emerged from the storage closet. He was tall and thin with a potato-like nose. “Take Owen to Mrs. Hodges. Tell her he needs a room.” To Layton, he added, “Mrs. Hodges used to be a contortionist in a specialty act. Now she owns a house that only lets to theatrical folks. Keeps a clean place, and she’s a damn good cook.”
“She makes butter scones every day,” said Roy with great enthusiasm. “And only one quid a week rent.”