Blue Door Venture Page 19

  ‘I wonder.’ Lyn gazed at her reflection in the mirror, dark eyes with heavy tired shadows under them.

  ‘Do you mind if you are?’ demanded Nigel from the next room.

  Lyn put her head on one side and considered it, and her reflection did the same. Did she? At one time she would have recoiled from the thought of doing any one thing for the rest of her life—but now, after the last few months…

  She looked round the untidy little room where Maddy, Sandra and Vicky, half stripped, sat among the litter of grease-paint and costumes. In the next room Bulldog was singing tunelessly under his breath, and Jeremy could be heard splashing and spluttering under the water tap.

  ‘Well?’ repeated Nigel.

  ‘No,’ shouted Lyn. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘O.K. Coming?’ yelled Bulldog, as he yelled every night when he was ready to go home. There were the same old ‘Wait a minute’ and ‘Coming now’ and ‘Come on, Maddy,’ and then they were ready to switch out the last lights, dash back for things they had forgotten, and eventually were all outside and the door locked. It was a lovely night, warm and still, with a little crescent of moon just beginning to appear over the roof tops.

  ‘I’m tired,’ said Maddy, in an enormous yawn. They linked arms.

  ‘What a night…’ breathed Vicky. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘I say,’ said Nigel, ‘you remember in the second act when I entered, and you weren’t down left, Jeremy, as you should have been…’

  And there they were again, on the usual post-mortem, of who had done what, right and wrong, during the show.

  Off they went down the road away from their theatre, silhouetted like cardboard figures—three quite tall, three a bit shorter and one on the dumpy side—disappearing into the dusk of the Spring night.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PAMELA BROWN (1924–1989) was a British writer, actor, then television producer. She was just fourteen when she started writing her first book, and the town of Fenchester in the book is inspired by her home town of Colchester. During the Second World War, she went to live in Wales, so her first book, The Swish of the Curtain, was not published until 1941, when she was sixteen. She used the earnings from the books to train at RADA, and became an actor and a producer of children’s television programmes.

  COPYRIGHT

  Pushkin Press

  71–75 Shelton Street

  London WC2H 9JQ

  Copyright © The Estate of Pamela Brown 2018

  Blue Door Venture was first published as in Great Britain, 1949

  First published by Pushkin Press in 2018

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  ISBN 13: 978–1–78269–192–1

  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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press

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